Sex, Drugs & Revolution Part 2
To the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, the breeding
ground for authoritarian attitudes is the traditional Christian family, where
they unfairly equate notions of traditional male authority with blind servitude:
Family relationships are characterized by
fearful subservience to the demands of the parents and by an early suppression
of impulses not acceptable to them… The conception of the ideal family
situation for the child: uncritical obedience to the father and elders,
pressures directed unilaterally from above to below, inhibition of spontaneity and
emphasis on conformity to externally imposed values… God is conceived more
directly after a parental image and thus as a source of support and as a guiding
and sometimes punishing authority… The power-relationship between the parents,
the domination of the subject’s family by the father or by the mother, and
their relative dominance in specific areas of life
also seemed of importance for our problem.
This traditional order would have to be
undermined by equating the woman’s role as inferior, and equal to slavery to
the man. According to Adorno and the others:
Can the attitude that ‘women’s place is in
the home’ be considered a prejudice? It
would appear that it is so…. Subjects who profess to some religious affiliation
express more prejudice
than those who do not… people who reject organized religion are
less prejudiced than those who accept
it.
Therefore, the authors of The Authoritarian Personalityconcluded that the means
to effect a transformation of society is through the proliferation of sex:
“We need not suppose that appeal to emotion
belongs to those who strive in the direction of
fascism, while democratic propaganda must limit itself to reason and
restraint. If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism,
eros belongs mainly to
democracy.’’
To
Adorno, since modern society was a hotbed of evil and tending
towards authoritarianism and fascism, only by first destroying civilization, through the spread
of all forms of cultural pessimism and perversity, could liberation occur. In his 1948 work on The Philosophy of Modern Music, Adorno argued that the purpose of modern
music is to literally drive the listener insane. As Jeffery Steinberg pointed
out, on the role of modern music, Adorno
wrote, “it is not that schizophrenia is
directly expressed therein; but the music imprints upon itself an attitude
similar to that of the mentally ill. The individual brings about his own disintegration… He imagines the fulfillment of the promise through magic, but nonetheless within
the realm of immediate actuality… Its concern is to dominate schizophrenic
traits through the aesthetic consciousness. In so doing, it would hope to vindicate
insanity as true health.’’ 7 Additionally, Erich Fromm, another leading Frankfurt School personality, who was
instrumental in devising the F-scale, devoted much of his seminal 1972 work,
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, to the analysis of necrophilia, which he
regarded as the dominant modern trend. From defi ned necrophilia as
all forms of nihilistic obsession
with death and destruction, particularly those accompanied with sexual overtones. His proposed “cure” for this mass social
affliction was the drug, rock and sex
counterculture of the late 1960s.
Therefore, one of the four directors of
The Authoritarian Personalityproject, R.
Nevitt Sanford, played a pivotal role in the experimentation and eventual mass usage of psychedelic drugs. In 1965, Sanford
wrote the forward to Utopiates:
The Use and Users of LSD 25, which was published by Tavistock Publications, the publishing arm
of Tavistock Institute. The Frankfurt
School and their Tavistock associates thus became the architects of the
counterculture project of the 1960s, sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation, under which the CIA and British intelligence conducted their
mass experimentation with psychedelic drugs, including LSD, known as
MK-Ultra.8
Through official
military and intelligence
conferences over which it presided, and
through various informal and secret operations, the Cybernetics Group and the Macy Foundation directed the spread of LSD by US agencies during the 1950s. In connection with the
founding of the World Federation for Mental
Health (WFMH), headed by John Rawlings
Rees, a New York agent of Montagu Norman
named Clarence G. Michalis had been made chairman of the board of the Macy Foundation. The Macy Foundation’s chief medical officer, Dr.
Frank Fremont-Smith, would be the
permanent co-director of the World
Federation for Mental Health with Rees.9 The
Macy Foundation’s chief LSD
executive, Harold Abramson, was a psychiatric researcher at Columbia
University and at the eugenics center in Cold Spring Harbor, Long
Island, New York. It was Abramson who first “turned on” Frank Fremont-Smith.
