The Illuminati Conspiracy - The Sapien System
Donald Holmes, MD(C)(1987)
New Falcon Publication
655 East Thunderbird
Phoneix, AZ 85022
602-246-3546
Introduction by Robert Anton Wilson
The Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy
by
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
—Oz the Omnipotent
It is characteristic of the primitive conditions on this backward planet that virtually nobody knows any of the basic facts about how the human race is actually governed. For instance—
1. Governments are not nearly as important as most people think. Since we live in a post-barter economy—a money economy—those who control the money supply effectively control the planet. Governments gave up all attempt to coin or control money in the 19th Century, mostly because they did not trust one another, i.e. no nation had faith that the coinage or currency of another nation was really worth what it claimed to be worth. The great International
Banks stepped into this vacuum and, by demonstrating more fiscal rectitude than governments had in the past, became the creators of money in the modern world.
After the banks had control, they no longer needed to be quite so prim in their fiscal rectitude. Nobody could challenge them.
This means that governments cannot do anything—good or ill, wise or foolish—unless the banks first lend them the money for the project. The power is in the banks. The governments survive on the permission of the banks. If the banks cut off their credit, governments die. Any government that resists has its credit cut off and dies.
As Buckminster Fuller stressed in all his writings (especially Critical Path and Grunch of Giants) this means that, in the modem world, banks act and governments only re-act to the situations the bankers have ordained. Even earlier, historian Brooks Adams wrote of the British financier Samuel Loyd, in The Law of Civilization and Decay,
He comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of foreign exchange.
In other words, as soon as the great multi-national banks had control of the money supply, they saw that they could manipulate cash and credit to maximize profits. They would have been rather dense if they had not seen this. Nonetheless, while these financiers quite sanely and legally maximize profits, the rest of us are at their mercy; but we never elected them to this position of power, and, by and large, we do not even know who they are.
2. In the present decade, it costs $50,000,000 to run a campaign for the presidency of the United States, $10,000,000 to run a campaign for the Senate and $5,000,000 for the House of Representatives. (These figures are documented in Buckminster Fuller's Grunch of Giants.) This means that the U.S.—the strongest country in the West—is not only "owned" (in trillion-dollar debt to) the banks, but also governed by persons who are either (a) millionaires or (b) heavily in debt to millionaires. In the words of ex-Senator Pettigrew, we now have "government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations
3. As Edward Luttwak documents in his cheerfully Machiavellian little text, The Coup d'Etat, more governments have been changed, since World War II by the coup d'Etat than by any other method. More governments have been changed by coup than by all the democratic elections and revolutions combined.
Since every coup is by definition a conspiracy, this means that conspiracies have had more effect on the past 40 years of world history than all the electoral politics and all the popular revolutions added together. That is rather ominous, in a period when "educated" opinion holds that it is infamous, nutty, eccentric or downright paranoid to think about conspiracies at all. We are, in effect, forbidden to think about how the planet is actually governed.
4. If governments cannot act without permission of the banks— without loans or "lines of credit" granted by the banks—and if the U.S. government is "owned" by the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) banking and corporate elite, and if other governments are, more often than not, changed by conspiratorial coup, the major portion of humanity is economically-politically controlled by persons who are largely unknown to the general public and/or have never been elected to any office. Democratic theory is beautiful and inspirational, but has nothing to do with the actual situation of the domesticated primates of this boondocks planet.
5. If the masses of the planet are politically-economically controlled by shadowy financiers and conspiratorial adventurers, the same masses are intellectually controlled by persons who are more visible but equally unpalatable to the Rationalist view of history. In blunt language, nearly 300 years after the Age of Reason was prematurely announced, most people in most nations most of the time are mentally in total bondage to religious leaders who operate on sheer bluk, i.e. on the basis of claims that cannot be proven and appear clearly insane to everybody who hasn't been raised within their frameworks.
