Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Selected Excerpts from

THE GREAT HEROIN COUP - DRUGS, INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL FASCISM

By Henrik Kruger; Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980: Box 68 Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print; Orginally published in Danish

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FATEFUL DAYS: A CHRONOLOGY OF THE HEROIN COUP

http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2013/ ... er-13.html

Kruger's Timeline:

Henry Kissinger put pressure on Paraguay to extradite Auguste Ricord, the main Corsican supplier of narcotics to the U.S. market.[2] Paraguay's President Alfredo Stroessner at first chose to ignore that pressure.[3]

In 1968 the Mafia's premier heroin importer, Santo Trafficante, Jr., travelled to Southeast Asia to check out possibilities for a new supply network involving Chinese opium merchants.[4] When he made the trip, the Corsican Mafia was supplying Trafficante with all the no. 4 heroin he could sell.

Nixon and Pompidou met in January 1970 to restore close Franco‑American partnership. It was a crucial step in the destruction of the French narcotics apparatus that controlled 80 percent of the heroin trade.

At the start of July 1970, White House staffer Egil Krogh proposed Operation Heroin, a major action against the narcotics smugglers. His idea was approved.

U.S. Mafia capos held a summit July 4‑16 at the Hotel Sole in Palermo, Sicily. There they decided to pour money into Southeast Asia and transform it into the main source of heroin.[5]

On 23 July 1970 Richard Nixon approved the Huston Plan to establish an espionage group that would supersede existing intelligence and enforcement agencies. The super‑group was to be steered from the White House, thus giving the president effective control over all intelligence--including domestic spying on U.S. citizens. The plan fell through, mostly due to the opposition of J. Edgar Hoover. However, the White House continued to develop the plan under cover of its fast‑growing, media‑hyped narcotics campaign.

In August 1970 the Corsicans, apparently informed of the outcome of the Palermo meeting weeks earlier, called their Southeast Asian connections to an emergency meeting at Saigon's Continental Hotel. Thereafter two loads of morphine base would be sent to Marseille each month.[6] However, the shipments were continually sabotaged, and rarely arrived at their destination.

Another major development in 1970 was the implementation of Nixon's Vietnamization program, through which the controls in Vietnam were returned to the CIA. The program pumped a fortune into South Vietnam, much of it pocketed by officials. Investigations of endemic corruption among non‑coms and senior U.S. Army personnel led to a Hong Kong office run by a lieutenant of drug czar Trafficante.[7]

Pure no. 4 heroin appeared in Saigon in 1970, creating an epidemic of addiction among GIs. All previously available heroin had been of the coarse form that could only be smoked. The new heroin wave was hushed up. There were two other significant developments in 1970: (1) to end persistent rivalry among customs, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), Nixon named the BNDD the sole U.S. representative on drug matters; and (2) the Mafia dispatched the notorious Tomasso Buscetta to Brazil to prepare a takeover of narcotics smuggling upon Auguste Ricord's extradition to the U.S.

On 26 February 1971 France and the United States signed the definitive agreement for a combined assault on heroin. Within days Ricord was sentenced in absentia. On April 6 Roger Delouette was picked up in New York. As detailed in chapter ten, after that the Corsican network collapsed quickly.

George H. W. Bush was appointed to be Ambassador to the United Nations two days after the agreement was signed, his term beginning on March 1, 1971, replacing a career diplomat, Charles Woodruff Yost, a friend of the Dulles brothers' uncle, Secretary of State Robert Lansing.

Yost had been called out of retirement when Nixon was inaugurated in 1969 to serve in that post. During his career Yost served as Ambassador to Laos (1955-1956) and Morocco (1958–1961), succeeded at Rabat by Philip W. Bonsal. Bonsal arrived in Morocco by way of Colombia (1955), Bolivia (1956 to 1959, and Cuba (appointed February 16, 1959 until mission was terminated October 28, 1960). Bonsal was the last U.S. Ambassador to Cuba.

On 27 May 1971 Congressmen Morgan Murphy and Robert Steele issued their report, The World Heroin Problem. Among their sensational findings was that some 15 percent of the GIs in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. The causes were easy to identify. Most obvious was the sudden appearance of enormous quantities of no. 4 heroin. Fourteen‑year old girls sold 90 percent pure heroin for peanuts. Pushers stuffed it into soldiers' pockets free of charge. Add to that the crackdown that effectively eliminated marijuana and hash from the barracks.

On the day the Murphy‑Steele report was issued, Nixon, John Erlichman, and Krogh agreed to secretly budget $100 million for a covert BNDD kidnaping and assassination program. Before that the White House had asked BNDD director John Ingersoll to draft a plan for "clandestine law enforcement" that would include assassination of major traffickers.[8]

Days later Nixon set up a special narcotics action and intelligence group right in the White House. In the same period the Special Investigation Unit (the infamous Plumbers) set up shop in Room 16 of the Executive Office Building. The two groups overlapped, and several of their members were associates of Mafia kingpin Trafficante.

On 17 June 1971 Nixon, on television, declared war on narcotics: "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will destroy us. I am not prepared to accept this alternative."

On 30 June 1971 the United States and Turkey signed an agreement that would halt Turkish opium cultivation. In return the U.S. handed the Turkish government $30 million.

On 1 July 1971 Nixon advisor Charles Colson recruited former CIA agent Howard Hunt as a White House consultant.[9] Hunt and Gordon Liddy would work out of Room 16 on narcotics intelligence, one of Hunt's specialties.

