Syria in Seattle: Commune Defies the U.S. Regime ***

 


*By Pepe Escobar : crossposted with* Strategic Culture Foundation

The marriage of post-Lockdown and George Floyd protests has nurtured a
rough beast that is still immune to any form of civilized debate in the
U.S.: the Seattle Commune.

So what really is the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone cum People’s Republic
all about?

Are the communards mere useful idiots? Is this a refined Occupy Wall
Street experiment? Could it survive, logistically, and be replicated in
NYC, L.A. and D.C.?

An outraged President Trump has described it as a plot by “domestic
terrorists” in a city “run by radical left Democrats”. He called for
“LAW & ORDER” (in caps, according to his Tweetology).

Shades of Syria in Seattle are visibly discernable. Under this scenario,
the Commune is a remixed Idlib fighting “regime counter-insurgency
outposts” (in communard terminology).

For most American Right factions, Antifa equals ISIS. George Floyd is
regarded not only as a “communist Antifa martyr”, as an intel operative
told me, but a mere “criminal and drug dealer”.

So when will “regime forces” strike – in this case without Russian air
cover? After all, as dictated by Secretary Esper, it’s up to the
Pentagon to “dominate the battlefield”.

But we’ve got a problem. Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is
supported by the city of Seattle – run by a Democrat – which is
supported by the governor of Washington State, also a Democrat.

There’s no chance Washington State will use the National Guard to crush
CHAZ. And Trump cannot take over Washington State National Guard without
the approval of the governor, even though he has tweeted, “Take back
your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”

It’s enlightening to observe that “counter-insurgency” can be applied in
Afghanistan and the tribal areas; to occupy Iraq; to protect the looting
of oil/gas in eastern Syria. But not at home. Even if 58% of Americans
would actually support it: for many among them, the Commune may be as
bad if not worse than looting.

But then there are those firmly opposed. Among them: the “Butcher of
Fallujah” Mad Dog Mattis; color revolution practitioners NED; Nike;

JP Morgan; the whole Democratic Party establishment; and virtually the
whole U.S. Army establishment.

Welcome to the Only Occupy Others movement.

Still the question remains: how long will “Idlib” be able to defy the
“regime”? That’s enough to cause an alleged “bully”, Attorney General
Barr, many a sleepless night.

*Real Black Power*

Trump and Barr have already threatened to criminalize Antifa as a
“terrorist organization” – even as Black Lives Matter has pointed a
yellow dagger in the asphalt of 16th St. in D.C. towards the White House.

And that brings us to the across the board legitimacy enjoyed by Black
Lives Matter. How’s that possible? Here is a good place to start.

Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 by a trio of middle class, queer
black women very vocal against “hetero-patriarchy”, is a product of what
University of British Columbia’s Peter Dauvergne defines as
“corporatization of activism”.

Over the years, Black Lives Matter evolved as a marketing brand, like
Nike (which fully supports it). The widespread George Floyd protests
elevated it to the status of a new religion. Yet Black Lives Matter
carries arguably zero, true revolutionary appeal. This is not James
Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”. And it does not get even
close to Black Power and the Black Panthers’ “Power to the People”.

The gold standard on civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1968,
concisely framed the – structural – heart of the matter:

“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of
Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated
flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils
that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals
systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical
reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

The Black Panthers, young, extremely articulated intellectuals who had
mixed Marx, Lenin, Mao, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Frantz “Wretched
of the Earth” Fanon took MLK’s diagnosis to a whole new level.

As summed up by the Panthers’ Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver:
“We believe in the need for a unified revolutionary movement … informed
by the revolutionary principles of scientific socialism.” That
synthesized the insights of MLK, who was, crucially, a proponent of
color blindness.

Fred Hampton, the target of a de facto state assassination in December
1969, made sure the struggle transcended race: “We got to face some
facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call
the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the
white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses,
and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people
say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with
water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight
racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black
capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”

So this is not only about race. This is not only about class. This is
about Power to the People fighting for social, political and economic
justice under a system that’s intrinsically unequal. It expands on the
in-depth analysis by Gerald Horne in The Dawning of the Apocalypse,
where the 16th century is fully dissected, “creation myth” of the U.S.
included.

Horne shows how a bloodthirsty invasion of the Americas engendered
fierce resistance by Africans and their indigenous populations allies,
weakening imperial Spain and finally enabling London to dispatch
settlers to Virginia in 1607.

Now compare this depth of analysis with the meek, almost begging for
mercy “Black Lives Matter” slogan. One is reminded, once again, of
Malcolm X’s sharpness: “We had the best organization the black man’s
ever had—niggers ruined it!”

To solve the Black Lives Matter question, one must, once again, follow
the money.

