Sinister Forces blog

Hitler, Osama and the Holocaust

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2011-05-02T21:39:28Z

Yesterday, the day they announced the death of Osama
bin-Laden, is also the day they announced the death of Adolf Hitler. May 1st, 1945 and May 1st, 2011. 66 years apart.

Ironically, we have no corpse for either of these
anti-Semitic murderers. No grave
site. No shrine. No jamrah
at Mina, for stoning the Devil during a dark pilgrimage.

Today, May 2, is Yom ha-Shoah, the day when Jewish people
around the world remember the Holocaust.
It is a day for solemn prayers and for chanting the Kaddish.

So ... when coincidences multiply and words seem unequal to
the task, here is a YouTube link to a song that says it all. Play it for all those who have suffered and died
because of ideologies and stupidities. For
religion and race. For redemption and
revenge.

All those. Jew and
Muslim. American and Arab. European and African and Asian. For all those cold and broken hallelujahs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8AWFf7EAc4

Coast to Coast AM this Saturday Night

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2010-10-29T19:02:46Z

Greetings, Sports Fans.

This is just a short note to let you all know that I will be interviewed by Ian Punnett on Coast-to-Coast AM this Saturday night (October 30-31) from 11 pm to 2 am Pacific time or (yeesh) 2 am to 5 am October 31 Eastern time.

With the most hotly-contested midterm elections in my memory coming along with the Halloween weekend, I am sure that the interview will be stimulating and ... well ... weird.

You may find yourself inspired to get a different sort of costume this year ... wandering bishop, say? mysterious assassin? Cross-dressing Nazi impersonator from Ohio? Cotton Mather? (actually, not a bad idea ... can you imagine the fun as Cotton Mather hunts witches on Halloween in, say, the Bronx? Compton? Little Havana? ... Georgetown? )

Anyway, a good time will be had by all!

Hear you then.

Boo.

Return of the Bishops

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2010-02-23T21:41:16Z

"Everything about Tommy Baumler was dark."

-- Timothy Wyllie

Greetings, boys and girls. You may remember my long series of articles (or a series of long articles, mejor dicho) concerning New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a veritable apostolic succession of wandering bishops who operated out of Guy Banister's office in the Big Easy. You may recall such names as David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Carl Stanley ... and Thomas Jude Baumler. Well, you'll never believe it, but Tommy Baumler's name came up again in the most bizarre place of all these bizarre places.

He was the lawyer who incorporated the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

Take a breath.

For those of you who need some background on Tommy Baumler, here is an excerpt from my series of articles posted here on the wandering bishops (more may be found in volume one of Sinister Forces):

Jack Martin remained a bishop with the American Orthodox Catholic Church to the end of his days, even going so far as to bring in another Banister associate, the corpulent attorney and unapologetic racist Thomas Jude Baumler, to the Orthodox fold, consecrating Baumler a bishop in August of 1974, nearly eleven years after the Kennedy assassination and seven years after the beginning of the Garrison investigation and the deaths of both Stanley and Ferrie. From personal correspondence with an individual involved with this affair, I learned that Baumler had already been ordained a priest by Stanley years before; in other words, prior to Stanley’s death in March, 1967. Baumler’s status in New Orleans society was assured; he came from an old family and was associated with one of the famous Mardi Gras “crewes”.

In addition, according to my informant, Baumler was also a Mason and belonged to the same lodge – the Etoile Polair Lodge of the French Grand Orient – as Mafia don Carlos Marcello, the man for whom David Ferrie was working on the day of the assassination. My informant goes on to insist that Martin could be relied upon to furnish FBI files on
“future applicants for Holy Orders”, a strange capability for a hopeless drunk. It is widely rumored that Martin had a source at FBI headquarters in New Orleans who provided him these files, but he also made it known that he was an investigator for the District Attorney’s office – something of which the DA was presumably not aware. Yet he had an income of some kind, for he was known to travel extensively throughout the United States for years on one errand or another involving the bishops, a true “wanderer”.

What was Baumler’s interest in Carl Stanley and the American Orthodox Catholic
Church? Why was it attractive to become consecrated the Bishop of Baton Rouge-New Orleans in this minuscule, obscure church as late as 1974? Soon after his consecration, he went on to consecrate another bishop, this time William Francis Forbes, in October of 1974. It was Baumler, after all, who told J. Gary Shaw in 1981 that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Guy Banister. He even told Jim Garrison investigator Harold Weisberg in 1969 that he personally met the elusive Oswald himself.

Now, in a book entitled Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, (Feral House, 2009) former Process member Timothy Wyllie goes into some detail about the founding of the movement and much of the day-to-day events in the lives of its members. It is a fascinating tale for those who are interested, and contains over 100 pages of art, articles, and other disjecta membra of that notorious group. It is on page 74, however, that he drops the name Tommy Baumler and describes the man perfectly. There can be no doubt. In 1967 -- while a priest of the American Orthodox Catholic Church, a Freemason, a hypnotist, a racist -- and as the Jim Garrison investigation into his friends David Ferrie and Jack Martin for their alleged role in the Kennedy assassination was heating up, Tommy Baumler was hanging out with the Process and even going so far as to suggest a name for their group: The Church of Christ and Satan. Wyllie says they had to talk him out of it, and finally settle on the name The Church of the Final Judgment.

Readers may remember the hysteria surrounding the Process from its earliest days. There were accusations that it was a mind-control cult, that they were devil-worshipers, that they were involved with ritual murder, etc etc. The fact that they were involved to a degree with Charles Manson didn't help; the fact that Charlie once famously proclaimed that he was Robert Moore (the co-founder of the Process) didn't help much either, or the interview with Charlie that appeared in the Process magazine. The fact that issues of said magazine bore such themes as Death and Fear was probably another clue to the already paranoid.

But then throw in the Son of Sam connection (made famous by Maury Terry, but to be fair was also bruited about by David Berkowitz himself long after his sentencing, and corroborated by self-described former members of the Process) and you have a truly sinister fantasy. The Process and Charles Manson; the Process and the Son of Sam cult. Okay, that will do.

Then toss in the "dark" Tommy Baumler and the Kennedy assassination conspiracy and you are deep inside Sinister Forces territory.

Pleasant dreams!

Pat Robertson's Pact with the Devil

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2010-01-16T19:14:56Z

Years ago Pat Robertson, noted televangelist and head of the 700 Club, made a pact with Satan. In exchange for a tediously long life and untold material wealth, Robertson agreed to serve as spokesman for the Devil.

If you are reading this blog, I imagine that you are familiar with my work on the subject. Chapter Fifteen in Volume 2 of Sinister Forces deals specifically with Robertson and his unashamed support for mass murderers such as Taylor of Liberia, Chiluba of Zambia, and Mobutu of Zaire, as well as death squads in Central America. His support was camouflaged by something called Operation Blessing, which was really a conduit for conflict diamonds and not for medical supplies for the desperate people of Africa (in this case, Rwanda and Zaire). Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. My research was based on published reports in Time magazine as well as excellent historical reporting by Sara Diamond in a series of books on the political movement associated with evangelical Christianity.

When Jesus was tempted by the Devil (Matthew 4:1-11, "... the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me.") he rejected Satan in no uncertain terms. Pat Robertson, however, said in effect "Where do I sign?"

And this past week, he reaffirmed once again his allegiance to the forces of darkness. He actually was able to blame the victims for their oppression once again. Just as he had during Hurricane Katrina (blaming the people of New Orleans for the hurricane, saying it was punishment from God for their licentious ways) he blames the people of Haiti for the earthquake. He specifically said it was a pact with the Devil that the Haitian people made in the 18th century during their revolt against France, a pact they have been paying for ever since. "True story," said Pat.

True story?

In the first place, there was no pact with the Devil. The people of Haiti at the time practiced a form of African religion which we now call voudon or voodoo. If Pat Robertson wishes to characterize the African gods as devils, that is his business I guess, but the people of Haiti would beg to differ.

Secondly, as we have seen on the video footage coming out of Haiti, the Haitians are overwhelmingly Catholic. As much as it would pain Robertson to admit it, Catholics are also Christians. Like Pat Robertson.

Thirdly, who actually made this alleged pact? The entire country? Is there some humongous parchment sitting in the basement of the Presidential Palace with thousands of signatures on it, signed in blood? And who signed for the Devil?

"People's Exhibit 666, your honor. The pact with the Devil signed by the people of Haiti, Beelzebub signing for Satan."

And, as a Christian, how does Robertson reconcile the idea of a pact having been allegedly signed in the 18th century having anything at all to do with the people of Haiti today? Does he deny the efficacy of conversion to Christianity by subsequent generations? Is he telling us that if your ancestors were burned at the stake in Europe for witchcraft during the Middle Ages that there is no hope for you today?

