In her reflections on the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt wrote that ‘secrecy—what diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government—and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history.’ [‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’] While this is undoubtedly the case, what is novel about the current period is not only the fact that secrecy has been generalised […] but that the black world has swelled in size as a driving component of the military-industrial complex. This does not just impact the art of government, but has insidious effects on society as a whole. [Trevor] Paglen captures this well when, echoing earlier arguments about the permanent arms economy, military Keynesianism, and the inextricable relationship between militarism, imperialism and late capitalism, he concludes that the ‘black world is much more than an archipelago of secret bases. It is a secret basis underlying much of the American economy.’ [Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World, p. 277]
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero, 2015), pp. 66–7.