James Angleton | 7 Types of Ambiguity

"Deception is a state of mind--and the mind of the state." - James Jesus Angleton

As the CIA's own website has the cunning arrogance to tell me: "...observers of the intelligence scene find James Angleton endlessly fascinating." Too true. Personally, though, what interests me the most is that with a small mountain of information available, none of it is believable. The man himself simply isn't there.

Vanished in a turn of phrase. Angleton is all fiction, these days. From Hollywood bastardization to the weird channeled communications with Michael Ledeen, ARTIFICE remains an inscrutable wall of impeccable forgeries. Largely, this is thanks to the CIA's enviable position as the primary author of it's own history.

"Counterintelligence is one of the most thankless jobs in spy craft. Its practitioners think the unthinkable, examining each operation, recruit or defector for the possibility that it may be a deception. Counterintelligence agents also try to recruit agents who work for hostile intelligence services, hoping to confuse opponents with cleverly packaged false information." - NYT5/12/87

It is unknown at this time, for instance, whether James Angleton wasreally a devoted fan of James Joyce, or just wanted to cultivate that kind of image. It is worth noting that he himself prefered being simplyJames Angleton. His full name was evoked, over and over, by John Birch vintage right wing researchers to emphasize his suspect roots -- no different from the careful enunciation of Barack Hussein Obama today. It got picked up by less extremist researchers like Mae Brussell and Robert Anton Wilson, perhaps because of how acutely poetic the cadence of his full name sounds on paper...and today it sticks with him.

James Angleton was writing French poetry and hadn't even arrived at Yale yet when 7 Types of Ambiguity was published in 1930. According to the legend of James Angleton, though, his eventual discovery of that book was life-changing. The book is forceful, the work of a young, brash intellectual who wrote the thing at 22 years old and celebrated his first publication by drinking himself into a sex scandal that got him banished from Cambridge. As legends go, that's definitely a good start by William Empson.

I suspect it's also a good start on understanding Angleton's disjointed body of work. I'm betting that his early years were real enough. I'm betting that he did read Finnegans Wake several times over, he did recieve several D's and F's while he was at Yale, and was profoundly influenced by Empson, as taught through the lens of professors Norman Holmes Pearson and Maynard Mack. I believe the story about James Angleton discovering his lifelong insomnia at Yale, too.

James Angleton led a long, strange life, though. There is entirely too much to be said about his legacy and legend, so I'm using Empson's book as a tool for orchestrating all this noise. A story in seven holographic slices, guided by questions of applied strategy, organization design, and unintended consequences.

Who has the time today to pursue the 10,000 networks that Angleton wove himself into? In fact, quite a few authors have devoted decades to exactly that, so I'm in no rush to replicate their work here. This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what James Angleton had to be.

1a. Comparative Metaphor

"Testing is a continuous process." - F M Begoum, Observations on the Double Agent

Counterintelligence work is insane. Let's start there. Critics who approach Angleton's work as merely "paranoid" are missing every available lesson on the buffet table. His job was paranoid. How he pursued it is an education.

"Russian spy schools know all about the CIA’s use of lie detectors in personnel screening and could be presumed to have no trouble at all training infiltrators to outwit the machine. There is some ground to believe that Communist agents still are operating in American intelligence organizations and perhaps there are more of them than ever." - Stefan T. Possony, 1964

Who do you trust? Angleton was tutored by Kim Philby and Kim Philby turned out to be a traitor. As origin stories go, it doesn't get much more cinematic than that.

Kim Philby was an MI6 man, specializing in sabotage and counterintelligence. Philby and Angleton were drinking buddies, having extended martini lunches and cracking fabulously intelligent jokes. Philby would later write of Angleton, "he was one of the thinnest men I have ever met and one of the biggest eaters." Angleton never talked about Philby much.

The circumstances of Kim Philby's downfall would make for either a boring movie or a living nightmare. The man had titanium nerves, despite spending most of his career self-medicating with alcohol. He was part of a Russian spy ring that became known as the Cambridge Five, and it all fell apart in horrifying slow motion. It was 1949 when their covers began to unravel, yet Philby didn't resign from MI6 for another two years. He spent three more years in limbo before finally being cleared in 1955 by Harold Macmillan. It wouldn't be until 1962 that he was finally exposed.

World War II had a lot of strange endings, though. Ezra Pound spent a few weeks living like a farm animal and getting his brain fried in the cages of Pisa. One of his critics -- an MP who supervised and escorted him around Italy -- rendered his verdict thus: "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives." So many great intellectuals are like that: constipated and doomed. Rewind about 5 years, though, and you'll find Ezra Pound in New Haven, Connecticutt, being introduced by our protagonist, who arranged for him to come and read. Pound was treated like visiting royalty and maintained a correspondence with Angleton for years afterwards. Angleton learned a great deal about the world from Ezra Pound.

Especially the lesson about staying out of cages.

In the aftermath of V-Day, Angleton was hard at work networking his way through post-war Italy. Pound was en route to an asylum and Mussolini was a swinging corpse, but Angleton had HUMINT raw material to spare in those heavy days. He helped manage two programs to get highly-trained (and connected) Nazis out of Europe, or at least out of Israel's reach. One through the US Military, the infamous Operation Paperclip, and the other through the Vatican itself. He made a lot of introductions on behalf of Israel during those years, too, and built the core relationships that would keep him in charge of the CIA's Israel desk no matter who got nominally appointed in the decades to come.

Staying ahead of the curve -- every curve, really -- was Angleton's ultimate pursuit. The eye of the pyramid is a position that places huge demands on the operator. Between finite time and exponential complexity, Angleton was faced with steep transaction costs for every piece of information he processed. However, he had to weigh that against the equally steep security risks inherent in adding personnel or allowing his data stream to be filtered.

Allen Dulles and James Angleton agreed on a foundational principle: counter-intelligence, properly pursued, has to be proactive -- they inverted the Nazi OODA loop where CI agents were the cleanup crew. Instead Angleton became a ghost in the system, wired into the center of a Panopticon rendered in paperwork. He operated ahead of the conventional intel process, monitored all internal communications, and used a vast network extending far outside the official CIA to keep tabs on the entire Langley establishment. From raw SIGINT to Special Operations, Angleton was an invisible supervisor.

Most importantly, Angleton controlled the flow of NSA intercepts into the CIA and micro-managed the only team that was given access to this valuable raw feed: they were called Staff D.

Everyone is a suspect. Everyone. It's easy for Normal Folks to dismiss the John Nash nightmare of Game Theory betrayal as "paranoid" from a safe, domestic distance, but what Nash outlined was a very real dilemma for counter-intelligence agents of any nation. The pursuit of "intelligence" places an inhuman burden on the secret police.

Despite all his tactical advantages, Angleton was still faced with an essentially impossible mission: Omniscience.

2b. Resolution

"The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done" - Tom Mangold

Angleton is perhaps best understood as the Patron Saint of Homeland Security. Compartmentalized secrecy, zero accountability, and access to everything. Yuri Nosenko spending almost 4 years in solitary confinement, undergoing beta version Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, was most definitely a precursor for the current situation in Guantanamo Bay and hundreds of other secret prisons around the world.

Then again, that's just a cheap literary device. It's unfair to the nuancesof the truly Angletonian theory of Counterintelligence to presume that he would approve of a rush job as sloppy as DHS turned out to be. Consider the recent headlines declaring that over four million US citizens have classified clearances, and over a million of those are private contractors.

Angleton liked recursive loops. Within the Countertintelligence desk, Angleton ran an additional secret team named SIG -- Special Investigative Group. This alone is a beautifully pure illustration of Hagbard Celine's First Law: secret police within the secret police within the secret police. This kind of total freedom from scrutiny was essential to the proper practice of Power. "It is inconceivable that a secret arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government," he once remarked, and that simple binary trap was the source for most of Angleton's headaches.

To Angleton, Counterintelligence was clearly an artform, yet today it's practiced more like an ISO 9000 certification. The Black Arts have been templated and Taylorized into something so foolproof that any MBA can make it happen.

Consider Kenneth Senser, ex-CIA, ex-FBI, and currently running the counterintelligence division of Walmart Global Security, a group called the Analytical Research Center. As a matter of corporate rountine, he maintains a network of informants, disinformation agents and agent provocateurs within the ranks of the "Anti walmart Movement." All network and company computer activity is monitored via CoreView, some shit-simple automated surveillance software from Raytheon's Oakley Networks lab. He manages a staff of nearly 400.

Kenneth Senser routinely busts Walmart executives around the world, but actual law enforcement is hardly part of the Angleton Theory. Allen Dulles and James Angleton agreed on another foundational principle: counter-intelligence, properly pursued, was an esoteric pursuit that tolerated petty crimes in pursuit of cardinal sins. Clearly, everything from drug dealing to genocide qualified as petty crime in the face of the Communist threat.

