35. A Window in Dallas – Introduction: Peering into the State of Nature
The Story of Nowhere – Studies in Utopianism and Humanity
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The Story of Nowhere Podcast Introductory Episode—“Episode Zero”: https://storyofnowhere.com/zero/
Myth, Empire, & Utopia: The Rise & Rule of Britannia (Full Series)
Road to Hell Film Reviews
The Nowhere Library
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Music Credits:
“War is the Health of the State” – Randolph Bourne
- “War – or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy – seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society.”
“Max Weber” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The State as a Vocation – Max Weber
- “‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state—nobody says that—but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions—beginning with the sib—have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.”
“State Monopoly on Violence” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
- Some scholars, however, diverge from Weber and, following the tradition set by Thomas Hobbes, instead argue that the ideal of the monopoly of violence concerns not only its control but also its use, such that the state is the sole actor that can legitimately wield violence except in case of immediate self-defense. Seen from this perspective, the state monopoly on violence can also be jeopardized by phenomena such as the growth of private security companies or organized crime.
“Elite Theory” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
- “[I]n political science, theoretical perspective according to which (1) a community’s affairs are best handled by a small subset of its members and (2) in modern societies such an arrangement is in fact inevitable. These two tenets are ideologically allied but logically separable.”
“Liberalism” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Classical Liberalism” – Kwantlen Polytechnic University
“Sovereignty” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
- “The thinker who did the most to provide the term with its modern meaning was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who argued that in every true state some person or body of persons must have the ultimate and absolute authority to declare the law; to divide this authority, he held, was essentially to destroy the unity of the state. The theories of the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)—that the state is based upon a formal or informal compact of its citizens, a social contract through which they entrust such powers to a government as may be necessary for common protection—led to the development of the doctrine of popular sovereignty that found expression in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.”
- “Another twist was given to this concept by the statement in the French constitution of 1791 that ‘Sovereignty is one, indivisible, unalienable and imprescriptible; it belongs to the Nation; no group can attribute sovereignty to itself nor can an individual arrogate it to himself.’ Thus, the idea of popular sovereignty exercised primarily by the people became combined with the idea of national sovereignty exercised not by an unorganized people in the state of nature, but by a nation embodied in an organized state.”
“James Burnham’s Managerial Elite” – American Affairs
“C. Wright Mills” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
The Power Elite (1956) – C. Wright Mills
“C. Wright Mills on the Power Elite” – Socio-Cultural Systems
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993) – Peter Dale Scott
- Deep Politics: “[A]ll those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.” (p. xi)
- “The essence of [conspiracy] is a single objective and/or control point; [Deep Politics or the Deep State] in contrast is an open system with divergent power centers and goals.” (p. xi)
L. Fletcher Prouty (Prouty.Org)
JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (1992) – L. Fletcher Prouty
Four Axioms of Modern Statecraft: “These leaders are influenced by the persuasion of a quartet of the greatest propaganda schemes ever put forth by man:
- “1. The concept of ‘real property,’ a function of ‘colonialism’ that began with the circumnavigation of Earth by Magellan’s ships in 1520. A ‘doctrine of discovery and rights of conquest’ was described by John Locke in his philosophy of natural law.
- “2. The population theory of Malthus.
- “3. Darwin’s theory of evolution, as enhanced by the concept of the survival of the fittest.
- “4. Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy, that is, that God throws the dice, and similar barriers to the real advancement of science and technology today.” (p. 2)
“Peter Dale Scott on Enlightenment Values in the Age of Trump” – Who What Why
“Trump vs. ‘Deep State’? That’s How Light Gets In” – Peter Dale Scott (Who What Why)
“Niccolò Machiavelli” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“The Philosophy of Machiavelli” – The Story of Civilization by Will & Ariel Durant (Audio)
Socrates Meets Machiavelli (2003) – Peter Kreeft
The Prince (1532) – Niccolò Machiavelli
- “[I]t is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.”
“Francis Bacon” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“The Philosophy of Francis Bacon” – The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant (Audio)
“Of Plantations” – Francis Bacon
“Thomas Hobbes” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“The Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes” – The Story of Civilization by Will Durant (Audio)
Leviathan (1651) – Thomas Hobbes
“Carl von Clausewitz” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
Vom Kriege (On War) (1832) – Carl von Clausewitz
- “We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of War used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a War, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw his adversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance.
- “War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.
- “Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence. Self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed usages of International Law, accompany it without essentially impairing its power. Violence, that is to say, physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of States and Law), is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object. In order to attain this object fully, the enemy must be disarmed, and disarmament becomes therefore the immediate object of hostilities in theory. It takes the place of the final object, and puts it aside as something we can eliminate from our calculations.”
“Asymmetric Warfare” – Military History Wikia
- “[W]ar between belligerents whose relative military power differs significantly, or whose strategy or tactics differ significantly.”
“Unrestricted Warfare” – Military History Wikia
- “Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation … a variety of other means … include using International Law (see Lawfare) and a variety of economic means to place one’s opponent in a bad position and circumvent the need for direct military action.”
“Unconventional Warfare” – Military History Wikia
- “[A]n attempt to achieve military victory through acquiescence, capitulation, or clandestine support for one side of an existing conflict. … UW contrasts with conventional warfare in that forces or objectives are covert or not well-defined, tactics and weapons intensify environments of subversion or intimidation, and the general or long-term goals are coercive or subversive to a political body.”
“Fifth-Generation Warfare” – Wikipedia
- “[C]onducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of ‘information and perception.'”
“The Zapruder Film – JFK Movie Clip (1991)
CBS Live News Coverage of the JFK Assassination (11/22/1963)
