Deep Politics and the Perpetual Enemy

The publicity of violence and the terror it spreads are one of the most potent means of establishing control of the public sphere, shaping its discourses and undermining dissent. “Deterrence is longer aimed only at the military sector, but essentially at the civilian population”[1] for the purpose of resisting the disequilibrium between decentralised action and centralised vulnerability. Everything and anyone becomes an enemy. Information is always weaponised. The official narrative provides the epistemic authority[2] through which clarity is sought.

Where socio-cultural and political power are concentrated in metropolises while disseminated via global communications networks, narrative power is unsettled. The linear, hierarchical structures of the national community or the corporate entity are disturbed as the questioning nature of the democratic imperative can become all-encompassing due to the ubiquity of information as a massless medium. The official mediums (the media) become one among many producers (or propagandists) of narrative.

Globalised information means the imperatives of market competition become inverted in the propagation of media. The marketplace of information is too anarchic for market actors to disseminate the “correct” protocols that instantiate control of the narrative. When information is ubiquitous, anyone can interpret and distort narrative structure, bending and twisting ideological machines until they break. The stressors of these are what need to be deterred (or co-opted, undermined, turned inward).

“Ideology relates to this as a process of simplification, specification and processualisation that reflects (or refracts) the telos of the dominant social groupings. It converts the energy of dissipated social action into a singular focus, mechanising thought processes and providing a common heuristic. A herd mentality but caught within a Gramscian bind of wars of position both internally and externally fought”[3].

This is reflected in forms like the Strategy of Tension of Operation Gladio, where terrorist acts and other forms of sabotage were planned by Western intelligence agencies with the aim of subverting the potential of populist movements in Western Europe. This is terrorism as theatre[4], the aim of which is not (at least strategically) carnage but the cultivation of totalising control through the construction of the information space. Widespread terrorism and inchoate violence disrupt alternative narratives that question centralising authorities. They require faith in the sovereign for provision of safety and prevention of violence. It doesn’t matter whether these are false flag events, “false false flags”[5] or acts indirectly conceived via recreancy and purposeful ignorance.

From this, security apparatuses (both public and private[6]) attempt to achieve omnipresence. To instantiate their ideological machines as the predominant narrative structures in the information space. What are these ideological facets? Beyond the preservation of elite power, they are the centralisation of coordination via regulatory capture, monopolisation, post-industrialisation, bunkerisation[7], opposition to populism, sacralisation of the other and the decimation of populations into purely political or economic units (a pure demography of moveable/tradeable blocs). “The ideology presently dominant in the UK might be described as minority worship, or the sacralization of any group whose interests are antagonistic to those of the White majority”[8].

In its culture narratives, this means an extreme focus on anti-racism and the prevention of hate as policy. There is no greater good than that done for the “excluded other”, whatever minority you to happen to sit within. These are not organically developed identities born from centuries of tradition and a unifying culture, rather diasporic identities whose only unifying tenet is ethnic or religious. Look at Israel and its cobbled together notion of a Judaism that overwrites the various tribal and religious enclaves that formed over centuries, instead uniting to form one Judaic perspective. National or communal consciousness is actively (and violently) opposed as they represent alternative loci of sociopolitical power, with their own narrative constructions. The overwhelming ideology is that of concentration and obfuscation, maintaining a front of democratic legitimacy by preset elections while public and private networks linked with the dominant forms of capital (financial and technological) and culture (post-national demographics) centralise power and disseminate propaganda.

“The new apparatuses of biopower and the technologies of which they dispose will qualify our access to what were previously the universal, indivisible and inalienable rights of citizenship; measure our levels of compliance with regulatory and corrective mechanisms that have not been written into any laws; appraise us through a system of surveillance and monitoring justified by ‘crises’ whose very existence it prohibits us from questioning; and, by doing so, will produce a new hierarchy”[9].

