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Noted in Passing: You want to see an insurrection? THIS is an insurrection. Coming soon.

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  • Dirk January 5, 2022, 10:35 AM

    Once We The People in any country are pushed far enough this is the consequence for Govt’s actions, or inactions.

    This response from Americans is far to late. But keep talking, bolder louder, you have their undivided attention, no really.

    The firefight occurring is swift and violent, people are dying for their beliefs. Democracy accountability.

    What’s fundamental is, most of the issues we in the US are angry about,,,,, are not unlike the issues in these slovic nations. Mostly can be defined by two words, “ oppressive government”.

    I don’t hold out much hope for AMERICA to actually respond in this fashion. Na were comfortably numb.

    Dirk

  • David Spence January 5, 2022, 10:51 AM

    “That’s how it’s done, son.” C. Daniels

    • Mike Austin January 5, 2022, 1:10 PM

      Yep. That video was music to my ears.

      “There’s something happening here
      But what it is ain’t exactly clear
      There’s a man with a gun over there
      Telling me I got to beware .”

  • enn ess January 5, 2022, 11:20 AM

    Become versed in Russian/Communist history, era end of Tsar Nicholas’s reign through the Bolshevik Revolution during Lenin’s reign through Stalins takeover (early 1900’s – mid/late 1830’s) and you will get an understanding of the how’s and why’s of this event. In short, they have lived through this before. Never again.

    • Mike Austin January 6, 2022, 1:27 AM

      I studied Russian History under Professor Basil Dmytryshyn at Portland State University in the late 1970s. He was a Ukrainian who had fought for six years as a partisan in World War II. He began fighting at 14 when the Germans and Soviets invaded Poland (September 1939). The stories he would tell! One stands out:

      “It is a simple matter to place explosive under a bridge or a vehicle. I know. I have done it.”

      He lived to be 95, dying last year.

  • Mike Austin January 5, 2022, 1:13 PM

    An insurrection is not marching and carrying signs and mouthing slogans. An insurrection is when people on both sides get killed. It gets peoples’ attention.

  • azlibertarian January 5, 2022, 1:32 PM

    Longish story ensues…..

    So the Air Force had me stationed in the Philippines between 1984 and 1987. If you do a little search for what was happening around that timeframe, you’ll find that the President of the Philippines in 1984 was one Ferdinand Marcos.

    Marcos was way corrupt. Hillary level corruption. Biden level corruption. Marcos had declared martial law from ’72 to ’81, and even after it had expired, he kept many elements of it going. Of course the Filipinos hated him, but if you were some simple guy, growing rice (or whatever), living in a t-shirt and flip-flops, what’re you going to do? The US government looked at him in much the same way as the Filipinos did: He may have been an asshole tinpot dictator, but at least he was their asshole tinpot dictator. And there were strategic reasons for the US to be in the PI. We’d been booted out of Vietnam, with Chinese and Russian assistance, and having a presence in that part of the world was worth putting up with someone you otherwise wouldn’t want to be friendly towards. [You don’t find deep water ports just anywhere around in the world, and the US Navy had one at Subic Bay. Clark AB, about 60 miles northeast of Subic, housed a long runway, but more importantly, and almost completely unappreciated by those there at the time, a huge antenna array we called “the Elephant Cage”. This thing was operated by a bunch of secretive guys in civilian clothes working for some three-letter agency that we weren’t supposed to mention. Put yourself back in the 80’s, pre-internet, and ask yourself: How would you listen in to what the Chinese were doing?) You put up with Marcos because the alternative–allowing China to grow unchecked–was too unpalatable.

    Back to Marcos….
    Of course, just because you’re a tinpot dictator, doesn’t mean that you don’t have political opposition. In fact, you sorta need to have a foil….someone who can run against you in an “election” (scare quotes intended), and when you steal the election, you can say that you won in a fair election. In the PI, that guy in the late ’70’s-early 80’s was Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino. In 1980, Marcos let Aquino travel to the US for medical care (heart attack), and he stayed behind in the US, serving as sort of an offshore opposition to Marcos. Aquino traveled back to the PI in August of ’83 to begin a run for the Presidency.

    And you’ll never guess what Marcos’ guys did when Aquino arrived. They fuckin’ shot him right as he was getting off the airplane. He never even touched Philippine soil. Right on the jetway. DRT.

    Don’t believe me about this? Sure. You should always question everything you read on the internet. But here is the fuckin’ video of it happening.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wex9Q3cWU3Q

    But instead of this drastic step working for Marcos, it backfired. The people were tired of him, and everything he’d been doing. Aquino’s widow, Cory Aquino, ran in her husband’s place, and Marcos attempted to steal that election too. Villages and towns reported statistically impossible election results–95% Marcos/5% Aquino (IIRC).

    And soon, this idea that Marcos had to go infected even the government that he ran.

    [More to follow]

    • azlibertarian January 5, 2022, 2:17 PM

      Marcos’ “Deep State” decided he had to go.

      It all happened in less than a week. One .gov unit or another….a governor here, a police captain there….would announce support for Cory Aquino. It began slowly at first, but then gathered steam (and that reminds me of the two ways that Hemingway said one might go bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly”.). I remember that the turmoil really began on a Wednesday. I had a trip that following morning, but I was so wrapped up in this coup/civil war going on literally in my backyard, that I stayed up all night long flipping between CNN (which we got from the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service) and the local TV stations. It was all so bizarre…..at one point late in the evening–like 9:30 or so–Marcos called a press conference. And there he was, the President of the country, in his bedroom at the Palace, in a fuckin’ track suit, with Imelda and his grandkids going in and out of the picture, telling the country that everything was going to be OK, that this was all one big misunderstanding. But it wasn’t going to be OK for Marcos. He just didn’t know it yet.

