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”

Global Extreme Centrist Ultra Non-Partisan Party

May 16th, 2020 – during the Covid-19 pandemic

It is time to vote for The Super Inclusive, Hyper Equal, Ultra Pro-Integration, Global Unity, Extreme Centrist, Non-Partisan Party

The headline may not be exactly serious, but the message in it definitely is.

The pandemic situation as of now; more than 4.5 million confirmed cases and more than 300.000 deaths, and all experts are saying that the numbers are too low, we are missing cases. Just a reminder, in case anyone still needs reminding.

But back to the point. It really is time for a movement that is inclusive, stands for global equality, promotes real integration, sees the need for global unity, and is non-partisan and issue based. Since it aims for balance and includes all sides, it is by definition extreme centrist, however funny that might sound.

I called it a party in the headline and a movement above, Lorenzo Marsili and Ulrike Guérot in The Guardian call for “... a hybrid structure: falling somewhere between a social movement, a political actor and a deliberative platform, providing a rallying point for all those wishing to resist the path of disintegration”. (The link to the piece is below.)

They were talking about Europe, my focus is the world, but the message is basically the same: we citizens, we the people, we humans, we need to wake up and we need to take action.

As the pandemic has reminded us, viruses or other diseases do not care about human defined borders. Climate change is global by definition, and is not restricted to one part of the planet. And our commerce is international and our supply-chains criss-cross the globe. We live in a interconnected and interdependent world, though most of the time it seems we don't remember it, we just take it for granted.

All these nationalistic parties and movements that have propped up around the world, rage about national identity, national culture, national ethnicity, national language, and at the same time they take the benefits of globalisation for granted. Not only do they want to “have their cake and eat it too”, they want to “have their cake, make it bigger at the expense of others, and eat it too by themselves”.

As Lorenzo Marsili and Ulrike Guérot point out in their article in The Guardian, “A nation is neither ethnicity nor language, neither culture nor identity”. A nation is basically a bunch of laws that a group of people have come up with.

Laws are written for a society, and when the society develops and changes, laws are rewritten or amended. So, by definition development happens first and laws follow. This process implies that we accept the changes that happen in the world and modify our laws to suit the new situation. A quote usually attributed to John Maynard Keynes says it all: “When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do sir?”

Well, the question now is what do we do when the facts change? Do we just bury our heads in the sand and wish that things will go back to “normal”, or do we construct a set of alternative facts which conform with our opinions, or do we opt for some other form of denial?

We have no other choice than to accept the changes that have already happened in the world due to globalisation and societal development. We also need to realise that the world is a big ship and big ships turn slow, so there will be changes in the future that will happen regardless of what we do now.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said that “A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions”. Globalisation, the internet, migration and development have, in a way, stretched the mind of the world, and this world will definitely not go back to its old dimensions. It will not retreat to some mythical safe sunlit place that only ever existed in our minds.

We should accept the change and development, and realise that since a nation is not defined as ethnicity, culture, language or identity, these are really not at risk with change. Besides, cultures and languages are very resilient, we still speak many different languages and have distinct cultures, they have not disappeared, they have adapted and will keep adapting.

Through the history of the world, the species that have survived, were usually the ones that were best at adapting to the new situations, not the ones that clung to the old ways. We should adapt and change with the world. We should be an active participant in the changes, and guide development towards a better future, and try to minimise the harm that come with the changes.

There has always been change, the issue now is that it is faster than it used to be, it “feels too fast”. But despite of this, we can not retreat to myopic protectionism and nationalism and isolation, it is way too late for that. The world may be a big ship, but that ship has already sailed.

Our problems are global, and to fix them we need global solutions. To get those solutions we need to come together across borders, engage in global co-operation, and build and strengthen international institutions. National solutions are good, but no one country can fix the mess we are in. We can not act alone, we have to act together.

We have a choice.

We can let hyper-partisan politicians play games with populism, grandstanding and obstructionism, let them distort facts and politicize the court system so they can stay in power, and let them lead the retreat to isolationism, protectionism and fake nationalism.

Or we can take action. Action for equality, for inclusion, for climate change, for better integration, for fair globalisation, for human rights, for better life for all.

It will be a long road out of this mess, and it will take a lot of time and energy to get to where we need to be.

So, it should not be taken with anger, which is powerful but does not last very long, but with hope, which sustains you and gives you a reason to move on.

So next time there is an election in your nation, vote for The Global Extreme Centrist Ultra Non-Partisan Party.

And if you don't find a national chapter, go ahead take action and establish one.

May 10th, in The Guardian's This is Europe series Lorenzo Marsili and Ulrike Guérot: Elites have failed us. It is time to create a European republic

On April 27th, in The Washington Post, King Abdullah II of Jordan wrote about “re-globalization”. I wrote about this earlier, but since the article deals with the same ideas, I'll put the link here again: King of Jordan Abdullah II: It’s time to return to globalization. But this time let’s do it right.

Re-globalization

April 28th 2020 - during the Covid-19 pandemic

King Abdullah II of Jordan writes in The Washington Post about “re-globalization”; about the need to find global solutions to global problems.

Basically he is saying that we should not retreat to myopic nationalism and protectionism, or return to the same normal we had before the pandemic, we should focus on creating something better.

Re-globalization “… aiming for a renewed integration of our world that centers on the well-being of its people. A re-globalization that strengthens and builds capacities within our countries and ushers in true cooperation rather than competition. A re-globalization that recognizes that a single country, acting alone, cannot succeed.”

I should just shut up and let him speak, so, below is the link to the piece, if you have not read it yet.

King of Jordan Abdullah II: It’s time to return to globalization. But this time let’s do it right.