Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Deep State Revisited

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

On this episode we dig down into the substratum of the ToE archive to better understand the true meaning of the Deep State.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Deep State Revisited. Deep state, shadow government, dual decision-making process. These terms are now fully ingrained in our everyday life. And it only took a few years for this to happen. So for this episode, we're going to listen to two stories from the TOE archives that get to the heart of what these terms mean both stories are from the more adventures in surveillance series that

we did a few years ago one story takes place in the usa well specifically my block in New York City. And the other one is about Russia. I have a friend, a radio producer friend, Charles Maines, who lives in Russia, in Moscow. And when I told him that I was investigating the Russia connection for my series on surveillance, he told me that there's one guy who sits at the center of the entire web, a guy named Vladislav Surkov. So Vladislav Surkov is Putin's master of political dark arts and subterfuge. He is the great, great puppet master of modern Russia. If you want to understand what's happening in Russia, if you want to know about Putin and you want to understand how Kremlin propaganda works,

then you have to know about Surkov. I mean, his job for most of the past 15 years has been to sell Putin to the Russian public, and in a way, Putinism to the world. So to give you a little background on this guy, Benjamin, Sirkov is the Kremlin aide that came up with the idea of what's called sovereign or managed democracy. So what is that, right? It's this kind of imitation of all the aspects of democracy without any of the real meaning behind it. It's all artifice. So for example, you might have free elections, but only a certain candidate or certain parties are allowed to win. You might have, say, courts that are nominally independent, but in fact, the verdicts are

never in question. Or you might have a press that's nominally free, but it basically publishes what the state tells them to. And even those who don't, who really are independent, of democratic institutions, but you have none of the intent of them. Thanks to Surkov, you're saying everything in Russia is fake, not just the news. Well, it is in a way. But Surkov's way of doing this was really ingenious.

He creates the impression of competition and choice and struggle while stage managing the end results. And he does this basically by running Russia like it's one big theatrical performance or play. So he creates plot lines for drama, but as the author, he basically knows the way the story ends. And he does this by being omnipresent. He might, for example, back a pro-Kremlin party and an anti-Kremlin party at the same time. He might spin out narratives in the press, some of them true, some of them false. He might pick up the phone and tell lawmakers to simulate debate in the Duma, for example, or, for example, sponsor some exhibit by some anti-Kremlin

controversial artists. So all of this was just to kind of create this hive of activity that was distracting and would give you the sense of a free and open society, when in fact, it's nothing of the sort, because the end result was always predetermined. As you're, you know, obviously aware, a lot of folks here in America are having a hard time parsing what exactly Russia is up to with all the hacking and online disinformation. Is it fair to say that whatever is going on, though, that Surkov is the guy in charge? Well, you know, it's debated. I mean, in a way, you could say that he lost a bit of influence. He was an untouchable. He was definitely a member of the inner circle, and he was someone operating in the shadows. He was considered kind of the

gray cardinal under Putin, and even under Medvedev, if you remember that whole story where Putin steps aside for four years, he has this guy who's even shorter take over the presidency. He was the Twitter president. Yeah, that's right. The tech president of Russia for four years. So Medvedev was up for re-election and it was a question of whether he was going to stay or whether he was going to go. And Serkov made the argument, and this was a rare thing where he kind of overstepped his bounds or he made sort of the wrong choice, but he pushed for Medvedev to stay. And really, Medvedev was always a puppet for Putin. So Putin comes back.

Putin overrules. He says, I want to come back to the presidency. And Serkov, as kind of punishment, is cast out. And he was given a new job, which was he was in charge of Russia's policies in Ukraine. No one really gets sent to Siberia anymore. Well, some of them do, Benjamin, but not Surkov. But it was a big demotion, I have to say. This guy, he starts at this new job really with the goal of redeeming himself

because he was cast out. And I think a lot of what's happened since is him working his way back to the center of power. Think about what's happened in Ukraine over the past few years. You've had the annexation of Crimea. You've had the war in eastern Ukraine and the Donbass. And, you know, essentially, Sir, Surkov played a role behind the scenes here, where he was applying all the same tactics he used to manage democracy,

all this kind of subterfuge. And he was using it on behalf of the Kremlin to essentially thwart Ukraine's drift towards Europe and away from Moscow's orbit. So he's already funding different parties. He's already working with different forces. And he's definitely more out of the shadows now, it has to be said, because this is a guy who's been personally sanctioned now by the US and the EU over what he did in Ukraine. Yeah, I've always wondered what it means when you get personally sanctioned. Well, it means he can't travel.

That's one. He's been blacklisted from going to the US. He's been blacklisted from going to Europe. But here's the thing. His response to this sanctioning was it was kind of a badge of honor. He said it was like getting an Oscar for best supporting actor. And in a way, this is so Sarkov. He says he's always borrowed from all these different cultural influences. He's a little bit rock and roll. He's a little bit art. He's a little bit politics. And so this guy says, you know, the only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg,

which he apparently can quote fluently his poems, and Jackson Pollock. He says, I don't need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing from these sanctions. But, you know, here's where it gets weird, because I know a reporter who says he knows a guy who was there when Surkov made this statement. And Surkov also mentioned another American icon he didn't need a visa to access, Donald Trump. Ah, so Trump's biggest fan in Russia is not Putin, it's Surkov. There is some evidence. Surkov wrote this novel, Okulonulya, Gangsta Fiction.

