OLIGARCHS, DEMAGOGUES, & MASS REVOLTS AGAINST
DEMOCRACY : The MASSES in the Street [can be] FOOLED & then SACRIFICED
By James Petras / The 4th Media News | Monday,
December 30, 2013
[Here only extracts: all in brackets and
reds added]
The masses in the street [can
be] fooled and then sacrificed.
The use of mob violence and “mass revolts” to serve the interests of
oligarchical and imperial powers against democratically-elected governments has
been a common strategy in recent times.
Throughout the ages, the choreographed “mass revolt” played many roles: (1)
it served to destabilize an electoral regime; (2) it provided a platform for
its oligarch funders to depose an incumbent regime; (3) it disguised the fact
that the oligarchic opposition had lost democratic elections; (4) it provided a
political minority with a ‘fig-leaf of legitimacy’ when it was otherwise
incapable of acting within a constitutional framework and (5) it allowed for
the illegitimate seizure of power in the name of a pseudo ‘majority’, namely
the “crowds in the central plaza”.
[..]
What progressives are unwilling to recognize is that the oligarchs
orchestrating the mass revolt are authoritarians who completely reject
democratic procedures and electoral processes.
Their aim is to establish a ‘junta’, which will eliminate all democratic
political and social institutions and freedoms and impose harsher, more
repressive and regressive policies and institutions than those they replace.
Some leftists support the ‘masses in revolt’ simply because of their
‘militancy’, their numbers and street courage, without examining the underlying
leaders, their interests and links to the elite beneficiaries of a ‘regime
change’.
[..]
Past and Present Mass Revolts Against
Democracy: Guatemala, Iran, and Chile
The use of mobs and mass uprisings by oligarchs and empire builders has a
long and notorious history. Three of the bloodiest cases, which scarred their
societies for decades, took place in Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, and Chile
in 1973.
Guatemala:
1954
Democratically-elected Jacobo Árbenz was the first Guatemalan President to
initiate agrarian reform and legalize trade unions, especially among landless
farm workers. Árbenz’s reforms included the expropriation of unused, fallow
land owned by the United Fruit Company, a giant US agro-business conglomerate.
The CIA used its ties to local oligarchs and right-wing generals and
colonels to instigate and finance mass-protests against a phony
‘communist-takeover’ of Guatemala under President Arbenz. The military used the
manipulated mob violence and the ‘threat’ of Guatemala becoming a “Soviet
satellite”, to stage a bloody coup. The coup leaders received air support from
the CIA and slaughtered thousands of Arbenz supporters and turned the
countryside into ‘killing fields’.
For the next 50 years political parties, trade unions and peasant
organizations were banned, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were murdered and
millions were displaced.
Iran, 1952 to
1979
In 1952 Mohammed Mossadegh was elected president of Iran on a moderate
nationalist platform, after the overthrow of the brutal monarch. Mossadegh
announced the nationalization of the petroleum industry.
The CIA, with the collaboration of the local oligarchs, monarchists and
demagogues organized ‘anti-communist’ street mobs to stage violent
demonstrations providing the pretext for a monarchist- military coup. The
CIA-control Iranian generals brought Shah Reza Pahlavi back from Switzerland
and for the next 26 years Iran was a monarchist-military dictatorship, whose
population was terrorized by the Savak, the murderous secret police.
The US oil companies received the richest oil concessions; the Shah joined
Israel and the US in an unholy alliance against progressive nationalist
dissidents and worked hand-in-hand to undermine independent Arab states.
Tens of thousands of Iranians were killed, tortured and driven into exile.
In 1979, a mass popular uprising led by Islamic movements, nationalist and
socialist parties and trade unions drove out the Shah-Savak dictatorship. The
Islamists installed a radical nationalist clerical regime, which retains power
to this day despite decades of a US-CIA-funded destabilization campaign which
has funded both terrorist groups and dissident liberal movements.
Chile, 1973
Chile is the best-known case of CIA-financed mob violence leading to a
military coup. In 1970, the democratic socialist Dr. Salvador Allende was
elected president of Chile. Despite CIA efforts to buy votes to block
Congressional approval of the electoral results and its manipulation of violent
demonstrations and an assassination campaign to precipitate a military coup,
Allende took office.
During Allende’s tenure as president the CIA financed a variety of “direct
actions” –from paying the corrupt leaders of a copper workers union to stage
strikes and the truck owners associations to refuse to transport goods to the
cities, to manipulating right-wing terrorist groups like the Patria y Libertad
(Fatherland and Liberty) in their assassination campaigns.
The CIA’s destabilization program was specifically designed to provoke
economic instability through artificial shortages and rationing, in order to
incite middle class discontent. This was made notorious by the street
demonstrations of pot-banging housewives.
