My good friend Tom Secker a.k.a. SIATDv1 through v2 has been making documentaries about intelligence services and now a long running podcast series on the intimacy between Hollywood and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Decades before the CIA was founded, Bolshevik filmmaker Eisenstein feared the American filmmaking capacity, dreading Walt Disney as some kind of Magus, which if we look at the deep effects Disney enterprises continue to have on our collective psyche is rather an understatement than an exaggeration. But after the agency came into being, it has had countless overt liaisons with Hollywood, and likely a lot more covert ones. What is happening with Homeland is another level though - the series, which is absolutely brilliant in its storytelling terrain an technique, manages to wring the Agency in a victim-position, having its central character the almost translucently feminine and hyper-expressive Claire Danes go through crisis upon crisis in her bipolar, ultramanipulative psyche, and walk us through crisis upon crisis faced by the Agency itself, in its increasingly evil-beset quests throughout a series of territories, e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and now in the 5th season, Germany, introducing into the plot finally the Russians, an their coldblooded efforts to keep Assad in the saddle. It sees as if, in fact, the government is perhaps using the show to an extent to justify that it will have, in the end no choice but to work with the Baath dictator.
Setting the stage for a pragmatist, Kissingerian policy for 2017?
It might be - I think that one character in Homeland even mentioned the Westphalean agreement. This would be a very good sign; it would mean America is taking on a multilateral view of Globalism and abandoning the quest for total hegemony.
The moral of this story is, or the pressing danger at least, is that there is a necessity to acknowledge the necessity of security agencies - a necessity to see them as the true intelligence of politics, - a view certainly held and supported by Vladimir Putin - and the very evil problem now faces us of having to trust those elements which are by their absolutely cynical nature least worthy of trust - we must trust then, the cynicism remains at the bottom of the sea, formed by high pressures, too ugly to perceive in daylight, but necessary of the metabolism of the world.
I explained the fix for that for you some time ago. The vastness of nature did not arise through the use of spies, but of merely eyes. It is through the lies of spies that humanity dies.
It’s quite the same with the human body as with the humanity-body. Some functions, most in fact, you do not want or need to be conscious of, if they are functioning well. If they are functioning poorly, we become conscious of them. That is what is happening now with these state-organs. They need to be ‘healed’.
The important, the crucial matter is whether or not the system is in the right way functional, - that is to say, whether it stands in relevant service to the whole organism, and goes about it according to pertinent intelligence.
We are going through the creation of a new organ - the digital information organizing heart - and it’s not a matter of preventing its existence (as a kind of Skynet) but of containing it to its function. That function is however quite large. To go right to the heart of it, the mere existence of atomic warheads precludes all self-contained national orders. Defense must always be pre-emptive, anticipating.
It’s my belief that the man formally responsible for this is Otto Von Bismarck, who ushered in the age of of permanently expansive military industry.
These three things came into being in unison: the computer, the atomic bomb and the CIA. These formed the initial conditions of the cold war, the American backbone in the age where time, space and force become different concepts entirely. The age of information is necessarily the age of deception, the age of force of pacification, and the age of calculating power of intellectual slackening. Contradicting statements remain - in this age, it is necessary to set ones own laws for what is real, if reality is not to appear as a shattered mirror. Time will ultimately tell which law was the wisest, but wisdom will not likely cause time to make her decision. It is foolishness that reveals wisdom, that sheds light on its nature. Thankfully I have performed most foolish acts in my life with open eyes. " Suspension of judgment", —
All of them, love.
I give you the solution, somewhat, to the ‘evil’ I attributed to this problem, here:
The message, which is slightly complicated (only slightly) is that to trust them requires of them that they become trustworthy; but for them to become trustworthy requires that they are addressed as something potentially trustworthy. This in itself is almost impossible, and yet there is no future for mankind without intelligence services, unless someone can resolve that nuclear issue in another way.
Anyway it’s kind of ridiculous that I am sticking up for the CIA in a thread somewhat dedicated to SIATD. I don’t mean to defend them at all, I mean to acknowledge the reality of this time. But how fucking boring is that.
For “them to become trustworthy” by you requires that they have cause to believe that You are trustworthy. It is a matter of demonstration. Unfortunately, people are extremely untalented at testing people and thus are always assuming too much confidence in what they lead themselves into believing (often merely what they wanted to believe) and getting tricked into trusting or mistrusting the wrong things/people - “profiling”.
The greatest problem is that the testing schemes (ancient in their make) have always been sloppy yet still functioned to raise a greater gathering, whether for good or bad. Because they have always somewhat worked, and yet remained secret, they are not subject to open scrutiny and falsifiability testing, “science”.
