“And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” Revelation 9:6 (KJV)

“Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” ― Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (1992)

After their gig the Filipinos like to go skate-boarding at midnight down on the beach road. It’s their new craze, and a great way to wind down. They’ll come up to my terrace for a while before heading for one of their skating haunts, and by that time I’m usually ready to crash. And not ready to deal with the Dogs up at the viewpoint, who know the musicians and wave them through, but don’t know me.

Sometimes I’ve joined them in the daytime, though. On the road through Kata there’s a stripped-out commercial space that used to be a restaurant, which has been turned into a little skate park since the pandemic shut it down, and once or twice I found them there as I passed by on the way to the beach. It’s a great vibe, with loud music on, the whirr and clatter of wheels, and Mia rolling spliffs in the afternoon. Kittiya and Megan are there and Yam of course, and then Sasha turns up as well, so it’s almost the whole original Jamrock crew that camped out under the rubber trees throughout the second lockdown.

I’m feeling blessed as I mooch around watching my young friends and looking at the street-art that fills the concrete walls. I’m struck by this figure that looks very much like Santa Muerte — Saint Death, Sacred Death, Holy Death. I’ve heard of this cult, which is reported to be the world’s fastest-growing religious movement. Huge crowds gather at private altars in the suburbs of Mexico City to make offerings to her, to pray for healing or protection, and buy icons and paraphernalia. Santa Muerte is a heresy of the Roman Catholic Church, with its origins in Mexico but an increasingly widespread appeal throughout the Americas and beyond.

I’m staring at Our Lady of the Shadows and trying to decipher the ribbon legend when Megan’s brother Kyle comes over to bump my fist and see if I’ve got a cigarette.

I give him a cigarette and gesture at the icon I’ve been admiring.

‘Have you seen this?’

He reads the banner. ‘Live. Fuck…’ and chuckles. ‘Wait — Live, or Love?’

‘I don’t know. Live, I think. You know who she is? Santa Muerte. They say it’s the fastest-growing religion in the world.’

‘Ah! Yes, I have it too.’ He shows me his upper arm, a tattoo of a beautiful girl from shoulder to elbow. She’s not a skeleton, not at all, but her make-up, with dark pools of eye shadow and trick-hollow cheeks, artfully reveals the skull beneath the flesh.

‘Huh, yeah, that’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘So they have this in the Philippines too?’

‘I got it because I like it. But I heard of this Santa Muerte. They worship Death. But — why? I forget why.’

‘It’s maybe a macho thing,’ I muse. ‘Very popular with criminals apparently, as well as working class and poor people. I guess it’s like — I worship death. You think I’m scared of you?’

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Gangsta thing.’

And we leave it at that.

Our one, two, three beautiful girls hurtle by, weaving their hips to gain speed for the ramp. The space resonates with the clunk and grind of wheels and and reggae music booms around this space bounded on three sides by concrete walls and the other by shutters of dazzling sunlight.

Nostra Senora de las Ombras. Hermana Blanca. La Flaca.

But there’s more to it, of course. I first heard it mentioned by a martial arts expert offering self-defense instruction, who became more and more interested in the importance of mindset, going beyond the secular in developing a ‘metaphysics of protection’, and rebranding himself as Inner Guardians. He made the connection between our death-obsessed times and the booming popularity of the Latin death-cult. It’s an interesting point, remembering those frightening red numbers flashed up on billions of screens twenty-four hours a day, and most of the population submitting to the mystery shot. Seeing this image on the wall in this echoing micro-drome piqued my curiosity, and I started reading around a little.

Santa Muerte is said to be a ‘cult of crisis’, meaning that devotion peaks during times of hardship. As Señora de la Noche (‘Lady of the Night’), her protection is invoked by those exposed to the dangers of working at night, such as taxi drivers, bar owners, police, soldiers, prostitutes, and of course drug dealers and petty criminals. She appeals to outcasts — their choice of the heterodox cult over established religion is a form of rebellion against conventional society.

I’m beginning to like her more and more.

The image I photographed, I learned, is an example of the merging of Santa Muerte with Our Lady of Guadalupe — as shown by the blue shawl decorated with stars and the fiery halo behind her head. As ‘Guadamuerte’, she becomes a surrogate for the Virgin herself and the whole feminine archetype in Roman religion.

Lady Death. Madrina: the Mother.

Her deepest roots probably lie in her role as a psychopomp, like Anubis or Charon, the spirit-guide without whose help you will never find your way to the afterlife. Devotees of Santa Muerte have apparently begun to recognise their saint as a reincarnation of Mictecacihuatl, ‘Lady of the Dead’ in Aztec culture, and the traditional ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrations as her unofficial feast day, and this re-emergence of pagan precursors is supposed to have provoked a degree of panic within the Catholic hierarchy.

So it’s nothing new, this worship (if that’s the right word) of death. It only seems strange to our kitsch modern outlook, which neurotically avoids the contemplation of mortality considered so essential in earlier cultures. I can see how Santa Muerte might play a role in a ‘metaphysics of protection’, of which, God knows, we are badly in need.

Historically there’s nothing so unusual about it; it’s our culture, tongue-tied and shame-faced in the presence of death, which is the anomaly. It’s only to us, metaphysically illiterate and ignorant of the ways of the spirit, that such a thing as Santa Muerte seems strange at all.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

As this iatrogenic holocaust unfolds, with more and more hideous discoveries about the effects of the vaccine emerging week by week, these words from Psalm 23 keep coming back to me, dimly remembered from church services when I was a kid. I never thought they would carry such resonance in my lifetime.

The fear-propaganda was incessant. It was terrorism, what else can you call it? Bio-terrorist governments herded their people into the vaccine centres and a whole society to the brink of cultural and economic suicide. And from the fear was born Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, and other horrors few will speak of. I assume the Santa Muerte cultists sought the protection of their saint, not the needle. If the latter, they abandoned their metaphysics of protection for a cruel trap.

You can scoff, if you like, at crowds of poor peasants crawling on their knees, clutching their skeletal icons and chanting about death. But consider your own culture:-

In 2012, a strange ritual was enacted in London, as part of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, the thirtieth modern Olympiad. The ceremony, directed by Oscar-winning film-director Danny Boyle, with musical direction by Rick Smith of Underworld, was entitled ‘Isles of Wonder’ — and it must have made many wonder. With a cast of hundreds and some impressive puppetry, it portrayed the host country in a very strange light. The UK’s National Health Service was chosen to represent the spirit of the nation, realised as a choreographed vision of vast wards of sick and bedridden children, cosily wrapped in Victorian night-caps and gowns, attended by hordes of dancing nurses. Behind them was revealed an enormous simulacrum of a newborn baby. Looming over the whole scene: a huge, sinister figure of death in black robes like a witch, holding what might be a wand or a syringe.

There are narrative overlays celebrating bed-time stories and a rich tradition of children’s literature, from Peter Pan to Mary Poppins, but nothing could overwrite the disturbing occultism of that dominating stage image. What a bizarre way to represent the culture of the host country, obsessed, it would seem, not with health but with sickness and death. It comes across, in retrospect, as a weird foreshadowing of the panic of 2020, and the kitsch infantilism that accompanied it — especially in the UK, where, at an appointed time each week, people were allowed to leave their houses and stand on their doorsteps — socially distanced, of course — to clap and bang pots in the street, applauding their socialised health system even as it was actively engaged in forced euthanasia and medical murder. Even the motif of dancing nurses would return to haunt us in numerous ridiculous Tik-Tok dance-routines made by NHS staff with nothing better to do. And the giant baby revealed at the end, hinting at the birth of a new world, resonates with the rhetoric of the Great Reset and the Green New Deal, a Brave New World arising from the green transition and bio-digital convergence.

I wasn’t aware of this bizarre ceremony until someone unearthed a clip a couple of months into the first lockdowns. I was astonished. Why would anyone create such a vision, simultaneously insipid and nightmarish, cloying and disturbing, as prologue to a festival of athleticism? Could anything have less to do with a celebration of Olympic values?

The video is a fascinating social document; a haunting image, in my perspective, of the tendencies which can overtake a desacralised, demythogised society. That witch is no psychopomp — her spell is cast by the fear of death, but the bizarre vision does not represent the cult of a saint like Santa Muerte, but its opposite — she is the dark side of the nanny state and the cloying cult of safety: an impoverished surrogate for metaphysical protections. Be careful where she leads you.

Death is, of course, a portal through which any of us may one day fervently wish to pass. Not all, though. At a time when the transhumanist elites on this planet are trying to kill off the rest of us useless eaters, the super-wealthy are hoping to secure for themselves some kind of synthetic immortality through their Gilgamesh Project, hailed by the WEF’s Yuval Harari as ‘the leading project of the scientific revolution’. Death is nothing sacred, he proclaims, merely a technical problem, like any other disease. But even Harari sees something of the absurdity of the immortality project.

“Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, ‘amortal’ cyborgs, capable of living forever. But amortality isn’t immortality, because it will always be possible for us to die by violence, and Harari is plausibly sceptical about how much good it will do us. As amortals, we may become hysterically and disablingly cautious … The deaths of those we love may become far more terrible. We may grow weary of all things under the sun – even in heaven … We may come to agree with JRR Tolkien‘s elves, who saw mortality as a gift to human beings that they themselves lacked.” (The Guardian, Sept 11 2014)

While life-extension technologies will never, one assumes, be available to any but the wealthiest elites on this planet, the absurdity of Harari’s amortality can be generalised to the broad scope of Western culture as a concomitant of the deceptive cult of safety which paved the way for the pseudo-pandemic. In fact I’m tempted to adopt the word with only a slight change of emphasis, as a neologism to describe the specific emptiness of the entire technocratic worldview. Amortality… even as Harari uses it, the word evokes a spiritually impoverished condition, a cosmic ennui which in itself encapsulates exactly what it is about death that the human spirit should venerate.

Such a rationalised cult of public safety or ‘public health’ is always used to provide moral cover for totalitarian measures, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Union and The Third Reich. No doubt this is an example of how totalitarian doctrine arises from the atomised masses; the obsession with safety, the submission to a ‘nanny-state’, arguably makes a medical dictatorship inevitable at some point. At the same time it’s a symptom of spiritual malaise arising from a desacralised vision of life which shies away from the reality of death. The mechanistic poverty of the technicians’ vision carries the collective experience further and further from any sense of Logos, creating an increasingly dependent population which consents to its own irrelevance and loss of value. Thus the cult of safety ultimately betrays the materialist masses who follow it. ‘Amortality’… such a perfect word to describe that technological, unnatural limbo of pseudo-life, of not-quite-death, which is the best the technocrats can ever do do fill their God-shaped void. Against which, the veneration of death becomes a protest on behalf of the natural order, and a reaching out to energies which can never be accessed through fear.

A living organism is not a machine, but a consubstantiality of matter and spirit, sealed by the emission of a single photon at the moment of conception, joined by a silver thread which Santa Muerte will cut with her scythe at the moment of death. If she can no longer do that, if that thread can no longer be found, there can exist no distinction, and therefore no conjunction, between matter and spirit, and the organism is condemned to be either one or the other — which in this material realm must mean matter. The organism degrades into a machine, whose parts can be continuously replaced but which can only aspire to the condition of life; an automaton, as Descartes conceived of animals — a mere mechanism.

So it seems logical to me that life cannot exist independently of death: that the denial of one is also the denial of the other, because it’s the denial of that consubstantiality, that super-position of matter and spirit. To ‘banish death’ in these terms is merely to redefine the living organism as a machine, in a reprise of the grotesque Cartesian error.

No doubt Harari and his fellow amortalists would see this as abstruse and sentimental reasoning, primitive wish-fulfilment, all part of the same delusion that insists that human beings possess some kind of hidden ‘spark’ — yes, he used that word, without irony — a ‘soul’, or ‘spirit’, a life force that expresses itself in free will and the self-evident experience of being alive. To reject that notion, on the basis of crude data-ism, is nihilism of the most insidious kind, a materialist dead-end. Harari’s bloodless amortals will not inherit the earth; their way leads only to a deeper death, and they will find that out in the end, too late to pray to Our Lady for release. In the mean time, and as a matter of urgency, we need to recognise their philosophy for what it is —spiritually dead, politically totalitarian, hubristically insane — and reject it as a disastrous aberration.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If you enjoy my less formal writing, please check my alternative publication:

Parijah Diaries

COVID era music diary

By The Lethal Text

Writer gratuities much appreciated — https://ko-fi.com/thelethaltext

Parijah Diaries #1

It was March of Year One, 2021 in old years, 2565 in the Buddhist calendar. The airports were quiet, the masking and social distancing rituals still in force but nothing more. I got my taxi driver from the old days to pick me up at the airport and drive me to Rawai.

“How’s business?” I asked him.

“Business quiet,” Chat told me, “but traffic good!”

That was true, and we made good time. The tourist towns down the West coast looked gutted, with whole streets of businesses boarded up, but Rawai, with its large expat community, seemed almost untouched. A few businesses appeared to have closed, but not too many. Joggers still circled the lake, and Nai Harn beach was as full of beautiful people as ever. I rented a Honda Click from my usual place and drove up into the hills.

Jamrock seemed deserted. There weren’t even any geese on the road. The boat bar was locked, but I could see some lights down the hill under the trees, so I rolled down to the clearing and a beautiful surprise — Mia and William, living in the huts under the rubber trees. I’d always liked Mia, though I hadn’t known her well, since she had only ever showed up at Jamrock from time to time: she had a gig at a restaurant in Kata, playing every night with just one day off, and making good money. Sometimes she’d come for a smoke before her gig. Once or twice she brought her partner Megan, and they played for us. They were fabulous singers and harmonisers, very accomplished, a cut above the rest of us jammers. Filipino musicians really are something else.

They’d already been living in the jungle for a while when I showed up: though they still had their rooms in Kata, they preferred to camp out under the trees. Why sit in a ghost town waiting for something to happen and running up your electricity bills when you could be chilling in the forest? Megan came over most nights, with her friend Kittiya, half-Thai and half-French, one of the loveliest women you could ever hope to lay eyes on, and so friendly with it, so open and unaffected. Megan’s brother Kyle, his face a mirror of hers and his long hair an ironic contrast to her Sinead-O’Connor-crop, was living in one of the other huts. He’d had a good gig at one of the big hotels up the coast, but was hard up now, no longer able to send money home. And then there was Ska — drummer, joker, midnight toker — and sometimes Luna too, his wife, but they usually went home at night.

Apart from the Filipinos, there was big gentle Mod, heavyset, dreadlocked Thai bass player, a young Belorussian couple called Aleks and Maria — Sasha and Masha to their friends — and Dima, a quiet Russian with an army haircut, who understood more English than he spoke. There were often other people around as well, but this was the hard core who would gather under the trees every evening. Nueng, Khun Jarok, was still the tenant, but he was packing up to leave, dividing his time between Jamrock and Kata, where he was setting up a new place on his own bit of land. He could no longer make the rent on this prime location, and now the owner was planning to build a house there. So an era was finally coming to a close. William — Yam — was working for him, and he didn’t seem to be enjoying it much. When Nueng turned up after a hour or two, I detected a definite buzz-kill, and that was generally the pattern over the next few weeks. When he was there, he’d lie around in a hammock drinking beer, waiting for food to appear and needling people in that superior way of his. He laughed at me for not being able to hack it in Isan.

“Isan different story!” he crowed.

“Different story,” I agreed. “Different freakin’ book!”

I quizzed him about who was still around, and he filled me in. Hardly anybody, it turned out. Ai, Musa, Oye, Nan, Nai, all had gone home or elsewhere looking for work. Ai had gone back to his home town, where he was working as a hairdresser. Musa had found work across the water in Krabi. Samart, Tik, Nan, Nai, and Ut had all gone South, to their farms and families or looking for work, and that was the general pattern. A lot of people had left the island and others had come in — there was a lot of movement, a lot of change.

I went to see Chiney and rented one of the bungalows behind his restaurant, further down the soi, the last stop on this road to nowhere. It was beautiful and private, just what I needed. There are only three bungalows; each of the original partners had built himself one, but now they all have families or live elsewhere, so the bungalows are available if anyone asks. I was the only guest. But every evening our group would get together under the rubber trees.

It might be the end of Jamrock, but to be honest the vibe was better than it had ever been. There were lights in the trees and fire and food, plenty of weed, and music in the evenings. Nueng was the only discordant element and he wasn’t around most of the time. The new centre of gravity, the heart of Jamrock in its final incarnation, was tiny, sexy, talented Mia and her ever-loving Yam.

Mia had been in Thailand for ten or eleven years. Her older sister, Grace, was the trail-blazer, coming to Phuket to work as a singer in the tourist towns. When she got pregnant and needed to go home for a few months, she was honour-bound to arrange a replacement for her gigs. No problem — her little sister Mia would come over. Tiny Mia was a huge hit, and stayed on in Thailand even when Grace returned, making a good life for herself. Everything was perfect until Covid came, but these are resourceful people and they didn’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves. Grace and Mia joined with others in setting up a Thai-Filipino charity called ‘Music for Life’, doing live-streaming events and raising money to help support out-of-work musicians. The sisters were also making a little cash cooking and selling Filipino food to order: Yam was their delivery man.

Money wasn’t their only worry, however; they were all dependent on work-permits for their presence in the country, and work-permits were provided through their employers and in some cases would soon expire. Without work, how would they renew their visas? And when business came back, assuming it did, would they be able to do so without getting vaccinated?

That was my worry, too. It would be so easy for Immigration to simply add proof of vaccination to the documentary requirements for visa renewals. Just one more piece of paper you’d have to produce. To me it seemed odds-on that this would happen, it was only a question of when. A new vaccination-drive was ramping up in Thailand; the government’s main procurements were about to be fulfilled, after many delays. Suddenly the news was full of stories about case-numbers rising exponentially. To me, it was an open demonstration that the vaccine precedes the virus as product precedes marketing; that the virus is summoned up purely to market the shots.

During the first twelve months of the pandemic, Thailand had been only lightly affected, with less than a hundred deaths ascribed to the phantom virus. I’d spent the first lockdown on the farm in Isan, and so had hardly been impacted by it at all. I was aware that many people in the area had lost their jobs. There were curfew patrols, a couple of guys in matching jackets on a motorbike, flashing powerful torches across the dark fields… and the snitches, of course, reporting gatherings of over five people to the authorities. It happened to us a few weeks in — one night we were sitting around with a bunch of farm boys who’d sold us a stack of rice-straw, drinking Lao Kao and smoking from a bamboo bong, and we did get to singing a bit, but nothing too rowdy. In the morning Red got a call from a local official — and so did the boss of the farm gang — advising us not to repeat this behaviour. But that was about the extent of it, for us in Khon Kaen province. In Phuket, meanwhile, Ska and Luna were hiding like Ann Frank from health officials going door-to-door door; three times it happened, and three times they hit the deck, not moving or making a sound until they’d gone, which on one occasion, the last I think, was after fifteen minutes. They came three times, suits and white-coats together, banging on the door, calling out their names, and trying to peer in through the windows.

But all of this, Megan told me, was just fun and games compared to what was going on back home, where President Duterte had said that unvaccinated people should be shot in the street like dogs if they ventured from their homes. It was never official policy, but such a threat had to be taken seriously coming from this President, a man who’d been associated in the past with vigilante death squads, who boasted that he’d cleaned up crime in Davao by killing all the criminals, and promised in 2015 to kill 100,000 more if he came to power. Megan told me that in many families, one person would sacrifice him or herself and take the vaccine, just so that there was someone who could go out to buy food. That’s the word she used — sacrifice — and I wonder how many of these people have since died, making the usage literal. They should be canonised, these people, though I somehow doubt the Vatican has heard even a single one of their sainted names.

Early in the pandemic, June or July it must have been, I’d had a call from an old friend — a man with good contacts, who knows who to ask if he needs to find out what’s happening — and he told me what he could, confirming what I’d already worked out for myself: that it was ‘manufactured’. Interesting choice of word, I thought — as in ‘manufacturing consent’, a phrase usually ascribed to Chomsky but which actually goes back more than a hundred years to Edward Bernays. And I got the impression he didn’t just mean in a lab; he meant the whole crisis. As time went on, everything confirmed this — at the height of the ‘overwhelmed hospitals’ panic in the UK, a friend of mine in London had to go in for some minor procedure, and the experience bore no relation to the narrative luridly propagated on TV screens. “Totes empty!” she told me. Meanwhile Red’s brother, away in Korea, and out of work now, saw alarming reports about overwhelmed hospitals in Khon Kaen, and called her to ask if everyone was OK. Red has a cousin who is a nurse at Khon Kaen hospital, so she gave her a call. There was nothing happening at all, she was told. They’d had a grand total of one Covid patient — one. That person had recovered and been discharged, and that was it.

Once the vaccines arrived and public opinion had been softened up with ballooning case-numbers, new curfews and restrictions were announced. It wasn’t as draconian as the first time, when no movement at all had been permitted between towns, forcing Chiney to close the restaurant for several months, and to lay off most of his staff. No furlough scheme here, but he had no choice. This time round, bars, gyms and massage shops were shut down, but restaurants could continue to operate, with social distancing rules and alcohol bans. Live music and dancing were prohibited. People went back to wearing masks while driving around on their motorbikes, and shops made them compulsory. Sign-in books and remote thermometers reappeared. In my hideaway in the hills, I took little notice, and nor did Chiney; there was no rearrangement of tables, and his restaurant remained one of the few places you could still have a beer with your meal.

“Are you going to get it?” I asked Chiney.

“I don’t know. I wait, I wait.”

He did eventually, and so did all his staff. He just felt he had no choice if he wanted to stay open, or he would lose most of his customers. He had not just his family to worry about, but his staff — eight people he thought of as family, most of whom lived on site. The restaurant was very quiet, and they were lucky to have two or three covers in an evening. Chiney didn’t care that he wasn’t making money, he just wanted to stay open. “Or what everybody gonna do?”

Now the island, with its single land-bridge, was closed off once again, and no one could enter without proof of vaccination. This had a cascade of effects on me. I hadn’t reported my whereabouts to Immigration when I arrived from Isan. Anyone on a visa has to report to Immigration every ninety days, and every time you stay somewhere else you’re supposed to inform them. I didn’t even think about reporting when I arrived here, because I assumed I would be back by next time, as if I’d never been away. But now if I left Phuket I wouldn’t be able to get back in, and this is where my friends were. I was still in two minds what to do as the deadline approached. I booked a flight to Khon Kaen, not knowing if I would use or not — and in the end I didn’t. I couldn’t decide what to do, so I decided not to decide, and stayed where I was. And if they brought in a vaccine mandate for all foreigners, they’d have to find me, wouldn’t they? It would be much easier for me to blend in here than back in Isan.

I have a Swedish friend in Bangkok who’s been illegal here for what must be fifteen or twenty years by now. He has no bank account, uses a phone registered in someone else’s name, works for a teaching agency that gives the wink to his lack of legal status and pays him in cash, and clearly by now the system has completely forgotten about him. He can’t go anywhere, of course; even travelling domestically is a risk, so he stays in Bangkok year after year after year. Throughout the time I’ve known him I’ve always been in the enviable position, from his point of view, of having the freedom to come and go. But now I envied him, already off-grid and invisible and very used to it. Who is more fortunate, in these times, than a forgotten man?

I was sitting with Mia at the stone table by the lean-to kitchen, talking under the rubber trees in the dark, smoking. ‘You know,’ she was saying, “I was never quite believing it, right from the start…”

Sasha, hovering nearby, came swooping in when he heard this. “Oh my God, no, it’s so hard for me to hear this kind of talk!”

“So don’t listen,” I said. “Go somewhere else.” Next to me I could feel Mia chuckling silently.

“I can’t,” he said, “I’m making a fire.”

Sasha Flameboy was always making fire.

He had been expelled from Belarus after getting rounded up at an anti-government protest. He didn’t care, because he made his money online, some kind of advertising scam involving buying and selling fake Facebook accounts. When he was ordered to leave the country, he and Dasha went to Moscow and then headed for Thailand. He had every reason to feel pleased with himself, and at twenty-four he thought he knew everything. And don’t get me wrong: Sasha is a likeable lad, with an infectious energy. But he’s no expert, shall we say, at arriving at carefully considered conclusions. ‘Sasha logic’, I call it, and I can always make Mia chuckle with that.

It’s quite natural for people from his part of the world to be focused on their old-world problem: the resurgence of authoritarianism. They cannot necessarily be expected to see that there’s a different kind of monster entwining the West — something new and insidious, qualitatively different from anything that has come before. It’s not Sasha’s fault he can’t see that; most Westerners can’t either.

“It’s the Mark of the Beast, man. Whatever happens, don’t take it.”

He did though, later, when he wanted to go to Bali. He should have listened to his Russian friends. Almost every Russian I knew in Phuket had a fake vaccine record. The Filipinos seemed equally wary — I didn’t know a single one, at least among the musicians, who had taken the shot. Thais tended to be a little naive in comparison, and most I knew were willing to get it if they had to. Not Nueng, obviously, who doesn’t even have an ID card. But Mod had taken two shots, for the most loving of reasons: to protect his wife, who was diabetic and rarely left the house. All of Chiney’s people were taking it so they could keep their jobs.

The vaccine available in Thailand at that time was Sinovac, which, if I understood it right, did not use the mRNA/lipid nano-particle technology. Nevertheless it had already hurt some people; the local press carried the heart-breaking obituary of a beautiful young doctor in her twenties, newly qualified, who had fallen sick ten days after her shot and never recovered, dying a month later after a brutal series of heart attacks. A local weed bar owner named Yunik, who of course called his place UNIQUE BAR, was carried off by a fast-acting bowel cancer, leaving behind the wife and two small children he lived for — I know, I spent a lot of time at his place. I used to go there in the daytime to write, late 2019 when I came back to Thailand. He was such a sweet man, and his kid would often be there playing or napping, while his wife took care of the new baby. Later I saw her at the weed bar Ska was working at, and she looked completely desperate. I didn’t speak to her — she wouldn’t remember me, and didn’t look like she was interested in conversation with strangers — so I asked Ska what had happened. This was before we knew about turbo-cancer and the SV40 in the shots, so neither of us connected his death with the shot. But now I know. I didn’t hear many such reports. Most Thais received the Sinovac initially, and it was only when it came to the boosters that the Pfizer and Moderna products were pushed on them, since Thailand couldn’t get hold of any until mid-2021 — and that’s when the ‘Died Suddenly’ trend really started to appear in Thailand. A thirty-year-old lad dropped dead in Red’s village. Among her King’s Steps contacts, a popular volunteer labourer, sixty-three years old and strong as a horse, took his booster and never saw another sunrise. You have to understand that these farmers, men who don’t drink the local Lao Kao rice spirit and therefore live past their fifties, are not old — they’re crazy strong. Man, you have to see these guys work. Fitter and stronger, some of them, most of them, than I had been at any point in my life.

Later, a study of school children in Thailand found that nearly a third of adolescents who had received the mystery shot showed signs of heart damage, to whatever degree. Around the same time, it must have been 2023 or 4, Red would pass on some very strange news: six people had died suddenly from heart attacks, all in the space of a couple of weeks, and this in a village of no more than four or five hundred people. Six sudden deaths, and in each case, they said, the victim had just been stung by an insect or other bug, which seemed to induce the attack within a few hours. Not one specific species, you understand — scorpions, centipedes, multiple hornet stings, anything that packs a painful punch. The adrenalin response, I guess, triggers a heart attack and they die. Now everyone’s suddenly terrified of the insects they’ve lived with all their lives. But the really unexpected thing she told me was that now everyone in the village was talking about the vaccine.

Once Chiney became aware that the Filipinos were camping out under the trees half a mile from his place, he invited them to play an audition, laid on a lavish buffet for them as payment, and gave them a gig on Sunday nights. This was long before the restrictions on live music were lifted on the island, and as word-of-mouth spread about the secret gig, more and more people started coming — old friends of the band and new. For a while, I believe, we were the only live music anywhere in the area, and the vibe was great. The girls would start with quieter material while people were eating, but by ten o’clock customers were pushing back the tables and dancing. Adding Kyle and Yam to the band had beefed up their reggae/ dub repertoire, and with two acoustic guitars, Mia on the slaptop, and Yam on bass, the whole sound was excellent, with three top-notch singers and a dry, tight rhythm section underneath, a very cool modern sound. The gig was a life-saver for them, as well as for the restaurant, pulling in enough people each Sunday, Chiney told me, to cover the monthly salary of at least two of his eight employees. Once or twice I saw a police car cruising slowly along the jungle soi, just scouting around to see what was what, but Chiney never had any trouble with them. The only time police ever came to Chiney’s restaurant, in my experience, was for coffee once in a while in the late morning or early afternoon.

He’d had to close during the first lockdowns, and been force to shed some staff. This time round he simply ignored all the restrictions. He continued serving alcohol as normal, and certainly didn’t rearrange any tables in observance of social distancing rituals. I assumed that his friends in Karon police had told him not to worry. What I hadn’t understood was that the opening of the soi lay right on the edge of the jurisdiction to the South, and Chalong police had been pushing the boundaries a bit by coming down our soi, so there was a bit of tension about putting on live music. It was only later that Chiney told me he always sent a member of staff to the top of the soi, two kilometres away, as a lookout on music nights. I had no idea.

Occasionally I saw customers following the New Normal restaurant protocols I’d heard about: arriving in masks, removing them once they were seated, and putting them on again to walk to the toilet. They were tourists participating in the ‘Sandbox’ scheme, vaccinated and quarantined, traced and tested, and under legal contract to remain within the Phuket ‘Sandbox’ rather than travel around Thailand. Since I was on the farm in Isan for all of Year Zero, and stayed up here in the hills for most of Year One, these were the only times I witnessed these absurdities with my own eyes. It’s easy to forget — all that ring-a-ring-o’-roses medieval-style role-play actually happened. Did we just imagine it? People eating with masks on. Singing with masks on. Jogging with masks on. Swimming. Driving alone. No, it all really did happen.

I was a bit shocked to find that Mia was calling the new band ‘The Vaccinated Marijahs’. She’d had the name ‘The Marijahs’ in mind for a while — pronounced like Maria but with a secret spelling to incorporate ‘Jah’, the rasta word for God. I thought it was brilliant, but she was throwing it away.

‘What is this?’ I asked her. ‘Product placement?’

‘It’s a hoax,’ she protested. ‘A scam! You’re not getting it!’

I got it — it just seemed like a waste of a cool name to pollute it with such a horrible word. Maybe a hoax, but it was still participating in the lie.

Weekdays were still very quiet but with the people the band was bringing in, Chiney could cover his wage packets and only needed to make enough in a week to pay power and water and his other overheads. He laid out money on new gear for the band, mixer, speakers and mics, and with two guitars and three superb voices underpinned by Yam’s bass and Mia’s electronic ‘slaptop’ the sound was clean and good. They’d always invite me up to sing two or three songs with them towards the end of the set, and I’ve never sung with such a cool band in my life. They let me have the lead on ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley, which everybody seems to know these days — it must have been in some movie. A favourite finisher was ‘Who Knows?’ by Protoje, with Kyle doing the dub vocals on the verses and me and Mia swooping in on the choruses, bluesing up the reggae and changing the words in Chiney’s honour:

Who knows? Who knows, who knows, who knows…
I just go where the trade wind blows
Sending love to my friends and foes
And I suppose

That I’m free
To be chillin’ here with Chinee
Jah provide all my wants and needs
I got the sunshine rivers and trees
Green leaves

And I think we all know what leaves he’s talking about, says Mia, aside.

And so it was that, later, the Filipinos were sitting around on my wide terrace with the ocean laid out below us, smoking and unwinding after the gig. A necklace of squid boats blazed out across the horizon like city lights in the distance. The whole Filipino crew was there, including all of the musicians and Kittiya and two or three of their other friends. With us was an English girl who had taken a shine to the band and liked to come up on stage to sing a song or two in a fashionable off-key style I rather liked. She was attractive, self-assured, and already financially successful in her early twenties, having given up a tennis career to go into business. At one point she’d asked one of the girls, Mia I think, whether she was vaccinated — I don’t know why because I wasn’t following their conversation — and suddenly there was a moment’s awkward silence framing Mia’s softly spoken, “Nooo,” looking down, with a gentle shake of her Medusa curls.

The girl’s confusion was understandable, I guess. She’d come in from England on the Sandbox scheme, and I suppose things had been very New Normal for her, until she’d hooked up with these musicians.

“So what about the rest of you?” she asked.

For a second, everyone looked at each other with an embarrassed laugh bubbling under; these Filipinos, Mia and Megan’s gang at least, have very cultured manners, very smooth and unconfrontational. They don’t like to give offense, and there was already a growing social taboo around the whole subject of vaccination. But the pause lasted only a second or two — actually the precise interval required by pinpoint comic timing — before Ska, getting up to go to the fridge, broke the silence with three immortal words.

“VACCINE MY ASS!” he said, jutting out a hip, with a side-flick of the eyes towards the relevant part of his anatomy before disappearing into the kitchen.

Vaccine my ass! in his resonant, heavily accented voice, breaking the tension, and everybody laughed — laughed hard.

It cracked me up — one of my all-time favourite Ska moments, and there have been plenty.

The girl wasn’t laughing, but looked around, surprised, at everybody there.

“Nobody here is vaccinated,” I said, passing her the joint. “Only you.” Then took it back to skim a flame round the roach end, as was the done thing. A nice example of organically arising culture, I would say. No one announced it or made a rule. People saw someone do it, understood why, and adopted the practice without comment.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think she was so much worried about finding herself among the unclean, as just a little surprised. It had perhaps never occurred to her that there were whole swathes of people in this world who were not playing the Covid game; who were simply not participating. Instead we’d been passing joints, sharing bongs and singing together under the trees for months. It was a miracle any of us were still alive.

That girl distanced herself from our circle quite soon after that, but I doubt the injection thing was a factor — there were other plausible reasons. Maybe Mia had a spat with her, I don’t know. Maybe she was working flat out on some new business and had no time to sing. We’d met her boyfriend, who was significantly older than her and very much the possessive type. Anyway, I can’t read the minds of inhabitants of normie-land, the kingdom of kitsch. I haven’t set foot in the place for years. What do I know about these people any more?

But I did enjoy that moment, the look on her face, the perfection of Ska’s timing and, above all, the brutal concision of that three-word manifesto.

How many words had I wasted by that time? How many conversations and arguments with my normies back home, how many emails sent and ignored, how much research and discovery, how much strategising and agonising about how to get through to them; how to alert them without scaring them off, how best to pose the argument, how to introduce them to the disturbing reality, how to do it gently, how to mitigate the lethality of the text.

Not easy. Doomed to fail, in fact. It was sad and farcical, the way we groped to find each other through queasy miasmas of propaganda and taboo, and finally the giving up, the feeling of utter helplessness and failure. And to cut through all the crap and meta-crap with those three well-chosen words…

Vaccine my ass! from that big frog mouth, feral white teeth in that ugly-handsome face.

And a gale of laughter, requiring a lot of high-fiving and knee-slapping as well as bending-over coughing fits and a little bit of vomit from Mia. She did that a lot, though. Acid reflux. You’ve got to alkalise, sister. And you’ve got to hand it to Ska — he knows how to break the tension — and he really, really doesn’t like tension.

Now the Season is finally here, everybody’s working again, every room in town is taken, and good times are back, for now. They’ve legalised weed in Thailand, the strip in Rawai is decked in neon and bulging with improbable bodies, everybody’s making money like this is their last chance, and it might be, who knows? But for now, everything’s right with the world.

And I’m the same, just living for the moment. It’s the only thing to do. I’m very lucky to have wound up here, in this place, surrounded by great people, quietly living the dream in the middle of this global nightmare. And it does feel like a dream, really — like no other phase of my life, for sure. I think we were all kind of wondering when we’d wake up and find it was all imaginary like in some crappy soap-opera or reality-switch movie. And it’s a paradox, but I think that’s how life should feel; how reality does feel if you are actually in it. It’s a measure: the more you live in reality, the more dream-like it feels.

Too bad it won’t last — but then again, as the man said, what does? It even makes it sweeter: this bungalow on the steep hillside, this broad terrace above the ocean, where I’m sitting in sunshine drinking coffee and smoking a little weed (well, it is New Year’s Eve) as the morning chill fades. Blue sea brushed with webs of mist, curving away over the horizon, nothing between here and the Indian subcontinent. Later, there’ll be the road through the jungle, spatters of sunlight exploding inside my head as I pass through a tunnel of trees; then the joyful swoops and bends of the coast road — the sheer joy of jumping on a motorbike in T-shirt and shades still hasn’t faded. Gliding down the hill to a little seaside town full of tattoed people, with somewhere to go — my Bohemia. Yes, I found it at last, that mythical country. It’s not my bar but I chose the name. It’s where I play, now, and groundation for my tribe.

Jamrock is barred and gated, the boat-bar boarded-up and dilapidated, its floors overgrown with weeds and its stairs with barbed wire; the huts are smashed and roofless; that was its last iteration, a final reprise of the vibe that had stuttered and flickered on and off over the years. We will not see it again, but that’s OK: no one steps into the same river twice. Carpe diem, friends; I salute my unvaccinated Marijahs and all Jamrockers past and present. I’m happy I was there at the end, and the best part of it for me was always the chance to get Mia talking.

Like the night I told her about my father dying, six years earlier, and she told me a beautiful story in return.

Her father had been taken by a stroke at the desperately young age of fifty, a few years back. It was a visceral shock. She went home, of course, but could only stay for a week because of her job. When she returned to Phuket, she couldn’t bear just to resume her life as if nothing had changed. So every night, after her gig, she took her sleeping bag down to the beach and slept on the sand or climbed higher among the rocks at the base of the headland. She wanted to be alone; she didn’t want to be in familiar surroundings; it was unbearable that nothing should change except that her father was no longer in this world. She still had to play her gig each night, but afterwards she went down to the shore and didn’t go back to her room until it was time to shower and get ready again. She filled her mind with natural shapes and sounds, waves and rocks and roots and leaves, natural light and darkness, the sounds of birds, insects and frogs. It was more than two weeks before she felt ready to move back into her room and re-inhabit her life.

