{"id":3118,"date":"2018-04-20T15:14:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T19:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=3118"},"modified":"2018-04-21T15:26:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-21T19:26:39","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-how-our-government-became-maoist-the-paradoxical-legacy-of-may-68","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-how-our-government-became-maoist-the-paradoxical-legacy-of-may-68\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | How Our Government Became Maoist: The Paradoxical Legacy of May \u201868"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we celebrate the gold anniversary of May \u201968, there is one lasting legacy, and it may well come as a surprise: Our government has become Maoist. Since 9\/11, and even more since Donald Trump\u2019s election, our government has fully embraced a Maoist vision of society and deployed Maoist insurgent practices. We\u2019re now Maoist, surprisingly, through our counterinsurgency\u00a0<\/em>mode of governing ourselves and others.<\/p>\n

Since the War on Terror, but especially since President Trump\u2019s inauguration, our government has come to see its own citizens of color\u2014Muslims, Mexican-Americans and Latino, Native Americans, African-Americans\u2014as dangerous insurgents who need to be designated and identified, isolated, and excluded. Our government has turned them into internal enemies, and come to see the rest of the population as docile masses that need to be pacified and distracted.<\/p>\n

In effect, our government has adopted Mao\u2019s way of imagining society as composed of a small active insurgency, a counterinsurgent minority, and a mass of passive citizens who can be swayed one way or the other. And on the basis of that Maoist vision of society, it has begun to govern domestically, on American soil, deploying Mao\u2019s brilliant warfare tactics: gather all the available intelligence, to weed out the dangerous insurgents, and seduce the passive masses.\u00a0 Mao\u2019s three-prong military strategy, which first mesmerized French colonial commanders like Roger Trinquier and David Gallula, has now come home to roost.<\/p>\n

May \u201968 was fueled in large part by the circulation of Maoist ideas within the Western Left. In the United States, it was fueled largely by opposition to our counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam. Paradoxically, though, May \u201968 will be remembered not for its radical politics or liberation and anti-war movements, but for paving the way to the counterinsurgency model of governing that dominates American politics today, even in the absence of a real insurgency. It will be remembered for The Counterrevolution\u2014our new way of governing ourselves and others.<\/p>\n

Counterinsurgency Warfare at Standing Rock<\/em><\/h1>\n

\u00a0\u201cMuch like Afghanistan and Iraq, the \u2018Fighting Season\u2019 will soon be here with the coming warming temperatures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 TigerSwan private security at Standing Rock, Report dated March 24, 2017<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A perfect illustration is the militarized counterinsurgency assault on Native American protesters trying to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline\u2014a topic left on the cutting block of our last seminar, Uprising 12\/13<\/a>, on Standing Rock.<\/p>\n

Energy Transfer Partners, the Fortune 500 energy company responsible for developing the Dakota Access Pipeline, hired a private security firm, TigerSwan, to surveil, monitor, and undermine the #NoDAPL protest movement. A close examination of TigerSwan\u2019s practices reveal that they were grounded on counterinsurgency theory. This is clear from the over one hundred internal TigerSwan communications that were leaked to The Intercept<\/em>, as well as over one thousand documents obtained by The Intercept <\/em>under freedom-of-information requests.<\/a>[1]<\/p>\n

In its internal communications, TigerSwan described the Standing Rock protest as \u201can ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component\u201d and drew parallels between the water carriers and jihadist terrorists.<\/p>\n

The internal documents reveal extensive aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, and covert infiltration of the camps and activist movements. TigerSwan collected information from social media that it then analyzed in what it called \u201cSituation Reports,\u201d an illustration of which is here<\/a>. There were \u201cDaily Intelligence Updates,\u201d see here<\/a>. They drew up \u201cpersons of interest\u201d lists, collected photographs of protesters, and recorded license plate numbers.<\/p>\n

In the tradition of unconventional warfare, TigerSwan also created and disseminated on social media information critical of the Standing Rock protests. It also tried to encourage internal divisions within and among protest movements and activists. An October 3 report describes how TigerSwan used its intelligence in order to promote \u201cExploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts between peaceful and violent elements,\u201d noting that this was \u201ccritical in our effort to delegitimize the anti-DAPL movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The TigerSwan documents treated protesters as \u201cterrorists,\u201d discussed their direct actions as \u201cattacks,\u201d and described the protest camps as a \u201cbattlefield.\u201d The Intercept <\/em>continues:<\/p>\n

