Censorship or National Strategy?
contemplating a dichotomy
An underlying assumption of strategy from a national perspective is that all nation-states and nonstate actors have interests they will pursue to the best of their abilities.
-Harry R. Yarger
What constitutes the interests of a nation? The greater good? The wellbeing of the majority? In this age of postmodernity I can’t say without leaving room for argument. For national strategy to be meaningful, nations must not only have inherent interests, but be governed by individuals committed to pursuing those interests. This is not the status quo in America. There is a way out, or at least a clear and obvious step that must be taken to get there, but we can’t set upon that path without first understanding our current situation.
Class vs. National Interest
The only way to conceive of national interest in a way that is both meaningful and accurate is to associate it with an identifiable class, or group, of human beings. In the case of a nation, it makes the most sense to consider citizens of the nation to be the relevant class determining the national interest. Currently, though, it is not American citizens writ large whose interests are advanced by the “national interest.” Instead, it is a group of insular elite1 who have failed spectacularly to serve even their own long term interests.2 Globalization is partly to blame. Nearly all of these individuals see themselves as citizens of the world with no particular fondness for their homeland (although they remain perfectly capable of regurgitating empty platitudes conflating American interests with a “rules-based international order). Indeed, such a fondness is considered provincial, a class signifier in and of itself. For national security to be a coherent concept, this must change. Until it does, national security strategy will be oriented towards advancing the interests of a transnational3 elite leaving Western nations vulnerable to eventual subjugation to those with strong, coherent, and enduring identities.
War is a Racket
War is a human endeavor and continuation of the political by other means.4 When an insular elite with interests that don’t align with The People control the political, it is also a racket. Smedley Butler took great pains to explain this in the wake of his lifelong and heroic military service. American military leaders dismissing the admonitions of their most highly decorated compatriot explains a lot. Most military leaders join to serve the American People, not an insular elite. In the process of advancing through the ranks, however, the ones who ascend into the general officer and flag ranks are increasingly likely to join that insular elite, if only to escape the cognitive dissonance witnessing how the U.S. Military is employed first hand. John Kelly, Stanley McChrystal, and Mark Milley are quintessential examples of this phenomenon. The disconnect has only grown since MG Butler’s day, a truth somewhat obscured by the myth making around WWII. Speaking of WWII, the Supreme Allied Commander of that war offered a similar warning after his own effort to align national strategy with American interests via Project Solarium.5
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
The only way national strategy and war waged in pursuit thereof can serve the interests of Americans, is if Americans as a class retain political control of the United States Government. This is a tall order that the information age placed within our reach for the first time in several generations. This would, however, supplant the current ruling class who will not allow this to happen without a fight.
Censorship and Strategy
The situation as described above constitutes a populist and nationalist narrative. Such narratives are targeted by the censorship-industrial complex (CIC) worldwide precisely because they pose an existential threat to the current order. To be clear, the current order is one where citizens of almost every Western nation are ruled by an insular elite with interests that do not align, and are often directly opposed, to their own. Put in Eisenhower’s terms, policy has been captured by a scientific-technological elite wielding a whole-of-society information apparatus that systematically excludes the very solutions to the problems it generates. This is baked into the current National Security Strategy as I have discussed previously.
If America is to survive, its government must be aligned towards serving the interests of Americans. Under the weight of the CIC, we can’t even have productive conversations about what those interests are, let alone strategize about how to best pursue them. While our political and cultural elite are allowed to take for granted that certain topics are not worthy of public discourse, America is doomed.
We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The first and most critical step out of this mess is to restore expectations of and commitment to free and open communication. Given the global nature of the information domain this commitment must also be global.6 Those who suggest otherwise must be allowed to voice their opinions, but make no mistake, they are class enemies of the American People.
Robert Barnes does a good job of describing how the elite class develops and maintains such insular beliefs. To summarize his thesis, they’ve never had a real job subject to reality testing. They go to elite preparatory schools, then to elite colleges, then into jobs closely tied to government.
There are very few, if any, who will truly benefit in the long run from a transition to the neoliberal feudalism projected by our current trajectory. This is a complex topic I hope to expand upon another time. In the meantime, if you haven’t familiarized yourself with the concept of neoliberal feudalism you owe it to yourself to read through the always insightful
’s foundational essay On the Nature and Crafting of Belief in the Elite’s Struggle for Power and Control here:
As you can see, I’ve been reading my Clausewitz. Thanks CGSOC!
