This week the heroic NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden accused the unctuous Senator Dianne Feinstein of hypocrisy for complaining about alleged CIA spying on U.S. senators while tolerating government spying on private citizens. Snowden described this as “the Merkel Effect.”
Yet ultimately all States rest on hypocrisy and myth.
From ancient Sumer to the present, all governments have been composed of elites. All states originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, exercise a monopoly of crime over their subjects through war and taxation, indoctrination and propaganda, and the conscription of resources and persons. All states or regimes are characterized by the brutal struggle for power in its diverse open and concealed forms by competing elites. The most significant political division to be observed in such internecine warfare is that between the rulers and the ruled, the “ins” and the “outs,” the elite and the non-elite.
The primary object of every government ruling elite is survival — masquerading under the rubric of “national security” — the jealous maintenance of its power, prestige, opulence and privilege against all potential rivals. All governments, no matter how ruthless and despotic (or seemingly benevolent and just), rest upon the “engineering of consent” of the gullible majority, largely by propaganda beamed at the populace by the rulers and their craven apologists in the complacent and compliant news media.
The rule of the elite is based on force or fraud. This force may be hidden or threatened, and the fraud sustained by a political formula, usually expressed as a generally accepted state religion, ideology, or series of myths. But it is the physical force of the gun that lay behind it all. And it is at your mind that every government gun is aimed.
9:46 pm on March 15, 2014