MK-Ultra,
which was first
brought to wide
public attention in
1975 through investigations by the
Church Committee, was run by the
CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. Investigative efforts, however, were hampered by the fact that CIA Director
Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra files destroyed in 1973. In 1977, a
Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents, which
led to Senate hearings later that year. In 2001 most information regarding MK-Ultra was officially
declassified. Although the CIA insists that MK-Ultra-type experiments have been
abandoned, former CIA veteran and
whistleblower Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the
CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind
control research has continued. 10
Whether as a
project directly related to such possible
findings, or as part of its continuing experimentation on unwitting subjects,
the CIA embarked on a large-scale
campaign to foster experimentation in
LSD. As the ultimate form of self-indulgence, “recreational” use of LSD was the perfect antidote to social
activism, and to trigger doubts about current norms to open subjects to new philosophies and ideals.
One official summed up the drug’s
effect as approximately that:
…you tend to have a more global view of things.
I found it awfully hard when stoned to maintain the notion: I am a US
citizen—my country right or wrong—You tend to have these good higher feelings.
You are more open to the brotherhood-of-man idea and more susceptible to the seamy
sides of your own society… I think this is exactly what happened during the
1960s, but it didn’t make people more communist. It just made them less
inclined to identify with the US They took a plague-onboth-your-houses
position. 11
Through the efforts of various LSD “evangelists,” the CIA managed to make it fashionable to poison
oneself, all under the delusion of exploring the possibilities of
consciousness. First proposed by famed psychologist and Theosophist, William James, the suggestion that drugs
could help expand consciousness in a manner similar to religious experience has
come to be known as the “entheogen thesis.” Psychoactive drugs, originally
referred to as hallucinogenics, but more recently as entheogens (“generating
the divine within”), have been used for centuries by numerous cultures, often
for both medicinal as well as
ritualistic purposes. However, influenced by
occult ideas, which reject traditional religion, there is a tendency among
exponents of this idea to mistake mystical experiences with all religious
experiences. Therefore, they discount the validity or even existence of rational
religious experience, and have constructed the theory that religions have a
purely psychiatric basis, going even so
far as to say that all religious are entheogen based.
Inspired by
William James, the leading evangelist of the mind-expanding potential of
psychedelics was Aldous Huxley,
who was first introduced to mescaline
by Aleister Crowley, later writingBrave New World. 12 The justification for Huxley’s involvement in MK-Ultra was offered
by him at a lecture to the California Medical School, in San Francisco in 1961,
where he explained:
There will be, in the next generation or so,
a pharmacological method of making
people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to
speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so
that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will
rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda
or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this
seems to be the final revolution. 13
MK-Ultra began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to the United States
accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, who
was brought in by Allen Dulles to play
a prominent role in the project.14 In 1952,
Osmond, who originally coined the word “psychedelic,” began working with
psychedelics, particularly mescaline and
LSD while looking for a cure for
schizophrenia at Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada. He suggested
that mescaline allowed a sane person to see through the eyes of a schizophrenic
and suggested that it be used to train doctors and nurses to better understand
their patients. His research attracted
the attention of Aldous Huxley, who
volunteered to be a subject. In 1953,
Osmond gave Huxley a supply of mescaline for his personal consumption.
The next year, in The Doors of Perception, whose title was drawn from a poem
by William Blake, and
which reflected the
ideas of Gurdjieff, Huxley claimed
that hallucinogenic drugs “expand consciousness.”
The man who introduced both Osmond and Huxley to LSD was Alfred Hubbard, who had worked for
the OSS during the war as a “Special Investigative
Agent.” Hubbard, who is known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” became the first person to emphasize LSD’s potential as a visionary or transcendental drug. He became an apostle for LSD in the early 1950s after supposedly receiving an angelic vision telling
him that something important to the future of mankind would soon be coming. When he first read aboutLSD he immediately
identified it as part of that
vision and he sought it out and tried
it for himself in 1951. Over the years, Hubbard also reportedly worked for the Canadian Special Services, the US Justice
Department and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms. Through his
extensive connections, which included the Pope, as he once boasted, he has been
credited with “turning on” as many as
6,000 people to LSD. 15
Hubbard was also in contact with LSD evangelist Timothy Leary who
began privately purchasing large quantities of LSD as well. 16 Between 1954 and 1959,
Leary was director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation
Hospital in Oakland, where he devised a personality test, “The Leary,” which is
used by the CIA to test prospective employees. Leary became
associated with CIA contractor
Frank Barron who had worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality
Assessment and Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960, with government
funding, Barron founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a
lecturer in psychology. Barron administered Leary some CIA-supplied psilocybin and LSD, after which Leary began experimenting regularly with
psychedelics and also studied their effects on others in controlled
experiments. Leary’s Harvard associates
included Martin Orne, a researcher receiving funds from CIA, and former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray who had
monitored the early OSS “truth
serum” experiments, and numerous other
known CIA contractors. One of Dr.
