Archive for the 'E. Howard Hunt' Category

Decadent Worker #83 - 21Oct87

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on October 21, 2007
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Decadent Worker 83UNDATED ENTRIES FROM MY NOTES MADE A FEW YEARS AGO IN SAN FRANCISCO.

Today everyone is saying that the conspiracies involving Marina Oswald and E. Howard Hunt have got a monopoly on racism. Of course considering what they say about me, anything could be true. Obviously there are racists in the woodwork somewhere or other. #####

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Speaking for myself — no. Occasionally I experience a waking nightmare about the subject, though. For what it’s worth, I don’t feel absolutely out of control of my own mind. It is more like there is an additional component to my mentality that occasionally becomes quite intrusive and obnoxious, with which I have to struggle for control of my own life — yet which I am usually capable of resisting. That, of course, could be illusion — the manipulation could be absolutely pervasive and could in fact dot every i of all my arguments against mind control. They could be using me to “eat.”

In DW #21 I described what, as far as I know, was my first mind control experience — an audio hallucination which occurred on the threshold of sleep when I was stationed in 1959 with Lee Oswald at LTA, El Toro Marine Base, Santa Ana and Tustin, California.

Probably my second such experience happened at Subic Bay, in the Philippines, when I was reading a biography of Henry David Thoreau. Only a series of intense nocturnal dreams about the subject matter of the book, it didn’t seem extraordinary at the time.

This happened just after I had become a Marxist, after looking first hand at the starving people of Intramuros in Manila. Up till then I was a Liberal and a Humanist. My Marxism was unusual in that it rejected Lenin, but held a place for Thoreau. For if he had lived at Walden Pond for 29 cents a day, then it could not be much of a burden for a government to furnish everyone with subsistence necessities. Anything beyond that, I figured, each individual could earn. Nevertheless, I wanted the people responsible for Third World shanty towns like Intramuros shot and the institutions that made such misery possible, even thinkable, suppressed and destroyed.

At about the same time, near the turn of the year, at Subic Bay, another Marine, named Mims, who was also an atheist, suggested I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Months later, in 1960, I found a copy in a Yokohama book stall and began reading it at the same time I was entering processing to go back to the States and be discharged. Again, I was bombarded with many vivid dreams in which, this time, Reardon and Francisco and John Galt gave lengthy philosophical speeches to reinforce what I was reading in the book. This was evidently the third time I was subjected to mind control. I became a laissez-faire capitalist, convinced absolutely that Ayn Rand was the greatest mind of our age. I gather from Undercover that E. Howard Hunt was stationed, with the CIA, at Atsugi Naval Air Station. So was my Marine outfit. I am told these days, for whatever it may be worth, that the CIA knew of the experiments on me but was not behind them. Instead, they are supposed to have been the work of a laissez-faire capitalist who belonged to the Independent Order of Foresters, of all things, and/or Jose Delgado and Nelson Rockefeller.

When laissez-faire capitalists complain, these days, because I no longer agree with them, I find that just astounding! –Kerry Wendell Thornley

Decadent Worker #78 - 2Oct87

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on October 2, 2007
in Castro, E. Howard Hunt, Nazi, Thule Society, Vietnam and Vril Society
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Decadent Worker 78Q. You say you want those with prior knowledge of the Indochina war tried for war crimes. You also express opposition to organized retribution. Which is it?

A. Both. I think it wise, always, to forgive past offenses. Ongoing oppression requires more flexibility. The war criminals are evidently still at it.

Revenge is nothing but an effective outlet for anger. As a general all-purpose deterrent it doesn’t work. When they publicly hanged pick-pockets in England, pick-pockets worked the crowd. When and where capital punishment prevails, the murder rate tends to be slightly higher. The more prisons they build, the more crime there is — because prisons undoubtedly breed criminal professionalism.

Paul Goodman asks, in Growing Up Absurd, why — when such facts have been brought to light in study after study — there is never significant prison abolition or reform. Maybe because vengeance is so emotionally satisfying that most people would rather ignore the logic of ripping down prisons in order to fight crime.

Q. And what about the war criminals who escalated the Viet Nam war?

A. They, and all other genocidal depopulationists in the Caucasian race, should be tried, before a tribunal — first, so as to determine exactly who they are and aren’t. Second, in order to break up their conspiracy.

