Dmitry Orlov on Trump presidency

Dmitry Orlov: Trump, Financial Crisis and the New Cold War

Russian-American author Dmitry Orlov discusses the new Trump presidency and what it may mean for the next stage of the Global Financial Crisis and the New Cold War. He also discusses his concerns regarding the threat of GMOs and Russia's recent prohibition on genetically engineered crops, which could lead to a global ban.

Dmitry Orlov Website
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com

The Technosphere Hiccups

Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov,

15 November, 2016

Those who took hard Hillary Clinton’s defeat and are now going through the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief are butts of a cruel joke, though played on them by an entity quite devoid of a sense of humor. The technosphere—an artificial machine-like sentient entity that wants to control everything including you and is busy destroying the biosphere and us with it—has taken pains to align their values with its own, to make them easier to control. It has no use for humans except as technocratic servants—engineers, scientists, technicians, bureaucrats, enforcers—and the best servant material is the lonely, atomized individual, snatched away from their family at a young age, their every interaction with other humans mediated by easy-to-monitor electronic communications systems, ideally a mental patient, chemically controlled, and too fragile to leave the man-made environment and venture out into the real world. On the other hand, autonomous, separatist, tribal groups are almost impossible for the technosphere to understand or to control.

The technosphere certainly wanted Clinton—the person at the epicenter of a large number of political technologies (some would call them “rackets”) contrived to control the populace and suck the life’s blood out of it: the financial racket, the medical racket, the defense and security racket, the prison-industrial racket, the higher education racket… She and her husband are as close as one ever gets to pure ectoplasmic emanations of the technosphere—special interest brokers and propagandists par excellence. Bernie Sanders was no challenge to this machine, and was knocked out of the running through purely bureaucratic means. But then there arose a more difficult problem: to select and promote a Repubican candidate who was strong enough to win the primary but too weak to win against Clinton in the general election. This situation is represented by the following Venn diagram.

As you see, the intersection of “able to win Republican nomination” and “unable to win against Hillary Clinton” is a null set. Thus, Trump’s electoral victory can be viewed as a purely technical glitch, caused by the problem of the Missing Candidate.

Back to those grieving Clinton’s loss: ironically, they are clustered in the larger cities, and would be the first to be killed by a Russian nuclear strike if Clinton’s relentless warmongering and Russia-baiting succeeded in triggering World War III. Thus, for them, voting for Clinton was symptomatic of a suppressed instinct of self-preservation. But this is not entirely their fault: they have been manipulated into thinking that anyone who supports Trump is automatically stupid, ignorant, racist, sexist and a xenophobe—and that simply isn’t true. The reason they are clustered in the big cities is simple: those are the places that the technosphere controls most fully. City dwellers tend to be oversocialized, eager to strive for ever greater inclusive fitness within a large and anonymous social realm, and that makes them easy to control. The technosphere’s reach is not infinite, and being a rational and machine-like intelligence, it applies cost-benefit analysis to its resource allocation decisions. This is why the electoral map looks like a handful of oversized blue blobs surrounded by a sea of red. Look at Pennsylvania: Pittsburg and Philadelphia voted Blue, but everyone else voted Red. Case in point: the technosphere can gain no purchase among the Amish.

