State Crimes Against Democracy

Political Forensics in Public Affairs

A. Kouzmin, M. Witt, A. Kakabadse, A. Kouzmin, M. Witt, A. Kakabadse

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349345397, 9780230348172
• eBook ISBN: 9781137286987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

Assembles leading theorists of a new paradigm of political theory, State Crimes Against Democracy, undertaking judicious and devoted hacking exposing the elusive nodes and circuitry that propagate elite dominance in world affairs, and what can be done to restore the demos to democracy.

1

State Crimes Against Democracy: A Clarification of Connotations

John Dixon, Scott Spehr, and John Burke

State crimes against democracy (SCADs) (deHaven-Smith, 2006), embracing economic state crimes against democracy (E-SCADs) (Johnston et al., 2010a, 2010b), have been defined by deHaven-Smith (2010) as

concerted actions ... by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty [with] potential to subvert political institutions and entire governments. ... [They] are high crimes that attack democracy itself. (p. 795, emphasis added)

SCADs are judged to be conspiracies of high office – intrigues involving oligarchic elites – inevitably, elected politicians, appointed public officials, political party officials, and state contractors – operating outside the glare of transparency – that produce “high crimes and misdemeanors”. They contrive, in some combination, to abuse the power of the state for their own personal or their organization’s gain, thus attacking the essential creed and covenant of democracy (Kouzmin and Dixon, 2010). They are the product of action taken by “government insiders”. As Griffin (2011, p. 1) notes,

Those who have gained control of a State in an ostensible democracy have many means not only for orchestrating major crimes, but also for preventing those crimes (including their crimes against democracy itself) from being publicized.

This gives rise to what Witt and Kouzmin (2010, p. 783) describe as “the chimerical presence and perfidious legacy of State criminality against democracy”. They are said to differ from other, more mundane, forms of political criminality – such as a graft, bid-rigging, and voting fraud – in that they are considered to have the potential to subvert political institutions and entire governments or branches of government. They have, therefore, become a catchcry that captures the spirit of Machiavelli that was put into words by Lord Acton in 1895: “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All great men are bad”.

Somewhat paradoxically, it is the Anglo-Saxon democracies that exhibit the most pronounced tendency to regard with suspicion the arbitrary exercise of power by their freely elected representatives. And among these, it is in the United States where conspiracy theories are most prevalent. Hofstadter (1965) sees this as a reflection of the “paranoid style” of American politics and equates this tendency to embrace conspiracy theories with a sort of social or political pathology.

Others, of course, disagree. As America’s global role and the power that accompanied and enabled it expanded after the Second World War, the practice of foreign policy came, necessarily, “to be conducted through opaque processes that bear all the hallmarks of conspiracy” (Hellinger, 2003, p. 205), where “government power is party to, rather than the innocent object of, conspiracy” (Harding and Stewart, 2003, p. 260). The prominence of secretive intelligence services, operating precisely outside the rule of law, as protagonists in the “Cold War” especially contributed to this mindset. “Thus, an inherent tension exists between the principle of democratic governance, which depends on access to information so that citizens can make informed decisions, and the secrecy that surrounds the collection of intelligence and covert intelligence operations” (Wittkopf et al., 2008, p. 405). The impunity with which these organizations carry out their activities is clearly inimical to the workings of democratic politics, that is, democracy by, and for, the people. In this sense, American global power and conspiracy theories are closely related, relatively recent phenomena.

The Cold War stimulated the growth of intelligence services and, at various periods, gave rise to practices inimical to the practice of open democratic societies. During the period of McCarthyism in the United States, widespread covert surveillance of citizens was tolerated and conspiracy theorists of the right persecuted many people, charging them with being secretly in the service of Communists, the country’s Cold War adversary. These charges eventually proved to be spurious in the vast majority of cases. Similarly, the present “War on Terror” has led to practices of surveillance of individuals, sanctioned by laws such as the Patriot Act, that are seen by many to be in similar violation of the values underlying an open democratic political system. Civil libertarians of all political persuasions – left, right, and center – have been critical of such measures and suspicious, in many cases, of the motives that led to the passage of such laws. Conspiracy theorists thus have additional ammunition, in terms of their critique of power and its abuse.

