By John Kennedy
February 2, 2026
The Technical State
When conducting an insurrection of a regime, the head of state and his legislative buildings do not matter. In the history of successful revolutions, as well as failed revolutions, the technical structure of the country is the key. The American military can capture the president, but when the energy, transport, internet, telephone, and other technical structures and industries remain in the hands of the government, then regime change is impossible because the state was untouched. When the FBI accused the January 6th protestors of being "insurrectionists," it should be asked what they were trying to coup. The capitol building is just that, a building, with little more than symbolic value. If they had decided to capture and occupy the building, the outside regime would've just surrounded the building and turned off the power and water until their surrender. To conduct a coup, you must not capture the government; you must capture the state. In his 1931 book, "Coup d'Etat," Curzio Malaparte wrote extensively on how to conduct a real insurrection, having been involved in Mussolini's rise to power, witnessing the Russian revolutions, and being a part of the Italian delegation to Warsaw during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920. He quoted Leon Trotsky extensively, the true mind behind the revolution that overthrew Kerenski's provisional government. In "Coup d'Etat" (p.30) a conversation between Trotsky and the revolutionary Dzerjinsky was outlined, which explains the process that led to the regime change of Kerenski:
"On the eve of the Coup d'Etat, Trotsky told Dzerjinsky that Kerenski's government must be completely ignored by the Red Guards; that the chief thing was to capture the State and not to fight the government with machine-guns; that the Republican Council, the Ministries and the Duma played an unimportant part in the tactics of insurrection and should not be the objective of armed rebellion; that the key to the State lay, not in its political and secretarial organizations, nor yet in the Tauride, Maria, or Winter Palaces, but in its technical services, such as the electric stations, the telephone and telegraph offices, the port, gasworks and water mains."
What is an insurrectionist who owns the parliament building but governs nothing ? Similarly, what is a president who governs from the Capitol but has nothing to govern ? The central tenets of security and governance in the West have been through the framework of the protection of the state apparatus to ensure its needs are met and that enemies, foreign and domestic, stay away from it. The nations of the West have had the great benefit of democratic governance. It's not the fact that the people can vote; it's the fact that democratic societies allow for more complex institutions and structures where the responsibility of state protection can be decentralized and therefore harder to occupy by an insurrectional force. The ruling classes in democratic societies do not need to completely rely on force in order to maintain their power; their legitimacy comes from the rule of law, their constitutions and oaths upon the Bible. Their power also comes from the organized chaos of democratic society; the public mind is created and formed in the never ending development of institutions, clubs, and competing religions within the nation. Edward Bernays, creator of American public relations and author of the book "Propaganda," writes (P.1):
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized."
The protection of the state in a democratic society goes far beyond the multi-billion dollar clubs of the NFL, NBA, or numerous smaller clubs people are allowed to participate in throughout their lives. America's Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is one of the most advanced and lucrative in the world, the weapons used by the US Military in its overseas ventures are distributed among multiple "private" companies such as Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics to name a few. America's energy is distributed between companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, and even the communications network is broken up into packets as devised by the RAND Corporation engineer, Paul Baran. Instead of one telegraph or data station which can easily be destroyed or captured, the internet in the United States is decentralized, data packets can be re-routed, if one route is destroyed, the data finds another. This ensures constant connection with the government and supremacy over the internet by the state. Although the technology has changed, the tactics remain the same. When looking at insurrections and coup d'Etat's around the world, there are two important factors: the technical expertise of the insurrectionists when conducting invisible maneuvers and the reliability of the state's secret organization to provide an invisible defense.
The Invisible Maneuver- Insurrectionist
Despite the romantic vision surrounding the idea of the revolution in the West, the reality is much different; the protestors in the street and the chants for freedom are merely a tactic of the coup d'Etat, but it is not enough to bring regime change. The protestors provide cover and legitimacy for the hopeful class of insurrectionist leaders looking to become the new ruling class of the country. The true revolution lies within the tactics of the small bands of technical experts, attacking not the government but the technical state. Curzio Malaparte expertly examined this process in his book "Coup D'etat." He references discussions between Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin begins: (p. 17)
If we want to carry out the revolution as Marxists, that is to say as an art, we must also, and without a moment's delay, organize the General Staff of the insurrectional troops, distribute our forces, launch our loyal regiments against the most salient positions, surround Alexandra theatre, occupy the Fortress of Peter and Paul, arrest the General Staff and the members of the members of the government, attack the cadets and cossacks with detachments ready to die to the last man. We must mobilize the armed workers, call them to the supreme encounter, take over the telephone and telegraph exchanges at the same time, quarter our insurrectional staff in the telephone exchange and connect it up by telephone with all the factories, regiments, and points at which the armed struggle is being waged."
Trotsky, however, disagreed with this notion, he replies:
"That is all quite reasonable, but it is too complicated. The plan is too vast and it is a strategy which includes too much territory and too many people. It is not an insurrection any longer, it is a war. One must concentrate on small tactics, move in a small space with few men, strike hard and straight. Hit your adversary in the stomach and the blow will be noiseless. Insurrection is a piece of noiseless machinery. Your strategy demands too many favorable circumstances. Insurrection needs nothing. It is self-sufficient."
