or How even the Occult was Disguised
by Miles Mathis
Caveat and disclaimer: this is an opinion piece, based on my own personal research. I follow what looks to me like a logical line of reasoning, but—as with all things of this nature—the truth is hard to find. It has been made hard to find on purpose, and I am not claiming I know everything or anything. My conclusions are not based on emotions, but on the evidence I give to you here. You may come to different conclusions, either more or less standard than mine.
In my last paper, we went all the way back to 1564 to try to decloak the occult. In this exposé, we will only go back to 1840 or so, but we will find that the nearer to the present we get, the weirder things become.
As I have always done before, I will lead you into this mystery by the same path I entered. I started with Madame Blavatsky, who came on the scene in about 1875, when she founded the Theosophical Society in New York with Henry Steel Olcott. I never had any use for Theosophy, being able to see through it from the beginning. However, like most people who pass it by, I simply assumed it was composed of and by people who had different interests than I do, or who were beating around in the bushes in their own ways. That is, I found it to be wrongheaded or uninteresting, but until recently I thought no more about it. Only after discovering that many other things were not what I thought they were did I return to Theosophy, the Beat Writers, and other fads, to give them a closer look. What I found may surprise you.
The key to Theosophy is not found by studying its various tenets and claims, but by studying Henry Steel Olcott. It is no accident that Helena Blavatsky was used as the frontwoman, since Olcott needed to remain in the shadows. If he had been more prominent, more people would have looked closely at him from the beginning, and the whole plot may have unwound long ago. As it is, I don't think anyone understands how or why Theosophy was really created to this day.
Even though Olcott has remained in the shadows, you can learn enough about him from mainstream sources like Wikipedia to go on. You don't have to prowl around in libraries for weeks or months. The first red flag is that he was a colonel. Since that is the first word on his page at Wikipedia, you get the first clue very fast. Not only was he a colonel, he was probably in what was then military intelligence. You aren't told that outright, but you are told it implicitly. He was a special commissioner of the War Department and then was transferred to the Department of the Navy after the Civil War. That is another red flag, although most people won't see it flapping. Military Intelligence has always been run out of the Navy, and to this day the ONI or Office of Navy Intelligence is the ranking intelligence arm of military intelligence. They also admit that at Wikipedia.
Beyond that, Olcott was one of only three people sitting on the commission to investigate the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. This commission was like the Warren Commission of its time, so you can see that Olcott was what we would now call a high-ranking spook. These commissions—then as now—are put together as cover-ups, hiding the truth and manufacturing some slick story to send to the papers. If you don't know what I mean, I encourage you to study the 911 Commission Report, which was the same sort of thing.
So we have red flags popping up all over the place concerning Olcott. Olcott was probably drafted into Intelligence because he had worked as a reporter for Horace Greeley in the 1850s at the New York Tribune. Olcott was present as a spy for the paper at the hanging of John Brown in 1859 in Charles Town, Virginia. You can read Olcott's story online, where he admits he was a spy for the newspaper.
His connection to Theosophy also began as a news story years later for the New York Sun, when he began investigating the spiritual powers of the Eddy Brothers of Vermont in 1874. He is said to have met Blavatsky at the Eddy farm. What is not made clear is why Olcott had returned to newspaper reporting in 1874. He had worked for Greeley in his 20s, but that was two decades earlier and he had since become a colonel and a ranking “investigator” for the Navy and the Government. We are told he also became a lawyer in 1868 specializing in fraud. Why would a high-ranking military man and lawyer return to newspaper reporting, especially to investigate what were then considered fluffy topics like spiritualism? Any person awake would assume he was on assignment, but not by the newspaper.
You may think Olcott was spying on Blavatsky, since she was a wealthy Russian and world traveler. The War Department may have thought she was a spy herself. But it is even deeper than that. If we study the published relationship of Blavatsky and Olcott, we see them working hand in hand. Olcott was not trying to undermine either Blavatsky or Theosophy. They were both promoting it to the best of their abilities. Although any cursory investigation then or now would find that the Eddy brothers were small-time conmen, the highly trained Olcott seems to have missed it. Why? Most likely because he was paid to miss it. But why would the US Government promote spiritualism and Theosophy, and assign a top agent to lead the promotion? To figure it out, we have to look at Theosophy in relation to what came before it and what came after.
What came before it is Transcendentalism. From the 1830s and 40s, people like Carlyle, Emerson and Thoreau had imported Eastern philosophies and religions, especially Buddhism.* Max Muller also helped import Eastern religious ideas to the West in the same decades, using his position at Oxford to educate the upper classes of England and the Continent. Although we must assume Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Muller, and most others had no idea of weakening Christianity via this importation of Eastern religions, the phenomenon did have this effect. The educated classes of the first half of the 19 th century were already questioning their upbringing, for any number of reasons we don't need to get into here, and so this early multiculturalism played into the provincial unease, increasing it. While many of the time saw this as an unfolding tragedy, we may assume some factions in government did not. The governments in Russia, across Europe, as well as in the US likely saw it as an opening. The State had been sharing power—and taxes—with the Church for centuries, and we know of the major historical disputes between them all the way back to Henry II and before. For this reason, the State read Nietzsche's “God is dead” proclamation with a smile, licking its lips. The State saw that the tithe that had long gone to the Church could now be claimed by it.
So after the Civil War, someone in the US Government must have looked at the Transcendentalists and thought, “wouldn't it be clever to infiltrate this movement and accelerate it? Buddhism will never take root in the US, but the right dose of it could certainly bring about the death of Christianity that much sooner. In which case we could double our tax intake without the people paying more total taxes+tithes.” Brilliant, as you see.
And not only the US Government. As we now know, the Russians and Europeans actually incorporated this plan earlier and much more fully than we did, which is why they were more successful. The Church is nearly defunct in Russia and large parts of Europe, and it has not been replaced by Buddhism or anything else. It has been replaced by an incredibly bloated State, which was the plan all along.
Americans have always had trouble looking closely at American history, so I encourage you to apply my theory to Europe or Russia instead. Has this happened or has it not? No one who knows anything of Russian or European history can deny that the State has long conspired against the Church. I am not a fan of Christianity and am not sad to see it go, but even I can admit that it has not been allowed to die a natural death. Marxism was used as a wonderful tool against it, and Darwinism, and a hundred other things. But in the US, where Marxism has been a less successful tool, other tools had to be used. I am showing you how Buddhism is one of those tools, and has been since after the Civil War.