Murray’s many subjects was a Harvard
undergraduate math major Theodore Kaczynski,
later known as the infamous “Unabomber.” 17 Leary later admitted to
knowing at the time that “some powerful
people in Washington have sponsored all this
drug research.” 18 “It was no accident,”
Leary explained, referring to the spread of LSD, “It was all planned and scripted by the
Central Intelligence, and I’m all in favor of Central Intelligence.” 19
Like many of the leading LSD evangelists,
including Aldous Huxley,
Gerald Heard and Alan Watts,
Leary was
strongly influenced by
Gurdjieff, whose teachings were often featured in The Psychedelic
Review. Gurdjieff believed that the
ascetic practices of monks, fakirs and yogis resulted in the production of psychological
substances that produced their religious or mystical experiences. Instead of the torturous practices of these
mystics, Gurdjieff proposed that the man who knows the Fourth Way “simply
prepares and swallows a little pill which
contains all the substances he wants. And in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required result.” 20
Leary later remarked about receiving a copy of the Fourth Secret Teachingof Gurdjieff:
For the past twenty years, we Gurdjieff fans had been titillated by rumors
of this Fourth Book, which supposedly listed secret techniques and practical
methods for attaining the whimsical, post-terrestrial levels obviously inhabited by the jolly Sufi
Master [ Gurdjieff ]. We had always
assumed, naturally, that the secret methods involved drugs. So it was a matter
of amused satisfaction to read in this newly issued text that not only were
brain-activating drugs the keys to
Gurdjieff’s wonderful, whirling wisdom, but also that the reason for
keeping the alkaloids secret was to avoid exactly the penal incarceration which
I was enjoying when the following essay was penned.21
Leary apparently first became interested in psychedelics when he read a 1957 article
by Gordon Wasson published in Lifemagazine titled
“Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” which
brought knowledge of the existence of psychoactive mushrooms to a
wide audience for
the first time.
Wasson, who was a vice president
of JP Morgan and served as a chairman to the
CFR, and had close ties to Allen Dulles and Edward Bernays. Wasson and
Henry Luce— Skull and Bones member and creator of Lifemagazine—were also
long time members of the Century Club, a
CIA front, along with John
Foster Dulles, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan.22 Time-Life was created by
Henry P. Davison Jr, also a member of Skull and Bones, who was Wasson’s boss at JP Morgan.
Wasson was associated with at least six
people suspected of being involved in the
JFK assassination, including C.
D. Jackson and Henry Luce. Wasson’s
name was found in the address book that was retrieved from the briefcase of George
de Mohrenschildt, a friend of Lee Harvey
Oswald, after his death. The address book also contained an entry for “ Bush,
George H. W. (Poppy).” Although de Mohrenschildt
denied any Nazi sympathies, his application to join the OSS during World War II
was rejected, because, according to a memo by former CIA director
Richard Helms he was alleged to be a Nazi spy. In addition to the Bush family, de Mohrenschildt was also acquainted with the
Bouvier family, including Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
Wasson was also a good friend with English
poet Robert Graves, author of The White
Goddess, a key book for modern Pagans and
Wiccans, in which he proposes the existence of a European deity,
inspired and represented by the phases of the moon, and which is the origin of
the goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies. In 1952, Robert Graves had sent Wasson a clipping from a pharmaceutical
company’s newspaper mentioning an article that Richard Evans Schultes,
considered the father of modern ethnobotany, and soon to become Director of the
Harvard Botanical Museum, had published in a journal over ten years earlier, in
which he reported on the use of psychoactive
mushrooms by native peoples in the mountains of southern Mexico. It was
this information that brought the Wassons together with Schultes, and eventually the Swiss chemist Albert
Hofmann. Wasson went on a study the use
of the mushrooms among Mazatec shamans
in 1955, which he covered in his Life article.
Graves was also a close friend of Idries Shah. Towards the end of the 1950s,
Shah established contact with Wiccan
circles in London and served as a secretary and companion to Gerald Gardner,
the founder of Wicca, whose rituals he
formulated with Aleister Crowley.