In one internal report dated May 4, a TigerSwan operative describes an effort to amass digital and ground intelligence that would allow the company to \u201cfind, fix, and eliminate\u201d threats to the pipeline \u2014 an eerie echo of \u201cfind, fix, finish,\u201d a military term used by special forces in the U.S. government\u2019s assassination campaign against terrorist targets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

TigerSwan also shared all their information with multiple law enforcement agencies at both the federal and state level, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the North Dakota Attorney General\u2019s Office, and state and local police.<\/p>\n

According to The Intercept<\/em>, one of the reports dated February 27, 2017, noted that the protest movements \u201cgenerally followed the jihadist insurgency model.\u201d TigerSwan anticipated that \u201cthe individuals who fought for and supported it [would] follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse.\u2019\u201d The private security company drew other parallels to post-Soviet Afghanistan, The Intercept <\/em>reports, warning that \u201cWhile we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora \u2026 aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies.\u201d AsThe Intercept <\/em>added, \u201cThe leaked materials not only highlight TigerSwan\u2019s militaristic approach to protecting its client\u2019s interests but also the company\u2019s profit-driven imperative to portray the nonviolent water protector movement as unpredictable and menacing enough to justify the continued need for extraordinary security measures.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this private security was on top of the militarized police response to the protests. Local, state, out-of-state, and federal law enforcement forces and National Guard troops deployed a heavily militarized police response\u2014including military-grade equipment and weapons, such as LRAD sound devices, water cannons, rubber bullets, and bean bag pellets.<\/a>[2]<\/p>\n

The paramilitary attack on protesters at Standing Rock by militarized police deploying counterinsurgency tactics is a prime example of the domestication of Maoist practices. The timeline of events that\u00a0The Intercept put together<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is a damning history of counterinsurgency being used against our own citizens: bringing home the mentality, techniques, and equipment from the War in Iraq and Afghanistan\u2014even the men, women, and technologies from the counterinsurgency. The private security firm, TigerSwan, was originally a contractor to the U.S. military and State Department during the early phases of the global war on terror\u2014basically, a competitor of Blackwater. Drawing on the same heritage as the RAND programs in Vietnam that Malcolm Gladwell revisits in his brilliant revisionist histories\u2014listen here to his episode on Saigon 1965<\/a>\u2014these private contractors live and breath the dogmas of unconventional war, but now on American soil.<\/p>\n

Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and the Politics of Terror<\/h1>\n

President Trump\u2019s nomination of Gina Haspel to head the CIA and Mike Pompeo to serve as Secretary of State has further escalated our government\u2019s embrace of the counterinsurgency model. The appointments represent another dangerous step toward strategies of torture, terror, and exclusion, both abroad and at home. With Gina Haspel at Langley, Mike Pompeo at State, and Donald Trump in the White House, the counterinsurgency model of governing will have won a trifecta.<\/p>\n

Gina Haspel oversaw some of the harshest forms of torture in the earliest days of the \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d program. In charge of the first overseas secret detention site, what became known as a \u201cblack site,\u201d Haspel supervised the interrogation among others of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, as the Senate Torture Report documented in gruesome detail. For that, Haspel is now rewarded with oversight of our foreign intelligence operations, hand-in-hand with another counterinsurgency warrior, Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis.<\/p>\n

In foreign affairs more broadly, the prize will go to Mike Pompeo, who, for his part, continues to maintain that waterboarding is not torture\u2014despite the fact that waterboarding was the classic form of torture during the Spanish Inquisition\u2014and even told Congress<\/a>he was open to bringing back waterboarding. Pompeo has praised the men and women who engaged in torturous interrogations as patriots<\/a>. For that, Pompeo gets to oversee foreign policy.<\/p>\n

And then, of course, to fully domesticate the counterinsurgency model of governing, we have in the White House a Commander-in-Chief who signs executive orders to keep out Muslims, selects winning designs for a wall against our Southern neighbors, and distracts the passive masses\u2014winning their \u201chearts and minds\u201d\u2014with reality-TV daily episodes of soap operatic \u201cyour fired\u201d spectacles.<\/p>\n

Since September 11, we had been headed in this direction: our government embraced and gradually domesticated a model of governing that operated through total information awareness, eradicating an internal enemy, and pacifying the masses\u2014the three key prongs of unconventional warfare. These new appointments and policies, however, confirm the historical shift.<\/p>\n

