Ghost Stations of the London Underground

Brexit: Why they lost

Some of this is interesting, especially the substantive point that when Tony Blair (who on every important issue was John Major's pupil rather than his adversary) and his creepy cultural commissars tried to redraw the political map along ethical rather than pragmatic lines they made the mistake of de-legitimizing their opposition.

With the advent of the third way in the 1990s, it became fashionable in some quarters to declare that the adversarial model of politics was now obsolete – so categories of right and left were no longer needed. But even the champions of a post-political consensus cannot avoid drawing a frontier between themselves and their rivals. Since they refuse to draw it in an adversarial way, they create a moral divide, which does not permit a true agonistic debate. Tony Blair pitted the modernisers against the traditionalists; for Emmanuel Macron, the frontier is between the progressives and the conservatives.

[Chantal Mouffe in The Guardian, 'Centrist politics will not defeat Boris Johnson’s rightwing populism'] 

The result of this de-legitimization was a subsequent total lack of debate about a whole series of crucially important matters, from life issues to mass immigration to the hunting ban to gay marriage.
In the end of course the Left lost the Brexit vote mainly because they'd co-opted the European Union to the same cause as Sunday shopping and sodomy for teenagers. No attempt was made at any point to sell either a different vision of Europe (whether Christian, classical or ethnic) or to placate the opposition that had taken up the Euro-sceptic cause by conceding any ground at all on any single issue. We were simply told that we were "racist" and we were standing against the tide of history.

And in the end most people decided they'd had enough. They'd had enough of "cultural change". They'd had enough of being called "nostalgics" and "bigots" and "Little Englanders". They'd had enough of having their noses rubbed in it.

(But yes, the idea that the Left can stop populism now simply by having a "green new deal" does seem quite silly.)

So should they have turned their evidence over to the MoS? Or just given it directly to @DAaronovitch? I'm the last person to suggest that the term "fake news" is overused, and no fan of the MoS, but this sounds legit. https://t.co/NCgGNjcecT

— Man in Black (@Man_in_Black_63) October 1, 2019

Britain awake?

Are liberals going mad?

For once, I'm not just using the word 'mad' as a political term of abuse. One of the most common sorts of "madness" is simple cognitive dissonance. It occurs when something happens that challenges one of someone's deeply (and indeed sincerely) held beliefs. It's the psychological equivalent of an unstoppable force striking an immovable object. In the most extreme cases it can result in literal hallucinations. More commonly though, the subject will simply start grasping for rationalizations for why something that of course cannot be the case seemingly is the case. And of course this is something that we all do most of the time, and sometimes we do it without even realizing it. The greater the trauma the greater the challenge to one's view of reality, and the more deeply and sincerely held the the belief the more pressing the need for a satisfying explanation.

And if an explanation is not forthcoming, or if it is not sufficiently "satisfying"... well, nature abhors a vacuum.

By 'satisfying' of course I don't just mean intellectually or logically satisfying "on the facts". If a great man is suddenly and publicly murdered (such as JFK, MLK, RFK, etc.) then there's an immediate and instinctive feeling than a lone gunman (Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan) with an obscure motive (thinking Kennedy was a "fascist", a desire for fame, the younger Kennedy's support for arms to Israel) just won't do as an explanation. And thus the 1960s generation had a strong psychological need for the 1960s assassinations to be political killings and for their victims to be martyrs for civil rights. And so the men who actually killed them had to be either patsies or involved in vast, right-wing conspiracies.

In the last couple of years of course similar things have happened with Trump and Brexit. And although the Trump conspiracy theories (i.e. Trump is a Russian secret agent and Russia rigged the election to make him President) have been largely debunked, the Brexit theories are still mutating and multiplying beautifully. Stephen Daisley in The Spectator recently wrote about 'Brexit and the great liberal crack-up'.

Liberals – or at least some of them – have gone quite mad over Brexit. There is almost no intrigue they will not seize on if it might explain away the last three years. 

TV historian Dan Snow tweeted a photograph of his postal ballot and the Brexit Party leaflet he claimed had been delivered inside the same envelope. When celebrity Twitter flicks on its blue-tick sirens, craven officialdom comes running but they brought bad news.

