Call Me "Irresponsible" -- Please

The lamentable circumstances surrounding the ongoing sterilization and neutering of the Snowden documents compel me to return to some fundamental principles of singular importance. One notion has attained what is now uncontroversial popularity even among those who severely criticize the manner in which Lord Greenwald & Friends have chosen to dole out what might have been significantly more disruptive disclosures had they been handled in a very different way.

In a thorough, detailed and richly-deserved trouncing of Lord Greenwald's incoherent, narcissistic, grandiose posturings (which never respond to actual criticisms in a manner understandable to a functioning human being, but are solely designed to browbeat and bully his critics into silence and submission), and a post which deserves your attention (as do many of the comments), Chris Floyd writes:

I feel that, on balance, the method of dissemination [utilized by Lord Greenwald & Friends] has not been as effective as other approaches might have been. (I have never advocated a "total dump" of the data, by the way; in fact, I don't know anyone who has.)

Other Greenwald critics have offered the same observation. They're wrong: I emphatically called for a TOTAL DUMP of ALL the Snowden documents. I went much farther: I imagined a dozen, or a hundred, Snowdens appearing, each laden with a huge trove of documents -- ALL of which are DUMPED on the internet. With this opportunity for additional explanation, I repeat that call. I reiterate and amplify my argument not primarily in connection with the Snowden documents -- that ship departed on its ill-fated voyage long ago, and will eventually find its resting place in the unreachable depths of the silent ocean -- but with a hopeful eye cast in the direction of future whistleblowers.

"Oh, Arthur! How dreadful you are! How criminally reckless! Don't you care at all about innocent lives that might be endangered? Has every spark of decency in your soul been extinguished? How can you be so irresponsible?"

But you see, I reject every standard and every assumption that leads to negative judgments of this kind. I am painfully aware that almost everyone disagrees with me. I don't give a damn. A brief response to those who condemn me would consist simply of an ostensive proof: "Look! The world we have is the world that conforms to your standards and follows your rules. It is a world of brutality, violence, exploitation, cruelty and death. So how's that working out for you?"

I made my call for a total dump in the first article I wrote about the Snowden affair, on June 11, 2013. In rereading that post today, and although I recognize it is unforgivably bad form to say so, I was startled at how accurately I captured a large part of the central problem, and how prescient my words turned out to be. Indulge me for a moment, and consider the opening of that first essay on this subject, keeping in mind what has happened in what is now almost a year since I wrote it:

An immense and unexpected sadness now suffuses the last part of my life. I did not anticipate, when we are ruled by a Death State which grows more brazenly callous in its murderous practices by the day, that those who challenge authority and seek to push back against the ascendance of brutality and oppression would willingly adopt critical aspects of the monsters' manner of destroying us. Whatever radicals and revolutionaries may be found among us, they are, with extraordinarily rare exceptions, always intent on minding their p's and q's, and never, ever soiling their cuffs with even a smidgen of dirt or dust. Even when we speak of peaceful revolution founded in civil disobedience, if you think that an unfailingly polite, neat, and manicured revolution is a contradiction in terms, you're correct. A well-mannered revolution is one doomed to fail. In the current circumstances, polite, rules-abiding challenges to authority have been rendered irrelevant and utterly without meaning.

If you wish to challenge authority in any serious manner, you must be prepared to provoke an unholy, chaotic, extremely messy scene, one punctuated with howls of outrage by those in power, where everyone is mortified, humiliated and riven with panic -- including you. Anything short of that is merely a very small speed bump on power's journey to ever-increasing destruction and death.

The manner of disclosure adopted by Lord Greenwald & Friends, a model of a polite, rules-abiding challenge to authority, has stopped exactly nothing. To the contrary, the primary effect of the disclosures has been to normalize increasingly pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance, and even to make it "legal." The title of my first article was, "In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic" -- qualities which Greenwald & Friends obviously detest. That's only to be expected: it's impossible to become celebrated, powerful and wealthy if your goal is the fundamental disruption -- and ultimately, the dissolution -- of the very system that bestows fame, power and money.

In the earlier article, I explained why I call the United States a "Death State": "More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well [as foreign policy]. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale." It is a measure of how far we've gone through the looking glass that "dissenters" appear to believe sincerely that they can challenge a Death State by adopting its methods. But when you adopt its methods -- as, for example, by internalizing its standards for disclosure and non-disclosure -- you voluntarily render your dissent "irrelevant and utterly without meaning" insofar as fundamental change is concerned. But the dissenters' acquiescence in this charade offers an additional, invaluable asset to the State: they offer the appearance of serious dissent, while ensuring that the challenge is ultimately inconsequential. In this way, people continue to delude themselves that "reform" is all that is needed, and that the system itself can be saved. This is precisely the pattern followed by Lord Greenwald & Friends.

I do not think that the monstrous Death State can be "saved" in any respect at all. It is a system that is corrupt and evil at its foundation, and in every one of its branches. My dearest hope is that circumstances force its dissolution and/or fundamental reconfiguration over an extended period of time, which might serve to minimize the pain and suffering involved (which would still be enormous, but certainly not greater than the suffering and death which is sure to come if the Death State continues on its current path). It is true that there are isolated, specific issues where injustice and deprivation can and should be ameliorated, if possible. Marriage equality is one such example -- but opening up the military to gays, lesbians and transgendered persons is most certainly not. Marriage equality bestows economic and other advantages on all the population equally. It is beyond indecent to insist that everyone should be entitled to join the Death State's military arm, and thus to become first-hand murderers themselves. Never has a push for "equality" been so ill-conceived, when there is no longer any legitimate reason for anyone to join the military at all.

And the manner of disclosure chosen by Greenwald & Friends is most decidedly not lessening the crimes of the Surveillance State. As noted above (and detailed in several of my articles, such as this one), the final effect of the Snowden leak will only be the normalization and legalization of surveillance on a vast scale.

Let us briefly consider some of the major objections raised to the apparently horrifying prospect of a "total dump." We've heard that disclosure of certain documents would empower other governments to engage in surveillance in ways that the U.S. government does. This objection rests on assumptions, and one notable omission, that seriously undermine it. I assume an adult realizes that every government engages in spying and surveillance to some extent; the major and most powerful governments engage in very broad spying and surveillance. How believable is it that the U.S. government utilizes methods of surveillance that are totally unknown to other States? Did Lord Greenwald do a survey of other governments, asking them if they know about Project Nostradamus (described sufficiently so they know what he's talking about in general terms, but shorn of specifics that would allow them to duplicate it)? That seems unlikely. So how does Greenwald or anyone else know what other States are already aware of, and what would be genuine news to them? Even if we assume that certain surveillance methods will take many people by surprise, the disclosure of those methods will enable those who would resist to develop far more effective means of combatting them and rendering them ineffective. For some reason, that possibility never seems to make it into the equation. So Lord Greenwald & Co. declare this area a no-go. The State is delighted. (I completely discount the outraged statements from heads of state and similarly placed individuals in response to the "revelation" that they themselves have been spied on. When such spying is disclosed in a major news story, of course Merkel will fume and stamp her feet; the charades of politics demand no less. Does anyone -- anyone over the age of ten, that is -- seriously believe that this came as news to her? I'm a nobody, and I assume the government knows everything about me if it wants to. If Merkel and every other foreign political leader hasn't made the same assumption, they're idiots.)

