AMERICA: THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
BY SHIU HUNG
There is much for us to lament about our country. We have become
supremely pretentious, complacent, and greedy. We and other industrialized
nations, constituting a small percentage of the world's population, consume
the vast majority of natural resources on the planet. This over-consumption,
self-indulgence, and waste has taken an unbelievable toll on the environment
and created worldwide human suffering and injustice, disguised as "democracy"
and "free-enterprise" and paid for by our tax dollars. The multinational
corporate hegemony has been well established by the machinations of the
IMF, World Bank, CIA, Pentagon, and the Goebbels propaganda machine of the
media. The national security state, in short, is upon us.
During the spring 1992 urban uprising in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities,
a curfew was declared under the auspices of civil emergency management.
The reasons given by our government were to curtail further civil unrest
and establish law and order in the affected cities. The verdict finding
Rodney King's police attackers innocent, we were told, had precipitated
the mass unrest. Economic inequities-a root cause of the uprising-were hardly
discussed. The media's extended coverage of this event provided Americans
with a convincing image of lawlessness, reinforcing the sentiment that law
and order is vital to our national security and that a curfew is a small
price to pay for civil order. To safeguard innocent lives and property,
extreme security measures were required. Martial law was instituted temporarily
under the more acceptable term "curfew." We should anticipate
more incidents as an excuse for martial law in the future.
The American public is not insulated from corporate illegal activities and
the national security apparatus under various guises, such as the war on
organized crime, the war on drugs, and counterterrorism. In many instances
our own government, via the national security apparatus, is the perpetrator
of the crimes that they then claim to combat.
For example, the CIA has been involved with heroin trafficking in South-East
Asia at least since the '60s and '70s. The drugs-for-arms trafficking in
Central and South American countries were a major funding strategy associated
with the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan and Bush talked incessantly about the
War on Drugs but many critics referred to the Reagan-Bush War with Drugs
waged against the American people!
Such actions by the CIA must be seen in the context of America as a national
security state, characterized by a massive covert "black budget"
program that goes back to the beginning of this century. The labor union
movement is but one of the many victims in a long list of social and peace
movements that opposed the corporate state and U.S. imperialism and fought
for civil rights in the '60s. From the earliest days corporations have thrived
on unfair labor practices and exploitation of workers, cooperating with
our government and the corporate elite to marginalize labor's progress.
During periods when labor is in demand (such as war) labor has experienced
brief upturns, but during down-turn business cycles corporations destroy
unions as much as possible. At times, corporate infiltrators and agent provocateurs,
with the sanction of our government, deter and incapacitate those opposed
to corporate exploitation. Often intelligence and law enforcement agencies
infiltrate and provoke conflicts within the more effective organizations.
After World War II and well into the '50s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the
rabid anti-Communist cold warrior, benefited from the CIA's initial disinformation
to Congress. Meanwhile, the same strategy of propaganda and disinformation
intensified overseas through the combined efforts of the CIA and the Gehlen
organization of old Nazis. The specter of totalitarianism and communism
in Eastern Europe allowed the CIA to recruit many Nazi high command officers
in its East European department for intelligence-gathering on the USSR.
The CIA, the old Nazis, and the East European émigrés became
the standard coalition in fighting the Cold War. The strange bedfellows
creating a national security state in the U.S. should have raised questions.
Meanwhile, U.S. multinational expansion was proceeding apace, establishing
economic hegemony across the globe, with the backing of the U.S. military
under the guise of fighting Communism and spreading democracy.
Based on Benito Mussolini's famous definition, "Fascism is Corporatism,"
the U.S. government has taken a parallel course since WW II. The U.S. government
and the multinationals have capitalized on the strategy of the Cold War
to maintain power. Their plan was/is to make people dependent on the state
to provide "national security" in a world characterized by "terrorists,"
"narco-traffickers," etc. Now that the cold war is over, new enemies
must be created to maintain the status quo.
Over the past 20 years or so, some of these new enemies began to surface
in the U.S., allowing the CIA and the FBI to amass some of their power in
dealing with them. Covertly the CIA/FBI/NSC created these new enemies through
domestic counter-intelligence and espionage operation, under the myth of
security threats and social and economic chaos. In many instances the CIA
collaborated with the ATF and local law enforcement agencies. The FBI used
CoIntelPro, a covert program that continued even after revelation by the
Justice Department and the media. There is substantial evidence that it
has been carried over into many of the so-called counter-terrorism programs
of today. To further isolate and fractionalize us into accepting a national
security state, the intelligence apparatus also conducts secret mind-control
programs using citizens as guinea pigs. The objective is to inject a "security
threat" into society from religious cult groups such as those led by
Jim Jones and David Koresh.
Dave Emory calls the technique that the Nazis used to influence its citizens'
thinking and minimize dissent the "salami tactic." It consists
in taking many small steps to intimidate the public into accepting legislated
policy and eroded civil rights. In this way people do not notice the gradual
changes. Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free explains how Germans
were treated during the '30s and '40s. His chapter "But then it was
too late" explicitly exposes the salami tactic of cutting the body
politic into thin slices. What occurred in Germany could happen anywhere
and appears to be happening in the U.S. today. The lesson to be learned
from our history is how vulnerable we are to deceptions and lies.
Propaganda and deception about domestic and foreign "enemies"
are used to influence popular sentiment to reduce civil liberties in the
name of security. Media images of chaos and moral deterioration lead to
rationales to increase police/military power and draconian measures to maintain
national as well as global security. The so-called democratic governments
of the world use their power under various guises to achieve ever tighter
centralized world dominance in the name of helping democratize nations ruled
by despotic and recalcitrant governments or to stabilize countries undergoing
internal conflict such as our "humanitarian" mission, transformed
into armed aggression, in Somalia and the current conflict in former Yugoslavia.
The American policy of political and economic domination of Latin American
countries has been a success through the last century to the present day,
using the ruse of helping those countries fight communism and install democracy
to gain public support. Even grassroots progressive activists can't turn
the tide of the fascist movement because they have been handicapped by the
so-called structural analysis in seeking solutions to the problems of the
world. To put an end to U.S. hegemony over other nations, they have to start
looking behind the scenes to see the fascists at work, to recognize that
the old Nazis and our contemporary fascists are connected and perpetrating
their deplorable scheme in the world.