The Methodist can see how absurd are the beliefs of Roman Catholics. The Catholics can see the obvious insanity of the Sikh militants who blow up airplanes because there are a few Hindus aboard. The Sikhs, no doubt, can see how nonsensical Scientology is. But none of the people processed by any of these cults can see how crazy their own cult is. It is often quite hard for a
rational observer to determine if the leaders of these cults are just cynically raking in the cash or are genuinely as deluded as their brainwashed followers.
One can acquire a reputation as a satirist, a wit, a cynic, etc. simply by stating blunt facts. For instance, it is quite clear from the above that the human race is largely governed politico-economically by unknown financial cliques and criminal scoundrels and governed intellectually by borderline psychotics and charlatans. But we have all been so conditioned and indoctrinated that to state the facts simply makes it sound as if one is being sarcastic or perhaps even trying to be"shocking."
Let us look at the situation of this planet in a little more detail.
SOCIOBIOLOGY OF DECEIT
All men are born liars.
—Liam O'Flaherty, Autobiography (first sentence)
Conspiracy is the first manifestation of intelligent life.
The original organic molecules formed affinity groups and conspired to exploit the resources of this planet. Working in small cells originally, these DNA conquistadores quickly developed organizations of higher complexity and spread a network of hungry, predatory Life over the previously dead Earth. In less than 3,500,000,000 years this network has expanded from the ocean beds to the very peaks on the Himalayas. No square centimeter of Earth is uninfested.
The trapdoor spiders formed their own secret society and went underground. They lurked silently, hidden beneath a plausible surface of twigs and soil, waiting to pounce out and devour any beetle or other tasty-looking morsel that happened to pass by.
The day of the undercover agent had come.
This technique of cover-up and disguise has proven an evolutionary success and is widely copied everywhere. Thousands of species of conspiratorial insects even today still hide behind ingenious make-up that deceives us into thinking they are only branches or rocks.
Other species got even smarter even faster. Polar bears donned white fur coats to fade into snowy landscapes. The leopard's spots make it hard to distinguish from speckled sunlight on foliage. The Norway rat (mus rattus Norwegious) learned to hide by day and come forth under cover of darkness.
The first human beings looked about them and very sensibly concluded, "It's a jungle out there." Human psychology has remained jungle psychology. As historian Carl Oglesby writes in The Yankee and Cowboy War
... a multitude of conspiracies contend in the night.... Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means . . . and where there is no limit to power, there is no limit to conspiracy
As soon as we find evidence of human beings on this planet, we find evidence of secret societies. Paleolithic paintings show that they met, typically, in the deepest, darkest caves, and they plotted sorcery and mischief against all competing species.
In every tribe known to anthropology, we still find secret societies. Most tribes have all-male secret societies, but many also have all-female secret societies. Most readers will probably remember that they had their own secret societies as children, with passwords and quasi-Freemasonic grips determinedly hidden from the adults.
>From this evolutionary perspective, every paranoid is partly right. The major error of the paranoid appears to be his characteristic belief in one jumbo Mega-Conspiracy that explains everything This is impossible, because it violates basic laws of primate psychology. Domesticated primates like wild primates are mischievous, sly and have a keen sense of humor: the double-cross is their most characteristic invention.
George Washington, who rose to power by conspiring against his king, said with blunt honesty, "Nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests." This is why governments, corporations and other large-scale conspiracies all have a natural life-span, like other living systems. There is no government on this planet that has existed in its present form for more
than 200 years; aside from the Dutch East India Company, most corporations rise and fall within 100 years (average). Outside of paranoid fantasy and Romantic fiction, most conspiracies collapse of their own"internal contradictions"within months or years. (Thus, if there actually is one big jumbo-conspiracy governing this planet, it must be, as Donald Holmes wittily
suggests in the following pages, of non-human origin.)
The study of conspiracy as a branch of primate psychology, has great interest in itself, as Machiavelli knew; but real conspiracies are not as clever or long-lived as the ones that paranoids and ideologists imagine; they are simply much dirtier.
