I was recently reading an interview with Peter Dale Scott, who wrote “The Road to 9/11.” What struck me was the title of the interview: “The ‘Deep State’ behind U.S. democracy.” VoltaireNet, which conducted this interview, first asked Scott about this. What exactly did he mean by this term? Scott’s answer is quite thought provoking.
“The term ‘deep state’ comes from Turkey. They invented it after the wreck of a speeding Mercedes in 1996 in which the passengers were a member of Parliament, a beauty queen, a local senior police captain, and an important drug trafficker in Turkey who was also the head of a criminal paramilitary organization -- the Grey Wolves -- that went around killing people. And it became very obvious in Turkey that there were [sic] a covert relationship between the police who officially were looking for this man -- even though a policeman was there with him in the car -- and these people who committed crimes on behalf of the state. The state that you commit crimes for is not a state that can show its hand to the people, it’s a hidden state, a covert structure. In Turkey, they called it the deep state, and I had been talking about deep politics for a long time so I used the term in ‘The Road to 9/11.’ This is why I have defined deep politics as all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged. So the term ‘deep state’ -- coming from Turkey -- is not mine.”
As soon as I read this, I said to myself, “Look Orhan at what we are exporting to the world” -- not a scientific concept, not a philosophical postulate but a word which resembles the mafia-like deterioration of state structures.
In neurotic families, babies first learn weird words rather than uttering the usual words “mom” and “dad.” I know some babies whose first word was “money,” for example. When you see a baby crawling around and constantly saying “money,” you don’t need to imagine what this family talks about the most. Likewise, when foreigners start to learn some basics about Turkish politics, one of the few concepts they came across is the “deep state.” It is very much part of our culture and political life. And as I tried to explain many times before in this column, these illegal traditions were directly inherited after the massacres of non-Muslims in Turkey.
It is quite interesting here that Scott applies a Turkish concept to American political life in order to get a deeper understanding of it. Let’s read more of Dale’s explanation of the concept. He says “deep state” refers to “a parallel secret government, organized by the intelligence and security apparatus, financed by drugs and engaging in illicit violence, to protect the status and interests of the military against threats from intellectuals, religious groups and occasionally the constitutional government. In this book, I adapt the term somewhat to refer to the wider interface in America between the public, the constitutionally established state and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power and violence outside the government. You might call it the back door of the public state, giving access to dark forces outside the law.”
He does not explain why America has a deep state. Maybe this explanation can be found in the work of another thinker, Noam Chomsky, who claimed that America was founded as an imperialist state which came into existence through the mass killings of Native Americans and the constant invasion of other countries’ lands: Mexico, Canada and others.
The Turkish deep state is a threat to everyone living in Turkey, whereas the American deep state seems to pose a threat to everyone around the globe. In Turkey, in every manipulation and hindrance of politics you can see the fingerprints of the Turkish deep state, and in this sense we may need to have a closer look at the American deep state in order to understand some global and regional crises.
I hope all “deep state” structures will be dissolved one day.
