A Former Top US Spy Predicts Revolution, “Multiple Mass Catastrophes”
billj 06.19.14
The founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity and former CIA hand Robert David Steele is predicting Arab Spring-style revolutions in the US and UK and that the 1% will be overthrown. He puts it this way in a must-read interview in The Guardian:
I see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon,” he continues. “They are all related: the collapse of complex societies, the acceleration of the Earth’s demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years now taking three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out of the City of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to include the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass catastrophes…”
“Revolution is overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo ante. We are at the end of centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls ‘The Manufacture of Evil,’ in which merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with captive governments to concentrate wealth and commoditize everything, including humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two ‘stops’ on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating.
Steele is clearly a radical, and the fact that he criticizes unrestrained corporate capitalism and includes income inequality and climate change in his list of catastrophic trends isn’t liable to sit well with those on the right end of the spectrum. Me, I agree with everything he says except for the revolution part.
I think it’s probably wishful thinking to imagine that people are going to rise up due to some single spark–a single event or revelation that reveals just how enslaved we all are and incites Americans to take to the streets. Rather, any revolution that comes our way will happen if and when we run out of food and/or water. Seriously, I think running out of food or water would be the only thing that would get people off of their iPads for long enough to foment rebellion.
At any rate, Steele reminds me of the late Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA guy who eventually went around warning that this whole American Empire thing would be our undoing. The American Empire could collapse “at FedEx speed,” he was fond of warning.
So, is bottom-up revolution in the cards, as Steele has warned? Or was George Orwell right in predicting that the future of humanity is “a boot stamping on a human face–forever” a.k.a. more of the same?
