Whether it be a nation or an empire, leaders always know that the fear card can produce unity and an excuse to utilize totalitarian measures against their own people, and the masses will love it, because the feels.
In reading about why the CIA and FBI saw threats with both JFK’s and MLK’s trajectories. Jacob Hornberger states:
Why did they target Kennedy? For the same reason they targeted all those other people for assassination — they concluded that Kennedy had become a grave threat to national security and, they believed, it was their job to eliminate threats to national security.
It has to sound familiar, especially over the past few years and the Russian threats due to Trump’s ‘friendly’ attitude to Russia (as he ramps up the sanctions, sending missiles to bases in Syria that Russian troops are based, etc.). Give me a break.
Although the article specifically attributes these actions as starting after WWII as the OSS operations were then made permanent by Truman’s creation of the CIA, the very psychological mechanism of fear has been a real thing in America since the colonial days.
It was the fear of American Indian raids that had independent and autonomous farmers in the colonies agree to pay takes to raise an army to remove those threats. It was the fear of a free trade zone in the southern United States in 1861 that prompted the northern politicians to “put down the insurrection” in a way that forever altered the US government to be highly centralized and a source of significant tyranny. Many southern states were subject to 12 years of military rule that not only wrecked the south economically, but revealed the desperate measures this totalitarian US government would take to keep itself “safe”.
By the 1890s this fear extended to the world for the US government, using the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor to make war with the failing Spanish Empire and seize lands around the world. By 1918, the progressive thought that the US was to be a power for “good” in this world, to keep the world safe made the people accept that sending millions of men overseas to die in France in WWI “worth it all”. Even Franklin Roosevelt knew that the end game of war was the only way to maintain his and his political party’s power, and used deceptive embargoes and tariffs to manipulate the Japanese Empire to lash out predictably allowing the US to enter WWII.
It was after this war that included the US immorally using nuclear bombs against primarily civilian populations that had little strategic military value that the US added yet another immoral weapon in their suite of tools to keep the world safe for democracy. Assassination. How totalitarian, how Communist!
The US using tactics that their “evil” enemies use are ever apparent these days when it can be argued that the US is the largest exporter of terrorism in the 21st century. It is no accident that securing the largest opium producing area in the world to secretly fund the CIA might be what keeps the politicians in line, with drug money ..
But I digress.
I guess the point of all this is to show how the US has developed into the very totalitarian state that it was fighting against in WWII. In Jacob’s article it points out that the way the nation/empire fights abroad always comes home. The domestic “fight” to retain power will start to use tactics that were only used in “war” or in classified CIA operations:
State-sponsored assassinations to protect national security were among the dark-side practices that began to be utilized after the federal government was converted into a national-security state. As early as 1953, the CIA was developing a formal assassination manual that trained its agents in the art of assassination and, equally important, in the art of concealing the CIA’s role in state-sponsored assassinations.
In 1954, the CIA targeted the democratically elected president of Guatemala for assassination because he was reaching out to Russia in a spirt of peace, friendship, and mutual co-existence. In 1960-61, the CIA conspired to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the head of the Congo because he was perceived to be a threat to U.S. national security.
So inside of a decade, the CIA developed the tools that the FBI could assist them with in these domestic threats ..
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough that enabled him to recognize that the Cold War was just one great big racket for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors and sub-contractors.
That’s when JFK announced an end to the Cold War and began reaching out to the Soviets and the Cubans in a spirit of peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence. Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University on June 10, 1963, where he announced his intent to end the Cold War and normalize relations with the communist world, sealed President Kennedy’s fate.
This deep state action over 50 years ago has served to keep a reign on US presidents ever since. This also was extended to other leaders that threatened the deep state:
… one day after his Peace Speech at American University, Kennedy delivered a major televised address to the nation defending the civil rights movement, the movement that King was leading.
What better proof of a threat to national security than that — reaching out to the communist world in peace and friendship and then, one day later, defending a movement that the U.S. national-security establishment was convinced was a spearhead for the communist takeover of the United States?
You now know why US media is the lapdog for deep state propaganda, to keep the narrative alive that the US is perpetually fighting terror and fighting to keep itself and the world safe while the US government has developed a ..:
… totalitarian-like governmental structure that has led our nation in the direction of state-sponsored assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change operations, and massive death, suffering, and destruction, not to mention the loss of liberty and privacy here at home.
No one should be surprised here in 2020 when we can see clearly how things are done, especially with Soleimani’s assassination.
The US has evolved into the very thing it was created to avoid.
The illusion of safety remains, but the reality of despotism is already here.
-SF1