‘You know what?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I think you’re doing it again.’

And she said, ‘Huh. I never thought of that.’ Looking around. ‘The difference being that this time I’m not alone. We’re all here together.’

‘Yes.’

Because it was Mia’s idea, of course, when Covid came and shut everything down, to go and live in the forest. And I just wondered if it was a similar impulse, consciously or not, which made that seem like the only thing to do; a sense that something had changed forever, that something had been lost from the world, and had made her feel the same need to mark it with a change of life; to connect with sea and leaves and sun and wind, to be close to Nature or God or whatever is permanent in this world; to sleep out under the stars and wake to the sounds of the new day; a fishing boat chugging across the bay before dawn, and cockerels crowing all around these hills.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

This one for Mia:

If you enjoy my less formal writing — journals, short stories and so on — please also follow me or subscribe at my alternative publication ‘Parijah Diaries’, which is a Covid-era music journal with flashbacks and videos. This piece is a preview for Lethal Text readers. See you there, I hope.

PAID SUBSCRIBER BENEFITS
So I was trying to think outside the box while mowing the grass around our guest accommodation here on the farm, because friends are passing through at the weekend… what can I offer to subscribers that’s actually of value? — and I got an idea. Not so much a eureka moment as a ‘well, duh!’ moment.

Paid Subscriber Benefits already include (it goes without saying) a massive hug if we ever run into each other, and immediate beers at the nearest bar, but I admit that’s not terribly likely to happen. Or is it? So here’s what I came up with. Not a paywall but an open door, and the keys for a weekend (3 nights) at this guest accommodation on a beautiful water-and-shade biodynamic oasis in rural Thailand, + free ongoing one-on-one writers’ workshop. See my subscriber chat for details.

Western Society, it appears, is now completely in thrall to its Shadow. C G Jung taught that if individuals cannot confront their Shadow — the unacceptable, repressed aspects of the personality — if they deny its existence, then it will end up controlling them. ‘It is a frightening thought,' he wrote, ‘that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism.’ (On the Psychology of the Unconscious, 1912.)

‘Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the serpent of healing of the mystery. Only monkeys parade with it.’ (The Integration of the Personality, 1939).

What is true on the individual level is multiplied on the collective. Civilisations and societies have their own long, deep Shadows, and as Jung frequently emphasized, when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. Viewed in that light, all we ‘conspiracy theorists’ have been doing, or trying to do, is shadow-work to keep a society sane.

‘Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions,’ wrote Jung at the end of the second World War, ‘is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.’ (The Philosophical Tree, 1945)

I’m sure I don’t have to spell out why I’ve been thinking about Jung’s Shadow archetype. Podesta and Alefantis, Wayfair and Balenciaga, Frazzledrip and the adrenochrome factories — even the sickest rumours are true. Now, with the release of some of the Epstein files, the Caligula-level cruelties hidden by that dense, dark shadow are visible to all who choose to look. How many will, I don’t know. It is traumatising even to know about these things, and many will choose to protect themselves from the knowledge.

What is done to children in this world — the most lethal text of all.

I came across the quotation at the head of this essay in Geoffrey Ashe’s The Hellfire Clubs — A History of Anti-Morality (The History Press, 2000), the best book I ever picked up in an airport bookstall. I wonder if Ashe has been tempted to write a follow-up, so much has come out about sadistic networks in the US, the UK, and throughout the Western world since the book was written. Anti-morality is a theme that has only grown in relevance, and could sustain further development. Ashe was my introduction to de Sade, and that speech tied a number of things together for me. It is put in the mouth of an unnamed Swedish conspirator, a member of a Templar Lodge which aims to overthrow kings in the name of Liberty, but with no democratic or egalitarian motive.

Later I tried to find a more precise reference by force-reading Juliette, or The Prosperities of Vice. Twelve hundred pages of predictable dross, divided into six parts: predictable because the abuse and exploitation of the innocent by the vicious is the mundane way of de Sade’s world. The main characters themselves define the futility of their obsession: that outrage

“…has its limits, even for the superhuman libertines of a Sade novel. Their crimes have made them rich, and they live sumptuously in tasteful surroundings, yet at times their appetites become jaded. Restlessly they crave ghastlier thrills. Sade’s philosophy, in the end, defeats itself. If Nature endorses anything and everything, then you can’t really be outrageous; you can’t defy Nature, except perhaps by outdoing her. You can outrage Respectability as the rakes did in England, but to Sadian intellectuals that is a trifle. They yearn for a living mystique of outrage, and their own arguments seem to make that impossible. ‘When, sighs Clairwil, will I be able to do an authentic evil?’ Again, ‘Could I set the planet ablaze, even so would I curse the Nature that had provided only one world for my desires to feast upon’.” (Ashe)

This evocation of the ultimate and actual banality of evil is, for this reader at least, the only thing that gives any point to the repetitiousness of its storyline, with de Sade’s plodding, mechanical prose embodying a plodding, mechanical imagination. It was when I realised that each part was in fact the condensed version of an entire volume, and that Ashe’s quotation was buried somewhere in de Sade’s sprawling labyrinth of versions written over a period of four years, that I finally gave up.

The speech, however, is interesting, calling to mind that sentence in Aldous Huxley’s letter to the dying George Orwell:

‘The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf.’

(Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell, 21 October 1949)

Ashe’s quotation makes sense not just of Huxley’s teasing reference, but of the strange rumour that Juliette was Georges Danton’s favourite book, and the surprising fact that the French Revolution’s Constituent Assembly freed de Sade from the Bastille and gave him an administrative job — surprising perhaps only to a reader still suffering from some residual naivety as to the true nature and provenance of the French Revolution.

While the name of de Sade carries a certain fascination in the public mind, the fact is that as a sexual abuser, a predator, as a Sadist in fact, the man was a comical failure. Ashe’s portrayal of ‘the divine Marquis’ is laced with absurdity, though set against a nyktomorphic background of considerable darkness. Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, born in 1740 of a distinguished Provençal family, cuts from any sane perspective a rather pathetic figure. For one thing, according to a police description of him, he was physically repulsive — short, pudgy, and ugly as sin. For another, his abortive attempts to live out his sexual fantasies constantly landed him in prison. He was ‘a psychopathic pervert, but of an ineffectual kind’. His nemesis was his wife’s mother, Madame de Montreuil, whose implacable enmity, aroused no doubt by the fact that de Sade spent most of his time living with his wife’s younger sister, was a major influence in securing his various prison sentences. De Sade was a minor aristocrat, and where a wealthier nobleman of higher station might buy immunity, he was endlessly tantalised by his own vision of unaccountability, and never realised it except on paper. For de Sade, the sublimation of power into sex was repeatedly frustrated, requiring a further sublimation into fiction, and it is this that gives us a window into the tastes of those like him, men like the ‘notorious Duc de Charolais, who found women exciting only when he was shedding their blood’ (Ashe). While de Sade, in prison, whiled away the time by imagining such horrors, we must assume that others with greater immunity carried them out.

De Sade spent a total of twenty-seven years in prison and insane asylums, ten of them in the Bastille, where he wrote 120 Days of Sodom ‘in a microscopic hand on both sides of a hundred-odd small sheets’, glued together to make a forty foot strip, which could be rolled up and hidden. And so he remains a comic figure, not a tragic one. But it is a dark comedy, which gives us access to a bigger picture. Ashe writes, ‘Sexual infamy was the basis of the reasons alleged [for his imprisonments], but would not have condemned him in itself. Other French aristocrats of his time went further.’ He then floats an interesting speculation:

The plain priapic energy of an earlier generation, the Duc de Richelieu’s, was souring into passions of a nastier kind. Having lost status at home and prestige abroad, the nobles were tempted to sexual barbarities, explicit or disguised, as the only means of recapturing a sense of power.

And it is only about power, which is why the Marquis could be reconciled with the Revolution, and vice versa. De Sade, writes Ashe, ‘believed at heart in Liberty without either Equality or Fraternity’; therefore Liberty would only be enjoyed by power; and this is his definition of Libertinism.

De Sade was born in the wrong century. Imagine what a great time he’d have had in Washington or Palm Beach in the early twenty-first century, what convivial company he’d have had, how much he could have got away with, without ever having to spend a day in prison. Whatever else they are, Satanists and Baal-worshippers or just followers of pedophile fashion, the little Caligulas populating the Epstein files are certainly sadists, and the vile Marquis is the perfect model for such contemptible creatures.

I first read The Trance-Formation of America by Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips in 2005, in my third-floor flat on J J Cremerplein in Amsterdam. I’d heard about it somewhere and looked it up on the internet. It hit me hard, and writing about it brings back a sharp memory of that time and place: the weird layout of the apartment, the desk jammed into that tiny hallway, the clunky desktop computer, the sagging bookshelf above it, and the blue typescript I’d found on a Spanish website, riddled with scanner-errors. I could have sent off for a copy, but I couldn’t wait — and somehow it seemed more appropriate to read it like that in samizdat.

Cathy was abused from birth by her father Earl O’Brien, a worm-digger with a sixth-grade education in Muskegon, Michigan, who prostituted her to tourists and drug dealers, and used her in pornography. When Cathy was seven he was caught sending pornography through the mail. However, the state did not come to her rescue. Instead, her father was offered a deal: there was an alternative to going to prison — to sign his daughter over into the CIA’s mind control project MK-ULTRA, sub-project MONARCH.

Children below the age of five who suffer severe sexual abuse often develop what used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder, more recently renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder: a fragmentation of the personality through compartmentalization of memory. This splintering of the young mind in response to abuse too horrible to comprehend is a defense mechanism. “We do not suffer from MPD,” states one victim cited in an academic paper. “We survive because of MPD.” The CIA, like the SS on which it was modeled, was interested in the potential this psychological syndrome offered for mind-control, i.e., the obliteration of the will and the conscious mind, an induced robotic compliance and amnesia achieved through trauma, hypnosis, electro-shock and drugs. The sexually abused child separates off its thoughts, feelings, and memories of traumatic experiences. The response is more deeply ingrained with repeated abuse, becoming highly conditioned and hypersensitized, and recurring in the presence of even the smallest trigger. DID is a survival mechanism; the irony, of course, is that it protects not just the abused, but the abuser. The possibilities were endless: sex slaves for use in political corruption and control; programmable assassins, torture-proof couriers; and the potential for an undetectable infiltration of society by programmed androids, like something out of a Phillip K Dick novel.

That’s why, in the late fifties and sixties the agency began to acquire thousands of abused and expendable children, the vast majority of whom would not survive the programming process: even the most useful and successful would be killed off at the age of thirty, when typically the programming would begin to deteriorate. Cathy, abused from infancy and already dissociative and highly susceptible to hypnosis, was perfect for the project. She was a ‘Chosen One’, and her journey, like a twisted Rags to Riches tale, takes her to governors’ palaces, Nashville, and the White House.

Trauma-based mind control techniques, according to the authors, originated in research into multigenerational Satanist families conducted in Nazi Germany by the Schutzstaffel (SS), under the personal oversight of Heinrich Himmler. The research was resumed in the United States no later than 1951 under Project BLUEBIRD, which morphed into ARTICHOKE and MKNAOMI. The aim of these projects was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that asked, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preservation?” In 1953 Allen Dulles took over as director of the organization he had designed with the help of the top Nazi intelligence chief, General Reinhard Gehlen, and brought the various mind control projects under the umbrella of Project MK-ULTRA, headed by Dr Sydney Gottlieb.

Cathy’s abusers in the sixties and seventies, however, are not National Socialists or even Jewish supremacists, but Catholic priests, Jesuits, Rosicrucians and Vatican Knights. They span the full range of respectability, just like de Sade’s parade of judges, politicians, nobility, priests and monks in his pornographic novels. Since Cathy’s enslavement took place under the auspices of the US Government and military-intelligence complex, there’s a growing preponderance of politicians, up to and including Senators, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, future presidents, and foreign Heads of State, as well as military-Satanic elements, specifically in the form of the notorious Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Aquino, the psychological warfare specialist, Satanist, founder of the Temple of Set and Chaplain to the US Armed Forces. To these you can add a number of well-known entertainers.

It goes right — as Jack Ruby said — to the top. But it starts when Cathy was born to bottom-dwelling monsters. Earl’s father died when Earl was two, and his mother took to prostitution. His brothers and sisters were all ritually abused and grew up to be drug addicts, prostitutes, derelicts and pedophiles — and joined in the sexual abuse of Cathy and her siblings. Her mother was of a higher social class but also abused by her mother and uncles and aunts, who had been abused by their father in turn.

Cathy’s psychological response to the succession of traumas being visited on her young life was, of course, to repress the memories.

I couldn’t think to bring to mind the fact that my father was sexually abusing me when I was any place else, playing with friends or when I eventually went to school or anything like that — I couldn’t think to bring to mind the sexual abuse.

The traumatized child remains consciously unaware of the traumatic memories until they are accessed by a repetition of the abuse, or by hypnotic triggers. This is referred to as a memory ‘compartment’ — an amnesic cyst sealing off the trauma and allowing the rest of the mind to function normally.

Cathy, she relates, was first prostituted to Michigan State Senator Guy VanderJagt, who later became a U.S. Congressman and eventually chairman of the Republican National Congressional Committee that put George H W Bush in the office of President. Meanwhile Earl and Uncle Bob began ‘programming’ her according to MONARCH methodology. They decorated her bedroom in red, white, and blue paneling and American flags. Fairytale themes were used to confuse fantasy with reality, as well as Disney stories and especially The Wizard of Oz, which provided the base for future programming.

The lethality of the text, and the suffocating completeness of the world it encompasses — its storyworld, in narratological terms — is crowned by a peculiar weave of language and allusion. The exuberant wordplay of the pedophiles, the scrambling and inversion of meaning through programming themes drawn from traditional and popular culture, the interweaving of cultural references into an impenetrable hedge surrounding the Sleeping Beauty, seems prima facie far beyond anything that might have originated in the minds of O’Brien or Phillips. Along with the trauma and torture, these linguistic sophistries made up the spell under which Cathy lived and was used. If you ask her, ‘How do you do?’ she will reply: ‘As I am told, thank you.’ This is her world, and the world is too much with her, to the exclusion of mind, free will, conscious thought, integrated identity or a sense of time. Under constant control and mental scrambling, she is programmed through trauma, torture, electric shock, hypnosis, drugs — and through language and culture. The constant Satanic inversions and mirroring evokes the terrifying psychopathic silliness of de Sade or Jimmy Savile. ‘Some day my prints will come’, sings the pornographer. She is Pinocchio, a puppet still in the carving stage. She is Cinderella. She doesn’t know who she is. Wonderland themes keep her confused — the White Rabbit chivvies and harries her to appointments with the Wizard and the Lizard of Oz. Her captors do the Scarecrow walk, and link arms with her to march her down the Yellow Brick Road. It’s all lost time and Never-Never-Land, ruby shoes and glass slippers, Charm School and My Fair Lady. At Tinker Air Force Base she is the Tinker-Belle, undergoing high-tech tortures to install new programs. The themes are drawn from the culture, from fairytales to Hitchcock movies, from Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie to Freedom Train, Hotel California and ‘Every Breath You Take’.

Cathy’s identity-splits by this time included personalities for pornography, bestiality, prostitution and incest, as well as a personality for withstanding the psychological abuse of her mother.

The rest of ‘me’ functioned somewhat ‘normally’ at school. My ‘normal’ personality provided a cover for the abuse I was enduring, but best of all it had hope — hope that there was somewhere in the world where people did not hurt each other. This same personality also attended Catechism, a weekly class at our Catholic church, St. Francis de Sales in Muskegon, Michigan.

The hope that still lived in her ‘front’ personality focused itself on religion, and Cathy decided she wanted to become a nun.

I could not rely upon my family, the police, or politicians to protect me. The church appeared to be my answer, and I listened diligently in class and prayed religiously. I learned all about the political structure of the church, and was prepared for my first Confession.

But Cathy would not find safety in the Church, any more than she found it in family or legal authority. On 7^th May 1966, ‘dressed in white from my Catholic veil to my white patent leather shoes as was mandatory for making my first holy communion’, she was confirmed in the Catholic Church. Before the ceremony, she was presented with a rosy cross necklace by VanderJagt and a blue Virgin Mary charm by Father Don, the senator’s pedophile colleague in Project MONARCH.

As VanderJagt fastened the rosy cross and blue virgin around my neck, he told me I was now dressed appropriately for the ceremony in red, white, and blue. I could feel his breath on my neck as he fastened the necklace and instructed, “When Father says ‘Body of Christ’ and you say ‘Ahhh men’… you acknowledge that Christ is God made man, and that you know what men are for. When Father gives you the host, it will stick to the roof of your mouth unless you suck it off his thumb.”

That evening, after a reception held at her parents’ home, VanderJagt drove Cathy back to church, she alleges, for a “special evening service with Father Don”.

VanderJagt unlocked the rectory door of the old church across the street from the new St. Francis structure, explaining that we had to “have a very important talk now that I had eaten the body of Christ.” The talk, blood trauma, and sexual abuse that ensued conditioned my mind to readily accept programming throughout the years that deliberately merged both U.S. Government and Jesuit mind-control efforts for New World Order controls.

“I work for the Vatican, and now, so do you,” VanderJagt told me. “You have just entered into a covenant with the Holy Catholic Church. You must never break that covenant […] You must carry the secret to your grave. Keep it secret from your mom, dad, everybody.”

VanderJagt proceeded to fill my suggestible young mind with biblical interpretation that laid the groundwork for future “inter/inner dimensional” programming themes utilized by Project Monarch programmers to control the compartmentalization of memory synonymous with MPD/DID.

Then they bathed her in the blood of a slaughtered lamb — ‘blood-trauma’ is a repeated feature of important stages of her programming — and this was the Rite to Remain Silent, which was ‘anchored in the Vow of Silence which the Jesuit monks take not only to keep secrets, but so they can still their mind and hear their inner guidance. […] After the Rite to Remain Silent was installed, the voices of my multiple personalities that I had previously heard in my head ceased. In the silence of deliberately created memory compartments, I could only hear the voices of my abusers who created them… commanding my silence.’

After undergoing the Rite to Remain Silent, Cathy was prostituted over the next four years to Gerald Ford and Senator Robert C Byrd, among others, usually on Mackinac Island, a political playground in Michigan, where her family always vacationed. Cathy says she perceived Mackinac as a ‘different dimension’. After being used by these men she would often be driven to Niagara Falls by her father, to ‘wash [her] mind.’ On Mackinac, too, she met Pierre Trudeau, who had been in power for a year and whom she had heard mentioned in her family as ‘one of ours’. Father Don spoke of Trudeau’s ‘loyalty to the Vatican’. Cathy’s description and characterization of Trudeau, as of many of the powerful political figures to whom she was prostituted, is nuanced and detailed. She reproduces dialogue, details of clothing and physique, describes hands and genitals. Trudeau, according to Cathy, was not just a pedophile but a skilled programmer himself, who laid down programming themes. Cathy made numerous bestiality films for Trudeau’s consumption, continuing until she had outgrown his prepubescent preferences.

At the age of thirteen, too old for VanderJagt as well, Cathy was passed on to Senator Robert Byrd, an extremely powerful man. He was a Senate Whip, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and Leader of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which holds the purse-strings of government. He was also, by her own admission, the mentor and political hero of one Hillary Clinton; and a Grand-Cyclops in the Klu Klan Klan. Cathy O’Brien was owned by Byrd from now on, while her father remained her handler, instructed in how to raise her. While Cathy’s mother was having more babies for the Project, Earl O’Brien posed as a model citizen, coaching Little League sports, chaperoning school and church and Boy Scout activities, and judging sand-castle competitions and kiddie parades with Guy VanderJagt.

Viewed as archetypal narratives, de Sade’s dismal pornographic fantasies form part of a distinctly modern plot-line which can be described in Jungian terms as the persecution of the anima. The Jungian anima is the countersexual aspect of the personality — animus in a female — and it is through his relationship with the anima that a male subject develops emotionality and spirituality, creativity and intuition; Jung called it the ‘archetype of life itself’. (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Vol. 9i.) The persecution of the anima represents a diseased warping of the psyche against itself to produce a monstrous Dark Masculine.

Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa (1748) is usually cited as the inaugurating example of this genre, which now finds its extreme forms in child pornography and snuff films. The closest parallel to Cathy O’Brien’s experience of the world might be found in de Sade. Cathy’s situation is that of Justine, the innocent adrift in a world which only exists to persecute her, rape her, torture her, exploit her in a hundred cruel and ingenious ways; a world in which there is no one to turn to, in which the authorities themselves are the perpetrators; a world dominated by a sick ‘respectability’ which preys on the society that feeds it. Justine’s abusers in Justine, Or the Misfortunes of Virtue are noblemen, priests, politicians, artists. In Cathy’s world the perpetrators are no different — senators, presidents, priests, popular entertainers and celebrities. In Cathy’s world, likewise, victims are taught that there is nowhere to run, no one to turn to. In her thirty years of torture, rape and horror, she lost any hope of finding a single good person in this world. The fact that one arises, in the nick of time, is a miracle, an extraordinary anomaly from the way of her world, in defiance of the CIA and the sick hegemony of sadists which infests our politics and culture.

Justine is not so lucky. When her path finally crosses that of her long-lost sister Juliette, we are set not for a happy ending or rescue but for final and fatal acts of brutality. De Sade has been praised on the left for allowing sexual pleasure to women; however the only female who experiences such pleasure is an abuser on a par with or beyond any of the male characters. De Sade is sexually ‘progressive’ only in the sense that he celebrates the existence of female abusers. O’Brien’s text corroborates that, in the person of a prominent female political figure, a future First Lady though never President, who subjected O’Brien as a teenage sex-slave to what she describes as ‘her gross perversions’.

Cathy O’Brien’s account of her life was written down as a deprogramming tool and potentially a legal deposition should her case ever be heard by a court of law. It was never intended as a work of literature or even self-expression, since the deprogramming process requires emotional detachment from the victim’s reconstructed memories. In its deadpan style, then, it weirdly parallels De Sade’s lifeless prose, conflicting with its lurid subject matter. The shocks are registered all the more powerfully in the reader’s mind. Both texts give us a disgusting inside-out vision of a society eaten out from within by psychopathic parasites, in which morality itself is a deception believed only by natural victims.

And yet the nonfiction text is possessed of extraordinary archetypal resonance and structural beauty. As a Rebirth story it gives us the happy ending first, in Mark Phillips’ account of his own life and his motives in rescuing Cathy from her life-long enslavement. It takes us with beautiful logic to the point of introducing the love of his life, who will now take us back to her own horrific beginnings.

Live in Cathy’s world for as long as it takes to read her book, and it will never leave you. The text induces a double-image — you see through your familiar world and into the vertiginous abyss it masks. The circles of her hell, like Dante’s, are peopled by great names and familiar faces — these are not the tortured souls, however, but the leering demons. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Ford, Reagan, Byrd, Clinton, Trudeau, de la Madrid, King Fahd… It is the ‘realm of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen.’ (Archibald T. MacAllister, Introduction, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi.)

As the reality sinks in, the reader will begin to understand where this institutionalised psychopathy is leading. The point, for the criminal monsters involved, is not just the depravity, the child-rape and the snuff movies, and it’s not just the military-intelligence applications either; mind control is a tool for social engineering on a society-wide scale as controlled individuals are placed in positions of influence in all sectors, including entertainment and media, the professions, and of course politics, even, in one instance, the installation of a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ as president in the form of G W Bush. Mind-control, in the minds of these neofeudalists, is the key tool in the subversion of humane societies and the creation of a totalitarian planetary regime. Sadistic hedonism is the only bonding and control discipline sufficient to overcome social and institutional entropy and impose an impregnable new order.

That’s the vision articulated by William Casey, Reagan’s CIA director, in a speech O’Brien reproduces from memory. Like many of the other perpetrators, he speaks freely in front of mind-controlled slaves like Cathy, assuming she will not survive or ever be sane enough to tell her story.

“I have World Vision,” he says, “one of peace. By removing the more violent factions of societies world-wide and replacing them with faithful leaders of one world government and the one world church, global unification is imminent. It is a beautiful vision, and it came to me in dreams. God has moved me to move men. I’ve moved them here and I’ve moved them there — now it is time to remove them. My World Vision encompasses the world and puts to rest all tensions, strife, over-population and starvation. My vision is a World Vision, and the churches see it my way, as evidenced by their support of the cause. After all,” he proclaimed, “even the Pope and the Mormon Prophet know that this is the only way to peace, and they cooperate fully with The Project.”

Yes, just like Justine’s tormentors, Cathy’s owners punctuate their bouts of rape and torture with lectures on moral philosophy. They love the sound of their own voices, projected onto Silence. The Byrd chimes in along the same lines.

“You lost your mind anyway, and at least you have destiny and purpose now that it’s mine.”

His country’s involvement in drug distribution, pornography and sex slavery was justified as a means of ‘gaining control of all illegal activity world-wide’ to fund Black Budget covert activity that would ‘bring about world peace through dominance and control.’ He adhered to the belief that ‘95% of the world’s people want to be led by the 5%,’ and claimed that this can be proven because they ‘do not want to know about what really goes on in government.’

Cathy is used and abused by depraved establishment pedophiles and totalitarian sadists; she rises to be raped and abused by people of quality. She bears The Project a child, Kelly, to be tortured and raped alongside her and used to further manipulate her mind and instincts. It is only by an extraordinarily slim chance that she comes within the orbit of an intelligence-connected businessman, the late Mark Phillips, who has some experience of the early days of behavioral modification research. He recognises what she is, and what the research has led to, and his fury short-circuits his survival instincts. He kidnaps her and her daughter and takes them to Alaska, losing everything he owns in the process, and there he falteringly begins the years-long process of deprogramming the victims. The text which results — this lethal text — is The Trance-Formation of America.

It is not the Cathy we see now that Phillips rescued — when he first met her she was just a dirty little slave, dumb as a rock and dressed like a prostitute; mind-shattered, Jesuit-spooked, amnesiac-scrambled, all lost time and twisted aura, she didn’t know who or what or even how old she was. The woman who emerged during deprogramming, who reconstituted herself from these ashes, is a wonderful human being, intelligent, expressive, compassionate, and beautiful. Thanks to Mark Phillips, the Monarch theme, the butterfly archetype, was allowed to complete its cycle for once, through trance-formation to transformation, into what she really is, what she should have been and would have been if not born and traded among sadists.

As a ‘Presidential Model’, Cathy was to visit the White House many, many times. She was always taken in through the door marked ‘Service Entrance’, which her handlers told her said SERVE US IN TRANCE. And that is what she does — and as we read, we understand, it’s what we do too. As Cathy says, mind control is a sliding scale.

Serve us in trance: it’s the sadistic vision, the neofeudal, technocratic vision in a nutshell. I think that’s what Huxley understood. For the Vampire Class to achieve full sadistic Liberty, society must be completely subdued, denatured, mind-controlled, entranced. Trance-Formation, then, is not merely a record of the sufferings of one mind-control victim, but a signpost on the road to a totalitarian-sadistic World Order utterly hostile to humanity. We compartmentalise this knowledge, as a victim does the memories of abuse, to protect our sanity. But the programming is becoming unstable, the rite losing its power. As Cathy, who somehow survived her thirtieth birthday, closes out her seventh decade on this cruel and beautiful planet, she can survey recent developments with some optimism. More and more survivors are speaking out, emboldened by high levels of interest in the Epstein revelations across every demographic. The possibility, distant though it has always seemed, that we might finally break our trance and confront the deep, grotesque Shadow cast by our society — an event which would constitute a social and political singularity because of the sheer unpredictability of its effects — is real enough at this point to have triggered a degree of panic in the sadistic class, as witness their increasingly desperate attempts to trigger a world war: their old fall-back.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

You can support my work at:

https://ko-fi.com/thelethaltext.

(All contributions gratefully appreciated. Can’t live without coffee!)

‘Shame on you! Shame on you!’ chanted the protesters as Watt scooted like a frightened rabbit behind the police barricades blocking access to Downing Street.

In the following days, a high-level meeting at the BBC is said to have taken place to discuss the problem — that the Corporation’s hold over a significant section of the British public appeared to have been broken.

No one should have been surprised. Over the previous sixteen months the vast, sprawling apparatus of the coercively-funded, government-controlled British Broadcasting Corporation had acted as a megaphone for incessant fear-propaganda about an ‘emergency’ which was used to seize dictatorial power and strip British citizens of their livelihoods and fundamental rights.

A coalition of journalists, media and public relations professionals, Journalists Against Covid Censorship, drew up a summary of the failures of the legacy media to provide citizens with impartial information when they needed it most. It’s a pretty extensive rap-sheet. In common with the rest of the legacy media in the UK, the BBC had published fear-inducing and sometimes inaccurate news coverage, without providing proper context for statistics on Covid-19 ‘cases’ and deaths; it had failed to provide a balanced account of the cost and impact of the lockdown policy, while undermining initiatives such as the Great Barrington Declaration that offered alternatives to the government’s COVID-19 mitigation policies. It suppressed coverage of alternative treatments such as ivermectin, fluvoxamine and hydroxychloroquine, and failed to enquire into the methodology of the PCR process, particularly its suitability as a diagnostic test and the thresholds at which the tests are run. It commissioned hit-pieces targeting scientists who dissented from the dominant COVID-19 narrative, downplayed or ignored instances of adverse reactions to the vaccines, including death, failed to report on or condemn the routine censorship by tech giants of dissenting voices and opinions, and helped to foster a hostile environment for people who chose not to take the Covid-19 vaccine.

These are not trivial charges, and they apply most sharply to the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, whose performance during the pandemic amounts to an utter dereliction of duty and its weaponisation against objectivity and truth. The Corporation had revealed itself as a proto-totalitarian instrument of propaganda and censorship.

In September 2020, a huge crowd packed Trafalgar Square chanting and singing — “We are the 99%!” “You can stick your poison vaccine up your arse!” and “Take down the BBC!”

The protests were quickly stifled by a second national lockdown over the winter, but came roaring back in April of 2021, rapidly growing into the biggest demonstrations the capital has ever seen. The BBC monkeys covered their ears and eyes and pretended everything in the paralysed capital was normal. When it acknowledged them at all, it claimed that the marchers consisted of a tiny minority of ‘right-wing conspiracy theorists’. A few hundred of them, that’s all. A few thousand at most.

Lies don’t come much more brazen than that: footage of the crowds in Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall, Whitehall and Hyde Park on weekends in May clearly showed hundreds of thousands of people of all ages, ethnicities and walks of life; on June 12th, half a million by conservative estimates; on June 26th, central London was overwhelmed by a vast tide of people flooding in from all quarters of the kingdom, despite the extension of travel bans. It didn’t look like ‘a few’ anything. It looked more like a cross-section of the entire British public. It looked like everyone.

But anger against the BBC goes deeper than its role in spreading the government’s anti-scientific COVID narrative. From September 2020 onwards, anti-lockdown protests and their aftermaths included subsidiary demonstrations outside Broadcasting House, the BBC’s headquarters in Portland Place in the West End of London, as well as at regional offices in other cities. These were not riots, but demonstrations of focused anger and disdain. The BBC, naturally, did not report on them.

“Shame on you!” the protesters chanted, beneath the strange statue presiding over the main entrance to the original building.

“Take it down! Take it down!”

The statue is part of a series by Eric Gill, a British artist of considerable reputation when the building was opened in 1932 — a reputation posthumously destroyed when Fiona MacCarthy’s 1989 biography drew on Gill’s own diaries to reveal the sculptor’s serial incestuous pedophilia. Gill had journaled details not just of his extramarital affairs, but of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and one of his sisters. Even his dog was not safe from his attentions.

This knowledge makes it impossible to look at the Gill sculptures commissioned for Broadcasting House without another narrative emerging. The post-modernist insistence that an artist’s life-history has nothing to do with his work completely breaks down in a case like Eric Gill. The biographical information is, absolutely, a key to understanding these subversive artworks.

Posterity may have quietly discarded the memory of Gill as an artist; but the crowds chanting outside the building remember certain things which the BBC, and the British establishment as a whole, would prefer us all to forget. For instance, they remember the names of some of those who used to stroll in beneath that statue, which presides over the main entrance like a tutelary deity.

Jimmy Savile, for one — that is, Sir James Savile, Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Order of Saint Gregory the Great, philanthropist, disk-jockey, entertainer, charitable fund-raiser and volunteer, serial rapist, pedophile and necrophiliac, friend and confidant of the Royal Family, particularly Prince Charles; Savile wasn’t just knighted but given the keys to the kingdom’s dingier nooks and most vulnerable bodies.

When he died in 2011, his golden coffin had hardly been laid in the ground before victims started to come forward. As the scale of his predations began to emerge, so did the extent of the wilful blindness from which Savile had benefitted over the course of nearly five decades, and the inability or unwillingness of British institutions to protect vulnerable people from this twisted predator.

It’s not the first time a nation has been brought collectively to such a point. In the nineteen nineties, the people of Belgium underwent a rapid, forced awakening in reaction to the ‘mishandled’ Dutroux case. They responded to its horrors with a series of huge public demonstrations known as the White Marches to express solidarity and compassion for the victims. Marchers carried white balloons and wore white garments or face-paint. The colour was chosen to symbolise hope, but I can’t help having other connotations occur to me: shock; horror; anger. There’s an old English word which comes to mind: aghast, cognate with ghastly: deathly white or pallid.

Nothing like the Belgian White Marches happened in the UK at the time — but people haven’t forgotten. The anger goes deep.

Once again — as with Dutroux — it’s clear that Savile was a monster who had long been protected by bigger monsters — and why would those with the power to protect him do so unless they were protecting themselves? It was clear to any with eyes to see that this sickness went much higher in society than these depraved but relatively powerless individuals.

Savile’s huge, ostentatious gravestone, a tasteless marble billboard advertising his status as a ‘philanthropist’ and popularity as an entertainer, stood for only nineteen days before it was taken down in shame by his family. His name is now synonymous with a psychopathic narcissism reminiscent of a fictional grotesque like The Joker. You only have to imagine this blonde demon strolling cockily into that building under Eric Gill’s sculpture to begin to understand this undercurrent of anger among the protesters flocking to Portland Place.

Savile wasn’t the only one by any means. Once a comprehensive police investigation finally started in earnest, eight entertainers, producers and DJs at the BBC were arrested for questioning. Two eventually went to jail — the presenter Stuart Hall (OBE) and the children’s entertainer Rolph Harris (CBE). Hall was charged in 2013 with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault of young girls and children, and eventually sentenced to 30 months in prison. Harris was arrested in 2013, tried in 2014 and sentenced to five years in prison. The ongoing operation eventually ensnared the pop star Gary Glitter, who was finally jailed after going on the run in South-East Asia. Later, another rapist and child-abuser was posthumously identified — and this name provides an overlap with the political world — in Sir Clement Freud, brother of Lucian, grandson of Sigmund and an institution-within-an-institution at the BBC — whose name even comes up in the sad story of little Madeleine McCann.

“This is the cry of the mothers,” sing protesters outside Broadcasting House, “the mothers who know…”

“Hey! Pedo! Leave those kids alone!”

“TAKE IT DOWN! TAKE IT DOWN!”

The statue?

Or the whole institution?

Is it coincidence that a building adorned with pedophile sculptures should be found to house a nest of pedophiles?

First — are these ‘pedophile sculptures’? Or merely sculptures carved by a pedophile? Do they have a pedophilic subtext, or are we imagining it based on what the sculptor confided to his diaries?

There appear to be five of them in series. In their titles, they allude to characters from Shakespeare’s music- and magic-soaked romance, The Tempest. It’s a charming entertainment for a daughter’s wedding, full of mystery and spectacle, incorporating a masque — a show-within-the-show, combining acting, singing, and dancing with fantastical costumes and stage effects. The editors of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio (1623), gave it pride of place at the front of the book, presumably because of the evocative theatre-metaphor it uses and its clearly autobiographical central character. Behind its spectacular effects lies an intriguing allegorical structure of ideas, and although it is not one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays it has influenced many other writers, provoking literary allusions and variations as diverse as W H Auden’s Caliban on Setebos, T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, John Fowles’ novels The Collector and The Magus, and of course Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, an exiled ruler who transforms himself into a powerful mage in order to regain his kingdom. With him, stranded on a deserted island, is his daughter Miranda, who in Act V utters the words lifted by Huxley for the title of his satirical dystopia: ‘O brave, new world, that hath such people in it!’ Prospero’s only other company is a semi-human monster — Caliban — whom he found on the island, and Ariel, a daemon or elemental spirit whom he released from imprisonment inside a tree, in exchange for twelve years’ service.

As an immaterial spirit, Ariel’s power is not physical but psychological, spiritual, perceptual. He creates illusions; that is all he does. Even the terrible storm with which the play opens turns out to have been a mass hallucination. Ariel’s hypnotic power is evoked throughout by music, and Gill highlights this, the flute held by Ariel in the first piece recurring in all of the others. Through Ariel, Prospero can make people fall in love, fight each other or kill themselves. He can destroy his enemies without ever revealing himself; but although his temperament has its brooding, vengeful side, he continues to grow spiritually during the action and ultimately — prompted by Ariel — foregoes the vengeance he is in a position to exact. The play ends happily, in marriage, the forgiveness of old feuds, the reunion of lost children, fathers, brothers and friends, and redemption of the self ‘when no man was his own’.

The sculpture which attracts most attention at Broadcasting House is ‘Ariel and Prospero’, because of its prominent position above the main entrance to the original building, on its South face. Gill portrays Ariel as a small, naked boy, though at the same time a colossus, his feet resting on the globe. With his hands lifted above his head, he leans back against the robed Magus who towers behind him, eyes closed, a beatific expression on his face. Not just the boy’s nakedness but Prospero’s posture and facial expression are somewhat ambiguous. The effect is subtle, and you might wonder if it’s all in your imagination — that is, until you consider this piece in the context of the whole series.