You may now begin to understand that Madame Blavatsky was not a Russian spy: she was here as a consultant. In the 1870s, the Russians and Europeans were already miles ahead of us on this plan, and with Blavatsky we were simply borrowing their expertise. It was a joint effort, a bilateral movement. Blavatsky was not inspired in the way we are told, but she was inspired. From her travels, she had discovered that Buddhism by itself wasn't enough of an accelerant. She found that the more mysticism you stirred into the pot, the more religious turmoil you could create. So I assume part of her recommendation to Olcott and his superiors was to basically throw in everything and the kitchen sink. As it says at Wikipedia,
One of the central philosophical tenets promoted by the Society was the complex doctrine of The Intelligent Evolution of All Existence, occurring on a Cosmic scale, incorporating both the physical and non-physical aspects of the known and unknown Universe, and affecting all of its constituent parts regardless of apparent size or importance.
Since these spooks wished to ensnare as many as possible in their nets, they tried to have something for everyone, a sort of religious circus. We see that in the society's seal:
Here we see the swastika, the ankh, the star of David, the ouroboros, and the Aum. Theosophy had a bit of medicine/candy for every dissatisfaction, an amulet for every ailment.
Theosophy might have succeeded even better than it did, but that Madame was a bit of ham. Her favorite part of the circus was acting the Guide, and she got caught with trapdoors and fake walls and things up her sleeve. Eventually they had to get rid of her and replace her with more reliable spooks.
The success of Theosophy seems to have encouraged military intelligence to create many offshoots and splinter groups, including the Golden Dawn, Thelema, OTO, the Church of Satan, the Process Church, and hundreds of others. Aleister Crowley is one of the easiest agents to expose, since the transparent absurdity of his entire biography starts at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was recruited by the British secret service and traveled to Russia while still a student (1897). He was also connected to Footlights, the famous Dramatic Club at Cambridge, where he slept with the (male) President of the Club. This is apropos, since Crowley would be an actor all his life.
I could expose many other similar groups in this way, but I think you see the method. It is almost too easy. So let us look at a group that most would think unconnected to these fake religious people: the Beat Generation. In an odd example of coincidence or serendipity, I was working on this paper when my fiancée walked into my den and said, “Have you seen the ads for 'Kill Your Darlings'”? I said, “What?” having no idea what she was talking about. Turns out a film being released as I write is about the Beats, with Daniel Radcliffe playing Ginsberg (groan: that's like having Orlando Bloom play Jean- Paul Sartre). Anyway, my fiancée had been driving home and had heard about it on NPR. She said the guy being interviewed was making an interesting criticism of the Beats. I said, “He's linking them to the CIA, I bet.” She laughed and said no. But we will return to this movie later.
In the 60-odd years since the Beat writers emerged from Columbia University, they have been the beneficiaries of extravagant praise and the recipients of almost no serious analysis. Not everyone has liked them, of course, but even those who disliked the most have never thought to analyze them closely. About the worst they have been accused of is Modernism or anti-Americanism. Norman Podhoretz accused them in Partisan Review (1958) of “an anti-intellectual worship of the primitive.” Big deal. But since I will show they were probably government operatives, none of these epithets had any sticking power. They were called anti-American by other operatives, so that you (and the youth) would think they were subversive. They knew that was guaranteed to sell more books.
Again, none of this takes much research, since anyone with a good eye can see it hiding it plain sight. The first red flag is Columbia University, which has been a prime playground for military intelligence since the Second World War. Real subversives come from the margins, not from wealthy universities in uptown Manhattan. The second red flag is the timing: the CIA was formed in 1947, and the intelligence community began its great expansion at that time, moving strongly into the media, the universities, and everywhere else. It is therefore no coincidence to see these major manufactured events erupting in the early 1950s. The third red flag is the promoters of these supposedly subversive writers: the New York Times, Viking Press, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the other mouthpieces and moneybags of Intelligence. The fourth red flag is the works themselves, which despite being devoid of all art and being amateurishly crammed with every piece of bald propaganda imaginable have still been sold as progressive if not revolutionary.
Let's start with Jack Kerouac, famous for On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Although his bio at Wikipedia is mostly a whitewash, with almost no real information about his life before 1957, we do get a couple of tasty morsels:
That is Kerouac's enlistment photo for the Navy, 1943. We are told he was honorably discharged after two days on psychiatric grounds for requesting an aspirin. Right. (Compare that to Burroughs' enlistment story below). That is curious considering that he was sane enough to be in the Merchant Marine. Are we to believe that the Navy thinks aspirin are grounds for dismissal while the Merchant Marine doesn't?
The other tasty morsel is the Horace Mann Preparatory School, which Kerouac attended for a year before Columbia. Although we only get a link there—and they pray you won't take that link—if you take it you will find that the Horace Mann school is the ritziest prep school in the nation. Tuition for 2013 is $40,000, if you want to attend. If Kerouac were the semi-literate football running back who could only afford to attend Columbia on a sports scholarship, how did he get into Horace Mann, much less pay for it? I guess we are supposed to believe he was brought in as a senior ringer for the football team.
We are given other tidbits while Kerouac is at Columbia. He joined Phi Gamma Delta, which means Kerouac was a Fiji. Just what you would expect of a subversive, right? At my college, all the revolutionary intellectuals hung out at the Fiji house. Kerouac also studied at the New School, which was and still is heavily funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
In the seven years between “leaving” the Navy and writing On the Road, Kerouac is supposed to have become “beat,” as in beaten down by the big world. So we are supposed to believe that this privileged young man, coming out of Horace Mann Prep and Columbia, and having enough money and time to write and travel about the country and buy dope, living sometimes with his parents in Ozone Park, had, between the ages of 21 and 28, not only become nearly used up by world weariness, seeing rightist politics on TV, and multiple spiritual quests, but had learned enough by the ripe age of 28 to transcend this shattering weltschmerz and become “the voice of a new generation.” To do this he only had to ramble on for 320 pages over a couple of weeks, never stopping to change his paper or his underwear.
