Deep State Rising

The Pluto Return of the USA (pt. 2): Deep State Rising

Note: I don’t recommend reading this if you haven’t read pt. 1.

In 1932, two years after the planet Pluto was discovered, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud engaged in an open-letter correspondence on the very Plutonian subject, “Why War?”

Although the meeting of two revered western minds on such a fundamental subject sounds like something that could have mass appeal, the letters have never become widely known. After reading them, I knew why: they name something too directly, a facet of our world we’d much rather ignore. As Pluto was crossing the threshold into literal public awareness, it feels like Freud and Einstein were able to touch its raw material.

The timing of the exchange situates it during the Great Depression, after the first World War but before the second, before the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb — in other words, before humankind was fully introduced to Pluto. But seeds were being planted, politically, psychologically, and even scientifically. Both Einstein and Freud were aware. Both note the technological development of destructive weaponry that could lead to, in Freud’s words, “sheer extermination”. Both agree on what Einstein calls a “lust for hatred and destruction” and what Freud labels a “death instinct”, an inescapable destructive impulse central to human existence. Freud takes it further, explaining that the impulse towards life, or eros, is psychologically intertwined with thanatos, the impulse towards death. If you’ll recall from the first essay in this series — that’s Pluto’s territory. The inseparability of death and survival is the core of the Plutonian paradox.

Einstein and Freud also speak plainly in regards to the powerful interests around the world who desire war. Freud points out “how little the rule of politicians and the Church’s ban on liberty of thought encourage” the creation of a peaceful society. Einstein writes that “the craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation on national sovereignty”. And then he gets even more direct: “This political power hunger is often supported by the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines . . . active in every nation, [they are] composed of individuals who regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests”.

Yup — way back before it was cool, Albert Einstein called out the deep state.

There’s a Plutonian thread that links America’s genocidal foundations to the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, and today’s military economy or “deep state,” a shadow economy funded by pretty much every world government and dependent on exploitation of human and natural resources. The same thread weaves between conspiracies about a “cabal” of blood-drinking pedophiles, the anti-Semitic origins of those narratives, and the ways we externalize the evil foundations colonial society is built on. Folks are so susceptible to conspiracy narratives today because the narratives we’ve been fed for centuries have already disconnected us from reality. It’s painful work to get back. With the reverence noted in the previous essay, let’s invite Pluto to be our guide.

I want to acknowledge up front a few primary sources for this piece, because I couldn’t have crystalized the information here without them. As in the previous essay, Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All The Brutes has continued to be essential in my personal integration of the brutal history we are swimming in — I feel like Peck has been my tour guide through the worst of Pluto’s territory, and I’m grateful. Much of my understanding of the deep state’s origin comes from The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, an 800+ page book that is technically a biography of Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1953–1961, and one of the most powerful people in American history. But Talbot said that he “was really trying to do a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the sixties”, and that feels like an accurate description of the book. Finally, journalist Chris Hedges’ recent coverage of the Russia/Ukraine War, and his blunt education on the history and purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has shed a lot of light for me on the current incarnation of the international war machine.

I also want to acknowledge that although I try to cite sources for every claim I make, there are some aspects of this narrative that can’t be “proved”. As I shared in the intro, this piece is ultimately a channel. I try to verify all the information my spirit guides give me, but in some situations, I can’t. The hardest subjects to research are international, particularly when they involve non-English speaking nations or individuals. Of course, I can’t follow any journalism or check original sources in languages I don’t speak. The countries I am referring to, which are mainly Russia, China and oil-rich nations in the middle east, like Saudi Arabia, have autocratic governments that suppress most investigative journalism anyway. And, though there is powerful reporting and analysis in English on some of these subjects, I sense that the myth of eternal American dominance clouds decisions about what to cover, as well as the journalism itself.

So: I have done my best to link to sources with in-depth explorations of things I sum up in a sentence or a paragraph. If there’s not a link, please do your own research, and/or take the statement with an extra grain of salt.

It’s not a coincidence that mainstream thought no longer considers Pluto a planet. That fact actually describes our current predicament with a sharp accuracy: we’ve tucked something dark and scary into a psychological back pocket, the same way in wealthy countries we’ve tucked away our genocidal histories. Especially in America, we’ve settled for the smug, false narrative that our country has been mainly a force for good in the world. We’ve even managed to send overseas the exploitative systems that serve our comfortable lifestyles. Cultural memory of the horrors of war have also drifted far from conscious awareness. And as Raoul Peck writes of the use of nuclear weapons by the US: “why has it never been called a war crime? Is it because those who dropped the bombs are those who got to name the deed?” There has been a great forgetting, especially in the past few decades, of many unresolved developments in American and human history.

The US Pluto Return and the “deep state” are overlapping concepts. A lot of this essay will focus on the international history and presence of the military economy, and on the timeframe around when Pluto was discovered, neither of which are directly connected to the Pluto Return (as I noted previously, the “deep state” is not what is collapsing during the Pluto Return). But, in my opinion we can’t understand the Pluto Return without grasping the Pluto archetype in depth, and we can’t do that without studying the way Pluto has been made manifest since humanity became conscious of it.

Moreover, the US Pluto Return has both domestic and international implications. Neither is subtle, but Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24th invasion of Ukraine, just four days after the first exact alignment of the Pluto Return, has made the international aspect impossible to miss. This is not to say that the Russia/Ukraine war is “about America”, but rather that a major part of the US Pluto Return is a shift in geopolitical power balances, with the US losing footing on the world stage while the military economy continues to grow. As the title of this essay references, the “deep state” is getting less deep, less concerned with hiding itself. It’s cresting in our awareness, reminding us that it’s always been around. I’m afraid the same will be true of Pluto.

