Where conspiracy theory turns into reality.
Prof Price has previously exposed how the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme – designed to embed social scientists in military field operations – routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions “within the United States.”
Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq” to domestic situations “in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order.”
One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”
Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.
James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York, concurs with Price’s concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the “study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements,” he said, including how “to counteract grassroots movements.”
Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.
The Guardian (UK)
Defense Dept. studying protesters to prepare for ‘mass civil breakdown’
Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian
3 comments:
A terrified power structure. Note that their concern is not just over threats to the consitutional structure of government, but over all threats to the "established balance of power and influence." That's nuts. The government has no legitimate role in maintaining whatever balance of power and influence happens to be in place at any one time.
Re: A terrified power structure.
I doubt that very much. They are preparing. They have the internet by the balls--if they want to control it like the Chinese, they can. NSA is watching. The police have been thoroughly armed and militarized in the US. The technology and fire power are such that any uprising would be intimidated by overwhelming violence.This is not the 60's.
The US is now a true police state. Left-leaning people are so cowed by "conspiracy theory" accusations that their brains have been softened to the point that they can't look aspects of reality in the face. Loss of nerve.
I can understand why they are terrified. Yankees assume a righteousness, permanence and justice to their system of government in a grandiose vision that I don't think is shared equally by the nation as a whole. Their hold on power IS more tenuous and fleeting than the popular imagination holds.
When I look at Texas' history, we've had five national governments in less than two hundred years and I've no doubt this one too will pass. As the era of fossil fuels winds down, the minor disruptions people imagine due to climate change will cause massive changes. Small rises in food prices have cause the Arab spring, Tienanmen square, Riots in India, Protests in Mexico over corn.. chaos among the poor. Just wait for the cultural adjustments in the decades to come, we'll look back over this period as the great quite peace that was an anomaly.
As the injustice grows and government has less support, people can't afford their homes, cars, travel, food and lifestyles it will eventually fail, maybe not tomorrow or next week but it is not a permanent fixture no matter how many weapons or police the Demo-Repubs surround themselves with. The energy intensive culture will end in a few decades, far, more suddenly than we are prepared for.
It all seems like ancient history but when I pour through the probate files and see we've only a couple generations pass between each government, It raises doubt in my mind about how much longer this one will maintain power and how much tolerance we should have for its hooligans and antics. We're on a major slow motion collision course with real resource constraints and to imagine that it won't result in a change in power structures is at best naive.
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