When the magnitude of the crimes they have committed and intend to commit in the near future is revealed, the majority of the world’s population will think hanging is much too good for them. I don’t think there is going to be time to convince them otherwise just because retribution happens in my opinion to be barbaric and useless. And to the extent that I, for one, stive to enlighten the world as to the futility of organized, legally sanctified revenge, it is for the sake of society’s victims, not its manipulators.

Chairman Mao could only have been referring to imperialist war criminals and their accomplices when he predicted that someday they would hang before the eyes of the whole world. I believe I am in a unique position to help make that prophecy come true. And if need be I am willing to hang with them, because I also had prior knowledge of the war, although I failed to recognize it for what it was.

Q. Your attitude toward E. Howard Hunt also seems contradictory. You say you think he was obliquely giving you a chance to blow the theories that aborted the mission. Why, then, do you say he is a war criminal who should be tried, as well sa questioned on tape with his response subjected to Psychological Stress Evaluation, etc.?

A. I think he was assigned by someone to supply that information about the war conspiracy, and deliberately botched it — a practice known as “running” an assignment. He also got me to promise, in effect, not to support any war crimes trials in the future. It was that premeditated! And, yes, I am breaking that promise. According to UFO’s: the Nazi Secret Weapon, members of Nazi secret societies are pledged to preserve and protect the white race. Both the Secret Order of Thule and the Luminous Lodge (Vril Society) must have been quite involved. I find it hard to believe the man I call Brother-in-law (and suspect was Hunt) was among the uninitiated. Castro was white; the Vietnamese weren’t — that was enough for the Nazis. Class war is only half the picture. Race wars are alive and well.

–Kerry Wendell Thornley

Decadent Worker #70 - 4Sept87

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on September 4, 2007
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Hit Squad, Inc.

Decadent Worker 70In addition to rumors and theories, there is another factor that will help the reader see my conversations with Brother-in-law in perspective. Life among the artists and writers in the French Quarter, not chats with a strange hoodlum, comprised the central theme of my activities as I perceived them then.

My association with Clint Bolton was more or less typical in this respect.

One night when I was being a barroom poet in a cafe, reading some of my verses to friends, he rather drunkenly butted in. “Tear down the walls!” he roared, in response to a line about keeping my love behind the highest wall.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Isn’t your own business worth minding?”

“No.”

That answer caught me off guard.

“Trouble with you young people nowadays — you build too many walls. Rip ‘em down.”

As our discussion continued I realized he was a man who knew a great deal about literature. If I ever wrote about him, he was to tell me later, I should describe him as an aging middle weight.

Clint Bolton, an aging middle weight, had retired from a career of news reporting, of which a highlight had been interviewing Ernest Hemingway in Spain.

When what he called our “Tuesday afternoon poetry reading circle” broke up, he and I went together to a saloon on Rampart, where we talked about Pindar until morning.

“I could write circles around you,” he bragged. “I could tell you so much about writing — hell, I’ve already forgotten more than you’ve learned.” Then he paused, as was his way, for an intolerably long and drunken interval as I patiently awaited his next word. Clint was an emotional alcoholic whose own eloquence often drove him to tears. “I never wrote a novel. Every newspaper hack keeps an unfinished book manuscript in his desk drawer. Don’t mess around with that Tuesday afternoon stuff, kid. Every little old lady in America writes poems. Write a book.”

As I walked him home at dawn, I told him about The Idle Warriors. This was in the spring of 1963, probably April, and I’d long since given up trying to find a publisher. “It needs work. Not enough unity and plot. Just a collection of anecdotes,” I told him. But the basic idea was fantastic. I was trying to explain why foreigners hate Americans — like The Ugly American, only about enlisted men in the service, about how some of them acted on liberty in the Far East in peacetime. Man, it was horrible. A bunch of crew-cut young punks who thought they were conquering heroes. They beat up on cab drivers, tore apart bars, made fun of the customs. I felt ashamed of my uniform by the time I’d been there a month. One guy I knew got so disgusted with it that when he got out he defected to Russia. So my main character in the novel does the same thing.”

By this time we were standing in front of Clint’s shotgun apartment, a couple of blocks up the street from the Bourbon House. “Say the truth, kid. That’s all there is to great writing, you know. Just saying the truth without wasting words. And another thing,” he paused again and let me stand there as he fished for words in bleary-eyed silence. “I listen to you — as you tell me about this novel of yours — your tone of voice, your enthusiasm — and I think: Why in hell’s name is this kid sitting around in saloons reading poems to a bunch of Beatniks? Writing is lonely work. That’s something you have to accept if you are going to be an author. And that’s your book. I can tell by the ay you talk about it. Now listen to me, son — because I wish you were my son and that I was your father — listen carefully, because I’ve got only one thing to say to you: Go home and write, ya bum!”

