The complete disconnect between the Russiagate nonsense and the well-documented history of American spying and militarism all over the world since WW2 is simply too much for me to bear. I am tired of the true history being ignored, tired of having to rebut a Gish Gallop of lies reaching back 75 years. This essay is an account of actual US behavior, as opposed to the deep sociological propaganda that we have been marinating in our entire lives. The narrative that has been erased is that, until WW2, the US government was rather isolated, parochial, and inward looking. Then it inherited the world, only to have had it immediately confiscated by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, and Curtis LeMay.

Today, I see America as "turf" being fought over in a gang war. The political parties are nothing but "fronts" for these gangs. There are three gangs, or crime families: domestic intel, foreign intel, and the military - none of them democratic, all devoted to furthering the goals of the elites. Each of these crime families was founded in the era of the European Civil War (ECW)(1914-1939). Each of them was founded by especially sociopathic monsters ("charismatic murderers", if you will) - Hoover, Dulles, and LeMay, respectively.

Over the last seventy five years, beginning immediately after the death of FDR, these crime families have diverted literally trillions of taxpayer dollars from productive use to unproductive military/intelligence spending. Today, from the outside, the US looks like a garrison state; from the inside it looks like a police state. The military budget is gigantic, 50% of the world's total, and never stops growing. We have somewhere over 800 foreign military bases. We have troops in approximately 180 out of 200 countries on the planet. A Pentagon audit is underway, about which an estimate of $20 Trillion of missing funds is bandied about. We have 25% of the world's prison population (which is more privatized every year) and a dysfunctional, racist justice system that is used as a profit center and runs on plea bargains and fines. We spy on literally ever bit that travels over the internet. Civilian government in America today is a sick joke.

To rephrase a widely known quote of disputed authorship, namely

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

I would say America went from a disorganized, rapidly growing Social Darwinism to a rigid, corporatist garrison state without genuine democracy in between. One might ask how a self-proclaimed democracy arrived at this sad state without ever being attacked domestically by any significant opponent. This essay is the answer to that question. It is all about the history that you were never taught. (There is a brief bibliography at the end.)

WARNING: This is an extremely long, two-part essay (8,000 words) about US history that took over a week to research and write. It suffers from too many rewrites and too many digressions. I don't expect many people to read all of it. (Given all that, see [NOTE] at end as to why I wrote it.)

PREFACE:

I take for granted that the Constitution itself was formulated to restrict democracy to men of property, as a recent essay clearly documents:

Democracy – the rule of the majority – was the last thing the nation’s aristo-republican Founders wanted to see break out in their new republic. Drawn from the elite propertied segments in the new nation, most of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his classic 1948 text, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It: “In their minds, liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of liberty.”

Protection of “property” (meaning the people who owned large amounts of it) was “the main object of government” for all but one of the U.S. Constitution’s framers (James Wilson), as constitutional historian Jennifer Nedelsky has noted. The non-affluent, non-propertied and slightly propertied popular majority was for the framers what Nedelsky calls “a problem to be contained.”

Anyone who doubts the anti-democratic character of the Founders’ world view should read The Federalist Papers,

Paul Street, Time to Stop Playing “Simon Says” with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton

While that origin story is true, it does not explain the open air panopticon we find ourselves in today. That arose around the time of the ECW due to a huge escalation of elite dominance, enabled by the fortunes and giant corporations created by the Industrial Revolution and the massive centralization provoked by the ECW.

INTRODUCTION: The briefest sketch of pre-superpower US history

America was founded by merchants, bankers, and plantation owners as part of the Enlightenment project to overthrow aristocratic rule. Unfortunately, its founding coincided with the Industrial Revolution. So that, within 100 years, the US government had been completely captured by industrial aristocrats, the tycoons of the Gilded Age. For fifty years, the industrial economy grew, the tycoons feasted, and the workers just got by. The Great Depression would have put an end to this oligarchy by some kind of revolution as in Europe, except for FDR, who saved capitalism by creating a brief interregnum of worker-oriented economics and government programs. But as soon as he died, the aristocrats, who had profited immensely from WW2, began to attack the society that FDR had constructed. The vehicle for this attack was militant anti-Communism, which justified the peacetime perpetuation of an out of control military/intelligence apparatus.

