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The Orange Revolution Comes Home to Roost?

By Karl North | August 30, 2020

The orange revolution, sometimes labeled simply ‘color revolution’, is a project of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization set up to facilitate the penetration of Western private capital in every part of the world.[1] As such, one of the tasks of the CIA is to destroy revolts against compliant governments, and to destabilize and eventually overthrow governments that resist Western imperial penetration in any way. The orange revolution is one of the CIA projects designed to achieve these goals. This essay explores the thesis that the current violence in the US against property and police, piggy-backed on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, is an attempt at an orange revolution.

The orange revolution is rooted in attempts to block anti-capitalist movements in Western Europe spawned by the crisis of capitalist economies in the 1930s and just after WWII. The first attempt was called Operation Gladio, which carried out assassinations of conservative political leaders in Italy and blamed them on the leftist parties, successfully decimating the Italian left.[2] The success of Operation Gladio led the CIA to expand it into a diversity of subversive Cold War operations in Europe and other parts of the world.[3]

Attempts to overthrow governments in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and more recently in the Arab world became known as orange revolutions. One of their trademarks is to piggyback violent extremist groups on peaceful protest demonstrations, to destabilize and spearhead the overthrow of elected governments. If this goal is not achieved, the back-up plan is to split a nation into separate parts and thus facilitate eventual capitalist penetration. Examples to date are Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. The risk of blowback in the use of extremists has led to loss of control in all these cases and others as well. As we will see, if there is an attempt to foment a US orange revolution against the current Trump administration, the same loss of control is occurring.

When the candidate of the ruling elites failed to capture the US presidency in 2016, they managed to harass the winner into continuing to follow their chosen foreign policies. The elite controlled mainstream media (MSM) , always a tool of mass deception, was ramped up to become the weapon of the opposing Democratic Party in a series of attempts to impeach the president, using false evidence. This succeeded in keeping the sitting administration off balance and more or less subservient to ruling class interests, but the president, emotionally unstable and incompetent to govern but expert at playing the MSM, remained a loose cannon. As the next election approached, the death of a black man at the hands of the police provided an opportunity to block the re-election of the Trump administration, or at least cause enough destruction of the social order to justify imposition of martial law.

Heavily funded by US corporations[4] and George Soros[5], the sponsor of orange revolution projects in Europe, the BLM umbrella organization fielded demonstrations around the nation against racist police violence. The MSM went into attack mode, encouraging the budding protest, and focusing on the peaceful demonstrations while minimizing reportage of the widespread violence to commercial and government property. The extremist fringe of white liberalism piggybacked on the demonstrations against racism, calling for revolution, trashing commercial property, pulling down statues of historical figures, and using the peaceful demonstrations as a cover for violent attacks on police stations, federal buildings and other symbols of law and order. Democratic politicians at city and state level supported the violence by allowing activists to declare “police-free zones”[6] and making vague calls for defunding the police. All this occurred against the backdrop of a collapsing economy and an out of control virus epidemic that is accelerating the collapse. Conditions are building that might support an insurrection.

What are the indications from these events that a budding orange revolution is taking place in the US? The CIA playbook of orange revolutions in other countries has sought regime change, or barring that, weakening states so that they partition into mini-fiefdoms that transnational capital can more easily manipulate. In the US, no highly organized movement with popular support exists on which to graft a violent, extremist spearhead such as occurred, for example, in Afghanistan, Syria, or the former Yugoslavia. US ruling elites have seized on BLM as pawns in an effort to discredit the Trump administration, using the MSM and the Democratic Party to magnify its effect, but much of the white working class and even parts of lower class minorities are either politically hostile to BLM, or are reacting negatively to the effects of the protest demonstrations across the country, as the following synopsis of investigative reporting will show.

Investigative reporter Michael Tracey crisscrossed the country talking to residents of neighborhoods trashed by extremist activists. His long interview and photo essay reveals interesting patterns that suggest a situation out of control from the perspective of orange revolution goals.[7] Tracey found that most of the destruction of commercial property occurred in low income neighborhoods, often to businesses owned by minorities residing in those neighborhoods. Local residents reported that the riot damage aggravated a local economic situation already in crisis. Tracey discovered a common pattern across the country where according to locals interviewed, mostly white activists from outside the neighborhoods carried out the initial destruction. Then, profiting from the weakened police protection, low income locals looted the trashed businesses. Interviews show that, far from supporting the demonstrations, local residents deplored the destruction and the lack of police protection. Many locally owned businesses had to put up “black owned” or “minority owned” signs to protect them from rioters:

Anecdotally, a retired academic friend in Minneapolis, one of the hardest hit cities, reports that due to the absence of police protection, burglars have initiated a crime wave in his upper middle class residential district. It shows how far the breakdown of law and order can spread.

If the immediate goal was to provoke a reaction from the Trump administration that could potentially be used against him in the electoral campaign, it succeeded. Federal agents were deployed, both overtly and covertly, to fight rioters in cities where local police had been enfeebled by BLM anti-police demonstrations backed by local authorities. But apart from an enraged outcry in the MSM, supported by liberals from neighborhoods not hurt by the violence, much of the lower income populace, including minorities, seems to support law and order more than they deplore police violence. This could work in favor of a Trump administration victory in November. To the extent that a BLM orchestrated uprising has gotten out of control and could backfire in the short run, it fits the pattern of blowback that has characterized orange revolutions elsewhere.

A long-term strategy of ruling elites has been divide-and-rule: in the case of the US to polarize the country racially or ethnically. The secondary goal is to divert attention from the deepening economic crisis caused by de-industrialization and by an underlying predicament: the depletion of the industrial resource base worldwide. If the immediate goal is to provoke enough disorder to justify a martial law or police state solution, that may succeed, but in ways that are impossible to predict, given the loss of control of the current unrest. One likely result, the US descending into a civil war, might backfire against a ruling class that needs a state sufficiently in control to continue funding the military industrial complex that defends financial class investments in the imperial periphery.

In conclusion, the success of ruling elites at polarizing the country and diverting attention from its deepening class warfare ironically make the success of a putative orange revolution hard to achieve in the short run. However, one characteristic of the CIA orange revolution playbook is a long gestation period of hybrid warfare leading up to a coup d’état intended to achieve its goals. The use of the BLM may be a trial balloon to develop strategy for the long haul.

[1] Prouty, L. Fletcher, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. Prouty is a former CIA officer who held a key position in the organization.

[2] Williams, Paul L., Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.

[3] Cottrell, Richard, Gladii, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis.

[4] Corporate America Pledges $1.7 Billion to Black Lives Matter

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/george-soros-racial-justice-organizations.html

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61533

[6] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/07/31/insane-seattle-moves-to-abolish-police-force-n2573513

[7] https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-still-no-national-conversation-12a7e3e4e006

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