The revolution does not belong with the protestors or democratic influencers online, but a rival castle within the nation that directly threatens the security of the state. Trotsky's tactics of invisible maneuvers to capture the state would be vital in third world conflicts against the liberal western nations in the decades to follow. Trotsky did not see his overthrow of Kerenski as political theater or fanfare; it was a matter of technique. Insurrection, Trotsky had said, "is not an art, it is an engine. Technical experts are required to start it and they alone could stop it." This band of men Trotsky had formed were recruited based on their technical and military expertise from factories, ports, and deserters from army regiments. Malaparte describes the training the men undertook. (p. 21)
"Trotsky's storming party consisted of a thousand workmen, soldiers, and sailors () These Red Guards devoted themselves for ten days to a whole series of "invisible maneuvers" in the very center of town. Among the crowd of deserters that thronged the streets, in the midst of the chaos that reigned in the government buildings and offices, in the General Headquarters, in the post offices, telephone and telegraph exchanges, barracks, and the head offices of the city's technical services, they practiced insurrectional tactics. Unarmed and in broad daylight, their little groups of three or four men passed unnoticed."
Under the command of Antonov Ovesienko, squads formed with soldiers and technical experts were assigned to their specialty; men trained in telegraph operations captured the telegraph stations, and railway men attacked train stations. This was to ensure their continued operation in the hands of the revolutionary government and out of the old government's hands; these squads would work independently of each other. Why did Kerenski, head of the Menshevik government after the overthrow of the Tsar, fail to stop Trotsky and his men ? This same question can be asked in the modern day; the states that have faced coups, such as the Arab nations in the Middle East and Africa, did not have an as well-developed security apparatus to defend their state. In nations where a ruler has ruled for decades, such as Assad in Syria or Gaddafi in Libya, their security may become old, relics of the past, and corrupt. More importantly, in the absence of a secret organization, a state tactic that will be discussed later, police measures cannot defeat the tactics of the insurrection. Kerenski had taken numerous police measures to ensure the defense of the government; shouldn't thousands of armed men and armored cars patrolling the streets be enough ? For the invisible maneuver to succeed, the insurrectionists require far more variables to be met. Firstly, it is vital that there is general disorder in the streets of the cities; it is in the chaos that the insurrectionists work. Secondly, the political understanding of the regime leader will determine how the insurrectionists are meant, if the police are the main means of defense, then the insurrectionists will overthrow the regime.
Chaos as Tactic- Insurrectionist
Aleksandr Kerenski was the head of the Provisional Government after the downfall of the Tsarist regime. Unlike the Bolsheviks, Kerenski was a moderate; he saw Western democracies as the model that the new Russia should aim to create. In Kerenski lay the same liberal-minded assumptions that had failed against the tactics of Trotsky: that police presence and enforcement will save the government. Kerenski's new Menshevik government had established itself in Petrograd, now St. Petersburg, and prepared itself against the Bolshevik insurrection. The Socialists, the middle class press, and the trade unions publicly accused the Bolsheviks as radical conspirators plotting to overthrow Kerenski's government. The Bolsheviks were not hiding their agreement and loudly proclaimed to the workers to go onward with the unfinished revolution. In response, Petrograd found itself swarming with cadets, Cossacks, army regiments, and policemen lined along the government ministries and palaces with armed patrols and armored cars moving slowly down the neighborhoods. Kerenski faced a major problem that the Bolsheviks would use to their advantage: the chaos in the streets of Petrograd became uncontrollable as 200,000 workers, deserters, and lumpen walked aimlessly in the streets:
"Colonel Polkovnikov, who was in command of the square and who threatened to imprison all deserters and forbade manifestations and meetings, and brawls. Workers, soldiers, clerks, and sailors at the street corners debated at the top of their voices and with sweeping gestures. In the cafes and stalovaie, everywhere the people laughed at Colonel Polkovnikov's proclamations which pretended that the 200,000 deserters in Petrograd could be arrested and the brawls forbidden."
In the chaos of the masses, the insurrectionists trained undisturbed as the police waited nervously for any sign of attack; what more could Kerenski do ? Because he was a moderate socialist, a liberal creating a democracy instead of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Kerenski placed too much faith in his police force and had ultimately refused to use the means at his disposal. The crowd laughed at Colonel Polkovnikov because they did not take the government seriously, they crowds, just as the Bolsheviks, openly defied the authority of the Kerenski regime. This would embolden any insurrectionists; it showed that the government was unwilling to defend their place as the ruling class over the state and the masses. While liberal regimes see crowd dispersal as a crude, inhumane tactic of regime survival, the control of chaos through force can become the deciding factor in whether or not a regime lives. When the Red Army and KGB had attempted to overthrow Gorbachev in 1991, the fate of the Soviet regime was decided when Boris Yeltsin had called a general strike to paralyze the revolutionary government. These leaders were defeated by the same Marxist tactics that Trotsky had used in 1917 by using the general disorder to paralyze the government. If the KGB leaders had followed the Chinese example of 1989, perhaps they would still be in power. In the modern day, the Iranian regime has been accused of killing around 3000 protestors, with President Trump claiming he managed to stop the hanging of 800 other protestors, despite this, the Ayatollah remains in power and the regime is still firmly in place. There are multiple lines of defense the state can utilize to defend itself; the utilization of crowd dispersal is unpopular and undesirable for a government. Because of this, and the ineffectiveness of police measures, states in the 20th century had realized the threat of the coup d'Etat by insurrectionists; a reality that has determined the policy of governments for the last century. So nations throughout the world have developed secret organizations to defend the state; these groups have been instrumental to regimes around the world because of their effectiveness in protecting the technical state.
