Why We Are All Responsible for the Current Crisis of Democracy (And I Do Not Mean What the Trilateral Commission Considers the Crisis of Democracy)
By Nathan Jaco
When any opposition to the policies of the current Presidential administration, or for any other administration for that matter, arise in public or private communication, I can think of very few examples that have not addressed the issues under false presuppositions; which, over time, serve to present the issues in a “false light” and thereby assist the establishment in the repression of dissent, or more broadly, the repression of a culture of dissent. Many questions get asked and many comments get made that relate to the context in which the government acts on the behalf of its people that question why or state that the government does not take appropriate actions on behalf of the majority of the populace, or that the government in fact does the contrary. This is the nature of public dissent in this country, and all of this operates under the false presupposition that it is the object of those that control state power act on the behalf of the majority of the populace, when it is clear that is not their objective. Examples abound of how those in power take whatever actions necessary, however contradictory, to accomplish their true objective of securing wealth and power for the elite of the public and private sectors, respectively.
In 2003, when Robert Novak publicized leaked information revealing the identity of CIA employee, Valerie Plame, few would argue that he was not working for the interest of the current Presidential administration, as this occurred after Valerie Plame’s husband, US ambassador Joe Wilson, had publicly criticized the Bush administration. The second major event in the timeline of the affair that strikes one as suspicious is that “a Special Counsel, Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed” to investigate the case as a result of then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s recusal of himself in the matter. The New York Times reported that on 21 January 2004 a group of former intelligence officers wrote to Congress requesting an inquiry into the matter which is atypical of the intelligence community. See Findlaw Introductory Paragraph: For full text: See this Findlaw Article . There is a wealth of publicized information on this affair, so I will not go into it at length here. The important point is that it was an act of political attack against the family of Joe Wilson in retaliation to his criticisms (and this is obvious to any reasonable person familiar with the incident), and thus the identity of a CIA operative was disclosed by individuals acting in the interests of the current establishment.
The one thing I find odd about the whole affair is that, to my knowledge, there was little or no public mention of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 23 June 1982, something I discovered when reading an interview with Noam Chomsky that first appeared in CounterSpy 6:3 in 1982 and was reprinted in the book Noam Chomsky Language and Politics, which makes it unlawful to disclose the identity of “US covert intelligence officers, agents, informants and sources.” This act was by “several constitutional scholars” considered to be “unconstitutional.” The editor’s notes in the book go on to say that, “The CIA and its allies in Congress had pressed for the bill several years as a way to stop CIA critics such as former agent Phillip Agee and the editors of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB) and CounterSpy from trying to hamper agency operations by exposing agents. The bill amended the National Security Act of 1947. The point here is that the government made it illegal to disclose the identity of CIA covert operatives in order to spite a very small community of critics, and thus they were acting on the interests of the establishment. The text of the article itself goes on to discuss how this law, which is tame in its constrictions of civil liberties in comparison to the USA Patriot Act, is part of the American elites’ war on the free press that has been conducted for some time, an example of planning on this front is the Trilateral Commission’s Orwellian-titled report on The Crisis of Democracy or TFR-08 .
The crisis of democracy is used in this rather sarcastically in this instance. It is designed to purport to the uninitiated that there is a crisis to democracy and a democratic way of life. What it really means is that democratic impulses in an increasingly aware population will lead to the use of democratic institutions by that population, thus they will no longer be subservient to the will of the elites. This, itself, is based on the fallacy of American democracy. The United States of America is not and has never been a democracy. It is a constitutional republic where the vast majority of the population possesses few genuine liberties due to the fact that they are essentially forced to conduct business under a corporate mercantilist command economy that is falsely identified as capitalism. The framers of the constitution were careful to use republic and not democracy. If the establishment kept publicly reiterating concepts of and about democracy, then the people might really want a democracy and thus the state sector of the elite would be out of a job.
There are many fallacies which are consistently presented to the people by the mass media with very little, if any, objection from the obedient intellectual class. An example of this is the so-called War on Terrorism. The Global War on Terrorism is considered to be a farce by those with an accurate perspective of America’s history in regard to the application of foreign policy. The US government has conducted acts of terrorism that are far worse than the attacks of 11 September 2001. For example, in 1952, when Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, commonly referred to as Arbenz, became the President of Guatemala, he attempted to make reforms that would serve the interest of a majority of his people and not a small ruling minority. Some of those reforms included land reforms that threatened the interests of the American United Fruit Co. So, the CIA planned and conducted terrorist actions that included sabotage and assassinations plots that took many lives of poor Guatemalans. In 1954, Arbenz relinquished power and then a small insurgency developed. In response, Guatemala’s US trained and equipped military conducted a campaign of repression that left thousands dead. Over four decades, this caused the death or disappearance of what is reported to be 250,000 human beings, not to mention the torture that occurred. US Marine Colonel and CIA operative Philip Roettinger had this to say:
“As a CIA operative, I trained Guatemalan exiles in Honduras (which had the largest CIA station in the world) to invade their own country and unseat the elected president… The coup I helped engineer in 1954 inaugurated an unprecedented era of intransigent military rule in Central America. Generals and colonels acted with impunity to wipe out dissent and garner wealth for themselves and their cronies… Later, I realized we weren’t fighting communism at all, we were fighting the people.”
Much of this is documented in 1,400 pages of files that were released by the US government in 1997.
Now these neo-fascist endeavors have become more blatant as time progresses. The 1982 interview with Chomsky by CounterSpy actually contained some interesting points about the Reagan administration’s “conservative” policies that parallel the Bush administration’s policies. Very little about these administrations’ policies are truly conservative; there has been considerable expansion of the state sector of the economy – high technology/advanced weaponry – which is commonly referred to in the aggregate as the military-industrial complex. There were and are also “increasing state controls and interference in the lives of individual citizens.” Chomsky refers to Reagan’s administrative policies as “proto-fascist, rather than conservative.” Chomsky says that the problems of the state capitalist system are, in part, the result of its “contradictory” aims:
This shows up very clearly among people who call themselves “conservatives.” They want a powerful and violent state to use instrumentally. On the other hand, they don’t want the state to be engaged in, say, social welfare programs. They don’t want the state to interfere with their prerogatives and their wealth-but they do want the state to enhance their power. To try to create a state which will meet both these conditions is not very easy, and I think this is a case in point. In a state capitalist society like ours, there is of course no sharp separation between the “state” and “civil society.” Infiltration, provocation, control and coercion have long been a part of the relation of the state to the citizens-increasingly so since World War II.
What I have discussed is the reality of the American political landscape. There are no “good guys,” there are their interests and our interests. To paraphrase US Marine Colonel and CIA operative Philip Roettinger, there was no war against communism, there was a war against the poor masses. So, I feel that it is quite reasonable for those who dissent to stop characterizing the issues under false presuppositions. Instead of asking “why is the focus on Iraq and not on Afghanistan and the terrorists that we no were involved in 9/11?” There should be statements that assert that we know the prosecution of the war on terror through Iraq was truly about terror – the terror of American imperial interests, trying to secure the oil, because one cannot capitalize on the market value of an asset unless one can secure that asset. Think about it: why are the Republicans so concerned with turning the world into democrats (meaning those who exist in a system of democracy and not the political party). It is only reasonable to assert that honest discourse will presuppose that there is no democracy, there are no “good guys” who run the state, and that the war is the class struggle of the rich using state power to subjugate and oppress the poor in order to secure economic power and through it a privileged life.
