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Plan 156 from Intra-Space

Balok

Plan 93 from Outer Space

"Like a vast network , the iridescent tendrils of our occult complex spread across the land, linking such centres as are located in California, Florida, North Carolina, Chicago, and New York. These dynamic centres of Thelema receive their vivifying current through our World centre in England." Such was the message of Janice Ayers in 'Sothis' I;2, in September 1977.

...

Crowley's erstwhile secretary Kenneth Grant (who claims to have formed a link to his 'angel' Aossic, and so calls himself Aossic, Ossik, or A'ashik) has - together with his followers - developed a more or less comprehensible outline of a 'new' cosmos on this basis. Interested readers are referred to Grant's books, many of which remain in print. [7] In this article we shall be concentrating on Grant's resulting theoretical expansion of Crowley's demonology. The latter never seems to have regarded angels or demons as very definite beings; for him, they ruled the material world, and were useful for things like getting hold of money. Under Grant's influence they were elaborated into complex transcendental schemes of alternate dimensions outside the circles of space and time. "The terrestrial vehicle is an outcropping in three dimensions of the Angel: the Angel is the fountain of living waters which empowers the terrestrial vehicle." [8] Through contact with this fountain, the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) opens the gate of remembrance of our supernatural reality, what Grant calls "the continuum often glyphed as the Goddess of which we are terrestrial facets." [9] Grant and his adherents 'remember' the origins of Be-ing [10] and have constructed a remarkably complicated collection of metaphors drawn from sources such as the Qabalah, H.P. Lovecraft, [11] Salvador Dalí, Michael P. Bertiaux, Austin Osman Spare, [12] Lemuria, Atlantis, extraterrestrial visitors from Sirius, the promotion of at least one new 'New Aeon', and a whole shoal of 'revelations'. 

Grant placed great emphasis on the development of a IX° 'dream-control' technique, borrowed from Thomas Lake Harris, and introduced into the Crowleyan O.T.O. by Ida Nellidorf under the name of "eroto-comatose lucidity." Before going to sleep the sexual energies were first raised by constant sexual stimulation without orgasm, and then concentrated onto a talisman bearing a requisite symbol, so that in its dreams, the aroused libido would copulate with a dream-partner. The talisman would thus become magically charged, and would make a particular wish - be it for gold or Gnosis - come true.

...

The Cult of Lam and Michael Staley, Grant's London amanuensis.

The 1919 portrait of Lam drawn by Crowley came into Grant's possession in 1945. Crowley never published any explanation of the image, and this allowed for the development of a distinct 'Lam cult'. For this article, Michael Staley provided the following detail in June 2001: "The point is that Crowley says nothing about Lam in his published writing; whether or not there is anything unpublished, I don't know. Interestingly, I have come across an account by an American visitor to Crowley's flat in Jermyn Street, London, in 1941 or thereabouts, who says that the portrait [he doesn't say who it is, but his description of it - he found it repulsive - leaves no doubt] was on Crowley's wall. When the visitor asked who or what it was, Crowley said that it was a portrait of his guru."

In the 1990's this cult (described as the "quintessence of the Typhonian O.T.O. tradition") was supposed to be a manifestation of the Hidden praeternatural/supernatural God or Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), who united the natural with the supernatural. Contact with this HGA was identical to an entry into the Aeon of Ma'at, or the extra-terrestrial continuum. [17] "In my view Lam is the mask of a dynamic state of [extra-terrestrial] [18] gnosis, rather than simply an entity." [19] Staley interested himself in Lam as a state of Gnosis, although he admitted that this state could sometimes also take the nature of an entity's mask; but he would break through these masks.

Crowley's (feminine?) Hoor-paar-kraat (Set) was again understood as the HGA; in the Tetragrammaton YHVH Ra-Hoor-Khuit (Horus) corresponded with the Vav, and Hoor-paar-kraat to the Heh final. "This identifies Hoor-paar-kraat with the Aeon of Ma'at." [20] Lam 'sits' in the Muladhara Chakra's Bija-Mantra, where the Fiery Serpent (or Kundalini) waits to uncoil. The 'optical' union with Lam took place in Lam's eyes, the region of the Ajna-Chakra (and also the seat of the will). [21] According to Crowley this corresponded to a sex-magical act in which one became conscious of the Ajna and Muladhara Chakras during orgasm. [22]

Contact with the HGA was defined as the stage of "reaching critical mass" after doing intensive Abramelin or Liber Samekh exercises. The HGA is the sum total of experience, gathered into this critical mass and then able to take on spontaneous form. [23]

This contact with the HGA - whether experienced in concrete exterior form, or as the aspirant's spiritual Higher Self - corresponded with the start of 'occult puberty'. [24] For an occultist, it meant that there was no longer any distinction between inner and outer. Evolution demanded that one cast off such old mental habits, [25] and that humanity should become non-human, as in Crowley's A*A*, where a kind of superman hatched from the Egg or Babe of the Abyss (that is, the concept of dissolution in occult Qabalah, the bridge between human and divine).

Freed of Ego, only this new human creature can help human evolution, and perhaps even that of the universe. ['Babe of the Abyss'; the whole point being that the Kabbalistic Abyss is the ultimate womb from which the soul is born before progressing to the Supernal Triad of sefiroth (Kether, Chokmah, and Binah) on the Tree of Life. After being born from the Abyss, it first reaches Binah, the 'Magna Mater'.]

For Staley, magic is primarily a matter of communicating with non-human entities. However, such entities are not to be found outside human beings, as man and the universe are one - both are aspects of the universe. [26] Staley found better comprehension of this through the Sanskrit concept of Advaita or "not-divided", and in the Prajnaparamita-Buddhist "Sunyavada". At one stage Staley worked with a Lam-Serpent Sadhana, in which the Lam-Serpent was visualised as the Kundalini surmounted by Lam's head. [27] This Lam-Serpent uncoiled itself along the sushumna, while the chakras were visualised, and the Bija-Mantras were vibrated. According to Staley the 'secret' of sex-magic resided solely in the fact "that matter is malleable and can be influenced by sustained, intense visualisation; the potency of this visualisation can be increased by the directed sexual current." [28]

The HGA functioned as the mediator and boundary station between the terrestrial and the infinite. With the HGA projected as the Egregore outside the individuality, the HGA can be used to communicate with the 'Secret Chiefs'; using the occult technique of 'Assuming a God-Form' one becomes an angel/egregore among other angels/egregores.

...

26. In Thelemic terms, the magician expels his blood into the chalice of Babalon. Babalon (or Venus, see Crowley's "Vision and the Voice", 1909) has been the (sometimes masculine) Scarlet Whore of Revelation; her number, 156, is equated Kabbalistically with 'constant copulation' and 'samadhi'. 

(excerpt)

Full Article and Hyperlinks:

http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/lam.htm

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"Erase This God Damn Thing"

Unprecedented Look Inside Scientology's Culture of Violence

This account comes from executives who for decades were key figures in Scientology's powerful inner circle. Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the highest-ranking executives to leave the church, are speaking out for the first time.

Two other former executives who defected also agreed to interviews with the St. Petersburg Times: De Vocht, who for years oversaw the church's spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, and Amy Scobee, who helped create Scientology's celebrity network, which caters to the likes of John Travolta and Tom Cruise.

One by one, the four defectors walked away from the only life they knew. That Rathbun and Rinder are speaking out is a stunning reversal because they were among Miscavige's closest associates, Haldeman and Ehrlichman to his Nixon.

Now they provide an unprecedented look inside the upper reaches of the tightly controlled organization. They reveal:

• Physical violence permeated Scientology's international management team. Miscavige set the tone, routinely attacking his lieutenants. Rinder says the leader attacked him some 50 times.

Rathbun, Rinder and De Vocht admit that they, too, attacked their colleagues, to demonstrate loyalty to Miscavige and prove their mettle.

• Staffers are disciplined and controlled by a multi­layered system of "ecclesiastical justice.'' It includes publicly confessing sins and crimes to a group of peers, being ordered to jump into a pool fully clothed, facing embarrassing "security checks'' or, worse, being isolated as a "suppressive person.''