For decades, when people went looking for power, they ran into James Angleton. Which is not to say they ever so much as saw the man -- just that they wound up on his radar screen and probably never knew how exposed they were. He occupied the crossroads between the Vatican, the Mafia, the Mossad, Shin Bet and the CIA. Like all espionage masters, he understood that secrets were best kept, period...best used for leverage, milked for intel, and only exposed as a regrettable last resort.

One of Angleton's greatest assets was his patience. He mastered the discipline that Bonaparte learned from French secret police pioneerJohseph Fouche: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Where most agents would have made moves, Angleton was content to let operations unfold for decades, letting infiltrators live out their entire lives in secret service. James Angleton waited. He routinely ran operations so convoluted even insiders would find them too absurd to be real.

Before the convenient epithet of Conspiracy Theorist was in common usage, smug realists in the US, UK and Soviet intelligence community would label such intricate paranoia "Angletonian." The man didn't just become a legend, he became an adjective. Few among us could aspire to reach such heights.

3c. Context

"Literature must in some sense be believable, whereas experiences of human beings in fact develop beyond all powers of conjecture. Thus Social Literature is conventional, while History exceeds all limitations of common sense." - Albert North Whitehead

When US Army Sergeant Robert Lee Johnson got caught spying for the KGB, he'd been doing it for over a decade. Despite all of the hard work of Army Counterintelligence, Johnson only got exposed because his wife decided to turn him in. Years later, Johnson would find himself bleeding to death on the US Penitentiary floor in Lewisburg, PA. In one of those non-believable plot twists, he was stabbed by his own son.

James Angleton had nothing to do with Robert Lee Johnson, yet the Johnson case itself would later become a central detail in Great Mole Hunt. The top minds in the National Security State agonized for years over two Soviet defectors, Yuri Nosenko and Anatoliy Golitsyn. One of the key data points was Robert Lee Johnson, so Angleton collected information on the case. To call it obsessive would be pulp cinema: it was simply his job.

Jay Lovestone was a life-long Communist activist and organizer, who really started to shine in the early 1930's, when he pulled together a fragmented US Communist demographic into a cohesive party platform. He organized almost a dozen national worker's Unions, funded hundreds more on the local level, and became a powerful figure at the AFL/CIO until his retirement. He was reporting directly to James Angleton the entire time, keeping tabs on the movement as he worked his way to the top. History has no way of determining if Lovestone saw himself as an infiltrator or if Angleton had compromised him somehow, but when the "Lovestone Empire" spy ring was revealed, it dealt a serious blow to the organized Left in the United States.

As it turned out, the Lovestone Empire was anything but: just a small team, one of hundreds of covert networks tucked into the counterculture. Once Operation CHAOS got uncovered in the 70's, the American public finally caught a glimpse at how tremendous the scale of activist infiltration really was.

The entire project was overseen by Angleton himself, designed as a small labyrinth of frequently overlapping, strictly compartmentalized projects. Several of them, notably MERRIMAC and Project 2, were tasked with the long-term infiltration of "domestic antiwar and radical organizations." The budget was in the millions, the agents were in the thousands and the network is ongoing.

Most of the agents were never exposed. Which is perfect; the ideal outcome to ensure maxmium FUD. The resulting feedback cycles of accusations and paranoia have been crippling the international social justice movement ever since.

Which is not to declare any victories for James Angleton. The greatest adversary of any progressive movement is simply human nature. Also, most CIA conspiracy narratives paint the agency as far more powerful than operational reality permits. Espionage work is difficult because the raw material is volatile, hard to measure accurately and impossible to predict. Human beings are buggy technology, so Angleton had to keep a fairly massive rolodex and travel in circles far afield from the Ivy League bubble of Langley.

As he slyly said to Seymour Hersh: "A mansion has many rooms." Even a basic tour of Angleton's mansion is absurd, in terms of sheer diversity, and in terms of heavy implications for hidden history. George DeMohrenschildt, Reinhard Gehlen, E. Howard Hunt, Roger Hollis, Frank Wisner, Klaus Barbie, Luigi Gedda, Ted "Blond Ghost" Shackley,Raymond Rocca...at every turn, another great damn book waiting to be written.

Angleton encouraged extremes. This is reflected in his legacy, where authors either pile on praise or denounce him as a criminal, but in either narrative he remains The Mastermind. This strategy of tension, more than 20 years after his death, rages on. Still: out here in the information vaccuum created by CI/SIG, it's altogether too easy to give Angleton more credit than the man deserves. In the absence of evidence, his legacy grows into a fiction the second you start to contemplate it.

One area where Angleton is surely afforded too much credit: his "Theory of Counterintelligence," which was very much WWI era technology and 100% British, too. Angleton's operation was essentially the template laid down by the original Coordinator of Information, Bill Donovan. Even here at the beating heart of Angleton's legacy, there's nothing there.

4d. Complexities

Angleton was not born into a normal life. He grew up in the network that would later become the P2 Lodge, where Italian fascism and Vatican intellectuals overlapped, the piously militant bloodlines traced by the Knights of Malta. He inherited his Italian network, but he surelyearned his connections with British and Israeli intelligence. The trajectory of his career makes it clear Angleton was more than fortunate, he was a natural. Still, some authors call it genetic...

Doug Henwood: "Intelligence ran in Angleton's blood; his father, James Hugh Angleton, headed the National Cash Register franchise in Italy; in the course of visiting NCR's European operations, he set up his own amateur spy operation, which was of benefit to the United States when the war broke out. Angleton père was a Mason, and a professed admirer of Italy and Germany in the 1930s."

Angleton is deeply mysterious, but that's a projected image, a studied pose. It's worth considering that Angleton made himself scarce because in person, the puppet master was socially awkward and downright transparent. As Amos Manor would later observe: "...he was fanatic about everything. He had a tendency toward mystification."

Despite that, Angleton made it a point to appear when and where it really mattered. He understood that his longevity within the agency depended on his direct involvement with contacts. Despite the culture of cut-outs, Angleton built his espionage network on personal relationships, and he defended these relationships from scrutiny by rendering them state secrets.

Despite the analytical (and critical) bent of Angleton's approach to uncovering spies within the ranks, later decades would bring a more qualitative touch to the process. In 1990, the CIA wrapped up Project Slammer, a long-term study in the motivational psychology of traitors and moles. Their conclusions were stark: "Heavy drinking, drug dependence, signs of depression or stress, extramarital affairs and divorce could be warning signs of a security problem." In the aftermath of cases like Aldrich Ames and Jonathan Pollard, investigations turned up simple behavioral cues that were ignored by co-workers and supervisors.

Consider Jeffrey Carney, desperate to get caught, stuck in a bad movie: "I was ostensibly trying to further my education and get the big picture," Mr. Carney said. "I was putting my nose in books where I didn't belong...talking to people, gathering information from conversations. It was actually very obvious, I felt. Somebody should have noticed. I took a huge document and another huge document with me, went across the hall into an unsecured room, laid the documents out on the table, secured everything, and had my camera ready, and started photographing..I was walked in on two times while I was photographing. . . . My face went red as a beet because my blood pressure was unbelievable, and the people went, 'Oh, excuse me, I didn't know you were busy.' And they turned around and walked out."

Internal culture is just as dangerous as any external threat. Angleton couldn't help but view the domestic press as an enemy -- he didn't even trust most of the CIA. His job description forbade it. He was engaged in a starkly simple game where most of the world was his adversary.

5e. Fortunate Confusion

"We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." - Carl Sagan

Word salad. There is no history here, only leftovers. Today's generation knows James Angleton by different names: Matt Damon, Michael Keaton, or The Cigarette Smoking Man. The Narrative is always a study in why men do horrible things in the name of noble goals.

The myth of James Jesus Angleton is only this: that he had to exist.Even agency history concedes his paranoia and ultimate failure. He is justified, legally and historically, by the principle of national security. As his champions with high clearance levels can always claim, it's what wedon't know that proves Angleton right. Thanks to his heroism, we willnever know how much we should be thanking him for. There's also other interpretations. When it came to Angleton's artistic legacy, most of his fiercest critics were his own colleagues by the end.

William Colby: "I determined a long time ago I had to get rid of him, and the question was how. I found several hundred people in there. I honestly couldn't figure out what the devil they were doing...I couldn't find that we'd identified any penetrations. And I concluded his work had hampered our recruitment of real agents. We weren't recruiting any because of the negative effect of the super-suspicion."

James Angleton has every legacy: take your pick. MKULTRA controller and sad paranoid headcase. The Mafia consigliere, the Vatican agent, the Company man. He is a true believer and a cynical manipulator, the ultimate insider and the stereotypical outsider. Angleton's keywords have all been woven into the UFOlogy mythos that centers around the Majestic 12 documents. It is remarkable how many key players in the JFK Assassination got written into that whole script: David Ferrie, Fred Crisman, Art Lundahl, John Paisley, and the fabulously unreal Gordon Novel, who rode out the 80's doing counterintelligence work for Larry Flynt, of all people.

