When Will It Be "Enough"?

Uninvited, unwanted, but there anyway: Hamilton police disrupt a funeral.

Within the space of about a day, New Jersey experienced two public displays of organized intimidation by paramilitary thugs. The first involved an armed assault by black-clad bullies whose conduct was indistinguishable from the criminal street violence of the Nazi SS. The other was merely a public protest by the local chapter of the National Socialist Movement.

The family of Elsie Wenzel, a beloved school lunch lady who died at age 71, gathered for a memorial service at a funeral home in Hamilton (a small town near Trenton) on April 15. Charles Wenzel, one of her grandsons, "had ... something like a seizure," related Elsie's widower, Edward, in an interview with The Trentonian. The family called 911 to summon the paramedics. Unfortunately, if you call the paramedics, the police are part of the package deal, whether they're wanted or not -- and they have an unfailing talent for making matters worse.


When Charles had another convulsion, he committed the unpardonable offense of defiling one of the sanctified bully-boys through physical contact. This constitutes "battery on an officer," and so the offended cop and several of his boyfriends attempted to handcuff Charles while he was lying on the ground receiving medical treatment.


"We didn't call you for this!" exclaimed a witness as several other people, including a granddaughter of the deceased, tried to intervene to protect Charles from the criminal assault. The officers responded by pepper-spraying the mourners and throwing several of them -- including Edward's middle-aged granddaughter -- to the ground. 

One of the officers called in a report that a "riot" was in progress -- "riot" being defined as any situation in which Mundanes loudly criticize the anointed purveyors of consecrated violence for their crimes against innocent people. Apparently the funeral parlor was located near a donut shop, because within seconds at least a dozen police vehicles were on the scene. 





(Courtesy of the Trentonian.)


One of Elsie's sons, who was to be a pallbearer at the funeral, was jumped by "seven or eight" of the armed tax-feeders and thrown to the floor of the funeral parlor, Edward Wenzel reported. Another eyewitness who drove by the scene was alarmed to see police swarming four other prone, helpless men.

By one account, at least a half-dozen of the pallbearers were arrested to sent to the hospital as a result of gang violence by the police. When police attempted to "escort" him from the chapel, Edward Wenzel refused; if they had laid hands on the bereaved elderly widower, an authentic riot might well have ensued. 


A day later in nearby Trenton, a battalion-strength contingent of riot police was on hand to provide "security" during a protest staged at the Statehouse by about fifty members of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a pathetic little outfit that -- in terms of authenticity -- has the same relationship to the Third Reich that Spinal Tap has to Led Zeppelin. 

As is typical in events of this kind, the NSM nitwits were outnumbered about three-to-one by counter-protesters. Events of this kind are an orgy of overtime for the unionized gendarme, and the April 16 protest was no exception: Every law enforcement agency -- local, state, and federal -- sent a contingent of uniformed trough-swillers to strut and preen in riot gear.

The familiar ritual of neo-Nazi protests reminds me a bit of Voltaire's description of the typical 18th Century Parisian dinner party, where one would experience "the usual unintelligible chatter, witticisms, false rumors, bad reasoning, a little politics, [and] a great deal of slander...." 


Every time neo-Nazi numbskulls conduct a protest, the air will be clotted with the same familiar slogans, the standard assortment of insults will be exchanged, and all of the familiar poses will be struck. 

All of this, I'm convinced, is incidental to the real two-fold purpose of such displays: Allowing the local constabulary to run up overtime, and reinforcing the notion that the police are the valiant protectors of the innocent, rather than the most significant threat to their life, liberty, and property.

It wasn't neo-Nazis of the NSM variety who disrupted Elsie Wenzel's funeral. It would be interesting to find out how many of the paladins of public order who pulled "riot duty" in Trenton on Saturday, April 16 had taken part in the police riot in Hamilton on the previous day. In similar fashion, it's quite likely that nobody who attended Elsie's funeral had ever been the victim of criminal violence apart from that inflicted on them by the Hamilton police. 

