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Friday, 11 November 2011, 4:51 pm Opinion: Prof. John McMurtry

The US is a Police StateReview of AndrewKolin, State Power and Democracy

by Prof. John McMurtryNovember 9,2011

Global Research Editor’sNote

This article by Professor McMurtry had beencommissioned by an academic journal called new Politics.

Upon receiving Professor McMurtry’s text, the editorialboard decided to reject it: “We are sorry to inform youthat the Editorial Board finds itinappropriate”.

Review of Andrew Kolin, State Powerand Democracy (2011), new York: St. Martin’sPress/Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp.

Many readers mayhave thought the U.S. is “like a police state” – - thinkof the security dress down of everyone boarding a flightwithin the U.S. sphere of control. Political scientistAndrew Kolin goes far beyond hasty analogue. he argues withrich factual substantiation that the U.S is a police stateall the way down – not only since the stolen elections andwar state of George Bush Jr., but before and since in acumulative throughline of bureaucratized despotism acrossborders.

Documented examples are reported in detail from1950 on to disclose a record that is as systematic insuppressing public dissent as its client dictatorshipselsewhere – albeit far more successfully kept out ofpublic and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contestsof, by and for the rich in America are proclaimed as “theleader of the Free World” in the ad-vehicle media manystill watch and read, an example helps to clarify thereality not reported. when three nuns protested before thewar-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime wasleft undone, “they were arrested, handcuffed, left on theground for three hours and then jailed for seven monthsbefore trial – - [for] sabotage and obstruction ofjustice” (p. 153).

Every step of their policerepression was within the laws that had been concoctedbefore and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions of“the Patriot Act” – with here as elsewhere thelegislative title as integral to the Orwellian language ofrule. the symbolic action of the nuns – painting blood on amissile silo – was in fact backed by international lawagainst the “supreme crime” of non-defensive armedinvasion of another country. indeed their protest occurredjust before the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad whichended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.But mass-murderous facts, citizen responsibility, moralcourage and peaceful expression of the law of nations do notdetain U.S. legal machinery. it is this legalmachinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case thatthe U.S. is a police state.

What is a police state? Kolinstates no criterion, but it can be deduced as unlimitedstate power of armed force freely discharged without citizenright to stop it. anyone who has lived in the U.S. orits client dictatorships may recognize the concretephenomena, but what is featured in this account are the lawsand directives which empower the police state norms. Whilethe men at the top always proclaim their devotion to thedefence of freedom as armed force assaults on domesticdissent and dissident countries increase, none have beenfound guilty of breaking the law or repressing freedom ofspeech or assembly. it is U.S. laws and policies which formthe U.S. police state, the argument is, and they arecontinuously made to enable an endless litany of crimesagainst human life.

The sustaining concern of this work,however, is not to define ordering principles, but to trackthe bureaucratic trails of legally terrorist offices,directives, and channels. the result is a detailed historyof the inner workings of the U.S. state which exposes thelegal suppression of democratic speech and action (omittingthe use of laws against harmless non-pharmaceuticals aslettres de cachet to imprison the poor and therebellious by the millions). Beneath continuouscorporate-state and media proclamation of America’sfreedoms and simultaneous academic fear to expose the linesof despotism, this work largely succeeds in providing theprocedural workings of the U.S. police state building bothbefore, and dramatically after, the turning point of 9-11.

The manufacture of pretext imprinted in the very timingand naming of the high-tech destruction of the World TradeCenter as “9-11”, and the fact that the Bush Jr.presidency needed a war or two to distract from itsillegitimacy and to empower its program of “full spectrumdominance” are not, however, raised in this book.they remain unspeakable facts within the official conspiracytheory now normalized as fact. yet this canonical theory ofthe 9-11 tragedy assumes the collapse of the fireproofsteel-cored buildings into their footsteps near the thespeed of gravity – an impossibility within the laws ofphysics – and the first legal question of any homicidalcrime – cui bono, who benefits?- is erased from itsrecord. So although this official story allowed all thepost-9-11 police state legislation and unlimited powersKolin focuses on, he avoids the pretext itself.