And so it would appear that the technosphere has suffered a setback. But it will not give up so easily, and the next step for it is to deploy political technologies to, if at all possible, invalidate and nullify the results of its electoral defeat. Indeed, this has already started: Bill and Hillary Clinton have recently shown up for a meeting with another ectoplasmic emanation of the technosphere, the predatory billionaire George Soros, clad in accents of Roman imperial purple. The rationale they gave for displaying the colors of the emperor’s toga is that it is a mixture of red and blue, and thus represents compromise. However, compromise, in their case, would be to exit from public life, for both of them are too old to ever run for any office again. No, this display of imperial colors is just that: a signal that the empire is getting ready to strike back: we should look forward to another attempt at a Color Revolution—the Purple Revolution—this time in the United States, financed by the very same George Soros. This mixed-up signaling is typical: after the Russian election, in which Putin was again elected president, the same Color Revolution syndicate organized and financed protests there, featuring little white ribbons—which, as it happens, were worn by Nazi collaborators during World War II. This nuance was not lost on the Russians, and the protests came to naught.
The technosphere is powerful, but is not all-powerful or infallible, and the world is developing effective antibodies against it generally, and against its political technologies, and the technology of the Color Revolution Syndicate in particular. Here’s an example: the US spent some $5 billion on destabilizing the Ukraine politically and turning it into an enemy of Russia. For a while people in Kiev could earn more in a day by protesting than in a month by working a job. End result: in a recent opinion survey, 84% (34,900) Ukrainians said that the person they want to be the president of the Ukraine is… Vladimir Putin, with the current president, hand-picked by the US State Department, lost somewhere in the margin of error.
Given the horrible suffering that has been inflicted on the Ukraine, which went through not one but two Color Revolutions, one would hope that the Purple Revolution in the US is somehow strangled in its crib. This, I believe, is not impossible: there now exists an anti-technology for dealing with the technology of Color Revolution, and all it takes to put it into action is a few groups of patriots. To remind: patriots are not nationalists; nationalists are people who hate other nations; patriots are people who love their land, and their people, more than any other, and are willing to lay down their lives in defense of it.
When the time comes to push back against and neutralize the actions of the Color Revolution Syndicate, patriots can form groups of partisans. The following is an extended excerpt from my forthcoming book, Shrinking the Technosphere (currently available for pre-order at a 20% discount) which has an entire chapter devoted to political technologies and their corresponding anti-technologies.

The need for partisans

A situation where the legitimate authorities are politically weak (because of outside pressure) but morally strong and have the truth on their side allows groups of locals to come together and form cells of partisans. While united by a common strategic goal— to defend their communities, thwart the outside forces, uphold legitimate authority—they are completely free to choose their tactics. Because they are spontaneously, anarchically organized, such partisan groups can be far more nimble than the government. Nor do they need to constrain themselves to tactics that are strictly legal. Here are some of the tactics that the partisans can add to their arsenal:

• Use multiple methods, from face-to-face communication with small, local groups at the neighborhood level to the use of social media, to get the truth out: that this is a foreign-organized, foreign-funded campaign based on lies. Detail what these lies are, present the evidence, and let the people draw their own conclusions. Since these local groups do not pretend to be an official source of information, they are invincible against the charge of spreading propaganda. The most the foreign puppet-masters can do is claim that they are “trolls” paid for by the other side—a story that other locals who have a good sense of who is who are unlikely to swallow.

• The puppet-masters behind Color Revolutions like to remain anonymous and “lead from behind,” and the goal of the partisans is to strip them of their anonymity. Suddenly faced with a cryptically hostile, disingenuous “fan club” that monitors their every movement and picks them out in every crowd demanding a “selfie,” making their whereabouts known at all times and generally hassling them with effusive, faux-friendly familiarity at every turn, the puppet masters are easily outed and neutralized. By making the outsiders’ identity known, the partisans provide a valuable service to the local security services, saving them the trouble of spying on or infiltrating the protest movement.

• Co-opt demonstrations by injecting specific issues and slogans that resonate with the local population. During Color Revolutions there are usually organizers lurking in the background who are “leading from behind” by quietly telling people what to shout based on a pre-approved script. The slogans are generally about nothing—“freedom” and “democracy” and other such nonsense— because they can’t very well be about the real goal of overthrowing the legitimate government through nefarious means. By injecting slogans in pursuit of specific, locally significant demands—“Lower bus fares!” “Freeze tuitions!”—the partisans can make the protest be about something legitimate that is potentially a win-win. The government can then step forward, announce that it has heard the voice of the people and negotiate in good faith. The protest movement then dissolves in jubilation—“We won!”—the government takes credit for a successful exercise in direct democracy, and the puppet-masters go home with nothing.

• Splinter the protest movement by creating a large number of social organizations. When the Color Revolution organizers try to hold a meeting, the partisans can try to inject a different agenda, claim that the real venue is elsewhere, show up in numbers and put forward a different leadership, stage a protest against those running the meeting and walk out, taking some number of others with them and so on. If written instructions are handed out, or props such as ribbons and placards, inject different instructions and different props that pursue a legitimate, local agenda.

