Oliver Stone, who has gone over to the dark side, recently refused to condemn Trump’s comments about Charlottesville because he claimed the deep state is a more serious problem than Trump. This is a piece I wrote about the deep state last January. I was familiar with the concept when it emerged in its current form since I had come up against it in studying Turkey. It has long been a common description of how the Turkish government operates & to my mind is rooted in Islamophobia & orientalism. That was my conclusion after studying it in Turkey so it is no surprise that those who employ it most, like Stone, are libertarian rednecks.

This is a post I originally posted about the deep state on January 28, 2017
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If you want to be politically au courant these days & still remain shallow you have to learn the lingo, especially the accusatory terms. Denunciation is the lion’s share of fashionable politics.

To be really cool but not give away the shallow depths of your understanding, these terms are de rigueur: neocons, neolibs, alt-right, alt-left, Deep State, color revolution. Most people don’t have a clue what they mean which is precisely the charm of using them. Nobody wants to look stupid by asking what the hell they mean.

Deep State has come into its own since Glenn Greenwald & Global Research use it now to claim the Deep State, defined as the CIA, defense industry, & corporations, is plotting to destabilize Trump’s presidency. Global Research, always on the cutting edge of nutty, goes further in suggesting that protests against Trump are a color revolution, meaning orchestrated by the CIA & Soros. Presumably the color of this one is pink, the motif of the Women’s Marches in the US.

The term Deep State originated in the 1990s to describe a clandestine network within the Turkish political system that conspires against popular democracy. It includes the military, judiciary, intelligence agencies, & operates mafia-style in collaboration with the CIA. The concept seems to be used most by foreign journalists with an Islamophobic distrust of Turks justified by libertarian nihilism & little understanding of how governments administer capitalism.

There’s no confusion why Global Research uses the term. It’s a right-wing libertarian cesspool which promotes the “New World Order” scenario of David Icke & Eva Bartlett that reptilian Jewish bankers called the Illuminati rule & are moving the world toward fascism. It isn’t that libertarians don’t see the class character of society but that they hold working people in contempt. To them, all substantive change comes from the nefarious forces of the Deep State & Illuminati.

Our man Greenwald may not advocate that reptilian anti-Semitic crap but he has zilch understanding of how capitalism & government relate to each other–a blind spot he has demonstrated more than once, especially in his campaign for Chuck Hagel as the lesser of evil US Secretary of Defense. Since when do progressives get involved in the selection of who administers US wars?

Libertarians & political fashionistas parrot the term Deep State because it appeals to their nihilistic suspicions that everything is fake & manipulated & it confirms their elitist, anti-Semitic prejudices that clandestine agencies & reptilian Jewish bankers run the world. When millions of working people enter the stage of history, they scorn them as manipulated by financiers & undercover operatives. To their minds, all revolutions & mass protests–from the Arab uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, & Bahrain to the Women’s Marches–are orchestrated by the CIA & Soros.

Who can reason with such madness? It’s political martyrdom to try.

Found this in my FB archives: some of the same cosmetic companies (like Estee Lauder, Revlon, & Lancome) on the boycott of Israel list are among those who still test on animals. Why is that not a surprise!?

Behind all the racist bravado Trump displayed in Phoenix is a man squirming because he knows forces beyond his control have the criminal dirt on him. Not the deep state–there is no such thing–but a section of the capitalists who are watching this unhinged guy create a fiasco & a farce of the presidency. What were they thinking when they let him take the election?

Psychologically, if he didn’t know his goose was cooked, do you think he would be so reckless & out of control, alienating the very people he needs to carry off a rightwing move to the right in US politics? It’s like death throes or standing on the deck of the Titanic whistling dixie. This is a slow motion takedown but he is coming down because he discredits the mythology about the presidency. We are held captive by a demented antisocial narcissist but there is little gratification in knowing how torturous it is for him as he waits for the exposures about his personal & political corruption to hit the news. They will go over every sordid detail like a cat playing with a mouse & for months. Most of us just want it over already. A cardiac event or an impeachment–whichever comes first. We just want him to live long enough to serve a long stretch in a federal penitentiary.

The women of Afghanistan have suffered the unspeakable for 16 years. It is detestable & an indignity that so-called progressives would make a joke about Trump grabbing them sexually. It isn’t just a question of being inappropriate but of being racist.

One of the hallmarks of a libertarian redneck is their misanthropy toward other Americans. To their minds, everyone except for them is unenlightened, in the dark politically, outright stupid. They mock the massive protests for women’s rights, against the Muslim ban, against the fascists & white supremacists as just assemblies of liberals too lowbrow politically to collaborate with.