At the pinnacle of the hierarchy, Miscavige commands such power that managers follow his orders, however bizarre, with lemming-like obedience.

• Church staffers covered up how they botched the care of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who died after they held her 17 days in isolation at Clearwater's Fort Harrison Hotel.

Rathbun, who Miscavige put in charge of dealing with the fallout from the case, admits that he ordered the destruction of incriminating evidence. He and others also reveal that Miscavige made an embarrassing miscalculation on McPherson's Scientology counseling.

• With Miscavige calling the shots and Rathbun among those at his side, the church muscled the IRS into granting Scientology tax-exempt status. Offering fresh perspective on one of the church's crowning moments, Rathbun details an extraordinary campaign of public pressure backed by thousands of lawsuits.

• To prop up revenues, Miscavige has turned to long-time parishioners, urging them to buy material that the church markets as must-have, improved sacred scripture.

Church officials deny the accusations. Miscavige never hit a single church staffer, not once, they said.

...

"But I believe these abuses need to end … This rot being instigated from inside Scientology actually is more destructive to the Scientology movement than anything external to it.''

BEATINGS: Random, whimsical

At 49, Miscavige is fit and tanned, his chiseled good looks accented by intense blue eyes. His frame is on the short side at 5 feet 5, but solid, with a matching, vise-like handshake.

The voice, resonant and strong, can transfix a crowd of thousands. Many call him "COB," because he is chairman of the board of the entity responsible for safeguarding Scientology, founded by L. Ron Hubbard in 1954.

"He is one of the most capable, intelligent individuals I've ever met," Rathbun said. "But L. Ron Hubbard says the intelligence scale doesn't necessarily line up with the sanity scale. Adolf Hitler was brilliant. Stalin was brilliant. They were geniuses. But they were also on a certain level stark, staring mad."

Rathbun, Rinder, Scobee and De Vocht say they participated in and witnessed madness, from musical chairs to repeated physical abuse.

What triggered Miscavige's outbursts? The victims usually had no clue.

"If it wasn't the answer he wanted to hear, he'd lose it," De Vocht said. "If it was contrary to how he thought, he'd lose it. If he found it to be smart aleck, or it was a better answer than he had, he would lose it."

Rathbun and Rinder list the executives they saw Miscavige attack:

Marc Yager: At least 20 times.

Guillaume Lesevre: At least 10 times.

Ray Mithoff: Rathbun said Miscavige "would regularly hit this guy open-handed upside the head real hard and jar him. Or grab him by the neck and throw him on the floor."

Norman Starkey: "Right in the parking lot, (Miscavige) just beat the living f--- out of him, got him on the ground and then started kicking him when he was down,'' Rathbun said.

He said he saw Rinder "get beat up at least a dozen times just in those last four years … some of them were pretty gruesome."

Said Rinder: "Yager was like a punching bag. So was I."

He added: "The issue wasn't the physical pain of it. The issue was the humiliation and the domination. ... It's the fact that the domination you're getting — hit in the face, kicked — and you can't do anything about it. If you did try, you'd be attacking the COB.

"It was random and whimsical. It could be the look on your face. Or not answering a question quickly. But it always was a punishment.''

Scobee said Miscavige never laid a hand on her or any other woman, but she witnessed many attacks, including the time the leader choked Rinder until his face turned purple. Rinder confirmed that account.

De Vocht estimated that from 2003 to 2005, he saw Miscavige strike staffers as many as 100 times.

Rathbun, Rinder and De Vocht admit that they, in turn, hit others. In January 2004, Rathbun pummeled Rinder and had to be pried off by several church staffers.

"Yes, that incident happened," Rinder said. "It wasn't the only time that Marty or I was involved in some form of physical violence with people."

He recalled holding a church staffer against a wall by the collar and pressing into his throat.

Rathbun said he attacked many people, many times, including throwing Lesevre across a table, boxing Starkey's ears, and tackling Yager down a flight of stairs — all, he said, on Miscavige's orders. He said he threw another staffer against the hood of a cab at Los Angeles International Airport. As a crowd gathered to watch, he cocked his fist and told him to improve his attitude.

De Vocht said he "punched a couple of guys" during one of many sessions where managers confessed their wrongdoings to their peers, a gathering that got raucous and physical. Embarrassed about it now, he says he easily rationalized it then: "If I don't attack I'm going to be attacked. It's a survival instinct in a weird situation that no one should be in."

The four defectors each said the leader established a culture that encouraged physical violence.

"It had become the accepted way of doing things," Rinder said. "If COB did it, it was okay for everybody else to do it, too."

Rinder said Rathbun was Miscavige's enforcer. "If Dave didn't want to go do any dirty work himself, he sent Marty to do it for him."

Rathbun doesn't deny it. It's difficult to get the truth, he said, "unless you talk to somebody who's got some dirt on their hands. And I freely admit I got dirt on my hands, and I feel terrible about it. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing."

Rathbun wasn't exempt from Miscavige's attacks. "He once grabbed me by the neck and banged my head against the wall.''

Nobody fought back.

(excerpts) 

Full Article:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1012148.ece

"Miracle Studies" Dismisses Schucman-Thetford MK-ULTRA Connections as "Conspiracy Rumors"

Regarding Conspiracy Rumors about Dr. William Thetford, the CIA and A Course in Miracles

By Joe R. Jesseph, Ph.D. Author: A Primer of Psychlogy According to A Course in Miracles [Coordinator of Miracle Studies]

...

One of the more bizarre forms of controversy to develop relative to ACIM in recent years (circa 2006) has to do with the suspicion that the Course is the result of a CIA plot -- a mind-control conspiracy. As is often the case in conspiracy thinking, some people have taken certain facts, combined them and come up with preposterous conclusions. In this case certain conspiracy theorists have added the facts that William Thetford was once employed by the CIA, that the CIA has funded psychological research and that some of that research was conducted by Thetford and Schucman, to concluded that the Course, which by its very nature is deeply threatening to the ego, must have been the result of a CIA plot. Contributing to this assertion is the fact that indeed some of the psychological research funded by the CIA was directed at discovering techniques for manipulating human beings, and that some of that "mind control" research was conducted in an unethical manner.

In the fall of 2006 I was asked about these kinds of assertions as found on a Web site with the headline: "ACIM: Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas! The MKULTRA Milieu Surrounding the 'Scribing' of A Course In Miracles." (MKULTRA is an acronym for a CIA program which funded the research of a very large number of prominent psychologists back in the 1960's, some of that research later found to have been conducted unscrupulously.)

The Web site in question contained wildly outlandish statements and suggestions intended to establish guilt by association -- a strategy that a trial lawyer or tabloid journalist might use, but not a very credible approach to serious, intelligent, scholarly consideration. None of us who are familiar with the facts about Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford, particularly those who knew them personally, could possibly take seriously the claims made on that Web site. However, I could see how people not familiar with the historical facts about the Course and its scribing could take such claims seriously, especially if they are orthodox in religious belief, already skeptical about the phenomenon of channeling, and even more so if they are not familiar with words actually found on the pages of A Course in Miracles.

Anyone who cares to have an informed perspective on the Course should at least become acquainted with the Course itself, along with relevant portions of the following books: 1) Absence from Felicity: The Story of Helen Schucman and Her Scribing of A Course in Miracles by Kenneth Wapnick; 2) Understanding A Course in Miracles: The History, Message and Legacy of a Spiritual Path for Today and the earlier version of this work entitled: The Complete Story of the Course by D. Patrick Miller, and; 3) Journey Without Distance: the Story behind A Course in Miracles by Robert Skutch. Wapnick's book is by far the most authoritative account and some important, relevant excerpts from it are available on the World Wide Web. Those excerpts are linked from a site dedicated to Helen Schucman and entitled The Scribe. Another helpful site is that of the Foundation for Inner Peace, publisher of the Course. On that site, in particular see: The Scribing of A Course in Miracles.

