According to an American political conspiracy theory, the deep state is a
clandestine network of members of the federal government (especially within
the FBI and CIA), working in conjunction with high-level financial and
industrial entities and leaders, to exercise power alongside or within the
elected United States government.
The term deep state originated in the 1990s as a reference to an alleged
longtime deep state in Turkey, but began to be used to refer to the
American government as well, including during the Obama administration.
However, the theory reached mainstream recognition under the presidency of
Donald Trump, who referenced an alleged "deep state" working against him
and his administration's agenda.[
The term has precedents since at least the 1950s, including the concept of
the military–industrial complex, which posits a cabal of generals and
defense contractors who enrich themselves through pushing the country into
endless wars.
Opinion polling done in 2017 and 2018 suggests that approximately half of
all Americans believe in the existence of a deep state in the United
States.
In his 2015 book The State: Past, Present, Future, academic Bob
Jessop comments on the similarity of three constructs:
1. The deep state, for which he cites Mike Lofgren's 2014 definition:
"a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level
finance and industry that is effectively able to govern... without
reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal
political process."[
2. The dark state, or "networks of officials, private firms, media
outlets, think tanks, foundations, NGOs, interest groups, and other forces
that attend to the needs of capital, not of everyday life" while "concealed
from public gaze" or "hidden in plain sight," citing political scientist
Jason Lindsay's 2013 article.
3. The 4th branch of U.S. government, which consists of "an ever more
unchecked and unaccountable centre... working behind a veil of secrecy,"
citing Tom Engelhardt's 2014 book
Deep state has been associated with the military–industrial complex by
author Mike Lofgren, who has identified this complex as the private part of
the deep state. University professor and journalist Marc Ambinder has
suggested that a myth about the deep state is that it functions as one
entity; in reality, he states "the deep state contains multitudes, and they
are often at odds with one another".
From election denial to QAnon, the origins of our age of
misinformation too often go unexamined. That’s too bad, because unraveling
the roots of one popular conspiracy theory—of a “deep state”—might reveal
something important about the cynicism now infecting U.S politics.
In the U.S., the idea of a deep state cabal of unelected officials
secretly pulling the strings of the American government, is widely
believed. One 2018 poll even claimed that a majority of American voters
place credence in the theory. This is no fringe phenomenon. America’s
democratic political institutions and public opinion are riven by anxieties
that have been given voice in the pronouncements of Donald Trump: “Either
the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” he told a
rally in Waco, Texas, in March 2023. This was nothing new. As president he
frequently deployed the term, often to denounce whistleblowers and leakers
from the U.S. intelligence community. Many of the January 6 Capitol rioters
were inspired by QAnon conspiracy theories that claimed a deep state was
working to undermine President Trump and betray the electorate. If he wins
this November, Trump has promised to “dismantle the deep state” by
stripping thousands of federal employees of their civil service
protections, allowing them to be fired at will.
The intricate apophenia of today’s QAnon-laced cynicism toward the
federal government as deep state finds its origins in legitimate public
concern about cold war CIA covert operations. Knowing this history offers
some answers for today’s conspiracy culture questions. Before the CIA’s
disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the American media
consciously avoided discussing U.S. covert action: “[W]e left out a great
deal of what we knew about U.S. intervention in Guatemala and in a variety
of other cases,” noted the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, James
Reston, in 1954. As a result, many of the CIA’s most significant operations
escaped popular accountability.
In learning about these covert interventions in the 1960s and 1970s,
the public became acutely aware of the gap between the official narrative
of a purely defensive foreign policy and the reality of these previously
secret offensive operations. That awareness caused many to ask who oversaw
American foreign policy. Was it their elected public representatives or
secretive intelligence officers?
One of the most influential books of this era to raise this question
was The Invisible Government, written in 1964 by journalists David Wise and
Thomas Ross. They opened their account with a stark declaration: “There are
two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is
invisible.” They then set out their thesis that the CIA had occasionally
acted outside the authority of elected officials, and that such covert
operations were not merely an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, but had
actively shaped it. Though their thesis was more nuanced and narrowly
focused than that of many contemporary purveyors of deep state conspiracy
theories, their book provided the language and narrative apparatus that
would eventually metastasize into the widespread skepticism in American
society toward officialdom, and in particular toward the U.S. intelligence
community.