The Secret Organization- State
In the formation of both the democratic and non-democratic security state, the development of a secret organization is essential and has dominated public policy for the last century. In the democratic state there is a distribution of responsibility of the state's most important assets and technical structure in semi-private hands. From this, the regimes of the West encounter knowledge and security problems in a global landscape that more centralized states do not face. Because the American state is global and its enemies numerous, the United States has developed nineteen intelligence agencies for the protection of different areas of society, with the CIA and FBI being the most well-known. Countries with smaller global footprints still require this organization, Iran for instance. Unlike in Kerenski's Russia or, most recently, Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, the Iranian regime has ensured its technical state's protection by special means, through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is said to control at least ⅓ of the Iranian economy, such as its energy, telecommunications, and construction centers, so as to ensure its protection. Abbas Edalat, an Iranian mathematics professor at Imperial College London, had stated that Iran is "not under normal circumstances." He continues:
"Iran has been subjected to threats of regime change, threats of military attack. In these circumstances it is not at all strange that the military gets increasingly more economic power in the country." Speaking of the guard, he continues: "This is the force that the government can trust to run the economy when Iran is in a state of siege."
In the process of insurrection, the regime will find that their greatest power lies within the secret organization. For Iran, it is the IRGC that protects its most vital infrastructure from attack and occupation; for the insurrectionists, it is the small bands that conduct the invisible maneuver. The formation of this secret organization is best seen in the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky in 1927, when Trotsky had attempted to usurp Stalin as General Secretary on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. It was Stalin during this time who had developed the way in which the state can defend itself against armed insurrection within its own system; it was Stalin who defeated and purged the Trotskyists from the Soviet system. Stalin, along with ally Menjinski, had managed to take control of the Soviet secret police, the G.P.U. Trotsky was quickly becoming isolated after being dismissed as People's Commissary of War, which lost him control of the Red Army, and the removal of Tomski lost him a lead position in the trade union, two organizations Trotsky planned to use to capture the state. Instead, he had to rely on the same tactics of insurrection used in 1917, but Stalin, with the help of the G.P.U. had developed a special corps for the defense of the state, armed squads to form an invisible defense against Trotsky's invisible maneuvers; numbering a hundred squads with ten men and a detachment of armored cars and machine guns, they successfully established a network of secret telephone wires to their headquarters at the Lubianka building, which secured communication between the technical state assets and the G.P.U. Malaparte explains further (P.50):
"The squad was the fighting unit in this special corps: each squad had to keep in training with a view to coming into action independently of its fellow squads, on the piece of ground allotted to it. Each man had to be thoroughly acquainted with the work of his own squad and with that of the other nine of his sector. The organization, according to Menjinski, was "secret and invisible." Its members wore no uniform and could not be recognized by any badge. Even their membership of the organization was pledged to secrecy. They underwent technical, military and political instruction; and they were bred for hatred of their adversaries known and unknown, whether Jews or followers of Trotsky. No Jews could belong to the organization."
In the modern day, many of the coup d'Etat's can be looked at through the scope of a given state's "special corps" and their effectiveness against domestic and foreign aggressors. In Syria, the Military Intelligence Directorate (MID) was a staple of the Syrian security state and loyal to the Assad family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the MID had turned Syria into a gateway for foreign fighters to join the Iraqi insurgency fighting the American occupation; this agency was feared and effective in what it did. But after the 2011 Arab Spring and the start of the Syrian civil war, the country, its military, and the state's infrastructure would be destroyed and split between different rival factions. By the time of Assad's fall, the MID had become a shell of its former self, riddled with corruption, outdated technology systems, and no will to advance. The HTS rebels were able to swiftly and bloodlessly take major cities and points from Bashar al-Assad, like Homs, Aleppo, and Hama. This is why, in the defense of the state, mastery over the internet is vital for regime survival because connection between insurrectionists is so much easier. In Iran, with cities being rocked by protests and riots, the regime in Tehran had turned off the internet; this is because social media companies, a hand in state protection in their own right, were spreading anti-Ayatollah propaganda; this included spreading rumors that the Ayatollah had been killed to sow confusion within the masses. This chaos is a tactic of insurrection, to confuse the army, the populace, and even the state itself. This chaos ensued after Assad fled, which caused the government to fall, just as Trotsky had swiftly overthrown Kerenski with his invisible maneuvers in 1917, and had caused the government to shelter in the Winter Palace (p.33):
"Kerenski had fled. They said he was at the front to collect troops and march on Petrograd, The entire population poured into the streets anxious for news. Everyone was talking, discussing, and cursing either the government or the Bolsheviks. The wildest rumors spread from group to group: Kerenski dead, the heads of the Menshevik minority shot in front of Tauride Palace; Lenin sitting in the Tsar's room in the Winter Palace."
