In The Deep State, author Mike Lofgren, whose 2011 commentary, "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult," remains the most-read article at Truthout.org, connects the dots between apparently disparate aspects of our current dystopia. "The deep state," argues Lofgren is "the red thread" linking the "ideological syndrome" of McMansions; DC's culture of careerist strivers; the financialization, deindustrialization and ultimate mutation of the US economy into "a casino with a tilted wheel"; the burgeoning of government secrecy even as individual privacy has been demolished; the consistency and persistence of unpopular policies regardless of which party wins elections; militarized foreign policy, "defense" and "security" establishments that thrive on failure and enjoy essentially unlimited funding whatever nostrums about the national debt and the necessity for austerity are being peddled for every other function of government; the prevalence of incompetence and ineptitude in government response to crises; unequal justice, including impunity for the wealthy and corporations, a corrupt Supreme Court and a strikingly punitive criminal legal system for ordinary people; legislative gridlock; perpetual war; political extremism and other ruinous epiphenomena.
••••••••••Excellent interview.
LT: So you don't see them as malevolent?
MF: Oh no, it's much more banal than that.
LT: Like Hannah Arendt on Eichmann?
MF: Exactly, the banality of evil.
Truthout
How the Powers That Be Maintain the "Deep State": An Interview With Mike Lofgren
Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview
2 comments:
What interests me is what happened to JFK? The deep state has been around for a while. They are insane as well as evil.
“Strangelove” was a thinly veiled *documentary*: there were quite a few neocon factions that were pressing in the USA policy establishment for a final solution to the communist problem, and never mind for the well documented infiltration of “christian” dominionists in the USA air force and in USA cabinet-level positions. Especially in the 1980s.
If the USSR just read the neocon policy papers of the 1980s and Reagan’s lips they would have not needed any inference engine to deduct that it could rapidly become USA policy to attack them.
Just like Arkhipov did in the 1960s during the Turkish missile crisis, when as part of a pattern of provocations and acts of aggressive war, the USA navvy attacked USSR nuclear missile submarines with the transparent purpose to force them to launch:
"The Soviet military was on a higher state of alert than even during the Cuban missile crisis. "
This is the usual vile right wing propaganda: in large parts of the world that is known as the Turkish missile crisis. Some very important factions of the USA elites had managed to get dozens of first-strike, short-flight-time, “decapitation” nuclear missile batteries next to the russian border in Turkey, and were trying to get the same nuclear missile batteries installed in various central european countries. People even in right-wing countries in Europe were absolutely terrified by this, because the USA plan was starkly clear, and it was to sacrifice those countries in a first strike against the USSR:
* To destroy in a surprise attack thanks to short flight time all the strategic nuclear weapons command centers in the USSR, making the USA (relatively) safe from a long range retaliation attack (submarine based missile are very unreliable, and were extremely unreliable then).
* Then the surviving tactical forces of the USSR would retaliate short-range against the countries they could reach, turning Germany (and the UK and Turkey) into radioactive glassland. Two birds with one stone! :-) The New American Century Project version 1.
(Continued)
Eventually the western european governments insisted on strict safeguards on dual-control, which involved western european troops prepared to fight USA troops if they tried to actually use the nuclear missile batteries for a first attack onto the USSR. This situation eventually persuaded the German elites that the USA elites had powerful factions which were effectively insane and became the motivation for the Ostpolitikl
This left the turkish missiles which were pretty much under the sole physical control of the USA troops. Indeed during the Turkish missile crisis J Kennedy seems to have been *strongly* advised to turn a crisis into an opportunity by firing those missiles on Moscow and all the relevant strategic command centers.
The mere installation of those missiles, never mind their arming and readying for launch, was an aggressive act of war by any definition, even worse than theUSA naval blockade of Japan in the 1940s, and the USSR leadership who were not insane warmongers unlike the John Birch society members on the other wise decided on a very proper and diplomatic answer, to re-establish some mutual-assured-destruction by doing something similar but vastly less threatening in Cuba purely as a limited response.
Now what actually happened is uncertain; some official transcripts show that J Kennedy was utterly surprised by the mention by the USSR of the threat of the turkish first-strike nuclear missile batteries, and this hints that “somebody” in the very top USA military and political elites funded and enabled the commission of an act of aggressive nuclear war without the knowledge of the USA president, which is a case of grave treason, which was surely investigated by B Kennedy. However within a few years entirely coincidentally both J and B Kennedy “died” and nothing came of that investigation.
The USA officer who was the firing officer for those first-strike nuclear missile batteries has written his memory of those times, as a patriot would, and they are starkly clear:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2012/10/05/author-recounts-world-on-the-brink-of-war-in-my-turkish-missile-crisis/
https://events.d.umn.edu/Alworth-Reading—My-Turkish-Missile-Crisis-A-Memoir-from-the-Frontline-of-.htm
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