For the next two minutes your politics and positions don't matter, this is smooth.
From OffGuardian:
Has Brexit triggered an anti-democractic “Color Revolution”?
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 last thing I read that slipped so smoothly into gear was:
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....MORE
“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin, and I was off on the biggest adventure of my life … But first let me tell you a little about myself....Or maybe not.
-Max Shulman Sleep Till Noon (Doubleday, 1950)
I do like that "The portraits are askew along the corridors of power" though.
