Why America is a threat to the world

 

BY Salman Rafi Sheikh

 

In the past two decades (2001-2023) since the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people in New York, US wars, both direct and indirect, have caused more than 4 million deaths worldwide. Without mincing words, this is a deadly scenario, where Washington has relied on war as its preferred means of executing foreign policy. Its unabated support for Israel and its continuing supply of weapons to Ukraine are yet another reminder of Washington’s frequent reliance on direct and indirect wars to accomplish its goals. This scenario is unlikely to change regardless of which president occupies the White House. While Donald Trump was seen to be against US war in Afghanistan and made a pact with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw US forces, it was Donald Trump himself who initiated the ‘trade war’ on China, which Joe Biden has been following steadfastly since 2020.

In fact, Biden faithfully expanded the scope – and the lethality – of the ‘war’ on China. In 2023, the Biden administration made a new pact with the Philippines to build four new military bases in the country. There is only one objective: to encircle China. These four new bases are in addition to the five existing ones. The militaristic nature of the US ties with the Philippines is the hallmark of US foreign policy that threatens world peace more than anything else. In qualitative terms, the expansion of military bases in the Philippines is not different from the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include Ukraine and thus encircle Russia. This push led to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine – a conflict that is now metamorphosing into a proxy and “jihadi” war on Russia. The militarization of the Philippines could be a prelude to an actual conflict with China, where these bases could become launchpads for the US proxies to wage their “jihad” on China in the South China Sea and even beyond.

But it is not China alone that is the target. The US has more than 750 military bases around the world in more than 80 countries – a number that can singularly explain the US war machine’s ability to kill millions around the world. To continue to retain this deadly ability, the US has recently “upgraded” its security pact with Japan too. While the pact will be announced on the Japanese leaders’ visit to Washington on April 10, reports indicate a major overhaul to the presence and operation of the US forces in Japan. This would also include a new task force attached to the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. The fleet’s four-star commander would spend more time in Japan than at present, and would have an enhanced support structure in the country. Over time, the task force, which would include different parts of the US military, would shift to Japan, thus complementing Washington’s encirclement of China.

Besides increasing its presence, Washington is also supporting Japan’s own transformation from a post-Second World War pacifist country to a military power in the region. Japan has recently announced that it will start exporting modern, including fifth-generation, fighter jets. The purpose is to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in the global security.

Who is the buyer? Many potential buyers happen to be countries – India, Germany, Vietnam, Australia – that are, in one way or the other, already are or will eventually join a US-led grand coalition against China.

Why is Japan changing? The key reason is the changing security environment and Tokyo’s threat perception. It has come to see China as a major threat. But this perception has been built by a continuous US projection of China as a typical “revisionist state” bent upon destroying the global order. Since China is the aggressor – even though China, unlike the US, has not aggressively started any war in the region – it makes sense for Japan to bolster its security and tie itself more closely to the US and its NATO allies.

A lot of this is happening during the Biden administration. Will this pattern change if Trump wins? It is highly unlikely. In fact, Trump might have a counterproductive effect that might accelerate the process of militarisation. Trump is known to have indicated on more than one occasion that he will push allies to spend more on defence. This is the first step towards greater militarisation, pushing US allies, both NATO and non-NATO, to increase their defence budgets. This will directly accelerate an arms race, and it will also create tensions around geographical flashpoints such as the South and East of China where China, itself threatened by Japanese build-up, will be forced to take countermeasures.

Donald Trump will be in office for four years only, but these four years could change the world massively. If allies continue to build up militarily in these four years, this will lock their policies on a pattern of militarization that might become too hard for them to change even if a Democrat returns to the White House in 2029. Therefore, it will ultimately become meaningless for allies – and US rivals – as to who wins or loses the US presidential elections. As far as America is concerned, the legacy of its policy – which is almost singularly driven by the imperative of protecting, at any cost, US global dominance – will leave the world not only a lot more militarized but also more prone to conflict. The only silver lining is the possibility of the world becoming truly multipolar as a result of the US allies’ military build-ups and reduced dependence on the US military support against rivals. This might give them significant space to follow autonomous foreign policy. Will this happen or not remains to be seen.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/04/05/why-america-is-a-threat-to-the-world/

 

 

it's time for being earnest.....

BY PEPE ESCOBAR

 

The Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats tho’ unseen amongst us, -visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.-
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,-
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled,-
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.

Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.

A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.

After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t – no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.

Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation”).

Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the “leaders” of the Global North.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”

The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.

Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did – striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.

This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.

Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.

The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?

The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism

Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties, we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and hybrid neofascism.

As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.

Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All Euphemisms.

So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff University and tweak it a little further.

Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.

Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the biblical genocidals in West Asia.

The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.

1. The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
2. Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite “leaders” across the Global North and South.
3. The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to academia.

This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in fact, The Mechanism.

It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic” – complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” – into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.

That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective West.

Killing them softly with AI

A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector, now in thrall with AI.

Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI Genocide.

Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lugen: essentially, the need to produce weapons as Covid vaccines.

That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to “increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of von der Lugen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”

Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.

Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.

And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) syndrome.

Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism. Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza Genocide kind.

And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)

How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?

Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.unz.com/pescobar/the-mechanism-how-the-order-based-on-made-up-rules-is-descending-into-savagery/ READ FROM TOP. it's time for being earnest.....

 

The CIA and FBI Were Never “Heroes”

 

BY Kenny Cordasco

 

A REVIEW OF THE BOOK BY J MICHAEL WALLER

— Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains

 

 

Confronted with an incoherent assertion, an exasperated Bertrand Russell once sighed, “Statements of this kind, I must confess, leave me gasping, and I hardly know where to begin.”[1] I found myself repeatedly having the same thought while making my way through a delusional new book about the intelligence community.

Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains is a schizophrenic attempt to merge reactionary Cold War anti-communism with contemporary right-wing scaremongering over diversity in order to explain what has “gone wrong” with the FBI and CIA. The author, J. Michael Waller, appears to be a 21st century reincarnation of Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper, with a worldview indistinguishable from the ravings of a madman.

While difficult to summarize owing to its kaleidoscopic nature, Big Intel’s central premise goes something like this: Shortly after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks initiated an “active measures” campaign to subvert American political, cultural and educational institutions from within. As part of their plot, they created the Frankfurt School, whose adherents launched a campaign of “cultural Marxism” that penetrated American institutions and devoured them from the inside over the next hundred years. This scheme was so successful that it outlived the Soviet Union, continuing on autopilot after the Cold War and engulfing the formerly “heroic” CIA and FBI, converting them into bastions of the totalitarian ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Despite the sheer insanity of all this, Big Intelis more than a mere freakish curiosity. It is a reminder that the ghosts of frothing-at-the-mouth, John Birch-style, McCarthyite anti-communism continue to influence American politics. This is crucial to appreciate, since the United States has decisively embarked on a reckless new Cold War against Russia and China, drastically increasing the possibility of nuclear holocaust. If we are ever to see the return of a vigorous anti-imperialist movement capable of reining in the national security state, socially conscious people will need to pay close attention to the thinking of its members. J. Michael Waller—who has long been nestled within the most reactionary corners of the intelligence community—has written a book that reveals how especially unhinged security state insiders understand the world. We would be remiss not to take a look.

Who Is J. Michael Waller?

Before saying anything further about his extravagant theorizing, it is worth discussing who J. Michael Waller actually is. While hardly a household name, he has long been a dedicated servant of the national security state. As early as the 1980s, he developed an “interest in fighting Communism and supporting President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to push Soviet-backed revolutionaries out of Central America.” Back then he was “national secretary of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), Reagan’s favorite youth organization,” as well as “a coordinator at the College Republican National Committee on Capitol Hill to promote the president’s takedown of the Soviet bloc.”[2]

Waller claims that he never applied to the CIA, but Big Intel’s cover refers to him as a “former operative for the CIA,” and in the text he claims to have “served as an asset for CIA Director Bill Casey in Central America,” albeit as a “total amateur.”[3]

His own website proudly boasts that he “received his military training as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (contras).” According to Big Intel, he first attempted “to sneak into Nicaragua on [his] own with the anti-Sandinista forces of former Sandinista guerrilla leader Eden Pastora.”[4] He claims to have been personally recruited by then-CIA Director William Casey in a Catholic Church during mass shortly thereafter.[5]

The Contras were known to have adopted a “premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants,” with “[h]undreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes…committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the…C.I.A. superiors were well aware.” Recently, Waller boasted to the One America News (OAN) Network about his involvement with the notorious terrorists—whom he characterized as “these really wonderful people in this peasant army.”

Waller’s exact role in Nicaragua is not entirely clear. But clues can be gleaned from his website, where he refers to himself as “a scholar-practitioner in strategic communication and unconventional conflict” and a “[s]pecialist in propaganda, political warfare, psychological strategy, subversion, [and] strategic communication.” He also boasts of his “[h]ands-on work with insurgencies and counterinsurgency efforts” as well as “[i]nvolvement at all levels with planning and execution of political and psychological warfare campaigns.” Presumably this refers to his time with the Contras; another site that appears to be Waller’s boasts that he received “contracts with the U.S. government in Honduras” to train “commanders and sub-commanders of the Nicaraguan Resistance Army in political warfare and political communication.”

Waller’s academic career has also been defined by his national security state ties. In Big Intel he claims to have “spent two years studying how to recognize and combat Soviet disinformation” via a research methodology he characterizes as “most irregular.”[6] He never elaborates on the nature of this methodology, but judging by the bizarre claims made in Big Intel, “most irregular” is an understatement.

Waller also claims to have “worked on U.S. contracts to design and implement political warfare attacks on the Soviet and Russian intelligence services,” to have been “on the scene at the Kremlin in the hours before the Soviet Union was abolished, and at the Russian parliament building during the 1993 coup attempt.”

Much of his post-Cold War commentary has consisted of warning that the “Russian threat” to the United States did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union; in Big Intel he describes his “unpopular and sometimes ridiculed view…that the former KGB had positioned itself to take over the Russian economy and state.”

He sees himself as vindicated because “a Chekist named Vladimir Putin [took] control of Russia’s government,” thus “confirming a warning in [his] academic research.”[7] At the NATO-sponsored Riga Conference in 2018, Waller explained that “the Russians have been subverting all of us for a hundred years,” and characterized the Russian Federation as “a hostile regime.”

One of Waller’s (many) complaints in Big Intel is that the “CIA’s strategic intelligence analysis has been poor for generations.” He cites as an example the agency “help[ing] start a senseless war in Iraq by assessing that Saddam Hussein was building an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.”[8] He conveniently omits that he himself was a major proponent of the Iraq War at the time. In a series of articles for the now-defunct Insight on the News in 2003-2004, Waller cheered the U.S. attack on Iraq as “audacious,” “spectacularly successful,” and “one of the most successful campaigns in military history.”

his seasoned “expert” promoted absurd claims during the war, including that “evidence is mounting of a connection between the former Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda.” He comparedGeorge W. Bush to “a modern Abraham Lincoln or an Old Testament prophet.” He praised the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive war for “envision[ing] regime change not only in states ruled by terrorists and tyrants, but wherever freedom is repressed.”