Although On the Road is sold as a counter-culture response to rightist politics of the 1950s, including—explicitly—McCarthyism, Kerouac was a vocal supporter of McCarthy. Again, you can confirm this with almost no effort, since Wikipedia sells On the Road as a response to McCarthyism on one page, then admits on the next that Kerouac “watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking cannabis and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joe McCarthy.” So, as they say, somethin' ain't right here.
We are told Kerouac used “a prose style he adapted from Hemingway,” but only someone who had read neither Kerouac or Hemingway could possible put that sentence on paper.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
Kerouac or Hemingway? I'll give you a hint: count the number of periods. That's about 160 words and one period. Hemingway averaged more like 12 words per period. And Kerouac has 14 commas where Hemingway might have one or two. If Kerouac “adapted” his style from Hemingway, he did so only by inverting it: doing the exact opposite of what Hemingway would have done at each and every point in the text.**
Another thing ain't right, and that is Kerouac's waffling between Catholicism and Buddhism. We are told it is more evidence of his emotional rollercoaster, but that isn't how it looks to an honest reader. What it looks like is that Kerouac is being honest when he says he is a Catholic, and dishonest when he says he is interested in Buddhism. In one interview, he said, "I'm not a Beatnik, I'm a Catholic." He then held up a painting of Pope Paul VI and bragged, "You know who painted that? Me!” That is too silly to be staged, and we must assume he was dressed down for it afterwards. Both Wake Up, his biography of the Buddha, and The Dharma Bums are written like they are assignments. The Dharma Bums (1958) is his immediate follow-up to the success of On the Road (1957), and his handlers obviously wanted to pounce fully on this opportunity to once again promote Eastern religions to Western audiences. But the book was so unconvincing that both Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki dismissed it as embarrassing. Since Watts and Suzuki also look to me like paid operatives, their comments in this case appear to be unscripted. It looks like they wanted to be sure their handlers understood they were more suited for this job, but it is unlikely Intelligence looked kindly on their undercutting of the propaganda. In subsequent decades Intelligence would become better at keeping all its agents on the same page at all times.
[Addendum, some time later: Of course, it later occurred to me what may have already occurred to you: Kerouac wasn't Catholic, he was Jewish. Remember, I wrote this paper at the very beginning of my big trip down the rabbit hole, so I hadn't done all that research when I wrote this. So, I was wrong. Kerouac claiming to be Catholic and claiming to have painted the Pope wasn't too silly to be staged. It was actually the perfect amount of silly to be staged, as we have seen since then.]
Which brings us back to On the Road. It would appear that the success of this book caught even its publishers by surprise, since Intelligence must have considered Kerouac mostly a wash-out by that time. He hadn't been able to produce the product by age 28, and they didn't think this was the product either—which is why they sat on it for five years. Although they were fine with the drug use—which they were already promoting—and the pseudo-artistic Bohemian shiftless lifestyle—which they had long been promoting to break up the family—it is likely they found On the Road altogether too positive. It was dissatisfaction they wished to promote, not any “beatific” thrill of life. Kerouac talks a lot about dissatisfaction—as he was instructed—but the problem is he was never good at creating it. On the Road actually acts as a sort of weak tonic against dissatisfaction, which Kerouac's handlers must have considered to be counterproductive. These handlers made a lot of mistakes with Kerouac, and by the time he was 28 his leash was way too long. It was a mistake to let Kerouac pal around with Neal Cassady, for one thing. Kerouac was getting way too many blowjobs while on the road, which doesn't tend to increase dissatisfaction.
You also have to remember that J. Edgar Hoover, a homosexual, was in one of the top positions in Intelligence (head of FBI) in those decades, but because he was old-school regarding homosexuality, Intelligence hadn't yet discovered the benefit of selling homosexuality to the greater culture. Although they have completely reversed directions on that since the 1950s, they saw the homosexual passages in On the Road as something to excise, not something to play up. Therefore, for them the book only delivered a partial list of desirables, and was burdened by several major undesirable qualities. And due to the poor writing quality, they expected the book to be hard to move, even with big pushes in the New York Times and other places. Well, they were wrong. The book wasn't just modestly successful as propaganda, as they had hoped, it was incredibly successful—and the bad writing was found to have been part of its draw. It was found that regular people preferred a regular writing style, since it didn't make them feel stupid. [Plus, we may assume they massively inflated the sales figures, as they always do with books they are promoting.] The book was so successful it actually backfired on them in some ways. First, it wasn't nearly downbeat enough, and the positive qualities of On the Road ended up leading to the hippie movement, which was far too positive and energetic, requiring forcible suppression just ten years later. Second, it made Kerouac a star, and due to his early failures, Intelligence had lost control of him. They had just enough pressure left on the reins to demand a Buddha novel—which would be The Dharma Bums—but after that he was finished. He was considered a loose cannon and had to be sat on constantly. By age 47 he had become such a liability, it looks like he had to be killed or relocated, I don't know which. The year was 1969, when famous people were being relocated all over the place, so I will be generous and assume they just moved him down to South America with many others, revoking his passport so he couldn't get back. [Later: No chance he was killed. He was simply retired, due to bad health and basic uselessness to Intel. See his late interviews, which were an embarrassment to everyone concerned. They didn't want him drinking himself to death on TV, so they told him to go drink himself to death in private somewhere.]
Now Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac was an angel compared to Ginsberg. Unlike Kerouac, Ginsberg was a master of creating dissatisfaction from the get-go. He could lie all day long and never miss a beat. If anyone could foil a lie-detector machine, it was Ginsberg. It is doubtful his pupils contracted even in direct sunlight.
I encourage you to reread the first hundred lines of Howl with this in mind: if I am right and Intelligence had set up its own hires as poets and artists and novelists, it would have to deal somehow with the fact that these hires had no real talent. They didn't know how to write or paint, so the agency would have to deal with that fact in some way. What “writers” like Kerouac and Ginsberg could do is what most people who have gone to college or have some native intelligence can do: ramble on nearly incoherently with no form, inserting cliches here and there and occasionally hitting accidentally on something that almost looked poetic—something that resembled depth or fluidity. That is what Howl is. That is what On the Road is. So to sell this formless rambling non-art as art, the agency hired another set of PR people to convince the world that this kind of writing was actually more artistic than real poetry or real novel writing. They sold this writing as “stream of consciousness.” They sold it as “jazzy.” It was like improvisational jazz. Right. Except that good improvisational jazz players know how to play their instruments and know scales and things like that. They know music. Ginsberg didn't know the first thing about poetry, didn't care enough to learn anything about it, and had no natural ear. He didn't know his scales, didn't know how to play his instrument, and had no talent. But, being full of hot air and of himself, he had no problem picking up the instrument nonetheless and honking on it for hours. He had the agencies behind him, with infinite amounts of money to promote him, so he had no need for talent or ideas. They supplied him with the propaganda and he was only expected to weave it willy-nilly into his ramblings.