These endless crises of whose vicissitudes the public is fully exposed to, whether economic or terroristic. Through spectres of Islamic terrorism, national populism or conspiracism, there is always a need to secure oneself against such amorphous, ongoing threats. None may end, much as the wars between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia[10] are perpetual. There is no escape from a perpetual danger. “Following the Strategy of Tension, the public in the ‘War on Terror’ must not be allowed to forget about the ever-present threat of Islamist terrorism, which could strike anywhere, any time, against even the most innocent, such as teenage girls at a pop concert. Only then will it acquiesce to oppressive social control (‘security’) measures deceptively sold as keeping it ‘safe’”[11].

If terrorism is “an abhorrence of freedom and a determination to destroy the democratic way of life”[12] then, as Hughes asks, who are the real terrorists here? Surely those who propagate fear and require increasing levels of security and derisking in an endless ratchet effect. Those who construct societies with deep vulnerabilities due to the various concentrations of power. “The consequences of natural disasters, industrial accidents, and terrorist attacks, were all being magnified by increasing accumulations of hazardous substances in industries, concentrations of populations in risky settings, and concentrations of political power in parts of our critical infrastructures such as communications, finance, and transport”[13]. Virilio noted that the innovation begets its accidents, its breakdowns an equilibrating mechanism of their acts. The creation of vast integrated cities with associated energy and control grids, of concentrated networks of political and cultural power, produce their antitheses – decentralised violence and breaks in the narrative. Chaos is the natural state, contravening the primary aim of a controller’s purpose – to eliminate risk and maintain stable order.

The strategy of tension takes this to extremes, directing the course of terrorism to maintain and expand intelligence operations, using them as the means to justify growing budgets and unaccountable power. Narratives entail control of information, the capability to strain information through the narrative form, obscuring or eliminating dissident data thereby creating a holistic, cohesive structure that explains “the facts of life” (i.e. the never-ending threat of crisis).

Dale Scott contextualises these phenomena as deep politics, underlying and undermining the surface politics of visible statecraft and political discourse. Conventional definitions of representative democracy and pluralism are surface politics, that that is publicly accessible and nominally accountable. Deep politics is one of networks and conspiracies aimed toward the preservation and extension of social structures that empower their particular membership or caste. In some respects, this is itself the surface-level phenomena of Marxian class analysis. The mechanisms that create these distinctions are borne of deeper tensions around ownership of the means of production and the attendant crises of business cycles and/or resource constraints (in a Malthusian context). Technological innovation has created further sets of production systems and ownership protocols. As previously mentioned, the ownership and dissemination of information are a primary means of wealth extraction and monopolisation, opposing decentralisation and overload that also come with information’s mass production. Deep politics is a surface-level expression of capital’s dynamics[14] and class/caste tensions.

“I define the deep state as an obscured, dominant, supra-national source of anti-democratic power. It is debatable whether this phenomenon has arisen due to (a) unique historical circumstances, (b) innate dynamics of capitalism, or (c) unresolved contradictions within human civilization. The Weberian state’s monopoly on violence does not stay confined to the democratic state or even the formal security state. There is sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that the U.S.-led world order has entailed systemic violence which has undermined democratic sovereignty. To account for these phenomena, the tripartite state is a useful theoretical abstraction. The tripartite state is comprised of the democratic state, the security state, and the deep state. None of the components are monolithic. Conceptually, the tripartite state is useful if imperfectly imagined as a Venn diagram with significant overlap. An examination of the current political system suggests that the independent realm of the democratic state is small indeed. At present there is not much observable democratic autonomy or agency vis-à-vis the overdetermining wealth and power of the deep state”[15].

There is no monolithic state as per libertarian explanations. States are riven by ideological tensions, single policy coalitions and social networks that codify acceptable opinion in their shared circles. Deep politics then is a dialectical praxis of conscious and hegemonic processes. There is the conscious action of political networks aimed at the obfuscation of their aims and general public acceptance of their ends. There is a hegemonic process of culturo-economic structures becoming pre-eminent via endogenous dynamics of social tensions defining a ruling class who control the distribuendum e.g. the agrarian temples who collected harvested grain and paid producers on set prices, the industrialisation of work patterns, the production of landlessness, etc. Parts of the state can sit either side of this tension, reflecting hegemonic or counter-hegemonic forms. The tension between landed and merchant interests during the Corn Law debates for example.