In addressing the conspiracy theory about ACIM as a brain washing tool and perhaps the product of brain washing, one ought to take note of a statement written by Helen Schucman herself and which concludes the first part of the Preface to the Course, which is entitled "How It Came." That statement says: "The names of the collaborators in the recording of the Course do not appear on the cover because the Course can and should stand on its own. It is not intended to become the basis for another cult. Its only purpose is to provide a way in which some people will be able to find their own Internal Teacher" (ACIM Text Preface, p. viii; italics mine; see the entire three-part Preface here: www.facim.org/acim/description.htm).

The Course can stand on its own. You don't have to believe it was channeled from Jesus to make use of it, and you don't even have to believe in Jesus. Neither do you have to believe in the phenomenon of channeling.

It has always been clear to me that the Course was not intended to be the basis for a religious organization of any kind. For one thing, such organizations are rife with ego specialness, hierarchies of power and attempts to tell people what to believe rather than helping them to "find their own Internal Teacher." The Course actually dismisses the phrase "formal religion" as an oxymoron:

In this world, there is an astonishing tendency to join contradictory words into one term without perceiving the contradiction at all. The attempt to formalize religion is so obviously an ego attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable that it hardly requires elaboration here (ACIM Psychotherapy Pamphlet-2.II.2:2-3).

In other words, spirit is formless while the ego's attempt to formalize spirituality is an attempt to imprison in form what is formless; to elevate the importance of form, which is an illusory projection of the ego thought system, at the expense of an awareness of content -- mind and thought -- which is reality because mind is a dimension of spirit.

The Course does not encourage proselytizing or even setting up study groups. What it means by "teaching," is not formal didactic teaching (or preaching), but teaching love and forgiveness by example; something I think the CIA would have little use for, especially back in the 1960s. That said, it is true that for most of us the Course material is not easy to understand, integrate and apply in spite of the fact that it continually says it is a "simple course." So a teacher and a study group can be helpful. In this regard, the only teacher of the Course in whom I have complete confidence is Kenneth Wapnick, who was intimately associated with Bill and Helen, having first met them in 1972 and then working closely with them to prepare the Course for publication in 1976. When one reads his autobiographical accounts (see links at: the Website dedicated to Ken), it is evident that Ken's own spiritual journey had led him to a place of knowing the message of the Course before he ever read it. He, too, had experienced an inner presence that he recognized in the voice that speaks from the pages of the Course itself. In effect, Ken became Helen's designated teacher of ACIM, while she and Bill preferred to stay in the background after the Course was published. And Ken, who knew Bill and Helen very, very well, just laughed when I told him about the CIA conspiracy theory regarding the Course. He thought Bill would be quite amused and no doubt have some clever remark to make, since Bill had a very good sense of humor. Helen, on the other hand, would probably not have been amused at all. She was very intelligent and could be scathing in criticism when she was so inclined. One can obtain a very helpful understanding of Helen, Bill and their relationship by reading Ken's book Absence from Felicity, which I've already mentioned.

Nevertheless, even a glass of water can be misused, let alone a spiritual document. So, in spite of its intent, it is true that the Course has been misrepresented and misappropriated, sometimes with very unfortunate consequences. The Course, like the glass of water, can serve a constructive, helpful purpose or a harmful one, depending upon who is making use of it and the purpose they wish to serve. Obviously the same is true of the Bible, the Koran, and countless other spiritual writings. Likewise, psychology can be misused, which brings me to the CIA and MKULTRA.

According to John Marks in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate2, back in the Cold War era of the 1950s and 60s the CIA had an interest in being able to make use of the scientific knowledge and professional techniques of psychology. They sought to have rapport with a wide range of psychologists to whom they could have access for information, consultation and research. Consequently, a large number of research projects of various kinds were funded by the CIA through MKULTRA, and a very long list of some of the most distinguished names in psychology benefited from this funding, most of them not having a clue about the nefarious activities of people like Drs. Gottlieb and Cameron which were discovered later. It was not until the Church Committee3 investigations of Congress beginning in 1975 that the unconscionable activities sponsored by MKULTRA funding came to light. But, the mere fact that a particular psychologist's research was funded by the CIA through MKULTRA should not be used to incriminate that psychologist. Neither should the fact that a psychologist was employed by the CIA be used to vilify that person. Back in the fifties, there was a lot of concern about Russia and communism, and there was a high level of public confidence in the CIA. What we've learned since then should not serve to discredit every one of the distinguished psychologists who received funding through MKULTRA, or who was employed by the CIA. The practice of guilt by association, which the Web site in question attempts, is reminiscent of another phenomenon of the late 1940's - early 1950's: McCarthyism.

Among the psychologists whose research was funded by the CIA through MKULTRA was the widely known and beloved Dr. Carl Rogers, who was instrumental in the development of what became known as "humanistic psychology," and who founded the "Person-Centered Approach" to psychotherapy. His goal was not to manipulate, brain wash and deceive people, but to free them from their conflicts so that they could become "fully functioning" persons -- "self-actualizing" human beings. One of Roger's most famous books was entitled On Becoming a Person4 wherein the second major section was titled "How Can I Help?" Yet Rogers received funding for some of his research through the CIA's MKULTRA program, just as did Bill Thetford and Helen Schucman.

In his book Marks discusses and quotes Rogers as follows:

Although he says he would have nothing to do with secret Agency activities today, he asks for understanding in light of the climate of the 1950s. "We really did regard Russia as the enemy," declares Rogers, "and we were trying to do various things to make sure the Russians did not get the upper hand." Rogers received an important professional reward for joining the Society [for the Investigation of Human Ecology, later called the Human Ecology Fund] board. Executive Director James Monroe had let him know that, once he agreed to serve, he could expect to receive a Society grant. "That appealed to me because I was having trouble getting funded," says Rogers. "Having gotten that grant [about $30,000 over three years], it made it possible to get other grants from Rockefeller and NIMH." Rogers still feels grateful to the Society for helping him establish a funding "track record," but he emphasizes that the Agency [CIA] never had any effect on his research (brackets mine).

It is common for psychologists to seek government funding for their research projects, and in the "publish or perish" climate of prestigious universities like Columbia it is not surprising that some of the work done by Bill Thetford and Helen Schucman received funding through MKULTRA. But it is hardly accurate to characterize that research as being directed toward "brain washing," any more than it would be accurate to characterize Roger's work that way.

My principle point here is that it is important to understand the historical context for the MKULTRA funding as well as to realize that not all of the psychological research funded by the CIA was of the dishonest and inhumane sort carried out by Dr. John Gottlieb and others. For an extensive discussion of this and of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology see "CIA's Behavior Caper" by Dr. Patricia Greenfiled, professor of psychology at UCLA.

Another example of legitimate psychological research funded in part by the CIA is Dr. John Gittinger's "Personality Assessment System," or PAS. This system was of particular interest to Bill Thetford and Helen Schucman for very sound professional reasons, and it utilized one of the intelligence and personality assessment tests which has been a standard in the psychology profession for decades: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS) which were a refinement of the earlier Wechsler-Bellview Intelligence Scales. Gittinger began his work on the PAS in 1948-49 when he was a psychologist at Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. To this day, the PAS is utilized by professional psychologists who are responsible for psychological diagnosis in connection with mental health treatment. Following are some excerpts from the PAS Website:

Psychologist Dr. John Gittinger conceived the fundamental idea behind the "Personality Assessment System", or PAS, many years ago when he observed that our personalities are shaped, to a large extent, by the way we use the several components of our intellect. He realized that each person learns to cope with life by using (or not using) the intellectual strengths and overcoming (or not overcoming) the intellectual weaknesses that she or he may have learned or acquired by genetic endowment. He saw that, over the period of our maturation into adulthood, this process produces what we call each person's "personality." The result, in other words, for each of us, is a coherent pattern for how to "do" life....

Even John Marks, in his anti-CIA book, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, recognized and reported that the most positive development during the 1950's and 1960's in the CIA was the Personality Assessment System....

