By any chance, could you lend me the keys to that F16?

I am not “offended” by the word “assumptions,” because I certainly have many…I am just unsure as to why “national security state” is an assumption. A rough list at best:

1. You are either with us, or against us
2. Global War on Terror
3. Homeland Security
4. domestic spying
5. secret detentions
6. torture
7. invasion and occupation
8. preemptive strikes
9. authorizations to use force
10. “Pentagonization” of social science
11. “I am a war president”
12. “we need a leader who is ‘tough’ on national security”

Those are observations more than assumptions, I think.

You did understand me when you said that I implied that national security objectives are sinister. I don’t favour states, let alone state violence, and I don’t identify with states. Whether some call this legitimate or that illegitmate…that’s not my discussion. If I focus on the national security state that is the U.S. today, it is because I think it is the most dangerous one on the planet at this moment.

Which elites run Washington? Very good question. I wish I had all the time and all the information to produce a comprehensive and integrated overview. In the meantime, one can follow published reports tying senators, congressmen, presidents, vice-presidents, etc., to various boards of directors, to the oil industry, to the weapons industry, just two examples, and if you go far back enough, to fruit companies and railroad companies (and quick support for coups against elected leaders in Latin America that threatened those interests).

You will likely disagree with all of this, and I don’t sense any “conversion experience” coming soon for either of us.

Max, it’s often hard for me to get through the dense layer of assumptions in your blog posts. For instance, I don’t know what this means:

“Any window dressing that works to obscure, or to produce a nice candy-coated gloss fostering support for national security objectives pushed by certain elites would be part of what I call HTS propaganda.”

“National security objectives” seems to be at the heart of this sentence, but I don’t know what it means. On the face of it, it’s a neutral phrase. All states have national security objectives. But your sentences seems to imply that national security objectives are sinister. Or maybe you mean only those specific national security objectives that are “pushed by certain elites”. In that case, it seems you’re suggesting that there are both legitimate national security objectives and illegitimate ones. Which brings up another question: who are these “certain elites” pushing the illegitimate national security objectives… and so on.

When you speak of the marketing language that is the same thing that I am essentially speaking about with reference to HTS propaganda. I plan to write a piece soon about the question of how HTS anthropologists, the few that there are, are allegedly “anthropologizing the military.”

Any window dressing that works to obscure, or to produce a nice candy-coated gloss fostering support for national security objectives pushed by certain elites would be part of what I call HTS propaganda. Really, the widely agreed upon details, rather than the conspiracy theories, are enough to indict the role of social scientists in HTS as far as I am concerned. I have never heard the particular conspiracy theory you allude to.

Incidentally, another aspect of HTS propaganda involves creating caricatures of critics as somehow unhinged types with whacky ideas, as well as patrolling blogs looking for fires to put out. Sometimes we don’t need abstract definitions of propganda, when we can just point to the practice.

In my limited understanding, any report or opinion that doesn’t actively portray HTS as a secret assassination program abetted by a handful of anthropologists is considered propaganda, but I’m probably overstating the case. I’m sure your definition of propaganda is much more sophisticated and considerate.