[Reader-list] Book Review: State Power and Democracy

[A. Mani]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27561


The US is a Police State
Review of Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy

by Prof. John McMurtry

	
Global Research, November 9, 2011


Review of Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy (2011), New York:
St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp.

Many readers may have thought the U.S. is “like a police state” - -
think of the security dress down of everyone boarding a flight within
the U.S. sphere of control. Political scientist Andrew Kolin goes far
beyond hasty analogue. He argues with rich factual substantiation that
the U.S is a police state all the way down – not only since the stolen
elections and war state of George Bush Jr., but before and since in a
cumulative throughline of bureaucratized despotism across borders.

Documented examples are reported in detail from 1950 on to disclose a
record that is as systematic in suppressing public dissent as its
client dictatorships elsewhere – albeit far more successfully kept out
of public and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contests of, by
and for the rich in America are proclaimed as “the leader of the Free
World” in the ad-vehicle media many still watch and read, an example
helps to clarify the reality not reported. When three nuns protested
before the war-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime was
left undone, “they were arrested, handcuffed, left on the ground for
three hours and then jailed for seven months before trial - - [for]
sabotage and obstruction of justice” (p. 153).

Every step of their police repression was within the laws that had
been concocted before and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions
of “the Patriot Act” – with here as elsewhere the legislative title as
integral to the Orwellian language of rule. The symbolic action of the
nuns - painting blood on a missile silo – was in fact backed by
international law against the “supreme crime” of non-defensive armed
invasion of another country. Indeed their protest occurred just before
the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad which ended in the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of children. But mass-murderous facts,
citizen responsibility, moral courage and peaceful expression of the
law of nations do not detain U.S. legal machinery. It is this legal
machinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case that the U.S. is a
police state.

What is a police state? Kolin states no criterion, but it can be
deduced as unlimited state power  of armed force freely discharged
without citizen right to stop it. Anyone who has lived in the U.S. or
its client dictatorships may recognize the concrete phenomena, but
what is featured in this account are the laws and directives which
empower the police state norms. While the men at the top always
proclaim their devotion to the defence of freedom as armed force
assaults on domestic dissent and dissident countries increase, none
have been found guilty of breaking the law or repressing freedom of
speech or assembly. It is U.S. laws and policies which form the U.S.
police state, the argument is, and they are continuously made to
enable an endless litany of crimes against human life.

The sustaining concern of this work, however, is not to define
ordering principles, but to track the bureaucratic trails of legally
terrorist offices, directives, and channels. The result is a detailed
history of the inner workings of the U.S. state which exposes the
legal suppression of democratic speech and action (omitting the use of
laws against harmless non-pharmaceuticals as lettres de cachet to
imprison the poor and the rebellious by the millions). Beneath
continuous  corporate-state and media proclamation of America’s
freedoms and simultaneous academic fear to expose the lines of
despotism, this work largely succeeds in providing the procedural
workings of the U.S. police state building both before, and
dramatically after, the turning point of 9-11.

The manufacture of pretext imprinted in the very timing and naming of
the high-tech destruction of the World Trade Center as “9-11”, and the
fact that the Bush Jr. presidency needed a war or two to distract from
its illegitimacy and to empower its program of “full spectrum
dominance” are not, however, raised in this book. They remain
unspeakable facts within the official conspiracy theory now normalized
as fact. Yet this canonical theory of the 9-11 tragedy assumes the
collapse of the fireproof steel-cored buildings into their footsteps
near the the speed of gravity - an impossibility within the laws of
physics – and the first legal question of any homicidal crime – cui
bono, who benefits?- is erased from its record. So although this
official story allowed all the post-9-11 police state legislation and
unlimited powers Kolin focuses on, he avoids the pretext itself.