By the end of Assad's regime, there was no means that the MID could've used to control the narrative. Iran, however, in its recent protests, has shown that even smaller nations can defeat Western technology used for insurrection. By turning off the internet, the Iranians were able to capture the users of Starlink before deploying jammers to disrupt Elon Musk's Starlink networks which the regime claimed to connect the Americans and the Israelis to protestors, and perhaps other actors, on the ground. Despite this being described as a "blunt instrument to crush dissent," it may just prove useful in protecting a regime that may lack the advanced technology of America but does not lack the engineering or military skill to protect itself. Among the tactics of regime protection that a state can rely on, few can be more important than the development of the secret organization dedicated to the protection of the state's technical assets, but there are other tactics at the Iranian, and any state's, disposal. Iran has the great benefit of being enemies with Israel, a Jewish state, and anti-Semitism is a legitimate tactic of state defense.
Anti-Semitism as Tactic- State
There is a growing visible faction in the West, an anti-Zionist faction that is challenging the post-World War Two consensus on everything from liberal ideology to the Holocaust. Its rival is the political establishment within the United States, the politicians in Congress, the political pundits like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, and the moneyed interest groups like AIPAC and Christian Evangelicals. These interests have found a home within the Trump Administration, an administration that is quickly losing support among young voters due to this support of Jewish interests. If this disdain for Israel and Jewish interests persists and consolidates itself into the personal political identity of the younger generation, Jews and politicians who support Israeli interests may find themselves pushed into political fringes, clinging onto a past ideology. When the state apparatus is under threat, and its enemy belongs to a distinctive ethnic group separate from that of the majority nation, this can be weaponized as an added self-defense mechanism. The "three Jews" in Soviet Russia, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, found themselves the target of anti-Semitism that Stalin was able to tap into an ancient prejudice to ensure that Trotsky failed to gather popular support due to his Jewish identity. This is despite the fact that anti-semitism was outlawed after the 1917 revolution and deemed a counter-revolutionary crime. But Stalin's Special Corps barred Jews from joining; the political training of this organization had taught anti-Semitism as state defense. At the heart of Stalin's anti-Semtism was not an ignorant prejudice, but a tactic to fight Trotsky and his insurrectionist attempts to capture the state from him as he did to Kerenski in 1917. Malarte explains: (p. 51)
"All that was required in order to draw the army, trade unions, and working class away from Trotsky, from Kamena and Zinoviev was to kindle all the old anti-Semetic prejudices and instinctive hatred of the Russian people for the Jews. Stalin relied on the common selfishness of the "Kulaks" and on the ignorance of the peasant masses, neither of whom had relinquished any of their age-long hatred of the Jews. By kindling anti-Semitism, Stalin was able to form a united front of soldiers, workers, and peasants against the dangers of Trotskyism. Menjinski was successfully hunting down the members of a secret society organized by Trotsky for the purpose of getting into power. In every Jew, Menjinski suspected and persecuted a Catiline. Thus, the struggle against Trotsky's party soon came to possess all the characteristics of a policy of anti-Semitsm, definitely sponsored by the state."
This tactic of self-defense is alive, both in Iran and in the United States. During the 12 Day War, the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, ran Operation Rising Lion, a reference to pre-revolutionary Iran when the flag contained a lion instead of the Nishan Rasmi. They had conducted assassinations and gathered intelligence by utilizing immigrant peoples living in Iran, such as Indians and Afghanis. As the Israelis conducted bombing raids in Northern Iran and finally concluded with the American bombing of Fordow, the exiled Iranian Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, supported Israeli strikes and urged the United States and Israel to overthrow the Ayatollah. Because of all these past events, any possible leader that could hypothetically replace the Ayatollah will be accused of being an American and Jewish puppet who supported the overthrow of his own country's government for his own gain. In the defense of the state, the Ayatollah couldn't have an easier enemy to utilize propaganda against.