He condemned critics who argued that the war was unnecessary, based on lies, or motivated by oil, and complained that “backstabbers” were comparing Iraq and Afghanistan with Vietnam—which was obviously an appropriate comparison—and whined that these naysayers were labeling the conflicts “quagmires”—which they obviously were.

During this period, Waller continued to work with the intelligence agencies. Such collaborations were not always harmonious—he complains in Big Intel that “jihadist sympathizers” convinced the FBI to shut down a “jihadist awareness training program” he started in 2005, on the grounds that it was “racist and bigoted.”[9]

Readers can judge for themselves whether the FBI harbored an abiding love for jihadism four years after 9/11, or whether something else might have been the problem. Nevertheless, in 2006, FBI Director Robert Mueller awarded Waller a citation for “exceptional service in the public interest.” A few years later he was appointed to the ominously named “Psychological Operations Capabilities-Based Assessment team for the U.S. Special Operations Command,” according to the Italian Institute for Strategic Studies(where he is also a member).

More recently he set up something called “Georgetown Research,” a “private intelligence company” whose bare-bones website provides little information other than that it is “a competitive intelligence company” for “confidential clients.”

He is also a “Senior Analyst for Strategy” with the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a neo-conservative think tank that reliably churns out comically hawkish commentary—a description that also applies to Waller’s writing (Waller-authored gems include “U.S. Should Arm Venezuelans to Take Their Country Back,” “America Needs an In-Kind Deterrent to Russia’s Political Warfare,” “Time to up the ante on Russian subversion in America,” and “Wokeness: A grave risk to America’s Military”).[10]

With a career trajectory like this, one begins to understand how the loony narrative of Big Intel could have been conceived. It is to that narrative that we now turn.

Cultural Marxism—Old Wine, New Bottles

According to Waller, “cultural Marxism”[11] originated as a Bolshevik plot to spread Frankfurt School thinking, which he argues abandons traditional Marxism’s class approach in favor of a relentless focus on gender, race and other “cultural issues.” He goes so far as to blame this ideology for somehow bringing down Weimar Germany: “Moscow’s plan a century ago was to use the Frankfurt School to destroy Weimar Germany from within after World War I, and then collapse the rest of Europe by poisoning its culture and destroying its history.”[12] It goes without saying that historians of the period will be surprised at this interpretation.

The rise of the Nazis forced Frankfurt School adherents to flee to the U.S. Even though they relocated to American universities, the Soviet Communists continued to pull the strings, Waller alleges. Guided by Moscow, Frankfurt School adherents “and other Soviet agents and fellow travelers” brought “their Central European ideological baggage with them to subvert and ruin” American institutions. Thanks to them, “cultural Marxism” supposedly took over the intelligence agencies, which “embraced it, wrapped it in lovely packaging called diversity, equity, and inclusion, and placed it at the core of their missions.”[13]

“Cultural Marxism, critical theory, and the other excreta of the Comintern’s Frankfurt School have rotted American society from within,”[14] Waller raves, and now the “great institutions [FBI and CIA] designed to protect us against the threat of Soviet Communism” have “absorbed and re-weaponized the most subversive Soviet plot ever launched.”[15]

Although Waller adds his own bizarre twists, the idea of “cultural Marxism” is not new. Historian Samuel Moyn has explained that the idea developed over a century “through global sewers of hatred.” Both he and Ari Paul of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) note its connection to the old anti-Semitic trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism”—the idea that Soviet Communism was a Jewish conspiracy. Paul thus accurately characterizes “cultural Marxism” as “a most paranoid fantasy” coming “straight from Nazi ideology.” He summarizes it as “the belief that a failure by communists to topple capitalism through worker revolt has led to a ‘Plan B’ to destroy Western society from the inside. By tearing down the gender binary, de-centering Christianity values [sic], championing the weak over the privileged and creating a multicultural society, revolutionaries have unanchored traditional Western order.”

This is almost word-for-word what Waller describes: He repeatedly claims that “cultural Marxists” conspired to abandon class warfare in favor of pushing a coercive racial and gender ideology, and that this was the design of a conscious Soviet plot to destroy America. They “move[d] from overthrowing the economic system to undermining the culture,” abandoning “the rich-versus-poor, bourgeoisie-versus-proletariat model for another engine of total wreckage of society, community, church, and family.”[16]

Waller’s contention that the Frankfurt School was a Bolshevik (he drops the “Judeo”) scheme to destroy American society is of course without evidence. Credible researchers differ in their conclusions about the relationship between the school and the Soviet Union, but none supports Waller’s fantastical notions. According to a scholarly study by Martin Jay, the Frankfurt School was sympathetic toward Stalin’s regime, and was initially silent about its crimes. But “after the Moscow purge trials” almost all of them “completely abandoned their hope for the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, the “Critical Theory” Frankfurt intellectuals developed had always contained “implicit criticisms of the Soviet ideological justification for its actions.”[17]

Other interpretations are even more damning. Philosopher Gabriel Rockhill, director of the Critical Theory Workshop at the Sorbonne, argues that it was actually the CIA that used the Frankfurt School—with the aim of undermining the left. Rockhill builds off the work of Frances Stonor Saunders, whose brilliant study The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters shows how the Agency constantly tried to co-opt left-wing culture in order to “steer” it away from supporting the “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet Union to create an anti-communist left that would tacitly support American hegemony.

Rockhill suggests that the Frankfurt School was a key part of this project: “In order to shore up the compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism,” he writes, “what better tactic than to champion scholars like these as some of the most important, and even most radical, Marxist thinkers of the 20th century?”

Detailing their numerous connections to CIA-funded publications and organizations, Rockhill provides compelling evidence that the Frankfurt School, far from acting to subvert Western civilization, was working overtime to prop it up. “The Institute was doing the kind of ideological work that the U.S. state and capitalist ruling class wanted to—and did—support.”