I went home and slept. But when I awoke, I got out the old Idle Warriors manuscript and had a look at it. Maybe Clint was right. Ola had said practically the same thing in different words. I should write this book.

In retrospect, I cannot free myself of the suspicion, so nagging, that there was an intelligence community plot to get The Idle Warriors into print. If there was, it failed — not completely, though. A few chapters were published in a nonfiction book about Oswald I wrote after the assassination. When I testified for the Warren Commission, photocopies of two of my manuscript drafts were taken for the National Archives. Any such theory, of course, cannot omit the hypothesis that both Clint and Ola Holcomb were agents…

If any theory remotely like that one is true, then I must have been virtually surrounded by the intelligence community before the assassination — perhaps since 1959 when Oswald and I volunteered in the Marines for that project to help Fidel Castro rid his new government of Russian agents. That’s a pretty enormous conspiracy theory to have to swallow; it sounds paranoid beyond all reason.

Yet if Nixon and E. Howard Hunt were in charge of the preparations to invade Cuba, and they were, and if Hunt possessed the authority to create exile governments, and he did, then why is it not possible that I was the focal point of such a government? One thing Brother-in-law seemed especially concerned about was the human slavery that exists within even the U.S. intelligence community. With authorization to create a government unrestricted by the usual overseeing clauses he could have designed an organization with multiple purposes. And if CIA bureaucrats really were signing things without reading them, such a document would have been possible.

That the CIA sector involved with anti-Castro activities went out of control, “like a rogue elephant,” just prior to the President’s murder is known.

What if they got authorization to protect certain individuals, to legally murder anyone who posed a threat to their lives? Such persons could under those circumstances have been selected for no other reason than their capacity to draw fire. I was writing a novel based on a man I had known who was probably an undercover agent (for the CIA) in the Soviet Union, a man who then returned to the U.S. with remarkable ease married to the niece of an officer in Russian intelligence. According to a theory presented… in The Yankee and Cowboy War, Oswald may next have been assigned by the CIA to spy on FBI people involved with Guy Banister in anti-Castro preparations. Besides my curiosity about Oswald, I possessed other qualities. I was a militant atheist in a predominately Catholic town, and I appear to have been involved in one way or another with an intelligence community heavily infiltrated with Jesuits. I was an extreme rightwing laissez-faire capitalist. I wanted John Kennedy assassinated and made no secret of it. On top of everything else, I had a chip on my shoulder. I was an emotionally alienated, judgmental misfit. What better way for the likes of Richard Nixon and E. Howard Hunt and Tracy Barnes to get rid of their enemies?

–Kerry Wendell Thornley
The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984

Decadent Worker #67 - 26Aug87

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on August 26, 2007
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Decadent Worker 67“Gordon Novel’s wife testified to Jim Garrison that Novel was the clean-shaven person impersonating Oswald and fabricating evidence against him in advance of the assassination. William Seymore also was impersonating Oswald at the car dealership, rifle ranges, barber shop as well as meeting with Mrs. Sylvia Odio in Dallas on the evening of September 25, 1963. (CH XI, 367 et seq.)” — Jay Pound, “Who Told the Truth About JFK?” - Critique, p. 87, Spring/Summer 1986, #21/22 (Box 11451, Santa Rosa, CA 95406. A sample copy of Critique costs $6.)

Q. If Hunt was in Dallas 22 November 1963 with orders from the Bilderbergs and the CIA to kill John Connelly wasn’t that doing it the hard way, in terms of security, seeing that the President was there, too?

A. Hunt may have just had a contract on Connelly, with no specifications about when or where to shoot him, and may have picked the time and place where JFK was to be hit so as to embarrass his bosses, in addition to double-crossing them. People under him may have been told that the President was getting lax about security and needed to be frightened into being more careful, thus justifying hitting Connelly then and there to them — at least that much had been hinted to me.

