by Miles Mathis
You know what makes this so much easier? You know why I can see through all this as if it is buried in pure ice? Because I never read this crap the first time around. I just turned 50, which means I was four years old in 1967. I didn't read it then, obviously, and I haven't read it since. Propaganda only works if it is fresh. From any distance, it all falls apart. The propagandist relies on his audience strongly taking a side and being ignorant of larger issues. But since I know that both sides are manufactured, I am not so easy to fool.
I didn't go to Ramparts for political confirmation, as the readers of the time did. They were caught up in the current headlines, and all the factions created by those headlines. I am not. The only reason I went to the Ramparts backissues today was to continue the research I am doing on the CIA and Modern Art. I have published several papers using the research of Frances Stonor Saunders, so of course the logical thing for me to do was to dig out her sources and study them closely. We are told that the CIA's funding of Modern Art, art critics, academics, and “leftist” journals was first reported by Ramparts magazine in March 1967. Ramparts first blew the cover of Encounter magazine and then the links were picked up by the mainstream press, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times and the Post then followed up strongly for more than a year.
That is your first red flag. We later learned from the Senate Church Committee hearings [1975] that both newspapers were favorite hangouts of Intelligence. The Washington Post has been called the CIA's own newspaper since the 1960's. I suggest you read Deborah Davis' book Katharine the Great, which catalogs many of the links between Intelligence and the Washington Post. The same has also been proved of the New York Times. You are still sold the ridiculous idea of a “liberal” press, but that is upside down like everything else. Since the press is controlled from above, it isn't liberal, it is fascist. The press is liberal on some issues now, like gay rights, say, but that is only because the fascists have taken that position, for their own reasons. To use that example, gay rights aren't being promoted because the fascists are liberal. Gay rights are being promoted because the fascists are doing everything they can to control populations. I am all for gay rights, but you have to make these distinctions. Otherwise you are just a dupe of higher powers.
Our second red flag is that Encounter was a sister publication of sorts to Ramparts. They were not formally connected (in the normal ways), but both were considered to be on the left. It is not so strange that one leftist magazine would blow the cover of another, since all magazines compete with the rest; but this should still give you the clue in another way. We now know that Encounter was a CIA front. We also know from subsequent research that most “intellectual” magazines on both sides had been founded by or swallowed up by Intelligence since the 1930's—this phenomenon accelerating in the late 1940's. This was also admitted in the Church Committee hearings, where the CIA itself bragged that it had editors or writers in all publications with any appreciable readership by the mid-50's. Well, if all this is true, why assume Ramparts was independent? Rather, the logical assumption is that Ramparts was a front like the rest. We then look for evidence for and against that assumption. That is the scientific method, after all.
Some will interrupt me to say, “No, that isn't the scientific method. The scientific method makes no assumptions—it simply compiles evidence objectively.” Wrong. At the beginning of the method, that is true. In the absence of evidence, you make no assumption. But once you have a large pile of evidence, you then make a limited assumption based on that evidence and continue on. If you had to withhold judgment until all evidence was in, you would never decide anything even temporarily. All evidence won't be in until the end of time. Since we already have a great deal of evidence Ramparts was probably a CIA front, we start with that tentative assumption and see how it holds up in the face of more evidence. I suggest you read Karl Popper's Postscript if you wish to know more about the scientific method.
More evidence can be gleaned by taking a quick survey of Ramparts' writers in 1967. Sol Stern wrote the exposé on the CIA and NSA, and curiously Stern was only a “radical” for a couple of years. He quit Ramparts in 1968 and soon became a conservative. Eventually he drifted to the Manhattan Institute and became a senior fellow there. The Manhattan Institute was founded by Bill Casey, CIA director from 1981 to 1987. Interesting, no? The same thing happened to Ramparts editor David Horowitz, who was a prominent “radical” for only a short time. Before he came to Ramparts, Horowitz was at Columbia University [red flag] and then worked at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in London [red flag]. But of course Frances Stonor Saunders tells us what to think of that: Russell was an honorary patron of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. “Of all the CIA's expenditures, the Congress for Cultural Freedom seemed its most worthwhile and successful.” [p. 91] Russell was also a writer for Encounter. I think we have just found a link between Encounter and Ramparts. Wasn't too hard, was it? We didn't need seven degrees of separation, just two.