We've also heard that a total dump would reveal the names of individuals who have been surveilled who are completely innocent of wrongdoing, and that such disclosure might reveal details of their lives that they legitimately wish to keep private. But such individuals, or at least some of them, might very much want to know that they've been spied upon, and they might be perfectly willing to accept any temporary inconvenience or even serious embarrassment. Equally important is the point that, if these all-knowing, all-seeing journalists can appreciate how outrageous and unjust it is that innocent people are spied on, then so can the general public. It seems much more likely to me that there would be an outpouring of public sympathy and understanding for those innocent people who have had their lives invaded by the State. Or is it the case that only the very special journalists are able to appreciate issues of this kind? The very special journalists certainly seem to believe that themselves. That's why they're so special.

Or we hear that a total dump would endanger "innocent" people of a different kind: those individuals who work for the Death State, including those engaged in covert operations, including spies themselves. In that first essay a year ago, I parsed some statements from Snowden and Greenwald, trying to figure out who specifically they believed would be harmed by certain disclosures. I pointed out that it certainly sounded as if they were talking about U.S. spies, among others. Later statements confirmed that this was indeed what they meant. And recall that Snowden recently said: "I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue." I termed this "highly objectionable." One reader (of severely impaired mental acuity) thought that I found Snowden's declaration, "I love my country," to be the problem. While I do find such statements offensive (and "objectionable"), I regard them as empty political bloviating; it's a revealing, and enormously depressing, indication of the trajectory of the Snowden Follies that Snowden and Greenwald sound more and more like politicians with each day that passes. But my objection was to the second part: "I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue." I thought of highlighting that part of the sentence in my original post, but decided against it. I thought readers could figure out which part was the more significant. I always underestimate the stupidity of certain readers.

We are talking about those individuals who have chosen to work for the Death State in some of its most deadly and illegitimate branches: in covert operations and in spying. If you believe that "spying serves a vital purpose," you will believe that spies are "innocent," and perhaps even noble. And Snowden "loves" the Death State, for he does not see it as a Death State. I would never expect such a person, or his carefully selected journalists, to mount a serious challenge to the Death State, for they cannot even take the accurate measure of the enemy with which they contend. They do not even see it as an enemy in the way I do, and in the way the facts compel one to see it. (I will address in a separate essay what a journalist should have done in my view, when offered the opportunity to receive the Snowden documents. It is a subject which requires a detailed discussion. For our purposes here, I need only note that to accept the documents -- and to accede to the conditions that Snowden apparently imposed -- requires that the journalist(s) in question be completely comfortable with the exercise of power and, in this particular case, a great degree of power.)

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Just as I view the State as monstrous and illegitimate, so too I view any and all spying and surveillance activities as entirely illegitimate and almost completely without merit of any kind. I've been over this ground many times. For the detailed argument as to why "intelligence" generally is an elaborate (and very profitable) fraud, you can start here and here. The links provide much more background. Always remember that "intelligence" is almost always wrong. I said that spying and surveillance are "almost completely without merit of any kind" only because there are very rare instances where the "intelligence" stumbles upon a small piece of information that is correct. And as rare as it is, even correct information will be disregarded when it runs counter to a policy that the government has already embraced.

You can go through every other objection to disclosure that has been offered and make counterarguments of the kind indicated above with regard to these particular claims. None of the objections is credible or convincing; in every case, a case for disclosure can be made that is at least as compelling, and usually it is far more compelling. Most importantly, since I reject the entire elaborate edifice of the State and surveillance in general, I reject at its root the notion that the State has secrets worthy of protection. The State has no secrets whatsoever that deserve protection from disclosure. None.

So I am brought back to what I wrote at the conclusion of that article from almost a year ago:

The entire edifice of "secrecy," especially with regard to national security, is a vicious lie from start to finish. Put it all out there. If full disclosure endangers those who work for the Death State, the problem -- and the responsibility -- is with those who choose to directly advance the Death State's goals. It is decidedly not with the leaker, or with the journalists.

...

I want mess. I want chaos. I want to see the ruling class in unrelenting, hysterical panic. My fantasy is that a dozen, or a hundred, Edward Snowdens appear, each laden with huge piles of documents. And all those documents are dumped on the internet -- but in a fully mindful and discriminating manner, and with a specific purpose in mind. The Death State's ruling class is intent on destruction, brutality, oppression and murder and, as they tell us repeatedly, their work is far from done. The purpose of unmasking all the secrets that the ruling class is so desperate to keep, of shoveling all of it directly into the blazing, unforgiving sunlight in a fully unfiltered way, is to stop them. ...

Stop them. Your life -- and the lives of many others -- depend on it.

This is emphatically not the view of Lord Greenwald & Friends. They are "serious," "respectable," and "responsible." I am none of those things, and I thank God for it every day.

*****

ADDENDUM: One of the best passages answering the charge of "irresponsibility" in a political context remains the following from Hannah Arendt. I have offered it several times before; I discuss this passage (and another one, as well) at length in "Against Voting." Arendt's essay is titled, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," and it appears in Responsibility and Judgment.

In writing about Nazi Germany, Arendt addresses the question: "in what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate and refused to participate in public life, though they could not and did not rise in rebellion?" This is part of her answer:

The answer to the ... question is relatively simple: the nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience. On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way—as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command “Thou shalt not kill,” but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves. The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking. This kind of thinking, though at the root of all philosophical thought, is not technical and does not concern theoretical problems. The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.

The Death State Brutalizes, Tortures and Murders Because It Can

The ascension of Obama, the Apotheosis of Marketing American-Style, has given rise to what appears to be a paradox. On one hand, Obama -- the first black president, who intentionally and with studied care adopted every policy and opinion of the white, male ruling class, since that remains the most certain path to power in the United States -- represents the triumph of public relations. What had been abhorrent and detestable under Bush becomes acceptable under Obama, at least to the extent that notable opposition has now absented itself altogether from the political scene. This was always the singular danger in Obama's candidacy, as a few of us had predicted. But almost no one heeded the warning. Americans simply and with immeasurable simple-mindedness adore the marketing. Throw an unending stream of shockingly empty, windy phrases at them, and they will collapse in paroxysms of self-induced ecstasy -- provided the person doing it is of a class they view with particular favor. They will be more than happy to supply the nonexistent content out of their own oversized vanity and preferred self-conception.

At the same time, as the Death State enters its late stages, the entire sphere of public relations steadily diminishes in significance to the ruling class. As I noted about the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, the ruling class cannot now be troubled even to pretend to give a damn about the ungraspable degree of damage they cause to huge numbers of human beings and other living creatures, and to the planet generally. What is true of the Gulf crisis is true of the ruling class's other major projects. The U.S. government systematically murders innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Does anyone care? Not that you'd notice or, more importantly, that the ruling class would notice or have reason to be concerned about. They know most Americans won't do a damned thing about any of it. Are Americans in significant numbers going to say, "No"? Are they going to choose non-cooperation? No, they are not. Why expend any effort at all on marketing at this point? It's entirely unnecessary.

So these two facets of the problem might appear to be at odds with one another. But if you consider the matter a bit further, you'll appreciate how well they complement each other. Obama alone -- Obama as the symbol of "the end of racism" in America, as the transcendence of the American project over its longstanding defects and failures -- provides all the cover that is required. What were war crimes under Bush can't be war crimes under Obama. Why not? Because he's Obama! If you object that the explanation can't be that simple (and, yes, simple-minded), I will urge you to consult the news more regularly. I will urge you to revise downward your conception of just how deeply idiotic Americans will make themselves. This is especially true with certain segments of the political yammering class. Speaking of empty and enormously destructive symbolism...