Snow’s local council released a statement saying postal votes were handled internally and double-checked; it was ‘very unlikely’ that Brexit Party literature could have arrived in the same envelope. ‘Rather,’ they said with no little diplomacy of phrasing, ‘it is likely that the leaflet was delivered on or around the same day as the postal voting pack, which is how this misunderstanding may have arisen’. 

Snow’s initial tweet racked up 3,500 retweets; his follow-up, admitting ‘a prank or incompetence on my part’ was likely to blame, managed a mere 300.

Snow’s flakery is far from isolated. Brexit angst is driving liberals to take positions they would have recognised as reactionary and illogical not so long ago. Decrying the BBC has become de rigueur in a way once confined to Tory conference fringes and mad academic symposiums on Zionist control of the media. Some remainers have convinced themselves the Corporation is pushing not only a pro-Leave agenda, but a pro-Farage one; some now openly question Auntie’s future.

Most of these charges focus on particular presenters, interviews or formats the accuser disapproves of. More worrying are those who question the virtue of due impartiality itself, simpering babyishly that broadcasters should instead air ‘The Truth’. Happily enough, The Truth just happens to match their own worldview, perhaps with an occasional nod to benighted opponents and their wrongthink.

Liberals on this side of the Atlantic have become as accustomed as their analogues on the other side to blaming their defeats on nefarious Russian plots. That’s not to say that the Kremlin doesn’t seek to influence elections in the West (it does) or that Putin wouldn’t favour the destabilisation of a rival superstate (he would). But liberals have fashioned a soothing parable in which a few Russian troll farms are all that’s stopping the people of Sunderland from embracing their inner European integrationist.

Those who weren’t brainwashed by Boris the Bot were motivated by ethnic prejudice. A fair whack of Remainers are positive their opponents are knuckle-dragging bigots. This view seems particularly prevalent amongst Labour members, though I suppose when it comes to racism they should know. 

Tell yourself often enough that your opponents are Freddy Krueger and you will come to resent all democratic niceties and wonder if a more direct approach might be in order. Accosting politicians (the good ones) and shouting at them is A Threat to the Fabric of Our Democracy; accosting others (the bad ones) and hitting them with a milkshake is not. As a result, nominally-liberal commentators are dunking their own reputations to excuse what the police treat as common assault.

The phrase "clinically fascinating" could have been more or less invented for these people.

In reality, of course, there is no great mystery about the Brexit vote. The simple truth is that the more people learn about the European Union the less they like it, and so the same generation that had voted for membership of the Common Market in 1973 ended up voting in 2016 to leave the EU. The European Union had been growing progressively more unpopular in Britain for the better part of thirty years, and then when dear old David Cameron declined to make any sort of intellectual case for EU membership and simply decided to force the issue he underestimated both the degree of Euro-scepticism in the country and his own personal unpopularity with conservative voters. Thus on the one hand he was undone by a near total lack of hard polling data on the subject of "Europe" that weren't forty years out of date. On the other, he was utterly overwhelmed by the cumulative result of two generations' worth of "cultural change"

Said cultural problem is of course the easiest to write about and (to me at least) the most obvious, and yet it's the one that the cognitively dissonant liberals have been most keen to ignore. The "European project" had been lashed (or lashed itself) to the mast of every neo-Marxist fad of the last 50 years, from green energy to gay marriage to NATO expansion to (conversely) anti-Bush-anti-war-anti-Americanism: the same people who legalised buggery for children and banned foxhunting had wanted us to join the Euro; people whose fathers (or grandfathers) had organised the trains to Auschwitz had preached at us about how Europe was more "civilised" than the backward and barbarous United States because America still had the death penalty. And more often than not the whole package had been topped off with an implicit sneer at all things English, from the weather (because having the most temperate climate in the world is boring and depressing, presumably) to our food and drink (because wine and pizza are healthier than ale and roast beef, supposedly - and everyone eats curry now anyway, you racist!) to the clothes we wore (because by the late 1990s even James Bond was wearing Italian designer labels) to the language we used on telly (mostly Americanised, as it happens, but only ridiculous "Little Englanders" ever complained) to (of course!) our history (because the British Empire, far from being the greatest and most enlightened the world had ever seen, just happened to be the biggest and most malignant - and because the Monarchy obviously had to be modernised, if not abolished altogether).

