Mike Benz

It was forbidden by international law to do war by military means.

You can just militarily, I'm sorry, to do,

territorial acquisition in a straight military conquest.

You couldn't just march into Canada, take it over.

That would be, you know, just as a purely military, you know, Empire 1.0 type thing that was done in, you know, from the medieval period through the Industrial Revolution all the way up until World War II.

We had this concept of democratic sovereignty.

So the lust for empire never ended.

After 1948,

we needed a new mechanism to maintain empire, not by military means, but by political vassalage.

Now, this is often supported by military means or it's accomplished at its outset by military means.

Oftentimes, we'll create a predicate for military activity and then we will set up our political vassal state from there.

But what I'm driving at is,

I'm not anti-blob, and I want to make this totally clear at the outset.

Even though the blob, this foreign policy establishment, is the antagonist, it's sort of the villain in the internet censorship story, we do perhaps

That is, we can't make pencils in the United States without getting the gum from trees in Malaysia, without getting graphite from mines in South America.

What happens if Malaysia nationalizes the gum trees or the unions go on strike or the national government

of Bolivia decides to box out U.S.

corporations, well then Americans don't have pencils.

So we have this Department of Dirty Tricks capacity, which spans this interagency foreign policy establishment to influence the course of foreign events, to support a particular political leader, to change or get past certain laws within foreign countries.

And this is why it was often called in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the Department of Dirty Tricks, because