Tag Archives: revolution

Stirring Footage From Inside Jan 6 Capitol Protest

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Watch this footage taken by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson and ask yourself if, given the circumstances,  there’s anything at all to be ashamed about in the overall behavior of this crowd of anywhere from half a million to over a million.

I couldn’t have felt prouder watching this honest, courageous, self-restrained ground-swell of patriotic feeling and righteous indignation.

If this be insurrection, make the most of it. And count me right in as an insurrectionist.


The protestors for the most part are dressed in ordinary street wear, some wearing masks of the US flag, others carrying US or Trump flags. Inside the halls of Congress they chant, Protect your liberty, Protect the constitution and tell the guards they are there because Trump, the guards’ boss, wants them there. They thank the guards for letting them in. They chant “Whose house? Our house,” “It’s the people’s house, let the people in,” and similar stuff.

“Defend the constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic,” shouts another. They talk about it being a war.

They march through the halls, look around and ask where everyone is because there’s no one but police. The brave Congress critters are skulking under desks in safe spaces, instead of meeting their constituents.

When someone sits in the vice president’s chair, one of the leaders tells him he cannot and it is disrespectful. The fellow in the chair then asks, with splendid logic, why THEY can steal an election, but HE cannot sit in a chair. But he does get up.

The officers who let them in are thanked repeatedly and told that they are only doing their job and it’s appreciated. A leader calls out that this is hallowed ground, sacred, and deserves respect. Another protestor says, Now that we’re here, we might as well form a government.

One guy’s looking for anything in the papers left behind that can be used against these “scumbags,” a sentiment probably shared by around 100 million people, including this blogger.

Someone tells the rest to watch what they do, because it’s a PR war…there’s talk of an information operation.

The guy with the horns on his head, Qanon Shaman, bellows in the background high above the paper hunters at the desks. Someone says they’ve found papers showing that Cruz was going to object to Arizona’s objection…he was going to sell us out anyway..Then he seems to retract. Another person says, Cruz and Hawley would have wanted us to do this. Someone says, There are 4 million people coming, some have just not got there. Another refers to a million people.

Several men get up and invoke Jesus Christ’s name, asking for light and protection from heaven, thanking Him for giving them the opportunity to be heard in this place and for being able to take back the country from communists, globalists, and traitors.

Before leaving, one of the leaders wants a picture taken and asks permission from the guards to do it.

Then they leave through one entrance while Mogelson leaves through another, where he takes more footage, this showing a more boisterous side of things. People are scaling the walls, tearing off fabric high up, but are largely nonviolent, with lots of chanting: USA, USA, and I think, We want Trump.

The police start tasering and throwing smoke bombs and people shout, Is that all you’ve got? We’re coming for you…

Someone builds a gallows and starts shouting, We’re going to hunt each and everyone of you down. There are calls to fight at home, to protest in the state capitols and to organize. Better to die a free man, shouts one man, than on your knees. Someone uses a flagpole to smash what looks like suitcases or boxes and shouts about how the media wouldn’t be able to record that. Another man says CNN is hiding behind Union Station.

People shout Treason, treason, treason.

Why The Establishment Is Attacking Ron Paul

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“If the guy is such a sure loser in 2012, why all the attacks? In his quiet way, Paul must have tapped into something. And you can get an idea of that something from what Pat Buchanan wrote the other day about the CPAC poll.

After asking “how do conservatives justify borrowing hundreds of billions yearly from Europe, Japan and the Gulf states — to defend Europe, Japan and the Arab Gulf states?” Buchanan answered his own question by making the case that such policies are not conservative at all.

“Ron Paul’s victory at CPAC may be a sign the prodigal sons of the right are casting off the heresy of neoconservatism and coming home to first principles,” Buchanan concluded.

Buchanan has put his finger on why the unemotional Texas congressman produces such an emotional reaction. The party establishment has to dread the prospect of a candidate who can unite the youthful libertarian conservatives with the Buchananite America-first types. Such a character might win a plurality running against Romney, Huckabee and neocon Barbie doll Sarah Palin.

And Paul might have the most money of them all, thanks to the support of those young voters who actually understand how the internet works. I suspect this is what all the shouting is about, even though the subject of it all never raises his voice.”

Paul Mulshine, NJ Star Ledger, via Lew Rockwell.

Kevin Carson on the Revolutionary Potential of Barter

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From a Kevin Carson comment on his own blog, Mutualist.org:

“So long as an industry is controlled by a handful of firms with the same organizational culture, using some form of oligopoly pricing, colluding to spoon out incremental improvements, and using push distribution methods for whatever crap they agree is the “new thing” this year, calculational chaos doesn’t cause much of a competitive penalty for any particular firm.

