Threat inflation has become a tool of political repression

From America is controlled by secrecy by Jacob Siegel.  Subtitled Threat inflation has become a tool of political repression.

I am increasingly sympathetic to this argument.

Threat Inflation is a very specific form of propaganda and quite effective.  

The problem with bureaucratised secrecy is what it does to the rest of society. As illusions come to seem real and formal mechanisms of truth-seeking appear blocked off, conspiracies offer themselves as a virtuous alternative. To encourage this in a country that already has a deep, native strain of paranoia and wild truth-seeking is a dangerous gamble.

“Secrecy is an institution of the administrative state that developed during the great conflicts of the twentieth century. It is distinctive primarily in that it is all but unexamined,” the scholar and American statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote toward the end of his long career in public life, when he turned his attention to the power in the shadows.

Moynihan, a Democratic Senator from New York, was known for his polarising work on race, poverty and the breakdown of the American family. But in his final published book, the liberal Cold Warrior delivered a revisionist account of the US conflict with the Soviet Union. Though he never wavered on the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause, Moynihan argued that the effort had been weakened and warped by the growth of a bureaucratic culture of secrecy. He delivered a measured but devastating attack on the underworld of administrative institutions better known today as “the deep state”.

In Secrecy: The American Experience, published in 1999, Moynihan argued that US policy had been systematically distorted by intelligence agency assessments that exaggerated the economic and military power of the Soviet Union. Because the agencies operated in secret, the exaggerations were not only shielded from scrutiny but had the perverse effect of fuelling their own growth. Over time, this process fundamentally transformed the American political system. “Secrecy is a form of regulation,” Moynihan wrote in the book’s opening line. This new form of regulation supervened democratic procedures and transferred power to bureaucracies operating in the shadows of the elected government.