Let's look at only the first 15 lines of Howl.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan- sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
Leaving aside for the moment that this isn't poetry—being just text cut indiscriminately into lines—I must admit I can't suspend disbelief enough to get past the first line. Why were these rich boys from Columbia in such bad shape? Do you honestly believe that “the best minds of my generation” were destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, etc.? If they were in fact dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, why were they doing it, who was to blame, and how could they be considered the best minds of the generation if they were doing it? Remember, although the time period we are talking about was the early 1940s, these “best minds” had apparently been rewarded deferments for some reason. In other words, they weren't fighting in Normandy or the Pacific. In 1943 and 1945, Kerouac and Ginsberg are said to be in the Merchant Marine, and even then they apparently only stayed in it for a few months, “to earn money.” In other words, they weren't drafted. They didn't experience the horrors of combat, which might have explained the passages above. They also don't talk about losing friends in the war, and that is because their friends were other privileged boys who stayed home and went to Columbia, or at worst found themselves in the Merchant Marine. So Howl should be suspect from the first word.
Also ask yourself this: if the “angelheaded hipsters were burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo,” and if these hipsters were the “best minds of their generation,” why were they looking for that connection in cheap fixes on the street? Wouldn't it have been altogether more logical to look for that connection in the countryside, out under those stars, making supplication or prayer to the sky itself? It is clear that Ginsberg is simply romanticizing this burn-out response to the world, in order to sell it to the youth. Although the best minds of that generation weren't doing that, it appears that Intelligence wanted them to do that. Or, it wanted to recruit the best minds, while steering the lesser minds into drug addiction and other forms of control. Since the various drug markets—legal and illegal—have always enriched the various government mafias, we have another easy cui bono here.
Ginsberg's bio is full of these red flags. Ginsberg's father was also a published poet.
Ginsberg was equally critical of his father. "My father would go around the house," he once said, "either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' I grew suspicious of both sides."
So if you were going to argue that Ginsberg and the other hipsters were on the street starving and hysterical because of problems at home, you would be in trouble. The worst thing Ginsberg had to put up with at home was recitation of Longfellow.
We get another clue from his mother. We are told,
Ginsberg's mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg, was affected by a psychological illness that was never properly diagnosed. Her mental illness often manifested as paranoid delusions. She would claim, for example, that the president had implanted listening devices in their home. . . .
That's interesting, wouldn't you say, considering what we now know. If Allen was a spook, his father may have been one as well, which means there probably were listening devices in the Ginsberg home. In which case any problems in the Ginsberg home weren't caused by the war or by any weltschmerz or world weariness: they were caused by Intelligence directly. Mrs. Ginsberg was being driven crazy by the spooks in her own house: her husband and son.
Some readers will have already balked at all this talk of Intelligence. They will think we have no evidence of such things at that time. So I send them to a 1995 article in the London Independent titled “Modern Art was a CIA Weapon.”
The CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex-communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.... The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
So you see, it isn't a conspiracy theory. The Independent admits that it has been confirmed by former CIA officials, and documents have been declassified. If the CIA could actively support the Abstract Expressionists, why not the Beat Generation?
This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.
See there? “Writers, historians and poets.” Mainstream confirmation of my thesis straight from the internet. But of course this confirmation had to come out in London, since the US press has been controlled since the same time: 1947.
Curiously, although this article first came out in 1995, apparently no one on the internet saw until about 2012, which may explain why I just discovered it. If you do a websearch on the article's title, you find republication and links of it in various places, but they all seem to be from 2012 or 2013. This delay may indicate the article was suppressed online until recently, and it may have been unavailable for more than a decade from the backissues of the Independent. To test this, I typed the page into the Wayback Machine, finding that it had not been webcrawled previous to August 5, 2009. I encourage anyone reading this to download a copy of the article at the Independent to their computer, in case it is taken down again.
Turns out Saunders borrowed some of her information from Eva Cockroft, who “blew the whistle” on this 21 years earlier in a June 1974 issue of Artforum, which you can read online. Like Saunders, Cockroft is still misdirecting, but in order to continue misdirecting she has to tell a lot of truth. For those like me who had already collated a lot of surrounding data, this amount of truth turns out to be far more than enough to read the rest of the signs without her help. In other words, it turns out to be such a huge dose of truth that it can no longer be spun. The lies won't adhere to it any longer. But also as with Saunders, this truth was told in a place where people like me were unlikely to find it. Realist artists and other honest people were unlikely to be reading Artforum magazine in 1974, or in any other decade.
In that article, Cockroft admits:
In June 1941, a Central Press wire story claimed the Museum of Modern Art was the “latest and strangest recruit in Uncle Sam's defense line-up”. The story quoted the Chairman of the Museum's Board of Trustees, John Hay Whitney, on how the Museum could serve as a weapon for national defence. . . .
Good to know that the major museums are now subsidiaries of the Pentagon. Just what we should want for art, as good democrats, right? Cockroft also unburies something else important: the charitable trust of this same John Hay Whitney was admitted to be a CIA conduit in the February 25, 1967 issue of the New York Times. [Remember that for later, when in other papers I talk about these charitable trusts of the billionaires not being what they seem.] Like Saunders, Cockroft tries to spin this control of art by plutocrats as something to do with the Cold War, but since she shows it goes back to at least 1929— long before the Cold War started—that isn't plausible. Again like Saunders, she also tries to spin this promotion of Abstract Expressionism as something to do with purity. The last two sentences of her article are:
By giving their painting an individualist emphasis and eliminating recognizable subject matter, the Abstract Expressionists succeeded in creating an important new art movement. They also contributed, whether they knew it or not, to a purely political phenomenon—the supposed divorce between art and politics which so perfectly served America's needs in the cold war.
