Sex, Drugs & Revolution Part 3
One of the earliest to arrive on the Laurel Canyon scene was Jim Morrison,
whose band The Doors, was named after Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
Jim was the son of US Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was in command of the warships that purportedly came under Viet Cong attack, in the
false-flag operation known as the Gulf
of Tonkin incident of 1964. The outcome was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which served as
president Lyndon Johnson’s legal justification for
the commencement of the Vietnam
War. The self-proclaimed “Lizard King,” Jim was a prodigious reader, being
interested in Nietzsche, the Beat poets,
and as his former high school teacher reported, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
demonology. 63 On the back cover of the
Doors“13” album, Jim Morrison and the
other members of the band are shown posing with a bust of Aleister Crowley.
The first
of the Laurel Canyon bands to produce an album were The Byrds,
called “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was soon followed by releases from
the John Phillips-led Mamas and the Papas, Frank
Zappa and The Mothers ofInvention, and
Buffalo Spring fi eld, featuring Stephen Stills and Neil Young. The Byrd’s David Crosby was the son of an Annapolis
graduate and World War II military
intelligence officer, Major Floyd
Delafield Crosby. 64 David
Van Cortlandt Crosby was also a scion of the closely intertwined Van Cortlandt,
Van Schuyler and Van Rensselaer families, who have produced US senators and
congressmen, state senators and assemblymen, governors, mayors, judges, Supreme
Court justices, Revolutionary and Civil War generals, signers of the Declaration
of Independence, and members of the Continental Congress. It also includes
several high-ranking Masons, such as Stephen Van Rensselaer III, past Grand
Master of the Freemasons for New York. 65
Crosby was kicked out of The Byrdsand joined up with Graham Nash and Stephen
Stills to form Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Suspiciously, Stills wrote a song titled “Bluebird,” which happened to be the
original codename assigned to MK-Ultra. A coincidence, perhaps, but since his
father was also in the military, Stills spent much of his childhood in Central
America, and was educated primarily at schools on military bases and at elite
military academies, and would later spend time fighting in Vietnam. Crosby, Stills and Nash were later
joined by another former member of
Buffalo Spring fi eld, Neil
Young. In 1966, while in Toronto, Young joined the Mynah Birds, fronted by Rick
James, who would later transform himself into a pimp persona to create the 1981
hit “Super Freak.”
Young was introduced to Charles Manson by Dennis Wilson, and was impressed enough with
Manson’s musical abilities to recommend him to Mo Ostin, president of Warner
Brothers. Reminiscing years later, Young seemed to be still enthralled with
Mason’s personality, saying: “He was an angry man. But brilliant… He sounds
like Dylan when he talks.” 66 He went even further:
“He’s like one of the main movers and shakers
of time—when you look back at Jesus and all these people, Charlie was like
that.” 67
For his part, Manson said in a 1995 interview from prison in California
that all his old musician friends “didn’t
give a sh*t,” except Neil Young, he remembered,
who once gave him a motorcycle.68 As
Neil Young explained, “A lot of pretty well-known musicians around L.A.
knew him, though they’d probably deny it now.” 69 Manson and his “Family,” with
which he used LSD to effect much of his
control over them, also spent time at the Log Cabin and at the Laurel Canyon home of “Mama” Cass Elliot. 70 Bandmate
“Papa” John Phillips would organize,
along with Manson associate Terry Melcher,
the famed Monterey Pop Festival, at which thousands of young attendees were
introduced to LSD, and which
through unprecedented media exposure would
first popularize the music
and fashions of the nascent “hippie” movement. Melcher, the son of Doris Day,
was introduced to Mason by Dennis Wilson
of the Beach Boys.
“Papa”
John Phillips was the son of US Marine Corp Captain Claude Andrew
Phillips and a mother who claimed to have psychic powers. John’s father was
stationed as a Marine in Haiti, as part
of a military occupation in 1927, the same year that David Crosby’s father was in the country.