America too may face a similar problem that the Iranian regime is facing. A few years ago, YouTube censorship against Nazi symbolism had reached such a peak that even mentioning the name of Adolf Hitler could've gotten a video demonetized, but today, the entire Nazi film "The Triumph of the Will" can be found in its full, unedited version with subtitles. It is no longer fringe political thinking to question the role of Israel in the United States, the domination of AIPAC over politicians in Congress, and even the role of Jefferey Epstein, and his relationship to Israeli intelligence is being questioned. Could the rise of anti-Semitism in America be, as Stalin had done, a rekindling of old prejudices among the peasant masses to form a united front against an enemy threatening America's technical state ? A suggestion to the American masses to mold a certain political taste for the benefit of the ruling class, or at least a rival castle, as Bernays had analyzed ? These questions inherently sow confusion, anger, and fear among the population; the post-liberal order that is woven into the Western people strains and leaves them disillusioned. Since the American mythos has been tied together by the idea of liberal agency, the individual as the ultimate decider of his or her fate, the idea of any vested interest molding and shaping the mind yourself and those around you is met with disgust, conspiracy, and fascination. For the state however, whether Soviet, Iranian, or American, it will do what it must to ensure its survival; by kindling prejudices, the group is sacrificed in order to fight the few. As the post-war order collapses around the world, the myth surrounding the Jews and the Holocaust, one of the main threads in the established order, must also unravel if the post-war consciousness comes to an end. Depending on the advanced political nature of the state, the further advanced tactics of containment through culture and controlled opposition may not be available. Crudeness can be a state's worst enemy, and if a state is pushed to the brink of collapse, its final line of defense will come from an unlikely ally.
The General Strike as Tactic- State
When a government faces collapse due to insurrectional forces, its final line of defense lies not within its police or armed forces, but within the labor organization of the country. The government can call upon the trade unions to organize a general strike to immobilize society in defense of the technical state. Despite the long and violent history between labor and the government, historical examples show that the trade unions can be the deciding factor in whether or not a regime survives or a new ruling class takes home in the capital heading their new state. If the state has the union at its disposal, the means by which they can be deployed effectively depends on the strength, will, political upbringing, and political aptitude of the ruling class. The general strike as a defense for the state had succeeded before, in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 in Weimar Germany, when Wolfgang Kapp and General von Luttwitz had attempted to overthrow President Ebert and socialist Chancellor Bauer through a coup d'Etat. The mistake of Kapp and Luttwitz was one of technique. Luttwitz had sent his Baltic regiments into Berlin; they had captured the Reichstag and government ministries, but they did not capture the state. Bauer's government had fled to Stuttgart, where Bauer called upon the proletariat and the trade unions to organize a general strike: (p. 81)
"At midday, Kapp thought he had the situation well in hand, but that same night, on March 13th, he found himself hemmed in by an unannounced enemy. The life of Berlin had been paralyzed in a few moments. The strike was spreading all over Prussia. Darkness reigned in the capital, the streets in the center were deserted although everything was quiet in the workers suburbs. A general paralysis had struck the technical services like lightning; even the nurses had left their hospitals. Communications with Prussia and the rest of Germany had ceased early in the afternoon; Berlin would be starving in a few hours time. There was no sign of violence or rebellion in the crowds and the workers had left their factories with the greatest coolness. The general disorder was perfect."
A revolutionary government with nothing to govern can never be legitimate; the unions of the railway, ports, power plants, factories, and other services had choked the Kapp government until its eventual collapse just five days later on March 17th. The general strike, however, had led to Ruhr Red Army uprisings, which led to Bauer's resignation and the new Chancellor, Hermann Muller, to combat the communists with the army and Freikorps. Despite this, the general strike was successful in securing the Weimar government until Hitler's election in 1933. The Kapp Putsch has shown that the revolution is not politics; it is technique. The leaders of the insurrectionists and of the regime are one of the most important components in a coup d'Etat. The Weimar government was not alone in using the technique of the general strike to defend its technical state. Before Mussolini's March on Rome, the Fascists already had control of the state's technical services; the march was simply a formality to hand the liberal Giolitti government over to the Fascist owners of the state. In the years before this, Giolitti had used socialist and communist militant organizations to defend the state against Mussolini's blackshirts. By the time of 1922, the Italian government had called a general strike but failed to stop Mussolini. So why did Weimar Germany succeed where Italy had failed ? The answer is the difference of political upbringing; Chancellor Bauer was a socialist, Prime Minister Giolitti was a liberal. From 1919 until 1921, Mussolini had clashed with the socialist organizations and communist Red Guards. Giolitti had quickly lost control of the situation, the socialists and communists took it upon themselves to wage war against Mussolini since his party was threatening their very existence in the country. Giolitti, meanwhile, was attempting to parliamentarize the Fascists in hopes of containing their violence.
