Ever since the conversion of the U.S. government to a national security state after World War II, the coin of the realm has been crisis and fear. Seize on crises — and sometimes even instigate them — and then when fear strikes the hearts and minds of the citizenry, that’s when it’s time for the national security establishment, specifically the military, the CIA, and the NSA, to seize more power and more money, in the name, of course, of keeping people “safe.”
None of this is new. It’s one of the biggest big-government rackets in history. And U.S. officials are not the only ones to employ it. So do other governments that are also national-security states, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea. Every government that is a national security state understands the importance of crises and keeping people agitated and afraid as a way of maintaining and expanding power.
According to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times today entitled “Fearmongering at Homeland Security,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, a former U.S. Marine general, is now, not surprisingly, engaging in this racket. He told an audience at George Washington University, “Make no mistake. We are in fact a nation under attack.”
He was apparently referring to “the terrorists,” (and maybe the Muslims), the illegal immigrants, and the drug dealers.
What he didn’t say, needless to say, is that the reason that “the terrorists” wish to do the United States harm is because of what the U.S. national-security establishment is doing — and has been doing for more than 25 years: killing, maiming, destroying, torturing, abusing, humiliating, and terrorizing people in the Middle East.
All that mayhem produces what the noted writer Chalmers Johnson called “blowback.” When a powerful foreign power unleashes death and destruction on poor, Third World countries, there is a big possibility of retaliation in the form of terrorist attacks. U.S. foreign interventionism is why America is under an ongoing, never-ending threat of terrorism. I call it the greatest terrorist producing racket in history.
