Following the explosion of protests and rioting following the death of George Floyd, “Black Lives Matter” activists in Seattle proceeded to occupy seven city blocks with the blessing of the city’s Democratic mayor, fashioning it into a self-proclaimed Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), and later changed its name to Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP).
“This is not an autonomous zone. We are not trying to secede from the United States,” said one protester, Maurice Cola, recently in a video interview circulating on Twitter.
Recently, after two people were shot in the zone, one fatally, police were actually prevented by mobs from getting to the victims and denied access to the area in order to carry out a homicide investigation.
Where is this movement towards lawlessness headed, and what does it have in common with similar scenes in recent history? Is this situation open to exploitation by power elites?
Tom Luongo from Strategic Culture asks the question…
The rate at which events are accelerating makes prediction a fool’s game. But I’ll take a shot at it, since I’ve been called a heck of a lot worse than ‘fool’ in my life.
Since the rioting began after the death of George Floyd it’s been obvious to anyone with any experience in covering global politics that these have been a directed operation aimed at undermining the presidency of Donald Trump here in the U.S.
The formation of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in downtown Seattle is the latest in a series of provocations and escalations intended to goad Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act of 1878 and deploying the military to put down these riots endlessly promoted by a complicit media in the West as mostly ‘peaceful protests.’
They are anything but that.
This is a situation that, because of the subsidization of it by the Mayor, Jenny Durkan, and the Governor, Jay Inslee, that will persist just long enough to descend into violence and chaos. Note how I don’t use the word anarchy.
Because we’ve already seen a form of government form in the CHAZ, with a governing council, a constitution of sorts and decrees of white people paying reparations to black members of the community.
Raz Simone, like a latter day Issac Hayes – the Duke — from John Carpenter’s now prophetic Escape from New York, is passing out AR-15s and AK-47s to keep the peace of the gun. And in no time some pigs will become far more equal than others.
But, even if my worst predictions about the CHAZ do not come to pass, since it is very much a tactical operation in the grander strategy to undermine and delegitimize Trump, there will still likely be violence.
All we have to do is look at what happened in other so-called color revolutions that piggy-backed on legitimate protests against existing, corrupt governments.
This reminds me of the situation in Ukraine in 2014 where the protests on the Maidan plaza in Kiev turned violent when snipers began shooting from rooftops. And to this day there are questions as to who shot who and what actually happened.
But given that a peaceful stability in the CHAZ serves no one in power, on either side of the political divide, the likelihood of a similar provocation is very, very high.
The way I see this, the people in the CHAZ are pawns in a much larger game being played by the power elite many of them want to overthrow.
All it takes is one agent provocateur, one guy with a rifle and a narrative springs into being.
If there is one thing that is abundantly clear after four years of watching this escalation in the U.S. it is that there is nothing Trump’s enemies won’t do to make things worse.
Because, in the end, this is about far more than Trump. This is about moving the U.S. into a failed political and economic state. The economic destruction is already well underway thanks to the persistence of the COVID-19 insanity.
The new normal of face masks and social distancing highlight the sheer cowardice of the corporate managerial class and the complicity of the corporate leadership, as The Saker pointed out in a recent post. He asks the question that if money isn’t the object of this corporate ‘bowing to the mob’ what is at stake.
The answer, of course, is power:
Specifically, the U.S. deep state – at a major faction within that deep state – is clearly desperate to get rid of Trump (and *not* for the right reasons, of which there are plenty).
There are plenty of signs that illustrate that Trump is even losing control of the Executive, including Secretary Esper contradicting Trump on what is a key issue – restoring law and order – or the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea voicing support for BLM (I consider that these actions by top officials against their own Commander in Chief border on treason). Needless to say, the pro-Dems neo-libs at Slate immediately began dreaming about, and calling for, a military revolt against Trump.
And that new normal now separates Americans along yet another vector, one much subtler than wearing a MAGA hat or sporting a ‘Coexist’ bumper sticker on their hybrid.
And that’s exactly why I think there’s going to be some kind of Maidan-like event in the CHAZ if President Trump continues to refuse to take the bait and roll the tanks in, metaphorically, to break it up.
But, ultimately, this isn’t Trump’s job, it is the job of the local elected officials to provide services to protect the property and livelihoods of their constituents. But that’s not what’s on display in Seattle.
It isn’t on display in New York City either where Mayor Bill DeBlasio is doing everything he can to disarm and delegitimize his own police force and inflamed tensions by allowing looters to run wild while enforcing social distancing rules against Hasidic Jews trying to worship in peace.
This is a movie whose ending I’ve seen before and I didn’t like it the previous times I watched it. What’s sad is that the people who’ve released this one are the same ones who released the previous ones.
It’s a tragedy which, frankly, as I’ve talked about ad nauseum. Trump has invited this onto himself because of his own weakness to confront his attackers while engaging in similar behavior against countries he doesn’t like – Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela.
No one in the international community will shed one tear if Trump is deposed in November or during his second term. Many of us Americans recognize his faults and what they’ve wrought but still understand that the alternative to him is the restoration of the worst parts of the Empire.
His only true accomplishment to date has been staying in power in a White House where his power has steadily eroded to the point of near irrelevancy. If he doesn’t make substantive moves to neutralize those behind the CHAZ he will be the one blamed when it explodes.
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