Domesticated neo-Nazi groups like the NSM have a way of Bogarting all of the civic outrage wherever they materialize, including outrage more properly directed at the local branch of the Ordnungspolitzei. This is one reason why the Feds are eager to feed and care for groups such as the NSM -- which also act as useful vehicles for federal provocateurs.


The likelihood that the National Socialist Movement -- or any similarly situated neo-Nazi group -- could become a menace to individual liberty and dignity comparable to that posed by the State's punitive priesthood is so small that it couldn't be detected by en electron microscope. Neo-Nazis are almost impossible to find, unless one seeks them out in a few rural habitats in the Northwest and Deep South. The police, by way of contrast, are almost impossible to avoid, and their behavior -- as I've noted before -- increasingly resembles that of an army of occupation. 

In part, this is because many of them are Reservists or Guardsmen who have served in Washington's military occupations abroad. But even those who have not been deployed overseas are being indoctrinated to think of themselves as combatants in constant peril for whom "officer safety" is the paramount consideration. 


To understand the institutional mindset of contemporary law enforcement, it's useful to juxtapose video records of two incidents. The first took place in Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison in 2005:

“Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” exclaimed an armed thug after one of his comrades hurled a grenade into a prison enclosure. The scene, described by commentator David Kramer as something out of "Schindler's List," struck me as some perverse hybrid of Wounded Knee and “Jackass”: Armed adolescent bullies cackling with juvenile glee as they gun down desperate, defenseless people.

One wonders how many of these murderous mouth-breathers are now employed in domestic law enforcement. And then one wonders how many of these sadists had been employed as police before being called up by the Regime to serve as hired killers overseas. And that thought leads us irresistibly to the second video:



In 2003,  two years before the episode at Iraq's Camp Bucca, riot police in Miami carried out a full-scale military assault — albeit with “non-lethal” weapons — against demonstrators who had assembled to protest a summit meeting promoting the artfully misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“After last week, no one should call what [Chief John] Timoney runs in Miami a police force,” observed investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill following the event. “It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, `back… back… back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.”

Among the protesters was an attorney named Elizabeth Ritter. She was driven into the streets out of disgust that Miami had been turned into a garrison state. Wearing a modest, professional business suit, she marched in front of Timoney’s stormtroopers carrying a sign that read “Fear Totalitarianism.” As if to vindicate Ritter’s point, some of Timoney’s goons shot Ritter several times in the back and legs with rubber bullets. Ritter crouched down and covered her face with her protest sign — only to be shot again by a rubber bullet, which penetrated the sign and struck her in the forehead.

During the  next morning’s mission briefing,  black-shirted thugs commanded by Sgt. Michael Kallman of the Broward Sheriff’s Office of homeland security enjoyed a hearty laugh as they reviewed footage of the criminal assault on Ritter. This led to Kallman being captured in his own “Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!” moment.

“I don’t know who got her,” chortled Kallman, “but … it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head.”

“Can I get a little piece of her red dress?” chimed in one of Kallman’s cretinous underlings from somewhere off-camera.

In a conversation with Major John Brooks, the ranking officer at the briefing, another of the blackshirts showed off a bandana that he had retrieved “from one of the scurrying cockroaches.”

“Oh, cool!” exulted Brooks in a fashion worthy of a twelve-year-old. “This is going in my office forever, and it’s going to bring me some very good memories.”

Despite the fact that Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel confirmed that police had committed criminal assaults during the protests, none of the costumed assailants responsible was punished in any way. In fact, the scenes described above were included in a training video, presumably used to instruct the Schutzstaffel in the proper use of what has come to be known as the “Miami Model” of homeland security.

 The foundation of the "Miami Model" is a doctrine of overwhelming force in the service of "order": The Mundanes are told to submit or be hurt -- or killed. This is the operative principle of every encounter between police and "civilians," which is why every such encounter -- even one incidental to emergency medical treatment at a funeral -- is freighted with incipient police violence.