The main thing that will cause them real harm, IMO, that will cause the “walls to come tumbling down” for American state capitalism the same as for the old Soviet system, is the looming singularity in small-scale production technology that will enable much of the population to meet a large share of its needs through direct subsistence production for use in the household/informal/barter economy. (That’s the theme of one of the sections in forthcoming Ch. 15)”

My Comment

Carson is always an interesting and productive thinker, and this snippet is from commentary on a blog post of his about the seizure of some of his writings by the police. The commentary goes from this incident to discuss various other things, including whether big business is really no different from the state, and if it is, how that fact can be squared with the wealth it produces.

Carson argues that its wealth is produced despite the existence of the same “computational chaos” suffered by states, because big business enjoys subsidies, cost-externalizations, and benefits deriving from its size and privileged relationship to the state. That means its wealth isn’t really “its” wealth but the appropriation of wealth actually created by others. (I’ve made much the same argument myself).

Small-scale production and barter withdraw the life-blood of the huge corporations – which is the consumer. The direction of consumption away from the corporate economy is thus an effective form of direct revolutionary action against the corporate state.

Now, one man’s revolutionary struggle is another man’s budget shopping. but why quibble? The main thing is to reclaim the human being as the focus of economic theory, rather than any spurious “economic man,” “factor of production,” or “felicific calculus”…

Paul Craig Roberts on the End of Empire (comment added)

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Washington Arrogance Has Fomented a Muslim Revolution
by Paul Craig Roberts

Hat-tip to David Redick for the link

“In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

~ Justice Louis Brandeis

Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No.
Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No.
Is the United States government responsible? Yes.

The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted from; (Item numbers inserted by ARTS)

1. the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposed the Shah;
2. from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia;
3. from the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq,
4. bombing weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games;
5. from the US violating international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims
6. from the US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban;
7. from the US violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians;
8. from the US government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages;
9. from the assault of American culture on Muslim values;
10. from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its puppet;
11. from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.

As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example, and America’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington confronts but revolution……

The change over which Obama will preside will have no American victories. The change will come from

1. America as a failed state,
2. from the dollar dethroned as reserve currency,
3. from America repudiated by its allies and paid puppets,
4. from massive unemployment for which there is no solution,
5. from hyperinflation that produces anarchy.
6. The day might arrive when Washington is faced with revolution at home as well as abroad.

December 5, 2008

My Comment

Roberts’s piece is provocatively stated, so I thought should add this comment.  I think he’s fairly correct to state that the Pakistani and Indian governments are not to blame, fundamentally, for what’s happening. However, to the degree that these governments – like others – tend to take the line of least resistance and  go along with Washington’s agenda, or buy into it, or stand on the sidelines while that agenda is enacted elsewhere, they encourage the misdeeds of the prime culprit. And, to the degree that they are themselves corrupt or lawless,  they don’t help the situation…

(Not following either of the two countries’ internal politics, I can’t do more than make a general statement).

How not to go along, you might ask?

Well, there’s Angela Merkel’s recent condemnation of global central bank interventionism. Why can’t we hear more of that from the global community?

Or has the cat got its tongue on every issue but the issue of Israel-Palestine?

Solzhenitsyn On Conscience

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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on developing a point of view:

“In First Circle, the young diplomat Innokenty Volodin lived a life of prosperity and comfort. As the privileged child of a hero of the Revolution he had married into a prominent family and advanced in the Soviet diplomatic service. But he became alienated from it all: he “lack(ed) something: he didn’t know what” (p. 341).
Upon examining the old fashioned ideas of his deceased mother in her diaries, his perspective on life changed from one of an Epicurean pleasure-seeking to one of ethical regard. He developed a “point of view”: Up to then the truth for Innokenty had been: you have only one life.

Now he came to sense a new law, in himself and in the world: you also have only one conscience. And just as you cannot recover a lost life, you cannot recover a wrecked conscience [p. 345]

Moral choices are often the consequence of accumulated culture, happenstance or social institutions, and as such judging others’ moral choices must be done with compassion and humility. Solzhenitsyn contemplates rather extensively his rejection of an offer to join the Soviet internal police force, the NKDV, when he was a young communist in Rostov in the late 1930’s:

“The NKVD school dangled before us special rations and double or triple pay …
It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “you must!”… inside our head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it …. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.” —

[Gulag Archipelago, p. 160].

This leads to a rather subtle and non-judgmental view of good and evil. Evil is very real and very wrong, but no human being is authorized to become too self-righteous in its condemnation: but for the grace of God go I.

In Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn says quite emphatically:

“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

“Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.” [p. 169]

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”