the American secret police

theses[8]

“intelligence community” is a euphemism for the secret police

what does this mean?

Every time I hear this phrase I laugh.

“Intelligence community”? What, is there a fucking bake sale? Oh, it’s Sunday tea time down at the community center, pinky in the air and a poison dart gun in your boot. Why, whatever democratically-elected government shall we overthrow today, my dears? How many journalists, dissidents, and artists shall we disappear, torture and murder, all in the name of “freedom”?

As Americans, we suffer from a frank inability to confront painful truths about our national character. For a decade, we lied to ourselves, insisting that “enhanced interrogation” wasn’t torture. It is torture, we torture, we are torturers.

“Political speech and writing,” George Orwell wrote, “are largely the defence of the indefensible.” In Politics and the English Language, he makes the following observation:

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

We see this operation at work today in the emergence of the phrase “intelligence community” in American discourse. So let us confront the truth of what the “IC” really is. Their function is no new thing under the sun. What is the plain English word for a plain English thing?

Examine the language we use to describe similar organs of state in other countries. Was the Ministry of State Security (aka the Stasi) in East Germany an “intelligence community”? What about the KGB? Or the Gestapo?

Secretly policing your own people is what secret police do.

So let’s stop talking about the “IC” this and the “IC” that. They’re not a community. There’s no fucking bake sale. They’re secret police, who exist to destroy our freedom, harrass journalists, blackmail lawmakers, subvert our democracy, wipe their ass with the Constitution, and to rule us in secret.

NSA? CIA? FBI? DEA?

Secret police.

see also

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language