• Liaise with state security services and local authorities, and trade detailed, real-time intelligence in exchange for specific small favors. Make these favors available to members of the protest movement in exchange for some behavioral changes or compromises. This can often be presented as the work of protest sympathizers within the government to be taken as a sign that it is about to collapse and can bolster the partisans’ standing among the protesters.

• Provide the security services with legitimate targets. Much of the work of the Color Revolution organizers involves gradually eroding the boundaries of permissible behavior until anything goes and the security forces, having allowed numerous minor transgressions, have become demoralized and are unable to mobilize against major ones. The organizers try to use human shields in the form of “children”—young, innocent, naïve, chanting about freedom and democracy—who then violate public order in minor ways. “But they’re just children!” and so the police do nothing. But if among these “children” there are some partisans who resort to a bit of staged violence here and there, with some pushing and shoving and a few punches thrown, providing the authorities with the excuse they need to intervene, then this pierces the veil of “nonviolence.” Remember, blocking streets and hindering public access to public buildings are not, by any stretch of the imagination, nonviolent acts. “Nonviolence” is nothing more than a tactic. It can even be used to promote violence by rendering a population defenseless in the face of aggression, in order to provoke a massacre and then use it for political aims, as was done by Gandhi, who preached nonviolence to Hindus, profiting politically when they were then massacred by Moslems.

• Organize local self-defense units. Patrol neighborhoods to prevent looting. Intervene in demonstrations to keep the protesters in line, helping the security services accomplish things that they may otherwise find difficult to justify. If the government can demonstrate that it’s just having a bit of trouble reigning in some patriotic-minded elements within the local population who rose up in spontaneous opposition to the protests, then claims of government heavy-handedness begin to ring rather hollow.

• Out of the stronger self-defense units, organize commando units and train them for special missions. These can be deployed if the Color Revolution proceeds through the stage of massacre and all the way through to regime change. At that point, the hand-picked puppets are about to be ensconced in official buildings, granted official titles, given fawning press coverage by the Western-controlled press and swiftly granted diplomatic recognition by Western governments. But before this can be accomplished, they have to be briefly trotted out before the public to create the illusion that they are “of the people.” It is at this point that they are at their most vulnerable, and all the previous efforts to splinter, co-opt and destabilize the protest movement can be brought to fruition to neutralize the would-be puppet government through a few decisive actions. Since by this point the puppets are being guarded by foreign mercenaries who are professionals, the commando units should likewise be composed of people who have professional discipline, training and experience. The installation of a puppet government is a political exercise which, in order to succeed, has to be successfully misrepresented as a popular triumph and as such can be derailed by a public embarrassment or a panic. Also, it helps to remember that the puppets are being installed by mercenaries, who, by their nature, are allergic to the idea of dying, since being dead gets in the way of collecting their pay. If their work environment becomes sufficiently dangerous, they reliably run away.

• Finally, if all else fails, the ultimate recourse is an armed uprising based on a guerrilla movement. If the movement has local public support, it can sustain itself for many years. In order to win, a guerrilla movement simply has to persist. After a few years of being unable to control its own territory, the state headed up by the puppets comes to be regarded as a failed state and an embarrassment for the puppet-masters, who are then forced to cut their losses and pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. The state can later be resurrected minus the puppets, or fission into several smaller statelets. By the way, this is precisely what is happening in the Ukraine as I write this: the armed uprising in the east (the industrialized, educated, Russian-speaking, densely populated part of the territory) has left the central authority in Kiev circling around in an ever-expanding void, unable to either crush the rebellion in the east or to accede to internationally agreed-upon terms for granting that region autonomy, since this would undermine its raison d’être of building a monolithic ethnically pure Ukrainian state. As the void deepens, it is becoming an ever-greater embarrassment to its masters in Washington.

P.S. Just to make sure you understand where I am coming from: I haven't liked any of the previous US Presidents, and I see no reason to like this one either. But he can be interesting to listen to. Please judge for yourself, and try to keep an open mind. When was the last time you heard a presidential candidate spell things out this clearly? Ever?