What Giolitti and the liberal government did not understand was Mussolini's Marxist upbringing; unlike Kapp, Mussolini understood the Trotskyist view of insurrection. Squads of blackshirts moved throughout the country attacking any organized movement that could be called to defend the state. The unions and accompanying Red Guards stood alone in their defense of the state as socialist newspapers, unions, clubs, and other organizations, including Catholic organizations, were crushed. The Red Guard would hide rifles and bombs in factories and towns to be used in guerrilla fighting against the Black Shirt squads that arrived, but eventually these forces were pushed into the countryside and mountains. By August of 1922, Mussolini had finally decided to take power, and the successor of the shamed Giolitti, the socialist Ivanoi Bonomi, called a general strike to stop the revolution from conquering the state and overthrowing the government. Malaparte, who had accompanied Mussolini on the March on Rome and had witnessed how the Fascists conducted the perfect revolution, explains (p.130):
"A general strike was proclaimed in August. This was called the legal, or constitutional strike; it was the last struggle put up by the defenders of liberty, democracy, legality, and State against the black shirt army. At last, Mussolini was going to face his most dangerous adversary, the only serious obstacle to the Fascist capture of the State. He was going to face and overcome the general strike which had been threatened for three years as a knockout blow to the revolution, the general strike against the revolution which had been the aim of his three years' struggle against the working class organizations to disable. The Government and the liberal and reactionary middle classes let loose the workers' counter-revolution, counting upon sapping the enthusiasm of the Black Shirts for the insurrection and removing the State for a time at least the overhanging threat of assault. But the Fascists sent from their own ranks relays of experts and specialist workmen to take the place of the strikers in the public services, while at the same time with a terrible display of violence the Black Shirts in twenty-four hours smashed the army of the defenders of the state ranged under the Red Flag of the Trade Union Congress.
The general strike as a tactic for state defense is uncommon, yet it is the final line of defense for a crumbling government. For many governments, this tactic is not within their means; labor organizations are costly, and the threats of labor strikes are too great for a government to risk. Countries such as the United States are able to not only tolerate but are able to maintain numerous large trade unions within its borders. The ILA is a massive union that controls America's shipping ports, and where a strike can paralyze the movement of exports and imports. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations represents thousands of union branches and around sixteen million American workers; the greatest obstacle for an insurrectionist movement in any country may not even be the government's secret organization; it is its labor organizations that will paralyze the state through a general strike. This tactic also applies to foreign invasion. Countries such as Iraq during the 2003 American invasion did not use a general strike, as Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist government had outlawed labor organization in 1987. By the time the Americans had taken control of Iraq, they had abolished every Saddam-era law except one, the outlawing of trade unions. If the Ba'athist government had called the General Federation of Iraqi Workers, a state union similar to Iran's Islamic Labor Councils, the remnants of the government could have undertaken a general strike to paralyze the technical services of the state to deny them access to the Americans. Instead, the general strike took the form of Italy's Red Guard fighting from 1919 until 1921; the strike became an insurgency. As the Americans settled into their positions, Iraqi partisans rose from the sands and fought back; they had taken key technical structures like Haditha Dam. In 2004, American Rangers retook the dam and staffed it with their own engineers and returned it to the Iraqi government in 2008. The new Iraqi president after Saddam, the liberal and Kurd Jallal Talabani, could not regain the control Saddam once had; the insurgency, much like the strikes of Italy and the Ruhr Red Army Uprising, had spiraled out of control, and unlike Hermann Mueller, he could not regain control. The Americans retook Fallujah and Ramadi, where partisans had stashed weapons and explosives around the city, but for the next two decades, America will never have full control of the country. Factions throughout the country emerged, Shia and Sunni alike; ISIS would dominate the region for years. By the time of the 12 Day War in June of 2025, the situation had only stabilized into a MAD doctrine; America never even gained control over Baghdad.
The general strike is a powerful and unpredictable tactic of state defense; the political training of the insurrectionists and government leadership is the deciding factor in this final line of defense. The governments of Weimar Germany and Italy had used the strike in order to deny insurrectionists access to the state; in Iraq, they used Jihad, where Bauer called upon the entire proletariat to defend the state; the Muslim world came into Iraq to fight the American occupation. Germany has shown that Bauer, trained in Marxism, can utilize the general strike as a successful means of state defense. Italy has shown that a liberal government can quickly lose control over the general strike and lose against an insurrectionist trained in Trotskyist tactics to capture the state and fight an insurgency. It's seen even now in Minnesota, where a general strike has been called against federal law enforcement and deportations. ICE and the local police have been unable to control the situation, resulting in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The Trump administration has met the general strike as a liberal through policing measures, even sending his own Colonel Polkovnikov, Border Chief Greg Bovino. Much like Kerenski's colonel, Bovini is not taken seriously; just as the deserters in the general disorder of Petrograd scoffed at Polkinov's demands, Bovino's shouts and commands while wearing his infamous border patrol coat are met with resistance, where even an ICE agents finger tip is bittenoff. These events reveal a united front among leftists, as an article from "The Inspector" says:
"Only a future of General Strikes involving large scale disruptions has the chance of stopping Trump forces."
As Trump's law enforcement measures fail to confront the General Strike, this will effectively bring about the end of the right-wing momentum in America and in Europe. Trump's base has split between anti-Zionists, libertarians, and Trump loyalists; the left has united under the concept of general strike. Although the strike was not targeted at the state to cause a general paralysis, it has effectively trapped conservative media, which continues to support the ineffective law enforcement measures as the situation deteriorates into violence between the people and police, which causes the Christian conservative base to lose the moral high ground in the country and in the world. Much like Kapp, Trump and the conservatives have an inherent misunderstanding of the nature of Marxist techniques, and their utter aversion to it as an ideology prevents them from undertaking effective techniques to meet the General Strike; the only advantage the conservative establishment has is the fact that the technical unions are removed from the leftists and firmly in the hands of the financial establishment behind Trump. This is especially crucial now, as the perceived brutality and unprofessionalism of ICE agents will hinder future deportation campaigns. This is unique in America, because the general strike in Minnesota reveals a weakness in the strongest defense that a liberal government can have. This final tactic in state defense is one only the most advanced and bourgeois society can effectively use: the containment of rebellion through culture.