But that hasn't stopped the mad doyens of the "liberal" Left from finding any number of alternative, more imaginative solutions to the Brexit conundrum. An eye-wateringly terrible book by Danny Dorling (a professor of geography - yes, really!) and Sally Tomlinson (who is an emeritus professor of education - WTF?) called Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire manages to blame virtually the whole Brexit vote on yes, you guessed it, nasty reactionary British imperialists who can't cope with the loss of the Empire. (It may not be the worst book about Brexit, but it certainly has a good claim to be one of them.)

As you can imagine, given that Dorling and Tomlinson blame the result of the 2016 referendum on something that ceased to exist long before Britain voted in favour of joining the Common Market in the 1973 referendum, it's somewhat light on relevant facts and logical arguments. To take just one example, there is (happily) absolutely no evidence that '71 percent of under 25s' voted to remain in the EU. The truth is that it was more like 46%, considerably less than the proportion of their parents' generation who would have voted to stay in the previous referendum and significantly less than the proportion of remainers amongst older voters in 2016. And in so far as the book has an argument, we're meant to believe that Brexit was caused by the rich getting richer thanks to austerity (because austerity makes people richer, presumably), which meant that they could make the poor work so hard that they were too weak to protest against the rich who were also stealing from them. (Or is "austerity" a form of theft? I'm not sure.)

In fact according to Dorling and Tomlinson the Brexit vote was all because we allowed 'a handful of billionaires [imperial nostalgics all, apparently] to poison [our] national conversation with disinformation'.* But how did those billionaires manage that, one wonders, when most tabloids came out for Remain in the referendum and the overwhelming majority of the population don't read newspapers anyway? We may never know. (By 2016 the proportion who did still read the 'papers was down to 29% and the number who actually took a regular paper was down to just 6 million, or about 10%.)

So what can you do? Mysteries that aren't even mysteries require new and more ingenious conspiracies to explain them. '[H]ow can a Britain of 2019 see a rise in death-rates, child poverty & infant mortality', ponders this review. Well, gee, maybe it's got something to do with our ageing population and women having babies much too late - which, it may shock you to hear, may, just may have something to do with house prices, which may, just may have something to do with supply and demand, which may, just may have something to do with immigration. But then that might suggest that immigration isn't just a non-issue cooked up by racialists and imperial nostalgia junkies to hoodwink the horrible hateful white working class.

In reality, of course, the biggest British imperialists of the middle of the twentieth century, whether they came from the liberal Right (such as Churchill) or from the "moderate" Left (such as Sir Oswald Mosley) were very much in favour of the European project. It was cranks and gadflies like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell (both committed anti-Americans) who came out swinging against European integration.

But then that of course is the whole point of cognitive dissonance. Who needs facts when your liberal beliefs are obviously so much preferable?

UPDATE: If you have to ask the question...

*This is according to someone with the name Joris Luyendijk. (Make of that what you will.)

The Nazi Legacy

Not so long ago I remember there was an anti-baldness shampoo advertised on the telly which, like several other products at the time, made a positive virtue of being German. In other words it followed very much in the footsteps of car manufacturers such as Audi and of course Volkswagen (of which of course Audi has been a subsidiary since 1966) in proclaiming loud and clear that its German-ness was a mark of quality. In a country like England, which still has a passion for Holocaust movies and documentaries about the Battle of Britain, this was of course quite remarkable. But just imagine what other products could try the same trick.

Let's start with cars then. Not only was Volkswagen famously Hitler's favourite car manufacturer, but he actually named its most famous model - 'the Beetle'. And whether or not you drive a German car, you're quite likely to be insured by a German car insurance company - namely Allianz, whose director general in the early 1930s Kurt Schmitt went on to become Hitler’s Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 until January 1935*. Schmitt also became a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS, rising to the rank of Brigadeführer, the equivalent of a one-star general. Eduard Hilgard, a member of the board of Allianz, became head of the Reich Group for Insurance in 1934. He represented the insurance industry in a conference summoned by Hermann Göring after the November Pogrom of 1938. Hilgard reported on the material damages caused during the Kristallnacht Pogrom and the estimated sums insurance companies had to cover.