Hamilton Township, New Jersey -- described by its municipal government as "America's Favorite Hometown" -- is a community of about 100,000 people. It is a reasonably affluent suburb blessed with abundant parks and other amenities -- and blighted by a police force capable of busting up a funeral in a fit of official violence that wasn't that far removed from the behavior of the torch-bearing Cossacks who raided the wedding in Fiddler on the Roof.

Earlier in the drama we had seen how Teyve, the Jewish milkman at the center of the story, was on friendly terms with the police chief. That friendship is savagely thrust aside once the chief's "duty" is made clear to him.

"Orders are orders -- you understand?"  simpered Anatevka's village police chief to Tevye as the troops under his command carried out their pogrom. After all, the chief had been told by his superior, in no uncertain terms, that his job depended on his willingness to carry out orders: "If you don't want to carry out orders, we will get someone else who will." Such people are never in short supply.

We are told that many -- nay, most -- of those employed in police agencies are people of conscience and principle. This is true of several people I know who are thus employed. I sometimes suspect that I've met everybody who fits that description.

For reasons of institutional solidarity -- or, what's much the same thing, conformity achieved through the threat of retaliation -- such worthy and decent police officers never seem to intervene in defense of innocent people being abused by their costumed comrades. In such instances, any effort made to de-escalate a situation involves admonitions to outraged Mundanes that they must "calm down" in the face of criminal violence being inflicted on a friend, loved one, or clearly inoffensive stranger.

As I've pointed out before, a police officer who actually intervenes to prevent criminal violence by a professional associate can expect to be cashiered immediately. The criminal offender himself, by way of contrast,  can expect a lucrative paid vacation while the local police union spares no effort to preserve his job. 

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible for Americans to avoid contact with the police, and the police were trained and expected to leave people alone. Now, however, police are permitted and encouraged to behave like packs of lupine predators, eager to exploit any opportunity to inflict themselves on the helpless.


It's tempting to think that at some point some helpless American is going to become our nation's Mohammed Bouazizi, or Khaled Said -- a living (or recently deceased) symbol of resistance to the persistent, unpunished abuse inflicted by the Regime's armed enforcers.

When he was three years old, Mohammad Bouazizi's father died. As the oldest son of an indigent family living in Sidi Bouazid -- a town about 160 miles from the Tunisian capital, Tunis -- Mohammad was responsible to provide for his mother and two sisters. He earned a computer science degree, but found that it was of little use in Tunisia's deeply depressed economy.

For years, Bouazizi managed to eke out a living as an unlicensed street vendor, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. Like others who carried out commerce without official permission, Bouazizi endured harassment from shakedown artists employed by the State, who in the course of the typical visit would steal the equivalent of seven dollars as a "fine." 

As the song says, talk is cheap, but even nickels add up. Even a single nickel is sorely missed when it's extracted at gunpoint from someone barely managing to earn enough to survive. But the contemptuous, arrogant words emitted by the armed functionary to carries out that theft do damage as well. The cumulative effect of such indignities can be enough to drive a despairing man to do desperate things.

He was driven to fatal despair when a municipal police officer confiscated his merchandise. 

The matter could have been cleared up if the officer had accepted the seven-dollar fine for operating an unlicensed merchant stand. But the sadist insisted on berating Bouazizi, slapping him, spitting in his face, and insulting his dead father. Heartsick with inconsolable despair, the young man set himself on fire. Public outrage over this incident grew into a revolt that eventually unseated the U.S.-supported incumbent dictator.

"What happened to him?" The police "happened" to him.

Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria, Egypt. Last June, after Said posted a video he had captured of narcotics officers divvying up the proceeds of a drug bust, he was dragged out of an internet cafe, taken to a nearby police station, and beaten to death. A small bag of hashish of the sort used by police everywhere to plant evidence was stuffed down Said's throat.

News of this atrocity was quickly propagated throughout Egypt, engendering a protest movement that eventually grew into the rebellion at Tahrir Square and the still-unfinished effort to uproot Egypt's deeply entrenched, U.S.-subsidized police state.