Like Stern, Horowitz is now a neo-conservative, having become a fan of Reagan sometime in the 1970's (or so he says). Stern and Horowitz want us to think they just changed their minds, but anyone studying the evidence and the timeline would come to a different conclusion. It looks like they got tired of the pose, or were bad at it, and were allowed to adopt the opposite pose. It must be tiring for fascists to pretend they are leftists or radicals for any length of time. Only someone as dispassionate as Chomsky can hold the pose for decades.
Yes, Chomsky was another writer for Ramparts. I was a longtime fan of Chomsky until I finally saw through him. It took 911 to pull that curtain back. Studying his misdirection on 911 (and on the Kennedy assassination), I was led to re-read the older books I loved, like Manufacturing Consent. I encourage you to re-read it with this in mind: notice who he points the finger at as the manufacturer of consent. He says it is the media. Hmmm. Strange, don't you think, that Chomsky never mentions the CIA, or those behind the CIA? It is the fault of the media? They are the top of the food chain? Once that has penetrated your skull, search on his other comments about the CIA. He is always diverting your attention away from them.
In this, Chomsky has to rely on his readers not having followed the Church Committee hearings in 1975, and (ironically) not having read Ramparts in 1967. But that worked out because Chomsky's audience was people like me: those too young to remember the big events of the 60's or 70's. We were the controlled opposition, and he was a premier controller.
Like Ezra Pound, Chomsky was probably recruited from the University of Pennsylvania. I also recommend you take a closer look at Chomsky's pushing of anarcho-syndicalism, which I tried for many years to understand. It sounds very leftist and free, doesn't it? Very grassroots? Nope. If you go to the Wikipedia page on Syndicalism, you get a total whitewash, but if you go to the page on National Syndicalism, you begin to smell the coffee.
French National syndicalism was created by the combination between the integral nationalism of Action Française and the revolutionary syndicalism of Georges Sorel. Action Française was a French nationalist-monarchist movement led by Charles Maurras. The collaboration was based on a principle that was fundamental to both doctrines – onslaught on democracy. Both movements were anti-democratic and sought the destruction of the present order of society.
Note that: Revolutionary syndicalism was anti-democratic. You wouldn't think that from the name, would you? To see how it was anti-democratic, we have to go to the page on George Sorel.
In his Reflections on Violence, Sorel says that parliamentary socialism, and its middle-class of bureaucrats and newspaper-intellectuals does not understand social science, economics, or any other matter important for good rule as well as the traditional liberal and capitalist elite that ruled before the mediocre middle-class became a powerful force in parliament. "How did these mediocre and silly people become so powerful?" Sorel asks. His theory on this is that the mediocre middle-class became powerful when the working-classes, people without property, were given the right to vote at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. Thus, the working classes now created a problem for themselves by creating a political elite that is more stupid and less competent than the people who had a monopoly of power before them. He proposed that this problem could be fixed only by a collective withdrawal and boycott of the parliamentary system by the workers. Thus, the workers must return to strikes and violence as their main political tool, so Sorel says. This gives the workers a sense of unity, a return to dignity, and weakens the dangerous and mediocre middle-class in their struggle for power, and their attack on capitalism.
Again, that is seductive, because it starts from the truth. I agree with his premise, which is that the bureaucracy seems stupid and inefficient. He then tells us that this bureaucracy is run by the middle class, and that we should therefore weaken the middle class. Well, isn't that what happened in the second half of the 20th century in the US? Hasn't the middle class been decimated?
But was the middle class ever in control of the bureaucracy? No. The wealthy have been running this country from the beginning, and although the middle classes may work as bureaucrats, they don't make policy. So Sorel was running misdirection from 1893 on, and he now looks like one more international Intelligence asset attacking Republicanism using some form of Marxism. Like Chomsky's anarcho- syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism looks Marxist but is really fascist. As you see in the quote above, the workers provide the strikes and grassroots impetus for revolution, doing all the dirty work. But after the revolution, they stay lower class. They aren't smart enough to make decisions, so we need a hierarchy for that. The rules come down from above. And since the middle class has been destroyed as well, the lower class can't even rise to the middle class. The lower class is cleverly trapped.