A redneck is what a redneck is: usually do-nothing blowhards & grandstanders of not much use to building a movement to stand against racism & war because they’re just so superior. Give me a liberal any day because they get off their asses to take a stand & don’t just sit at their computers mocking.

“Everyone and their cat knows that Pakistan supports militants in Afghanistan and provides safe havens to them as well. The establishment proudly calls it the “strategic depth.” Nationalists here should stop feigning disbelief.

Friends abroad please don’t feel sorry for Pakistan after what Trump has said. Pakistan was never the victim to begin with, Afghanistan was. The military establishment never respected the sovereignty of Afghanistan and always wanted a client regime in the war-torn country. They have always tried to create the spectre of India in order to hide their own myopic policies towards Afghanistan.

“We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting,” he said. “That will have to change and that will change immediately.”

Sometimes even the devil ends up saying the truth and there’s simply no reason to refute the quote above.

For a long time, Pakistan has played a duplicitous game with the US, so now it’s only the case of chickens coming home to roost for the policymakers here.”

–Usman A Khan Tahir, editor of Pakistan Today

Shame on Cuba for attending the 59th International Fair in Damascus. The trade show & cultural exchange had been suspended since the revolution began in 2011 so Assad could gather allies & focus on crushing the revolutionary upsurge against his dictatorship. Syria claimed 23 countries participated including the rogue’s gallery of Russia, China, Iran, India, Argentina, Venezuela, Iraq & Egypt. Does Cuba really want to take its place among those countries?

There is that expedience question & surviving in a hostile capitalist world but if Cuba really does stand for human freedom it would be a whole lot less isolated & certainly less compromised if it rendered legitimacy to freedom struggles rather than to brutal dictators. Let’s just say that the more Cuba equivocates on Palestinian self-determination, supports ruthless dictators like Assad, & remains silent on war, the more it is running out of cachet & becoming a hack.

This is the rally in Boston, MA on August 19th in response to the fascist & white supremacist show of force in Charlottesville. Media, which always lowballs the number of protesters, estimated a crowd of 40,000. It may have been double that.

What’s significant about this march is that Boston is one of the most segregated cities in the US & in the 1970s had outright violence against Black children over the desegregation of public schools. When I lived there after 1978, even public pools were segregated. I was repeatedly threatened with violence at my workplace for socializing with Black co-workers; I was unable to have breakfast or walk down the street with any after our night shift finished for fear we would be assaulted. I was once stopped in my car by a policeman who told me to turn around since I was driving into the Black neighborhood & would be in danger when I had often done door-to-door political work there without a single incident.

The political irony is that the antiwar movement was always immense in Boston. We could put out a call for an emergency rally & within hours thousands would show up. That changed after the Gulf War when the antiwar movement around the country receded to a trickle.

Things have changed in Boston & around the country since the 1970s & since the decline of the antiwar movement. This anti-fascist mobilization along with the thousands who rallied in several cities in every state show the potential for rebuilding a massive antiwar movement that yokes the struggle against racism in this country to the racism of US wars–an uncompromised movement that makes no exception for Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. Given Trump’s plans for escalation of war in Afghanistan, we have no alternative.

(Photo of Boston march by Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

When Obama became president, there were so many who said stop blaming him for Bush’s wars. It became tedious to respond to as Obama extended the number of US wars. Now with Trump, the new political force of libertarian rednecks refuse to condemn his actions on anything & instead blame protesters who didn’t protest Obama. The utter puerility of such politics masks several political problems but the worst is passivity in the face of war.

That was one helluva war-mongering speech by Trump. He’s too stupid to lay out such a strategy so what he said represents the US Pentagon. What stuck out most to me was the belligerent stance toward Pakistan which has been an ally of the US in Afghanistan & the inclusion of India as a key player in Afghanistan. That can only foment greater conflict between those countries & endanger the people of Pakistan & Kashmir. Mostly this new strategy is an escalation of violence & extremely threatening to the people of Afghanistan. Trump made clear that the Pentagon plans on conducting much of this escalation in secret.

What this means practically & imperatively is that antiwar forces in the US, Pakistan, India, & Kashmir must actively collaborate with each other & with antiwar forces around the world to push back this thrust in defense of the people of Afghanistan. We can no longer allow the Afghans to suffer, especially after the US dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in the world in their country last April. An injury to one is an injury to all is a survival strategy, the iron law of social transformation, not an assertion of noblesse oblige.

Afghans are our brothers & sisters, not our enemies nor terrorists. We must stand united & committed to their defense.