In police states of the kind Washington has supported in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the region, people have been willing to endure a great deal of abuse as long as there was some reasonable expectation that they would be able to feed themselves. It's not surprising to see that forbearance evaporate in the heat of the ongoing economic meltdown, which has left many people without the means to feed their families.  

The triggering incidents that set off revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt were episodes of casual, arrogant abuse by police officers who considered themselves to be imperviously clothed in official privilege. Incidents of that kind are becoming more commonplace here in the putative Land of the Free, and the debt-prolonged illusion of prosperity that has long anesthetized public sensitivities is coming to an end.

Once again, it's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone, somewhere is going to be pushed too far by an officious prig in a government-issued costume, an atrocity will result -- and then all hell will break loose. 

Given the perverse ingenuity police display in arranging opportunities to impart such abuse, this could happen nearly anywhere, at any time. Meanwhile, those of us who belong to the productive class should avail ourselves of every opportunity to share the following message with representatives of the State's coercive caste:

We don't need you.

We don't want you.

We don't respect you.

We won't tolerate you much longer.

Obiter Dicta

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Let's Play "Name That Arab Despotism"!

There is a large and powerful Arab state ruled by a Soviet-trained military dictator. The figure he has chosen as a successor, the head of the secret police, was also trained in the Soviet Union, and the apparatus of terror and repression he supervises was created with valuable input from the KGB. Thus it's not surprising to learn that he is one of the most notorious torturers in a region where that occupation is common. During one torture session he supervised, that thug actually offered to cut off the arm of a prisoner in order to please representatives of his regime’s chief foreign sponsor.

Despite the fact that this country has seen its gross domestic product grow consistently for the past thirty years, the percentage of its population in poverty has grown even faster.  The entrenched socialist oligarchy devours practically all of the wealth created in the country, and is also sustained by lavish foreign subsidies. 

The Dear Leader portrays himself as a humble old soldier, a self-abnegating servant of the country. It's entirely possible that he actually believes his own propaganda; this would explain why that simple son of toil has amassed a fortune estimated in the billions. Meanwhile, at least a million residents of the capital city are permanently homeless and can be found sleeping in cemeteries. 

The existing economic and political cartel in the country we're discussing is quite similar to the one in charge of post-Soviet Russia. Shortly before relinquishing its monopoly on political power, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union apportioned its membership among several "contending" parties. At the same time, the Party deeded to itself everything of value in the country in anticipation of "privatizing" the economy. In this way, the Nomenklatura protected its power and perquisites against the vagaries of electoral politics.

The controlled implosion of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991 was a neat trick -- but the ruling elite of the Arab state we're discussing actually did the same thing decades earlier. In 1974, its ruling Arab Socialist Union calved off two "contending" parties -- one on the "right" and another on the "left" -- while re-naming itself the National Democratic Party (NDP) and laying claim to the "moderate center." 

Until very recently, the NDP -- which remains ensconced as the ruling party -- was a member in good standing of the Socialist International, which was founded by Karl Marx.

Given the pedigree of this junta, we shouldn't be surprised to learn that it has a long and amicable relationship with the despotic dynasty ruling North Korea. Decades ago, as head of the air force, the future Arab dictator arranged for his pilots to receive training from North Korean advisers in preparation for a war against Israel. Pyongyang also supplied the country with Soviet-produced missiles and the know-how to produce its own. 

We're not discussing Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Iran  (which isn't an Arab country, of course). This is portrait of the Egyptian government headed by Hosni Mubarak and his hand-picked successor Omar Suleiman. That Arab socialist regime, we are insistently told by the Obama administration and various retread Cold War conservatives, is a flawed but valuable ally of the United States. 

Some of those singing that refrain has been performing cadenzas of alarm over the prospect of Cairo falling into the clutches of a dreadful "Islamo-Communist" alliance bent on creating a global Caliphate. The operatic variations on that theme performed by Glenn Beck have been worthy of  a coloratura soprano. 

By this reading, the uprising in Cairo is not a tribute to the irrepressible human desire for freedom. Instead, the brave defiance offered by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians was orchestrated as part of an elaborate plot to undermine the "stability" provided by Mubarak's U.S.-subsidized torture state.