Perhaps he is referring to Exodus 34:7 which says that the sins of the father are visited upon the children, even to the third and fourth generation?

In that case, the fallout from the pact would have ended in the mid-19th century ...

But let's put all this pseudo-exegesis aside for the moment and focus on what was being said and who was saying it.

When Robertson was dealing with Charles Taylor of Liberia, Liberia was being used as a place to launder money for ... Al-Qaeda. If I worked for the Department of Homeland Security, I would have a lot of questions for Pat Robertson even ignoring his call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (Pat only likes anti-Communist dictators). If anyone should be on a no-fly list, it's Pat Robertson. But then, he has his own planes. Maybe the same ones used to carry diamonds while the people of Africa, people he was supposed to be helping and for whom he raised money in the United States, starved and died.

Pat has been on the wrong side of these issues for a long time, and his followers are afraid to call him on it. By blaming New Orleans for Katrina, and Haiti for the earthquake, and dealing with death squads, conflict diamonds, conflict gold, and generally supporting insane and vicious murderers on at least two continents, Pat is at least guilty of treason if not worse. Rather than express sympathy for the victims of natural disasters, he blames them. Why is this consistent?

Because, as a man who has supported terror around the globe, he has to blame the victims. He cannot take any of this responsibility himself. If he were to put the moral burden where it belonged, he would have self-destructed long ago, being unable to face the world as the creator of the 700 Club on the one hand and realize his culpability as an enthusiastic supporter of evil regimes on the other. The tension would have been too much. He would be unable to walk a straight line, metaphorically and literally.

But as a man who has made a pact with the Devil, it all makes sense. Pat is doing the Devil's work here. He is encouraging his listeners -- devout Christians, I assume -- to condemn victims. He is ignoring the basic precept laid down by Jesus Christ himself, in Matthew 25: 34-46:

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.' Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also will answer, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?' Then he will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

According to these lines, Pat, you are accursed and are destined for the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. A fitting end for someone who really knows pacts with the Devil.

Thus far the words of the Gospel.

The Reason We Believe in Conspiracy Theories

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2009-12-29T19:33:50Z

A few days ago, a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a Northwest flight from London to Detroit, a la Richard Reid.

He appeared at the check-in counter with no passport, no luggage, and an expired visa for the United States. He paid for his ticket in cash. His father -- a prominent Nigerian banker (a real one, not the one who sends you those scam emails) -- warned the United States that his son was a potential terrorist. His son's name was placed in a database of possible suspects, a database containing more than 500,000 names. According to eye-witnesses at the scene of the check-in, the man was accompanied by another individual -- a "sharp-dressed man" to plagiarize ZZ Top -- who virtually escorted the seemingly impoverished young Nigerian through the red tape at the airport, claiming that the Nigerian was actually a Sudanese refugee.

With all of these warning signs, with all of this impossible lack of documentation, the young Nigerian man with a crotch full of high explosive boarded the flight and as the Northwest airliner made its approach into Detroit attempted to detonate the bomb.

Why do we believe in conspiracy theories?

Yours truly, the author of this post, has himself been on the watch list. I myself have had the boarding passes with the dreaded "SSSS" designation, requiring security officials to haul me off the line and put me and my carry-on in a special area to be thoroughly searched for explosives. And that was for domestic flights to New York, Boston, and Washington DC. That list contains about 20,000 names. An elite group, to be sure. It's not the "no fly" list, which is somewhat more rigorous and more dreaded, but it's still a much smaller list than the 500,000 name database in which our terrorist appeared.

How is it possible that I appear on this list, and a man who had all the warning signs did not? We can say this was simply a snafu, but what snafu puts me on the list and not him? How did the system go out of its way to ensure that this undocumented guy boarded the flight, replete with explosives?

How did the system go out of its way to ensure that I -- a writer, a businessman, a thoroughly non-violent person with no criminal record -- is flagged as a potential bomber?

This is why we believe in conspiracy theories. Not all of the theories. Not even most of them.

But some of them, because some of them make sense in light of the available evidence. To paraphrase, "if you don't believe in conspiracies, then you don't have all the facts."

There could, of course, have been another -- somewhat less palatable -- explanation.

On Christmas Eve, I emailed some friends of mine predicting that there would be a terrorist incident involving an airplane. Now, if you were a suspicious person (and who, reading this blog, is not?) you would suspect that I had some kind of advanced and guilty knowledge of the event. But that was not the case.

I would wake up every morning for the past week with a melody running through my head. I tried to take no notice of it, but it would come back to haunt me during the day, just below conscious awareness. Finally, I sat down and "listened" to it, realizing that it was Franz Schubert's Piano Sonata in A, one of the last he ever wrote.

Many readers are probably familiar with this piece, without knowing it. It was the theme song for the television sit-com Wings.

Wings was produced by David Angell, who is perhaps more famous as writer and producer for Cheers and Frasier.

David Angell died on 9/11, as his flight slammed into the North Tower.

With these and other bits of connective tissue, I came to the conclusion that there was another terrorist incident involving an aircraft and that it was imminent. I was not one hundred percent convinced of this, but I thought it merited at least a quiet mention to someone, so I chose friends of mine who specialize in studying synchronicity and who have a website devoted to it. I asked them not to publish it, but to keep their eyes open for a possible incident even as I hoped I was wrong and just being fanciful.

(You can see the Synchronicity post here: http://ofscarabs.blogspot.com/)

And then, a few days later, it happened. A terrorist incident involving an aircraft.

As I write in Sinister Forces, sometimes what we think is a conspiracy in the literal sense may be the result of dark actions taking place on another level of experience altogether. When we live in an era in which religion and religious conflicts have taken on this intensity, and when spiritual ideologies threaten the survival of tribes, races, and nations, it is possible that this level of social focus and concentration enables or facilitates the flow of these "sinister forces", clouding individual judgment and arranging circumstantial events in such a way as to create the perfect "space" for these phenomena to take place.

Either that ... or there really is a conspiracy on a very high level of participation. You pick the scenario that makes you the most comfortable.

Beasts, Men, Gods ... and John Lennon

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2009-12-07T22:07:33Z

The Hutuktu of Narabanchi related the following to me, when I visited him in his monastery in the beginning of 1921:

"When the King of the World appeared before the Lamas, favored of God, in this monastery thirty years ago he made a prophecy for the coming half century. It was as follows:

"'More and more the people will forget their souls and care about their bodies. The greatest sin and corruption will reign on the earth. People will become as ferocious animals, thirsting for the blood and death of their brothers. The 'Crescent' will grow dim and its followers will descend into beggary and ceaseless war. Its conquerors will be stricken by the sun but will not progress upward and twice they will be visited with the heaviest misfortune, which will end in insult before the eye of the other peoples. The crowns of kings, great and small, will fall . . . one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. . . . There will be a terrible battle among all the peoples. The seas will become red . . . the earth and the bottom of the seas will be strewn with bones . . . kingdoms will be scattered . . . whole peoples will die . . . hunger, disease, crimes unknown to the law, never before seen in the world. The enemies of God and of the Divine Spirit in man will come. Those who take the hand of another shall also perish. The forgotten and pursued shall rise and hold the attention of the whole world. There will be fogs and storms. Bare mountains shall suddenly be covered with forests. Earthquakes will come. . . . Millions will change the fetters of slavery and humiliation for hunger, disease and death. The ancient roads will be covered with crowds wandering from one place to another. The greatest and most beautiful cities shall perish in fire . . . one, two, three. . . . Father shall rise against son, brother against brother and mother against daughter. . . . Vice, crime and the destruction of body and soul shall follow. . . . Families shall be scattered. . . . Truth and love shall disappear. . . . From ten thousand men one shall remain; he shall be nude and mad and without force and the knowledge to build him a house and find his food. . . . He will howl as the raging wolf, devour dead bodies, bite his own flesh and challenge God to fight. . . . All the earth will be emptied. God will turn away from it and over it there will be only night and death. Then I shall send a people, now unknown, which shall tear out the weeds of madness and vice with a strong hand and will lead those who still remain faithful to the spirit of man in the fight against Evil. They will found a new life on the earth purified by the death of nations. In the fiftieth year only three great kingdoms will appear, which will exist happily seventy-one years. Afterwards there will be eighteen years of war and destruction. Then the peoples of Agharti will come up from their subterranean caverns to the surface of the earth.'"

-- Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 1921

The above citation is worthy of examination. It was supposedly revealed to the explorer, spy, and author Ossendowski during his sojourn in Asia after the First World War and the collapse of the Russian monarchy. He, along with other White Russians, escaped along a treacherous route of more than a thousand miles into Mongolia via Tibet and China only to find himself embroiled in another campaign in Mongolia. It was his reference to Agharta/Agharti that caught my attention in the first place, engaged as I am on research involving Rene Guenon and others of that period, but I took a few moments off and began to do the calculations.