Here is today's sign on the road down the slope toward the Valley of Ultimate Stupidity and Loathsomeness:

The Supreme Court has upheld a U.S. law that bars "material support" to foreign terrorist organizations, rejecting a free speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups.

The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

IOZ is certainly correct that, since the U.S. government now explicitly claims "the right to have you killed" -- and anyone else at all, I would add for clarity and emphasis -- "without any legal recourse or sanction and with no process of law or investigation necessary to legitimize your death," it would be passing strange to evince spluttering moral outrage about a comparatively minor procedural matter. If the Death State can murder anyone it chooses, whenever it chooses, simply because that is what it chooses to do, debates about what constitutes "material support" to what are allegedly "terrorist organizations" approach luxuries in which it is almost unseemly to indulge.

Still, the Supreme Court ruling is shockingly wrong. But this is hardly news for the Supreme Court today, or for the Supreme Court on many, many days in the past, let us not forget. I will offer a brief word, not about the "material support" aspect of this egregious error (as bad as that element is), but rather about the Death State's use of the "terrorist organization" designation.

One of the best examples of the entirely instrumental use of this term was recently discussed by Jim Bovard, in an article I excerpted in, "An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State." You will be hard-pressed to find more than a very few liberals or progressives today who will challenge the liberal orthodoxy about the nobility of the Clinton administration's war crimes in Yugoslavia. "The U.S. stopped a genocide!," scream the ignorant propagandists. That's a lie. But put "humanitarian" before "intervention," and liberals are stupider than a gnat. We're back to the problem of "oversized vanity and preferred self-conception."

But in the article that I excerpted, Bovard writes the following about Clinton's Yugoslavia policy. I've highlighted only the portion that concerns our subject here, but liberals and progressives in particular might consider permitting the truth of all these observations to penetrate their skulls just the tiniest bit:

Bill Clinton has often acted like his 78-day bombing assault on Serbia in 1999 was his finest hour. The State Department was referring to the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group until 1997. After Clinton decided to attack Serbia, the KLA officially became freedom fighters. The fact that both Serbs and ethnic Albanians were up to their elbows in atrocities was simply brushed aside or denied. After surviving a Senate impeachment trial, Clinton was hellbent on starring in an old-time morality play.

Clinton’s bombing campaign killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Serb civilians. From intentionally bombing a television station, Belgrade neighborhoods, power stations, bridges (regardless of the number of people on them at the time), to “accidentally” bombing a bus (killing 47 people), a passenger train, marketplaces, hospitals, apartment buildings, and the Chinese embassy, the rules of engagement for U.S. bombers guaranteed that many innocent people would be killed.

In his anniversary op-ed, Clinton declared that “without the law there is no freedom.” But the law did not stop, or even slow, Clinton from raining death on Belgrade. Clinton brazenly violated the War Powers Act, the 1973 law which required the president to get authorization from Congress for committing U.S. troops to any combat situation that lasted more than 60 days. The House of Representatives refused to endorse Clinton’s warring. But, on Serbia and many other issues, Clinton acted as if his moral mission exempted him from all restraints, legal and otherwise.

The shifting and even inversion of labels is a device the U.S. government uses whenever its goals change, and when the previous label would prove a hindrance to the policy it has decided upon most recently. What had been a "terrorist organization" is now a group of "freedom fighters," or vice versa as deemed advisable.

The truth of the label is of no moment whatsoever. When used by governments in this manner, labels are merely signifiers allowing pursuit of the chosen policy to proceed without objection. As in the case of Yugoslavia, almost no one objects or even notices the shift. Americans love the marketing. And then they pretend to react with wonder and astonishment when everything turns to blood-drenched shit. I say "pretend to react" because I find it hard to believe that large numbers of people are actually this profoundly dumb. On some level, they know they've been fooled again -- or, to be more accurate, that they've allowed themselves to be fooled again -- but they don't want to admit it. Better, they think, to sheepishly acknowledge stupidity than to confront the lies they so enthusiastically tell themselves.

The Death State uses the "terrorist organization" label today whenever it is convenient to do so: that is, when that usage makes it easier to pursue its chosen policy. But ultimately, it pursues that policy not because of facts or the truth of the situation, but because that is what it has chosen to do. In part, its policies are in the pursuit of greater power, control and wealth -- but of equal or even greater significance is that the State pursues the policies it does because it can. This underscores the unanswerable power of the State; from this perspective, which is the perspective of those deeply damaged people who seek political power on the national stage, power is the not the means to another end. Power is the end. The ruling class knows it, and they know you will do and believe anything to avoid this particular truth.

Here's another example. You might want to follow the argument preceding this short passage -- but, oh dear me, it's long and, still worse, complicated. So you probably won't want to follow it. Bye-bye!

From a lengthy essay about the immense evil of torture (all fully applicable to the current criminal administration), "Lies in the Service of Evil":

The crucial point is Foucault's. Let me rephrase it as follows, in connection with torture specifically.

Torture does not work. Its use permanently damages all those who are tortured, and those who administer the violence. Its "lawful" use profoundly undermines the broader society and democratic institutions in ways that are irreparable. But its persistent, ineradicable failure is entirely irrelevant for those who seek to consolidate and expand state power. Moreover, its inherent failure underscores their aim: it does not work, everyone knows it does not work, but the state does it because it can.

In this view, power is all, and power is its own justification. It is a simple truth, and a terrible one.

There is the terrible truth about the Death State, offered for your consideration.

Hey, that reminds me. Are there any good shows on TV tonight? Something fun, okay? Really stupid would be good, too.

In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic

An immense and unexpected sadness now suffuses the last part of my life. I did not anticipate, when we are ruled by a Death State which grows more brazenly callous in its murderous practices by the day, that those who challenge authority and seek to push back against the ascendance of brutality and oppression would willingly adopt critical aspects of the monsters' manner of destroying us. Whatever radicals and revolutionaries may be found among us, they are, with extraordinarily rare exceptions, always intent on minding their p's and q's, and never, ever soiling their cuffs with even a smidgen of dirt or dust. Even when we speak of peaceful revolution founded in civil disobedience, if you think that an unfailingly polite, neat, and manicured revolution is a contradiction in terms, you're correct. A well-mannered revolution is one doomed to fail. In the current circumstances, polite, rules-abiding challenges to authority have been rendered irrelevant and utterly without meaning.

If you wish to challenge authority in any serious manner, you must be prepared to provoke an unholy, chaotic, extremely messy scene, one punctuated with howls of outrage by those in power, where everyone is mortified, humiliated and riven with panic -- including you. Anything short of that is merely a very small speed bump on power's journey to ever-increasing destruction and death. (This point was the theme of an essay from 2007, "Break the Goddamned Rules": "Friends, if this country -- and if you individually -- are to have any kind of human future at all, and by 'human,' I mean a life with any genuine meaning and joy, a life not fatally compromised by ongoing murder, torture, and brutality -- you had better fucking disturb the peace every second of every day.")

I refer to the United States government and the machinery of terror it has erected as a Death State. I chose that phrase because of what the United States is and what it does:

For more than a hundred years, the foreign policy of the United States government has been directed to the establishment and maintenance of global dominance. To this end, violence, overthrow, conquest and murder have been utilized as required. (See "Dominion Over the World" for the sources and development of this policy [the earlier essays in that series are listed at the conclusion of that article].) More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale.