Of course it was not merely German car manufacturers who invested in the Nazi war machine! Albert Speer himself acknowledged that the Blitzkrieg of 1939 would not have succeeded without the support of General Motors - or, more specifically, its German subsidiary Opel. And of course Ford too supported the Nazis - although his support was ideological and only in their early years. Time magazine though went so far as to make Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938. (The cover was an anti-Hitler cartoon by a German Catholic exile, but the magazine's founder, rather more ambiguously, referred to Hitler as the year's most influential man 'for better or worse'.)

But where better to drive your Nazi car than on a Nazi autobahn - on which, thankfully for the European economy, there is still no speed limit. At least one of Hitler's dreams lives on - even if it is the same as Jeremy Clarkson's! And if you need to refuel, there'll probably be an ExxonMobil, Chevron or BP somewhere along the way - the successor companies of Standard Oil, which was the Nazi war-machine's most important fuel manufacturer.

Not that it's just cars, of course! Various industries found much to be gained by cooperating with the Nazis. During the war years Siemens, who now make the trains I go to work on in the morning, were making switches for military use and even had their own slave labour camp actually inside Auschwitz. The most notorious beneficiary of the Nazi regime though was of course the chemical industry. Kodak and Agfa, who nowadays make cameras, and BASF, who make pesticides, as well as the pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-Aventis and Bayer - whom we have to thank for first producing aspirin - were all members of the German chemical conglomerate I G Farben, whose directors after the War eventually ended up being put on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

Nazi culture has in fact survived in various other ways as well. Nobody had heard of Hugo Boss before he was chosen to design those beautiful SS uniforms. Nowadays he's one of the modern fashion world's biggest brands. Ditto IBM, until they helped to compute the numbers of Jews being rounded up during the so-called "Holocaust". The Swedish founder of Ikea too was also a Nazi sympathiser. And Fanta, which is nowadays simply an orange-flavoured version of Coca-Cola, was actually invented by Coca-Cola's German distributor as a wartime alternative to the (famously/notoriously American) soft drink because at the time they couldn't get the ingredients for the Real Thing. The German film company UFA, which distributed such Nazi hits as Triumph of the Will, is still going strong today - though it is now owned (ultimately) by the Nazi publishing giant Bertelsmann, who also own Random House. The Nazi holiday camp Prora has recently been reopened.

So, you can still wear Nazi designer clothes and use a Nazi computer whilst working for a Nazi investment bank. At the end of the day you can return from the office on a Nazi train to a home furnished with Nazi furniture. When you go on holiday you can drive a Nazi car, insured by a Nazi insurance company and fuelled at a Nazi petrol-station by the side of a Nazi road, and you can then stay the night in a Nazi youth hostel. You can even take your holiday snaps using a Nazi camera. If it all gets too much for you then why not take a Nazi painkiller and relax by reading a Nazi book published by a Nazi publishing house or by watching a Nazi film distributed by a Nazi production company - whilst sipping a Nazi soft drink.

So, where's all this headed? Well, in all probability the Euro-sceptics really have been right all along. The "new" Europe will, in fact, end up looking very much like it was always going to - at least from the 1930s onwards. Even such modern and politically correct causes as "ethnic diversity" nowadays have their own Nazi heritage. Many European ethnic minorities are today represented by FUEN, which was originally founded in 1949 to support displaced Germans who had supported Hitler but found themselves on the wrong side of the new borders that had been drawn up by the Allies. A similar organisation is the YEN or Youth of European Nationalities organisation. And if you're a budding young politician who has successfully contributed to the "harmony" of Europe's different peoples and nations then you may even end up being a candidate for the Robert Schuman Prize, which is presented by the Alfred Toepfer foundation, which was itself founded by (you've guessed it!) a German entrepreneur with close ties to the Nazi regime.

UPDATE: And if you fancy some Nazi running kit and training shoes (or at least some trainers made by a company founded by and named after a man who used to make jackboots for the Wehrmacht) then there's always Adidas. That's 'Adi' as in 'Adolf', the Adolf in question being Nazi Party member Adi Dassler (after whom the company was named). His brother Rudolf or 'Rudi' Dassler, who was also a Nazi, went on to found his own footwear manufacturing company, called Ruda - later renamed Puma.

