According to the Washington Post, “The United States has warned the United Nations that it has credible information showing that Moscow is compiling lists of Ukrainians ‘to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation,’ according to a letter obtained by the Washington Post.”
When I read that, my mind immediately went to Guatemala, which was one of the U.S. national-security establishment’s first regime-change operations. It occurred in 1954 and targeted the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, with regime change.
Arbenz was democratically elected by the people of Guatemala. That’s ironic, of course, because U.S. officials often proclaim that they are devoted to democracy. The reason they rejected democracy in Guatemala was because Arbenz believed in socialism and, even worse from the standpoint of U.S. officials, befriended Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union. U.S. officials considered Arbenz’s mindset and action to be a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” That’s why he was targeted with regime change and replaced with a brutal, unelected military dictator.
The CIA, which orchestrated the violent coup that succeeded in ousting Arbenz from power, had a kill list in that operation. Even though the operation took place almost 60 years ago, the CIA still will not let us see who was on its kill list (because of “national security”) but it is a virtual certainty that Arbenz was at the top of the list. Fortunately for him, he was able to escape his country before the CIA was able to assassinate him.
No, I’m not saying that Russia has copied the U.S. regime-change operation in Guatemala in apparently compiling a list of Ukrainians who are being targeted for assassination. What I’m simply saying is that all national-security states, including the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, Egypt, and many others, engage in assassination and other dark-side activity.
Of course, it wasn’t always that way for the United States. Our country was founded as a limited-government republic, one whose powers were limited and restricted. For the first 150 years of our nation’s history, the U.S. government lacked the power to assassinate people. That changed after World War II, however, when the U.S. government was converted to a national-security state. That was when the CIA was called into existence, along with its dark-side power of assassination.
That was also when the Pentagon and the CIA acquired their regime-change powers, including invasions, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, and inciting revolutions and coups in foreign countries.
Even though the Constitution does not permit the federal government to wield and exercise these dark-side powers, the Supreme Court knew full well that it could do nothing, as a practical matter, to enforce the Constitution against the ever-growing power of the military-intelligence establishment. Recognizing such, the Supreme Court made the very practical decision to acquiesce to the new order of things. The Court would henceforth refrain from interfering with the Pentagon’s, CIA’s, and NSA’s dark sides powers of assassination, kidnapping, secret mass surveillance, torture, coups, wars of aggression, undeclared wars, indefinite detention, and the like.
Thus, given that Russia is a national security state, it should not be surprising to anyone that it has invaded Ukraine and has a kill list as part of its regime-change operation. That’s what national-security states do. The shame in all this is that in deciding to abandon its founding governmental system of a limited-government republic and instead to become a national-security state, like Russia, China, Egypt, and others, the United States ended up becoming like them.
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