Their statements and writings make this clear. For example, Theodor Adorno explained that “Our philosophy [e.g., the Frankfurt School] stands in the sharpest opposition to the politics and doctrine that emanates from the Soviet Union.” Max Horkheimer stated in 1956 that “Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned,” and that “the preservation of these gains” must be ensured. Horkheimer later went on to very publicly support the U.S. war in Vietnam.

These are hardly the actions of people acting on orders from Moscow. “Ultimately,” Rockhill concludes, most Frankfurt School adherents were “global spokesmen for an anti-communist politics of capitalist accommodation.” Notably, he concurs with Waller that the Frankfurt School “increasingly turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity.” But Rockhill sees this as a means of undermining the left: “The Frankfurt theorists helped set the stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics, which would become consolidated in the neoliberal era.”

Conversely, Waller sees this shift as a means of undermining civilization itself. He seems to believe that mere criticism of Western institutions—family, gender norms, religion, etc.—is an inherently destabilizing act that inevitably leads to total destruction. More level-headed observers might argue that it is the responsibility of free-thinking citizens in a democracy to interrogate their society, in order to identify and hopefully rectify its flaws. Either way, Waller’s crude charges about the Frankfurt School acting as a Soviet puppet simply cannot be substantiated—and his lurid claims that large numbers of people accepting its ideology are enough to upend civilization are even less compelling.[18]

However, the broader idea—that contemporary discussions around gender and race are the result of an attempt to evade the issue of class—might strike a chord with some readers, and thus warrants comment. Indeed, neo-liberalism often does emphasize race and gender in order to mask its rejection of class politics. But outside movements like the Frankfurt School, the left has generally been critical of such practices—far from abandoning class, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, and other groups emphasized it. And countless contemporary figures (Barbara Fields and Adolph Reed, among many others) have insisted that the vapid neo-liberal rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism is nothing more than an attempt by capital to ignore wealth inequality.

A subset of this phenomenon is the national security state’s embrace of such multicultural rhetoric. Agencies like the CIA and the Pentagon adopt this vocabulary in order to put a progressive gloss on the decidedly not-very-progressive project of keeping the world safe for American capital by way of military and economic hegemony. “Woke” CIA ads are merely attempts to sell “torture, brutal coups, and global death-dealing” to “a millennial audience seemingly invested in notions of racial justice and feminism,” as The Intercept put it.

Given that intelligence agencies continue to spy on and disrupt movements composed of what the FBI derides as “Black Identity Extremists,” as well as accuse Black socialists of working for Russia, it is pretty obvious that its embrace of the language of diversity is merely “lipstick on a pig.” Waller is one of a number of uber-reactionaries who never “got the memo” on this. His inability to understand the simple concept of pinkwashing, combined with his generally paranoid worldview, have thus triggered him into conjuring up a nonsensical zombie Soviet plot, which he astoundingly sees as a more plausible explanation.

The Perils of Not Doing the Assigned Reading

In her classic study The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick observed that people write “about Communists with an oppressive distance between themselves and their subject, a distance that often masquerades as objectivity but in fact conveys only an emotional and intellectual atmosphere of ‘otherness’—as though something not quite recognizable, something vaguely nonhuman was being described.” [19] Waller’s approach in Big Intel is an extreme example of this tendency.

Waller never explains why Communists, leftists, or “fellow travelers” would want to destroy Western civilization. He depicts them as automata pre-programmed to obliterate societies for no discernable reasons. This may be because, like many on the right, he is clearly unfamiliar with the ideologies that he condemns. This is most apparent when he discusses Marxism, which he calls “the civilization-destroying theories of Karl Marx.”[20] He claims that “Marx’s goal was not to improve but to destroy: family, human relationships, economics, patriotism, loyalty, morals, religion, Western civilization. Destruction of the entire human existence.”[21] “The goal of Marx then, as with his disciples now,” he goes on, “demanded the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization.”[22] Needless to say, there are no citations to Capital or anything else written by Marx, except for a few letters.

Waller’s views on other influential left thinkers are similarly rabid. Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci “mastered the art of strategic psychological warfare” and “went beyond taking control of government or the means of production to destroying Western civilization itself.”[23] Education philosopher John Dewey is derided as “a willing Comintern fellow traveler,”[24] while sociologist C. Wright Mills is chastised for being “anti-Christian.”[25] Here, too, their actual works are cited sparingly, if at all. This ignorance of anything actually written by Marx (or “his disciples”) situates Waller squarely within a wearisome tradition on the reactionary right of defining “Marxism” as “anything that scares them.” And the further one gets into Big Intel, the more it becomes clear that Waller is scared of quite a lot.

McCarthyism, Redux

One of the most surprising things about Big Intel is its regurgitation of 1950s-style McCarthyism—Waller is such a hardline anti-communist that he appears to have come straight from a HUAC hearing. His understanding of the Cold War is that the Soviet menace was inherently expansionist and had to be stopped at all costs. “Stalin was planning to re-order the post-Axis world under the red banner,”[26] requiring the CIA to “become a covert political player against Communist expansion worldwide.”[27] Cold War historians like Frank Kofsky and former security state insiders like Daniel Ellsberg have long shown the erroneous nature of such views. Kofsky conclusively demonstrated that fears of Soviet military aggression had more to do with justifying military Keynesianism at home than describing reality.[28] And Ellsberg (no Stalinist) confirmed that “the presumption that [Communist] regimes, like Nazism, had an insatiable appetite for expansion, which they were determined to satisfy by military aggression where necessary and feasible,” was “flat wrong,” and “dangerously so.”[29]

But Waller apparently never got this memo either. In a subsection titled “Saving America from Communist Imperialism,”[30] he argues that any Third World expression of leftism or nationalism was inevitably the result of Soviet influence, and indicated an impending Soviet military takeover. “When left-wing Mohammad Mosaddegh won election as president of Iran with Stalin’s blessing,” he writes, “Eisenhower deftly deployed the CIA to remove the Soviet proxy and restore the Iranian monarchy for twenty-five years of stability.” Shortly thereafter, Eisenhower “had the can-do men of the CIA mount a creative operation in 1954 to prevent the Soviets from securing a foothold in Guatemala.”[31] (Emphases added.)