Historically, syndicalism was a precursor to fascism. Sorel's revolutionary syndicalism joined in 1909 to the integral nationalism of Action Francaise, creating national syndicalism. Mussolini adopted national syndicalism in Italy and renamed it fascism. I suppose Chomsky is assuming you don't know that.
Although national syndicalism and fascism are the same thing, as sold at places like Wikipedia they look very different. . . on paper. Fascism is sold as conservative, violent, and totalitarian, while syndicalism is sold as Marxist. I will be told that Chomsky's anarcho-syndicalism is not nationalist. It is simply co-operative. But that isn't the question. Yes, some forms of Marxism look great on paper, especially when they lead with co-operation. But the question you should ask is this: “why doesn't Chomsky just defend Republicanism, Democracy, the Constitution, and so on: the form of government that worked fairly well until the CIA undermined it? Why is he promoting this weird anarcho- syndicalism that has never been tried anywhere, and that looks awfully close to several forms of Marxism/fascism that have already failed miserably? I will tell you why: Chomsky is promoting misdirection. He was hired to do it and he has done it very well. Job one has been destroying the Constitutional Republic we had, and since Marxism failed to do that in the US in the first half of the
20th century, they switched to other gambits, including this anarcho-syndicalism gambit which they chose to promote to naïve leftists—especially the young ones.
Speaking of which, look out for Russell Brand. Brand is now in the news calling for revolution and telling people not to vote. He is just the latest provocateur, undermining the last vestiges of democracy while posing as a progressive. The CIA is quite happy for you not to vote, as are their controllers. The Rockefellers would be glad if voting died out altogether. That is why they inserted the voting machines, which have already pretty much killed the efficacy of voting. Also beware of these guys:
More agents in disguise, encouraging you not to vote. Once again, it is called controlling the opposition. They have been hired to convince most of those who are unhappy about the current situation to do even less than they are currently doing about it. Before, most US citizens were doing nothing but voting. Now they are being encouraged to give that up, too. For a better response, see this.
The mask these guys are wearing is called a Guy Fawkes mask, although they are relying on the fact that you won't know who Guy Fawkes was. They know you probably won't take the time to look it up, so you will just think it is a way to hide their identity. It isn't. It is an inside joke. These guys are pretending to be revolutionaries while wearing the mask of a guy who tried to assassinate King James I. But was Fawkes therefore a progressive or revolutionary? Not quite. He wanted to replace the Protestant James with a Catholic King. These guys above are just that progressive. Or, more likely, they are just some dopey college students paid by the CIA with free dope to hold up a sign. The joke is on them, too, since the dope is probably genetically modified.
OK, that was admittedly a diversion, but it was a worthwhile one so I won't apologize for it. Let's return to the writers at Ramparts in 1967. An article from September 7 called “Let Them Eat Oil” is by Robert Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer. Both names brought up red flags on a search. I searched on Oppenheimer first, since the famous Oppenheimer, Robert (of Manhattan Project fame), makes several appearances in Frances Stonor Saunders' book. We find he was a member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom [p. 333]. He signed a letter to the New York Times in 1966—along with John Kenneth Galbraith, George Kennan, and Arthur Schlesinger—whitewashing the CCF's links to the CIA. But who was Mary Oppenheimer? At the end of the article, it says that Fitch and Oppenheimer were married in July 1968. That's weird, since the article was published in September 1967. How did the editor know in 1967 that his writers would get married in 1968? Oh, the stuff you find when you are down the rabbit hole.
Although Mary has no presence on the internet, Robert Fitch has a small presence. Supposing it is the same Robert Fitch, he resurfaced in the past decade attacking the Democratic party and unions. Sounds like David Horowitz and Sol Stern, so I assume it is the same Robert Fitch. As for Mary, this may be Mary Slack Oppenheimer, since by doing a search on “Mary Slack Robert Fitch” I found a link at the genealogy sites between her and Robert Fitch. Regardless, the Oppenheimer family is known for running De Beers diamonds in South Africa. Mary's father Henry was one of the richest men in the world, as was her grandfather Ernest. Needless to say, the Oppenheimers have never been known as progressive, radical, or as anarchists. So finding an Oppenheimer at Ramparts is a big red flag.