“I think that subsequently, by now, the CIA may not have known where Hunt was at the time, and they may not even have realized what he was up to until years after and years later when his name started to be commonly mentioned in connection with the assassination. I think by now the CIA probably knows where Hunt was and what he was doing or have some very strong feelings about that, and what they’re not too happy about it. But whatever it was, and is, that Hunt was involved in, it seems to be, or would appear, that he was around Dallas about the time of the assassination, involved in some clandestine activity. It may have been illegal clandestine activity, even something the CIA was unaware of. The CIA acts very strangely about this. The CIA will not give Hunt any help… Helms gave a deposition which said nothing. No way would he go out on a limb for Hunt. In my own mind, I have a feeling that the CIA knows where Hunt was and what he was doing, and while they’re not going to prosecute him for a lot of reasons, they’re involved in the cover-up themselves and don’t want to bring any embarrassment upon the agency… Hunt, for his own part, might not be strong enough to bring them forward to defend him before any committee or in a court of law, it’s at least strong enough for them not to take any overt action against him… It’s a very, very strange thing.” — Victor Marchetti, “Ex-CiA Official speaks Out” by Greg Kaza, Full Disclosure (c) 1986 Capitol Information Association, Box 8275, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48107. $15/yr.

Decadent Worker #64 - 14Aug87

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on August 14, 2007
in E. Howard Hunt, Earthquake, Rockefeller and Surveillance
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Decadent Worker 64Among the pranks that make my life more confusing than most, I’m told, is a Rockefeller and/or E. Howard Hunt project to convince people I’m a space alien instead of a war crimes witness. This collective delusion is seeded by actual UFO close encounters. Most individuals will gladly believe in magick, religious miracles or cosmic visitors before they will accept the possibility that technology is just a little more advanced than is generally known.

Actuall, I feel like an alien — alone with a species neither too dumb to create horrible weapons nor smart enough not to use them, an awkward link in evolutionary adolescence. That along lends credibility to the Earthquake Conspiracy Theory.

Otherwise, who would dream that humanity, upon discovering the causes, would not halt natural disasters? Instead, the U.S. and an organization identified via the grapevine as the Illuminati, is causing earthquakes:

Independent corroboration is found in the 1969 section of The Gemstone Files by Bruce Roberts: “Pentagon and Department of Interior researches study methods of inducing earthquakes by injecting fluids into deep wells. Also nuclear devices were tested for the same thing.”

Earthquakes rattled China in 1976 as soon as I began speculating about Jesuit infiltration of Mao’s Communist Party. A jolt struck San Francisco just as I delivered the punch line of a joke with possibilities for political interpretation. Naples shook soon after I made friends with a Neapolitan family with a Mafia reputation. Chile was shaken when I got in a fist fight with a man who may have been a Chilean agent. Mexico City rumbled the whole time I hitched along the Rio Grande.

Evidently, whenever foreign agents within U.S. boundaries earn the displeasure of the Pentagon, retaliation strikes their homeland. That I seem so often involved is probably because my case — which the authorities find too explosive to handle — serves instead as something of a domestic intelligence community communications reference point.

So when the U.S. becomes annoyed at Slobovian agents elsewhere in this nation, they manipulate a few of them over my way as they are meanwhile pumping fluids or whatever into the fault lines under Slobovia. That way everyone in the intelligence community understands who pissed off Uncle Same and, roughly, how — without the Pentagon having to officially admit it is wagin undeclared warfare.

I used to get mad at people who wouldn’t answer my questions about conspiracies of which they obviously knew something. Blackmail, extortion, fanaticism and ill will came to mind as motives for their clam-like silences. Gradually I have realized that in many cases there was much they knew I just would not have believed.

So add my Earthquake Conspiracy Theory to your list, along with my confessions of JFK assassination participation and my protestations that I am not expressing myself in cant, my insistence UFO’s are of terrestrial origin, that my person is bugged and surveilled by microscopic video cameras, that I hold two-way conversations with radios, etc. Someday you’ll say I told you so. — Kerry Wendell Thornley

Decadent Worker #55 - 15Jul87

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Decadent Worker 55“Lee Harvey Oswald, CIA, with carefully planted links to both the ultra-right and to the Communists, was designated as the patsy. He was supposed to shoot at Gov. Connelly… Each of the four shooters — Oswald, Brading, Prattiano, and Roselli — had a timer and a back-up man… Hunt and McCord were there to help.” — The Gemstone File by Bruce Roberts

Note: Oswald could not have been one of the shooters, for photographic and eyewitness evidence proves he was on the front steps of the Depository when the President passed. Roselli may have been the source of this data, may have thought Oswald look-alike William Seymour was Oswald. Anyway, it is significant that John Connelly, not JFK, was supposed to be the target.

[Caption] THE MYSTERY TRAMP, Dallas, 22Nov63: He ain’t selling any alibis. Captured by police, the three tramps were not identified or booked.

[Caption] WATERGATE BURGLAR E. Howard Hunt looks like the man I call Brother-in-law, probably was known to others as Maurice B. Gatlin Sr.

“It is difficult to understand the gravamen of Mr. Hunt’s complaint given the state of the ruling by the Court and the witnesses available to both sides, Liberty Lobby, Inc., persented no evidence as to Mr. Hunt’s whereabouts on November 22, 1963. No such evidence was presented by the defendant in the case since Liberty Lobby did not know, and does not know, where Mr. Hunt was on November 22, 1963 in view of the fact that Mr. Hunt has given so many different stories as to his whereabouts that day. On the other hand, Mr. Hunt, who would have been precluded from offering evidence as to his whereabouts on November 22, 1963 had there been a stipulation which he honored, presented testimony from himself and others which, if believed, would have convinced the jury that Mr. Hunt was not in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963… Thus Mr. Hunt enjoyed the best of both worlds. He was prepared to and did offer testimony as to his whereabouts on November 22, 1963. The defendant on the other hand, offered no such testimony. That the jury did not believe Mr. Hunt and did not credit his alibi witnesses has apparently created a problem for Mr. Hunt from which he seeks redress inappropriately.” — Mark Lane, In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, No. 85-6078, Appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida

“The interesting thing was the jury said we were clearly not guilty of libel and actual malice, but they were now suspicious of Hunt and everything he invoked because we brought out a lot of stuff on Hunt… One of the key points in the mind of the jury as far as we’ve been able to tell at Spotlight is that Hunt to this day still cannot come up with an alibi for where he was the day of the assassination.” — Victor Marchetti, “Ex-CIA Official Speaks Out” by Greg Kaza (Full Disclosure, Box 8275, Ann Arbor, MI 48107. $15/yr.)

Decadent Worker #50 - 26Jun87

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on June 26, 2007
in CIA, Castro, E. Howard Hunt, JFK, John Connelly, Mafia and The Decadent Worker
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Decadent Worker 50SUPERTRAMP WITH “CRIME OF THE CENTURY”: DALLAS, 22 NOVEMBER 1963

“Based on everything I have seen, Hunt doesn’t have a leg to stand on because the deeper he gets into this the more he runs the risk of exposing himself. We had just all kinds of material on Hunt. We had a deposition from Joe Trento saying, yes, he saw the internal CIA memo. We produced one witness indeposition, Marita Lorenz, who was Castro’s lover at one point, and she said that Hunt was taking her people and running guns into Dallas. Lorenz said that a couple of days before the assassination Hunt met them in Dallas and made a payoff. What they were all doing, whether it was connected to the assassination, we don’t know.

“I think if Hunt keeps pursuing this, all he’s doing is setting the stage for more and more people to come forward and say bad things about him, and raise more evidence that he was in Dallas that day and that he must have been involved in something. If it wasn’t the assassination it must have been some kind of diversionary activity or maybe it was something unrelated to the assassination and the wires got crossed and it was a coincidence at the time.” — Victor Marchetti, “Ex-CIA Official Speaks Out,” Full Disclosure (My emphasis.)

In 1966 I worked at Glen Towers near Beverly Hills where Mafia Don, John Roselli, lived. One night in a discussion of the government he said, “Who’s really stupid is the CIA. They’re so stupid they killed their own President — trying to get some bookie!”

“Oswald was now in the most dangerous of two worlds. He was acting out pantomimes under the command of a violently pro-Castro cabal dominated by autonomous intelligence operatives and Mob elements…” — William Turner

John Connelly as into race horses — was he the “bookie”?

Decadent Worker #35 - 7May87

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on May 22, 2007
in Allen Dulles, CIA, E. Howard Hunt, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms and The Decadent Worker
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Decadent Worker 35“At the end of 1961,” writes E. Howard Hunt in Undercover, “Dulles was forced to ‘retire,’ and Richard Bissell followed. He was succeeded, not by Tracy Barnes, but by Richard Helms, untainted by the Bay of Pigs.

“After a considerable bureaucratic struggle Barnes established the Domestic Operations Division and appointed me its chief of covert action. The new division accepted both personnel and projects unwanted elsewhere within CIA, and those covert-action projects that came to me were almost entirely concerned with publishing and publications. We subsidized “significant’ books, for example, The New Class, by Milovan Djilas, one of a number of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., titles so supported; ran a couple of news services — one based in Washington’s National Press Building — even subsidizing the printing and distribution of a well-known series of travel books. The work was not particularly demanding, and at the end of the day, I still had sufficient energy to write fiction at home.”