After Dr. Gittinger’s retirement from government service in 1978, many of the psychologists with whom he had worked developed university affiliations. Students at such prestigious institutions as Cornell University, The Ohio State University, The University of Missouri, and American International College are among those who have been provided with an opportunity to learn to analyze and interpret PAS profiles. Further, the Gittinger Assessment Center, established at Hocking College in 1984, serves as a site for training, resources, information, data collection, and future development of the PAS. (For the full account see: Originator: John Gittinger and for a complete explanation of the PAS see: Non-technical Overview.)

It is quite understandable to me that Bill Thetford and Helen Schucman would have an interest in the PAS and in conducting research with it. Certainly any psychological test (like the glass of water I mentioned) could be used for unethical purposes of manipulation and control. However, Bill and Helen, like Carl Rogers, were psychologists interested in helping people. Helen's particular interest was in children, and particularly mentally retarded children.

So, some of the research Bill and Helen engaged in was funded through MKULTRA, but it is not accurate to characterize their interest as having to do with "mind control," nor is it accurate to characterize the entire body of research funded through MKULTRA that way. Further, much of what went on under the aegis of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was of legitimate interest to professional psychologists and that Society may even have helped the science of psychology to move in a broader, more  humanistic direction. To quote John Marks again:

By investing up to $400,000 a year into the early, innovative work of men like Carl Rogers, Charles Osgood, and Martin Orne, the CIA's Human Ecology Fund helped liberate the behavioral sciences from the world of rats and cheese. With a push from the Agency as well as other forces, the field opened up.

Summary of Dr. William Thetford's Professional Career

When he graduated from DePauw University in 1944, Bill was uncertain about what he wanted to do. He had majored in psychology but also enrolled in the pre-med program. Even though he was accepted at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, he still wasn't sure he wanted to study medicine, so he decided to apply for a job at the University and wait to make a decision about whether to enroll in medical school. The job he got involved work as an administrator with the Manhattan Project with responsibilities for supervising certain buildings and for radiation decontamination. Robert Skutch5 quotes Bill about this job:

The atmosphere in our department at the time was an extremely exciting one. There was a sense of utmost urgency and high sense of national priority to the work being done...It was the belief of the scientific community that the Nazis had already progressed very far in the development of atomic energy, and that we were in a life or death race with them.

Remember, this was before the end of World War II and the social/political climate in the U.S. was profoundly affected by that war as well as the "Cold War" which followed.

Bill finally decided not to enter medical school, but when the atomic bombs were dropped he was horrified at the devastation and quit his job. Skutch quotes him regarding his next step:

A few weeks later Dr. Carl Rogers arrived on campus. Although I knew nothing about Rogers, who even then was one of the most eminent names in the field of psychology, I signed up for his first course on Client centered Psychotherapy, simply because some of the graduate students I knew recommended that I do so.

Rogers immediately recognized a very intelligent student with keen insight into what Rogers was teaching and to Bill's dismay Rogers appointed him as a teaching assistant and then invited him to become Rogers' research assistant.

In 1949 Bill received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago after completing research related to Rogers' theory. Again, Skutch quotes Bill:

I was intrigued with the possibility of measuring the autonomic nervous system and its functions before and after Rogerian therapy...Rogers was very impressed by this study, and I was actually stunned that I had found any significant results at all.....In March 1949, somewhat to my surprise, I received my Ph.D. However, I still had no real awareness of the field of psychology...Although I had met many eminent people during my studies...no one seemed to have any awareness of how these specialized areas of knowledge could be synthesized.

Even though Bill lacked confidence in his own qualifications it seems evident that many others were quite impressed with him. This kind of situation involving Bill's humility and the high regard of others appears to have characterized much of his early professional career. After Chicago, at the suggestion of a friend, he applied for and was accepted into a position at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago where he worked in research involving schizophrenic patients and patterns of response to the Rorschach inkblot test. This was done under the direction of Dr. Samuel Beck, a leading authority on the Rorschach, about which Bill knew nothing. But, in what by now seems to be characteristic fashion, Beck was quite impressed with Bill and even regarded his lack of experience with the Rorschach as a positive factor since it meant that he would not bring bias into his studies. Bill stayed on in this program under Dr. Beck for 2 1/2 years, and it is during this time that he was introduced to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which was contrary to Rogers' theories. Skutch quotes Bill about this period as saying:

One thing I felt strongly about, both during graduate studies and afterwards at Michael Reese, was that I did not in any way wish to be a university professor...I had already turned down several offers...I felt I had nothing to profess. Also, I did not feel that university life was something that I would happily adapt to.

Bill subsequently moved on to enroll in the Washington School of Psychiatry in Washington. D.C., because he was intrigued by the eminent Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theory of psychiatry which focused upon interpersonal relations rather than the individual psychodynamics of Freudian psychology. (By the way, this kind of focus in psychological study is compatible with the study of human ecology as a psychological undertaking since it takes an interest in the environment of human relationships surrounding an individual.) This was during the period 1951-54 when, in addition to being a post-graduate student at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Bill was employed as a psychologist for the U.S. government, and this is when Bill’s association with the CIA began. I could not find details of his government employment, although one source states that during 1953 Bill served as a consultant to the Foreign Service Institute in Beirut, Lebanon. No doubt Bill was employed by the CIA at this time. Skutch quotes Bill about the next phase of his career:

When I completed the study program at the Washington School, I was undecided about what to do next. Since I had long been attracted to New York City, I decided to go there to look for a position. The head of the Psychological Placement Service at the N.Y. State Employment Service said he had absolutely the perfect job for me...What he had in mind was the Directorship of the Psychology Department at the Institute of Living in Hartford Connecticut.

The Institute for Living is a very well known mental health treatment center and hospital, which was founded in 1822, being one of the first mental health facilities of its kind in the U.S. Bill stayed there as Director of the Division of Psychology from 1954 to 1955 when he moved to the CIA-funded Society for the Study of Human Ecology at Cornell University Medical College. About this, Skutch quotes Bill as saying:

After a year at Hartford I received a call from Dr. Harold G. Wolff, one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine, a leading authority on stress disorders, and at the time Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Cornell...Dr. Wolf offered me an appointment as Chief Psychologist in the Human Ecology Study Program which he was directing. My uneasiness about becoming involved in a university position had mellowed somewhat by this time and I decided to consider an academic appointment. As a result, I accepted Dr. Wolff's offer, and before I knew it I became an instructor and a year later was promoted to assistant professor.

The idea of taking an ecological approach to the psychological study of human beings intrigued Bill and fit in with his general tendency to be attracted to unconventional approaches to psychology which emphasized understanding people in the context of their family relationships as well as their socio-cultural and natural environment, the kind of interest that had led him to the Washington School of Psychiatry. John Marks characterizes Wolff as not only being brilliant, but also as arrogant and quite interested in helping the CIA find ways to both manipulate human beings as well as train them to resist such manipulation, but there is nothing in Bill's history to suggest that he shared these kinds of interests. There is nothing in Bill's story to indicate that he himself had any interest in brain washing, hypnosis, drug-induced states or the like. Whether he had any knowledge at all of these activities being carried on with CIA sponsorship through MKULTRA is unclear to me, but I think it is unlikely that he did. Anyway, he stayed on at the Human Ecology Study Program from 1955-57, and then, upon the urging of a friend, applied for and -- even though rather unsure of himself -- took a very challenging job at Columbia University where he began in 1958 as an Associate Professor of Medical Psychology and Director of the Division of Clinical Psychology at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

Apparently he was fascinated by his work under Wolf at Cornell, and the job at Columbia had been subject to controversy because members of the search committee could not agree upon a candidate. Thus, they were willing to consider Bill who apparently was less controversial to them. Bill told the Cornell people that he would accept the job if given an Associate Professorship, which he thought quite unlikely. But they surprised him by offering it. So, off he went.

Faculty politics can be quite conflicted and difficult. In fact, it was this very kind of difficulty that later led Bill to make his famous speech to Helen in which he said that there must be a better way for them to relate to each other as well as to their colleagues. They had been involved in some bitter, acrimonious interpersonal conflicts by June of 1965 when he made that speech, and when Helen -- surprisingly -- immediately agreed with him and said she was willing to help. This event led to the scribing of A Course in Miracles following a series of unusual dreams and visions on Helen's part during the summer of 1965.

