excerpts from the book
America Besieged
by Michael Parenti
City Lights Books
THE NATIONAL INSECURITY STATE
Within the government there exists what
some hay: called "the national security state." It consists
of the president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the National
Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous intelligence
agencies. The national security state often operates like an unaccountable
sovereign power of its own. Its primary function is to defeat
political forces that seek alternatives to capitalism at home
or abroad or that try to introduce any seriously reformist economic
policies, even within the existing capitalist framework.
***
U.S. intelligence agencies have perpetrated
terrible crimes against the peoples of other nations. In countries
like Guatemala, Greece, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Argentina, Zaire,
Haiti, and the Philippines, U.S. national security forces have
used military intervention, terror, sabotage, bribery, propaganda,
and political disruption to bring down populist or democratically
elected governments and install regimes that better suited the
needs of global investors, including reactionary dictatorships
of the worst sort.
Countries that embarked upon popular revolutions,
such as Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Angola, found their economies
and peoples devastated by the mass-murder assaults of U.S.-supported
mercenary armies. The CIA has sabotaged and stolen elections abroad,
waged massive disinformation campaigns, and infiltrated and fractured
the trade-union movements of other nations. It has funded and
trained secret armies, paramilitary forces, torture squads, and
death squads, and pursued destabilization and assassination campaigns
against labor, peasant, religious, and student organizations in
numerous nations. Jesse Leaf, an ex-CIA agent active in Iran,
reported that CIA operatives instructed the Shah's secret police
on interrogation "based on German torture techniques from
World War II" and that the torture project was "all
paid for by the USA" (New York Times, Jan. 7, 1979).
***
WE MUST FIGHT CITY HALL
Who are the privileged and powerful ?
Those who own the banks, corporations, factories, mines, news
and entertainment industries, and agribusiness firms of this country
are what is meant by the "owning class" or the "rich."
The "ruling elites" or "ruling class" are
the politically active portion of the owning class. They and their
faithful acolytes and scribes compose the Business Roundtable,
the Business Council, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council
on Foreign Relations, organizations started by the Rockefellers,
Mellons, Morgans, and other economic royalists. From their ranks
are recruited the secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury,
national security advisors and CIA directors, and, indeed, U.S.
senators, presidents, and vice presidents. For the very top positions
of state, the ruling class is largely self-recruiting.
***
It is often frustrating and sometimes
dangerous to challenge those who own and control the land, labor,
capital, and technology of society. But, in the long run, it is
even more dangerous not to do so.
***
Popular passivity is the goal of all rulers
who seek to preserve their entrenched privileges against the claims
of the public. It is what they usually mean by "stability"
and "order." The real name of their system is plutocracy,
rule by the wealthy few, the very opposite of democracy. In the
interest of liberty and social justice, it should be hated and
fought, resisted and replaced with a system of ... rigorous democratic
protections for public and private well-being
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