According to SCAD theorists (deHaven-Smith, 2010; Johnston et al., 2010a; Marrs, 2010; Witt, 2010), there are numerous proven or strongly suspected instances of SCADs. Those judged to be proven, all of which have a long trail of public hearings, public records, and academic research establishing their truth, include:

•McCarthyist fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration;

•Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – the false claim during the Johnson US presidency that North Vietnam attacked a US ship that justified the Vietnamese War;

•Watergate – the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the effort to discredit him during the Nixon US presidency;

•Iran-Contra Affair during the Reagan US presidency when by secret arrangement funds provided to the Nicaraguan contra rebels came from profits gained by selling arms to Iran;

•the felon disenfranchisement program that restricted the franchise for Florida’s 2000 election; and

•the fabrication of intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction during the G. W. Bush US presidency to justify the Iraq War.

Those suspected, all of which have substantial evidence of covert actions with countervailing deniability that tend to leave the facts in dispute, include:

•the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy;

•the assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, of Martin Luther King, a prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement;

•the shooting of George Wallace, the four-term governor of Alabama and four-time candidate for the US presidency, which became a news event (an October Surprise) with the potential to influence the outcome of the 1972 US presidential election;

•the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on 11 September 2001;

•the mailing of American military-grade anthrax to US Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy just after the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack;

•the mortgage lending fraud and subsequent bailout;

•the financial frauds related to outsourcing and privatization of public services; and

•the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Many of the SCAD conspiracies, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the “Watergate” incident, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, were the subject of investigations by the legislative branch of the American federal government, demonstrating its constitutional commitment to checking abuses of power. Some of these investigations produced evidence of malfeasance at high levels; many did not. It seems the investigations that found no credible evidence of conspiracy involving “government insiders” are the ones that concern the SCADS proponents, for they hint, collectively, at the potential magnitude to which abuse of power can rise that is characteristic of much of the activity of Western democratic governments (see, for example, Olmsted, 2009). Their suspicions of those in positions of power may appear to many as reflecting a somewhat paranoid conspiracy theoretic perspective. SCADs theorists, however, maintain that they are not, strictly speaking, conspiracy theorists. They argue that SCADs are reflective of a systematic pattern of violations of the democratic process that is deeply embedded in the Western democratic world, especially the United States, involving domestic assassinations, bogus international incidences of aggression, secret agreements to aid shadowy political movements abroad, and the like (deHaven-Smith, 2010). In short, democracy is threatened not by an ill-informed or apathetic public, but by the people at the top of the political food chain, the very people charged with the public trust, or what they term “oligarchic threats to democratic praxis” (Thorne and Kouzmin, 2010).

In this sense SCADs can be construed as generating a potential pattern of mega-conspiracy – conspiracies on steroids – with the incidence of SCADS most prevalent where the workings of government are less than transparent, perhaps hiding an abuse of power by clandestine high officials or state agencies, in the absence of the free exchange of information, hiding possible abuses from the glare of the general public and scrutiny of their watchdogs. It is instructive that as societies become more complicated and the growth of government proceeds apace, suspicion of government flourishes. Big government is government that is both distant and estranged from its constituency.

To denigrate and discredit inquiry into the veracity of suspected SCADs by labeling such research as conspiracy theoretic does nothing more than prevent investigation of the nature, extent, and etiology of the alleged abuses of state power involved from being reported, so ensuring that they fall outside the purview of public scrutiny. Indeed, as Manwell (2010, p. 848) argues persuasively, “research shows that people are far less willing to examine information that disputes, rather than confirms, their beliefs[; thus] pre-existing beliefs can interfere with SCADs inquiry”. This obviously includes people’s beliefs about, and trust and faith in, the state.