Shortly before his death, Crowley had elevated Gardner to the VII° of the OTO, and issued a charter decreeing that
Gardner could perform its preliminary initiation rituals. 23 After Crowley’s
death in 1947, Gardner was regarded as
the chief representative of the OTO in
Europe. In 1960, Shah founded his publishing house, Octagon Press, one of
its first titles being a biography titled Gerald Gardner, Witch, which Shah
wrote under the pen name of Jack L. Bracelin. Shah met Graves in 1961, and
later wrote to him that he was researching ecstatic religions, and that he had
been “attending… experiments conducted by the witches in Britain, into mushroom-eating
and so on.” Shah also told Graves that he was “intensely preoccupied at the
moment with the carrying forward of ecstatic and intuitive knowledge.”24Graves
encouraged Shah to publish an authoritative book on Sufism for a Western
audiences, which became The Sufi s,
published in 1964, for which Graves wrote the foreword.
Wasson is considered the founder of
Ethnomycology, the study of psychoactive
mushrooms used for spiritual purposes, inspiring later researchers such
as Terence McKenna and John Allegro.
Wasson wrote in Lear y’s The Psychedelic Review that the magic mushroom “permits you to see more clearly
than our perishing eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of life, to travel
backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even to
know God.” 25 In 1967 Wasson would publish Soma: Divine
Mushroom of Immortality, which proposed that the ancient Vedic intoxicant Soma was the magic mushroom.
Wasson would later discuss the
Eleusinian Mysteries in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the
Mysteries, co-authored with Albert Hofmann,
which proposed that the special potion “kykeon,” used in the ceremony,
contained psychoactive substances from the fungus Ergot, from which LSD was developed.
After
first experimenting with psilocybin mushrooms in the summer of 1960,
Leary was given a copy of Huxley’s The Doors of Perceptionwhich he
believed corroborated what he had experienced, “and more too.” 26 Leary soon
met with Huxley and the two became friends.
Huxley instructed Leary, according to his autobiographical account of
the Harvard University Psychedelic Drug Project, Flashback: “Your role is quite
simple, Timothy. Become a cheerleader for evolution,” he said, forewarning him
however that, “These are evolutionary matters. They cannot be rushed. Initiate
artists, writers, poets, jazz musicians, elegant courtesans, painters, rich
bohemians and they’ll initiate the intelligent rich. That’s how everything of
culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has
been passed on.” 27 Leary also
quoted Huxley as saying: “These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories,
will bring about vast changes in society.
This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the
word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.’ 28 Leary himself added: “We had run up against the Judeo-Christian
commitment to one God, one religion, one
reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding
days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a
polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist
religion based on intelligence,
good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.” 29
Leary also modeled himself on Aleister Crowley. His autobiography, Confessions of a Drug Fiend, was a composite
of Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiendand
Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Leary confessed in an interview with Late
Night Americaon PBS:
Well, I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley; I think that I’m carrying on much of
the work that he started over 100 years ago. And I think the 60’s themselves
you know Crowley said he was in
favor of finding your own self and “Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the law” under love. It was very powerful statement. I’m sorry he
isn’t around now to appreciate the
glories that he started.
According to released CIA documents, Allen Dulles purchased over 100 million doses of LSD, almost all of which flooded the streets of the
United States during the late 1960s.
30 Key in the operation were several individuals recruited by Huxley, the most
prominent of which were Dr. Gregory Bateson
and Alan Watts. Watts became a
popularizer of Zen Buddhist philosophy and at the same time founded the
Pacifica FM radio stations which were among
the first to push the British-imported rock of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and the Animals.
Bateson, an anthropologist who had worked
with the OSS, became the director of a
hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo Alto Veterans
Administration Hospital.31It was also the
Macy Foundation’s chief LSD executive
Harold Abramson who gave LSD for the first time to Bateson. Then in
1959, Bateson gave LSD to Beat poet Alan Ginsburg at Stanford
University, under controlled experimental
conditions. During 1936–1950,
Bateson was married to anthropologist
Margaret Mead, who would also help launch the modern feminist movement,
through her patronage of Betty Friedan, a studentprotégé of Kurt Lewin of the
Frankfurt School and Tavistock.