John attended a series of elite military prep schools in the Washington DC
area, culminating in an appointment to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. After
leaving Annapolis, John married Susie Adams, whose father, James Adams, Jr., had
been involved in what Susie described as “cloak-and-dagger stuff with the Air
Force in Vienna.”71
Phillips later married Michelle Phillips, then only sixteen, who
became a founding member of the Mamas and the Papas. Already in grade eight,
Michelle had become a protégé of Tamar
Hodel, who “groomed” her, providing her a fake ID and amphetamines to allow her
to cope in school after staying up all night. And to keep Michelle’s father
from disapproving, explained Michelle, “Tamar put on perfect airs around my dad
and when it became necessary she would sleep with him.” 72 As described in
Vanity Fairin a December 2007 article titled
“California Dreamgirl,” Tamar’s father,
Dr. George Hodel, was “the most pathologically
decadent man in Los Angeles” and “the city’s venereal-disease czar and a fixture in it’s A-list demimonde.” Also noted in the article was that “ George Hodel shared with Man Ray a
love for the work of the Marquis de Sade and the belief that the pursuit of
personal liberty was worth everything.” 73 Tamar and her siblings had grown up
in her father’s Hollywood house, which was
the site of wild parties, sometimes joined by director John Huston and photographer Man Ray. 74 Tamar
talked of how she “often ‘uncomfortably’ posed nude… for ‘dirty-old-man’ Man
Ray and had once wriggled free from a predatory
John Huston.” 75 Her own father, not so shockingly, had committed incest with her. “When I was 11” Tamar explained,
my father taught me to perform oral sex on him.” Her father also “plied her
with erotic books, grooming her for what
he touted as their transcendent union,” and freely shared her with his influential friends. 76
George Hodel was arrested followed by the
sensational 1949 incest trial. Worse still, as has recently come to light
in Black Dahlia Avengerand Exquisite Corpse,
is that George Hodel was the alleged
killer in the gruesome and muchpublicized
Black Dahlia murder. With methods that suggest ritual murder, on January
15, 1947, Hodel killed actress Elizabeth Short, then bled and surgically cut
her in two, transporting the halved corpse, with the internal organs intact, to
a vacant lot where he laid the pieces out in imitation of certain photographs
by Man Ray. 77 Ther have been, however,
numerous suspects identified in the case, including Orson Welles.78
John and Michelle Phillips’ daughter Mackenzie
eventually became the star of the hit TV
show in the 70s called One Day at a Time, before gaining infamy for substance abuse issues. In September
2009, Mackenzie released her memoir, High on Arrival, which revealed the source
of the anxieties she was struggling to cope with. In addition to introducing
her to drugs at the age of eleven by injecting her with cocaine, Mackenzie claimed that “Papa” John
had raped her on the eve of her first marriage, and had engaged in an incestuous
affair with her that spanned a decade, and ended only when she became pregnant
and did not know who the father was. Likewise, her sister Chynna Phillips, who
hinted as similar abuse, also
eventually entered rehab. Chynna first became known in 1990 as third of the
vocal group Wilson Phillips, alongside Carnie and Wendy Wilson, the daughters
of the reclusive Brian Wilson of
the Beach Boys, at whose home were held
recordings sessions of Charles Manson
playing music.
In addition to fellow band member Denny
Doherty, Michelle would eventually also marry
Dennis Hopper, and have affairs. among many others, with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, brother to Shirley MacLaine. Beatty and Nicholson were part of a network of
actors and musicians known as Hollywood’s
“ Young Turks,” who were
featured in a series of
films now considered
counter-cultural classics, also featuring such as Peter Fonda,
Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper.
One such movie was 1967’s The Tr ip, an attempt to create
a film version
of an LSD experience, written by Jack Nicholson. Nicholson would later star in the 1975 film version of Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. Dennis Hopper directed and Peter Fonda starred in one of the most
critically acclaimed counter-cultural films
of the decade, Easy Rider. The
art director of Easy Riderwas Jeremy Kay, who had also worked on Kenneth Anger’s Crowley-inspired Scorpio Rising, and was a
member of the Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis(or OTO). Two weeks after Easy Riderpremiered in 1969,
police raided the Solar Lodge’s compound, after which eleven members of the
sect were charged with felony child abuse. Various sources have claimed that
Manson had ties to the group. 79
Kenneth Anger enjoyed cult status in Hollywood as author of two controversial Hollywood
Babylonbooks, and as underground experimental film maker of Crowley-inspired films that
merged surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult. Anger’s Inauguration of
the Pleasure Domestarred Marjorie
Cameron as “the Scarlet Woman,” and Anaïs Nin as “ Astarte.” Anger has been
cited as an important influence on
later film directors like Martin Scorsese, John Waters and David Lynch, who
continued to work with the Young Turks network, such as Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Dern’s daughter, Laura. Anger’s patron
was John Paul Getty, the founder of Getty Oil, named the richest American in
1957. Getty gained much media attention when his grandson was kidnapped and was
sent his ear when hefirst refused to pay the ransom.