Then we get Clark Kissinger, who is supposed to have written (with Paul Booth) “Meet the Men who own it” for Ramparts in September, 1967. He is another ghost to history, having a very truncated bio full of red flags. He has several short bios online, but none mention his time with Ramparts. He is supposed to have worked with the Black Panthers, but since the Black Panthers were infiltrated or manufactured from the ground up, that is another red flag.
Rather than enter into a long proof of that, we will simply look at Kissinger's later work with Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a total figment of the CIA's imagination. Just visit his page at Wikipedia. He is said to have been a member of the Black Panther Party until 1970. Problem with that? His date of birth is given as 1954, which would have made him 16 years old in 1970. When did he join the Panthers? When he was 12? C'mon. They are just testing you with pages like this, to see how stupid you really are. Can you subtract 54 from 70? The picture is a dead giveaway as well.
You have to be kidding me! Is that supposed to be a picture from jail, with the handcuffs? Mumia is supposed to be serving a life-term for murdering a cop, and barely beat a death sentence. Do you honestly think they allow people on death row or serving life sentences to wear waist-length dreds and a full beard? Do some research. It is not allowed in any state, for obvious reasons: you could hide weapons or contraband in there. But there is more.
According to Wikipedia,
In 1991 Abu-Jamal published an essay in the Yale Law Journal, on the death penalty and his Death Row experience. In May 1994, Abu-Jamal was engaged by National Public Radio's All Things Considered program to deliver a series of monthly three-minute commentaries on crime and punishment.
Right. And you believe that? I mean, you don't find any of that suspicious? A death row inmate being hired by NPR to do a series of commentaries on crime and punishment? Why not just give him a variety show on TV, like Sonny and Cher? Let me cut to the chase here. Mumia is a fake, and so is Clark Kissinger. Mumia isn't in jail and never was. He is fictional. They hired some guy to play this part. Same for Clark Kissinger. He is another long-running minor character in the CIA epic. Both of them exist only in the Matrix.
Notice anything strange? In that last photo, Mumia suddenly looks about seven feet tall. Does he look seven feet tall in the first black and white photo? No, he looks short and stocky, with short arms and a short neck. And in the other photos with women, he looks maybe 5'10”. But in the last photo, he is suddenly a giant. Either that, or both women are about 4'6”. I'll give you a hint: the last photo is faked. It's a paste-up. They've also used several guys to play Mumia over the years.
Also ask yourself this: do you think guys that have been given the death sentence are allowed photo- ops every weekend? Sure, why not: bring everyone and their grandmother into the maximum-security prison, so that they can be photographed hugging a convicted murderer. What could go wrong? It doesn't happen that way in real life, my friends.
We get another red flag from William M. Chace, who wrote a review of Normal Mailer's Why are we in Vietnam? for Ramparts in December, 1967. Although that has been scrubbed from his current online bios, we find he has since risen to be President of Wesleyan and then Emory universities. But the easiest red flags have to do with his scholarly writing, which has focused on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Lionel Trilling. He also won the Sidney Hook award. We have run across all those names recently, haven't we? They are major characters in Frances Stonor Saunders' book as well as my last three papers. Let's start from last and work our way back. Sidney Hook was involved in everything: a founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and on the editorial board of both Encounter and Partisan Review. All four were CIA fronts.
Curiously, Sidney Hook's bio at Wikipedia has been scrubbed. No reference of Encounter magazine. Nonetheless, they ought to rename the Sidney Hook Award the CIA Front Award. Lionel Trilling was a member of the ACCF and a grant recipient from the Farfield Foundation (another CIA front) [Saunders, p. 358]. T. S. Eliot was on Sidney Hook's Waldorf committee in 1949, and was a member of the British Society for Cultural Freedom (the British counterpart of the ACCF). I have already linked Joyce to British Intelligence back to the 1920's.
Another writer for Ramparts was Gene Marine. I encourage you to do a search on him. Although he wrote at least four books up to 1972, there are only four Google entries on him. One is an empty bio at the Nation. Another is a short death notice, with no information. The other two are empty book lists. Looks like another figment of the CIA.