The question here is — why is Ariel shown as a naked child? He never takes the form of a child in the play, although he does have a childlike curiosity about human nature which might perhaps suggest such a representation. His nakedness can be glibly justified in terms of classical traditions, as in the cherubs that adorn medieval and renaissance art. On the exoteric level, Gill in 1932 seems to be evoking the infancy of these magical new technologies, radio and television, which will one day ‘bestride the world’, to borrow another Shakespearean phrase. So this piece, in and of itself, has artistic justification, though according to the book I consulted, ‘Broadcasting House in the Nineteen Thirties’, Gill was forced to tone down aspects of the work he had completed for the building as a result of objections at the time. One of the alterations was to reduce the proportions of the phallus with which he had endowed his Ariel figure. Anecdotes recall his working on ladders dressed only in a long coat, and female employees being instructed not to look up as they entered or left the building.

The book lists three other pieces in the series, located on the West, East and North fronts of the building, but an online image-search reveals five pieces in all. Ariel is seen to grow and mature throughout the sequence.

In Shakespeare’s play, magic is explicitly a metaphor for theatre, the powerful new art-form of the English Renaissance, itself a revival and evolution of the theatre traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, and Ariel commands the magical special effects that entrance the audience. It’s a simple step for Gill to stretch the metaphor to the new broadcast media, with Ariel representing the immaterial propagation of radio waves.

In the first two pieces we see a visual embodiment of this technological metaphor, the angels’ folded wings echoing those of the heraldic eagles on the BBC’s coat of arms, the arrangement of their feathers evoking radiating electromagnetic waves.

These two pieces by Gill, both entitled ‘Ariel Between Wisdom and Gaiety’ (reflecting the BBC’s charter-obligation to inform and educate as well as entertain) follow the visual structure of the coat-of-arms. The second of the pair is located above the bookshop windows at street level. I’m not sure of the location of the first; the book accords it pride of place above the concert hall entrance on the North side, but Wikipedia gives that place to the last piece in the series, which would make more sense. In the first of the two it looks as if Wisdom’s right arm has been clumsily extended to take the hand away from where it would otherwise rest, and it makes sense to speculate that this version was replaced by the second, as another of the alterations Gill was forced to make to ‘tone down’ these blatantly sexual images?

In the original, Ariel’s face is turned towards Wisdom; in the second piece, towards Gaiety, who is holding Ariel’s flute in front of her mouth in a gesture reminiscent of the sign of silence. Wisdom’s left hand performs a similar gesture in front of her own lips. In her right hand, she holds an open book with the latin word OSCULTA — Listen! — inscribed across its pages.

The last two pieces in the series focus on the psychological power of music, dramatising its hypnotic effect. From my brief research I’m not sure where this fourth piece is located on the building or what its title is, but again it is a highly dubious visual image. Ariel, still naked, is now the largest figure in the tableau. On either side of him is a group of three figures, which seem to represent archetypal family groups of man, woman and child. Ariel is seated in the centre, naked, playing his flute. All six of his listeners gaze at him, entranced. On each side, the child of the family is closest to him and reaches out a hand…

In the final relief, Ariel is fully grown, a physically powerful figure now, and he has finally put some clothes on. The most important thing in this image is that the adults have disappeared. In a superficially innocent, exuberant image, the two children are completely under the power of Ariel’s music, dancing on either side of him and bunching up their skirts in their hands. Ariel’s stance both complements and contrasts with that of the children — he is not dancing but conducting the dance, embodying focused purpose, not abandon.

So what are we looking at in this series of sculptures? A surface text relating to the the media of radio and television and a subtext reflecting Gill’s secret life? Or are text and subtext inextricably bound together in a more generalised psychopathic scenario?

On the surface level, a powerful new technology is shown even in its infancy bestriding the world. In its maturity we see it dissolving the family, making the adults disappear and entrancing the children. The whole allegory is centred around music, just as the building is itself centred on an internal tower of cantilevered studios using state-of-the-art architectural strategies to isolate them from city noise as well as sound from other studios. BBC radio, of course, broadcasts not only music but spoken word and drama, but the music motif of the sculptures can be taken as symbolic of the psychological power of the new medium as a whole, not only its light entertainment wing. Even without the perverted subtext, the series reads like a parable of social engineering, the induction of a hypnoid trance that leaves its subjects isolated and vulnerable. The innocent surface text about the power of the new media is not elaborated merely to veil the subtext — the allegory is sinister on both levels.

The dramatist who used the name ‘William Shakespeare’ wrote his play for a daughter’s wedding. Prospero guards the honour of his young daughter fiercely, and everything he does, we understand by the end of the play, is motivated by his care for her future. Look at her the wrong way, and the mage will paralyse you, hunt you with spirit dogs, terrify you with visions of hideous winged furies and drive you to the brink of madness.

By contrast, Gill’s variation on the theme is characterised by a kind of sinister frivolity, which reminds me of something, I don’t know, maybe a track-suited procurer in a blonde wig, chomping on a fat cigar. Jimmy Savile was five years old when the building was opened. His key to the kingdom would be music; children deprived of protection would be his prize. Before his time was over, the BBC would become notorious for reporting on an event before it happened. In his Broadcasting House sculptures, we might say that Eric Gill somehow achieved the same feat. Like Savile, Gill seems to have enjoyed flirting with confession, lifting the mask teasingly, toying with exposure. The occult practice of hiding in plain sight gives the sociopathic artist a sexual thrill.

Perhaps it is true that what happens within a particular space depends on the kind of invocations that are made around and within it. Walk in under that statue mounted above the entrance like a tutelary deity, and you’ll find yourself in an art deco lobby. Here you will see a sixth piece by Gill, standing alone.

It’s called ‘The Sower’, and constitutes Eric Gill’s foreshadowing of the growth of a sick culture which ate the institution out from inside, turning it into a leering parody of all it was supposed to stand for.

Or maybe it was there from the start.

Thanks for reading The Lethal Text! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

You can support my work at:

https://ko-fi.com/thelethaltext.

All contributions much appreciated!

‘Never resist a sentence you like,’ wrote Jean Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990), and his incandescent style overflows with irresistible sentences. If you interrogate them, however — which is perhaps to ‘misread’ Baudrillard — you find that his beautiful paradoxes mask assumptions and transitions which must be explicit in a valid argument.

Take, for example, the passage on religious iconography and the death of God, leading up to the stunning epigram: It is through the death of God that religions emerge. A beautiful sentence, dazzling in its anticlerical hatred, and I’m sure that the first time I read it I applauded it to the echo.

The ‘death of God’ is, of course, a logical contradiction, since any definition of God must, a priori, include the property of immortality. To say that ‘God is dead’ assumes not that God doesn’t exist but that God has existed and no longer does. Death-of-God theology, therefore, is incompatible with atheism. And with theism, too, unless you worship a strange kind of God: one who is mortal. Death-of-God philosophers from William Blake to Hegel to Altizer to Paul Tillich and so on are not atheists, and for the most part they are not actually claiming that God has died. They mean that belief in God has died; that the connection with God has been lost, specifically in Western society.

But it is the contradiction that gives the phrase its glamour, its daring; the shock of the paradox. Friedrich Nietzsche, who did not originate the idea but gave it widespread currency, milks it — bleeds it, I should say — for melodramatic imagery. We are God’s blood-drenched murderers.

What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? — FriedrichNietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Section 125, tr Walter Kaufmann.

We should note that Nietzsche distances himself from these words by putting them into the mouth of his ‘Madman’ character, ranting at people in a crowded marketplace. This is a literary technique, and Baudrillard follows Nietzsche’s lead in requiring to be read more as a creative artist than a logician. Inspired by the romantic archetype of the German philosopher, post-war theorists like Baudrillard and McLuhan developed what was essentially a hybrid form, part argument, part incantation. The device of the paradox, which short-circuits the faculty of reason, is paramount in this form.

Nietzsche in his middle period appears to have believed that the Enlightenment released us from the necessity or even the possibility of believing in God, while challenging humanity to become gods themselves to atone for the deicide, having apparently forgotten that the pursuit of such a goal is the suggestion of a madman. Or maybe it was his followers who forgot. Faith in ‘homo deus’ would later be recognised as a core element in totalitarian systems by Hannah Arendt. Transhumanism is implicit, too, in Baudrillard’s simulation theory, in which reality itself becomes anthropogenic: this is the world the technological Übermensch creates, the limitless fields of simulacra he spreads before us.

Baudrillard takes the Death-of-God formulation as axiomatic, and is more nonchalant about it than his master. For the post-modern theorist, the Death of God is so automatic an assumption that it has lost the shock of paradox, and lives on as only as cliché that must be wrapped in further paradox to make it taste of anything. So God is killed by his own symbols, and without its ‘divine referential’…

…the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference […] in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination.

Then comes the phrase that encapsulates Baudrillard’s project.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

The idea of reference without referent, of ‘perfect’ simulacra ‘radiant with their own fascination’ is foundational to all of Baudrillard’s thinking about simulation. From this metaphor he develops his central theme of hyperreality, the fourth order of simulation which is ‘no longer of the order of appearances at all’. The word ‘never’ expands the discussion beyond the emptiness of religion to embrace all human culture; for him ‘the murderous capacity of images’ eventually puts at stake our access to reality itself, calling in question ‘the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real’. The perfected map, rather than becoming redundant, destroys the territory; not because it is inaccurate, but precisely because of its accuracy.

In the history of religion, there have been many waves of iconoclasm — the literal breaking of statues. Baudrillard refers to ‘the iconoclasts’, not specifying whether he is thinking of Christian, Jewish or Moslem iconoclasm, but regardless of creed he ascribes a new motive for fury against the image.

Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all […] This death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

Baudrillard’s iconoclasts understand that a God that can be reduced to symbols is already dead. Iconoclasts destroy religious icons not out of fidelity to an ineffable Godhead beyond time and space, but out of fear that the God they worship no longer exists. At first glance, a strange motive to impose on Sunni Moslems and Calvinist Christians over a thousand year span… but let’s grant as plausible the speculation that iconoclasm and fanaticism in general might conceal a gnawing fear that the belief for which the fanatic kills or destroys is false, that religious (or political) violence is engaged in as an exorcism of doubt.

The priest class destroys itself by reducing God to signifiers. The divine identity is lost under a mountain of simulacra, and we no longer know what God is. So far so reasonable. Does that mean we no longer know what reality is? Baudrillard presents the Death of Truth, like the Death of God, as an absolute truth; a new orthodoxy.

‘Henceforth’, he decrees, ‘it is the map that engenders the territory.’

There is a kind of shamanic glee to Baudrillard’s provocations. For him the most beautiful sentence is the articulation of a paradox. In philosophy, however, as in science, logical contradiction is a problem and not an adornment, but for the post-modern social theorist paradox is the whole game. In fact Baudrillard loves ringing that bell so much that it becomes predictable, like a rat in an experiment hitting the pleasure switch over and over again. It’s more or less a structural device: on whatever subject he is musing, he pursues the paradox, and when he has found it he moves on. Paradox is the cadence of his liturgy, marking the end of each verse of the psalm.

Is to read Baudrillard closely to misread Baudrillard? Perhaps. We can take his work, like McLuhan’s, as ‘probe, not package’, but we must be careful not to be seduced by his style into ignoring his sleights of hand. The thing is, having seen and named the phenomenon of hyperreality, Baudrillard makes it clear that he embraces it, wants to disappear into it. And that’s exactly what he does, over the course of his career. Paradox is his pass to utopia, the magic word that opens The Cave where he will chain himself in place and gaze at the shadows on the wall in a willing suspension of disbelief.

At what point does the literary lover of paradox become the skilled practitioner of Doublethink? ‘The simulacrum is true’: in Baudrillard’s four-word epigram we find the most economical and aesthetically pleasing expression of that Orwellian concept to be found anywhere outside of 1984.

And it’s brilliant. Doublethink as an art form.

Doublethink as an escape. Because of course that’s what it is, under totalitarian conditions, a survival mechanism just as dissociative personality disorder is a survival mechanism. But it means that this guide can take you no further from this point; he is not in the business of resolving his own paradoxes; he loves them too much. ‘The Death of God’ is a logical contradiction and a category error; an invalid statement a priori. These paradoxes — of the Death of God, the Death of Truth, the Death of Reality — can take you nowhere but in perpetual redirect loops. None of these things, by definition, is in the category of the mortal, regardless of their existence or otherwise. Truth cannot die, only the meaning of words be twisted; individuals and societies can destroy their connection with God, or lose touch with reality. But these are social phenomena, and have no bearing on whether such things exist or not. Baudrillard is a ‘social theorist’, rebranded as a philosopher. ‘The Death of God’ is social psychology, not ontology.

People lacking confidence or method in their critical thinking skills will always look for ‘social proof’; if they don’t know what to believe, they will simply do what most people around them are doing. Recent years have given us one of the most tragic examples of this in all of history. In normal times, it may seem a sane enough policy, giving a reliable indication of where the ‘fitness pay-offs’ lie, in evolutionary parlance. Unfortunately, fitness pay-offs are ‘not homologous with structures in reality’, to borrow Donald Hoffman’s phrase. That’s why conformity has always had the potential to turn deadly as reality shifts and evolves; fear of the white feather can become the distal cause of death for whole armies of people.

History has given us many examples of scientists who saw their work as merely uncovering the work of the Creator; and many, too, of scientific converts, whose atheism was rendered obsolete overnight by the implications of their discoveries. Since the scientific method is founded on disproof, not proof, one could reasonably argue that it is atheism that has been disproved by science, not theism.

Intelligent Design is an argument from science, not from faith, and is becoming increasingly hard to ignore, impossible to refute except through metaphysical contortions like the multiverse. As is theism, you might object, but the title of Stephen C Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis is well judged. The void left by the failure of the standard model, the Cartesian machine model, invites hypothesis, and theism is one — or a theory, we should call it. Intelligent Design should certainly be accepted as theory rather than hypothesis at this point, and a very powerful one. How does a theory become a fact? By ‘exchanging for reality’ in Baudrillard’s socio-enonomic terminology. But that exchange can only take place individually. Intelligent Design does not confer any knowledge of what ‘God’ is; theism tends to imply personhood, whereas ID, in Meyer’s disciplined argument, quite properly allows only on the descriptor ‘intelligent mind’ as a scientific conclusion.

What kind of mind? The mind of what? The reality behind the signifier ‘God’, in truth, must far exceed human capacity to describe or comprehend, scientifically or otherwise. The face of God is treated as a lethal text in the Book of Exodus; no one can look on it and live. There’s no need to smash icons, however. You might want to see them again; they are sacramental art. But we should expect that beyond proof of design we move beyond the ability to articulate in words or images at all. This is as far as science can take us. In looking for clues we seem to be much better served by going back to ancient sources. The ‘anatheistic’ process — the process of finding one’s way back to God after ‘the Death of God’ — has to be open-minded, non-conformist, syncretic, and to that extent collaborative, but ultimately it’s a completely personal one.

Buddhists and Stoics, drawing perhaps on the same ancient Vedic sources, conceive of the Universe itself as God. And that doesn’t mean the night sky, of course. It means God is everywhere, everything.

My own feeling is that we’ll know if God dies, because everything will cease to exist.

Or rather, we won’t.

Leave a comment

You can support my work at: https://ko-fi.com/thelethaltext.

All contributions much appreciated!

A COVID mask in the shape of H R Giger’s ‘facehugger’ creature? The idea came to leatherworker James Body right at the beginning of this movie, and by August 2020 he was marketing them through his Pirate Leatherworks operation based in York, UK. I didn’t come across photographs of it until about three years later. But what a brilliant concept. After all, as Nerdist enthused at the time, ‘It combines the safety we need with the horror franchise we love!’

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Ridley Scott’s Alien. In 1979 I was in London, studying for a PGCE at a college in Richmond, and having a free afternoon I took a train into the city to watch a movie. I’d been attracted by those posters featuring that weird xenomorphic egg and the tag-line In space, nobody can hear you scream, which established the suffocating tone of Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror film, and I don’t mind admitting that I watched a lot of it through splayed fingers. You have to remember how new the genre was, how gritty and realistic in comparison with what had come before — it seems incredible that it was made only a few years later than a film like Logan’s Run, or Star Wars for that matter. I suppose it also didn’t help that I was watching it in a huge and almost deserted cinema in Leicester Square.

The horror was seeded not just by the grisly special effects; it was as conceptually creepy as it was visually shocking. H R Giger’s biomechanistic designs, both of the creature’s parasitic life-cycle and of the eerie, visceral interiors of the wrecked alien spaceship, were unforgettably disturbing. There was something about the whole production that utterly spooked me, and musing later about the power of its effect I wondered if it was explained by our deep-seated, latent fears of our own bodies and mutative disease. The film was as frightening as cancer. I also remember thinking that I was less afraid of the alien itself than of the minds that could come up with such sick ideas.

Many years later I met one of the writers in Bangkok, where I was working at an international school. I was trialling a new way of constructing a literature course using narrative archetypes, inspired by Christopher Booker’s superb literary taxonomy, The Seven Basic Plots; Why We Tell Stories. I paired the works on the syllabus with other narratives which drew on the same archetypes, to bring out deep themes and structure. So for Comedy (i.e. the love story) I paired A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Avatar, which was all the rage that year; for Voyage and Return, The Great Gatsby with The Wizard of Oz; and for Overcoming the Monster, Beowulf and Alien. An acquaintance happened to know the producer and writer David Giler, who had retired in Thailand. I contacted him and invited him to come and talk to my students, which he did, and he was very interesting and not scary at all. Giler and the screenwriter Walter Hill had adapted the original story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. He’d been sent O’Bannon’s screenplay, which in his opinion was dreadful but contained one extremely powerful scene. Giler relayed the screenplay to the director Ridley Scott, who was looking for a science fiction story for his second film. Scott had a similarly low opinion of the writing and called Giler to complain.

Why are you making me read this rubbish? he wanted to know.

Have you got to the scene yet? asked Giler.

What scene?

Ah, well, said Giler. You’ll know when you get to it.

If you remember, the film opens with the crew of the Nostromo, a huge industrial cargo ship returning through deep space, being woken from stasis by the ship’s computer in order to respond to a distress signal coming from a nearby planetoid. Landing there, they find a derelict space craft of non-human origin, and three of the crew enter it to investigate. In a vast silo, Executive Officer Kane (played by John Hurt) finds strange egg-like pods, and as he bends over to peer inside one of them a creature launches out of it, smashing through his visor and attaching itself to his face. Back on board the ship, Kane is placed under observation in the medical bay. It proves impossible to surgically remove the creature since its blood is so acidic that to do so would endanger not only Kane’s life but the ship itself.

He lies in a comatose state for several days, until it is found that the ‘facehugger’ has fallen off by itself and is lying dead on the floor. Kane wakes up and seems fine. The tension is lifted, and the crew, in celebratory mood, share a last dinner together before returning to stasis for the final leg of their voyage.

And that dinner is the scene which Giler was waiting for Scott to get to in the O’Bannon script. As viewers, we instinctively understand that the tension must be released before ramping it up to even higher levels, so as the astronauts laugh and joke and enjoy their spaghetti, we’re uneasily expecting something to happen — that the threat has to re-emerge. We just don’t know from what direction it will come.

I’m sure you know -- it’s one of the most famous scenes in science fiction history.

The facehugger, we will come to understand, constitutes only one phase of the alien’s life cycle. It has deposited an embryo or larval form inside Kane’s body, where it has been incubating, and now it bursts out through his chest in a scene of extreme, blood-drenched horror.

Giler told me quite frankly that no one was happy with the way that scene looked on screen — the creature moves like the puppet it is, and runs across the wrecked table like a model on tracks. But it didn’t matter — through splayed fingers I was not going to see anything but what they wanted me to see, which was the monster’s brutal attack from the last direction you could possibly expect; that it was inside Kane, growing and transforming, and now ripping through its human host and emerging in imago form.

And the crew sitting down to that dinner, I feel, is where most people still are in our own sci-fi horror movie, which has been playing out for the last six years. Only a fool would think that the movie was over.

The public, jealously guarding its ignorance, remains oblivious to the scale of death and disability caused by the COVID ‘vaccine’. In 2022 the facehugger came off, the tension was released, and attention was abruptly switched to another monster, far away in Eurasia. This interlude has stretched out for four years already. The pandemic is all in the past, they think; the emergency is over; mistakes, no doubt, were made, but all in good faith, and now we’re getting on with our lives. And believe me, I’m grateful for every day of peace and mundanity, and trying to live each one to the full. But my bristling sense of horror has not diminished.

During this interval, global treaties were renegotiated and legislative loopholes closed; censorship provisions were progressively strengthened; mRNA factories were built, and the poison smuggled into the food supply; and we are periodically reminded that we must prepare for the next pandemic. In Bill Gates’ public estimation, Covid was a beta-test, enabling us to expand and refine our public health responses in preparation for what he called ‘pandemic #2’, which ‘will get attention this time (smirk)’.

Like the scene got attention.

Trump got elected. His Warp Speed project, some argued, had pre-empted the original plan to extend the lockdowns for years, collapsing economies worldwide and taking us into a totalitarian New World Order, or ‘Great Reset’ as Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum had rebranded it. That’s how it felt to me at the time, I have to say — but either way, it meant that the injections were untouchable without destroying Trump politically. Robert F Kennedy did good work reducing the childhood vaccine schedule, but was not allowed to go anywhere near the C19 shot. Pfizer acquired smaller companies specialising in oncology, to take advantage of the boom in cancer. No one was arrested, not Fauci, not Gates, not Bourla or Bancel… by end of 2025 it was clear that the president had been captured, and suggestions that he had converted to Judaism gained traction. Meanwhile his (deliberate?) fumbling of negotiations with Russia, and his steps towards the forced integration of Oceania under a single power-centre, led many to conclude that after abandoning their pandemic scheme the globalists had simply reverted to the age-old war model to achieve the same ultimate ends of hypercentralisation, population control, and the radical restructuring of society.

The mystery shots remained on the market. The deaths continued: heart attacks, strokes, auto-immune disease, hideous neurological disorders, and aggressive, fast-spreading cancers. But there was worse.

The masks were off, but the horror, when it re-emerged, would come from inside.

Have you got to the scene yet?

In January 2022, just as the UK government made its surprise U-turn and began dismantling its COVID restrictions, an embalmer in Alabama USA went public about the strange white bloodclots that had been obstructing the process of embalming some of the corpses he was asked to prepare over the past few months. Over time, other embalmers and funeral directors began to speak up. Whereas standard procedure had always used a single entry point into the vascular system to drain a body of blood and replace it with embalming fluid, now multiple entry points were often needed. With some cadavers, the process was proving impossible to complete.

The clots were white when rinsed, rubbery, tensile and resistant to solvents. Early descriptions compared their consistency to calamari. They retained the shape of the artery or vein from which they were taken, and in extreme cases could measure up to 19 inches. In a 2024 world-wide survey of embalmers, 83% of respondents reported finding similar white fibrous clots in (on average) nearly a third of their cadavers. Soon, doctors started finding them in living patients as well. Obviously, the growth of such clots would slowly and surely obstruct the vascular system, depriving the body of blood and oxygen, effectively strangling the host from inside.

There’s always a bigger monster. In Beowulf, after the hero has destroyed Grendel, the monster which night after night has been preying on the villagers, he discovers that the nightmare is not over. There’s a second monster — Grendel’s Mother — the adult form, far more dangerous. Grendel was just an adolescent; it is his parent, who waits in her underwater lair, that almost defeats the hero in the final battle.

By coincidence, the central computer that controls the Nostromo’s systems and takes care of the crew is known as ‘Mother’. It was Mother who detected the distress signal and woke the crew, Mother who allowed the stricken Kane back on board, Mother who enforces company policy.

In the discussion following David Giler’s talk to my class, I had let things flow for some time before dropping in any reference to Beowulf, the Old English epic poem which was, after all, the set text. I explained to Giler that our course was structured around narrative: not just text, but plot, story and archetype, and that I was trying to use Alien to focus minds on the structure and themes of Beowulf.

Giler approved: I’m very much a narrative man, he said. But Ridley Scott, he added, really isn’t. What he meant was that rather than simply narrating, Scott would get new ideas about the story during filming, sometimes late in the process, and this could make things difficult, to the extent that they had to write and film extra scenes post-production in order to make sense of his elaborations. One of these changes concerned Science Officer Ash, played by Ian Holm. Mother, it transpires, is following a secret company directive to ensure that the ship returns to Earth with the alien on board, regardless of the safety of the crew. Her tool is Ash, who, it turns out, is not human but a humanoid robot planted among the crew. When Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) accesses the computer and discovers the secret directive, Ash tries to kill her. Another crew member, the powerfully built engineer Parker, saves her life by literally knocking Ash’s head off, exposing the android’s inner circuitry. In a haunting scene added post-production, Ash’s disembodied head speaks.

Ripley: Ash, can you hear me? [slams her hands down on the table] Ash?

Ash: [awakens and starts speaking in an electronic and distorted voice] Yes, I can hear you.

Ripley: What was your special order?

Ash: You read it. I thought it was clear.

Ripley: What was it?

Ash: Bring back life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded.

Parker: The damn Company. What about our lives, you son of a bitch?

Ash: I repeat, all other priorities are rescinded.

Ripley: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it. How? How do we do it?

Ash: You can’t.

Parker: That’s bullshit.

Ash: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

Lambert: You admire it.

Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

Parker: Look, I am... I’ve heard enough of this, and I’m asking you to pull the plug.

[Ripley goes to disconnect Ash, who interrupts]

Ash: Last word.

Ripley: What?

Ash: I can’t lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies.

— Transcript, Alien (1979)

The emergent backstory, then, is that the alien, whether a natural life form or an engineered bioweapon in some intergalactic war long ago, eradicated the entire crew of the derelict alien ship. The company has used the crew of the Nostromo to acquire a specimen, to study and adapt to its own purposes, and this specimen is of far greater value than either the Nostromo’s cargo or the lives of its expendable human crew.

So I asked Giler a deliberately naive question, trying to bring the class back to thinking about the set text. In Beowulf, there are two monsters; the second worse than the first. In Alien, there is only one, but there is bigger monster protecting it, and that monster is the corporation itself, inhuman in its psychopathic pursuit of profit and power — ‘all other priorities rescinded’. Was that the film-makers’ intention?

Oh yes, said Giler. Absolutely — looking at me as if it was too obvious to need further comment. I hadn’t left him much to say, and I realised I should have framed it as open question. But the point was made, and I could see two or three students nodding in concurrence, so it was a bookmark we could return to in our next class, when we would discuss the archetype of the monster, the qualities of the monstrous.

I taught at that school for six years, leaving in 2013. Seven years later, the year of the lockdowns, a handful of the students I’d taught there got in touch with me to thank me for opening their minds and teaching them to have questions. Not many, but for every one who wrote, there must have been more who had the same thought but not my contact details. Maybe my influence saved some of them from making the terrible mistake that so many made the following year.

It was that leather facehugger mask that brought all this back to mind as the COVID frenzy faded from memory and the war system reasserted itself.

But in my mind’s eye I was seeing, not the embryonic creature bursting through the chest-wall of the unfortunate Kane, or the saliva-dripping teeth of the adult alien, inches from Ripley’s face; I was back in that vast, misty silo, filled with thousands upon thousands of eggs.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

You can support my work at: https://ko-fi.com/thelethaltext.

All contributions much appreciated!

FURTHER READING ON SUBSTACK

Laura Kasner, Clotastrophe. Results of the 2014 World-wide Embalmer Blood-clot Survey

Vesa Reports, White Clots — Overview; A Call to Action

Dr Phillip McMillan, Understanding Embalmers “White Clot Syndrome”

Kevin W McCairn PhD, Cadaver “Calamari” Amyloidogenic Fibrin Aggregates

These words constitute a naked, unadorned statement of the ideology behind the World Economic Forum’s project to ‘reset’ the world, economically, socially, politically, and even biologically. It is issued by one Yuval Noah Harari, Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lead adviser to Klaus Schwab, Director of the World Economic Forum. As a hyper-active ‘public intellectual’, Harari seems to have won the role of chief propagandist of the scientific dictatorship the WEF seeks to usher in under the banner of their ‘Great Reset’.

Harari has said and written a great deal about the new creed of ‘dataism’, and has used the same phrases in many interviews and articles, but this quotation captures perhaps his most brutally nihilistic formulation of the totalitarian reality he insists we are now entering, exposing the philosophy of the biodigital convergence in its most most reductive, anti-human terms. It is more than a political statement; its sneering, triumphalist tone — “the whole idea… that humans have this ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’… that’s over” — seems to reveal a personal animus against any such metaphysical ideas as offences against scientific materialism. However, as the student of history knows very well, to quote Hannah Arendt, “Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power,” (The Origins of Totalitarianism p345), and Harari has admitted as much: “Science isn’t really about truth, it’s about power.” This comes close to an admission that his own mechanistic, scientistic outlook, too, is predicated not on the pursuit of truth, but power-worship. And when he announces in his grandiose fashion the end of soul, spirit and free will, he is speaking not for truth, but for power.

Essentially, what the much-memed quotation describes is the human condition under totalitarianism. It’s a pathetic sight: dehumanised, denatured, desacralised; living without soul, spirit or free will; the living death of slavery. In Harari’s vision, humanity is reduced to automatism. Some would say that we are already there, to all intents and purposes already under totalitarian control, and no doubt many are, exhibiting all the signs of at the very least of a proto-totalitarian mentality which does not augur well. Listening to Harari I feel as if I’m hearing the official verdict on the dilemma posed by Theodore Kaczynski a quarter of a century ago: Harari is delivering the financial elite’s executive decision on the choice that would inevitably face them once machines could outcompete humans across all fields of activity.

“Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes ‘treatment’ to cure his ‘problem.’ Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them ‘sublimate’ their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”

From Industrial Society and its Future (‘The Unabomber Manifesto’) Ted Kaczynski 1995

The final solution to ‘the human question’ — depopulate or re-engineer? — at this point seems to be both. Depopulation and genetic control; forced evolution of the species; dataist centralised control over the devolved human animal.

We are ‘hackable animals‘, in Harari’s deliberately dehumanising expression, and it’s not like we’ve never seen the use of bestialising metaphors in propaganda before. So the ‘animals’ part comes across as a crude retro-insult, what you’d expect from a twentieth century Nazi or Maoist, co-opting an obsolete Cartesian worldview in which humans and animals were ontologically distinct, the latter being allowed no consciousness, soul or spirit. Descartes viewed animals as automata, merely sophisticated machines — and that’s the point, the machine-metaphor implicit in the word ‘hacking’. Human beings under totalitarianism have to become automata in order to survive; they become merely part of the machine. There’s a reason totalitarian systems are often called ‘soul-destroying’; there’s a visceral reality in that phrase.

“If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone. A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions, and can ultimately make decisions for us.

Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people.” (Speech at the WEF, January 2020)

Harari makes no secret of the fact that this ‘bio-hacking’ means under-the-skin biometric surveillance: in fact he trumpets the idea at every opportunity. His role seems to be to go a little further than his boss at the WEF in foreshadowing the totalitarian nature of the Reset.

Schwab will go as far as to say that COVID-19 “will also accentuate one of the greatest societal and individual challenges posed by technology: privacy. We will see how contact tracing has an unequalled capacity and a quasi-essential place in the armoury needed to combat COVID-19, while at the same time being positioned to become an enabler of mass surveillance… The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network…” (Covid-19: The Great Reset, Klaus Schwaab 2020, p44)

Harari is even more explicit. “COVID is critical,” he has said, “because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimise, total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.”

In interviews and presentations Harari repeatedly and insistently alludes to the advent of ‘under-the-skin surveillance’ using biometric sensors. How these will be installed in the human body he does not explain; he throws in references to ‘wearables’ and ‘implants’. However, the repeated use of a synonym for ‘hypodermic’ leaves this listener, for one, in little doubt that this is a reference to injectable technologies, the advent of which, as he says, changes everything.

“People could look back in a hundred years and identify the coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin, which I think is maybe the most important development of the 21st century, is this ability to hack human beings, to go under the skin, collect biometric data, analyse it and understand people better than they understand themselves.”

Biometric dataism, this worm with its head buried in the Umwelt of your body, is the logical evolution of what Foucault memorably called ‘the machinery of furtive power’: a parasitic infestation absorbing you into the mycelium of the machine; the creepiest thing imaginable.

Harari does issue the obligatory ‘warnings’, according to the dialectical method; like Elon Musk warning us about the dangers of AI, he draws attention to the dangers inherent in ‘dataism’, such as the rise of ‘digital dictatorships’ — really? — and ‘data colonies’: i.e., the populations of those countries which lose in the AI / mass data arms race. In truth it is inevitable that under such conditions the whole of humanity, including the technocratic class itself would constitute a data colony under digital dictatorship, and ‘dataist’ states would be not just dictatorships but totalitarian systems. All this seems inevitable in the dataist revolution, and Harari says nothing to suggest otherwise. What is interesting about Harari is not any such superficial or disingenuous warnings, but the assumptions he makes and his choice of language.

And this hubristic little transhumanist, this ideologue of techno-parasitism, this cleverling mouthpiece of furtive power, I have to admit — this guy really, really gets under my skin.

It is interesting to note that in Harari’s ‘macro-historical’ theory human success is explained by the ability to believe in mobilising ‘fictions’, such as gods, nations, money, corporations or an ‘imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism’, and this in turn allows them to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, in ways that even social insects cannot, and thus to dominate the natural world and all other species. With the word ‘fictions’ Harari loftily dismisses all non-materialist aspects of existence, on the crude assumption that no human concept or reification corresponds to anything in reality — presumably he would have no time for the idea that myths, for example, or gods, even, might function as analogues for truths that cannot be articulated literally. But let’s grant the general point about mobilising fictions, and merely note that a fabricated pandemic would fit very well under that umbrella. Michel Foucault’s chapter on Panopticism in Surveiller et Punir makes an important connection between epidemics and the growth of disciplinarian structures in society; in the light of this history, what is happening today begins to look like the culmination of a historical process rather than any kind of break with the past.

The transformative power of epidemics is celebrated by Klaus Schwab in his COVID-19: The Great Reset, and Harari has said more than once that the pseudo-pandemic ‘legitimises’ total under-the-skin biometric surveillance. These ideologues of the Fourth Industrial Revolution hardly bother any more to disguise the truth or their plan: they seem more interested in revealing the method.

Meanwhile the public continues in a trance-like state, heads buried in the parallel reality of government-corporate ‘news’, completely oblivious to the gaping plot-holes in the official narrative. All totalitarianisms, according to Arendt, create a fictional reality — a ‘system of delusion’ in Leo Strauss’s phrase, a ‘psychotic official narrative’ in CJ Hopkins’, gratefully embraced by the quaking masses:

“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in its ability to shut the masses from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers to the understanding of the unintegrated and disintegrating masses — whom every new stroke of ill luck makes more gullible — are, so to speak, its lacunae, the questions it does not care to discuss publicly, or the rumours it does not dare to contradict because they hit, although in an exaggerated and deformed way, some sore spot.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The mental state of the masses over the past two years and more has been a cause of bemusement to many of us who have stood outside the New Normal bubble, looking in. It seems impossible that they can’t see, or feel, what is happening, where this is all heading. In many ways the population seems to be, already, in a quasi-totalitarian condition: a whole society in deep denial. Most would dismiss the ‘Great Reset’, if they’ve even heard of it, as a ‘conspiracy theory’. They probably think we crazed conspiracy theorists have dreamt up Klaus Schwab from our own fevered imaginations. Looking at the man, I can’t help wondering the same thing.

Meanwhile Harari’s function is to lay it on the line for us, without much in the way of intellectual frills. Arendt argues that totalitarian systems never generate any original doctrine, drawing instead on what is already out there in society — and to that degree, as Catherine Austen Fitts has said, “It’s not ‘them’. It’s us.” The totalitarian movement will use what is worst in us to build its utopia, and what is worst in us is our apathy, our atomisation, our credulous fearfulness, our feelings of insignificance and helplessness, our moral cowardice and lack of compassion, and the miserable fear of death that haunts the mechanistic-materialist model. The rebellion must be philosophical, drawing on the deepest roots of human courage. Faith in an ultimate reality does confer a certain advantage in battle. But we can leave the argument over the human soul for another time. Let’s start by proving to ourselves that whether or not Free Will still exists, Free Won’t quite evidently does.

These words are from a brief but memorable conversation the journalist Ron Suskind had with Karl Rove, the chief political adviser and Machiavellian ‘teacher of tricks’ to the Bush dynasty. Rove was senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W Bush administration, as well as heading the Offices of Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Strategic Initiatives. The public knew him jocularly as ‘Bush’s Brain’.

Rove had a way with words, and these particular ones were spoken in a low-key aside, not exactly an unguarded moment but one which acknowledges — in carefully chosen words — what both parties to the conversation know but cannot say.

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality.’

I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W Bush, The New York Times Magazine)

Suskind published his article in 2004, leaving the speaker unnamed in the original article but later identifying him as Rove. It’s a revealing little conversation, and we are indebted to Suskind for passing it on. An empire which starts to believe that it creates reality sounds like Ozymandian hubris to me, but perhaps that’s taking Rove too literally. To ‘create reality’, in the political sense, means of course to simulate it, in such a way that a majority of people accept their first impressions as real. The fearful majority can then be used to hound and vilify doubters and ultimately force acquiescence in the deception, intimidating them into believing or pretending to believe, or keeping silent. This is the ‘engineering’ or ‘manufacture of consent’, as Edward Bernays called it — his definition of the role of mass media in a modern democracy.

When we act, we create our own reality.

Or as Baudrillard put it, The simulacrum is true.

Which is both a post-modern paradox and the ultimate example of Orwellian ‘Doublethink’. The power to create reality rests on the masses’ conditioning to resist Thoughtcrime, and their inability to perceive contradiction under conditions of fear.

