From: aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Re: Wit & Wisdom of Fascist LaRouche
Date: 27 Sep 1992 08:30:31 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu


dxc4@po.CWRU.Edu (David Condon) writes:


>In a previous article, aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker) says:

  [Material deleted in which Bob Ingria had challenged the hypothesis 
  of the Beatles as a social engineering project and raised the 
  question of various other musical groups and movements]


>>Well, I don't have the kind of specific knowledge about the popular
>>music industry that would be needed to try to seriously address any 
>>of this. I think it is undeniable that the industry in the late sixties
>>and early seventies had a degree of openness to counter-culture music
>>which was virtually equivalent to endorsement. Which leading companies
>>may have had oligarchical and/or intelligence connections via their
>>financing or management and which were merely jumping on the bandwagon
>>for commercial reasons is difficult to say, without a lot of research.
>>
>>However, I will deliver one bit of history I am aware of as regards the
>>"San Francisco sound". Once upon a time there was a young female
>>anthropologist who wrote what was later to become a classic "Coming of
>>Age in Samoa". This study compaared adolescence in Samoan society to 
>>that in the U.S. As part of her conclusion, she suggested that American
>>teen-agers focussed their emotional energy on a specific romantic interest,
>>while Somoan youth tended to be much more diffuse and generalized in their
>>affections. There is a clear implication in her tone that she found the
>>Samoan system preferable. Margaret Mead eventually married the psychologist 
>>Gregory Bateson, who is at least reputed to be the intellectual mentor of 
>>Stewart Brand, who is perhaps best known as the founder of the Whole Earth 
>>Catalog. 
>>
>>What is more interesting, is what Mr. Brand was doing some years earlier. 
>>As recorded in Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", he returned 
>>from his bus trip with Ken Kessey's Merry Pranksters to become the 
>>organizer of the San Francisco Trips Festival. This project involved 
>>finding a closed movie theater in what was then called a "Negro ghetto"
>>section of San Francisco, and renting it for a giant party. LSD was
>>put in the punch, and some of the participants were even aware of it.
>>Exotic light effects were set up to addd to the atmosphere, and a local 
>>band was hired to play.
>>
>><Following done in a Paul Harvey voice>
>>
>>Stewart Brand's "Trips Festival" was indeed destined to become part of
>>the history of the sixties. For you see, the movie theater renovated
>>for this party was named the Fillmore, located in the ghetto neighborhood
>>called Haight-Ashbury. And the unknown rock band had taken or would soon 
>>take a name derived from the metaphysics of the psychedelic experience, 
>>The Grateful Dead. 
>>
>>And Now You Know ... THE REST OF THE STORY.
>>
>><Paul Harvey voice off>
>>
>>We can only speculate as to the degree of intellectual influence of
>>Margaret Mead on her husband's protege. What is undeniable, is that the
>>culture which Stewart Brand was so singularly involved in helping create
>>espoused the very value shift advocated by Mead in her book. (If any
>>participants here are reading this on the Well, and have contact with
>>Stewart Brand, his comments would be welcome and enlightening).

>It's posts like this that make alt.conspiracy such an endless delight to
>read. I mean, it's paranoid tripe, but it's GOOD paranoid tripe, and the
>thing is, the whole thing is sort of shifted 89.9999 degrees from reality.
>EVERTHING fits. So were Bateson, Mead and Brand all in the pay of the 
>Rothschilds? I suppose the Media Lab must be in this up to their clavichords, 
>right? Stewart Brand wrote that book about them that I thought was so cool.
>Now I know. And, I mean, EVERYTHING that had an influence on sixties culture --
>John Cage (requiescat in pace)! STAR TREK, for crying out loud. Now I 
>understand ... _Stranger in a strange land_ could give Larouche enough
>material to fill an encyclopedia.

Well, I'd be interested to know why you consider this "paranoid". Are you
one of these people who uses the term as a fancy way of saying "This
person doesn't think like I do, so I'll be insulting?" As far as I know,
the facts I presented are not in dispute. One can of course, dispute the
INTERPRETATION, but this is also a little problematic, since I didn't 
GIVE an interpretation, preferring to let the facts speak for themselves.
You are of course free to INFER an interpretation, and challenge that,
which you appear to have done. It would have been useful if you had been
a little more specific as to exactly what you thought I was implying.
Now if you actually think I thought the House of Rothschild had these
guys on their payroll, I could just say you were full of crap. However,
I don't really think you're that dense, so I have to take that as 
sarcasm. 

To the extent that the players in this affair were under some kind
of co-ordinated oligarchical influence it is much more likely to have
been intellectual than financial. The concept of a conspiracies which
work themselves out through an "invisible college" of co-thinkers is
well established, and any number of people over the years have come
forward to proclaim themselves part of such conspiracies and recruit
adherents. For notable examples see "The Aquarian Conspiracy" by
Marylin Ferguson or "The Open Conspiracy" by H.G. Wells. On a more
mundane level, you have a quote from Tom Grundner in your sig, so 
you are presumably acquainted with the NPTN. This is an "open
conspiracy" to create FreeNets and promote certain instutional 
relationships (e.g. "cybercasting") within the networking community.