The story of Bill's relationship to Helen began when he hired her as a research assistant at Columbia in 1958. Shortly after assuming his position at Columbia, he found that his new job was going to demand much more from him than he had imagined, or been led to believe. As he was getting himself oriented and setting some priorities, the Dean of the College notified him that the University had received a large grant from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases for conducting a cooperative study of neurological and sensory deficits in infants and young children. A research psychologist with special training and skill in working with children and in psychological testing was needed. Helen became that psychologist and seven years later she and Bill became involved with the scribing of the Course. From then on, their work with the Course was kept a carefully guarded secret, because it would certainly have jeopardized their professional status as well as their employment.

Helen herself had a very strong authoritative and assertive personality, while Bill tended to be much more passive and inwardly unsure of himself. As I mentioned, she and Bill had much difficulty in their relationship, which was one of the factors leading up to Bill's earnest plea for "a better way." Anyone who knew Helen would find it ludicrous that somehow Bill could have used "mind control" techniques to influence her!

In conclusion, I'll quote a few passages from D. Patrick Miller's first book about the Course:6

Whether one views it as happenstance or predestined preparation, several major elements of Thetford's character made him suitable to become Schucman's helper in the recording of the Course. Perhaps most significant was his reluctance to "profess" a distinct philosophy of his own. It's safe to assume that few academics of his status could have resisted the temptation to revise, add to, or even co-opt a major project on which they were assisting a junior colleague, regardless of the project's nature or origin.

Second, Thetford's intellectual curiosity and flexibility would counterbalance Schucman's judgmental tendency, and help both of them deal with a system of psycho-spiritual thought that substantially challenged their psychoanalytic training. Thetford's brush with humanistic psychology may have also prepared him for the transpersonal dimensions of the Course material.

Finally, the younger professor's passivity is probably what made it possible for him to tolerate Helen Schucman's contrariness, albeit not happily. It remains a sad irony that the tenuous balance of the relationship between the two Course recorders never matured into a healthy reciprocity. In 1977, the year following publication of the Course, Schucman was forced to retire from Columbia-Presbyterian at age sixty-eight...In 1978 Thetford took early retirement and moved to California.

Let me just repeat that revelations about unethical and illegal activities sponsored by the CIA through MKULTRA only began to surface as a result of the Church Committee investigations in 1975. The last date I see for a joint psychological publication by Thetford and Schucman is 1972, though Bill continued his role in the MKULTRA-sponsored personality research project 130 until he retired. That project was professionally sound, utilized the PAS, and would only have been of use to the CIA in the same indirect way that the research of Carl Rogers and many other legitimate psychologists would have been. I think that the reason for keeping that project classified is that the CIA hoped to prevent Russia and other foreign countries from either knowing about or making use of psychological research sponsored by the CIA in the United States.

Perhaps this background and summary will contribute to an understanding of why the allegations of conspiracy and "mind control" as being factors in the scribing of A Course in Miracles are preposterous. Anyone unfamiliar with the Course who wants to know more will have to do more reading, particularly reading Wapnick's Absence from Felicity. It might also be helpful to watch the video entitled, "The Story of A Course in Miracles" which is available from the Course publisher, the Foundation for Inner Peace. See their catalog at: https://www.acim.org/miva/merchant.mvc

_______________________________________
1See chapters 4 and 5 of A Primer of Psychology According to A Course in Miracles by Joe R. Jesseph,
 Outskirts Press, Denver, Colorado. 2008
2Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. New York: Dell
 Publishing, 1988.
3Also on the Internet see this page of the History Matters Website.
4Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person. The Riverside Press: Cambridge, MA. 1961
5Skutch, Robert. Journey Without Distance: The Story Behind A Course in Miracles. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2001
6Miller, D. Patrick. The Complete Story of the Course: The History, The People, The Controversies Behind A Course in Miracles. Berkeley, CA: Fearless Books, 1997.

Full Article and hyperlinks:

http://www.miraclestudies.net/BillCIA.html

W.S. Burroughs Warned of Elitist Nazi World State using Psychic, Electronic Mind Control

And what would the future look like if such groups actually exist and if they do combine and take over? An elitist World State very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis. At the top would be a theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render opposition psychologically impossible. Entry to this privileged class would be permitted only to those whose dedication to the world state was absolute and unquestioning. In short, you don't get in by merit or ability but by being an all around one hundred percent shit. - The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. "Mind War" - William S. Burroughs (1985)

Mind War: Text Files

Related Archives:

From PSYOP to Mind War: Aquino and Vallely (pdf file)

Not a Ghost of a Chance

RE/Search Interview with William S. Burroughs (1982)

"Vice President Burroughs" Confirms Remote Electronic Mind Control Program

Related Articles:

From MindWar to FoxNews

"Humans" are EXTINCT (Part Two)

It's not an easy thing to meet your maker - Roy Batty. Blade Runner 

In 1998, Iceland created the world's first national DNA database of its citizens. Almost all of its 275,000 citizens trace their lineages to the original Nordic Vikings of a prior millennium. In a unique arrangement, Iceland's national genetic code was sold to the genetic research and pharmacogenetic industries through an entity called deCODE Genetics. Less than 8 percent of Iceland's population opted out of the voluntary program, hence deCODE possesses virtually a complete national genetic and hereditary portrait of Iceland. Scientists at deCODE are currently utilizing the information in their study of a range of debilitating condition, including respiratory and muscular disease. Safeguards have been built into the program to conceal individuals' names. But at least one Icelander has sued the government to have her father's genetic history removed. As of March 2003, the case is still winding its way through Icelandic courts. Iceland's national genomic information will be made available to a wide variety of scientific, commercial and governmental entities in an Internet-based system that employs massive data storage drives codenamed "Shark." 31

One main company manages and controls Iceland's genetic data. That company is already positioned to become the worldwide manager and disseminator of all genomic information globally. In anticipation of that day, the company currently operates genomic offices in California, New York, Zurich, Haifa, New Delhi and Tokyo. The name of the company is IBM. Its Iceland project operates under a division known as "Life Services - Nordic." 32

Estonia became the second nation to databank its entire population. In 2001, Estonia created the Estonia Genome Project to capture the genetic profiles of its 1.4 million citizens. A biotechnology industry article cited by the government's website explains,  "Unlike remote Iceland, Estonia has long been a European stomping ground, ruled by a succession of Russian, Swedish, German and Danish invaders who left their genetic heritage. Estonia's ethnic mix thus could be a major draw for pharmaceutical companies that want to find disease genes common to most Europeans. 33

The tiny Polynesian nation of Tonga sold the information on its unique gene pool to Autogen, an Australian genetic research firm, in 2000. Tonga's 170 islands host a group of some 108,000 natives isolated for more than three millennia. Autogen was quoted as explaining its interest in Tonga's population: " The less mixture of inter-racial marriage, the more likely you are to be able to determine a particular gene that may be responsible for a particular disease, whether it's breast cancer or whether it's kidney disease."34

After reevaluation the arrangement between Tonga and Autogen was cancelled. Autogen instead focused on a Tasmanian genetic repository. "Tasmania is one of only a few populations in the world where up to seven-generation family pedigrees are available," the company announced. "This makes it an ideal location to study the genetics of complex diseases such as obesity and diabetes."35

In England, the UK Biobank recently opened as a repository for the medical information and genetic data of a half million volunteers. More commercial initiatives are underway to secure national genetic information around the world using ethnic, national racial and even religious parameters. The pharmaceutical companies, governmental agencies and research foundations that operate these databanks will interconnect them globally. The devoted men and women laboring on these national projects are joining research hands to create new disease-fighting drugs, unlock the mysteries of hereditary disease and improve the quality of life. In the process, prodigious masses of individual genetic information are being gathered. This data can be exchanged and retrieved at the speed on light from a computer and even downloaded to a cell phone. 