It is one of the ironies of our time that conspiracies and secret societies have proliferated more than ever at precisely the same time it has become impolite and uncouth to discuss them. In this sense, the Nazis defeated the Liberal Democracies in World War II, because they have achieved a form of Thought Control over the Liberal Mind. Liberals are afraid to think of conspiracies because that might lead to the One Big Mega-Conspiracy, i.e. to"thinking like Hitler." But a mind chained by Tabu is a mind unfree. I believe it is time we broke Hitler's power over our minds and began to think in terms of the facts instead of being restrained by Tabu.
Disguise, deception and group-action have a long evolutionary history, and primates have all these traditional evolutionary habits, which in political jargon are called conspiratorial habits. Even if it is Tabu to think about it, that seems to be the way things are on this planet.
TRUE CONFESSIONS
When four sit down to conspire, three are fools and the fourth is a government agent.
—Duncan Lunan, Interstellar Communication
Frankly I myself never dared to violate the Liberal Tabu—"Thou shalt not think about conspiracies"—until I was virtually forced to think about them.
In the 1960s in Chicago, I was involved in the anti-war movement. Congressional investigators later revealed that there were over 5000 government agents assigned to infiltrate peace groups in Chicago alone—some working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), some for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and some for Army Intelligence. From 1968 on, the
FBI was following a program code-named COINTELPRO. The purpose of COINTELPRO was to make sure the anti-war movement knew it was infiltrated, in order to spread suspicion, distrust and paranoia among individuals and groups who might otherwise have cooperated harmoniously. Working in the peace movement in those days was, accordingly, like living in an Eric Ambler novel. In any given week I would be warned perhaps three times that somebody I trusted was really a government agent, and, of course, somebody who was accused one day might very well be around to accuse somebody else the next day. Over 20 years later, I still don't know who was a government agent and who was not. I enjoyed it all rather than being terrified only because I basically agree with Helen Keller that "Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing."
I encountered the same Spy Story atmosphere in the early 1970s when involved in the campaign to secure the release from prison of the controversial scientist, Dr. Timothy Leary. At one time or another, everybody in the Leary Defense Committee suspected everybody else of being a government agent (I think the poet, Allen Ginsberg, suspected me for over a year) and eventually government "leaks" in the press attempted to persuade us that Dr. Leary himself had become a government agent. I still relish that classic John Le Carre touch, especially since some people believed it.
Eventually it was confirmed that Leary's son-in-law, Dennis Martino, had been entrapped into becoming a government agent. Dennis later died in Spain and three press reports in two days claimed the cause of death had been murder, suicide and accident. That mystery is still unsolved, at least in America. Presumably, the Spanish authorities finally came up with a coroner's verdict,
which may or may not be the truth, but by then the U.S. media had lost interest. As far as you can learn from American sources, Dennis Martino accidentally overdosed, committed suicide and was murdered, all on the same day. Evidently, nobody in the U.S. media wanted to find out what the hell really happened.
But there are wheels within wheels in this modern Machiavellian world.
During the last year of my employment as Associate Editor of PLAYBOY, a certain executive came into my office one day and closed the door behind him. He told me that my home phone was tapped and that I was under heavy surveillance by the Red Squad of the Chicago Police Force.
I was stunned, and asked how the hell he knew this.
He replied that certain people in the PLAYBOY empire had made an arrangement with a Chicago police official. The official received regular money through some circuitous route that was not explained to me; in return, he notified his PLAYBOY contacts whenever an executive of the firm was under police investigation.
That was when I first realized how often there are spies spying on spies.
Incidentally, my informant told me why I was under heavy surveillance. A police informer in the Black Panthers, he said, had reported that I was involved with a group of white radicals who were buying guns for the Panthers.
Despite my cynicism about cops, I was shocked. I explained heatedly that there was no truth in this at all. "We know, we know," said the executive, who was very close to Hefner. "We trust you." And they did trust me. They never made any attempt to ease me out the back door, or dissociate the Bunny Empire from me. They even offered to pay my legal expenses if the police ever busted me on this absurd charge.
