Yesterday, the Guardian published (LINK ) an in-depth article on how recent revelations of NSA domestic surveillance relate to the real war on “terrorism” – that is, “... anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability.”
That’s right. In line with a growing body of Defense Department doctrine often promulgated directly by private-sector contractors, Our Government is preparing to clamp down on looters, rioters, political dissidents such as Occupy, and above all environmentalists, during civil disorders expected to result from environmental catastrophes and resource depletion. In direct cooperation with the largest multinational corporations (and often while paying them a pretty penny out of the public coffers for the same), the DOD is collecting your communications on dKos, Facebook, e-mail, and other outlets so that they know if you might be one of the Dangerous People who dare to acknowledge the probable scenarios that they themselves are planning for:
. . . in 2010, the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of "large scale economic breakdown" in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain "domestic order amid civil unrest."
The 2010 exercises were part of the US Army's annual Unified Quest programme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that "ecological disasters and a weak economy" (as the "recovery won't take root until 2020") will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between "resource-starved nations."
Naturally those who can see what the Pentagon sees and dare to consider alternative solutions before martial law is needed to “quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” are a grave danger which must be identified and eliminated.
Why have we the people suddenly become the enemy of the military and intelligence apparatus that (supposedly) is intended to protect us? Well, obviously, it isn’t and never was intended to protect us. The Workers. The Little People. Or most especially, the malcontents who dare to have dissenting opinions. We could be tolerated so long as there was no significant probability that the vast mass of workers placidly chewing their cuds could be separated from their television-induced myopia and obese fast-food-fed contentment. But:
The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:
“A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity . . . . Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions.”
Economic hardship, especially when it cuts down to the point of physical hunger and starvation, is a potent social incendiary. We have seen this during the past two years with the Arab Spring, and with current events in Syria and Turkey, it’s obvious that the political upheavals in the Middle East have not yet run their course. Every European nation has historical experience of something similar during the last three centuries. The dissolution of feudal economic stability and the rise of capitalism led to wars, revolutions, plague and famine throughout the era we tidily describe as the “Renaissance”. While concentrating on the beautiful art and colorful personalities of the period, Americans tend to forget the blood, suffering, and starvation that went hand in hand with the new concentration of wealth in the hands of nobility and powerful merchant clans. We describe the rise of Protestantism as a purely theological phenomenon, when in fact it was as much a “protest” against the conspicuous consumption of the aristocracy, led by the wannabe’s of the upper merchant class. And although we think of the French Revolution as the classic model of democratic uprising, we often fail to notice that it was part of a large continuum in which the issues of great disparity between excessive wealth and poverty collided with government corruption and significant economic recession following imperial overreach.
The coming century will see massive pressure put on existing social and political structures by environmental change and declining resources. Those who currently control those resources and operate those political structures recognize the danger to their continued enjoyment of untrammeled power. That danger is US. And they’re determined to eliminate it before it can challenge their domination of whatever is left after they finish their wholesale plunder of the Earth we live on.