By John W. Whitehead
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 Donald Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State, a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State, to 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.
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, D.C.. 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.
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 long, sold 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 costs, that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for a long time.
The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law, disguised as national security, is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.
How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.
This present military occupation of the Nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.
This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.
Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.
In 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”
In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance.
Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the Nation has been transformed into a battlefield.
And then you’ve got the government, which has been steadily amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon-launchers and police firearms and ammunition.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing, and inescapable.
So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly-partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.
I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington, D.C., no matter who sits in the White House.
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” this is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
—The Rutherford Institute