Black Lives Matter profited in 2016 from a humongous $100 million grant
from the Ford Foundation and other philanthropic capitalism stalwarts
such as JPMorgan Chase and the Kellogg Foundation.

The Ford Foundation is very close to the U.S. Deep State. The board of
directors is crammed with corporate CEOs and Wall Street honchos. In a
nutshell; Black Lives Matter, the organization, today is fully
sanitized; largely integrated into the Democratic Party machine; adored
by mainstream media; and certainly does not represent a threat to the
0.001%.

The Black Lives Matter leadership, of course, argues that this time,
“it’s different. Elaine Brown, the formidable former chairwoman of the
Black Panthers, takes no prisoners: Black Lives Matter has a “plantation
mentality”.

*Try to set the night on fire*

Set the Night on Fire is an extraordinarily absorbing book co-written by
Jon Wiener and the inestimable Mike Davis of City of Quartz and Planet
of Slums.

Cataloguing in exhaustive detail the L.A. of the Sixties, we are plunged
into the Watts riots in 1965; the antiwar movement joining the Black
Panthers to form a uniquely Californian Peace and Freedom Party; the
evolving grassroots unity of the Black Power ethos; the Che-Lumumba club
of the Communist Party – which would become the political base of
legendary Angela Davis; and the massive FBI and LAPD offensive to
destroy the Black Panthers.

Tom Wolfe notoriously – and viciously – characterized L.A. supporters of
the Black Panthers as ‘radical chic”. Elaine Brown once again sets the
record straight: “We were dying, and all of them, the strongest and the
most frivolous, were helping us survive another day.”

One of the most harrowing sections of the book details how the FBI went
after Panthers sympathizers, including the sublime Jean Seberg, the star
of Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957) and Godard’s Breathless (1960).

Jean Seberg contributed anonymously to the Panthers under the codename
“Aretha” (yes, as in Franklin). The FBI’s COINTELPRO took no prisoners
to go after Seberg, enrolling the CIA, military intel and the Secret
Service. She was smeared as a “sex-perverted white actress” – as in
having affairs with black radicals. Her Hollywood career was destroyed.
She went into deep depression, had a stillbirth (the baby was not
black), emigrated, and her – decomposed – body was found in her car in
Paris in 1979.

In contrast, there have been academic rumblings identifying the sea of
converts to the Black Lives Matter religion as mostly products of the
marriage between wokeness and intersectionality – the set of interlinked
traits that since birth privileges heterosexual white men, now trying to
expiate their guilt.

Generation Z, unleashed en masse from college campuses across the U.S.
into the jobs market, is a prisoner of this phenomenon: in fact a slave
to – politically correct – identity politics. And once again, carrying
zero revolutionary potential.

Compare it once again to immense political sacrifices of the Black
Panthers. Or when Angela Davis, already a pop icon, became the most
famous black political prisoner in American history. Aretha Franklin,
when volunteering to post bail for Davis, famously framed it: “I’ve been
locked up for disturbing the peace, and I know you’ve got to disturb the
peace when you can’t get no peace.”

Elaine Brown: “I know what the BPP [Black Panther Party] was. I know the
lives we lost, the struggle we put into place, the efforts we made, the
assaults on us by the police and government – I know all that. I don’t
know what Black Lives Matter does.”

It’s open to endless debate whether Black Lives Matter is intrinsically
racist and even inherently violent.

And it’s also debatable whether taking a knee, now a household ritual
practiced by politicians (complete with Kente scarves from Ghana), cops
and corporations, really threatens the foundations of Empire.

Noam Chomsky has already ventured that the protest wave so far carries
zero political articulation – and badly needs a strategic direction, far
beyond the obvious revolt against police brutality.

The protests are dying down just as the Commune emerges.

Depending on its evolution that may pose a serious problem to
Trump/Barr. The President simply cannot allow a running color revolution
to develop in the middle of a major American city. At the same time he’s
impotent as a federal authority to dissolve the Commune.

What the White House can do is to dog whistle its own counter-insurgency
units, in the form of armed to their teeth white supremacist militias,
to go on the offensive and crush the already flimsy supply lines of the
wokeness-cum-intersectionality crowd.

Occupy after all took over key areas of 60 American cities for months
just to suddenly dissolve into the ether.

Additionally, the Deep State has already war-gamed plenty of scenarios
to deal with siege situations way more complex than the Commune.

Whatever happens next, one key vector is immutable. A state of permanent
insurrection only benefits the 0.00001% plutocracy comfortably ensconced
while the plebs set the night on fire.

In
THE SAKER
http://thesaker.is/syria-in-seattle-commune-defies-the-u-s-regime/
13/6/2020