If the "fiftieth year" of the next century is taken to mean 1950, then 1950 plus "seventy-one years" of happiness leads us to 2021, after which there will be eighteen years of warfare, ending in the appearance of the peoples of Agharti: the mystical Shangri-La or Shambhala of Saint-Yves Alveydre, Rene Guenon, etc. This would happen about the year 2039-2040.

However, if by "fiftieth year" is meant fifty years from the date of the revelation -- 1890 -- then the fiftieth year would be 1940 and the seventy-one years would end in 2011 ... bringing the revelation more or less in line with 2012 hysteria. The three kingdoms could be, conceivably, the US, Russia and China. The Crescent, of course, is a reference to Islam.

I only mention all of this in passing. Since I already jumped into the "birther" fray, I figure I might as well contribute to 2012 fantasies of destruction.

A fellow-traveler in the ways of Nazi occultism, Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, wrote in his The Occult Roots of Nazism, the following intriguing sentence:

Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action.

Are 2012 fantasies such a symptom? Do the fantasies anticipate change and action in some telepathic sense, or do they create change and action? What, I wonder, is the causal link?

As mentioned in my previous post, it is possible -- in an extreme, quantum-consciousness kinda way -- that the birther phenomenon of 2008-2009 somehow "caused" the asing announcement next to Barack Obama's birth announcement in 1961. Traditional ideas of cause and effect may not be the appropriate paradigm, however, when dealing with the time-warping (and hence cause-and-effect-challenging) ways of the quanta.

Is Hollywood's perennial fascination with catastrophe films an indication that something dire is about to happen? Does it reflect some deep-seated death wish of the American people? Is it actually contributing to a future, cataclysmic event? Or are all of these statements equally true?

The eccentric gothic horror author H.P. Lovecraft wrote, in the seminal text of what became known to some as the Cthulhu Mythos, "The Call of Cthulhu", that an impending catastrophic event caused poets and artists to sense the event long before it took place. In my own work, I have pointed out this bizarre circumstance, one that has been carefully documented in several places.

In Norman Mailer's study of Lee Harvey Oswald -- Oswald's Tale -- we learn, for instance, of a letter written to Marina Oswald (now living in Texas with her husband, Lee Oswald) from Russia. Their good friend from Minsk, Pavel Golovachev, writes (on September 15, 1962):

By the way, Marina ... the basic idea of Pogodin's play A Man with a Rifle is contained in the words "Now we do not have to fear a man with the rifle." This, as doctors say, is a quintessence ... (p. 312)

It was a mysterious statement in that context. Pogodin died on September 19, 1962: only four days after the letter was written. His play, A Man with a Rifle, was published in 1937 and concerns a soldier who joins the October Revolution in 1917. It is based on a conversation overheard by Lenin, an old woman saying that no one need fear a man with a rifle anymore, because since the Revolution such a man would be on their side now. Why would that statement come up in a letter to Marina Oswald more than a year before the assassination of a president by a man with a rifle, a man who had been to Russia to, ostensibly, join forces with the Soviet state?

And the use of the term "quintessence" in this context is intriguing. It means, literally, the fifth essence, the fifth element after earth, air, fire and water: spirit. It is an alchemical term, related to the concept of transformation and transmutation.

As an aside: in an e-book offering by a contemporary writer of Russian birth, Valentina Filina-Pattison entitled To the Horizon and Beyond (Canada, 2003), we read of a scene in modern Russia where a young woman is going to see the Pogodin play with her boyfriend (p. 97). The young woman's name is Marina ...

All of these curious circumstances lead us to wonder if the process is irreversible. Can we cause change to occur through fantasy, through art, through various transformative processes, rather than be no more than passive observers?

What if we were, then, to become a bit more pro-active in this process and insist on imagining a more perfect world: one that comes into being without bloodshed, without cataclysmic events, without malice?

Or is that too much like a John Lennon song?

Asing the Body Electric!

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2009-12-06T06:10:07Z

My apologies to everyone for having been MIA this past year. Part of this was due to the strange behavior of this website, and the fact that once I had published my angle on Presidential candidate John McCain as a "Manchurian candidate" ... a story that was widely distributed, and which appeared in Wonkette as well as in some Polish and Asian websites (for some reason) ... the site went down and the McCain story (as well as a number of others before it) disappeared into the ether.

I suspect foul play. But I have no proof.

What I want to discuss here is something that I have been holding onto for quite some time. I have resisted publishing it because I did not want to contribute to the national insanity on this issue. However, now that Sister Sarah has jumped on the mule train, I figure it is about time I joined the fray.

Now before I go much further, I want to be explicit: I am not a "birther." I do not believe that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. I believe that the arguments set forth by the "birther" movement are without foundation because one would have to believe that a conspiracy existed as long ago as the day of Obama's birth in 1961 (or even earlier) to defraud the presidential election process in 2008. I study conspiracy theories, as you know, and this one is beyond the pale. Efforts to prove that Obama was born in Kenya (for instance) have been demonstrated to be false and the result of amateurishly-forged documents, etc. I feel that there is a tangible element of racism and paranoid hysteria in these allegations that devalue honest journalistic investigation.

Okay, that being said ...

There is a synchronistic element hidden within the "birther" allegations that no one has noticed so far. It is truly bizarre, and its existence suggests to me that the fury of the birthers has its origin in the "sinister forces" of which I write. I even hesitate to bring this up, knowing full well what the reaction will be among the birthers and how they will use this synchronistic piece of "evidence" to add more fuel to their fires, full as they are of heat and no light. But, here it goes:

In the two birth announcements from the Hawaii newspapers mentioning that a son was born to Mr and Mrs Barack Obama on August 4, 1961 we notice that the next announcement in the series, directly below that of Barack Obama, is for a son born to a Mr and Mrs Norman Asing on the same day.

Okay. Wait for it. Wait for it ...

"Asing" is a word in the Indonesian national language, Bahasa Indonesia, and means ... "foreign"!

(You will recall that Barack Obama spent four years in Indonesia growing up and still has a good command of that language.)

Now the birthers will say that this is evidence that there was a conspiracy back in 1961 when Barack Obama was a week old, and that the birth announcement for Mr Asing was a coded message to their followers that "the eagle has landed" or something (much, I assume, to the real Mr Asing's dismay).

My interpretation, of course, is somewhat different. I believe that the birther movement was so intense that it created a ripple in space-time (I write about this in Sinister Forces, you may recall, in connection with the Kennedy assassinations, the Texas Tower Sniper, etc. all of which were predicted in novels and plays long before the events took place). I believe that this announcement is a clue, but not of a conspiracy. It is a prediction of what would occur, a prediction created by the intensity of the debate and the passions of the individuals involved whose quantum effects were felt not only in the present and presumably in the future but -- like the Kennedy assassination prefigured in the work of Maurice Maeterlinck -- also in the past.

I would never have noticed this had I not spent many years living in Malaysia which uses a national language quite similar to Indonesia's, and in which the word "asing" has the same meaning, so it was only serendipity that brought my attention to the birth announcement where the word "Asing" jumped out at me because, you see, in Malaysia and Indonesia I was also "asing": a foreigner.

Thus, in the immortal words of Linda Ellerbee, "and so it goes."

Please Read This

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2008-05-16T18:30:16Z

Those of you who have read my Unholy Alliance as well as Sinister Forces are aware of the documented support of fascism by certain elements in our own country.

I covered the relationship of the Bush family to the Nazis in Sinister Forces, citing the available -- declassified, unclassified, readily-available -- documentation.

Today, in the wake of the obscene statements by President Bush before the Israeli Knesset concerning "appeasement", there appeared in the Huffington Post a recap of everything I have been saying. Except it was not written by me, but by Larisa Alexandrovna.

Please give it a look:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/all-the-presidents-nazis_b
_102022.html

Thank you!

What, Me Worry?

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2008-04-25T03:31:26Z

Okay, enough.

I have been silent for a while, largely due to my unwillingness to contribute to the overheated political rhetoric that dominates our media during this dysfunctional primary season. It’s not my place to try to tell you who to vote for, or even if you should vote. I realize that many of my readers are thoroughly disenchanted with the political system in this country (as how could you not be after Florida in 2000?), and consider politicians from both parties to be equally corrupt and the difference between the parties largely one of cosmetics and spin and not one of substance.

But I have been writing about political and historical issues for some time, and the events of the past few weeks have caused me some kind of psycho-spiritual embolism, so in order to relieve the astral pressure on my embattled cranium I feel the need to vent.