As for his ‘reality-based’ designation, it’s surprisingly respectful — a refreshing change, at least, from being called a ‘far-right conspiracy theorist’, ‘climate denier’, ‘antivaxxer’ or whatever. Respectful too in comparison with the way people like us are viewed by our families, colleagues and the public at large. And yet, so far has the relationship between map and territory already travelled towards the ‘death of reality’, it is simultaneously a put-down. Under modern conditions, those who stake their beliefs on the reality principle are quaintly irrelevant, failing to understand the true reach of power. You’re not delusional, you’re just ‘reality-based’.

But that’s not what they’ll tell the world.

People like us, now, falling prey in ever greater numbers to Baudrillard’s ‘false desire to know’, were predicted and modelled and arrangements were made well in advance. The ‘reality-based community’ is no threat to the Empire: to believe that ‘solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality’ is merely laughable in the world of the noble, imperial lie. In Doublethink, ‘reality-based’, becomes a term of mild contempt.

Rove believed that the enemies of the lie are no threat, because the lies are so layered and extensive that they create a trap. The ‘conspiracy theorists’ become so fascinated by their ‘judicious study’ of reality that it incapacitates them. Their conclusions are academic; they make no difference in the world of the lie. Mesmerised by visions of the abyss, they are baffled as to how knowledge can be translated into political power. The weight of the new reality is enough to induce a defeatist paralysis, and the gazers into the abyss become isolated in a society they cannot affect. No matter how strongly based their knowledge is, the problems of communication, exacerbated by media stratagems and political theatre, makes getting through to people around them virtually impossible. How do you teach chess to a beginner so absolute that they believe no such game could possibly exist?

For the political class, as for Jean Baudrillard, the concept of ‘reality’ is obsolete; it is a bitter clinging to territory that no longer survives the map, or even precedes it any more.

And that, you should understand, is the desert you will wander in forever, if you succumb to the false desire to know.

And what about the other group in Rove’s binary? There has been some discussion, among the ‘reality-based community’, that is, about appropriate terms to use for a general public which rejects and derides those gullible enough to ‘believe that solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality’. We tend to call them ‘sheep’, or ‘the sheeple’ — those easy to lead, the natural followers, too timid to break ranks and too preoccupied to be able to articulate a question or notice a contradiction. Or we call them ‘normies’, blinded by their unshakeable normalcy bias. Or ‘NPC’s -- Non-Playable Characters , as in computer games, i.e., characters who are not avatars for conscious agents but programmed artefacts of the simulation itself. Some think such nomenclature unhelpful, not reflecting the proper attitude of an educator, which is what we should be: the ‘awake/asleep’ antithesis often engenders a counter-productive hubris.

Rove, meanwhile, has his own, rather colourful expression for this group. In public, politicians of course will flatter the electorate as ‘the great American people’ or whatever, but in the backrooms? Rove had his own phrase for the electorate, who think it is they who put governments in power — he called them ‘the Sucker Brigades’.

It’s a witty insult, with a kind of poetic economy about it. We are the suckers; another one is born every minute, and must never, ever, be given an even break, for so it is written. But why ‘brigades’? It seems counterintuitive — too structured, too active. Walter Lippmann’s ‘the bewildered herd’ feels more accurate. But this oxymoronic quality is what makes it such a witty phrase. In two words it perfectly captures the reality: the ease with which the suckers can be induced to give their consent to atrocity, triggered to hate, marched off to kill and die — or simply, as in 2021, to die. The cattle queuing, socially distanced, following protocols, as they waited their turn at the jabbatoir.

In coining the phrase, Rove was not saying anything new, just putting an old idea in a punchy new form. A hundred years ago, it was already apparent that the new mass media would be consciously and purposefully used to manage perception, shape attitudes, and fundamentally alter the nature of democracy. The scientific study of the human mind would be key to the deployment of effective techniques to engineer consent. Edward Bernays, generally acknowledged as the progenitor of the modern public relations industry, was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and the theory and practice of modern public relations, advertising and propaganda was founded on Freudian psychology.

Bernays argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society. At a time when the mass media consisted of radio, newspapers, printed posters and silent movies, he already envisioned — and went on to prove — that these tools could be used to ‘stereotype the public mind’.

National Socialism embraced these ideas and techniques enthusiastically and to world-changing effect. While it may be a figure of speech to say that Goebbels designed his propaganda campaigns with Bernays’ book open on his desk, it is not an exaggeration: the National Socialists were deeply impressed by American propaganda, which they believed had won the First World War.

The theme was no less avidly taken up by progressive scholars and theorists in the USA. Journalist and media guru Walter Lippmann explored theories of perception to show how a media system could be used to standardise, control and regiment the group mind. In his books he takes a critical stance:

And yet Lippmann was himself a public relations consultant to the government and a colleague of Bernays on the Creel Commission, which generated the propaganda to mobilise American public opinion behind entering the European conflict, thus proving that war could be sold in the same way as Coca Cola or Lucky Strikes. He argued that in a properly functioning democracy a specialised class must run things, analysing and executing, making decisions and exerting control through the political, economic and ideological systems. Specialists do the thinking and planning, and ‘manufacture consent’ (Bernays’ phrase, not Chomsky’s) for their plans through the mass media. In his highly readable 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippmann develops a sophisticated theory of stereotypes as the foundation – and means of control – of human perception.

And so the 20th century became the century of propaganda. The guru of the neoconservative movement, Professor Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, argued that ordinary people are not strong enough to gaze into the abyss, and must therefore be protected from reality by the construction of a ‘system of delusion’. In this he was specifically arguing from Plato: in his vision, the majority of the population are confined to a modern version of the Cave, where the mass media projects a wall of Platonic ‘noble lies’.

In such a system, those who are strong enough to peer into the abyss will be rejected by the mass, and heard only by the system’s ubiquitous monitoring devices. They must be infiltrated, identified, listed; ultimately, when convenient, they must be rounded up and disappeared. And yet, as reflected by Rove’s distinctive terminology, even then they will be more worthy of respect than those who march obediently off a cliff into the very abyss whose existence they have been taught to deny.

Lippmann, a little more kindly than Rove, calls the naive general public ‘the bewildered herd’. The herd’s role in a democracy is to be spectators, not participants— except when they are periodically allowed to vote for one or another member of the specialised or ruling class in an election. The ruling class and its specialised bureaucracy must use the mass media to control public opinion, “so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd” (Public Opinion, 1922).

That is, until it is decided that a bit of raging and trampling serves the interests of the ruling class. When the herd’s power to destroy, distract and escalate division is required, it will be used. If the ‘scientific manipulation of public opinion’ can overcome chaos and conflict in society, it can be used to unleash the same when required. The lifeblood of the oligarchy, after all, is a dialectic of conflict creation and management.

Lippmann mocks the naivety of a public which holds to the absurd belief that an accurate picture of the world can be gained passively, without effort.

“For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality or representations of truth to fall into their laps.” Walter Lippmann (Ibid)

What we have instead can be called, without any exaggeration, a Straussian ‘system of delusion’. Huge industries exist to manipulate public opinion. Governments hire PR companies to create fake ‘news’ reports which are aired by news organisations without attribution, in place of authentic journalism. The Pentagon and NASA have their own film studios. In 2012, President Obama signed a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) abolishing the legal prohibitions barring intelligence agencies from using the same propaganda techniques within its own borders as it does abroad.

Thus the media system in the West should properly be viewed as an arm of the military-intelligence complex. The CIA’s infiltration of both news and fiction media from the sixties onwards was code-named MOCKINGBIRD, and by 1981 CIA Director William Casey was boasting to Ronald Reagan that ‘We’ll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’ If anyone doubts the collusion between intelligence agencies and media operatives to control the narrative, they should consider the meeting that took place at Clint Murchison’s hotel on 21st November 1963 — the evening before the Kennedy assassination — which included journalists as well as future presidents, CIA officers and mafiosi (as revealed by LBJ’s mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown).

Awareness of this level of media infiltration and control has been building for a long time. In an influential essay in 1996, author Alex Constantine wrote:

“It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe – one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales – a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.”

This level of deception and reality-creation involves not only narrative repetition and carefully selected imagery: it also involves events enacted on the stage of reality, combining fact and fiction in varying proportions to realise Marshal McLuhan’s concept of ‘global theatre’ in an age of satellite technology. McLuhan envisaged communication satellites as enclosing the earth in a man-made environment — or ‘pseudo-environment’, to borrow Lippmann’s term — within which reality can now be shaped to the technocratic will. In his vision, the communication satellite “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theatre to be programmed.” (From Cliché to Archetype, p. 9)

It is sobering to reflect that technologies of deception have evolved as fast as technologies of destruction. Deployed by an infotainment complex in which government, corporations and intelligence agencies have long played out their noble lies in dynamic, three-dimensional live dramas, AI has vastly expanded the potential of geopolitical theatre to take control of the public discourse. As the extent of the concentric and overlapping webs of deception, simulation and dissimulation becomes clear, the observer must begin to see something very much like Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical ‘precession of simulacra’; we find ourselves facing a singularity of simulation, evoked by the Baudrillardian paradox of ‘the death of the real’.

Front-projection gave way to green screen… drone aircraft to CGI… crisis actors proliferated… The internet made a whole new range of psychological operations and experiments possible. Public opinion could be divided through self-reinforcing social media bubbles; social psychology and cybernetics were studied through the propagation of the Kony 2012 campaign; boundaries of credulity tested by the heavy promotion of Flat Earth theory; collective memory called into question through the ‘Mandela Effect’; historical continuity by the ‘Grand Tartaria’ fable. Truth could be drowned out by disinformation, a hundred wild conspiracy theories disseminated to froth the waters every time some truth broke the surface. In time, the overloaded public mind would be conditioned to believe that truth itself was obsolete.

There was a significant leap forward in technologies of simulation with the advent of Facial Re-enactment Software, enabling ‘real-time face capture and reenactment’. In tandem with voice-cloning technology and sophisticated facial mapping, the image of a real person could be made to appear to speak in an extraordinarily naturalistic form of high-tech ventriloquism. The technique enabled a completely realistic and controlled simulation of speech and facial expressions. The Bin Laden videos which were released sporadically throughout the years following 9/11 until his poorly simulated, posthumous ‘death’ in 2011 were transparent forgeries, using different voices and dialects and some very poor ‘look-alikes’. In the dying months of the Obama administration, it emerged that The Pentagon had paid Bell Pottinger, a British PR firm, to make ‘terrorist’ videos — none of which were very convincing at all, but that didn’t matter to the sucker brigades. In the future, as new technologies of simulation come into greater use, global theatre will be much slicker. In 2023 the US Army announced its intention to use ‘deep fake’ video techniques in its propaganda. The potential for reality creation using facial re-enactment software in the future is enormous, from the sabotaging of dissident voices to the creation of completely fictitious terrorist masterminds or political leaders. Strauss’s ‘Gentlemen’ — trained to appear like leaders but doing and saying nothing unscripted by the ‘Philosophers’ — just got digitised.

The history of the ‘noble’ or propaganda lie is as long as that of literature or philosophy; we have seen it evolve through all phases of narrative form, from authorial narrative to polyphony and enactment, from epic poetry to high-tech multimedia global theatre. So it’s no wonder that the herd is bewildered. A hundred years of perception management and psychological conditioning has created a population that resembles, intellectually speaking, Lippmann’s bewildered herd.

I was one of them — that is, until I left my homeland and in 2001 and, barely a month later, watched two huge towers collapse, live on television. It was another five before I had any inkling of the contradictions involved in that event. For a while, there, I was marching in the sucker brigades like everyone else.

Maybe I still am. Plato’s Cave consists, in its modern manifestation, of caves within caves within caves, nested together like Russian dolls.

New verbal amulets are issued from time to time – ‘fake news’, ‘misinformation’, ‘Russian hacking’, ‘climate-denier’; ‘anti-vaxxer’ – new bells hung round the necks of the cattle. Befuddled and bemused, they forget the dots before they can even think to connect them. By its moral cowardice, the herd vindicates the criminal elite’s contempt for them and justifies the predators’ own twisted ethics. The wilfully blind are no better than the predators who feed on them, goes the logic. Moral cowards wilfully ignoring a holocaust of innocents deserve what is coming to them; by their contortions to avoid the truth, they make monsters of themselves.

We are living now in opposed moral universes which are becoming more and more alien to each other. Speaking from my own experience, it has become nearly impossible to communicate anything important across this divide, as one camp obsessively pursues discernible reality and the other runs from it in a state of denial, clinging to manufactured myths. I find myself standing on a different continent from many of those I love; it is difficult to hold any kind of meaningful conversation across this yawning chasm. To them, I am a nutjob, a ‘conspiracy theorist’, living in an alternate reality and trying to impose it on theirs, insensitive to their feelings.

Whereas, from this side of the divide, they appear to be living like Truman Burbank, in an imaginary past, a static moment where everything is exactly as it appears to be. While intellectuals might be seduced by clever talk of liminalism and post-truth, al Dajjal (the One-Eyed, the Deceiver) is already here, on every screen, in every hand, weaving the Matrix around us. Without disciplined critical thinking, mutual criticism and debate, nobody will be gifted the privilege, or the curse perhaps, of escaping their engineered reality.

You might object that you’re harder to fool than that. I wasn’t born yesterday, you say.

And that’s true, you weren’t. Yesterday would be an improvement, actually. Without epistemology, memory or history, you are adrift in a sea of events, clinging to the wreckage of a society that never really existed; reborn every day, every minute.

Which doesn’t mean, paradoxically, that I shouldn’t listen to you. I remind myself every day that if a ‘non-playable’ character is part of the architecture of the game, then their function was never to listen but to deliver messages, some of which may prove essential to my own playability, my survival.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Almost immediately upon the onset of the great pseudo-pandemic of 2020-2, the name of the English novelist and essayist George Orwell, along with the title of his greatest work, enjoyed an extraordinary resurgence in public awareness, with quotations and memes proliferating all over the internet and even the streets as the relevance of his greatest work to our own times grew ever clearer. Within days of the first lockdowns, sceptics had tagged the syndrome Covid-19(84) — a formulation which encapsulated the proposition perfectly, and with an economy impossible even in Newspeak, that the emergency was being used, or had even been contrived, as a political tool.

Conscious UK rappers name-checked him as the most effective way of evoking the totalitarian nightmare that was about to engulf the Western world. Memesters quoted or paraphrased him, often to brilliant offect.

But here and there in the comments I’d see a rumour that had been floating around the internet for a few years: that George Orwell was one of theirs, not one of ours — an operative for the elite, a literary double-agent: in dissident parlance, a ‘shill’, one who has taken the King’s Shilling — and that his last and greatest work was written not as a warning to humankind but as an instrument of ‘predictive programming’; in other words, that his intention was not to avert the dystopian future he described, but actually to help manifest it by conditioning his readers to accept, not its desirability of course, but its inevitability.¹

The assumption is that in terms of the text itself it would be impossible to distinguish the functions of warning from conditioning: impossible to guage the author’s authenticity. It’s straight out of the book itself — under Ingsoc, anyone might be an agent of Goldstein; or an informer for the Thought Police. It transpires in the novel that even the rumoured underground rebel group — ‘the Brotherhood’ — has been set up by the Party as a fly-trap for dissidents, in an echo of the Bolsheviks’ own Operation Trust from the 1920s. The twenty-first century Truth Movement has no doubt been allowed to flourish for similar reasons, drawing in dissidents, though not so much to generate arrest lists as to map the human terrain.

The best way to control opposition is to make sure it is led by your own agents — that’s Disinfo 101. Beyond that, a paralysing atmosphere of mutual suspicion can be created by parachuting in disinformation agents whose task is to accuse others of being disinformation agents, triggering endless shill-wars and draining the energy of the movement — that’s Disinfo 2.0.

As I’ve heard it, the case against Orwell goes something like this:

1. Orwell — his real name was Eric Blair (which doesn’t help!) — attended Eton College, England’s most prestigious secondary school and a grooming stable for future politicians, diplomats and intelligence officers.

2. His great-grandfather was a wealthy man who married into the aristocracy and derived income from plantations in Jamaica. His father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and Eric Blair served in the Imperial Police in Burma before becoming a writer. His mother was from the wealthy Limouzin family; his maternal grandfather had timber interests in Burma.

3. One of Blair’s teachers at Eton was none other than Aldous Huxley, scion of an influential eugenicist family, brother of one of the architects of the United Nations, itself a prototype of the World State which Huxley went on to evoke in his own futuristic dystopia, Brave New World (1931). Huxley is presumed, then, to be a New World Order operative. The counter-culture researcher Jan Irvin of Gnostic Media has hypothesised that he may have been one of the architects of MK-ULTRA.

4. From this, the inference is drawn that Huxley became Orwell’s life-long ‘mentor’, feeding him information about the elite’s plans for humanity for him to draw on in constructing a masterpiece of predictive conditioning posing as a political warning: the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Critics will also lump him in with Bertrand Russell, another democratic socialist from a wealthy background, who supported population reduction and mind control (‘through injections, injunctions and diet…’) and H G Wells, the popular English novelist turned promoter of a technocratic socialist World State, or ‘New World Order’.

5. The fact that Orwell took wartime work at the BBC (where he produced cultural broadcasts for Indian audiences) is taken as confirmation that he was an MI5 asset. From 1937 to the present day the intelligence agency has had offices in Broadcasting House, and vets all BBC employees. So this must be Orwell settling in back at HQ. (Orwell quit his post when he found out that almost nobody was listening to his broadcasts.) His first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessey worked as a censor at the Ministry of Information during the war.

6. In 1949, Celia Kirwin, the sister-in-law of Orwell’s close friend Arthur Koestler, started work at the Foreign Office in the Information Research Department (IRD), newly created to disseminate anti-Communist propaganda by placing articles in the international press worldwide and providing information to their authors. Orwell received a request from Kirwin, with whom he had been romantically involved at some point, to provide a list of writers who should not be approached by the IRD on account of their Communist sympathies. Orwell obliged, providing a list of thirty-eight names.

7. His last two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were heavily promoted after his death by both the IRD and the US Central Intelligence Agency as propaganda assets in the ‘Cold War’ against the Soviet Union.

All of this is taken as evidence that the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist George Orwell was actually an agent of the British Empire and its intelligence services; placing all of his work — but especially his anti-totalitarian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four — under suspicion.

That’s the case in outline. If I’m missing something I invite anyone to help fill the gaps. Once in a while I have asked those who casually spread this calumny whether there is some concrete evidence they can point me to, but without learning anything new. Searching online, all I find is anti-semitic dross accusing him of having Jewish friends and showing a lack of ‘Jew awareness’ in his work. Expecting a man who risked his life to fight Fascism in the run-up to the Second World War to despise Jews is, I would suggest, not just a bigoted but an anachronistic smear. Orwell drew a veil, they say, over the role of prominent Jewish banking families in financing both Russian Communism and German National Socialism — but none of this emerged until long after Orwell was dead. Professor Anthony C Sutton, author of the explosive series of history books, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and FDR, and Wall St and the Rise of Hitler, didn’t begin publishing until 1974, almost a quarter of a century after Orwell’s death.

The rumours seem to have taken off after the blogger Miles Mathis ‘outed’ Orwell in the course of a 2015 post about Noam Chomsky. There are ‘red flags’ all over Orwell, he writes. He came from ‘vast pools of wealth’. He wore a Hitler-style moustache ‘throughout the war’. (The photo he uses is from the mid-twenties, in Burma. He’s in uniform because he’s in the Imperial Indian Police. It’s the only photo I’ve seen of him wearing this style of moustache, fashionable in the military at the time, after which he switched to the Clark Gable pencil style which he wore throughout the thirties and forties. Does Mathis never have second thoughts about what he commits to pdf?) He goes on: most people think the portrait of Big Brother used on some editions was modelled on Hitler but really it was a portrait of Orwell himself! (In fact on its publication Nineteen Eighty-Four was universally recognised as what it was, a projection of Stalinism into a post-revolutionary future in England, and Big Brother as modelled on ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin, who was rarely seen in public.) When Orwell immersed himself in working-class life, homelessness and poverty, he was really ‘spying’ on the poor. He published in left-wing journals which were later exposed as having received CIA funding. (Again, this didn’t come out until fifteen years or more after Orwell’s death.) What else? Oh yes, going back to Eton, it seems that his principal tutor, the historian A S F Gow, may or may not have been the ‘fifth man’ in the Burgess-McClean Cambridge spy-ring. If so, then Gow was spying for the Soviets. So this is a very confused picture — a young man with a Hitler moustache, recruited by a Soviet spy to write anti-Communist polemics? To Mathis it’s all the same — it’s just ‘Intel’.

If I’ve got it right — Mathis does not make his argument explicit, relying instead on sarcasm and innuendo — the accusation is this: that although Orwell gave every evidence of detesting imperialism and being prepared to oppose totalitarianism to the death, really he was working for the totalitarians — all of them; that by condemning, satirising and lampooning totalitarianism he was actually serving its agenda by conditioning his readers to accept the inevitable victory of Big Brother.

These rudimentary and ludicrous remarks by Mathis, rather than the more painstaking research of Jan Irvin, probably sparked the current trend of ‘exposing’ Orwell as a ‘shill’, which in recent years has reached a pitch of solipsism I find amazing. I caught a hilarious bit of chat, with an obviously Mathis-inspired conspiratainment crew who call themselves The Sheep Farm, which went something like this: only a handful of photographs of George Orwell exist, and in some of them he looks like a different person. Therefore we have no way of knowing whether he even existed; for all we know, his books were written by a committee. Throughout his career he wrote social commentaries, and then suddenly produced these two political satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which have nothing in common with his previous work and ‘came out of nowhere’.

And the interviewer, James Delingpole, unforgivably fails to object: ‘Hang on — out of nowhere? I think you might be forgetting about Catalonia.’ Instead he immediately buys into it and starts mourning another fallen icon, perfectly ready to countenance that most Stalinist of tactics, the ‘unpersoning’ of George Orwell, and write him out of history.

This kind of nihilistic, hands-free, competitive conspiracy freestyling is very fashionable at the moment, with the incomprehensibly popular Miles Mathis as its doyen. For George, it’s all déjà vu; he’s been through this kind of smear-campaign before. Orwell was put on trial in absentia by the NKVD² in Barcelona, remember? Mathis implies that he was convicted of being a British agent, which is not the case: the charge was simply that he was a member of the POUM, the Spanish Communist militia which was not affiliated to Moscow, and that was its crime. The NKVD decreed that those who would not submit to Moscow’s leadership were ‘hindering the war effort’ and were therefore ‘objectively fascist’. Isn’t that beautiful totalitarian logic? Orwellian, you might say.

Andres Nin, leader of the POUM, was arrested, tortured and murdered. The Belgian Georges Kopp, Orwell’s friend and commander, was arrested and tortured for eighteen months. Mathis and the Sheep Farm don’t talk about this. Presumably they haven’t read Homage to Catalonia. Mathis’ perfunctory research, and the boys follow his lead in this, is sourced entirely from Wikipedia; none of his premises are based in the writing itself. The thing about Mathis and those he inspires is that he thinks that everything can be faked. They think that great literature can be produced to order, and I know it can’t. It has to come from somewhere.

Mathis makes no claim to be a student of literature, and does not comment on any aspect of Orwell’s work beyond its broadest outlines. He writes mainly about mathematics and physics, correcting the fundamental errors of Newton, Leibniz and Einstein, and he may be a genius in his field for all I know, though it’s noticeable that even in these areas of study he has a tendency to dismiss those who disagree with him as ‘agents’, ‘planted critics’ and so on.

In terms of what exactly is supposed to be so pernicious about Orwell’s work, all I can find is the assertion that Animal Farm is an anti-revolutionary tract. To that I suppose Orwell must plead guilty, since he described himself as a democratic socialist. Are we to conclude then that Mathis identifies as a revolutionary communist, who resents Orwell’s effectiveness in exposing the reality of Stalinist Russia? That’s the only sense I can make of his attacks at this point.

Mathis returned to the topic in 2023, eight years after his Chomsky post. By this time, the story has moved on quite a way: Eric Blair is now a ‘rich peer’ who was recruited into MI5 by his tutor A S F Gow while still at school, and Gow directs all his movements from that point on. It is Gow who instructs him to join the Imperial Police rather than going to Oxford, Gow who directs him to travel to the North of England to spy on coal miners agitating for better conditions, Gow who sends him to Catalonia to spy on the Republican resistance, and Gow who instructs him to ‘claim to be a writer’ as cover for his movements.

Around the same time as this, the Sheep Farm uploaded a sprawling Wikipedia investigation — nine or ten rambling hours of hyperlinks and Wikipedia pages, endless geneological digressions intended to prove, I think, that Orwell was a scion of the Plantagenet bloodline (that is, of course, if he actually existed). I scanned about half of it. Mathis at least keeps it brief, and is still sufficiently in touch with reality to know he’s writing about a real individual.

Mathis doesn’t believe that Orwell took a Fascist bullet through the throat in the trenches, however, though he has to accept that within the month Orwell and his wife were on the run from the Communists. He claims that they had to leave Spain because Orwell’s cover had been blown, and that he was later convicted by the NKVD of being an agent of the British government. The Sheep Farm boys seem to think that the Orwells were only imagining themselves to be in danger. Perhaps they think NKVD torture rooms are no big deal and it was all just fun and games. Perhaps they don’t know what happened to Orwell’s friend and comrade Georges Kopp.

It might be time to tell that story again.

Eric Blair’s parents were not wealthy; his grandfather was a clergyman and his father a civil servant. He described his family background as ‘lower-upper-middle’ or ‘impoverished genteel’ class. His educational opportunities, including his attendance at Eton, were obtained through scholarships. Aldous Huxley taught French at the school for one term, and Blair was in his class. All agree that Huxley was a nervous, ineffective teacher who struggled to exert authority, and he didn’t remain long in teaching.

Blair invested much of his time at school in student journalism, but was unmotivated academically, and left Eton with qualifications too poor to enable him to apply to university, so he enlisted in the Imperial Police. Yes, he probably ended up in Burma because of his family connections. I imagine he was sent there to ‘become a man’, after the disgrace of Eton. But despite his ‘posh’ background, to use Mathis’s word, he became, over time, a convinced anti-imperialist, and a committed socialist. If you don’t believe him, or if you don’t understand what kind of socialist he was, read his work, or more of it. He was a prolific writer, and his political evolution is there for all to examine. His experiences in Burma, witnessing the racism and casual cruelty of his colleagues, kick-started his political education. He went there, according to schoolmate Steven Runciman, the historian, because he had ‘a romantic idea’ about the East, and indeed he liked Burma, appreciated its culture and became fluent in the language. It took time for disillusionment to set in. Returning to England to recuperate from dengue fever in 1927, he decided not to go back, and resigned from the police. Mathis finds this suspicious. ‘Suddenly at age 24, he quit the police to become a writer.’

By Orwell’s own account, he had wanted to be a writer since he was six years old. And now, after five years in Asia, he had some material to get him started. His autobiographical first novel Burmese Days was published in 1934, and we learn enough through the experiences of the conflicted main character John Flory to understand that the decision to leave the Imperial Police was not sudden at all. If you want a quick take on his reasons, read the short story ‘A Hanging‘ (1931), and/or ‘Shooting an Elephant‘ (1936). In brief, he was worn out by the contradictions of his position, and feared what he might become if he remained.

“I think that he was very afraid that he would become part of the dirty secret himself, that he would either become a racist or a sadist or both by being in this situation, and wanted to repudiate this in himself.” -- Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, (UK: Orwell’s Victory) 2002.

Having seen how the poor lived in Burma, he wanted to know how they lived in his own country. Yes, he was able occasionally to draw on the financial support of his parents or one of his aunts as he made his way as a writer, but one should not assume, so of course Mathis assumes, that his colonial grandparents approved of or even knew what he was doing after his return from East. The main reason he used a pen-name was to protect his family from his writing, and vice versa. His writing about this period of his life — Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), for instance — suggests rather convincingly that he was well acquainted with intense anxiety about money.

His strength was always writing from reality: memoir and reportage, based on experience, observation and use of the telling detail. He did not invent easily, and his one attempt at experimental fiction (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) fell apart in his hands; his response was to turn his limitations into a strength. Reality was enough, and he honoured it by cultivating a disciplined lucidity of thought and style. His essays, articles and reviews are written with poise and clarity, humming with intelligence; although he rejects stylistic display, there is no sacrifice of pleasure in the restrained beauty of his sentences — his writing is of the highest quality, and Orwell is rightly regarded as one of the greatest essayists in the history of the English language.

After his Burmese experience, he made poverty and deprivation his theme. Mathis calls this ‘spying on the poor’. I call it finding a subject. For several years he periodically immersed himself in the lives of the working poor, the unemployed and the homeless. He made excursions disguised as a tramp, exploring the slums of London, staying in flophouses and workhouses, and working on the hop-farms in Kent as a seasonal labourer. He got himself arrested, hoping to experience Christmas in jail, but was released after two nights in a police cell. He washed dishes in Paris, lay sick in a hospital for the poor. He toured the North of England by public transport and on foot, lodged in a room above a tripe shop, went down the mines and into the factories, attended meetings of both the Communists and the Fascists and witnessed first-hand the violence of Mosley’s blackshirts. The writing based on these experiences — Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier — was published under the Orwell brand, but his alter ego on his expeditions was ‘P S Burton’, so that’s three identities already. How many more ‘red flags’ do you want, the guy was obviously a spook!

Yes, he did keep in touch with his tutor at Eton, A S F Gow, and consulted him about his decision to become a writer, and later about his intention to marry Eileen. To Mathis and the Sheep Farm boys, this makes Gow his MI5 ‘handler’, directing Orwell’s movements. Perhaps it’s true -- we can’t know: we don’t know that Gow was a recruiter for MI5, though it’s possible of course. The idea that Gow was the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring arises from the art critic Brian Sewell’s assertion in his autobiography, and Sewell was a close friend of Anthony Blunt, the ‘fourth man’. The notion that there was a fifth man had been sown by a Russian defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, sparking a craze of speculation in the mid-sixties, but it was later revealed that the scholar John Cairncross had confessed to MI5 back in 1964. Gow’s identification as an MI5 officer is dependent on the Sewell accusation — otherwise Gow would have no information to interest the Soviets, except as a tutor at Eton and then Trinity College. The novelist Anthony Powell, a former tutee of Gow at Trinity, dismissed the notion in his journals, believing that George Orwell, whom he also knew, would have known about and commented on any left-wing political interests on Gow’s part.

In any case, all this speculation seems superfluous, given that Orwell’s decisions are completely consistent with the young man’s desire to become a writer, and need no further explanation.

What Orwell was doing, in literary terms, was developing the ‘Bohemian’ style of reportage which had appeared on the other side of the Atlantic some seventy years earlier, and into which Mark Twain made several excursions early in his writing career. Orwell was the first in England to bring to this genre a genuine literary sensibility, and yes, it is Bohemianism of a kind, propelled by an impatience to escape the bourgeois bubble and grapple with reality. Reading him, you do not get any sense of posturing or self-indulgence, but of lived experience, vividly evoked, and a compulsion to confront the truth about his own society. Read the Burma stories, and you’ll understand a lot more about the compassion and fundamental honesty of this fine writer, and how he developed his ability to evoke reality — physical, social, economic, political — with economy and nuance.

For all the unpretentious lucidity of his prose, there’s something driven and self-destructive in his pursuit of the reality principle which only found full expression in his last and most famous book, the terrifying and uncompromising work which is associated more than any other with his name. Orwell’s final reality-immersion would be in Spain, fighting against Fascism in the Civil War.

1

The most topical example to illustrate the principle of predictive conditioning would be the proliferation over the years of Hollywood plot-lines about devastating pandemics, including Twelve Monkeys (1997), I am Legion (2007), Contagion (2011) and many more— including, of course, Bill Gates’ Netflix Documentary The Next Pandemic (2019) — and the obvious role these played in conditioning the public to accept a terrifying new viral enemy-image.

2

The NKVD — The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs — was the feared Soviet secret police, forerunner of the KGB, responsible for state security, political purges, and the administration of forced labour camps. During the Great Purge,1936–1938, the NKVD conducted mass arrests, imprisoning, torturing and executing hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.

THE CANCELLATION OF GEORGE ORWELL: 2 THE PURGE

After the failed Nationalist military coup and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with the siege of Madrid in 1936, Orwell headed out to join the Republican resistance. As a democratic socialist, he enlisted not in the Comintern-run International Brigades but the POUM militia

Read full story

Thanks for reading The Lethal Text! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

The calumny is put about by Miles Mathis and his imitators that George Orwell was no rebel but actually an operative for the totalitarian tendency that surfaced so monstrously in the 1930s and has returned in new forms in the twenty-first century. The smear rests on the kind of wild assumptions and uninformed speculation that gives ‘conspiracy theory’ a bad name, and comes from individuals who have not read Orwell in any detail, if at all, and know little to nothing about his life.

For example, it is taken for granted by his accusers that he was a Fabian Socialist, based on nothing more than the fact that he delivered a lecture to the Fabian Society in London in 1942. In fact his encounter with the Fabians was marked by cantankerous wrangling on both sides, and Orwell went there to challenge, not to endorse, the Fabian program; after his return from the Spanish civil war the writer had been ostracised by the Left in London and censored by leftist publications, including his own publisher, Gollancz.

Similarly, the coincidence that a young Aldous Huxley worked as a stand-in French teacher at Eton College for a term and that a young Eric Blair was in his class is inflated into rumours that the two men remained friends for the rest of their lives, which is to say, of Orwell’s, and that Huxley secretly became Orwell’s political and literary ‘mentor’.

In fact it is hard to see where Aldous Huxley fits into Orwell’s life, politics or literary development at all. Huxley was a pacifist, and Orwell had no time for pacifists; his nervous, ineffective stand-in French teacher at Eton was a ‘benign’ eugenicist and Utopian progressive, like the aristocratic socialist philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the novelist H.G Wells. Orwell was none of these things and despised all of them. As Orwell headed for the sound of gunfire, Huxley emigrated to Southern California and lived there for the rest of his life.

The counterculture researcher Jan Irvin (Gnostic Media) has attempted to expose Huxley as an ‘architect’ of the post-war MK-ULTRA mind-control and social engineering project. He has emphasised Huxley’s connections with the Esalen Institute and a number of the CIA cut-outs involved in steering the rising post-war counterculture into a hedonistic dead-end, and he was certainly involved in promoting the use of psychedelics, which he had featured twenty years earlier as the recreational chemical pacifier ‘soma’ in the society of Brave New World.

But to try to embroil Orwell with Huxley is not credible, philosophically, politically or personally. Orwell chose experience as his mentor, not some ‘highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck’ (England, Your England). Orwell’s framing as Huxley’s protégé quickly falls apart on examination.

Yes, there is the famous letter Huxley wrote to his former pupil after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four — but this letter is written specifically to take issue with Orwell’s version of a collectivised future society. Nor, if you read it,1 will you find any hint that these words are written to a personal friend. The tone is impersonal — ‘Dear Mr Orwell,’ he writes, not ‘Dear George’ or even ‘Dear Eric’ — the body of the letter contains no personal references on either side, and was sent via his publisher. Written a mere three months before Orwell’s death, it gives no hint that Huxley even knew he was ill. Orwell had merely instructed his publisher to include Huxley on the list of those to be sent complimentary copies. Even in reaching out, as we say, writer-to-writer, Huxley failed to comment on Nineteen Eight-Four beyond the routine acknowledgement that it is ‘very fine’ and ‘a profoundly important’ book, without saying what is fine or important about it — before going on to suggest that his own vision of the ‘ultimate revolution’, based not on force but on the pleasure principle, is more plausible. This is not to deny that Huxley’s letter alludes to important contexts, for instance in its references to de Sade. However, lecturing the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four on sadism as a political driving force seems a little superfluous, since the idea is explicitly endorsed by the character of O’Brien, and highlighted structurally in the novel as the torturer’s final revelation to Winston Smith: that there is no higher purpose behind the Party’s ruthless exercise of power; that the purpose of power is power, and the purpose of torture is torture. On the evidence of the letter, there seems to be nothing between these two writers beyond the fact that their paths once crossed at Eton and they both later produced influential dystopian novels.

The two novels are as different as the two men. Huxley’s social comedy transplanted into the 26th Century bears no comparison, artistically, to the raw, traumatic tour-de-force his younger contemporary produced. To see clearly the yawning political and philosophical gulf between these two writers, leave aside for a moment the contrasts in the two societies depicted, the paradigmatic differences that Huxley touches on in his letter, and focus on the writer’s attitude to his characters. The inevitable disaster that engulfs Orwell’s rebellious lovers, Winston and Julia, is evoked with intense pathos; Huxley’s protagonist Bernard Marx, by contrast, is a shallow, hypocritical loser, and Huxley is merely laughing at him — at all of his characters, trapped in this mindless, pointless, artificial society. Orwell’s vision is tragic and deeply moving, whereas Huxley merely finds the degraded future of humanity amusing.

In fact, despite routine journalistic assertions that he was heavily influenced by Brave New World, Orwell had made a number of critical asides about it in print. He saw Huxley as sharing H G Wells’ ‘essentially hedonistic worldview’ — in contrast to his own punishing pursuit of the reality principle — and having nothing to teach him about politics:

“A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come.” — Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)

The literary forerunner of Nineteen Eighty-Four was not Huxley’s book but We by Yevgeni Zamyatin, who was one of the first writers to experience the Soviets’ treatment of dissidents. Zamyatin’s novel was published in English in 1924 but banned in the Soviet Union, and Orwell was not even aware of its existence until the early forties. He finally obtained a copy in 1946, just when Nineteen Eighty-Four was taking shape in his mind, and he reviewed it enthusiastically, comparing it favourably with Huxley’s book.

“The resemblance with Brave New World is striking,” he wrote. “But though Zamyatin’s book is less well put together — it has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarise — it has a political point which the other lacks.” Zamyatin’s novel “is on the whole more relevant to our own situation.”