Militarism had not been a major part of American society or politics prior to WW1. The founders injunction to "avoid foreign entanglements" had been heeded, assisted by the country's geographic isolation. The US standing army in 1914 consisted of 100,000 men. Its major duties over the previous 30 years had been fighting Indians and crushing Spain, a third rate power, in order to join the game of colonialism. Militarism only began to make inroads under Teddy Roosevelt who built the navy up to 300 ships, the third largest in the world. But, the real increase in military influence took place under Woodrow Wilson, who brought the country into WW1 and American troops into Europe. He also instituted unprecedented, draconian repression of domestic dissent, which carried over into the post-WW1 period.

The wartime gestation of the superpower state

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the dominance of the military and of intelligence agencies, both domestic (FBI) and foreign (CIA, NSA) was baked into modern America (the continent-sized, industrialized nation state) from the moment that version of our country came into being in the early 20th century. Prior to this time, the only continent-wide intelligence network was provided to the Robber Barons by the heavily armed, private Pinkerton detective agency - itself not an auspicious foundation for citizens rights.

This essay will review how today's rabidly militaristic America was born as a side-effect of our involvement in the European Civil War (1914-1945). The ECW forced the US to knit itself into a continental military power, commanded from national headquarters in Washington, DC., with federal agencies becoming, for the first time, a visible presence in historically localist America. And because it was war that drove the centralization, the military and intelligence agencies naturally became the dominant players in Washington. Because WW2 was so vast and pre-computer control technology was so primitive, that military soon escaped civilian control - never to return to it.

Part of the reason for that lack of control is the history, or rather the lack of history of the USA. Unlike Europe, America has no millennia-long backdrop of factions that never resolved, factions whose unremitting rivalry gave rise to rooted communities and power balances, and to respected traditions like noblesse oblige, which grew out of innumerable peasant revolts and the dominant secular presence of the Catholic Church. America, the modern nation state, was constructed in a few decades out of a mad scramble for a continent full of resources. Conflicts were resolved by moving further into the wilderness. The bounty of an entire continent had trained Americans that it wasn't worth fighting for values when you could just go grab loot elsewhere.

So, when an national ethos (i.e., values, a reason for fighting) was needed to participate in the ECW, an "American Way" of life was propagandized into existence: rugged individualism, the predominance of small business and small towns, the British sense of fair play, the "melting pot". (The genuine ethos of racism was airbrushed out of that picture.) This thin stew of "tradition" was fed to the children of immigrants, to unsophisticated farm boys, to regimented, deeply conservative American Catholics. This ersatz nationality was an expedient of wartime that substituted for the natural, centuries-long process of creating national identities.

PART ONE: The founding of Domestic Intelligence (and the Mafia)

The dominant story about the 1920s America is that it was one long party - The Roaring Twenties, and that is a fair picture. However, something important is left out: the 20s began with the first round of hysterical anti-Communism. The most notorious event here was the Palmer Raids (which operated by entrapment, agents provocateur, and incommunicado detention) and the mass deportation of US citizens, most prominently, Emma Goldman.

Ignoring the Palmer Raids ignores the rise of one of the key players and key institutions of the modern garrison state: J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Contrary to current folklore about fighting gangsters, Hoover got his start by organizing the Palmer Raids and its aforementioned illegalities. Hoover also brought the police state innovation, the card index of suspected agitators, into American domestic intelligence.

Despite his early promise as a rationizer, Hoover became nothing more than a powerful blackmailer with a personal agenda that included hatred and persecution of blacks, unions, homosexuals, and intellectuals. Anyone group he disagreed with became a "subversive".