Before there was Pluto, there was Hades, his Greek counterpart. Hades was a chthonic god, one whose realm was the underworld, literally under the earth. He was worshipped mainly by agricultural cults. Out of respect, the Greeks didn’t like to say his name, so they called him Plouton, which means “riches,” an agricultural allusion to the mineral riches found under earth’s surface. In the Roman era, the myth around Pluto became more warlike, but the association with riches stuck.

Today, the military industry I’m calling the deep state has its talons hooked deeply into the riches beneath the earth’s surface, in multiple sinister ways. Military operations use vast amounts of fossil fuels; military technology depends on rare-earth minerals, which are mined with environmentally destructive techniques and exploitative labor practices; and military weaponry involves manipulations on the subatomic level, another beneath-the-surface territory ruled by Pluto that… we really probably shouldn’t be fucking with. By design, the entire operation has been as invisible as its creators could make it — at least until very recently.

There are two reasons I can see for why the deep state is currently “rising”. One is the rise of globalized technology corporations with the same resource-harvesting goals: fossil fuels for their server farms and crypto-mining projects; rare-earth minerals for the devices they’re desperate to sell us; and nuclear power for a “clean” energy future and space travel/erectile dysfunction therapy. These companies birthed themselves on the “open” market, but now their supply chains and human resource pools overlap with those of the military economy. And when big tech companies receive contracts directly from government military budgets (like the JWCC contracts in the US, scheduled to be distributed by the Department of Defense between Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle in December 2022), there ceases to be any distinction at all between those corporate entities and the deep state. As the tech giants consolidate resources to ensure their own future dominance, they engage the same destructive practices as the military economy — just in plain public view.

The second reason the deep state is rising is that while its original footholds were in the US and Europe, over the years, the geographic location of its beneficiaries has shifted. For the first time in several centuries, wealth is concentrating itself on the other side of the globe. The military and technology economies are flooding money to oil-rich Middle East nations; to both the Chinese government and its billionaire entrepreneur class, and to a more lawless demographic, a black market of arms manufacturers and other unsavory trades operating out of eastern Russia. Historically, the deep state was often hidden from democratically elected leaders and lawmakers because its intentions were counter to desires for peace and diplomacy. But in the autocrat-ruled countries that have now set themselves up as its world headquarters, there’s no need for pretense. In this sense also, there’s a rising, a surfacing of something that has been buried, a next level of extraction.

Let’s be clear: as I write in mid-2022, the US still has a massive military, and a massive military budget. The dollar is still strong. But the collapse of the American establishment in the US Pluto Return indicates that the US is further losing its hold on the international war machine. The arrogance of the American exceptionalism built into our national mythology has kept us from seeing the global situation accurately (one concrete example is American think tanks’ continuous inaccurate assessments of Russian & Chinese military spending, detailed in this article, to which I’ll refer again later). Especially since the end of the Cold War, American mythology imagined this country as forever dominant in the military economy. But the monster we helped to create could easily turn against us.

It won’t be until chapter 4 that I can lay out these claims in full. In that section, we’ll look at the larger picture of geopolitical shifts indicated by Pluto’s transit through Capricorn (2008–2024), and at the Great Reset, another conspiracy narrative that, like the deep state, is actually very real (and has an obvious astrological correspondence). To get there, we first have to know the history that Pluto is weaving together for us, and that’s what I’m going to try to get at here. It’s obviously very dark, so prepared for another katabasis. If it helps, you can remember that in mythology, characters who visit the underworld usually bring back a treasure, something of high value. In my own work with this information, I’ve found that to be true. Facing the shadows of our reality leaves me more alive than ever with the determination to survive them — that’s actually the nature of Pluto. I hope that’s your experience, too.

In the US natal chart, Pluto is in Capricorn in the second house. When reading a chart for a country, the second house has information about that country’s wealth: its economy, its banks, its overall prosperity or lack thereof, and its actual, physical resources, including land. Pluto’s themes of power struggles and death, and Capricorn’s shadow of brutality in the name of hierarchical progress are accurate descriptors of America’s relationship to its wealth. This nation was literally built on stolen land, through stolen labor and lives. It was also economically built on stolen land, labor, and lives, as none of America’s 20th century prosperity would have been possible with the centuries of slavery and settler colonialism that came first. That the US Pluto Return will knock us out of global economic dominance is almost a given.

There’s something even deeper here, though — something that is coming full circle around the Plutonian nature of land theft and environmental exploitation. The settler colonists who moved westward through Turtle Island over about three hundred years not only continuously displaced and genocided the native population, they also exploited the land they stole. From soil erosion and other unsustainable farming; to the Gold Rush, to today’s oil and natural gas extraction (which disproportionately effects the 1% of land that still belongs Indigenous Americans), the current dominant American economy generated itself out of centuries of resource theft. And in recent years, the American economy birthed the globalized tech corporations and their white, plutocrat leaders, who have now moved their exploitative operations and supply chains overseas. It’s really still the same colonial and white supremacist project, searching for new opportunities to extract.

While the European colonizers were just as brutal in their methods of extraction, countries like Belgium, France and Spain didn’t have contiguous frontiers into which they could expand their populations, so they couldn’t practice settler colonialism in the same way as Americans. Germany’s story was different. The German states weren’t unified as a country until 1871, and so missed the timing for overseas colonialism, which was at its height in the 16th and 17th centuries. After unification, resentment of Germany’s weakness compared to the other European nations began to simmer. Eventually, Adolf Hitler rode this resentment into power.

