{"id":146845,"date":"2019-11-04T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T12:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=146845"},"modified":"2019-11-03T08:38:17","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T08:38:17","slug":"the-metamorphosis-of-the-deep-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/11\/the-metamorphosis-of-the-deep-state\/","title":{"rendered":"The Metamorphosis of the Deep State"},"content":{"rendered":"

2 Nov 2019 – <\/em>It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There\u2019s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor.\u00a0 But with a twisted twist.<\/p>\n

The \u201cDeep State\u201d has been redefined as career bureaucrats doing their patriotic duty.<\/p>\n

It was two years ago, early in the Trump administration, when The New Yorker<\/em> and Salon, <\/em>among many others, were asserting in no uncertain terms that there was no deep state in the United States, and so Trump had nothing to fear from that quarter since it was a figment of his paranoia.\u00a0 Kit Knightly, writing in the Off-Guardian<\/a>, brilliantly demolished this spurious propaganda at the time in a must read reminder of how tricksters play their games.<\/p>\n

The corporate mass-media have recently discovered a \u201cdeep state\u201d that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcolm X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.<\/p>\n

This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The Council on Foreign Relations<\/em>.\u00a0 In its September\/October 2017 edition of its journal Foreign Affairs,<\/em> Jon D. Michaels, in \u201cTrump and the Deep State: The Government Strikes Back,\u201d writes:<\/p>\n

Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the \u201cdeep state<\/a>,\u201d a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda. The concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives. Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.<\/em><\/p>\n

The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration\u2019s media problems come not from \u201cfake news\u201d but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious, undemocratic \u201cdeep state\u201d but simply from the state\u2014the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition \u2013 \u201cunelected bureaucrats\u201d \u2013 that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep state, which is just the state power structures. Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected.\u00a0 State power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed with which bureaucracies operate.\u00a0 Ask Max Weber.<\/p>\n

Drip by drip over the past few years, this \u201cstate bureaucracy\u201d meme has been introduced by the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected president.<\/p>\n

Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, Trump\u2019s War on the \u2018Deep State\u2019 Turns Against Him\u201d <\/a>asserting that the Times has finally admitted to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far. But in this game of deceptive revelations \u2013 going shallower to go deeper \u2013 what is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.<\/p>\n

In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning \u2013\u2013 \u201cNew York Times Confirms: It\u2019s Trump Versus the Deep State\u201d<\/a> \u2013 originally published at The American Conservative <\/em>and widely reprinted, <\/em>the lead-in to the article proper reads: \u201cEven the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk.\u201d\u00a0 So the \u201cpowerful bureaucracy\u201d redefinition, this immovable force of government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state supposedly is.\u00a0 Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil servants doing their patriotic duty.<\/p>\n

Then there is The New York Times\u2019<\/em> columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the Today Show<\/em> recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie that:<\/p>\n

Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he\u2019s [Trump] right. There is a deep state\u2026there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people. And, as Comey\u00a0told me in my book, \u2018thank goodness for that,\u2019 because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals \u2013 we don\u2019t have a monarch, we don\u2019t have a dictator \u2013 they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law.\u00a0What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It\u2019s a positive thing in this sense.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, \u201cin my book, \u2018Thank Goodness for That<\/em>,\u2019\u201d as he put it so eloquently. These guys talk in books, of course, not person to person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the brazen bullshit these guys are capable of.<\/p>\n

This new and shallow deep state definition has buried the old meaning of the deep state as evil conspirators carrying out coup d\u2019\u00e9tats, assassinations, and massive media propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, and who, by implication and direct declaration, never existed in the good old U.S.A. but only in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan where shadowy elites killed and deposed leaders and opponents in an endless series of coup d\u2019\u00e9tats.\u00a0 No mention in Foreign Affairs<\/em>, of course, of the American support for the ruthless leaders of these countries who have always been our dear allies when they obey our every order and serve as our servile proxies in murder and mayhem.<\/p>\n

Even Edward Snowden, the courageous whistleblower in exile in Russia, in a recent interview<\/a> with Joe Rogan, repeats this nonsense when he says the deep state is just \u201ccareer government officials\u201d who want to keep their jobs and who outlast presidents.\u00a0 From his own experience, he should know better.\u00a0 Much better.\u00a0 Interestingly, he suggests that he does when he tells Rogan that \u201cevery president since Kennedy\u201d has been successfully \u201cfeared up\u201d by the intelligence agencies so they will do their bidding.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t need to add that JFK, for fearlessly refusing the bait, was shot in the head in broad daylight to send a message to those who would follow.<\/p>\n

Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet.\u00a0 After a while you don\u2019t hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda\u2019s endless reiterations.<\/p>\n

To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda, just as denying its existence was.<\/p>\n

It is a trick, not the treat it is made to seem.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Nov 2019 – To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda, just as denying its existence was. It is a trick, not the treat it is made to seem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[290,1294,276,109,287,70],"class_list":["post-146845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-culture","tag-deep-state","tag-democracy","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}