Comment by limit499karma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by limit499karma | Hacker News Reader

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In my opinion, the transformation of the role of intelligence gathering arms of the state in the United States occurred after World War 2. What emerged from that heady moment was a transplantation of the ethos of the British Empire's intelligence apparatus. I noted in your bio a pdf -- "The Myth of Scarcity" -- that indicates that you have an inclination to pursue a matter to its root cause. What is proposed to you is that you review the provenance of 'Anglo-American' intelligence services to its beginnings in Elizabethan England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham

Those who are familiar with that period of English history know full well that the 'realm' was engulfed in internal conflicts and that the 'system' devised to "protect the realm" viewed the "subjects of the Crown" as potential adversaries. There you will find the 'DNA' of CIA. [So r/1960s/1947 ..]

America won "World War 2" but lost its soul.

Secret police and the maintenance and extension of power through internal/external covert ops seem to be an inevitable feature of government at any scale.

Rome had the Frumentarii, and there are examples from Persia, China, and Sparta.

These were overt empires run by emperors. What we've had since the end of WWII is a covert empire directed by an informal pseudo-government of oligarchs, hidden under a veneer of democracy.

In the UK the Crown never changed its mind about internal adversaries, as the recent "spycops" inquiry shows.

https://www.spycops.co.uk/

In fact, we directly inherited the British spying apparatus via George Washington’s first counterintelligence apparatus which pre-existed the revolutionary war

People forget that George Washington was a traitor of the British crown directly - Which, of course I support however, Washington did not actually dismantle such power structures, simply transferring ownership of them

One of my history professors once took an aside to note that the American “Revolution” is a bad name for the event, because there was very little change in power structures: the people in power before the war, were largely still in power after.

War for independence, yes. Revolution? Eh, not really.

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