I wrote that over four years ago; it was true then, and it is more true today. A nation whose primary products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a wide scale is a Death State. For those of us who desperately wish for a world where life and happiness have a significantly better chance of realization -- and in many cases, any chance of realization at all -- the Death State is the enemy with which we must contend. To use an expression which is trivially inapposite but which nonetheless captures an aspect of what I want to convey: This ain't beanbag. If your manicure is that important to you, you may want to sit out this battle.

In what follows, I will discuss only a single aspect of the continuing NSA/Prism leak stories. It is an aspect that is unforgivingly revealing with respect to methodology. More particularly, it demonstrates the extent to which almost everyone has internalized the primary importance of obedience to authority, and how this remains true even when individuals believe they seek to challenge authority.

The Profound Threat that WikiLeaks Represented

I wrote extensively about WikiLeaks three years ago. I spent a great deal of time on one particular issue, for I regarded it as of singular and unique importance. It was also an issue that, in my view, was widely misunderstood -- and, of even more importance, it was an aspect of WikiLeaks' approach that was widely disapproved of and even intensely disliked. I should note here that I speak of WikiLeaks in terms of the promise it offered, and the radically different approach it utilized in the dissemination of information. While that promise was briefly realized, the ruling class quickly understood the threat WikiLeaks represented -- and they therefore set about destroying it as completely as they could. As a prefatory matter, I also state that I will not be distracted by questions about Julian Assange and his personal behavior. In my articles about WikiLeaks, although I offered praise when I thought it was deserved (and Assange unquestionably deserved high praise in critical respects), I always made a distinction between the phenomenon of WikiLeaks itself, and those individuals associated with it. In fact, that distinction is not a difficult one to make. When people refuse to understand the difference between the nature of an action itself and the judgment we might pass on the person who undertakes the action, it is usually because they are trying to get away with something.

In the case of WikiLeaks, before the rape allegations against Assange surfaced, it was very clear that many people were deeply uncomfortable with one aspect of WikiLeaks' operations above all. Although I acknowledge that some people sincerely condemned Assange's personal behavior (or what that behavior appeared to be, based on those reports that surfaced), it was also entirely obvious that many people used the personal allegations to condemn someone -- and something -- that they very much wanted to condemn anyway, and for entirely different reasons. I have my own views of what has been suggested about Assange's personal life, but I will not discuss them because I consider them entirely irrelevant to an analysis of WikiLeaks and the system with which it was contending.

What was it that WikiLeaks did that aroused so much consternation and condemnation? It wasn't simply that WikiLeaks provided "secret" information that the State was determined to keep from public view. It wasn't even that WikiLeaks provided a huge amount of such information. It was that WikiLeaks provided masses of "raw data": the original documents themselves, whether they be battle reports, inter- or intra-agency communications, or documents of many other kinds, sometimes with redactions, often complete. And WikiLeaks offered them with no filters whatsoever: no one was going to hold our hand as we read the documents, telling us what was "important" and what wasn't, and what its significance was, or whether it was significant at all. If we wished to understand the documents and what they revealed, all of us had to do the work ourselves.

What we discovered was that many people didn't want to do the work. More than that, they resented the fact that such responsibility was demanded of them. They wanted some "authority" figure to explain it all to them, they wanted "experts" to tell them what it meant. In one of my later WikiLeaks articles, I discussed the gross misunderstandings and mythologizing attendant upon the Pentagon Papers. I excerpted a Frank Rich column, noting that it was surprising that Rich got so much of this right, when he can be depended upon to get so much wrong. I wrote:

Rich also identifies one of the reasons for the reaction of indifference by so many to the Wikileaks release:

The [war] logs also suffer stylistically: they’re often impenetrable dispatches from the ground, in contrast to the Pentagon Papers’ anonymously and lucidly team-written epic of policy-making on high.

In part, many members of the mainstream media as well as many bloggers reacted with indifference because of intellectual and class snobbery and elitism. These critics unabashedly adore the "lucidly team-written epic of policy-making on high," for this approach is self-evidently "important" and "significant." Such critics don't have to slog through the innumerable, often dizzyingly unclear details: the "important" issues are handed to them on a platter. They can eat the meal at their leisure, gently masticating their own added morsels of wisdom.

They can't do this with the Wikileaks material, as I discussed in detail in the preceding installment. If we want to make sense of the Afghanistan documents, we have to do the work; in part, as I said, we have to be "intelligence analysts" ourselves. This is what I've identified as a crucial part of Wikileaks' genuinely revolutionary approach: it transfers the demanding work -- understanding the material in the first instance, and then making those judgments we think justified -- to each and every one of us. Many people don't want the responsibility. Their greatest preference is to defer to authority, to obey. Wikileaks deprives them of that opportunity. One of the results is that many people profoundly resent Wikileaks and wish only that it would instantly dissolve into nothingness.

This particular resentment stands largely separate and apart from a writer's political beliefs, and you find it on both right and left. It is more deeply personal than political convictions alone. Wikileaks allows people no excuse merely to obey, and they no longer have justification for being intellectually lazy. Wikileaks' critics often decry the manner in which government systematically and increasingly disregards citizens' voices and concerns -- but present them with the means to take back their own power in a meaningful way, and they recoil in horror. In addition to being invaluable in itself, Wikileaks' work provides this additional benefit: it reveals many people's actual motivations and concerns. And one great truth that has been revealed (again) by this latest episode is that the majority of people want to be guided by authority, by "experts," by those with "secret information." Give them that "secret information" so they can judge it for themselves and they immediately cry: "Oh, we can't possibly understand that! Only the State, or 'experts,' can be trusted with that information and explain it to us!" Most people want to obey. They've been taught obedience as the primary virtue, and they now believe the lesson and have fully internalized it.

As I discussed in the WikiLeaks series, it was only to be expected that such resentment would be found on the right. What I found more intriguing, and particularly revealing, was that the same resentment found expression on the left. I spent considerable time analyzing such complaints from the left, emphasizing how the complaints proceeded from the same preferred deference to authority (see here and here).

On this same point: at the outset of my WikiLeaks series, I excerpted some very perceptive remarks from Jay Rosen concerning WikiLeaks' methodology. Here is part of what Rosen said:

And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’re gonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional press isn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com:

The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.

The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.

So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

Before I address one particular aspect of the current NSA/surveillance stories, there is a further passage concerning WikiLeaks and "raw data" that I need to provide. This will also indicate a radical proposal I have in mind, which I will get to shortly. Almost three years ago, I wrote:

Given the unrelieved fraud that is "intelligence," and in light of the conclusively and repeatedly proven inability to trust any part of the Establishment to "filter" any of this or any other material whatsoever, including "raw data," I view it as a complete and shining triumph for Wikileaks and other organizations to release as much information, and as much "raw data," as they can get their hands on. Wikileaks thus increases what is in the public record, and thereby provides more information on the basis of which you can make your own judgment. We -- by which I mean you, me and everyone else -- certainly can't do any worse than the politicians and "experts" in trying to make sense of it. Moreover, I consider it much more likely that we will do a significantly better job. And even if we don't, we aren't the ones who will be ordering bombing runs, assassinations, or invasions.

The broader point remains the most critical one. By acting as it does, Wikileaks entirely bypasses the structures of authority, "order" and obedience. By stepping outside them altogether, Wikileaks diminishes their power -- and transfers that power to all of us. Just think about what would happen if ten or twenty organizations did this many times a week, releasing "secret" and "confidential" information closely guarded by governments, multinational corporations, and others who exploit, brutalize and act in innumerable destructive and cruel ways. The world as it exists today would be severely threatened as people began to see the details of what is actually transpiring.