Critical attention is instead confined to the silencing of questions,
alternatives and dissent by the legal machinery of repression
justified by it. Such “institutional analysis” is favoured by
America’s lead critics, and positivist social science rules out what
is not  so corroborated. The clear exception to this methodological
silencing here is attachment of the descriptor “police state” to the
U.S., and the legally well informed record of demonstration. The
maze-like bureaucratization of operations of repression is not
ultimately covert, Kolin shows, but sanctified by official policies
and laws.

Kolin’s attention to dated laws, directives, offices, and machinations
behind the spotlight and personalization of politics is a welcome
re-grounding amidst the daily media kaleidoscope of ever-changing
images and personalities. In contrast to the usual academic fear of
ideological non-conformity, Kolin clearly summarizes at the outset:
“In the latter part of the twentieth century, when mass movements for
all intents and purposes were eliminated, what remained was for the
most part was procedural democracy, which in a short period, would
also be eliminated, to be replaced by a form of absolute power in
which government had been made into a permanent police state. Much of
this took place after the attacks of 9-11, during which the
administration of George Bush in a very short time, was able to put in
place many of the essential features of what is now an American police
state” (p.2).

U.S. Police State in Formation from the Revolution through Reagan to Bush-Obama

Kolin goes back to the U.S. state’s foundation to find the dictatorial
impulse. “The truth of the matter”, he says, “is that after the
American Revolution there was thinking among economic and democratic
elites that America had become too democratic, especially as mass
democracy was expressing itself on the state level”(p. 3) – a view
better known since a Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission Report
made it famous centuries later. The Founding Fathers’ anti-democratic
politics have been explored before by Michael Parenti, who blurbs for
the book. For Kolin, it is “mass democracy” that frightens the
dominant ownership class from the start because it threatens their
ruling proprietary control. But this economic diagnosis is not pursued
by Kolin. He conceives the motor force as “control over people and
territory by the state in itself. This non-Marxian thesis is
historically associated with theoretical anarchism, but is here
conjoined to the idea of “mass democracy”, a motivating idea behind
this work which is not given further definition.

Yet we may surmise that mass democracy entails popular assemblies -
the traditional “town hall meeting” of classical American democracy -
in place of representation by professional politicians controlled by
corporate and financial lobbies. The meta-argument is that the nature
of the U.S. state itself  is disposed towards power after power “over
people and territory” and is thus structured against mass democracy
from the beginning. It is implied that mass democracy could not itself
lead to a police state. This implied argument is not secure.

Desires of popular masses can be as overwhelmingly compelled to
control people’s thought, action and dissent by force as state elites
are, and they can be as driven to seize the territories of other
people and to lord it over them via great majorities – as in the
popular witch-hunts through American history and as, more broadly,
age-old ethnic warfare and killing and enslavement of losing
societies. Something deeper than the will of the demos to which it is
accountable is required - rules to live by which protect and enable
life itself. This may be the most fundamental gap in democratic
theory.

Annihilating Not Only Democracy, But Countless Lives and Life Supports

 For perhaps the majority in the U.S., loathing of government is a
national pastime except for “our men in uniform” – that is, arms-laden
American enforcers chasing, shooting and bombing designated enemies of
America at home and abroad. Wars seem in fact very popular with the
majority if they are not being lost, and public pillories and prisons
for deviators from the American Way seldom lack similar support.
Police state laws, the invasion of Iraq and so on seem to have been
popular if they are successful. Yet Kolin’s work is more concerned to
expose the state which is represented as the world leader in democracy
while it rules by armed force, secrecy and terror and – especially
since 9-11 - violently suppresses dissent in its own society. The
inside mechanisms of legalist-bureaucratic rule not discussed or
connected in the dominant media or political science are uniquely laid
bare. There were many designated “enemies” from the beginning – from
American Indians and genocidal laws against them to the FBI, Sedition,
Alien and Espionage Acts of 1917-18, the CIA founding in 1947,
followed by the Internal Security Act of 1950, McCarthy’s House
UnAmerican Activities Committee from 1957, and the Patriot and
Homeland Security Acts of today. All of these legal mechanisms, he
shows, have been structured to silence alternative thoughts and voices
in the public sphere. When to be merely unAmerican brings life ruin to
U.S. citizens and designation as “the enemy” can justify the
saturation bombing of weaker societies, the derangement becomes clear
amidst a sustained train of such abuses over generations.