Difficult as it may be to believe, Glenn Beck's take on this issue qualifies only for a silver medal in the silliness sweepstakes. First place goes to this unfathomably foolish essay, with shares equally apportioned to the young man who wrote it and the purported adults on the editorial staff of the journal that published it.

Exporting repression: An American-made tear gas grenade in Cairo.

Elaborating on Beck's rococo conspiracy theory, the author insists that the uprising against Mubarak is the work of an "Islamo-Leninist" alliance that he describes as the modern successor to "the Soviet-backed Nasser."

Actually, Nasser's successor is the Soviet-trained Hosni Mubarak, who heads a party that grew directly out of Nasser's Arab Socialist Union. It should also be pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood was a CIA-supported enemy of Nasser. 

"While Hosni Mubarak may not share American hopes and conceptions of what constitutes a democratic government," the author continues, "he has been an ally of the United States and Israel, and has attempted to institute as many free-market reforms as possible...." For this reason, "our government understands the necessity of supporting Mubarak, whom even Former Vice President Dick Cheney has identified as an ally."

Oh, you mean Mubarak and his torturers have earned the Darth Cheney Seal of Approval? I guess that settles it, then. 

For those who stubbornly remain unpersuaded, the writer deploys the heaviest artillery at his disposal:

It's a Communist plot! Egyptian Muslims and Christians unite against tyranny.

"Our support for Mubarak is a direct application of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, named after Reagan advisor Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who differentiated authoritarian governments (such as Mubarak’s Egypt and Pinochet’s Chile) from totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, and stressed the need to support authoritarian governments as strategic partners against hostile regimes and movements, such as Islamism and Communism."

Referring to criticism of Glenn Beck by Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol, the author laments:  "It is a sad and shameful day when a self-identified `conservative' betrays the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and the long-term strategic interests of the United States in favor of what most likely amounts to a desperate attempt for publicity and attention from a political movement in which he is now obsolete."
 

Apparently we are to believe that the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was a divinely revealed codicil to the Decalogue, or at least a secret annex to the U.S. Constitution authorizing open-ended military and economic support for any despot who is baptized a "strategic partner" by our rulers.

Actually, that doctrine was actually spawned in the Trotskyite slums of academia in the late 1960s, before being articulated by Kirkpatrick in an essay that could be considered an Ur-text of neo-con imperialism. It is treated as holy writ by those who believe America has been anointed by History to propagate democracy at gunpoint throughout the globe. Those on the receiving end of the Empire's ministrations understandable consider it to be demonic rather than divine. 

The "Kirkpatrick Doctrine" as practiced in Cairo.

 The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was the direct mirror image of the Brezhnev Doctrine, under which Moscow claimed the supposed right to prop up and defend its own satrapies wherever they were threatened by "instability."

During the second Reagan term, Secretary of State George Schulz pronounced a corollary to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine under which Washington would actively promote anti-Soviet insurgencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In other words, the U.S. would emulate another Soviet strategy by promoting "wars of national liberation."

Among the despots supported by Washington under the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was Saddam Hussein. Among the insurgents who received American help pursuant to the Schulz Corollary were the Afghan Mujahadeen -- the direct progenitors of the Afghan insurgents currently doing battle with American occupation troops. For the past decade, U.S. foreign policy has been an exercise in dealing with Kirkpatrick Doctrine-related blowback.

Defenders of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine will indignantly insist that I am guilty of "moral equivalence" by comparing it to the Brezhnev Doctrine. A good and sufficient reply is to point out that those doctrines directly intersect in Egypt, where -- according to the author quoted above, and many others of his ilk -- America has a moral duty and strategic imperative to support the socialist torture regime of Soviet-trained, North Korean-allied Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.

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Saviors in Uniform? (Updated, 2/2)

"The Army and the People Are One!" Don't count on it.

"The army is all good men but the police, every policeman is bad," explained Egyptian demonstrator Mustafa Abdel Wahab to Time magazine. Mr. Wahab is as tragically mistaken in the first assessment as he is correct in the second. 