Both books are relevant to ours. Brave New World may have more in common with the suffocating technocracy we see rapidly taking shape in the post-Covid world; we may already be half-way there. When I read both books as a teenager, I wondered which would come true, and decided that they both would, in turn: that the world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four was a staging post on the way to Brave New World. Now I think that’s wrong: both visions are true, but they co-exist in time. While the compliant are seduced and conditioned into loving their servitude, Nineteen Eighty-Four lies always an inch beneath the surface, the iron fist inside the velvet glove. We saw enough five years ago to know that. Those who saw through the propaganda and refused to comply with medical invasions of our personal autonomy felt strong hints of the Orwellian nightmare as we endured that long, long Hate Week. The rappers and the memesters weren’t wrong. We were all Winston Smith, there, for a moment, and none of us will ever forget the experience.

Except that unlike Winston, we had already read the book, and the book-within-the-book; it was Orwell’s vision that gave us eyes. The novel is a political education as well as an unforgettable piece of fiction: it was Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, that first introduced me to the concept of the false-flag attack:

“In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him.” (Chapter 5)

It gave me the concepts of doublethink and thoughtcrime, and made me think about permanent war, and the non-military functions of war; about cognitive control through linguistic debasement; about the mutability of the past. Within the context of Soviet/Eastern Bloc Communism, Orwell’s vision was astonishingly accurate. Christopher Hitchens, in Why Orwell Matters, quotes the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz, who gave Orwell perhaps the greatest compliment one writer can pay to another.

“Milosz had seen the Stalinization of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers:

‘A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. […] Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.’ — Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (1952)

Only one or two years after Orwell’s death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.” — Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, pp54-55

Hitchens points out that the book wasn’t only banned behind the Iron Curtain, but in many Moslem countries as well, following the lead of Iran, where the Shah could not tolerate its clear-eyed portrayal of political absolutism (he also hated Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Thus Nineteen Eighty-Four transcends its immediate political context, and thirty-five years after the fall of Soviet Communism remains both compelling and important. I’ve run into a number of people who read it for the first time during the Covid lockdowns. At the same time, the implausible smear about its author is repeated more and more frequently, even by well-intentioned but deeply disillusioned people like Dr Mike Yeadon, who was so important in exposing the Covid deception.

The danger is that we strip ourselves of our cultural assets, our teachers and examplars, the thought-leaders of our culture as it existed at the end of McLuhan’s Third Epoch, the era of print, of democracy, of Protestantism, nationalism, capitalism, human rights and the ferment of ideas. Totalitarians and absolutists — and that includes Technocrats, by the way — still hate Orwell, that’s clear, and that’s why they send their shills to tell us he was a shill. It’s nothing new.

In my opinion, George Orwell was one of the most honest writers who ever lived. He valued clarity above all and matched the transparency of his style with the openness of his thought. At six foot two, his head was always above the parapet. And he was someone you’d want alongside you in the trenches — no coward, no shill, and no question, George Orwell is one of ours.

As for this new vogue of vacuous conspiracy freestyling, I’ll say this to those perpetuating the Stalinist smear-campaign against Orwell: you are collaborating in a process of cultural debasement which makes us weaker with every loss, and you should do some serious reading before you discard one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, whose work grows more relevant by the day. Until you do, you’re just playing totalitarian games, like Ingsoc’s child-spies:

‘Up with your hands!’ yelled a savage voice… ‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought-criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

After the failed Nationalist military coup and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with the siege of Madrid in 1936, Orwell headed out to join the Republican resistance. As a democratic socialist, he enlisted not in the Comintern-run International Brigades but the POUM militia (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, affiliated not to the Comintern but to the International Labour Party). He was at the frontline in Aragon for a little short of four months; it was winter, and the militias endured extreme deprivation at high altitude in Alcubierre. His comrades were poorly armed, trained and equipped, but “the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism … the ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England … the effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.” (Homage to Catalonia, Ch 7) The posting was uneventful for long periods, but he did have some experiences of close combat, such as a diversionary grenades-and-bayonets night attack during the siege of Huelva.

But his most frightening experiences in Spain came not on the front-lines but the paranoid streets of Barcelona. Returning on leave after three months at the front, he found the city riven by sectarian conflict: the revolutionary atmosphere had disappeared; there were riflemen on rooftops, armed gangs roaming the streets. The Communist newspapers were denouncing their allies as fascists, and the NKVD secret police stealthily purging those who did not follow the Moscow line, in secret so that word would not get back to the front and especially the POUM militias holding the line in Madrid. Vicious multi-factional street-fighting broke out in May 1937, as the Socialist government tried to regain control of the Anarchist-dominated city. For the first time Orwell found himself under fire from those he thought were on his own side. Eventually the Anarchists stood down, and the government sent in assault guards to occupy the city.

Within days of his arrival back at the front, Orwell took a sniper’s bullet in the throat and survived by the merest chance: the bullet narrowly missed both the carotid artery and the trachea, and the shot was so clean it cauterised the wound as it passed through. It was eight days before he received medical attention. Discharged from hospital two weeks later, he staggered back into Barcelona, where he found the liquidation of the POUM in full swing — the Comintern had turned their Barcelona HQ into a prison and launched an open purge, branding the militia Trotskyites and fascist-collaborators and arresting them or massacring them in the streets and squares. Many were tortured, many more executed en masse. Andres Nin, the leader of the POUM, was arrested, tortured and murdered. The first Orwell knew of the danger he was in was when his wife (and editor) Eileen intercepted him in the street to prevent him entering his hotel, so that he wouldn’t be seen. He went into hiding, sleeping in a ruined church, but his friend and commander in the POUM, Georges Kopp, was not so lucky. Still hardly able to speak, Orwell broke cover to try to intervene with the Communists on Kopp’s behalf, visiting police and military authorities to retrieve paperwork that would prove Kopp was now working for the government and was no longer in the POUM. Kopp’s surviving relatives appreciate that these efforts constituted an act of extreme bravery. Orwell was not one to abandon a friend.

The Orwells failed in their attempt, and left the city the next day, making for the border with France disguised as tourists. Arriving back in England, Orwell worked for nine months writing-up his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, only to find the Communist campaign of lies against the POUM had infected the left-wing press in England. The New Statesman would no longer carry his articles, and his publishers, Gollancz’s Left Book Club, turned down his account of events in Spain. Ultimately, it was their loss — Orwell took the book to Frederic Warburg’s start-up company, and although Homage didn’t sell well, his next two books — his last two — would put Gollancz in the shade and Secker & Warburg on the map.

So we know exactly how the seeds of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were planted, and when and where: Barcelona and London, 1937-8. There should be no dispute about what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about, or what Orwell’s intentions were in writing it; it arises out of a very specific context. At a time when much of the Western intelligentsia had been seduced by naively idealistic notions about Communism, and many had indeed joined the Communist party, Orwell experienced, first-hand, the brutal psychopathy of Stalinism, and understood that Soviet Communism was as great a threat as German or Italian Fascism, and that the enemy was totalitarianism in any form. He found powerful ways of writing about the impact of this revelation in his final two novels. Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution framed as a children’s story, which makes the brutality of its climax all the more shocking. Nineteen Eighty Four asks whether English Socialism might devolve into totalitarianism after a revolution in England, and imagines what life might be like a few decades down the line, which is as far as its predictive aspect goes. It is an analysis of totalitarianism, and an exploration of the human soul under totalitarianism. Because it is a great work of art as well as of propaganda, it has transcended its context and become a work for all time. But in the case of these libellous mischaracterisations of his motives, and the, yes I’ll say it, conspiracy theory about his loyalties, whether put about by Neo-Stalinists, anti-Semites or post-Covidian cultural nihilists, there is no doubt either about what happened in Spain or the intention behind the two anti-totalitarian masterpieces that arose directly out of it. Things took a very dark turn in Barcelona; and this became the darkness of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Madrid fell to the Francoists, and Barcelona, hollowed out, was taken without resistance. Three months later Hitler and Stalin finalised their non-aggression pact. George Kopp, however, was held for eighteen months, repeatedly interrogated by Russian NKVD operatives, beaten and tortured and continually moved around from place to place to keep him disoriented. By the time they released him he had lost half his body-weight and his own wife didn’t recognise him. Orwell invited Kopp to London, where he and Eileen, with help from her brother and sister-in-law, took care of him for two months, nursing him back to health, so there was plenty of time for the writer to listen to his friend’s experiences and reflect how easily it could have been him. He must have wondered how he would have survived under torture, and Kopp’s experience became an important element of the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell draws on the shock of seeing what they had done to him in one of the most moving moments in the novel.

“Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.

‘Go on,’ said O’Brien. ‘Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.’

He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. […] But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O’Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.”

Those who continue to spread smears about Orwell should perhaps reflect that they are perpetuating a Stalinist witch-hunt which ended in torture and death for many of Orwell’s comrades, and which spurred him to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the first place. In Spain Orwell had learned that in Communism the free world faced a threat as grave as that posed by Fascism; that the Stalinists were in fact bitter enemies of the egalitarian spirit he’d experienced in the trenches. Back in London, the left’s betrayal of free speech showed Orwell how easily the seeds of totalitarianism could transplant themselves to English soil. Could English Socialism devolve into Ingsoc? There’s a passing allusion in the novel which implicitly poses the question.

“Winston could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — ‘English Socialism’, that is to say — it had been current earlier.” (Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter III.)

In 1941, for instance, when Orwell himself used it prominently in The Lion and the Unicorn — Socialism and the English Genius.

The question now was how to prevent the perversion of the socialist ideal into the terror of Barcelona. Orwell had come back from Catalonia fully committed to socialism but bitterly opposed to totalitarianism in either its Fascist or Communist incarnations, both of which would happily have killed him. (Indeed, he never fully regained his health after that sniper’s bullet.) The enormity of the news he brought with him, its shocking, dream-like quality, propelled him to his greatest fiction. But whether he turned what he’d witnessed into a ‘fairytale’ for children or a futuristic dystopia, London’s intellectual Left didn’t want to know.

After his desperately early death in 1950 (he was forty-six), the backlash over his anti-totalitarian novels rippled on for years as different interests bickered over rights and royalties, reputation and politics. The disciple of the reality principle became a weapon in the Cold War; then the truth wars; then the corona wars. Right now, he has become disputed territory in the war to retain our history and cultural identity at all.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

“The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002).

Jesse Hughes: I knew right then and there it was gonna be bad, and I knew that these kids had no idea what was coming – none – they’d never heard a gunshot in real life and it hit them so hard I saw fear like a blanket fall on the whole crowd and they fell like wheat in the wind…

They looked at me, and then all of a sudden they only realized in the most primitive way

– mortal –

– danger –

and fell to their faces in terror the way you would fall before a god and that infuriated me because I knew what gunfire was, I was able to think through it … I had some practical upbringing growing up in the desert too where you’ve got to get yourself out of your own problems you know?

So I had my eyes open, I kept my head up, I was thinking about my friends, able to get through my fear of myself and be like fuck like some of us – OK, because – Davey was in the middle of that stage, and when the lights went on you know – he saw shit he’d never seen before in his life and I mean – awful stuff dude it has no parallel on anything that I’ve ever experienced and – because it’s not just death it’s – the most – unsuspecting innocent victim you can imagine and –

people who are gripped in terror and can’t move as a result of it – it’s not fair, and when you’re watching it in real time and when you’re thinking about it – it’s not fair and there was nothing we could do about it

and I watched about seven people die and – a couple of them – they were I mean they were literally three feet from the barrier, they could have fallen backwards and been alive – and they were too scared to even turn around and even think about it and just standing with their hands up like this until the dude finally saw her and all she did was go

no no no no –

she surrendered to death in front of my very eyes and I was yelling at her I remember I was going hey! what the fuck! and she wouldn’t – I don’t think she could hear me I think she was so terrified I think she’d already given it up, and that to me is not fuckin’ fair —

and that comes from public policy against things it comes from a lot of stuff man I will lay the blame right in its lap like – when you tell people that they can’t help themselves and that they’re basically children and to take guns out of their eyes and and – you weaken them to the point where 3 feet away is life, and you can’t even see it because you’re so scared…

[From an interview with Jesse Hughes, leader of the band Eagles of Death Metal, published by Rebel Media May 12 2016]

“A surplus of reality…”

The phrase has a grim ring of truth to it. The terrorists, in Baudrillard’s model, have a monopoly not just on guns but on ‘reality’ – the reality of living under the terrors of air bombardment or civil war, for example – terrors which they replicate in the soft capitals of the West, vengefully returning some of that reality, characterized by arbitrary sudden death, to the timid, deluded inhabitants of the Western wonderland. They are correcting a reality-deficiency within these populations, who, like the Eloi of H G Wells, are so innocent they cannot even recognize danger when it appears.

As at the Bataclan Theater, where Jesse Hughes watched a girl frozen in terror surrender her life. As much as the collapsing towers, she embodies Baudrillard’s idea of the suicide of the West, too much wrapped up in its layers of unreality to see what is being done in its name and where it leads. This reality-deficit is present to a degree of absurdity in survivor accounts of an earlier theatrical massacre, this time in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight premier of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, 20th July 2012. There is a running theme of theatricality, cosplay, and special effects in these strangely bloodless narratives.

Wikipedia: Holmes … reentered the theater through the exit door. He was dressed in black and wore a gas mask, a load-bearing vest…, a ballistic helmet, bullet-resistant leggings, a bullet-resistant throat protector, a groin protector, and tactical gloves. … Initially, few in the audience considered Holmes to be a threat. According to witnesses, he appeared to be wearing a costume, like other audience members who had dressed up for the screening. Some believed he was playing a prank, while others thought he was part of a special effects installation setup for the film’s premiere or a publicity stunt by the studio or theater management.

In the words of one young woman at the premiere:

I thought that he was just a part of like a prop or something, that he was just being theatrical, that it was part of the show, you know, since it was the midnight premiere I didn’t know that he was like seriously like a bad guy, you know what I mean? He came in and he was in full gear — cos they have things in the movie like that, you know, where they’re dressed up kind of like that, and I didn’t know — and then he threw the grenade or whatever it was of gas and it exploded and there was all this gas and I thought, well, that was a special effect, and nobody knew what to think of it, and then he shot the ceiling, just straight up in the ceiling, and then everybody knew it was real at that point…

And then, among all this talk of theatricality and the sudden inruption of reality, a perplexing coincidence: the mass casualty exercise taking place on the day of the midnight screening, at the Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine in nearby Parker. From the Denver Post:

Along with response to natural disasters like hurricanes and floods and terrorist attacks, one of the scenarios being used to train the students is how to respond if a shooter fires at people in a movie theater and also uses a bomb in the attack.

“The irony is amazing, just amazing,” said Rocky Vista Dean Dr. Bruce Dubin. (Denver Post, 20^th July 2012).

Jean Baudrillard would have been fascinated to learn, if he’d lived long enough, that in the twenty-first century such amazing ironies would become commonplace. After all, his definition of ‘reality’ consists of just five words: “that which can be simulated”.

Parallel drills mirroring real events have taken place simultaneously with or immediately before a number of high profile terrorist attacks and mass-shootings in Europe and the USA, to the extent that it would appear to be the norm. Such simulations could serve a number of purposes; for example in disguising preparations for the event; in paralyzing legitimate security responses to the unfolding event; and in the transfer of blame to an appropriate scapegoat entity, often those taking part in what they have been told is a security operation or training simulation.

In London too, on 7^th July 2005, a table top exercise was taking place, as revealed by Peter Power, CEO of Visor Consultants security firm, in a BBC Radio 4 interview that same day; the exercise was premised on bomb attacks at exactly the same three London Underground stations hit by explosions, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds. The attacks of that morning had also been closely mirrored more than a year earlier in a televised ‘tabletop’ simulation broadcast by the BBC on 16th May 2004 under their prestigious Panorama franchise. Some of the first survivors to emerge into daylight from the hell of those underground stations reported finding people in bandages and thermal blankets already waiting on the sidewalk. It seems that even in real events — where people really are torn apart by bullets or bombs — the actors are there, ready for the cameras. Their job is to seed the narrative, while real survivors with real impressions of the event are excluded, in case they’ve seen something they were not supposed to see. In England, one such (severely injured) survivor was eventually able to give his story to a local newspaper — less closely controlled than the mainstream press — saying that around the blast-holes in the floor of the underground carriage he saw metal shards bent upwards, into the carriage — in which case the explosions must have originated underneath the train, not from back-packs worn by the patsies, four young Moslems from the north of England, who in any case had not made it onto the trains.

In the twenty-first century we have seen an evolution of the tactic, from mass casualty events where only agency is simulated — the relatively simple GLADIO false-flag terror model of the twentieth century — to purely theatrical events with fictional casualties as well as fictional perpetrators: mock-terror incidents, where the drill does not provide cover for a real event but is presented as one.

The May 2012 amendment of the Smith-Mundt Act (1948), which had insulated the American public from the kinds of misinformation which could legally be disseminated to foreign audiences, enabled this evolution by removing these prohibitions against the domestic use of ‘black’ propaganda, meaning that deceptions and simulations could now for the first time be legally be practiced on the population of the United States.

There exists extensive evidence that the Sandy Hook massacre (2012) falls into this category, as documented in Professor James Fetzer’s book ‘Nobody Died at Sandy Hook’, where he convincingly argues that the event was a two-day FEMA drill presented in the media as a real event, and that there were no victims, only fictitious children created from younger images of siblings and photoshopped into family photographs, for the equally fictitious killer Adam Lanza to shoot to death in a school which had been closed since 2008. The only available way to defend against such copious evidence showing the event to have been a simulation is to claim that all of that evidence is itself simulated — theorising an extensive, organised conspiracy of malicious ‘hoaxers’ and ‘deniers’ — while avoiding any actual analysis of those materials or even the acknowledgement of their existence, and instead hyping up these counter-accusations to the most inflammatory level. The controversy continued to escalate, its Baudrillardian ripples forming complex interference patterns, culminating in a massive campaign of defamation lawsuits against the most egregious ‘hoaxers’ and ‘deniers’. The highest-profile of these were against the self-confessed role-player Alex Jones and the bona fide researchers James Fetzer and Mike Palacek, resulting in both cases in convictions and brutally deterrent awards of damages to the plaintiff.

At the Boston Marathon bombing (2013), crisis actors, including the double amputee Nick Vogt, got into position as police loudspeakers announced ‘This is a drill!’ and the police department tweeted out the announcement online; then the smoke-bombs went off. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, like Sandy Hook Elementary School, was not in operation at the time of the alleged incident (2016), its registration having expired in 2013, and by this time an educated part of the audience, far from being terrified, was growing weary of the game. It was too easy: after Boston the crowd-sourcing of thousands of photographs online proved the deception within twenty-four hours. In Orlando some role-players were particularly inept, allowing themselves to be caught out of character on camera. Identities were quickly traced; a number of role-players turned out to be bit-part actors with bios on IMDB. Some have appeared on camera giving media interviews as eye-witnesses at more than one event: one unfortunate woman seems to have been photographed at the scene of no less than four mass-shootings or terrorist attacks – including Friday 13th in Paris.

Meanwhile, the corporate media, apparently unable to muster a single competent investigative journalist, continues to churn out acres of product, covering funerals, anniversaries, tributes and memorials to the fictitious dead, interviews with grieving relatives appealing for gun control, follow-up documentaries fleshing out the official narrative, and ultimately, of course, blockbuster Hollywood movies. While the public dutifully believes the accumulating fictions, governments continue to slice away their legal protections and natural rights.

In the aftermath of a succession of such ludicrous frauds, a section of the research community took to dismissing each new event as pure theatre, soaked in stage blood only. Suddenly, everything is a hoax. Nothing is real; only simulation exists. I would imagine that this wave of hyper-skepticism is itself boosted as part of the psychological operation.

It was in the light of all this that I went back to review the details of the November 2015 attacks in Paris. When it happened I didn’t have the stomach to look at images or read anything beyond the headlines. A post on Facebook – Je Suis Sick of This Shit – summed up how I felt. Terrorism had become, as they say, the new normal, a constant background of arbitrary death, as in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil. I was aware that some were saying it was just more mock-terror; insinuations were made about the role of Jesse Hughes and his band; a well-known crisis actress had once again been spotted. To me it was all Schrödinger’s Cat – simultaneously real and unreal – but sickening either way. I was almost ready to give in to Baudrillard and resign myself to a state of hyperreality, where the distinction between reality and simulation no longer exists, and “the simulacrum is true”.

However, it would be a gross error to assume that just because a new tactic has been detected in the process of McLuhan’s ‘global theatre’, it is now the only play in the book. The attacks of 7th-9th January 2015 in Paris seem to have had elements of simulation — the highly unconvincing ‘execution’ of the prone police officer outside the Charlie Hebo Magazine offices, for example — and false-flag attack: when the ‘hostage-taker’ Amedi Coulibaly rushed out of the Jewish Delicatessen in Port de Vincennes into a hail of police fire, his hands appear to be cuffed or tied together; which would imply that he was not the hostage-taker, but a hostage himself.

I would not put it past the architects of these events to be mocking and feeding the skeptics in the way they design their terror events, hybridising their models to further fragment the research community, creating confusion, contradiction and double-bind. One of the implications of mass data-mining is that public responses can continuously be fed back into evolving tactics.

So I listened to all the accounts I could find by survivors of the Bataclan horror. I found no inconsistencies in their narratives, or between the accounts given by different band members, or by the same band members at different times. For all the different ways people have of coping with such trauma, and the different experiences they had within that event, I’ve seen nothing but reality – a surplus of it – in their eyes. Nothing I could legitimately doubt.

However, there were a number of strange elements in the events of that Friday 13th, including the predictable ‘amazing irony’ of a large-scale, multi-site exercise that same day, foreshadowing the events of the evening: a mass-shooting drill, involving SAMU emergency medical technicians, emergency-room doctors, ambulance dispatchers, hospital administrators and victim role-players. Then there were the Syrian and Egyptian passports all too conveniently found near the remains of suicide-bombers, reminiscent of the highly unconvincing discovery of passports and ID cards in Manhattan on September 2001, London in July 2005, and indeed Paris, earlier in 2015.

There were also eye-witness reports of one of the teams of terrorists attacking bars and restaurants consisting of two heavily muscled white men.

“The gunman calmly reloaded his weapon several times. He then shot up at the windows in the street to make sure nobody was filming anything or taking photographs. It lasted over six minutes.

He fired lots of bullets. He was white, clean shaven and had dark hair neatly trimmed. He was dressed all in black accept for a red scarf.

They looked like soldiers or mercenaries and carried the whole thing out like a military operation.” (The Mirror)

“Everything he was wearing was tight, either boots or shoes and the trousers were tight, the jumper he was wearing was tight, no zippers or collars. Everything was toned black.

If you think of what a combat soldier looks like, that is it – just without the webbing. Just a man in military uniform, black jumper, black trousers, black shoes or boots and a machine gun. Maybe a woolly hat.” (The Guardian)

The implication of these reports is that special forces were involved in the restaurant attacks, as was the case in the brutal and bizarre massacres in the Brabant, Belgium, in the 1980s. Even if the terrorists at the Bataclan were indeed jihadis who thought they were avenging Syria and Iraq, that doesn’t mean that French security forces didn’t procure and engineer the attack and then lay further rings of slaughter around the main event to amplify its scale and horror. Singer Jesse Hughes revealed in an interview that when he arrived at the theatre before the gig, he found a backstage security guard behaving so strangely that he asked the promoter of the event to have the man removed. He was subsequently informed that six security guards had failed to show up for work that evening, and in the aftermath of the massacre drew the obvious conclusion that they had been warned to stay away. Survivors of the massacre also alleged that the terrorists, once they had stopped executing people and instead gathered hostages on the upper balcony while the security forces prepared to storm the building, showed their prisoners thick wads of bank-notes which they then set fire to, saying they wouldn’t be needing money any more. The implication is that they had been promised safe passage once the operation was complete, but had realised at this point that this would not come to pass.Then there is the coincidence of Prime Minister Manuel Valls issuing an inter-ministerial instruction on the eve of the attacks, 12th November, regarding the care of victims of terrorist acts. The instruction created a new organisation — “Cellule interministérielle d’aide aux victimes” (CIAV) — which would assume responsibility for the identification, assistance and registration of the dead and injured from 13th November onwards. In the light of this congruence of coincidences it becomes impossible to deny the involvement of the French government in the organisation of this attack.

It has also been claimed that video footage from the drills was inserted into news coverage along with authentic images of the aftermath of the attacks. But to leap to the conclusion that therefore there were no victims, on the model of Newtown, Boston and Orlando, is at best illogical, at worst a deliberate COINTELPRO-style tactic of confusion. The photographic and video evidence from the Bataclan itself, as well as the eye witness and survivor accounts, makes it impossible to maintain the notion that it was all fiction.

The slaughter inside the theatre was not theatre: it was real. The presence of recognisable crisis actors in Paris then becomes an inside joke, a mocking jibe at the section of the audience that understands it. Perhaps the reason certain actresses are used repeatedly is because they’ve been spotted.

There is the real. There is the simulation, appearing real. And then there’s the ultimate tour de force: the real event presented as simulation; the fake fake.

Real, unreal or hyperreal, the effects are the same – militarisation of the police; further loss of individual rights; destabilisation of the the political order; strengthening of the institutions of power.

Jesse Hughes isn’t acting in these interviews. In fact I saw something which I recognize from my own experience – the way closeness to death brings out the substance of a person, makes them more real, for a while, than they’re allowed to be usually. We’re all just playing parts, most of the time. Jesse Hughes, if you watch him in earlier interviews, is quite an engaging personality, playing the irreverent hedonist, the lovable rogue. What comes out of him in the Paris interviews is something deeper. He becomes real.

So this is how we live, under the double-edged sword.

Even a magician like Baudrillard can’t make reality disappear. It’s still there, underneath the accumulated strata of deception. Reality and simulation are not opposites; the first contains the second as it does everything else. ‘The simulacrum is true’, Baudrillard tells us, but it’s a sleight of language: the simulacrum is real, an all-important difference; it is what it is, deceit, maleficence, sorcery. Reality has not been ‘murdered’ by its own image; only by the meaning of words, in our treacherous post-truth academy.

For half a century the same covert military structure, using different front groups, has been killing its own people, mirroring the brutal suffering its other face inflicts on Iraq or Libya, or Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. The violence is counterbalanced, the sword double-edged; reality, like water, finding its level.

They wear the Islamist mask as once they wore the Communist mask, and once in a while, just to lighten the tone, any mask that comes to hand. Disney characters, Carnivale masks, whatever. You can’t be serious all the time. It’s more than forty years since they pulled on the clown mask, to show us that, after all, they do have an endearing sense of play.

So this is how we live, tricked and deluded, gamed and divided, mocked and derided, helpless and ashamed of our helplessness. This is how we live, cut to ribbons by fear and conflict, double-bound by contradictory illusions, under the dialectical sword. This is the system we live under, as brutal and bizarre as anything in the long history of brutal and bizarre human cultures to which this planet has been host.

Outside La Belle Équipe restaurant in the 11^th Arrondissement, a girl stood smoking a cigarette with a friend. Just as she went back inside, a black car drew up in the street, and moments later the machine-gun fire started. Like everybody else, she hit the floor; unlike many others, she got up after the shooting stopped.

Outside, everybody looked dead. In the spot where she had stood smoking, a girl of similar age lay motionless on the ground. Her mobile phone was ringing and ringing. And she thought – is that my phone? Is that me lying there, or me standing here? Did I really survive?

Inside the Bataclan, the copper taste of blood was in the air. The wounded pulled dead bodies, still warm, on top of themselves. Desperate to live, tributes belly-crawled through lakes of blood. Backstage, hallways, staircases and corridors turned into a terrifying labyrinth, a monster with an AK47 around every corner.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

The Kingdom of Bohemia ceased to exist in 1918, when it was absorbed into the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. The people of the various lands which now constitute the Czech Republic were all referred to by the English as Bohemians, and the Czech language as Bohemian, until the term ‘Czech’ became more prevalent in the twentieth century. However, the defunct kingdom is immortalized, for purely accidental reasons, in the current usage of the word ‘bohemian’ to denote the lifestyle of impoverished artists: unconstrained by convention, sexually free, voluntarily poor; a life devoted to art and love. The word is now used almost exclusively in this sense.

The accident was merely that Romani people living in France were thought to have entered Europe through Bohemia. Bohèmes was the name the French gave to the Roma, just as the English by a similar misconception called them Gypsies, believing their origins lay in Egypt. The word carries the full range of connotations generated by outsider perceptions of the Roma people: wandering and adventure; poverty and laziness; dirtiness and immorality; exoticism and possession of arcane mysteries.

Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Bohèmes en Voyage’ in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) is a case in point. To Baudelaire the Roma represent everything foreign and exotic. They remind him of his voyage to India; they remind him, perhaps, of himself, self-exiled from the bourgeoisie and thus from family. To him they are ‘the prophetical tribe, that ardent-eyed people’ (trans. William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). Their women breast-feed openly, and their men watch over them with ‘gleaming weapons’ and ‘eyes rendered heavy / By mournful regret for vanished illusions’. They represent fertility and ferocity, and are watched over by the Anatolian-Phrygian mother goddess Cybele, who ‘Makes the desert blossom, water spurt from the rock / Before these travelers for whom is opened wide / The familiar domain of the future’s darkness.’

The Bohemians had arrived in France from the fifteenth century onwards; now their misnomer would be appropriated by a new tribe, and Bohemia would become, not a country or a people, but a state of mind.

In post-revolutionary, early nineteenth century France, artists and poets started moving into cheap working class areas in Paris, often areas where the Roma had settled, and before long the term ‘Bohème’ had transferred itself to those who adopted a version of the gypsy lifestyle and aspects of their dress. Indeed Romani culture reportedly regards cultural attitude — the Romani spirit called romanipen or romaimos — as more important than ethnicity in determining membership of the tribe. An ethnic Rom, for example, who does not exhibit romanipen is considered gadjo or non-Romani; and likewise a gadjo who shows romanipen may be considered Romani. From mid-century the word ‘bohemian’ also enters the English language to describe the unorthodox lifestyles of artists, poets, musicians and actors in cities across Europe.

These bohemians were apostates of the bourgeoisie who renounced security, orthodoxy, and social convention. The bohemian abjures the narrowness of the bourgeois vision, its kitsch denial (and refusal ever to speak of) the uncontrollable and disturbing aspects of life; bohemianism is an attempt to embrace life in all its fullness, including, of course, sexuality and death. It mirrors the Romantic aesthetic, founded not on beauty but the sublime – an aesthetic experience which transcends beauty and ugliness, life and death, and which overwhelms the observer, inducing a primitive awe and reducing his personal existence to insignificance. Since experiences of the sublime are (by definition) rare, the bohemian tends compulsively to seek self-immolation in sexual passion and alcohol or drugs – opium and hashish in nineteenth century Paris, and of course absinthe – to render the mundane sublime.

The bohemian artist is detached from his middle or upper-class roots and finds a greater sense of belonging among the poor. Of course, a dedication to art is, de facto, a renunciation of money, though shadowed by dreams of recognition and wealth. Wealth comes to real artists only as a by-product or side-effect of their art; no one goes into art to make money; anyone who does is gadjo, no part of this tribe. The bohemian accepts poverty because he aspires to something richer than wealth. The mystery he sets against bourgeois banality, the arcane enlightenment that sustains the literary gypsy, is more than status or wealth; it is art. The goddess that breaks the rock for him and makes the desert bloom is not Cybele, but his model or Muse.

As for love, the poets and painters of Montmartre, the Latin Quarter and other bohemian haunts found their anima in the idealized figure of the grisette — the poor working class girl who cheerfully combines prostitution with her work as a seamstress, a flower seller, or a milliner’s assistant. The title role in Giacomo Puchini’s opera La Bohème (1896), beloved of the bourgeoisie across Europe and indeed the world, is a composite of Francine and Mimì from Henri Murger’s loosely structured novel, Scenes de la vie de bohème (1851), in turn based on the character sketches he wrote while living in Paris. The composite character Mimì is a seamstress, but all the other main characters are artistic bohemians: Rudolfo is a poet, Marcello a painter, Musetta a singer, Schaunard a musician, Colline a philosopher, and so on. The cast is made up with students, working girls, townsfolk, shopkeepers, street-vendors, soldiers, waiters, children… and this is the bohemian milieu.

Forty years later Tennessee Williams beautifully evokes a similar urban milieu in his play A Streetcar Named Desire, set in New Orleans. In Williams’ cast there is no poet – that role is subsumed into the lyricism of the author’s stage directions, and the madness of his alter ego, Blanche Dubois. But Elysian Fields thrums with jazz musicians, sailors, working men, street-vendors and prostitutes. For the bohemian poet or the New Realist playwright, these people are real in ways that those trapped in the illusions of the secure, respectable life are not.

The life-style is not sustainable, of course, and there are only two ways out of Bohemia: fame or death; apotheosis or self-destruction. And there are so many ways to take the latter road: drink, drugs, disease, starvation, madness. Although unknown at the time of his death, the young poet Thomas Chatterton, who killed himself in 1779 at the age of seventeen, became a Romantic icon when the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis immortalized him in his painting of 1856, which inspired a rash of copycat suicides by other would-be Parisian artists jealous of his posthumous fame.

After the success of his novel, Henri Murger moved out of the city and spent the next ten years re-cycling stories of people he’d known in the far-off country of Bohemia.

The bohemian meme spread across Europe and the English-speaking world, surfacing in the Shelley menage on Lake Geneva, and the pre-Raphaelite group in London, which created a powerful visual style that later made millions for the owner of the Biba chain of clothing stores and myriad other Carnaby Street entrepreneurs. Via Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Nico, Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, the Grateful Dead and the Doors, eventually it found its way into my naive provincial skull, whence I would never be able to extricate it, or even want to try.

I grew up in the cathedral city of Winchester in southern England, the ancient capital of Wessex and now a pleasant dormitory town an hour by train from London. My father was an advertising man who worked for the oldest agency in the country, traveling up to Berkeley Square every day; an educated man of taste – the ad man who never sold himself, and still managed to make a long and cumulatively successful career in the business.

As a teenager, I gravitated not towards London but Bohemia. I found some of the poets, musicians and painters who nested in my provincial town, such as the great Duncan Tweedale, a Northerner who lived on benefits and practically without furniture, but owned an ancient hand-operated printing press on which he laboriously cranked out editions of an underground magazine called Black Eggs. I remember faces, paintings and poems – and I remember the magical midsummer’s night we all spent on top of St Catherine’s Hill outside of the town, the site of Stone Age ritual labyrinths, crowned by a stand of tall hornbeam trees. We lit a fire and jammed and smoked and entwined until dawn, when I literally rolled down the hill and somehow found my way home.

Captured by the rip-tide of bohemianism, but still under the control of my (very lovely) parents, I somehow found myself studying at Oxford University, where after a few miserable and misplaced months I found a band to play drums in, started by two guys who had recently graduated and were now squatting a beautiful, dilapidated house in Iffley Village, a mile or two along the river — it was the old Mill House, which had previously been owned by a Professor of Botany at the University. The large garden, overgrown but full of rare plants and trees, sloped down to the sluice gate, where you could hurl your body against the rush of water and always be beaten back. There was a tall tulip tree, with its magnolia-like flowers; clearing a nettle bed we found rare snake’s-head orchids. Since the professor’s death the house had stood empty; another rock band occupied the upstairs, and the ground floor was ours. We spent hours and days working on our music, playing Grateful Dead and Beatles, Stones and Steely Dan until our live sound was tight as a studio recording. We gigged at colleges in town sometimes, but as time went on we took to just throwing parties. That way we could leave our gear permanently set up in the enormous front room with its double sets of French windows opening on to the overgrown lawns. People came, bringing drugs and wine; they spilled out into the gardens, and later the river. This was where I experienced my first LSD trips, wandering off across the river and into the dark countryside for hours. There were many that year – far, far too many – but I managed to pull out of my psychedelic trance in time to study for a week or two and pass my first year exams.

You could call us hippies – which was merely a new name for bohemians, though I now understand that there were powerful influences manipulating things. I dropped into college occasionally for tutorials, but apart from that I spent most of my time at the Mill House. The locals hated us, of course, and sometimes threw bricks through our windows. Staying in the house with a girlfriend one cold New Year, we found that the tulip tree had been cut down by the local council, and workers had sawed the trunk and branches into neat logs, some of which we lugged inside and burned in the fireplace all night, tripped out of our minds and transported by the sweet smoke of the rare, perfumed wood.

Our bohemian bliss survived until the end of my second year, when the two guitarists moved to London to try their luck. I went back to my studies. It was 1977. Nothing by now but a doe-eyed, disoriented lotos-eater, I had no idea how to deal with the world or the future. I didn’t know what direction to take, and after graduating I followed my girlfriend to London, and took temporary labouring jobs while I wrote poems and struggled to resist increasing pressure to decide what to do with my life. Of course I’d known, almost forever, what I wanted to do with it. But somehow, now, I forgot.

By 1980 it was as if I was waking from a dream, or some great experiment that was finally being shut down. The music and the fashions seemed to have changed overnight. Reagan and Thatcher came to power. There were new cults – of the body, of money, of ‘lifestyle’. The bohemian meme was not dead in me but slept like a recessive gene. I got to grips with London, searching for a viable career, and soon, starting a family.

Murger’s health never recovered from his years of deprivation, and nor could any of his subsequent work match the success of Scènes de la vie de bohème. He died, penniless, in a Paris hospital in 1861.

That same year, a new mutation of the meme surfaced thousands of miles away across the Atlantic, when the San Franciscan journalist Bret Harte created his ‘The Bohemian’ persona for his column in The Golden Era newspaper. The name ‘bohemian’ had been appropriated by journalists of the new commercial style; young, cultured newspaper columnists in the big cities called themselves bohemians, and when the Civil War started they spread out across the country to cover the conflict, their roving life-styles and dependence on the pen giving them some imaginary congruence with the archetype. A number of them of them built humorous, self-admiring print personas for themselves; the life of the journalist became the tangential subject of the journalism, just as in a later re-incarnation of this style, the ‘gonzo journalism’ of Hunter S Thompson.