Criticalattention is instead confined to the silencing of questions,alternatives and dissent by the legal machinery ofrepression justified by it. Such “institutionalanalysis” is favoured by America’s lead critics, andpositivist social science rules out what is not socorroborated. the clear exception to this methodologicalsilencing here is attachment of the descriptor “policestate” to the U.S., and the legally well informed recordof demonstration. the maze-like bureaucratization ofoperations of repression is not ultimately covert, Kolinshows, but sanctified by official policies and laws.

Kolin’s attention to dated laws, directives, offices,and machinations behind the spotlight and personalization ofpolitics is a welcome re-grounding amidst the daily mediakaleidoscope of ever-changing images and personalities. Incontrast to the usual academic fear of ideologicalnon-conformity, Kolin clearly summarizes at the outset:“In the latter part of the twentieth century, when massmovements for all intents and purposes were eliminated, whatremained was for the most part was procedural democracy,which in a short period, would also be eliminated, to bereplaced by a form of absolute power in which government hadbeen made into a permanent police state. much of this tookplace after the attacks of 9-11, during which theadministration of George Bush in a very short time, was ableto put in place many of the essential features of what isnow an American police state” (p.2).

U.S. PoliceState in Formation from the Revolution through Reagan toBush-Obama

Kolin goes back to the U.S. state’sfoundation to find the dictatorial impulse. “the truth ofthe matter”, he says, “is that after the AmericanRevolution there was thinking among economic and democraticelites that America had become too democratic, especially asmass democracy was expressing itself on the statelevel”(p. 3) – a view better known since aRockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission Report made itfamous centuries later. the Founding Fathers’anti-democratic politics have been explored before byMichael Parenti, who blurbs for the book. for Kolin, it is“mass democracy” that frightens the dominant ownershipclass from the start because it threatens their rulingproprietary control. But this economic diagnosis is notpursued by Kolin. he conceives the motor force as “controlover people and territory by the state in itself.This non-Marxian thesis is historically associated withtheoretical anarchism, but is here conjoined to the idea of“mass democracy”, a motivating idea behind this workwhich is not given further definition.

Yet we may surmisethat mass democracy entails popular assemblies – thetraditional “town hall meeting” of classical Americandemocracy – in place of representation by professionalpoliticians controlled by corporate and financial lobbies.the meta-argument is that the nature of the U.S. stateitself is disposed towards power after power “over peopleand territory” and is thus structured against massdemocracy from the beginning. it is implied that massdemocracy could not itself lead to a police state. Thisimplied argument is not secure.

Desires of popular massescan be as overwhelmingly compelled to control people’sthought, action and dissent by force as state elites are,and they can be as driven to seize the territories of otherpeople and to lord it over them via great majorities – asin the popular witch-hunts through American history and as,more broadly, age-old ethnic warfare and killing andenslavement of losing societies. Something deeper than thewill of the demos to which it is accountable isrequired – rules to live by which protect and enable lifeitself. This may be the most fundamental gap in democratictheory.

Annihilating Not only Democracy, But CountlessLives and Life Supports

for perhaps the majority inthe U.S., loathing of government is a national pastimeexcept for “our men in uniform” – that is, arms-ladenAmerican enforcers chasing, shooting and bombing designatedenemies of America at home and abroad. Wars seem in factvery popular with the majority if they are not being lost,and public pillories and prisons for deviators from theAmerican Way seldom lack similar support. Police state laws,the invasion of Iraq and so on seem to have been popular ifthey are successful. yet Kolin’s work is more concerned toexpose the state which is represented as the world leader indemocracy while it rules by armed force, secrecy and terrorand – especially since 9-11 – violently suppresses dissentin its own society. the inside mechanisms oflegalist-bureaucratic rule not discussed or connected in thedominant media or political science are uniquely laid bare.There were many designated “enemies” from the beginning– from American Indians and genocidal laws against them tothe FBI, Sedition, Alien and Espionage Acts of 1917-18, theCIA founding in 1947, followed by the Internal Security Actof 1950, McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committeefrom 1957, and the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts oftoday. all of these legal mechanisms, he shows, have beenstructured to silence alternative thoughts and voices in thepublic sphere. when to be merely unAmerican bringslife ruin to U.S. citizens and designation as “theenemy” can justify the saturation bombing of weakersocieties, the derangement becomes clear amidst a sustainedtrain of such abuses over generations.