*Schmitt's successor as Economics Minister was Hjalmar Schacht, who had been deputy director of Dresdner Bank. Dresdner Bank was also complicit in the Nazi regime, although since the war it has thrived and prospered, now owning investment bank Kleinwort Benson. Another bank that was useful to the Third Reich was Chase Bank.

Matty Lee

Looking patriotic and rather lovely!

The Purging of Paul Joseph Watson

It may make me even more of a heartless, callous, mean-spirited right-wing bastard, but... it's hard for me to feel too sorry for Paul Joseph Watson. At the end of the day, unlike however many other hundreds of thousands of YouTubers, he's one of the ones who's landed on his feet and (apparently, according to that recent, slightly blubby documentary) he lives off the proceeds of his wordsmithying in quite a nice flat in South London. (Would that we could all make the Internet work for us like that!)

Having said that though, there are three points very much to be said in his favour:

1. He is very, very good at what does. (I'd rather listen to his angry ranty [Sheffield-born] Battersea-boi screeds than watch most other things on YouTube, let alone television.)
2. He does happen to be right about most things. (OK, I haven't listened to all his stuff. For all I know, he may once have touched some political live wire to do with US government pedo pizza parlours or whatever. And no, I'm not a free speech, gay rights and Paki-bashing libertarian-type either. But to most extents and purposes he's impressively perceptive. By the standards of the modern British right, he's surprisingly "sound".)
3. And yes, the most important thing he's right about is the matter of whether or not modern social media platform providers have the right and/or responsibility to censor what we say (and think) via their services. (Apparently it's all to do with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which some Republicans are supposed to be trying to reform. Or something.)

Because yes, that last one is a genuine effing problem. If President Trump doesn't have the right to block lippy followers on Twitter, why should Twitter have the right to ban users just because they don't like the cut of their jib - provided, that is to say, what they're being banned for isn't actually criminal. And then again, on the subject of criminality, how can Google claim they're just providing a service (essentially no different from the US Postal Service) that just happens to be abused by criminals from time to time (for example when nonces are sharing kiddie-porn) and yet reserve the right to censor YouTube (for example... if they don't like the cut of your jib).

And that of course brings us to PJW's recent problems with the Magic Face-Book. Watson has written up his own account of being banned by Facebook on Human Events and given a reasonably intelligent interview about it to sp!ked. And James Delingpole has come out swinging for the lad at Breitbart (in the wake, it has to be said, of The Donald himself on Twitter), declaring with characteristic British understatement that 'Silicon Valley censorship poses one of the biggest threats to Western Civilisation in the world today'. (It's up there with 'fundamentalist Islam, China, eco-fascism, neo-Marxism, and so on', apparently.*)

As it happens, I think PJW is right.

This is nothing less than election meddling. Everyone Facebook has banned was instrumental in getting Trump elected. This is punishment. This is a political purge. This has nothing to do with ‘hate’ or ‘violating terms of service.’

Well quite!

It just remains to be seen (a) whether or not it will work and (b) whether the likes of Donald Trump and his "conservative" allies will do anything about it.

*Demographic obliteration doesn't quite make the grade for Dellers's threat matrix, presumably. (Not to the same extent as the world 'badly needs' conservative jokes and memes, at any rate!)

The X-Files: The Shape of the Conspiracy - Part One: Sceptics and Secret Smokers

Carl Busch and Ronald Pakula - the assassin and the liar?

The "shape" of the conspiracy in the early episodes of The X-Files is actually remarkably simple. Mulder and Scully go out to investigate UFOs, and Mulder repeatedly stubs his toe against the US military, who are responsible (a) for recovering crashed alien spaceships and harvesting their technology and (b) for keeping this secret from the public - which explicitly is all for the sake of national security. Governments have the right to keep their military secrets under lock and key, after all, and the inference is left dangling that if the public were to find out that "we are not alone" there would be mass panic. And if that also means covering up that the aliens are abducting human children and doing obscene experiments on them then that's just too bad! (We later find out that the abductions in the first episode were actually all about turning humans into super-soldiers, so we can perhaps legitimately infer some background military interest there as well. But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves!)