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. By Edwin Black. Pg. 439

Related Archives:

"Humans" are EXTINCT (Part One)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part One) (The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part Three) (The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part Two) (The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture)

Mind Control and Eugenics: "Redressing" Nature's Randomness, Intolerant of Uncertainty in Human Behavior

Oatmeal (Quaker Oats Billboard)

Mind Control and Eugenics: "Redressing" Nature's Randomness, Intolerant of Uncertainty in Human Behavior

 
Dead in the bathtub. Psycho (1960)

Madness was made possible by all that milieu that repressed in man of his animal nature...madness then became the other side of progress. By multiplying mediations, civilisation offered men ever increasing means to become insane - Michel Foucault. History of Madness. Pg. 374

The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain. - Dr. Jose Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry Yale University Medical School - Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974

--

The term designer babies is by and large just emblematic of the idea that genetic technology can do more than merely correct the frail aspects of human existence. It can redress nature's essential randomness. Purely elective changes are in the offing. The industry argues over the details, but many assure that within our decade, depending upon the family and the circumstances, height, weight and even eye color will become elective. Gender selection has been a fact of birth for years with a success rate of up to 91 percent for those who use it.

...

It goes much further than designer babies. Mass social engineering is still being advocated by eminent voices in the genetics community. Celebrated geneticist James Watson, codiscoverer of the double helix and president of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratories, told a British film crew in 2003, "If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease. The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent." For the first half of the twentieth century, Cold Spring Harbor focused on the "submerged tenth"; apparently, the passion has not completely dissipated.

Following in the footsteps of Galton, who once amused himself by plotting the geographic distribution of pretty women in England, Watson also told the film crew," People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." Watson gave no indication of what the standard for beauty would be.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. By Edwin Black. Pg. 442-443

--

Though [John B.] Watson's work was the beginning of mans attempts to control human actions, the real work was done by, B.F. Skinner, the high priest of the behaviorists movement. The key to Skinner's work was the concept of operant conditioning, which relied on the notion of reinforcement, all behavior which is learned is rooted in either a positive or negative response to that action. There are two corollaries of operant conditioning Aversion therapy and desensitization.

Aversion therapy uses unpleasant reinforcement to a response which is undesirable. This can take the form of electric shock, exposing the subject to fear producing situations, and the infliction of pain in general. It has been used as a way of "curing" homosexuality, alcoholism and stuttering. Desensitization involves forcing the subject to view disturbing images over and over again until they no longer produce any anxiety, then moving on to more extreme images, and repeating the process over again until no anxiety is produced. Eventually, the subject becomes immune to even the most extreme images. This technique is typically used to treat people's phobias. Thus, the violence shown on T.V. could be said to have the unsystematic and unintended effect of desensitization.

Skinnerian behaviorism has been accused of attempting to deprive man of his free will, his dignity and his autonomy. It is said to be intolerant of uncertainty in human behavior, and refuses to recognize the private, the ineffable, and the unpredictable. It sees the individual merely as a medical, chemical and mechanistic entity which has no comprehension of its real interests.

Skinner believed that people are going to be manipulated. "I just want them to be manipulated effectively," he said. He measured his success by the absence of resistance and counter control on the part of the person he was manipulating. He thought that his techniques could be perfected to the point that the subject would not even suspect that he was being manipulated.

Dr. James V. McConnel, head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, said, "The day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior. We want to reshape our society drastically."

Mind Control by Harry V. Martin and David Caul/ Napa Sentinel August/September/October/November 1991

Related Archives:

Du Pont's Race of Supermen

"Humans" are EXTINCT (Part One) 

"The Angel in the Wreckage" (unfinished writing)

When a "Duplicate" America Moves In

It is safe to say at this point that if you even remotely have a heart, courage or much of a brain left, the epicenter of this New World Order (the U.S.) has become so degraded as to be rendered almost completely unlivable. And it is also safe to say that the 'spark' within experience that used to make each of us unique, individual beings has been brutally snuffed out by human arrogance and greed. - ce399. 16 February 2008

Tod Browning on the set of Freaks (1932)

Žižek: Chocolate Laxative

ce399. 2008 'Obama faces race issue' (before)

ce399. 2008 'System Denial' (after)

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’ - Slavoj Žižek 2006

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/zize01_.html


ce399. (remake) 2008.

Related Archives:

"Creating Genocide Conditions for Negro Population"

Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1950

Foucault: Abnormal (misc notes)

Ex-Clinton Aides Advising Honduran Coup Regime (& Video)

Right-Wing Death Squad Genocide - El Salvador 1982

But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the coup in Honduras

Ever since the military abducted President Manuel Zelaya at gunpoint on June 28 and expelled him from the country, the Obama administration has cast itself as a steadfast defender of “democracy” in Honduras.

The real nature of that defense has become somewhat clearer with the news that key former aides to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have surfaced as top advisers to the illegal regime led by Roberto Micheletti, which was installed by the coup.

Ginger Thompson of the New York Times reported from San Jose, Costa Rica Sunday that in organizing the first sessions of a US-brokered mediation exercise between the ousted President Zelaya and the leader of those who overthrew him, Micheletti, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias instructed both men to appear at his residence with just four advisers.

“On Thursday morning, Mr. Micheletti showed up with six, adding an American public relations specialist who has done work for former President Bill Clinton and the American’s interpreter, and an official close to the talks said the team rarely made a move without consulting him,” Thompson reported.

The PR man was identified as Bennett Ratcliff of San Diego. Thompson quoted an official close to the talks as saying that “Every proposal that Micheletti’s group presented was written or approved by the American [Ratcliff].”

Perhaps even more significantly, Lanny Davis has emerged as among Washington’s most prominent defenders and spokesmen for the Honduran coup regime, acting as a lobbyist for the Honduran branch of the extreme right-wing Latin American Business Council.

Davis has been closely tied to the Clintons since he attended Yale Law School together with them in 1970. Between 1996 and 1998, he served as President Clinton’s special counsel. And in the 2008 presidential campaign, he served as one of Hillary Clinton’s most prominent fundraisers and surrogates in attacking her principal rival, Barack Obama.

It is inconceivable that such figures would be playing such a prominent role in advising and defending the coup regime in Honduras without receiving a green light from both Secretary of State Clinton and the Obama White House.

...

Obama is not going to confront any “hawks.” The evolution of US policy in the wake of the coup has demonstrated, once again, that the military and intelligence agencies in the US are asserting their power even more directly than under the Bush administration, using Obama as their front man. This is undoubtedly the case in Honduras, where the overthrow of an elected president is inconceivable without prior approval from Washington and the US military, which continues to occupy the country.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14381

--

US Lobbyists with Clinton Ties Hired to Defend Honduran Coup Regime

Supporters of the coup in Honduras have begun hiring advisers and lobbyists with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an attempt to strengthen support in Washington for the coup. A Honduran business group has hired lobbyist Lanny Davis, who served as White House counsel for President Bill Clinton. The coup government has also hired Bennet Ratcliff, a public relations specialist with ties to former President Bill Clinton.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/15/honduras

--

Clinton told reporters that the situation in Honduras had "evolved into a coup" but that the United States was "withholding any formal legal determination" characterizing it that way.

"We're assessing what the final outcome of these actions will be," she said. "Much of our assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic system. But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062904239_2.html?sid=ST2009062902805

--

The World Anti-Communist League (WACL)

Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson,
Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated The World Anti-Communist League (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1986).