Deep politics runs counter to popular currents of political expression, defining a common sense that is increasingly securitised and elite-centred. Its friend-enemy distinction is highly abstract, determined by its attempt to bunker down against public scrutiny. Thus anyone can be an enemy of the deep state. Repression, rather than acknowledgement[16], is a key component of the practice of deep politics. As is its militarisation, a direct response to the narrative construction of perpetual enemies. From this comes its propagation of stochasticism[17] as an explanatory framework for events as they occur (there is no unifying explanation other than the enemies’ own beliefs and desires), and its creation of enemies as conspiracists when the distinctly planned nature of terrorist events or crises become clearer.

No enemy is truly defined other than ones created and parameterised. “As the highly overdetermined signifiers ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘paranoia’ presently circulate they are first and foremost media sign-forms employed to create a terminology which is commodifiable into commercial narrative forms. The multiple meanings thus created for multiple audiences results in a generalized ambiguity that undermines any attempted reduction to a single coherent critical category. The attempt to isolate and define the ‘conspiratorial narrative’ as a generic form can itself become an avoidance, a displacement, an evasion of the disturbing claims of political critiques reframed as innocuous conspiracy theories”[18]. Conspiracy as a descriptor reflects the commoditisation of information and its structuring within narratives that further hegemonic imperatives.

As Dale Scott notes in relation to the friend-enemy distinction between deep politics and popular government, “there have for a long time been two prevailing and different political cultures in America, underlying political differences in the American public, and even dividing different sectors of the American government. One culture is predominantly egalitarian and democratic, working for the legal consolidation of human rights both at home and abroad. The other, less recognized but with deep historical roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of repressive violence against both domestic and Third World populations to maintain ‘order.’ To some extent these two mindsets are found in all societies. They correspond to two opposing modes of power and governance that were defined by Hannah Arendt as ‘persuasion through arguments’ versus ‘coercion by force.’ Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία)”[19].

There is something to this, threads of decentralisation running counter to those of concentration. As the narrative construction of conspiracy theory has demonstrated, a politics aimed toward group differentiation, exchange and a more isolationist posture sits in contradiction with one that requires the securitisation of the population and its reduction to a pure demography of internalised tensions (that cannot challenge the deep state as it cannot cohere shared understandings in distinction to the predominant media narrative). However, we must not forget that this is within a construction of a hegemonic project. Escaping this condition cannot involve a naïve retrogression toward a pure democracy or persuasive order. Coercion and violence exist, and the capacity to bend them to a sovereign’s will is paramount in the founding of new orders. The desire for a decentralised, less securitised order requires its leaders to define their enemy as that of deep politics, its networks, trusts and lobbies. This will be a politics of immense power that can meaningfully cripple those institutions, undercutting the multi-institutional order through the production of antagonisms that can border off or control these structures. Anything else means perpetual war or vassalisation. Without the production of violence or the sovereign will, deep politics will retain its dominance.

[1] Paul Virilio, Pure War

[2] https://iaindavis.substack.com/p/deconstructing-marianna-in-conspiracyland-f99

[3] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2020/12/05/accidents-in-ideological-machines/

[4] https://digwithin.net/2012/07/21/nexus/

[5] https://off-guardian.org/2024/07/11/the-rise-of-the-false-false-flag/

[6] https://unlimitedhangout.com/2019/09/investigative-series/how-the-cia-mossad-and-the-epstein-network-are-exploiting-mass-shootings-to-create-an-orwellian-nightmare/

[7] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2023/06/17/autonomous-agencies-and-the-spectre-of-disinformation/

[8] https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/03/02/the-riddle-of-rotherham-mad-ash-white-trash-and-the-hostile-elite/

[9] https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2024/01/04/four-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse-the-regulatory-apparatuses-of-biopower/

[10] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

[11] https://dhughes.substack.com/p/the-law-vs-the-truth-what-happened-fe3

[12] https://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/remarkable-disappearing-terrorism/