this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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The idea that the US has any restrictions on violence or war, formal or informal, is an illusion. It's part of the facade of "liberal democracy".
The US hasn't "declared war" since WW2, but has militarily killed somewhere in the area of 15 million people since then by my estimate. Probably a lot more when you add in all the illegal unilateral sanctions. The UN exists to legitimize US wars and imperialism, and fails to do even that most of the time. There are zero consequences, so the only meaningful policy the us has adhered to in the last 100+ years is "might makes right".
To make it worse I belive it was after 9/11 but it might have been earlier, Congress authorized the President to start a "conflict" with any nation they deem as a threat, just so long as it legally is not called a war the president can do it.
Though this is irrelevant because the law does not matter in the US its a fiction no one is willing to follow any more.
Honestly, that kind of law never existed.
Even going back to early post colonial history. Like Gen. Andrew Jackson (before he was president) was just unilaterally starting wars with Spain and indigenous peoples without asking for approval from anyone. Mexico was invaded by a cabal of US slave owners and their armies, which is essentially how Texas became a territory. Hawaii was similarly taken by a capitalist coup and just shoved under the empire's umbrella for the sake of capitalist expansion. There are some accounts that JFK didn't know about the bay of pigs invasion plans.
One thing I consider a good framework of history is this:
The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, was an information gathering agency. Parenthetically they were involved in doing a lot of money laundering to hide ties with Nazi Germany and other financial crimes. But it operated under the orders of the Presidential Office. When the CIA was proposed to replace the OSS after WW2, the Dulles brothers both made the argument that the CIA should not be constrained to:
This created a shadow government that was only accountable to its self. We all probably know Allen Dulles was a Nazi sympathizer. Before WW2 he worked for the German agency which paid the SS. Allen even tried to convince his brother to get the US to join the war on the side of the Nazis. But after the war the CIA became the new center for Nazi power that was a state within a state. It filled it's ranks with Nazis and other fascists, and purged any communist/socialist sympathizers which existed in the OSS (who, by some accounts may have saved Ho Chi Minh's life when he had malaria).
The first Reichstag moment was probably the JFK assassination. The second was probably
I often think about that. According to what I remember hearing or reading from Aaron Good, FDR would have charged Dulles with treason after the war. Dulles was literally helping Nazi leadership escape Germany towards the end of the war. Except that of course he died before then, and his nominally socdem VP Henry Wallace had been forced off the ballot for the 1944 election in favour of the more anti-communist and pro-capital Harry Truman. Truman would be convinced to start the CIA and give them the mission to do whatever they want in service of Wall Street, and the Dulleses went into history not as traitors and Nazi collaborators but as accomplished statesmen crucial to the foundations of the empire as we learned to know it since.
I think about it a lot too. I think those two laid the foundation that the State Department is the political branch of the CIA. The Nazi empire was rehabilitated and folded into the American empire largely because of those two.