Even a cursory knowledge of Cold War history shows all this to be farcical. Mosaddegh was a nationalist, motivated by the imperialism of the British, who had been exploiting Iran’s oil wealth and keeping its workers impoverished for decades. Far from a “Soviet proxy,” he was known to dislike Communism, and cracked down on the small Iranian Communist Tudeh Party (which in turn viewed him as an American stooge). When Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil, the CIA and MI6 overthrew him in a coup, then set up a police state run by the Shah which, according to Amnesty International, accrued one of the worst human rights records in the world—or what Waller calls “twenty-five years of stability.”

Similarly, there was never any threat of “the Soviets securing a foothold in Guatemala.” Far from being a Soviet creation, Guatemalan Communism, numerically small but politically influential, was entirely homegrown. It was motivated by miserable living conditions created by an unequal system of land ownership maintained by Guatemalan elites and America’s United Fruit Company—the largest landholder in the country. These Guatemalan elites and United Fruit teamed up with the CIA to overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz, which ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and led to genocidal results that reverberate to this day.

It is particularly galling that Waller’s grasp of history is so comically poor, because the dust jacket of Big Intel alleges that he did “groundbreaking scholarship after the Soviet Empire’s breakup.” This will surely come as a surprise to scholars of Russia, among whom Waller is a non-entity. Nonetheless, any scholar knows the importance of familiarizing oneself with the standard literature on a subject before writing about it. He clearly did not do this, or he would not have made such lunatic claims.[32]

His refusal to do the bare minimum level of basic research allows Waller to continually trot out cartoonishly hawkish interpretations of every international situation he discusses. For example, he claims that “[t]he Sandinistas turned Nicaragua into a staging area to exportSoviet-sponsored subversion and violence across Central America.”[33] Similarly, Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada interrupted “Soviet plans to take over the Caribbean and Central America.” Waller claims that documents proving such claims were released (though he does not cite them), and that they “proved the ongoing covert Soviet invasion of the Americas.”[34] (Emphases added.) Once again, such interpretations fly in the face of the historical record.[35]

My Country, Always Right

Whereas “Communist imperialism” was everywhere, to Waller American imperialism was a fiction. Discussing the USSR’s role in the world, he sneers that they “opposed American ‘imperialism,’ whatever that was, especially the military and CIA that repressed those struggling for Third World ‘liberation.’”[36] (Emphasis added.) In Waller’s mind, to even suggest that American imperialism or Third World exploitation were real is laughable, since only the Soviets exploited other nations. Thus, a subsection titled “Third World Killers Become Cool” refers not to U.S. support for countless literal Third World killers,[37] but rather to the New Left’s admiration for Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.[38]

To Waller, anyone politically to the left of Genghis Khan was a Soviet agent, or at the very least a useful idiot. His framework leaves no room for nuance: “All loyal Americans were anti-Marxist,”[39] with the alarming implication that “any Marxist or anarchist [was] by definition, a legitimate target” of counterintelligence activity, albeit “only if the law allows.”[40] (Emphases added.)

Accordingly, Waller sees First Amendment protections as suspect. He condemns the ACLU for adhering to “an extreme interpretation of the First Amendment that disregarded the Founding Fathers’ profound concerns about foreign influence and subversion.”[41](Emphasis added.) When faced with (alleged) foreign subversion, the First Amendment is little more than a liability, Waller seems to imply. “Free societies had trouble reconciling protection of free speech with protection from foreign enemy manipulation,” he warns. But he does not consider the possibility that the state might exaggerate or invent out of whole cloth tales of “foreign enemy manipulation” in order to restrict civil liberties at home.[42]

Deep State Heroes

The heroes of Waller’s narrative are “honorable” national security state personnel—with “honorable” meaning “untainted by leftist sentiments”—as suggested by Big Intel’s subtitle, which claims that the FBI and CIA were Cold War Heroes. He praises the CIA for rigging the 1948 Italian elections,[43] wistfully refers to “Allen Dulles and his inner circle of great men,”[44] and calls Dulles and Richard Helms “legendary heroes” of U.S. intelligence.[45]

But Waller’s main protagonist is FBI godfather J. Egar Hoover, who he sees as one of the only men in Washington who “got it.”[46] Hoover supposedly understood the threat that “cultural Marxism” and critical theory posed to American life—although Hoover tellingly never used either term. Though Hoover is said to have grasped the insidious nature of the threat right from the beginning, Waller laments that at times he was not as forceful in stamping it out as he might have been. Thus, the infamous Palmer Raids “did not go far enough,”[47] since they were aimed at dangerous radicals espousing harmful “Central European ideologies.”

Waller contrasts the steadfast Hoover with the suspect William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA. Because “the OSS needed people with direct knowledge of everything about enemy territory,” they recruited “immigrant scholars who had lived under Hitler’s rule and in Nazi-occupied areas.”