Further memetic noise comes from Michael Ledeen, a careful student of Gladio and the Strategy of Tension, and one of the Great Architects behind both Team B and The Vulcans. In his column for the American Enterprise Institute and on several other blogs, he will regularly publish conversations with Angleton's ghost, channeled via Ouija board. I am sure there are already conspiracy forums unpacking the intricacies of Angleton's opinions on Osama Bin Laden.

I mention all this only in the interest of applied physics. The event horizon of history is about to close on Angleton's legacy as pop culture continues to digest him into the Spectacle and his last living accomplices, victims and witnesses finally die. It's a new day in America.

6f. Invented Interpretations

"Angletons principal concern was not with "moles" per se, but with the inherent vulnerability of intelligence services to systematic deception. To him, "moles" were a means to this end if, and only if, they were in a position to provide timely feedback to an adversary about what channels his intelligence service were monitoring and how it is was interpreting the data it was intercepting. With such a feedback loop in place, he believed perfect deception was possible." - Edward Jay Epstein

Strangely, effective Counterintelligence operations are totally indistinguishable from normal life. People of all ideological backgrounds are quite industrious at foiling their own plans, exposing their own secrets, derailing their own investigations...it is significant that a useful idiot can be every bit as effective as an actual trained asset. Gallows humor in the control room as the masters of the universe play cards and smoke cigars. And wait.

Consider the case of Oswald Le Winter. The man is apparently real, a professor and poet, but his primary occupation would appear to be running disinformation on orders from the CIA. At least, that's what he says. He has claimed to be a NATO liason officer for the Gladio program and a former agent of the CIA, and troublingly, he has also claimed that he's targeted journalists with deliberate disinformation "leaks" in campaigns that lasted for years and paid $100,000 per gig. His testimony is an integral part of the BBC's Timewatch trilogy on Gladio, yet even by his own admission, he was working to disrupt investigations into both the murder of Olof Palme and October Surprise saga.

Oswald Le Winter is an article unto himself, and only a single asset, one of hundreds feeding mystery meat into the sausage grinder of History. The CIA doesn't write history -- that kind of naked power is crude, too lowbrow for the Yale crowd. Angleton reached out to several authors in order to help sculpt his own legacy through selective leaks. This was years after he'd begun planting conflicting narratives through agents like Le Winter, Ledeen, or assets like William F. Buckley and Dr. Leary. This was years after he'd finished planning his countermeasures for the key vulnerabilities in his record. He never forgot the last lesson of Ezra Pound.

So most of what we know about Angleton was carefully orchestrated and scripted by the man himself. In all probability, this includes most of the "dirt" and apparently incriminating data points.

7g. Contradiction

"Actually, I didn't know whether to believe Angleton at all." - Stephen Jay Epstein

No final word on Angleton's legacy, of course. The final consideration is that Angleton himself was a mole: one of his own disciples concluded as much. As for a final verdict on his technique, history appears to be on the Kingfisher's side. Epstein makes a good case, though it does boil down to the Broken Clock Principle. The existence of any moles in the FBI and CIA would be enough to validate Angleton -- surely that's setting the bar on intellectual achievement a little too low, even by American standards. And let's not forget, despite his pivotal role in US history James Angleton was very much an Italian.

"Persons having the deepest and most legitimate insights into intelligence matters are most scrupulous in their trusteeship of such knowledge and that the penchant for sensational revelations is the near monopoly of the charlatans and pretenders who scavenge along the flanks of the intelligence enterprise." - Frank Wisner

While most accounts end with Angleton leaving the Agency in various stages of defeat on Christmas Eve, 1975, even Langley will cheerfully admit that ARTIFICE was re-activated pretty much as soon as Ronald Reagan got elected back in November 1980. The call came from Willam Casey, who was the next Director of Central Intelligence and getting his team up to speed for the transition. All that Jimmy Carter, Stansfield Turner transparency crap was being liquidated through out the chain of command. Operation Cyclone was kicking back into high gear, and Angleton returned as a consultant. Whether this position was active counterintelligence work, or just a pension gig to keep the old master on campus, I will leave the guesswork to you.

Curiously, Angleton may be his own worst critic. Joseph Trento insists that James Jesus Angleton confessed and Confessed and I haven't seen these quotes disputed yet. If genuine, they're fucking remarkable:

"You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends. They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all. You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed. We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what happened."

"Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it... Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon."

"...the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in our mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious." - William Empson, Milton's God

http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/7_types_of_ambiguity/

Interview with Yang Lian in Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair

I have been travelling, all over the world, many times. It’s not that I am everywhere, but everywhere is inside of me. This is true of Lea Valley. We base our individual discoveries on the idea that both the place and we ourselves are new, or renewed by the dialogue between place and ourselves. It is not a general Lea Valley, but my Lea Valley. Lea Valley is very special and different from other places.

I myself am a valley, like my poem. Or like a river. The movement goes down. Every poet is an archaeologist of now. The layers of this time are within the moment of where we are. It’s not cancelled time, but all the time brought into one moment. I feel Lea Valley is a wonderful chance for me to see how deep the self, or selves, could be.

I did some research on the area. Lea Valley is part of London today, but it was once the border of Saxon and Viking kingdoms. There was a Roman camp in Springfield Park. An ice age made this landscape. All those realities are part of myself. All those layers make a dialogue of my memories including layers from other places. I write about other rivers: Hutuo, Hudson, Parramatta. All those rivers I have been to before. They become part of Lea Valley, within the riverbanks. Lea Valley is me. I am Lea Valley.

I don’t try to compare the Olympic experience in Beijing directly with what is happening in Lea Valley. But it’s a general problem of the world, the commercial use of landscape. I witnessed the destruction of history in Beijing. History and classical chinese culture have been totally covered over and destroyed by so-called globalization, by ugly buildings. That is a new way to cut our memories, to root them out.

Lea Valley is being destroyed all the time. It is always being destroyed: by old industries, football grounds. They transform everything. The authorities have tried their best to convert the marshland, the original view, to a more commercial use.

As poets, we know that we have become important. Only by our deep experience, our studies, can we keep the soul of the landscape. We can remember the original creative power we gain from the land. I am now a British citizen, but, when my strangers eyes look on Lea Valley, I recognize how rich are the links between the depths of the local and my experience of other places. I deeply hope the London Olympics are not only for commercial gain, but for the discovery of this other spirit. The invisible link between this land and mine.

The key word, not only for the Lea Valley, but all other matters, is awareness. Poetry is the best way to show understanding and awareness. Lea Valley must be the base of spirit, not only a base of sport. The government and the commercial bodies don’t know that vision or have that understanding. They think of Lea Valley as a place of nothing. They don’t have a vision of real development, the development of the mind. They only see buildings. We, the poets, need to tell them, or at least write down, that awareness is our poetry. I hope to suggest that Hackney does something based around the fact that there are so many writers in Lea Valley. The council should think about Lea Valley and literature. Festivals are the real Olympics, the Olympics of the spirit.

When I walk in London, I love these so-called canals. They’re beautiful. London is pretty low lying, a lot of marshland. Chelsea was originally marshland. Now of course it has expensive buildings. Luckily, we have a small piece of marshland left, in Hackney. When I walk through these marshes it is hard to believe I am almost in the centre of London. It is both wild and alive. It reminds me of the wild geese, crying as they cross the sky. In Chinese characters, the flying shape is exactly the character for ‘human’. It is the sign or symbol for ‘homesickness’.

In Lea Valley context, this homesickness is not only for China, but for man. For the original life of the land. Those wild geese remind me of this, otherwise I would be cut off. If we lose awareness, we can become so poor, so boring.

Beijing has changed more in the last thirty years than in the previous thousand. It’s a huge change. Remembering the Communist times, the Cultural Revolution, when people were living in extremely poor conditions, I’m not totally against that. You find that the classical will almost always be destroyed. The serious culture, the intellectual culture, is very different today. All those changes, including the introduction of a measure of democracy, are important. I’m happy to see people talking about democracy and not just mouthing off hollow slogans.

For the last fifty years, or even more, what happened in China was a kind of disaster. Based on unawareness. Based on huge emotion: all the way back to the opium war, Japanese War, Civil War. The Chinese people have not undertaken a clear introspection. They have not built up a good understanding of their own cultural traditions. Therefore, they don’t know what were the good things in that tradition. For quite a long time they have tried to abandon everything. But no one can abandon a tradition, since the language is inside the people. Tradition controlled everyone. Secretly, subconsciously, we were unaware. The young men, idealists, found themselves joining the power game and ending up as bigger or smaller dictators.

London has always been a base for exchange between the very high culture of China and England. You tell me that Arthur Waley loved the River Lea? Lea Valley has a link with classical Chinese Landscape. The water, the waves: it has a classical Chinese Melancholy beauty. I’m not totally surprise by Waley’s love for this place. The moon in the river. Huge clouds. The skies are so dramatic.

