Markovian Parallax Denigrate

Rigorous Intuition


Markovian Parallax Denigrate
It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace, their knee in your balls and their fist in your face. Yes and long live the state by whoever it's made, sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late. - Leonard CohenOn August 5, 1996, Usenet groups were spammed by messages of seemingly random word strings, "sometimes numbering in the thousands in a single posting," under the subject line "Markovian Parallax Denigrate":jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferringcaw update Cohen air collaborate ruesportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflowerDebby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novoITT most chairperson Dwight Hertzog differentpinpoint dunk McKinley pendant firelight Uranusepisodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variacbrotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritancecohesion refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeironameable yearbook hark....I imagine that night the data stream must have been thick with reports of Usenet abuse. But like much abuse, we have to ask, what's its point? It was either nonsense, or a cipher. And if a cipher, then it was a virtual numbers station.I used to be an avid listener of shortwave radio, and often found numbers stations without realizing what the monotonous intoning, beeps or bizarre sound sequences might be. Interestingly, no one who knows for sure what they are is talking even now, though the most informed guess is that it's the background noise of the black ops world. Fittingly, they can make for creepy listening. For instance the German station, known as "Swedish Rhapsody," which broadcast in the voice of a young girl. And a new one, apparently transmitting from the Southwest US and known as "Yosemite Sam", that begins with a brief data burst followed by the phrase "Varmint, I'ma Gonna Blow Yah T'Smithereens!" This is repeated ten seconds later on the next highest of four frequencies. "Transmissions always start at an offset of 7 seconds, such as at 10:00:07. The timing of the transmissions seems to be excellent." (If this sounds like fun listening, you may want to consider the Conent Project. Though it was released before the debut of "Yosemite Sam" )Getting back to "Markovian Parallax Denigrate," Google has archived an example here that was posted to alt.religion.christian.boston-church. The sender is identified as "Chris Brokerage," though clicking "view profile" brings up the email address susan_lindauer@worf.uwsp.edu.Now, "Susan Lindauer" - does that name mean anything to you? Thanks to Project Willow on the RI discussion board for reminding me of her strange story. At least of the strangeness we can know.In 1993 Lindauer left a career as a journalist with such credits as Fortune, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and US News & World Report to join the press office of Democratic Congressman Peter DeFazio. Three years later, at the time of the "Markovian Parallax Denigrate" postings, she was working for former Senator Carol Mosely Brown. And two years after that, in 1998, Lindauer was making a deposition in the Lockerbie Trial that contradicted the official Libya did it! yarn, corroborating the accounts of others, such as former DIA operative Lester Coleman that it was instead all about Bekka Valley heroin and CIA drug dealing. (Coleman's book, Trail of the Octopus, can be read online with free registration here.) Because of her time on the Lockerbie case, Lindauer developed an impressive network of Middle East contacts. (Her Washington contacts weren't too shabby, either. Andrew Card is her second cousin.)But how you're likely to know Lindauer's name is by her March 2004 arrest for acting as an "unregistered agent" of the Iraqi government over a period of five years. (Shades of the stitch-up of George Galloway.) Lindauer argued that her efforts to lift sanctions and to prevent war were being misrepresented. To the Associated Press, Lindauer claimed she was being punished for involving herself in US foreign policy. Though the media portrayed her as a spy and its echo chamber called her a traitor, she was never charged with espionage.That was two years ago. Her case has yet to come to trial. In fact, she's been judged unfit to stand trial. Today, "she is confined to a federal mental facility in Texas, perhaps never to get her day in court...She is being held past her scheduled release date, which had been sometime early this month, and, she tells friends, might be forcibly medicated as part of her treatment."According to two court-appointed doctors:the defendant is suffering from psychotic disorder not otherwise specified, delusional disorder, hallucinatory phenomena, and mood disturbance that render her mentally incompetent to the extent that she does not understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against her and is unable to assist properly in her defense at this time.Lindauer had been free on bail until last September when the court, informed by the judgement of the doctors, decided she needed closer observation. Now, it's unclear when she's getting out, and "friends say her mental state seems to have worsened during incarceration":"I got a call from her Feb. 4," says [friend JB] Fields. "They are talking about forcibly medicating her. She sees women around her, in Carswell [federal medical center in Fort Worth, Texas], who can't hold their own silverware to eat because of medications, and she doesn't see how such treatments make anyone more fit for trial. Seems a lot like the way the Soviets used to treat dissidents." Lindauer told another friend she was being guarded like a terrorist at Carswell, and a relative of Lindauer who recently attempted to visit her was turned away, Fields says.So, what was all that about "Markovian Parallax Denigrate"? Lindauer was caught up in the Lockerbie intrigue by 1994. Anyone cross-posting a cipher to Usenet would be unlikely to use his or her own email address. And yet hers was.From spynumbers.com:"59372 98324 19043 78903 95320...". The mechanized female voice drones on and on... What have you stumbled on to? Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and misinformation?Chances are, all of the aboveChances are, by 1996 some parties were unhappy with Lindauer sniffing around the drugs of Lockerbie. And so, perhaps for short-term shit-disturbance and a cheap investment in an unknown, long-term pay out, the "Markovian Parallax Denigrate" was created and ascribed to Susan Lindaur. (It's interesting to see "Webb" in the word string. It was in August, 1996, the same month of the "Markovian Parallax Denigrate," that Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" first appeared.) Deliberate misinformation, to suggest Lindauer was playing a double game, and to lay down some legend if she gave them cause to use it.Psychotic, delusional, hallucinatory. But they were after her.
