FBI Revolt Building Against Comey For Letting Hillary Off The Hook
When most people think of “revolution” they visualize screaming marauding mobs in the streets. However real revolutions occur when there is a systemic breakdown in the command organizational structure of bureaucratic entities, whether military or civil. When the lower and middle ranks refuse to obey or deffer to the authority of the upper echelon. All governments, no matter how tyrannical, rest upon consent, whether maintained by force or violence, or by lies and disinformation. When such mass refusal, civil disobedience, and resistance occurs, the command structure begins to disintegrate and revolution follows.
As one person observed concerning Hannah Arendt and her seminal book, On Violence:
The Function of Violence
“In times like these, power is effectively lost when its command structure disintegrates. The giving and accepting of commands is a major component for the instrumental use of violence, and must be presupposed by those with power in order that they maintain their power. But a power that has lost authority increases the likelihood that those receiving the commands will falter. Commands are like contracts that people believe will be honored but can only make referrals to laws, force, and character when they come to collect; when the structures that ensure such contracts or commands have lost the respect of the people, everything can change in a “flash.”
“In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always held absolute; but this superiority lasts only as long as the power structure of the government is intact – that is, as long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to use their weapons. When this is no longer the case, the situation changes abruptly. Not only is the rebellion not put down, but the arms themselves change hands – sometimes, as in the Hungarian revolution, within a few hours.” (p48)
“These moments of power-loss bring about the prospect for a new form of government, where new ideas are given a space and new constitutions can be drawn up. None of these things can happen if the arms once used to repress peoples continue to remain with the government and their users obey commands. When the thrust of one’s political activity is reduced to violence mixed with some vague notions about ideal human life (or some exact notions about how to run an economy from 150 years ago), the authority of the existing power is reinforced not challenged and the potential for a new power will remain untapped. The public opinion of a people becomes the ultimate arbiter in these instances.
“The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience – to laws, to rulers, to institutions – is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.” (p49)
“This “support and consent” is not so easily detectable but it is easily observable in daily life. When or where the threshold is crossed from acquiescence to rebellion is not definable in an analytic way but becomes apparent in a mass event, a non-localized disobedience. In other words, a small group of people is not going to incite an insurrection but can seize power once that general disobedience and loss of authority has taken place. A situation of major power-loss and potential transition is a mass phenomenon that the great majority takes part in. Without this vast critical majority, any revolutionary practice is powerless, and this lack of power (just like with regimes losing their power by losing their authority) is what leads them to turn towards violence.”
The next four years should prove interesting.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, by Étienne de La Boétie
Read the Introduction by Murray N. Rothbard
8:10 pm on October 15, 2016
