On Saturday President Trump blathered at Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and called the media “some of the most dishonest people on earth” to a crowd of cheering CIA officials. Said to the most thuggish and deceitful organization within the national security state, a government that relies heavily on national security action, the comment had a palpable irony.
When examined in its totality, the national security state has upheld a system of class domination from Texas to Zaire. According to the Guardian, has a consistent modus operandi of violence and oppression against any economic or democratic alternatives to capitalism and its structures anywhere in the world. It is a true mafia don, breaking the legs of anybody that tries to do things differently on his turf.
The national security state funded death squads in Nicaragua in the 1980s and blackmailed many black leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. It violently installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran in 1953 and peacefully removed Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, in 1975. Though its actions may appear contradictory or foolish, each example listed exhibits a consistent policy of crushing democracy to preserve capitalist domination.
With the seizures of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from the Spanish in 1898, the architecture of the globalized security state maintained by the United States took its contemporary shape. From that point forward, U.S. troops were deployed across Latin America and Southeast Asia to preserve U.S. interests and prevent the people of these nations from obtaining economic independence.
Don’t take my word for it. Read this incredible quote Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in U.S. history, wrote in his book War is a Racket: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in ... I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
By World War I the U.S. already waged domestic counter-insurgency against its own citizens. These efforts are known as the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids of the late 1910s. The operations targeted trade unions and other radical workers' groups underwent surveillance, violence and mass arrests.
An early target of the security state during the Red Scare was Indiana-born leader of the U.S. Socialist Party Eugene V. Debs. When Debs urged workers to resist the military draft and halt the production of weapons in factories, then-President Woodrow Wilson had him imprisoned on sedition charges.
Upon his conviction, Debs issued the following credo to the court, “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