All this is more or less confirmed later on. We find out in 'Redux' that in 1947 the Majestic 12 (MJ12) organisation was set up by the US Government to investigate the Roswell crash, and by inference we can connect the dots with other "military" episodes such as 'Deep Throat', 'Fallen Angel' (and its sequels 'Tempus Fugit' and 'Max'), 'E.B.E.', 'Little Green Men' and of course the 'Dreamland' episodes, in which we actually meet named MJ12 agent Morris Fletcher (not to mention his wife and children).

So far, so simple! No hybrids or clones, no Alien Bounty Hunters or Black Oil, no Syndicate or Rebel Colonists!

So, what then of the X-Files?

We're invited to imagine at the end of the pilot episode that Mulder's superiors at the FBI want to shut him down partly because they view him as an embarrassing crank who'll give the Bureau a bad name and partly because they see the X-Files themselves as a waste of money. It's only right at the end, with the appearance of the Smoking Man (the latterly named Carl Gerhard Busch, aka C.G.B. Spender) and his Spielbergian government warehouse in the bowels of the Pentagon, that we first get a suggestion that beyond the sceptics in the FBI there are other government agents out there who are actually rather interested in Mulder's work. The CSM clearly works for the Pentagon, who are apparently content for the time being to allow Mulder to investigate alien and/or "paranormal" activity on earth provided (a) it can all be kept under wraps and (b) they get to keep any physical evidence he discovers. (We see the Smoking Man filing away Ray Soames's tracking device, and in the first season's final episode he does the same with the alien foetus from Fort Marlene. And in the second season a not dissimilar fate awaits Dr Banton himself in 'Soft Light', thanks to Mulder's connexion with X - who is supposedly Mulder's contact at the Pentagon, not to mention his friend in the FBI, even though it's not always clear which of them is working for the other.)

In the second episode, the military situation is fleshed out, and we discover not only that the air force are flying their own UFOs but also that they're well up to date with the old government mind-control experiments. Indeed, they can pinch your most recent memories right out of your head if they want to. And we're introduced to another military secret agent who is also interested in Mulder's work and who, like the CSM, is also (we later learn) free to come and go at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

In fact Deep Throat is even more interested in Mulder than the Smoking Man is. In fact he's willing to provide Mulder with inside information, the implication being that Ronald Pakula fancies himself as a latter day Mark Felt and that Mulder and (presumably) Scully are going to be his Woodward and Bernstein. He wants to expose the government conspiracy that he's been involved in "for a long, long time", but he'll need their credibility in order to do so. And he's well aware what will happen to him if he's caught.

For a few episodes at least, this arrangement holds. Deep Throat gives Mulder some scraps of background on a couple of military projects that people weren't supposed to know about (a mad computer, a creepy kiddy cloning programme, etc.*) He also winds him up something rotten by helping him land a couple of really big extraterrestrial fish (in 'Fallen Angel' and 'E.B.E.'). And he gets back... what exactly? It's worth bearing in mind that he initially approaches Mulder not to give him inside knowledge but to warn him off investigating Ellens Air Force Base. The quid pro quo may as well be that Mulder will get inside information provided he's prepared at times not to dig too deeply. So, is Deep Throat's job to control Mulder as much as it is to encourage him? (To be fair, that's often how UFO researchers have been treated by government agents in real life.) All we can say for certain is that he's testing and training Mulder and gaining both his trust (in a world where one should trust no one) and his personal loyalty (which, in a world of conspiracies within conspiracies, is an important thing).

We find out at the end of 'Fallen Angel' though that Pakula isn't just helping Mulder in secret. He's also protecting him from on high. When Section Chief McGrath asks him why he's protecting Mulder, he replies enigmatically

I appreciate your frustration, but you and I both know Mulder's work is a singular passion - poses a most unique dilemma. But his occasional insubordination is in the end, far less dangerous ... [t]han having him exposed to the wrong people. What he knows...what he thinks he knows... Always keep your friends close, Mr. McGrath... but keep your enemies closer.