But today the paranoid style has gone mainstream, and it has infiltrated
the very organs of democratic politics that Hofstadter sought to defend. So
how did public concern about CIA covert operations mutate into the
all-encompassing cynicism toward government officials that characterizes
belief in a deep state today? The Invisible Government was published at the
beginning of an era of revelations about secret state activity and
government deception. In 1967 Ramparts magazine revealed that the CIA had
covertly sponsored the National Student Association to try to influence the
emerging international student movement in a liberal and anticommunist
direction. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg provided the press with a secret
Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, which revealed that four successive
administrations had deceived the American people about the U.S. role in
that conflict and the likelihood of victory. In December 1974, just a few
months after President Nixon resigned over Watergate, itself a scandal
about government secrecy and duplicity, New York Times journalist Seymour
Hersh published the first of a series of articles about some of the most
controversial CIA operations, leading to three separate official inquiries
into the activities of the CIA and FBI.
Filtered through this steady drumbeat of revelations, The Invisible
Government took on new meaning, with many coming to believe that the secret
state was eroding the very foundations of American democracy. A 1967
Herblock cartoon about the scandal revealed by Ramparts magazinefeatures
Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit with “CIA” tattooed on its thigh,
burrowing in a hole beneath the twin pillars of “U.S. Credibility” and
“Integrity of Schools and Foundations,” with Alice tumbling down the rabbit
hole of “undercover activities.”
These revelations of state secrecy and deception coupled with the
narrative of an “invisible government” also lent credence to conspiracy
theories about President Kennedy’s death, in particular the popular idea
that the CIA played a role. The Invisible Government was directly
influential here. In the late 1960s New Orleans district attorney Jim
Garrison prosecuted Clay Shaw for Kennedy’s murder, alleging CIA
involvement. Garrison drew at length from The Invisible Government when
researching his prosecution. His case was flimsy, and the jury took less
than an hour to deliver a “not guilty” verdict. But the trial was later
popularized by Hollywood director Oliver Stone in his 1991 blockbuster JFK.
In the film’s denouement a teary-eyed Garrison, played by Kevin Costner,
delivers his closing argument to the jury: “What ‘national security,’” he
asks them, “permits the removal of fundamental power from the hands of the
American people and validates the ascendancy of the invisible government in
the United States?” (Emphasis added.) The film was incredibly damaging for
the CIA and helped persuade the agency to become much more proactive in its
public relations.
Today the deployment of the “deep state” by populist politicians like
Trump taps into a rich vein of popular suspicion in American society that
partly resulted from excessive state secrecy and official deception. Since
Hofstadter, *we have tended to understand belief in conspiracy theories as
a kind of psychosis*. In doing so we have focused our gaze pejoratively on
the “basket of deplorables” who tend to believe such theories, and ignored
the official sources and government policies that first produced these
widespread anxieties.
The two-week-long anti-quota protests in Bangladesh have turned
violent after groups linked to the ruling party attacked student protesters
in the capital, Dhaka. More than 400 people were injured on Monday and
Tuesday during attacks on protesters who are against the government job
quota system amid rising unemployment in the South Asian nation. The
protests began on July 1 after the High Court reinstated the job quota that
reserves one-third of civil service posts for children of fighters who
participated in the country’s liberation movement in 1971. So what
triggered the current protests and why is the quota system facing
opposition? Who is protesting against job quotas in Bangladesh? Students
from government and private universities across Bangladesh are demanding
reform in the conventional job quota system, under which more than half of
much sought-after government jobs are reserved. The protesters said they
are not aligned with any political group and they want a merit-based system
that is fair to all. Fahim Faruki, a protester and third-year international
relations student at Dhaka University, said the students organised the
protests through a Facebook group and were not backed by any political
organisation. The protest movement has come to be known as the Students
Against Discrimination movement. Thousands of students from Dhaka
University in the capital as well as Chittagong University have staged
sit-ins against the quota system.
In 1972, the country’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman,
introduced a quota system, reserving a percentage of government jobs for
children and grandchildren of people who fought in the 1971 war of
independence from Pakistan. Under the system, 44 percent of first- and
second-class government jobs are “merit” based. The remaining 56 percent
are reserved for specific communities:
30 percent for the children and grandchildren of freedom fighters
10 percent for women
10 percent “zila quota” for “backward” districts
5 percent for ethnic minorities
1 percent for people with physical disabilities
What do the anti-quota protesters want?
The anti-quota protesters are demanding the 30 percent quota for children
of freedom fighters be abolished.
They support reserving jobs for ethnic minorities and people with
disabilities. (???)
