

              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 4  Num. 57
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
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THE GANGSTER NATURE OF THE STATE
 
My transcription of a talk by Dr. Michael Parenti. Michael 
Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale 
University in 1962. He has taught at a number of colleges and 
universities, and is the author of many books, including 
*Democracy for the Few* (St. Martin's; sixth edition); *Inventing 
Reality: The Politics of News Media* (St. Martin's; second 
edition); and *Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America (St. 
Martin's). I will include a list of his audio taped lectures at 
the end of this transcript.
 
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MICHAEL PARENTI:
Thank you. It's very nice to be here. I made a note that I wanted 
to come tonight, when I heard that Peter Dale Scott and Michael 
Levine were going to be speaking. I had no idea I *was* going to 
be coming in this capacity -- a very last-minute thing.
 
I, I've been looking at history, and I've been impressed and 
depressed by the fact that history is really a chronicle of 
immense atrocities. What we have in history is the fact that, 
when surplus value develops, when there's more than a subsistence 
economy, you have some portion of the population that will do 
everything it can to enslave and to exappropriate the labor of 
the rest of the people. Whether it's a slave society (as in 
ancient Greece and Rome), or feudal society (where people were 
reduced to serfs), or in Capitalist society (where people are 
driven to the edge of insecurity and made to work faster and 
harder).
 
And one of the things that's used in that arrangement is a very 
conscious instrument of control, that's very necessary. And that 
instrument is called the State. That is, what they do is set up a 
State -- an organization that has, as Max Weber (who wasn't a 
Marxist), as Max Weber called it: "An organization that has a 
monopoly on the legitimate uses of force and violence."
 
But that's what we have today! We also have developed, in modern 
times, some democratic features, some means of trying to fight 
back and restrain this arbitrary power -- this use of power for 
the sheer sake of exploiting people for self-enrichment of a 
small elite.
 
What am I trying to say? That along with government, we also have 
a thing called "The State". And along with governance, along with 
policies, and along with those things, we have this other 
instrument -- even in a democratic State. And that instrument's 
goal, whether it's in democratic France or democratic England or 
democratic Germany or democratic Italy or democratic USA or 
democratic Canada, and all these countries... All of them have 
these other instruments and agencies, that ACT LIKE A BUNCH OF 
*GANGSTERS*!! That act repressively. That use surveillance. That 
use every dirty trick in the book: unequal enforcement of tax 
laws, name it; the bringing in of drugs into whole neighborhoods 
and communities; trumped-up murder charges; assassination. That 
you HAVE IN THE MIDDLE of these democracies, you have the state 
within the state -- known as the "national security state". And 
that State is capable of the most UNSPEAKABLE crimes that you can 
think of! And those crimes are perpetrated against their *own* 
people; they're perpetrated against people around the world.
 
Not long ago, I got a letter from a woman who's been a community 
organizer in Chicago. And she said with GRIEF in her heart, she 
said, "I *remember* the sixties! I *remember* the tremendous 
democratic organization and leadership that was developing in the 
Latino and African-American communities! And I remember those 
leaders! And every single one of them today is either DEAD (shot 
by the police) or in Marion prison on trumped-up charges! And I 
remember the demoralization that took place; the shattering of 
those organizations. And after those organizations were 
shattered, and demoralized, then in came the drug traffickers. 
And those drug traffickers, the thing I remember the most about 
them, is that they were aided and abetted by the feds! By the 
federal agents themselves."
 
And this is what happens. That is, we are dealing with a State 
that was engaged in domestic counter-insurgency. And it was 
*more* interested in having a population that was *un*-organized, 
and *de*-moralized, than a population that was *organized*, that 
was effectively fighting for its democratic rights. Because if 
it's organized, and it's effective, and it's powerful, it will 
start making demands and start pursuing *its* interests. And it 
will start cutting in on the interests that those police, and 
those "coppers", and those undercover people, and those forces of 
military and "law and order", are dedicated to protecting -- 
protecting the *status quo*, protecting those with property 
against those who don't have it.
 
And by the way, for the last thousand years we've had theorists 
who've made that point. Except they make it proudly.
 
Adam Smith said, "As the divisions of property become 
increasingly unequal, it is more and more necessary to have a 
State, to defend those who have property from those who do not."
 
John Locke: "The purpose of the State is to defend those who have 
property from those who do not."
 
James Harrington. You can go on. James Madison. Alexander 
Hamilton. The only difference was that when [Karl] Marx said it, 
he said "to defend those who have property from those whose labor 
is exappropriated by those who accumulate wealth off their labor, 
who have all the property." He changed it a little bit. And he 
said it wasn't just "haves" and "have nots", it was "haves" 
taking it from those who produced it and created the "haves".
 