      So getting adequate rest for a pilot is an important thing. You make bad decisions when you haven’t slept. And when I got to the squadron on Thursday morning for my early morning flight, of course the entire crew was talking about this whole Marcos thing. And like me, not one of us had slept a wink the night before. This flight was a recipe for an accident (which, thankfully, we did not have.). I remember my copilot being very concerned about his young wife and infant son being left behind in what might have potentially been a war zone (thankfully, my family was in the States, and I was relieved of that worry).

      It was early morning….light just after sunrise….that we got the engines started. Clark had the one runway, 20-02 (meaning that in one direction you’d take off on a 200 degree heading, and the opposite on a 020 degree heading), and we always took off on 20. We were parked on the south side of the airport, which meant that a normal takeoff would have us taxiing all the way to the north end to take off on 20. But I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could, so I asked the copilot to request an opposite direction takeoff on Runway 02. The Tower Guy kinda stuttered a minute, and said that we could take off on whichever runway we wanted, but we needed to be aware that there was a flight of 3 Philippine Air Force F-5Es orbiting overhead, and that he wasn’t talking to them. We speculated that they were overhead Clark, getting guidance from their command on whether to attack the Palace or to defect the airplanes to Clark (whose Filipino military commander had gone over to the Aquino side early in the whole thing).

      So as I watch this brief twitter video glimpse of what is happening in Kazakhstan, it all looks very familiar to me. They’ve got a government headed by a guy that they don’t like. The economy sucks. Inflation is raging. Someone….maybe military; maybe police; maybe civilian….decides that they’ve had enough, and it’s on like Donkey Kong. Shots are fired (as they were in the PI in the 80’s. The difference being that the competing Filipino forces back then knew enough to shoot over the heads of their opponents. It was Battle by Acoustics more than anything.).

      And now I wonder about how different we are here in America. I don’t think that we’re close to shooting at our political opponents, but then again “Gradually, then suddenly” applies here too.

    • Mike Austin January 5, 2022, 2:19 PM

      I remember the Aquino assassination. I was 30 at that time. All Hell broke loose. But I’ll leave that for your next chapter.

  • Aggie January 6, 2022, 7:00 AM

    All I can say is, the Russians better stay far, far away from any intervention here. They descend from Genghis Khan, and they hate the Russians with a heat from the sun. A few million Kazakhs were starved to death by Stalin and they haven’t forgotten a single one.

    • Casey Klahn January 6, 2022, 11:07 AM

      …and they already have gone in. Putin: game, set, match.

      • jwm January 6, 2022, 11:12 AM

        Casey-
        Question for you on the Bi partisan Mountain thread.

        JWM

  • Dirk January 6, 2022, 7:33 AM

    What if! What if Americans stood/fought to recover their nation. What If, say the Dems, a few American communists “ Invited” say China into the country you know, to restore normality.

    How do you suppose,,,,,,Other Americans would respond?

    Suppose the five com bloc nations rolling into kstan, were their to prop up another fellow authoritarian regime.

    Find it interesting that “others” in the region have suggested that the US, are in fact heavily involved in the removal of this totalitarian govt. instrumental in arming the and leading those silly rebels. Many reports confirming the US has in fact been arming this region heavily,,,,, recently.

    How do NATO block countries respond??, do they respond,??Imagine WWIII tipping off, all because a few peasants are angry cuz fuels to expensive.

    Sometimes it’s just this simple!

    Sometimes it’s a group of world leaders who need to hide their dirty deeds, going to the dirty deeds play book.

    So my question is this. Is this hiccup in Kstan nothing, or is this hiccup in Kstand everything?

    Does this snow ball, or melt?

    VI

    • Mike Austin January 6, 2022, 1:29 PM

      “What if?” There is so much happening here, there and everywhere that my head doth spin. Much is below ground, seemingly invisible. What is really happening in Kstan? Who is financing it? Qui bono? Hell if I know. Things will play out and some of the smoke will clear. It seems like a small thing, a local thing. Like the assassination of an archduke was in 1914.

  • azlibertarian January 6, 2022, 1:41 PM

    It’s getting a little more “insurrection-y” over in Kazakhstan, if you don’t mind me making up a new word. From Jack Posobiec, who I am now following on my new Gettr account…..
    Kazakhstan officer beheaded, protesters killed as government offices are targeted amid unrest.
    Note this from the article,….

    …A Russia-led military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), sent peacekeeping troops to Kazakhstan on Thursday at the request of Mr Tokayev.

    The group’s secretariat said Russian paratroopers were deployed, as well as troops from four former Soviet republics.

    A video showed soldiers embarking a cargo plane at a military airfield near Moscow.

    The alliance said the peacekeepers’ main tasks would be to protect important state and military facilities and help the Kazakh law and order forces….

    Much of this reads like an old Tom Clancy novel.

    • azlibertarian January 6, 2022, 1:44 PM

      Also, note that the “abc” source of this article is the Australian Broadcasting Company, not the one you were probably thinking about. We can’t have an American company bringing us news that detracts from the narrative, and certainly not on today’s anniversary.

  • Dirk January 6, 2022, 10:02 PM

    Sent links to GV,this Kstan gigs gotten bad very quickly.

    Pay attention, is this the opening round?

    VI