So, to come back to where we start: human beings are always inspired by nature and the discovery of nature in themselves. You have a link between man and his discovery of nature and roots in locality. Then you find you have a link with all the great classical poets in all language: Goethe, Homer, Dante, Li Po, Du Fu. Everyone. This is the key: we translate everyone into ourselves. If we think of the new Olympic structures in China the Games were run as a dictatorship toy. As part of the propaganda of Communism. The apparent links between the two Olympics are so shameful. It would be shameful for London to think that the only reason that the Olympics would be done for commercial reasons.

The only deep energy that happens inside these epochal cultural transformations, in China and in Britain too, is the poetry or the eyes of poetry. Then we could say, there is a link, and a very great link.

The landscape is inspiration, I think. The external landscape is an inspiration in front of our eyes. But, finally, poetry builds up the inner landscape, inside our hearts and minds. Inner knowledge also includes all the spiritual understanding in the idea of forms and in the discovery of landscape. This is what brought the human soul to connect with the Olympics in Greece. The transformation of external landscape into inner landscape, that is the power of spirit. I don’t know how, but if somebody can see this point, then anything is possible.

We must do our own projects, not only for an audience but for ourselves: deep discoveries, between poets, and therefore between two languages, two cultures. Image by image, sentence by sentence, inside of the form. We don’t understand the language of the other – but our understanding through poetry, like bolts of lightning, leads us forward. We see how language moves, and that it is such a beautiful experience. Both languages are so interesting.

The deep dialogue between Chinese and English is like a dialogue between time and space. The Chinese language has been transformed from 3,000 years ago until today. And the transformation, good and bad, is proved by thousands of great masterpieces. There must be something unique inside that language.

The English language is the language which covers the greatest space in the world. Very different colours to the same language. How to judge the poetry? This was the real meeting point between China and England. Real discussions about what is the meaning of global, what is the meaning of a cultural exchange today. I come back to the idea of the international within the local. That has to be the dialogue, between the depth of the different roots. We can have a real internationalism, not just a commercial level of internationalism, causing us to fall into emptiness. Which would be a great pity and a disaster. 

Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?
Edward Said
Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders
Granta, 509 pp, £20.00, July 1999, ISBN 1 86207 029 6


E.P. Thompson called it the ‘Natopolitan’ world: that is, not just Nato plus all the Cold War military and political institutions that were integral to it, but also a mentality whose web extended over a lot more activity and thought, even in the minds of individuals, than anyone at the time had suspected. Of course there were the revelations in the mid-Sixties about Encounter and the CIA, and later in the US and Britain a stream of disclosures about covert counter-insurgency in every form, from secretly underwritten academic research to assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against Soviet totalitarianism.

One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre operation to ‘counter Communism’ by trying ‘to break down ... doctrinaire thought patterns’ and anti-American attitudes throughout the world was ‘just about as totalitarian as one can get’. Marshall belonged to an Orwellian US Government agency called the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) and his kind of common-sense voice, commenting on the enterprise from within, isn’t ever heard from again. On the other hand, Frances Stonor Saunders’s gripping book is stuffed with names of individuals, organisations and publications, whose sleazy history she gives in painstaking detail.

Unfortunately, not all of her information is fully accurate or complete. It is, for example, careless to place the artist Frank Stella in a travelling delegation of grown men when he would have been about ten years old, and to quote from books without supplying page numbers or publication history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original.

Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of investigative history, an extremely valuable contribution to the all-important post-World War Two record. The dispiriting truth it reveals, or confirms, is that few of ‘our’ major intellectual and cultural figures resisted the blandishments of the CIA, whether in the form of cushy foreign jaunts, under the table subsidies – Partisan Review, Commentary, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review were its beneficiaries, in addition to Encounter, and all its French, German, Italian and even Arabic and Indian offshoots – or contracts for organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Ford Foundation, which seemed at first to exist for scarcely any purpose other than to further US foreign policy and provide cover for the CIA’s machinations. Ford’s present reputation and munificence in Asia, Africa and Latin America are still tainted by this highly political history.

Saunders sets out her themes very ably in the introduction, which situates the covert projection of US policy objectives in the context of the Marshall Plan, the postwar reconstruction of Europe (especially Germany) in competition with the Soviet Union, and the creation of a massive apparatus of cultural propaganda, one of whose main purposes ‘was to advance the claim that it did not exist’.

The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was edited by Richard Crossman and the Congress distributed it. Carefully negotiating my way through a maze of booksellers’ wares laid out on the pavement alongside Ezbekieh Gardens in Cairo in late 1957, I was brought up short by a large pile of TGTFs stacked in front of one of the vociferous peddlers. His attention perhaps caught by my Western suit and non-Egyptian appearance, he called out to me shrilly: ‘Hey, Mister, you want dirty book? Five piastres only.’ In those days five piastres would buy at least three falafels. I stopped to pick up one of the little paperback volumes and, leafing through it, said contemptuously: ‘Five piastres for this?’ ‘No,’ came the quick reply, ‘take them all for five piastres.’ I ended up with a copy for half a piastre, and realised when speaking with my father about the publisher, Franklin Publications, that the enterprise had something to do with the US Embassy, which was dumping untold numbers of gratis copies all over Cairo. I had eluded the grasp of one rapacious merchant, only to fall prey to another. The book struck me as tedious, certainly not dirty in any obvious way, and massively self-important. In those unpolitical days of mine, I had no idea what I had really bought: a fruit of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and one of its many subsidiaries.

A few years later, when I got my first job at Columbia University in 1963, I met many of Saunders’s cast of characters at social events on Morningside Heights: Diana and Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald – all of them brilliant, feisty, friendly and endlessly voluble. Some of their hangers-on were third-rate intellectual goons like Arnold Beichmann (former Communist, rabid anti-Communist, now an aged relic of the Hoover Institution). No one then called them the New York intellectuals, as they have since become, and no one, except the dashing and iconoclastic Fred Dupee (who had their number quite early on), even hinted to me that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was in effect a part of the CIA. I published my first literary and philosophical essays in the Partisan and Kenyon Reviews (corresponding in the latter case with Robie Macauley, who, Saunders says, was a CIA agent pure and simple), and generally felt OK about a world that seemed concerned with ideas and high Modernism, even though it is now obvious that it was only tangentially concerned with those things.

When the revelations about Encounter came, they were almost immediately overtaken by the 1968 student revolution at Columbia, the anti-Vietnam and Civil Rights movements, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, all of which seemed to matter a great deal more. For my part, I found that, with the exception of a few people like Chomsky and the late Eqbal Ahmad, no one in ‘the movement’ wanted anything to do with me or my interest in violations of Palestinian rights as a result of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Martin Peretz and Michael Walzer wrote their ‘Israel Is Not Vietnam’ article, Ramparts was closed, and soon the American ‘Left’, with Walzer and Irving Howe leading the vociferously pro-Israel shift, turned sharply to the right, and from there to neo-liberalism. (Saunders doesn’t consider the role played in Cold War politics by Israel’s post-1967 supporters: a pity since it explains many of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon became neo-conservatives and Reaganites, principal among them Sidney Hook and the egregious Irving Kristol, whose role in Saunders’s narrative is positively Rasputinlike; even Partisan Review, famously Trotskyite in its origins, joined the neo-cons in the Eighties.

Saunders’s account of Partisan and its editor, the insufferably pretentious William Phillips – in a chapter she calls ‘Cultural Nato’ – is devastating. Far from being independent, PR was on the CIA payroll via front organisations like the Farfield Foundation. Before that, it had been carried financially by none other than Henry Luce (the owner/editor of Time-Life), whose ideological position was quite the opposite of Partisan’s at the time; in return for this largesse PR apparently restrained itself and said nothing about big corporations. Later Allen Dulles (CIA chief and brother of the more famous John Foster) kept the magazine afloat, and even got it tax-exempt status. And as the tide changed in the Reagan period, Phillips, perpetually in command, changed accordingly. As Sidney Hook said of his pal, ‘Phillips will go to any lengths to get help for PR.’

As for those gifted rebels around PR, like Mary McCarthy, they don’t look so good seen through Saunders’s unsentimental eyes. Here is McCarthy writing to Hannah Arendt about a lavishly subsidised event in Venice in July 1960 (others in attendance were Moravia, Iris Murdoch and Herbert Read):

The main event, from the point of view of sheer scandal, was a series of furious clashes between Mr Shils and William [Phillips], on the subject of mass culture, naturally. I swear Shils is Dr Pangloss reborn and without Dr Pangloss’s charm and innocence. I said so, in almost as many words, when I got into the fight myself. Another feature of the Congress was [Robert] Oppenheimer, who took me out to dinner and is, I discovered, completely and perhaps even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and sense of divine mission ... [Oppenheimer] turned to Nicholas Nabokoff [sic]... and said the Congress was being run ‘without love’. After he had repeated this several times, I remarked that I thought the word ‘love’ should be reserved for the relation between the sexes ... George Kennan was there and gave a very good and stirring closing address (which ought to have crushed Mr Shils and all his Luciferian camp for ever) but the rumour was that he was crazy too, though only partly crazy.