That's a very strange ending to a very strange article. After blowing the whistle on an obviously reprehensible and fascistic enterprise, she ends by trying to whitewash the whole thing.
Or does she? Are we sure she wrote every sentence here? The tone of those sentences don't match the tone of her opening pages, so we should ask that question. Beyond knowing that art was co-opted long ago by fascist private interests, we now know that the media was taken over by the same interests. Part of Cockroft's and Saunders' outings was the outing of the arts and literary magazines, and Artforum is of course one of these. Many of these magazines were shown to be straight-up fronts, and all the others could have material inserted anywhere at the discretion of Intelligence. That is now admitted to be true even of top outlets like the New York Times, which are pre-read by the CIA and then redacted and/or rewritten. I suggest that is what we are seeing here. After all, the last sentence doesn't even make sense: how can the “divorce of politics and art” be a “political phenomenon”? The art is either being used politically or it is not. If it is, as Cockroft has admitted, then the art cannot be divorced from politics. A woman who had just written such a hard-hitting exposé would hardly end it with such a piece of illogical gassiness.
Whoever added those last sentences to this article want to keep selling you the main line of Modernism they were selling you before 1974: the old lie that Modernism was both politically progressive and at the same time somehow apolitical. Mainly, it was progressive because it was our art instead of Hitler's or Stalin's; and it was apolitical because it wasn't a Nazi propaganda poster. However, since we are seeing it was promoted by fascists for fascist reasons, it doesn't really matter whether it was abstract or not. Its form has turned out to be beside the point, hasn't it? It doesn't matter that it was realist or abstract; what matters is that the artists were controlled. They were chosen because they agreed to be controlled. By the standards they themselves have promoted, that is enough to dismiss them at once
and forevermore. Once we pull away all the layers of misdirection, we see that it was realists like me that were truly independent and truly involved in “free enterprise” painting. We were the ones expressing our own individuality. The famous artists of the 20th century turn out to have been expressing the needs of the CIA or of the war effort or of the Rockefellers.
But back to Saunders. I also beg you to stop and ponder this quote from her 1995 article:
At this time the new Agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time. . . . If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Staffed by Yale and Harvard graduates—like Burroughs? Burroughs was a Harvard graduate. Of course the Agency was also staffed by Columbia graduates, but they leave that out here. The writers at the Independent (who are likely to be MI6, remember) are trying to convince you that the CIA was actively promoting Rothko, Pollock, and “other Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School” in order to combat Communism. Does that make any sense? Do you combat Communism by promoting Leninists? Of course not. They weren't supporting these guys to combat Communism. They were supporting them to co-opt art in the US, replacing it with a manufactured market they were in control of. They were also supporting them to promote decadence. They needed to destroy all standing norms, mores and markets, in order to replace them with what we now know as the New World Order. Bush, Sr., didn't invent the New World Order, he was just a cog in a machine that has been spinning for many centuries.
But there is more information buried in that last quote. We are told these CIA agents from Yale and Harvard “wrote novels in their spare time.” Like Kerouac? Most people don't read closely enough. Most people read that line and it only registers as “those CIA agents were budding amateurs, writing just to kill their free hours, never submitting their manuscripts to publishers.” But that isn't the right reading. The right reading is this, “Those CIA agents were writing novels and poems and making other art which they then published and promoted as avant garde.” In fact, the way you should read it is, “Most of those famous artists and writers that we know of from the past six or seven decades were CIA agents. Their work as agents was producing the art we have come to know.” Like Ginsberg did, these CIA artists just used their fake leftyism as a cover. The modern left is now composed mostly of these fake leftists. In the media and arts, both sides have been co-opted, and they are now both manufactured.
We also find the Rockefellers behind Modernism, and the Independent admits it.
Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art [MOMA] in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.
There you have it. Remember, the Congress of Cultural Freedom is the CIA (see two quotes above). So we have published proof from a mainstream London newspaper that Rockefeller conspired with the CIA to promote Modernism, and he did it prior to the Cold War. If Abstract Expressionism were only being promoted as part of the Cold War, then why were the Rockefellers supporting Modernism as far back as 1929? MOMA was founded in 1929, and there was no Cold War in 1929. Russia wasn't even an enemy in 1929. Russia was an ally up until the end of WW2. The Independent contradicts itself in its own article, which is indication it is trying to spin the story even as it “leaks” it.
Also notice that Rockefeller calls Abstract Expressionism “free enterprise painting.” This is classic Newspeak. Since Abstract Expressionism is being promoted by the CIA, it is the opposite of free enterprise painting. It is contracted propaganda. Abstract Expressionism is CIA painting, and there is nothing “free enterprise” about the CIA. The CIA is and always has been about control.
And we get more astonishing information, poorly spun:
William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's [MOMA's] International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
Wow, so MOMA is really the CIA's museum. We are never told that over here in the States, are we? It is also worth looking at Tom Braden's quote in this article:
We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.
Again, very poorly spun. Let me unwind it for you. Braden wants you to think that his promotion of Modernism was really a promotion of artistic freedom. But what if you were an artist in 1950 who didn't fit the CIA mold, either as agent or artist, do you think you would be a beneficiary of this “freedom”? No, you would probably see the CIA's co-option of the arts as a rigid barrier, wouldn't you? And you would be right. The contradiction lurking here is that Braden is defining the Soviet Union's artistic rules as fascism, and the CIA's artistic rules as freedom. Braden is pretending that the CIA didn't create Modern dogma in its promotion of Modernism, but of course it did. The Theory surrounding Modernism has been the most dogmatic, vicious, proselytizing, and propagandized that has ever existed in the history of the arts. Because the CIA had almost infinite wealth from the beginning (both from the treasury and from private wealth like the Rockefellers), it could hire a vast army of academics, historians, and critics to inundate and control the field. Anyone who disagreed with any pronouncement handed down from high could be denounced as a philistine and permanently drummed from the field. This was the state of the arts in 1950 and it is still the state of the arts. I know because I was one of those drummed from the field. It is an artistic fascism far beyond anything the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany ever dreamed of.
We also have to pull apart this ridiculous quote:
[Braden] confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.
