Comments on: U.S. Needs Hit Squads, ‘Manhunting Agency’

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:16:08 +0000

I just remembered the old Tom Clany book, Clear and Present Danger. It laid out this exact death squad scenario re: “drug war.” Published 1990.

It was a decent book, assuming the reader knows nothing about U.S. intelligence connections to narcotics trafficking.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:01:39 +0000

@anothernut

I can think of a couple core titles that I’d recommend to everyone:

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer

and

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Additionally, an academic treatment I was required to read in college was called People, States, and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era by Barry Buzan.

You’re right about thinking that it’s a “natural course of events.” The cycle happens over and over again. To grossly oversimplify: As socio political cohesion breaks down, states come to view internal threats (the people) as their primary concern.

Mayer mentions this growing divide between the government and the people:

“…they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

Finally, the most depressing of them all, in my opinion:

Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm

By: anothernut

anothernut — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:49:21 +0000

Kevin, can you recommend a good book (or website) that analyzes how societies that seek every greater “security” through control (as opposed to peace, openness, justice, etc) eventually implode? Seems like a natural course of events, and I’d love to read more about the dynamics of it. You know, like reading the cliff notes for contemporary America.

By: ltcolonelnemo

ltcolonelnemo — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:24:43 +0000

Ah, but the post-9/11 period in U.S. History engages in the “revelation of the method.” That’s why so many TV shows have, to use a general all-encompassing term, “political operatives” as their protagonists. We, the citizens, are now being let in on the “secret” through the media channels.

Of course, a large number of Americans don’t care enough about where the loot comes from. They would rather partake in the sublimated warfare of never-ending, televised, sporting events.

Anyone who cares to know, and these people are always in the minority, or employed by the government and its contractors, has known that the historically, the U.S. has regularly organized acts across the entire spectrum of violence to accomplish its ends, just like every other nation state that preceded it.