Why You Can't Overthrow the Government (and Why You Would Almost Certainly Regret It If You Did)
Admit it - you've fantasized about overthrowing the government.
Wealthy corporations and well-paid politicians leave us just enough democracy to keep the masses happy, but we know they're literally getting away with murder. There seems to be no fully effective response to the unilateral invasions and aggression of the United States, nor is there any easy way to expose the blatant lies used to justify them. It appears that the massive amount of suffering in the world, much of which could surely be abated with the determined rational efforts of compassionate people, will instead to some extent or another continue to be exacerbated by systems which create people obsessed with the pursuit of power without regard to the welfare of others.
The idea that some new system could sweep all this away and replace it with a largely fair and efficient system is incredibly appealing. And the notion that you personally might be able to play a major role in such an operation is quite exciting.
So of course you've fantasized about it. You're paying attention, you're a compassionate person, and you're outraged. You want a better world, and you want it now.
But before you advocate revolution at your next political meeting, consider whether you and those around you are really capable of overthrowing the government, and whether, even if you did, you'd be likely to be able to replace it with anything better.
The United States is controlled by some of the most powerful people in the world, with access to mind-bogglingly large quantities of resources. They will not surrender their wealth easily, and they will not hesitate to kill you or any number of other people to defend it if they believe there's a credible threat to it. Obviously, if you've decided to overthrow the government, you've decided that your probable death and that of what will certainly be many other innocents is worth the chance of success. That puts you on level ground with your enemy - both of you are determined to accomplish your goals at any cost. So far, so good.
Unfortunately for you, though, this is where it starts to get tricky. You don't have hundreds of billions of dollars per year to spend on an armed force of troops, tanks, aircraft, and a variety of high-tech weaponry. If you or some of your trusted friends with mutual goals have extensive backgrounds in technology and in using black market connections to secure various forms of weaponry and raw materials, then maybe you've got at least a few resources, even if they're not even a tiny fraction of what you would need to fight an offensive war against an immensely well-equipped and paranoid enemy. It's too bad that you won't be able to use guerilla tactics very effectively, because those typically only work very well in defensive wars.
Naturally, you'll need to know about the locations of important military institutions and officials to get started. Hopefully some of your connections know a good deal about tactics and espionage, and you have a good idea of how to put some agents in key government positions. You'll probably have to devote quite a few decades of your life to this, so your total devotion to the cause will be an asset here. Yes, every day the U.S. government pours insane amounts of money into stopping much better-funded organizations than yours from doing these things, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Still, because you're going to find yourself severely lacking financially, you might turn to people as your best resource. That makes sense. So you'll need to get the word out in order to build up a force of people willing to give their lives to the revolution. Sadly, however, there are a few major obstacles that come up almost right away.
First, the more you start to connect with other revolutionaries, the more risk you take that the government will notice, charge you with treason, incarcerate you, and quite possibly execute you. You're on the government's home turf, and due process for suspected terrorists is in short supply these days. So your efforts will require great duplicity and secrecy. Hopefully you'll be able to rely on your extensive background in espionage (which you've so far managed to hide from the U.S. government), but you'll need to ask an awful lot of people to join you in order to have the numbers you'll need. To be an effective organizer you'll also need to communicate with people all over the country, which would be a lot easier if you could use the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. Unfortunately, that's been being monitored a lot lately. If your network of revolutionaries is exceedingly well organized, maybe the capture of one of your cells won't bring down everyone in your organization. But frankly, in a country this obsessed with counterterrorism, the government is going to find you sooner or later, and almost certainly sooner - in which case, you'll get to go down in history as just another justification for more suspensions of civil liberty.
Of course, vastly exacerbating the problem of drawing others into your movement is the fact that most people would perceive you as a dangerous radical and turn you in, or otherwise actively oppose your actions. How do I know this? Well, if enough people were so opposed to the government that they believed that revolution were a reasonable course of action, there would no longer be a need to overthrow the government, because the people would already be responding to the existing political corruption with outrage. They would start by voting out corrupt politicians and demanding accountability from their representatives. They'd get involved in peaceful organizations demanding change and alter the way they lived to take away power from the existing power structures. Eventually, people would riot in the streets. If all this happened, and for some inexplicable reason positive changes to the system weren't forthcoming, then people would probably begin to support revolutionary movements. Notably, none of this is happening. The reason it's so difficult to create meaningful change within the context of the current system is the exact same reason it's next to impossible to get people to revolt. A propaganda-duped population won't support revolution any more than they'll fight within the preexisting system to create change. It won't even accept that there's a problem. For that matter, most people are extremely distracted, either by their comforts and leisure activities or by their daily struggle to survive.
You might think you can expect your progressive friends to join you, but don't count on it. If you've ever done any organizing (which I sincerely hope you have if you're planning on being a leader in a revolution), you know how hard it is in the prevailing American culture to motivate even those who might agree with you to take even a single day off work to carry a sign expressing one of their political views in their own words. Do you really think you can persuade even a small number of people from such a population to take it a few thousand steps further and give up their lives for the cause?
Something else that's important to remember is that as corrupt as many of our leaders are, the root causes of our country's problems are systemic. Specific politicians aren't the issue; when they leave their jobs (or are, say, assassinated), the system that put them in place just replaces them with others who are similarly corrupt. There are a lot of systemic reasons for this, such as that it's difficult (or maybe impossible) to become a successful politician without accepting financial help from powerful interest groups who then gain influence over your governance, or that the way wealth is distributed in the U.S. is incredibly unequal. In order to improve things, therefore, you won't be able to stop at getting rid of the people who are currently in power. You'll also have to replace the current government with a system that prevents small groups of people from attaining disproportionate amounts of power and money, but continues to encourage innovation and production.
