Agitprop - It's What Keeps The National Security State Healthy
while it impoverishes and oppresses the rest of the US, and other nations and peoples all over the world. That's where the trouble is, not on Capitol Hill, but several miles south...
Glenn Greenwald writes: “That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or "coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face. … The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay" while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump's 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post's White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”
Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.
The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere; “One by one, Democrats are coming over to introduce themselves to former VP Dick Cheney and shake his hand,” added ABC News’ Ben Siegel. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. … Where is this “insurrection"? What happened to it? Where did it go? The January 6 protest barely lasted four hours until it was easily subdued. Copying the Bush/Cheney model of keeping fear levels high by constantly issuing vague warnings of looming violence and doom, the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate "heightened threat” warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden's inauguration; no violent protest erupted once COVID lockdowns were eased due to social media provocations; none happened on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack; there was no right-wing violence perpetrated in connection with the commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high.
What is really going on here is as tawdry as it is obvious. Democrats have no governing program on which they can run and win. The complete collapse of the party was temporarily obscured by the once-in-a-generation talent in Barack Obama and the very narrow win in 2020 of a banal, empty septuagenarian, thanks to the incumbent-killing double crisis of a devastating pandemic and economic shutdown. But the edifice of this party collapsed under Obama — “the Whole Democratic Party is Now a Smoking Pile of Rubble,” warned supreme Democratic partisan Matt Yglesias at Vox in 2016 — and it is collapsing once again under Biden. Its only ideologies — neoliberalism, corporatism, militarism — are widely despised failures, but they are imprisoned by their donor base from offering anything else.”
It’s some very expensive agitprop - agitation propaganda - that every 20th century totalitarian regime used to garner support and suppress criticism of their evil deeds. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini - and now Cheney and Pelosi - very much a bipartisan effort here, and their supporters in the American equivalents of Komosomolskaya Pravda - in which there was no news, in Izvestija - in which there was no truth, and in Der Stürmer, in which there was neither news nor truth, just hysterical ranting… And it’s a stage play, performed by both wings of the Neoliberal Corporatist Unity Party, the Republicans (represented by Dick Cheney and the Bush family), and the Democrats (represented by Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry), pretending to support the ongoing gross fraud of “American democracy”, a sort of democracy in which you get two choices whose actual enacted policy is identical. What they say is miles apart, and what they act out on Capitol Hill is a Punch and Judy show, two puppets on the same puppeteer. They fight like cats, just like they did during the Kavanaugh hearings, making high Kabuki drama of that, lots of smoke and noise and flashes - and then on their two 15 minute breaks, going in the Senate chamber to give the National Security State - the true ruler of the United States - by a very bipartisan vote of 97 to 3, nearly a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money. If you hate Democrats, you should hate Republicans just as much, because both of them are collaborators in this massive fraud and theft which has hollowed out the country, its people, and its wealth, leaving wreckage and ruin behind.
”There is one book that captures perfectly what has happened to the United States: National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon. Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: It is the national-security establishment that is in charge of the federal government.
Oh, yes, I know, everyone thinks that the other parts of the federal government — the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are in charge. That’s because they are inculcated with that notion in their public school civics classes or at the state-supported colleges they attended. As Glennon points out, that notion is false. The real power and control lies with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. They permit the other parts of the federal government to maintain the veneer of power. That doesn’t matter to them. What matters is that they are in charge and that the other three branches defer to them on critical matters, such as who is going to be secretary of defense.
And just in case you’re wondering, Glennon is not some sort of crackpot author, which makes his book so dangerous to the national-security establishment. Since 2002, he has been a professor of law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also served three years as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also was a professor of law at the University of California and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars. Glennon is an author to be reckoned with.” https://www.fff.org/2020/12/11/the-national-security-establishment-is-in-charge/
And here’s Glennon talking about his book. At the end, he talks about change coming through elections, but I don’t believe that one bit, and I strongly doubt that he does, either. Calling for what really needs to happen - the utter destruction of the National Security State - and frankly, most of the Federal Government not concerned with foreign policy or arbitrating disputes between the constituent States in the United States, might result in him getting into a bit of trouble at work…
Not all dems are crazy and not all repubs are evil. The crazy and the evil get the headlines, but success as a society comes from suppressing the zealots and supporting the rationals. In every contest, one side is better. The repubs are consistently better for individuals and for the future of our society. None are perfect. Dems are consistently better for the stupid and the lazy who want others to care for them. Ignoring them all increases the odds we'll get the worst. Supporting the best, warts and all, increases the odds of continuing improvement. We seldom get good choices. Success comes from making the least bad choice, and working for improvements from there.