When these systematic attacks simultaneously annihilate life-serving
advocacy and institutions at home and elsewhere, a more sinister and
unidentified pattern emerges. Not only non-conforming speech and
thought are repressed, but standing up for other people’s lives and
life means becomes criminalized. An invisible war is waged on social
conscience and defence of life itself.  Indeed this is the
unrecognized selector of what the U.S. police state invariably attacks
inside and outside its borders – social movements and orders to enable
the lives of citizens opposed to transnational private money
sequencing to more. Consider here for immediate example what the
police protected in New York in the Wall Street protests until world
attention no longer allowed the savage beating to continue with the
dominant media cheering it on. Government armed force did not protect
the lives of citizens or their cause of life justice or real market
businesses on the street. Armed protective attention was directed
instead to Wall Street operations by barricades, long swinging
truncheons, continuous special vehicles of service to the money-men,
and moving lines of trap and assault of the citizens standing for “the
99%”. In the wider world, the  seven-month U.S.-NATO bombing of Libya–
not to defend citizens as pretended, but to bomb main cities and
government capacities, seize control of the country’s wealthy
financial assets and sub-soil oil fields – went on with hardly a voice
of dissent. That it destroyed Libya’s social state of  free
healthcare, higher education and guaranteed subsistence in food,
housing and fuel was never reported even by public broadcasters.

The U.S. state is in these ways structured not only towards total
force and control. It is, more deeply, programmed to liquidate what
serves the lives of people so as to grow transnational corporate
profit for the few. Always however, there is a pretext of a demonic
enemy that people are being protected from – “communism”,
“subversives”, “Islamic militants”, “terrorists”,
“violence-threatening protestors”, all with no criteria. Most warred
upon by the U.S. state are societies’ social life support systems –
including public water, electricity, health and living subsidies.
Consider here the bombed former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya - not to
mention trillions of dollars of defunding of U.S. social security
itself to pay for private bank bailouts by public dollars. This is the
deeper shadow side of the U.S. state and its global allies.

On the other hand, the non-police state dimension of America - the
relative but important freedom of people to say what they want in
private – is an anomaly not engaged by this text. The strength of its
analysis is its encyclopaedic report of the U.S. record through
successive repressive laws, witchhunts and official policies, from
cancelling the passports and rights of alleged communists to run for
office to ever more “outlawing of dissident thought. For Kolin, this
propulsion towards “absolute control” where citizen security is
usurped not protected is a silent telos of the police state. Some of
the revelations are hair-raising (although published errors like
“Senglarb” for “Singlaub” and “Chili” for “Chile” do not assist
disclosure of what most are reluctant to face). President Ronald
Reagan  supported  El Salvador’s death-squad leaders, remained
complicitly silent in the murder of Archbishop Romero and Jesuit
priests calling for social justice, and backed Guatemala’s
bible-fundamentalist Rioss Montt who mass-murdered Mayan peasant
villagers in the tens of thousands , saying “beans for the obedient;
bullets for the rest”(p. 117). His administration also secretly funded
war crimes against Nicaragua by drug sales into the U.S. and arms to
Iran, repudiated guilt and damages awarded by the World Court, and
mounted endless attacks on “any individual or organization that voiced
discontent toward the military or government”, including a 1992 CIA
training manual for torture, false imprisonment and extortion
including of Americans. Effective impunity - the primary marker of a
police state – ruled. The Bush Jr. presidency then outdid Reagan in
criminal impunity, war crimes and direction of mass murder, while the
Obama presidency sustained all the mechanisms, added a third war and
further stripped the social security system.

