A CIA color revolution is when CIA operatives agitate people in other nations to incite riots to overthrow those people’s governments and destabilize regions. CIA color revolutions are an endless cash bonanza to the CIA and its various appendages.
It doesn’t matter if those governments were democratically elected in. If the country has resources, labor, skill or land the United States government will give the CIA operations carte blanche to engage in agitprop in order to seize those country’s assets and ouster its government. This leaves an opportunistic vacuum to fill. It is usually filled with draconian policy that distorts a once-thriving, self sustaining nation into a slave state to the United States. Neoliberal policies, sometimes at the insistence of USA funded terrorist groups, are put in place of socialist, or at best quasi-socialist, policies. Environments are ransacked. Human lives become chattel. A new white kingdom is built on the backs of a brown nation.
It’s Thanksgiving in the USA. This should all sound familiar and even familial since our country is based on hegemony, war and occupation of indigenous people’s land.
These color revolutions are hyper-hysterically mis-characterized in USA state media as working class civilians demanding democracy in their brown, oppressed nation. This mis-characterization couldn’t be further from the truth. Sadly, these color revolutions are becoming so normalized that most USA citizens have become immune to their catastrophic global impact.
So normalized in fact that when a color revolution happens in the United States it goes undetected and is tragically under reported. The USA color revolutions always target the poorest communities, infecting local government bodies with corrupt economic policy where greed is at the center of the municipality’s agenda, disabling or thwarting or hindering any progress as poverty rises, while extracting life sustaining natural resources like potable drinking water or land on which to grow food for sustenance. Often, in their place, state of the art surveillance systems are installed on Section 8 Housing or the over-financialization of the build-out of a new police station, for instance. This is similar to when elaborate heavily funded military bases set up camp in the regions of the countries that we “revolutionize.” Our military set up base in the poorest regions of Afghanistan to exploit the poppy fields. The marriage of predatory financial markets with the drug trade create “Opportunity Zones” that exploit the most addictive neighborhoods. These neighborhoods happen to fall prey to what eventually comes out of those poppy fields. That sounds like a system that is circular, you might say. It’s built that way, each depending on its other to thrive.
Unlike the civilians in other countries who recognize when a color revolution is taking place and push back against its operations often fighting to maintain their way of life, their health, their economic stability and their true understanding of freedom, which is defined as their own ardent attachment to culture and tradition, United States civilians watch with gaping mouths and shrugging indifference as their communities slowly rot from the inside out, turning into despotic sources of greed and for-profit poverty industrial complexes.
Can we not see the similarities between Libya and Anywhere, America? Libya, a once harmonious, somewhat economically stable country that even had a small tourism trade was scapegoated, ransacked, plundered and turned into a slave nation. We can see the similarities: small local economies that had a working eco-system which balanced out a life for everyone through local merchants, good schools and systems that worked for everyone have eroded and in its place a hollowed out shell unrecognizable even to the occupants who call it home. Libyan flags wave pitifully on the landscape of a region once flush with opportunity. American flags wave pitifully on the landscape of a region once flush with opportunity.
Civilians in the more prominent wealthy areas of the USA remain unaffected, unencumbered and glibly unaware of the color revolutions that cause generational poverty just a few states over. Where children have no access to nutritional food, or transit riders have no access to decent transit or roads and where generational poverty is very very expensive, causing a rising rash of horrific sicknesses that pave the way to addiction, trauma and the bonds that choke all opportunity out. The beiged out bourgeoisie peruse their plethora of organic produce options right out their front door, then hop on 7 different types of transit options or protected bike lanes to whisk them away to whatever brightly lit cafe, or overcrowded restaurant or lush park that meets their every whimsical desire, blissfully unaware that color revolutions are pock-marking this country they seem to hold so dear. After all, they vote (The ‘I Voted!’ sticker prominently displayed on their not-too-fancy-to-draw-attention-to-their-privilege-jacket) and it’s usually for a candidate in a beige suit with an itchy drone finger who paves the way for a candidate with an itchy golf hand.
Color revolutions seem to be a way of life now. Ordinary, expected little coup d’etats of autonomous regions. The scale gets tipped. The balance is gone. The desperation for survival mounts. The money dries up. The food dries up. The water dries up. The poor are targeted incessantly and continuously until their every waking moment is “What bullshit will I have to deal with today?” Surveillance is everywhere, outsourcing autonomy to the highest bidder. Children become little old men and women by the time they’re 5 years old and it’s simply daily Dickensian drudgery at the behest of surveillance capitalism with a backdrop of Orwell’s 1984 in the outer mist. Hope is stupid. All that’s left is what I call “The Real.”
Society remains neutral, unaffected by it and non-reactive. Circling the drain is this regretful notion that we wasted our good crisis, or our last three good crises. We allowed an institution that was compromised to begin with to eat its own tail, to become so corrupted and so diseased that dystopian novels made into tv shows use Congress as their muse.
And we financialize. Everything. Your footprint, your thoughts, your screens, your mood, your flower bed, your outrage, your body, your sexual orientation, your water, your food, your hair, your toenails, your children, your future, you. Someone’s bank account is getting very fat off of all this financializing. And it certainly isn’t mine.
If you’re thankful this year at your table, then you’re thankful for your delusion. You’re thankful that you’re programmable, you’re thankful that you’re blissfully unaware of your own privilege, you’re thankful that you’ve never experienced a color revolution and have never been a starving refugee in your own country.
If you’re questioning what exactly there is to be thankful for, then you can join me this Thanksgiving at my table. It’s exactly where you should be.