Now you seem to imply that by simple concatenation of association
or observance of co-ordinated effect one can establish almost 
anything as a conspiracy, with the implication that this is ridiculous.
Well, this is true beyond question. One need only look at the writing
of Robert Anton Wilson who does this for entertainment and is quite 
clever at it. (I stopped reading Wilson because I feel that 
conspiracy-theory-as-entertaiment detracts from seriously trying 
to figure out what is actually going on. Somewhat like TV "news").

However, I don't think this applies in this case. First of all, in a 
conspiracy which spreads by intellectual influence it is possible and 
even common for prople to act on behalf of the conspiracy and its ideals 
without being aware of that fact. All kinds of people who never read "The 
Aquarian Conspiracy" or even heard the term are out in the world doing 
the kind of things Ferguson advocates simply because they have resonated 
to concepts and value shifts which have been transmitted through the 
media and other instutions.

Secondly, what I established ihere was not just simple association. 
It was association combined with action on the part of one party 
which had as its result a substantial contribution to an outcome 
desired by the other party. Now this isn't PROOF of a conscious 
desire on Brand's part to bring about the changes desired by Mead. 
The phrase "We can only speculate..." means exactly that.
(The semantically challanged may consult a dictionary under "S"
to retreive the meaning of the word "speculate"). 

There is an epistemological issue lurking here that plagues much 
of the specualtion and research in the conspiracy field. If your 
idea of knowledge is that scientific certainty is required before a
hypothesis can be useful, then there will be little useful knowledge
to be gained with regard to conspiracies. Except for the "open
conspiracies", the very fact of a particular conspiracy is covert. 
Even in open conspiracies, the partticipants don't necessarily
advertise their adherence to the particular agenda they may be 
following. So most of what we have in this whole arena is specualtion
based on circumstantial evidence. There are few smoking guns. What
we need is not a quest for "absolute proof" which we will rarely if
ever acheive. What we need is a better understanding of how to work
with circumstantial evidence and how an accumulation of such
evidence can lend a hypothesis plausibility. And even a plausible
hypothesis is not absolute fact. One may consider it sufficiently
established to take action based on it (I propose this standard
as a reasonable operational definition of "knowledge") but still
realize in the back of one's mind that it may be modified, refuted,
or shifted in context as new knowledge and insight occur. 

If I leave the discussion here, I will be guilty of sleight of 
hand in shifting the terms of the debate from "conspiracy" with
covert and sinister implications to "open conspiracy" which is
only semi-covert and may or may not be sinister. To make any of 
this relevant to LaRouche's quote, (Remamber LaRouche's quote? 
This is a thread about LaRouche's quote.) it is necessary to 
connect the intellectual milieu of Mead, Bateson, Brand, et. al.
with the villains of the British oligarchy. (If you have read 
this far and are still waiting for the smoking gun, give it up. 
There will be no smoking gun presented in this post). What 
follows in incomplete and includes specualtion, but also, hopefully,
pointers for further research. 

Item - Margaret Mead was at least reputed to have been a "Dame"
of the Knights of Malta, a secret society, little known outside
the history books, of which the Queen of England is said to be 
the titular head. (There are actually two branches of the order
around today, one Catholic and the other British. Comments here
refer to the British branch.) This organization is one of the 
several secret societies of the rich and obscure about whose
inner workings we can only speculate. LaRouche has published
material on them, but it is not in machine readable form, so
I am unable to post it. Their history can be found in mainstream
sources. They appear to have been an organization somewhat 
similar to the Knights Templar, but not as well known. There is 
some material on them in "The Messianic Legacy" by Baigent, 
Leigh and Lincoln, best known fort their book Holy Blood, 
Holy Grail. (Note- this is not an endorsement. I think these
guys are weird, and may well be a front for the very conspiracy
they claim to expose). Mead's membership in this group provides
at least a tenuous link to the British oligarchy.

Item- The Fabian society. Books have been written about
this British liberal policy association and their avowed
policy of "permeation" (the practice of Fabians working
within other organizations for Fabian goals without 
identifying their agenda). You are encouraged to read them.
A good one if you can find it is "Fabian Freeways", written
in the fifties or sixties by a conservative of some sort. I
don't recall the authors ideological agenda and I'm not
endorsing it. What is valuable in this book is its documentation
of extensive links between the Fabian Society in Britain and
leading organizations of American liberalism.

Many household names of the late 19th and early 20th century
were members of this group, including notably H.G. Wells,
George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley. There
may have been some overlap with membership in the Golden Dawn, 
but I don't know any details. The founders of the group were
Beatrice and Sidney Webb, professional bureaucratic with the 
British Colonial Office (the agency in charge of administering
the British Empire). For those of us who lived through the early
days of the Vietnam war protest, some flavor of just how slimy 
these people actually were can be gained by noting that they 
were pro-Empire to the point of supporting the Boer War - The 
British Empire's Vietnam. (Anybody remember Hubert Humphrey
and the Americans for Democratic Action?) The Fabian line appears 
to have been that the Empire should be preserved as a mechanism
for spreading socialism throughout the world (Does anybody 
remember the National Endowment for Democarcy?). 

