Gleiwitz délivré

At the high point of the Jeremiah Wright imbroglio, I was chatting with a friend who largely shares my sympathies for passive radicalism, but as we talked about the truths behind the Rev's critique of the imperium, I found myself defending his contention that the US government introduced crack and HIV into the urban community. These are accusations that even the most staunchly anti-imperial political radicals generally eschew as being somehow beyond the pale, existing in the realm of pure paranoia and fantasy. On the merits of evidence, I endorse neither, but this notion that these kinds of conspiracies are categorically impossible is the real fantasy. The government that brought you the Tuskegee experiments and that deliberately dosed its own soldiers with LSD for days and weeks at a time is capable of plenty of skulduggery, and the government that will kill a million Vietnamese or displace 4 million Iraqis from their homes can hardly be defended with the line "well, they wouldn't do that . . ."

As for this anthrax shit and our friend Thoreau's willingness to embrace the distinct possibility that the gunman wasn't necessarily working alone, I raise a cloudy glass. We are ruled by people who would use a false flag operation straight out of the 1939 playbook, so let's never preemptively conclude that there are some lines they just wouldn't transgress.