Bring On the Firing Squads! Republicans Make the Case for a Coup d'Etat
Generals Michael Flynn & Jack Ripper ("Dr. Strangelove") - Who's crazier?
In a previous post, I wrote:
There's a bad moon rising in this country. Our democracy is endangered. Our society is fraying at the seams. We're becoming Weimar America, Americans battling Americans.
I've seen this movie before, but not here, having lived through coups d’état, guerrilla attacks, kidnappings, terrorist attacks and fatwas to assassinate American diplomats. In almost all cases, there were warning signs of oncoming violence - like volatile Nebraska wind storms. Something doesn't seem right. Locals are cringing, animals fidget, cars are racing through the streets, sound of gunfire.
For my money, the film that best portrays this gathering storm tension is The Year of Living Dangerously. A slow boil tension builds as unseen forces maneuver in 1965 Jakarta in the lead-up to the violent coup that ousted Sukarno. The viewer can almost sweat along with the protagonists, Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, amid the sweltering tropical heat and raw suspense. Something's about to break and it ain't good. Neither the foreign journalists nor diplomats have a firm grasp on what's happening, which makes the suspense that much more taut.
In a 46-minute rant this week, President Trump suggested a "revote" of the presidential election, the outcome of which he rejects. At about the same time, freshly pardoned felon Gen. Michael Flynn endorsed an ultra-right group's call for Trump to "immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a re-vote."
Echoing Flynn, retired Air Force 3-star general Thomas McInerney, citing "complicity to treason," helpfully called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, suspend habeas corpus, declare martial law and deploy the military to seize and secure all the voting machines. The president, he added, must “start arresting these people right away, [under] this national emergency. I would declare martial law.”
Trump affiliated attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell also ballyhooed on social media the need for the president to invoke martial law. "It's 1776 in America again," Wood bellowed at a rally. "Joe Biden will never set foot in the Oval Office of this country. It will not happen on our watch. Never gonna happen." And, true to form for the far right, there are the nefarious Jews to blame - George Soros must "get out of our country!"
And not to be out done, everyone's pet political dolt and King of the Kongressional Klown Kar, Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, recalling the Arab Spring uprisings, declared, "If they can do that there, think of what we can do here."
Finally, let us not forget as well Trump's ominous summons to violence, addressed to America's own homegrown Sturmabteilung, the so-called Proud Boys - "Stand by and stand back." A bunch of armed "militias" stormed and stomped threateningly in a number of states in recent months, notably in Michigan where assault rifle-toting thugs essentially took over the state legislature. Furthermore, the FBI broke up one group's plan to kidnap and murder Governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as to carry out mass executions of state officials, ISIS-style.
What are we to make of all this?
The United States has gone through periods of extremist violence before, notably radical leftists in the '60s and '70s and anarchists around the turn of the 20th century. And fascism reared its ugly head in the '30s with the German-American Bund, hardly a mass movement, but a scattering of farcical goose-stepping Hitler-wannabes among the German-American community. Indigenous Muslim extremists have sought to pull off a handful of domestic terrorist attacks in recent years, almost all of which law enforcement has done a commendable job in thwarting.
Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics in 1964 in which he posited, "in a populistic culture like ours...a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible."
What differentiates today's from previous internal threats is encouragement given to radical right groups by none other than our president, assisted by Vichy GOP complicity and the insane blatherings of nutcases like Flynn, McInerney, Gohmert and the rest of the lunatic fringe-squared. In other words, Republican leadership is the accelerant to an increasingly combustible situation. Rest assured there are many Timothy McVeigh replicants out there at this moment devising schemes to foment mayhem and mass death. Prime targets are police and government officials. It likely is a mere matter of time before any number of these blow up another federal facility or gun down innocent citizens they deem their enemies.
What particularly fascinates me is the vaporous netherworld of fantasies and conspiracies which these people inhabit, from Trump on down to the lowest "low information" yokel in Hinterland USA who loses sleep at night over the dark earth-smashing machinations of omnipresent and indefatigable pizza parlor pedophiles, the Illuminati and Satan-worshiping, infantivore Democrats.
Trump's facile lies about a "rigged election" are actually quaint compared with the miasma of fabulism swirling on the right. The latest doozy among the conspiricist community, including the delusional General McInerney, is that U.S. special operations forces were killed recently in an attack on a CIA computer facility in Germany that held clandestine information about a massive, super-secret effort to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
I mean, who makes this stuff up anyway? Some unit of chain-smoking OCD Slavic celibates deep inside the GRU?
What's deeply disturbing is the masses of Americans who accept these tales. And not just dentally challenged habituées of county fairs, but retired generals, folks with law degrees, members of Congress. The whole QAnon thing is a reversion to medieval superstition. When I see Trump attorney and ex-federal prosecutor Sidney Powell tremulously spinning fairy tales about a vast conspiracy organized by the corpse of Hugo Chavez, my jaw drops. "Does she actually buy this crap?" I ask myself.
The fact is, perhaps half the American population resides in a parallel information universe, "in the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge." We read the articles and listen attentively to the pundits who try to explain the genesis of this bifurcation of reality. But I still scratch my head. I just don't get it.
What I do get, based on my experiences as a diplomat, is the steadily building tension that, with no brakes, will lead us to civil violence. You may dismiss talk of a coup d'etat and Trump's nattering about remaining in power as the fleeting imaginings of non-serious crackpots.
I hope this is true. But call this ex-diplomat anxious.