Refugee Crises, Social Collapse, Countrywide Blackouts: The Coming U.S. Climate Nightmare

The record heat wave that the Pacific Northwest is experiencing right now, where Portland has reached an all-time high of 116 degrees Fahrenheit, Seattle has hit its own record of 108 degrees, and the southwestern Canadian locality of Lytton hit 117.5 degrees (48 degrees higher than what’s normal for this time of year) confirms an unnerving reality about the position that we on this continent are going to be in amid the climate crisis: even the places where climate migrants will initially relocate to are themselves going to be unsafe.

Last year, environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten wrote about the options that the first wave of climate migration are going to have:

The nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo. Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in The Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse.

This doesn’t even fully account for the 60 million U.S. residents who live in the coastline areas that are most vulnerable to hurricanes. Out of these residents, 13 million are confidently expected to become displaced by the end of the century, many of whom are anticipated to move to the Midwest — which itself will experience massive declines in agricultural yields due to warming and crop diseases. The Mountain West is also not going to be safe; quoting the National Climate Assessment, Northeast resident Zoya Teirstein has written that “Our region is looking at ‘the largest temperature increase in the contiguous United States’ — 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the time 2035 rolls around. We’re going to be slammed with the highest rates of sea-level rise in the whole damn country, and we’re going to have the highest rate of ocean warming. Urban centers are particularly at risk (remember Superstorm Sandy?).”

For perspective on just how destructive this process is going to be for the country as a whole, look at what this will likely mean for my community along the Redwood Coast. Since my area is so temperate due to its proximity to the ocean, and since water is relatively abundant here due to the region’s mountain ranges, it’s unlikely that I’ll be forced to flee anywhere during my lifetime, at least for weather-related reasons. It’s estimated that under a high-emissions scenario, my area will only be stuckwith a nearly 55 degree Fahrenheit temperature average by the end of the century. But while the temperatures themselves won’t force anyone in my community to get out, and the area has tribal and corporate-built power stations that will make its residents for the most part exempt from the country’s larger blackouts, numerous other factors will drive my surroundings into chaos.

The impacts that we’ll see, such as the inundation of around a third of the town of Arcata when the sea level rises by 1 meter or the fact that many sections of our highways will also be submerged at such a point, are going to be made very difficult for us to adapt to by the destabilizing factors within society that Lustgarten described. Since our area is relatively safe in terms of temperature and water access, and since this range of relative safety stops so close to where I live (there’s a town in the Central Valley whose residents are currently being forced to either live off of bottled water or stay with relatives), we could see a great influx of climate refugees.

Our area’s infrastructure and housing are built to accommodate the over 130,000 or so who make up Humboldt County’s present population, so what will happen if just several hundred thousand relocate to here? How easy will it be for us to feed ourselves and these refugees when agriculture in the outside world has collapsed, as is increasingly occurring in the Central Valley amid unprecedented depletions of reservoirs? How will we find the resources to solve this humanitarian crisis after neoliberal shock policies have wreaked far greater havoc upon our economy than they have even now? Decline in affordable housing is already a problem with California that’s multiplying the humanitarian fallout from climatic disasters. And since global warming’s impacts are estimated to be soon to create the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history, our economic situation in this scenario is indeed going to be dire. How well will we fare while we’re being hit by the pandemics of the coming decades, which scientists predict will be more deadly than Covid-19 due to the increased disease risks posed by warming temperatures?

What’s alarming is that this is one of the lower-risk areas when it comes to being impacted by the climate crisis. Just outside my little temperate zone — which is itself experiencing an unprecedented decrease in rainfall levels — the question is no longer whether or not society can manage the impacts of the climate crisis, but for how long the land itself will remain habitable. The California Natural Resources Agency has written that:

By the year 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, one study found that the average area burned by wildfires would increase 77 percent and the frequency of extreme wildfires burning more than 25,000 acres would increase by nearly 50 percent. In the areas that have the highest fire risk, the cost of wildfire insurance is estimated to rise by 18 percent by 2055…By mid-century, the Central Valley is projected to experience heat waves that average two weeks longer than those today, and the hot spells could occur four to 10 times more often in the Northern Sierra region.

