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Title : Trump and the Deep State -- or: The problems caused by right-wingers who steal left-wing terminology
link : Trump and the Deep State -- or: The problems caused by right-wingers who steal left-wing terminology
Trump and the Deep State -- or: The problems caused by right-wingers who steal left-wing terminology
On Democratic Underground today, a poster linked to a new piece by Professor Peter Dale Scott, titled "Donald Trump and the Deep State, Part 1." Without reading the piece, a couple of DU readers presumed that Scott must be some sort of neo-fascist wolf-in-sheep's clothing.The problem is the term "deep state," which Scott popularized in this county. (He borrowed the phrase from Turkey, where it is commonly used.) The American far rightists have appropriated the term "deep state." Tossing aside Scott's definition, neo-fascists now use the term to as a catch-all name for whatever conclave of boogeymen haunts the right-wing imagination on any given day: "Deep state" is the new "Illuminati."
Some of you may recall when Roger Stone claimed that the "deep state" tried to kill him with polonium poisoning. He got better.
When a know-it-all youngster on DU suggested that Professor Scott should be classified with the Alt Right, I felt obligated to mount a response:
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Professor Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat, a professor at Berkeley, and a respected poet. Over the decades, he has strongly opposed conservative administrations from Nixon to Reagan to Dubya. He wrote groundbreaking works exposing connections between the CIA and organized crime. He is well-known for his work on the CIA's disastrous coup in Indonesia, for his pieces exposing American links to neofascist states (such as Chile), and for his opposition to the Vietnam war.
In short: For many years, his name was associated with progressivism, anti-interventionism and anti-militarism.
Scott borrowed the term "deep state" from Turkish politics. (The phrase is commonly used there.) I know that he defined the oil industry as a key component of the deep state -- thus, he would surely point to the appointment of Rex Tillerson as an example of the deep state in action.
A quick skim of Scott's latest piece will show you that he identifies Donald Trump as an exemplar (or tool) of the deep state who deceptively ran for office as an opponent of same. In this regard, Scott likens Trump to Hitler.
It is true the far rightists in this country fastened upon Scott's work and appropriated the term "deep state" for their own purposes. Scott is not responsible for that. He should have known better than to appear on Alex Jones' radio program some years back. Scott has also appeared -- far more often -- on shows run by leftwingers and socialists. (I first encountered him via the Pacifica network.) I guess that some people believe that a microphone is a microphone. Personally, I think that life is easier if one strives to avoid "guilt by association" accusations.
I chatted with Scott a few times more than twenty years ago; he probably would not recall. I definitely would NOT classify him as any sort of right-winger -- quite the opposite. That said, I've not really followed his work in recent years; it is possible that he has written cringe-inducing material during that past decade or so. If he has, I hope that someone reading these words will enlighten me.
There used to be a robust tradition of left-wing anti-CIA, anti-militarist, anti-fascist criticism. If you are old enough to recall publications like Covert Action Information Bulletin and CounterSpy, you may be familiar with that tradition. The situation is very strange now: Some of the rhetoric employed by those old-school lefty writers has been commandeered and perverted by the far right.
I'm an old dog, and I find these new tricks to be both infuriating and perplexing.
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Here are a few excerpts from Scott's new piece. You tell me if Scott sounds like a Trump apologist or an Alt Rightist.
On February 3, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported President Trump’s plans to pave the way for a broad rollback of the recent financial reforms of Wall Street.[1] Although no surprise, the news was in ironic contrast to the rhetoric of his campaign, when he spent months denouncing both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for their links to Goldman Sachs, even when his campaign’s Financial Chairman was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Steve Mnuchin (now Trump’s Treasury Secretary).
Trump was hardly the first candidate to run against the banking establishment while surreptitiously taking money from big bankers. So did Hitler in 1933; so did Obama in 2008.
However, Trump’s connections to big money, both new (often self-made) and old (mostly institutional) were not only more blatant than usual; some were also possibly more sinister. Trump’s campaign was probably the first ever to be (as we shall see) scrutinized by the FBI for “financial connections with Russian financial figures,” and even with a Russian bank whose Washington influence was attacked years ago, after it was allegedly investigated in Russia for possible mafia connections.[4]
Trump’s appointment of the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin (under Clinton) and Hank Paulson (under Bush), has reinforced recent speculation about Trump’s relationship to what is increasingly referred to as the deep state.
Throughout the campaign, the Kochs and Trump (whose chief backer was another maverick billionaire, Robert Mercer) were apparently at arm’s length from each other. Vanity Fair suggested in September that at that time the Kochs were “in direct opposition to the Mercers,” in a “civil war that threatens to tear the party apart” — even though, starting around 2011, the Mercers had been donating “at least $1 million a year to the Koch network.”[25]I could quote more, but you get the gist.
Whatever the tensions, it was clear after the election that Trump in his transition team had “surrounded himself with people tied to the Kochs.”[26] Soon the Trump nominee for Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, another major billionaire contributor to the Koch donor list. (Betsy’s brother Erik Prince, famous as the founder and owner of the notorious private army Blackwater, was quietly advising the Trump transition team on matters related to intelligence and defense.)[27]
And Trump’s CIA Director is Mike Pompeo, formerly a Koch-sponsored congressman “who was so closely entwined with the climate-change denying Koch brothers that he was known as the ‘congressman from Koch.”[28] (The new administration has reportedly instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website.)
So how do we deal with the problem of Alt Rightists and neo-fascists appropriating the terminology (and some of the argumentation) that once was the province of the left-wing radicalism that grew out of the anti-war movement? Today, our political choices come down to an exasperatingly false dichotomy. In one corner, we have pro-Trumpers pretending to be rebels and revolutionaries and working-class heroes; in the other corner, we have MSNBC offering reverential treatment to Bush administration alumni and intelligence officers.
Where does leave a guy like me?
Sure, I've taken to watching MSBC religiously. Times being what they are, I feel obligated to follow every quiver and convulsion of the ongoing battle against Trumpism. Yet on a deeper level, I feel alienated, homeless and friendless.
Thus Article Trump and the Deep State -- or: The problems caused by right-wingers who steal left-wing terminology
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