Anger also struck up a close friendship with
controversial sexologist Alfred Kinsey, as both shared an interest in Aleister
Crowley. In 1955, he and Kinsey traveled
to Crowley’s derelict Abbey of
Thelema in Sicily in order to film a short documentary titled Thelema Abbey.
Anger restored many of the erotic wall-paintings that were found there as well
as performing certain Crowleyan rituals at the site. The documentary was made
for the British television series Omnibus,
but later lost.
In 1961 Anton
LaVey and Anger began hosting regular parties in San Francisco for
friends interested in magic and the
supernatural. This “Magic Circle” was the precursor of the Church of
Satan. With his kitschy b-movie version of Satanism,
LaVey achieved quite a bit of notoriety, attracting celebrities like
Jane Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr., and
attention from talk shows like Donahueand The Johnny Carson Show. LaVey wrote the bestselling The Satanic Bible (1969) and later The Satanic Rituals(1971),
which employed occult novelist H. P.
Lovecraft, the Enochian Keys of Elizabethan magician John Dee, psychodrama and the chant “Are We Not
Men” from H. G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, later employed by the rock
band Devo.
Kenneth Anger became acquainted with notable countercultural figures, including
Tennessee Williams, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page,
Mick Jagger and his girlfriend
Marianne Faithfull, which he involved in his Crowley-themed works, Invocation of My Demon
Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising
(1972). Faithfull’s father was a British Army officer and professor of psychology, and her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, was
originally from Vienna, with aristocratic roots in the Habsburg Dynasty and Jewish ancestry on her
maternal side. Faithfull’s maternal great uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,
the nineteenth century Austrian nobleman whose erotic novel, Venus in Furs, spawned the word “masochism.”
Tony Sanchez, a friend of the Rolling Stones, describes that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and their
girlfriends Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, “listened spellbound as
Anger turned them on to Aleister
Crowley’s powers and ideas.” 80 Faithful
and Pallenberg were fond of reading
Robert Graves’ The White Goddessout loud, and Anger, commenting on
Anita, said, “I believe that Anita is, for want of a better word, a witch… The occult unit within the Stones was
Keith and Anita… and Brian Jones. You see,
Brian was a witch too.”81 The home of
Brian Jones, where he drowned in his own pool in 1969, was
described by Marianne Faithfull as “a veritable witches’ coven of decadent illuminati, rock princelings and hip aristos.” 82 In the
rare footage of a television special named Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, Mick Jagger tears off his shirt to
reveal a
Baphomet tattoo. 83
Both Jagger and Faithfull were associated
with the Process Church, 84 which researcher Terry Maury, author of The
Ultimate Evil, has implicated in Charles Manson (who was also interested in Scientology) and Son of Sam multiple murders.
The Process Church was founded by the
English couple Mary Anne MacLean, the ex-wife of former boxing champion Sugar
Ray Robinson, and Robert DeGrimston. Their
Process Church was a religious group that flourished in
the 1960s and 1970s, originally
headquartered in London, and that had
developed as a splinter client cult group from
Scientology. 85 They were often viewed as Satanic as they worshipped both
Christ and Satan, who they believed
would become reconciled, and come together at the end of the world to judge
humanity. “Christ said,” wrote DeGrimston, “Love thine enemy. Christ’s enemy
was Satan and Satan’s enemy was Christ.” 86 Process Church venerated
Adolf Hitler and their symbol was a variation
of the red Templar cross in a
derivative of the swastika. 87
Anger also introduced Crowley to
Led Zeppelinguitarist Jimmy Page,
who became the owner of one of the world’s largest collections of Crowley memorabilia, including Crowley’s notorious Boleskine estate on the
shores of Scotland’s Loch Ness. Page, who composed a soundtrack for
Anger’s Lucifer Rising, which was never
used, makes a brief appearance, holding an Egyptian stele while gazing at a
portrait of Aleister Crowley. As
explained by Gary Lachman, founding member of the New Wave band Blondie, and
now author, in Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of
the Age of Aquarius, “tales of pacts
with the Devil followed Zeppelin throughout their career, and stories of
orgies, black masses and satanic rites were commonplace, mostly centered around
the infamous Chateau Marmont off the Sunset Strip.” 88 Lucifer Rising was based on the concept from Crowley’s Book of the Lawthat mankind had
entered the Aeon of Horus. Gerald Yorke, a
Crowley associate and OTO member,