Ask yourself, “How does the CIA trust themselves?” Or MI6, Mossad, or any of them? None of them are exactly what you would call “moral people” (lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, conning… all of the things that you distrust people about). So how do they trust each other? What spawns “honor amongst thieves”?
True. This untalenteness is a problem, and philosophy must aspire to develop a sound protocol for judgment of danger of a member to a whole. A security agency could only be justified if it was run on the basis of such a philosophy. But man is used to walking on partially hollow legs.
Such rigorous testing would constitute the lions part of what I called ‘healing’.
That could well be the most compelling question in all of politics. I have no definitive answer, I’ll say that right away. There is the standard of hardness, mercilessnes, what one is willing to do. Fear must play a great part in it, recognition of each others will too power, game theory like reductionism, which is the destroyer of will and ethics. How to install an ethics in such an environment? I think that the concept of honor is actually the best place to start. Honor is present in the basest form, the aspect of nationalism that goes with security services; ethics is absent. So I would propose we modulate the phrasing of the question into “how does one inspire ethics into the honor among thieves?”
Intelligence is a very complex field, so don’t go jumping to conclusions from greatly simplified statements, such as: The fundamental connective force between the “thieves” (let’s call them that, even though it applies to almost every kind of group) is simply Mutual Understanding and Passion. That is what you were seeking of me and I was waiting for from you (30 days).
Such mutual understanding and passion is common but very rarely pure. The impurities is what creates the weakness in the chain of trust. Serpents whisper in the ears of kings so as to cast the perception of mutual understanding and passions. False flags are created specifically to create mutual passion via an artificial, staged event, a “framing of a victim” and false accusation, “finger pointing”, “scapegoating”. So the question isn’t really how to contrive the mutual passion and/or understanding, but rather how to prevent it from happening for the wrong reasons while allowing it to happen for the right reasons, as you say, “ethics”.
So you first need to define your ethics (and I have already been through all of these elements with you merely in less obvious terms … apparently). You are a supporter of individual respect for self. Your VO is obvious testimony to such. Thus your ethics must be founded in such. That can be a little tricky because most who respect themselves, disrespect everyone else and on a sliding scale. And that is where the flaw in almost all ethics theories comes in.
Are spy groups ethical? They include every abhorrent activity known to man and are particularly proud if really good at it. Of course not getting caught by the wrong people is a paramount a sacred moral. And unfortunately more times than not, You are “the wrong people”.
So now tell me, how can you be ethical and also either be, be complacent with, or trust ANY spy/thief group? What exactly do You mean by “ethical”, because I can’t see the connection to spy groups, cabals, and the occult.
Yet there is still a fix that you have already been told.
By ethical I might mean two things; either my own ethics, which includes a will to be free from hostile involvement, a condition for which fighting is a required means. But it is a separate issue when it regards the interior ethics of the spy agency. These people do not want to be free from such involvement, they want to be thoroughly involved in and by government. That is why I say they are perhaps the true intelligence of the state. But only if they are truly intelligent, like Vladimir Putin, who was set up to be a puppet by people who are now gone.
It is usually considered unethical to rely on the unethical behavior of others and to always get others to do your “dirty work” while cowardly hiding in the shadows.
Those who inspire war between two nations are more guilty of murder than the two nations combined.
The point is to conspire against nuclear war. Smaller wars are justified to this end.
It is rational to rely on behavior of others that does not correspond with your own ethics. It is human to rank all ethics so as to place ones own at the top. It is wise to be merciful to other ethics as long as they do not interfere with ones own, but only until then. The severity of self-interest serves its bestowing virtue.
We must all act according to our nature.
The rest depends on what it is that we act on.
The CIA recently released an Office of the Inspector General’s report into their engagement with the entertainment industry which found that the entertainment liaison office have basically been acting like cowboys. All kinds of rules getting broken, records not being kept, no accountability whatsoever. They had currently serving CIA officers meeting with people from the entertainment industry with no briefings on avoiding the leaking of classified information, no record of the meetings, often without anyone from the public affairs office even being present.
This sort of quasi-deniable relationship really worries me. Also, I want to know what were the 22 ‘projects’ that the CIA worked on between 2006 and 2011. Some are obvious, like Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, but I know Salt is another, presumably Homeland counts even though it would be towards the end of that period. I wonder if they are including Charlie Wilson’s War and The Good Shepherd, both of which were assisted by their entertainment liaison officer Chase Brandon.
