The mass purges begin with the Army.

Posted by Pointman on February 5, 2021 · 4 Comments 

The abiding characteristic of all regimes that come to power via a coup is paranoia. It takes control of them on the day they seize power and it never lets go of them thereafter. In their inner thoughts, they know they aren’t legitimate, which is why there’ll always be a big propaganda effort to convince the outside world and their own people that a coup didn’t occur, and the downside for the people is always hard punishment if they dare to mutter otherwise. America is getting the big propaganda effort at the moment but what’s also just starting to happen is the other classic action of a paranoid regime – mass purges.

First to consider is the legislative branch of government. Congress is largely under their total control with the help of a few key collaborators like Mitch McConnell. The GOP congressmen have already made various profitable accommodations with the new regime in return for keeping up an appearance for propaganda purposes of being a real opposition. Since free and fair elections are unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future, that’s a stable situation as far as the regime is concerned.

The judiciary was the prime means of subverting the Republic and bringing it down, so there’s no need to do much tinkering with appointments in the short term, though the regime have decided to “streamline” the approval process which in reality means they can pack all appointments up to and including the SCOTUS with anyone they like. You may have noticed in the stop steal phase that the judiciary was invariably on the side of the plotters.

The executive branch was originally weaponised for political purposes by the Obama administration and the key players heading up the various organisations it consists of remained largely in place awaiting the coup and in the end actively abetting it. However, that won’t save some of them from the mass purges if they’re perceived as potential threats to the regime’s dominance.

Why will the purges be mass purges? Because there’s simply too many people to crush. The majority of people who actually voted Trump in the stolen general election number about 80 million, which is a bit too much to sweep under the carpet in a country of about 330 million people. Bear in mind that only about 200 million of those are eligible to vote legally. That’ll be changing fairly soon, by the way.

Again, following the usual dictatorship paranoid habit, the biggest perceived threat is always the armed forces, which means they’re the first to get the treatment. The rationale is that it’s being done for the nation’s security against “domestic terrorists”, which is nuspeak for political opposition of any kind these days. Lotsa nasty things are going to be announced with that as a preamble. The ostensible threat is the massed ranks of white supremacists packing the armed forces must be liquidated, but everyone on the firing line in this first pass will be a full bird colonel and upwards with their perceived support for the coup being the main criteria deciding whether they’ve got a future in the armed services.

From then on it’ll be left to their replacements to ripple the purge down the ranks. Once they’re in place and any potential opposition forcibly retired or put out of harm’s way, the new men will be totally in charge of an army that’ll be making a rapid return to the Obama days of massive budget cuts, obsolete equipment and downsizing. And it’ll be back to the bad old days of the VA where wounded warriors were systematically abused for ever serving Old Glory.

In 1937 a certain Reinhard Heydrich leveraged Stalin’s paranoia to engineer the appearance of a plot against him from within the Red Army. The result was the Tukhachevsky purge in which thousands of officers were executed, imprisoned, demoted, denounced or ran for their lives before it became their turn for a show trial. The spectacular results catapulted Heydrich from nowhere into Hitler’s inner circle. By the time operation Barberossa rolled in ’41, the Red Army had semi-literate peasants in charge of regiments and whole corps with appalling consequences for the Russian people. Conservatively, the estimate is 20-30 million dead, pro-rata the highest casualty rate of any country in the whole war.

When you leave aside all the uplifting patriotic reasons and bright, shiny medals, the only damn thing every soldier fights for is his comrades. Introduce a systemic culture of denunciation, informers and distrust into the ranks and you’ll thoroughly rot out the esprit de corps that’s vital to any military body.

And that’s exactly what’s intended.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Legitimising the coup.

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Purges, Resist the Regime