As millions upon millions of people within these zones leave, the places they settle in will not just undergo social collapses as a consequence. They’ll also experience even worse environmental damages. Oregon resident Elise Herron wrote two years ago that “Fire counts are already up in the region. As of late June, AP News reported, the number of fires in western Oregon, 48, was double the average for the past decade, 20. At the same time, cities are increasingly creeping closer to forests. Western Washington and northwest Oregon combined contain around 1,400 square miles of forest-edge development.” What will happen in these kinds of urban areas when they experience the rapid urbanization that Lustgarten describes? A perfect storm of humanitarian crises.

They’ll be overcome by the series of destabilizing factors that a 2016 Pentagon training video described as “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” and a “growing mass of unemployed.” In response to these and other social ills, say this training video, a 2016 War College report, and a 2019 Pentagon document, the military is going to have to step in. According to the latter resource, the country will likely experience unprecedented blackouts within the next two decades due to how poorly our electrical infrastructure is built under neoliberalism, speeding up the process towards this importing of America’s foreign wars.

The Army, say the first two of these resources, will be prompted to occupy the country’s largest cities. Human intelligence assets and digital surveillance will be used to monitor those within these places and pick off political dissidents. To ensure that the Army’s actions within these zones can be presented to the country as justified, says the War College report, internet and cell phone access will have to be cut off within the occupied areas to prevent reporting on “controversy over US military intervention.”

The impoverished and desperate masses will be met with horrific warfare tactics from the hyper-militarized police, the military itself, and private mercenary companies that serve as paramilitaries in the coming class war. These tactics, which the American internal security state has lifted directly from Israel’s Gaza siege model, will show the masses within U.S. borders how much their government really cares about them. On top of the cruel neoliberal policies that have strangulated their communities amid the environmental collapse, this is going to discredit the capitalist state’s claim to legitimacy, opening the door for an anti-colonial proletarian revolution in the core of global imperialism.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

The U.S. Empire’s Decline Foreshadows The American Settler-Colonial State’s Eventual Defeat

Throughout these last two decades, as Washington has reacted to the great imperialist blowback incident 9/11 by waging perpetual wars with reckless abandon, it’s been confronted with the ways that imperial hubris tends to undermine an empire’s influence. The Iraq invasion proved extremely costly, both in terms of resources and for U.S. diplomatic interests; this immense crime destroyed much of Washington’s perceived credibility, helping pave the way for the rise of Iran in southwest Asia and the rise of China globally. And the Afghanistan war has failed to subdue the Taliban because of the brutality against civilians and immense corruption that Washington’s occupation has brought to the country; the Taliban is able to maintain support from the local populations by pointing out how the alternative is to live under imperialist control.

These self-defeating consequences of Washington’s recent wars, which have also applied to things like the U.S. military’s murderous drone program or the cruel U.S. sanctions against numerous countries, foreshadow what the U.S. government’s weaknesses will be when the wars inevitably come into the country’s borders. The U.S. military has expressed many times over this last five decade that it expects deteriorating living standards and climatic crises to produce internal unrest, and that it will need to respond to these lower class revolts with occupations of U.S. cities and other counterinsurgency measures from Washington’s wars abroad.

This reality of the U.S. empire intending to target rebels in its borders with the most extreme of its warfare tactics abroad is something we must take seriously as members of the anti-colonial proletarian revolutionary movement. This is objectively cause for great concern and great defensive preparation. But at the same time, it’s a sign that the enemy we’re up against in the fight for this continent’s liberation from colonial occupation and bourgeois rule has crucial weaknesses. Weaknesses which ironically stem from how far it’s willing to take its acts of brutality; if Washington’s shameless transgressions in Afghanistan have destroyed its own potential for winning the hearts and minds of the Afghani people, irrevocably costing the empire strategic ground, the same will happen in the U.S. when our military starts bombing neighborhoods or massacring civilians.

Our situation comes back to what Mao wrote about how reactionaries are “paper tigers.” When he stated this, he didn’t mean that the reactionaries shouldn’t be taken seriously. Only that they shouldn’t be viewed as invincible. He explained this in these statements that came after his “paper tigers” quote:

We have developed a concept over a long period for the struggle against the enemy, namely, strategically we should despise all our enemies, but tactically we should take them all seriously. In other words, with regard to the whole we must despise the enemy, but with regard to each specific problem we must take him seriously. If we do not despise him with regard to the whole, we shall commit opportunist errors. Marx and Engels were but two individuals, and yet in those early days they already declared that capitalism would be overthrown throughout the world. But with regard to specific problems and specific enemies, if we do not take them seriously, we shall commit adventurist errors. In war, battles can only be fought one by one and the enemy forces can only be destroyed one part at a time.