Wartime and Cold War secrecy (and Hoover's blackmail trove) kept his incompetence, corruption, and closeted gayness hidden until his death. After that, JEH's wartime screwups and fights with BSC were documented in A Man Called Intrepid - a book with major revelations about wartime spying and cracking the Enigma code. His domestic reign of terror was documented by Anthony Summers.

In 1975, three years after Edgar's death, a congressional committee would order a detailed check on the domestic security files of the ten largest FBI offices. This indicated that no less than 19 percent of the Bureau's total effort was still devoted to hunting 'subversives'. Yet criminal conduct was discovered in only four out of 19,700 investigations - and none of those involved national security, espionage or terrorism.

Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

Another thread of our garrison state also got its start during the 1920s: organized crime. It rapidly became a major focus of American media, chronicled by influential creeps like Walter Winchell, an ally and promoter of Hoover with strong mob connections. At first, during Prohibition, the FBI was serious about fighting the mob. But, by the mid 1930s, the mob had compromised Hoover. He would never seriously threaten them again, until the embarrassing Apalachin Meeting of 1957.

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had even publicly denied the existence of the Mafia despite investigating it for years. This continued until 1957 when the Apalachin meeting, a summit of international Italian organized crime figures in Upstate New York hosted by Joseph Barbara, was raided by police. The raid resulted in the indictment of 58 Cosa Nostra bosses, and the aftermath confirmed the existence of the Mafia to the public. Despite this, little else was revealed about the organization itself.

- Wikipedia

In summary, the 1920s saw the creation of a rabidly anti-Communist domestic police/intelligence agency (and media allies), alongside the nationwide expansion of organized crime, who always hated Communists and saw them as a rival for control over labor unions. Organized crime will later come to be a major partner with the CIA, valued for its clandestineness.

The FBI was dominated by Hoover to the same extent that Russia was dominated by Stalin. Agents obeyed Hoover without question or they were fired or exiled. Politicians obeyed him or they were exposed or indicted. He was momentarily fought to a draw by the un-blackmail-able Harry Truman, who feared that Hoover's constant spying for domestic political advantage threatened to become an American Gestapo. It was that fear which led Truman to the fatal mistake of allowing Allen Dulles to write the charter for the CIA. Truman transferred foreign intelligence to the CIA to keep it out of the hands of Hoover. That was the first of many "lesser evil" choices that brought America to where it is today.

PART TWO: The Founding of foreign intelligence

Prior to the ECW, America's foreign policy was run by the Robber Barons, who provided their own foreign intelligence service. This power was epitomized by the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.
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By (1911, Sullivan and Cromwell) had already become a unique repository of power and influence. Enormous fortunes were accumulated in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Many of the men who accumulated them used Sullivan and Cromwell as their link to Washington and to the world...

Few in Washington had ever paid much attention to collecting intelligence about other countries, either because they believed the United States did not need it or because of the notion that, as a previous secretary of war, Henry Stimson, memorably put it, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail"...When Robert Lansing became secretary of state (in 1915)...the division had...three officers and two clerks.

- Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers - John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

With the end of WW1, the elites decided that a more formal, private structure was necessary to conduct their foreign policy. So they created the Council on Foreign Relations. (There is a reason the CFR is regarded with deepest suspicion by the political left.)

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(American elites) believed that business should be the vanguard of American expansion, and that state power should be used whenever necessary to promote and defend it...the brothers (Dulles) and a handful of their friends had decided to create an invitation only club, based in New York, where the worldly elite could meet talk and plan...they brought their new club into being in 1921. They called it the Council on Foreign Relations..

In the 1930s and 1940s members of the council produced more than six hundred classified policy memos for the State Department...the council's intimacy with senior policy makers in Washington was evident, leading some to view it as a nerve center of America's hidden "permanent government".

- Kinzer

A subset of the elites despised FDR so much that they organized a coup against him. That coup was foiled by General Smedley Butler ("war is a racket"). But the coup plotters had too much power to be brought to trial. Pro-fascist bums like Prescott Bush, Henry Ford, the Wall St. firm of Brown Brothers, and Sullivan and Cromwell (home of the Dulles brothers) felt free to invest heavily in Nazi Germany through the 1930s. It was only because of WW2 that their ties to Germany were broken by the "trading with the enemy" laws.