So neither the artists, the public, nor the Congress were free to like what it liked or to do what it would otherwise do (surely the definition of freedom). Modernism had to be forced on it for its own good, in the name of freedom. Artists had to be lectured to, told what to paint, and then the Congress had to be bypassed, and then the museums had to be filled with this art whether people wanted to look at it or
not. And for Braden, that is the definition of freedom and democracy. But we still aren't finished. The Independent has more for us:
In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London. The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds. So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes.
At taxpayers' expense. Although taxpayers have always disliked this art and still do, their taxdollars are used to promote it, for propaganda purposes. And that is sold back to them as freedom.
The Independent pretends this CIA “influence” ended sometime in the 60s, but no one believes that. Since all the contemporary arts have continued to devolve and deconstruct, we may assume they are still doing so on purpose, at someone's behest. The promotion in the 1950s was no accident and the promotion of what we see now is still no accident. The Independent tells us that the arts were infiltrated back then as part of the Cold War. We are supposed to believe that promotion of Pollock and Rothko and the Beat Generation made Russian art and poetry look bad. Right. But although the manufactured vitality of American art may have fooled some people, that was never the deeper goal. The CIA could have promoted good art and poetry instead of what they did promote, so the claim doesn't wash. The worst possible art has been promoted for a century, and so we should ask why.
It was promoted for precisely the same reason Buddhism was promoted. Buddhism was promoted to undercut Christianity, so that the Government could steal its tithe. In the same way, Modern Art was promoted to replace real art, so that the Government could steal its market. Just as the Government wasn't in control of religion in 1800, it wasn't in control of art. It had to share markets and power. But as we have gotten closer and closer to the present, we have seen the Government taking over all markets, spiritual and mundane. To do this, it had to first destroy existing markets. In religion, it had to destroy existing forms of worship and belief. In art, it had to destroy all existing forms and conventions. In medicine, it had to destroy herbal cures, home remedies, self-medication, and free advice. In pharmaceuticals, it had to destroy the old drugs, co-opt their markets, or create markets for the new lab drugs. In education, it had to destroy the old coursework, the old books, and the old teachers. Since parents were often these teachers, it had to destroy that link as well.
The CIA had to promote the worst possible art for many reasons. One, it is what their agents were capable of. Real artists wouldn't work with them, so they had to promote what they had. Two, because it was easy to produce, they could get it at a moment's notice, in whatever quantities they needed. Three, the worst artists were the easiest to control. Because they had no talent, they knew that to be part of the scene they had to do exactly what they were told. Four, the CIA found that a part of the public actually liked this very bad art, and that rich buyers would buy it. Unexpectedly, this art appealed to rich people who had always had artistic aspirations, but no talent. They could comprehend it. It did not make them feel small. Once they placed it in the living room or dining room, it did not overwhelm them. It was an art that fit them. Being vulgar, they naturally preferred a vulgar art. Being formless themselves, they preferred a formless art. Having no eye for beauty, they did not require it. In fact, they languished in its presence and preferred the ugly. Besides the rich, this new art also appealed to a broad range of the shallow and ambitious, who wished to be famous but had no real means to achieve that until now. They could see that the new art gave them an opening. Since this was clearly the kind of art anyone could produce, they could produce it, too. Art then became only a competition in groveling at the feet of the CIA, which they were perfectly capable of doing. This would explain the career of someone like Julian Schnabel without further study.
Addendum, February 2014. A reader alerted me to an article just published at the Chronicle of Higher Education by an English professor at Providence College, Eric Bennett. This article is about the Iowa Writer's Workshop, at which he was a student from 1998 to 2000. He admits that the writing programs at the University of Iowa have long been underwritten by the CIA, via the Farfield Foundation, the ACCF, and the Rockefellers. The sentence in the article that is most useful here is this one:
Creative-writing pedagogues in the aftermath of World War II, without exception, read Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, and The Sewanee Review. They breathed the intellectual air of New Critics, on the one hand, and New York intellectuals on the other. These camps, formerly enemy camps—Southern reactionaries and Northern socialists at each other’s throats in the 1930s—had by the 50s merged into a liberal consensus that published highly intellectual, but at the time only newly "academic," essays in those four journals, all of which, like Iowa, were subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation.
As we have seen and will see, they were also subsidized by many other CIA front organizations. The government used the purse-strings to exert control over these programs, keeping them in little pens that Bennett says serve “to venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible.” Or, in other words, to keep them small and disempowered. By a constant stream of top- down propaganda, writers were convinced that being solipsistic, quotidian, and creatively modest were artistic virtues. As with painting, science, politics, and every other category, the inversion of the thing was sold as the thing itself.
[Also note the name Bennett, which links him to the families.]
At the same time I was made aware of this article by Bennett, I became aware of a 2012 Salon article by Joel Whitney. It quotes from Saunders' 1995 Independent article, but rounds out the leak with some further information. Although Saunders tells us the Partisan Review was linked to Intelligence, Salon tells us the Paris Review was as well. Peter Matthiessen, the magazine's founder, has now admitted that in several recent interviews, including this one at Penn State. Matthiessen admits that he was recruited by the CIA right out of Yale in 1953, and that the Paris Review was his “cover.” That information has been added to the Paris Review page at Wikipedia, but it is a bald admission with no commentary as to how it must affect everything to do with the magazine. Both Matthiessen and George Plimpton have tried to maintain that Matthiessen was the only one who knew, but—given what we now know from the CIA itself (see Tom Braden)—that isn't believable in the least. When various writers were pleading ignorance back in the 1960s and 70s, Braden flipped the leak, outing them. He said that all these writers and artists knew exactly what was going on, and Saunders' book confirms that over and over. So does the article at Salon, which outs both Plimpton and Nelson Aldrich as members of the ACCF. Although Plimpton says he didn't know until the 1960s, it is illogical that he would have been happy to work for a CIA front in 1960 but not in 1954. Is he implying he was less patriotic in 1954?
Salon admits,
The Paris Review had already mastered the highly profitable art of selling interviews for reprints in Congress- affiliated [ACCF] magazines by the time of Plimpton’s Ernest Hemingway interview, begun in 1954. . . .
This is a dead giveaway beyond the ACCF link, though Salon doesn't seem to realize it. Ernest Hemingway himself was a CIA agent in 1954, and the CIA admits that on their own website. See my next paper for the full exposé.
Salon also tells us one of the main reasons the CIA backing was a problem: “by funding a magazine with a New York office that was distributed in the U.S., it was engaged in propagandizing to the American public, which was illegal.”