And many people -- many of those "ordinary" human beings across the world who today are entirely disregarded and only brutalized, and who "merely" provide the labor and often the blood that sustains the power structure that rules us -- would make sense of it. At a minimum, they would make sense of it in ways that the prevailing powers ceaselessly try to obfuscate and cover up. A lot of "ordinary" people would begin to see a fuller version of the truth.

That's exactly what States and those who rule and enable them are afraid of. That's why they condemn Wikileaks with such vehemence, in a manner that frequently verges on hysteria. The ruling class understands very well indeed the threat that Wikileaks represents, and what would happen if additional organizations utilized the same strategy. If you want to understand the threat embodied by Wikileaks, do what I suggest: multiply Wikileaks by ten, or a hundred. The ruling class sees that possibility with startling and unnerving clarity. Why do you think they're scared shitless?

And they are.

The Filtering of the NSA/Surveillance Stories

As I said, my focus at the moment, with regard to both WikiLeaks and to the NSA/surveillance stories, is primarily on methodology, as opposed to the specific content of the stories. I have a lot to say about the content of the NSA stories itself, and I will get to it in time. I'm concerned with methodology specifically as it discards, or embraces, obedience to authority. I regard this as a foundational issue of extraordinary importance, as I recently discussed yet again.

In connection with the NSA/surveillance stories, we should begin with the remarks of the leaker, Edward Snowden. I state at the outset, with immense gratitude, that I am filled with admiration for Snowden. He is very young and, because of what he viewed as a transcendently important matter of principle, he chose a course of action which may well affect the rest of his life -- and even tragically end it an unforgivably premature fashion. These are actions of great bravery and courage.

What follows is not intended as a qualification or diminishment of my admiration for Snowden personally. I am concerned with a question of method and approach, because I view it as of special importance. Some of the reasons for the importance I attach to these matters are set forth above, and this further discussion will hopefully amplify those reasons. Snowden offered several statements concerning how he selected those documents he would provide to journalists. Snowden said:

"Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone".

Which people in particular is Snowden concerned about? We aren't told. It's possible that ordinary civilians are included in his statement, although that seems unlikely. It's more probable that he means those who are connected in some way with the U.S. government. Perhaps "assets" -- that is, spies -- are among those he doesn't want to "endanger." It matters which particular individuals he means, but we have no means of evaluating his statement. I'll come back to this.

Snowden also said this:

Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden's leaks began to make news.

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

Snowden's comments about Bradley Manning imply a recklessness and lack of deliberation to Manning -- which is directly contradicted by the record and by Manning's own statements. I need not spend time on this aspect of Snowden's remarks, except to note that I consider them deeply regrettable, for this thoroughly excellent post addresses these questions in exemplary fashion.

Obviously, in both the Manning and Snowden cases, the first level of filtering that occurred resulted from the choices and standards employed by those individuals themselves. They chose the documents they would provide -- because they believed them to be "in the public interest" (a phrase so vague that it can mean almost anything), and/or because they would not endanger or "harm" people (although which people is something we still don't know).

As I say, that much is obvious, and everyone is aware of that kind of filtering. But I have yet to see anyone comment on the final paragraph from the excerpt above:

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

And so we have a second level of filtering, exercised by the journalists to whom Snowden provided the documents. The journalists will decide "what should be public and what should remain concealed."

And did those journalists choose to keep certain documents "concealed"? Yes. Yes, they did:

The Guardian and The Washington Post, who both revealed the existence of the PRISM program Thursday, declined to release all 41 slides of the top-secret PowerPoint presentation they had obtained.

Barton Gellman, co-author of the Washington Post story, told The Internet Chronicle Friday, “We put up the [slides] we thought we should. Much of the document seemed to us to be classified for good reason.”

“We’re not engaged in a mindless, indiscriminate document dump, and our source didn’t want us to be,” Greenwald told Buzzfeed Saturday. “We’re engaged in the standard journalistic assessment of whether the public value to publication outweighs any harms.”

These additional comments are to the same effect:

On the issue of conditions for publishing the information from Snowden, Greenwald tweeted, “I have no idea whether he had any conditions for WP, but he had none for us: we didn’t post all the slides.” ...

Gellman, meanwhile, noted on Twitter, “BTW the Guardian didn’t publish whole PRISM brief either; chose ~same slides the WP did. There are things in there that should stay secret.”

Thank God we have the press to protect us. Who knows what might happen if we had the full truth, or at least a fuller version of the truth?

We're again told of the unassailable importance of "the public value." Who is "the public"? Are you "the public"? Am I? Do you want to see the whole goddamned thing? I sure as hell do.

And what "harms" specifically? And to whom -- specifically? Harm to those who work for the Death State, perhaps in the intelligence and national security community? Are we concerned about harming them? I surely hope not. Since the Death State claims the right to murder any one of us it chooses, whenever it wants, for any reason it invents, it seems to me that "the public" are the ones who ought to be concerned about being "harmed." Is it the great unwashed public that these journalists are worried about? Then let them say so. But how would that work? We might be endangered because some of the U.S.'s national security "secrets" might be exposed? The United States is the most powerful nation that has ever existed in the entire history of the human race, with a military capability that could obliterate all of life on the planet many times over. No nation would dream of mounting a serious attack on the U.S. for precisely that reason (and when I say "no nation," I absolutely include Iran, for all the hysterics who might see this). Moreover, isolated terrorist attacks, no matter how horrifying they may be in themselves, fall far short of an "existential threat" to the U.S., no matter the vast amount of propaganda designed to convince us otherwise. No nation would dare mount a serious attack on the U.S. precisely because they know how powerful the U.S. is -- because it is not secret.

The entire edifice of "secrecy," especially with regard to national security, is a vicious lie from start to finish. Put it all out there. If full disclosure endangers those who work for the Death State, the problem -- and the responsibility -- is with those who choose to directly advance the Death State's goals. It is decidedly not with the leaker, or with the journalists.

But all right. I recognize that, in this instance at least, no one is going to listen to the rantings of someone who is obviously an "irresponsible" madman who screams at shadows and eats live babies for breakfast. But at a minimum, I would expect to see as detailed an explanation as these journalists believe is "responsible" for what they have chosen to keep concealed and why. If "harm" is involved, I want to see at least a general indication of the harm involved and those individuals who might suffer it. And I will repeat that, as far as I'm concerned, when you do battle with a brutal, endlessly murderous Death State, "a mindless, indiscriminate document dump" is a superlative weapon. Yes, it would certainly cause chaos and hysteria -- but primarily among the ruling class, that is, among those who choose the Death State's goals and direct its actions. I will add that many of the members of the ruling class are professional killers, in that they direct the murders, including the murders of innocent human beings, that occur every single goddamned day because of the actions of the United States.

This second level of journalist filtering comes up again in connection with a Greenwald tweet that I find startling and bizarre:

Clapper: leaks "literally gut-wrenching" - "huge, grave damage" - save some melodrama and rhetoric for coming stories. You'll need it.