The intentions of Hitler and the Third Reich were explicitly colonial. They’re all laid out in Generplan Ost, a Nazi policy document that imagined a German occupation of eastern Europe, through a combination of extermination, enslavement and settler colonialism. The policies came from the concept of Lebensraum, or the German need for greater “living space”, which originated around the turn of the 20th century. Hitler wove them into the Nazi slogan of blut und boden or “blood and soil”, a reference to a unified race (“blood”) on a land of their own (“soil”).

As this article by David Carroll Cochran breaks down, Hitler drew direct inspiration for his genocidal plans from the United States. Cochran writes that “the American West became an ‘obsession’ for Hitler and his closest followers”, and that “Nazi leadership routinely referred to Eastern Europe as ‘the German East’ or the ‘Wild East,’ and its inhabitants as ‘Indians’”. However, as the war unfolded and resources thinned, “Nazi strategy shifted away from the traditional methods” of settler colonialism, and “toward their own innovation of mechanized murder in the death camps, now targeting almost exclusively Jews”.

“Having tried his project in a much more densely populated area, over a much shorter timeframe, and during a war he failed to win, Hitler did manage to kill millions, displace millions more and change the demographics of Europe,” Cochran writes. “In contrast, the United States played a much longer game — a gradual but relentless expansion and depopulation of Natives over wider spaces and more decades, and without rival military powers seriously threatening the project. Like Hitler, the United States killed and displaced millions and changed the demographics of a continent. Unlike the Nazis, the country largely completed the process of racial replacement and continental dominance, while at the same time creating a powerful national myth of frontier heroism and progress. It is a myth Americans are still struggling to come to terms with”.

Cochran also quotes Hitler in Mein Kampf, where he praises the way the “Aryan” America conquered “its own continent” by clearing the “soil” of “natives” to make room for more “racially pure” settlers. Mein Kampf was written in the 1920s, but the abridged version that went on to sell millions of copies was published in 1930, the same year Pluto was discovered. Over the next two decades, the Nazis rose to power, attempted their genocidal mission, and fell, but not without revealing to humanity a new level of our own dark potential. How a society could devolve so quickly into such a horror show is an existential question that remains with us today.

Yet if we have, in the words of Sven Lindquist, “the courage to understand what we know” — there is no mystery at all. Racism and alterity (psychological “othering”) are inextricable from Plutonian histories of land, resources and colonization; so is the cold logic of capitalism, both in regards to resources and to human bodies. The next essay in this series will look more deeply at the way we carry these ideologies in our bodies, brains and nervous systems. But we need to recognize that the Nazis were not an anomaly. They were a condensation of the genocidal heart of the colonial project, Pluto concentrate. The same callous, murderous drive is at the core of white America, and always has been.

And, in the exact same timeframe that Hitler was putting his death machine into action, another mass death power was being developed — by the USA. The first few decades of the 20th century saw rapid development in quantum physics, with science beginning to to operate at the sub-atomic level, the almost ineffable space where math and matter meet. In 1938, the same year Hitler invaded the Sudatenland, scientists (coincidentally in Berlin) induced nuclear fission (the splitting of a heavy atomic nucleus) for the first time. After that, resources and research efforts worldwide were thrown into courting the massive amounts of energy that could be unleashed by manipulating the atomic world. It only took seven years for the US to make and drop the bomb.

The bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000 people, mostly civilians, bringing to life Freud’s pessimistic prediction of “sheer extermination”. Since then, no other nuclear weapons have been used in war, although nine countries are known to have them. In America, we’ve mythologized our country’s choice as something unfortunate but noble. But there’s a lot we haven’t reckoned with. The material level of mass death, environmental poisoning, and racist justification is awful enough on its own. The spiritual reality of the bombs is even more terrifying. Not only do we hold enough power to destroy humanity many times over — we also essentially stole that power from the earth. Nuclear fission isn’t “natural”. While it does happen in the earth, in the form of radioactive decay, it’s only accessible to humans through a complex technological mixture of minerals, chemistry, physics and massive computers and machinery. Manually-induced nuclear fission was hailed as a breakthrough, but… are humans really ready for that much power? Is our access to it improving life on our planet? Or are we messing with something too fundamental, something that’s out of our depth?

The same technology that created the bombs also gave us access to nuclear power as an energy source. The first nuclear power plant was built in Russia in the 1950s, and today there are about 440 of them. They generate about 10% of the world’s electricity. Nuclear power also plays an essential role in space travel, some medical procedures, and food treatments. In recent years, plutocrats like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Richard Branson have invested in nuclear, wanting to shift society away from its fossil fuel dependency.

The process of generating nuclear power doesn’t emit carbon, so it’s “clean” compared to fossil fuels. But it does require uranium, a non-renewable source mined in toxic conditions — and it also produces highly poisonous radioactive waste. After the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011, Japan and several other countries turned off their nuclear reactors or began a phaseout plan. The United States did not, but few new reactors have been built in the US since the 1970s — the average age of the nuclear reactors in the US is 39, with most of them approaching the end of their operating licenses. Efforts to build new ones or upgrade old ones have stumbled, sometimes due to public pushback, and sometimes because of outdated technology and know-how.

However, as of May 2022, 55 new nuclear power plants are under construction worldwide — just not in the US or Europe. China currently has 15 under construction, and has announced plans for the creation of 150 more by 2036. India has eight power plants being built, and South Korea and Russia have four each. In most cases, the investment in nuclear is touted as a way to reach lowered-emissions goals, and as a “transitional” power source on the way to a fully renewable energy future.