Well, don't get me started on these guys. As I said there are
ALREADY books on them, and I'm not ready to write another one 
tonight. 

The relevance of this is not to Mead, Brand et. al. directly
but to the psychedelic culture generally. LaRouche claims to
have detected a factional split in oligarchical circles relating
to the role of high technology in their desired social order. 
A viewpoint he identifies as the "Wells" faction supports the
necessity for high technology and scientific advance, but tightly
controlled and restricted to a loyalist intelligentsia (in contrast
to LaRouche's "republican humanist" policy of making the ENTIRE
CULTURE scientifically and technically literate). The other
viewpoint, which he calls the "Russell Faction" holds that high
technology is too inherently uncontrollable to permit in society.
This faction looks to a society in which the masses are controlled
by drugs, entertainment, and a revival of pagan religious ritual.
It is this faction to which LaRouche would attribute the design
and promotion of the value-complex usually referred to as "the 
sixties". 

If such a faction actually exists, then Mead is almost certainly
a member, at least in spirit and probably consciously. To me
the accumulation of circumstantial evidence (not all presented 
here - that's why we have libraries) makes this conclusion 
obvious. Your mileage may vary.

>I wonder, what kind of music does Lyndon Larouche like to listen to? I
>mean, music is an important part of my life. That's one thing I always 
>wonder about people -- what kind of music they like. Hey, Larouche must
>not be able to stomach Mozart, he being a Freemason and all, right?

He is fond of Motzart and Bach, but reserves his highest praise for
beethoven, who he asserts actually celebrates the creative processes
of the hunman mind as the subject of his music. Perhaps his favorite
piece is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, combining as it does the work
of this great composer with the "Ode to Joy" of LaRouche's favorite
poet, Freidrich Schiller. (Larouche's organization has published at 
least three volumes of Schiller's collected works). In case some nasty
minded individual is wondering, no LaRouche does NOT like Wagner. He
considers his work to exemplify the "blood and soil" cult spirituality
underlying Naziism.

>But it's not surprising that Larouche would have some bad memories of
>the sixties, having spent a good part of the decade recruiting zomboid
>thugs to crash Communist Party meetings with tire chains. Gang-banging
>the already pathetically marginalised remnant of the Old Left was a
>truly vital part of his agenda. It was called "Operation Mop Up."

Well, I wasn't there and obviously the two sides tell different stories.
The version I heard is that "Operation Mop-Up" was a campaign of verbal
heckling at public meetings to expose the ideological bankruptcy of 
the CPUSA. The Socialist Workers Party intervened as a self-appointed
"defense force of the left" and initiated the violence. LaRouche's cadre
defended themselves and gave a good account. (Your mileage may vary).

-- 
>"In universities, it is forbidden     |  "Personally, my politics are so far
>to teach nonsense. But the _history_  |  to the right, I consider Paul Revere
>of nonsense -- that's scholarship!"   |  to be a pinko."
>               -- Saul Lieberman      |                 -- Tom Grundner


That's ridiculous. The teaching of nonsense is not only not forbidden,
it is required.

-Steve

Postscript and Meta Comments

Some folks will wonder why I put so much time and thought in a response 
to a post that was basically wisecracks. I have to admit, I wondered that
a couple of times myself. I finally figured out that this is a fuundamental
difference between the intellectual environment in a medium like usenet
and either face-to-face conversation or even online real time chat. In
offline conversation, the use of putdowns to squelch serious discussion
works because of the real time intellectual/emotional dynamics of the
group consciousness. If one caan use wit to create a group emotional
reaction antithetical to further consideration of the subject, the
severely limited bandwidth of the real-time intellectual environment
will virtuallty assure that the subject will get semi-permanently 
dropped. in a non-synchronous post and read environment, however,
the bandwidth, although limited in fact, is so much greater than
that of the real-time environment as to appear effectively infinite.
I mean this in the sense that whole new modes of interaction become
possible which will proliferate until they reach whatever limits
are inherent in the new environment. 

In particular, David and I are carrying on our little exchange
in front of an audience of at least dozens, more probably hundreds,
and possibly thousands of silent participants throught the Net, 
any of which may decide at any time to climb up on stage and 
make themselves part of the show. So David may choose to completely
or largely ignore what I've said here, and some substantial 
numbers of our silent audience may feel the same. However, none 
of that needs to squelch the conversation or detract from its 
value as would be the case with face-to-face. As long as there are
those in the audience who think I'm making sense, it will 
continue to be worthwhile to give thoughtful answers to smart
ass comments.

Final P.S. For those interested in further material on LaRouche's
views on rock music and the counter culture, I am reposting
separately the artcle "The Satanic Roots of Rock". I'll post
it under it's own subject heading so as to help avoid subject drift.