Issue Number One:

Watching MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight (Thursday, April 24, 2008) I was startled to learn that yet another Republican has decided to meet with Nazis. Olbermann prefaced his remarks by saying, in effect, that one should resist any attempt to link Republicans with Nazis as a matter of course. I only wish the Republicans exercised the same restraint. Readers of my books are aware that the Republican Party has a long history of tolerance where Nazis and other assorted fascist fellow-travelers are concerned. It’s a matter of documentation, Keith, and for some reason damned few Democrats feel the need for the same warm and fuzzies that only a leather jackboot and a cracked monocle can provide. We can talk about the World Anti-Communist League; about Ronald Reagan’s wooing of anti-Communist ex-Nazis; of Richard Nixon’s defense of Romanian Nazis; etc. etc. Check out Sinister Forces, or Unholy Alliance. I’ve laid it all out there.

But today we have a new crease in the uniform. A Republican candidate for the Indiana State Congress – Tony Zirkle – has attended a meeting of the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on April 20 of this year: Hitler’s birthday. Photos of the event show Zirkle standing before a painting of Hitler, making his own speech. Naturally, the GOP has called this “repulsive” and “nauseating,” but the damage is done. Now, we might be tempted to give Zirkle the benefit of a doubt: maybe he was trying to convince the Nazis to leave the Dark Side and embrace the Light. He did, after all, talk about Jesus and Christianity. However, Zirkle has also suggested in interviews with Indiana newspapers that “segregating African-Americans in separate states” is something that should be discussed. Thus, one more Republican name is added to the list of those who had tacitly or implicitly supported Nazism, a list that begins with Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker in the 1930s …

Issue Number Two:

I can’t even begin to express my disbelief at the fact that Richard Mellon Scaife has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President ... and that Mrs Clinton has apparently accepted the endorsement after criticizing Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama.

Anyone who has read Sinister Forces knows the story of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” against Bill Clinton that was financed and spearheaded by Scaife and all the dirty details surrounding this national scandal.

I’m speechless. Just … without words to express the surreal nature of this scene. Is this Hillary’s way of getting back at Bill for his infidelities, by waving Richard Mellon Scaife in his face? I dunno.

So, America, this is why you are so cynical, I guess.

Issue Number Three:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I hate having to contribute to this brouhaha, but here it goes:

Hillary has attacked Barack Obama because of his pastor, Rev.Wright, who – in snippets of a sermon that showed up on YouTube – made the controversial statement “God damn America.” This is an issue that will probably dog Obama for the rest of the campaign, and it’s pathetic. Leaving aside all the arguments about this for just one moment, though, let’s look at another piece of evidence.

What about all the psychotic fanatics of the religious “right” that surround Republican presidential hopeful John McCain? Why is that not an issue? Not for McCain or for Hillary Clinton?

Well, it isn’t, I guess. It’s different. If John McCain has a weird pastor, that’s just eccentric. If Barack has a weird pastor, well … Barack is black, you see … and had an African father … who was a Muslim … and … and … and Barack lived in Indonesia for a few years as a child … so … it’s like … it’s like … well, it’s just different, that’s all. Black men with weird pastors are scary. White people with weird pastors are funny and kinda cute.

This whole campaign is starting to look like outtakes from Blazing Saddles.

Issue Number Four:

Barack Obama is not a Muslim.

Issue Number Five:

Barack Obama is not a Muslim.

Issue Number Six:

Barack Obama is not a Muslim, but I kinda wish he was. You want to keep America safe? Elect a Muslim president. That’s gotta make the Al-Qaedas of the world sit back and take a breather. How would they react to that? The Great Satan with a Believer president? Yikes.

But the fact is, he’s not. And you would not believe how many people I come across who think he is! It’s beyond belief and, once again, I am rendered speechless over the incredible stupidity of so many of my fellow Americans over this issue.

Jack Kennedy was a Catholic. No matter how you felt about Catholics and a “world-wide Catholic conspiracy” in 1960, at least you started from an incontrovertible fact: John F. Kennedy was undeniably a Catholic.

But Barack Obama is not a Muslim. His father was a Muslim.

I am not a segregationist. My father was a segregationist, though, as you can read in the declassified FBI documents reprinted in The Sinatra Files and in books about the Gary School Strike of 1945. My father was a John Birch sympathizer. He was also a Goldwater Republican (which actually looks sane compared to the neo-cons who’ve been running this country for the past seven years). But I am not a segregationist, and Barack Obama is not a Muslim.

Sorry to disappoint everyone (including Hillary, who cynically expressed some confusion on this point about a month ago).

Issue Number Seven:

Blue States. Red States. Enough already.

This dualistic characterization should have been jettisoned a long time ago. This is the one point – and the only one – on which I find myself in agreement with Lyndon LaRouche. It’s antiquated and meaningless, especially when you can no longer identify which party is more left or more right anymore. True conservatives despise the Bush administration and all it has done to damage the country by employing non-conservative principles: big government, big spending, invasion of privacy, etc. So … is the Bush administration really, really a right-wing administration? I dunno. Is fascism right-wing, or is it a radical deviation from the right? Doesn’t the right need a left in order to be right? Where is the left wing in America? It sure isn’t the Democratic Party. Not anymore.

So forget Blue States and Red States. It’s only a device to make us feel complacent about our differences which – using this system – seem mythically insurmountable. This is not the Civil War. This is America trying to understand itself, and figure out a way to survive with honor after two terms of dishonor and incredible breaches of the Constitution, in spirit if not in the letter of the law. We will disagree, that’s what happens when people are allowed to express their differences. But that does not mean we have to be divided, like children in kindergarten, into two separate camps and made to take naps while the “teachers” plot the rest of their afternoon.

On Henry Clay’s tombstone, you can read the following inscription: “I know No North -- No South -- No East -- No West.” Amen to that, brother.

As for me … no, I will not tell you whom I am voting for, or if I am voting. I don’t want to influence anyone in either direction. I realize you all have good reasons for voting – or not voting – the way you do. You can be participants, or observers. Or both. That’s your choice.

It’s up to you. Just don’t bitch about the outcome later if you are only an observer. Otherwise, you’ll start sounding like a commentator or a pundit, and we really don’t need any more of those. Right?

Left?

In Memoriam

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2007-11-11T00:53:56Z

As you have all probably heard by now, Norman Mailer has died.

Some of you may remember that Mr Mailer very kindly supplied a foreword to my Unholy Alliance; that foreword became part of his chapter on the occult in his book about writing, The Spooky Art.

What you may not realize, however, is that I had known Mr Mailer over a period of almost thirty years, since the time he began writing The Executioner’s Song. That was because a friend of mine – the late Judith McNally – became his assistant then (the mid-1970s). We all lived in Brooklyn Heights in those days, and Mr Mailer’s brownstone was across the street from where Judith lived and about a block from my apartment.

This was not a relationship I deliberately cultivated, largely because I was certain that a lot of would-be writers were always trying to get him to read their manuscripts or open doors for them in the publishing world, or maybe they just wanted his autograph. Instead, I maintained a kind of professional distance from a man I admired greatly (hey, I’m a New Yorker and that’s pretty much what we do!) but helped out from time to time: when his printer wasn’t working, or by locating some research materials he needed to which I had access. I would meet him and his wife Norris Church on those too rare occasions and they were always gracious and charming.

When Unholy Alliance was first published in 1994, however – as a rack-sized paperback – I found I had attracted a fan. Although my friend Judith would opportune him occasionally by pushing one manuscript or another of mine in front of him – those of my (still) unpublished novels – and he would always react favorably, I was still very shy of actually seeking his advice on anything I was working on. After all, the gulf between his craft and mine was considerable. I knew I still had a lot of work to do. And,as one of the most prolific authors I had ever known, he was always very busy.

But Unholy Alliance got his attention. He has stated publicly that he read the book three times, and I can assure you that is so. Mailer was not the sort to hand out praise where it wasn’t due, or to suffer fools gladly (as anyone who has read his work will realize at once). I am not putting all this down to brag; far from it. What I want to emphasize is the nobility of a writer of his stature in dealing with a relative unknown. Because what is not discussed in the obituaries you will read this weekend is his kindness and generosity towards other writers. And I am not the only one, not by far.

I admired his political position on the Vietnam War and, later, on the Iraq War. I admired his approach to culture and the politics of culture. I admired his lack of fear in approaching everything he thought worthwhile, whether it was running for political office or directing films or making his contribution to the JFK assassination literature. If you doubt he was a great writer – probably the greatest American author of our generation – you need only pick up An American Dream, Of A Fire on the Moon, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago … or just read the first page of The Gospel According to the Son. Only Mailer would dare to write in the first person as Jesus one day, and as the Devil the next (The Castle in the Forest). Questions of life and death, God and the Devil, good and evil, and the war between the sexes occupied him for most of his life but especially in the last twenty years or so. He became almost a Gnostic in the way he dealt with these issues. He could cut through a theological argument with a mind sharpened on first-hand experience of war, marriage, politics, and of course literature. His novel of the CIA – Harlot’s Ghost – is truly one of his best works and very probably the best novelization in existence of the CIA and its history up to the Kennedy election and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Again, I ask you to suspend any disbelief for a moment and go back and read some of Mailer. You will be struck by a kind of weird nostalgia for a time when values were being earnestly discussed – not from a tediously dogmatic religious position, but – from the perspective of a cultured, literate, author who wrote as easily in fiction as in non-fiction and for whom fiction was just another way of writing non-fiction. The noise that passes for debate in the dawn of the 21^st century is all form and no substance – cotton candy and Wonder bread – when set against the red meat of Mailer’s journalism. He takes no prisoners; not even as a Prisoner of Sex, a book that caught the most flack from the feminist movement even as he believed himself to be a defender and apologist for women and women’s rights.

But it is the man I knew in the past few years that I memorialize here. Visiting him in Provincetown during the annual Norman Mailer Conference, reacquainting myself with his accomplished wife and children, I was able to have some long conversations with him on a wide range of issues. The first year I attended the conference, Judith McNally – who was still working for him all these years, more than 25 as I recall – was there and in fine form. We sat and listened to him discuss the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul, talking about all of this in detail, off-the-cuff and without notes, in the Provincetown Theatre before an audience of his close friends and admirers before reading some pages of Ancient Evenings, his sprawling novel of death and reincarnation. It was an event that still resonates with me, several years after the fact: Norman Mailer, in person, talking about Egyptian religion, mummification, and the ka.

By the same time next year Judith had died, tragically young. Preceding him in death by only eighteen months, I like to think that she has been making arrangements for Norman’s reception in the Afterlife (a suggestion for which I am sure my ears will be boxed when it is my turn to ascend the Chariot!).

There is really too much to say and I am rambling, I know. My condolences go out to Norris, Norman’s wife for twenty-seven years, and to the rest of his family, his friends, to Mike Lennon his archivist and biographer, to Dwayne who was Judith’s opposite number in Provincetown and a writer himself, to the members of the Norman Mailer Society, and to all those readers and fans who recognize that a giant has passed among them, and disappeared … only to leave his writing as testimony to his genius.

During my last conversation with him, he expressed a desire to know how many more years he had to live. He had just finished writing The Castle in the Forest – a novelized biography of Adolf Hitler, told from the point of view of a Demon – and it was designed to be the first volume of a proposed four-volume work. He said that if he knew he had five or six more good years, he would take that time to finish the other three volumes. If he knew he did not, then he would do other things.

He did other things.

Good-bye, Norman. Thank you for everything. It has been a privilege to know you. And a great loss to lose you. Say "Hi" to Judith for me.

Making No Sense of a Massacre

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2007-04-21T21:11:49Z

The latest edition of Time magazine has just appeared, dated April 30, 2007.� (Walpurgisnacht, the Witches� Sabbath made famous in the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula, for anyone interested in the resonances.)� And the cover story is about the Virginia Tech massacre, with the caption �Trying to Make Sense of a Massacre.��

It�s about what you would expect of Time.� Pious musings, faux sensitivity.� There are some unintentionally ironic moments, however.� The court-ordered evaluation of Cho following his stalking incident in November of 2005 bore writing by a judge who claimed that Cho posed �an eminent danger to self or others�.� Eminent, not imminent.� Cho strove for both.

In addition, his first victims in the classroom shootings were students attending a German language course;� next on the list was the engineering class being taught by a Romanian Holocaust survivor who lost his life while heroically saving those of his students, so many years after his survival of the death camps and on the day known as Yom ha-Shoah, �Holocaust Remembrance Day�.� Thus, as in every such event, synchronicities pile up.

But what was annoying were the reflections by Jeffrey Kluger and David von Drehle, which focused on the narcissistic aspects of the crime and the criminal who committed them.�� Kluger � in �Why They Kill� � begins by asking �If you want a sense of just how terrible Monday�s crimes were, here�s something to try: imagine yourself committing them.�� His point is that it is easier for us to imagine ourselves as victims than as killers.� I guess Kluger has never played a violent video game.� I guess Kluger never served in the armed forces.� I guess Kluger is not old enough to remember Vietnam�s My Lai massacre in which young, red-blooded American boys with automatic weapons � told to �shoot anything that moves� � did just that.� Of course, Kluger might respond, that was war.� This is different.� This is peacetime.� A college campus.� No �eminent� threat.�

With the increasing � the exponentially increasing � amount of technology available in our materialist society and the proportional lack of spiritual or moral elevation, we are reduced to using this technology to visualize fantasies of pornographic violence.� In these fantasies we are rarely, if ever, the victims.� We are usually the perpetrators.� Of course, in these fantasies we wear the white hats.� We are killing drug dealers, or terrorists, or gang members.� During basic training our men and women are taught that the enemy is a target, an object, not a human being.� No one accuses our troops in Iraq of being narcissists, though.

Our technology has enabled us to create powerful works of art, vast multi-media creations linking music and image and text into spiritually-elevating experiences that demonstrate our love for culture and artistic expression � except that, well, we don�t use it that way.� Instead, we project our own homicidal impulses onto the computer screens and with virtual Glocks murder hundreds, thousands, of virtual � whatever, whomever.� For some of us, this represents a safety valve, a release of these impulses and tensions as they are grounded in a virtual world where no one really dies and no one is really to blame.� For the rest of us, though, it�s training.

Kluger emphasizes � as does von Drehle in his article �It�s All About Him� � the role that narcissism plays in the minds of mass murderers and serial killers.� As usual, the mass murderer and the serial killer are conflated, taken to be representative of the same violent impulse when of course they are not.� The serial killer is a �lust killer� in the old terminology;� the crime has a definite sexual element.� The dead body itself is an object of desire, a focus for sexual acts and fantasies.� The mass murderer, however, is not concerned with the bodies he (it�s usually a male) creates.� He�s not concerned with quality, only with quantity, like a solder on a battlefield or a gamer at the controls.� The people he kills are not people; they are objects and not even sexual objects.� Instead, they represent the nameless and unnamable forces arrayed against him.�

To relegate the entire phenomenon of mass murder� to one of narcissism and clinical depression is to miss the point.� Narcissism and depression are not the cause, they�re the symptoms of an underlying disorder.� Narcissism is a defense mechanism, a way of keeping the identity intact in a world that has lost its moral compass; and by �moral� I don�t mean only knowing right from wrong (although that would be a welcome development), but something deeper than that.

In the United States, a country made up of people from virtually every country on earth, we have lost a shared sense of connection.� We don�t know to whom we belong:� what family, what race, what ethnicity, what religion � what history.� An immigrant from South Korea in 1992, how could Cho be expected to identify with the American Revolution, or Lincoln�s Emancipation Proclamation, or the inaugural address of President John F. Kennedy?�� Yet he did identify with the assassinations of Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon.� Pop icons took the place of cultural identification.�� American� was probably an artificial identity for Cho; as was Virginia Tech.� None of these things � social and cultural constructions invented by white people � provided any kind of real human connection for Cho.� It�s hard enough for the rest of us, those of us born and raised here, to claim American �roots�:� the whole idea is pretty problematic, especially if your ancestors were slaves, or illegals, or Nazis brought in under Operation Paperclip � My own ancestors showed up here from Eastern Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century.� How much of American history, then, do I share with my neighbors?

The whole point of America was to do just that:� to create an artificial environment that would guarantee a certain level of freedom for all its citizens regardless of their background; a country removed from considerations of monarchy and therefore from considerations of hierarchies, classes, even race, religion and family.� It was an escape route from religious and political persecution in Europe.� Well � for white people, anyway.�

According to the statistics published in this issue of Time, most mass murders are carried out by men, both black and white (about evenly divided).� In dissecting the mentality of mass murderers, though, the articles in question focus on the idea of narcissism and avoid questions of race and ethnicity.� It is assumed that the motivation for one is the motivation for all, regardless of race.� That seems intellectually dishonest to me.�

Further, von Drehle compares Cho to Ted Bundy, and this is where his analysis starts to spring leaks.�� Bundy was a serial killer, a sexual psychopath and sadist, who killed women by first convincing them that he needed their help and then taking advantage of their kindness by knocking them out, kidnapping them, and then killing them.� He was handsome, charming, with an easy smile and ingratiating manner.� To all intents and purposes, he was socially integrated.� Cho was anything but.� While Cho may have had psycho-sexual problems � as seems evident from his stalking of women, and taking photos of them with his cell phone when they weren�t looking � the murders he committed had none of Bundy�s sexual dimensions (unless, of course, all murder is to be considered in terms of a sexual impulse).� Von Drehle, however, sees the narcissistic impulse as the core impulse, the unifying characteristic, of both killers.�� He writes �Only a narcissist could decide that his alienation should be underlined in the blood of strangers.��

Let�s take a look at that.� In the first place, who gave us the term �alienation� and how was it used?� Probably the first time it was employed in any kind of a methodical way was by Erich Fromm.� In The Art of Loving, he writes:�

Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions.