It was years before I wondered why the Bunny Empire decided to trust me in such an explosive matter. My guess, now, is that they had me under surveillance, too, along with their other editors—but that's only a guess. Maybe it was just that I have an honest face. I'd like to think that. Of course, I was not buying guns for the Black Panthers. I had met a few Panthers at Peace rallies, and the informer had seen me. He or she had probably "improved" the story to impress the Red Squad. A PLAYBOY editor talking to Black Panthers is not all that sensational, but a PLAYBOY editor buying guns for the Panthers was a story that made the informer seem on the edge of discovering a major conspiracy.
I could tell several similar stories, but I would again have to conceal the names of my sources and you would probably not believe me. Truth is much, much stranger than melodrama. Instead I will examine the neuro-economics of conspiracy and then relate some notable conspiracies that have become matters of public record. We will see that the theories outlined by Dr. Holmes in this book are, however shocking, no more bizarre than the world in which we live.
WEALTH AND "MONEY"
A banker is a man who will loan you money if you can prove you don't need it.
—attributed to Mark Twain
Just as most people have no idea how this planet is governed at this barbaric stage of evolution, most people have no concept of where "wealth" comes from. This is because most of us have never learned to distinguish between wealth and money.
Money was originally created by the State, as I mentioned at the beginning; this is why King Lear says his persecutors can't accuse him of counterfeiting. The State was, in those days, the only legal creator of coin: a legal coin was, by definition, a State coin.
As States learned the advantages to be gained by issuing debased coinage—a matter discussed with great clarity and wit in Jonathan Swift's little-known but brilliant Drapier Letters every State and every individual became the potential victim of coins that did not contain the amount of gold stamped on them. Eventually, no State would trust any other State in this area and, more
and more, the paper of the great banking firms began to seem the only"safe" medium of exchange.
The U.S. Constitution, amusingly, says that Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof, but Congress has not exercised that power in over a century. Official U.S. money is issued by a private bank, just like the money of all other nations (except Albania, a lonely heretic), but, because U.S. money says "Federal Reserve Note" on it, most Americans assume it is issued by the Federal government. It is issued, actually, by the Federal Reserve Corporation, a private bank, owned largely by the Rockefellers and Morgans. We do not "owe the National Debt to ourselves" as the late Franklin Roosevelt once said; we owe it to the Rockefellers and Morgans.
Irish money says "Bank of Ireland" on it and English money says "Bank of England," and so on; all across Europe, most people know that the banks are in control of the creation of money. Only in America, because the word "Federal in Federal Reserve is thought to mean "federal" and because the Constitution says Congress shall coin money, is there a lingering belief that the government is still a sovereign entity not owned by the bankers to whom it is in debt.
None of this has anything to do with Real Wealth in the sense of classical
economics.
Real Wealth, in the economic sense, consists of tangible assets. It includes, not only plants in operation "owned" by individual or corporate capitalists, but known resources, inventions, bridges, roads, scientific data—all the creations of human intelligence that can be concretely applied to make the human environment more pleasant for somebody or for everybody.
Thus, if all the Real Wealth disappeared over night, the world would be entirely different. We would literally be back in the Old Stone Age, and no amount of Federal Reserve Notes or other paper would change our situation. We would have to re-invent and re-create all the science and technology of the past 30,000 years step by step.
On the other hand, all the money in the world—all the Federal Reserve Notes, Bank of England notes, etc. and all the stocks and bonds—could disappear over night and the world would be exactly the same physically. There might be a hell of a fight over who owned what, but the human world of Real Wealth would still be here.
In kindergarten language, Real Wealth consists of "things" that can't be stored in banks or computers, while money consists of "tickets" or symbols that can be stored in banks or computers.
Of course, Real Wealth is more than solid "things." I have been arguing for 30 years, in various publications, that Real Wealth is essentially pure information. It has finally dawned on me that nobody understands that but a few mathematicians and computer buffs; so I now say, more simply, that Real Wealth is ideas that work. In the terminology of General Semantics, Wealth is
ideas that are similar in structure (isomorphic) to the energy systems of space-time.