Ken
Kesey, mental patient turned author and the foremost among Bateson’s
Palo Alto recruits, and others were given
LSD by Dr. Leo Hollister at Stanford and it is from that point that it
was said to have spread “out of the CIA’s realm.’’ 32 Beginning in 1959, Kesey had volunteered as a research
subject for medical
trials financed by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project, which tested the
effects of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline,
and other psychedelic drugs. Kesey wrote
many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the MK-Ultra study and in the years of private experimentation
that followed. Kesey’s role as a medical guinea pig as well as his stint
working at a state veterans’ hospital, where he had access to the cabinet where
they kept LSD, inspired him to write One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nestin 1962.
Kesey continued experimenting on his own and
involved many close friends who collectively became known as “The Merry
Pranksters.” Kesey and his Merry
Pranksters helped shape the counterculture of the 1960s when they embarked on a
cross-country voyage during the summer of 1964 in a psychedelic school bus
named “Further.” The Pranksters visited Timothy Leary at his Millbrook retreat
in upstate New York. At Millbrook, after leaving Harvard in 1962, Leary was working for William Mellon
Hitchcock’s CIA front, The International
Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), later renamed the Castilia Foundation.
William Mellon Hitchcock funded the IFIF/Castilia and
later financed an LSD manufacturing operation.
He had a large estate in Millbrook where
Leary lived. 33 The Pranksters also created a direct link between the
1950s Beat Generation and the 1960s psychedelic scene: the bus was driven by
Beat icon Neal Cassady, Beat poet Allen
Ginsberg was onboard for a time, and they dropped in on Cassady’s friend, Beat
author Jack Kerouac.
By fostering a proliferation of
experimentation in sex and drugs, the youth of
America in the 60s were lured away from their traditional faith, opening
the way for the Frankfurt School’s
version of Marxist revolution. It
was Marcuse who coined the phrase, “make
love, not war,” during the anti- Vietnam War demonstrations. The key to
promoting Marcuse’s ideas of the
combination of sexual liberation and
Marxist class struggle with the anti-war movement was a pact between
the Black Panthers and the Youth
International Party whose members were commonly called Yippies. The founders of the Yippie movement were Jerry Rubin,
Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Stew Albert and others, who came together
in 1968 to use media publicity as a means of bolstering the counterculture of
the hippies by aligning it with the
revolutionary politics of the New
Left. Abbie Hoffman had also been a student
at Brandeis University of Herbert Marcuse, who he said had a profound effect on
his political outlook. The Yippies most
well-known manifestos included Jerry
Rubin’s Do It! Scenarios of the Revolutionand
Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of it. Their message, explains
historian Hilary Radner, “was consistent; politics alone would never draw the young
together, the Yippies maintained, but
sex, pot and good music—the liberation of desire—by offering a viable
revolutionary alternative lifestyle to American puritanism, would.” 34
As explained by John Coleman, the Black Panthers
were the creation of the Tavistock-affiliated
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which was instrumental in creating the
New Left in America. The creation and manipulation of the
African-American identity began in 1914, when Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn
of Columbia University became chairman
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) and
recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen
Wise.35 Racists have interpreted this strategy has having the goal of promoting miscegenation, but the true intent
was to undermine Christianity and the
American political establishment. As part of their strategy to create the New
Left, the Frankfurt School would rally
African-Americans through the artificial construct of the basis for their unity in
their common black identity, and to
overthrow the political system as run by their “white” oppressors.
