A threat which drew loud applause from a crowd of American leftists. From The Times-Picayune:

Mikhail Gorbachev drew loud cheers in New Orleans Friday when he promised to lead a local revolution if the Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t keep its promise to improve levees by 2011.

“We will be coming back,” the Soviet Union’s last leader said, through an interpreter, during a ceremony in the Lower Garden District. “If this pledge is not fulfilled, we will start a new revolution in New Orleans.”

After the applause died down, Gorbachev said that action should be a last resort, even though, he added, most Americans apparently have forgotten that their country is the result of a revolution.

“We shouldn’t want another revolution,” he said. “We should do our best in every (other) way.”

Gorbachev, who is in New Orleans as the board chairman of a worldwide organization that promotes environmentally friendly construction, spoke at the International School of Louisiana after a quick tour of the Katrina-ravaged Lower 9th Ward.

“A few brief hours are not enough to see everything,” he said, “but it is enough to appreciate the scale of the disaster that the city had to go through.”

As a result of that trip, “my impression was that New Orleans is beginning to come back,” Gorbachev said, “but, still, there is a lot that remains to be done. . . .

“We saw many traces of the devastation, but we also saw the signs of the city coming back.”

In a meeting with City Council President Arnie Fielkow earlier Friday, Gorbachev said he had been told of the work that businesses and citizens’ groups have done to help restore the city.

Such action is commendable, reflecting the citizens’ courage, he said. But, he added in an interview, it is not enough.

A civil war seems more and more likely every day. Soon America may look like the America in Orson Scott Card’s Empire

h/t Moonbattery