The style and tone of this formulation is disturbingly reminiscent of a schoolyard taunt. "You're upset now, big boy? Just wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet!" In one sense, I understand the temptation to address pompous, lying bastards in this manner. In light of the stakes involved, I also think it is a temptation that must be resisted. If Greenwald has no measurable concern for his own well-being, what about that of Snowden, his source? It almost certainly does not overstate the case to say that Snowden is running for his life at this point. Greenwald knows that far better, and undoubtedly in much more detail, than I do. Is it wise to deliberately provoke the Director of National Intelligence in this way? This administration murders innocent people with a regularity that suggests they do it simply as a way to pass the time. We know -- and Greenwald certainly knows, as his writing attests -- what this government is capable of. Clearly, the Obama administration is parsing every word that Greenwald utters. Is poking the administration in the eye the "responsible" thing to do? I think not, for Edward Snowden's sake, if for no one else's.

Another Greenwald tweet in that same series deserves mention:

I honestly don't think these programs are "sensitive". & I think claim that our stories cause "huge, grave damage" deserves scorn

That would seem to argue for full disclosure, and fairly strongly, not for helping to "conceal" aspects of this story. Again, since we haven't been provided an explanation as to what has been kept secret and why, we have no way of evaluating these questions. In the end, we are left with the notion that there are things "we're better off not knowing," and that some information is being withheld, even by the journalists, "for our own good." But this is exactly what the government tells us.

Greenwald's reference to "coming stories" indicates another kind of filtering: the order and timing of the stories. Greenwald has stated: "There are dozens of stories generated by the documents he provided, and we intend to pursue every last one of them." Recall Jay Rosen's comments about WikiLeaks' approach:

Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released in two forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released online in full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.

With regard to the Prism story, and it appears in connection with the upcoming stories the Guardian may offer, we are being provided the first element -- "vetted and narrated to gain old media cred" -- but not the second -- "released online in full text, Internet-stye, which corrects for any timidity or blind spot the editors .. may show." Given their approach to date, we will have no way of knowing what the Guardian decides should be kept "secret" or why.

We might summarize the problem this way: once the filtering begins, it's gatekeepers all the way down.

And in connection with the promised upcoming stories from the Guardian, I have a number of similar questions. How are they deciding which stories to publish and when? Is "newsworthiness" the sole consideration? What constitutes "newsworthiness"? Certainly, they also need time to ask for comments from interested parties and the like, that is, to perform all the "vetting and narrating" to which Rosen refers. Are there other, more mundane but all too human considerations -- for instance, marketing factors? I do not suggest that Greenwald himself has such concerns; I am almost certain he does not. But let's be adults about this: you can be certain that someone at the Guardian is figuring out how to maximize this treasure trove of documents, with an eye fixed firmly on the bottom line. But in the absence of a fuller explanation of how they're going about this, we can only make educated guesses.

I have gone through this exercise to explain the differences in methodology and why they matter. What I find extraordinary is the fact that, to my knowledge, no one has commented on these particular aspects of the Prism story and the stories yet to come. I would like to think that at least a few people are aware of these issues, but I have yet to come across any commentary that addresses these concerns. This confirms, still another time, how comfortable most people are in obeying authority, especially when it is an authority they view favorably. I've read many comments from Greenwald admirers in recent days. I am inescapably led to the conclusion that, because they view Greenwald as being on "their side," the kinds of questions and concerns I've raised here simply never occur to them.

There are many aspects of Greenwald's work that deserve admiration and gratitude, not least these latest stories. (And I repeat that I have not even begun to consider the content of the stories. I view these questions of method as properly preceding that discussion.) But relying on anyone to vet and filter stories and news for you is asking for trouble. At some point, you're very likely to get it. And again, keep in mind that the adversary here is the Death State: not a figurative or metaphorical Death State, but an actual Death State.

I want mess. I want chaos. I want to see the ruling class in unrelenting, hysterical panic. My fantasy is that a dozen, or a hundred, Edward Snowdens appear, each laden with huge piles of documents. And all those documents are dumped on the internet -- but in a fully mindful and discriminating manner, and with a specific purpose in mind. The Death State's ruling class is intent on destruction, brutality, oppression and murder and, as they tell us repeatedly, their work is far from done. The purpose of unmasking all the secrets that the ruling class is so desperate to keep, of shoveling all of it directly into the blazing, unforgiving sunlight in a fully unfiltered way, is to stop them.

At this moment in history, I submit there is no more important purpose in the world. Some might even describe it as a noble purpose.

Stop them. Your life -- and the lives of many others -- depend on it.

Some Decidedly Unfriendly, Even Rude Observations

You know -- actually, most people don't, which is a hugely significant part of the problem -- if one were genuinely concerned with stopping violence and the murder of innocent human beings, one might focus one's energies on perhaps the greatest source of these evils: a culture which celebrates violence and brutality in multiple forms, throughout every aspect of its many manifestations, and a government which systematically and ceaselessly unleashes destruction and death around the world.

On the latter point: one might also find the time to criticize a State, which is to say the government of the goddamned United States of America, which claims the "right" to murder anyone, anywhere, anytime -- and which has already actualized that claim on a terrifying number of occasions. To say the government of the United States is one of the greatest sources of violence and of violent death in the world today is not to exaggerate in even the slightest degree: it is the unvarnished, goldplated, fucking, goddamned truth.

Therefore and thusly, to believe that one of the greatest sources of violence in the world today should be trusted to solve the problem of gun violence in America is to believe in self-contradictory statements which immolate themselves on a gigantic pyre of the most ridiculous, asinine, ludicrous notions ever imagined in the malformed, grotesque, nonfunctioning brains of the dumbest animal that has ever existed. Anyone who believes that gun control -- gun control devised and implemented by a brutal, endlessly violent, systematically murderous State -- will even begin to solve the problem of violent death in and by America is a fucking idiot. Moreover, to believe that the man who has lovingly embraced the principle of mass murder, and who proudly and repeatedly declares to the world that he is a serial murderer dedicated to continuing his murders into the indefinite future, targeting an ever-increasing number of victims, is sincerely devoted to ending even a single aspect of the problem of violence is so colossally, stupendously stupid that it defies accurate description.

HOWEVER. Ah, perhaps you suspected there was a "however." That may be because you are not a fucking idiot. I am not about to weigh in on this issue with regard to the details, to try to balance the pros and cons of various gun control measures, and blahblah fucking blah. No, ma'am and no, sir, I absolutely will not. And that is because I completely distrust both sides of this debate. On the right, we have many people who wail and moan about the destruction of rights guaranteed by the blessed Constitution, and memorialized in the sacred Bill of Rights. People must try to move beyond the civics primer they read in first grade. Seriously, people should at least try to reach, say, a fourth-grade level of understanding on this subject. I defy you to identify a single amendment in the Bill of Rights that has not been subverted, perverted, trampled, and ground into dust since the Constitution's adoption. That process began within a few years of the Constitution's ratification -- that is, while all those saintly Founding Fucking Fathers were still around. Moreover, the Constitution was not designed to implement the initial, tragically brief goals of the Revolution and fashion them into the structure of a State. Oh, no: the Constitution was designed to stop any genuinely revolutionary impulses dead in their tracks. As I've noted before, the Constitution was the indispensable means for the establishment of "a government of, by and for the most wealthy and powerful Americans -- and it made certain (insofar as men can make such things certain) that their rule would never be seriously threatened. The most wealthy and powerful Americans were the ones who wrote it, after all."