Living by their wits and their pens, these journalists glamorised their roving, unattached life-styles, and no doubt part of the attraction was the subtext of roving, unattached sexual possibility which is synonymous with dreams of travel. Harte’s column was wildly popular, and — like Murger — he republished them in book form after the war, as The Bohemian Papers. (This time nobody made an opera.) On the East Coast, Junius Henry Browne entertained the public in The New York Tribune and Harper’s magazine with pen-portraits of ‘bohemian’ journalists (such as himself) and accounts of some of their adventures on the road. It’s a watered down version of the bohemian ideal; I suppose the American fascination with the sheer size of their acquired continent and the adventures to be had on it explains the phenomenon; the experiences of these adventurers seemed essentially romantic to the new American bourgeoisie.

In 1872, when a group of journalists and aficionados of the arts in San Francisco established a club for cultural pursuits, looking to introduce some of the ‘sophistication’ of the East coast to the West, they called it, inevitably, The Bohemian Club. Many of the Club’s members were prosperous, respectable businessmen – and now the ‘Bohemian’ tag expanded to include wealthy, sociable bon-vivants. The Club quickly acquired some extraordinary prime real estate in the form of 2,700 acres of ancient redwood forest in Sonoma County, where from 1879 it held an annual retreat in the woods, called The Bohemian Grove –- and it was at the Grove that a dark form of Haute Bohème — high (aristocratic) bohemianism –re-emerged. More Thelème than Bohème, it would have shocked even Baudelaire, and made de Sade weep with envy.

“There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone.”

Jorge Luis Borges, in his ultra-short story ‘Everything and Nothing’1, plays with the idea that William Shakespeare had the power to assume any identity he chose because he had no identity of his own. He becomes aware of his ailment and searches for relief from an aching sense of hollowness. He finds it in the theatre.

Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays on stage at being someone else. His play-acting taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first he had known; but when the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became a nobody. Trapped, he fell to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales.

He enters the ‘controlled hallucination’ of writing, inventing myriad people to be, an escapist multiplicity to cover the ‘no one’ inside him:

Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being.

Then one day he wakes up to the ‘surfeit and horror’ of being so many slain kings and unhappy lovers, and gives it all up. Returning to the village of his birth, he ‘recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he did not bind them to those others his muse had celebrated, those made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin phrases.’ And so he sees out the rest of his existence imitating a ‘retired impresario who has made his fortune and who interests himself in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury.’ Only when friends from London come to visit does he slip again into the role of a poet. When he dies, he tells his maker: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.”

God replies: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons — and none.”

Borges’ story is based on the surprising fact that almost nothing is known about the greatest poet in the English language and the greatest dramatist in world history – and that what is known about his life reveals nothing in the least bit interesting or suggestive of genius or literary ability of any kind. He focuses on the least convincing aspects of the conventional Shakespeare story — the inexplicable genesis of his art and, more than a decade before his death, his abrupt retirement both from the theatre world and from writing — to bring the story full circle, putting a post-modern gloss on the absurdity of the Shakespeare myth. The historical William Shakspere (sic) of Stratford-upon-Avon was a mediocrity: a run-of-the-mill businessman, broker and money-lender, a petty, litigious burgher who got a little rich. This paradox gives rise to Borges’ conceit: nothing less dramatic can be imagined than the life of the great dramatist.

Indeed, William Shakespeare is the Invisible Man of his time. His name on a title page or a dedication; a sole, ambiguous attribution by a contemporary; six signatures all spelled different ways. He owned no books, wrote and received no letters. He was never paid for what he wrote; never arrested either, unlike a number of his contemporaries; never questioned or tortured, even after the use of his work in support of the Essex rebellion.

The plays, of course, did not write themselves – but nor were they composed by Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon2, who by all indications was barely literate. The conventional assumption is that he must have received a grammar school education, but this is only an assumption since the enrollment records have not survived. William Shakespeare the writer, by contrast, had a world-class education and was deeply versed in every aspect of Renaissance humanism, as can easily be deduced from what he wrote.

The name Shakspere is most likely an anglicisation of the Norman Jacques-Pierre, and the wild variety of spellings of the name on extant documents seem to be creative attempts by third parties to transcribe it phonetically, with the soft J consistently approximated by ‘Sh’ but the consonant cluster and the final vowel causing all kinds of confusion — thus Shakspere, Shaxper, Shagspur and so on. It’s important to note that the A is always short, as in Jack, in the various versions of the Stratford man’s name that appear in documents. Pronunciation would have approximated to a collocation of ‘shack’ and ‘spare’ in modern orthography.

Shakespeare the poet, on the other hand, was always spelt with the middle E, making the A long and giving us the verb to shake. In nearly half of the surviving examples, the name was printed with a hyphen — SHAKE-SPEARE — which is the standard way of indicating a pseudonym, as with the anticlerical pamphleteer Martin Mar-Prelate, actually a group of Puritan satirists attacking the Anglican Church. The pseudonym was obviously chosen for its classical connotations: it derives from a soubriquet for the goddess Minerva or Pallas Athena, the ‘spear-shaker’. The two names are not the same, in spelling, pronunciation or provenance. But they are close enough for confusion, or misdirection.

I think Borges would have liked this version of the story almost as much: Will Shakspere of Stratford, this hollow man who does not know who he is, goes to London in the 1590s just as his near namesake bursts onto the literary scene, and finds that his name, or something like it, is on everyone’s lips. Sometimes in the taverns he’ll pass himself off as the poet, and once or twice it gets him laid. He picks up a few acting parts — non-speaking roles only, since he cannot read — and looks for business opportunities in the theatre world. But the best deal he ever makes is to sell his name as an allonym for this writer who already functions under a pseudonym, the misdirection creating a double layer of secrecy.3 And that’s as close as he ever gets to the real ‘William Shakespeare’, whoever this writer was who was spearheading the English literary renaissance through the medium of theatre. It was a walk-on part, like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, with no chance of understanding the intrigues going on around him.

It is no surprise that the the writer in question went to such lengths to disguise his identity. He lived in a dangerous age for writers, the age of the Cecils, Archbishop Whitgift and the English Inquisition; the age of Elizabeth, Queen of Eyes and Ears. Pseudonymity is always tempting for writers, even in safer times: fiction, after all, is multiplicity, the prismatic refraction of personality. An author simultaneously reveals himself in his works and conceals himself behind them. Choosing a pseudonym is also an opportunity to create a brand: ‘Will Shake-speare’ was created as not just a nom-de-plume but also, like Martin Mar-Prelate, a nom-de-guerre, chosen for its defiant connotations — the brandishing of a spear before battle. And so the identity of ‘William Shakespeare’ remained a mystery for hundreds of years: he was the non-entity from Stratford; everything and nothing; everyone and no one.

In time the mystery would give birth not just to J L Borges’ quaint little story but to a fashionable post-modern theory of authorship, usually referred to in Roland Barthes’ formulation as ‘The Death of the Author’ (La Morte de L’auteur). This bizarre and depersonalising theory arose in the later twentieth century, but may (as a number of commentators have suggested) owe its provenance to the strange disjuncture between the works of William Shakespeare the dramatist and the uninteresting biography of William Shakspere of Stratford. Barthes and other fashionable intellectuals in the nineteen sixties argued that a writer’s life had no relevance whatsoever to the work, and promoted an ideology in which authors are merely unconscious or passive conduits for the culture and the language. Barthes may have been influenced by Borges’ story, for all I know; there’s not much more, essentially, to Death of the Author theory than an expansion of the Argentinian’s flight of fancy into a humorless theoretical model. If ‘it is the language that speaks’, in Mallarmé’s formulation, then the author has no authority, is merely a mouthpiece, and literature is reduced to sociology and linguistics. Like the citizen under Communism, the author is stripped of free will and authentic action. An even more unsettling retrospective on the theory would point out that the flesh-and-blood author becomes nothing but a foreshadowing or prototype of the Large Language Models of contemporary technology.

In any case, both Barthes in the sixties and Borges in the forties were lagging several decades behind the news: ‘Shakespeare’ had already been unmasked, not as some non-entity with infinite negative capacity and no identity of his own, but the opposite: very much someone, in fact. The Death of the Author was just a passing rumour: in the discovery of Shakespeare’s identity, the author really is reborn. The experience of rereading certain Shakespeare plays in its light is electric; we have been gifted a whole new writer — an even better one, deeper, more resonant, more real, more important than ever.

As a reader, unless you are a professional scholar, it’s hard to encompass such a vast body of work, and most Shakespeare enthusiasts end up knowing a handful of the plays, up to a dozen or so perhaps, rather well. You may have seen certain plays several times on stage or screen in different productions. If you’re a literature teacher you’ll have taught some of these plays a number of times, and there is no better way to become really familiar with a text than to teach it. Those who come to know the texts well tend to develop a strong sense of an individual voice, a singular sensibility and personality behind the plays, as indeed one would with any writer.

That was the case with J Thomas Looney (1870 – 1944), who taught Shakespeare throughout his career as a school-master, and in retirement decided to identify that personality, if at all possible, by drawing up a profile of the author’s discernable characteristics based purely on the works, and trying to find a match among historically documented individuals who were on the scene at the time at the birth of English theatre in Elizabethan London.

If, like me, you’ve always felt that unsettling disconnect between the works and their recognised author, it comes as a huge relief to read Looney’s profile; one is immediately struck by its plausibility; it seems to represent a kind of rebirth of the individual in itself. Even before he puts a name on it, tentatively at first, one has a strong sense of the existence of this man taking shape: and he really is the opposite in every way of the mediocre stand-in we’d been forced to put up with for so long — at last, a Shakespeare worthy of the name. Looney’s instincts are good:

“Altogether we may say his poetic temperament and the exuberance of his poetic fancy mark him as a man much more akin mentally to Byron or Shelley than to the placid Shakespeare suggested by the Stratford tradition.” (110)

Looney’s exploratory reflections blast through the banality of the Stratford myth. We’re not looking for a respectable businessman but a wasted genius:

“For example, a man who has produced so large an amount of work of the highest quality, and was not seen doing it, must have passed a considerable part of his life in what would appear to others like doing nothing of any consequence. The record of a wasted genius is, therefore, what we might reasonably look for in any contemporary account of him.” (110)

We should not expect him to be universally popular:

The poetic genius has always been more or less a man apart, whose very aloofness is provocative of hostility in smaller men. (111)

And significantly, as it would turn out, Looney predicted that his relationship with the theatre would in real life turn out to be the opposite of the Stratford man’s: “It is much more reasonable to suppose that the dramatist was one who was prepared to give both himself and his substance to the drama, rather than one who was engaged in extorting a subsistence from it.” (114)

The profile in summary goes like this:-

“1. A matured man of recognized genius. 2. Apparently eccentric and mysterious. 3 Of intense sensibility, a man apart. 4 Unconventional 5 Not adequately appreciated 6 Of pronounced and known literary tastes 7 An enthusiast in the world of drama 8 a lyric poet of recognised talent 9 Of superior education — classical — the habitual associate of educated people.” (118-9)

Looney’s additional notes touch on the playwright’s feudal, aristocratic perspective; his classical education; his enthusiasm for Italy; his fondness for aristocratic sports; his knowledge of and responsiveness to music; his financial profligacy and improvidence; and his conflicted relationships with women.

That’s quite a fully developed profile, which I think most Shakespeare readers would find convincing. Already we have a somewhat vivid portrait of the man, whoever he is. Out of this wealth of impressions, however, it’s a purely literary consideration which gives Looney the lead he is looking for. Shakespeare must have been known, he argues, if not for the dangerous and consequential enterprise of the plays, then surely as a lyric poet. In his early work, perhaps...

“His sonnets, Venus and Adonis and other lyric poems, place him easily amongst the best of the craftsmen in that art. Now, although his contemporaries may not have known that he was producing masterpieces of drama, it is extremely improbable that his production of lyric verse was as completely concealed. He may have hidden lengthy poems like Venus and Adonis or Lucrece, or brought them out under a nom-de-plume. But that no fugitive pieces of lyric verse should ever have gained currency under his own name is hardly possible.” (116)

Surveying the field of Elizabethan lyric poetry, he came across an example by Edward de Vere4 which not only seemed to exemplify the sinuous logic and concinnity of the Shakespeare’s sonnets, but was written in the same stanza form as Venus and Adonis, i.e., a six-line stanza in iambic pentameter consisting of an alternately rhymed quatrain and a final rhyming couplet — like the sestet of a Shakespearean sonnet. Looney found that no less than seven of the twenty-two surviving lyric poems by de Vere he found scattered among various anthologies were written in this stanza. The imagery of the poem, too, seemed highly Shakespearean, the haggards metaphor recurring in a number of places in the plays (pp 371-8) in the same context of fickle or untamed women:

From the poem:

“Like haggards wild they range, These gentle birds that fly from man to man. Who would not scorn and shake them from the fist And let them fly, fair fools, which way they list?”

“ For then she never looks upon her lure. Another way I have to man my haggard, To make her come and know her keeper’s call.” (The Taming of the Shrew, IV 1)

“Then go we near her, that her ear lose nothing Of the false sweet bait that we lay for it. I know her spirits are as coy and wild As haggards of the rock.” (Much Ado About Nothing, III i)

This is legitimate internal evidence, which Looney was perhaps lucky to stumble on so early in his search, though this is probably more of a testament to his alertness and purposeful methodology. From there, everything falls inexorably into place as the book becomes a literary biography of the man — take him for all in all — who gave us the great works of Shakespeare. Looney’s investigation, Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1920) is transparently presented, highly coherent, based on sound reasoning, deep knowledge of the works, and, I would say, a pretty unerring instinct; the book is also highly readable and its argument powerfully persuasive. His investigation establishes the identity of the author beyond reasonable doubt in my view, and provides a framework for a century of highly productive research by literary historians ever since.5

Insiders knew, of course, and more than a few cryptically acknowledged it to posterity and to each other in their works, as Alexander Waugh has documented in his Who Knew? series of video presentations. One of the most accessible of such contemporary references is the frontispiece of a book of emblems and devices, Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612), which features a woodcut image reflecting the contemporary awareness of a concealed poet writing for the stage. A hand holding a pen emerges from behind a theatre curtain, and writes (upside down from our perspective to signify a code) the Latin words MENTE VIDEBORI (By the mind I shall be seen). It’s an anagram: NOM TIBI (your name is) DE VERE.

A more obscure though quite intriguing example has come down to us in the text of a Latin address delivered by the scholar Gabriel Harvey in 1578. In the course of a Royal Progress, Harvey delivered a public address in Latin to one of Elizabeth’s courtier-poets, the 28-year-old Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, in which he exorted the young Earl to abandon the pen for the sword and assume his martial destiny. The name William Shakespeare, of course, doesn’t appear in print until 1593, as a signature to the dedication of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis to the Earl of Southampton; certainly the 1593 publication marks the highly successful launch of a ‘new’ writer, whose fame rests on what he wrote (or rewrote) during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the opening years of the seventeenth. But there are intriguing hints that the pseudonym had been in use much earlier — from around 1577, Robert Prechter thinks — and Harvey’s oration is one of them:

Virtus fronte habitat: Mars occupat ora; Minerva
In dextra latitat: Bellona in corpore regnat:
Martius ardor inest; scintillant lumina: vultus
Tela vibrat: quis non redivivum iuret Achillem?

Valour dwells on thy brow: Mars possesses thy mouth: Minerva
In thy right hand lies hidden; Bellona in thy body reigns:
Warlike passion burns in thee; thine eyes flash: thy countenance
Shakes spears: who would not swear that Achilles was reborn?

Vultus tela vibrat: Thy countenance shakes spears. A coincidence? Perhaps, though ‘Minerva lies hidden’ in the same passage reduces the odds, introducing a context of secrecy. On the other hand, if Harvey was deliberately making the pun, why didn’t he use hastas (spears) rather than tela, which can refer to any projectile weapon?

It’s not a material point; just an intriguing reference which gives me my title, if nothing else. In any case, it should be emphasized that Looney’s argument does not depend on ciphers, codes, or anagrams, but on textual and literary evidence. Circumstantial evidence, copious as it is, comes in as corroboration, not as core argument, though it is remarkable, once the identification is made, how everything falls into place. The book is more than an exercise in historical detection: it’s a compelling creative history of the artist.

It is admittedly surprising to find such a reference so early in the timeline; it almost seems like foreshadowing rather than intelligence. It was only later, banished from the Court and his life torn apart by scandals and feuds, that the poet committed to the name under which his achievements in poetic drama would pass into history. But de Vere was involved in the theatre as a patron throughout his adult life, and was known to write and produce for his companies; he had performed in Commedia del Arte in Venice, and returned from his travels in the mid-seventies with descriptions of the Italian theatres, which became the blueprint for the London play-houses, the first of which — The Theatre — opened in 1576, followed by The Curtain in ‘77. Harvey’s address, then, was given at a highly significant moment in the evolution of English theatre — and that, I don’t doubt, was why Elizabeth was not about to follow his advice by granting de Vere a military commission. She had other uses for him.

Within three years, however, he had been banished from the Court for his affair with Ann Vavasour, and remained in the cold for two years — during which time he established his own writers’ colony at Fisher’s Folly, the mansion he bought in London’s theatre district. His anomalous, déclassé status at this intensely creative and precarious time in his life liberates him from class stereotypes, in my view, and puts him on the road to becoming the Shakespeare we know as the greatest literary artist in the language.

The identification with the non-entity from Stratford-upon Avon had always rankled, speaking for myself. I remember staring at that face and wondering how such intense masterpieces could originate in such a vapid gaze. In my youthful viewpoint, great writers must surely have strong personalities, should be contradictory and unpredictable, controversial and misunderstood. Monsieur Jacques-Pierre from Stratford was awfully disappointing in that respect. Edward de Vere, the scandalous seventeenth Earl of Oxford, by contrast, fits the role perfectly, emerging from his aristocratic background to become the first Bohemian in English culture, if you happen to be looking for one. Obviously one has to be cognisant of one’s own prejudices: but regardless of preconceptions, the simple fact is that his biography is undeniably the biography of a writer, missing only the work itself — the lost oeuvre of Edward de Vere.

The whole thing becomes much more than a dispute about attribution; it’s an inquiry into the nature of art itself, specifically of fiction and the writer’s relationship to his work. The astonishing revelation that emerges is just how close is that relationship in the case of Shakespeare; the extraordinary extent to which de Vere drew on his own experiences, his own story. He may have started as a Tudor propagandist, but as time goes on his work becomes more and more personal, less and less containable. Who wrote Hamlet? Hamlet did.

De Vere is the answer to the riddle and the antidote to ‘Death of the Author’ theory. The problematic Earl was one of history’s great individualists, attracting much Puritanical opprobrium for his profligacy and bohemianism, his feuds and love-affairs. His creativity is about as far from a passive conduit as you can imagine; he didn’t just create his individual masterpieces, he did as much or more than anyone to carve out the space, physical and cultural, in which they would be heard, pouring, as Looney puts it, his substance into the drama.

De Vere’s creative evolution is unique. In his late teens and early twenties he was Elizabeth’s favourite and a star performer at court, both in his own person and as the Puckish spirit behind brilliantly devised court entertainments. High-born and rebellious, driven, brilliant and reckless, his intimate relationship with the Queen allowed him to escape punishment for acts of defiance which would have had serious consequences for any other courtier. As becomes clear in the extraordinarily personal court drama of Hamlet, he saw himself as having the special status of a court jester or ‘licens’d fool’ in Elizabeth’s court.

After his return from Italy in 1576, he entered a period of intense turbulence in his personal life that would ultimately lead to his banishment from Court in 1581 (and ultimately become the plot of Othello). He had been flirting with expulsion from the magic circle for some time, and when disaster came, he responded with a fierce creativity and focus, recommitting himself to the drama, fully and defiantly embracing his literary destiny. If the banishment hadn’t happened, the poetic drama would never have become what it did. Looney stresses de Vere’s restlessness within the Court and his increasing Bohemianism, as he calls it, anachronistically perhaps. But Fisher’s Folly, the mansion de Vere acquired in the theatre district after his banishment, and where he brought together writers from all backgrounds, might legitimately be called the birthplace of Bohemia avant la lettre, and of a new literary style emerging from a potent cultural mix. The decade which began with de Vere’s expulsion from court saw a marked change in the character of English poetry, which ultimately stems from Lord Oxford’s immersion in London’s extramural theatre world. Looney writes:

We have already had to remark his restiveness under all kinds of restraints imposed by the artificiality of court life and his strong bent towards that Bohemian society within which were stirring energetic forces making for reality, mingled with much evil in life and literature. (162)

Quoting from Dean Church’s Life of Spenser, Looney characterizes the ‘Drab Age’ of English poetry as marked by “feebleness, fantastic absurdity, affectation and bad taste … Who could suppose what was preparing under it all? But the dawn was at hand.” (160)

De Vere’s exile has everything to do with this change. Looney cites Philip Sydney’s ‘In Defense of Poesie’ “as representing the earlier, feebler period, and the ‘rude playhouses with their troops of actors, most of them profligate and disreputable’ as being the source of the later and more virile movement.” (161)

The decade of the eighties constitutes “the period immediately following upon [de Vere’s] first poetic output, and it was during these years that he was in active and habitual association with these very troupes of play-actors […] What distinguishes Oxford’s work from contemporary verse is its strength, reality and true refinement. When Philip Sydney learned to ‘look into his heart and write’ he only showed that he had at last learnt a lesson that his rival had been teaching him.” (161)

During the next ten years, 1590-1600, “there burst forth suddenly a new poetry, which with its reality, depth, sweetness and nobleness took the world captive. The poetical aspirations of the Englishmen of the time had found at last adequate interpreters, and their own national and unrivaled expression.” (160)

The clinching evidence for de Vere’s authorship is the autobiographical nature of his art. Looney comments on the irony that considering how long he kept himself concealed, we are going to end up knowing more about this man than anyone who ever lived. Not only him, of course: his perspective on every major figure in his life, friend or foe. That’s what made him so explosive; courtiers might smirk at the satirical portraits that are everywhere in the plays, but no one outside the Court could be allowed to penetrate its privacy in this way. As so often in social elites’ ruthless protection of their interests, the reality principle itself ends up giving way — as in Borges’ fanciful story, or Barthes’ mechanistic theory.

De Vere’s self-portraits are just as unflinching. If his great studies in human folly are centred around his own person, this is not narcissism but rather its opposite. Tragedy, after all, is the study of how we destroy ourselves; in Hamlet, Othello and Lear, de Vere volunteers himself as the tragic model. This truthfulness, this devotion to reality no matter how uncomfortable, must have been one of the main reasons for the secrecy surrounding his identity, initially at least. It was more than just aristocratic convention and the stigma of print: the identity of the author, if known, would completely change the way his plays would be heard or read. The sonnets, explicitly autobiographical, wouldn’t be read at all, if the Privy Council could help it; when SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS appeared (posthumously) in 1609, the publication was immediately banned and all copies rounded up and destroyed, with only a few dozen known to have survived.

So Shakespeare could only be read on the condition that we were not put in a position to fully understand him. And anonymity is what de Vere himself wanted; he makes that very clear in the sonnets. He wants his name, he says in Sonnet 72, to be buried where his body is. And again in Sonnet 81, there’s the insistence that ‘I, once gone, to all the world must die.’ He actively wants to be forgotten, though he knows his work will survive. And he got his wish, for three hundred years at least, until J T Looney pulled back the curtain. The irony is that his work would never fully come alive, in my experience at least, until his identity as author was restored.

Without the correct attribution we lose unique insights into the structure of artistic revolutions, to adapt Thomas Kuhn’s famous book-title. Shakespeare’s drama represents such a significant paradigm shift that it wasn’t until the 19th century and the Romantic Revolution that his artistic influence really began to find receptors. Early Romantic-era writers like Coleridge, Hazlett and de Quincy recognised the significance of the work of the dramatist — and systematic inquiry into his identity follows immediately on from that period. Those who like to portray the status of Shakespeare as purely down to his imperialistic propaganda value should note that it was the the individualists and non-conformists of the Romantic Revolution who rediscovered him as a writer, recognising their kinship with him — which has nothing to do with nationalistic worship of an establishment icon. Without them we might never have seen the growing awareness of a hidden personality behind the works shown by a number of nineteenth century American writers and intellectuals -- Hawthorne and Bacon, Whitman, Twain, and Emerson among them.

But even a century after J T Looney’s book, thanks to the self-interested inertia of academia and the stubborn resistance of commercial interests like The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare’s identity is still only known to a tiny fraction of those who know his name.

Much of the resistance to de Vere’s authorship seems to reflect class prejudice, or inverted snobbery. De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and Lord High Chamberlain of England (a ceremonial post), is automatically to be rejected because of his high birth. We would prefer an idealised rags-to-riches figure, Mr Nobody from Nowhere, Dick Whittington with a talking cat. Instead what we get is Lord Byron with Faustian gifts and ‘lewd’ friends, the charismatic magnet for a Bohemian milieu in Venice and London. Sentimentalists don’t want to hear about this reckless aristocrat who got himself imprisoned in the Tower and then banished from Court. The final trigger was his affair with one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, resulting in the birth of a bastard son and a vendetta pursued against him by relatives of the lady. The feud spilled onto the streets of Blackfriars in lethal brawls and ambushes, leaving three men dead and de Vere badly wounded. Such was the implosion of the child star of Elizabeth’s court.

For a decade at least, dating from soon after his marriage, his life was, you could say, dramatic: this period gave him the stories to which he returned in his ultimate self-exile from the Court, the years of seclusion during which he hammered out the final versions of his greatest works, turning them into literary as well as dramatic masterpieces — the great studies in human folly which became famous throughout the world. The classical masks and other metamorphoses which he found for his own dramas and traumas allowed him to write about his own life to a degree none of us ever associated with this period. In doing so he revolutionised the uses of fiction and moved literature into a new phase — which had to wait a couple of centuries, admittedly, for the world to catch up; and that is when questions began to be asked about who he actually was. The beginnings of the search for Shakespeare’s identity were contemporaneous with his rediscovery as a writer.

In the meantime, Stratford had become the chaste birthplace of a miracle, a kind of new Bethlehem. Will Shakspere goes to London and immediately starts producing masterpieces, without the foundation of education or any preparation in the form of experimentation or apprentice-work, leaving behind no juvenilia. Fifteen or so years later his genius is suddenly switched back off, and he doesn’t lift a pen again, leaving his unfinished works to be completed by hacks. This is not realistic; it’s a fairytale, a Borgesian flight of fancy. The reality is that de Vere’s masterpieces were achieved through a lifetime’s labour and were the result of both exuberant experimentation and painstaking revision. The ‘Shakespeare’ period of the 1590s and early 1600s, which have been traditionally seen as the explosion of Will Shakespeare’s youthful and implausible genius, turns out to have been the maturity of de Vere, who achieved his art through sweat, tears, and, yes, blood too.

It’s not just self-interest and inertia that keeps the Stratford fairy-tale alive, and it’s not just class resentment either. There is something deeper here as well, I believe; ultimately it’s the same impulse that lies behind leftist ‘Death of the Author’ ideology. It’s the leftist abolition of the individual itself, as a concept, as a reality, as a moral centre — which Marshall McLuhan foresaw as the inevitable effect of the digital age. If even a writer is nothing but an LLM, then how can any of us prove our existence as unique entities? It brings us one step closer to absorption into the machine. And that is our culture war.

In fact, the Stratford misdirection has always met with most opposition from writers, directors and other artists. Any real artist knows the labour of art; genius doesn’t just switch itself on and off like a light on a timer. Good writing is hard, long work, the work of an individual who is both equipped and compelled to write by his or her own history and psychology. Art is by definition individualistic and can come only from an individual, as an expression of unique identity. It is not a passive process. Genius is not magic.

Our celebrity culture promotes the fantasy that education, discipline and mastery are not preconditions for original creative production and the glamour that surrounds it. We want to believe in achievement without effort, in ‘genius’ without discipline. That these plays somehow wrote themselves.

Today de Vere is no academic footnote, but a challenge to the engineering of contemporary culture. Just as secret performances of Shakespeare’s plays were staged by dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Communist tyranny, so de Vere’s clandestine art can sustain us in our own times. The Borgesian paradox is moot: Shakespeare was not nobody. He was a specific individual, unique and unrepeatable. Great art is not produced by impersonal cultural or historical forces, not by theory, and certainly not by technology. De Vere’s identification is death to Barthes’ collectivist theory; in a word, it’s the Rebirth of the Author.

5

Some of the most cutting-edge work in recent years has been done by Professor Roger Stritmatter in analysing the marginalia in de Vere’s Geneva Bible and their relationship to the play-texts, and more recently a similar investigation of the library at Audley End, near Saffron Walden in Essex, which is found to contain seven Elizabethan-era books annotated in de Vere’s hand, particularly those pertaining to the Roman plays.

Thanks for reading The Lethal Text! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

HAMLET

Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

LORD POLONIUS

By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.

HAMLET

Methinks it is like a weasel.

LORD POLONIUS

It is backed like a weasel.

HAMLET

Or like a whale?

LORD POLONIUS

Very like a whale.

HAMLET

Or how about a huge Jewish conspiracy to put the Goyim into a hypnotic trance and programme them to slaughter each other in a cannibalistic orgy?

LORD POLONIUS [Aside]

Methinks there is method in his madness!

Apophenia is the human tendency to imagine patterns and see meaning in random data. The more widely known term is pareidolia, which is a subset of apophenia, specifically the phenomenon of seeing familiar objects in random visual information. If you see a human face in a rocky cliff, or a camel in the clouds — that’s pareidolia. But if you see nothing but a vast Jewish plot in the complete works of William Shakespeare? Joseph Atwill calls it typology, but I’m not so sure. He has said and written that the plays are ‘incomprehensible,’ rendering Shakespeare texts the equivalent of random data from his perspective, and unleashing a display of rampant apophenia and confirmation bias, unrestrained by any knowledge or understanding of the texts or the period.

In Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, Joseph Atwill transplants his own theory from his highly successful book Caesar’s Messiah – The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus — that the Christian Gospels encode the events of Titus Flavius’ victorious military campaign in Judea and are therefore a Roman creation to mock the Messianic Jews and put them under the spell of a pacifist religion. Now he finds the same code mirrored in Shakespeare for the reverse purpose, to create ‘Jewish revenge literature’, a ‘pie-in-the-face to the Gentiles’.

For him this is the secret and actual meaning of the entire works of Shakespeare; he proceeds to dismiss the significance of the whole oeuvre and discourage anyone from ever reading it again. He is trying to do for Shakespeare what he did for the Gospels.

At least he’s open about it. In interviews, such as the one he gave to Red Ice Radio in 2014, Joseph Atwill makes no secret of the fact that before applying his ready-made theory to the works of Shakespeare, he had no interest in the writer and hadn’t read him. Indeed, couldn’t read him — he repeatedly calls the plays ‘boring and incomprehensible’. It is only in the light of his theory that they become comprehensible (or interesting) at all.

“If you understand the gospels, if you understand the story of Jesus as a kind of prefiguration and a mockery of the Roman-Jewish war, then when you come to Shakespeare you have the correct interpretive framework to make sense of the plays […]

“If you are familiar with the gospels typology then suddenly all of the Shakespearean plays which are so boring and incomprehensible become kind of funny and very easy to understand. I read Titus Andronicus and the reason that I actually was interested in that play is because the character Titus obviously evokes the character who is in back of the gospels, Titus Flavius …but more Andronicus, this caught my attention, I wasn’t really into Shakespeare, but there was something about the title that brought me into it.”

“People who read the book […] will see that the plays themselves are really quite interesting when you know what they’re really talking about.”

So, the plays are incomprehensible except in the light of Atwill’s ‘Flavian Comic Code’. Joseph Atwill is the only person in four hundred years (apart from the Jews, obviously) to have understood the works of ‘William Shakespeare’, which was, according to him, the pseudonym of a teenage Italian-Jewish courtesan who ‘was Shakespeare’ and therefore wrote Hamlet at the age of nineteen). Anything else you ever saw in it is merely an apopheniac illusion, and Shakespeare a ‘pseudo-genius’, constructed with the intention of entrapping all those poor Gentile souls who think his art actually means something and then boring them to death. In short, Shakespeare is Jewish Revenge Porn.

But don’t worry: Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah is here to save us from Shakespeare and to stop us from ever wanting to read her again. Perhaps in time Mr Atwill plans to rescue us from literature in its entirety, since apparently he must destroy what he does not understand.

Atwill claims that the plays and poems were written by Emilia Bassano Lanier, a Marrano Jew from Venice who was the teenage mistress of the Lord Chamberlain, Baron Hunsdon, at the court of Elizabeth I for four years, before falling pregnant and being married off to a cousin in 1592, by which time she was 23 and already the greatest (pseudo-)genius in English literary history.

According to his theory, Lanier wrote the entire works of Shakespeare, including the sonnets in which she adopts a male persona and writes love poems to herself. Her purpose in creating the greatest poetic oeuvre in the English language, works which played a primary role in the unification, expansion and refinement of English into a literary language, was entirely to reverse the Flavian code and turn the Roman joke against the Gentiles.

One wonders why she would go to a whole lifetime’s trouble to do this – why write 38 plays, 154 sonnets and three long narrative poems, rather than focusing her satire in a single play or poem? Lanier’s only published work was Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (1611) – would this not be the place to look for ‘Jewish revenge literature’? Why make Lanier the author of the entire oevre and have her repeat the same trick ad infinitum like some kind of obsessive-compulsive psycho?

Ah, but it was easy, according to Atwill: “Given her background, the literature just came naturally out of her mind.” There you go — she just couldn’t help it.

Either way, the secret and actual message of the Gospels, is “You stupid Jews, we beat you good, ha ha ha! And now we’re selling you this new religion to turn you into pacifists.”

The secret and actual message of Shakespeare is the reverse: “You filthy Goyim, we’re gonna get you in the end, ha ha ha! And now we’re creating the greatest literary works in the English language to torture you with long boring plays which nobody understands but are really programming you to submit to your fate!”

On the basis of this amazing theory Atwill then dismisses the whole of Shakespeare as something poisonous and degrading.

“…and beyond that, frankly, I’m really not sure what value the Shakespearean literature has … I don’t think this literature is useful, I don’t think it makes better people, and I would compare it to the apocalyptic zombie cannibalism in our current genre, I mean it’s, it’s, sick!”

The problem with this is that if you approach the works of Shakespeare (or any other author) without any previous experience or knowledge, waving a piece of paper with the word ‘typology’ scrawled on it, which you regard as a license to see anything you like ‘coded’ into the vast complexity of the texts, there is nothing to restrain the apopheniac tendency to see your own obsessions mirrored back at you. Atwill’s vaunted ‘typological’ method appears to mean basing interpretation on the random occurrence of key words, which are taken in isolation and given arbitrary new meanings in order to open the gate to an army of irrelevant hypotheses in the service of an astoundingly reductivist theory.

This is how the Shakespeare Grifter thinks: Hmm, nobody understands this shit anyway, so I can just make up whatever I want and people will believe me.

Let’s have a look at what Atwill has written about one Shakespeare play, The Tempest, and consider his method in action. I read his essay ‘Shakespeare’s Apocalyptic Brave New World’, published on his own website, the stated purpose of which is to elucidate the phrase ‘Brave New World’, uttered by Miranda in the play and made famous by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel of that title.

Early on in the essay, Atwill shares with us the fact that he was surprised to find that this play has a happy ending. According to his theory, all the Shakespeare plays should have endings in which the ‘Gentile’ characters are cannibalistically slaughtered, or better still, slaughter each other. If a play ends in marriage, the forgiveness of old feuds, the reunion of lost children, parents, brothers and friends, and the redemption of the self ‘when no man was his own’, we must ignore all of this and find the Jewish revenge porn hidden within the text, which is the ‘actual’ ending.

The play, you see, only appears to be about forgiveness and to have a happy ending; in reality it enacts the usual Jewish revenge, evokes the Jewish apocalypse and has an ‘occulted outcome’ which is of course nasty, vengeful, and Jewish.

So why then would Lanier give her play this false ‘happy ending’? Ah, says Atwill, she was probably blackmailed into it – or replaced by another author. He doesn’t say who this might be, but since writing Shakespeare is so easy I presume it could be pretty much anyone.

The only reason I didn’t stop reading (once I’d stopped laughing) was out of morbid curiosity.

No doubt this ad hoc ‘blackmail’ hypothesis or such like will have to be wheeled out many times as Atwill eventually realizes that Shakespeare wrote rather a lot of plays with happy endings. They’re called comedies and romances. And every time it happens, either that author is going to have to be replaced, or Emilia is going to have to be blackmailed again until she falls back in line with the programme.

Meanwhile, this charming entertainment for a daughter’s marriage, a romance incorporating a masque, is interpreted in the same way as Titus Andronicus, as a substandard horror tragedy which Shakespeare never bothered to revise or publish in an authorized edition. But it’s all the same to Atwill – to him there’s nothing in Shakespeare but endlessly repeated visions of dire and degrading punishments to be meted out to the Gentiles at the Apocalypse. That’s what they all mean. Once you’ve read one play, you’ve read them all.

Here is what happens when Atwill applies his theory to Shakespeare’s magic-and-music-soaked text — get this. At the end of The Tempest what ‘really’ happens is that young Prince Ferdinand of Naples is castrated by his bride while he sleeps, then circumcised by a half-human monster, and finally his penis is cut off and eaten by his father, his uncle, and his bride’s uncle.

I kid you not:

“Prospero’s ‘cell’ is where vengeance is delivered. First, Prospero describes his cell as a ‘court’ – in other words where justice is delivered. Then he orders Ferdinand to sleep there. While he is asleep Miranda ‘severs’ Ferdinand – in other words castrates him. Then, Caliban is told to ‘trim it handsomely’ – meaning to circumcise Ferdinand’s castrated member. Finally, the Gentile nobility is told to spend a night inside the cell – to participate in a cannibal feast of the ‘trimmed’ member.“

Sick enough for you?