Many of these, Waller alleges, were “principally loyal to the Kremlin” and aimed “to overthrow the United States Constitution.” Donovan, he laments, “seemed blind to the fact that Communists and foreign assets recruited into the OSS would not have American interests first in mind.”[48] Whereas Hoover consistently “saw the threats clearly,” Donovan “seemed not to see domestic threats from the Soviet side at all,” which supposedly led to the intelligence community adopting a “no enemies on the left mentality.”[49]

Granted, Waller is not entirely critical of Donovan. He credits him with making “a brilliant strategic decision that jump-started American foreign counterintelligence against the Kremlin,” referring to Donovan’s putting former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and his intelligence network on the U.S. payroll. As if anticipating that readers might object, he defensively notes that “Gehlen and his men had never harmed the United States.” Of course, given that Gehlen was “a top German intelligence officer on the Eastern Front against the Soviets,” it is safe to say that they harmed a lot of other people—but since they weren’t Americans, no matter. “Thanks to Donovan’s quick action,” Waller gushes, “the Gehlen Organization became critical to American efforts to contain the Soviets during the Cold War.”[50]

As noted by David Talbot, the CIA ensured that “the Gehlen Organization” became “West Germany’s principal intelligence agency.” Gehlen’s subordinates included Dr. Franz Six, “an intellectual architect of the Final Solution as well as one of its most enthusiastic enforcers.”

During his tenure in West Germany, Gehlen plotted “to reinstitute fascism” in the event that the German left won elections, with the CIA itself “supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy.”[51] Waller apparently sees this as “brilliant” intelligence work. One cannot help but notice the contradiction of a book whose central gripe is supposed foreign influence over U.S. intelligence simultaneously praising the CIA for making a network of literal Nazis “critical” to that intelligence.

Successfully incorporating a Nazi cell into the espionage apparatus aside, Waller blames Donovan for allowing a “soft-on-Communist mentality” to “permeate the American intelligence and counterintelligence communities.”[52] This supposedly ingrained sympathy for Soviet Communism made intelligence institutions vulnerable to the Bolshevik “cultural Marxist” plot.

It is ridiculous to assert that the American intelligence community was “soft on Communism” during the Cold War, which was defined by a manic anti-communism. But Waller is not entirely wrong about Soviet penetration of war-time American intelligence operations. If he had stopped there, this part of his narrative would at least be somewhat plausible.

As the pre-eminent historian of the crimes of McCarthyism (and dedicated leftist) Ellen Schrecker acknowledges, “during the Second World War, [Soviet] espionage agents penetrated the U.S. government and its top-secret atomic-bomb project,” in part “[b]ecause most of the dozens, if not hundreds, of Americans involved with that operation were in or near the Communist Party.” Since the NSA’s 1995 release of its VENONA decrypts, scholars have confirmed that “Moscow’s espionage operation was more massive than anyone had suspected.”

Such breaches were only possible due to the anomalous nature of the New Deal period, wherein a number of progressive individuals—notably Henry Wallace—less hostile toward the USSR, attained positions in government. The Second World War led to a further thaw in hostilities between Washington and Moscow as they became uneasy allies against the Nazis.[53] Unsurprisingly, Soviet intelligence took advantage of this situation.

Importantly, Schrecker notes that those with “a narrow perspective on American communism” never “try to understand why so many otherwise law-abiding and well-educated individuals were willing to send secrets to Moscow.” (Emphasis added.) “Were they dupes, traitors, or something considerably more complicated?” She emphasizes that Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, a major study of the issue by conservative author John Earl Haynes that Waller himself often cites, “suggests [that] at the height of the worldwide struggle against fascism, these men and women did not think that they were betraying their own country.”

In any event, “[b]y the end of 1945, the unique political conditions that had favored the Soviet espionage operation had changed and the KGB was never again to achieve such a success.” Hardline anti-communism became the order of the day—people like Wallace were exiled from the halls of power, and McCarthyism purged the American establishment of left-wing and even pro-New Deal personnel.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

An especially notable feature of Big Intel is that it brings together decades’ worth of right-wing bogeymen under a single rubric. The “radical theorists and Soviet agents” who founded the Frankfurt School were not just “the fathers of cultural Marxism and critical theory,” but also “the progenitors of political correctness and twenty-first century wokeness.”[54]

Their ideology is blamed for “intimidation of independent thought, the relentless attacks on religion and the American founding, the extreme politicization of academia and law, and thus government, and politicization in the FBI and CIA.”[55] The Bolshevik plot is also blamed for cancel culture, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and DEI.

Countless prominent individuals are singled out—and in a very peculiar way. There is a long tradition of reactionaries being unable to distinguish between milquetoast liberals and revolutionary Marxists (or anyone in between), and Waller is a perfect example. He reflexively sees every vaguely liberal person as an agent of International Communism.

Thus, liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr exemplified “American Protestant collusion with the Kremlin”[56] because “Marxist theory heavily influenced [his] intellectual development in the 1930s.” That Niebuhr was known to have been an anti-communist Cold Warrior, dismissed by Noam Chomsky as the “prophet of the establishment,” is irrelevant. Similarly, Barbara Lee (D-CA) remains to this day a “Communist Operative.”[57] John Conyers (D-MI) was a Communist “acolyte,” “if not a card-carrying member.”[58] Jim McGovern (D-MA) “worked with the Sandinistas and FMLN or the Cuban regime” as a congressional staffer, and “still supports the same old causes” as a sitting congressman.[59] Surprisingly, Waller overlooks that Vice President Kamala Harris is the daughter of a Marxist economist—surely an indication that the Bolsheviks are running the White House from beyond the grave.