It is a measure of the power of the elites in this period that no one questioned their prerogatives, and that they felt free to run foreign policy from a private club - often for their own personal profit. By the 1930s, they were meeting regularly in secret to coordinate foreign intelligence. The attendees of those secret meetings, most prominently William Donovan and Allen Dulles, created the US foreign intelligence agencies: the OSS and the CIA. Input from the public's elected representatives was minimal.

One of the most striking aspects of the Dulles brothers' careers in the period between the world wars was the ease with which they moved between service to government and to private clients. Sometimes they served both at once...Yet no one asked them for financial disclosures, and few eyebrows were raised when they found ways to profit from their diplomatic assignments...

During the late 1930s, Allen became involved in a secret organization known enigmatically known as "the room". It was a private forum, based in an unmarked apartment on Sixty-Second Street, where bankers, businessmen, and corporate lawyers - a total of about three dozen - met to exchange the most sensitive information they had gathered about events unfolding around the world....These patricians not only advised the Roosevelt administration on covert operations abroad, but willingly arranged corporate cover for agents undertaking them...

William Donovan...like others in ("the room") was concerned that the United States seemed about to enter a global conflict without a real intelligence service...

In 1940, there was little in the way of an "intelligence setup" in Washington. Networks established in World War I had been allowed to atrophy....Much of what the White House learned about foreign countries came from private citizens like Donovan, who during the late 1930s spent part of his time as a self-appointed intelligence agent in Europe.

- Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers

Other elitists carved out their own foreign policy turf, aided by the grasping intransigence of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover tried and failed to squash British Security Coordination, the British foreign intelligence operation that had been placed in Rockefeller Central with the connivance of FDR. In the process, Hoover merely enabled Nelson Rockefeller.

Nelson Rockefeller had persuaded Roosevelt to let him start a new agency in the unguarded vastness of South America...This new ( agency was called) the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs...Millions of Rockefeller dollars went into various schemes to discredit, depose, or in other ways damage the pawns of Axis conspirators in South America. The FBI and the State Department were at loggerheads over who had jurisdiction in the region; it was easier for Rockefeller to show personal initiative and foot the bill...This also protected FDR's public stance of noninvolvement.

William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid

By 1947, due to pressure from Dulles and other elites, the CIA had been created; and the troublesome Hoover had been limited by law to domestic operations. A major impetus for the creation of the CIA was the emerging Cold War. FDR's statesmanship and the need for the alliance with the Soviet Union had kept elite anti-Communist fanaticism in check. But the end of WW2, the death of FDR, and the atomic bomb destroyed those checks.

In the early Cold War era there were realpolitik reasons to resist communist advances, but reason did not demand the Manichaean hysteria that ensued. It is true that post-ECW Europe was prone to political leftism; but that had been politically legitimized by the activities of the wartime Resistance. The potential for leftwing governments was driven by the postwar devastation, which the American elites were, at first, too stingy to ameliorate. If the Marshall Plan had been implemented in 1945, the political problems would have been manageable without resort to CIA machinations. On another continent, the Communists in China and Viet Nam had been correctly perceived as more Asian and nationalist than doctrinaire Stalinists by foreign service officers. Those officers were purged in the anti-communist inquisition and then blamed for "losing China", and their reports of the sincere admiration of Ho Chi Minh for America were ignored.

In retrospect, FDR's presidency proved to be nothing more than an interregnum of worker-friendly realpolitik that made the US into the principal global power. Post ECW, control of the US was quickly taken back by the oligarchs by means of a paranoid anti-Communism. A coterie of ideologues created a firestorm of fear of Communist domination. From the end of WW2 to the explosion of the first Soviet A-bomb, this fear was completely exaggerated. Russia was a scorched earth ruin, while the US was dominant both militarily and economically.