So even if you can convince a substantial number of people that revolution is needed and that they're the ones to do it, you're now faced with the problem of defining a goal for the revolution that they can all get behind. Oops! You forgot that progressives and liberals are notorious for disagreeing about things. We can't agree whether or not to impeach perhaps the most criminal president in history, whether it's a good idea to vote for third party candidates, or even, sometimes, on what street corner we should protest. It appears that we can't agree about whether or not revolution is a good idea. We can't agree, even in broad terms, about whether the system we're striving to create is socialistic, anarchistic, communistic, democratic, or something else. How can we agree on a fine-tuned system and a well-defined plan of action for implementing a new system?
Lenin would never have gotten anywhere without the debacle of World War I, and the fact that it completely broke the Tsar's army, wartime scarcity pushed people to the brink of starvation. The Bolsheviks' rallying cry was "Bread and Peace!". If a significant chunk of the Tsar's army hadn't gone over to the Reds, bringing their military arms with them, there would have been no revolution. Although Iraq veterans have suffered grievously, ordinary American people have no comprehension of the state of misery the vast mass of the Russian people were suffering by 1917. And yes, the US National Security State is far more sophisticated and deeply entrenched than the Tsar's secret police and military could ever have been. The difference in technology levels alone changes profoundly the dynamics of the equation.
In Vietnam, near the end, Officers were getting "fragged" by their men; entire units would refuse to go on patrol and stay in their barracks or fire-bases. The military machine itself was breaking down through mass disobedience. Nothing like that is on the horizon in Iraq. Although Lt. Watada and Sgt. Benderman are very brave souls taking courageous personal moral stands against the war, the from-the-ranks rebellion--such as there may be today--is considerably more tepid and reserved than in the Vietnam era. It lacks the true "mass" character that was beginning to coalesce around resistance to the war in Vietnam. The best thing people can do is lay low, get out of debt, cut consumption to bare essentials and otherwise withdraw as much as possible from the reining economic system, learn how to garden in a permaculture way, move "off the grid" if possible, and get to know their neighbors better. You can't fight the Octopus directly; it's too strong and has too many arms. Sounds corny, but I think George Lucas was on to something with the Jedi way..."only for defense, NEVER to attack."; Making local communities more self-sufficient and self-reliant because based on mutual-aid principles will be keys to future survival. E.F. Schumacher felt that the basic problem of governments & economies in the modern world were not this ideology or that, but that they were all TOO HUGE in scale, producing dehumanizing alienation. The American Revolution as an historical phenomena is actually quite an odd and special case. The French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions, how they came about, and why, and their legacies, are far more instructive in the study of revolution generally. America is not at that point, not even close. If the US Military truly breaks, the equation might change, who can say, but part of the reason we are not even at Vietnam-levels of resistance is...this is what happens when you rely on a professional, all-volunteer standing army that focuses only on war and battle and nothing else. It becomes a state-within-a-state, is inherently autocratic, and ultimately, a threat to liberty itself. Unless the dynamic changes in some dramatic way, any r-word talk is probably coming from a COINTELPRO type provocateur, or someone reckless. I'm not religious, but Jesus was on to something with his recommendations to his follows to "be in the world but not of it."; Peace, ya'll.
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John (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 17 comments [1 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Feb 1, 2007 at 11:24:27 PM
About half way through, I had composed my comment only to find it at the end of your article. I have incurred the wrath of pundits like Paul Craig Roberts for constantly urging them to call for impeachment. It is only from articles like yours that the public will be moved to act. It is not enough just to point out the crimes of this administration, much of what we think of as apathy is nothing more than extreme frustration that stems from not realizing that there is something that can be done. Your approach, I believe, will do more to reestablish government of, by and for the people than anything I have read in months. Thank you.
Hal O'Leary
Wheeling, WV
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Halo (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 29 comments) on Friday, Feb 2, 2007 at 3:18:00 AM
When the decision was made in April of 1947 to go ahead with a full scale nuclear build-up, capable of immolating the mass of the human race; our nuclear war fighting elite, finished themselves off.
Our nuclear war fighting elite have "Ben" doing all that is humanly possible to exterminate us all.
"ET" told them no then, and it appears that "ET" is ready to continue to prevent our extermination in an all out nuclear war.
The Royals in London are reported to have fully agreed with the extermination of humanity with the use of nuclear weapons.
When the Royals were told that to go ahead with a full scale nuclear build-up, it would inevitably lead to the total destruction of the human race, the Royals when asked for their opinion about that, were reported to have said: "Grant them Eternal Rest."
Their abusive genocidal actions have ended their predator relationship with humanity. It will of course require some time for the mass of the population to get a handle on what has happened in this world. We are the "Living Dead." We only exist due to an intervention into our world by some still unknown "High level Power."
This is why Bush Fiend is pushing for a war with Iran. This is to allow a full blown nuclear war to develop, before th people figure it all out.
When it all sinks into the Minds of the ordinary folks, don't worry about a revolution. It is a done deal.
The question will not be whether or not our nuclear armed Enemy Fiend class is going, it will be rather, in what manner they are going.
Skinned or unskinned, they are going.
.
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Patrick (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 519 comments [22 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Feb 3, 2007 at 6:12:31 PM
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