Almost zero. Gangsta Fiction is the translation. And what people say he wrote it. He used a pen name. So the credited author of this book is Natan Dubavitsky. But Surkov's wife is Natalia Dubavitskaya. And so a lot of people think this is Sirkov. And it's also clear that the person who wrote Okulanulya

is a serious fan of Donald Trump's. How so? Well, the whole plot of Almost Zero is this PR guy's rise to fame and fortune. The main hero of the novel is this guy, Yegor Samokhodov, a book publisher who sidelines as a political operative. He falls in with the criminal gang.

And he's constantly working behind the scenes in the world of politics, media, police, business, and basically bribing everybody. You know, essentially, he's this genius master manipulator. He can see everything that nobody else can. But, you know, there are all these kind of Trumpian moments in it and these Trumpian phrases that are just so clear to me anyway. One of the things this PR guy is constantly running off about is the idea of

or truthful hyperbole. This is straight out of Art of the Deal. Yeah, even I know that one. Yeah, yeah, the Trump line is I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts.

People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. So does this guy get all of his ideas from the art world, like the guy in the novel? Oh, yeah. So the world of literature, art, music is where Surkov grabs all of his ideas. In fact, some speculate his political career really started

with a musical discovery he found at a local black market in Russia. What was that? A VHS cassette of Pink Floyd live at Pompeii. The one where they play the Roman Amplitheater? Yeah, yeah, from 1974, right? So Pink Floyd was huge in the Soviet underground, and Surkov was like a lot of kids from the former Soviet Union. You know, he was a huge fan.

And I mention this because the theory is that Surkov starts this lifelong fascination with three things. Architecture for one. You know, there's something about the amphitheater, this circle as the kind of the ideal construction for performance. And there's something about the way that the camera pans around Gilmore and Waters and the rest of the Floyd that, you know, it's clear that they can see everything.

And the other thing that he notices from this is the Floyd, you know, the Floyd obsession with optical illusions, the laser light shows and everything like that. So that becomes like another really huge influence on Surkov. But you said there were three things. Well, yeah, there's a third one, which is that people will pay a lot to see a good fucking jam. Charles, what does this have to do with anything?

Well, so this Floyd tape gets him into the idea of performance and theater and spectacle. And this is why then young Surkov enrolls in this drama school. Like a lot of institutes in Russia, it's got a really long name. And it's Moskovsky Institute Kultury, which means the Moscow Cultural Institute, на факультете режиссуры массовых театральных представлений, which means the Faculty of Mass Theatrical Performances. And so it's here where he's introduced all these great, you know,

Russian theater traditions. And, you know, some people know like Meyerhold and Stanislavski, and that's kind of the basis of things. But then young Serkov gets into this little-known strand of old believer puppetry, which, you know, not a lot of people know about, but it has to do with how many fingers you hold when you pull the strings. And then he gets into all this esoteric stuff that goes way back. I mean, he's looking deeper into the well of traditional avant-garde from the 20s. So you've got like Totlin, you've got Vladimir Khlebnikov, you've got Daniel Harms.

But at this moment, when young Sirkov is at this Moscow Institute of Culture and the Faculty of Mass Theatrical Performance, it was oddly a hotbed for the study of a bunch of ideas about art, about technology, about power. And those ideas went back even further to the 18th century to the time of one guy, a prince named Georgi Potemkin. The Villages guy. Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring that up because history is actually unclear whether Georgi Potemkin was actually this guy

who built these fake villages for Catherine the Great. That's always been the legend, right? The Potemkin village. But what is clear is that something was built and whatever was built was built by a guy that you've talked about recently, Benjamin, and that's Samuel Bentham. No. Yeah. In 1783, Samuel Bentham came to Russia and ended up working for Georgi Potemkin's estate. And this is where he comes up with a real idea for the Panopticon.

So when Jeremy Bentham talks about his brother Samuel's ideas for the surveillance building, you're saying that he's specifically talking about the work he did in Russia? Yeah. Yeah. And there's something really uniquely Russian that's embedded in Samuel's early ideas that many scholars believe his brother, Jeremy, kind of missed. What do you mean? Well, so most people believe the Panopticon was designed to oversee the Russian peasant workers. But the thing is, they already had overseers.

They had Englishmen who were there to do that. But there were lots of problems with these overseers. They were drunk. They were lazy. They weren't working hard. So there were all these- Oh my God. He designed it to oversee the overseers.

Exactly. The Panopticon was Samuel Bentham's proposed solution to Georgi Potemkin's real problem, which is who will guard the guards? Now, like I said, we don't know exactly what Potemkin showed Catherine the Great when she came down into southern Russia and eventually to Crimea in 1787. Most historians don't buy this fake villages thing. But he definitely showed her something. And perhaps it was one of Bentham's panopticons.

