350, tops
As the Republican party and Donald Trump’s more ardent supporters work to rewrite the narrative of the attempted coup, supporters of those arrested over it sought to turn it from a political to a human rights issue with the “Justice for J6” rally near the Capitol on Saturday.
As a protest, it was a flop.
Turnout was at best half of the 700 predicted by organisers, which in itself fell well short of the many thousands who stormed Congress in January. The event organiser, Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign operative, blamed the poor attendance on government intimidation and press scaremongering.
It’s shocking when the government intimidates people just because they want to seize the Capitol, murder all the Democrats, and make Trump dictator for life.
It is fortunate that the US military did not throw their weight behind the J6 thugs, otherwise things could have ended up like Guatemala in 1954 or Chile in 1973.
In those countries which have been through successful liberal-democratic transitions out of autocracy and feudalism (Western Europe) plus their transplants elsewhere (the US, Canada, Australia, NZ and perhaps, after long agonising hauls Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan, liberal democracy has found its feet. In some other parts of Asia; (Philippines and Indonesia) it is still trying to do so, if not staggering around like a drunk on a Friday night.
But Latin America was colonised from the Iberian peninsula, and before any success for liberal democracy in Spain and Portugal which only relatively late in the 20th C moved to it themselves. Thus the ‘natural’ political arrangement for the Latin American countries became the 20th C version of European feudal autocracy, which was military dictatorship.
Revolutionary movements which sought to overthrow such anciens regimes and their colonialist variants in Asia (China and Vietnam in particular) had to first raise their own armies, and no army can ever be a democracy. Moreover, after the successful revolution there were always dissatisfied elements lurking about, ever-ready to stage a coup or a political assassination, so the temptation to hang onto power and not yield it to a popular electoral process became too hard for the revolutionaries to resist: if it was ever there in the first place.
Thus the story of the Cuban Revolution and its Second Declaration of Havana.
http://www.walterlippmann.com/fc-02-04-1962.pdf
Braynard has boasted that this was a success and that it could have had a much smaller number turn up and have been a success. Why? Because people are talking about it and him. More people than were talking about him previously.
I would add Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile to that list. Costa Rica has been democratic as long as anyone can remember. The other two have long democratic traditions, though both were seriously upset by military rule in the 1970s and 1980s. Rwanda might qualify as well, as it has made huge steps (especially compared with its twin, Burundi), in recent years.
In relation to Mostly Cloudy’s comment,
I think it distorts what happened in Chile in 1973. Yes, there was a CIA-inspired coup attempt in June, but it was very incompetently executed and failed miserably. However, the successful coup, at 9 AM on a cloudless Tuesday morning, on the 11th September (do those details seem familiar?), was home-grown, and supported by the USA only after it had succeeded. The CIA had nothing to do with it.
Rolling Stone
Right wing conspiracy rally collapses under weight of right wing conspiracies.
The lackluster attendance may be connected to conspiracy theories that the event was a false flag or honeypot for federal agents to entrap and arrest attendees.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/justice-j6-rally-turnout-1228692/
BTW, liberal democracy had found its feet in Hong Kong. It’s now functionally dead and we should not underestimate the ability of the Chinese state to crush it completely.
That’s one thing I wonder about: how does Hong Kong fit into post- colonial theory? British Empire flexes its muscles at diminished Chinese empire -> HK becomes a hundred year rental property that adopts the ways of British style liberal democracy -> goes back to capitalist Party dominated China -> new Chinese Empire destroys the liberty that former Imperial colony.
Like, how does one explain that? It makes sense if you think that empires have always gobbled up failing empires but it doesn’t if you think it’s the Big Bad European empires destroying the hopes and dreams of indigenous peoples who are in a state of nature and definitely not as mean and nasty as the rest of the human race.
Not justifying it as “right”; we don’t live in a just world. Things are what they are and we can’t improve things based on Hollywood movie mythology.
BKiSA: My last visit to Hong Kong was in 1957. As you would know, it was ceded (in perpetuity?) to the British as a result of China’s loss and humiliation in the First Opium War of 1840, when the British East India Company was heavily into the opium trade, and the British government supported them 150%.
After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, it suited the Maoists to keep it as a contact point with the West, even though its population largely consisted of people hostile to them and everything they stood for. At no time after the Suez crisis of 1956 was Britain interested in going to war in order to keep it, though the Brits did take part in the Korean War of 1950-53, when British soldiers fought Chinese troops..
I went to the Chinese equivalent of a Saturday matinee in Canton in 1957. The film was some el cheapo featuring Mao’s troops (the good guys) vs Chiang Kai Shek’s.(the bad guys). It amused me that even though I could not understand a word of it, the kids in the front stalls all cheered when the good guys won.
Omar, I believe (dredging up high school social studies) that HK Island and Kowloon were needed after the first and second opium wars, but that the New Territories were leased for 99 years at a later date. Yes, the EIC were appalling – little better than pirates really – but BKiSA’s point is a very valid one. Personally I think the British gave up HK hoping that China would honour the treaty and that in the intervening 50 years the communist regime would fall, as had the Soviets. Chinese empires though they wax and wane do seem to be very resilient. In my view HK is now functional part of mainland China nd anyone doing business there or visiting for fun would do well to remember that.
And meanwhile, a handful of Scottish witches, with barely any publicity or organisation, managed a far better turnout at their own ‘storming’ of parliament. Almost as though one of those protests reflects a legitimate concern and the other is absolute madness.