And throughout the world, dominant economic interests today have 
enlisted the efforts of assassins and torturers. As we talk, at 
this moment, the CIA and other such agencies, in this country and 
other countries, have sponsored violence, torture, death squads, 
drugs... in scores of countries. From Zaire to Angola to 
Mozambique to El Salvador to Guatemala to Indonesia to East 
Timor. And you go on and on and on. All... to western Europe to 
the USA! To Chicago and Detroit and Boston and New York. They 
have systematically targeted, in many countries, the clergy, the 
peasant leaders, intellectuals, journalists, student leaders, 
labor union leaders, workers, and any community activists and 
such. Tens of thousands have been murdered and assassinated to 
prevent social change; to destroy any kind of redistributive 
politics, any kind of government, any kind of social movement 
that is not willing to reduce its people to economic fodder.
 
And with NAFTA, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, we 
now see the Third World-ization of the USA will continue, full- 
speed ahead.
 
The gangster nature of the State is cloaked by the democratic 
facade, *and* by the democratic substance of the government. I 
mean, there *is* some democratic substance there. Democratic 
victories have been won. We have struggled, and certain things 
*have* been won.
 
And yet, in the midst of this, the State still goes on.
 
And what is so compelling about an issue like drugs (as Michael 
Levine is pointing out) is that it's not that we're saying, "The 
government is not doing enough about drugs," or that "We're 
losing the 'war against drugs.'" It's that the government, or 
elements in it, are *active* *perpetrators* and purveyors of 
drugs! {1}. {2}.
 
And what is so compelling about the JFK assassination is how 
nakedly the gangster nature of the State is revealed! It is an 
awakening. And to know the truth about the JFK assassination is 
to create a de-legitimating force that calls into question the 
entire State system and the entire social order it represents. 
And this is why, for 30 years, the mainstream press has 
suppressed, or dismissed out of hand, the findings about JFK's 
death, the findings of independent investigators like Peter Dale 
Scott, Harold Weisberg, Carl Oglesby, Mark Lane, Antony Summers, 
Phillip Melinson(sp?), Jim Garrison, Cyril Wecht, and dozens and 
dozens of others. They're called "assassination buffs". They're 
not "buffs". Even that *word* is a limiting and marginalizing and 
diminishing term. A "buff" is a kind of a hobby pursuer, you see. 
It's a kind of a quirky person with all his quirky little 
interests. Would you talk about "Holocaust Buffs"? Would you? No. 
They are serious investigators of a very serious crime which 
leads to all sorts of serious understandings about the criminal 
nature of the State.
 
                   [...to be continued...]
 
---------------------------<< Notes >>---------------------------
{1} From *Project Seek* by Gerald A. Carroll (Carson City: 1994, 
Bridger House Publishers):
 
  Now, it is difficult to distinguish legal activities from 
  illegal ones when it comes to business and commerce. Most 
  banks, whether they realize it or not, launder illegal drug 
  money to some degree. They can't help it. Drug money serves 
  to undergird our entire economy, especially when economic 
  recession strikes. *The* *drug* *business* *never* *sees* 
  *bad* *times*. If all the illegal drug money were to vanish 
  tomorrow, our nation would be plunged into a deep economic 
  depression, as would most of the Western world. [CN -- Our 
  dollars, once backed by gold, are now backed by drugs.] And 
  now that Communism no longer carries ideological clout, there 
  is simply no protection from the exploiters of these 
  controlled substances, other than conscious efforts from good 
  people to abstain from using them.
 
  Laws making street drugs illegal today serve only to make the 
  cost of drugs 200 to 400 times greater than they would be if 
  they were legal, taxable commodities. Then, drug use and 
  addiction could be attacked as the social problem that it is, 
  instead of a full-blown criminal offense. Under current laws, 
  drug-selling "territories" in large urban areas become war 
  zones, because the local drug dealers want to keep their 
  market share up, and their competition down. It is an old- 
  fashioned economic truth: Once a substance is "illegal," the 
  price rockets upward, well beyond the normal price for the 
  substance if it were "legal." Current law benefits the 
  criminal and no one else.
 
{2} From *Project Seek* by Gerald A. Carroll (Carson City: 1994, 
Bridger House Publishers):
 
  [Quoting from Gemstone Files] "All this dope processing and 
  shipping is controlled and supervised by [organized crime] 
  for [organized crime]. Dope arrests and murders are aimed at 
  independent pushers and maverick peddlers and smugglers who 
  are competing with, or holding out on, [organized crime]. 
  While Nixon was conducting his noisy campaign against dope 
  smuggling across the Mexican border, his dope officer in 
  charge of protecting the [syndicate's] dope trade was E. 
  Howard Hunt."
 
  [...]
 
  "Still more dope comes from South America -- cocaine, and now 
  heroin. U.S. aid went to build a highway across Paraguay 
  (Uruguay?). Useless to the natives, who have no cars; they 
  use it for sunbathing during the day. All night, airplanes 
  loaded with cocaine take off from the longest landing strip 
  in the world -- financed by U.S. tax money for the benefit of 
  international [syndicate] dope pushers..."
 
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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
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    Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"        
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