The FBI, CIA, and Pentagon began surveilling, abusing, smearing, blackmailing, infiltrating, and destroying people and organizations who were suspected of promoting communism, socialism, leftism, liberalism, or progressivism.
The CIA also began specializing in the art of assassination —
When the Constitution was ratified, it brought into existence a limited-government republic. That meant a government whose powers were very limited — limited, that is, to those powers enumerated in the Constitution itself.
After World War II, that all changed. U.S. officials told the American people that while the Allied powers had been victorious against Nazi Germany, that did not mean, unfortunately, that Americans could rest. The United States, they said, now faced an enemy that was arguably an even bigger threat than Nazi Germany. This new enemy, they said, was America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, which was ruled by a communist regime.
They said that there was a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the world, including the United States. That conspiracy, they said, was based in Moscow, Russia. U.S. officials convinced Americans that, to use the title of a movie that came in 1966, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” Most everyone became convinced that the United States was in grave danger of going Red, with commies ending up running the IRS and the rest of the federal government.
In addition to this supposed threat from communist Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union, Americans were told, was the threat from communism itself, which was a philosophy that entailed having government take care of people, as compared to a society in which people take care of themselves. U.S. national-security state officials viewed communism as a political and economic narcotic that, once imbibed by people, would inevitably seduce them into wanting more.
To combine this twin treat of communists and communism, U.S. officials said, it was necessary to convert the federal government from the limited-government republic on which the country was founded to what is called a national-security state, which is a type of governmental structure that characterizes totalitarian regimes. The big difference between the two governmental structures is that in a republic the government’s powers are limited while in a national-security state they are not.
The national-security state consists of a massive, permanent, and ever-growing military establishment (i.e., the Pentagon and what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex), a secretive agency with the power to assassinate, kidnap, detain, and disappear people (i.e., the CIA), and a surveillance agency with the power to secretly monitor people’s activities (i.e., the NSA).
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