posted by Jeff at 4:39 AM 22 comments
Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Why They Fight
"All right, let's sum up. This year in History, we talked about the failure of democracy." - Starship TroopersSo, let's see what we've got: when Plame was outed by Cheney's office she was working on the Iran file, tracking WMD technologies; the congressional probe into NSA spying will likely now be dropped; new photos of Abu Ghraib frat pranks have filtered out; an Ohio Republican county commissioner has been charged with the attempted abduction of a 14-year old ("come here, little girl"), and Democratic senate hopeful Paul Hackett has been pressured by his party to drop out of a race the popular Iraq war vet could probably win to ensure a slot for a career politician who probably won't.What's missing? Oh yeah: Harry Whittington has a pellet in his liver, now too, as well as in his heart (though he's said to be doing "extremely well"); Dick Cheney admits to drinking; and the ballistics just don't make sense at the reported distance of 30 yards.Anything else? Just everything. Everything touched by the fallen angel of the American republic has become a farce, begetting tragedy. It's why The Daily Show has become the premier news program in the United States, because citizen/viewers are permitted to laugh at their condition, but powerless to do anything to change it.It seems a defining characteristic of the present hegemon that if they deny it, it must be true. Should Bush ever deny having danced the hokey pokey with Jack Abramoff, the next week we'll see the pictures of the two in the Oval Office, shaking it all about.Many Democrats, bless their blinkered souls, thinks all this means they're winning. That historic low poll numbers for Bush will translate into great gains next Fall and a sure victory for a safe, DLC candidate in 2008. They think, if they can't impeach the President for taking the country to war on a lie or the de facto President for Plame, then surely to God Cheney will be forced to resign for shooting a man.As if. He's not going anywhere unless the "Lord calls him home" - whoever, and wherever, that may be for Dick Cheney - because even though Life Goes On for most people as if it isn't really happening, the Big Show with Iran is just ramping up. So Dick won't be leaving just yet.It's wrong, I think, to call what's coming the "War with Iran," when actually it's just another campaign in the Long War that's intended to survive us, and walk the world through its greatest crisis of conflict and resolution. This is spelled out clearer than ever in the Pentagon's latest Quadrennial Defense Review, a .pdf of which can be read here. (See also this thread on the RI discussion board.)As Bill van Auken notes, the language has been massaged so the enemy is no longer identified as "terrorists" but as "extremists" or "violent extremists." US forces are transitioning from "battle-ready" to "battle-hardened" to meet the "new strategic environment" in which the United States will not only be going to war with nations, but also "conducting war in countries we are not at war with." The Pentagon also intends to "provide US NORTHCOM with authority to stage forces and equipment domestically prior to potential incidents when possible."How long has it been since you watched Starship Troopers? Perhaps you should again. I caught some of it last week on television, and I was surprised at how reality has outpaced it. I don't mean the space travel and the giant bugs; I mean the abandonment of democracy and dutiful dissent and the remodeling of America into a martial society. The bugs, of course, were never bugs anyway. They're the eternal, dehumanized other that needs only extermination. (The original title of 2002's giant spider movie Eight Legged Freaks was "Arac Attack.")Paul Verhoeven's film is smart enough to satirize Robert Heinlein's rather straight-ahead authoritarianism (for instance, citizenship is a privilege of those who sign up for "federal service"), though satire seems a hard thing to grok for those who were disgusted by the story of "Hitler Youth in love."Besides expounding principles of governance which could arguably be described as fascist, Heinlein was also - again, arguably - a student of the occult, and a familiar of the principals of the Babalon Working: Jack Parsons, L Ron Hubbard and "the Scarlet Woman," Marjorie Cameron.In the 1993 the essay Whence Came the Stranger: Tracking the Metapattern of Stranger in a Strange Land, "Adam Walks Between Worlds" writesCameron and others recall that Heinlein and Parsons were quite close friends. They may have met at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Fan club wich maintained a reading room -- they were certainly seen there together. It was also common for science fiction authors to tour the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratories that Parsons co-founded. Heinlein was particularly avid in availing himself of such tours. He used to take years off to study advances in science and often wrote glowing of NASA. So here was Parsons, the wunderkind of the rocket scientist community while Heinlein was its chief PR man and visionary. Space travel was both men's passion and livelihood. They had much in common, including their friendship with L. Ron Hubbard, who must have mentioned one to the other. Heinlein lived within