Containment Through Culture- State
Throughout the history of the tactics of regime survival and overthrow, there is a recurring pattern of liberal governments struggling against insurrectionists forces and successfully conducting their own coup d'Etat. The reason behind this is one of technique and ideological restrictions. Giolitti believed that he could contain the violence of the Fascists in parliament, Kerenski believed that police measures could defend his regime effectively, and Kapp thought that taking the government offices and making the police stand down would be enough to usher in a new government. All three of these individuals had a fundamental misunderstanding of how to defend or capture the state; they were liberals, not Marxists. As the United States, the ultimate example of a liberal society and government, advanced rapidly, both technologically and institutionally, they sought to expand their power and influence overseas, most notably after the Second World War. They would find a rival in the Soviet Union and so the security establishment in America would begin a policy of containment. However, this containment is not the one thought about when speaking on Vietnam or South America; the United States had sought to contain Marxism by diluting it with its own ideology. This had to be done because, as seen in earlier examples, the techniques undertaken by liberal governments fail in direct confrontation with the tactics of Marxists. This is seen in Cuba, when the Kennedy administration had failed to overthrow the communist dictator Fidel Castro. Instead of conducting the coup like Trotsky, by capturing the state, the American military and intelligence services planned the war like a law enforcement operation. They had landed Cuban exiles on a beach and tried, but failed, to assassinate Fidel Castro. The main reason why it failed was because the U.S. was hoping to use international law to support the exiles militarily; it is called the "Recognition of Belligerency." American planners like William Harvey, Ted Shackley, Edward Landale, and Bobby Kennedy had hoped that these exiles could capture terrain and form a provisional government within the Cuban state, which would then allow further US involvement and support for the exiles; they had planned this without understanding the concept of state capture. One of the Cuban exiles who took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Roberto San Roman, had spoken about one of the major plans of the American intelligence agents that would ultimately fail, that being the sabotage of the Matahambre copper mine. Roman stated:
"They gave us good training, with scale models of the shafts and the way they took the minerals up from the mines. We had big targets and special demolition equipment and all that. We were training for two weeks using rubber rafts, big ships, and small ships."
This operation would fail on the day of the invasion as the boat the rebels were given, had died at sea. This would not be the last that American military planners, the intelligence services, and the political class would fail against Marxist tactics. In 1993, America had traveled to Somalia to enforce the UN peacekeeping mission during the ongoing civil war. One of the factions in this civil war, led by Mohammed Farrah Aidid, had been accused of stealing food aid and escalating violence against the population, peacekeepers, and other humanitarian efforts. So, the US launched Operation Restore Hope, where American Rangers and Delta Force, two of the most elite units in the American military, were sent to capture Aidid. Aidid, who had fought in numerous wars and had studied in the elite Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union, treated the Battle of Mogadishu through the lens of a Marxist, while America treated it like a law enforcement operation. In the chaos of Mogadishu at the time, Trotsky can be remembered to have pointed to the chaos in Petrograd; at the swirling masses brawling and arguing, he said to Oviensko, "There is my general strike." Similarly, Aidid's men had taken the form of Stalin's Special Corps, men with no uniform, badge, or distinguishing feature. Aidid had formed an invisible defense and combined it with the chaos of the general strike, whose members would drag American bodies through the streets. This difference in tactics also applies to the situation in America itself. Street gangs in American cities, whether knowingly or not, take the form of the squads formed by Trotsky and Stalin, and similarly, by partisan and insurgent groups in the Middle East. The Bloods and Crips are over fifty years old and the Latin Kings are over seventy years old; these gangs are found in nearly every major US city, and American law enforcement, both state and federal, has been unable to defeat these street gangs. While the RICO laws were able to bring down the more hierarchical crime syndicates like the Italian Mafia families, the decentralized nature of the aforementioned street gangs allows them to operate independently of each other and control certain territories in the cities. Alaistar Crooke, author of the book "Resistance," had described that structure of Hezbollah, while they are not the street gangs of America, their structure had effectively defeated the Israeli army on multiple occasions, and their structures similar to insurgents and gangs that the American military and police have faced, he explains (p.182):
"These bottom up community strengthening measures also underline Hesballah's military doctrine. Far from the western image of a movement that is so regimented- or totalitarian, as Hesballah's detractors describe it- that there is no room for personal initiative or autonomy, Hezbollah's doctrine is one that encourages personal responsibility and initiative () In the conflict with Israel in 2006, a Hesballah military commander explained that commanders of the small militia units that operated in villages had almost complete autonomy- within the parameters of the overall plan that was developed before the war began. These units also networked with neighboring units at their own discretion.