But no one rankles Waller more than Barack Obama. The sections of Big Intel that deal with his presidency read like transcripts of a Fox News segment from 2011—hell, even Saul Alinsky gets a shoutout. Like the Tea Party conservatives of that era, Waller mistakes warmongering, neo-liberal shill Obama for an anti-imperialist revolutionary intent on overturning the American system via a “cultural revolution.” He warns that Obama did not receive adequate schooling in “patriotism and American history”[60] as a child, that he read Marxists in college, and that he had expressed admiration for Comrade Niebuhr. Waller raves that “Obama entered the presidency with the worldview, training, organization, and talent networks in place to fundamentally transform America,” and that he oversaw “the conversion of the CIA, FBI, and the rest of the intelligence community into instruments of his agenda,”[61] or “Obama’s Great Cultural Revolution.”[62] Incredibly, Waller even claims the Obama administration’s plan revolved around “rigorous critical theory and anti-imperialism.”[63] (Emphases added.)

One wonders how Waller squares such delusions with Obama’s actual policies, which were the furthest thing from “anti-imperialist.”[64] He appears to believe that Obama’s cultural agenda interfered with his oversight of the military, as when he claims that the “White House seemed more obsessed with taking over the levers of power through its cultural Marxist revolution than it did with terminating bin Laden.” Since bin Laden was rather famously “terminated,” this is yet another extremely silly thing for him to have written.[65]

Undaunted, Waller indicts the Obama administration for spearheading a takeover of the intelligence community by the woke. Discussing Executive Order (EO) 13583 (“Establishing a Coordinated Government-Wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce”), Waller comes close to accurately perceiving the true nature of such policies: “On its face, EO 13583 looked like a virtue-signaling sop to the various identity groups that funded or mobilized voters for Obama’s presidency.” But Waller insists that EO 13583 was really “an ideological palace coup” and “a majoritarian decree to transform the culture of the entire federal bureaucracy through implementation of critical theory.”[66]

Obama’s intelligence officials are the subjects of particular vitriol. Waller lambasts CIA Director

John Brennan for promoting diversity, complaining that “[n]owhere in his four-hundred-page memoir did Brennan ever claim that the goal was to make intelligence more efficient or its deliverables more productive.” (Two sentences later, Waller asserts the exact opposite—that “Brennan began a constant refrain that the cultural revolution in the CIA would make America’s intelligence machinery stronger.”[67]) (Emphasis added.)

Obama’s selection of James Comey to lead the FBI might have “had the appearance of keeping a level, nonpartisan approach,” since Comey was “a lifelong Republican” who had investigated the Clintons in the past. But this too was merely a ruse—Comey was “a Niebuhr acolyte” hell-bent on “replac[ing] the FBI’s fidelity, bravery, and integrity with diversity, equity, and inclusion.”[68]

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, too, “looked like a Republican but acted like a Marxist.” Perhaps best known to CAM readers for lying to Congress about the NSA spying on the entirety of the American population (something Waller notably does not criticize him for), Clapper is derided as “a counterintelligence weakling” with “leftist, soft-on-Russia views.” Waller even alleges that he attempted to “obtain Department of Defense passes for the Russian GRU military intelligence rezident and his deputy officers so they could roam the Pentagon freely and unescorted,” a claim too absurd to be taken seriously. (Emphases added.) Worst of all, from Waller’s perspective, Clapper “quietly sponsored the intelligence community’s first annual ‘Pride Summit.’”[69]

As a result of all this, Waller claims, “an aggressive, extreme, psychologically manipulative diversity program” was “waged against personnel” by the intelligence agencies. “After years of work, the horizontally networked identity groups had not only burrowed into the heart of the American intelligence community; they had fused with its vertical bureaucratic command structure to mobilize as secret agents of change across Uncle Sam’s intelligence and counterintelligence defenses.”[70] The horrifying results included nightmares like FBI employees having to view PowerPoint presentations on gender.

One such controversial presentation, which does indeed appear to have been rather over-the-top, prompts Waller to start making comparisons to the Cheka and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[71] Given the absence, in this case, of a mountain of corpses, the analogy comes off just a little bit silly. Equating “having to sit through an irritating PowerPoint” with “Cheka murders” and “the Chinese Cultural Revolution”—in which he erroneously claims more than one million people died—obliterates any remaining right Waller had to be taken seriously. What normal people understand to be the typical frustrations of cubicle culture, Waller interprets as a totalitarian conspiracy—albeit one that is apparently easy to defeat, since this particular PowerPoint was so widely despised that it was quietly withdrawn.[72]

The Spook Who Cried Wolf

Waller spends most of Big Intel warning that a Soviet/Russian disinformation campaign has been steadily degrading American institutions for more than 100 years. A glance at the rest of his career shows that he has been making similar claims for decades, right up to the present.

At the aforementioned 2018 Riga Conference, for instance, Waller insisted that “Russia’s going to exploit all our vulnerabilities, including elections, as it has,” then suggested the United States “exploit those vulnerabilities of the Kremlin regime, of the gangster state, and even of the Russian Federation itself.” He offered several creative ideas for how to do so, such as carrying out “cyberattacks to steal [Russian government] bank account money [to] fund opposition movements.” Ultimately, he argued, the U.S./NATO should “prepare for a sudden collapse of the Russian Federation regime, and take advantage of it, the way we failed to do in 1991.”

Such ideas would make even Victoria Nuland blush. It comes as something of a surprise, then, that Waller does not buy into the Russiagate narrative.