was credited as a consultant. Yorke had also been the personal representative
of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to the
West. Starring as Osiris in Lucifer Risingwas Performancewriter and co-director
Donald Seaton Cammell, friend of Marlon Brando, and son of Charles Richard
Cammell, who happened to be a close friend and biographer of Aleister Crowley. 89
“Freaks” Vito Paulekas and
his wife Zsou’s three-year-old boy
was the first candidate to play in
Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising,
before dying of a tragic accident. The child’s death was ascribed, in the
documentary Mondo Hollywood in morbid
sarcasm, as “medical malpractice,” being that Vito had fed the child LSD before
it fell from a scaffolding and died. The child died on December 23, 1966, the
very winter solstice heralded the Age of
Satan by Anton LaVey, who performed
the role of the devil in Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brothera longside Mason
“Family” member, Bobby Beausoleil. The
boy’s mother suggested the fall occurred during a “wacky photo session,” which
may be connected to the fact that, according to
Bobby Beausoleil, the eventual
star of Lucifer Rising, some of Anger’s film projects were
for private collectors:
“Every once in a while he’d do a little thing that
wouldn’t be for distribution.” According to biographer Bill Landis, Kenneth Anger was at one time investigated by
the police on suspicion that he had
been producing snuff flicks. 90
Bobby
Beausoleil was convicted of killing Gary Hinman in 1970 under the orders
of Charles Manson. Manson had instructed Beausoleil to make it look like it had been committed by Black
revolutionaries, because he had been predicting to his Family that a race war,
which he referred to as Helter Skelter, was
imminent. Helter Skelter was borrowed
from a Beatles’ song of the same name,
on the so-called White Album. According to former Manson follower, Catherine
Share:
When the
Beatles’ White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and
over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that
everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn’t
that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way
around. He thought that the Beatles were
talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the
White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song “ Helter
Skelter”—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the
whites were gonna go down. 91
Having lost his star performer, Anger then
asked Mick Jagger to play Lucifer , but
finally settled on Anton La Vey. The
film was released in 1969 with
the title Invocation To My Demon Brother.
The later Manson murders of Stephen Parent, Sharon Tate,
Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski and Abigail Folger involved a series of
cross-associations that hint of a bizarre and depraved world involving the
celebrities of Laurel Canyon and the
black arts. According to Sammy Davis
Jr., had he been in L.A at the time, he likely would have been at the same
residence as the Manson murders. “Everyone there,” he explained, “had at one
time or another been into Satanism, or, like myself, had dabbled around the
edges for sexual kicks.” 92 The murders took place in a house rented earlier by
Terry Melcher. John Phillips was one of the investors in
Sebring International, founded by Jay
Sebring, hair-dresser to the stars, on whom the 1975 movie Shampoo,
starring Warren Beatty was based. Sharon Tate, who was eight-an-a-half months
pregnant at the time she was killed, was the wife of Roman Polanski, who had had an affair with Michelle Phillips in London while he was
married to her. Tate had been initiated into witchcraft by Alex Sanders, the High
Priest of Gardner’s Wicca, during the filming of 13, also known as Eye
of the Devil. 93
Susan Atkins, who stabbed Sharon Tate to death, was for a time a dancer
in
LaVey ’s Topless Witches Revue, and she would later claim that she was
inspired to murder by him. Polanski had just directed Rosemary’s Babyin 1968, based on the
best-selling book by the same name by Ira Levin, major elements of which were
inspired by the notion of Crowley’s
Moonchild, as well as the publicity
surrounding LaVey ’ Church of
Satan. 94 In the movie, the role played by Mia Farrow is drugged by a
Satanic coven to be impregnated by
Satan, portrayed by LaVey, to
produce the anti-Christ, to be born in 1966, the same year LaVey started his Church of
Satan, and celebrated in the movie as “the Year One.” LaVey was
used as publicity for the film adaptation, attending the San
Francisco premiere. 95 According to
Beatlesbiographer Geoffrey Giuliano, at a party in California in
1973, John Lennon “went berserk, hurling
a chair out the window, smashing mirrors, heaving a TV against the wall, and
screaming nonsense about film director Roman Polanski being to blame.” 96 John Lennon was shot in 1980 in
front of the Dakota Building in New York, which was used in the filming of Rosemary’s Baby.