driving distance of Agape Lodge which often performed the Gnostic Mass and, judging from Stranger and other writings, Heinlein was quite familiar with the ritual.While doing his "federal service" Hubbard wrote a novel that virtually prefigures The Turner Diaries entitled Final Blackout. Published in 1940 and "generally considered Hubbard's best science fiction novel," Final Blackout is described by an Amazon reviewer as "an adventure story written for fascists, by a fascist":Here's the set-up: a world war, started by weak, democratically elected elitists, has been dragging on for decades. A courageous soldier known simply as "The Lieutenant" overthrows the corrupt military power structure and takes matters into his own hands. He defeats all challengers and installs himself as a military dictator, bringing peace and prosperity to war-ravaged Britain. This new regime's torture and execution of dissidents is mentioned only in passing -- but I guess you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.It's not just science fiction, but the para-science of UFO research that finds itself triangulated with the occult and the far right. In Messengers of Deception, Jacques Vallee catalogues contactee themes such as intellectual abdication, racism and social engineering that support Paris Flammonde's observation that "a great many of the contactees purvey philosophies which are tinged, if not tainted, with totalitarian overtones."In an interview six weeks before 9/11, Bob Dylan said "We are living in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney's science-fiction have won. This is the real world. Science-fiction has become the real world, whether we realize it or not."That's true, even though we're not fighting the giant bugs yet. It's true, because enough people have been made to see no difference, and we who do are now the "extremists."
posted by Jeff at 7:02 PM 54 comments
Monday, February 13, 2006

Accidents will happen
I've lived in this town for thirty years, and to no one I'm a strangerAnd I put new bullets in my gun, chamber upon chamber - Nick CaveI hate the sense that TranceFormation of America makes. I've referenced the book several times here, notably with respect to Dick Cheney's endowment, Bill Bennett's sado-masochism and the ubiquity of Oz programming, and each time I've apologized for doing so. Cathy O'Brien's account of her decades of torture and mind control is a fittingly dissociative jumble of contaminated memory, fantasy and truth, and if the rationality of these times were any less attenuated I'd be inclined to not bother trying to separate the parts:Dick Cheney, then [assistant] White House Chief of Staff to President Ford...was the reason my family had travelled to Wyoming where I endured yet another form of brutality - his version of "A Most Dangerous Game," or human hunting.... Dick Cheney had an apparent addiction to the "thrill of the sport." He appeared obsessed with playing A Most Dangerous Game as a means of traumatizing mind control victims, as well as to satisfy his own perverse sexual kinks.It's just out of this world, right? But then Cheney goes and shoots a man, in this world - not the otherworld of O'Brien's narrative - so another suggestive point of unfortunate contact is made, and the weirdness bears down a little more.Reportedly this was the first occasion for the victim, Austin "millionaire attorney" Harry Whittington, 78, to go hunting with Cheney. Naturally enough he's a Republican, and not surprisingly he's a Bush appointee: a few years ago, then-Governor George Bush named him to the Texas Funeral Services Commission. If that means anything to you, it probably means Funeralgate. TFSC was the investigating body on the case of Service Corporation International, headed by Bush family friend Robert Waltrip, which had been "recycling graves" and throwing corpses in the woods. Eliza May was the director of the TFSC when the investigation began, and was fired, she claimed, on account of pressure from the Governor's office to help his friend at SCI. Her replacement? Harry Whittington. (As we've noted, SCI has gone on to better things, like being tasked to disappear the dead of Louisiana.)Whittington was shot by the Vice President on the happy Republican hunting grounds of the 50,000 acre Armstrong Ranch of South Texas. The ranch had belonged to late Bush "Pioneer" Tobin Armstrong, who died last October, and is now the property of daughter Katherine. Perhaps the most interesting family biography belongs to Tobin's widow and Katherine's mother Anne, who advised Nixon, served as Ford's British Ambassador, and "approved covert actions on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Reagan." Perhaps also worth noting is that Anne was a Halliburton director when the company first hired Dick Cheney.This happened on Saturday, but the incident wasn't news until late Sunday. What happened in the interim? I could imagine Cheney calling Wolf, the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction, to clean up his mess. But in the horror show we can't stop watching, Cheney himself is the cleaner. So how was the missing time spent?Then, when the shooting was finally reported, it was told as a joke. Dick Cheney puts an elderly man in intensive care, and the newsreaders can't stop grinning. In the blogosphere too, it became a piece from the lighter side. What's