As Terry Bouton writes (in Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution):

In Pennsylvania, the Revolution had been forged by elite and ordinary folk who insisted that a free government could only survive in a society with a relatively equal distribution of wealth. That belief had pushed the revolutionaries of the 1760s and 1770s to make wealth more equal -- or at least to repeal laws that made wealth more unequal. When many of the gentry decided during the war that concentrations of wealth were a blessing rather than a curse, they attempted to divorce wealth equality from the public's understanding of the Revolution. ... [T]he governments that emerged from the Revolution often fostered massive inequalities of wealth. At the same time, they redefined "democracy" as an ideal that could be reconciled with those disparities. By transforming democracy into a concept that encouraged uninhibited wealth accumulation rather than wealth equality, the founding elite (and subsequent generations of elites) tamed what they could not defeat. They turned democracy from a threat into an asset by making it into a concept that supported their own ideals and interests.

In brief: the Constitution was not the culmination of the Revolution. It was the end of the Revolution, once and for all. The history of the United States since the Constitution's adoption, including all the horrors that assail us at present, represents merely the playing out of the inevitable consequences of the Constitution's meaning and purpose. The ruling elite was hardly disposed to create a State that would threaten their power and wealth in any serious way; to the contrary, they devised a State, resting on the precious Constitution, specifically designed to protect their power and wealth, and increase them still more. You can read more on this theme in "Concerning the American Change in Management." In connection with these same issues, I must add that all those who collapsed on their fainting couches in response to this NYT essay reveal only what might be described, in an act of reckless charity, as an exceedingly naive faith in our "sacred" form of government. And here, "faith" is the only appropriate word: an informed knowledge and understanding of history proves the truth of my argument many times over (and not only in the United States). A fair amount of Seidman's NYT article is a recitation of facts; the balance of his commentary is notable only for how unremarkable it is, provided one is familiar with actual history (as opposed to what is in those first-grade civics primers most Americans cling to with such desperation), and provided one has some understanding of how societies in fact function. (On this and similar points, I am often tempted to say I only seem radical to many people because almost everybody else is so goddamned fucking conservative -- to say nothing of retrograde in a manner that even Cro-Magnon man would find shocking in its primitive quality.)

With regard to those on the right who loudly wail about their fun with guns being curtailed, I might be somewhat sympathetic to their plight but for one fatal failure on their part. And it is certainly true, as indicated above, that whatever gun control measures are enacted will have almost nothing to do with solving the problem of violence (however one conceives it), but everything to do with entrenching the State's power and control over the lives of all its subjects still further. But, with exceptions so rare that they are meaningless in terms of representing a countervailing force of any significance, the right has no objection to the State's assertion of power in the State's battle with its alleged enemies. The right does not object even to Obama's assertion of absolute power, that is, his claim of a right to murder anyone in the world, anytime he chooses. As long as such power is nominally tied to fighting terrorism or certain other specified evils, the right applauds it. The right almost never mentions these claims of power, even the claim of power over life and death itself. Given their contemptible, damnable silence on these issues, they should hardly expect anyone to come to their aid when they fear the State is coming for their guns. You're fine with absolute power, you ridiculous schmucks? Okay, you got it.

As for those on the "left," well, Jesus Christ. What can one say? "Oh," the "leftists" moan, "it is truly awful that Obama claims he can kill anyone he wants. What? Oh, yes, and he actually kills anyone he wants. Oh, my. Dearie me. And indefinite detention, endless surveillance of everyone all the time, rendition ... oh, dear, oh, dear, oh dear. Just dreadful. Still, no reason not to vote for and support the Democrats! Because, well, ah, um ... oh, yeah: CRAZY REPUBLICANS!! Aaaaaaiiiiiiiieeeeee!!!" Consult "Accomplices to Murder," and especially Part II, for examples of this eloquent argument. Needless to say, those on the left have no problem with a serial murderer who has adopted the principle of mass murder taking on more powers to "solve" the problem of gun violence -- because they have no problem with him being a serial murderer who has adopted the principle of mass murder, at least no problem that anyone needs to be upset or concerned about.

To sum up my attitude toward all those on right and left who have no measurable concern with the State's claim of absolute power or with many other associated claims of power (which is almost all people), and who now so frantically announce their passion for or resistance to gun control, and in my unstinting effort to be entirely truthful, I can say only: they can all go fuck themselves.

I offer an additional point of special importance. One of the central, intractable problems on both right and left is that, with regard to any allegedly serious problem that arises, the default reaction is always to appeal to the State for the "solution." This phenomenon may be more easily noticed on the left, which displays a fundamentalist fervor in declaring that virtually everything, from food and diet, to construction (of anything, highways, homes, schools, you name it), to making the "free" market actually "free" (by government edict, to be enforced by violence as necessary, by means of a vast array of punishments), and so on unto the ends of the universe (and the space program, too), can only be made to "work" through State control and intervention -- but as I've indicated, the State is the default solution on the right as well, whenever the supposed problem concerns a threat they deem suitably scary. And here, I will reprise an excerpt from Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, the State. It is not at all coincidental that I first offered this passage in an article about the killings at Virginia Tech, almost six years ago: "The United States as Cho Seung-Hui: How the State Sanctifies Murder."

Nock identifies the nature of the State, any State, as follows:

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any other origins. Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution "forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group."

And Nock says the following about the "mass-man" who is the citizen of the State:

The mass-man, ignorant of [the State's] history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share -- he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State, "sees it, admires it, knows that there it is ... Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources ... When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion."

...

The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is obviously the life and strength of the State, and obviously too, it is now so inveterate and so wide-spread -- one may freely call it universal -- that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it, and least of all hope to enlighten it. This attitude can only be sapped and mined by recurrent calamity of a most appalling character. When once the predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of America, all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself with pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as Professor Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no more that one can do. "The result of this tendency," he says, "will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention, no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that nasty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization."

With regard to the State (and its Constitution), and the mass-man, the tragic process in which we are now enmeshed is that identified by Nock: "all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its appointed end." In that article from 2007, I said: "[B]arring a fundamental change in direction, this is the course upon which we long ago embarked."

We can, we should work toward that "fundamental change in direction"; that is certainly the purpose of my own writing, as unimportant in the scheme of things as it is. But if we are to be truthful, history offers little hope that such a change can be effected on the required scale, and with sufficient speed.

Still, there is always a first time. So we shall have to hope for that.

The State and Full Spectrum Dominance, Abroad and At Home

I offer here some observations about the State, any state, at any time, anywhere in the world. The continuing economic conflagration has caused me to reexamine certain ideas with additional information, and from a perspective that differs in certain ways from my earlier methods of analysis. While I am confident that what follows is correct with regard to the most important general points, I am still investigating many particulars. It is more than likely I will return to these issues with further specific examples, and with additional thoughts about particular manifestations of the dynamics involved.

When I refer to the State, I use that term with perhaps its most generally accepted meaning: those individuals and those economic-societal interests that direct the mechanisms of control and enforcement over a designated geographic area. These mechanisms may be reflected in a written document, but that is not required. I start from this basic principle:

[F]rom the first historic forms of the State, the State has always formed and will always form alliances with certain individuals and segments of society -- to which the government bureaucrats will provide favors and special dispensations, and to the severe disadvantage of those individuals and groups that are not so favored. ... [O]ur contemporary tribalists believe, without any history or evidence whatsoever to support the claim, that if only members of their tribe were in charge, they would act in saintly and disinterested ways, and they would be uniformly non-venal, non-self-seeking, and non-human. Good luck with that. It has never happened and it never will, barring a fundamental transformation of what it means to be human.

