19/10/2024
Mike Benz and the US National Security State !
By JEAN CURTHOYS Jean Curthoys is a retired academic and feminist philosopher from The University of Sydney.
Who, really, is trying to control us? Mike Benz, a former employee of the US State Department and an authority on internet censorship, is attracting much attention on social media with his answer to that question.
Fast talking, intense, and convinced that control of the internet is the key to wider controls, he can overwhelm his audience with the vast knowledge he acquired by ploughing through the manuals, reports, and vision statements of a myriad of organisations. But what he has to say is shocking, so it is important that it is so well based. For Benz, the ultimate power re-shaping our lives is not, as so many believe, the World Economic Forum – this is a lesser player on his scenario. Rather, it is the US 'national security state', consisting of the CIA, the US Department of Defence and the State Department. In alliance with NATO, these bodies operate an extensive network of government institutions, NGOs, and public private foundations – a complex and opaque arrangement he calls 'the blob'. In essence, he told a stunned Tucker Carlson, he is talking about military rule. If that seems implausible, it becomes less so when we hear Benz out on the history of the internet and how this military establishment decided that controlling 'the narrative' was no longer a subsidiary aspect of war but a primary aim. Here, he makes much of the combined interests of the US military industrial complex and the multi-national US corporations, at times sounding, as one interviewer put it, like the Noam Chomsky of some decades ago.
The story begins in 1991, when democratic – movements 'from the people', wanting governments to work 'for the people'. This meant that presenting their repression in terms of defending democracy was a challenge. The challenge was met by an Orwellian change in language. Democracy no longer meant government 'by the people' but 'the defence of democratic institutions'. Understanding this makes sense of why so much mainstream commentary appears so self-righteous in demonising those who have lost confidence in their institutions as authoritarian, far right, extremists.
Redefining democracy, though, was not enough. Because it is unprecedented for a military defence establishment to target its own citizenry, its role had to be concealed. Benz' research reveals that the millions of dollars poured into developing censorship techniques are dispersed to universities, civil associations, the media, NGOs and other bodies. This was called a 'whole of society' approach, rendering invisible the central role of military intelligence while inducing the illusion that the move for so-called 'safety online' is from the 'bottom up', not, as it actually is, from the 'top down'. Even more pernicious is what is implied by this ‘whole of society' policy. For when a society has successfully coordinated all of its sectors to support the ruling agenda, it has moved from authoritarianism, even fascism, to full-blown totalitarianism. Or so Hannah Arendt argues in her definitive work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Three features, she shows, define totalitarianism: rule by controlling the mind; the coordination of all sectors to the aims of the ruling body; and military and economic power working in unison.
Benz does not present his account of internet censorship in these terms, but it is effectively what it demonstrates. Jean’s academic publications include Feminist Amnesia (Routledge, 1997). the US military opened the internet – its own creation – to the public. Some may remember the euphoria of that time when the 'net', a place where ordinary citizens could publish, was seen as making free speech a concrete reality for all. This was the pre-history of internet censorship, but it laid the foundations of what was to come. What we didn't know then was that the military establishment backed internet freedom in these early years, but not for any commitment to free speech. Assisted by US intelligence agents posting pro-Western ideas, Facebook in particular had accelerated resistance to repressive regimes hostile to US interests – the 'colour revolutions' in Eastern Europe and the Arab spring being the notable instances. These 'Facebook revolutions' brought home the power of propaganda as an instrument of war for they succeeded 'without a shot being fired’. For the 'blob', however, the point was less the democratic aspirations of the resident populations than that the overthrow of a hostile regimes enabled US multi-nationals to move in and take over previously state-owned assets. From the outset, the internet was a creature of the combined interests of the US military industrial complex and the globalised multi-nationals – just as Chomsky used to say. In 2014, the 'blob' abandoned internet freedom, shocked by the 'loss' of the referendum in Crimea where the overwhelming majority voted to join Russia. It was now apparent that spreading proWestern ideas on the internet was no longer, on its own, sufficient to counter pro-Russian sentiment. Suppression of anti-Western ideas became equally imperative. So much so, that NATO not only established a whole apparatus for censoring the internet but enshrined it in a policy of 'hybrid warfare', a policy which made controlling 'the narrative' equally, if not more, important than naked military power. [NATO Secretary General] Stoltenberg summed it up as moving 'from tanks to tweets'. The internet was now literally a site of warfare.
Until 2016, the machinery of internet censorship was confined to Eastern Europe and parts of Germany. It was the dramatic events of that year – the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the increasing electoral power of populist parties in Spain, Italy and Greece – which ushered in the Orwellian world we now inhabit. In the name of defeating populism (which spread largely via the internet) the 'blob' turned its methods of internet censorship inward, onto the populations of Western nations themselves. (Australia is directly involved as part of the intelligence sharing 'Five Eyes' alliance.) Readers of The Light Australia probably need no persuading about the existence of censorship and how the deletion or shadow banning of posts labelled mis-, dis-, and malinformation mostly targeted no such thing, but dissent itself. A lot more can be learned, especially about the alarming use of AI, by following Benz on X, YouTube or Rumble. Most useful to mention here are the aspects of his 'big picture' which can get lost in the detail of the 'blob's' octopus tentacles. First, though, why was the national security state so threatened by populism? Benz maintains that it is because these movements are about restoring the power of nation states to manage national economies in the interests of citizens. This places them in direct opposition to two requirements of multinational corporations: to be able to go where labour is cheapest and to expand internationally by taking over erstwhile state assets. Putting this another way, it could be said that Benz identifies the threat of populism in its opposition to neo-liberalism. Others have suggested as much. The new insights into Benz' account concern the way the attack on populism has been managed.
Populism is patently democratic – movements 'from the people', wanting governments to work 'for the people'. This meant that presenting their repression in terms of defending democracy was a challenge. The challenge was met by an Orwellian change in language. Democracy no longer meant government 'by the people' but 'the defence of democratic institutions'. Understanding this makes sense of why so much mainstream commentary appears so self-righteous in demonising those who have lost confidence in their institutions as authoritarian, far right, extremists. Redefining democracy, though, was not enough.
Because it is unprecedented for a military defence establishment to target its own citizenry, its role had to be concealed. Benz' research reveals that the millions of dollars poured into developing censorship techniques are dispersed to universities, civil associations, the media, NGOs and other bodies. This was called a 'whole of society' approach, rendering invisible the central role of military intelligence while inducing the illusion that the move for so-called 'safety online' is from the 'bottom up', not, as it actually is, from the 'top down'. Even more pernicious is what is implied by this ‘whole of society' policy. For when a society has successfully coordinated all of its sectors to support the ruling agenda, it has moved from authoritarianism, even fascism, to full-blown totalitarianism. Or so Hannah Arendt argues in her definitive work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Three features, she shows, define totalitarianism: rule by controlling the mind; the coordination of all sectors to the aims of the ruling body; and military and economic power working in unison. Benz does not present his account of internet censorship in these terms, but it is effectively what it demonstrates.
Jean’s academic publications include Feminist Amnesia (Routledge, 1997).