In Egypt -- as is the case nearly everywhere else -- the police and army are what Alexander Hamilton called "correspondent appendages of military establishments." Not every individual soldier or policeman is exceptionally depraved, of course. But the institutional purpose of such establishments is to serve the depraved interests of those who control the State. This is why, as Hamilton pointed out, military bodies (which include police agencies) "have a tendency to destroy ... civil and political rights." Decades of "emergency" rule in Egypt have destroyed whatever trivial substantive differences may once have separated the police from the military. 

In the late summer of 1994 I spent a couple of weeks in Cairo covering a United Nations conference on population control. That event attracted thousands of people -- politicians, delegates, lobbyists, activists, and journalists -- from around the world. In anticipation of media scrutiny the Mubarak regime made a considerable effort to prettify itself. The cosmetic changes included issuing brand new white uniforms to the heavily-armed police officers who were deployed in small groups everywhere in downtown Cairo.

I remained in Cairo for a few days after the conference ended. It was my expectation that the departure of the Important People would bring about a change in the security situation. In a sense, I was correct: The white uniforms were put away, and the heavily-armed police who prowled the streets reverted to their standard military attire. Like other visitors, I had assumed that the high-profile police presence was the exception, rather than the rule. We were wrong.



The ongoing upheaval in Egypt offers a potent illustration of the fact that government police agencies are instruments of plunder, rather than protection -- and that protection of person and property is best handled privately.


When they weren't beating people in the streets or hauling them off to be murdered, plainclothes thugs from Egypt's Central Security Service (or Mukhabarat) brazenly looted private businesses or provided protection to those who did -- deputized criminals referred to by one protester on the scene as "prisoners who have been released by that bastard Mubarak in return for their services to beat up civilians." Egyptians not employed in the coercive sector responded by creating private anti-looting patrols. 

Private defense: Egyptians link arms to protect property.

Public loathing of the government's police force is widespread in Egypt, which is a healthy development in any society. However, as Mr. Wahab's comments illustrate, the growing disrepute of Egypt's police organs organs has actually enhanced the stature of the military.

Writes Steve Coll of The New Yorker: "There have been reports that protesters are relieved to see the Army in the streets; no doubt, as in many other like countries, the Army has more credibility than the corrupt and often torture-prone police." 

For 31 years, Hosni Mubarak has been a CIA sock puppet ruling through decree while maintaining a pretense of "legitimacy." Mubarak avoided naming a successor, most likely because Washington didn't give him permission to do so. In the terminal crisis of his reign, he has tapped Omar Suleiman, the head of the Mukhabarat secret police, to serve as vice president. Since Suleiman has been running Egypt's apparatus of imprisonment, torture, and murder for decades, this appointment wasn't really a promotion. And in his current position Suleiman would be in charge, even if somebody else is cast in the role of figurehead.

Dictator-in-waiting: Suleiman, left, with Israel's PM Netanyahu.

 Ian Black, Middle East editor for the London Guardian, points out that Suleiman "is the keeper of Egypt's and the president's secrets, a behind-the-scenes operator who has been intimately involved in the most sensitive issues of national security and foreign policy for nearly 20 years." 

Not only was he was the dungeon master and chief persecutor of Egypt's political dissidents, but he also coordinated rendition and torture operations with the CIA. He's also been a dutiful asset of the Pentagon, according to WikiLeaks. 

A Foreign Policy profile of Suleiman published two years ago points out that Suleiman was a rent boy for both sides during the Cold War circle-jerk: He attended "the Soviet Union's Frunze Military Academy" while Cairo was a Soviet client, and then "received training at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center" at Ft. Bragg in the 1980s. As head of the Mukhabarat, Suleiman was"one of a rare group of Egyptian officials who hold both a military rank ... and a civilian office...." His most important assignment was to monitor "Egypt's security apparatus for signs of internal coups." 