In a three-step movement of world historical proportion, our government has brought home the logic of warfare developed by colonial commanders in Algeria, Indochina, and Vietnam.<\/p>\n

It started abroad, post 9\/11, in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we redeployed the unconventional warfare strategies that the colonial powers had developed in Indochina and Algeria, in Malaya, and in Vietnam. We embraced precisely the forms of torture that French commanders like Roger Trinquier and Paul Aussaresse had refined on the FLN\u2014waterboarding, stress positions, electricity\u2014this time on Muslim suspects at American \u201cblack sites\u201d and secret prisons abroad.<\/p>\n

We then deployed those unconventional war logics more widely throughout our foreign policy, turning to drone strikes to summarily eliminate even our own citizens abroad, outside the war zone, and to total information awareness on all foreigners around the globe.<\/p>\n

Then finally, in what can only be described as a tragedy of poetic justice, we brought it all home, hypermilitarizing our police and turning them into counterinsurgency tactical units equipped with night scopes and military-grade assault weapons, armored vehicles and grenade launchers, to face off with unarmed protesters in T-shirts. The NYPD began surveilling Muslims, infiltrating mosques and college student groups with no reasonable suspicion, collecting total information on every halal store in and around the city. The NSA turned on ordinary Americans, collecting all their telephony data and communications.<\/p>\n

But the first steps down this path started abroad, as we became adept at waterboarding and torturing suspects, and at total NSA information awareness. And agents like Gina Haspel oversaw it\u2014in her case, right where it began, in a far away secret prison in Thailand. Under her supervision<\/a>, al Nashiri, a suspect in the USS Cole attack, was waterboarded at least three times. Haspel later was involved in the destruction of videotapes concerning al Nashiri\u2019s torture. It had all been videotaped, but, purportedly acting on orders, Haspel directed the destruction of those tapes and they were ultimately destroyed.<\/p>\n

Now, to be fair, we all bear some responsibility, insofar as we never really held anyone to account\u2014especially not our leaders, the men and women in the White House and Pentagon who knowingly devised and approved techniques like waterboarding a suspect at least 183 times.<\/p>\n

To the contrary, Donald J. Trump in fact campaigned and won the Electoral College promising to ramp up the barbarity and send Americans indefinitely to Guantanamo Bay. Trump gleefully embraced waterboarding and worse, even going so far as to propose torturing not just the suspects themselves, but their wives and children, their families. And a sufficient number of Americans voted for him that he is now President, and is now rewarding those who participated in the torture\u2014handing them control of foreign intelligence and foreign affairs.<\/p>\n

One result is that, today, it is almost as if we have become inured to the torture. Cruelty has become democratized. The red line of torture has faded, like a line drawn in the sand. The domestic consequences are corrosive and increasingly visible: as a result of years of counterinsurgency indoctrination since 9\/11, torture has become normalized in this country. We now prize, rather than revile the brutal excesses of our counterinsurgency form of governing. We reward, rather than penalize, those who engage in them.<\/p>\n

And unless and until we begin to see these patterns\u2014unless we begin to understand this new counterrevolutionary form of governing\u2014it will be practically impossible to properly resist it.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, Today\u2019s Counterrevolution Differ Little from Other Forms of Uprising<\/h1>\n

Counterrevolutions have not always been modeled on counterinsurgency\u2014although, as Peter Paret showed in his early historical analyses of the Vend\u00e9e counterrevolution, those uprisings often bore a lot in common with unconventional warfare. But the argument here is not intended to be trans-historical.<\/p>\n

The argument, instead, is that, today, in this country<\/em>, the Counterrevolution is in fact modeled precisely on Maoist thought and practices from the 1960s. As a result, it bears many similarities to the modalities of revolt we studied earlier\u2014especially Maoist insurrection<\/a>. It is, in fact, its mirror image. And this is no coincidence. The French commanders who developed modern warfare did so first in response to the insurgencies in Indochina, and they did so by appropriating Maoist strategy and thought\u2014as did American commanders struggling against the Vietcong in Vietnam. The texture of the Counterrevolution today is Maoist. And that, I believe, is remarkable. The lasting legacy of the insurrections and protest of May \u201968.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h1>\n

[1]The Intercept, May 27, 2017<\/a><\/em>, \u201cLeaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used At Standing Rock To \u2018Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2]Ibid.<\/p>\n

____<\/p>\n

Bernard E. Harcourt is the author most recently ofThe Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens<\/em><\/a>(Basic Books, 2018). He is a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and lives in New York City.<\/p>\n

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