A week before Rosemary’s Babypremiered in Los
Angeles, Polanski and Tate attended
a party hosted by John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate,
where Robert F. Kennedy was the guest of
honor, the same evening that he was later shot to death by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel. Witnesses
to the shooting say that Sirhan’s demeanor was strangely calm, and Sirhan
himself claims to have no recollection of the killing. 97 Sirhan had
become interested in the psychic
teachings of AMORC, a subject that also
interested Charles Manson when he was in
prison. 98 William Turner, a former FBI agent
and Democratic Party Congressional candidate, who with his campaign
manager John Christian co-authored The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and
Cover-Up(1993), showed that Sirhan’s famous notebook contained numerous allusions
to the Illuminati and “Kuthumi,” the equivalent
of Bailey’s Master, Koot Humi. After
his arrest, Sirhan requested copies of
Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, as well as Talks on the Path of
Occultism, Volume I: At the Feet of the Master, co-authored by Annie Besant and
Charles W. Leadbetter.
As most studies of the sixties agree, the idealism
of the decade died with two events: the Manson murders and a
tragedy that was showcased in a film called Gimme Shelter,about the Altamont Free Concert. The concert headlined
and organized by The Rolling Stones,
also featured, in order of appearance: Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying
Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Under the advice of
the Grateful Dead, the Hell’s Angels biker gang was hired for
security, a deal that was rumored to include $500 worth of beer. Many of its
members had close ties to Charles Manson,
particularly a club known as the Straight Satans, one of whose members, Danny
DeCarlo, watched over the Family’s arsenal of weapons. 99 Fueled by LSD and large amounts of amphetamines, the
crowd also became unruly, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers. Caught on camera during the film was Meredith Hunter, a young African-American man, being
stabbed to death by members of the
Hell’s Angels, in front of the stage while the Rolling Stonesplayed on, after he drew a
gun. The song they were playing, contrary to most accounts of the incident, was
Sympathy for the Devil, as was initially reported in Rolling Stonemagazine
based on the accounts of several reporters on the scene and a review of the
unedited film stock. 100 Alan Passaro was arrested and charged with murder, but
was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense after the jury viewed the footage
from the concert. Film critics Pauline Kael of the New Yorker and Vincent Canby
of the New York Times led the charge against Gimme Shelter as an opportunistic snuff
film, essentially saying
that the filmmakers were complicit in the murder by
having photographed it and subsequently profited from its
theatrical release. 101
Neoliberalism Part 1
In its rejection of communism, and then “Islamism,”
the West has promoted the adoption of secular democracy, which includes
capitalism. The propaganda of the post Cold War era has sought to validate the
implementation of modern capitalism by suggesting that the alternative, communism,
has proven to be a failure. It accomplishes this lie by suggesting that the
only alternative to capitalism is the Soviet model of state ownership. Without
an apparent alternative, the West has been promoting the particularly harsh
brand of capitalism, known as neoliberalism. Based on the rapacity of
interest-based banking, deregulation and the elimination of social services,
neoliberalism Has been directly responsible for myriad afflictions
experienced in the world, particularly the Third World.
Since the early 1970s, there has been a broad
international agenda led by right-wing
American foundations to sway public opinion towards greater acceptance of
neoliberalism. Essentially, neoliberalism draws support from the philosophy of
Adam Smith. The particular context of Smith’s theories was the Industrial
Revolution, which saw the rise of large industrial interests. The banking
powers in particular were constrained by the Church’s condemnation of the
interest-based transactions. Therefore, Smith was arguing that the Church, or
any other authority, should have limited oversight into the actions of
industry, and that they should be allowed to determine for themselves what was
most conducive to profit, because
the free pursuit of self-interest would create enough surplus to benefit all. In other words, “greed
is good.” This spontaneous redistribution of wealth was attributable to what
Smith called “the invisible hand.” This is of course a naïve analysis that
presupposes that the leaders of industry will always act morally.
Neoliberalism has been the basis of the
exploitation of the Third World by ncorporations
through an international banking system headed by the World Bank and the IMF.
As revealed by John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hitman, the loans
extended by the World Bank and the IMF are coordinated in order that the
borrowing nations could “develop” their countries by hiring American
engineering firms, like Bechtel and Halliburton. Then, to ensure the payment of these debts in
light of the growing poverty they
inflict, neoliberal policies are imposed
to reduce government expenditures, to discourage state nationalization of
industries, and the industry is deregulated to further open these victim countries to the rapacious activities
of Western corporations.The term “ neoliberalism” was coined in 1938 by the
German scholar Alexander Rüstow at the Colloque Walter Lippmann. The colloquium defined the concept of neoliberalism as “the
priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition
and a strong and impartial state.” 1 The
chief propagandists of neoliberalism in
the twentieth century were
Friedrich Hayek (1899
– 1992) and Milton
Friedman (1912 – 2006). The first form of neoliberalism, classical neoliberalism, stems from classical liberalism and was chiefly created in the period
between the great wars in Austria
by economists, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They were concerned about the
erosion of liberty by both socialist and fascist governments in Europe at that
time and tried to restate the case for liberty which became the basis for neoliberalism.
Milton Friedman has been hailed as the most
influential economist of the past half century. To his critics, Friedman is
credited with bringing economic disaster to
Chile, Israel, the United States,
and other countries with his “monetarist” theories. It was at the
Rockefeller-funded University of
Chicago, that Friedman helped build an intellectual community that produced a
number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics.
In 1947,
Milton Friedman and
Friedrich Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society, to coordinate the
creation of an international network of think-tanks and foundations, to spread
their philosophy of corporate greed.
Mont Pelerin was a sister organization to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan European Union.2 Prominent members have
included Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of Germany,
President Luigi Einaudi of Italy,
Chairman Arthur F. Burns of the US
Federal Reserve Board, US Secretary of State George Shultz, Prime
Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe of Sri Lanka, Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe
of the U.K., Italian Minister of Defence Antonio Martino, Chilean Finance
Minister Carlos Cáceres, New Zealand Finance Minister Ruth Richardson and
President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic. Eight Mont Pelerin members, including Hayek and
Friedman, have won Nobel prizes in economics.
Hayek appropriated fascism’s vehement rejection of communism
into the realm of economic philosophy. After
World War II, because of the excesses of
fascism, the right was largely discredited, and communism was gaining widespread
popularity in Western Europe. Many considered the nationalization of industries
as a positive instrument of progressive economic policy. To counter these
tendencies, Hayek derived his strategy
from Carl Schmitt, to whom, according to
William Scheuerman, in “The unholy alliance of
Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A.
Hayek,” he openly acknowledged his debt. According to Hayek, “The conduct of Carl Schmitt under the Hitler regime does not alter the fact that,
of the modern German writings on the subject, his are still among the most
learned and perceptive.”3 Following Schmitt,
Hayek characterized state intervention
in the economy as tantamount to totalitarianism. 4 Hayek notes that the
“flawed” conception of a welfare state “was very clearly seen by the extraordinary
German student of politics, Carl Schmitt,
who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing form of
[interventionist] government better than most people.” 5
According to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock
Doctrine, Friedman’s harsh economic prescriptions were inspired by the MK-Ultra research performed on behalf of
the CIA by Dr. Ewen Cameron. She points out, however, that Cameron’s
research and his contribution to the MK-Ultra project was actually not about mind
control and brainwashing,
but “to design a scientifically based system for
extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture.” 6 As
she has shown, in The Shock Doctrine, Friedman employed a strategy she refers to as “disaster capitalism.” Klein states that, using the language
of Dr. Cameron, Friedman proposed taking
advantage of the trauma of the Pinochet
coup to implement what he called economic “shock treatment.” Friedman observed that “Only a crisis—actual
or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that
are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our
basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them
alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically
inevitable.” 7 Friedman estimated that “A
new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes;
if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively during that period, it
will not have another such opportunity.” 8
The
World Bank and IMF, both private
entities owned largely by the Rothschild and Rockefeller families, were created
in 1944, at a UN sponsored monetary conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
The World Bank and the IMF were both
creations of the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), whose chairman was David
Rockefeller. The World Bank has also had
powerful connections to the Chase
Manhattan Bank, which along with
Standard Oil, serves as the economic base for David Rockefeller. David became the president
of Chase in 1960, and under his leadership, Chase spread internationally and
became the largest of any bank in the world. The bank was also closely
associated with and has financed the oil industry, having longstanding
connections with its board of directors to the successor companies of Standard Oil, especially ExxonMobil, a major portion of which is owned
by the Rockefeller Foundation. Three presidents
of the World Bank, including John
J. McCloy, Eugene Black and George
Woods, all worked at Chase before taking up positions at the World Bank. A fourth president, James D.
