This Guerilla Warfare Expert Says the Capitol Siege Looked Like the Beginning of a Colour Revolution
David Kilcullen, CEO of Cordillera, said Jan. 6 looked like what happened in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia in the 1990s
After watching supporters of President Donald Trump and right-wing agitators storm Capitol Hill on January 6 in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, guerilla warfare expert Dr. David Kilcullen is concerned that a colour revolution is brewing in the US.
“Revolutions often begin with massive peaceful protests over a contested election. These lead to violence, which triggers a government crackdown, which provokes insurrection, international condemnation and, often, regime change,” he said in a statement.
As the Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and senior counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, Kilcullen said the scenes he watched unfold in Washington D.C. “looked a little like the opening move of a colour revolution, as seen in Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia or the Arab Spring”
In an essay he published the next day, January 7, in The Australian, Kilcullen expressed concerns that further violence between right-wing and left-wing populist groups could erupt in the next two weeks leading up to President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“Each has its peaceful political players, its mass street activists and its violent extremists,” he warned.
“The notion of an inevitable, peaceful democratic transfer of power is dead.”
The Colour Revolutions
The fall of the Soviet Union is often described as a pivotal moment for Western Democracy. While the failed August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev symbolized the power of democracy to win the hearts and minds of individuals, the dissolution of the USSR did not guarantee political freedom for newly-formed nations like Ukraine and Georgia.
Instead, these countries developed “hybrid regimes” which meshed democracy with Soviet-style autocracy, reflecting the influence of Russia on the region’s political systems. Russia is a prime example of this style of government. The country goes through the pageantry of elections every four years knowing Vladimir Putin will win before the first ballot is counted.
After earning his first premiership under Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1999, Putin began his campaign to reunite the USSR. Then, between 2000 and 2005, a number of revolutions happened in neighboring states such as Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. These revolutions became known as the “colour revolutions,” with each being given an associative color by scholars.
Historians treat each revolution as inter-related phenomena because democracy was spreading through the region in waves during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A key similarity between them is that the revolutions were not seen as ideological. Instead, they were described by revolutionaries as efforts to improve each nation in the names of national integration, freedom, democracy, and economic development.
January 6, 2021
Participants in the January 6 siege parroted the narrative that they were only trying to save the US from itself.
While the line can be clearly drawn between these events and the Colour Revolutions, disinformation experts are concerned by how the participants were encouraged by conspiracy theories and online propaganda.
Analysts at intelligence Firm Zignal Labs found phrases like “hold the line” and “trust the plan” — often associated with Qanon conspiracy accounts — circulated social media sites more than 80,000 times during the siege.
Similarly, there were more than 1 million mentions of “civil war” and “storm the capitol,” according to a report by the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, pro-Trump activists celebrated the siege on Parler and other right-wing social media sites, saying the event was an effort to “save the constitution” from Communist Democrats.
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington, told the AP that the internet was the primary meeting ground for most of the participants. She is concerned that the pat on the back the participants got from Trump could encourage further action.
“That’s going to embolden these extremists in the future,” she said. “They see their job as a job well done, and they can do it again with impunity.”