Unlike those who had previously held his position, Suleiman became a public figure several years ago as Mubarak -- who reportedly suffers from cancer-- became enfeebled. He and his handlers spent several years building internal coalitions and developing diplomatic contacts abroad. As Cairo-based journalist Issandr Amrani points out, "most Suleiman supporters recognize that to gain the presidency he would most likely have to carry out a coup -- perhaps a soft, constitutional one -- but a coup nonetheless."

Thumbs up for tyranny!

Well, how about a "People Power" coup, orchestrated with the help of the kind folks in Washington? That appears to be what we're seeing in Egypt now, and we could conceivably see something similar here in the United States before the decade is over.

The convulsion in Cairo brings to mind Brig. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap's essay "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012," which was published in the Winter 1992—93 issue of the U.S. Army War College journal Parameters -- a subject I have discussed before.

Dunlap used the literary device of a smuggled prison letter composed by "Prisoner 222305759," condemned to death for "treason" by the American military junta of Gen. E.T. Brutus. Following a series of military disasters overseas and domestic crises at home, Brutus staged a coup in the name of protecting "public order" from the corruption of the political class. 

In the decades leading up to the putsch, the "Prisoner" recalled, "The one institution of government in which people retained faith was the military." Even as the public lamented the corruption and profligacy of Big Government, they had nothing but bottomless respect for the Regime's chief instrument of death and property destruction. The military retained its prestige in spite of the fact that its structural defects -- made painfully visible by a long, bloody, and futile war in the Gulf --  left it "unfit to engage an authentic military opponent."

While the military was no longer well-suited to fight and win wars, its subtle integration into every element of domestic life made it perfectly suited to carry out a coup: 

"Eventually, people became acclimated to seeing uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood. Now troops are an adjunct to almost all police forces in the country. In many of the areas where much of our burgeoning population of elderly Americans live — [military dictator] Brutus calls them 'National Security Zones' — the military is often the only law enforcement agency. Consequently, the military was ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the coup."

During Egypt's long "state of emergency," its army managed to lose two wars abroad, while fine-tuning its skills as an instrument of domestic suppression. Granted, it has announced that it will not fire on Egyptian citizens, which is always a welcome development. But why should the Egyptian Army fire on protesters, given that the citizen uprising is helping to entrench military rule, rather than end it?

With our own economy unraveling and our political class becoming shamelessly predatory and unbearably impudent, it's not difficult to imagine a similar scenario playing out in America, with Tea Party Republicans -- for whom the military (which in our system includes our own "torture-prone" police) is sacrosanct --  eagerly welcoming a military coup as "liberation" from Big Government. Perhaps Field Marshal Stanley McChrystal -- formerly military proconsul in Afghanistan, most recently seen flogging Soviet-style "national service" in the pages of Newsweek -- could be tapped to play the role of America's Omar Suleiman. 

UPDATE 

"`Why don't you protect us?' some protesters shouted at the soldiers, who replied they did not have orders to do so and told people to go home." 

This on-scene account from Tahrir Square described a coordinated attack by a mob of "pro-government protesters," some of whom were mounted on horses or camels. The assailants -- criminal subcontractors in the employ of the regime -- used clubs, whips, straight razors, and machetes. They acted with complete impunity, beating and killing at whim. Among their targets were journalists attempting to document the pogrom: Anderson Cooper discovered that international celebrity conferred no protection.

Among those chronicling the scene are Graeme Wood of The Atlantic, who was present in Tahrir Square during the last mass protest -- the 2003 demonstrations against Washington's assault on Iraq. 

"During those protests, the police encircled the protesters and let them scream for a couple days, Wood recalls. "Late at night, I stood among the police, asking them about their hometowns in Upper Egypt. Then, around midnight, they were called to attention, told to harden their lines, and finally to march toward the remaining protesters, letting none escape. Truncheons came down, and within a few minutes they had rounded everyone up into paddy wagons, and the square resumed its light evening traffic."

While blood is being shed in Tahrir Square, government-organized bands of criminals are looting everything in sight. The police are actively protecting the thugs and looters. Meanwhile, the "good men" in the Army do nothing to protect those who had trusted them.

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