Today the American Left is pretty much in tatters. A few small weeklies or monthlies such as the Nation or the Progressive can still be called left-wing, but the contemporary cultural climate in the United States is dominated by the corporate-government nexus, which no longer lurks in shadowy organisations or behind the front foundations that Saunders inventories with compelling tenacity. Everything is now quite open, sanitised and corporatised: what the CIA did covertly forty years ago is done openly by the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson and the National Rifle Association, and even they are only a very tiny part of an immense, palpitating hulk of profligate, ideologically discolouring squid.

In the first years after World War Two there were principals who pulled strings, drafted intellectuals, passed the money, organised conferences and trips – men like Josselson, Lasky, Tom Braden (later a TV personality), Denis de Rougemont, Cord Meyer, John Hunt, Nicolas Nabokov (a minor composer, Vladimir’s cousin) – and dozens of willing operatives, engaged, as Braden saw it, in the battle against ‘ignoramuses, or, to put it more politely, people who just don’t understand’. An impressive apparatus of former World War Two intelligence officers like the afore-mentioned Macauley, Arthur Schlesinger, Cass Canfield, Malcolm Muggeridge, Victor Rothschild played along happily, according to Saunders, who interviewed many of them for her book. There were also the ambiguously situated onlookers (maybe participants too?) like Isaiah Berlin and one or two others, in addition to some of the people now gathered around the New York Review of Books. What is remarkable about the list of names she spools out is not only their number and even distinction (Robert Lowell, Jackson Pollock, Spender), but how little the revelations of their being subsidised by the CIA affected their prestige. Huge sums were spent setting up radio stations, concerts, travelling exhibitions, academic and intellectual conferences. Stravinsky, Samuel Barber, Arthur Honegger, among others, participated. Prizes and awards were distributed, only occasionally earning the well-deserved anger of mavericks like Pierre Boulez, who denounced Nabokov and his fellow conspirators with healthy insults about their dishonesty and mediocrity.

Saunders estimates that $200 million were spent in the effort, wherever possible, to buy intellectual support for the US, to get critical voices to soften their attacks on the US and its policies, to promote the country’s values and, simultaneously, vilify those of the Soviet Union. She quotes Senator William Fulbright:

The effect of the anti-Communist ideology was to spare us the task of taking cognisance of the specific facts of specific situations. Our ‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking ... Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.

The ‘perniciousness’ of anti-Communist orthodoxy, Fulbright went on, ‘arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalisation and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth’. Another exception was the late Andrew Kopkind, whom she also quotes, a first-rate radical journalist and intellectual whose ‘deeper sense of moral disillusionment’ had to do, he said, with the fact that

the distance between the rhetoric of the open society and the reality of control was greater than anyone thought ... Everyone who went abroad for an American organisation was, in one way or another, a witness to the theory that the world was torn between Communism and democracy, and anything in between was treason. The illusion of dissent was maintained: the CIA supported socialist cold warriors, Fascist cold warriors, black and white cold warriors. The catholicity and flexibility of CIA operations were major advantages. But it was a sham pluralism and it was utterly corrupting.

Evidence for the devastating correctness of this view is found in Saunders’s chapters on the Rosenberg case and the emergence of Senator McCarthy. Men and women who knew better, or who could at least have encouraged dissent from the hysteria of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee, simply went along with the whole thing, became incensed onlookers (like Leslie Fiedler), or just kept quiet as their friends were tarred and feathered, ostracised and sacked from their jobs.

Saunders is very good on the connections between the Wasp establishment (a sort of consortium) and the CIA, and on how important, socially prominent businessmen, lawyers, academics, theologians and philanthropists lent their names and institutions to a massive underhand operation, involving shady payments to agents and (perhaps) unwitting American stooges all over the world. To American readers this is a relatively familiar story, first mapped out by C. Wright Mills and Vance Packard, then in books like Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarins, Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest about the making of the Vietnam catastrophe, more recently in biographies of Reinhold Niebuhr, McGeorge and William Bundy, John McCloy and George Kennan, among others.

To many people (myself included) Niebuhr, for instance, was a serious theologian, a great preacher, a powerful intellectual presence. Certainly compared to Billy Graham, who unofficially took over from him as the senior theological figure and consultant to Presidents, Niebuhr was somebody of genuine gravity. Yet, according to Saunders, he was an ‘honorary patron of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and a Cold War “realist” ’. He believed in the importance of a ‘calculated balance of power’ and in foreign policy as ‘the exclusive responsibility of an élite authority’. He contributed greatly to the force of the proposition, advanced by Whittaker Chambers, that the future would be decided ‘between the two great camps of men – those who reject and those who worship God’. And, as Saunders adds, he ‘served up liberal helpings of theology to Time-Life readers, winning Sidney Hook’s approval for successfully reviving the doctrine of original sin as a political tool, and making “God an instrument of national policy” ’. This capacity to reduce ‘the complexity of world relations to a struggle between the powers of light and darkness meant that the rhetoric of American foreign policy had come to rest on distinctions which resisted the processes of logic or rationality.’ Robert McNamara’s various attempts to apologise for his role in the Vietnam War should qualify him for the list of offenders, not least because his self-serving, self-promoting message – ‘it was all an honest mistake’ – needs to be regularly trotted out and mocked for the drivel that it is.

Saunders catches precisely the sublime confidence of former preppies and Ivy Leaguers who thought they were entitled to rule the world, and whose ideas (if that’s what they are) still pound excitedly through Madeleine Albright’s feverish speeches about American indispensability and supremacy. But she should have gone into greater detail about the appearance of the ‘three-worlds’ concept, which was an essential part of the story she tells; more might have been made of the struggle between East and West over influential post-colonial countries like Ghana, Egypt, Indonesia and India. CIA tactics of the kind Saunders describes were often employed well beyond Europe, creating the ‘Third World’ and, with it, the tiers-mondisme which in time became associated with a kultur-kampf when V.S. Naipaul, Pascal Bruckner (The Tears of the White Man), Conor Cruise O’Brien and others withdrew their earlier support for national liberation movements and what was once the Non-Aligned Movement.

The other subject she doesn’t fully broach is directly entailed by what she digs up about the complicity between power and intellectuals. For a time during the Fifties and Sixties, entire disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, area studies and political science, as well as innocuous fields like languages and comparative literature, were heavily infiltrated by the American Government for geopolitical ends. Today the part played by ‘policy intellectuals’ and those who use them – the various Washington think-tanks, Political Action Committees and the military-industrial complex – has reopened the question of how free individual researchers, even those protected by university tenure, really are. In the softer academic fields of cultural studies, literature, ethnic research, feminism, the tension between advocacy and what used to be called the ‘liberal humanities’ is quite fierce.

No one now can confidently say where the humanities begin and end, and where interest-created fields of knowledge pick them up or overlap with them. I tried to deal with these issues when I studied Orientalism twenty-five years ago. Reading Saunders took me back into the problems I confronted then and rekindled my interest in them, as all around me in the university, large corporations, mega-donors like Bill Gates and his kind, as well as the defence industries, openly buy up professors’ time (they can be hired for research into smart weapons, for example, or Islamic terrorism). Is there any role, or any possibility of a role in the post-Cold War era of globalisation for what Foucault and Chomsky, each in their different ways, called intellectual resistance and even freedom?

The prospects are not very encouraging, if the muddy past churned up by Who Paid the Piper? is anything to go on. I find it invigorating that Saunders, who is in her thirties, has taken up the challenges all over again, and if she doesn’t really say what ought to be done now, the energy and determination of her research, to say nothing of the scepticism that nurtured it, are important signs of stirring intellectual restlessness and even of a kind of incitement, which is what is needed most of all.

Fin-de-siècle globalisation is, however, a stickier, more encompassing element for the intellectual to function in than the Cold War. For the individual critical consciousness the pursuit of freedom is rather like Yeats’s ‘struggle of the fly in marmalade’, a daunting, perhaps impossible aspiration, especially for those humanists or literary intellectuals who no longer feel they can retreat to a privileged Arnoldian sanctuary, or take strength from a grand narrative of enlightenment and emancipation. The task is to provide as much material as can be assembled from alternative sources (today’s mainstream media being nearly useless for that purpose) and to apply universal norms of justice to overweening power and unchecked market economics. In this, I think, personal witness and effort must bear a disproportionate share of the work. A growing library on the insidious intellectual abuses of American power is greatly enhanced by Saunders’s excellent book.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/edward-said/hey-mister-you-want-dirty-book

'History broke Liverpool, and it broke my heart'

In 1904, shipping agents in Poland sold my grandparents a ticket to the New World. I believe they travelled overland to Hamburg and boarded a ship for America. After a shorter voyage than they had expected, they finally came ashore. Even used to the baroque splendour of the Warsaw my grandfather visited from the agrarian plains of the east, he was staggered by the city at which he made landfall. New York! he cried. The greatest city on earth! The splendour of its architecture bearing down on the water was enough to impress any pogrom immigrant. It was only after three days that my grandparents understood that they had been put off at Liverpool, the final destination on a ticket they couldn't read.

