No doubt about it: the coup d'etat was successful.
That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump's call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep Statea.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance Stateto swoop in and take control.
It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation's capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.
This new order didn't emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year, however.
Indeed, the real coup happened when our government "of the people, by the people, for the people" was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government "of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations."
We've been mired in this swamp for decades now.
Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State's tune.
Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.
Joe Biden will be no different: his job is to keep the Deep State in power.
Step away from the cult of personality politics and you'll find that beneath the power suits, they're all alike.
Follow the money. It always points the way.
As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, there is "a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed."
This stealthy, creeping, silent coup is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, which put the military in charge of a coup that would institute martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation's security.
Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today's current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.
Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.
We've been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so longsold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all coststhat it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we've been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
4
4
3
