| Todd,
Let me add a bit to your dialog. My first job after leaving U of Chicago in 1970 (I formally finished my Ph.D. in Econ in 1972) was as Assistant Prof of Econ at the U. of Virginia. My UVA colleague Warren Nutter was away as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in DoD at the time. He return to UVa in 1973 for my last two years there. Before and during his stay at DoD he strongly criticized CIA and other estimates of USSR GDP and economic growth as greatly exaggerated. With the Soviet Union’s collapse and better data he was proved right.
Warren
Military Junta is just another name for a variety of “Fascism,” as was seen in the many military juntas precipitated by the CIA or supported by them, as with Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Indonesia, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, South Vietnam, et al., whether with a civilian figurehead at the top, or military officers. Or as suggested in recent books like “National Security and Double Government,” our own “actual” rulers, which we here would never admit to.
I am reading/perusing a few books by Richard J. Barnett, founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, that I just purchased and recommend to those few who genuinely oppose U.S. military interventionism, not just situationally depending on which US militaristic faction they support. One is a book published in 1972, Roots of War, in which Barnett has one chapter entitled “The Operational Code of the National Security Manager.” A deliberate, and correct/accurate, modeling from the Rand Corporation’s earlier document at the link below, but instead of projecting on to the Soviets, was an objective and accurate analysis of the US “National Security State Ideology” of our NS Managers.
Read the piece at the link below, but only for the “nature” of the analysis but as applicable to the far more advanced and powerful US War System in the 1950s. With our “Manager's” recognition of a “Missile Gap,” but lying by omission with the fallacious claim that it was against us, showing the Rand Corporation was excelling in their assigned mission, of creating a “Climate of Opinion” favorable to the National Security Managers of the Military Industrial Complex. One benefits far more in understanding that than reading Andrew Bacevich and other contemporary critics of the MIC who are incapable of understanding its underlying “Operational Code,” while promoting the Conservative founders of our “National Security State Ideology” for their “Conservatism. Or, in other words, the “political theory,” the “general beliefs,” of the MIC and our National Security Managers, even though they are so destructive of our society to the point now that we’re on a course of suicidal cataclysmic proportions, and shared by both parties as can be seen in a reading of current events. Notwithstanding the lies and duplicity of the so-called “New Right” while promoting war with China first, and disguising it as Trump did, as “America First."
This Rand document defines Operational Code:
<image.tiff> That’s the aim of “Cognitive Warfare,” executed at the highest level ever, by the US and Israel. In early Cold War language, the objective was to create a “Climate of Opinion” in the US conducive to the Military Industrial Complex which had come into existence during WW II, and was desired to be continued by the likes of Gen. Curtis LeMay, and Gen. Hap Arnold, and led to the creation of the Rand Corporation, which became the template for all the pro-war think tanks that followed. Even, in the case of Rand, developing an economics ideology conducive to a Military Industrial State: Rational (or Public) Choice, certainly with a lot of similarities to the libertarian’s darling, the Nietzschean, Ayn Rand.
Incidentally, this might (should) be of interest, and goes along with the Operational Code of the National Security Managers: "Foundations of Effective Influence Operations: A Framework for Enhancing Army Capabilities” Of course like all US/Israeli documents on “Cognitive Warfare,” the current and preferred renaming of "Influence Operations" (being more inscrutable to ignorant people, which the vast amount of people are, especially those who believe they “know so much” there’s nothing more to learn) which this is, the document itself serves as an “Influence Operation.” As this suggests the Army only got involved in Influence Operations at the end of the Cold War. At least in what I saw with a very quick glance at this. Though it’s “truthful” to the point that it was always the CIA, or their former officers who founded National Review, who took the lead in conducting Influence Operations against the US population.
Over Decades, Democracy for Israelis Has Been a Military Junta for Palestinians The present government is dangerous to many Jews, also those who voted for the parties in the government coalition. But first and foremost it is dangerous for all Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line. It could carry out various expulsion plans, which its senior ministers – Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – have been advancing openly. They are not making do with just the “small” and indirect types of banishment that previous Labor and Likud governments conducted – such as construction bans for Palestinians and crowding them into Area A, sending them to the penal colony in Gaza and revoking their residency status. But for the big expulsion, outside the borders of the Greater Land of Israel, political-military chaos must be created. In other words, war. During a war it will be easier to reprise the Nakba of 1948. If mass expulsion seems like fiction, let us remember that until recently, talk about an antidemocratic legislative blitz sounded delusional. After all, long before justice ministers acted to weaken the judiciary – which never stopped the dispossession and discrimination – expelling Palestinians from their homeland was burnt into Israeli ideology and praxis as a realistic option. Even before the state was founded, it viewed the indigenous people as an unnecessary surplus, who in the worst case are to be ignored and in the worst case to be gotten rid of. The danger of expulsion is concrete because most of the protesters against the government are convinced that until now, Israel was a democracy. They have been and still are willfully blind to the fact that their democracy for Jews has been a military junta for Palestinians. The dictatorship they are warning about has been operating already for six decades. Not just Israel’s Jewish and Druze citizens maintain it, but also the Diaspora Jews who support it emotionally and financially, and the West– enlightened in its own eyes – that treats it with never-ending tolerance. Israel’s military regime over the Palestinians is a parliament, government, courts, jailer and hangman all together. There is no greater lack of separation of powers than this. We control a conquered population, deprive it of civil rights and, even before the invention of fake news, claimed everything was legal and proper. Generations of Israelis, including most of today’s protesters, were tamed into seeing all the “small” types of expulsion that were developed and implemented as a natural condition. The residents of Masafer Yatta and their eviction – with the approval of the High Court of Justice – do not interest them. The LGBT community will make it difficult to pass the legislative initiatives against them. Exclusion of women will arouse greater opposition than what the Noam party assumes. The planned harm to the elderly, the sick, salaried workers and students will sow seeds of dismay also among Shas and Likud. But the worsening harm, planned against the Palestinians, has Knesset majority larger than the size of the coalition. Labor MKs Naama Lazimi and Gilad Kariv, who were regarded as the progressive social hope, have already proved that discrimination against the Palestinians is part of the consensus. They are among the opposition members who voted – so disgracefully! – with this poisonous, destructive government to allow revocation of the citizenship of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Today they are clinging to a specific excuse, tomorrow they will grab onto another one to support a measure for a broader expulsion. They, their voters and the supporters of the “moderate” right of Benny Gantz, Gideon Sa’ar and Avigdor Lieberman will not lie down under the wheels of the trucks to prevent the nightmare that the settler right is piecing together. This is not prophecy. It is forbidden to prophesy over a manmade disaster as if it is an existing place in space, and it’s just a matter of time before we reach it. This is a warning, an alert, an S.O.S. cry.
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