By implication then, Pakula is telling Mulder that he's helping him to get at the truth whilst at the same time reassuring the FBI that it's better to keep Mulder on a short leash (or at the very least to have him inside the tent pissing out) - working under the supervision of a section chief (not to mention people like the Smoking Man), writing up X-Files that can then be safely buried away, and, of course, having Scully "spying" on him the whole time. Who are "the wrong people"? Again by implication (and it's a daring double bluff by Deep Throat) they're probably people like Deep Throat himself. (Of course, also by implication, Pakula is also admitting to McGrath that the military does indeed have secrets that it would be dangerous for Mulder to uncover.)

The point of the scene apparently though is simply to show that Deep Throat, like the Smoking Man, is an important figure at the FBI as well as in the "defence establishment". The assumption always seems to be that they belong to the "executive branch", which for some reason in the X-Files universe is far more influential than it is in real life, so presumably these people have enough clout with the Clintons and/or Janet Reno to be able to do and get effectively whatever they want. (According to X in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone, Mr Mulder. The question is when they'll use it.')

Of course in 'Fallen Angel' Mulder is to all extents and purposes working as Deep Throat's secret agent, spying for Pakula personally on an MJ12 UFO salvage and containment operation. We learn later on that the Syndicate have done a secret deal with the colonists, but the rest of the MJ12's policy is still to shoot first and ask questions later. So this may well be Deep Throat's cover plan if and when he gets found out by the Smoking Man - to claim that Mulder is his asset rather than vice versa.

The first real suggestion that Deep Throat himself is giving Mulder the runaround though (after a certain amount of unsubtle, dramatically ironic foreshadowing) comes in 'E.B.E.' Deep Throat is giving Mulder the truth in this story, but he's also giving him lies. Is he misdirecting him from time to time in order to protect him - because he claims that he's protecting Mulder from truths that (by inference) Mulder is not ready to know? Possibly! But he also tells Mulder that "they" are closely observing him electronically and can "still hear" him. The suggestion then, presumably, is that when Deep Throat says he lied to Mulder to protect him from "the truth", the real truth that he's trying to protect Mulder from is that he suspects that he, Deep Throat, has been rumbled, and so he is now bluffing his colleagues by openly (i.e. in Mulder's apartment) handing Mulder disinformation. Whichever way one slices it though, the point of the story is that by this point Deep Throat has got cold feet and therefore to some extent is prepared to help his military colleagues mislead Mulder. (And arguably this allows him to save Mulder's own arse at the end of the episode when - yet again, implicitly - his colleagues trust him enough to apprehend Mulder and then let him go again.) By the end, however, Mulder doesn't know which lie to believe, however much he wants to.

One subject about which Deep Throat may be telling the truth, on the other hand, is what is later referred to (in the Smoking Man's apocryphal 'Musings', that is†) as UNSCR 1013:

After the Roswell incident in 1947, even at the brink of the Cold War, there was an ultrasecret conference attended by the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Britain, both Germanies, France and it was agreed that should any Extraterrestrial Biological Entity survive a crash, the country that held that being would be responsible for its extermination.

Conspicuously missing from this little list of countries are the three "former Axis" nations represented by the officials who end up calling the CSM (and by implication Garnet) in 'Anasazi', specifically Italy, Japan and (presumably, rather than Germany!) Austria. In '731' we learn that the Japanese government is prepared to do a deal with Dr Shiro Zama to take on his still living human-alien hybrid (and, presumably, sponsor his research). So one can speculate that the reason these governments are interested in the MJ12 files is that unlike the goody-two-shoes UNSC permanent member nations they are still officially open to the possibility of doing deals with extraterrestrials. (Have they even, albeit unwittingly, been sponsoring the Syndicate from afar?)

The next time we see the CSM, in 'Tooms', he seems to have graduated up the food chain from Section Chief Blevins's desk to that of Assistant Director Walter Skinner. It's confirmed that, unlike Mulder's superiors at the FBI, the CSM's concern with the X-Files is not that he thinks they're a waste of time and money but that Mulder may be too good at what he does - getting near the truth.