“Suspicions and piecemeal evidence were there all along to show that the ‘Russia collusion narrative’ against Trump was a lie,” he writes, but “[f]or four years, the narrative that Trump and those around him ran America as Russian traitors was pounded into the political psyche.”[73] By 2020 “some of the biggest names in the American intelligence community had convinced themselves and half the country, with no corroborating evidence, that Trump was a Putin tool. A derangement syndrome had swept some of the most respected, or at least prestigious, names in U.S. intelligence.”[74]

As Alan MacLeod, Matt Taibbi, Jeff Gerth, Glenn Greenwald, and countless other critics have carefully documented, there were always, from the very beginning, a million reasons to know that Russiagate was pure nonsense. In a way, then, it is nice to see Waller come up with something sensible after putting forward so many absurdities. Indeed, the portions of Big Intel that deal with Russiagate could have been written by the likes of Taibbi or Greenwald.

But there is a boy-who-cried-wolf aspect to it, since the rest of Waller’s book promotes the same logic as Russiagate. Waller accuses every politician, every intellectual, every activist, and every ideological trend he dislikes, from the Russian Revolution to the War on Terror, of originating with a Soviet influence campaign. Now, with Russiagate, such claims have been directed against a figure (Trump) that he does like. Has this led him to re-think his approach? Not at all. Instead of finally realizing that reflexively accusing everyone you disagree with of working for a foreign power is unjustified and harmful, Waller interprets Russiagate as the Frankfurt School plot proceeding to its latest phase.

Waller—again, correctly—notes that Comey, Clapper and Brennan among others spread liesabout the Hunter Biden laptop story being Russian disinformation. But he attributes this not to the typical machinations of a deep state which he himself has long served, but to these men being “a triumvirate of direct descendants of the Frankfurt School.”[75] Thus, even on the rare occasions when Waller inadvertently gestures toward something vaguely resembling the truth, he remains a one-trick pony; an old dog uninterested in learning new tricks, or even aware that there are any to learn.

Why Does This Matter

Some readers may wonder, given its clearly unhinged contents, whether it is even worth examining Big Intel at all. Why waste time focusing on such obviously fraudulent material? There are two reasons.

First, as noted at the outset, it is important to appreciate the way the security state thinks. Waller might be a particularly disturbed figure, but his general perspective—that America is rife with harmful foreign plots that need to be combatted, and that the left is comprised of all foreign agents or assets—is not so different from the worldview of the intelligence community writ large.

The second reason requires a bit more explanation.

Ever since Donald Trump blasted George W. Bush for lying about non-existent Iraqi WMDs in 2016, there has been a renewed willingness on the part of self-styled “right-wing populists” to engage in a (limited) critique of the permanent warfare state. Not long ago, only a fringe minority of Republicans, like Ron Paul, would risk doing this, but now it is relatively common to see people on the right criticizing “forever wars,” “the deep state,” etc.

Unfortunately, this shift coincided with the weakening of the anti-imperialist left, with many progressives falling for nonsense about Russiagate and coming to believe that the CIA, FBI and NSA were guardians of American democracy (prompting socialist publications to issue reminders that “the CIA is not your friend”).

The result has been an information ecosystem characterized by segments of the left abandoning critiques of empire, with elements of the right filling the gap. This has led to some shallow analyses of militarism that lack a coherent grasp of political economy, and that are less concerned with the “triple threat” of militarism, racism and materialism about which Martin Luther King, Jr., warned. Waller’s book is a particularly egregious example of this trend, with its ultimate “critique” of the security state being that it is too “woke”—but not too murderous.

Tucker Carlson, another figure fond of making such criticisms, prominently endorsed Big Intel; his blurb sits atop the front cover. Lately, Carlson has been reinventing himself as a critic of the “deep state” and vaguely defined “establishment elites.” To be fair, he has indeed taken a number of positions that set him apart from other pundits, such as supporting Julian Assange and giving a platform to Palestinian Christians. But more often, his ideas subtly reinforce the overall dominance of the military-industrial complex, as when he condemns the U.S. for funding a proxy war against Russia—which is good—but on the grounds that Mexico or migrants are the real threat—which is bad—or that China is—which is very bad.

As Alan MacLeod unearthed in a major investigation for MintPress News, Carlson has incredibly suspicious connections to the CIA. In addition to being the son of a Reagan-appointed CIA propagandist, Carlson traveled to Nicaragua to support the Contras (this may be where he met Waller), then tried to join the CIA, then wrote for the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, penning articles defending the Agency against its critics, notably Gary Webb.

In a recent interview, Carlson clarified that, when it comes to the CIA meddling in other countries, “I don’t really have a problem with that as much.” Even more recently he interviewed Waller himself, and appeared to completely endorse Big Intel’s contents, offering not a word of pushback.

In a climate where “limited hangouts” like Carlson are held up as principled opponents of empire, “critiques” of the intelligence services like Big Intel may well be seen as compelling by less politically savvy observers. This makes it important to carefully scrutinize them, and to offer an alternative by providing principled analyses of the national security state.

After all, many of Waller’s targets (Obama, Clapper, Brennan) are indeed genuine villains. It is just that he sees them as villains for entirely ridiculous reasons. This is not a minor disagreement.

Obama was not bad because he encouraged diversity—he was bad because he was a mass murderer. In the same way, Waller blasts Mike Pompeo not because he was a fanatic who wanted to kidnap and kill Julian Assange and start a war with Iran, but because he failed to stem the DEI tide. Similarly, Waller’s problem with Gina Haspel is not her history of torturing people but that she, too, supposedly promoted DEI.[76]

Sophisticated observers will see through this sort of thing, and understand that any worldview that considers the CIA and FBI “heroic,” so long as they avoid woke language and stick to overthrowing Third World governments and consorting with Nazis, is fundamentally bankrupt. When a pro-Contra, Iraq War-supporting “intelligence expert” comes along and claims that the deep state was just fine until it started waving rainbow flags, the appropriate response for informed students of foreign policy is to laugh off such nonsense. We have more important things on which to focus.

 

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/07/15/the-cia-and-fbi-were-never-heroes/

 

 

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