Andrew Gavin Marshall: The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy

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The Transnational Homeland Security State and the Decline of Democracy
When Empire Hits Home, Part 4

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

As the western world is thrown into debt bondage and the harsh reality of the draconian economic ‘reforms’ to follow, a social collapse seems increasingly inevitable. We will soon witness the collapse of western ‘civilization’. The middle classes of the west will dissolve into the lower labour class. The wealthy class, already nearly at par with the middle class in terms of total consumption, will become the only consuming class.

The state structure itself will be altering; nation-states will become subordinate to supra-national continental governance structures and global governance entities simultaneously. Concurrently, state structures will no longer maintain their democratic facades, as the public state is gutted, where all that remains and is built upon is the state apparatus of oppression. States will become tools of authoritative control, their prime purpose will be in establishing a strong military, as well as police-state apparatus to control the people. This is the dawning of the ‘Homeland Security State’ on a far grander scale than we have previously imagined. The object of ‘totalitarianism’ is to have ‘total control’. In this project of total control, state borders, as we know them today, will have to vanish; the institutions of oppression and control will be globalized.

As society collapses, the social foundations of the middle class will be pulled out from under their feet. When people are thrown to the ground, they tend to want to stand back up again. The middle class will become a rebellious, possibly even revolutionary class, with riots and civil unrest a very likely reality. The lower class itself will likely partake in the unrest; however, the youth of the middle class will be thrown into a ‘poverty of expectations’, where the world as they have known it and the world they had expectations to rise into, will be taken from them. Civil unrest is as inevitable as summer after spring.

When society collapses, the state will close itself over society to prevent the people from overtaking the levers of power and rebuilding a new social foundation. Nation-states are about to reveal to the people of the west their true nature, and that which the people of impoverished lands the world over have been exposed to for so long. At their heart, nations seek and serve power; their skeleton is not the public welfare they speak of espousing, but the apparatus of oppression that they build and expand, regardless of all other considerations.

In February of 2009, Obama’s intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the economic crisis has become the greatest threat to U.S. national security:

I’d like to begin with the global economic crisis, because it already looms as the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries ... Economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they are prolonged for a one- or two-year period... And instability can loosen the fragile hold that many developing countries have on law and order, which can spill out in dangerous ways into the international community.[1]

What is being said here is that economic crises (“if they are prolonged for a one or two year period”) pose a major threat to the established powers – the governing and economic powers – in the form of social unrest and rebellion (“regime-threatening instability”). The colonial possessions – Africa, South America, and Asia – will experience the worst of the economic conditions, which “can loosen the fragile hold that many developing countries have.” This can then come back to the western nations and imperial powers themselves, as the riots and rebellion will spread home at the same time as they may lose control of their colonial possessions – eliminating western elites from a position of power internationally, and acquiescence domestically. Thus, the rebellion and discontent in the ‘Third World’ “can spill out in dangerous ways into the international community.”

In this type of scenario, where established western elites are threatened with losing control of vast imperial possessions (resources, key strategic points), while concurrently are threatened with revolt at home, the end result is inevitably the rapid militarization of the foreign and domestic spheres. It is no coincidence that as the economic crisis emerged in late 2007, the Pentagon military Africa Command (AFRICOM) was created in December of 2007, setting the stage for a military-based foreign policy for the entire continent of Africa in an objective aimed at securing its resources.

As the economic crisis continued, the domestic populations of western nations, particularly the United States, were increasingly subjected to further surveillance and police state measures. We have body scanners at airports, legal immunity was granted to corporations that spy on our telephone calls and emails and internet-usage. The Homeland Security State is transnationalizing, following the economic crisis, itself.

The powers of globalization – the state, banks, corporations, foundations, and international organizations – are well aware of the effects this social reorganization will have on the people and the reactions that are likely to arise. After all, these same organized powers have been doing exactly this to the rest of the world for decades and even centuries. What we are about to witness is not entirely new, it’s just being done on an entirely new scale, and it’s largely new to us.

Continued. . .