Another writer for Ramparts in 1967 was Paul Krassner. He was a member of the Merry Pranksters, who, with Ken Kesey, pretended to be hippies in order to smear them. The CIA smear is the subject of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Krassner is most famous for his 1960's magazine The Realist, which looks to me like another CIA front—although I will have to unwind that in another paper. The main point of The Realist appears from this distance to be to smear the counter-culture, by making it look like it is composed of a bunch of potty and sex-obsessed adolescents. Krassner's most famous “prank” was his Fuck Communism bumper sticker. Explaining the humor of this item, Krassner said anyone criticized for displaying the sticker should say, "Go back to Russia, you Commie lover." Wow, funny. CIA humor at its best, I guess. Notice how they dressed their true feelings as a joke.
These were the true sentiments of the right at the time, of course, and they said these things in all seriousness. So how is that bumper-sticker a joke for the counter-culture? Ask yourself that. In 1963, Kurt Vonnegut described the bumper sticker as "a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2.” Right. We may have to look at Kurt Vonnegut again, too.
Peter Collier also wrote for Ramparts in 1967, and of course he followed David Horowitz into Reagan worship. Collier and Horowitz became buddies and co-writers. If you don't understand why this is so obscene, remind yourself that Reagan was the governor of California from 1967 to 1975. Ramparts was published out of San Francisco. In 1969, Reagan sent the troops to Berkeley (in San Francisco) to fire on unarmed war protesters. One was killed and many were injured. He later said, “"If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Do you think real radicals would ever forgive him for that?
Ramparts is also known for publishing the first articles on Kennedy conspiracy theories. But knowing what we now know, that just means the government wanted to muddy the waters by controlling the opposition there as well. They had provided you with the mainstream false story, AKA the Warren Commission, but that wasn't enough. They had to steer any alternative theories away from the truth as well, so they began to manufacture other false stories, to confuse the history even more. Yes, most of the conspiracy theories were planted by the government as well. The mainstream story and all or most of the prominent alternative theories are decoys.
So I guess the question is, why would the CIA blow its own cover? Why would one CIA front— Ramparts—squeal on another CIA front—Encounter? We get the answer in Saunders' book, near the end. Tom Braden, the head of the IOD who ran the whole arts operation for the CIA after 1950, blew what was left of the cover in May 1967 in an article in the Saturday Evening Post called “I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral.” That's right: you didn't read that wrong. Not immortal. Immoral. Lacking morals. Synonyms: psychotic, evil, vice-laden, vicious, dishonest, shameless, decadent, postmodern. The CIA wrote an article with that title, the Saturday Evening Post printed it (the Saturday Evening Post, not Hustler), and no one blinked an eye. We aren't told whether Norman Rockwell did the illustrations for that piece. That was just a month after the Ramparts exposé. But the CIA had known about Ramparts intention to break this story since early 1966, a full year earlier [Saunders, p. 381]. The CIA tells us it did everything it could to sink the story, but was unsuccessful. Right. The CIA was not able to prevent a small magazine from publishing material that went against national security, and then was not able to stop the New York Times and the Washington Post—which they also owned—from the “orgy of disclosures” that followed? They weren't able to stop their own man Braden from publishing in the Saturday Evening Post? That's about as believable as their story about not being able to invade Cuba. When asked, Braden said he “forgot” about his secrecy agreement. Right. Braden also apparently didn't care about scooping Ramparts. He had a lead of three months to work on his article, and could have easily scooped Ramparts by publishing in March instead of May. That is just one more indication that the CIA controlled Ramparts.
It wasn't Ramparts the CIA was trying to scoop or spin, it was Conor Cruise O'Brien and the international contingency of the 1966 PEN conference. The Irishman O'Brien and others—especially the French—were tired of seeing International PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) infiltrated by the CIA. They are the ones who began leaking information in 1965. By 1967, the CIA could see that their cover was already blown, so the best they could do is take control of the leak. That way, they could at least spin it. That is what the “orgy of disclosures” in 1967 was about. Like the orgy of disclosures in Saunders' book in 1999, it was the effort to minimize and direct. Smaller fish could be thrown to the sharks, a few minor crimes could be admitted, but all the big stuff would remain buried.
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