Angela Davis who emerged as a nationally
prominent activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA and Black Panther Party and through her
association with the Civil Rights Movement, encountered Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile
Crisis and then became his student. On Marcuse’s urging, Davis spent the next
two years studying at Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe University, Institute of Social Research under Theodor Adorno. Prior
to her return to the US, Davis spent the summer of 1967 at the Tavistock Conference on the Dialectics of
Liberation, which involved political debate, poetry and performance art, led by
R. D. Laing, fellow Black Panther
Stokely Carmichael, Allen
Ginsberg and Marcuse.36 In a television
interview, she said “Herbert Marcuse
taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a
revolutionary.” 37 Davis was also discovered to have links with the CIA, when Charlene Mitchell, a member of
the Communist Party USA’s Central
Committee, confi rmed report that If
They Come in the Morning,the book that
launched Davis as an international celebrity, was funded by CIA-controlled foundations. Third Press, which published the
book, received $125,000 used to Publish and finance advance advertising for it from the
Ford Foundation, Field Foundation, New World Foundation and Chase Manhattan Bank. 38
The Black Panther movement itself, as has
been shown, was thoroughly
infiltrated by the
FBI through its notorious COINTELPRO
operation. 39 A report by the Center for
Investigative Reporting journalist Seth Rosenfeld discovered that leading Black
Panther member, Richard Aoki, was an undercover FBI informer. Aoki was a Japanese American
whose family was interned during the war. Like the other Black Panthers, Aoki’s adolescence was
involved in petty crime. He joined a gang and shoplifted, burgled homes and
stole car parts. After the war, Aoki enlisted in the US Army and became a weapons
expert. He acknowledged that he had “cut a deal” in which military authorities
arranged for his criminal record to be sealed. Aoki then became a major political
activist and as an FBI informant
infiltrated chapters of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers’
Party and nearly from its inception
the Black Panther Party. 40 Aoki
had attended Merritt College for two years where he became close friends with
his longtime acquaintances Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founding members of
the Black Panther Party. Although there
were several Asian Americans in the
Black Panther Party, Aoki was the only one to have a formal leadership
position. He joined the Black Panther Party
early and was eventually promoted to the position of Field Marshal, providing
them their first firearms and weapons training, which preceded fatal shootouts
with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s.
Nevertheless,
J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the
FBI, declared in late 1968 that the Panthers, who by now had chapters
across the nation, posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the
country.” In a tape-recorded interview for the book in 2007, two years before
he committed suicide, Aoki was asked about the allegations that he had been
an FBI informant. Though he initially
contended they weren’t true, he hinted: “People change. It is complex. Layer
upon layer.” Bobby Seale and the FBI have refused
to comment on Rosenfeld’s findings. 41
Most of the Black Panther leaders started off
their lives as petty criminals before becoming politically engaged. When Stokely Carmichael’s family moved to the East
Bronx, at that time an aging Jewish and Italian neighborhood, in a 1967 interview
he gave to LIFE Magazine, he said he was the only black member of the Morris
Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft. Stokely Carmichael was also heavily influenced by the
work of Frantz Fanon and his landmark book Wretched of the
Earth. Similarly, as a teenager, Huey P.
Newton was arrested several times for minor offenses, and by age fourteen had been
arrested for gun possession and vandalism. Newton supported himself in college
by burglarizing homes in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills areas and by committing
strong-arm robberies and other crimes. Newton wrote that he began his law
studies to become a better criminal, although he said that he repented that he
had been a “big-time fool” for having such narrow ambitions.
Eldridge Cleaver as well, as a teenager, was
involved in petty crime and spent time in detention centers. At the age of
eighteen he was convicted of a felony drug charge and sent to the adult prison
at Soledad. In 1958, he was further convicted of rape and assault with intent
to murder, and eventually served time in Folsom and San Quentin prisons.
Tragically, Cleaver was a psychopath, supposedly reformed. By the time he wrote
his collection of essays titled Soul On Ice, which was praised by The New York
Times Book Reviewas “brilliant and revealing,” he was to have renounced rape
and all his previous reasoning about it. In the most controversial part of Soul
On Ice, Cleaver admitted to having committed acts of rape, claiming he
initially raped black women “for practice,” before moving on to the serial rape
of white women, which he saw as a political or “insurrectionary act.” 42
In “The White Race and its Heroes,” Cleaver
stressed the importance of creating alliances with white political activists,
like the one he spearheaded with the
Jerry Rubin of the Yippies. As
Cleaver explained:
The characteristic of the white rebels which
most alarms elders the long hair, the new dances, their love for Negro music,
their use of marijuana, their mystical attitude toward sex—are all tools of
their rebellion. They have turned those tools against the totalitarian fabric
of American society—and they mean to change it.43
Cleaver selected Jerry Rubin as his presidential running mate
on the ticket of the Peace and Freedom party, and wrote an introduction for
Rubin’s Do It!Rubin in turn celebrated Cleaver in Do It!, writing a chapter
titled “We Are All Eldridge
Cleaver.” Abbie Hoffman went on speaking
tour with Cleaver. And in 1971, Cleaver encouraged the revolutionary wing of
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),
the Weather Underground, to bust Timothy Leary out of prison. Both the SDS and the
Weather Underground were also part of the Institute for Policy Studies ( IPS)
network. 44 The SDS was founded in
1905 by a group of notable
socialists. By 1962, the SDS had emerged as the most important of the new campus radical group and
came to symbolize the core of the New
Left. In 1968 and 1969, as its radicalism reached its peak, the SDS began to split under the strain of
internal dissension. Along with the New Communist Movement, some extremist
illegal factions also emerged, such as the
Weather Underground. As soon
as IPS opened its doors in 1963, it
plunged into the anti- Vietnam War movement. IPS was also at the forefront of
the feminist movement. Popular senior scholars associated with IPS have included noted Canadian activist
Maude Barlow; Richard A. Falk who served
as the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories; feminist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich; Norman
Birnbaum who is a member of the editorial board of The Nation; Hunter Pitts O’Dell
who worked with Martin Luther King; and Noam Chomsky.