Background: The World Anti-Communist League was founded in 1966 in Taipei, Taiwan. WACL was conceived as an expansion of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a regional alliance against communism formed at the request of Chiang Kai-shek at the end of the Korean War. (1,9,30,35) The Asian People's AntiCommunist League (APACL) had roots in the China Lobby, a group dedicated to stopping official international recognition of the Chinese Communist government. The China Lobby had U.S. government connections, and allegedly Ray Cline of the CIA assisted this group in establishing the Taiwanese Political Warfare Cadres Academy in the late 1950s. (45) The founders of APACL were agents of the governments of Taiwan and Korea, including Park Chung Hee who later bacame president of Korea; Yoshio Kodama, a member of organized crime in Japan; Ryiochi Sasakawa, a gangster and Japanese billionaire jailed as a war criminal after World War II; and Osami Kuboki and other followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church. (4,8,9,11,30) Sasakawa provided major funding for Moon and the Unification Church. When Park became president of South Korea after the 1961 coup, he adopted the Unification Church as his political arm. (45)

During the 1970s WACL (World Anti-Communist League)spread to all six continents and chapters were opened in Japan, Europe, Britain, Australia, the U.S. , and Latin America. The organization attracted former Nazi supporters in Europe and in Latin America. The Latin American group, Confederacion Anti-Comunista Latinoamericana (CAL), headed by Raimundo Guerrero, sprang from the roots of Los Tecos, a World War II facist group. (11) CAL was overtly fascist and connected to a chain of rightwing military plots in Latin America. (59)

The Unification Church (UC) of Sun Myung Moon has remained a major power within WACL. Moon claimed that he raised $1. 4 million for WACL's 1970 annual conference. (41) In 1975, Moon denounced WACL as being too fascist, and claimed to sever connections between it and the UC. Reports in the New York Times, Searchlight and elsewhere, however, indicate the separation is nominal only. (41) In 1985, WACL's Japanese branch was still run by Osami Kuboki who also headed the Japanese Unification Church.

History of the World Anti-Communist  League (WACL)

Related Archives:

Hillary Clinton and the Coup in Honduras

Honduran Coup Resistance Growing (Video)

Honduran Women Speak Out Over Sweatshops

The School of the Americas

The "Endgame for the Human Race"

Nagasaki 1945

Now, of all the crises that afflict us, I think my own feeling is that this growing democratic deficit may be the most severe. Unless it’s reversed, Arundhati Roy’s forecast might prove accurate, and not in the distant future. The conversion of democracy to a performance in which the public are only spectators might well lead to—inexorably to what she calls the “endgame for the human race.” - Noam Chomsky 2009

I feel that we are not speaking truthfully if we talk about life and the future of humanity, while each day we are destroying the future of humanity. It is important to pinpoint who our enemies are, what the causes are of the damage being done to the planet, damage that may put an end to humanity. - Evo Morales 2007

What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly— our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. - Arundhati Roy 2009

Related Archive:

"Humans" are EXTINCT (Part One)

Obituary for California: The Arnold Schwarzenegger - Jörg Haider Connection

ce399. 8/8/08

Jörg Haider, an Austrian populist, died on October 11th, aged 58

If you wanted to see a Nazi in Jörg Haider, it wasn’t difficult. The tanned, cold, Aryan good looks, the liking for black leather, the taste for extreme sports and fast cars, all hinted at it. So did the youthful membership of pan-Germanic mock- duelling clubs, the black-cross flags, the foggy Remembrance Day trysts with SS officers and the band of crop-haired followers who were liable to break out in a chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. His father had been an illegal Nazi long before the Anschluss, and his mother a local leader of the League of German Maidens; their de-Nazification after the war, with Robert made to dig graves and Dorothea banned from teaching, struck their son (though he did not remember it) as brutal injustice.

Then there were the remarks, few enough, but indicators of a certain current of thought. Hitler’s employment policies had been “orderly”, he said, unlike the modern Austrian government’s; words that forced him to step down briefly in 1991 from the governorship of Carinthia. The SS veterans he mixed with were men of “character”, “honour” and “conviction”. The phrase Überfremdung, foreigner overrun, which crept into his immigration-talk, had not been heard since Nazi days. And though he once picked a Jew as his deputy at the top of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), he could not help wondering aloud how the head of the Jewish community, Ariel Muzicant, apparently named after a soap powder, could have such dirty hands.

The rest of Europe certainly took him at those words, and when the FPÖ notched up its best electoral result in 1999, 27% of the vote and a place in the governing coalition, EU sanctions were placed on Austria. Many Austrians were ashamed of Mr Haider; but others were aware that he articulated their country’s confusion about the past, a mixture of defiance and repentance, victimhood and guilt, and the struggle to expel old ghosts. Mr Haider, too, talked of “drawing a line” under Nazism and declared that he wanted keine braunen Schatten, no brown shadows. The outside world found such mumblings unconvincing. Mr Haider retorted that this was not the world’s business.

The Haider show at home (and it was always a show of sound, speed, lights and glamour) had a different feel. There he was the Carinthian boy-wonder, waltzing round his adopted deep-south base in a bone-buttoned loden jacket, wolfing Strudel and Nudel washed down with Jörg Bear beer and handing out 5,000 ski passes for the Gerlitzen to mark his 50th birthday. He lorded it like a local count on €10m-worth of forested slopes in Bärental, bought for a song by an uncle in 1941 from a Jew fleeing for Italy. As Carinthia’s governor for the past decade (in a border province that had been successively invaded by Mongols, Turks and Slavs), Mr Haider played the Austrian patriot, defying the law to ship criminal immigrants from eastern Europe across to Styria on the night bus, uprooting Slovene road signs and plastering towns with posters promising a clean sweep of filthy foreign beggars.

The eternal chancer

All this hard-right politicking gave the jitters to some. But Mr Haider, sly as a snake and sharp as a razor, was not so easily defined. When Austria’s ruling parties opposed Turkish membership of the EU, he supported it. Austria’s own accession he first endorsed, then passionately resisted (leading the “No” forces in the 1994 referendum), then accepted. When Saddam Hussein was a pariah, he went to Baghdad to shake his hand. His most admired politician was Archduke Johann, a modernising 19th-century governor of Styria, closely followed by Newt Gingrich and Tony Blair. His ideology shifted with whatever group he was talking to, conservative one moment and leftish the next, as various as the suits, jeans, Robin Hood outfits, puffer ski-jackets and medieval robes in which he clad himself. It was often said that the only “ism” he ever embraced was populism.

This made him, for all his toxicity, a tantalising oddity in Austrian politics. In a country corruptly dominated since the war by “black” (conservative) and “red” (socialist) parties, allocating by the entrenched Proporz system all seats and posts of any consequence, the blue-flagged FPÖ offered an eruption of difference. Many objected when Mr Haider, after his putsch in 1986, gave such a hard-right shove to a party briefly attempting to be liberal. But he thought of it as a vehicle for saying the unsayable, testing the new and generally raising Cain. Behaving this way was a freiheitliche, a truly liberal, thing to do.

When Mr Haider died, smashed in his black car on the road to Klagenfurt, he had just reassumed leadership of the Alliance for Austria’s Future, the party he formed in 2005 after splitting from the FPÖ. (There had been many rows, flouncing-outs, reconciliations; this one was unmendable.) His new party had gained 11% of the vote in September’s elections; he was on the up again in national politics, though never, it was clear, as far as a post in government.

His death itself was the last dramatic Haider show, speeding drunk along a road where he had narrowly escaped death before, crashing into a concrete pole, flipping over time after time. Once more, he played the chancer. Some supporters also thought he was escaping agents of Mossad.

Obituary
The Economist (Print Edition)
16 October 2008

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12415006

--

Arnold Denies Allegations That he “Admired” Hitler

Schwarzenegger was quoted as saying he “admired” Hitler in a 1975 transcript of an interview while filming the documentary “Pumping Iron.” We speak with Martin Lee, author of “The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists”

Schwarzenegger was also forced to deny comments he allegedly made 25 years ago that he admired Adolf Hitler. Schwarzenegger was quoted as making the comments in a 1975 transcript of an interview while filming the documentary “Pumping Iron” that made him famous.

According to the transcript in a book proposal circulated six years ago, Schwarzenegger said when asked to name his heroes: “It depends for what. I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker.” A consultant to the documentary, Peter Davis, later said the Hitler quote was taken out of context.

In addition to the transcript, film producer George Butler wrote in the book proposal that in the 1970s, he considered Schwarzenegger a “flagrant, outspoken admirer of Hitler.” Butler also said he had seen Schwarzenegger playing “Nazi marching songs from long-playing records in his collection at home” and said that the actor “frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an S.S. officer.”