A hundred years ago the city was the gateway to the empire, the port from which nine million emigrants sailed off to the promised lands of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. My grandparents stayed. They joined the life of what was then Britain's only really multicultural city which teemed with Lascar seamen from the Indies, the descendants of African and Black American sailors, Jews from the Pale of Settlement, and the largest Chinatown in Europe. It was a city with its back turned against the land, one which barely inhabited the country it was nominally part of. Everyone went to sea at some point, one way or other. A young man learning his trade signed on at the docks and next day sailed to South America. In the manifest of the SS Lacona at Ellis Island, my father's name appears in 1923 as part of the crew: Jew Cook.

Liverpool came into existence to move things around: cotton, sugar, slaves and, later, paperwork when the insurance companies moved there. There was a saying that lingers in Liverpool today - the Liverpool gentleman and the Manchester man. Manchester was an industrial city that made things, its workforce stable, drawn from the Lancashire hinterland, dedicated to progressive causes such as the industrial revolution and the campaigns that grew out of it for trade unions and socialism. The Manchester mill-owner had dirt under his finger nails. The Liverpool gentleman engaged in commerce sat in an office in a white collar. The dock labourers, crowded along Scotland Road, formed the largest and densest slum in Europe, famine-Irish in origin, subject to arbitrary labour practices which had more to do with the slave auction than industrial relations. The gentlemen voted Liberal and the dockers right up to the 1930s still saw politics as an extension of the Fenian/Orange struggles over the water. But from the port came an infection of new ideas. The convoy ships that dodged the U-boats during the battle of the Atlantic to bring food to Britain from Canada also brought the records of Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter and Howlin' Wolf and the discs changed hands for huge sums in the dock road pubs, the beginnings and origin of the Mersey Sound that grew up in the warehouses that smelled of damp and the cargoes they once held, everything made of brick and iron to avoid combustion.

Liverpool's blitz was second only to London's and got a lot less newsreel coverage because of the propaganda value for the Germans of knowing how badly the docks had been bombed. Liverpudlians sat sullen in the cinema as the brave Cockneys grinned into the cameras. What about us, they asked? My father would turn off the TV in disgust when Dad's Army came on. The Home Guard he was part of defended the blazing warehouses after the German bombers came over. When the war ended, Liverpool's heyday had passed, transatlantic shipping was in decline, the unskilled dockers were decanted out of Scotland Road into brand new council estates in Halewood and Speke, and car factories were built to give them work. For the first time since it came into being, Liverpool was a predominantly industrial city, and this state of affairs lasted until the 1980s when manufacturing was eviscerated by successive Tory governments that transformed Britain into a service economy. Liverpool went Labour in the 1970s, but without a strong indigenous tradition of town-hall socialism it was prey to takeovers from the Militant Tendency, to the one-day wonders who strutted the streets in their mohair suits, the Derek Hattons who told the people that if Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle caved in, it would be Liverpool that would take on Thatcher, even if it lost and went to the wall.

It went to the wall. From a population high of 700,000 in the 1960s, Liverpool now struggles to maintain the 400,000 mark. What has Liverpool given Britain in the past 30 years? Its population, a genuine diaspora. History broke the back of the city and it broke my heart. Bold Street, where in the 1950s my mother stepped out of Cripps with a black and white Cresta hat box, had by the 1980s descended into a street of run-down charity shops. What do you do with a port on the wrong side of Britain? Tow it round to Gravesend? But even if the total tonnage coming into the container port at Seaforth is greater now than it was in the 1960s, it still doesn't need the sheer manpower of the former days of shipping. At the lowest point of its decline in the early 1990s, Liverpool descended into mass redundancy, failed strikes, depopulation, the anarchy of gang, gun and drug culture, the bottom of the league table in all the indices of poverty and social exclusion. If that wasn't enough, it has been victimised further by what, from afar, I can only describe as a form of racism, a venomous derision for Liverpudlians that condemns them as soon as they open their mouths as thieves and scallies, rob-dogs and whiners.

You felt as if the rest of the country wanted Liverpool drowned just off the coast of Ireland with all its whingeing population. Liverpool was Britain's Detroit, a city that had died through its own irrelevance to the modern economy. My own childhood and teens felt cemented over; I had come from one culture which had seen its past in eastern Europe obliterated, only the dead left behind in its vandalised cemeteries, now everything my parents had strived for and made as the children of immigrants growing up in the city centre, migrating out to newly built suburbs, was boiled down to a Brookside script, to Harry Enfield in a perm wig, crude stereotypes that dehumanised the whole complex identity of a city whose inhabitants were formed by a history of immigration and emigration, where the bitterness of life could only be alleviated by a humour that was harder, had bite.

The last time I wrote about Liverpool, in 1998, the city council's press officer told me that it was applying for European capital of culture status and would get it. There was a cast-iron confidence about the bid. Liverpool was about to reinvent itself because it had no other choice. Its period as an industrial city that made things had not even lasted half a century, it had to return to what it once did, preoccupying itself with impermanence. What I heard and saw then, was greeted with contempt when I returned to London. Liverpool planned to, and was already demonstrably succeeding in attracting particularly from the US. The hotels were full. New ones were being built and when they were completed, they were full too. To Americans, Liverpool wasn't football or men with perms or drug dealers, it was the city of the Beatles and the place from which their own ancestors had left Europe for the new world. Something of the land on the other side of the Atlantic was there in Liverpool. Its twin city was New York which seemed natural and obvious, the two had joint millennium night celebrations. In the Liver Building, a kind of Trump Tower of the early years of the century, America recognises one of the world's first really large-scale reinforced concrete buildings and the start of a revolution, a system of construction which would lead within 20 years to the symbol of 20th-century America: the skyscraper. And along the street from it perhaps the most important office building in the world, the first cantilevered glass curtain wall, built in the 1850s.

Now Liverpool has a shot at reinvention. It is accused of trading on its past but its past is modernity. Its heritage is people dreaming of escape and of the future. If the city can be reborn, this is its moment. There could be no other choice but to give this to Liverpool, nowhere else needs it so badly. Carl Jung came to the city in 1927 and dreamed of a magnolia tree growing from an island in the city square. He saw the dream as the climax of the whole process of the development of consciousness. "Liverpool is the pool of life," he wrote, "it makes to live." Jung came and saw something where others scorn and see nothing. In 2008 I hope that millions will come to my native city and see that it is still there, despite everything, infecting the country as all ports do, with new ideas.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2003/jun/05/artsfeatures.europeancapitalofculture2008

Mass Mind Control Through Network Television: Are Your Thoughts Your Own?

Why do countless American people go along with the War on Iraq? Why do so many people call for a police state control grid? A major component to a full understanding of why this kind of governmental and corporate corruption is to discover the modern science of mind control and social engineering. It's baffling to merely glance at the stacks of documentation that this world government isn't being constructed for the greater good of humanity. Although there are a growing number of people waking up the reality of our growing transparent soft cage, there seems to be just enough citizens who are choosing to remain asleep. Worse yet, there are even those who were at least partially awake at one time but found it necessary to return to the slumber of dreamland.

This is no accident; this is a carefully crafted design. The drive to dumb down the populations of planet earth is a classic art that existed before the United States did. One component to understanding and deciphering the systems of control is to become a student of the magicians of influence and propaganda. In order to defeat our enemies (or dictators), its imperative that we understand how they think and what they believe in.

When people think about mind control, they usually think in terms of the classic "conspiracy theory" that refers to Project MkUltra. This program is a proven example of 'overt mind control.' The project had grown out of an earlier secret program, known as Bluebird that was officially formed to counter Soviet advances in brainwashing. In reality the CIA had other objectives. An earlier aim was to study methods 'through which control of an individual may be attained'. The emphasis of experimentation was 'narco-hypnosis', the blending of mind altering drugs with carefully hypnotic programming.

A crack CIA team was formed that could travel, at a moments notice, to anywhere in the world. Their task was to test the new interrogation techniques, and ensure that victims would not remember being interrogated and programmed. All manner of narcotics, from marijuana to LSD, heroin and sodium pentathol (the so called 'truth drug') were regularly used.

Despite poor initial results, CIA-sponsored mind control program flourished. On 13 April 1953, the super-secret project MK-ULTRA was born. Its scope was broader than ever before, and only those in the top echelon of the CIA were privy to it. Official CIA documents describe MK-ULTRA as an 'umbrella project' with 149 'sub-projects'. Many of these sub-projects dealt with testing illegal drugs for potential field use. Others dealt with electronics. One explored the possibility of activating 'the human organism by remote control'. Throughout, it remained a major goal to brainwash individuals to become couriers and spies without their knowledge.

When it was formed in 1947, the CIA was forbidden to have any domestic police or internal security powers. In short, it was authorized only to operate 'overseas'. From the very start MK-ULTRA staff broke this Congressional stipulation and began testing on unwitting American citizens.