Even though the Mossad had killed many Hezbollah leaders in the pager bombings in 2024, the overall structure of the organization remains, and therefore Hezbollah remains. Countries like America have fought the War on Terror like they fought all their wars, like Kerenski, through patrols, presence of enforcers, and decrees. During the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, American units would raid compounds and apartment buildings to kill or capture high-value targets. As the war dragged on, they simply conducted airstrikes with UAVs and other advanced technology, but they simply killed the leader without destroying the structure of the organization; their technique was flawed. This is seen explicitly in the recent Maduro capture in Venezuela; Trump had conducted what he said was a "law enforcement operation," and yet despite Maduro being abducted, the technical structure of the state remains in the hands of the government, even without the president.
Western governments have had the great advantage of the marketplace, where consumers can fulfill their desires in stores, where their beliefs become commodified and therefore contained within the system. Marxism in America, for instance, was always far from the European understanding of it, the understanding which allowed revolutionaries like Mussolini and Trotsky to capture the state. The reason for this is because American Marxism is looked at through the lens of the Black struggle and their intellectuals, who have a fundamental misunderstanding of state structure and the realism of power. Rebellion in America is often pointed towards law enforcement, an organization that fails to protect the state and has failed in American cities. The ruling class, as seen in 2020, is more than willing to defund these departments as willing sacrifices, as they're not a key factor in state defense. The containment of rebellion can be seen further in the counterculture of the 1960s. Woodstock and the music that came from it are immortalized in museums and radio stations. Hippies, and hippie culture became commodified in stores, movies, and even in the way people speak. The Black Power movement has gone through a similar process; Black Panther leaders like Bobby Seale became a celebrity chef on television, taking him off the streets and on the grill. The most stark example is the Shakur family. Afeni Shakur, the mother of rapper Tupac Shakur, became a legend in the Black Power movement after she had successfully represented herself and defeated the charges that would've landed her a three hundred-year prison sentence. Her son, however, would be the one to take the Black Power movement off the street and into the multi-billion dollar music industry. He would build himself an image of a West Coast gangster, although early interviews reveal him as being a softer, more effeminate person. He would honor his mother in songs such as "Dear Mama," that even "as a crack fiend mama, you always were a black queen." 2Pac's music has been immortalized within the American identity, black and white.
Leftism in America has not gone anywhere because of this containment mechanism; the system operates in such a way that there is no need to destroy the ideology or arrest its leaders. The American leftists' outrage at the social injustice in the country reinforces the system's ability to lock itself down. The reflex actions of these groups is to reach out and shake the system, to attack it, and to gather activists to fight it, but this all plays into the hands of the system and how it absorbs the energy of these political movements. Lenin himself described this problem, saying:
"To change the world, to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie and to bring the proletariat to power, is not the hardest task. The hardest task is to change the habits of millions and millions of people trained in capitalism.".
The foundational values of Western rebellion are the very constructs that reinforce the capitalist superstructure in the West. The culture behind feminism supports the economic basis of the country and therefore their containment, whether it be through women "liberated" by careers or through their sexual independence on social media or in the pornographic industry. During the Iranian protests, the highest value applauded in the West was Iranian women shedding her clothes in defiance and a Canadian woman smoking a cigarette while also lighting a picture of Ayatollah Khamanei. Among the right, they idolize figures who may embody traditional and masculine ideas: expensive cars, beautiful women, and big muscles become the ultimate embodiment of men because pleasure is the most sought-after feeling in these societies. These movements, whether new or old, continue even as an idol is torn down by their own hands over internal disagreements in the movement. The Catholic Church has been at the forefront of this in recent years; young converts discover this faith and are disillusioned as Church officials defend third-world immigration and attack deportations as cruel. This is combined with the number of ideologies and trends that rise and fall during weekly cycles, and the more the people on the left and right hate and rebel, the more the system will absorb them until they become trapped in structure. What the United States has done with all of this is create a defense mechanism that relies on every person, no matter the ideology, to defend it. The liberal government cannot defend the state from the legitimate tactics of the coup d'Etat head on, so when a figure emerges calling for action and change, the organization he builds around himself crumbles under the weight of accusations and disagreements in decisions, all the while his phrasings are being commodified on T-shirts and hats.
Conclusion
America is a country of factions, now revealed more as the threads of the post-war ideology are pulled away more and more. The financial capitalists, leftist organizations like the CRS, the churches, ethnic interest groups, and the many thousands of organizations and clubs varying in shape and size are scattered throughout the country, with some backed by unknown interests. These groups come together and cure; they defend the state like a wall and are the first and last responders in the defense of the American state. Just as Mussolini had learned and applied in Italy, the fight is not against the government but against the hundreds of organizations that stood in his way to power: the socialists, middle-class clubs, newspapers, unions, Red Guard factions, and even the Catholic Church. Because the animating spirit of America has led to this point in history, a new world must be created, which will inherently sow instability and death; it is the path that all nations must go through. America, as of now, isn't a nation but a furnace, a place where a nation someday might be forged.