...
Amy Goodman: Can you talk about his relationship with Kurt Waldheim.

Martin Lee: When Schwarzenegger was married in 1986 at his wedding he made a very lavish and glowing toast to Kurt, the former Secretary General of the U.N., who, at that time was embroiled in an international scandal because it became public that Valdheim was a member of a Nazi S.S. unit that participated in war crimes in the Balkans.

For Schwarzenegger to have made this toast at that time after these revelations surfaced is really quite shocking. It shows, at the very least, insensitivity to the victims of Nazism and anti-Semitism.

This isn’t the end of the story. A few years later, Schwarzenegger had his photo taken with, Jorg Haider, the head of the extreme Right, Freedom Party in Austria, a catch basin for neo-Nazis, and Holocaust deniers. He, in a sense, is a supporter of Heider, and espouses similar policies with respect to immigration as Heider does in Austria.

Schwarzenegger has association with the Organization of U.S. English, which has a history of ties to white supremacists. Even though others have resigned from the board of advisors, he still lends his good name, so to speak, to this organization. Other people, even right-wingers have resigned because of the controversy. Schwarzenegger has stayed on; he should be called into account for this.

...

http://i1.democracynow.org/2003/10/6/arnold_denies_allegations_that_he_admired

"Humans" are EXTINCT (Part One)

National Socialism is nothing but applied biology. - Rudolf Hess / Popular adage in the Third Reich.

The intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were strictly America. He merely compounded all the virulence of long-established American race science with his fanatical anti-Jewish rage. Hitler's extremist race science, which in many ways seemed like a logical extension of America's own entrenched programs and advocacy, eventually helped shape the institutions and even the machinery of the Third Reich's genocide. By the time Hitler's concept of Aryan superiority emerged, his politics had completely fused into a biological and eugenic mindset.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003) by Edwin Black. Pg. 270. ISBN# 1-56858-258-7

Old Navy Ads Imitate US Weekly

...the consequences of genetic advance are obscured by hype and conspiratorial clamors. Adding more fog, human genetics is now in many ways dominated by capital investment, and many revelations are subject to the eighteen-month initial secrecy of patent applications, the protracted strictures of Wall Street financing and the permanence of corporate nondisclosure agreements. Many areas of human science are now trade secrets. Twentieth-century corporate philanthropy has given way to twenty-first century corporate profits. Information is often controlled by public relations officers and patent attorneys. It takes a profoundly trained professional eye and a clear mind to separate fact from fantasy and blessings from menaces.

...

...humanity should also be wary of a world where people are once again defined and divided by their genetic identities. If this happens, science-based discrimination and the desire for a master race may resurrect. This time is would be different. In the twenty-first century it will not be race, religion or nationality, but economics that determines which among us will dominate and thrive. Globalization and market forces will replace racist ideology and group prejudice to fashion mankind's coming genetic class destiny. If there is a new war against the weak it will not be about color, but about money. National emblems would bow to corporate logos.

Newgenics may rise like a phoenix from the ashes of eugenics and continue along the same route blazed in the last century. If it does, few will be able to clearly track the implications because the social and scientific revolutions will develop globally and corporately at the speed of a digital signal. The process will manifest as gradual genetic-based economic disenfranchisement. First, newgenics will create an uninsurable, unemployable and unfinanceable genetic underclass.

The process has already started.

Black. pp 428-429.

http://www.waragainsttheweakmovie.com/

ce399 notes:

In the twenty-first century it will not be race, religion or nationality, but economics that determines which among us will dominate and thrive. Globalization and market forces will replace racist ideology and group prejudice to fashion mankind's coming genetic class destiny. If there is a new war against the weak it will not be about color, but about money.

In disagreement somewhat with Black on this point. The Eugenic Bomb is a (silent) global Auschwitz. The goal of the Eugenic Bomb is to eradicate ethnicity (meaning non-White) and standardize the human 'product.' This process is therefore racist at its most core, microscopic level. The 'generically attractive' post-human at its most virulent is (Sir)SPAM(alot) in humanoid form. The post-human is DEVOID of SPIRIT - a soulless automaton with a literally hardwired, machine-like consciousness.

Main Entry:
vir·u·lent Listen to the pronunciation of virulent
Pronunciation:
\ˈvir-ə-lənt, ˈvir-yə-\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Latin virulentus, from virus poison
Date:
14th century

1 a: marked by a rapid, severe, and destructive course b: able to overcome bodily defensive mechanisms : markedly pathogenic 2: extremely poisonous or venomous3: full of malice : malignant 4: objectionably harsh or strong
— vir·u·lent·ly adverb

To paraphrase Huxley (1932): The Brave New World is inhabited by creatures of human shape but stunted humanity. They consume, fornicate, take 'soma,' (etc)...they do not read, write, think, love or govern themselves. Art and science, virtue and religion, family and friendship are all passe'. What matters most is bodily health and immediate gratification.

and from Eugene Hacker:

Indeed, if the atomic bomb makes possible the idea of total species-wide extermination, then the genetic bomb would appear to follow upon that, but with more refinement: the extermination of genetically targeted populations within a given region. As Virilio notes, the genetic bomb is a more updated term for the population bomb, the demographic explosion that was seen to occur in the United States during the 1950's. noted by Einstein and many sociologists of the postwar era. But Virilio discounts the population bomb thesis and suggests that, now, the genetic bomb is in the process of engineering new divisions within the species, a "super-humanity that has been 'improved,' a eugenic humanity, by virtue of decoding the genome.

Related archives:

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part One) (The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part Three) (The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part Two) (The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture)

Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution (1962) (mp3 files)

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street (Revisited)

ce399.2008

"We are finally beginning to see the seeds of a bottoming" in the housing industry. - Alan Greenspan. May 13, 2009.

--

Maple Street, U.S.A., late summer. A tree-lined little road of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice-cream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 p.m. on Maple Street. . . . This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon, in the last calm and reflective moment — before the monsters came.

...

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices. To be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the frightened, thoughtless search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things can not be confined to the Twilight Zone. - Rod Serling. March 4, 1960.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5u-QVk3PFU&feature=related

Nazi Zombie Road Signs in Texas, Nazi Zombie Banks on Wall Street

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKVwwSto7iA&feature=related

"We need more details from Treasury on how exactly it plans to remove bad assets while protecting the taxpayer,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee. “We have zombie banks that are weighed down because their liabilities exceed their assets. Without a precise mechanism for addressing toxic assets, it will be difficult to increase lending.”

Bailout Plan: $2.5 Trillion and a Strong U.S. Hand.  Geithner Sets Out Sweeping Overhaul to Bank Bailout

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/business/economy/11bailout.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

"An Invisible Political Movement" (Debunking Bush is Incompetent)

  
ce399. 2008. click to enlarge.

Item. One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if a public building or a political headquarters is blown up, there is a political enemy. But if an accident or a series of accidents occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in slow motion fashion over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings - then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

-Philip K. Dick. A Scanner Darkly. Pg. 91 Vintage version. (via Green Anarchy Magazine. Issue ?)

Italian Futurism 100 Years!

The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

F.T. Marinetti

20 February 1909.  Le Figaro (Front Cover)

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.

Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea.

Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.

“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!... We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There’s nothing to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the first time through our millennial gloom!”

We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.

The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathematics of our perishing eyes.

I cried, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.”

And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.

But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!

And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.

“Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!”

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch!... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air...

O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black beast of my Sudanese nurse... When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!

A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.

They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!

And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:

Manifesto of Futurism

   1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

   2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

   3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

   4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

   5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

   6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

   7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

   8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

   9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

  10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

  11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that... But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?... Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner... But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!... Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

But we won’t be there... At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting... Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!

You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them... We’ve understood!... Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors—Perhaps!... If only it were so!—But who cares? We don’t want to understand!... Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!

Lift up your heads!

Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!

http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html

Related Articles:

Back to the Future

Marinetti's futurist manifesto, published 100 years ago next month, launched one of the most brilliant and disturbing episodes in 20th-century art.

http://www.newstatesman.com/art/2009/01/futurist-manifesto-futurism