It's only in the very last episode of the first season though that we really get the first incontrovertible hints that there's more to "Government denies knowledge" than just the MJ12. For the first time it is implied that the Smoking Man is both of the Government and yet somehow not of it, and that within the official Government's official cover-up "conspiracy" there is another conspiracy even more ruthless, with its own even darker purposes. Deep Throat seems to imply that Dr Berube's experiments in human-alien hybridization are being shut down simply because they got out of hand - they were "too successful", and when one of the test subjects not only survived the experiments but was found to be running around outside alive and well, it was time for the military in "Los Alamos" to bring them to an end. But he also talks about 'so-called "black organizations"' and '[g]roups within groups ['[i]nside the intelligence community'] conducting covert activities, unknown at the highest levels of power'. In other words, this is the Syndicate in all but name. He seems to be trying to suggest that he doesn't really know about the actual Syndicate, though we can guess from what we find out in later episodes that he is quite probably a member. (Presumably he wouldn't want Mulder to associate him with them too closely when the latter does eventually find out about them. And of course it's also possible that Deep Throat knows or suspects that the real reason that Purity Control is being shut down is to stop the Colonists from finding out its real purpose - i.e. following on from his old friend "Bill Mulder's project" - to find a vaccine for the Black Oil. Perhaps it's for Bill's sake that he doesn't tell Fox any of this just yet - and of course he'll never get the chance to later!)

Indeed several things point to this being an operation by what we will later come to know as the Syndicate:

1. we will later discover that although the 'Purity Control' experiments probably were originally about creating super-soldiers for the military, after 1973 they came to be about: (i) creating the means to turn the Syndicate (and their families) into human-alien hybrids so that when alien colonization begins they will be immune to the Black Oil (aka Purity) and thus survive the colonization process (and not have monsters jumping out of their tummies), whilst at the same time "hiding in plain sight" (from their fellow humans, especially any who've survived without being stung into becoming hosts for alien foetuses) in order to serve as a "Vichy Government" for the invading extraterrestrials; and/or (ii) creating a vaccine for the Black Oil that will allow them and the human race generally to resist the colonization process;
2. we will also later discover that cover-ups of this sort, both for "the Government" and for the Syndicate, are almost always delegated to CSM's group Garnet, so the Crew Cut Man and his and his fellow nameless "men in black" goons are almost certainly working for Busch††;
3. Deep Throat's little speech to Scully just before he dies about 'That's the kind of people you're dealing with!' suggests (as does his dying 'Trust no one.') that there's more going on here than just "Government" secrets - because these are the sorts of people who would happily betray the US government in order to save their own skins; and
4. fourthly, it's not explained why the alien foetus that Scully manages to abscond with from Fort Marlene then ends up in the CSM's Pentagon storage facility.

On this last point, it's just possible that what we're seeing here in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' is the first real evidence that although the CSM has a cushty billet at the Pentagon and although he and Deep Throat have various mysterious ways and means of pulling strings both in the military and at the FBI, the two of them have actually been loyal to their own "government within a government". In closing down Dr Berube's experiments and bumping off a man who by leaking to Mulder (whether it was misinformation or the truth!) had become a liability, it's the Smoking Man's people who have ended up getting their hands on '[t]he wellspring ... the original tissue'. Although in 'One Son' it's slightly retconned (because apparently the alien foetus did end up back at Fort Marlene), the final scene, mirroring as it does not just the final scene of the pilot episode but also that of Raiders of the Lost Ark, leaves hanging a very heavy inference that the Cigarette Smoking Man is someone we will see again.

*In 'Young at Heart' Deep Throat talks about "the Government" being interested in the dodgy doctor's research, and Mulder, who has never seen him before, speculates that the CSM is from the CIA. But the fact that both of them are interested in the case, and the perfectly reasonable suggestion some have made that the military might want the secret of youth for their super-soldier project, would suggest that "the Government" even in this episode means the Pentagon. (OTOH we also learn, albeit from the man himself in 'E.B.E.', that Deep Throat is ex-CIA - and we know from JFK that you never really leave "the Agency".)
†In real life UNSCR 1013 is a fairly boring resolution passed in 1995 about arms flows in Rwanda.
††The CSM is clearly the head of Garnet, but as such he evidently has two "hats": sometimes, when working directly for the MJ12, he can call upon military personnel (such as as in 'Anasazi', when he's trying to recover the stolen MJ12 files, and in 'Apocrypha', when he's moving a UFO that's mentioned in the MJ12 files); otherwise, he uses his own MIBs such as Krycek and Luis Cardinal, who are (supposed to be) loyal directly to him.