This is the approach we revolutionaries in the U.S. must use to overcome the violent backlash that we’ll be met with in the coming decades. It’s clear that the empire’s contradictions are going to produce an anti-colonial proletarian insurgency within our generation; sociologists have lately been predicting that such a domestic revolt is coming due to how dire conditions are growing for the country’s poorest and most disenfranchised communities. The question is whether or not the movement for decolonial, Marxist-Leninist revolution manages to not be crushed by the counterrevolutionary terror campaign from the police, the military, and their adjacent paramilitaries.

We can do this by despising the enemy strategically (which is to say by not believing that the enemy’s modern military technologies render an overthrow of the state impossible), while taking the enemy seriously in regards to tactics (which is to say by acting with as much caution as possible in the face of this great strength). The latter must be done by cultivating a strong security culture within our cadres, by making our cadre members commit to militancy training, and by doing so while not neglecting the task which will make all of this work pay off: the winning over of the local masses surrounding our cadres to our cause of anti-colonial proletarian revolution.

A security culture can be created by studying red flag behaviors for potential movement saboteurs; one can find lists of such traits, which include emotional manipulation of an organization’s members, the stoking of unnecessary divisions within a group, and the promotions of defaming claims about those within an organization. Under our surveillance state, it’s also important for party members to get VPNs and encrypted emails. Militancy culture can be cultivated by routine group trips to the gun range, martial arts training among members, and the mandatory reading of literature like The Art of War and Che’s Guerrilla Warfare. Diligent exercise routines are crucial as well. But these measures won’t get us very far unless we also do mass work, where we organize aid for our communities, engage in tenant organizing, and otherwise establish connections with the masses. As Mao explained about the goal of this kind of mass work:

Everybody must be mobilized to share the responsibility, to speak up, to encourage other people, and to criticize other people. Everyone has a pair of eyes and a mouth and he must be allowed to see and speak up. Democracy means allowing the masses to manage their own affairs. Here are two ways: one is to depend on a few individuals and the other is to mobilize the masses to manage affairs. Our politics is mass politics…. An active leader followed by inactive masses will not do.

If we build this base of support within our communities, during the moment of revolutionary crisis we’ll be able to seize territory away from the control of the settler-colonial state and the bourgeoisie. This is the reward that the guerrillas in Colombia are currently getting for their efforts, which have included not just the creation of a well-trained revolutionary army but the construction of their organization in a way which makes them in tune with the interests of the surrounding masses. As the journalist Oliver Dodd reported this year about Segunda Marquetalia, the organization that’s carrying out this anti-colonial insurgency:

Although the group was only re-established on August 29, 2019, Segunda Marquetalia already has a significant base of civilian support in the communities I visited. I watched their troops pass through villages unhindered and saw their members work openly, interacting with the civilians in the streets, even holding public meetings, seemingly unafraid that their presence could be reported to the Colombian military. A local woman living in a farm within a Farc stronghold, who did not see herself as a socialist or political activist, told me, “The community here prefers the Farc [Segunda Marquetalia] to the police and military. They are always around to help immediately when asked. They are part of us and support us with basic needs in a difficult situation. They also help us to organise the community here.”

If we take this lesson from Segunda Marquetalia and engage in mass work — rather than making our cadres into elitist groups of gatekeepers who look down upon the masses — while incorporating security culture and militancy culture, we’ll make the U.S. empire’s failures abroad afflict the empire at home. Only when we’ve made sure to not underestimate our enemy, to take our enemy seriously in tactical terms, can we take advantage of the ways that our enemy is strategically weak.

