Anti-Liberation Theology.

Not Light Viewing: Did the creators of the 1971 television series The Guardians intuitively grasp the political utility of religious extremism, or did somebody they met in a bar tell them? The early 1970s were a dangerous and dubious time. Shadowy figures gathered in great houses and plotted coups. Assassination and terrorism filled the headlines. Certainly, it was no accident that the network broadcasting The Guardians, ITV, decided that it was too close to home to be screened in Northern Ireland.

A GOOD TELEVISION SERIES can alter the way people view the world. Fifty years from now, people will still be drawing lessons from Game of Thrones. Similarly inspired, I continue to draw lessons from a British television series first screened in 1971, The Guardians.

The “Guardians of the Realm” are a paramilitary force set up to enforce the will an authoritarian British government. Confronted with a rapidly disintegrating United Kingdom, shadowy forces, headed by “The General”, seize power and establish a dictatorial regime. The resistance movement, known simply as Quarmby, respond with a campaign of assassination and terror. Like Game of Thrones, The Guardians is not light viewing.

One episode of The Guardians, in particular, left me forever alert to the cynical use of religion as a political weapon. Not entirely happy with the way things are going in the Guardians’ new UK, the CIA sets up a weird religious movement through which it plans to influence public opinion.

Given what has happened in the years since The Guardians first screened, I have often wondered who the creators of the series, Rex Firkin and Vincent Tilsley, had been talking to. Certainly, radical religious movements were frequently to be found buttressing the authoritarian regimes installed by the CIA throughout the 1970s and 80s – especially those whose primary function had been to forestall, or destroy, left-wing governments attracting dangerous levels of popular support.

This was especially the case in Latin America where the Christian socialism of “Liberation Theology”, espoused by a growing number of Catholic priests and prelates, was attracting a growing following among the rural and urban poor. The ascension of the vehemently anti-communist Polish cardinal, Carol Wojtyla, as Pope John-Paul II, in 1979, served – for a while – to stem the spread of Liberation Theology across the Catholic lands. To those responsible for preserving the global hegemony of the United States, however, Catholic Christianity would always be suspect. Popes come and go, but Christ’s “preferential option for the poor” endures as an unacceptable challenge to American imperialism.

The religious expression weaponised by the CIA was evangelical Protestantism. Both at home and abroad, evangelicalism became an extraordinarily potent rejoinder to the latent socialism embedded in the Christian gospel. Where the Catholic Church preached a theology of atonement and imitation, radical Protestantism promised rebirth and redemption – without the need for good works.

“Born again”, the evangelicals could come before God pre-forgiven and debt-free. In combination with the emotional intensity of its services, evangelicalism’s guarantee of salvation constituted a compelling sales pitch. Catholicism’s insistence on confession and penance put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Only three things could keep an evangelical from God’s eternal company: socialism, abortion, and homosexuality. Providing the believer eschewed these three affronts to the Almighty, his or her salvation was assured.

What’s more, evangelical congregations numbering in the thousands were able to give worshippers extremely powerful emotional experiences. They were also large enough to fund comprehensive welfare services to congregants in need. Who needs socialism when you have your church?

Besides, Jesus wasn’t so much a friend of the poor, as a benefactor of the provident. Nor was he the enemy of the rich. Evangelicals were encouraged to see the accumulation of great personal wealth as a sign of God’s approbation. After all, what sort of incentive to Godliness is poverty?

Having just logged-on (3/10/22) to the Brazilian Electoral Commission’s website, the practical effect of this slow but steady spread of evangelicalism across Latin America is staring me in the face. With 99.9 percent of the votes counted, the Socialist candidate, Lula, has fallen agonisingly short of the 50 percent + 1 of the popular vote he needed to avoid a second round against the far-right (and recently baptised evangelical Christian) Jair Bolsonaro.

Had the religious demographics of the states of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo remained what they had been when Lula first won the Brazilian presidency back in 2003, it is likely they would have delivered him the votes he needed to win. With the help of the much increased and increasingly pivotal evangelical vote, however, both states fell to Bolsonaro by wide margins.

One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to see in the bloody alliance of Latin American dictators, reactionary Catholics and fanatically anti-communist evangelical protestants a political combination of enormous utility to the United States. As New Zealanders, inhabitants of one of the most secular societies on earth, we find it difficult to grasp the centrality of religious belief to the politics of Latin America. Nevertheless, we need to understand that the tactics of the CIA-backed anti-insurgents of the 1970s and 80s were born out of what lay about them. If hands needed to be bloodied, it helped to have a religious faith ready and willing to wash them clean.