Wealth is created by analysis: by extracting higher-order structure from the raw signals perceived by the senses. You can starve to death in a wheat field if your mind has not analyzed the energy system of space-time sufficiently to recognize that wheat is edible and nourishing. Money, then, is not Real Wealth, but consists of tickets for the exchange of Real Wealth. Such tickets are necessary in an advanced technology-economy-society, because barter becomes cumbersome and unwieldy.
Most money, however, does not exist in tangible form at all, not even as paper. Most money, in today's advanced techno-society, exists only as computer records or, in less advanced outposts, notations in ledgers. Banks may legally lend up to eight times the amount they have on deposit, and as Penny Lernoux documents in her invaluable In Banks We Trust, they often go far beyond this and hope to cover their tracks before the bank examiner comes around.
Michele Sindona, a kingpin of the Vatican/Mafia/P2 clique and founder of the infamous Franklin National Bank, was convicted of murdering a bank examiner in Italy, after being convicted of 65 counts of bank fraud in the U.S. His principle flaw appears to have been that he was more reckless than older and wiser financiers who have been running the world longer and more judiciously. (We shall return to the Sindona/P2 case history.)
When banks lend eight times what they have on deposit, or more than that, they are gambling that everybody will not come in and withdraw their funds on the same day. It is a safe gamble, most of the time. But it means that paper wealth has become even more metaphysical and ghostly than the most debased coinage of the most corrupt Tudor or Stuart monarchs. It means that, by a species of magic, the Real Wealth of the planet can be manipulated as the ghostly paper is maneuvered from one computer to another. And it means that the really bold adventurers and pirates can alchemically transform totally unreal paper into ownership of resources, factories, roads, bridges and whole nations on occasion, as they, following Samuel Loyd, establish a rise . . . at their pleasure," or just as easily establish a fall.
The reader should consult some of the books I will be summarizing here especially illuminating is Richard Hammer's The Vatican Connection, which tells how Johnny Roselli and his friends in the American Mafia printed one billion dollars worth of counterfeit stocks which disappeared into the
Vatican Bank/Banco Ambrosiano feedback loop in such a manner that the New York District Attorney's office, which had wiretaps on most of the felons, never did find out where the $900,000,000 of the $1,000,000,000 finally landed.
Buckminster Fuller, in Grunch of Giants, describes the modern world as governed by MMA&O—Machiavelli, Mafia, Atoms and Oil. You know the Mafia. Atoms and Oil are the multi-national corporations. Machiavelli is the symbol of the paper-magic wizards, or international banks, who make the whole system possible. GRUNCH stands for GRoss UNiversal CAsh Heist. It's another book you really ought to read.
NEURO-GEOGRAPHY OF CONSPIRACY
Go West, young man.
—Horace Greeley
As I pointed out in Prometheus Rising (Falcon Press, 1983), the Real Wealth of the world has been doubling every generation since statistical economists started collecting data in the 18th Century. This is a side-effect of the accelerated doubling of knowledge that has been occurring in the past two milleniums. (Information, or ideas-that-work, is the source of Real Wealth.
Remember?) As George Anderla, a French statistician, determined, if we take all the knowledge of 1 A.D. as our base, then knowledge has doubled at the following rate since then:
AD 1 unit
500 AD 2
750 AD 4
1900AD 8
1950 AD 16
1960 AD 32
1967 AD 64
1973 AD 128
A glance at world-historical trajectories indicates that this doubling of knowledge-and-wealth has followed a western (and mildly northern) vector, as has been documented e.g. in Brooks Adams' Law of Civilization and Decay, Timothy Leary's The Intelligence Agents and Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path.
Bronze Age tools first appeared in Southeast Asia, followed by large-scale agriculture, slavery and war. By 1 A.D. all the technology thusfar produced was being processed through the schools and banking establishments of Rome. By the time this knowledge/wealth doubled in 1500, the universities of North Italy and the great Florentine banking families like the Medici held the hot center of power. By 1750, the next doubling was occurring mostly in England, the first Empire on which the sun never set."
By 1900, the U.S. was becoming a rival to England; by 1950, the American Empire had replaced the English Empire. The years since 1950 have witnessed what Prof. Oglesby calls "the Yankee and Cowboy war" as Eastern bankers like the Rockefellers try to hold on to control and are challenged by Western mavericks like Howard Hughes.
The more adventurous and innovative persons—those with nervous systems programmed by maverick genes and/or bizarre imprints and conditioning: the "misfits"—have been moving steadily westward for about 5000 years. They have been moving away from centralized Authority, out into the perimeters and frontiers, because that is where misfits and geniuses can function.
Clausewitz described war as a continuation of politics by other means; Oglesby calls conspiracy "the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means." Conspiracy, the murky territory between politics and war, is part of our glorious primate heritage, which is why Ambrose Bierce defined peace as "a period of cheating between two periods of fighting."
The role of conspiracy in human history, I suggest, is a period of cheating during which two power centers are struggling,-one of them Eastward and representing established ideas and old wealth, the other Westward and generally representing maverick ideas and new wealth. Enclaves of "outlaws" move in the shadowy territory between these two power poles, running their own games and exploiting the paranoia of each side where and when they can.
Anthropologist William Irwin Thompson has suggested, in a recent address in Oslo, Norway, that the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative—the so-called "Star Wars" program—is more radical, and less reactionary, than it looks on the surface. Thompson alleges that, under the
pretext of military bluster, SDI actually represents the total re-alignment of American society into a scientific-technological paradigm. Only the most "patriotic" rhetoric, Thompson says, could sell to the American people a program which amounts to the most expensive and most daring scientific research-and-development project humanity has ever attempted. In this context, Reagan represents the "Cowboy elite" that Oglesby sees as being on the edge of toppling the Rockefeller and other Yankee empires. The Cowboys are looking for a High Frontier, and they are computerized Cowboys now.
Werner von Braun used Disneyworld—both the amusement park and the TV show—to "sell" NASA's more adventurous ideas to the politicians by first selling them to the people. General Graham, who gave the "Star Wars" idea to Reagan, is following the same scenario. Amid the 24 separate-and-interlocking conspiracies struggling over the turf on this planet, the Cowboys are
struggling for higher and more imaginative lands in the stars. Why not? They are, in the 20th Century, the same sort of mavericks the Yankees were in the 18th Century— namely, "the products of the Protestantism of the Protestants and the dissidence of dissent," as Edmund Burke said of the wealthy radicals who wrote the Declaration of Independence. The coming dominant looks to be, like California, a mad mixture of Hollywood, computers, special effects,
apocalyptical visions and dope. Reagan does not fully understand the neuro-geography of the historical forces he represents.
The next dominant will probably be further west and more technological.
If we revise our chart of the doubling of knowledge (Real Wealth) to include
these factors we find:
KNOWLEDGE CENTER OF PRINCIPLEThe rising power always seems to the West or Northwest of the declining power that struggles against it; it is always richer and more powerful than any previous Empire; it always seems to the older power center (and its kept intellectuals) exactly what California seems today—a kind of sociological Granola made up of equal parts of fruits, nuts and flakes.
DATE FACTOR POWER ENEMIES
1 AD 1 Rome Greece, Egypt
1500 AD 2 Florence Turks
1750 AD 4 England France, Spain
1900 AD 8 England Germany
1950 AD 16 New York Russia
1960 AD 32 California Russia
1967 AD 64 California Russia
1973 AD 128 California New York
? Japan California
THE C.I.A. & THE MAFIA
Patriotism, sir, is the last recourse of the scoundrel.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson
In the 1960s, the CIA conspired with two Mafia leaders, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. Mr. Giancana and Mr. Roselli provided professional Mafia assassins and the CIA trained them and sent them to Cuba to kill Fidel Castro. Like most real conspiracies, this was unsuccessful, Senor Castro is still alive. This conspiracy was also well documented in Congressional hearings and broadcast in the news media internationally, so you are not considered a crank if you write about it.
You will begin to understand what I call the Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy when I remind you that Johnny Roselli was also involved in printing one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) worth of counterfeit stock for the Vatican Bank. That is documented fully in The Vatican Connection by N.Y. Times reporter Richard Hammer, which I again recommend to your attention.