After his break from prison, Leary and his wife Rosemary stayed with Cleaver
in Algeria. According to Leary, “Panthers are the hope of the world,”
he wrote to Allen Ginsberg. Cleaver, he
added, “is a genial genius. Brilliant! Turned
on too!” 45 However, Cleaver placed Leary
under “revolutionary arrest” as a counter-revolutionary for promoting drug use.
Cleaver later led a shortlived revivalist ministry called Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, “a hybrid
synthesis of Islam and Christianity he called ‘Christlam’.” 46
Cleaver eventually turned to the right-wing, becoming a Mormon and a member of
the Republican Party.
During the 1960s and 1970s, another prominent Black Panther member, James Forman, lived
with and had two children from Constancia (“Dinky”) Romilly, the second and only
surviving child of Jessica Mitford, of
the infamous Mitford sisters, who
were Children of the Sun, and whose
sister Unity was a friend of Hitler. Jessica’s first husband
was Esmond Romilly, who was a
nephew-by-marriage of Sir Winston Churchill.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman received a Ph.D. from the Union of
Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy
Studies ( IPS). In 1964, several leading African-American activists joined the
staff and turned IPS into a base of
support for the civil rights movement in the nation’s capital.
The sexual liberation the Tavistock Institute sought to promote was
fostered through rock‘n roll music which was heavily influenced by the sex and
drug hedonism of Aleister Crowley.
The Beatles, for example, famously
included Crowley as one of the many figures on the cover sleeve of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, where he is situated between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West.
The album contained a fantasized version of an
LSD trip, called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Also featured on the
album cover are Aldous Huxley, Carl
Jung, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Max Müller and T. E. Lawrence. The Beatles, according to former British intelligence officer John Coleman, were a
Tavistock project. Their music, he said, was actually written by Theodor
Adorno, whose 12-atonal
discords were scientifically pitched to create mass “environmental
social turbulences.” 47 As John Lennon
later noted, reflecting the intent
of the Tavistock Institute, “changing the lifestyle
and appearance of youth throughout the world didn’t just happen—we set out to do
it. We knew what we were doing.” 48
As personalities associated with 60s counterculture,
gurus such as Leary and psychedelic rock
musicians such as the Grateful Dead,
Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Big Brotherand the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplaneand The Beatles, soon attracted a great deal of
publicity, further interest was generated in
LSD. The first show of the Grateful Deadunder that name took place in
1965 at one of Kesey’s “Acid Tests.” These were a series of parties centered
entirely around the advocacy and experimentation with LSD, later popularized in Tom Wolfe’s 1968
book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader grew up in Menlo Park, site of the Tavistock-affiliated Stanford Research
Institute, which conducted extensive intelligence operations for the CIA, particularly experiments into telepathy
and remote viewing. Fellow band member Bill Kreutzmann as a teenager met Aldous Huxley at his high school, who encouraged
him in his drumming. Another member, Bob Weir is reported to be a member of the
Bohemian Club, and has attended and performed at the secretive club’s annual
bacchanal. 49
It was also at one of these parties that the
members of the Grateful Deadmet
Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Simply
known as Owsley Stanley, or “Bear,” he
was the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and became
the band’s soundman. 50 Owsley was the first
private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD, producing, between 1965 and 1967,
more than 1.25 million doses. Owsley,
the scion of a political family from Kentucky, was raised in Arlington
Virginia. He attended the prestigious Charlotte Hall Military Academy in
Maryland, but was reportedly kicked out in the ninth grade for being intoxicated. Then, at
only fifteen, he voluntarily committed himself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC
which, as Colin Ross explained in The
CIA Doctors, Dr. Winfred Overholser
Sr. funded LSD research through the Scottish Rite Committee and was at the center
of the mind control network. 51 St.