The SCAD rhetoric is that the “State” – “as an apparatus of rule” with a monopoly of coercion (Steinberger, 2004, p. 8), or, in Weberian terms, “the set of politico-administrative institutions that constitute the organized political community under a government that is the sovereign political entity with the exclusive right to exercise sovereign political power or force” (Weber, 1964 [1915/1947], p. 154) – can and does knowingly commit “crimes against democracy”, acts of commission or omission that offend one or more inalienable, self-justifying foundational principles of “democracy”. At issue, then, is the need to clarify three presumptions made by SCAD theorists:

•that there are inalienable, self-justifying foundational principles of “democracy” that can justify what acts of commission or omission if committed constitute “crimes against democracy”;

•that such “criminal acts” can be “committed” by the “State”; and

•that the “State” “knowingly participated” in a “criminal process” that led to “crimes against democracy”.

The purpose of this chapter is to give further veracity to SCAD research by explicating the ontological, epistemological, politico-philosophical, and legal foundations of the concept of “state crimes against democracy”, so as to clarify “who” or “what” has committed “what” offense against democracy. This involves a deconstruction of its three constituent concepts: “democracy”, “state”, and “crime”. It offers a conceptual framework as a first step toward establishing a rigorous set of criteria and standards by which acts of commission or omissions committed in the name of the state constitute a SCAD.

On Democracy as a Victim of a State Crime

There is a set of very vexing issues related to “democracy” – fundamentally, government of the people, by the people, for the people, and accountable to the people – defined as a “theory or system of government by freely elected representatives of the people” (Bloomsbury, 2010 [1986], p. 79). This view of democracy was essentially refuted by Schumpeter (1976 [1943]), who argued people are usually manipulated by the political class and that therefore, according to Birch (1993), “a democratic system of government is best identified in institutional and procedural terms, rather than in terms of the ideals which democracy is supposed to serve” (p. 51). It is the “government insiders” who maintain the state institutions and understand their procedures, and as a result they are regarded as competent and “the masses are politically incompetent” (p. 53). The backlash to this proposed unequal relationship by many anti-positivists in the social sciences was vociferous – they replied that it is precisely power-holders who are the real threat to democracy while ordinary people, who should be in control of their own political fates, are the victims of elite criminality. In short, the values associated with democracy are, emphatically, the obverse of the covert criminal behavior cynically engaged in by those seeking to subvert the democratic processes in order to retain power and privilege. This is the essence of SCADs.

The politico-administrative institutions that define a democratic system of government are what house the democratically elected representatives of the people and other “government insiders”. In a liberal democracy their powers, and thus their actions, are constrained by the principle of intra vires, underp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• TitlePage
• Introduction: State Crimes Against Democracy – Political Forensics in Public Affairs
• 1   State Crimes Against Democracy: A Clarification of Connotations
• 2   Normalizing the SCAD Heuristic
• 3   From a Fabric of Suspicion: The U.S. Constitution and Other Founding Dilemmas
• 4   Auditing Moral Hazards for the Post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) Leadership
• 5   Ideal Typing (In)visible Power in the Context of Oligarchic Isomorphisms
• 6   The Social Construction of Race, Inequality, and the Invisible Role of the State
• 7   Unlimited and Unchecked Power: The Use of Secret Evidence Law
• 8   American Military–Education Convergence: Designing the Failure of Public Education
• 9   Privatizing Vulnerability: The Downside to Shareholder-Value Maximization
• 10  The Determination of Behavioral Patterns in Tourism Destinations through Terrorism: Lessons from Crete, Greece
• 11  Cultural Narratives, Early Occupy Movement, and the TEA Party: Revolts Against E-SCAD and SCAD
• 12  SCAD Alert: Occupy Wall Street Is to Capitalism What Labor Unions Were to Communism – A Systemic Contradiction That Can Be Neither Swallowed nor Spit Out
• Index