As I’ve done my google research on nuclear, my sense has been that there’s not a lot of objective information available. Most websites that come up with information answering basic questions are clearly from industry or governmental sources. Most journalism on links between nuclear power plants and cancer or other health issues is outdated, and especially over the past decade, there seems to be very little coverage. But I did I find this article from the Los Angeles Daily News, about a massive study that was killed by federal regulators in 2015. Reporter Teri Sforza writes: “The push for this new probe was driven by dissatisfaction with the U.S. government’s reliance on an unsophisticated 27-year-old study — employing even older data — to assure Americans there are no health risks associated with living near nuclear power plants.” But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dropped the new study after two years of preparation, saying “they were convinced the study couldn’t link reactors to disease and would be too costly.”

Despite the lack of info, there’s a picture of the implications of nuclear that I’ve started to piece together, and I can’t lie: from the perspective of Pluto, humanity seems dangerously, tragically, absurdly naive about the consequences of our extractive behavior. We are using a stolen form of power with an arrogant avoidance of its morbid potentials. Three likely ones seem important to name:

1. the potential that rising sea levels and other aspects of climate change will lead to more meltdowns like Fukushima, since nuclear power plants require vast amounts of water to operate, and are almost all located along rivers, lakes or coastlines;
2. the potential that as more governments access nuclear technology in the name of environmental protection, nuclear weapons could also proliferate;
3. the potential that short-sighted methods of waste disposal will disastrously poison the environment in the next several hundred or thousand years — or sooner

The issue with waste disposal is particularly disturbing. Many nations have begun to build “geologic repositories”, deep underground storage facilities for nuclear waste. In the US, the government has accumulated a fund of $44.3 billion to build a repository, but finding a location for one has proved illusive. So decades worth of nuclear waste still lies unprocessed in “temporary” containers around the US. The containers are aging, and some are already leaking. Even the waste disposal techniques that nuclear advocates consider the “safest”, like vitrification (turning the waste into glass), are expensive, technologically challenging, and myopic in their timeframes. As a 2018 Greenpeace report entitled The Global Crisis of Nuclear Waste put it, the waste generated by nuclear programs “will remain hazardous to humans and the environment on a time scale that transcends the geologic era defining the presence of human civilization.”

The poisoning of the environment through radioactive waste feels to me like extraction and destruction on a different level even than the greenhouse gases that are a more immediate threat to our species. Our emissions have given the earth a fever — she could heat up for a few millennia, kill off most humans and our pollutive systems, and then maybe recover an equilibrium. But high-level radioactive waste is a cancer, a substance that inherently eats through life. It could take up to a million years to decay, and some of the containers we’re holding it in are barely designed to last a few thousand.

Just as with other aspects of the extractive economy, there is magical thinking happening here on the part of the plutocrats. Since the development of nuclear technology began, its proponents have wanted to pretend there’s no reciprocity necessary in our extraction of energy from earth’s invisible realms, but actually, there is reciprocity whether we like it or not. There is a byproduct to nuclear harvesting — a material, darkly poisonous byproduct. The belief that we could possibly handle it safely comes from the same arrogance that led us to nuclear power in the first place. You may remember Charon, gatekeeper to the underworld, from the previous essay. To me, the lack of ease with which nuclear power surrenders itself to us, and the fact that we can’t create it without poisoning ourselves, tells me that humanity did not enter this realm with proper initiation or respect. In mythology, getting to the underworld is only half the journey. Not everyone makes it back across the river Styx. Why do we think that Pluto will let us out of this alive?

Of course, the magical thinking continues here. The generational pass-off of nuclear waste disposal, and the delusional belief that new science will come along to solve the problem, is part of it. But also, maybe none of that would matter if we just, you know, had another planet to start extracting from. That’s why the plutocrats now are looking at leaving earth.

Space exploration requires energy from many sources, including fossil fuels and nuclear. Human-made rockets use vast amounts of fossil fuels to get off the ground: about 11,000 pounds of fuel per second, or about two million times what a car burns (according to a humblebrag on this NASA trivia sheet). Nuclear power has also always been used in space, but projects today are starting to involve much more of it, as scientists consider how to establish long-term bases away from earth. Elon Musk has advocated using nuclear for faster rocket boosters and extra-terrestrial power generators, and even suggested the use of nuclear bombs to terraform Mars.

Another fantasy the plutocrats are investing in is nuclear fusion, the opposite of fission, where two atomic nuclei merge. Fusion can produce even more energy than fission; it’s the atomic process happening continually in the center of the Sun and in every star. Human scientists have been able to induce fusion, but it’s not yet a viable energy source because we can’t make it happen without using more energy than we generate. It requires, among other complex technological resources, a rare element called tritium. Tritium only exists in a certain layer of the upper atmosphere and has to be harvested from there; calculations show that we could run out of tritium before we’re able to harness nuclear fusion on any scalable level. Yet the plutocrats continue to put resources towards this sinking investment. To me it feels like a new height of arrogance to think that we could steal from the Sun.

The plutocrats’ recent obsession with space travel is not only about their dysfunctional penises (more on that in the next essay). It’s also a psychological mechanism for avoiding the reality of imminent collapse on earth. No one is in a position to see the trajectory of humanity as clearly as the plutocrats — after all, they have access to all the data available, and they are the ones making major calls about where resources are directed. Unfortunately they are also spiritual man-children, too immature to even begin to look reality in the face. Instead they are running away to fantasy futures in which there’s never a price for humanity’s extractive behavior. They won’t be able to run forever, though. That’s just not how Pluto plays.

Well, here we are at the end of the world. We should probably back up, though. Since I haven’t yet offered a definition of the deep state — I’m going to give it my best shot now.