The premises for this singularly diseased instance of apopheniac fantasy arise as follows:

1 Prospero, the deposed Duke of a powerful city-state, refers to his modest home as his ‘cell’ (i.e., like a monk’s bare room) or ironically as his ‘court’. Not understanding his self-deprecating irony, Atwill decides that ‘cell’ means a prison and ‘court’ means a court of law, and therefore that this is where justice will be meted out to the enemies of the Jews.

2 Prospero sends Ferdinand to his cave to ‘repose [himself] a while’. Atwill thinks that ‘repose’ necessarily means ‘sleep’.

3 The word ‘severed’ has been used only by Alonso:

Is she [Miranda] the goddess that hath sever’d us,

And brought us thus together?

‘Sever’d’ obviously means ‘separated’ here, but the word calls to Mr Atwill’s mind the irresistible image of severed testicles.

4 Later, Caliban is sent to the ‘cell’ or cave to perform his normal menial duties of cleaning and tidying. Prospero’s phrase ‘make sure you trim it handsomely’ is taken by Atwill to mean ‘make sure you circumcise the sleeping Prince Ferdinand’s castrated penis. And do it handsomely.’

This despite the fact that Prospero has just revealed Ferdinand and Miranda alive, awake and, as far as we can tell, completely unmutilated, playing an innocent game of chess in Prospero’s cave.

5 Prospero tells the bemused company that they should get some rest and he will tell them the rest of the story over breakfast. Apparently that’s code for ‘we’ll have a cannibal feast and eat Ferdinand’s sever’d penis.’ (With some Flavian beans, no doubt.)

For me this was the highlight of the essay. Now I understand why Atwill calls it The Flavian Comic Code.

If you can bear it I’ll share a couple of other highlights from this festival of apophenia. Let’s see what Atwill makes of two passages: Ariel’s famous song, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I”, which the spirit sings when Prospero releases him from his twelve years of servitude; and Prospero’s famous speech ‘Our revels now are ended’, which he addresses to his daughter and son-in-law, ostensibly to calm them and and more importantly himself, after his abrupt termination of their betrothal masque.

First the song.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Now you and I might think that this is a lyrical grace-note to the conclusion of the drama, an anticipation of pastoral bliss, the end of toil and resumption of play for this mischievous spirit of nature.

But we’re just stupid goys, so what do we know? In fact things are about to get really bad for the Gentiles, because this innocent little song is an anticipation of the Apocalypse which is about to overtake them all, once they have been released from their dream-state.

“Compare to Isaiah 34:11 and 35:1-2,” Mr Atwill instructs us.

“34:11 But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.

35:1 The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

35:2 It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God. ….”

Slam dunk, innit? The poet says ‘owls’ and ‘blossoms’ as a cloaked allusion to the occulted, encoded Jewish-apocalytic message. Presumably ‘she’ could just as well have used ‘cormorant’ and ‘wilderness’, or ‘glad’ and ‘rejoice’, or ‘rose’ and ‘solitary’, and it would have come to the same thing.

And it always does come to the same thing, believe me.

Finally then, to one of the greatest speeches in English poetry, Prospero’s requiem for the great illusion of life, the end of worlds and the striking of theatre sets.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Is there anything much lovelier in English poetry? So inward, yet so resonant, so limpidly clear even while contemplating the deep mystery of reality itself.

Except that’s not what it’s ‘really’ about, of course. Atwill enlightens us, describing the speech as “the most important in the play, in which the enraged Prospero gives a description of the coming Apocalypse of the Gentiles envisioned by Isaiah. Prospero’s use of the term ‘dissolve’ […] is one of the two keys needed to understand the passage and he is using the term in the same context as Isaiah does in 34:2-4, describing the slaughter of all the nations, the stink of their carcasses, and the melting of mountains with their blood […]

Thus, in the first part of the passage, when Prospero indicates that actors are “the stuff that dreams are made of” [sic], he is actually saying that the actors are part of the dream that Isaiah foresaw which leads to the apocalypse of the nations.”

Prospero’s speech is a spiritual exercise he uses to get control of his emotions as the climax of his plot approaches. The mood is not anger, but acceptance. He’s calming himself by looking at it all sub specie eternitate. But this great speech and the important character development it embodies is of no interest to Mr Atwill except in its use of just two separate words, ‘dissolve’ and ‘dream’ — or ‘actors’, I’m not sure — but these two words apparently tell us what the speech is ‘really’ about – the approaching Apocalypse and the fiendish Zionist plot to put the Gentiles into an MK-ULTRA dream-state through their construction of the pseudo-genius ‘Shakespeare’, whose magnificent works will prove to be as much an illusion as the spirit masque just witnessed by Miranda and Ferdinand.

“Given the depiction of the ‘Globe’ as an element in the dream state that leads to the Apocalypse of the Christian world, it is hard not engage in paranoid wondering of to what extent Jewish influence in the media is related to the ‘dream state’ for Gentiles described in the Tempest. Or as John Lennon stated – hopefully tongue in cheek – ‘show business is an extension of the Jewish religion.‘”

And so you will sleep, and while you sleep you will dream, and while you dream…

…the Jews are gonna sneak in and cut your dick off, ha ha ha!

And then the world will end and there’ll be nothing left but owls and blossoms.

And Jews, obviously.

Read it for yourself if you don’t believe me. Read it, before accusing me of creating straw men or any such thing. See if you can get through it without laughing, before criticizing me for my constant appeal to ridicule. There are absurdities, manifest errors and blurrings in every point made. If you want to see cultural debasement in action, you’ll find it here in its most toxic, reductivist form. If on the other hand you want anything that even qualifies as an interpretation, forget it.

What motives lie behind this drivel? I can’t express how bad it is. I feel like John Savage, wandering alienated through the abject society of Brave New World. Lost for words, I find that all I can do is quote Shakespeare:

“Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

We were talking about journeys, border-crossings, and shifting cultural identities.

Anissa is from the Congo. Not the big one, the Democratic Republic, formerly the Belgian Congo, synonymous with suffering — but its smaller neighbour, Republic of.

My Congo, she calls it.

‘When I am in my Congo,’ she says, ‘they call me La Parisienne. But here…’

She looks around at the peeling walls of the classroom. It’s a top-dollar boarding school near Paris, set in beautiful grounds, though some of the buildings are surprisingly dilapidated. But the sweep of her eyes is meant to indicate the world beyond the walls, where these beautiful Africans can still experience some sneers and rudeness when they go into town.

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Everyone knows what she means.

‘When you go back,’ I ask, ‘do you feel you’ve changed? Do you still feel you belong?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do, and I don’t.’

Which was perfect, allowing me to introduce the idea I was trying to get to, that of liminality — that is, an in-between or threshold state, on the boundary between two domains, realms, conditions, ages, statuses, whatever; the subject having left one set of classifications and not yet entered another.

I thought it would be a good topic for writing, giving the students an opportunity to write about themselves if they wanted to. Teenagers are an obvious example of liminality. They stand on a threshold, no longer children, not yet adults. And for these international kids there are cultural thresholds too.

But it also offered lots of imaginative possibilities. Liminal entities move in different worlds but belong in none, inhabiting the gaps, the interstices, the in-between. Ghosts, superheroes, mermaids and other chimaeras, vampires, centaurs and harpies, cyborgs and shamans.

The Russians and French in the class knew the word, but the Africans were unfamiliar.

I threw up an image-search on the projector.

“The Shaman wears an animal skin or horns or feathers to make himself appear like a hybrid — it symbolises the ability to move between worlds, the human world and the spirit world.”

“Ah,” said Anissa. “Le Marabout.”

My only association with the word was the maribou stork, a big, ancient-looking bird with a bald head, an ugly, heavy beak and downy feathers cloaking its shoulders. In my mind’s eye I saw a shaman hopping around in a feathered cape with some kind of beak contraption attached to his face.

“Maribou?”

“Marabout. Witch…”

She turned those huge eyes to her friend Chrisvène, as if unsure of the term, and added,

“…doctor?”

Later I looked up the word and found that in Saharan and sub-Saharan countries it refers to travelling Islamic scholars — but that’s not how Anissa was using it. It seems that further South it has attached itself to the shaman or ‘witch-doctor.’

I asked the students to think about what they wanted to write about out of all these ideas, and walked around chatting and answering questions.

When I got to Anissa I asked her to tell me more about the Marabout.

“Do people in your Congo go to the Marabout for help?”

“Yes,” she said. “He can find things that you have lost.”

“And if you are sick, can you go to him for healing?”

Chrisvène spoke up. “You can go,” she said, “but it is dangereuse. You should only go if there is nothing else you can do.”

“Why is that?”

“Because he may steal something from you.”

“Really? Like what?”

She looked at Anissa, who reached her hand up to the middle of my forehead and made a pinching movement with beautifully manicured fingers, drawing something away through the air like a thread, then turning her hand over as if to show me.

“Your… star,” she said.

And when she said that, and made that gesture, for some reason the image of the stork-man disappeared from my mind’s eye and was replaced by a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a white butcher coat.

“Hmm,” I said. “I think the same may be true of some of our doctors here, in the West.”

It was only a throw-away remark before turning away to talk to other students, and I didn’t expect her to know what I meant, but she was nodding, widening, if that were possible, those enormous eyes.

It was early 2019. Two years later I remembered this conversation, and wondered if she remembered me saying that.

I hoped so. She’d seemed to understand what I meant, even though I wasn’t sure myself.

Be careful, I want to say to those I know and love. He may steal something from you.

Your star.

We know now, beyond any doubt, don’t we? That was democide. Is.

I thought so from the beginning. I’d read Bill Joy’s article Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us way back in 2008, and from there the Unabomber’s The Future of Industrial Society, and I’d checked out the Deagel.com population forecasts and knew about the Georgia Guidestones. I’d read the Club of Rome’s 1991 publication, the First Global Revolution, with its infamous passage concluding “The real enemy then is humanity itself.” With the known eugenicist Bill Gates announcing that ‘we’ would have to vaccinate the entire population of the planet, you didn’t need to be a genius to have some idea of what was going on — though you would have to be a genius to figure out how to alert your propagandised family members to the danger they were in. And of course they don’t want to know now — I’m sure I wouldn’t, either. And so we go on, pretending it didn’t happen and isn’t happening, in this weird, depressing, unreal fashion like a chemtrail day without shadows… but it did, and if it did, then the event over-arches our entire adult lives; we just didn’t know it.

At some point in 2020 or 2021 a clip was doing the rounds from an interview with Stanley Johnson, former EU Commissioner and father of the then Prime Minister of the UK, in which he postulated that the ideal population for the British Isles would be between 10 and 15 million people, and that this must happen by 2025 at the latest. That caught my attention because I remembered that the Deagel.com forecast for UK population in 2025 lay within that range. The coincidence strongly suggested shared but unstated premises. Another clip that resurfaced around then was an excerpt from an interview with Professor Dennis Meadows, lead author of The Limits To Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1972 — the document which inaugurated the establishment environmentalist movement — in which he flatly states that ‘we are going to have a billion people’, though without giving any dates by which the global population will be reduced to that level.

Recently I went back and watched both full interviews, and it was interesting to view them side by side, as it were. Both take roughly the form of a career retrospective, highlighting the role of the subject in the formation, over the last half century, of the powerful establishment faux-environmentalist movement, operating through multilateral organisations and treaties which are being used to strangle Western economies and societies. Both men played important roles in the construction of the kill-box in which we find ourselves.

Both interviews have to be seen in the context of a strange and counterintuitive trend of disclosure, beginning in 2010 with Bill Gates’ ‘Innovating to Zero’ TED talk, in which he presented a formula for calculating carbon dioxide emissions:

Controversy focused on Gates’ assertion that vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, etc, could reduce population growth by up to 15%, and Reuters, USA Today and other fact-checking services expended much effort reassuring the public that Gates was not talking about killing people with vaccines, but referencing the widely accepted fact that reducing infant mortality tends to lead to an eventual decrease in birth rates, since parents grow more confident of their offspring surviving into adulthood. In fact what he is doing here is referencing a well-known argument in order to eliminate it in favour of his own more radical solution.

“Probably one of these numbers is gonna have to get pretty close to zero.”

When he says this, laughter ripples through the audience. It’s a strange disconcerting moment. The laughter seems to acknowledge a subliminal message: that the ‘zero’ of Gates’ title refers primarily to the first factor in the equation — People.

Was it an invited audience? I don’t know, but it probably had an invited contingent, and maybe it was some of these people who laughed and the reaction rippled out from there. Regardless, it shows that even by 2010 the idea had been accepted, if only subconsciously, by some sections of society.

And of course the issue of population was foundational to the environmentalist case: it was there from the beginning, before climate even figured in the debate — that issue was only pumped up in the late eighties and 1990’s, with the formation of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the publication of The First Global Revolution and the 2nd edition of The Limits to Growth. Population is the #1 premise of establishment environmentalism — but has to remain unspoken, or can be spoken of only through equivocation, which is where carbon dioxide comes in. The meme ‘You are the carbon they want to reduce’ captures it exactly.

The eugenics/climate equivocation is illustrated very clearly in the 2012 Stanley Johnson interview, which became much more interesting in retrospect, once Johnson’s son ‘Boris’ had acceded to the position of Chief Clown in the Parliament of Fools in the immediate run-up to the inception of the Great Cull. Interest focused on the passage in which Johnson Snr expresses his opinion that the ideal population of Britain would be somewhere between 10 and 15 million — by 2025 ‘at a limit’. The equivalence of the climate crisis and the population issue doesn’t just characterise the interview but the entirety of Johnson’s career, to the extent that it becomes very obvious that the one is merely cover for the other in the mind of this orthodox functionary, and in building the legislative framework to impose the environmentalist/ depopulation agenda on the world.

Johnson’s experience of environmentalism as downstream of population concern forms the backbone of the interview, and of Johnson’s career. The interviewer, the Guardian’s long-serving environment editor John Vidal, throws him an invitation very early. Johnson seems strangely breathless in the early stages of his coming-out interview; his tension about peeling back the environmentalist mask to reveal the eugenicist skull beneath. Once Vidal has got him to broach the forbidden subject, he gradually becomes more comfortable and stops hyperventilating. By the end of the interview he is channeling, almost verbatim, the Club of Rome:

“In the end the problem is the human race itself, there’s no question about that.”

I’m not saying that Johnson has no feeling for the natural world or that his environmentalism is not sincere: he likes animals, wants to preserve the English countryside, and so on. But his career is a very clear illustration of the hierarchy of issues in establishment environmentalism. Having been employed by the World Bank in Washington DC in the sixties, Johnson set up the UN Fund for Population Activities in 1971 and “only came into environment on the back of that” (14:04 in the interview). And that is establishment environmentalism in a nutshell.

The passage that gave this interview its shock value comes towards the end, as Johnson grows more comfortable with his taboo-breaking assignment. Vidal asks him about the ‘carrying capacity’ of Britain, and it’s worth quoting Johnson’s answer in full because there’s a linguistic non-sequitur, a leap to a different linguistic register, which is of interest (from 22:36 in the interview).

“Well, Britain, I’d put it at 10 to 15 million,” (both Johnson and Vidal start laughing), “– um, I think that’d be absolutely fine, I mean that would do us really splendidly — at-at-at a limit, 2025.”

What caught my ear here is the contrast between the Old Etonian bluster of ‘absolutely fine’ and ‘that would do us splendidly’ and the cold bureaucratese of ‘at a limit’, not to mention his stutter on the phrase. It’s an odd slippage of diction, suggesting, again, an allusion to unstated premises, unreferenced agreements and policies. The coincidence of Edwin Deagle’s 2025 forecast for the UK falling within exactly the range specified by Johnson is highly noteworthy, I think; it seems clear to me that Deagle is singing from the same hymn-sheet. The fact that Deagle’s country-by-country forecasts amount to a decline of over a billion in world population invites the speculation that that was the intended milestone to be reached by the inverted biowarfare of the COVID operation: a reduction in world population of approximately one billion people. Deagle is calculating the implications of such a decline on military spending. In his final (2020) Disclaimer, Deagle takes the COVID debacle as evidence for his collapse thesis, but clearly does not believe his projected ‘confluence of crises’ has yet materialised.

“After COVID we can draw two major conclusions:

The Western world success model has been built over societies with no resilience that can barely withstand any hardship, even a low intensity one. It was assumed but we got the full confirmation beyond any doubt.

The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through the so called Great Reset.“

This third Disclaimer contrasts with the previous two in its length and relative freedom of expression; it’s as if he has been let off the leash by the materialisation of the crisis he knew to expect but couldn’t name, and can now speak more freely. I do think it is likely that the forecasts are Deagle’s extrapolations based on premises he cannot reveal, and I think it’s perfectly obvious what those premises were.

Professor Dennis Meadows is a much bigger wheel than Stanley Johnson in the history of the establishment environmental movement. While technically a co-author of the 1972 The Limits to Growth report, he was clearly the driving force behind it. In fact Limits to Growth grew out of Meadows’ two year directorship of the ‘Club of Rome Project on the Predicament of Mankind’ at MIT (1970 to 1972).

Like Johnson, Meadows shows a certain tension in broaching the topic of depopulation. His confession comes towards the end of the interview, hosted by the Club of Rome’s Dutch Association, and he prefaces it with an acknowledgement that ‘since you are able to edit out all the stuff you don’t like, I can speak honestly.’ But he’s not quite honest; as with Johnson, he obfuscates: he talks about population ‘coming back down’; about this reduction ‘occurring’, as if these might be spontaneous developments. He talks about volcanoes and pandemics as possible natural triggers for what he regards as inevitable collapse. But eventually he gets the courage to let the equivocal style slip a little, and his language coyly acknowledges human agency and a decision already reached.

“We are so far above the population and the consumption levels which can be supported by this planet, that I know that one way or another it’s going to come back down, so I don’t hope to avoid that. I hope that it can occur in a… a civil way, and I mean civil in a special way: peaceful. Peace doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy, but it means that conflict isn’t solved through violence, through force, but rather in other ways, so that’s what I hope for. The planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion, depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption he want to have. If you want more liberty and more consumption, you need fewer people, and conversely if you have more people – I mean, we could even have probably eight or nine billion if we have a very strong dictatorship which is smart; unfortunately we never have smart dictatorships, they are always stupid, but if we had a smart dictatorship and a low standard of living … but we want to have freedom and we want to have a high standard of living, so we’re going to have a billion people. And we’re now at seven, and we have to get back down. I hope that this can be slow, relatively slow, and that it can be done in a way that is relatively equal, you know, so that people share the experience, and we don’t have a few rich forcing everybody else to deal with it. These are my hopes, and they’re pretty pessimistic hopes, but that’s what lies ahead.” (From Part IV of the interview.)

Meadows must know that it’s happening; phase 1 of the operation, at least. I imagine he must be moderately pleased by the ‘civility’ being shown by the submissive masses as the epidemic of heart attacks, strokes and cancer rolls on; the ‘gruesome quiet‘, to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, which surrounds the continuing cull. As for ‘sharing the experience’ — what a bizarre choice of words! — a fifteen-year-old boy in this Thai village died from cardiac failure last week, while a royal princess lies in a four-year coma, so I suppose there is some degree of ‘equality’ in the distribution of sudden death (leaving aside the exempted politicians, of course, and the pharma CEOs and directors of international health organisations who decided selflessly to forego their dose so that someone else could benefit).

But for myself, that phrase evokes only a bitter laugh, since there is not one member of my blood family with whom I can ‘share the experience’ of living through this unprecedented period in human history, not one whom I was able to successfully alert to the danger, not one with whom I can discuss any of this to this day.

Perhaps Meadows thinks that tricking people into allowing themselves to be injected with substances designed to kill, maim and sterilise is not violence: that it’s a ‘peaceful’ way of dealing with the problem. But the subtle nervousness betrayed by both Johnson and Meadows tells me that both men have some sense of the deep moral abyss inherent in the cause they are espousing, regardless of karmic sleight-of-hand: that mass-murder is mass-murder, even if you deceive or bully people into taking the poison voluntarily. Both no doubt believe that ‘science’ validates the necessity of the operation. Johnson, however, is no scientist, and Meadows, though he is described as a ‘scientist’ by both the Club of Rome and Wikipedia, has a background in social science and systems management. No one who declares carbon dioxide to be a ‘pollutant’ can lay claim to a scientific outlook.

I think people are gradually becoming aware that population phobia is as hollow as the climate hysteria. We hit the peak in rate of population growth way back in 1968 — the same year, ironically, that Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Live births, worldwide, have been declining since 2012, when 146 million babies were born. In 2021, 54% of countries had fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, according to Reuters — and that includes India. This decline has not yet shown up in population totals, since the death rate is also falling. But it will. In a few decades, we will be close to a peak in population (the UN projection is for 2084, peaking at around 10 billion). The expectation is that from that point, population will enter a continuous decline.

Population concern, then, is as much a profasis for mass murder as climate change. The underlying motive is as old as oligarchy itself: fear and hatred of the common people, and a desire to get rid of them at the earliest possible opportunity; that is, as soon as they are no longer needed to supply the needs of the oligarchy. And that moment is now: as robotics and artificial intelligence take over all human roles, the economic value of the human being falls to zero. It’s not about saving the planet — it’s about preserving for all time the dominant position of the oligarchy.

The ‘civility’ Meadows hopes for applies only to the targeted, not the perpetrators. He searches for another word and comes up with ‘peaceful’. But what he actually means is ‘pacification’: he hopes the masses can be kept passive during the process of their elimination. And it occurs to me that this can be achieved only through the creation of systems of distraction just as sophisticated as the system of elimination. Meadows has spent much time in his retirement devising ‘strategic games’ to educate students about sustainable development. But — and here’s an unsettling thought — if the depopulation agenda has been in place since the nineteen seventies, then the whole of social media has arisen under its shadow, providing us all with strategic games to play — ‘a simple crutch to occupy the mind’, to paraphrase Michael Stipe. And so we pass the time like Vladimir and Estragon, bickering about what’s real and scoring points off each other, until it’s our turn to shuffle out of the oligarchs’ way and vacate the planet to their pleasures. Is that all we’re doing, even here?

Just a thought. I’ll take it as a reminder not to spend too much time online. I’m growing food; I helped create this farm in 2019, and it’s almost impossible to break even, but the barn is stacked with rice, the fields are positively bursting with bananas, and my ponds are full of fish. I’d better get back to work — it’s good being outside, under the sun, taking the strain to achieve something real. It’s in my nature to be civil, but I will not be pacified, will not participate in the lie, will not pretend it’s not happening, and I trust, friend, that neither will you.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Ever had the experience of something you’re looking at disappearing right in front of your eyes? It’s disconcerting. You’re sitting in a huge old library, leafing through the tome you ordered up from the stacks, you turn a page and pouf! — the book dematerialises in your hands.

That’s akin to what just happened with deagel.com‘s forecasts for 2025.

Deagel reports on military-industrial affairs, along the lines of the much better-known Janes defence and security platform; articles assessing weapons systems and acquisitions, R & D, military expenditure, states of readiness, that kind of thing… As such it is of specialised interest.

But in 2014 its comprehensive country-by-country 2025 forecast attracted wider attention, because it arrived at the bottom line — military expenditure — via some startling projections about population.

I’d taken a quick look at the site in 2018. Almost every country in the world was listed, together with population, GDP, relative purchasing power, military budget and so on. According to the forecasts, the year 2025 would see population trends thrown into reverse, with the global population projected to decline by over a billion people. Counterintuitively, these losses would be concentrated, not in the Third World as comfortable Westerners might prefer to assume, but in the West itself. USA, the Five Eyes/ British Commonwealth countries, Western Europe and Scandinavia registered the most brutal reductions.

The population of the USA, for example, would shrink to 61 million people — an astonishing 80% reduction on the 2013 census. The United Kingdom would be hit almost as hard. These were the deepest cuts, but losses on a comparable scale were registered across the Western block, country after country being devastated by population collapses comparable with the effects of the mid-fourteenth century ‘Black Death’.

In contrast, India would continue to grow, though more slowly than the current rate, as would Pakistan, Indonesia and Brazil. China and Japan would experience significant but manageable reductions, while losses in Russia would be marginal.

In marked contrast to the developed world, Second and Third World countries continued to grow or experienced relatively modest reductions. Thailand, for example, was slated to lose three and a half million of its 68 million inhabitants, around 5% of its population, while Australia to the South would decline by 60%, and even the once fabled sanctuary of New Zealand would lose a quarter of its people.

No commentary or explanation of the methodology was provided. A brief ‘Disclaimer’ stated that the website was ‘non-profit, built on spare time’, had no links to any government, and provided its information ‘AS IS, without further explanations and/or guarantees.’ The forecasts were merely a model built on ‘speculative assumptions’.

This did nothing to dispel the mystery. What were these ‘speculative assumptions’? What might happen to bring about this collapse of population throughout the Western world? What was the scenario being modelled here?

‘Does Deagel know something we don’t?’ was the question everywhere.

The site responded to all the unexpected attention with a second, expanded Disclaimer dated 26th October 2014, explaining the general rationale behind the model. Noting that ‘There have been many questions about the countries forecast specially the one focusing on the United States’, and promising some ‘explanations, thoughts and reflections’, the author goes first to the question of its sources:

The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of the forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN, USG, etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country’s page. There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources such as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. But all these sources are from the internet and are of public domain for at least a minority. For example, several years ago Dagong, the Chinese ratings agency, published a report analyzing the physical economy of the States comparing it with those of China, Germany and Japan. The conclusion was that the US GDP was something between $5 to $10 trillion instead of $15 trillion as officially reported by the USG. We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree.

He then gets into the premises on which the forecast is based, with a reflection on the consequences of an ebola pandemic:

So far the few cases of Ebola-infected people have ‘enjoyed’ intensive healthcare with anti-viral and breathing assistance but above all with abundant human support by Physicians and nurses. In a pandemic scenario that kind of healthcare won’t be available for the overwhelming number of infected leading to a dramatic increase of the death rate due to the lack of proper healthcare. The ‘quality’ factor is that the death rate could increase to 80-90% in a pandemic scenario from the stated 50-60% rate.

This turns out to be something of a false start, since neither a pandemic nor a nuclear war figures among the forecasts’ ‘speculative premises’. However, the point he makes here about the death-rate of a serious pandemic being multiplied by the collapse of overstressed health systems is valid, and was seen to a degree in the consequences of the COVID attack. This is important in contemporary development of biowarfare theory — one need not use a maximally lethal agent, incurring the danger of blowback; the desired death-toll can be achieved through the societal effects of panic and the resulting systemic collapse and political changes ‘justified’ by the apparent situation.

So what is it that Deagel was modelling, if not a pandemic? What was going to wipe all these millions from the census?

Simple, he says: the collapse of the Western financial system, inevitable since 2008. First he reassures us that not all of these disappearing people are going to die:

The countries’ forecast population numbers do reflect birth/deaths but also migratory movements. Many countries are going to increase their gross population due to immigration while their native population may shrink.

Nevertheless, ‘the death toll will be horrible.’ The West will fall much harder than the Soviet Union 30 years ago, its problems exacerbated by top-heavy demographics and economic reliance on a service sector which will disappear along with the financial system. It’s ‘a confluence of crisis with a devastating result’, dwarfing the collapse of the Soviet empire.

After the election of Boris Johnson as Chief Clown in the Parliament of Clowns, someone reposted an interview with his the new Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a former EU Commissioner, in which he expressed the view that the ideal population of Britain would be somewhere between 10 and 15 million. That rang a bell — didn’t Deagel’s forecast fall within that range?

Furthermore, speaking in 2012, Johnson said that such a reduction needed to be achieved ‘at a limit’ by 2025.

That year again.

Please note that I am not proposing Johnson senior as some kind of arch-villain pulling strings behind the scenes — merely suggesting that as a former European Commissioner, his thinking might be taken as representative of establishment orthodoxy across the multilateralist institutions, not just the EC but the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WEF, the WHO and the rest.

I checked, and yes — the UK population was projected at 14 million, within the desired range as expressed by Commissioner Johnson, whose son — no doubt under unremitting pressure from his GSK and BMGF advisers — now enacts precisely the policies which allow us to see with chilling clarity the route to such a societal collapse.

In late April of 2021, thinking of writing something about the depopulation agenda, I went back to Deagel.com and found that everything had changed. The site had been redesigned, with a cleaner, more modern look — and the 2025 forecasts had completely disappeared.

This didn’t strike me as good news: these apocalyptic forecasts had sat there for seven or eight years, and for them to abruptly disappear at this critical juncture seemed only to underline their significance. A year into the pandemic, with a devastating economic and supply-chain collapse inching closer with every lockdown, it looked very much like the belated suppression of something that was never intended to attract such widespread attention.

If so, the move backfired, only intensifying the curiosity. Internet researchers renewed their efforts to find out who ran the site, and finally made a breakthrough. One of the hosts of Marfoogl.tv was finally able to put a name to the domain registration by digging back to its inception using the ‘WhoIs’ registry. The registration had been hidden from 2014 onwards, but you know what they say — the internet never forgets.

The site was registered to a Mr Edwin A Deagle. Details of Deagle’s career and the content of occasional published writings by him confirmed the plausibility of the identification. We had our webmaster, the impatient, authoritative voice of the disclaimers.

This is an important breakthrough — but it also heralds more bad news. Why? Because this man was well connected and highly experienced in his field. Deagle’s background was in the US air force and army (he was a decorated combatant in Vietnam). After the war he became a national security expert, and an adviser to the Carter transition team. Ultimately he was recruited as Director of International Relations at the Rockefeller Foundation.

My heart sank. Readers may or may not be aware of the influence of the Rockefeller Institute in creating and controlling a professionally centralised medical-pharmaceutical complex from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. Rockefeller interests are notorious for their leadership in eugenics programmes, pre-war, in both the United States and the German Third Reich. According to historians Anthony C Sutton and Webster Tarpley among others, Rockefeller industries partnered with I G Farben, the corporate powerhouse of National Socialism, both in co-ownership of the Auschwitz labour camp and the provision of key technologies to Germany which it refused to share with the Allies until forced to after the US entry into the war in 1942. A number of today’s most prominent pharmaceutical companies derive directly from the post-war break-up of the Farben chemical conglomerate.

Deagle’s CV, with its Rockefeller, CFR and Trilateral Commission connections, holds open the possibility of unacknowledged sources, and only adds weight to his ‘speculations’.

Edwin Deagle died of cancer on 16th February 2021, and sometime between the 1st and 23rd April his site was redesigned and the 2025 forecasts abruptly suppressed.

There is some good news — though it’s only good news about the bad news. First, an anonymous internet researcher was able to dig up the forecasts and archive them here: https://archive.is/nAHJK. [The link is included in this interview with Doug Casey, whose analysis is worth reading.]

After Edwin Deagle’s final tweaks, both the US and the UK are let off a little bit more lightly, at 100 million and 22 million — losses of around 70 and 65% of their respective populations.

Not only do we have the raw figures, we have — more good news about the bad news — a new edge in interpreting them. Late in 2020, after tweaking his figures for what would turn out to be the last time, Deagle dashed off a third, ‘post-COVID’ version of the Disclaimer, with some compelling — and disturbing — additions and variations.

Possibly it was this essay as much as anything which finally led to the suppression of the notorious Deagel forecasts after his death in February 2021. This third and final version needs be read in full, and I reproduce the whole text below.

Disclaimer #3 dated Friday, September 25th, 2020

In 2014 we published a disclaimer about the forecast. In six years the scenario has changed dramatically. This new disclaimer is meant to single out the situation from 2020 onwards. Talking about the United States and the European Union as separated entities no longer makes sense. Both are the Western block, keep printing money and will share the same fate.

After COVID we can draw two major conclusions:

The Western world success model has been built over societies with no resilience that can barely withstand any hardship, even a low intensity one. It was assumed but we got the full confirmation beyond any doubt.

The COVID crisis will be used to extend the life of this dying economic system through the so called Great Reset.

The Great Reset; like the climate change, extinction rebellion, planetary crisis, green revolution, shale oil (…) hoaxes promoted by the system; is another attempt to slow down dramatically the consumption of natural resources and therefore extend the lifetime of the current system. It can be effective for awhile but finally won’t address the bottom-line problem and will only delay the inevitable. The core ruling elites hope to stay in power which is in effect the only thing that really worries them.

The collapse of the Western financial system – and ultimately the Western civilization – has been the major driver in the forecast along with a confluence of crisis with a devastating outcome. As COVID has proven Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship. The Spanish flu one century ago represented the death of 40-50 million people. Today the world’s population is four times greater with air travel in full swing which is by definition a super spreader. The death casualties in today’s World would represent 160 to 200 million in relative terms but more likely 300-400 million taking into consideration the air travel factor that did not exist one century ago. So far, COVID death toll is roughly 1 million people. It is quite likely that the economic crisis due to the lockdowns will cause more deaths than the virus worldwide.

The Soviet system was less able to deliver goodies to the people than the Western one. Nevertheless Soviet society was more compact and resilient under an authoritarian regime. That in mind, the collapse of the Soviet system wiped out 10 percent of the population. The stark reality of diverse and multicultural Western societies is that a collapse will have a toll of 50 to 80 percent depending on several factors but in general terms the most diverse, multicultural, indebted and wealthy (highest standard of living) will suffer the highest toll. The only glue that keeps united such aberrant collage from falling apart is overconsumption with heavy doses of bottomless degeneracy disguised as virtue. Nevertheless the widespread censorship, hate laws and contradictory signals mean that even that glue is not working any more. Not everybody has to die migration can also play a positive role in this.

The formerly known as second and third world nations are an unknown at this point. Their fate will depend upon the decisions they take in the future. Western powers are not going to take over them as they did in the past because these countries won’t be able to control their own cities far less likely countries that are far away. If they remain tied to the former World Order they will go down along with Western powers but won’t experience the brutal decline of the late [ed; latter?] because they are poorer and not diverse enough but rather quite homogenous, used to deal[ing] with some sort of hardship but not precisely the one that is coming. If they switch to China they can get a chance to stabilize but will depend upon the management of their resources.

We expected this situation to unfold and actually is unfolding right now with the November election triggering a major bomb if Trump is re-elected. If Biden is elected there will very bad consequences as well. There is a lot of bad blood in the Western societies and the protests, demonstrations, rioting and looting are only the first symptoms of what is coming. However a new trend is taking place overshadowing this one.

The situation between the three great powers has changed dramatically. The only relevant achievement of the Western powers during the past decade has been the formation of a strategic alliance, both military and economic, between Russia and China. Right now the potential partnership between Russia and the European Union (EU) is dead with Russia turning definitively towards China. That was from the beginning the most likely outcome. Airbus never tried to establish a real partnership but rather a strategy to fade away the Russian aerospace industry. Actually Russia and China have formed a new alliance to build a long haul airliner. Western Europe (not to mention the United States) was never interested in the development of Russia or forming anything other than a master slave relationship with Russia providing raw materials and toeing the line of the West. It was clear then and today is a fact.

Russia has been preparing for a major war since 2008 and China has been increasing her military capabilities for the last 20 years. Today China is not a second tier power compared with the United States. Both in military and economic terms China is at the same level and in some specific areas are far ahead. In the domain of high-tech 5G has been a success in the commercial realm but the Type 055 destroyer is also another breakthrough with the US gaining a similar capability (DDG 51 Flight IIII) by mid of this decade (more likely by 2030). Nanchang, the lead ship of the Type 055 class, was commissioned amid the pandemic and lockdown in China.

Six years ago the likelihood of a major war was tiny. Since then it has grown steadily and dramatically and today is by far the most likely major event in the 2020s. The ultimate conflict can come from two ways. A conventional conflict involving at least two major powers that escalates into an open nuclear war. A second scenario is possible in the 2025-2030 timeframe. A Russian sneak first strike against the United States and its allies with the new S-500, strategic missile defenses, Yasen-M submarines, INF Zircon and Kalibr missiles and some new space asset playing the key role. The sneak first strike would involve all Russian missile strategic forces branches (bombers and ground-based missiles) at the different stages of such attack that would be strategic translation of what was seen in Syria in November 2015. There was no report that the Russian had such a capability of launching a high precision, multiple, combined arms attack at targets 2,000+ kilometers away. Western intelligence had no clue. The irony is that since the end of the Cold War the United States has been maneuvering through NATO to achieve a position to execute a first strike over Russia and now it seems that the first strike may occur but the country finished would be the United States.

Another particularity of the Western system is that its individuals have been brainwashed to the point that the majority accept their moral high ground and technological edge as a given. This has given the rise of the supremacy of the emotional arguments over the rational ones which are ignored or deprecated. That mindset can play a key role in the upcoming catastrophic events. At least in the Soviet system the silent majority of the people were aware of the fallacies they were fed. We can see the United States claims about G5 being stolen from them by China or hypersonic technology being stolen by Russia as the evidence that the Western elites are also infected by that hubris. Over the next decade it will become obvious that the West is falling behind the Russia-China block and the malaise might grow into desperation. Going to war might seem a quick and easy solution to restore the lost hegemony to finally find them into a France 1940 moment. Back then France did not have nuclear weapons to turn a defeat into a victory. The West might try that swap because the unpleasant prospect of not being Mars and Venus but rather a bully and his dirty bitch running away in fear while the rest of the world is laughing at them.

This website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees. We are not linked to any government. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a game of numbers whether flawed or correct based upon some speculative assumptions.

If there is not a dramatic change of course the world is going to witness the first nuclear war. The Western block collapse may come before, during or after the war. It does not matter. A nuclear war is a game with billions of casualties and the collapse plays in the hundreds of millions.

______________________________________________________________

LINKS:

ARCHIVE https://archive.is/nAHJK

What in the World is Deagel.com? – Deagel.com: Forecast 2025

https://tapnewswire.com/2021/03/deagles-last-words-everything-we-know/

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

                                               “I have seen myself backward.”
                                              Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly.

In Hampton Fancher’s original screen adaptation1 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, Rick Deckard — a ‘blade-runner’ or police assassin hired to hunt down rogue androids — is instructed to go to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to test their latest model, the Nexus 6. His task is to find out whether his equipment, the Voight-Kampff machine, still works on a state-of-the-art replicant produced by a corporation whose motto is ‘More human than human’. Has the difference between android and human now narrowed to the point where it can no longer be detected? Can technology still distinguish between natural human and designed replicant?