that about, but a coping mechanism to keep the absurdity at safe distance. You let it get to close, it can either drive you mad or efface your presumption of the world. We need to be able to cope with the Deep Absurdity, but sometimes we need to stop laughing long enough to do something about it.It's suggested that Whittington is wholly responsible for getting "peppered"(note: not shot in the face and chest), by his having separated himself from the hunting party and approached them from behind. Cheney, so goes the word picture goes, was tracking a bird, wheeled about, and - whoops.An accident? Sure; could be. But just as possible is an intentional act, because in so much they do, the Bush Administration and Cheney at the head of its class conduct themselves with the berserking disregard of a thrill kill cult. They've shrugged "It was an accident" over too many bodies. Even those who don't know O'Brien's account of Cheney's love for hunting humans have been given great cause to wonder, what isn't he capable of? Remember, this is a man who attended the Auschwitz memorial ceremony dressed for a duck hunt, wearing a wool cap which read "Staff 2001." Was he enjoying a good, deep-body chuckle, knowing he wouldn't be held to account for it by anyone but people like us, and so could get away with it?Guy de Maupassant's "Diary of a Madman" tells the posthumous, first person story of a respected judge whom no one would ever suspect of murder, and so he senselessly kills a little boy and a fisherman just because he could. ("Who would ever know? Who would ever suspect me, me, me, especially if I should choose a being I had no interest in doing away with?") Appended to the diary de Maupassant adds this remark: "Alienist physicians to whom the awful story has been submitted declare that there are in the world many undiscovered madmen as adroit and as much to be feared as this monstrous lunatic."I frequently read remarks such as What will it take for Bush to lose his base? Eat a baby on live TV? Maybe we'll yet find out.
posted by Jeff at 12:16 AM 97 comments
Thursday, February 09, 2006

The gods must be crazy
Like a crystal swan in a sky of sunsHis ship comes shining. - Bruce CockburnIt certainly was a rare and splendid thing to hear so much truth spoken to power at Tuesday's funeral of Coretta Scott King. (How often in his five long years has Bush addressed an unvetted crowd? How many times have the props been Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines?) And the predictable spin of studied apoplexy the power-shills displayed at the "Wellstone-ing" of the occasion was hysterically absurd. (Much talk of "disgracing the memory," which amounts to the same as the only good civil rights leader is a dead civil rights leader.) Someone should tell them that to be truly Wellstoned is less about pomp than circumstance.So sure, it felt good, watching two generations of Bush squirm while Joseph Lowery poured brimstones on their heads, and Jimmy Carter evoked wiretaps and the Helter Skelter time of Katrina. But in the end - and that's what this seems like, doesn't it? - truth to power is an unsatisfying equation. because what is it that power gives in return? At the King funeral, it responded as it often does, by rising to its feet and joining the ovation, and then sitting back down with a huge smirk on its face. Power is liberal with words, even "amen." And yet, some words power must keep to itself.The Carter presidency inherited George Herbert Walker Bush as Director of Central Intelligence. In one of Bush's early briefings with the President-Elect, Carter reportedly told his DCIA, "I want to have the information that we have on UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. I want to know about this as President." Bush turned him down. The information existed on "need to know," and "simple curiosity on the part of the President wasn’t adequate." This according to Marcia Smith, then Science and Technology analyst at the Congressional Research Service, which was then tasked by Carter to deliver what the CIA refused.Carter, rightly judging he could not trust Bush, shortly replaced him with his Annapolis classmate Stansfield Turner. (Bush later wrote about Carter, "beneath his surface cool, he harbored a deep antipathy to the CIA.") Turner triggered the so-called "Halloween Massacre" which eliminated 800 field positions. This was a milestone in the privatization, and deep criminalization, of the covert assets of US intelligence, which then clustered out of government around their champion, George HW Bush.Smith drew into her project Daniel Sheehan, then General Counsel to the United States Jesuit National Headquarters who went on to found the Christic Institute.According to Sheehan,[Smith] asked me if as Legal Counsel for the Jesuit Headquarters whether I could get access for the Library of Congress from the Vatican library. The Vatican library has a fairly large section concerning the issue of extraterrestrial intelligence, and UFOs. I undertook to contact the Jesuit who actually runs the Vatican library, and much to my shock, they said we couldn’t have access to it.A second request to the Vatican library failed, even though Sheehan stressed he was acting on behalf of a department the Library of Congress and it was the President himself who requested the information. (Interestingly, Smith later asked Sheehan to address the scientists of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the topic of the potential religious implications of alien contact.)I think most of us realize that the jihads and crusades of this century are merely the Straussian religious text to the subtext of control via manufactured crises. On September 18, 2001, Tehran saw the largest vigil in the Muslim world to honour the memory of the victims of 9/11. Of course, this was not the religious impulse the architects of this crisis meant to encourage. So the forces of moderation in Iran were frustrated, and the fundamentalist engines were fed the fires of provocation and aggression to carry us to this point, at which words and truths fail us and we again are presented with the despairing inevitability of war.On the evening of December 29, 1980, while driving in the Huffman area of east Texas, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Vickie's seven-year old grandson Colby encountered a large "diamond of fire" hovering at treetop levels over Highway FM1485, emitting odd bleeps and occasionally releasing a "large cone of fire" from its lowest point which made the road impassable. They stopped the car, and Vickie, "a committed Christian who does not believe in UFOs or extraterrestrial life...thought it was the coming of the end of the world." The three exited to get a better look, though they could feel the heat of the object burning their skin. Colby became terrified and cried to his grandmother.From the account Vickie later told Air Force personnel at Bergstom Air Force Base when she and Betty were interviewed about the incident:Colby was screaming and crying and everything so, and I thought the world was coming to an end, and I believed that sooner or later we'd gonna have to meet somebody. And I was telling him that ah.. look right in it, you know, I was showing him, I didn't find where the object was, you know when I... it was kinda like a flat... aluminum, I guess, you know, the inside of it looked dark, you know, the object did, and I was telling him to look right inside if he saw a big man it'd be Jesus.As they watched the object begin to depart, a swarm of helicopters surrounded it. Betty said later, "they seemed to rush in from all directions...it seemed like they were trying to encircle the thing." Betty and Vickie counted more than 20, many which they later recognized as double rotor CH-47 Chinooks, spread over an area of eight kilometers. Hours after the incident, Cash and the Landrums began suffering radiation sickness:Over the next few hours Betty's skin turned red as if badly sun burned. Her neck swelled and blisters erupted and broke on her face, scalp and eyelids. She started to vomit and continued to do so through out the night. My morning she was almost in a coma. Some time between midnight and 2am Vickie and Colby began to suffer similar symptoms, although less severe. At first they suffered the sunburn like condition and then diarrhea and vomiting. It was a miserable night for all three victims. The following morning Betty was moved to Vickie's house and all three were cared for there. Betty's condition continued to deteriorate and three days later she was taken to hospital. The burns and swelling altered Betty's appearance so radically that friend who came to visit her in hospital did not recognize her. Her hair began to fall out and her eyes became so swollen that she was unable to see for a week.More on the Cash/Landrum incident can be read here, which adds:An off duty Dayton policeman and his wife were driving home from Cleveland through the Huffman area the same night and also observed a large number of CH-47s. A man living in Crosby, directly under the flight path, reported seeing a large number of heavy military helicopters flying overhead. Oilfield laborer Jerry McDonald was in his back garden in Dayton when he saw a huge UFO flying directly over head. At first he thought it was the Goodyear airship, but quickly realized it was something else. "It was kind of diamond shaped and had two twin torches that were shooting brilliant blue flames out the back", he said. As it passed about 45 meters above him he saw that it had two bright lights on it and a red light in the center.This is, despite its being an offense to the sensibilities of secularists, a new age of religon. Or perhaps more accurately, a caricature of a religious age. (And quite literally so, given the psy-op incitement of offensive cartoons.) And UFOs are, for close contactees, often religious and metaphysical events ("if he saw a big man it'd be Jesus"). And more, they are also of military consequence (from the interview, Betty Cash: there was helicopters completely around the object...the type of helicopters that I've never been used to seeing.... They were the ones that had two deals, two rotors on them, and they were quite a few." USAF Captain John Camp: "Did these helicopters have any type of markings?" Cash: "Yes, they sure did: 'United States Air Force'"), and of such intelligence classification that neither George HW Bush nor the Vatican Library would share their knowledge with President Jimmy Carter.Great blood sacrifice is coming to much of the world as it takes a controlled descent into chaos, but that also brings opportunity for the few who hold the words of power. And when peace comes, it will come with strange gods.
