“Criminality of US empire and deep state with historian Aaron Good

 

“Criminality of US empire and deep state with historian Aaron Good”, Interview of Aaron Good by Ben Norton, streamed live on Jun 24, 2022, Multipolarista, duration of video 2:01:02, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY82b8hC7JQ >.

~~recommended by dmorista ~~

Introduction by dmorista:

The short description of this video gets right to the heart of the matter: “Multipolarista host Ben Norton speaks with historian Aaron Good about his book 'American Exception: Empire and the Deep State,' detailing the breakdown of democracy, the criminality that lies at the heart of US government policy, and the corporate interests driving it.”

In this excellent interview, author and professor Aaron Good discusses his recently published book, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (June of 2022), with show host Ben Norton. They address a wide range of issues, including the fact that the “Deep State” concept (that was picked up and distorted by the Trump presidential campaign), originated with Turkish Academics. Those Turkish scholars were analyzing the alliance between corporations, the military, and organized criminal elements who used extremely ruthless political and social control tactics in Turkey in the 1970s, including numerous political murders.  Canadian-American U.S. scholar Peter Dale Scott introduced the Deep State concept into U.S. academic and political discussions, and unlike the far-right propagandists and disinformation operatives, he scrupulously cited the origins in Turkey and discussed what the parameters of that concept actually were.

The book is an extension of Good's dissertation, and he was originally motivated to pursue a P.hD. to work in greater depth on those very issues. He is not the first to write and say that the big events, that took place in the U.S. and overseas in the 1960s and 1970s, cannot be understood by swallowing the standard Corporate Controlled Media explanations. From the murder of John F. Kennedy, to the removal of Richard Nixon, to the various attacks on the peasants and workers of both the Third World and on working people here in the U.S., a more sophisticated level of analysis is necessary.

Good and Norton promise that this talk is just the introduction to a series of more detailed discussions they will present in coming weeks and months. This was an excellent introduction to the topics. They plan to look at the various chapters of his book in greater detail in the future. This is absolutely essential material to understand, and I look forward to hearing more of this material from interviews presented at Multipolarista. The political assassinations, various types of skullduggery, and horrific changes in our society such as the proliferation of military weapons and attacks on what were once civil rights like reproductive health care, social security and Medicare, and the massive Voter Supression operations, are all part of a Corporate / Capitalist directed agenda to increase profits while pushing the American populace down to Third World living standards and social norms. The first step to defeating this agenda is to understand it. Good and Norton do yeoman work in that area in this 2-hour long video.

Good and Norton discuss various facts such as that while JFK was no angel, nonetheless, he became opposed to the Cold War and the War in Vietnam, and was preparing to pull all the U.S. forces out of Vietnam if he was re-elected in 1964. The corporate and capitalist militarist interests killed him (and his brother RFK along with several others) to make sure he did not get to implement any of his more peaceful policies. Even Nixon had policies that were far better than the harsh measures that began to be implemented once he was out of the way. The U.S. has not been any sort of functional democracy for a long time, and the room for maneuver under the increasingly harsh Corporate State has become more constricted as time has passed.