Did the creators of The Guardians intuitively grasp the political utility of religious extremism, or did somebody they met in a bar tell them? The early 1970s were a dangerous and dubious time. Shadowy figures gathered in great houses and plotted coups. Assassination and terrorism filled the headlines. Certainly, it was no accident that the network broadcasting The Guardians, ITV, decided that it was all just a little too close to home to be screened in Northern Ireland.

Or, in today’s Brazil.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 October 2022.

Deep State. Big Trouble.

Dark Days: The unmistakeable, if unacknowledged, shifting of pieces on the American political chessboard: strategic leaking of intercepted electronic communications; mass media revelations of politically compromising information; all points to the intervention of the same Deep State that brought down Richard Nixon.

 

THE NUMBER OF REFERENCES to “The Deep State” has shot up since Donald Trump became President of the United States. A term previously confined to academic discussions of Turkish politics is beginning to appear in mainstream news stories all over the world.
 

Driving the “Deep State” reference spike to ever-higher levels has been the obvious collusion of US intelligence agencies and key media outlets in the ouster of Michael Flynn, President Trump’s National Security Adviser.
 

So, what is The Deep State? And do New Zealanders have any reason to worry that their own state may not be as shallow as it appears?
 

Turkey is still the best place to start this discussion.
 

The secular republic created by General Mustapha Kemal out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire in the years immediately following World War I was very much a top-down affair.
 

Kemal and his army had saved the Turkish heartland from dismemberment at the hands of the victorious allies. For that historic achievement Kemal was not only given the name “Ataturk” – father of the nation – but the army which made it possible was accorded a privileged status in the Turkish state – and its politics.
 

Without the army, Kemal’s modernisation and secularisation of Turkish society could not have succeeded. In the 1920s the Turks were an overwhelmingly rural, poorly-educated and deeply religious people. Had Kemal’s social reforms (the emancipation of women, for example) been put to free and fair vote they would, almost certainly, have been defeated. Accordingly, Kemal’s constitution expressly forbade the politicisation of Islam.
 

Below the surface of the Turkish state’s everyday interactions with its people Kemal and his successors created a deeper structure of permanent state interests and actors. Any political threat to the Ataturkian settlement would be answered by its principal defenders: the armed forces, the secret police, and the ordinary police leadership. This was what Turkish political scientists dubbed “Derin Devlet” – The Deep State.
 

Following World War II, the Turkish Republic (which had remained neutral until the final months of the war) acquiesced in the United States’ diplomatic and military policy of “containing” the Soviet Union and joined the Nato alliance.
 

As a key player in the Cold War, the Turkish Deep State was now obliged to extend its grounds for political intervention to include not only politicised Islam, but any too-aggressive pursuit of socialism. It also stepped up its suppression of Turkey’s minority Kurdish population’s quest for self-determination.
 

Clearly, Turkey is not alone in possessing a deep state apparatus. No modern state considers it prudent to leave its people defenceless against either invasion from without or subversion from within. The more important question, however, is whether or not the core institutions of the state: the armed services, the secret services, police, judiciary and senior civil servants believe there to be certain political aims and objectives so contrary to the constitutive ethos of the state that they must be suppressed – at any cost.
 

There is ample evidence from New Zealand’s brief history that this country possesses a deep state of considerable assertiveness. Any perceived threat to the dominant position of New Zealand’s settler population; its capitalist economic system; or to its status as a member-in-good-standing of the Anglo-Saxon “club”; has been met with decisive and often bloody intervention. From the trumped-up excuses for Governor Grey’s assault on the Maori King Movement in 1863, to the political destabilisation campaign which preceded the 1975 General Election, the machinations of New Zealand’s Deep State are hard to miss.
 

The unmistakeable, if unacknowledged, shifting of pieces on the American political chessboard: strategic leaking of intercepted electronic communications; mass media revelations of politically compromising information; all points to the intervention of the same Deep State that brought down Richard Nixon.
 

President Trump should not be surprised. In the eyes of the American Deep State he is guilty of President Nixon’s “crime” of attempting to supplant its own apparatus. President Trump’s key advisor, Steve Bannon, has made no secret of his intention to engage in a Lenin-like “smashing” of the core institutions of the American state – or, at least, to purging their leadership. This cannot and will not be countenanced.
 