Unfortunately, Joel Whitney at Salon unmasks himself at the end—if not long before—by saying this:
None of which is fair to attach to the Paris Review, if not for Matthiessen’s claims that the Review’s ties ended before the ugly stuff, or for Plimpton’s failure to disclose the ties that remained.
So in his summation, Whitney is telling you to your face that the greatest crime here is failure to disclose and other white lies? You have to be kidding me! What about the fact that all this was illegal? What about the fact that nothing was what we were told it was? William Styron said in the first issue, “I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.” We now know that was total, malicious misdirection, since the whole point of all these magazine was drum-beating. What about the fact that, all told, at least 9/10ths of 20th century American literature and criticism should now be suspected of being manufactured? If all these people were working for Intelligence, what is to prevent us from assuming everything they did was Intelligence work, including the novels, poems, and essays? What is to prevent us from re-reading everything published in that time period, combing it for covert propaganda? You may not think that is necessary, but I for one do. As you will see in upcoming papers, I have found evidence that is exactly what has happened. It is not just the Beats that are fake, it is almost everyone.
[Also note the name Whitney, which, like Bennett, is from the families. Both are linked to the highest levels of the peerage.]
I said I would return to the new Beat movie called “Kill Your Darlings” and now seems as good a time as any. This looks like the latest CIA effort to continue old propaganda, since they don't like to let a good franchise die. It is a follow-up to last year's On the Road, also probably produced at the behest of the CIA (American Zoetrope). There are still books to be sold (or I should say Kindle) and lives to destroy. This is a Dead Poets Society without Robin Williams, trying to pull gays and other impressionable youths into the theater and re-romanticize the manufactured sturm und drang of the Beat Generation. They still have drugs to push and this time they can fully push the gay angle as well, which they couldn't back in the early 50s. If all the semi-smart straight young men they decided not to recruit into the Intelligence agencies in the past few years go to this film and decide to experiment with drugs or man-love, the CIA will have succeeded, since this will screw them up for decades and hopefully the rest of their lives, keeping them from resisting whatever it is the government tries to sell them. It may also make them more easy to blackmail.
One thing the movie reviews mention that I haven't really gotten to yet is the link to Yeats they have manufactured. Although it is doubtful any of the Beats ever bothered to read Yeats—using him as only a name to drop—there is of course a connection. Yeats was ensnared in the 1890s by the Golden Dawn—an offshoot of Theosophy—to his everlasting shame. Although Yeats was a real poet with real talent, and although I assume he had no idea what the Golden Dawn really was, he has been sullied by this mess like many others. He and others of his time were genuinely interested in reconnecting to their Irish pagan roots, and for some reason they were fooled into thinking the Golden Dawn could help them do that. To me Yeats looks like a dupe rather than a hire, and it is probable that his investigations into magic were fruitful for him and his poetry. Which means he wasn't harmed as much as many others who were ensnared. It is also informative to learn that Yeats clashed with Aleister Crowley, although it appears Yeats never really figured out why he mistrusted Crowley. If Yeats had been able to unmask Crowley, I think he would have quit all these societies for good.
[Addendum, later: As it turns out, Yeats was a crypto-Jew from the same families. Almost all famous people are, especially in the arts. So I was wrong here as well. Yes, he was an agent with some real writing talent, like Joyce, but he was still an agent. I also appear to be wrong below, regarding Yeats and Maud Gonne. My assumption now is that Yeats was gay and so was Gonne, and the stories we are told are told to cover that.]
However that may be, it is certain that the Beats had nothing at all to do with Yeats, either stylistically, as men, or as artists. They would never have been attracted to a woman like Maud Gonne, they would never have taken paganism seriously—since it didn't pay, and they never had the discipline to learn to do anything well, as he had. They had nothing to do with Yeats even in reaction, since their work was never a serious reaction to anything. They weren't really trying to bring Yeats into the postwar era or trying to compete with him or trying to reinterpret him or anything else. Modern Art was never an honest response to older art, it was simply an ignoring and ignorance and dismissal of everything that had come before, and the dishonest attempt to replace it with non-art. The work of the Beats was always just a trumped piece of shallow self-revelation—by those with little of interest to reveal—sold as deep and important. The only reason they chose Yeats to mention in this movie is that he is still on the CIA shortlist. They ensnared him long ago and have used his name ever since. The CIA writers don't know him as a poet, but they do know him as a name from Golden Dawn, which their predecessors created. So dropping his name still helps them in many ways.
Now William Burroughs. Burroughs was the worst of the lot, one of the few men slimy enough to walk arm in arm with the artist Francis Bacon.
Was Burroughs ever young, or was he born at 40? I could find no pictures of him looking less than 40. Here is the best I could do:
That is 1957, and Ginsberg still has some hair, but Burroughs already looks 40. You can learn at lot by searching on Burroughs and seeing who he is photographed with. I won't have time here to out everybody, so you will have to do some of your own research. But just to get you started: Frank Zappa, Davie Bowie, Jimmy Page, Grateful Dead, Tom Waits, Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Madonna, Kurt Cobain. It may be that some of those photographed with Burroughs were innocent, but the red flag is there and you will have to make your own call. [Later: None are innocent.]
Burroughs' bio is full of red flags. He was from a very wealthy family (Burroughs adding machines) and graduated from Harvard. He also attended medical school in Vienna. His uncle was an advertising guru who worked as a publicist for the Rockefellers. We are told Burroughs was turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy in 1942, which means he applied to them both. Since he was a trust-fund boy, he didn't need to be applying to either. The OSS is of course the precursor to the CIA. Notice that it doesn't say he was turned down by all the Intelligence agencies he applied to in 1942. Say he applied to three and was turned down by two, his bio would read the same, wouldn't it?
To cover this, we get an absurd story. We are told Burroughs enlisted in 1942, was classified 1A, infantry not an officer, and that his mother then got him out by claiming mental instability. That would be terrible if it were true, since it would mean rich mothers can get their sons out of service at will, even after enlistment. But we know it isn't true. The army doesn't work like that. The more likely story is that Burroughs didn't need to enlist because he had been accepted by some agency in Intelligence. He was probably on local assignment in 1943, doing set-up for some big project.