As you just mentioned, you know, I did just do an episode on the Bentham's and the panopticon. So, you know, I did do some research, and, you know, I'm pretty sure that a Panopticon wasn't built in Russia until 1806. Well, that's right, because Bentham's designs were officially put to use for an art school that was built in St. Petersburg in 1806. But the plans were based on what he and Potemkin

had presented to Catherine the Great in 1787. And this art school was built after Potemkin died, some say under mysterious circumstances. Well, I don't know about that, but I do know that from his diaries, he'd hoped to set up an institute for the study of all these things that he'd been interested in. That's surveillance, watching the watchers, optical illusions, performance. So in a way Potemkin is one of the unsung heroes and maybe even the father of Russian political technology. And did he ever set up his institute? Well, so a few historians believe that the Panopticon that Bentham built housed not an art school,

but rather the first secret institute for the study of Potemkin's School of Political Technology. Oh my God, and that burnt down almost immediately. There was a lot of political intrigue, of course, going on in Russia at that moment. But no, there was never anything like an official institute for Potemkin's ideas. Until this moment in the late 80s early 90s when out of nowhere this Potemkin school pops up in Moscow. And it pops up at this place that might sound familiar, the Moscow Institute of Culture in the Faculty of Mass Theatrical Performances. There's a guy who lives on my block in one of the new condo buildings. He has a beard and tons of tattoos.

So I was surprised when a few months ago, Mathilde pointed him out to me and said, you know, he wears a Make America Great Again hat. I've been giving him the evil eye ever since. Every time I see him walking his little dog or locking up his bike. But it's been cold out. He's always wearing a hoodie. And since he wears his black hat backwards,

I've never been able to see the Trump slogan with my own eyes. But yesterday, as I was walking home with Arcto on Avenue C, I saw him coming towards me, and he wasn't wearing a hood. I realized I would finally be able to deliver to his face the line that I've been rehearsing in my head ever since the night of November 8th. Are you such a fucking coward that you can't even wear the red hat? I take a deep breath and narrow my eyes as he approaches. And when I catch his gaze, I belt out my line. What, are you too much of a coward to wear the red hand?

I'm totally screwed. His hat says, make America goth again, not make America great again. Are you talking to me? He sounds like Robert De Niro. Before I can reply, I realize that Arcto's no longer holding my hand. A bus is roaring down the avenue. I gasp, but then I see him. Somehow, Arcto's gotten inside the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store that we're standing in front

of. Excuse me, I mutter as I run over to the door. I tug and pull at it, but for some reason, it won't open. Arcto is darting around, showing everyone his Pepe the Frog doll. Try pushing, my new favorite neighbor says. I shove the door open with such force, I tumble onto the floor. Arcto runs over to the lottery ticket machine and starts banging on it with both hands. An elderly lady bends down and picks up his Pepe doll from the floor. I've never been inside the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store before. In fact, I don't think I've ever even looked in the window. It's packed.

There must be at least 30 people waiting in line. I scoop Artaud into my arms, take Pepe from the elderly lady, and head for the door. But a burly man in paint-splattered overalls steps in front of me. What's up with your sweatshirt, he snaps. Are you part of the deep state? Okay, now this is going to take a little bit of explaining. You know how right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones have popularized this term deep state? In fact, the alt-right now uses it almost as shorthand for what they call the internationalist, Obama-loving, freedom-hating, Trump-undermining faction of the United States government. A faction that works covertly from the shadows, of course, thus the name Deep State. Well, a few weeks ago, I was procrastinating on the internet, and I went to one of those cafe press sites where you can put a logo on a mug or a piece of clothing, and I made

myself a Deep State sweatshirt. It looks like athletic wear, but instead of Ohio State, it says Deep State. I know, it's stupid. People usually laugh when they see it. But not this guy, standing in front of me here in the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store.

He definitely doesn't think the Deep State is funny. In fact, he's pissed. Did you come in here to spy on me? He snarls. Uh-oh, I think, clutching our toe close. He turns and addresses everyone in the store. Did you know that the deep state itemizes every EBT purchase we make? And then they put us in databases? Poor people like us, we are always the guinea pigs for the deep state and their bullshit surveillance experiments. They're always trying to come up with new ways

to take away the services and benefits we need and charge us more for the ones we can't live without. Fuck the deep state, someone yells. Yeah, get the fuck out of here, someone else adds. And take your racist motherfucking baby. That sounds like the old lady who handed me Pepe, but I don't want to turn around and check. I just want to get out.

So I take a deep breath, and I walk around the simmering man in the overalls, and I pull open the door to the payday loan slash check cashing for a small percentage fee store and I walk out onto the street. It's bright. The sun is in my eyes. But I can see my neighbor across the street unlocking his bicycle. Arcto and I stare at him as he maneuvers it out onto the street.

His hat definitely doesn't say, Make America Great Again. As he turns onto 7th Street, he looks back over his shoulder and gives me the finger. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Deep State Revisited.

It was written and produced by me, Andrew Calloway, and our special TOE Russia correspondent, Charles Maines. Both of the stories come from our More Adventures in Surveillance series. You can find all of our series by going to the TOE website at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. Just click on the series tab. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of radiotopia home to some of the world's best podcasts find them all at radiotopia.fm

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