Equally, forbidden is what the American Deep State has deemed an unacceptably dangerous attempt to alter the United States’ geopolitical posture vis-à-vis the Russian Federation. In the National Security Agency and the CIA (if not in the FBI) there is clearly a powerful faction which regards the Trump Administration as having been irretrievably compromised by the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
 

This is a very big deal. The present situation in Turkey shows what happens when a populist president believes himself to be in the cross-hairs of the Deep State. The Ataturkian legacy is being smashed to pieces by Turkey’s Islamist President, Tayyip Erdogan.
 

Will America’s democratic legacy be next?
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 21 February 2017.

From Langley, With Love.

Inside The Magic Circle: Making America great has never, ever, been the President's job.
 

NEVER BEFORE have the puppet-masters’ strings been more exposed. Clearly, something very close to a full-scale civil war is raging across the dark institutions of the American Deep State.

 

In the days immediately preceding the 8 November presidential election we witnessed the critical intervention of the New York Office of the FBI. Faced with the near certainty of “strategic leaking” by his own agents should he refuse, the hapless FBI Director, James Comey, agreed to inform Congress (and the world) that the Bureau was re-opening the investigation into the Clinton E-mail Scandal.

 

At the time it seemed reasonable to speculate that the FBI’s New York Office was a hot-bed of Trump supporters gone “rogue”. But, as Glenn Greenwald’s recent posting on The Intercept makes clear, the true motivation for the New York Office’s political intercession was very probably the CIA’s own political interventions on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

 

The FBI’s disdain for the CIA’s legally questionable (to say the least!) rules of engagement is well known in US national security circles. In the lurid light of the strategically leaked “Russian Dossier”, the re-ignition of the Clinton E-Mail Scandal is beginning to look more and more like a pre-emptive FBI strike.

 

That such a politically compromising document – unsourced and unverified – has been injected into the bloodstream of the American body politic just eight days before Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States is as unprecedented as it is alarming. As Greenwald rightly states: “The threat of being ruled by unaccountable and unelected entities is self-evident and grave. That’s especially true when the entity behind which so many [Trump opponents] are rallying is one with a long and deliberate history of lying, propaganda, war crimes, torture, and the worst atrocities imaginable.”

 

Just how this overt effort to undermine the duly-elected President-Elect of the USA plays out will depend largely on how most Americans view the role and conduct of the CIA. On the one hand, there is what might be called the “Jason Bourne” view of the agency, and, on the other, the view inspired by the television series “Homeland”.

 

The Jason Bourne CIA is presented as a murderous law unto itself. Unrestrained and unaccountable, this version of the Agency would not hesitate to cobble together a damning dossier and use it to weaken, perhaps fatally, the administration of a president deemed (by itself) to be a person inimical to the USA’s long-term strategic interests.

 

The Homeland CIA offers a much more nuanced view of America’s national intelligence agency. Above all else, the Agency’s operatives are portrayed as patriots. Their contradictory obligations: to remain loyal to the US Constitution; and to take whatever steps are necessary to protect America’s interests; repeatedly reduce characters like Carrie Mathison, Peter Quinn and Saul Berenson to guilt-ridden wrecks.

 

Of the two views, the Homeland CIA is by far the more dangerous. By painting over the blood-red crimes of the Agency with reassuring coats of ambivalent grey, the series’ writers encourage the view that although it is often necessary to uphold the Constitution by subverting it, and to preserve America’s international reputation by tarnishing it, the agents responsible never, ever, stop loving the United States.

 

One could almost say that the Jason Bourne CIA is how American liberals view the Agency when the evil Republicans are in power; while the Homeland version provides them with the excuses they need when the CIA’s misdeeds are authorised by a Democrat. So, if the Russian Dossier really is a CIA concoction, then, as far as Trump’s liberal opponents are concerned, it’s from Langley, with love.

 

Greenwald rails against this anything-to-rid-America-of-Trump  double standard: “There are solutions to Trump. They involve reasoned strategizing and patient focus on issues people actually care about. Whatever those solutions are, venerating the intelligence community, begging for its intervention, and equating their dark and dirty assertions as Truth are most certainly not among them. Doing that cannot possibly achieve any good, and is already doing much harm.”