U.S. imperialism, whose hubris in warfare strategies renders it unable to subdue far weaker armies like the Taliban, is on the verge of experiencing great strain for its armed forces due to climatic and economic crises. Due to these things, we should despise the empire strategically, using its growing weaknesses as motivation for the tactical moves we’ll need to make for ensuring its defeat.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

“American Apocalypse”: What It Looks Like When A Collapsing Empire Eats Itself

In a 2018 article, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff wrote an account of his experience with being paid to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology.’” The ultra-wealthy hedge fund managers he encountered at the event confronted him with queries that didn’t reflect what the affair was supposedly going to be about. Instead, he was met with a morbid insight into what the richest benefactors of capital and empire expect their system to look like after a civilizational collapse:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’ The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

Implied in this hypothetical scenario where billionaires create a hostage situation so that they can turn their guards into post-apocalyptic slaves is a context where the population outside of these luxury doomsday bunkers has been thoroughly ravaged by engineered destruction. For the angry mobs to be held back from storming the compounds, the mobs will need to lack the organization and resources to mount an armed revolt against the ruling class. This will require a population that, in the event of a destabilizing event like a countrywide power grid breakdown or a pandemic worse than Covid-19, has been preemptively demobilized by the class warfare tools of the elites.

These tools are the same ones the imperialists have used to subdue nations like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine: strategic disinformation designed for giving the masses reality-defying views of history and current events, bombings and drone strikes which destroy critical infrastructure and allow for the carving up of lands by corporate interests, drone strikes that disproportionately kill civilians, the use of private mercenary companies to carry out violence against the targeted population with impunity, military occupations that are done either by U.S. forces or by imperialist proxies, resource blockades that seek to weaken rebellions by depriving civilians of nourishment and medical supplies, deliberate shootings of children and other defenseless individuals to try to terrorize the targeted population into submission.

If these billionaires have considered scenarios of capitalist collapse enough to have human shock collars enter their minds, they must also be contemplating how indispensable these atrocities will be for ensuring that their guards will merely have to fight off disorganized angry mobs rather than a revolutionary People’s Army.

It’s apparent that this is the mentality of the ruling class simply from judging their recent actions; ever-increasing militarization of the police, the waging of endless wars abroad that facilitate this excessive arming of the empire’s internal law enforcement, border militarization, ICE concentration camps, the construction of highly intrusive surveillance towers along the southern border which replicate Israel’s monitoring of Gazans, the implementation of the most expansive and invasive digital surveillance state on the planet within U.S. borders, the training of U.S. police by Israel to deadly effect, the legalization of covert CIA psychological operations in the U.S. media, the deployment of unidentified federal troops into cities so that protesters can be black-bagged and put into unmarked vehicles, social media micro-targeting by U.S. intelligence that manipulates public sentiments, the ongoing erosions of privacy and right to due process under the “War on Terror.” Neoliberalism is also part of this reaction to imperial decline, because its ever-growing policies of privatization, austerity, regressive taxation, wage cuts, and deregulation are the only ways the bourgeoisie can maintain upward profits in an environment where capital and empire are perpetually weakening.

As the commentator John C. Whitehead has concluded, all of these policies reflect an engineered effort by our government to create an “American Apocalypse,” where destabilization gets inflicted upon the American masses in the same ways that have occurred in Washington’s foreign interventions:

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power. According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future — a future the military is preparing for — bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

The step after this one is the environment that those hedge fund managers described, where society has collapsed so much that money is no longer useful and the elites have to retreat to makeshift feudal fortresses. Ideally for these elites, the collapse of capitalism will allow for a total transition back into feudalism, with them taking the position of royalty. But how plausible is it that our current socioeconomic order will simply convert into a high-tech version of the system that capitalism grew out of? The fact that the super rich anticipate such desperate scenarios for themselves in the leadup to this hoped-for dictatorship, where all that’s stopping their own guards from rebelling against them are flailing coercive measures, shows just how fragile the control of the ruling class will get after capitalism has fully eaten itself.

U.S. imperialism, and capitalism in general, are in a state of unprecedented and accelerating contraction. When the U.S. dollar crashes, as Chinese experts have been predicting, Washington is going to be forced to withdraw many of its global military forces — a retreat that will be furthered in the coming decades by the grave damage which will be done to Washington’s military installations and armed occupation capabilities by global warming. The imminent new wave of socialist revolutions is also going to diminish the military capacity of the imperialists and the global bourgeoisie. Since the Pentagon has expressed that it’s worried climatic catastrophes will immensely strain the U.S. military’s resources in the coming decades, it’s clear that this implosion for the armed strength of capital and empire will apply to the affairs within the core of imperialism the U.S. First the empire will have to retreat abroad, then at home.