Wolfensohn, also served as a director of the
Rockefeller Foundation. 9
The
CFR is
considered to be
America’s most influential foreign-policy think tank.
Several members of Skull and Bones,
many of whom have attained influential
positions in control of
American foreign policy, have served on the CFR, including Winston Lord, its president
from 1977 to 1985. As one historian observed, “At any one time The Order can
call on members in any area of American society to do what has to be done.” As
Alexandra Robbins explains:
Under the society’s direction, Bonesmen
developed and dropped the nuclear bomb
and choreographed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Skull and Bones members had ties to Watergate and the Kennedy assassination. They control the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission so that they can push
their own political agenda. 10
At least forty-seven CFR members were among the American delegates
to the founding of the United Nations.11
Among them were John J. McCloy, Alger Hiss
who was later found to have been a Communist spy, Nelson Rockefeller, and John Foster Dulles. Past president of
the World Bank, John J. McCloy, was former High Commissioner of
Germany and chairman of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as
chairman of the CFR where he was
succeeded by David Rockefeller, with whom he had worked closely as chairman of
the Chase Bank. 12 Prior to the war, McCloy had been legal counsel to IG Farben. During the war, as an assistant secretary in the War
Department, McCloy blocked the executions
of Nazi war criminals, forged a pact
with the Regime of pro- Nazi Admiral
Darlan, displaced Japanese-Americans in California to internment camps,
refused to recommend the bombing of Nazi
concentration camps to spare the inmates on grounds that “the cost would be out
of proportion to any possible
benefits,” and refused Jewish
refugees entry to the US. 13
After World War II, McCloy helped
shield Klaus Barbie from the French. In
1949, he returned to Germany as American High Commissioner. He commuted the death
sentences of a number of Nazi war
criminals, and gave early releases to others. One was Alfried Krupp, the ultra-wealthy German industrialist
who was represented by Otto Skorzeny
in Argentina, and Hjalmar Schacht, who subsequently went on the
payroll of Aristotle Onassis.14
The influence
of the CFR is unparalleled among think
tanks. One study revealed that between 1945 and 1972, roughly 45% of the top
foreign policy officials who served in the United States government were also members of the
Council. Roughly 42% of the top foreign policy positions in the Truman administration were filled by Council members, with 40% in the Eisenhower administration, 51% of
the Kennedy administration, and 57% of
the Johnson administration, many of whom were holdovers from the Kennedy administration. 15 In
the first several decades of the existence of
the CIA, its leaders were drawn from CFR
membership, such as Allen Dulles, John
A. McCone, Richard Helms, William Colby, and
George H. W. Bush. When Wisner lost
the wherewithal to continue “the dirty work” of the CIA in Europe, Africa, Latin America and
Asia, and eventually shot himself in 1958, he was replaced by Richard Bissel
who ran the covert action department until 1962, when Richard Helms became Deputy Director for
Operations. Helms was director of
the CIA from 1966 to 1973, when he was
succeeded by William Colby.
The
CFR is also closely connected with the leading foundations that have acted
as CIA funding fronts. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1971 had fourteen out
of nineteen of its directors also being members of the CFR; the Carnegie Corporation followed with
ten out of seventeen; and the Ford
Foundation with seven out of sixteen; and the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund with six out of eleven board members also
belonging to the CFR. The Council also
has extensive ties to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and other
major Tavistock affiliatedthink tanks, most especially the Brookings Institution,
as well as the RAND Corporation and the
Hudson Institute. As John Coleman explained, “Without a doubt, RAND is THE think tank most beholden to Tavistock Institute and certainly the RIIA’s most prestigious vehicle for control
of United States policies at every level.” 16
Examples of
RAND policies implemented include the ICBM program, analyses for US foreign
policy making, instigation of the space programs, US nuclear policies,
corporate analyses, numerous projects
for the military, and the CIA in relation
to the use of mind altering drugs as part of
MK-Ultra. The CFR’s influence
also extends to the media. In 1972, three out of ten directors and five out
of nine executives of the New York Timeswere Council members. In the same year,
one out of four editorial executives and four out of nine directors of the
Washington Postwere also Council members. Of both Time Magazine and Newsweek,
almost half of their directors in 1972 were also Council members. 17
Through his status at the top of this pyramid
of power, David Rockefeller maintains
access to leading industrialists and the highest offices in the world which, as a private
citizen, gives him uniqu
influence in the world affairs. In his 2002 autobiography Memoirs, he
confessed the goal he and those within his network have pursued:
For more than a century ideological extremists
at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized
incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for
the inordinate influence they claim we
wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we
are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United
States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring
with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic
structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I
am proud of it.