The CIA sought to incite a military coup through economic chaos. Thousands
of truck owners were paid not to drive their trucks leading to shortages in the
cities, while right-wing terrorists blew up power stations plunging
neighborhoods into darkness and shop owners who refused to join the ‘strike’
against Allende were vandalized.
On September 11, 1973, to the chants of ‘Jakarta’ (in celebration of a 1964
CIA coup in Indonesia), a junta of US-backed Chilean generals grabbed power
from an elected government. Tens of thousands of activists and government
supporters were arrested, killed, tortured and forced into exile.
The dictatorship denationalized and privatized its mining, banking and
manufacturing sectors, following the free market dictates of Milton
Friedman-trained economists (the so-call “Chicago Boys”).
The dictatorship overturned 40 years of welfare, labor
and land-reform legislation which had made Chile the most socially advanced
country in Latin America.
With the generals in power, Chile became the
‘neo-liberal model’ for Latin America. Mob violence and the so-called “middle
class revolt”, led to the consolidation of oligarchic and imperial rule and a
17-year reign of terror under General Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
The whole society was brutalized and with the
return of electoral politics, even former ‘leftist’ parties retained the
dictatorship’s neo-liberal economic policies, its authoritarian constitution
and the military high command. The ‘revolt of the middle class’ in Chile
resulted in the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the oligarchs
in Latin America to this day!
The
Contemporary Use and Abuse of “Mass Revolts”: Egypt, Ukraine, Venezuela,
Thailand, and Argentina
In recent years “mass revolt” has become the instrument of choice when
oligarchs, generals and other empire builders seeking ‘regime change’. By
enlisting an assortment of nationalist demagogues and imperial-funded NGO
‘leaders’, they set the conditions for the overthrow of democratically elected
governments and stage-managed the installment of their own “free market”
regimes with dubious “democratic” credentials.
[…]
CONCLUSION
Mass revolts
are two-edged swords: they can be a positive force when they occur
against military dictatorships like Pinochet or Mubarak, against authoritarian
absolutist monarchies like Saudi Arabia, a colonial-racist state like Israel,
and imperial occupations like against the US in Afghanistan. But they have to
be directed and controlled by popular local leaders seeking to restore
democratic majority rule.
History, from ancient times to the present, teaches us that not all ‘mass
revolts’ achieve, or are even motivated by, democratic objectives. Many have
served oligarchs seeking to overthrow democratic governments, totalitarian
leaders seeking to install fascist and pro-imperial regimes, demagogues and
authoritarians seeking to weaken shaky democratic regimes and militarists
seeking to start wars for imperial ambitions.
Today, “mass revolts” against democracy have become standard operational
procedure for Western European and US rulers who seek to circumvent democratic
procedures and install pro-imperial clients.
The practice of democracy is denigrated while the mob is extolled in the
imperial Western media. This is why armed Islamist terrorists and mercenaries
are called “rebels” in Syria and the mobs in the streets of Kiev (Ukraine)
attempting to forcibly depose a democratically-elected government are labeled
“pro-Western democrats”.
The ideology informing the “mass revolts” varies from “anti-communist” and
“anti-authoritarian” in democratic Venezuela, to “pro-democracy” in Libya (even
as tribal bands and mercenaries slaughter whole communities), Egypt and the
Ukraine.
Imperial strategists have systematized, codified and made operational “mass
revolts” in favor of oligarchic rule. International experts, consultants,
demagogues and NGO officials have carved out lucrative careers as they travel
to ‘hot spots’ and organize ‘mass revolts’ dragging the target countries into
deeper ‘colonization’ via European or US-centered ‘integration’.
Most local leaders and demagogues accept the double agenda: ‘protest today
and submit to new masters tomorrow’.
The masses in the street are fooled and then sacrificed. They believe in a
‘New Dawn’ of Western consumerism, higher paid jobs and greater personal
freedom … only to be disillusioned when their new rulers fill the jails with
opponents and many former protestors, raise prices, cut salaries, privatize
state companies, sell off the most lucrative firms to foreigners and double the
unemployment rate.
When the oligarchs ‘stage-manage’ mass revolts and takeover the regime, the
big losers include the democratic electorate and most of the protestors.
Leftists and progressives, in the West or in exile, who had mindlessly supported
the ‘mass revolts’ will publish their scholarly essays on ‘the revolution (sic)
betrayed” without admitting to their own betrayal of democratic principles.
If and when the Ukraine enters into the European Union, the exuberant street
demonstrators will join the millions of jobless workers in Greece, Portugal,
and Spain, as well as millions of pensioners brutalized by “austerity programs”
imposed by their new rulers, the ‘Troika’ in Brussels. If these former
demonstrators take to the streets once more, in disillusionment at their
leaders’ “betrayal”, they can enjoy their ‘victory’ under the batons of “NATO
and European Union-trained police” while the Western mass media will have moved
elsewhere in support of ‘democracy’.
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