15. Crimes of the Powerful
15.6 State-Organised Crime
Michael Brandt, MA
Chambliss (1989, p. 184) defines state-organised crime as, “acts defined by law as criminal and committed by state officials in pursuit of their job as representatives of the state.” A more recent term, “state crimes against democracy” (or SCADs for short), has been suggested by Professor Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University. He defines these as, “actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty” (deHaven-Smith, 2013, p. 12). There are many examples of state-organised crimes, including illegal surveillance, coup d’états, assassinations, and illegal wars (Simon, 2012, pp. 203-258; deHaven-Smith, 2013, pp. 138-140). Despite causing widespread harm, state-organized crimes receive even less attention from criminologists than corporate crimes (Friedrichs, 2007).
Given that nation-states have a monopoly on what gets defined as a crime (they write the laws), the harmful behaviours they engage in are rarely defined as crimes. Consider perhaps the most infamous state-organised crime in history, the Nazi extermination of millions of people, including Jews, members of the LGBTQ community, Jehovah Witnesses, the disabled, Roma (also known as Gypsies), as well as those critical of the Nazi state. The Nazis perpetrated a genocide, and many complicit individuals were prosecuted for crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Trials. However, had Germany been victorious in World War II, it is unlikely that any such trials would have taken place. The victors in wars rarely allow their own harmful behaviours to be defined as criminal. Consider that if the United States had been on the losing side of World War II, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan would likely have been designated war crimes, and those responsible for the horrific injuries and deaths of hundreds of thousands would have likely been put on trial. At the time, senior military officers, including Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower (who would later become president of the United States), did not believe the atomic bombs were required to end the war (Stone & Kuznick, 2012).
It is significant that had the international rules of war (the Nuremberg Principles) been applied to decisions made by U.S. presidents to invade countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, it is possible that every U.S. president since the end of World War II would have been found guilty of war crimes (Chomsky, 2004; Chomsky’s Philosophy, n.d.). None of these countries posed a direct threat to the security of the United States and authorisation to use military force was not obtained from the U.S. Congress or the United Nations (Chomsky, 2004; Chomsky’s Philosophy, n.d.). Joe Biden, and the two presidents before him, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, also ignored the law: Obama approved the use of force and the deployment of CIA operatives in Syria, and Trump ord