He was stationed in New York, near Columbia, and worked as the recruiter there, we must assume. In 1944 he was already 30, so he was 8 years older than Kerouac and 11 years older than Ginsberg. He wasn't a student at that time, being only a project coordinator. Yes, it looks very much like Burroughs was the Intelligence liaison in the beginning. He only got involved on the creative side later, when he saw how easy it was. That much is admitted in his bio, where they tell us that Kerouac and Ginsberg encouraged him to write, and seeing their methods, he realized it didn't take much in the way of creativity or effort. You should also look skeptically at the amount of drugs he claimed to have done. Since he lived to 83, it is impossible that he was a heroin addict for more than fifty years. This is just one more indication that the drug use was a pose, to help sell drugs. All these guys were paid drug pushers, via the written word. You may ask how Burroughs' life could help sell drugs. You may ask why anyone would wish to be like Burroughs, much less look like him, and I answer those questions with another question: why would anyone wish to have their picture taken with Burroughs? And yet thousands have, including very rich and famous people. Anytime you publicize and romanticize something, a lot of people will be drawn to it. If famous people are doing it and getting famous for it, a lot of people will do it, too, thinking to learn by imitation. Burroughs and the other Beats were and are considered cool, and recreational drug use has been sold as cool from the very beginning. This was no accident. It was a longterm marketing plan, on a par with the old cigarette advertisements, beer commercials, and softdrink ads. The Beat poems and novels were the original product placement, and the youth were hit with it from all sides. If the Beats weren't pushing hash and heroin on them, Carlos Castaneda was pushing magic mushrooms, Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were pushing LSD, and Ken Kesey was pushing everything. And that is not to mention every band since 1963, which have pushed every possible drug for every possible occasion.
I encourage you to reread Burroughs with this in mind. To start with, remember that the main character in Naked Lunch is called Lee the Agent. The Agent. The agent of what? Perhaps of The Agency? Do the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists refer to departments in the CIA? Is the Interzone the place of inter-agency wars that Burroughs has witnessed? Is Interzone University meant to refer to Harvard, or perhaps Columbia, or both, where the agencies battle for recruits?
I hope so, because it would give finally give the book some small meaning. Although it is sold to us by various and many CIA-front critics and academics as something special (TIME listed it in 2010 as one of the greatest novels since 1923), about the only sensible critique of it I have seen was from Stefan Beck at Salon in the same year.
Still, “Naked Lunch” serves a very valuable and reliable purpose. Get to it early enough, somewhere between the Hardy Boys and Holden Caulfield, and the fatigue and tedium will inoculate you against all sorts of intellectual malfeasance. You’ll never swallow the line that obscenity is a hallmark of genius, or that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom (usually it leads to the palace of excess, except when it leads to the hovel of incomprehensibility). Dismiss Burroughs as a pull-my-finger bore and you’re ready to dismiss Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brothers, Jonathan Littell and a host of others too dull to mention.
Although Norman Mailer suggested Burroughs was possessed by genius, that paragraph of Beck contains considerably more genius than Burroughs ever had, hitting the snail squarely on the head.
If you wish to continue along this line, I can give you some more leads. Take a look at Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. You only have to glance at Wikipedia to find out that Kesey and Gordon Lish were part of an MKULTRA drug program in Menlo Park in 1960, for which we are told they “volunteered.” This is where the idea for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is supposed to have come from.
This will take you to Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which in 1968 continued the CIA's plan of selling LSD to the hippies, thereby short-circuiting their activism. It was also the rather transparent attempt to derail the burgeoning hippie and activist movement by infiltrating the movement and then suggesting it had already lost its idealism. It followed a group of fake hippies (Kesey's Merry Pranksters) who preferred getting high to changing society, and suggested this was the arc of the entire movement of the 60s. Since even this plan failed, the government was forced to stop the hippie movement in 1969 by more direct methods, including bringing in the National Guard and manufacturing even larger events.
With this in mind, I encourage you to take a closer look at every event and famous person in recent history, a majority of which can be pulled apart as easily as I pulled apart the events and people above. You might think the internet would have been cleansed of all useful information, but I have not found that to be the case. A lot of this information is hidden in plain sight at places like Wikipedia, as I have shown you. It would appear that some in positions of power want this information to be known, which in itself indicates that Intelligence is not monolithic. Although these events get manufactured and these plans do go forward, not everyone in government, the military, or the CIA is happy with them. Perhaps this is what Burroughs was telling us with his Liquefactionists, Senders, Factualists, and Divisionists. One faction writes history and another faction tries to unwrite it. One faction fakes an event and another faction leaks it. One faction tries to turn America into a wasteland, and another faction tries to stop them. The destructive faction has been ascendant for decades, and still is, but it isn't all powerful even now. In previous papers we have seen some signs of hope, and even here we saw Salon publishing counter-propaganda from Stefan Beck. Since we have seen Salon pushing propaganda concerning Sandy Hook recently, this means that the war isn't only between different outlets, but within those outlets. The bad guys don't have total control over the mainstream media, which is why I am here. We have to use the opening while we still have it.
To those agents who are reading this—and I know you are there—you may ask why I can't just shut up and leave well enough alone. Why do I seem to be on this idealistic crusade? Just in case you really don't know, even after reading all my papers, it is because I am one of the real artists you defined out of the game. You stole my life from me and left me on the side of the road, with nowhere to go. More than that, you blocked all other meaningful work as well, for me and all people like me. I am also a poet: you destroyed poetry. I am a novelist: you destroyed that, too. So I went into science, only to discover you had destroyed that, too. You have destroyed the top end of every field, which of course will leave people like me very bored, with nothing to do but counter-attack. If you had found a way to include us—had left some field of endeavor open to excellence, idealism, truth, and beauty—you might have saved yourself much opposition. In the meantime, people like me might have solved some of your problems for you, and the world wouldn't have to be such a nasty cut-throat place.
At the end of the film The Mission, the monk played by Jeremy Irons is begging the Bishop not to order the destruction of a native tribe, and the Bishop says, “Such is the World.” Irons answers him, “Such have we made the World.”
*I am a great admirer of Carlyle, Emerson, and Thoreau, so do not imagine I am exposing them with the rest.
**I am not saying Kerouac should have written like Hemingway. In fact, I strongly dislike the way both of them write. I find both styles extremely boring, though for very different reasons.
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