U.S. Pledges to Prevent Corbyn's Election

In a recording leaked to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promises that the United States will "push back" against the election of Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister of the United Kingdom, noting that “It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

According to Robert Stevens of the World Socialist Web Site,

Pompeo didn’t outline what would be required to prevent Corbyn from being elected and what a “push-back” against him would involve. But senior figures in the UK military have already made clear what they are prepared to carry out: a coup d'état along the lines of that which the CIA engineered in Chile in 1973 that ended with the murder of elected social-democrat leader Salvador Allende and thousands of his supporters.

Just a week after being elected Labour leader [September 12, 2015], with the backing of hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters, the Sunday Times carried comments from a “senior serving general” that in the event of Corbyn becoming prime minister, there would be “the very real prospect” of “a mutiny.”

The general revealed that the military would be prepared to use “whatever means possible, fair or foul.” He warned, “You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Trident [nuclear weapons], pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.” 

Just a few months later, Britain’s then Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nicholas Houghton, asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr about Corbyn’s statement that he would never authorise the use of nuclear weapons, replied, “Well, it would worry me if that thought was translated into power.”

[snip]

The forces attacking Corbyn fear that if he won office—under conditions of growing social polarisation set to escalate under Brexit—millions of workers and youth would demand he make good on previous pledges to oppose austerity, militarism, war and attacks on democratic rights.

Corbyn is important because he acts as sort of a canary in the coalmine. Both Bernie Sanders and Corbyn are anti-war social democrats, a political orientation entirely within the mainstream but now no longer allowed for someone in a leadership position of a mainstream party.

The fraying Washington Consensus will brook no challenge to its neoliberal orthodoxy and its waging of perpetual warfare. The problem is that market fundamentalism and permanent warfare don't garner much support at the polls. Hence, the necessity for intelligence agencies, that serve at the behest of elites who remain fully committed to the Washington Consensus, to fiddle about and find ways to distract and divide the electorate: The Russian bogeyman, the Chinese demon dragon, the anti-Semitic peacenik social democrat.