Command over ever more external territory and peoples is always the
direction. Permanent war is the omnibus vehicle of its advance, and
mass mind control including by torture is a standard method, along now
with serial murders across borders by drones. While seldom penetrating
these generic principles of the global police state, Kolin follows the
specifica of the inside workings of the legal-bureaucratic machine
through many phases, acronyms and abhorrence of real democracy built
into policies and laws. One better knows why the U.S.  becomes a
failed state when one sees the absolutist overriding of every attempt
to bring it back into line with life-respecting values during the last
half century. The Fulbright and Church Committees, the mass
progressive movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, all come to nought until
post-9-11 laws, terror and surveillance make the police state a formal
affair, and what is not mentioned here, Congress increasingly
degenerates into the best frontmen the banking, oil, weapons,
med-insurance and pharma corporations can buy. The apogee of police
state method follows - military tribunals in place of due process to
deal with endless arrests for an open-ended charge of terrorism
against people in their own countries, systematic rendition and
torture against international laws, abolition of habeus corpus and all
procedures protecting against false charge, simultaneous denial of
legal standing as prisoners of war, and evidence kept secret without
possibility of disproof. The legal limbo of the Guatanomo prison has
helped to permit evasion of any accountability to the rule of law.
After promising to eliminate it, President Obama did not.

If one ignores the blinkering out of the private transnational
corporate-financial system behind ever  more people and territory for
natural resource, market, labor, and strategic exploitation without
limit, the book is a treasure-trove of the U.S. state-machinery for
undemocratic world rule. The despotic compulsion to intimidate,
control and terrorize innocent and conscientious citizens across the
world including within the U.S. is hard to deny in face of such
organized evidence. Just about every horror story one has heard of
U.S. state rule finds a reference here. Even Franklin Roosevelt
(internment of Japanese citizens) and Robert Kennedy (greenlights to
FBI spying and bugging without cause, including of M.L. King) are
flagged. As for Bill Clinton, he led genocide of Iraqi’s social state,
attack on social security at home, and refused to ratify the
International War Crimes Court.

“Abstract wording” of laws against “terrorism” from the 1960’s on is
the means whereby progressive non-violent organizations and people
have been  criminalized for standing against mass-murderous U.S. state
policies from Latin America to the Middle East to Indonesia to
Vietnam. “Empire rolling back democracy” is the stated theme across
decades and continents, but it might be more disquietingly understood
as an ecogenocidal program of money-party rule across borders. People
are replaced, but the mechanism rules on. With the presidential brand
change of Obama, for example, no law, directive and policy of
disemployment, union-busting, social security elimination, or foreign
war was stopped, whatever the promises to do so. All have in fact
increased, including by new bombing of a defenceless oil country.
Least of all is the Wall Street license to print debt-money and siphon
trillions of dollars more of taxpayers’ money reversed. Rather
taxpayers at home and abroad are increasingly ruined to pay for the
bankers’ fraud while ever more lose their homes, jobs, social security
supports, and futures of their children.

Yet the economic level of the U.S. police state remains in the
shadows.  From the start, the founding of the U.S. was on the basis of
protecting private wealth and its accumulation with no common life
interest defined. It allowed the limitless seizure of Indian people’s
lands and territories West of the Appalachians which George III had
forbidden, and extended the unregulated rights of the private money
power so fast and far that Thomas Jefferson himself warned that
“banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than
standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that
has set the government at defiance. The [money and credit] issuing
power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to
whom it belongs”. Over 230 years later, the problem is clearer as U.S.
state rule by force and dictate becomes a visible dead-end. But as to
whether the Wall-Street money power behind the state that predates the
world is brought under control is a question not posed in this study.
So far the first step solution of public-bank utilities and non-profit
loans to government has been silenced wherever it is raised.

_______________________________________________________________




Best

A. Mani



-- 
A. Mani
CU, ASL, CLC,  AMS, CMS
http://www.logicamani.co.cc