As I write in early July 2022, humanity is at a wild threshold. We know it in our nervous systems and our souls, even if we can’t quite grasp it cognitively — we are all in the process of untangling ourselves from the myths that have led us to believe this threshold would never be reached. I can’t speak to any experience except that of someone raised white and privileged in America. But I think the US Pluto Return helps us define the threshold we sense, especially if we do reside here, on the stolen land and in the nation where Pluto’s current worldly presence seeded itself. The centuries of slavery and genocide, and the continued oppression of Black and Indigenous people are one part of our truth that the American myth suppresses. But to understand the deep state, and what’s happening now, we also have to take an honest look at America’s more recent actions around the globe. Our ideology would have us believe that post-WWII America in particular has been a force for good in the world. But in reality, dozens of efforts undertaken with American military power have been undemocratic, unnecessarily violent, and have generated political instabilities that are still around today. In the meantime, the the murderous systems that serve us have been outsourced to poorer countries where blatant exploitation of land and humans can continue.

But it’s happened over several decades — and often without the consent of our democratically elected leaders. Here we arrive in tricky territory, a space in which it’s not easy to distinguish truth from ideology, facts from propaganda, and outrageous conspiracy theories from outrageous conspiracies. What’s for sure is that Albert Einstein’s observation, of the individuals and networks “active in every nation” “whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines”, was prophetic and astute. “I have especially in mind that small but determined group,” Einstein wrote in the same exchange with Freud quoted earlier, “composed of individuals who are indifferent to social considerations and restraints”, and who “regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests.”

Although the deep state has changed forms many times in its decades of existence, and although information has been so suppressed that it’s no surprise false theories abound, this has always been the essence: the deep state is an alternate economy, generated and kept alive by individuals and organizations around the world who profit from war. It’s funded by the billion through the tax dollars of any country that needs to buy weapons and other military technology, and has been on a track of nearly uninhibited growth since its origins in the early 20th century. Power players at high levels of government in Europe and the US were the ones who kick-started it, but today it’s become a frankenstein, an entity its original masters can no longer control.

You might also say that conspiracy theories about a deep state outdate the deep state itself. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda that was published in Russia in 1902 or 1903, a few years after the first Zionist conference and right as a bloody wave of pogroms against Jews in Russia began. Investigations by multiple European countries in the 1920s proved it fraudulent, but it made its way to Germany anyway with the rise of the Nazis, and even was required reading for Germany schoolchildren for many years. Henry Ford also brought it to America, publishing it in weekly installments under the title “The International Jew: The World’s Problem”. The Protocols purports to be the secret notes of a group of Jewish leaders, the “Elders of Zion”, discussing their plan for global domination.

Although anti-Semitism has much more ancient roots — tracing all the way back to the earliest centuries of Christianity — The Protocols was a new accusation that stuck. So the “cabal” concept was already around in the public mind as the deep state started to do its secretive, subversive thing. The deep state is definitely not a tiny circle of all-powerful string-pullers sitting around a table somewhere and plotting away. But its reality is so massive and complex that I’m not surprised a simplified version has turned up. Like the interstellar dreams of the plutocrats, it’s a subconscious psychological mechanism we use to keep the awful truth at bay.

There’s a cliff-edge here that I want to back away from, though. Christianity is its own Plutonian entity, responsible for unspeakable evil around the globe; the Church is actually the single entity on the world stage right now that has caused more death and destruction than the USA. Other more extreme themes in today’s conspiracy theories, like blood libel and sexual/ritual abuse of children, can be traced to ancient anti-Semitic accusations, and, if one really wants to go off the deep end, the likelihood that the Church itself actually did perpetuate those atrocities. The bones of the children being excavated at Catholic-run Native American “boarding schools” across Turtle Island have already proven that this conspiracy is more than a theory. However, all of that is beyond the scope of this essay. Thank goddess.

So. The deep state.

While a thorough, decade by decade history of the deep state would be ideal to include here… it’s just too much. And no matter how many angles and specifics of the situation I share, there will always be facts and events I don’t know about, and alternate viewpoints I fail to present. Instead I’m going to offer the understanding of the deep state I’ve received from my spirit guides, pieced together with what I learned from The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, the blunt, thorough journalism of Chris Hedges, and lots of other research. Most facts that aren’t directly cited you’ll find explained in detail in The Devil’s Chessboard, if you’re willing to do the work of reading it. This narrative is an affront to American mythology, and it’s hard to accept. I invite you to exercise your autonomy with it, letting in only the parts of it that resonate with what you know to be true. But also: especially if you’re white, don’t underestimate the power of your own denial.

I’m going to describe the deep state in three phases of its history: its origins during the two world wars; its expansion during the Cold War; and its decentralization since the fall of the Berlin Wall. There’s also a fourth phase — now — but we’ll get there in later in this series.

One might say that the Christian trauma mentioned above had reached a breaking point around the turn of the 20th century. After hundreds of years of crusades (religious wars) followed by the Inquisition and witch burnings, European Christians began exporting their trauma through colonization and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries they dug colonial talons into entire continents, particularly Africa and the Americas, ruthlessly exploiting both the land and the humans. By the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, resentment against rule by distant, arbitrary monarchs was simmering in the colonial governments, so starting with the American Revolution in 1776, many colonies in the Americas gained “independence”. Although industry and trade remained dominated by colonial players, by the early 1900s there was less money and less glory in it for France, Spain, Great Britain, Portugal, Belgium and other European powers — and, in my view, less outlet for the millennia of generational trauma built up in the cells of the population. At the same time, the Germanic states were unifying for the first time after centuries of warfare, becoming the nation of Germany in 1871. But Germany didn’t have hundreds of years of colonial exploitation under its belt, so it had less money, and much less power. The result was a decreasing standard of living, and especially after defeat in WWI, a population ripe for a leader with a scapegoat and a “solution”.