Precisely how extensive illegal testing became will never be known. Richard Helms, CIA Director and chief architect of the program, ordered the destruction of all MK-ULTRA records shortly before leaving office in 1973. Despite these precautions some documents were misfiled and came to light in the late 1970's. They laid bare the spy agency's cynicism. Despite the widespread knowledge of MK Ultra and the civil lawsuits that followed, this form of behavior modification is not the most expansive. The real dangers are the types of thought control that are 'covert' and not the subject of several dozen Hollywood movies like "Clockwork Orange" and Mel Gibson's "Conspiracy Theory."

Our founding fathers faced enormous challenges in the formation of this country and its bill of rights. One challenge was laying down the groundwork or a free society without knowing what kind of technological advances would be made. Who would have guessed in those times that we needed an article in the bill of rights that specifically prohibits the government and it's associates from engaged in mind control or thought control. The closest item that promises our protection from the government is the 4th Article in The Bill of Rights which states, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Like many are now beginning to note, the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights are merely given lip service by our supposedly elected officials.

One of the most common examples of mind control in our so-called free and civilized society is the advent and usage of the television set. This isn't to say that all things on TV are geared towards brainwashing you. They're not. But most of the programming on television today is run and programming by the largest media corporations that have interests in defense contracts, such as Westinghouse (CBS), and General Electric (NBC). This makes perfect sense when you see how slanted and warped the news is today. Examining the conflicts of interest is merely glancing at the issue, although to understand the multiple ways that lies become truth, we need to examine the techniques of brain washing that the networks are employing.

Radio isn't any different in its ability to brainwash a population into submission. Sixty-seven years ago, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare. It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles' radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles' explanation at the end of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing into the night to escape the alien invaders.

According to researcher Mack White ( http://www.mackwhite.com/), "Psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects of the broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates to the suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear. Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which has done groundbreaking research on, among other things, mass brainwashing. Two years later, with Rockefeller Foundation money, Cantril established the Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR), also at Princeton. Among the studies conducted by the OPOR was an analysis of the effectiveness of "psycho-political operations" (propaganda, in plain English) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Then, during World War II, Cantril and Rockefeller money assisted CFR member and CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow in setting up the Princeton Listening Center, the purpose of which was to study Nazi radio propaganda with the object of applying Nazi techniques to OSS propaganda. Out of this project came a new government agency, the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS). The FBIS eventually became the United States Information Agency (USIA), which is the propaganda arm of the National Security Council. Thus, by the end of the 1940s, the basic research had been done and the propaganda apparatus of the national security state had been set up--just in time for the Dawn of Television."

Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit. It's no longer an overstatement to note that the youth today that are raised and taught through network television are intellectually dead by their early teens.

The dumbing down of humanity is represented by another shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television. Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions, such as the "fight or flight" response. The reptile brain is unable to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real. Thus, though we know on a conscious level it is "only a film," on a conscious level we do not--the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised--and the effect is all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible for us to survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us vulnerable to the manipulations of television programmers. This is where the manipulators use our own emotions as strings to control us. The distortions and directions we are being moved to are taking place in the subconscious, often undetected.

Propaganda techniques were first codified and applied in a scientific manner by journalist Walter Lippman and psychologist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of Britain. Edward Bernays said in his 1928 book Propaganda that, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

The Creel Commission provided themes for speeches by "four-minute men" at public functions, and also encouraged censorship of the American press. The Commission was so unpopular that after the war, Congress closed it down without providing funding to organize and archive its papers. The war propaganda campaign of Lippman and Bernays produced within six months such an intense anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolf Hitler, among others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. Bernays coined the terms "group mind" and "engineering consent", important concepts in practical propaganda work. The current public relations industry is a direct outgrowth of Lippman's and Bernays' work and is still used extensively by the United States government. For the first half of the 20th century Betrays and Lip man ran a very successful public relations firm. World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, both by Hitler's propagandist Joseph Gobbles and the British Political Warfare Executive, as well as the United States Office of War Information.

Turn on your local newscast. You have a few minutes of blue-collar crime, hardly any white collar crime, a few minutes of sports, misc. chit chat, random political jibber-jabber, and a look at the weather that no one is forecasting correctly. Is that what happened in your town? And we're supposed to own the airwaves! The mainstream media openly supports the interests of the prison industrial complex. The stories focus on minority criminal groups, and exploit the real threat to appear much more dangerous than they are. Think about the growing per capita number of prisoners in the country. Then remember that this is happening at the same time that our prison boom began. The police on our streets have created criminals. The focus is to keep us in a state of fear, that way the elitists can attack any group they want to without fear of consequence. This is why the media is continuing to craft the timeless art of dehumanization.

The techniques are increasing in their sophistication over time as the mind scientists that serve the empire continue to discover scientific breakthroughs as to how the human brain functions, learns, retains information, and behaves. The most effective brainwashing techniques are used on the most successful propaganda networks. Examine the music bed that lies low during the fright night scope of the second. It's spooky. I wonder if we are supposed to be thinking with our minds or getting ready for stunt. Observe the graphics with the music. They're glitzy and flashing. Like the monkey that is attracted to shiny objects, it's our monkey hand that controls to remote often stops the search for entertainment when the proper amount of glamour catches their attention. Most importantly, notice the repetition behind the lies that the politicians and their corporate media groupies tell us. You see, the unimaginable fallacies are created as 'truth' not because it's logical or provable, but because of the broken record technique. No matter how ridiculous the lie, it's repeated often enough that the brain doesn't know the difference between reality and nursery rhymes. This technique is under estimated in its ability to allow the puppeteers to hypnotize millions of people. Instead of "Fair and balanced" it's "We say it enough times, and you believe it."

It's a tragic day when the state can monopolize on the enslaving and imprisonment of a population. Hollywood will continue to frighten us with films on the mafia, gangsters, and the corrupt blue collar criminal whose stupidity and greed get them caught. In the end, our minds are already pre conditioned to accept living in a police state economy and society because we read it in the paper, saw it praised on the news and talk shows, or saw it in a movie. There are several movies planned right now that support the official story of 911 and a few movies that glamorize the War on IRAQ. According to David L Robb, Author of Operation Hollywood, "Hollywood and the Pentagon have a long history of making movies together. It's a tradition that stretches back to the early days of silent films, and extends right up until the present day. It's been a collaboration that works well for both sides. Hollywood producers get what they want - access to billions of dollars worth of military hardware and equipment - tanks, jet fighters, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers - and the military gets what it wants - films that portray the military in a positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting efforts. The Pentagon is not merely a passive supporter of films, however. If the Pentagon doesn't like a script, it will usually suggest script changes that will allow the film to receive the military's support and approval. Sometimes these proposed changes are minor. But sometimes the changes are dramatic. Sometimes they change dialogue. Sometimes they change characters. Sometimes they even change history." They create something coined 'disinfotainment'. They mix disinformation with entertainment and call it disinfotainment.

Unadulterated Violence is now accepted on regular TV. Killing in the name of the mother government is praised, that is unless the violence is committed in self defense to protect someone from the system. Sharp shooters, bombers, and assassin are worshipped if they are fighting for the system, are in the military, or are associated with groups that control the masses locally, such as the local police department. I don't condone violence, however it's hypocritical to support one form of homicide when it favors the elite, and condemn another when it's done to protect your land, freedom, or loved ones. This odd reality transfers itself into the shady world of video games that are stepped in plots and tasks to kill as much as the player can. The players are getting younger and younger with 7 out of 10 children playing games with a 'Mature' rating. Recently I was browsing the PC video game selection at a very large electronics store. I was appalled to see nearly 50 different games in which the setting of the game is IRAQ and the goal is to kill as many insurgents as possible and fulfill the mission. Children today are being indoctrinated through their favorite games and law enforcement programs to be the button pushes of the weapons of mass destruction for tomorrow's world.

Is it any wonder why there are two house bills and a senate bill (with more on the way), which are giant steps in dismantling free speech of the general public. These bills together would kill (PEG) cable access centers where the public still owns the airwaves. It's the programming created locally, without censorship or commercial gain. Their income is derived from franchises within the local cities and a small percentage cable subscriber frees. This is a corporate takeover because this is centralizing communication by removing the locally based programming and moving the audience to the more official, nationalistic, and sensational programs that promotes violence, uniformity, and slavery over peach, diversity and freedom. Cable access features free speech and information with perspectives neglected by mainstream television. It also features a free flow programming system with fresh programs being aired by new producers on a rotating basis. This keeps the content and information creative and locally based while network TV is rigid with regular time slots and repetitive programming.

The blocks of programming that are universally accepted parallel the shift to craft our entire lives towards the factory's bell and the illusion of time. This is the creation of the hive mind. The hive mind is result of massive brainwashing to the general public. Everyone shares the same thoughts, goals, knowledge and understanding. A hive mind society gears itself towards conformity and ignores diversity while masqueraded as the road to utopia in mainstream television. Network programming, weather it's the news or drama, is geared towards artificially creating your world and reality. With the proper amount of entertainment and sensationalism, we may even be living our lives through the television set. Many anchors and actors are beautiful and research shows that attractive people are usually perceived as trust worthy. While the real news rolls quickly by on the bottom of your screen, the anchor is selling you on the idea of having your very own police state hell hole right here in your local jurisdiction, or how 2 sports opposing teams chased around on a court for 2 hours in attempt to score points means something to you. No education, no information, SPIN. Today the media represents a tool of brainwashing and indoctrination that is utilized on behalf of the owners interests.

