...the immoral folly of Vietnam (p. 253).
...we can talk of a visionary realism: the need to bring a fresh, visionary alternative from outside to bear on institutions that, although worthy of preservation and respect, are clearly not working as intended (p. 254).
The first two quotes make it clear that Scott is much nearer to Chomsky (and George Bush) on 9/11 than to David Griffin. Scott does not think 9/11 was an inside job. All he says is that the government hasn't told the whole truth. "Jihadists" did it.
The war in Vietnam was "immoral," of course, but not from the point of view of the warmongers, and "folly" implies that it was a "well-intentioned mistake," which is the official propaganda line on that history. Chomsky would disagree, and so do I. The war in Vietnam served the economic and political interests (destroying the threat of a bad example, i.e. an independent Vietnam) of the ruling class (aka power elite, military-industrial complex, Wall Street, etc.). See Chomsky for this argument; he makes it better than I can. Where Chomsky and I differ (and I just don't know about Scott) is that I think JFK was killed in order to get him out of the warmongers' way.
Given that Scott, like George Bush and Noam Chomsky, believes that "jihadists" were responsible for 9/11 and (unlike Chomsky but like Bush) that Vietnam was an "immoral folly," it is not surprising that he considers "institutions" such as the the CIA "worthy of preservation and respect." Even if he does NOT think these institutions were behind the JFK assassination and 9/11 (et al.), this is an extraordinarily naive statement just on the basis of what he himself has documented in his many books and articles.
Scott must know perfectly well that if our "institutions," in sum, our government (his "public state"), were still in anything remotely like a state of health, or anything remotely resembling the "public state" it is said to be, the crimes of 9/11, JFK, etc. would have been solved long ago. If these institutions were still "legitimate" in this sense, sure, there could be "rogue elements" that might even manage to kill a president or fly airplanes into buildings. But they could not have done these things (in the latter case bringing the US Air Force to its knees) and gotten away Scot free (no pun intended), leaving them to haunt the history books and provide a seemingly inexhaustible source of true-crime "murder mystery" material. A legitimate government would have solved the crimes (and others) long ago.
Scott is trying to hang on to the illusion that the government is still (if it ever was) the "public state" he imagines (and which we have all been more or less brainwashed into believing it is (if we grew up in the US). This is debilitating because we need to know where we stand before we can hope to do anything about it. I think the perpetrators want (some of) us to know, too, in order to intimidate us into feeling forever cowed and helpless, but that strategy could backfire if we ever break out of the doublethink bind.
(Article changed on May 03, 2024 at 12:59 PM EDT)
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