What is the deep state?
The “deep state” is the idea that, separate from elected politicians, parts of the bureaucracy, the military and intelligence agencies, big business and finance are linked together and run the state from behind the scenes. In Japan it is translated as “the dark government” or “shadow government,” and online it is often abbreviated as “DS.”
Origin of the term
The term is said to be an English translation of the Turkish “derin devlet.” In Turkey in the late 20th century, there were suspicions of an unofficial network linking parts of the military and security services with criminal organizations, and it came to be widely discussed after incidents in the 1990s.
In the United States, around the 2016 presidential election, the term came to be used among supporters of Donald Trump to mean “forces inside the government obstructing the president’s policies,” and it spread rapidly.
The deep state as conspiracy theory
Later, the deep state became linked with conspiracy theories such as “QAnon,” which spread from anonymous online posts, and came to be told as a story in which “there is an evil secret organization that rules the world, and a hero fighting it.” Such stories were mixed with old secret-society legends such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati and spread to many parts of the world, including Japan.
However, no solid evidence has been presented for the claim that a deep state systematically controls the state. Meanwhile, in political science, issues such as the continuity of the bureaucracy across changes of government and how to oversee the powers of intelligence agencies are discussed as real problems. It is important to distinguish conspiracy theories from real debate and to check where information comes from.