As a former buddy of Lee Harvey Oswald, writing a noval based on a man who may have gone to Russia at CIA instigation, I would have been within the field of Hunt’s official attention at that time. I find it hard to believe that he would not at least have known about me, if he was not, as I’m inclined to suspect, traveling to New Orleans on an occasional weekend to give me his personal attention, using the name of a man he wanted to implicate in the JFK assassination plot: one Gary Kirstein… (p. 154)

Witness Richard Nixon’s sweating in the Watergate tapes about E. Howard Hunt’s power to make public further crimes, linked somehow in Nixon’s mind with ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing,’ in which Nixon obviously felt himself to be implicated. That’s dealt with in some of the science-fiction Slim is talking about and it is also going to happen in the real world. Someday there will be individuals with microphones planted in their heads so that many people can hear what is going on in their lives. And they will be centers of invisible governments, that everyone equipt to listen will belong to — like big houses with one person at the center of every one of them. What do you think of that idea?”

I thought it both bizarre and impossible, but I did not want to say as much to them. “Yeah, that sounds like a pretty clever way to resist the government.” (p. 157)

“Kerry, what do you think of various organizations in the intelligence community joining forces for recruiting purposes, by implanting listening devices on individuals and observing their behavior until who they should work for is decided on the basis of what kind of people they are?”

Again, I expressed agreement with what seemed both irrelevant and unlikely… (p. 158) — Kerry Wendell Thornley, The Dreadlock Recollections, (c) 1984

LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Totalitarianism: Where every aspect of the individual’s life except community business is the business of the community.

Decadent Worker #29 - 16April87

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on May 20, 2007
in Allen Dulles, CIA, Castro, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Bissell, The Decadent Worker and philosopher-king
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Decadent Worker 29LANGUAGE IS THEFT Terrorism: An explicative used by the tiger when scolding the house cat for killing mice. — Ho Chi Zen

“Kerry,” Brother-in-law once said, “one good way to construct the government of the philosopher-king would be to arrange it so that whoever was king didn’t know it, and in such a way that he would be used for decision-making purposes while standing in line at the store and places like that.”

So incomprehensible a notion seemed academic to me, but I saw no reason to say as much. A stupid idea, anyhow, this philosopher-king jazz, because even if a dictator managed to rule benevolently, what was to guarantee an equally kind and wise successor. That objection I expressed. Slim and Gary both answering, “Yes,” and looking smug, as if they had thought about that one and solved it.

As for our unwitting philosopher-king, Slim contributed something now about that idea: “As one good way to do it. Not the only way.”

“Sure,” I said, eyeing them both with a mixture of skepticism and boredom, “that sounds like one good way to have a philosopher-king.”… (pp. 51-52)

Once Brother-in-law also asked me if I didn’t agree that the philosopher-king should also be someone who could keep “state secrets.”

I routinely concurred.

E. Howard Hunt writes in Undercover that he once received a cable signed jointly by Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes summoning him to headquarters. “Bissell had succeeded Frank Wisner as chief of the Clandestine Services, and after hospitalization brought on by overwork Wisner had been assigned to the relatively relaxed post of London chief of station. As a special aide to Allen Dulles, Bissell had created the concept of the U-2 aircraft, then managed that successful program. I had held several perfunctionary meetings with Bissell during consultation periods in Washington and a lengthier one during a Latin American chiefs of station in Lima, Peru.

“As principal assistant to Bissell, Tracy Barnes told me, I was needed for a new project, much like the one on which I had worked for him in overthrowing Jacobo Arbens. My job, Tracy told me, would be essentially the same as my earlier one — chief of political action for a project recommended by the National Security Council and just approved by President Eisenhower: to assist Cuban exiles in overthrowing Castro. Representative Cuban leaders were grouping in Florida and New York, and my responsibility would be to organize them into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would, once Castro was disposed of, form a provisional government in Cuba….”

Such an assignment may have given Hunt the opportunity to experiment with unusual forms of government. (p. 52)

…when Gary spoke of his “philosopher-king” it evoked in my imagination visions of an old man in trunks on a blanket with his legs crossed, surrounded by an orderly circle of Devil’s advocates of restrained and gentle nature — the image of a Hindu holy picture, quite distant from everything ugly except unavoidably relevant tales of human perfidity. (53) The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984