Industrial production of weapons — and the use of technology to develop new, more lethal ones — started during the American Civil War, but went global during WWI. It’s almost as if the colonial death impulse took an inward turn as it reached its external limit. As both Einstein and Freud note in their 1932 letters, technology had begun to blend with warfare to create weapons that took killing to the next level. It also created an industry of individuals and organizations that profited from them, and from a world where war was a constant.

Between WWI & WWII, the weapons industry was just beginning to form, but the aboveground situation was already foreshadowing the messy, criss-crossed reality. The political policy of the US towards Germany and all of Europe was “non-interventionism”, but for American businesses wanting to go international, post-WWI Germany was an especially affordable place to expand. Coca-Cola, IBM, Ford, General Electric and many other large companies opened factories or other facilities in Germany in the 1930s, and many western businessmen supported Hitler’s policies. Many who lived there or who had personal contacts in the Nazi government knew about the concentration camps and other atrocities taking place in the heart of Germany, but did what they could to keep that information from reaching President Roosevelt in America, because they didn’t want the negative business consequences of a war between the two countries. In 1939, when the MS St. Louis arrived in Florida carrying almost one thousand Jewish refugees, these same characters and their allies in the US government influenced Roosevelt’s decision to turn the boat away.

Part of what aligned the US power players with the Nazis was their shared antipathy towards the Soviet Union. After WWII, as the nuclear build-up of the Cold War began, the US formed the CIA, ostensibly to keep tabs on Soviet weapons development. The CIA was a spy agency, and was staffed and led mostly by people who were already spies, meaning many of them had Nazi contacts and associates. Public association between the US and Germany would never have been acceptable, but the CIA had no trouble maintaining and strengthening these connections underground. Today we know that the CIA helped many Nazis move to America after the war ended, setting them up with new identities and comfortable lives. The government also recruited Nazi scientists through Operation Paperclip, inviting them to add their knowledge to US weapons development.

Germany’s attempts at nuclear development were neutralized when the war ended, but the European powers and of course the Soviet Union joined America in continuing to invest heavily in weapons and military technology. After WWII, military build-up was an easy sell to lawmakers, and a new, global industry of weapons manufacturing sprang into existence. Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the US between 1953–1961, watched it happen and in many ways enabled it, but by the end of his presidency, he was nervous. In his farewell address to the nation in 1961, he gave it a name: the military-industrial complex. He also offered a warning.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” Eisenhower said. “The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city . . . we recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications . . . We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

And thus the deep state was born.

The next three decades comprised the peak of the Cold War and the US war in Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet-Afghan War (all of which lasted entire decades), as well as multiple Arab-Israeli conflicts and hundreds of smaller military confrontations. Of course, the US public knew about the Cold War and Vietnam War, and about the general increase in military spending — although anti-war activism existed, at least until the horrors of Vietnam started to come out in the 1970s, it wasn’t too hard to get public buy-in for “protecting freedom” under the threat of nuclear war.

But something else went on during those years too: the US launched multiple covert military operations, coordinated through the underground networks of the CIA, to instigate undemocratic regime changes. Today, most of us who have a grounded knowledge of US history do know this — but as these operations were being carried out, and in their immediate aftermath, control of information was tightly managed. The CIA had media elites with shared business interests on their side who agreeably helped shape the story (one example is Henry Luce, founder of Time). After a coup went down, the public would inevitably find out about it, but it was easy enough to create confusion about what really happened and why. Covert coups or coup attempts took place in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Chile (an incomplete list). In retrospect, there’s plenty of evidence the CIA was involved in these operations, but a lot of it only came to light decades later.

What really happened is, of course, still up for debate, and the details of every scenario are unique and complex. I invite you to do your own research — The Devil’s Chessboard is a great place to start. “Why” is another question with no easy answer, but the narrative that has emerged for me ties together the military economy, the ongoing colonial project, and the white supremacy-induced sociopathy and arrogance that has characterized most American leadership, both public and private.

In the 1800s, almost all of Spain’s colonies in Central and South America gained “independence”, but the ruling class remained composed of the descendants of colonizers, and colonial business interests continued to steal resources from the land and indigenous people (United Fruit Company is the most outrageous example of this). France and Great Britain had “scrambled” for colonies in Africa at the same time Spain was losing its territory, but after WWII they couldn’t afford to maintain rule overseas, so African countries also started to gain their sovereignty. And by that time there had been a shift in western consciousness around imperialism: in 1941 the US and the UK had released the Atlantic Charter, a non-binding document that nevertheless articulated an intention to do thing differently. “No territorial aggrandizement, no territorial changes made against the wishes of the people (self-determination), [and the] restoration of self-government to those deprived of it” were a few of the principles it set out.

The citizenry of Africa and the Americas had also acquired a western political framework by the second half of the 20th century, and were more conscious of the insidious nature of neocolonialism — so leaders began to call for more radical breaks from the US and European powers. One of the main ways to do this was to nationalize industries that had long been dominated by private colonial interests (in the Americas the main ones were coffee, bananas and other produce; in Africa palm oil, timber, petroleum, and diamonds were central). To nationalize an industry is to take it away from corporate control, sending its profits to the state instead of private owners. In countries devastated by centuries of exploitation, the nationalization of industry could provide desperately-needed resources for infrastructure, education, health care and other civilizational basics the colonial powers had never provided. Several times, democratic elections in these countries yielded leaders who wanted to make big moves in this direction. Liberal political leaders in the west also supported the process, at least in theory.

