I recently reconnected with a friend from fifteen years ago who used the term “deep state.”
Back in those days, I was already a voluntaryist, but the only word I had was “anarcho-capitalist.” Since I was working in Hollywood, most of the people I knew were Hollywood liberals. I had quickly discovered that talking about philosophy with those people was futile. They didn’t have a clue what I meant. This particular friend seemed to have a more open mind than most, so I had discussed political philosophy with him a few times. I could tell he thought I was a wacko, but harmless.
I recently saw a post on Facebook from him. He seemed to have drastically changed his opinion. Since I agreed with his point, I “liked” his post. To my surprise, he sent me a private message, saying that he didn’t understand what I was talking about back in the day but, since he had learned about the “deep state,” he realized I was right. The Facebook messenger is hardly the place for a philosophical discussion, so I didn’t ask the question on my mind, “WTF is the deep state?”
The State is, and always has been, Our Enemy, as Albert Jay Nock so brilliantly proved in 1935. It is the institution that claims the authority to impose its will on all the inhabitants of its geographical territory. It uses its monopoly on legalized violence to threaten, coerce, manipulate, and rob us all. Although it is made up of human beings, it has an identity of its own, dependent upon one myth that has acquired the attributes of religious faith. Even its priests, who one might expect to know better, delude themselves into believing that their will is the “will of the people” (aka the will of God) and that all they do is for the “greater good.”
Is the “deep state” just another term for the inherent evil of the State, or is it a different institution? The way my friend used it seemed to indicate the former, but then I heard others use it in a way that sounded more like the latter. So I looked it up.
It seems that the supporters of Donald Trump coined the term to mean the “state within the state,” what I always thought of as the establishment politicians, officials, and bureaucrats who hold the dominant power within the State. That makes sense because Donald Trump marketed himself as the anti-establishment candidate, and the “deep state” sounds more nefarious than simply “the State,” which is so widely worshiped, or “the establishment,” which has a connotation of dependable tradition.
If the “deep state” is a separate entity within the State and is in opposition to the “authority of the president,” then what is the State? Apparently, the State is the President, whose election represents the “will of the people,” the basis for the whole con game of some human beings having the “authority” to rule other human beings. The notion that 25 million out of 315 million Americans voting for Trump (many of whom just wanted to prevent the horror of a Hillary Clinton presidency) represents the will of the people is ludicrous. Furthermore, the idea that ill-intentioned politicians are trying to subvert that “will of the people” cloaks what is happening in reality. The “deep state” is merely a faction fighting for power against the president’s faction.
For as long as there has been a State, there have been factions vying for the power it possesses in its monopoly over legalized violence. This battle for power is nothing new or different. It is merely a new term designed to benefit from the public’s mistrust of the State while implying that the State is not the enemy.
Posted on my blog at http://voluntaryistliving.com/?p=372
Please read my post on The Cabal, my future posts will explain more about this subject but the Deep State Is basically the CIA and the people who control the CIA & money system and if you've been watching the main stream media CNN, BBC, Facebook, you should of realized there something seriously wrong with the world. Basically the President Isn't really in charge he Is just a middle man. Whoever controls the military is in control. I was hoping that was Trump, but I think he may have lost control and be just another puppet. I applaud him for his courage though, he's tough.
Thanks for your response. I can agree that there is something seriously wrong with the world, but I have my doubts about whether anybody is in control. I believe the ongoing political battles for dominance by multiple factions are causing great harm, but my hope is that people are waking up to the whole charade.
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STOP"Curiously, there aren’t many political concepts Americans have borrowed from Turkish history, but the deep state seems to be one of them.
The Turkish phrase derin devlet literally means “deep state.” According to historian Ryan Gingeras, the term “generally refers to a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.”
This concept of a deep state, Gingeras continues, is used to “explain why and how agents employed by the state execute policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” Breaking the law, of course, often means employing criminals. Gingeras, a specialist in organized crime in Turkey, looks at the underbelly of the Turkish deep state to examine how alliances between generals, statesmen and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” are formed. (Elsewhere, Gingeras traces the heroin connection, noting that the Turkish deep state itself is riven by factional rivalries.)"
https://daily.jstor.org/the-unacknowledged-origins-of-the-deep-state/
The term entered into English via former Canadian diplomat, poet, and Berkeley professor emeritus of English Peter Dale Scott, regarding the Susurluk scandal (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susurluk_scandal)
that followed the crash of a Mercedes into a flatbed truck in that town northwest of Istanbul in the late 90’s late one night, killing all but one passenger, including 3 men supposed to be arch enemies, the assistant police chief of Istanbul, the leader of the Kurdish faction in the Parliament, and a world-class drug lord and murder for hire expert Abdullah Çatlı, the leader of the Grey Wolves (who was a contract killer on Interpol's red list) along with his movie star girlfriend.
Prior to this, Çatlı (pronounced Chutluh) had escaped from a Swiss prison with the aid of a helicopter — a NATO helicopter.
When the state police learned of the incident they rushed to the scene but too late because the local police had already investigated and it was all over the papers. Turkey learned that day that they were governed not by the public state but by a deep state. The US, indeed the West, has yet to learn this fact about its own countries.
Çatlı's operation, the Gray Wolves, is often described as the beginnings of Gladio-B, a Turkish and Central Asian continuation of the NATO intelligence program known as Operation Gladio in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, which implemented what they called the "strategia della tensione", with dozens of bombings of banks, school buses, train stations, and any venue that would raise public ire and anxiety. In this clip from the BBC, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, interviewed in his life cell in prison for the Peteano bombing, explains the motive behind the strategy.