Alienation, therefore, is the result of a materialist society that turns human beings into commodities, i.e., objectifies them so that they have lost their essential humanity.� By directing one�s �life forces� into materialist goals, a human robs himself or herself of basic humanity, becomes � in Holden Caulfield�s words � a �phony�.� In order to sell oneself, one has to be concerned with packaging, with advertising, with spin:� these are all concepts we have inherited from World War II and its aftermath, from a black art known as �psychological warfare� but which has come down to us as �communications science� and its ugly offspring, advertising.� We live in a culture where people no longer communicate with people, they no longer touch;� instead, you read my ad and I read yours.� My people will call your people.� We�ll do lunch.

Lest someone think I am going off the deep end here, let�s look at Cho�s writings.� He blames the rich and the decadent.� His focus � self-serving and narcissistic or not � was precisely materialism. �To go back to von Drehle�s statement above, we would have to characterize virtually all revolutions, all civil wars, all wars in general, as acts of narcissism.� They all promote one identity above all others; one nation, or race, or religion, or political philosophy.� We belong, you don�t.� We are the solution, you are the problem.� You are standing in the way of my happiness.� You enslave me, if only with your thoughts; �your way of life;� the way you pray; the way you vote.��

The difference between acts like Cho�s and � let�s say � the Russian Revolution led by that great narcissist V.I. Lenin is that Cho�s alienation is a symptom of spiritual disconnectedness, of spiritual impoverishment.� In order to survive the slow death of one�s identity � the inability to frame one�s identity in terms of status goods, or credit cards, or nice hair � one focuses on one�s identity, creates an enhanced identity that is consistent with one�s inner life, one�s inner anger and hatred.

As I mentioned in the previous post, suicide bombers share more than a little in common with Cho.� Are they also narcissists?� Isn�t that a simplistic characterization of their motivations?� A suicide bomber is a mass murderer who ends by killing himself or herself in the process.� A suicide bomber leaves a video or written testimony and mails it to the press. Complains about oppression.� Kills innocent people.�

I submit that my linking Cho with suicide bombers is just as valid a comparison as that used by von Drehle and Kluger in their articles.� Using �narcissism� and �depression� as reasons for what happened at Virginia Tech is lazy and facile;� pop psychology masquerading as insight.�

Cho was sick, no doubt about that.� He was mentally ill.� But those are terms whose meaning we no longer recognize because they are labels that can be applied so easily it�s a wonder they don�t come with a solvent, just in case.� Cho was a �crazed, lone gunman� to be sure; but that doesn�t answer any questions, doesn�t solve any problems.� All the work the government tried to do in the wake of the Columbine massacre resulted in not very much, because the perspective was all wrong.� As usual, we like to focus on symptoms and not on root causes.� We could have prevented VT with � what?� A pill?� If only Cho had taken his meds �

Years ago, R.D. Laing wrote that schizophrenia was a spiritual disorder that should be respected as such.� His approach made some headway until it was discovered that schizophrenia could be treated with chemotherapy.� With drugs.� Schizophrenics were no longer wandering the streets, mumbling to themselves, hearing voices.� As long as they took their meds, we were safe from them.� So, Laing�s work became discredited, a quaint reminder of the kind of thinking that went on during the Sixties.� But what do the drugs actually do?� It is recognized that they do not cure schizophrenia, they only mask or reduce the symptoms so that schizophrenics can function in society, enabling them to bring themselves �the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions�.�

Yes, Cho was ill.� Dangerously, radically ill.� But by dismissing his case as easily as do Kluger and Von Drehle, we run the risk that other Chos will rise, enabled by his example;� because those market conditions still exist and alienated narcissism is the only survival mechanism available to those who can�t quite make a sale.

Tales from the Darkside

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2007-04-20T16:25:57Z

I suppose I am expected to comment on the past week�s notorious Virginia Tech massacre.� It seems that there has been enough media coverage of the event that for me to add anything would be entirely superfluous and unwelcome.� Be that as it may, there are some angles to this event that need examining.�� If you are a student at VT, though, you are encouraged to surf somewhere else.� You don�t need the aggravation.

I have not been able to see the documentation that Cho sent to NBC, beyond whatever has already been broadcast which � of course � is partial and heavily edited.� Therefore,� there is a lot I cannot address as yet.� I did read the famous play, in which he accuses a stepfather of abusing him and then eventually winds up killing him after attacking him with a variety of weapons.� I also read in the same play references to the Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon assassinations:� events I cover in Sinister Forces.� That Cho, at twenty-three years old, would even care about these last two events is in itself surprising.� (I know a lot of twenty-three year olds who would not know the relevance or the make the connections.)�� In that same play, there is language reminiscent of the writings of Sirhan Sirhan in the days prior to his assassination of Bobby Kennedy (�Kill!� Die!�) which made me think, for a moment, of Cho as a programmed killer.� But sometimes the difference between deliberate brainwashing and what occurs in our society naturally is very fine, very thin.

The association with the John Lennon assassination is startling, for it brings to mind the circumstances surrounding his killer.� Mark David Chapman was married to a woman of Japanese ancestry from Hawaii;� he was a mental patient for awhile;� he carried a copy of Salinger�s The Catcher in the Rye with him when he went to assassinate Lennon.� He identified with Holden Caulfield in the novel, a young man who was obsessed with what he called �phonies�: the insincere people he met at his school and in his environment generally.� I think we can see that Cho also identified with this idea when he castigated his schoolmates as rich, decadent individuals.

A generation of us growing up in the 1950s and 1960s also identified with Holden Caulfield.� The ongoing popularity of Salinger�s novel is evidence that this identification has not waned with the passing of time.� What worries me is that Cho will become a kind of pop icon in the years to come.� Just as Charles Manson has his own groupie following, a website, recordings of his songs for sale, and some loyal Family members still supporting him, Cho will become as strong in the underground due to his media-savvy approach to his own legend.� He produced a multi-media package of photos, writings, and video that he sent to NBC in the two-hour period between the shootings.� It is said that he also was influenced by a famous Korean film, The Old Boy, which I watched last year on DVD.� More about that later.

Cho lived within a violent fantasy, this much is certain.� He purchased handguns and then filed off the serial numbers (for what possible reason?� Did he intend on killing people, then dumping the gun somewhere to avoid detection and prosecution?� Not likely.� He wanted the notoriety and the attention.).� My impression is that he was following a scenario learned from television or film.� If one is a bad-ass killer, one files off the serial numbers of one�s gun.� Simple as that.� A ritual, not a strategy.

As a Korean living in the United States � who emigrated to this country when he was eight years old � he would have felt alienated and alone for awhile, especially as it seems he was not part of a local Korean community or culture. This alienation seems to have continued long past its expiration date, though.� �Did he blame his parents for bringing him to the United States?� Possibly, which would account for his accusations of child-abuse (if, indeed, he was not actually abused).� There were other Asian students at Virginia Tech; quite a number of them, actually.� He did not seem to have formed any relationships with them.� Of course, there are many different cultures and ethnicities in Asia and it is possible he found no one particularly compatible.� Or vice versa.

The stories we hear about Cho from roommates and other students fits the profile we have come to expect of the crazed, lone gunman:� the Lee Oswalds and Sirhan Sirhans.� The Mark David Chapmans.� He is being described in the media as a loner who did not talk, did not socialize, and who was sick, insane, twisted and all the other terms we ordinarily do not use of the mentally ill anymore but which are acceptable when we describe someone who has been responsible for the worst mass murder in America�s recent history (that is, if we don�t count the Jonestown massacre of 1978 or, dare we say it, the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001).� Cho identified with the Columbine killers in his writings, two young men who planned � after their shootings at the high school � to hijack a plane and fly it into � the World Trade Center.

We now have to realize that we are dealing with a specific type of event and a specific demi-monde.� From Holden Caulfield to Mark David Chapman, to Columbine, to Virginia Tech, among others not so well-known or so flamboyant in their acts of violence.� We have created a world of the disenfranchised and the problem is we don�t recognize this level of spiritual poverty since we are blinded by material wealth.� As our country moves slowly into a deeper and deeper state of fascism, we will be leaving behind those children who are not followers, who are not joiners, who are not jocks, who do not �fit in� with the social stereotypes we have come to expect.� Children are naturally cruel to other children;� young adults can be, too.� But when the overall environment � the habitus as Pierre Bourdieu would say � emphasizes uniformity and calls it �patriotism�, and denigrates differences of opinion and calls it �treason� or, at best, �misinformed�, then we are creating more and more Chos and Chapmans.

