by
Ajamu Baraka
The
ongoing political circus in the capital of the world’s most
powerful empire opens almost daily with a new act each day
showcasing an even more bizarre and more revealing display of the
internal rot of a culture and a political system in decline.
The day
before Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, the
Russia-gate drama took an unexpected and dangerous turn with the vote
by the House Intelligence Committee to release a now classified memo
that alleges that senior members of the Federal Bureau of
Investigations (FBI) may have misled the U.S. Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISA court) in order to secure a warrant to
engage in what Republicans assert is a politically motivated effort
that spied on the Trump campaign before he won the 2016 election and
attempted to undermine his presidency.
Right-wing
neoliberal Democrats who have engaged in a vigorous defense of the
intelligence agencies of the U.S. state are concerned about the
possible fallout with the public. They argue Republicans are
deliberately undermining confidence in U.S. institutions by
irresponsibly hurling allegations that support a growing public
perception that the government and the individuals who populate
governmental institutions are inherently corrupt.
Republicans
now refer to this as “FBI-gate” and Democrats counter by
appealing to the dubious belief that the FBI is some kind of neutral
political force populated by people of unreproachable character—those
who would never engage in the kind of crass partisanship being
alleged by Republicans in Congress.
Even
members of the Congressional Black Caucus–the one caucus that
traditionally has always been wary of the FBI because of its history
abuse against Black activists, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.–joined in the effort to prop up this institution and its
former director Robert Mueller.
This new
narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the
assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the
notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover
was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his
obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler,
Hitler’s Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and
kept on the FBI’s mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi
invasion of Poland in 1939.
As the
nation’s political police, the FBI has been at the center of
domestic repression and political manipulation for decades. From
Hoover’s early career working as special assistant to Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer, when Hoover was given the responsibility
to plan and execute the infamous “Palmer raids” in which
thousands were arrested in twenty-three states for “subversive
activities,” to his and the FBI’s role in the first McCarthy
period of repression in the 1950s through to the COINTELPRO program
against the anti-war, Black Liberation and Civil Rights movement. The
intelligence gathering, counter-insurgent role of the FBI has been
consistent.
When the
history and role of the FBI is objectively understood as a central
component of the repressive state apparatus, it is not farfetched to
accept the meaning of the August 2016 message Peter Strzock, the
director of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, sent to Lisa
Page, a high-level official with whom he was romantically involved.
In that message, it is clear that Strzock thought it prudent to
develop a strategy to undermine a Trump presidency, even when the
chance of Trump getting elected seem impossible to many.
Strzock
is quoted as texting to Page over a secure device: “I want to
believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s
office—that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected—but I’m
afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in
the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.”
This
quote reveals two things: (1) the thinking of individuals who hold
institutional power and are well versed in the exercise of
“extra-democratic” institutional power, or what some refer to as
the power of the Deep State; and (2) the specific rationale for
implementing what appears to have been a classic counter-intelligence
project to influence, manipulate and control a political process, in
this case the election for the presidency of the United States.
In
response to the information coming out about the memo and the
explosive allegations of governmental malfeasance, Rep. Adam Schiff,
ranking Democratic member of House Intelligence Committee made the
laughable statement that the vote to release the memo “politicize(s)
intelligence process.” Perhaps Schiff hoped that the public had
forgotten all of the instances of politicized intelligence from the
manufactured data supporting the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the
manufactured data about the existence of weapons of mass destruction
that justified the disastrous attack on Iraq.
But what
Schiff, as well as some Republicans, are concerned with is how the
public will process and respond to the existence of a massive,
coordinated effort to exercise unelected political power.
They are
concerned the extent of the coordination between the state and
elements of financial and corporate sectors exposes the hidden
reality of how real power is exercised in Washington and the
financial center in New York, the power behind the reach of the
atrophied mechanisms of democratic accountability and control.
Beyond
the Circus: Strengthening the Ideological and Political Mechanisms of
Domination
It’s
ironic, or perhaps just a reflection of the power of propaganda, that
it is now just becoming apparent that while the attention of the
people was mobilized and directed to fictitious external sources of
electoral interference by the Russians, the real culprits working to
undermine the limited democracy that does exist were always in the
United States and in plain sight.
They are
the ones who re-authorized extending FISA section 702 that allows the
state to collect communications from U.S. citizens and even tap into
communications databases of companies like Google to collect
information without a warrant. They supported inserting provisions of
the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” into
the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as one of Obama’s
last legislative acts. They were silent as the government prosecuted
whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, which justified expanded
National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance and called for the head
of former federal contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden.
They think it is a good idea for Facebook to establish “counter
speech” controls and for Google to adjust its algorithms to bury
alternative news sites and sources of “radical” analysis.
And
while Trump has been a useful idiot for the Deep State, it is
important to clearly identify the forces driving this process and
giving it political legitimacy–liberal Democrats!
Despite
the phony news of economic prosperity that came out of Trump’s
State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, the more insightful and
“responsible” members of the ruling elite recognize the explosive
potential of real opposition to the elite agenda and understand the
crisis of confidence in and legitimacy of the system will continue to
deepen.
The
recognition of that has resulted in ruling-class elements being
united in one very important area– “domestic national security.”
That is to say not the threat of “terror attacks” or other
physical threats, but the security that the ruling class is
attempting to acquire for itself by strengthening the repressive
state apparatus against the people. Using the gift of “Russia-gate”
given to it by the Democrats, the state in collaboration with the
capitalist communication sector has attempted to tighten its
ideological grip on the public by limiting the range of information
available to the public.
The
neo-liberal right has always understood much better than many
elements of the left what Cuba revolutionary Jose Marti meant when he
said that “trenches of ideas are more powerful than weapons.”
So,
while we are entertained by the theatrics of Trump and shudder with
horror after his latest antic, the real forces of totalitarianism are
working right under our noses, normalizing the capitalist
dictatorship in the name of upholding freedom.
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