deep politics

wikipedia |  Deep politics is a phrase coined by researcher and academic Peter Dale Scott, which he describes thus;

“My notion of deep politics… posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too provocative to be retained with equanimity.”^[1]

Scott has extensively researched political processes that fly under the radar of conscious political activity, are omitted from discourse on the right and the left, and are many times intertwined with global drug traffic. Here is Scott’s definition of “parapolitics”;

par a pol i tics (pa˘r ə po˘l ə tı˘ks), n. 1. a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished. 2. generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making but by indirection, collusion, and deceit… 3. the political exploitation of irresponsible agencies or parastructures, such as intelligence agencies… Ex. 1. ‘The Nixon doctrine, viewed in retrospect, represented the application of parapolitics on a hitherto unprecedented scale.’ 2. ‘Democracy and parapolitics, even in foreign affairs, are ultimately incompatible.’^[2]

Although valuable, Scott ultimately found the label of parapolitics too limiting;

“…the investigation of parapolitics, which I defined (with the CIA in mind) as a ‘system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.’ . . . I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional . . . it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture’s rational surface. Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of deep politics, all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.”^[3]

David MacGregor is another academic who applies the ideas of parapolitics and deep politics to his own research. Here are some of his observations;

“Deep politics is a revision of Scott’s original concept of parapolitics first developed in The War Conspiracy. It responds to criticism that political conspiracies, like the murder of Kennedy, are too difficult to arrange and keep hidden…^[4]

“Scott came to see parapolitics as “too narrowly conscious and intentional to describe the deeper irrational movements which culminated collectively in the murder of the President.” In contrast deep political analysis presupposes “an open system with divergent power centers and goals” The collapse of the First Italian Republic in the mid-1990s, involving large-scale criminal influence in government, offers a telling example. It originated as an American parapolitical operation to suborn the threat of communism which parachuted prominent U.S. Mafia hoods into power in post-war Italy “[B]y the 1980s this . . . strategem had helped spawn a deep political system of corruption exceeding Tammany’s, and (as we know from the Andreotti trial of 1995) beyond the ability of anyone to call it off”. Another example… is the CIA-financed jihad against Russian occupiers in Afghanistan that flooded Europe with opium and helped create Osama bin Laden, a modern version of the Old Man of the Mountains, who’s [sic] 11th Century followers – the Assassins – “sacrificed for him in order to perpetuate his crimes”^[4]