The battle of the intel blackmailers

None of this mattered to people like Hoover, who sought out and aided red-baiting politicians like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. However, Dulles soon had his own blackmail goods on Hoover. Matters came to a head when the Hoover-enabled Senator Joseph McCarthy went after one of Dulles's CIA officers. It was a full scale sexual blackmail battle:

Dulles...made sure his agency kept its own files on Hoover...The CIA counterintelligence chief (James Angleton) was ruimored to occasionally show off photographic evidence of Hoover's intimate relationship with FBI deputy Clyde Tolson...Dulles compiled even more scandalous files on Joe McCarthy's sex life. The senator who relentlessly hunted down homosexuals in government was widely rumored to haunt the "bird circuit" near Grand Central Station as well as gay hideaways in Milwaukee...This gave Dulles leverage in his battle with McCarthy that none of the senator's other political opponents enjoyed.

Hoover kept his own secret files on McCarthy, one of which was filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy's habit of drunkenly groping young girls' breasts and buttocks.

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

And you thought the 1950s were about the Red Scare! No, they were basically a dirty game of blackmail for political power. What a sewer: McCarthy, Nixon, Hoover, and Dulles all wrestling in the mud. Along the way in his battle with McCarthy, Dulles was able to assert the principle that Congress could not investigate the CIA.

Because of the highly sensitive nature of the CIA's work, Dulles informed (McCarthy) his agency must be granted immunity from congressional investigations...Dulles defiant position on congressional oversight astonished even the anti-McCarthy Democrats on the subcommittee...But the CIA director never wavered from his stand, and he soon won Eisenhower's support. Nixon was again dispatched to meet with McCarthy, to work out a face-saving way for the senator to back down...

(NYT correspondent Hanson Baldwin warned of ) "a philosophy of secrecy; and power" taking hold in Washington under the banner of national security. (But) after years of relentless harassment from Red hunters, many Washington liberals cheered Dulles as a savior. His CIA became known as a haven for the intelligencia and for others looked upon with suspicion by McCarthyites.

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard

This never-even-get-sent-to-jail card for the CIA is so much more important than the Red Scare - it was the CIA slipping the leash and going completely rogue in 1953. The liberal reaction to Dulles slapdown of McCarthy is completely reproduced in today's rabid neoliberal embrace of the CIA and FBI, whom they believe will save America from Trump. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Despite the defeat, the FBI did maintain its domestic turf; and the internal, anti-any-leftist police state continued to grow.

Unfortunately, after McCarthy’s death, McCarthyism persisted.  In August 1956, the FBI established COINTELPRO designed “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” groups and individuals it categorized as subversives, opposed to the national interest.”  By ‘59, more then 400 New York FBI agent were assigned to fighting “communism.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/13/the-new-mccarthyism-is-the-elect...

The Pentagon, A Preview

The goal of the Cold War ideologues was the destruction of the Soviet Union. Their tool was the US military, and specifically the nuclear bombers of the air force to which the A-bomb had given godlike powers.

The rise of the Pentagon, the third leg of the elite dominance, is self-evident. But few people today know the details, the main actors and influences, of how it metastasized from insignificance to atomic dominance over the course of ten years. The accidental rise of Hoover and the elite scheming of Dulles are better known origin stories. The Pentagon's story was driven by many factors - the war, the atomic bomb, the anti-communist scare, and the personality and clique-driven military. To do justice to the complexity and importance of the story, I have dealt with it in its own essay.

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NOTE:

I wrote this essay for myself, to organize the history that formed my life. I wanted to have a set of talking points, a narrative that was solid enough to rebut the garbage that is foisted on me day after day by the uninformed and their manipulators. The only change that writing this essay has provoked in me is a clear-eyed realization of the complete futility of expecting the United States political system to be able to control the monsters in the MIC. Any hope of saving the planet lies outside our corrupt duopoly, that only represents the crime families I am writing about. I'm sure that when I get around to organizing the economic history of the US, I will reach a similar conclusion about the gangsters on Wall St.