Elizabeth’s is also where presidential assailants, serial killers or other
federal cases are kept, such as Ezra Pound
and John Hinckley, Jr. who shot Ronald
Reagan. Nevertheless, Owsley attended the University of Virginia for
some time, and after a stint in the US Air Force, beginning in 1956, he later
moved to Los Angeles, where he worked at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
founded by Jack Parsons. 52
By 1967, the
Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of LSD that a sizable drug population had
emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Peter
Coyote, narrating the documentary “Hippies” on The History Channel, added that,
“Some on the left even theorized that the
hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti-war movement with LSD, turning potential protestors into
self-absorbed naval-gazers.” 53 A disillusioned Abbie Hoffman once described:
“There were all these activists, you know, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers…
all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded
with all these ‘flower
children’ who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from?!” 54
Instrumental in creating this sex, drugs and
rock ‘n roll counterculture, by luring the “ hippies,” the disenfranchised
youth, and runaways from across America to San Francisco, to bring about the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon and the famed 1967
“ Summer of Love,” was the song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your
Hair),” sung by the Mamas and the Papas.
An excellent online article by David McGowan, titled “Inside The LC: The
Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel
Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation,” the Mamas and the Papas, along with all the other
bands that signaled the birth of the folk rock phenomenon, were all associated
with a network of groups located in
Laurel Canyon, involved in occult activities, all with ties to military intelligence
and Charles Manson’s “Family.”
Frank Zappa, in the early years, was Laurel Canyon’s father figure, leading an entourage in a residence dubbed the
“Log Cabin” where, in the words of Michael Walker, author of Laurel Canyon, there “raged a rock-and-roll
salon and Dionysian playground.”55 Like many in the Laurel Canyon set, Zappa came from a family with a military and
intelligence background. Zappa’s father
was a chemical warfare specialist assigned to the Edgewood Arsenal in Aberdeen, Maryland, a
facility frequently cited as being deeply enmeshed in MK-Ultra experiments with LSD, THC, BZ and other biological and
chemical agents, and where numerous Nazi
scientists were employed under Operation
Paperclip.56Zappa literally grew up at the
Edgewood Arsenal, having
lived the first seven years of his life in
military housing on the grounds of the facility. 57
Anger and the
Laurel Canyon groups were closely associated with Vito Paulekas, his
wife Zsou and Karl Franzoni. Vito
also happened to
be first cousin of Eva Paul, wife
of Winthrop Rockefeller. 58 According to Barry Miles, in his book Hippie, “The first
hippies in Hollywood, perhaps the first hippies
anywhere, were Vito, his wife Zsou, Captain Fuck [ Franzoni] and their
group of
about thirty-five dancers.
Calling themselves Freaks,
they lived a
semicommunal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they
could.” 59 Also in the troupe were most of the young girls who would later become
part of Frank Zappa’s GTO project, including Gail Sloatman,
who would later become Zappa’s wife.
According
to Miles, Vito operated
“the first crash pad in LA, an open
house to countless runaways where everyone was welcome for a night, particularly young women.” 60 By the mid 1960s,
the group had expanded into a guesthouse known as “the treehouse” at the Log
Cabin. The “treehouse” attendees included
Mick Jagger and his girlfriend
Marianne Faithfull, members of the Animals, Mark Lindsay from Paul
Revere and the Raiders, Alice Cooper who
joined Zappa’s Mothers of Invention,
Janis Joplin, and Roger McGuinn and Mike Clarke from the Byrds. Retired
journalist John Bilby recalls, “Tim
Leary was definitely there,
George Harrison and Ravi Shankar were there. 61 By 1967, the Zappa
dancers were splitting their rent with staff from the hippie publication The
Oracle, a San Francisco-based publication with intelligence ties that specialized
in psychedelic occultism. Frank Zappa took over the commune in 1968. Also
included in the pack was Kim Fowley, who had spent time working as young male
street hustler, but had his greatest success creating the Runaways, featuring Joan Jett, who were recently the subject of a film
in 2010. Fowley crassly attired the band
in leather and lingerie, and boasted, “Everyone loved the idea of 16-year-old
girls playing guitars and singing about fucking.” 62
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