As this implosion progresses, the ruling class will increasingly resort to paramilitaries to try to suppress revolts. This is something the revolutionaries must take into account if we intend to survive the violent capitalist reaction of the coming decades. But as we’ve seen in capitalist regimes that have already been resorting to this tactic, such as India, paramilitaries aren’t necessarily as reliable as official armed forces; the relatively meager training of America’s private mercenaries shows this will likely also be the case in the U.S.

The fact that these mercenaries were cultivated through the profit motive is likely why this inadequacy exists within their preparations for the coming class war; capitalism and imperialism are ultimately incompetent at military strategy, putting short-term economic interests and reactive military adventures ahead of pragmatism. This was what set off U.S. imperialism’s decline in the first place; the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq may have advanced imperialist economic interests in the short term, but the blowback they created set off an ongoing unraveling of Washington’s global hegemony. One that will put the U.S. bourgeoisie in an even worse position when the class confrontation comes to a head.

To carry out anti-colonial proletarian revolution within what’s currently called the United States, we must build the organizations capable of taking on the task of overthrowing and replacing the capitalist state after the system’s contradictions have produced a sufficient mass uprising. And we must do this in a way which allows our cadres to survive the state repression, paramilitary violence, and imported imperialist interventions that the ruling class will meet us with. The imperialists are growing desperate, they’ve as much as admitted this. But we won’t be able to defeat them unless we adopt a revolutionary strategy that’s better than the strategy behind their domestic counterinsurgency effort. As The Art of War concluded, “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.

Colombia’s Nazistic Horrors Show How The U.S. Ruling Class Will React To Future Internal Uprisings

With the world-shocking acts of state violence that have been carried out by Israel and Colombia during the last two months, we’ve gotten a clearer picture of what it will look like when the “imperial boomerang” effect — where an empire’s evils abroad manifest within the empire’s own borders — fully comes to define events within the core of global imperialism the United States. In Israel, the U.S. empire has cultivated a laboratory in necro-politics, where methods of brutal repression have been innovated to preserve the settler state in the face of unending Palestinian resistance. By giving ample military technologies and training to Colombia’s repressive forces, the Israelis have exported the findings from their laboratory to one of Washington’s most strategically important neo-colonies, which has been fighting off an anti-colonial revolt of its own.

With the intensification of class conflict in the U.S. amid a thirteen-year-long depression, and amid an unprecedented decline in Washington’s global power throughout the last two decades, the U.S. empire has so far fulfilled the imperial boomerang in many ways. Not only has it imported the tools of CIA propaganda that have defined U.S. destabilization efforts abroad, used its private mercenary companies for assisting in internal repressive efforts, and quite literally brought home its wars by funneling increasingly large amounts of Army equipment from the War on Terror into its police departments, but it’s “Israelified” its internal repressive state by having Israeli forces train American police. This has led to an uptick in American police brutality due to more militarized and trigger-happy police, an increase in government-fostered disinformation throughout American society, and a consequential furthering of racial divides amid escalating state terror against colonized peoples within U.S. borders.

If this is how bad the imperial boomerang has made things so far, imagine what the country will look like when the rest of the brutality within Washington’s global imperialist projects gets brought into our communities. To get a sense of what I mean by this, think of the very darkest chapters in Washington’s history of exporting death and destruction, the kinds of crimes that Americans tend to prefer not to even learn about. Washington’s wanton murders of civilians during the Vietnam War are one example, which is explained by the columnist K. Nazari to be applicable to Colombia’s modern situation:

In the year 1999 the Colombian government presented a new strategy in cooperation with the USA to guarantee “peace and wealth for the country.” This plan is still running today. The program has the name ‘Plan Colombia’. It was officially designed to combat the drug business but in fact, it was aimed at fighting insurgencies, especially the FARC-EP. During the birth of Plan Colombia, the guerilla was so overwhelmingly strong that the Colombian military could not even defend major cities from the FARC guerilla. The rebels took control of village after village and the threat of the FARC taking control of city after city was real. The Colombian military was desperately in need of money and expertise. Fortunately for them, when it comes to fighting communists, the USA has no morals and does not hesitate. They align with anyone, even with a de facto narco-state.