According to Anthony Summers' book, Conspiracy there is a good prima facie case that Johnny Roselli was also an instigator of the assassinations of both John and Bobby Kennedy, in collaboration with Sam Giancana—the same Giancana who had previously collaborated with Roselli in providing assassins for the CIA. While Summers' evidence is not conclusive, it is chillingly plausible.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded, on the basis of the hard scientific evidence of acoustics, that there were two gunmen shooting at John Kennedy in Dealy Plaza, one from the front and one from the back. On the basis of softer but persuasive supporting evidence, the Committee concluded further that a conspiracy of more than two persons was probable and that the possibility of Mafia involvement was worthy of deeper investigation. The Chief Counsel for the Committee, Prof. Howard Blakey, was willing to be more definitive in a press conference. 'I am now firmly of the opinion that the mob did it,n he said. "It is a historical truth." (Quoted by Summers in Conspiracy.)
Sam Giancana was shot dead in June 1975, after testifying once before the committee and while negotiating with their investigators about further questions they wished to ask him under oath. Giancana was shot through the mouth—the sasso in bocca, traditional Mafia punishment for suspected informers.
Johnny Roselli was shot dead in July 1976, after he, too, had been called once before the Assassinations Committee. According to journalist Jack Anderson, Roselli had told him that he was not involved in the Kennedy assassinations but another Mafia "family" was.
The Mafia has acquired its international empire only because the most popular drugs of our time are illegal. In the past 40 years, the rulers of the Mafia have graduated from multi-millionaires to billionaires only because these absurd anti-drug laws remain on the books.
It is permissible in "liberal""educated" circles to say that these laws remain in force because of stupidity or conservatism or superstition. If you say the laws remain because somebody is making a profit out of them, you are supposed to be eccentric or downright nutty.
Nonetheless, the ancient Romans knew that the basic question about any social policy was cui bono? (Who profits from it?)
INTERLUDE & KOAN
In CIA jargon, a "useful idiot" means somebody who is working for them but doesn't know it.
My involvements with controversial politics have left me with one lasting legacy. Whenever I suspect that I am taking myself or my theories too seriously, I stop and ask myself, "Have I become a useful idiot yet?"
THE STATE AS CONSPIRACY
The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced.
—Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching
It is likely that the State as we k[n]ow it is an innately conspiratorial organism. As the sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out in his remarkable book, The State, there is no anthropological or historical evidence that anything like Rousseau's "Social Contract" ever happened in pre-history; on the contrary, the State appears in human affairs only after conquest by armed force. It is to maintain themselves in power over the conquered that a conquering elite create those institutions— police, army, taxation—that make up the skeleton of the State as we know it historically. There is no record of a tribal people peacefully "contracting" to set such a machinery of oppression above themselves. Conquerors impose it upon them.
Bakunin argued in God and the State that nobody has ever seen "God" or the "State." This, although startling, is true. Human beings, called priests, claim to represent "God," and other human beings, called civil servants, claim to represent the "State," and this metaphysical sleight-of-hand is alleged to justify acts which would be regarded as not only criminal but barbarous if it were remembered that mere human beings were doing these things. Similar verbal magic—meaningless words like "heresy and "treason"—are used to convince the victims that resistance is evil, escape or flight is just as evil, and even thinking that you are being victimized is somehow sinful.
In simple language, anybody who robs you is a thief, unless he claims to be an agent of the "Staten—in which case, he is not a thief but only a tax-collector. By the same metaphysical trick, anybody who murders millions is a lunatic, unless he claims to be an agent of "Gods—in which case he is a Crusader. You can resist an ordinary bandit with a perfect sense of righteousness, but you feel guilty about resisting the Churchman or Statesman, since that is called "heresy" or "treason"
Since the State was founded in conquest and is maintained by metaphysics (or, in the Logical Positivist jargon, "abuse of language"), it follows Oglesby's rule—"where there is no limit to power, there is no limit to conspiracy.