When thesesystematic attacks simultaneously annihilate life-servingadvocacy and institutions at home and elsewhere, a moresinister and unidentified pattern emerges. Not onlynon-conforming speech and thought are repressed, butstanding up for other people’s lives and life meansbecomes criminalized. An invisible war is waged on socialconscience and defence of life itself. indeed this is theunrecognized selector of what the U.S. police stateinvariably attacks inside and outside its borders – socialmovements and orders to enable the lives of citizens opposedto transnational private money sequencing to more.Consider here for immediate example what the policeprotected in new York in the Wall Street protests untilworld attention no longer allowed the savage beating tocontinue with the dominant media cheering it on. Governmentarmed force did not protect the lives of citizens ortheir cause of life justice or real market businesses on thestreet. Armed protective attention was directed instead toWall Street operations by barricades, long swingingtruncheons, continuous special vehicles of service to themoney-men, and moving lines of trap and assault of thecitizens standing for “the 99%”. In the wider world, theseven-month U.S.-NATO bombing of Libya– not to defendcitizens as pretended, but to bomb main cities andgovernment capacities, seize control of the country’swealthy financial assets and sub-soil oil fields – went onwith hardly a voice of dissent. that it destroyed Libya’ssocial state of free healthcare, higher education andguaranteed subsistence in food, housing and fuel was neverreported even by public broadcasters.

The U.S. state isin these ways structured not only towards total force andcontrol. it is, more deeply, programmed to liquidate whatserves the lives of people so as to grow transnationalcorporate profit for the few. Always however, there is apretext of a demonic enemy that people are being protectedfrom – “communism”, “subversives”, “Islamicmilitants”, “terrorists”, “violence-threateningprotestors”, all with no criteria. most warred upon by theU.S. state are societies’ social life support systems –including public water, electricity, health and livingsubsidies. Consider here the bombed former Yugoslavia, Iraqand Libya – not to mention trillions of dollars of defundingof U.S. social security itself to pay for private bankbailouts by public dollars. This is the deeper shadow sideof the U.S. state and its global allies.

On the otherhand, the non-police state dimension of America – therelative but important freedom of people to say what theywant in private – is an anomaly not engaged by this text.the strength of its analysis is its encyclopaedic report ofthe U.S. record through successive repressive laws,witchhunts and official policies, from cancelling thepassports and rights of alleged communists to run for officeto ever more “outlawing of dissident thought. for Kolin,this propulsion towards “absolute control” where citizensecurity is usurped not protected is a silent telosof the police state. Some of the revelations arehair-raising (although published errors like “Senglarb”for “Singlaub” and “Chili” for “Chile” do notassist disclosure of what most are reluctant to face).President Ronald Reagan supported El Salvador’sdeath-squad leaders, remained complicitly silent in themurder of Archbishop Romero and Jesuit priests calling forsocial justice, and backed Guatemala’sbible-fundamentalist Rioss Montt who mass-murdered Mayanpeasant villagers in the tens of thousands , saying “beansfor the obedient; bullets for the rest”(p. 117). Hisadministration also secretly funded war crimes againstNicaragua by drug sales into the U.S. and arms to Iran,repudiated guilt and damages awarded by the World Court, andmounted endless attacks on “any individual or organizationthat voiced discontent toward the military or government”,including a 1992 CIA training manual for torture, falseimprisonment and extortion including of Americans. Effectiveimpunity – the primary marker of a police state – ruled.the Bush Jr. presidency then outdid Reagan in criminalimpunity, war crimes and direction of mass murder, while theObama presidency sustained all the mechanisms, added a thirdwar and further stripped the social security system.

