I Am A Chomskian Left Libertarian; Get Over It.

Noam Chomsky’s recent book “Failed States” is about the many ways in which the U.S. falls into that category—while reserving for itself the authority to name other states as “failed” and to intervene in their domestic affairs in order to keep their “failures” from spreading.

Noam points out that we have moved beyond the mere hypocrisy of a “double-standard” to the hyper-hypocrisy of a single standard: “our way” as defined by powerful elites, or “the highway.” The highway is the ever-present military option.

The militarism that pervades our society is no longer regarded as problematic (recall Eisenhower’s coining of the term “military-industrial-complex”); in fact, it isn’t even regarded at all. And that’s exactly the way the boys in the Pentagon like it. They would prefer that we stay tuned to professional sporting extravaganzas and “American Idol” and let them quietly massacre the Afghan women and children that we claim to be liberating. Whenever anyone questions the outcomes of their nefarious activities, they chant “Al-Qaeda”—allegedly a global shadow-network of religion-mad evil-doers and freedom-haters bent upon our destruction (when, in fact, it is largely the brand-name that the CIA concocted to apply to the DISORGANIZED perpetrators of occasional crimes against the United States’ self-proclaimed “interests” around the world).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the CIA and Pentagon felt compelled to justify their outrageously disproportionate claim upon U.S. tax revenues. Remember the so-called “peace-dividend” that was bandied about during the Clinton Administration? If the American people had ever gotten a taste of that, the military-industrial-complex would have hit hard times.

These days, I don’t just read Chomsky. The "Annals" of Tacitus are never far from my hands. In Book 2, Tacitus recounts the wiles of a certain slave by the name of Clemons who, after the murder of his master, Postumus Agrippa, attempted to pass himself off as the latter. “In age and figure he was not unlike his master,” Tacitus explains. So he spread the rumor that Agrippa was alive and then went about in disguise, keeping a low profile, for “he knew that truth gains strength by notoriety and time, falsehood by precipitancy and vagueness.”

This is the genius of the so-called “war on terror”: by definition, there can be no enemy who can be exposed by notoriety and time. Precipitancy and vagueness are therefore the order of the day. No democratic process is permitted to penetrate the veil of secrecy with which the “war on terror” is conducted. National security is at stake. We wouldn’t want another 9/11, now would we?

Because the American people have been cowed by the rumored threat of the "Green Menace" (the new color-code for the now outdated "Red Menace" that paved the way for the present dominance of the military-industrial complex), Clemons rules our country; his former master, the democratic prerogatives of the American people, lies murdered by his slave.

Resist. Refuse. Renounce.