Rockefeller has also maintained life-long
connections to the CIA. Rockefeller was close to Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles, an in-law of the Rockefellers,
was also a founding member of the CFR, Chairman
of the Board of the Rockefeller
Foundation and Board Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
It was in the Rockefeller Center that
Allen Dulles had set up his World
War II operational center after Pearl Harbor liaising with MI6, which also housed their principal US
operation in the Center. David
Rockefeller associated with the former
CIA director Richard Helms as well as Archibald Roosevelt Jr.,
a Chase Bank employee and former CIA agent. Archibald was the cousin of CIA agent
Kermit Roosevelt Jr., who
orchestrated the Iran coup of 1953. Also
in 1953, Rockefeller befriended William Bundy, a key CIA analyst in the 1950s who became the
Agency liaison to the National Security
Council. In Cary Reich’s biography of David’s brother Nelson, Vice President
to Gerald Ford, a former CIA agent states that David was extensively briefed under the direction
of Allen Dulles on covert intelligence operations
by himself and other Agency division chiefs. 18
Displeased with the failure of the CFR to include Japan, David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in July 1973.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia University and a Rockefeller advisor
who was a specialist on international affairs, left his post to organize the
group. Other founding members included Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, both later heads of the Federal Reserve system. According to former
Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the
Trilateral Commission was “a skillful, coordinated effort to seize
control and consolidate the four centers of power: political, monetary, intellectual,
and ecclesiastical…[in] the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to
the political governments of the nation-states involved.” 19
Henry
Kissinger was also a member of the
Trilateral Commission. German-born and Jewish, Kissinger was also a Frankist. 20 David Rockefeller and
Kissinger first met in 1954
through their membership in the CFR, after which Kissinger was invited to sit on the board of
trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers
Fund. Rockefeller consulted with Kissinger
on numerous occasions, as in the case of Chase’s interests in Chile and the threat of the election of socialist-leaning
President Salvador Allende in 1970.
After Allende’s election, commercial
banks, including Chase Manhattan, Chemical,
First National City, Manufacturers Hanover, and
Morgan Guaranty, cancelled credits to
Chile. 21 Chase was one of a number of corporations doing business
in Chile, along with ITT and
Pespi-Cola, who were concerned about Allende’s
left-leaning policies. These concerns
were communicated to President Nixon,
who was personally beholden to Donald Kendall, the President of Pepsi Cola.
After discussions with Kendall, David
Rockefeller and with CIA director Richard
Helms, Kissinger went with Helms to the
Oval Office and gained the support of President Nixon.
A coup against Allende was
unofficially endorsed in 1970 by the Nixon administration and the CIA,
as substantiated in documents declassified during the Clinton administration.
The CIA had inserted covert operatives
in Chile in order to prevent a Socialist government from arising, and conducted
propaganda operations designed to push
Allende’s predecessor to support a military coup. Known as Project FUBELT, it aimed at worsening the economic
crisis that President Allende faced, in
order to encourage a rightwing coup.22 In a document dated 15 September
1970, Nixon ordered CIA director Richard
Helms to “Make the economy scream [in
Chile to] prevent Allende from
coming to power or to unseat him.”23 An extended period of political unrest
ensued, between Allende’s Popular Unity
government and the conservative-dominated Congress of Chile. Discontent culminated in the Allende’s downfall in a coup d’état organized
by the Chilean military, led by Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet. The
Pinochet coup was a watershed event of the Cold War and the history of Chile. Before
Pinochet, Chile had for decades been hailed as a beacon of political
stability in South America, a continent otherwise rife with military juntas.