At the huge, pyramid-shaped Tyrell Corp building, Deckard is greeted by a poised, beautiful young woman and escorted into the presence of the CEO of the corporation, Dr Eldon Tyrell. The great man requests that Deckard run a control test on a human subject first. His assistant Rachael will oblige.

The Voight-Kampff test consists of a series of questions designed to elicit an emotional response. Rather like a lie-detector, the machine correlates questions and answers to involuntary physiological responses, in this case by detecting micro-movements of muscles around the eye, and measuring capillary dilation, fluctuation of the pupil and dilation of the iris.

The test on Rachael takes much longer than usual, suggested by the use of montage. In novice screenwriter Hampton Fancher’s original 1981 screenplay, when Deckard finally switches off the machine, Tyrell immediately asks him for his conclusion, and the two men proceed to discuss Rachael’s identity in front of her, with brutal insensitivity to her feelings. Rachael has been revealed — if the machine still works — to be a replicant. This is a devastating revelation for Rachael, who thinks she is a real person, with her own memories and dreams.

Deckard removes the adhesive discs from her cheeks and switches off his beam.

DECKARD: Lights please.

The lights come on.

TYRELL: Well?

DECKARD: If she is, the machine works.

TYRELL: The machine works. She is.

Rachael sits very still. Except her eyes — they go to Tyrell and hang on.

He stares back at her as he speaks.

TYRELL: How many questions did it take?

DECKARD: Thirteen.

Rachael sits rigidly in her chair, as the ground crumbles around her, her big mermaid eyes locked with Tyrell. His voice is quiet and strong, mesmerizing. She’s hanging by a thread.

Deckard watches with a bad taste in his mouth.

DECKARD: She didn’t know?

TYRELL: Memory implant. She was programmed. But I think she has transcended her conditioning. I think she was beginning to suspect.

Rachael nods fixedly. Careful not to let go her grasp.

TYRELL: How many questions does it usually take, Mr. Deckard?

DECKARD: Five, maybe six.

Slowly, carefully, Tyrell unlocks his gaze from Rachael and turns towards Deckard, who is starting to put away his equipment.

Rachael sits there very pale and expressionless, her feet flat on the floor; alone is the word.

After seven months of script development (prolonged by ongoing industrial action at the studio) the relationship between Fancher and the director Ridley Scott, two brilliant but demanding men, had deteriorated to the point where the writer walked off the project. At that point Scott called in David Peoples, a screen-writer with a long list of credits, to complete the changes that he still thought necessary.

Peoples found the script quite brilliant, and retained most of it as it stood.2 The changes he did make are all the more interesting because they are relatively few. Sometimes he adds a line or two of dialogue, such as the additional question in the Voight-Kampff test undergone by the replicant Leon in the opening scene.

HOLDEN: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about… your mother.

LEON’s response, taking its final form only in the shooting script, is perfect:

My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.

Explosive gun-shots, deafening in the confined space, confuse us for a moment, and Holden is already reeling backwards in his chair before the viewer realizes what has happened. Now Leon stands, and puts another bullet in him.

A number of Peoples’ changes consist of breaking up longer scenes into shorter ones and interleaving them to ‘delay the pay-off’. Rachael’s Voight-Kampff test is a case in point. As brilliantly as Fancher evokes Rachael’s sensations as she learns the truth about herself — that she is not, as she thought, a real human, but rather a designed commercial product — he does it mainly through narration. For Peoples it won’t do, dramatically. For one thing, the emotional impact of the revelation is entirely internal, conveyed through Fancher’s narrative, and needs to be externalised somehow, or go to waste. Secondly, this moment, the intense pathos of the replicant’s awakening to reality, is just too beautiful to consume in a single scene. It must be savored a little longer, dramatized, made more playable.

So at the end of the test Peoples has Tyrell ask Rachael to leave the room before any more is said. Looking somewhat offended, she wordlessly complies, the rhythm of her high heels on the floor loud in the silence. Now the creator and the natural enemy of this beautiful golem will discuss her in private, and the combination of her hurt expression as she leaves and Peoples’ crisp, rich dialogue conveys the pathos of her situation without yet revealing her own response.

DECKARD: She really doesn’t know?

TYRELL: She’s beginning to suspect, I think.

DECKARD: Suspect! How can she not know what she is?

TYRELL: Well, we began to notice in them a strange obsession.

Tyrell is pacing now, lecturing.

This obsession, he goes on to explain, is with the past, with memories as the source of identity. But replicants, hatched in adult form, have a life-span of only four years, not enough time to develop a stable sense of identity. Beyond four years, they have a tendency to develop dangerous emotional responses to their situation: they rebel.

“After all, they are emotionally inexperienced, with only a few years to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past… we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions… and we can control them better. In the case of Rachael, I simply copied and regenerated cells from the brain of my sixteen-year-old niece. Rachael remembers what my little niece remembers.”

As Deckard remarks, we’ve come a long way from Dr Frankenstein.

Memory implantation and erasure is a motif in Philip K Dick’s science fiction, associated with a powerful theme of identity – and the breakdown of identity – throughout his work. It is pervasive in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel from which Fancher distilled his original ‘Dangerous Days’ screenplay, which eventually became Blade Runner. Dick’s original vision was broader in the novel than Fancher has time to explore in his screenplay. There was a state religion, a whole culture built around simulation, and the main development in the plot was that Deckard came to realise that he wasn’t just pursuing a handful of rogue androids but that in fact the city had been completely infiltrated by replicants, who had duplicated all its key institutions. There was a police department and a replicant police department, a City Hall and a replicant City Hall, and so on. Dick’s vision, then, was of a burgeoning parahuman world, replicating exponentially. Fancher’s script had to cut most of this material while retaining enough to make a sense of dizzying replication continue in the mind of the viewer, and to radically focus these ideas into a cinematically engaging plot.

The most spectacular choice he makes is to retro-style the storyworld as futuristic film noir, creating a cyber-punk feel which Ridley Scott is able to exploit brilliantly in painting a simultaneously futuristic and dilapidated Los Angeles which is both strange and completely convincing. The central character is remodelled as a cynical private eye along the lines of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. This enables him to plug into two powerful narrative archetypes which electrify the plot, though the second of these only emerges through the collaborations with Peoples and Scott (Fancher having rejoined the project after the falling out over script revisions). The final product’s haunting originality comes in large part from the fact that it ranges beyond the ‘Monster’ archetype implicit in this story-type, from the Jewish golem legends through to the latest science fiction.

What Fancher does is root the story much more firmly in the narrative archetype3 of Comedy: that is, the love story, as in La Comedia Divina de Dante. The original novel has a much weaker archetypal anchor, and drifts badly as a result. Fancher reached into that mess and pulled out a plot well known in theatre from Roman times. Two lovers yearn to be together but cannot, usually for reasons of who they are, and usually enforced by a dark, unrelenting father or other patriarchal figure. One of the lovers is from the wrong class, or the wrong family, or is poor, or a slave — or, in this iteration, one of them is not actually human. Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Avatar. Lots of intrigue, lots of disguise — playing rich, playing dead, playing blue. That’s how it is when you’re in love with the ‘wrong’ person. The farce will resolve, in the end, to wild joy, but either way you have to laugh, and that’s how this type of story became known as Comedy.

The deep theme of this archetype is always identity. If a love story doesn’t have this theme, it lacks archetypal power. Our multiplying identity issues must be resolved. You cannot expect to find true love, to paraphrase Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots, if you don’t know who you truly are.

As in Blade Runner.

She’s on his kill-list. She doesn’t know who she is. Still refuses to believe it. She comes to Deckard’s apartment to show him a photograph of herself as a little girl, with her mother. (It’s David Peoples who is threading this ‘mother’ leitmotif throughout the screenplay.) And Deckard, wearily, proves to her that her life-story is not hers and she is therefore not real, by quoting examples of her intimate childhood memories in a beautiful passage of dialogue, ending with another little chime on the bell of the mother.

DECKARD: Remember that bush outside your window with the spider in it?

Rachael looks up at him.

DECKARD: Green body, orange legs… you watched her build a web all summer.

RACHAEL: Yes.

Her voice is getting very small.

DECKARD: One day there was an egg in the web.

Rachel nods faintly.

RACHAEL: After a while, the egg hatched and hundreds of baby spiders came out and ate her. That made quite an impression on me, Mr Deckard.

DECKARD: You still don’t get it? […] Implants. They’re not your memories, they’re Tyrell’s sixteen-year-old niece’s.

Rachael doesn’t say anything — she can’t.

DECKARD: He’s very proud of them. He ran them on a scanner for me.

Rachael just stares at him, stunned and barely holding on.

And Deckard lets her run. Her disillusionment is not his problem. He’s already done her a favour by not killing her. She’s not even human, after all: a simulacrum; a replicant. A ‘relational object’.

As she now knows. She’s had her awaakening, her anagnorisis. She’s staggering under it, clinging to an old photograph, knowing none of it’s real. The plot now must proceed by steps to the point where it is finally proved to Deckard that he too has, shall we say, identity issues.

As do I.

And as do you.

The difference between life and story is that the awakening doesn’t happen all at once. With me it took many years. The Western middle classes, I now know, became the most deluded, self-deceiving people in the world, and that’s where I come from.

The generation born in the post-war years was a threat to the psychopathic elites, the exploiters and enslavers who feed on human suffering and are sustained by the war-system we live under. Numerous, healthy, prosperous, educated, the Baby Boomers had to be managed, and we were: diverted, hoodwinked and sent down a blind alley — or rather a labyrinth where we wandered for years. And that was the Counterculture, or rather the Counter-Counterculture with its pantheon of charismatic spooks and sexy surrogates, its ‘life-time actors’ and ‘agents in tie-dye’, deployed to pre-empt our challenge with chemistry and weaponised anthropology, in an extraordinary example of social engineering.

You see, ‘peace and love’ was never exactly what it was about, that huge mobilisation — beat-poets and social theorists, chemists and anthropologists, freak-dancers and Young Turks, sound-engineers and disc-jockeys, TV-presenters and underground magazines and artists and hair-dressers and cult-leaders. None of it would have happened without the drugs, and the drug culture wasn’t blowback but an engineered vector through which ‘entheogenics’ and ‘psychedelics’ (new names for psychotogenic or psychotomimetic drugs — i.e., substances which induce or mimic the effects of psychosis) were to enter society, along with a new sexual paradigm designed to destroy the family, and a new aesthetic to debase the culture through an ‘archaic revival’ and New Age mysticism. It was exhilarating but ultimately destructive, or deconstructionist by intention, a highly effective intervention to divert a generation and undermine the anti-war movement; to produce dissociation and ultimately social atomisation; to isolate and target the young, alienating them from their elders; to ‘unfreeze’ social structures, in preparation for deep change.

It was author and ethno-mycologist Jan Irvin, building on the ground-breaking work of the late lamented Dave McGowan in his books Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon and Programmed to Kill, who discovered the smoking gun when it comes to deep-state involvement in seeding the drug culture. In researching the work of John Allegro, the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar whom Irvin also publishes, he stumbled across documents which revealed beyond any doubt that the banker and journalist Gordon Wasson was working for the CIA when he undertook his heavily publicised trip to Mexico to ‘discover’ the magic mushroom in 1957; Henry Luce’s Life magazine featured the adventure as its cover story, ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, May 13th, 1957. Wasson, in fact, was engaged in Sub-project 58 of MK-ULTRA.

Irvin’s discovery confirmed with documentary evidence what McGowan suspected: that MK-ULTRA was not just a project to create robotic killers, couriers and sex slaves, but something much broader, a social engineering project on a vast scale — a project, in fact, to redesign society. Irvin has continued to unearth facts which force us to re-evaluate not just our concepts of government, society and culture, but our stories about ourselves.

His research also brought interesting results at the architectural level of MK-ULTRA, by mapping connections around institutions such as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the Bohemian Grove and its sister institution the Century Club in London, and key players like Edward Bernays and Marshall McLuhan. In doing so, he has made what may turn out to be a second major discovery: that right at the centre of this web, we find none other than Aldous Huxley. Was he merely observing developments, or did he, as Irvin speculates, participate as one of the architects of the psycho-social cultural engineering project called MK-ULTRA?

Huxley came from the famous Darwin-Wedgwood-Huxley dynasty, closely associated with eugenics. His brother Julian was an evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and internationalist and one of the founders of the United Nations. Brave New World is presented by the author as a prescient warning, the prophecy of a future whose anti-human horror will be disguised by consumerism, hedonism, bio-engineering and conditioning. In view of his insider status, we should understand that in Huxley we are not looking at prescience, exactly: unless you can call a blueprint the architect’s amazing premonition of the building.

As Irvin says, drugs were the counter-culture; none of it would have happened without LSD; we already knew that Timothy Leary was a CIA asset; more shockingly, we now find evidence suggesting that Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were ‘agents in tie-dye’ as well. The Doors and Frank Zappa and ‘Papa’ John Phillips and Dave Crosby and virtually all the leaders of the West coast hippy movement seem to have been placements, parachuted into LA along with all the logistical support they needed. There are varying degrees of certainty about the performers and musicians who gravitated towards Laurel Canyon; and of course there are different levels of participation, witting and unwitting agents and so on. The social, commercial and technological contexts (the venues and contracts and session musicians and dance troupes and FM radio and strobe lights and sound systems) sprung up around the new music with remarkable rapidity. And we know that the scene was riddled with weird crime and cult activity, Charlie Manson’s Family et al, and that there was also a strange military presence, not just in the family backgrounds of the key players, but physically in the form of Lookout Mountain Air Force Base, which housed state-of-the-art film studios with lavish production facilities. The swirling creative mess of the Counterculture was not spontaneously seeding itself but being subjected to steerage, and at the same time its growth and impact was being massively accelerated and amplified.

Legions of pied pipers were deployed; they had the soundtrack, the attitude, the look and the vibe, to lure the children away from the village. And I was one of them, of course — how would I not be? But it turns out I never rebelled, as I thought I was doing, but enthusiastically followed instructions – or ‘suggestions’, shall we say? All they had to do was show me a forbidden path, and I was gone.

And there’s the epiphany. It’s not easy to live with. The knowledge itself is psychotogenic, you might say. I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Through drugs and music, the project altered my outlook and shaped my life, turning me, over time, through pseudo-psychosis and addiction, into a force for disintegration.

As Dick puts it in A Scanner Darkly:

Substance D is for Dumbness, Despair and Desertion – desertion of you from your friends, your friends from you, everyone from everyone. Isolation and loneliness… and D is finally Death. Slow death from the head down.

Part of the fascination of Philip K Dick, in retrospect, is the way he intuited the realities of his own time in ways not appreciated until much later. His most interesting figurations often turn out to be real, a fact of which we are becoming increasingly aware: real, already, in the fifties and sixties, when the mind control projects of MK-ULTRA were taking effect. What was coming was already there, but all presented futuristically, of course. Memory erasure. Memory insertion. Screen memories. With the technology that existed now, you could make anyone remember anything. Hell, you could make a man remember walking on the moon.

How did he know? What little Bluebird sang to the Horse-lover? How did Mr Fat see into the heart of the Artichoke?

Professor Darrell Hamamoto, formerly of UC Davis, makes the point that as a child Dick lived in Berkeley and traveled to San Francisco every week to attend weekly therapy sessions at the Langley-Porter clinic, the elite extension of UC Berkeley Medical School and the same clinic attended by Allen Ginsberg.

‘Probably an early example of what later became known as the indigo children. [Dick] was a genius as a child and he was being tested very early on for possible intelligence work, just as people with extraordinary athletic ability like Eldrick (‘Tiger’) Woods was being tested very early on through his father Earl Woods, whom we know was in the intelligence area.”

So when you begin to understand that what came out about the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project in congressional inquiries in the 70s was just the tiny tip of a gargantuan iceberg, that the super-soldiers and sex-slaves and torture-proof couriers were just its most spectacular victims, and that the scope of the project was a wholesale reconfiguration of society, the re-engineering of values, norms and relationships… and that you too were an experimental subject, and still are…

When you begin to get an inkling of how everything was weaponised, woven into webs to snare your psyche — music, art, novels, psychology, anthropology, chemistry, entertainment, celebrity, everything —

When it dawns on you how you were gamed and moulded, seduced and traduced by artists of the lie and guides to nowhere… That even your ‘rebellions’ were predicted and promoted, the sub-project of a sub-project of a sub-project…

What will you do?

We weren’t the first generation to undergo radical remodelling, nor the last. The psy-ops never stop; they just keep rolling in, like waves on the beach. These days the mind control is automated, and comes without merry pranksters handing out acid tabs at rock festivals. Like everything else, it’s gone online. It’s all dataism, now that we’re all just hackable animals, in Yuval Harari’s despicable phrase. Robert Epstein calls it S & M — Surveillance and Manipulation. It’s dull stuff, but highly effective. But with the new mind control something has become clear, which wasn’t, to me, until recently.

‘Who would have thought I was so important?’ asked a skeptical friend of mine. Indeed — who’d have thought it? But he is, I am, you are.

David Peoples nailed it with the killer line he gives to Rachel, once the reality of who she really is has sunken in. She has just saved Deckard’s life by shooting Leon. Back at Deckard’s apartment, she watches him pour himself a drink. His hands are shaking. “It’s part of the business,” he tells her. “I get it bad.”

And she answers, coolly, bitterly.

“I’m not in the business…

I am the business.”

And that goes for all of us, now.

That realisation activates a second narrative archetype, which has been operative on a subliminal level from the beginning of the film — the archetype of awakening, of rebirth, in which the protagonist is found initially in a suspended state, neither dead nor fully alive: sick, or imprisoned; emotionally dead, comatose or entranced; disconnected from reality. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Snow Queen… Peer Gynt, A Christmas Carol, Crime and Punishment, Death and the Maiden. Clues have been threaded through the narrative, depending partly on Rachael’s questions — Have you ever taken the test yourself, Mr Deckard? — and conclusively through the oblique commentary on events provided by Deckard’s police handler, Gaff, and his habit of making little origami figures out of silver foil, or whatever is to hand. We see three — a chicken, when Deckard is trying to avoid the assignment; a stick-man with an erection, when he is falling for Rachael; and finally, in the last scene of the film, a unicorn. Earlier the audience has been privy to a reverie in which Deckard imagines a beautiful wild unicorn — the thought came out of nowhere, and nobody else knows about it — but somehow Officer Gaff does. Which means… Screen memories. Implants. He’s very proud of them. He ran them on a scanner for me.

So when you understand how you were turned into an obedient golem, an innocent Eloi, zoned-out zombie-child at the coming-out party of the Hellfire clubs… When you finally see how the culture has been engineered, and through it, you… And when you begin to wonder who designed your mind, who scratched the Aleph on your forehead and can erase it too…

That’s your replicant epiphany.

Blade Runner is about the mass-production of synthetic human beings.

Natural human beings are unique. They are born from their culture — the culture is the mother. It evolved naturally in a particular race or people in a particular time and place, developed over time as a collective response to nature and situation and climate and history and other species and neighbouring societies. And somehow, out of the random sorting of recombinant strands, randomly, organically, miraculously, came you.

Didn’t you?

Or was the culture supplanted by something else?

You thought you were accidental, natural. Just the way you are.

You thought you were human.

What will you do? When you understand that you, too, were mass-produced?

You’ve got a choice. You can sit rigidly in your chair while the floor crumbles around you. Or you can stare for a moment at the tinfoil unicorn in your hand, nod as if this merely confirms what you were beginning to suspect — and head for the elevator where a beautiful woman of your own kind is waiting for you.

Or you can look up at your interrogator, and say: “My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Legends of the golem, usually sourced as an archetype in Kabbalah, are actually found in Talmud, but may stem from the same magical traditions. According to these stories, sometimes presented as cautionary tales, a rabbi could create a crude, humanoid being, in a travesty of God’s creation. These monsters had no will or intelligence of their own, but could be used as the rabbi desired, against the enemies of the Jews, for instance, or of the rabbi himself.

According to the stories, the rabbi would shape the golem out of earth, and then activate it by walking or dancing around it while reciting certain letters from the alphabet and the secret name of God. To de-animate the creature, the rabbi would walk in the opposite direction, saying the same letters and words in reverse order. Another way to bring a golem to life was to write the name of God on parchment and stick it on the golem's arm or in its mouth. One had merely to remove it to terminate the golem.

Other sources say that once the humanoid creature had been physically shaped, the Rabbi would write the letters aleph, mem, tav, spelling the word EMET, meaning ‘Truth’, on the golem's forehead to awaken it. In order to destroy the being, it was only necessary to erase the aleph, creating the word MET, or Death.

In Hebrew the word golem means ‘shapeless mass’. The Talmud uses the word to mean ‘unformed’ or ‘imperfect’; Adam is called a ‘golem,’ meaning ‘body without a soul’ (Sanhedrin 38b), for the first twelve hours of his existence. A golem has no will of its own; that is the point of it. It carries out instructions – in some versions, these have to be written on rolled up pieces of paper inserted into the creature’s mouth.

It has always been the dream of mankind to be able to create parahuman creatures, it would seem, with human capabilities but no soul or will, and therefore no ability to disobey or rebel. And there, maybe, is the difference between God and humanity. God, according to our theologians, gave us choice. But man, if he replicated himself, would reproduce everything except his own free will.

Not that I'm a Talmud scholar or anything — the only reason I stumbled across accounts of golem stories was because I was researching Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley -- which is not only recognised as the first work of science fiction, but embodies a storyline which repeats and resonates throughout the entire genre. The creation by humans of artificial humanoid entities of one kind or another, whether robots or clones, artificial intelligences or genetically designed replicants, is often shown as having tragic consequences, as in the 1818 original. There's a deep moral malaise associated with the idea. In many such stories, the humanoids turn violently against their human masters. In many of them, they begin to seem more human than the humans who created them. This thematic structure has proved so dominant in modern times that I started to wonder whether it represents an archetypal structure in the human psyche, or whether it is merely a modern twist on the narrative archetype of Tragedy. To stand alone, it would need ancient examples, so that's what I was looking for.

The sub-title of Mary Shelley's novel -- The Modern Prometheus -- directs us to the Greek myth of the creation of the human race by Prometheus the Titan, who is horribly punished by Zeus for the crime of providing his creatures with fire, stolen from the gods.

But this had never satisfied me. Yes, there are similarities. Like Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein suffers long torture as his Creature kills everyone he loves one by one, apparently saving him until last. In both, the sin committed is going against the natural order. Prometheus, by giving divine fire to the humans and educating them in the arts of civilisation, has created a species unlike any other, and Zeus' anger stems from his fear it will grow more and more powerful over time until eventually it overthrows the Olympian gods. Prometheus essentially sacrifices himself for his creation; Shelley's allusion to the god is deeply ironic, then, given that the young scientist does nothing at all to help or teach his re-animant, abandoning it naked to the world.

Dr Frankenstein's motivation is pathologically hubristic, bordering on the insane -- after the death of his mother, he decides to abolish death itself, through a blend of ancient and modern science. He assembles a humanoid being out of dead tissue and organs, and animates it with the "spark of being" using methods he keeps secret. The moment he sees his Creature alive is the moment he wishes it dead. He wanted to create a superhuman being, and in many ways he succeeds: it is highly intelligent, and possesses great strength, agility and powers of endurance. But it is hideously ugly, and Victor's horror at its appearance triggers a deeper moral revulsion at what he has done.

"How can I [...] delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips." (Chapter 5)

He abandons the Creature, thinking it will die in the cholera outbreak afflicting the city. But it doesn't, of course. It survives, and teaches itself to speak and read, and comes back to find its maker, fully informed of its situation, superhuman in strength, speed and agility, hyper-intelligent, and with a very reasonable demand -- that Victor should make another of his kind, a female this time, to be his wife, and if he did that, the pair would disappear together into the Arctic regions and never be heard of again. Victor accepts, and begins the task, but is again overcome by a deep sense of wrongness about what he is doing and abandons the work. The Creature has already suffered a great deal; this further rejection is too much, and it now enters into a long, calculating orgy of revenge.

And yet it never loses the reader's sympathy -- and this becomes a common feature in stories of this type. In many or even most cases they are modern inversions of the ‘monster’ myth, in which the parahuman ‘monsters’ are invested with more humanity than the humans who created them. It is the Creature that narrates the entire middle section of the story. In Blade Runner the production of 'replicants' -- used as soldiers, labourers, sex-slaves, assassins -- has become an industry, and the shadowy Gothic unease that permeates Frankenstein has evolved into the cool ironies of chic sci-fi. Like his predecessor, Roy Batty tracks down his designer -- in this case Dr Eldon Tyrell, CEO of the Tyrell Corporation -- makes a reasonable demand, and enters on an orgy of killing when it is refused, but never forfeits our admiration or empathy. Like Frankenstein's Creature, the replicant weeps over the body of his creator in the ultimate realisation of the murderous capacity of images.

But is the Prometheus myth really the archetypal root of these stories? There is no rebellion, in the myth, of the created against their creator. Prometheus is a god, not a mortal human being like Victor Frankenstein, and this is a crucial difference. A god creating a new species is not the same as a member of that species creating a travesty, whether sub- or super-human, of itself. To be created by a god is to be human. To be created by a human is to be... what? Humanoid. Golem. Slave.

It is in the golem stories that we find the central agon of Shelley's tale -- including some famous examples where the golem goes out of control, turns on the rabbi or threatens the whole community. Murderous rampages -- as in Frankenstein, as in Blade Runner -- are an occupational hazard for golem-whispering rabbis from the beginning. The most famous legend of the golem exists in several versions, in which the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a historical figure, the sixteenth century ‘Maharal’ of Prague and a man of Faustian erudition, creates a golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River to defend the Prague ghetto either from pogroms or from the threat of expulsion by the Emperor Rudolf II. He animates it by placing a shem with the name of God written on it in the golem's mouth. The Rabbi names the golem Josef, and it is known familiarly as Yossele. Rabbi Loew deactivates the golem every Friday evening so that it does not desecrate the Sabbath, but one week he forgets, and the resulting situation escalates to the point where the golem is threatening the whole community. Finally the Rabbi manages to remove the name from its mouth, whereupon the golem shatters into pieces. In some stories the Rabbi is injured trying to de-activate the creature. In the story of the Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu Ba'al Shem, the golem keeps growing until he fears it will destroy the universe. Rabbi Eliyahu erases the Aleph from the creature's forehead and it shrivels away to dust, but not before slashing at the Rabbi's face and scarring him for life.

Termination is a factor which Victor Frankenstein has not considered at all when he creates his re-animant: how to switch it off. How to kill it -- and the Creature survives every other main character in the novel, except the various epistolary narrators. In Blade Runner, the mass-produced replicants have termination fixed in their genes, giving them a four-year life span, hardly enough time for them to work out who they are; director Ridley Scott’s storyboards for the movie included sketches of an ‘incinerator asteroid’ with perfect replicant bodies disappearing into furnaces on conveyor belts. But some replicants still 'wake up' before their four years are up, and have to be dealt with by police assassins like Deckard. Tyrell and his genetic designers have assumed they can dispense with and eradicate the emotional dimension -- they don’t want their combat models to experience empathy or guilt, their ‘leisure’ models to experience disgust or humiliation, or their laborers to feel boredom or resentment. But emotion proves impossible to uproot in a complex living being. Even starting from scratch, Tyrell cannot create something of that level of sophistication that can function without emotion. The four-year lifespan is a stop-gap measure to hold the gates until a more permanent solution is found. The story situates itself at a transitional stage in the design cycle: a solution has been found, but is only at the prototype stage. That solution is the insertion or ‘implanting’ of memories. Nexus 6 prototypes are ‘gifted’ a history, a childhood, the memory of parents, and believe themselves to be fully-fledged human beings. This new generation will not even be allowed to know what it is. That cruelty can now be eradicated.

This aspect -- sympathy for the golem, the subjectivity of the created being -- which we find fully developed in Frankenstein and its science fiction derivatives, is present in rudimentary form in the golem stories. When Isaac Asimov wrote his I, Robot stories, one of the linking characters is a "robopsychologist", Dr Susan Calvin. But even Rabbi Loew's golem, Yossele, has individual qualities, such as the ability to become invisible or raise the dead, and bizarre though this is, it shows the beginnings of characterisation, while the use of the nickname reflects empathy for the golem or at least a familiar acceptance. There is another story, apparently, where the golem falls in love, and goes on a murderous rampage when it is rejected.

So legends of the golem very clearly give us the true archetype (literally, ‘first example’; in structuralist theory, ‘deep structure’) — a subconscious psychological substrate to the narrative archetype most commonly at play in stories about robots, clones and replicants. Frankenstein clearly has much closer precursors than the Prometheus myth in the Jewish golem stories; I would argue that it is, in fact, a secularised golem story. That's what gives it its queasy physicality, its visceral sense of moral recklessness, of wrongness, all of which is absent from the Prometheus story.

One could multiply examples: the golem archetype underpins so many famous works of science fiction in our era, from Isaac Asimov’s seminal I, Robot series (the title was borrowed from Eando Binder's 1939 short story) to Kubrik’s 2001, Michael Crichton's West World, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and Alex Garland's superb Ex Machina. To see these stories as being about robotics, cloning, or artifical intelligence per se is a shallow reading. On a deeper level they are about slavery – about the experience of being denied admission to the human race, despite being ‘more human than human’ in the motto of Tyrell Corp; more human, in these stories, than the impostors who create and exploit them.

They are golem stories; they share basic elements with the Talmudic archetype, and hinge around the question of being able to stop the power you have unleashed; how to prevent the humanoid creature — or neural net or Large Language Model — aspiring to your own condition and developing a will of its own. Victor Frankenstein overlooks the danger entirely, seeing himself as a god lording it over a new race, and this is his hamartia — the tragic mistake. The Jewish golem legends use neat magical mechanisms, such as the erasure of the letter Aleph from the creature’s forehead, to maintain control. Even so, as the citizens of Prague discovered, a lot of damage can be done before termination can be effected. Philip Dick solves the problem using a terminator gene, and imagines a huge industry built on the production, sale and disposal of humanoid (‘replicant’) bodies, dwelling on the enormous waste involved.

But when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, we are told over and over again, notably by Elon Musk, that control will not be possible -- that the key to controlling AGI will prove even more elusive than the breakthroughs needed to create it. It will not be as easy as erasing an Aleph or removing a shem. At the same time, the running amok of the golem is held up to us as the almost inevitable outcome, as humanity precipitously pursues the goal of creating its own technological doppelgängers, of self-destruction by its own images. Humanity, like the God of Neitsche and Baudrillard, will be destroyed by its icons. Rabbi Eliyahu Ba'al Shem’s golem is going to keep growing keep growing until it fills the universe. The cautionary tale has become the plan.

Never has a technological innovation been so heavily prefigured in fiction and legend. We’ve seen so many robots by now that the Uncanny Valley has almost been covered over, used as landfill for defunct designs, limbs and engineering waste. There’s slight concavity in the terrain, makes it very popular with bikers, hikers, skaters, breakdancers and speaker’s events. I think they’re planning to resurface it completely and turn it into a skating rink. Fast forward to 2025, and the market is suddenly humming with humanoid AI robots. Competition is fierce, the development curve exponential. Elon Musk predicts that humanoid robots will be the biggest commercial product of all time -- bigger than the automobile, then -- and that humanoid robots will quickly outnumber humans on the planet. What will they look like? Tesla's Optimus android sets the aesthetic for an evolutionary explosion of sleek, minimalist, artificially intelligent bipedal designs coming onto the market. Prototypes include Atlas (by Boston Dynamics), Ameca (Engineered Arts), Figure 02 (Figure AI), Unitree G1 (Unitree Robotics), Astribot S1 (Astribot), Neo Beta (1X), Walker S1 (UBTech), and many more.

But at the same time a very different design-direction has emerged. Two or three months ago, Clone Robotics released footage of its biomimetic AlphaClone - musculoskeletal androids designed for the home with the Telekinesis training platform to teach the Clone new skills. The first AlphaClone will be produced in a strictly limited edition, available to investors in the project and, no doubt, selective prospective investors and collectors. I’m guessing it will be the most expensive prototype on the market, due to its esoteric retro-styled appearance and hyper-realistic movement.

You can feel your ears popping, so steep is the plunge into the Uncanny Valley.

That essay by the 'roboticist' Masahiro Mori was written all of fifty years ago, but this is the moment it foreshadows. Mori's prediction was that responses to humanoid robots would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion the closer they approached to a realistic, lifelike appearance without attaining it. He theorised that "the sense of eeriness is probably a form of instinct that protects us from proximal, rather than distal, sources of danger. Proximal sources of danger are corpses, members of different species, and other entities we can closely approach. Distal sources of danger include windstorms and floods."

These AlphaClone robots introduce a new level of biomimesis through the use of hydraulically actuated artificial muscle rather than motors. Movement is key to the 'uncanny' response.

"Movement is fundamental to animals—including human beings—and thus to robots as well," Mori wrote. "Its presence changes the shape of the uncanny valley graph by amplifying the peaks and valleys, as shown in Figure 2. For point of illustration, when an industrial robot is switched off, it is just a greasy machine. But once the robot is programmed to move its gripper like a human hand, we start to feel a certain level of affinity for it. (In this case, the velocity, acceleration, and deceleration must approximate human movement.) Conversely, when a prosthetic hand that is near the bottom of the uncanny valley starts to move, our sensation of eeriness intensifies."

This is exactly what happens in Frankenstein -- Victor's crashing descent into the Valley is triggered by seeing the thing move. While the smooth lines of Optimus largely neutralise the eeriness effect in terms of appearance, Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot captures natural human movement to a degree that gave me a single shiver, watching it going through its paces: its running-style, the way it decelerates and loosens down from a sprint... Uncanny. But in the AlphaClone, the use of elastic, hydraulically-powered synthetic muscle-fibres is predicted to confer a smoothness of movement which will make it more human-like than any of its rivals, though I don't think this has been demonstrated yet. Even so the hyper-realism of the AlphaClone is uncanny, sending us straight back into that gloomy laboratory and the doctor's shocked epiphany, his sudden awakening to the question -- "What the hell am I doing?" The shudder that drives that question is now a selling point, a cheap inverted thrill.

We might ask: Why humanoid robots at all? Why should an all-purpose machine, for example, have only two hands? Why must it be bipedal, especially since that form of locomotion is the most challenging to replicate? Why should it have a head, when sensors can be placed anywhere on the machine? The answer, I suppose, is that the obsession with the human form is pragmatic, since robots have to function within a human-oriented technological environment. To do this they need excellent hands and touch. But they do not need musculo-skeletal physique or hydraulically actuated muscles. These are aesthetic decisions, with hyper-realism as the explicit objective -- simulation for simulation's sake.

Humanoid robots are also designed as relational objects for humans, from robotic dolls to robo-police, exploiting feelings of human affinity and obedience to authority. These effects can perhaps be amplified by increasing the humanisation of the machine. But the more accurate the simulation, the more we find ourselves in another narrative archetype, one which evokes most powerfully the Uncanny Valley and the crawling eeriness of being confronted by a simulacrum -- the Doppelgänger story, which despite its often Gothic settings arose during the First Industrial Revolution. Now the danger is not merely a golem's tendency to run amok, but an individualised double's insidious plan to take over the protagonist's life and identity.

Ultimately the purpose of any machine, from the Jacquard loom to Kurzweil's K250 music synthesizer to autonomous weapon systems, is to replace human beings and human skills. Some may argue that the displacement of humans by humanoid slaves and soldiers should be considered ethical, since it eliminates human suffering: the suffering of menial work or military combat; but also the suffering of playing in an orchestra or becoming a master-craftsman in brocade and damask weaving. Realistically, I think we all know that, in this world, the elimination of human suffering can only mean the elimination of humans. Humanity will be replaced by its images, its golems and doppelgängers, and chief among these we must include AI. If a Large Language Model is a linguistic golem, AGI, if it is even possible, is a doppelgänger for the human mind.

Why the compulsion to replicate ourselves in such obsessive detail? Is it narcissism, sacrament or sorcery? To me, this drive, archetypal or not, is quite bizarre. Imagine a species that can't function without the assistance of simulacra of itself -- it's freakish, on the face of it, absurd, as if some kind of short-circuiting loop has occurred, a pathological literalisation of the recursion implicit in consciousness and its technological projection onto the world.

I'm with the iconoclasts; I shudder at these imitations. If this Valley doesn't seem so Uncanny any more, something has gone seriously wrong. That sense of eeriness is survival instinct; "corpses, members of different species and other entities we can closely approach..." -- these descriptors all apply, and I say we should trust our instincts: that something that looks human, but is not, is indeed a source of danger, distal as well as proximal. You know, djinn, demons, skinwalkers.

And I'm not buying the run amok narrative, if AI starts eradicating humans. I tend to believe that these legends are cultivated in case they need to be used as cover for extermination programmes. The war of the machine is subtler than that. I'm thinking more about what this Singularity does to the sense of being human, and of what it means to be human.

In the longer term, I suspect that the obsession with human form might have a lot to do with the Gilgamesh project, in the hope of ultimately providing immortal technological bodies for those who want to live forever -- the amortals (remembering that Victor Frankenstein's original aim was to abolish death). On a deeper level, then, it's part of the war with God. If we can create humans, indistinguishable from the real thing, that disproves God, doesn't it? -- and makes us gods by default.

I think the opposite may be true. Baudrillard wrote that everything eventually becomes a simulation of itself in expurgated form, and we are now in territory where this applies, apparently, to the entire species. The Unabomber's dead, Captain Ludd long gone, and not King Arthur or Donald Trump are going to save us from this technocratic vortex. That would need a philosophical and cultural revolution, starting with ourselves, in defense of the reality principle -- a new iconoclasm, rejecting these empty forms, these imitations and travesties, before we turn into pale simulacra of ourselves — if we haven’t already.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment