A cultural change over my lifetime has been whether it’s cool to believe in the existence of a deep state. There was first a big change from the 1960s to the 1970s, when handsome actors like Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, made deep state conspiracy thrillers.

The class connotations are important to recall: Conspiracy theorizing in 1975 was upscale, leftist, and sexy. After awhile though, it became downscale, like Randy Quaid in 1996’s Independence Day.

Here’s an NYT article that tries to gently introduce readers to the fact that practically everybody in Turkey is a conspiracy theorist, perhaps for good reasons. The reporter appear convinced that of course the deep state notion is useful in understanding Turkey, but he has to initially act like it’s some wild and crazy 1970s idea.

When Turmoil Strikes, Turks See Conspiracy at Work

By TIM ARANGO OCT. 28, 2015 ISTANBUL — In the aftermath of modern Turkey’s deadliest terrorist attack, an old specter has reappeared on the political scene: the widespread assumption that events are being manipulated behind the scenes and outside the law by a web of shadowy forces called the “deep state.” Though officials were quick to point a finger at Islamic State terrorists when a pair of suicide bombings killed more than 100 people in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, Internet users swiftly lit up Turkey’s social media with more cynical explanations. They theorized that government agents and outside accomplices were once again conspiring to stir up trouble and provoke violence for political purposes. “The deep state is back,” wrote one. “Now, in the name of the deep state, ISIS carries out attacks,” wrote another, referring to the Islamic State.

Actually, Erdogan’s number 2 man immediately blamed the bombing on the Kurdish victims, implying it was part of convoluted plot to make the government look bad. After that notion went over poorly, the government switched to blaming the more plausible-sounding ISIS.

In the same vein, Turkish columnists drew on the country’s history of political violence to explain the attack — one called the bombings “a Turkish classic” — and leaders of opposition parties said the government must have been to blame.

The talk comes with a new twist. Some Turks are speaking of this presumed deep state as one that serves the interests of the man who ostentatiously demolished an old one, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. With their country convulsed by political instability, terrorism and the renewal of an old war with Kurdish militants, many Turks are turning to the deep-state idea these days as a way to make sense of the chaos around them. That the idea is so widely accepted highlights not only Turkey’s history of coups and political intrigue, but also its deep polarization. Turkish society has not been able to unite in the face of a deadly tragedy, and now faces an early election on Sunday that could deepen its political instability. Mr. Erdogan came to power a decade ago intent on destroying the old deep state, which historians have described as a clandestine network that worked to secure the secular and nationalist principles of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and to undermine leaders with different ideas. Under Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist political party, Justice and Development, a series of investigations and court cases exposed the links of previous governments to a sordid array of characters, including mob bosses, contract killers and drug runners, who were enlisted to do dirty work. Consolidating his power, Mr. Erdogan removed the military — the institution that academics say pulled the strings of the old deep state, especially at the height of the Kurdish war in the 1990s — from its dominant role in Turkish politics and installed his own loyalists in the state’s bureaucracies instead. He vanquished the old deep state — but many Turks, aware of the history, now suspect that he has erected a new one in its place. … Partly it reflects a Turkish penchant for conspiracy theories. Even so, though no one has yet proved the existence of an actual, organized deep state, there is a long record of violence that turned out afterward to be the work of agents for the state. Historians say its roots go back to the underground cells of “Young Turk” reformers in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire,

The Young Turk reformers conspired in Masonic lodges because the elaborate entrance requirements made them harder to penetrate by the Sultan’s secret agents.

and later to a Cold War program to prepare clandestine networks in NATO countries in case of a successful Soviet invasion.

The Operation Gladio leave-behind program.

… In a classified diplomatic cable from 2002 released by WikiLeaks, W. Robert Pearson, who was then the American ambassador in Ankara, wrote that “the Turkish Deep State, the behind-the-scenes machinery and power relationships among selected members of the military, judicial, and bureaucratic elite, has endured as an essential factor in political life, and in citizens’ wary calculations of their relationship to the state.” … Now, when Turks speak of the deep state, they are often referring to a widespread perception that the government bureaucracy is now filled with loyalists to Mr. Erdogan’s party. And many say they discern familiar patterns, reminiscent of older times of turmoil, like the angry mobs that have recently attacked Kurdish political offices and the office of The Hurriyet, which is one of the country’s largest newspapers. “All of those things are signs to the Turkish public of extrajudicial activities that are signs of the deep state,” Mr. Pearson said in an interview.

The article doesn’t mention the American-supported Gulen cult of the Poconos, which probably would have been too much too fast for NYT readers.

The Gulen cult took control of the police forces of Turkey through controlling the test prep centers. Erdogan used the Gulenites to fabricate a purge of the military deep state, then in late 2013 Erdogan and Gulen went to war, with Erdogan cracking down on the test prep centers. The Gulenites almost managed to bring Erdogan down by leaking evidence of his spectacular corruption, but he apparently made a deal with the defeated military to defeat Gulen. Or something. It can be hard to tell what’s really going on in Turkey.

In other Turkish news, from Hurriyet: