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Has Brexit triggered an anti-democractic "Color Revolution"?

by Kit

david-cameron-corbyn-main
It’s important to remember, it was never supposed to get his far.
The Prime Minister didn’t want it. The Chancellor didn’t want it. The Queen didn’t want it. The opposition didn’t want it. The President of the United States didn’t want it. JP Morgan didn’t want it. Goldman-Sachs didn’t want it. Parliament didn’t want it.
None of the heads of state of Europe wanted it. None of the banks wanted it. None of the corporate oligarchs wanted it. None of the corporations wanted it. The IMF didn’t want it. NATO didn’t want it.
JK Rowling didn’t want it. David Beckham didn’t want it. Bob Geldof didn’t want it. Eddie Izzard didn’t want it. Lily Allen didn’t want it. George Soros didn’t want it.
…and yet it happened.
Experts with scary numbers were on the BBC. Smiling pro-EU columnists snidely mocked from almost every paper. Trendy celebrities tweeted their complex political views in 140 characters or less. There were a lot hashtags. A lot of memes. Leavers were mocked and patronised. Guilted by association with a handful of clownish politicans we’re all supposed to laugh at, and the right-wing gutter press we’re all supposed to despise. All the heels wanted out, all the faces wanted in.
Marches were ignored, speeches unreported, politicians mis-quoted. Facts made up. An MP was martyred, and a movement blamed for her murder. There was a lot of name-calling, and more fear-mongering. That’s usually all it takes, to stop a movement.
…and yet it happened.
The chaos that followed – that still persists – is all the evidence you need to show just how shaken up the political establishment has become. The portraits are askew along the corridors of power. For once the term “political fallout” does not feel a dramatic metaphor. No institutional plan still stands, there is only a wasteland; pockmarked, cratered and scorched. The survivors shamble about, unsure what to say or do. Deformed. Cancerous.
A gang of ravenous Tory cockroaches tussle over the scorched bones of their leader. Sliming and biting their way to a seat of power they will hold for less than 6 months…probably. It would be amusing to watch, if it weren’t so nauseating.
A deep-rooted pocket of Blairites, a hold-out from a war long-since lost, have launched an assault on the only man left standing in the maelstrom, hoping to drag him down and take his place before he can implement the democratically ascertained will of the people.
It was never supposed to go this far. And now it must be stopped.
Let us imagine, for a short while, that this isn’t Britain. That the vote, rather than being on EU membership, was instead about leaving the OAS or joining NATO. That Jeremy Corbyn is a Bolivarian socialist or David Cameron a post-Soviet oligarch. Let’s imagine that none of this happened in a “Western democracy”, but a struggling banana republic, or a mewling new-born Balkan state. Imagine this is not here, but over there. Not us, but them.
Let us pretend this is one of those countries where these things happen.
The country’s fate was, ever so briefly, put in the hands of the people. They were being tasked with voting on an issue that could destroy trade agreements set to make many multi-national companies billions of dollars, an issue that poses a direct threat to America’s financial and Imperial interests, an issue that is an existential threat to NATO itself.
You can’t leave that to chance.
The people must be controlled. They are pressured and coerced by the media, scared by their leaders and gently instructed by the Empire.
…but they don’t listen. They vote the wrong way, and in such numbers that the usual checks and balances, all the little tweaks in the process, and lost ballots and “accidents” STILL don’t swing the vote.
Now ’tis all in pieces, all coherence gone. You have to move. You have to put his right.
The Prime Minister has resigned, and his (hopefully temporary) replacement is being chosen from a small group of millionaires by a slightly larger group of millionaires. The popular socialist opposition has come under constant attack from ambitious Neo-Liberals in his own party and the vast majority of the press, all funded and connected by a PR firm with strong connections to an ex-PM and war criminal. All evidence points to this being a planned coup.
All the while, lawyers and politicians are arguing over the legality of the referendum, the demographics of the vote, the nature of a “parliamentary democracy”. Thousands of people march through the capital, a supposed grassroots movement, supplied with loudspeakers and stages and a big screen from…somewhere.
