In the 1960s, the Young Lords used to get themselves sent to the brig so they could organize fellow conscripts to commit mutiny.

But all they ever accomplished was shutting down aircraft carriers and saving people from getting bombed. They couldn't go viral on Twitter.

You know the conservative response to "Lt. Che Meme" is "I can't believe Obama let them teach Communistm at West Point" right?

I mean I get that these ops are meant to appeal to teenagers which is why its so infuriating that adults give this a pass.

Soon enough there will be an openly "Leninist" SOF brigade that parachutes in to support the self-determination of oppressed nations.

For now though the right for active-duty officers to make chickenshit social media spectacles can be the new debate to suck up all our time.

What else is a meme protest in 2017 going to do except goad the reactionaries to react?

Rapone is an Army Ranger who writes papers on why Gramsci says you should support (the US Army intervention in) Kurdistan

What does it mean that West Point grads are writing papers on Gramscian tactics? What kind of "Communism" did Obama want taught there?

US military has worked since 1960s to transform from a top-down command structure to a decentralized one, reflecting battlefield realities.

This was the transformation of the California military-industrial complex that birthed Silicon Valley in the 1970s -

the ability to run decentralized operations *within* the control structures of a top-down command hierarchy. Encapsulation.

Army *may* have been clueless about deception ops in 1940s and amateur at them in 1960s, but they've had 50 years since to get good at them.

OK I'll spell it out: If West Point is willingly graduating "Communists" that doesn't mean Communists have infiltrated West Point.

If West Point is teaching "Communism" (Gramsci's strategies for organizing) that doesn't mean it's promoting working-class revolution.

It means the Army has developed a method for encapsulating Communism and deploying Communists just like any deploying other military system.

This is just another mundane example of a military reverse-engineering and re-deploying an enemy's technology.

It's no more "Communist" than the CIA salvaging the wreckage of a Soviet submarine and copying the design of the torpedoes for the US Navy.

In the 1960s the Army tried to use drugs + hypnosis to create sleeper agents who could be conscious Communists and unconscious soldiers.

In the 1970s the goals of this program were externalized as computer networks: indirect control of conscious subjects through suggestion.

50 years later there's enough of an infrastructure of bullshit that a reverse-engineered Communist solider might consciously believe that

they were making the Army Communist, forgetting they're still subject to the same need-to-know restriction on orders as every other solider.

The reverse engineering of Gramsci is accomplished here by swapping "international working class" with "locally oppressed ethnic groups."

The conservatives attacking this stunt aren't wrong when they say that DSA West Point is the result of Obama's policies.

Take a previous generation's struggle, like the brave organizing of BPP / Young Lords among their *fellow conscripts* in the Army

and strip this down to a set of symbols and gestures which can then be re-deployed selectively in operations compatible with imperialism.

Collective practices with material consequences are reduced to individuals having the right beliefs and feelings.

Anarchist affect and aesthetics were deployed with hacker tactics in Anonymous' infiltration of Libya's civil infrastructure in 2011.

This was the signature campaign in Obama's imperial reshaping of the Middle East / North Africa.

Blaming Saddam for 9/11 in 2003 was the original deception that justified America's first war of occupation since the 1970s.

When the Bush/Cheney admin failed to achieve the "7 countries in 5 years" regime change goal https://www.salon.com/2007/10/12/wesley_clark/

the strategy of empire was changed up under Obama to covert wars and color revolutions while the domestic antiwar movement was dismantled

for lack of an over target - there were no "wars" under Obama, only the occasional drone strike or conspiracy theory.

"DSA West Point" is just the next chapter of the campaign of deceptions and invasions that began in 2001 - support US occupation of

eastern Syria under the guise of a separatist movement using fake "Leninist" affect and aesthetics. Over the past year these aesthetics

have evolved from promoting a fake-Leninist irregular soldier like Brace Belden to promoting regular infantry officers at West Point.

Is it expensive and complicated to develop the academic + media networks necessary to pull that off? Sure.

But, like aircraft carriers or submarines that can launch missiles from underwater, the USA has had 70 years to work on these tactics.

And there's more than enough oil on the eastern bank of the Euphrates to make the costs worth it.