Capitol Punishment, or "The City on the Hill Has Lost its Shine"

This week, Richard casts a grammatically-suspect eye over recent events in Washington and braces himself for the backlash.

"It's not protest," Biden said. "It's insurrection."

That's funny: it was a different story in Ukraine, wasn't it? Not to mention Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Belarus, etc, etc.

It's also funny how the mainstream media - who were happy to act as a mouthpiece for the State Department in decrying "rigged" elections in other countries and cheering on "color revolutions" - are now nailing themselves hands and feet to the narrative that US elections cannot be anything other than honest and open... Y'know, despite four years of telling us the last one was hacked by the Russian State. They even refused to give up the ghost after the Mueller Report and subsequent inquiry, which practically collapsed the Steele Dossier, failed to come up with the goods. But cast that from your mind because you're not supposed to remember any of this now they've got the right result. "Biden won fair and square!" they keep telling us, pausing only to snigger contemptuously at Trump's fraud claim and his supporters' dubious allegation that the Democrats were aided by the CCP. "That's just a conspiracy theory!" they spit back. "There's not a grain of truth in it whatsoever." A certain idiom about pots and kettles leaps to mind.

Biden as pictured on the BBC News website's report on the siege. Note the not particularly subtle halo effect.

But it doesn't actually matter whether or not Biden won this election legitimately. What we're seeing is the US political establishment's worst nightmare: a home-grown color revolution being played out right in the centre of power, and neither the Democrats or Republicans have a fucking clue what to do about it.

Over the last 30 years, both parties have pushed western-style liberal democracy abroad, engineering coups that paradoxically terminated any chance of a comparable system occuring naturally in countries the State Department deems problematic. "We came, we saw, he died!" Hillary Clinton famously whooped after Gaddafi was killed by western-backed rebels in Libya, presumably invoking Julius Caesar rather than Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. Ten years later, Libya is little more than bandit country where those self-same rebels sell black Africans in slave markets for $400 apiece. "O brave new world that has such people in it," eh?

Clinton after receiving news of Gaddafi's death.

Then there was the Euromaidan, where we witnessed the shameful spectacle of Victoria Nuland handing out cookies to "pro-democracy protestors" (ie. far-right militants) while John McCain took to a makeshift stage flanked by burly men in balaclavas to make a rallying speech about freedom and liberty. Conveniently missing from these happy scenes, dutifully captured by American news media, were said demonstrators throwing molotov cocktails at police officers, violently forcing staff onto the roof of the Russian embassy building and President Yanukovych having to flee Kiev amid a hail of bullets. Eight years on, Ukraine has still yet to be granted EU membership, leaving them isolated from both western Europe and Russia. But then, that was the plan all along. The Obama administration declared it a watershed moment in bringing democracy to a country that had long been seen as nothing more than a glorified satellite state when, in reality, they simply wanted access to Russia's border. Still, at least Ukraine got Zelensky out of it, they tell us - and everybody loves a celebrity turned politician who confuses patriotism with nationalism, right-? And at least he isn't that nutjob Poroshenko. When you've got a President who's a cross between Roderick Spode and General Jack D. Ripper it's hard to keep up the illusion of democracy, regardless of how many Washington Post and New York Times op-eds try to convince you otherwise.

Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Maidan Square.

But things aren't looking too peachy these days in the good old US of A either. Last year, lockdowns across the United States saw basic constitutional rights all but abolished, leading to sweeping changes in electoral practices that were promoted to better serve the interests of "democracy." Unable to express their frustrations against a system they felt had been rigged against them, is it any wonder disgruntled voters followed the example of the politicians and media who smugly promoted US-style democracy overseas by taking their grievances straight to the heart of government itself? Who else was going to fight their corner: the newspapers who made no secret that they buried the Hunter Biden story because they didn't want to damage Sleepy Joe's chances, or the tech giants in Silicon Valley who treat even mild criticism of Covid restrictions as political extremism?

Lest we forget, this is the same media establishment who accuse Trump of white supremacist dog-whistling when he's explicitly condemned all forms of racism in no less than 38 public addresses. The fact that he increased funding for African-American colleges and reformed the appeals process in the penal system allowing prisoners serving excessive jail terms for minor offences to have their sentences reviewed (going some way to repairing the damage from the punative legislation introduced by Biden under the Clinton administration, a bill that dispropotionately affected African-American males) doesn't seem to matter. "He's a fascist!" they cry. "And if you voted for him, that makes you a fascist, too. You're out of touch with reality. Don't you understand that everything he says is a lie?!" But where was their incessant "fact-checking" in their coverage of the DNC when Michelle Obama slyly accused the Trump administration of building the "cages" on the Mexican border? Or when Biden repeated it during the second Presidential debate? They know damn well who drew up this policy and put it into operation. (Clue: Michelle wakes up with him every morning.) But no, gotta keep that narrative rolling - and it's been rolling along ever since 2016 when Clinton made her "Basket of Deplorables" speech, characterising half of Trump's support base as unreconstructed bigots instead of people who felt betrayed and left behind by the neoliberal excesses of the Obama era. Add Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Trump Accountability Project to the mix and you're looking at a very, very combustible situation.

Now I ask again: after four years of this, is it any wonder why these people went to Capitol Hill?

Just to be clear, I don't condone Trump riling up his supporters with baseless accusations of electoral fraud, and I don't support their anti-democratic means of trying to overthrow the election result. But when it comes down to it, what is the difference between Trump encouraging his followers to march on the Capitol and McCain tacitly cheering on violence in Maidan Square? Or the way CNN and MSNBC fawned over Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó because it was seen as, to coin a phrase, 'politically correct'? Only one: it's not happening thousands of miles away. Today it's in the Capitol, tomorrow or the day after it'll spill out into the streets. This is a pampered, privileged system happy to turn a blind eye to the violence it exports around the world only to recoil in self-righteous horror when that same violence lands on its own doorstep. This isn't a bunch of disorganised fanatics showing disrespect to the Constitution, it's the snake eating its own tail. And the way things are going right now, it's going to keep eating until it chokes.

In his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneaparte, Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. If that's the case, what we're seeing in the US right now is Fawlty Towers 2.0. It's time for the Shining City on the Hill to get its affairs in order instead of imposing its own hegemonic blueprint on the rest of the world.