US Capitol Jan 6th

Shocking, surprising, inevitable and
totally expected

Watching the mob in the US Capitol on Jan 6th, the first thought that came to my mind was Romania 1989. I was surprised by the thought myself, why does this remind me of something that happened in Romania 31 years ago. The US is not a communist dictatorship, it is the polar opposite, the revolution in Romania was a genuine grass roots people's revolution against a repressive dictator, this was a mob trying to change the result of a free democratic election.

After a while, I realised it is not the actions that are similar, but the process of how to get to this point. The inevitability of the end result in both situations, and how unexpected and shocking it seemed.

In both cases, everyone knew deep down that this is how it will end, but it was still unexpected, and everyone was surprised when it did.

You have to be of certain age to personally remember the revolutions of 1989, or what the world looked like before that, so a bit of background.

You kind of always knew that the Soviet rule of Central Europe will end one day, but you did not expect that day to come, and when it did, it was sudden, unexpected and surprising.

In 1988-89 Solidarity in Poland managed to gain some political power. In Hungary they started opening borders in the spring of '89, and letting East-Germans walk through to Austria. Subsequently the Berlin Wall fell in November, as the Czech Velvet Revolution was gathering speed across the border. And the Bulgarian regime change started before the year ended as well.

Revolutions rarely are peaceful, and once these started, the expectation and fear was that since the regimes were repressive, the revolutions would be bloody. And after all, there had been a bloody uprising in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, both of which were violently suppressed.

But all these were peaceful revolutions, and everyone was relieved that there was no bloodshed.

Then came Romania in December. It started with demonstrations, followed by violent government crackdowns, which just fueled the uprising, and after hundreds of casualties Nicolae Ceauşescu was executed on Christmas day.

It was shocking, it was surprising, but at the same time it was also inevitable and totally expected.

Just like the US Capitol on Jan 6th.

Shocking, surprising, inevitable and totally expected.

… And violent and bloody, five people lost their lives, including a police officer guarding the Capitol. This was definitely not a peaceful demonstration, along the lines of the First Amendment. Once the police barriers were breached, the free speech arguments evaporated.

They say that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Well, maybe so, but this failure of not realising what will happen or for that matter of making adequate security preparations, definitely has a lot of parents. Here are a few of them.

The Obvious Ones

First of all, Trump, and all who enabled him for the past years. And all those who did not stand up to him when they had a chance. All who went along with his fiction about the lost election. Those in the Senate and the House who voted against certifying the result of the election, even after the riot.

The list is too long to print here, and has been, and will be, covered far better by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN, MSNBC, et al.

The Media

Which brings me to media.

Fox and especially the talking heads who perpetuated and amplified Trump's fiction and misinformation about the election, not to mention everything they did during the previous five years.

The mainstream media is not without blame either. There was and is this institutionalized notion of balanced reporting, of hearing from both sides of the argument. A solid and good idea in normal times, but it does not work in an environment where one side distorts the truth and calls it an Alternative Fact. If there ever was a good intention paving the road to hell, this was it.

If one side presents a solid verifiable fact, and the other, since they do not like the fact, presents an Alternative Fact, the truth is not somewhere in between; it is a case of one side being right and the other wrong, and you should say and print and broadcast that.

And of course you should report that some people do not believe in the fact and try to find the reason why, and report that. What you should not do, is to provide false equivalency to facts and Alternative Facts.

Opinions are not facts; you can have an opinion about a fact, but it does not change that fact.

Normalisation of shocking

From the start Trump broke norms and said shocking things about nearly everything. It seems everyone got so used to hearing Trump say something shocking, that it did not really shock anymore; we had reached the maximum capacity of being shocked.

This is a long and gradual process, but then again five years is plenty of time.

So, on Nov 6th in the “Save America” rally – when Trump ranted about a stolen election, claimed he won by a landslide, and told the crowd to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” and "You'll never take back our country with weakness," "You have to show strength and you have to be strong" – we listened but we did not hear what he was saying.

The fired up crowd listened, and heard, and got us where we are today.

Complacency

Once the shocking was the new normal, we became complacent. “Trump just rants and rants and the crowd cheers and then everyone goes home feeling better. Big deal.” Did we really forget Charlottesville so fast, or did we just become complacent about the danger. Or is it just denial, “It will not happen here”?

Denial

Well, it did happen and it happened in the US Capitol. What about Trump's lies (probably more than 30.000 by now), what about “good people on both sides” after Charlottesville, or Michigan Statehouse, or “Stand Back and Stand By” for Proud Boys.

Well, if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out immediately. But if you put the frog in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, it will not jump, and will eventually die. Were we that frog, complacent and in denial of the facts?

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post about the security planning and thinking behind it. The link is here “Pentagon placed limits on D.C. Guard ahead of pro-Trump protests due to narrow mission” I'll go through a few the issues below.

Optics

This would be funny if the situation was not so tragic. Some officials and the military were worried about “the optics” of soldiers inside the Capitol. I understand the idea of not militarising civilian security, but this kind of thinking prioritises what security looks like, not how good the security is.

And in the end, what we got was optics for the history books.

Blind spots

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy is quoted as saying that officials didn’t in their “wildest imagination” envision rioters breaching Capitol grounds. Where were these officials when Charlottesville or Michigan Statehouse happened? Or did they just miss the “Imagination 101” course in college?

My experience and understanding about security is that you should always be prepared for any kind of situation, not just the normal everyday ones. You should expect the unexpected, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Bureaucracy and a number of Jurisdictions

I do not think that the people involved are incompetent or stupid, on the contrary, they are most likely very capable and bright and good at their jobs. But, since this is D.C., which is not a state, they work in a jungle of jurisdictions and civilian and military command structures, which means a lot of bureaucracy, which is usually not the fastest way to operate.

The WP article reports a call from the Chief of the Capitol Police to Pentagon and city officials:

On the call, Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund was asked whether he wanted help from the National Guard. “There was a pause,” one of the D.C. officials said. And Sund said yes. “Then there was another pause, and an official from the [office of the] secretary of the Army said that wasn’t going to be possible.”

And this at the same time as the Capitol was being overrun by a mob, and the senators and the representatives were rushed into secure locations. In my book that is not a time to be worried about optics or jurisdictions or command structures or Standard Operating Procedures.

Good capable people in a “jumble of jurisdictions and command structures” and the end result was another paving stone on the road to Hell with a “good intention” inscription on it.

This is understandable, but not acceptable, and if this can be fixed by making D.C. the 51st state, then I am all for it.

And last but not least

The security in the Black Lives Matter protests this past year has been way more extensive than what was in the Capitol on Jan 6th, and the police response to the protests was far more brutal.

Is this basically because we all know deep down that the Black Lives Matter protesters have real reasons and legitimate issues about systemic racism that they are protesting about, and that the overwhelmingly white Trump protesters, really do not have that serious issues?

Was it that the police prepared for the BLM protest thoroughly, because they knew the issues were real, and the protesters have real grievances?

And was the, maybe unconscious, assumption that Trump protesters who are mostly white, and so do not really have that serious issues, do not have to be taken so seriously, and can be handled with much lighter security?

If so, this particular paving stone on the road to hell has “(un)conscious bias” written on it.

PS The New York Times Editorial on Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the riot is headlined:
”Trump Still Says He Won. What Happens Next?”

PPS An interesting analysis in The New York Times
“A Preordained Coda to a Presidency”