The parallels between the U.S. military’s genocide against the Vietnamese and the U.S.-backed Colombian narco-state’s war against political undesirables are clear. In fact, a Colombian court describedwhat this state did as a “political genocide,” where 6,000 people were killed from 1984 to 2002 alone for simply associating with Colombia’s communist movement. Through murder, torture, forced displacement, and other human rights abuses, the regime — fittingly with the help of some of Israel’s most decorated spies — created a precedent for the similar atrocities that are now taking place within the country. One which has remained relevant to Colombia’s fascistic political culture amid the dirty war against communist guerrillas that it’s been waging since Plan Colombia began.

The arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial executions of protest leaders, torture, sexual abuse of prisoners, mutilations, disappearances, massacres of protesters, use of helicopters to shoot unarmed civilians in broad daylight, assassinations of journalists, and bounties on protest medics that the Colombian government has been carrying out in coordination with the country’s paramilitaries during the last two months are all rationalized as essential for a broad-reaching “counterterrorism” effort. One which seeks to label all facets of opposition to the government’s free market fanaticism, whether human rights organizations or labor organizers or indigenous liberation fighters, as part of an all-encompassing conspiracy perpetrated by narco-criminals and foreign governments. “Castro-Chavismo” is how this supposed foreign subversion threat is often described.

By treating all who challenge the regime’s agenda as assets in a terrorist plot, the regime can claim that it isn’t committing any real war crimes by applying the proportions of force that it does, parallel to how Israel falsely claims that its frequent bombings of children and other non-combatants in Gaza aren’t actually war crimes because these individuals are supposedly “human shields” for Hamas. The language from the Israeli military and Zionist propagandists, which consistently labels all facets of Palestinian society and Palestine’s diverse resistance movement as “the Hamas,” is another way that Israel’s methods for crushing freedom have been exported to the country which Hugo Chavez described as “the Israel of Latin America.”

In Colombia, this Zionist technique of blankedly responding to all opposition as “terrorism” both in military doctrine and in rhetoric has taken the form of Uribismo, the ideology that’s attributable to Colombia’s still influential ex-president Alvaro Uribe Velez. During these protests, Uribismo’s goal of stamping out opposition to neoliberalism at all costs has manifested in Uribe’s theory of the “dissipated molecular revolution,” a convoluted and confusing framework which best I can discern posits that a hypothetical socialist revolution needs to be destroyed on a molecular level. This thorough suppression campaign naturally calls for the stigmatization and violent disassembly of every group which in any way challenges Colombian neo-colonialism and settler-colonial capitalism.

The “dissipated molecular revolution” has been getting proliferated within police, the military, and paramilitaries by Alexis Lopez Tapia, the self-professed neo-Nazi who’s been providing Colombia’s law enforcement with the intellectual framework for how to understand the protests and how to try to break the strike. As one Colombian radio journalist has written, the consequences of the lies of Uribe and Tapia are truly Nazistic, with these far-right conspiracy theories serving to justify a dictatorial order under the guise of Colombia’s “liberal democracy”:

“Resist Dissipated Molecular Revolution: prevents normality, scale and cup”, wrote [Uribe] on May 3 on Twitter, as a message in the form of a secret code. The country immediately began trying to decipher the cryptic concept. “Do you want to talk about molecular revolution or do you want to talk about national socialism?” I ask defiantly, the promoter of the concept currently in Colombia, the Chilean Alexis López, in an interview with a Colombian radio station. Designated in Chile as a neo-Nazi in 2000, López is a far-right entomologist who does not speak of Pinochet as a dictator but as the man who prevented “us from falling into a totalitarian state of a socialist character.” Author of articles as “How many Soviets are there in Chile? O Students or violent: aren’t they the same?” It is not a voice that is taken seriously in the south of the continent.

Doesn’t this all mirror the claims from the American right we’ve seen during this last year about the Black Lives Matter protests being the products of “outside agitators,” or about Antifa secretly being some kind of cohesive organization that’s led by “globalists” like George Soros? This demonization of an organic movement against racialized police brutality as a manufactured subversion effort by malign and powerful forces is a prelude to when the full brutality of Zionism and Uribismo will get brought into U.S. borders. The U.S. ruling class is already readying its internal repressive forces not just for greater police violence, but for right-wing paramilitary massacres and military invasions of major U.S. cities. When this state terror campaign comes for us, it will be rationalized with an Americanized version of “dissipated molecular revolution.”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.