But most beneficiaries of the colonial project did not support nationalization — obviously, they lost an immense amount of profit when forced to stop extracting from previously colonized lands. Since the Cold War was in full effect, nationalization of industry was easy to twist into anti-Communist propaganda. But manipulating public opinion only went so far: in situation after situation, the CIA and the military teamed up to overthrow leaders who planned to nationalize. They supplied arms to rebel groups who opposed those leaders, or in some cases, straight-up paid for their assassinations (the prime example of this is Patrice Lumumba of Congo). Then they attempted to install puppet leaders who would maintain the colonial status quo. A lot of these efforts took place without the permission of the US executive branch. The political instability of Africa and Central and South America today is largely the result of these coups and the violence and division they generated.

This is phase two of the deep state, a time when there were twin influences: the weapons industry, which profited directly from the manufacture and sale of weapons (and their various supply-chain needs); and a group of power players in high levels of government worldwide but concentrated in the US (and moreso in the CIA), who were acting to protect colonial business interests in a liberalizing world. (The Soviet Union also poured resources into military buildup, spying and regime change, but with less business-sector involvement.) These two influences fed off each other; however, they’re not exactly the same.

First, to be clear, when I say “weapons industry”, I mean the individuals and groups who profit directly from the instruments and technology of war. This industry stretches from the mines where metals and rare earth minerals are extracted; to the sprawling world of weapons manufacturing from guns to missiles to tanks; to sales and transport; to oil companies and private militias; and to the scientists and engineers involved in the development of cutting-edge technology. Countless billions of government dollars have gone to the private companies and contractors that operate in this arena. It’s huge, and so are its paychecks.

The CIA and its associates, on the other hand, are probably the closest we’ve ever come to an actual “cabal”. They weren’t all-powerful, but they took action as if they were, again, often against the will of democratically-elected leaders (President John F. Kennedy Jr., who wanted post-colonial nations to thrive, was on particularly bad footing with them). They weren’t interested purely in money, as people in the arms industry tended to be. They definitely acted to protect their financial interests, but there was also a hunger for power, and a delusional belief that they could shape the entire world to their liking. On this level, the question of “why”becomes a spiritual one.

By the 1980s, the original deep state actors were mostly dead or retired, and after the disaster of the Vietnam War, even hawkish political leaders had somewhat soured on the idea of regime change. The arms industry was thriving, though: President Ronald Regan’s 1982 budget introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, which increased US defense spending by 13%. The publicly stated goal of the SDI was to force the Soviet Union into bankruptcy as it tried to keep up. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it looked like the policy might have worked (although this 1994 interview with Mikhail Gorbachev tells a different story about why the Soviet Union dissolved). Either way, with the end of the Cold War, theoretically, the US could cut back on military spending, no longer needing to “deter” the Soviets. But the deep state, with beneficiaries now firmly entrenched in both public and private sectors around the world, was not about to let that happen.

There was a rare astrological transit around this time: the conjunction of Uranus and Neptune, an alignment that takes place every 170 years. It was exact in 1993–1994, but was building for years in advance. Interestingly, Uranus was discovered in 1781 and shares with the American Revolution themes of rebellion and paradigm shifts; Neptune was discovered in 1848, the same year the Communist Manifesto was published, and shares the communist themes of collectivism, idealism, and a shadow side of delusional groupthink. A simple interpretation of this energetic combo would be that the paradigm of American capitalism dissolved the paradigm of Soviet communism. However, it also represents the creation of a new paradigm altogether: a more decentralized (Neptune) and ungovernable (Uranus) weapons industry.

In the early decades of the deep state, a majority of the folks making money from arms manufacturing were white westerners. As it grew, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, its network of beneficiaries internationalized. Countries like China, India and Pakistan started nuclear programs. Middle Eastern countries further exploited their vast oil reserves. And in Russia, a massive organized crime network called the vory, underground during the Soviet regime, emerged as major actors in the new capitalist government. These same networks, which operate today with relative impunity in eastern Russia and much of the surrounding geography, are the center of the “black market”, where weapons, drugs, restricted species of animals, human organs and actual humans make up most of what is exchanged.

The US, meanwhile, continued its own military buildup in the name of “deterrence”. In the 1990s, even without the easy “other” of the Soviets to justify sustained military investments, powerful people in government found ways to keep US funding of the deep state strong. The crew around President George W. Bush was another wannabe cabal: Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the others who initiated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan thought they could install puppet regimes in those countries too. Although he’s never been proven as the speaker, this chilling quote has been attributed to Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Yet the result of both wars initiated by the Bush Administration demonstrates not so much that Rove was a member of a secret cabal controlling world affairs, but that he was drunk on a fantasy of absolute power. Iraq and Afghanistan were both military and moral overreaches — and ultimately, failures. They drained resources and lives from everyone involved, doing nothing for the cause of peace. The military economy, of course, encouraged the wars to drag on, but eventually the US had to withdraw from both countries with its tail between its legs. The occupations left violence and instability in their wake, just like the coups of the fifties and sixties. That the US ever had the power to shape the destinies of those countries and their people was a delusion.

Over the last three decades the military economy has expanded around the globe, influencing politics in every country and driving the death march towards climate collapse. As demand for high-tech, computerized weaponry grows, the supply chains of the industry have ended up in countries like China, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda: no matter what country is buying weapons, they’re inevitably supporting nations with lax labor and environmental laws, and the amoral entrepreneurs operating out of those countries. Neoliberal free-trade policies enabled this globalization, which led to easier weapons access for everyone. But over time, it has also allowed resources to concentrate in nations that are willing to harbor the war industry, and exploit their own lands and people to feed it. In more recent years, big tech companies have started using the same supply chains, resulting in further expansion of these extractive industries.

