The State as Drug Lord

I think one of the more telling points against the drug war is just how hypocritical the states involved in the Drug War are. The key government players are under absolutely no illusion that they’re helping to combat drug use. Rather, the state—especially the U.S. national security state operating abroad—has exactly the same interest as any other organized crime lord in keeping the stuff illegal: it keeps the price up. The higher the price, the more money outfits like the CIA can make selling the shit to fund their favored thugs.

Of course there are some useful idiots in Congress, the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, etc., who actually take this shit at face value. The more naïve Drug War supporters in Congress and the state legislatures play the role of Baptists in this classic Baptist/Bootlegger scenario. But the real players in the Drug War, the people inside the loop, the people who really matter, want drugs kept illegal for the same reason Al Capone supported Prohibition.

From the Golden Triangle of Indochina, to crack cocaine funding for the Contras, to the latest revelations about the CIA’s ties to Walid Karzai’s opium operation, the story repeats itself like the leitmotif in a Wagnerian opera.

When Rothbard said governments were mafias, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Keeping it in mind is a useful antidote to the whole pink-ass “Policeman Dan is always your friend” culture that too many suburban white folks have absorbed.

Along the same lines, if you find yourself continually shocked by every new revelation (like recent news of Karzai) that yet another loathsome international gangster is on the CIA payroll, you might want to reevaluate your view of the world.

Any time the American state and its pet media (see Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s propaganda model of the media) attempt to manufacture a pretext for war by whipping up a moral panic about the latest Hitler-of-the-Week, be prepared to discover that he’s actually been on the CIA payroll for decades.

Regarding the propaganda model, by the way, think back to cable news coverage of the Russia-Georgia thing last year. In all that talk about “Russian aggression,” how many times do you recall anyone reminding the audience that Georgia actually started the whole thing by invading a province whose independence was guaranteed by treaty, even firing on Russian peacekeeping troops? Did anyone mention the role of the International Republican Institute, National Endowment for Democracy, or Soros Foundation in engineering color coded revolutions like that of Georgia? Or put those color-coded revolutions in context as an attempt by Oceania to encircle Eurasia? Uh huh—I didn’t think so.

The U.S. national security community helped engineer the coup that put Saddam in power. You know how they’re always bleating that he “used weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors”? Um, yeah, sure—he used them against neighbors like Iran back in the 1980s; and guess who the U.S. was backing in that war? Like the joke goes, the U.S. government knew Saddam had WMDs because it saved the receipts.

If Satan were a CIA client and either outlived his usefulness or stopped taking orders from Washington, you can be dead sure the next day you’d see a presidential spokesman at the podium, or Gen. Powell briefing the Security Council, breathlessly announcing all the terrible, terrible stuff they’d “just discovered” was going on in Hell. And then a photo would resurface of Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Devil twenty years before.

Virtually everything you see about the world in the mainstream press is as scripted as the Five-Minutes Hate in 1984.

Once again: Free your minds! Policeman Dan is not your friend. And what the U.S. government does overseas has nothing to do with “freedom” and “democracy.” It’s all about propping up a system of power—and in doing so, the American state has installed or defended some of the worst monsters in history.

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