To The Trans-National Elite the Nation State is a Dirty Word

Remember this. The folks at the New York Times really don’t buy into all this stuff about nation states and fighting against evil-doers. They belong to the secular trans-national elite that subscribes to a faith that we are beyond atavisms like nationalism. Or at least we soon will be.

For these advanced folks, cycles of violence are caused by roots causes such as oppression. In fact, if you look at any conflict in the world, you will discover that at the root of it is the oppression of some marginalized group, whether people of color, gays, or the Palestinian people.

So we really should not be surprised or even outraged about the revelation of the “secret program of combing through a vast international data base containing banking transactions involving thousands of Americans,” as Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it.

If you work for the New York Times you probably believe that the War on Terror is a put-up job, a Pentagon plan hatched up with the Religious Right to take over the world.

The outrageous thing is that the disclosures of secret information about tactics and methods used by the United States government in pursuing terrorists makes the task of our fighting men more difficult. Maybe it will even result in people being killed.

The nation state has been a boon to the ordinary people of Europe and North America. It has freed them from the face-to-face community of blood kin, and created a successful, though abstract locus for their loyalty and belonging. And even in the bloody twentieth century only 5 percent of males were killed in wars, as opposed to 20-40 percent in primitive societies.

But the trans-national elite is above all that. They sneer at the miraculous nation state. They want to move on to bigger and better things, a global state without all the mess of democracy, a state that they will control, or think they will.

Ordinary people would do well to resist the plans of the trans-national elite and shame the newspaper that broadcasts to terrorists the operational plans and intelligence methods of the United States government.