Aaron Good > Quotes

“Economic insecurity and deprivation are key components of a hierarchical society. If they are eliminated, and if literacy and education are widespread, the elites have to deal with a population that is not as easily mesmerized by power and not compelled by necessity to submit to subjugation and exploitation in exchange for material security.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Thus, it should be understood that when pro-US figures use the term, “rules-based international order,” they are not referring to anything analogous to the rule of law. Quite the opposite, they are using Orwellian language to describe a system in which essentially no rules can be established and/or observed, given that the dominant state has the prerogative to violate and/or rewrite “rules” at its whim.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The mainstream media must be considered part of the deep state. Its assumptions, biases, priorities, and defaults are very much a function of the interests of a tiny elite of corporate wealth whose interests the media necessarily serves regardless of this or that outlet’s position along the ever-narrowing spectrum of allowable political perspective.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In general. the global communist meta-conspiracy theory is absurd given the historical realities at the time. In World War II, the Soviets lost 26.6 million people to America’s roughly 400,000 dead. Large swaths of Soviet territory had been destroyed by the Nazi invaders.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Here again, Mills highlights something historically significant which only became more evident over time—the affinity between the Nazi power elite and power elite of the emerging US empire.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Given that convention requires the cloaking of imperialist policy with liberal rhetoric, Hillary Clinton committed an unusual faux pas when she chose to paraphrase imperialist par excellence Julius Caesar.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Among other historical episodes, Glennon ignores the years of lobbying efforts by Wall Street-connected lawyers that preceded the creation of the CIA in the wake of the disbanding of the CIA’s wartime precursor, the Office of Special Services (OSS).”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“At present, the neoliberal/neoconservative bipartisan consensus so greatly narrows the spectrum of contestable policy debate that effectual public discourse is largely relegated to cultural issues with little to no bearing upon issues of justice which animated the democratic struggles of previous eras.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In reality, it was not Soviet communists, but US elites who had directed all planning to achieve dominance over as much of the globe as possible.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reaffirmed this, stating, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole.”21 George White of OSS, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the CIA put it more colorfully: “[I]t was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“privatization—the transformation of the public domain (education, utilities, prisons, etc.) into avenues for rent extraction”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Over time, the function of education became economic, i.e., training people for jobs to help them and society economically. The political content has been reduced to the indoctrination of nationalist loyalties”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Even setting aside the CIA, the deep state permeated his administration. For example, twenty-six high-ranking Kennedy officials had previously been panelists on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“This radical but reasoned interpretation suggests that at crucial points, foreign policy is formulated and executed by an elite of power operating under such secrecy that conventional approaches to studying the state’s decisions may be grossly inadequate.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Intelligence representatives from France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran met in Kenya at the Safari Club with CIA operatives, including former CIA Director George H. W. Bush, to overcome constraints imposed by Washington. This led to the emergence of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) as the depository of money for off-the-books covert operations and the formation of what Scott calls a supranational deep state.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The key point is that the Western use—and subsequent demonization—of Sunni Islamist terror can lend itself to Clash-of-Civilizations-style cultural explanations for international political phenomena. However, this can only occur in the context of widespread historical obscurantism and disinformation that could collectively be described as state gaslighting.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“When progressive activism threatened the power elite’s monopoly on power, the response—besides a slew of assassinations—was a massive surge in right-wing elite activism, a counterrevolutionary crusade which fundamentally altered American politics and society.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Unprecedented state secrecy gave the power elite vastly expanded realms in which to pursue desired political ends. Its dimensions and details obscured by state secrecy, exceptionism—the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law—allowed for the state to decisively influence politics at key moments in a top-down, authoritarian manner while practices of plausible deniability preserved a degree of democratic legitimacy.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“In particular, the CIA was the brainchild of men like Allen Dulles.19 Along with his brother, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles was a longtime employee of Sullivan and Cromwell, the storied Wall Street law firm whose clients included the world’s largest multinational corporations.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“From the beginning, the English colonists and the early United States had comparatively open, democratic methods of handling affairs with themselves in comparison to the violent coercion deployed against “others,” including American Indians, African slaves, Mexicans, Japanese, and Hawaiians.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Career bureaucrats, as Harry Truman observed, “look upon elected officials as just temporary occupants,” and this is especially true within the Trumanite network.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“While it may seem implausible that the US could have orchestrated the OPEC crisis, there is much evidence to support such a conclusion. For starters, all the key Middle Eastern actors in the affair—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran—were US allies. Given the disparity in power, it would be more precise to describe them as client states. Client states do not harm the interests of their patron state.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Thus, there has been what could he describes as the “conspiracy theory conspiracy” wherein state actors intervene in civil society to help create a prevailing common sense wherein reasonable suspicions of high criminality are reflexively dismissed and stigmatized by our sense-making institutions”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“According to Senate investigation, domestic programs that have violated these strictures in the Bill of Rights include the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, the FBI’s campaign “to ‘neutralize’ [Martin Luther King] as an effective civil rights leader,” the CIA’s mail opening program which the FBI and CIA heads declared illegal in 1970 even as it continued, the NSA collection of millions of cables sent by private citizens, widespread wiretapping and bugging without warrant, the collection and dissemination of purely political or personal information obtained through electronic surveillance, hundreds (during the 1960s alone) of warrantless CIA/FBI break-ins which often involved theft and bugging, and the widespread use of informants to infiltrate and surveil “peaceful, law-abiding groups.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The interchangeability in the command posts across the big three serves to reinforce the shared psychology of the power elite.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“Any post–World War II US empire, they maintained, was a defensive and consensual enterprise established in response to the Cold War—which the Soviet Union started.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“There were massive worker uprisings in the US after World War II. The anti-New Deal Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947 in response to labor militancy and couched with anti-communist pretenses. For example, under the law, union officers were required to sign anti-communist affidavits for the federal government.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“There are three larger realms in which democratic decay is most evident. The first—and a central one for the purposes of this book—is the diminishment of the rule of law. The second pertains to the drastic rise in inequality. The third is the decline in American nationalism.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“The basis of US hegemony shifted from being a constellation of one-to-one power relationships and into being a structural, market-based type of power.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

“US officials distorted Soviet actions, opportunistically inflated the Soviet threat, wanted to reform rather than destroy Western colonialism, misconstrued nationalist revolutions in the Third World, and utilized every manner of fascist or retrograde Anticommunist dictator.”
― Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State