We have already cited Anthony Summers' book Conspiracy, to indicate that there is real evidence, not mere paranoia, behind the claim that the Mafia was involved, perhaps centrally, in the Kennedy assassinations. According to Summers' more recent book, Goddess, there is also good evidence that Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli had arranged for the electronic bugging of the bedroom of a house belonging to Peter Lawford, where Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy met for romantic dalliance in what they thought was privacy. Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters' Union, who had been imprisoned by Bobb's get-tough" Justice Department, was allegedly also involved in this plot, which was intended to obtain material with which Bobby could be blackmailed. A BBC documentary on Summers' book—"Say Goodnight to the Presidents BBC-TV 1985—supported all of Summers' charges.
Giancana and Roselli were both shot in the mid-l970s as we have seen. Jimmy Hoffa simply disappeared and has never been found dead or alive. Rumor claims he is buried beneath an interstate highway in Illinois.
Norman Mailer, many of you might remember, became convinced, while researching his biography of Marilyn Monroe, that there was some kind of "cover-up" connected with her death. Mailer even implied that there was a definite possibility of murder.
According to Summers' Goddess and the BBC documentary previously cited, there was indeed a conspiracy in which Marilyn's death was concealed for three hours while persons unknown removed from her house all documentia of her love affairs with John and Bobby Kennedy. The weight of circumstantial evidence suggests that this conspiracy was instigated by Peter Lawford, who had, as we noted, loaned his house as a trysting place for Marilyn's affairs, and who was also brother-in-law to the Kennedys. It is not demonstrable that Lawford ever thought, or allowed himself to think, that he might also be concealing clues in a murder case. He probably thought, or wanted to think, that he was merely concealing politically embarrassing sexual dalliances. The possibility of murder remains only a possibility, although it is still insisted upon by Hank Messick, a former consultant to the New York Joint Legislative Committee on Crime. Messick claims that unnamed informants in the Mafia told him Marilyn was killed to lure Bobby Kennedy into a trap and then blackmail him into ending his crusade against the Mob. All one can say about that theory is "Maybe.”
Nonetheless, another of John Kennedy's mistresses—although he did not pass her on to Bobby—was one Judith Exner. Ms. Exner, the House Select Committee on Assassinations later noted, was, curiously enough, the mistress of Mafioso Sam Giancana before, during and after her affair with the President. The Committee was of the opinion that it was probable that Mr. Giancana more or less shoved Ms. Exner into the President's bet, for blackmail purposes. Mr. Giancana, you may remember, was also suspected by the Committee of having a hand in JFK's assassination, and diet of gunshot wounds—through the mouth—while under investigation.
Another of JFK's amours was with a Mary Pinchot Meyer, a most interesting lady. She was married to Cord Meyer, a top CIA official who happens to be the only man to have received the Agency's Distinguished Intelligence Metal three times. Mary Pinchot Meyer was also a dear and good friend of Dr. Timothy Leary; and, according to his book, Flashbacks, Mary told Dr. Leary in 1962 that the CIA wanted to stop him and other scientists from publishing LSD experiments, because they wanted to keep the mind-altering properties of LSD one of their own little secrets. In 1964, about a year after John Kennedy was assassinated (or about two years after the somewhat mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe), Mary Pinchot Meyer was shot dead on a street in Washington.
Thereafter Dr. Leary was repeatedly arrested, and although every case against him except one was dismissed by the courts, he was finally convicted in that one case, which involved alleged possession of one half of one marijuana cigarette. He was sentenced to 37 years— although the penalty for that crime in that state (California) was normally six months—and was released after
serving over five years. Dr. Leary claims he was framed by the arresting officer; he also claims there was a cover-up in the shooting of Mary Pinchot Meyer. Nobody much cares what Dr. Leary claims, because for over a year before his release government officials had leaked to the press claims that he had become an informer. There is no record of any person or persons convicted on the basis of Dr. Leary's testimony, oddly, but the rumor has stuck to his name and "everybody knows" he is a government agent these days.
As the French say, it gives one ferociously to think.
