Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929)[1] is a Canadian poet, academic, and former diplomat. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyerF. R. Scott and painterMarian Dale Scott, he is best known for his critiques of deep politics andAmerican foreign policy since the era of theVietnam War. Notably, he was a signatory in 1968 of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[2]
Although trained as a political scientist, Scott holds an atypical academic appointment as a poet-scholar in an English department.
After receiving undergraduate degrees inphilosophy (first-class honours) andpolitical science (second-class honours) fromMcGill University in 1949, he studied at theInstitut d'Etudes politiques (France, 1949) andUniversity College, Oxford (1950-1952) before receiving aPh.D. in political science from McGill (with a dissertation on the social and political philosophy ofT. S. Eliot) in 1955. He briefly taught in McGill's political science department and spent four years (1957–1961) with theCanadian diplomatic service before joining the speech department of theUniversity of California, Berkeley as a lecturer in 1961. He was subsequently promoted to assistant professor of speech (1962), associate professor of English (1968), and professor of English (1980); since his nominal retirement in 1994, he isprofessor emeritus of English.[3][4]
In terms of poetry, he is best known for his book-lengthepic poemComing to Jakarta (subtitled "a poem about terror"), which describes in measured, prosodically regular verse the 1965 crisis in Indonesia that resulted in theIndonesian Civil War and the deaths of as many as half a million people, in which the CIA played a decisive role.[5]
Scott is far from a stridently political poet, working always to connect the polemical to the personal. InComing to Jakarta he writes:
To have learnt from terror to see oneself as part of the enemy
can be a reassurance
In the context of this emotional and psychological side of conflict, Scott alternates between descriptions of his own life—"dressed up in polished / gaiters with a buttonhook"—and the massive violence of his principal subject. Somewhere between confessional and scholarly, his poems often contain citations in the margins.
Scott has described the book-lengthMinding the Darkness (2000) as his most important poetic work, though he concedes that "Like other long poems by older men...it toys dangerously with abstract didactic principles."[6] The work is intended as the culmination of a trilogy (also includingListening to the Candle [1992]) of whichComing to Jakarta was the inception.
Scott has written about the role of thedeep state (as opposed to the public state).[7] Rejecting the label of "conspiracy theory", he has used the phrase "deep politics" to describe his political concerns. His interest incontemporary history has spilled over into his works of poetry, some of which must contain marginal notes to explain to readers which documents or real-world news events are being referred to. His book,The Road to9/11 (2007), deals withgeopolitical context of events leading to9/11, and argues "how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or totalcover-ups of past domestic criminal acts, including, perhaps, the catastrophe of 9/11."[8] His booksThe Road to 9/11 andAmerican War Machine are available inFrench under the titlesLa Route vers le Nouveau Désordre Mondial andLa Machine de Guerre Américaine.[9] The latter was reviewed in March 2011 by Bernard Norlain, a retired Frenchfive-starGeneral of the Air Force.[10] In all, his books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Indonesian. His articles have been translated into 16 languages, including Turkish, Arabic,Persian, Chinese, and Japanese.
An aspect of Scott's work that combines both his investigating interests and his poetry is illustrated byThe Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11.[11]
In 1972,Bobbs-Merrill Company published Scott's bookThe War Conspiracy,[12] which lays out Scott's theories of why the United States went to war in Vietnam.[13]Kirkus Reviews saidWar Conspiracy is "undoubtedly one of the most important overviews to date of the subterranean reaches of the U.S. intelligence machine in Southeast Asia."[12]
Kirkus Reviews called the book a "[s]taggeringly well-researched and intelligent overview not only of theJFK assassination but also of the rise of forces underminingAmerican democracy".[16] TheKirkus review also described the book as a "kind ofRosetta stone for cracking open the deepest darkness in American politics."[16]Publishers Weekly said that Scott's "thoughtful, extremely (and sometimes excessively) detailed book promises more than it actually delivers" and that "the 'facts' on which he relies are often the result of other people's not necessarily accurate reporting".[14] According toPW, "[t]he book's most useful feature is a careful discussion of how U.S. Vietnam policy changed abruptly after Kennedy's death."[14]
In a 2004 review forThe Wilson Quarterly,Max Holland, recipient of a Studies in Intelligence Award from theCentral Intelligence Agency, wrote that "Deep Politics is an unreadable compendium of 'may haves' and 'might haves,'non sequiturs, and McCarthy-styleinnuendo, with enough documentation to satisfy any paranoid."[17] Shortly thereafter, Holland reiterated similar comments in a second piece written forReviews in American History and criticized the University of California Press' editorial committee for approving the publication of the book: "This peer approval by a major university press illustrates the boundless and utter disbelief in theWarren Report that exists even in the highest reaches of the academy, and it also reveals the gross inattention given to the subject by serious historians."[18]
Scott responded to Holland with a letter to the editor, stating: "I was disappointed to see those who have published me attacked vigorously for doing so by a major historical journal. I continue to believe that it is the job of the academy to open minds, not to close them." Scott observed that it is "gross intellectual cowardice to allege or imply falsehoods without supporting this accusation", and that "One might have thought in a 19-page attack... there would be at least a paragraph dealing with what I had actually written." He added that, "Holland demonstrates at the outset that he has done no basic research on Oswald, whom he believes to be the only important person in the case."[19]
In 2013, formerSalon editor-in-chiefDavid Talbot includedDeep Politics in his list of top seven "best books on the subject", describing the work as a "masterpiece, a meticulously detailed examination of the deep network of power that underlies the events in Dallas.... filled with provocativeinsights about how the upper circles of U.S. power actually operate."[20]
Of Scott's book,American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (2010), whistleblowerDaniel Ellsberg remarked: "I said of Scott's last brilliant take on this subject,Drugs, Oil and War, that 'It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children.' Now Scott has written an even better book. Read it!"[21]
Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files, 1994-1995: Essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba. JFK Lancer Publications (1995).ISBN978-0965658201.
Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics: Revelations from CIA Records on the Assassination of JFK. New York:Skyhorse Publishing (1995).ISBN978-1626360099.
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan. Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield (2010).ISBN978-0742555945.
The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (2013)
Introduction toAccessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities & the Report on the JFK Assassination, by Sylvia Meagher (1976).ISBN978-1620879979.
^[1]Archived 2011-04-08 at theWayback MachineLa Route vers le Nouveau Désordre Mondial,La Machine de Guerre Américaine, Editions Demi-Lune official website
^[2]Archived 2011-04-10 at theWayback Machine Review ofLa Route vers le Nouveau Désordre Mondial (The Road to 9/11) by French Air Force general Bernard Norlain
^Burnett, Thom, ed. (2006)."Key Figures".Conspiracy Encyclopedia. Collins & Brown. p. 186.ISBN9781843403814.Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. RetrievedAugust 5, 2015.
^University of California Press.Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. University of California Press.Archived from the original on December 15, 2014. RetrievedDecember 13, 2014.
^Holland, Max (June 1994). "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination".Reviews in American History.22 (2). Johns Hopkins University Press:191–209.doi:10.2307/2702884.JSTOR2702884.
^Scott, Peter Dale (September 1994). "Correspondence".Reviews in American History.23 (3). Johns Hopkins University Press:564–566.doi:10.1353/rah.1995.0071.JSTOR2703334.
"Deep Politics." Interview onKPFA (1994). Los Angeles:Pacifica Radio Archives.PRA AZ1004.