MY piece for Tuesday, February 26, 2025 is captioned, “Every Guyanese must understand what the “Deep State is.” I quote from a section of that article about the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein.

“He tried to commit suicide and was put on 24 hours surveillance. Yet, despite that water-proof system, he still took his life. When journalists and academics theorise that Epstein may have been murdered, they are accused of conspiracy theory. Thirdly, very few people believe that a lone gunman killed President Kennedy. Those who believe it was a Deep-State conspiracy are deemed conspiracy theorists.”

Here are two dimensions of the Epstein suicide. The cell mate of Epstein was removed the night he committed suicide. Secondly, the surveillanc’se camera failed that night. Yet, despite these two powerfully compelling facts, those who see Epstein’s death as a murder are labeled conspiracy theorists. Those who believe Epstein was murdered point to the tentacle of the invincible, powerful, Deep State.

I was a mere lad in short pants when I heard people talking about an invisible government that is the real government that runs the show in the US. It was Marxist and anti-colonial scholars and anti-imperialist activists, particularly the Black Civil Rights movement in the US and Cheddi Jagan in Guyana that popularised the term, “invisible government”, which President Trump recast as the Deep State.

Before Trump’s discovery of the Deep State, scholars used the term, the military-industrial complex.  

From the 1960s onwards, the theory of the Deep State did not receive universal recognition, simply for three reasons. One was the fantastic global reach of the US that had replaced Europe as the dominant force in international relations because of the demise of European power after World War 2.

Secondly, the US became the number one attraction for people around the world wanting to have a meaningful life.

The US was simply phenomenally rich, and it motivated people to migrate there either to become rich or have a sound economic future. The pull of America obsessed people around the world, and because the US provided for them, at the psychic level America was a heaven, and thus they were not interested in knowing about the dark side of the US, both its domestic structure of a cruel, dog-eat-dog nature, and its foreign policy whereby the US removed governments around the world that it could not control.

Thirdly, the global penetration of the American journalism and culture made people think that the US was a paragon of pure democracy. The peoples of the world at the subliminal level accepted that the US was the freest country in the world, therefore it was unthinkable to think that the real power in the US was in the hands a cabal of powerfully-invisible men that Third World and Marxist scholars referred to as the military-industrial complex. 

A majority of people around the world after 1945 and maybe up to the tenure of President Jimmy Carter were not disposed to accepting that the real power of the US government was not the elected president, his Cabinet and Congress. There were episodic moments of discovery of the hidden hands that control the US. Four of these were the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the CIA overthrow of President Allende of Chile, and the continued harassment of the Castro Government.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that the US was a country dominated by the omnipotence of the intelligence/security/military people was the exposure by Afro-American organisations, including Martin Luther King, the NAACP, people like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. Their exposure of the Deep State was limited because mainstream journalism shut them out. 

The changing attitude to American democracy with its inherent flaws began to catch the eyes of the American people with the assumption to power of an ultra-right, conservative government of Ronald Reagan, a 10^th-rate Hollywood actor that became president.

The world finally accepted that there was a powerful Deep State in the US when that invisible power tried to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, and in his first term tried to derail his tenure by invoking treasonable action by Trump through his relationship with President Putin. The Deep State began his conspiracy against Trump during Obama’s tenure and it reached its pinnacle under President Biden.

Mr. Trump saw the working of the Deep State and what it did to him. The charge against the former FBI chief, James Comey is the beginning of Mr. Trump’s determination to get at the Deep State. I have no hesitation in believing that the CIA and FBI and other state intelligence agencies wanted to stop Mr. Trump from being elected, and when he was elected, tried to remove him.     

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.