posted by Jeff at 4:39 PM 65 comments
Tuesday, February 07, 2006

The Trouble with Fascists
"We Fascists are the only true anarchists. Once we've become masters of the state, true anarchy is that of power." - Pasolini, SaloFascists have, let's call them, boundary issues. The boundaries of states, and I mean both federations and conditions, and the boundaries on the roadmaps of the soul. They transgress.Now of course, transgression can be a good thing, providing it's your own boundaries you are crossing. In fact, in almost every religious culture, transgression is allowed to be a holy thing. Think of fools of God like Saint Simeon Salus, a sixth century hermit who would perform such antics as blowing out the candles of a church just as the service was beginning, eating sausages on Good Friday and defecating in the marketplace. Yet as George Hansen tells in The Trickster and the Paranormal Simeon was also known to perform miracles, including the multiplication of food, telepathy and predicting the future. Nityananda, who last century violated many orthodox Hindu laws and would embarass his devotees by his nakedness and such happenings as smearing excrement over his body and sitting "with large piles of it, offering some to passers-by as a sweet." (The inversion of food/excrement and mouth/anus is a recurring and powerful transgression. The Aztecs had a copraphagic deity named Tlazolteotl, "Divine Excrement," also known as Tlaelquani, the "Eater of Ordure." See also "The Eye of Horus".) But Nityananda is remembered for his "miraculous healings, prophetic powers and even weather control." Joseph of Copertino mortified his flesh with chains and metal plates that pressed into his sores, and wore broken crockery around his neck to increase his humiliation. Joseph is also arguably the best-documented levitator in history. He also displayed telepathy, clairvoyance, healing powers and more. Sri Ramakrishna, one of India's greatest saints, often dressed as a woman and would eat the food left as temple offerings for gods.So, what was that about fascism, and what am I going on about now? I'm going on about Pasolini's final film, the one he may have died for: Salo."You must be stupid to think that death would be so easy. Don't you know we intend to kill you a thousand times?"It's a hard film to see, and not just because it's hard to sit through. Its graphic sexual sadism has prompted its banning around the world. (I first tried to catch it at a Toronto Forbidden Films festival in the mid-80s, but the Ontario Film Board forbade the screening.) Given how there are many works in the past 30 years that have out-grossed it, I suspect it's still problematic not so much for its generalized sexual sadism as for its pointed depiction of fascist sexual sadism.The film is an adaptation of the Marquis De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, which Pasolini set in Mussolini's "Republic of Salo," the Nazi puppet state of northern Italy that he nominally administered during the final years of the war.If you haven't seen it, you've seen and heard of something like it. Forced nudity on collared and leashed prisoners with covered heads, paedophilic rape, coprophilia, humiliation and torture, ritual abuse and murder. Is it fascism? Is it Salo, or someplace else?(And I should say, the death of a thousand times includes such insufferable yet mundane things as the Killing Jokes of deadpan irony. The Cheney/Bush gang are masters of timing. It's Republican prostitute Jeff Gannon getting back his press pass, this time for "Pajama Media." It's Rumsfeld comparing Chavez to Hitler. Doesn't he know what he's saying, and doesn't he know what he sounds like? Yes, and yes: of course he does. And it must give him tremendous pleasure.)"Our guide restored the divine character of monstrosity thanks to reiterated actions. That is to say: rites."It's been a topic before here how the psycho-sexual atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, and most certainly the unnamed secret prisons in the "War on Terror's" encircling gulag, did not arise in a vacuum and without the stage direction of senior officials. They also enact ritual, and are more than reminiscent, to both students and survivors, of the methods of covert mind control. Survivor Kathleen Sullivan has says that "many survivors...are experiencing an additional set of reactions....wave after wave of devastating emotions and flashbacks after each new revelation is made public. What was done to the prisoners is too similar to what was perpetrated against most of us." And last July I wrote that the "mission is brutalization. Not just of the captives, but of the captors and their codependent subjects in the Homeland. Because the transformative mission extends beyond the literal confines of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, to the imaginative boundaries of Empire."But there's more going on here than brutalization. Or rather, the brutalization has, I believe, a sacramental aspect. Because there's a liminal quality to the bulldozing of values which achieves for the fascists - and possibly also for some fragmented parts of their victims - an ecstatic state of transgression. Perhaps understanding this dynamic will help explain and anticipate the congruity of fascism with occultic crime and untangle "Satanic Ritual Abuse" from the double caricatures of fundamentalist hysteria and secular humanist disdain.Pasolini, by the way, was murdered the year of Salo's release, after having received death threats from neo-Fascists on its account. Last year, Italian police reopened the case after Giuseppe Pelosi, a then-17 year old who served nine years for the killing, recanted. Pelosi said Pasolini hadn't, after all, tried to rape him with a wooden stake, but had been killed by a politically motivated group of men, and he "had to play the game played by these people, the 'respectable' people who ordered the murder."Those are some wild games, the games respectable people play.
posted by Jeff at 4:56 AM 88 comments
Sunday, February 05, 2006

JFC Fuller's Army
But there's no dangerIt's a professional career - Elvis CostelloJust a quick note about how they're the damnedest things, the things I didn't know.Since I was fourteen or so I've had on my bookshelf a copy of JFC Fuller's Decisive Battles of the Western World. I knew he was a Major General, an early advocate of air power and mechanized assault, and a popular military historian. I'd known his philosophy of armoured warfare won more favour in Germany than in Britain, and that it became the blitzkrieg of commanders such as Heinz Guderian. And that was about it. What I didn't know was Fuller was both a fascist and an occultist, and no slouch at either.Fuller served on the Policy Directorate of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and was the only Englishman honoured with an invitation to Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday party in 1939. He was also a life-long Thelemite and an early advocate of Aleister Crowley. A .pdf of Fuller's early study of Crowley, The Star in the West, can be read online here, and also his Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah. (By the way, an online edition of his Foundation of the Science of War is hosted by the US Army Command and General Staff.) He was also an accomplished artist of occult subjects. That's his work, entitled "Knowledge and Conversation," next to his portrait in the above illustration. Kenneth Grant, in Outer Gateways, states that Fuller actually drew the sigils for Liber XII, "one of the most mysterious communications every received by Crowley" under alleged inspiration of the entity Aiwass.Grant adds that Fuller's sigils are evocative of those reproduced by purported UFO contactee George Adamski, who insisted that they were "not to be interpreted mystically, but as glyphs of the nut-and-bolt variety." (In the 1950s Adamski asserted he had been contacted by "spacemen" from Venus, much as the occupants of the airship of 1897 claimed to have been out-of-state rather than off-world. Now, the claims of origin are most often distant stars. The lies, whether human or trans-human, keep abreast of science's plausible denial.)Grant writes:It is well known that Hitler had occult affiliations, and that one of his chief engineers was the celebrated Werner von Braun who later enabled the Americans to visit the moon. Is it not feasible that Hitler, in favouring Fuller as he did, was not only interested in Fuller's tank designs but also in his other, more recherche machines? The fact should not be overlooked that Hitler was in contact with entities as enigmatic and as alarming as Aiwass, and perhaps his interpretations of the messages he received from them were as coloured by his conditioning as were those of Crowley.So, what's the point? Two points: if we mean to combat fascism, then we should learn to recognize it on our bookshelves and in the mindbombs dropped by respectable fascists. (Fuller's Generalship of Ulysses S Grant is still an influential study of the Civil War strategist, though one Amazon reviewer does chide his history of The Second World War for barely mentioning the extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.) Also, we had also better brush up on our occultism. Because we can't really know the fascist character if we project upon it our familiar secular and liberal mental landscapes. That is going to take us to mad places, but that's the nature of comprehending the method.