Subtle Growths

From the schizophrenia of the third reich, there came an entity, sublime beneath the feet of any participating in the orgiastic war machine of the nazi party’s twelve year seizure of government. The mess of competing ideologies, social groups, class interests, almost everything floating in the primordial soup of Weimar Germany, all that came together to flow along the orbits of the hollow vessel, Adolf Hitler, combined down into the structure of the Reich and in doing so, grew extensions of the Reich, its actions and organizational policies driven by the momentum of energy poured into it and its form dictated by the particularities of the mass that built it. It’s from this that the Schutzstaffel was born. Tellingly an agency originally created to protect Hitler himself, it upstaged and eventually purged the old martial organization of the Sturmabteilung, its 19th century ethos of thuggish brutality and homoerotic masculinity recognized by the Darwinian intellect of historical motion as out of date, to be purged in the Night of the Long Knives. No longer, would Hitler be guarded by a martial stability constructed around him, such a thing relies on the older notions already outstaged, of the nature of power, both in the organizations surrounding it and the importance of a single man, as Hitler. Hitler became Der Führer then, no longer the Napoleonic genius, but the middle-manager of powers far larger than he could comprehend from his station. Rather, the Schutzstaffel morphed into being the organizational template of power going forward. As a nation was constructed from the chaos of the era, from industrial technology, from mass-communication, new ways of power were constructed in line with it.

By 1944, the Schutzstaffel had become a bacterial undergrowth within every avenue of power in the Reich. The organization had attached itself as the auxiliaries or parallels to every function of governance, in ensuring the total domination of the Nazi Party’s organization-technologies over all things. It did so by becoming bacterial, a substance inscrutable at the level of individual persons, but one that flowed through, latched itself onto, or replicated and replaced existing structures and in doing so, Nazified those structures. It’s this that Allen Dulles saw such potential in, during his mid-war jaunts off to Switzerland, holding court in Zürich, where he unsuccessfully attempted to broker a peace deal with Heinrich Himmler. In Himmler he saw, though never met (and perhaps would have had his illusions shattered, had he ever) a man of his own volition, a man who saw this form of power and desired to build it, to make it operate for one’s own idea of the proper functioning of things.

Dulles brought the idea back and found instant success. Truman made a statement in 1964 regarding the outgrowth and metastization of the CIA since its chartering after the war from its primitive early editions, the OSS and etc. In this statement, he recognized the state of things that had transpired, the entire nation now effected by an organism more akin to a bacterial growth than any vertical form of power. One year earlier, the power of this organization made itself clear. Attempting to steer the nation away from its codependent horn-lock with the Soviet Union, John F. Kennedy found himself targeted and removed by the machinery of this organism as it moved on its own, rejecting the attempt to change its host to a being less beneficial. 

When the Soviet Union was morphing into a new form of nation, its internal factions set to work warring against each other for the future of the nation. In a split that appears again in Metal Gear Solid 3, the KGB and GRU represent these factions, the former being the party leaders desiring a more global nation and the latter being the nationalist militarists. Regardless of the truth of this to the larger history of the Soviet Union, in it is a truth about the way in which these organizations function. Just as the CIA emerged from the cauldron of Dulles’ political location, the blue blooded WASPs of the Ivy League, just as the SS emerged from Nazism, these all emerge not as neutral hangers-on to power, but as their own organisms. This results in the situation seen then, where multiple of these organisms spawn in order to be an emanation of conflicts internal to the system, now made more and more explicit via their fighting-forces. The combat of these organisms, as can be seen in the 1990s wars over Russia’s future, or the CIA using Snowden as a blow against the NSA, provides a key by which to read the underground currents of conflict, those often not even explicit to the ones supposedly at the center of them.