Just as the development of the nuclear bomb happened in the same timeframe as Hitler’s rise and fall, another massive shift on earth was asserting itself as the Soviet Union dissolved. The code for the worldwide web was written between 1989–1992, and the first browsers came into use in 1993. Although the physical internet was built in the decades before, the www was the development that enabled the true global connectivity the internet is known for. The themes of the Uranus/Neptune conjunction are present here too: the www led to a decentralization of information and power, and it also quickly became an ungovernable entity. Today, the globalized tech companies are reaching a status in which they themselves are ungovernable. More on that later, though.

The deep state is an amorphous entity. It doesn’t exist as one organization, or any kind of manageable structure, despite the fantasies some of its players have had along the way. However — no discussion of the deep state is complete without including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. NATO was founded in 1949 as a post-WWII military alliance between western European countries plus the US and Canada. Its original purpose was to buffer the Soviet Union, but after the Cold War, instead of pulling back, NATO kept voting to expand, allowing new countries to join the alliance. NATO’s post-Cold War encroachment in eastern Europe is one of Vladimir Putin’s rationales for the war in Ukraine.

NATO is the organization where deep state power has been centered since the end of the Cold War. The US is just one country in it, but we’ve always had outsize influence. This article by journalist Chris Hedges gives a great summary of NATO’s history, and a blunt prediction about its future. Basically, the worldview of the alliance is limited by the same white, colonial narcissism that other deep state actors have demonstrated.

Hedges describes NATO’s 2030 initiative, which “sees the future . . . as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.” He writes that NATO decision-makers are “terrified” by the strategic alignment forming between Russia and China, and refuse to see that NATO expansion has not made the world a safer place. They cannot “accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. [They] speak in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing” that America “has the right to impose its will as the leader of the ‘free world.’”

The newly-formed white male billionaire class, who dropped their plan for world domination at the World Economic Forum in 2020, operates from a similarly myopic, white supremacist worldview. There’s no need for theories about the conspiracy of the Great Reset: it’s all laid out in the actual document the WEF released after their conference. One of the ideas the Great Reset puts forth is “stakeholder capitalism”, an approach that identifies both governments and international tech companies as “stakeholders” in a newly globalized world, and suggests the creation of governing bodies in which power is shared between them. Holier-than-thou anti-conspiracy voices scoffing at the Great Reset have not done their research: the tech companies really are plotting a global takeover, and they’re doing it in plain sight.

But a few interesting paradoxes converge here. First of all: the core shift articulated by the Great Reset is theoretically scary because it would take power away from democratically elected bodies (governments) and make them share it with non-democratic, profit-driven bodies (corporations). But liberal democracy is officially in decline around the world, and it’s hard to argue that our democratic institutions are doing anything worthwhile to confront humanity’s existential crises. Second: the white plutocrats of the WEF, like the war economy beneficiaries who run NATO, operate from a worldview that can’t imagine the decline of the west. Their colonial, white supremacist conditioning leaves them oblivious to the violent potentials of right-wing terrorism, the likely collapse of the US government, and the implications of China’s growing international influence. So even as they plot their takeover of the world order, these original plutocrats fail to see the direction in which the world is really headed.

Authoritarian governance is on the rise. Global tech corporations are consolidating the world’s resources and accumulating power. Beneficiaries of the war economy continue to influence politics in every country. All three of these facts point to the tough reality that western democracy has lost massive ground.

Why?

Could it be the moral rot at the foundations of the entire colonial project? The fact that America, the arrogantly named “birthplace of democracy”, is actually an entity built on exploitation, destruction and death?

I’ve used words like “narcissism” and “psychological mechanism” a few times in this piece. I have no credentials to make any official diagnoses, but I feel called to reference this part of the story because at the core of the deep state, an out of control entity that thrives on death, is a big psychological quandary. How did we end up like this — as a culture, and as a species? How did we diverge so far from harmony with the rest of the ecosystem? We can trace the trauma back to early Christianity for sure, or even to the patriarchy of the Old Testament. But what about China, an ancient civilization with roots much older than Christianity, and the one government poised to be on equal footing with the tech companies in the new world order? The Chinese government exploits its land and people mercilessly, and keeps public sentiment under control with a combination of ideology, censorship, propaganda, and its nascent surveillance state. There may well be alterity, or a narrative of racial superiority, at the center of its belief system; there may also be the same denial around the pace of climate collapse clung to by the west.

So: what is it at the human core that keeps driving us towards oppression and destruction? Where does this impulse come from? Sigmund Freud’s patriarchal and colonial conditioning severely limited the brilliance in his overall body of work. But in his description of the intertwined psychological forces of eros and thanatos, the survival instinct and the death instinct, it seems like he was right on.

And now we have arrived back in Pluto’s homeland.

In the next essay I’ll be switching gears to do a deep dive on the personal and somatic side of the Pluto Return. Character traits we might describe as “sociopathy” or “narcissism” — as well as the conditioning of whiteness itself — can also be understood as western European historical trauma, manifesting in the body, brain, nervous system and energy field. This is one way to answer some of the bigger questions. In the fifth (and hopefully final) essay, we’ll get into the spiritual “why”, looking at karma, ancestry, and magic.

I invite you to use the questions above as Plutonian koans. I think that by contemplating them, we come closer to Pluto, and to the radical survival drive that thrums in rhythm with death.

This is the second essay of a five-part series. I’m planning to complete all five by mid-2023, and publish them here on Medium as they are ready. Remember to follow me so you don’t miss them! For more astro-political reading, check out my other articles on Medium, as well as the Astrology for Apocalypse ebook.

You can also find me at www.astrologyfortherevolution.com and @astrologyfortherevolution on IG. If you want to send me a little love in compensation for literally hundreds of hours in the underworld writing this essay series, you can tip me at paypal.me/activistastro, or on Venmo @astrofortherevolution .