A look forward to sharing an essay awaiting publication composed by a friend of mine that explores Project Solarium in detail while relating it to a novel, and in my view essential, addition to Joint strategy doctrine.
This statement has far reaching implications. Information is one of the four national instruments of power. The temptation to use this instrument to achieve national strategic ends is one that can no longer be indulged without serious consideration due to its recursive relationship to policy. The one ring from Tolkien’s lore comes to mind as a perfect allegory for this dynamic.
I find it quite odd (I truly dont imply anything about you or your comment here) that people dont mention and in many cases I suspect dont even see the elephant in the room on this. The banking and finance paradigm that existed from the birth the USA and was then made manifest during the reign of the Jacksonians and then enforced with a broad based deep public sentiment that resembled a devout religion was certainly overturned in 1913, it was in fact mostly dismantled in the 1970s and then fully done away with by the late 1990s, it was ended with the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, centralized control of capital everywhere is essentially the heart of the Neoliberal project.
The USA, fully for the first ~150 years of its existence and then still mostly in the real economy for the the next ~40 years after that, was a system of systems whose national strategy worked in tandem with and was indeed actually powered by many sub national local and regional strategies. And it could be again.
In fact the heart of the American idea of democracy and federalism was a decentralized system of systems with people living in a paradigm of national prerogative AND local/regional semi-autonomy which allowed for an imperfect and limited but still real democratic environment. A great shame is that just as some demographics were able to get start getting full access to it, it was destroyed.
In other democracies, like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Iran, Turkey, Russia, and any country where you vote in Africa, nationalism works just fine with democracy. It is the natural state and all parties have to adhere to it, even if they don't want to. In Turkey for example even communists have to support the Turkish people. No one in these countries supports mass immigration.
It is only when the media are hijacked by a people who aren't the majority people, and who have a long history of hostility and conflict with the majority people, that you get a long process of turning nationalism into anti-nationalism. The U.S. was nationalist when it was democratic in the past. Hollywood worked hard on making Whites hate themselves and accept race mixing and mass immigration to give the Left permanent election victories through imported voters. Hollywood studios in the past resolved to make at least one pro-race mixing, anti-"racist" movie per year, even when they knew they'd lose money from it. So it had nothing to do with making money. It had everything to do with being anti-White.
Likewise their brethren in the social sciences pushed an anti-White, pro-immigration agenda even though the professors had nothing to gain from that. And the media bosses amplified that agenda even though they had nothing to gain from that - they weren't international, their newspapers were only in the U.S. It had nothing to do with money.
Likewise the war agenda is not for money. In that case they could just invade countries in Africa or wherever, produce weapons for that, without disturbing the extremely sensitive Gulf region where the oil can be lost if the Strait of Hormus is mined shut. And it's not "for the oil" as the Left claims. In that case they'd never aid Israel. There is no oil in Gaza. Nor in Lebanon. Almost no oil in Syria. And attacking pro-Palestinian countries means cutting off the oil trade with Iran, to the detriment of the U.S. And lately, cutting off trade with oil-rich Russia, because Russia helps the pro-Palestinian Syria and Iran.
No, the foreign agenda is entirely based on who is pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. The U.S. opposed Iran and Iraq but not Saudi Arabia, because Iran and Iraq were pro-Palestinian, whereas the Saud government is a de facto Israeli ally. Note, Iraq went to war against Iran on the U.S. behalf, with U.S. money and weapons. A war that killed about a million people, about half in either country. Iraq's Hussein was staunchly pro-American, even toward the end, hoping the Americans would take him back as an ally, despite his generals trying to make him change his mind. But he helped the Palestinian resistance. He hosted them. He gave money to the families of suicide bombers, families whose homes and all they owned were illegally razed by Israeli bulldozers. So the neocons demanded that he be removed.
Just like it was the neocons who demanded that Iran be attacked. In the 1980s there were still both neocons and realists in the State Department and Defense Department - with the "realists" being the ones who'd trade peacefully with whoever was in charge in the Middle East. The neocons were pushed by the media bosses, the realists were opposed. So the politicians gave the neocons full control. It had nothing to do with oil or selling guns, which could have been handled much better without being bogged down by the neocon/Israel agenda.