I want the FBI to be disbanded.  Forever. I’ve wanted this to happen since 1970.  When the Senate hearings led by Franck Church revealed the extent of the FBI’s (and the CIA’s) infiltration of political and cultural organizations a couple years later, my hatred of the agency multiplied a hundredfold.  That being said, I don’t want the FBI to be replaced by a Donald Trump-run national police agency—a TBI, if you will. For those who don’t know and those who don’t remember, Richard Nixon tried to remake the FBI in his image back in the early 1970s.  He got very close to doing so.  According to what I’ve been able to parse over the years in my reading, conversation and other research, a big reason Nixon failed in turning the FBI into his own private police force was the presence of another powerful reactionary. That was the long time director of the Agency, J. Edgar Hoover, who only ended his directorship by dying.

So yes, Nixon tried to centralize the FBI, CIA, DIA and NSA under his command during his rule.  Although the agencies were mostly in agreement regarding their targeting of the Black liberation movement, the antiwar movement and the New Left, it was a combination of Nixon’s paranoia and his fascist tendencies that convinced him to have one of his aides—a squirrely young right wing zealot named Tom Huston—devise a plan that would have consolidated all of these agencies under the direction of the White House.  Nixon approved the plan on July 23, 1970 and it was rescinded five days later.  Maryland Senator Charles McMathias, a liberal Republican (when there was such a thing) described what happened in a January 22, 1974 editorial in the Los Angeles Times: “Many constitutional lawyers believe that for five days in 1970 the fundamental guarantees of the Bill of Rights were suspended by the mandate given the secret ‘Huston plan’,” during those five days the plan was approved, “authoritarian rule had superseded the constitution.”

When Hoover downright rejected Nixon’s plan and convinced Nixon to give it up (one guesses this was done through blackmail and threats of various kinds), Nixon and his advisors came up with a Plan B.  This plan still gave Nixon plenty of power when it came to directing investigations against his perceived enemies.  It also resulted in the creation of the secret covert operations unit that would become known as the White House Plumbers.  These men, all of whom came from the black ops sections of the CIA and other agencies, broke into offices, intimidated opponents and otherwise waged a mostly illegal war on the aforementioned targets opposed to the Nixon agenda.  They were also involved in going after more mainstream personalities on Nixon’s personal enemies list.  The original plan proposed by Huston included a set of contingencies that included the construction and maintenance of concentration camps in the US desert for leftists, Black radicals and others deemed national security risks.

Many folks in the popular Left movements in the early 1970s discussed the rumors we had been hearing about the camps.  Some of the conversations were in jest, but all of them had a serious and ominous undertone.  Living in western Germany at the time, where remnants and reminders of its recent Nazi past were everywhere, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that past and its similarities to the police state unfolding under Nixon and his palace guard.  When the investigations collectively known as Watergate began to uncover numerous illegal actions by the White House Plumbers, multiple police agencies, the FBI, CIA and NSA, those of us who were still involved in extra-parliamentary politics nodded our heads, confident that our instincts had been correct.  Of course, the surveillance and black ops against the antiwar and liberation movements didn’t stop for long.  By the time Reagan had made it through his first year in the White House, things were more or less back to how they were in 1974.  The difference was that a lot of the actions taken in the 1960s and 1970s by the police state were now legal, especially if the president committed them.  This trend has continued.  As for Nixon and Trump, the fact that Trump is serving a second term after being indicted for dozens of crimes and convicted of felonies in thirty-four instances kind of says it all.  Fascism is more than just a rumor and is quickly becoming fact in the United States.

Which brings me to the Nazis and their Reich. Once they were handed power by the German chancellor and Bundestag, the Nazis and Hitler created lists of their enemies.  These lists, called Sonderfahndungslisten (Special search list—literal translation), were lists of people who were to be arrested by the SS once the Wehrmacht annexed a country.  The lists included citizens and (especially in Britain) European exiles from the Reich.  According to the SS commander who composed the list for Britain, it included 2820 names.  In an October rally in Wisconsin, Trump told the crowd he would go after what he called “the enemy from within.”  According to various news reports, these enemies include Democrats, members of the media and numerous others.  It does not include the millions of immigrants the Trumpists are hoping to detain and deport.  One assumes they are on other lists maintained no matter who is in the White House.  The effect of such lists is to silence the opposition.  I fear this may already be happening among the liberal opponents of Trump.

Another aspect of Trump’s return is his determination to decimate the federal bureaucracy as it currently exists; what trumpists like to call the deep state. This includes the Pentagon.  The positions that would remain after this purge would be filled only with those loyal to Trump and his policies.  It’s reasonable to assume that if those remaining are not considered loyal, they will be replaced by others who are.  In other words, the deep state would remain, except its allegiance would be to Trump and the forces he represents.  One can see this already happening if they look at Trump’s picks for his cabinet and staff.  Some might argue that every president brings in their own people.  This is only true to a point.  What Trump is working towards is something more akin to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.  As I wrote in 2017, when Trump first took power,

“A historian friend told me that he did not believe history repeated itself. Bearing that in mind, I asked him if he thought it still had lessons for us to draw on. He answered, yes of course. Keeping that under consideration, I decided to take a deeper look at the rapid changes Donald Trump and his “people” are trying to put in place in the United States. As I began my investigation, it was announced that Trump adviser Steven Bannon had replaced a General and an intelligence chief on the National Security Council. In essence, this move is another attempt by the Trump administration to upend the traditional chain of command (the professional class, if you will), with ideologues from outside that class.

Upon hearing of this move, I was immediately reminded of similar moves by Adolf Hitler at the beginning of his regime. Known as the Gleichschaltung, this time period in the rise of Nazism involved (among other things) the replacing of various members of the German government with Nazi ideologues whose primary allegiance was to Hitler and the philosophy of Nazism. Essentially the process of bringing all elements of power, from the government to the military to the trade unions to the media, into line with the Nazi state, the Gleichschaltung began with the elimination of independent state legislatures. This was followed by the dismantling of trade unions, attacks on the independence of the churches (especially those opposed to the Nazis), the elimination of all political parties except for the Nazi party…. In addition, the private militias of the Nazis became official state military organizations with the task of enforcing allegiance to the Hitler wing of the Nazi party.”

Repeating the point I made above, and after looking at those Trump has selected to work with him beginning in January, it’s quite clear that the strategy of Gleichschaltung is what the trumpists are engaging in.  Of course, not every element of the Third Reich’s takeover will be replicated in the US circa 2025, but then again it’s not Germany in the 1930s.

So, yeah, I want the FBI to be dissolved.  And the CIA, DIA, NSA.  I don’t want a new surveillance state under the direction of trumpists, tech bro billionaires and their companies, the Israeli intelligence industry or the local police.  Unfortunately, the trend I detect as regards the contemporary surveillance state indicates that we will be getting exactly what I (and millions of others) don’t want.  Indeed, much of it is already in place and currently working.  There are very few modern politicians from either corporate party that vote against the intensifying panopticon and even fewer who speak loudly against it.  The corporate sector is on board and putting in bids to get their piece of it as I write.  Given the ongoing privatization of public agencies, if the trumpists succeed in shutting down the FBI, one possible replacement might be a mostly privatized national police agency.  If they don’t succeed in shutting it down, one can be reasonably sure that the FBI with trumpist management would remove any agent, clerk, forensic expert, etc, not on board with the FBI becoming another tool in the trumpist vendetta against those “enemies within” that they seem to fear so much.  Those FBI employees who are forced out would be replaced by fellow trumpists ready to do their leader’s bidding.  In other words, the Trump version of Nixon’s dream might be fulfilled.

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