By Julie Collins
A CIA color revolution is when CIA operatives agitate people in other nations to incite riots to overthrow those people’s governments and destabilize regions. CIA color revolutions are an endless cash bonanza to the CIA and its various appendages.
It doesn’t matter if those governments were democratically elected in. If the country has resources, labor, skill or land the United States government will give the CIA operations carte blanche to engage in agitprop in order to seize those country’s assets and ouster its government. This leaves an opportunistic vacuum to fill. It is usually filled with draconian policy that distorts a once-thriving, self sustaining nation into a slave state to the United States. Neoliberal policies, sometimes at the insistence of USA funded terrorist groups, are put in place of socialist, or at best quasi-socialist, policies. Environments are ransacked. Human lives become chattel. A new white kingdom is built on the backs of a brown nation.
It’s Thanksgiving in the USA. This should all sound familiar and even familial since our country is based on hegemony, war and occupation of indigenous people’s land.
These color revolutions are hyper-hysterically mis-characterized in USA state media as working class civilians demanding democracy in their brown, oppressed nation. This mis-characterization couldn’t be further from the truth. Sadly, these color revolutions are becoming so normalized that most USA citizens have become immune to their catastrophic global impact.
So normalized in fact that when a color revolution happens in the United States it goes undetected and is tragically under reported. The USA color revolutions always target the poorest communities, infecting local government bodies with corrupt economic policy where greed is at the center of the municipality’s agenda, disabling or thwarting or hindering any progress as poverty rises, while extracting life sustaining natural resources like potable drinking water or land on which to grow food for sustenance. Often, in their place, state of the art surveillance systems are installed on Section 8 Housing or the over-financialization of the build-out of a new police station, for instance. This is similar to when elaborate heavily funded military bases set up camp in the regions of the countries that we “revolutionize.” Our military set up base in the poorest regions of Afghanistan to exploit the poppy fields. The marriage of predatory financial markets with the drug trade create “Opportunity Zones” that exploit the most addictive neighborhoods. These neighborhoods happen to fall prey to what eventually comes out of those poppy fields. That sounds like a system that is circular, you might say. It’s built that way, each depending on its other to thrive.
Unlike the civilians in other countries who recognize when a color revolution is taking place and push back against its operations often fighting to maintain their way of life, their health, their economic stability and their true understanding of freedom, which is defined as their own ardent attachment to culture and tradition, United States civilians watch with gaping mouths and shrugging indifference as their communities slowly rot from the inside out, turning into despotic sources of greed and for-profit poverty industrial complexes.
Can we not see the similarities between Libya and Anywhere, America? Libya, a once harmonious, somewhat economically stable country that even had a small tourism trade was scapegoated, ransacked, plundered and turned into a slave nation. We can see the similarities: small local economies that had a working eco-system which balanced out a life for everyone through local merchants, good schools and systems that worked for everyone have eroded and in its place a hollowed out shell unrecognizable even to the occupants who call it home. Libyan flags wave pitifully on the landscape of a region once flush with opportunity. American flags wave pitifully on the landscape of a region once flush with opportunity.
Civilians in the more prominent wealthy areas of the USA remain unaffected, unencumbered and glibly unaware of the color revolutions that cause generational poverty just a few states over. Where children have no access to nutritional food, or transit riders have no access to decent transit or roads and where generational poverty is very very expensive, causing a rising rash of horrific sicknesses that pave the way to addiction, trauma and the bonds that choke all opportunity out. The beiged out bourgeoisie peruse their plethora of organic produce options right out their front door, then hop on 7 different types of transit options or protected bike lanes to whisk them away to whatever brightly lit cafe, or overcrowded restaurant or lush park that meets their every whimsical desire, blissfully unaware that color revolutions are pock-marking this country they seem to hold so dear. After all, they vote (The ‘I Voted!’ sticker prominently displayed on their not-too-fancy-to-draw-attention-to-their-privilege-jacket) and it’s usually for a candidate in a beige suit with an itchy drone finger who paves the way for a candidate with an itchy golf hand.
Color revolutions seem to be a way of life now. Ordinary, expected little coup d’etats of autonomous regions. The scale gets tipped. The balance is gone. The desperation for survival mounts. The money dries up. The food dries up. The water dries up. The poor are targeted incessantly and continuously until their every waking moment is “What bullshit will I have to deal with today?” Surveillance is everywhere, outsourcing autonomy to the highest bidder. Children become little old men and women by the time they’re 5 years old and it’s simply daily Dickensian drudgery at the behest of surveillance capitalism with a backdrop of Orwell’s 1984 in the outer mist. Hope is stupid. All that’s left is what I call “The Real.”
Society remains neutral, unaffected by it and non-reactive. Circling the drain is this regretful notion that we wasted our good crisis, or our last three good crises. We allowed an institution that was compromised to begin with to eat its own tail, to become so corrupted and so diseased that dystopian novels made into tv shows use Congress as their muse.
And we financialize. Everything. Your footprint, your thoughts, your screens, your mood, your flower bed, your outrage, your body, your sexual orientation, your water, your food, your hair, your toenails, your children, your future, you. Someone’s bank account is getting very fat off of all this financializing. And it certainly isn’t mine.
If you’re thankful this year at your table, then you’re thankful for your delusion. You’re thankful that you’re programmable, you’re thankful that you’re blissfully unaware of your own privilege, you’re thankful that you’ve never experienced a color revolution and have never been a starving refugee in your own country.
If you’re questioning what exactly there is to be thankful for, then you can join me this Thanksgiving at my table. It’s exactly where you should be.