Command over ever more external territory and peoples isalways the direction. Permanent war is the omnibus vehicleof its advance, and mass mind control including by tortureis a standard method, along now with serial murders acrossborders by drones. while seldom penetrating these genericprinciples of the global police state, Kolin follows thespecifica of the inside workings of thelegal-bureaucratic machine through many phases, acronyms andabhorrence of real democracy built into policies and laws.One better knows why the U.S. becomes a failed state whenone sees the absolutist overriding of every attempt to bringit back into line with life-respecting values during thelast half century. the Fulbright and Church Committees, themass progressive movements of the 1960’s and 70’s, allcome to nought until post-9-11 laws, terror and surveillancemake the police state a formal affair, and what is notmentioned here, Congress increasingly degenerates into thebest frontmen the banking, oil, weapons, med-insurance andpharma corporations can buy. the apogee of police statemethod follows – military tribunals in place of due processto deal with endless arrests for an open-ended charge ofterrorism against people in their own countries, systematicrendition and torture against international laws, abolitionof habeus corpus and all procedures protecting against falsecharge, simultaneous denial of legal standing as prisonersof war, and evidence kept secret without possibility ofdisproof. the legal limbo of the Guatanomo prison has helpedto 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 privatetransnational corporate-financial system behind ever morepeople and territory for natural resource, market, labor,and strategic exploitation without limit, the book is atreasure-trove of the U.S. state-machinery for undemocraticworld rule. the despotic compulsion to intimidate, controland terrorize innocent and conscientious citizens across theworld including within the U.S. is hard to deny in face ofsuch organized evidence. just about every horror story onehas heard of U.S. state rule finds a reference here. EvenFranklin Roosevelt (internment of Japanese citizens) andRobert Kennedy (greenlights to FBI spying and buggingwithout cause, including of M.L. King) are flagged. as forBill Clinton, he led genocide of Iraqi’s social state,attack on social security at home, and refused to ratify theInternational War Crimes Court.

“Abstractwording” of laws against “terrorism” from the1960’s on is the means whereby progressive non-violentorganizations and people have been criminalized for standingagainst mass-murderous U.S. state policies from LatinAmerica to the Middle East to Indonesia to Vietnam.“Empire rolling back democracy” is the stated themeacross decades and continents, but it might be moredisquietingly understood as an ecogenocidal program ofmoney-party rule across borders. People are replaced, butthe mechanism rules on. with the presidential brand changeof Obama, for example, no law, directive and policy ofdisemployment, 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 adefenceless oil country. Least of all is the Wall Streetlicense to print debt-money and siphon trillions of dollarsmore of taxpayers’ money reversed. rather taxpayers athome and abroad are increasingly ruined to pay for thebankers’ 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 remainsin the shadows. from the start, the founding of the U.S. wason the basis of protecting private wealth and itsaccumulation with no common life interest defined. Itallowed the limitless seizure of Indian people’s lands andterritories West of the Appalachians which George III hadforbidden, and extended the unregulated rights of theprivate money power so fast and far that Thomas Jeffersonhimself warned that “banking institutions are moredangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Alreadythey have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set thegovernment at defiance. the [money and credit] issuing powershould be taken from the banks and restored to the people towhom it belongs”. Over 230 years later, the problem isclearer as U.S. state rule by force and dictate becomes avisible dead-end. But as to whether the Wall-Street moneypower behind the state that predates the world is broughtunder control is a question not posed in this study. So farthe first step solution of public-bank utilities andnon-profit loans to government has been silenced wherever itis raised.

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John McMurtry is a frequent contributor toGlobal Research. Global Research Articles by JohnMcMurtry

The US is a Police State