“Our protest is not against the quota system. It is instead for the
reformation of the system,” Faruki said. (?)
Another protester, Ayan*, 23, who is also an international relations major
at Dhaka University, concurred, saying they do not want the quota system to
be abolished altogether but want the percentage of jobs reserved to be
lowered.
How has the government responded?
The government has deployed riot police who fired tear gas and charged with
batons on Tuesday during violent clashes between the protesters and a
pro-government student group. Paramilitary troops were also deployed across
several districts amid heightened tensions.
On Thursday, student protesters from the public Comilla University,
southeast of Dhaka, clashed with police, who opened fire, local media
reported. Twenty people, including students and three policemen, were
injured as a result, local media reported. Ruling party leaders and
ministers have tried to paint the protesters as anti-nationals and against
the government after Hasina, who has been in power since 2009, referred to
them as “Razakars”. In Bangladesh, Razakar is an offensive term that refers
to those who betrayed Bangladesh in the 1971 war by collaborating with
Pakistan. “Why do they have so much resentment towards freedom fighters? If
the grandchildren of the freedom fighters don’t get quota benefits, should
the grandchildren of Razakars get the benefit?” she asked at a news
conference on Sunday. In response, protesters chanted the slogan, “Who are
you? Who am I? Razakar, Razakar,” during a protest at Dhaka University. A
student leader quoted in a local media outlet said the slogan was chosen by
students in response to the government’s efforts to discredit their
movement. Asif Nazrul, a law professor at Dhaka University, told Al Jazeera
that the message the students intended to convey through their slogans was
clear. “I doubt any student at Dhaka University would identify themselves
as Razakar,” he said. Nazrul also criticised the government’s response,
suggesting it was eager to suppress the protests and had found a convenient
pretext to do so.
How many people have been killed and injured in the protests?
At least five people have been killed, police officials said.
As of Tuesday, more than 400 people were injured, and 297 were treated at
the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, the AFP news agency reported.
Were there clashes between protesters and the Chhatra League?
The protesters have blamed the ruling party’s student wing, the Bangladesh
Chhatra League (BCL), for the violence. Faruki said BCL members summoned
protesters inside the university hostel before the attack.
“They surrounded us from the high buildings and pelted us with stones and
small brick parts. Many students were injured.”
Faruki added that the BCL was armed, leaving the protesters helpless
against them.
“We were unarmed. How will we get arms?”
The student protesters said they were not safe from the BCL in hospitals
either. “The student league went inside the [Dhaka Medical College]
Hospital and attacked there,” Faruki alleged.
Thus, there was enough time to get details behind through the
spying agency but why did Hazeena, developed the crowd -student protest?
Was the Deep State conspiracy seen in the cross-fire action?
RAW has better personnel and quota enforcement in India is
different; in my opinion, as Baktavatsalam lost the Govt to DMK, Haseena
lost it too. QUOTA IS TOOL TO TOPPLE A GOVT AND WHY NOT MODI USE IT AS HIS
TOOL GAIN THE CENTER TOTALLY? MAY BE THAT IS WHY mODI IS WAITING; NEW
PRESIDENT ELECT NOBEL LAUREATE YUNUS MAY SET RIGHT THINGS. IT IS NOT A
MILITARY JUNTA TOO.
K RAJARAM IRS 6824
On Wed, 7 Aug 2024 at 10:27, Markendeya Yeddanapudi <
[email protected]> wrote:
> What is happening now in BanglaDesh is actually the beginning of a Third
> Front against India.Hasina is the elected Prime Minister who is betrayed by
> her own army chief.India must actually expand the Chicken neck by a hundred
> miles,occupy the St Martin Islands and continue Hasina as the prime
> Minister.
> Otherwise we will have a very big problem there.As it is it appears ISIS
> flags have appeared everywhere in Bangladesh,Hindu Temples are under
> destruction,Hindu homes burnt and Hindus under another Pundit style
> elimination.Murders by the hundred are happening.
> If we keep quiet another similar fake student agitation will be started
> here also which will be made into an agitation against India.India must
> make armed intervention.Otherwise we confront a Chinese Naval Base in the
> St Martin Islands,and attempts to occupy the Chicken neck.The Chicken neck
> must be expanded by a hundred miles.Continue Sk Hasina as the Prime
> Minister and refuse to recognize some new Dummy prime Minister hoisted by
> ISIS or China.
> YM
>
> --
> *Mar*
>
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