The Leavers are denounced as racists, xenophobes and nationalists; or patronised as idiots who “didn’t understand their own interests”. A hashtag appears, and starts trending, suggesting those who voted out have all changed their minds. A huge multi-national law-firm comes forward, on behalf of “clients who wish to remain anonymous”, to challenge the legality of any parliamentary action on the back of this referendum. The President of the United States “calls for calm”, and his Secretary of State declares that the vote can be “overturned”.
Columnists from all over the press, all owned by a handful of millionaires (all of whom wanted the opposite result), start questioning the nature of a referendum. Is a binary vote truly democratic? Is there a danger of a tyranny by the majority? Doesn’t parliament have a duty to protect a country from its own people? Should we bow to mob rule?
We know this process, we’ve seen this happen. It has been Orange, Green and Rose. It has sprouted Jasmine, Lotus and Cedar. They are stage-managed revolutions, psychological, emotional and media-driven movements that seek to undermine the democratic process of Sovereign states via Astroturf movements and “student” protests. A low-cost high yield crop always repays its subsidies, and where you always, always reap what you sow.
I’m not suggesting that London will become Kiev, or that military police will march down Oxford Street to quell the rebellion. I highly doubt it will come to that, too many rich people own too many nice cars in this part of the world. Too many townhouses would find that street battles spoil their views.
Don’t shit where you eat, as the saying goes.
But make no mistake, since the Brexit result was announced, British democracy has been under a sustained, all-out attack. The narrative has been set. That Brexit is already a catastrophe, just ten days in, is now beyond question. The discussion is not “What we do now?”, but rather who is to BLAME for Brexit? The answer is apparently Jeremy Corbyn.
For the as-yet-colourless British revolution to succeed, Corbyn must be removed. The shrieking media banshees are out in force. The tabloid hitmen are aligning their rifle-sights. The machine has clicked into motion, and its churning gears cannot stop until ABC (anyone but Corbyn) is leader of the LAbour Party. Nothing makes this more apparent than the Parliamentary Labour Party, and their failed and desperate coup, where 172 MPs demanded that Corbyn stand down in favor of [To Be Determined].
Hilary Benn has gone into hiding, everyone has forgotten what Liz Kendall looks like, Yvette Cooper is crying in the bathroom because twitter was mean to her, Chuka Umunna is busy editing his Wikipedia page and nobody copied Andy Burnham into the memos…so he accidentally chose the wrong side. Options are thin on the ground.
Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, puts forward Angela Eagle as leader (presumably she finds her “charismatic”, although God knows why). She praises Eagle’s “rhino hide”, and derides Corbyn’s character by suggesting he is being controlled by a “consiglieri”[sic] who have “screwed his courage to the sticking point[sic]”. Not once in her column does Toynbee mention Eagle’s vote FOR the Iraq war, or that she was one of the 180+ MPs who shamefully abstained from the welfare bill vote under Harriet Harmon’s brief, craven leadership.
Elsewhere, and on laughably flimsy evidence, Corbyn has been accused of anti-Semitism, attacking a reporter and hiding from Tom Watson. He is a weak but decent man, but at once also ambitious and conceited. He is all faults to all men.
Will Hutton has joined his voice to the chorus, his bilious out-pouring all but calling for Corbyn to be violently overthrown. One thing is sure – the Corbyn Phenomenon must never happen again. A new-New Labour is needed:

A well-led Labour party with a crafted cluster of policies to secure a better capitalism…Its constitution would put the election of its leader in the hands of the parliamentary party.

The workers’ party must be reformed as a capitalist party, and it must remove the choice of leaders from the unreliable hands of its members. He concludes:

The Labour party must be reclaimed – for the sake of British values, for British democracy and for the very future of our country. Nothing less will do.

He doesn’t say who the party is being reclaimed by, or from whom it is being reclaimed. He simply, and in purely Orwellian language, demands that the minority over-rules the majority for the sake of “democracy”.
A last-second plan has been hastily assembled from the broken pieces of the status quo. A three-step plan that involves a discredited referendum being ignored, and a newly castrated opposition being re-staffed with millennial Blairites. These steps are secondary of course: First, Corbyn must go. They don’t know which colour our revolution will be, as yet. But they will make damn sure it isn’t red.


Ammended: July 4th 2016, 21:05

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Categories: Brexit, EU, Europe, featured, Kit