When Salinger was writing in the 1950s, his was the handwriting on the wall.� It was the era of the man in the grey-flannel suit, the corporate ad-man, the ranch-style home, Arrow shirts and Camel cigarettes, Suzie Homemaker and Leave It To Beaver.� And the CIA (CIA was apparently recruiting at VT).� And the Cold War.� �Holden Caulfield was the archetypal alienated teenager, but he was unarmed.� He went insane, instead.� Had a nervous breakdown.

Cho was being treated for the Holden Caulfield disease.� With drugs.� That�s all we know how to do anymore.� Either that, or Dr Phil.� But Cho had one thing Holden did not:� access to a Glock nine millimeter and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.� Holden wanted to be the Catcher in the Rye; he wanted to save the children.� Cho wanted to kill them.� Cho says, basically, that time has run out.�

In this, he is joined by another subculture, another demi-monde: that of the suicide bomber.�

These are children who strap explosives to their chests and commit mass murder, and they do it in the name of the disenfranchised.� They do it in the name of people they know, people they grew up with, people they have seen arrested, tortured, murdered in the streets.� And their names and photos later adorn posters, collectible cards, and other media as they, too, become pop icons.� I am not trying to moralize about this, or point fingers, or say who started it, who fired the first shot � who is right and who is wrong.�� My concern is not with being a god-like observer on a hill, looking down and parting the Red Sea � Regardless of who has politics and history on their side, children are dying.�

The suicide-bomber expresses a form of solidarity with the disenfranchised through the violent act of murder.� To those who do not have access to television stations, podcasts, and newspaper publishers, a gun and a bomb are cheap, efficient alternatives.� Their despair is twofold:� despair at the inhumanity and horror they have witnessed, and despair that they are unable to stop it, to cure it, to heal the wounds.� They can�t even hold a press conference, or appear on talk shows.� So instead they choose the next best thing to make their point.

Cho, however, did not witness anyone being murdered, tortured, dragged off the street to face an uncertain fate.�� He grew up in America.�

But he saw the same news we have all seen.� He saw Abu Ghraib.� He heard about US soldiers in his home country, in Korea, being accused of rape and assault and avoiding punishment.� He listened to the President of the United States lie about reasons for invading Iraq.� He saw young men and women � his own age, and younger � being given automatic weapons and sent to a foreign country on false pretenses.� He knew something was wrong.� Very wrong.�

His mental illness may have been related to what we used to call existential angst.� We don�t use that terminology anymore, since we have come to the conclusion that much mental illness is the result of chemical imbalances that can be corrected with the right drug.� But what came first, the angst or the imbalance?� It is the opinion of this writer that there is a symbiotic relationship between the two.� Just as stress exacerbates all sorts of nervous and somatic disorders, so does angst contribute to the development of chemical imbalances.� Treating the chemical imbalance does not, in my view, treat the underlying psychological or � I am going out on a limb, here � spiritual disorder.� It masks it;� forces it underground where it lurks in our psychic basements, collecting weapons and writing manifestos while all the time we appear to be �under control�.� This spiritual disorder is of our own making;� it is standing behind us, large and looming, and we chatter on as if it isn�t there.� Not there at all.� What, me worry?

Cho is no hero, and I will not dignify his actions by calling him a victim.� Nor will I say that he was simply sick and deranged,� the �crazed, lone gunman�.� Rather, he is a symptom.� He is the malignancy that has spread throughout America�s system, the ghost in the machine, the haunting of our house.� He was a tumor that attacked one of our organs before it surgically removed itself.

There are others out there.� The malignancy has spread.�

Yesterday, on Countdown with Keith Olberman on the MSNBC cable network, former presidential counsel John Dean appeared to comment on the Alberto Gonzales case and on the recently exposed situation that hundreds of thousands of US government documents in all areas of life have �gone missing�.� That Freedom of Information Act requests are being answered with a �can�t find it� letter in more than 70 percent of cases.� That our government is now hiding whatever it can, whatever it wants to, from its own people.�� Dean brought up as an example what happened during his time in the Nixon White House, when an important Oval Office tape was shown to have 18-1/2 minutes �missing�.�� Dean said � and as I write in my own work � when Alexander Haig was asked who was responsible for erasing those missing minutes, he responded �A sinister force�.

To quote Edward R Murrow and Keith Olberman on this, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre, �Good night, and good luck.�

Memo to Diane

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2007-03-22T05:09:04Z

Diane, whenever two events happen simultaneously pertaining to the same object of �inquiry, we must always pay strict attention!

�� -- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

Sharp-eyed readers of this site have noticed a confluence of events has taken place in the last week that bears closer scrutiny.

I�ll be brief.

A few days ago, it was reported in the Los Angeles Times that the sons of the late convicted Watergate Plumber and CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt, revealed that their father admitted that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.� According to their statement, Hunt had been approached by a �rogue element� within the CIA that wanted to kill Kennedy during a stopover in Miami.� Hunt declined to participate, but he evidently did not warn anyone about the plot.� Hunt, due to his involvement with the failed Bay of Pigs operation and his close friendship with many prominent anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, hated Kennedy and was probably not too sorry to learn of his assassination.� Many conspiracy theorists, in fact, insist that Hunt was in Dallas that day and, indeed, Hunt had always been somewhat vague as to his actual whereabouts that afternoon.

Readers of Sinister Forces will remember that Hunt had written several occult novels and one in particular that was a thinly-disguised attack on the Kennedy family.� Readers of Sinister Forces may also recall the name Charles Harrelson.

Charles Harrelson was the convicted and imprisoned assassin of a US District Court Judge in 1979, in a case that made national headlines.� He is the father of actor Woody Harrelson (of Cheers fame, among many other appearances on television and in film).� Charles Harrelson, shortly after his arrest for the murder of Judge Wood, admitted his involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, stating that he was the shooter on the infamous Grassy Knoll.� He later retracted that statement and would say no more about it.

Charles Harrelson died in prison on March 15 at the age of 69, evidently of natural causes, although his death was not reported until today, March 21.�

That both of these events � the revelations about Hunt and the death of Harrelson � would take place in the same week raises eyebrows.� As I have written extensively in Sinister Forces, this type of coincidence may be evidence of the operation of deeper, darker forces at work in history and behind the flimsy screen of reality.� And the fact that this is all taking place against the backdrop of what is now taking place in Washington, DC and with the bizarre reincarnation of Watergate counsel Fred Fielding taking the legal reins at the White House, indicates to lovers of dietrologia that, as Inspector Clouseau would say, �Sinister forces are at work!�.�

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in dangerous times.� The future of our Republic is at stake, as I�m sure most of you already realize.� The excesses of the present administration concerning the abuse of the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, and prisoner abuse and torture, all lead us to consider that what is going on today in Washington is, as former White House counsel John Dean has written, �worse than Watergate�.� My initial response � in learning that Charles Harrelson had died on virtually the same day that the Hunt sons had revealed their father�s pre-knowledge of the Kennedy assassination � was to suspect foul play.� As Hunt�s family came forward � I thought � they got rid of the one man who claimed, with some credibility since he was already a convicted political assassin, that he had been the shooter on the Grassy Knoll.� Tying up a loose end.�

And it all takes place in the open, albeit not on the network news programs swamped as they are with the far more important speculation concerning the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith�s child.� There are times when I feel like Mel Gibson�s character in Conspiracy Theory, clipping newspaper articles and showing how seemingly disparate information is related.�

In the immortal words of Edward R Murrow (and Keith Olbermann):� Good night, and good luck.

Immanentize the Eschaton!

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2007-01-13T17:36:12Z

Over the past 48 hours I have received numerous emails advising me of the death of Robert Anton Wilson.�� It seems important that I say a few words here about a man I never met, but who had a tremendous influence over the spiritual, cultural and psychological development of many of my friends over the years.

Wilson was the co-author, along with Robert Shea, of the Illuminatus! Trilogy.�� This series of paperbacks came out in the mid-1970s at a time of tremendous social upheaval in the United States.�� We had just come out of Vietnam, Watergate was in full-swing, and the various Intelligence Committee and Assassination Committee hearings were informing us of the extent to which our government had spied on its own citizens, committed assassinations, and conspired in all sorts of mayhem at home and abroad.� At the same time, neo-Paganism was growing in popularity, in particular the version known as Wicca:� the Witchcraft movement.