 

Greenwald’s sterling defence of the US Constitution, notwithstanding, the situation in Washington may already have moved beyond the power of the most conscientious journalist to remedy. Regardless of Trump’s ultimate fate, the men he has nominated to defend US interests are quietly reassuring their Senate interlocutors that the continuity of America’s military, foreign relations and national security policy is not about to be upended by 3:00am tweets from the White House.

 

The unchanging priorities of the American Deep State crowd around Trump like ancestral ghosts: hemming him in; whispering in his ear; by turn inflaming and freezing his untutored political heart. His supporters should not be surprised. Though they may not know it, making America great has never, ever, been the President’s job.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 January 2017.

The Dangers of Political Adrenalin

A Fraction Too Much Friction: Those high-drama, high-risk moments in a nation’s history, when the political adrenalin is coursing through the body politic, are precisely the moments when rushing to any sort of judgement – let alone action – is the worst possible thing politicians, journalists and political activists can do.

 

I’VE ONLY EVER MET ONE serving agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. As far as most of us lefties knew he was a liberal American academic; friendly, generous, with a fund of interesting stories to tell. Outwardly, at least, the man seemed harmless. It was only when he was driving three of us away from a late-night exercise in radical derring-do that the thought occurred to me that there might be more to this guy than met the eye.
 

As our wheel-man whisked me and my comrades away from the scene of our “symbolic action” he gave us a piece of extremely good advice.
 

“The moments after an action such as this”, he said, “are always the most dangerous. Your bloodstream is full of adrenalin and you feel invincible. The truth of the matter, however, is that your judgement is shot. That’s why it’s in the immediate aftermath of high-risk activity that people are most prone to making the sort of stupid mistakes that get them caught. So, I’m just going to drive around for the next half hour or so. Give you guys a chance to decompress: for the adrenalin to work its way out of your system.”
 

It occurred to me that we were probably listening to the voice of experience. And something told me that the high-risk activities our driver had been involved in were almost certainly a whole lot more hazardous than a bit of symbolic protest action.
 

A few months later, our American friend was engaged in a discussion about political radicalism and let slip that he had once lectured a roomful of Northern Irish internees: IRA and UDF hard men. That set me thinking. What sort of security clearance would you need to be given access to political prisoners of that ilk? And who would issue it? British Army Intelligence? MI5? MI6? The guy simply had to be a spook.
 

Thirty-five years later, at an end-of-year party in Auckland, I mentioned my suspicions to a mutual American friend. He gave me a sharp look and grinned. “Well spotted”, was all he said.
 

Over the years, I’ve become convinced that our American friend’s advice applies with equal force to the after-effects of collective – as well as personal – excitement. Those high-drama, high-risk moments in a nation’s history, when the political adrenalin is coursing through the body politic, are precisely the moments when rushing to any sort of judgement – let alone action – is the worst possible thing politicians, journalists and political activists can do.
 

John Key’s resignation, for example, was just such a moment of high political drama and risk. People got excited. Adrenalin flowed. Our collective judgement was shot. All sorts of stupid mistakes – and statements – were made, and all sorts of silly stories were published and posted. What the country needed was someone to drive it around for a while and give it a chance to decompress.
 

Because Bill English is not some sort of Jesuit torturer just aching to draw blood with his newly acquired political instruments. Nor is Paula Bennet a whip-wielding Westie dominatrix in spiked heels and a leopard-skin corset. These two human-beings are nothing more, nor less, than National Party politicians – and by no means the worst of their breed.
 

And, before you start reeling off all the many and varied sins of this government, it is, perhaps, worth considering how very similar it is to the government which preceded it.
 

Who was it who pioneered the policy of moving beneficiaries from welfare to work, and kept their children poor? Allowed the public housing stock to rot where it stood rather than build new state houses? Refused to re-empower the trade unions, or rescue public broadcasting? Which party was it that signed the New Zealand-China FTA and set in motion the diplomacy that culminated in the TPPA? Who persecuted Ahmed Zaoui and masterminded nuclear-free New Zealand’s rapprochement with its “very, very, very good friends” the Americans?
 

The “continuity” represented by Bill English being sworn-in as John Key’s successor extends backwards in time well beyond the 2008 General Election, and will extend forward well beyond any change of government in 2017.
 

But, if it’s the excitement of dis-continuity you’re after, then for God’s sake try to remember that collective good judgement is generally exercised in inverse proportion to the amount of collective adrenalin coursing through your political system.
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 13 December 2016.