This isn't the first democracy to destroy itself with the machinery of democracy. It's happened again and again. Most notably in Italy, Japan, and Germany, but countless smaller democracies have experienced just what we are facing now. The difference here being that this particular collapse into the nightmare of unregulated cronyism and fathomless cruelty, legalized graft and enshrined corruption happens under the shadow of climate change. We were already facing a dire prognosis. There was a faint hope that we could begin to prepare for that reality. No more.
There are many layers of grim irony contained in these events, starting with this one: Even including the litany of democracies that the Americans and Soviets and their proxies destroyed throughout South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East since 1946, there are no greater drivers of mass migration than climate change and political dictatorships.
Layered on to this irony is another, even darker one: Nothing drives xenophobia more than immigrants. It has always been thus. In 1845, Ireland was ravaged by a plant disease. The resulting famine killed a million people in six years and caused another million to flee their country. Most moved to the United States. Spend some time in newspaper stacks, reading what people had to say about the Irish immigrants fleeing the famine to New York in the years leading up to the Civil War and beyond.. "NO DOGS OR IRISH," the signs on the taverns read.
Now the Irish-Americans are among the American elites, and they have forgotten their own history, and have joined the xenophobes who once scorned them.
I think I first began to understand the magnitude of the atavistic rage within us on the US invasion of Grenada shortly after Reagan's election. I was in an Irish pub in Santa Monica eating lunch when the news of our military triumph over such a vast and terrifying enemy as the Grenadans was announced. The whole place erupted in cheers at our victory, as if we had just vanquished cancer. I felt very alone that day.
Ronald Reagan was a familiar figure to me—as governor of California he had presided over two big events in my family: the evisceration of the public education system, including UCLA, where my father worked. The other was the closing of mental hospitals. My mother was working as a clinical psychologist at the time, working with "mentally disordered sex offenders." She told me, shocked and crying, that the hospitals had been emptied, their patients, mostly veterans, dumped on the streets in downtown LA. This was the beginning of the explosion of homelessness in California.
Reagan's campaign manager, Bill Casey, was also familiar to me. Bill Casey was a member of the OSS, the WWII precursor to the CIA, though the two agencies could not have been more different. Though run by relatively conservative Irish Catholics, the OSS was a wild, free-ranging agency, packed with poets, dreamers, acrobats, throat-slitters, and bombers from every nation. Bill Casey, like his protector and mentor, Allen Dulles, despised democracy. He believed that FDR's New Deal was Bolshevism, aka Satanic. He believed that institutions like Congress and the judicial system just got in the way of the real business of America, business, and that to be successful, intelligence agencies needed to work unsupervised and utterly beyond the law.
As a top US intelligence operative during WWII and the Cold War, Casey had worked on or presided over many coups around the world:
1951: Mohammad Mossadegh, a writer and attorney in Iran, was elected Prime Minister on a platform of booting out the oil companies who had virtually enslaved the entire nation. CIA teams moved in, quickly destabilized the country with sabotage teams, propagandists, targeted assassinations and the like, then engineered a successful coup. Mossadegh, like Victor Navalny was imprisoned until his death in 1967. The chaos that resulted from this coup was dealt with by a notoriously brutal domestic intelligence service called the SAVAK, trained and supplied by Britain's MI6 and our CIA. The brutalities and excesses of the SAVAK led to the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s and is the root of much our current MiddleEast predicament.
1960: The Republic of the Congo. Patrice Lumumba, an Enlightenment scholar and poet was elected Prime Minister after gaining independence from Belgium. Immediately on his election, Belgian business interests supported by the US began a campaign of sabotage and destabilization. Lumumba appealed the US and UN to no avail. So, he reached out to the Soviets for help. Lumumba was killed and replaced with a CIA asset named Joseph Mobutu. As in Iran, a vicious domestic secret police force was established. This one was called the Special Intelligence Brigade, staffed entirely by cronies and relatives of Mobutu, and trained by the Israelis. Mobutu's Brigade was as bad as the SAVAK.
The list is nearly endless--we could talk about China, Japan, Mexico, Salvador, Honduras, Vietnam, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Panama... it goes on and on.
One lesson persists through all of these tragedies: Fascists, dictators of any kind, are, in the end, lousy civic administrators. Every country they rule ends in utter ruin. Cronyism, corruption explode, unchallenged by law. Incompetence reigns ini these regimes, because responsible management and unrestrained graft are incompatible.
A political scientist named Chalmers Johnson warned us about these sorts of coups, and he knew well of what he spoke. He was the founder of the China Studies department at Cal, co-founded the Japan Policy Research Institute at UC San Diego, and consulted with the CIA in Vietnam from 1967-73. He had started out as a true believer in the logic behind American anti-communism. But as time went on he began to change. As the end of his life approached, he wrote a trilogy of books: Nemesis, The Sorrow of Empire, and Blowback, and the three books constitute a profound and forensic warning, and the world largely ignored him.
In discussions regarding Blowback, he said:
“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”
Blowback is an often-misunderstood term in intelligence operations. It is commonly thought of in the sense of things like 9/11, in which US-trained and equipped Saudi insurgencies turned their newly acquired expertise and confidence against their former trainers and suppliers. But there is another aspect to blowback, and that is that secret operations on the scale that the US has engaged in over the years inevitably produce a large contingent of experts--in subversion, destabilization, propaganda, sabotage, and etc, and sooner or later, they will consider doing those same actions within US borders.
I mentioned earlier Bill Casey, and his dream of a completely privatized intelligence/action capacity, and he got his wish with the publication of the Church Commission Report of 1975, and the subsequent firing of over a thousand of these clandestine operators, including Mr. Casey.
Casey was recruited by Reagan's people to run his political campaign. And he brought the lessons he'd learned in the Congo, in Iran, in many, many other places to this new job. He recruited these fired operatives, and they made up the hard core of his team. Many of them started PACs, lobby shops, political consultancy firms that are now considered giants in their field, still humming along, in the US and elsewhere, subverting democracy wherever they go.
Casey was not the root of the problem, he was a branch. He was far from being a singular personality, he could have easily been replaced by any number of similar operatives. But it was Casey who got the job. He died rather suddenly not long before he was due to appear before Congress to explain how Iran/Contra and US support of anti-communist death squads in El Salvador led to the CIA's importation of vast amounts of crack cocaine into Los Angeles.
Reagan's presidency was a disaster, of course. A false prosperity ginned up with credit and the gutting of banking, environmental, and other regulations, union-busting in the interest of 'efficiency,' the support of groups like the Constitutional Sheriffs, a nakedly fascist organization ruled by cronyism, corruption, and violence. One type of union was supported: the Police unions, and they were continue their favored status, staffed though they are by gangsters with badges. But the Pats of the world and the millions like him, the deluded trolls who "do their own research" by gobbling up and parroting Bulgarian and FSB propaganda shops? They don't see this history. They are looking into a fake mirror. They do not see themselves in it. They see an idealized, air-brushed lie, buttressed by think tanks and Hollywood movies and sitcoms. And they are impenetrable. It feels too good for them to believe it, and like a drug addict, seek ever-more bracing atrocities. I don't hate you, Pat. You're contemptible in almost every way, but you're just another one of those guys--a dupe, a disposable follower. You've been had. And you'll burn with the rest of us.
Our civilization received a death sentence last week. In the midst of the most serious threat humanity has faced in its existence, climate change, the largest and most powerful country on earth became a cronyist, kleptocratic dictatorship. And for those of you who think fascism is a meaningless word, you will learn that that is not the case.
As the quote goes, "modelled after Rome, settled via genocide, and built by slavery, what could go wrong?"