For many of us at the time, neo-Paganism was seen as an anti-intellectual, purely right-brain kind of environment: the epitome of what we would call the New Age.� Those of us who tended more towards the left-brain, ritual magic environment found ourselves without a real group or society that measured up to our standards of serious scholarship and committed practice.� There was the Church of Satan, which was seen as little more than a club for ex-Catholics (!) and of course the OTO.

The OTO at the time was in the midst of turmoil itself.� Some prominent members were switching sides from Marcelo Motta�s group � in the US, headquartered in Tennessee � and Grady McMurtry�s group � headquartered in California.� There were serious political and philosophical differences between the two groups and, unfortunately, they were the only games in town.� Most of the groups � whether pagan, Wiccan, or Thelemite � were arenas for cults of personality, and that diluted both the medium and the message.�

Then, suddenly, there was the Illuminatus! trilogy, and everyone had an alternative perspective, a weltanschauung that merged paganism, Thelema, and Asian religions with conspiracy theories, thousands of historical references and layers upon layers of meaning � all done in an exuberant, manic style that captured our imaginations and gave us a paradigm for our own cosmological and theological suspicions, amorphous as they were.� We identified so strongly with the ideas in the Trilogy that groups began to form based on the concepts we found there:� Discordians, Erisians, Hagbard Celine chapters of various cults, etc.� In addition, the ideas and thought of Timothy Leary were evident in all of Wilson�s writings and that led us to neurological (and dare we say pharmacological!) perspectives on the phenomena of initiation, illumination, and conversion.�

My own understanding of synchronicity, mind-control programs, and the link between government psychological programs and analogues with shamanistic practices and secret society rituals were mirrored in the Wilson-Shea Trilogy.�� Living in New York City at the time, I witnessed the emergence of an occult revival that took place in the bars, clubs, bookstores and apartments of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens � all of it tinged with the elements to be found in Illuminatus!.��

There will be those who will tell you to read Cosmic Trigger and the other, later, books by Wilson, and they are justified in doing so.� But I submit that you will never quite understand the context of Cosmic Trigger unless you read Illuminatus!.�� It will also take you back to a time when we, the people, felt we had a chance to own our own spirituality no matter what form it would eventually take.� It was the pre-AIDS, pre-Iran-Contra, pre-Iraq world:� a kind of interregnum between the end of Vietnam and the scandals of Watergate and the beginning of our Middle East adventure and the scandals of the Bush administration (replete with Fred Fielding, the same lawyer for both Nixon and Bush!).� It was the Carter era, and John Lennon was still alive.� Jonestown was in the wind, and so was the Son of Sam.� But we felt we were on the verge of a spiritual breakthrough, a group satori that would result in an explosion of illumination signalling the end of the Old World and the beginning of the New � or, as Wilson would say, the immanentizing of the eschaton.

God speed, Robert Anton Wilson.�� And thank you.

Requiem for a Heavyweight

nospam@example.com (Peter Levenda) — 2007-01-05T18:23:38Z

Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.

-- Mephistopheles

Reality, what a concept!

-- Robin Williams

Greetings, children.� Sorry to have been absent lo! these many moons.� Truth to tell, I have been rocked by our common experience.� I have a growing sense of anxiety and unease � that maybe Speaker Nancy Pelosi will turn into a Woofer or a Tweeter, but not both.� Will the Democrats amplify our problems, or will� they become merely turntables, revolving doors of political insincerity and stupidity, such as we have come to expect? Weird, surrealistic visions arise of our potential future twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.� Why do I feel this way, when everything looks so promising (at least, for the next 100 hours)?

Last year probably ranks up there with 1963, 1968, and 1975.�� Government scandals, deaths, accusations, political upsets, and an ongoing war in a foreign country that is sapping American strength and testing American resolve � not to mention Iraqi strength, Iraqi resolve, and the deaths of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands.�

At the funeral for Gerald Ford, our 38^th president, former President George W. Bush actually took a swipe at conspiracy theorists.� Did anyone catch that?� Why did he feel it was either appropriate or necessary to attack conspiracy theorists during Ford�s funeral?� Methinks the lady doth protest too much.� Let�s look at Gerald Ford briefly, and find out a few things they did not mention during the funeral or during the days of post-mortem (literally) that preceded it.

In the first place, Gerald Ford was a Freemason.� Okay, not much to work with there.� Just odd that no one mentioned it.

In the second place, Gerald Ford worked as a male model early on in his career.� Oops.� No mention of that during the funeral!�

But that�s not the most interesting part.� Ford was actually a business partner of Harry Conover, a well-known name in the modeling business in the post-World War II era, and the man credited for having discovered Candy Jones.� Candy Jones was one of his star models (and briefly his wife), and just incidentally a woman whose biographer � Donald Bain � claims was a Manchurian Candidate, i.e., a programmed assassin.� Ford-Conover-Jones.� Later, of course, Ford would find a berth on the Warren Commission, hence the jibe at conspiracy theorists by George W. Bush, himself an easy target due to his family�s notorious support of the Nazi regime both before and during World War II, and the fact that George Bush himself was once head of the CIA.

Donald Bain, of course, was one of the screenwriters for the popular television series Murder, She Wrote.�� That series starred Angela Lansbury as a kindly old writer of detective stories living in Maine.� Angela Lansbury, of course, also starred in the film version of the Condon novel, The Manchurian Candidate.�� The film also starred Frank Sinatra, not a stranger to byzantine plots and organized crime scenarios.� Most importantly, though, the film was directed by John Frankenheimer � the director with whom Bobby Kennedy had his last meal at Frankenheimer�s Malibu beach house hours before his assassination by a � programmed assassin.� Who were the other guests that evening?� Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.� Roman Polanski was the director of the film version of Rosemary�s Baby (starring Sinatra�s wife, Mia Farrow).�� His wife, Sharon Tate, �would be dead a year later, murdered by Charles Manson�s minions.� As Ed Sanders would say, �ooo�eee-ooo�.�

That�s what happens when you pull at the thread of Gerald R. Ford.�

(In the interests of full disclosure, I was once interviewed by Candy Jones on her radio program, sometime in 1980.� At the time, I had no knowledge of her Manchurian Candidate status, or I would have been interviewing her.)�

All of this took place in the era known as the Sixties.� It was a time of an unpopular war in a foreign land;� political turmoil;� and the alienation of America�s youth.�� We have all the elements necessary for a revisit of that tumultuous time, except for the latter.� America�s youth are not marching on the streets, protesting the war, agitating for political change.� There is a reason for that, of course, and don�t think the Powers That Be are not aware of it.� There is no Draft.

Since America�s youth is not being directly confronted with the possibility of being called up and sent to die in Iraq, America�s youth is basically unconcerned about the entire event.� In fact, I am appalled by the total lack of interest in anything remotely political, foreign, or historical by these, our future leaders.� We have somehow managed to raise a generation of George H.W. Bushes.� And we saw how that turned out.

Naturally, the level of cynicism among the youth is what contributes to this startling ennui.� What else has happened this year?� We had an importart religious leader � the front man for the Evangelical movement � exposed as a man who frequented male prostitutes while doing crystal meth.� We had another religious leader call for the assassination of the president of Venezuela, the same guy who said that the people of New Orleans deserved Hurricane Katrina.� Our moral leaders are obviously emperors in new clothes, and our youth is smart enough to see that.

Today, in China, the Communist Party has lost its moral authority and that means great and terrifying changes will take place in that country until a new moral authority asserts itself.� What will happen to the United States if we lose our moral compass?� (I don�t mean if our political leaders and religious leaders lose their moral compass; that ship sailed a long time ago.)� I mean our people, our average people,� the people who make this country work.� Where will they turn?� If we can�t trust the priests or the ministers, the Catholics or the Evangelicals (and we are all scared to death of the imams, thank you Fox Network and the 700 Club) what options do we have?� Orthodox Judaism?� Perhaps.� It would be a refreshing change to see our youth studying the Torah and the Talmud; they might begin to understand Christianity a little better!� Buddhism?� Too � Beatles in the Sixties, right?� Santeria?� Macumba?� Palo Mayombe?� Voudon?� A little too � ethnic for Middle America?�

The problem may not lie in our religions, but in our religious organizations.� Here�s a thought:� what if our moral guidance did not come from human beings?� What if our moral compass was set not by the priests but by the texts themselves?� What if our only recourse was to the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing � the Sutras �?�

Why, that would be like � like � actually referring to the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution!� That would be like building our political viewpoint on those sacred texts!� What a concept!�

Too bad it wouldn�t fly.� Not in the America of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, NSA wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and Abu Ghraib.� Perhaps we will have to start meeting in secret, like the early Christians: in catacombs and cemeteries in the middle of the night, reading the forbidden books and dreaming of a utopia that once was, that might have been, that � who knows? � might still be in the distant future.

America.

What a concept!