Another crucially related idea flows from this one, and it concerns the significance of law to the State:

The law is not some Platonic Form plucked from the skies by the Pure in Heart. Laws are written by men, men who have particular interests, particular constituencies, particular donors, and particular friends. ... Laws are the particular means by which the state implements and executes its vast powers. When an increasingly authoritarian state passes a certain critical point in its development, the law is no longer the protector of individual rights and individual liberty. The law becomes the weapon of the state itself -- to protect, not you, but the state from threats to its own powers. We passed that critical point some decades ago. The law is the means by which the state corrals its subjects, keeps them under control, and forbids them from acting in ways that the overlords might perceive as threatening. In brief, today, in these glorious United States, the law is not your friend.

I think these ideas explain a great deal, but to understand the nature and origins of the State, and to grasp how the State will act once it has been established, we have to travel to a still deeper level.

For that, I return to Albert Jay Nock, and to this passage from my essay, "The United States as Cho Seung-Hui: How the State Sanctifies Murder":

In his classic book, Our Enemy, the State (first published in 1935), Albert Jay Nock makes a fundamental distinction between government and the State, a distinction I will soon discuss in more detail. For our purposes here, I too briefly note only the following in this regard: by government, Nock means that system that spontaneously arises out of a social order, where "in [Thomas] Paine's view the code of government should be that of the legendary king Pausole, who presented but two laws for his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please, and that the whole business of government should be the purely negative one of seeing that this code is carried out." Nock goes on to note: "Paine's theory of government agrees exactly with the theory set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence."

This was not the concept of government embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Nock makes the argument that with the adoption of the Constitution, our nation's fate was already sealed; I have to confess that the longer I consider the matter and the more I read of world history and political theory, the more I am convinced that Nock was correct. It is worth recalling that many of the founders were notably lacking in confidence about the longevity of the system of government they had devised. The Constitution represented the abandonment of government for the State:

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any other origins. Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution "forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group."

Thus, it is not enough to say, as I myself did, that "the State has always formed and will always form alliances with certain individuals and segments of society," although that is also true. The more accurate statement, and a formulation that delves more deeply, is that the State would never have taken form at all, and it would not have been able to impose its rule, but for the existence of a class or group of individuals that crafted the State to their particular ends. Here, I am not concerned with evaluating whether those ends are good or bad (except for the fact that one may believe that domination and exploitation are always bad, as I do), but rather with identifying the basis on which the State is founded.

Those States that existed in the past and that exist in our world today have nothing to do with government in Nock's sense: a system that spontaneously arises out of a social order. As I have been considering these issues, I was first prepared to argue that Nock's idea of spontaneous social order represents voluntary action in a significant sense that the State does not. But I now think that is not exactly correct, for what appears to be spontaneous social order also relies on many elements of manipulation, control and coercion. I would go still further: order, when applied to any form of social activity, cannot occur in the complete absence of manipulation, control and coercion.

I plan to analyze many aspects of the mechanisms of manipulation, control and coercion in my series on tribalism. These mechanisms will be found in social networks, in political organizations, and -- most importantly, for this is the ultimate origin of all the rest -- in the family. And it is, in fact, in these other forms of order that many of the State's enforcement mechanisms find their start. Yet there remain two critical differences between government and spontaneous social order on the one hand, and the State on the other. The first difference concerns the degree of voluntary activity which is allowed: speaking very generally, instances of spontaneous social order permit a greater degree of voluntariness, both in the origins of that order which finally develops and in the ongoing operations of that order. This is what the word "spontaneous" designates: the order that arises is not imposed on a group of people in a particular area, but it begins on the ground, if you will, and rises up from there.

The second difference concerns the scale and effectiveness of the order involved, and the consequences of the scale and effectiveness attendant upon the State. For some thoughts on this question I turn to a fascinating article by Robert Higgs: "If Men Were Angels: The Basic Analytics of the State versus Self-government." The article is unusually provocative, and I strongly recommend reading it when you have time to consider Higgs' arguments and their implications.

Consider just a few brief excerpts. Higgs quotes the famous passage from Madison's Federalist No. 51, and then writes:

The passage that refers to the angels is a rhetorical masterpiece, so memorable that it has become almost a cliché. In Madison’s argument, however, it does more than emphasize that human nature is something less than angelic. It also serves as a springboard that propels Madison directly into a consideration of “framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” which is “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature.” In short, it moves Madison directly to a consideration of government as we have known it for the past several thousand years—a monopoly operating ultimately by threat or actual use of violence, making rules for and extracting tribute from the residents of the territory it controls. Henceforth, for clarity, I refer to this all-too-familiar type of organization as “the state.”

In evaluating the benefits and dangers of the stateless mode of existence compared to the State, Higgs goes on to write:

Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state (Hayek 1944, 134-52; Bailey 1988; Higgs 2004, 33-56) and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state (Higgs 2004, 101-05). It is unfortunate that some individuals commit crimes, but it is stunningly worse when such criminally inclined individuals wield state powers.

Lest anyone protest that the state’s true “function” or “duty” or “end” is, as Locke, Madison, and countless others have argued, to protect individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property, the evidence of history clearly shows that, as a rule, real states do not behave accordingly. The idea that states actually function along such lines or that they strive to carry out such a duty or to achieve such an end resides in the realm of wishful thinking. Although some states in their own self-interest may at some times protect some residents of their territories (other than the state’s own functionaries), such protection is at best highly unreliable and all too often nothing but a solemn farce. Moreover, it is invariably mixed with crimes against the very people the state purports to protect, because the state cannot even exist without committing the crimes of extortion and robbery, which states call taxation (Nock 1939), and as a rule, this existential state crime is but the merest beginning of its assaults on the lives, liberties, and property of its resident population.

In the United States, for example, the state at one time or another during recent decades has confined millions of persons in dreadful steel cages because they had the temerity to engage in the wholly voluntary buying and selling or the mere possession of officially disapproved products. Compounding these state crimes (of kidnapping and unjust confinement) with impudence, state officials brazenly claim credit for their assaults on the victims of their so-called War on Drugs. State functionaries have yet to explain how their rampant unprovoked crimes comport with the archetype described and justified in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. In vain do many of us yearn for relief from the state’s duplicitous cruelty: Where is the state of nature when we really need it?

Higgs summarizes this part of his argument as follows:

With regard to large-scale death and destruction, no person, group, or private organization can even begin to compare to the state, which is easily the greatest instrument of destruction known to man. All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty, and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.

The lesson of the precautionary principle is plain: because people are vile and corruptible, the state, which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst, is much too risky for anyone to justify its continuation. To tolerate it is not simply to play with fire, but to chance the total destruction of the human race.

Finally, consider this passage from Higgs' concluding section:

[E]verything that makes life without a state undesirable makes life with a state even more undesirable. The idea that the anti-social tendencies that afflict people in every society can be cured or even ameliorated by giving a few persons great discretionary power over all the others is, upon serious reflection, seen to be a wildly mistaken notion. Perhaps it is needless to add that the structural checks and balances on which Madison relied to restrain the government’s abuses have proven to be increasingly unavailing and, bearing in mind the expansive claims and actions under the present U.S. regime, are now almost wholly superseded by a form of executive caesarism in which the departments of government that were designed to check and balance each other have instead coalesced in a mutually supportive design to plunder the people and reduce them to absolute domination by the state.

You can begin to see how these ideas inevitably lead us to an examination of the present crisis.

This subject is very complex, and this is long enough for one installment. Some further thoughts about the State as such, and about the United States in general and concerning the present crisis in particular, will be offered in the next and concluding part of this essay.