Since the 1996 Telco act, television and radio stations all across the nation were bought out by major international media outlets. Clear Channel and Infinity are the two largest corporations in radio today. This has centralized the distribution of information and has threatened our free society ever since. The media drums to the heartbeat of its owners, whose interests are not of the general public. Instead they are interested in their other financial endeavors like defense contracting, oil business, political parties, prison industry. The conflicts of interest are monumental with the deregulation of the corporations. The lines are now blurred between one network's coverage of the war and the other.

Once we come to the conclusion that the media is intentionally deceiving us, we can apply the principles of problem-reaction-solution. This formula takes a problem by either creating it or allowing it to happen and presenting that to the population. It could be terrorism, molestation, extra terrestrials. These topics create fear and no one in their right mind would support terrorism or crime. It's therefore OK to blast the television, the papers, and radio with 'the problem.' The natural reaction from the people is a request for more control to ensure more safety. Most let their fear and emotional side control their decisions and usually translated into something like, "The government needs more power over our lives to make us safer and freer from tyranny. I believe what the media tells me so I will support whatever decisions they make." Today's mainstream corporate news program discourages dissent of the war and paints activists with a negative brush that hints of treason. At the same time, the so-called journalists are cogs in a much larger machine who know that if they report a story that paints the government in a dark light, is likely to remain on 'the wire' and off the front page.

The most disturbing thing about spending a single hour examining network cable news and modern Hollywood films are the reoccurring themes in the backdrop. The central ideas of countless "investigative reports" or "Friday night special" features are about a threat of some type over the horizon. The end of the world as we know it is being sold. If the news isn't feeding it to you, then the History Channel or Discover Channel are either talking about the crusades, asteroids, UFOs, earthquakes, terrorism, or exposes about serial killers. They are crafted a message that our world is unstable, and the threat is always an invisible and dangerous one that only our military can fix. When you record and log all the messages, you end up with a script, a screen write produced through the movie studios of Hollywood hell.

I am not alone in noting this observation. Local and network news are designing their editorials about despair and fear because the owners, producers, and editors now understand that fear sells. The end result are the desired ratings, delivered like expected. The masters of modern spin understand that we like to be terrified. Just look at the success in the action/suspense/terror genres that have plopped onto the conveyor belt and packaged for our glee consumption. When the editors in charge found out that simply plastering a terror alert chart didn't scare the people the same way it used to, they began to kick up the campaign of terror a few notches with new and creative ways to sell the police state.

When you get to the other side of the terror alerts of all shapes and sizes, you find another nightmare masquerading as the savior. The 'Ministry of Truth' will protect you. The mother government is here to rescue you and squash this brown terrorist bug, this gray alien, this avian bird flu, and every other nightmare that the nightly news brought you. The finest public relations specialists take the science of worshipping our kings down to a frame by frame level. George W. Bush is pictured in numerous poises with a hallo around his head. In other pictures, he stands tall with dozens of American flags blowing in the wind behind him. A more blasphemous display features him speaking in front of the cross of Jesus Christ. The message send couldn't be more clearly presented. Our current leaders are of the messiah status and only through them, will we reach the gates of safety. The lie that has been accepted by so many as truth is that this is a religious war. Numerous prime time programs are telling the story of the crusades (without the horrors) to synch our vibrations up to something out of the 13th Century, instead of the 21st Century. If the America people accept the fact that the crusades are here, that George Bush reports directly to god, and that revelations are here, then they have won the war for our minds.

The loudspeaker whispers, "All our problems are by accident, never design." Across the room the system's minion snorts, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." It's that plot that says Middle Eastern terrorists from an Afghan cave are the reason beyond our little, "War on terror." Related messages in the script demonize young minority males and suggest harsh punishments for crimes they commit. They don't come out overtly and state their racist agenda. They come at you from the side by airing the same crime news repetitively, usually when it's committed by the minority group. The networks love the fact that the TV sets the norms in society and today, and hence politically opinion. Who would imagine that in the United States of America, both candidates of both parties in the 2004 election would be members of the Skull and Bones society at Yale University? Out of 290 million Americans, this is the best we could come up with?

It is the decision of the owners to influence producers, editors, and others involved to paint to brush to fit the objective, which is the bottom line. If Sports is what the people want, then they get it, usually in large doses. Multi-media sports (or spectator sports) is just an escape from our own existence. It's like gambling, or drug addiction. It provides that buffer zone of rooting for something with other people that we've been told is good. People's fantasies also lead them to fixating on sports. Its simulated masculinity, in an age where there's a push to change us from men to robots. It's human nature to resist and fight that which is suppressing us. The sociologists and psychologists in areas of influence know this. Spectator sports prove the outlet internationally for what has been stripped away from us. We've lost the right to rebel and change our government through warfare if necessary. Today the bulk of our nation's population today doesn't know what's really going on with the fall of the American dollar and the plans for the transfer of American wealth to other countries. However, most can tell you who the top basketball or football players are. A lot of fans wish they were the stars, out there on the stage, the court, and the drag strip. Either you're "numero uno" in center stage or you're nothing. End of story.

What I never understood when I was in high school was why my peers and friends would act naïve or ignorant in a "Wayne's World" or "Beavis and Butthead" kind of way. What I've learned since then is that the numerous programs that are pimping themselves of as 'entertainment' are actually demo graphed to the lowest common denominator. This is especially true with disc jockeys in Radio today. The reason our airwaves are saturated with jokes and content centered on fart jokes, private parts, borderline racism, and general trash talk is because it is selling. In the meantime, large numbers of our children, young adults, and older audiences are mimicking what they see and hear because the current 'norm' is selling this behavior as cool or 'chic.' When the conditioned is so intense that these forms of content are considered the norm, anything else seems either bizarre or uninteresting to the average American's attention span that is decreasing by the day. Hypothetically, if a producer on a network did get away from a feature story exposing government corruption at the highest levels, chances are the large impact necessary wouldn't be realized because the average viewer's brain has already been conditioned to seek out certain types of disinfotainment.

The media has created the picture perfect society that could exist if we only did things their way, (their interests/government interest). It tells us what happiness is and what it is not and same for love, hate or anything else they can implant into our sub consciousness. We can become the perfect slave to the system through indoctrination given through network TV. Over time the messages are becoming increasingly racist, violent, and dishonest. But the programming began decades ago and few have the eyes to see it for what it has become. We live in a world where the populations give their minds away to the official version of the event, where utopia is right around the corner when big brother is riding shotgun. It's a world where Hollywood can make you believe anything, even that you are free. It's a world in which the prosecutor and the judge sit on the same side of the bench. The most obvious reason that our minds are being controlled on a massive scale psychologically, is become our culture has been conditioned incriminatingly to a TV, a radio, or a paper. We are given the world reality through a screen, some ink, or radio waves. The truth is hiding in plain site. The indoctrination through these mediums warns us that views other than those presented by them are unimportant and too be condemned. This Administration and media monopoly has a carefully crafted dehumanization program to anyone that dissents the official version of events.

Some people are wrong about 5% of the time. Some are wrong most of the time. I wish I was wrong all the time. A lot of people deal with these

intense realities, by asking me rhetorically, "What is the solution, smart guy?" Remember, it's the viewers, the consumers and all the other little votes called dollars that helped this oligarchy system lay its concrete foundation in our backyards. We must recognize the truth about why the system is flawed and enslaving us if we wish to beat it. The most important solution to fighting this type of brainwashing and mind control is to start with ourselves and our own awakening in the smaller things. In this case, it's brainwashing but after awhile we break Outside the Box and begin venturing outside the system and into unknown terrain. Fighting with people and forcing them to understand 'our truth' is not a solution. If our collective free will created this nightmare, than only our collective free will change it. The battle begins in the heart and mind of the beholder, and then extends outward from there, only to those open to the information.

If you choose to travel the road to the truth, then you must be prepared for the obstacles that await you. You may be condemned or criticized by your family, your friends, your lovers, or your co-workers. This is their programming that began at birth that is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You're going to have to be stronger than that. You must realize that there is a reality that exists outside of this controlled artificial system. Like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, he took that 'leap of faith' over the bridgeless canyon in an attempt to get to the other side. Like Neo in the Matrix, he took the red pill from Morpheus in his attempt to cross over to his real self. Once you wake up, it's as if a hypnotist came along and snapped his fingers. You wake up and say to yourself, "Oh my god. I can see it now. Why did it take me so long to wake up?!" For some of you it can be a major shock. Like anything else, take this information and knowledge in stages. If it took a lifetime for them to mold your reality for you, then you know that it may take longer than a day to fully awaken. Remember, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

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