On 25 July 1971 the Asian Peoples Anti‑Communist League (APACL) and World Anti‑Communist League (WACL) met in Manila. The two international lobbies for the Nationalist Chinese, prime bankrollers of international opium and heroin smuggling, angrily attacked Nixon for his approaching trip to Peking. [10]

In August 1971 the BNDD announced the location in Southeast Asia of twenty‑nine drug refineries, fifteen of them allegedly producing heroin. Among the largest was one in Vientiane, Laos, which was camouflaged as a Pepsi Cola plant. Nixon, representing Pepsi's interests in 1965, had promoted its construction. Though the plant never capped a bottle, it continued to be subsidized by U.S.A.I.D.[11]

In October 1971 top BNDD analyst John Warner told an interviewer that the continued flooding of the U.S. heroin market, despite the shutdown of French supply routes, indicated that more than the previously assumed 5 percent of U.S. heroin was originating in Southeast Asia.

On 1 November 1971 BNDD agents arrested a diplomat attached to the Philippine embassy in Laos, and a Chinese journalist from Thailand, attempting to smuggle forty kilos of heroin into the U.S.A. That same year BNDD agents at JFK airport arrested the son of Panama's ambassador to Taiwan with fifty kilos of heroin. Finally, and most dramatically, Parisian police nabbed the Laotian Prince Chao Sopsaisana attempting to smuggle in sixty kilos. Sopsaisana, the head Laotian delegate to the APACL, was about to become Laos' emissary in Paris.[12]

The focus nevertheless remained on the French narcotics traffickers. Nixon could also produce results in the newly arisen Southeast Asian danger zone, but those amounted to the smashing of the remnants of the Corsican Mafia and their Southeast Asian supply network.

Through it all the U.S. supported Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky and other South Vietnamese politicians known to be making immense profits from the heroin traffic. When U.S. reporters exposed Ky's narcotics airlift, the CIA station and U.S. embassy in Saigon issued blanket denials. [13]

In late 1971 BNDD director Ingersoll issued the following statement: "The CIA has for some time been this Bureau's strongest partner in identifying foreign sources and routes of illegal trade in narcotics. Liaison between our two agencies is close and constant in matters of mutual interest. Much of the progress we are now making in identifying overseas narcotics traffic can, in fact, be attributed to CIA cooperation." [14]

The catch was that BNDD "progress" and CIA "cooperation" went only as far as the French Mafia. CIA cooperation on Southeast Asia was another matter. The agency hindered BNDD agents and kept the press in the dark, while itself smuggling large quantities of opium via Air America.[15] A notable discrepancy arose in 1972 between CIA and BNDD estimates of the heroin traffic. CIA reports had 25 percent of the heroin coming from Mexico, the rest from Marseilles. The BNDD estimated that Southeast Asia already supplied 30 percent of the heroin on the U.S. market.[16]

In January 1972 Nixon created, again by decree, the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) to flush out pushers in thirty‑eight cities. Simultaneously, New York's police narcotics squad was reorganized following revelations of blatant corruption. ODALE ceased to exist on 1 July 1973 when it, the BNDD and the narcotics intelligence branches of the Justice Department and Customs Bureau were merged to become the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which now operates in the U.S. and worldwide.

On 17 July 1972 James McCord, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez, led by Hunt and Liddy, broke into the Democrats' Watergate offices in Washington. Of these seven men, four were from Miami, four were active or former agents of the CIA, four had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and three were closely linked to the Cuban narcotics Mafia.

The same day Nixon telegrammed Pompidou his congratulations. Two days earlier, France had closed out a series of raids against the Marseilles heroin labs. The great heroin coup was well on its way to completion.

On 9 August 1972 Nixon made William C. Sullivan the director of the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI), which would coordinate domestic drug intelligence. Sullivan had been the president's choice to head the Huston Plan's aborted super‑intelligence agency.[17]
With Egil Krogh executive director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, covering foreign narcotics intelligence,[18] complete control over narcotics management was in the president's hands.

In August 1972 U.S. troops were withdrawn from South Vietnam. The country was turned over to the CIA and a narcotics trafficking South Vietnamese government.

In late August, in the midst of Nixon's reelection campaign, the BNDD announced the first noticeable heroin shortage on the streets of America. Nixon's battle with the French Mafia had borne fruit. Soon he would rid the U.S.A. entirely of the White Death. However, someone had forgotten to mention that returning GIs had helped triple the U.S. addict population from the 1969 figure of 250,000. In reality, then, the total heroin supply was appreciably greater than that prevailing prior to Nixon's campaign against the French. Americans, however, would reelect Nixon, who cited apparent gains in foreign affairs and the struggle against the drug plague.

On 12 August 1972 New York crime families decided at a Staten Island summit to resume the drug traffic they had supposedly abandoned in the fifties.[19] Citing "social responsibility," they decried the Cuban and Black Mafias' sale of heroin in the suburbs to children of "decent people," and vowed that the drugs would thereafter remain in the ghetto. But the importance of the families had waned. Others, especially Trafficante's Cuban organization, had become too strong.


The heroin coup was complete by 1973.

Bush remained at the United Nations until January 18, 1973. The next day he replaced Bob Dole as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, where he stayed until September 16, 1974, the month after Nixon resigned. The new President Gerald Ford, then named Bush Chief of the Liaison Office to China, and in October 1974, the Bushes traveled to Peking, where he served during the critical period when the United States was renewing ties with the People's Republic of China. Four years later this position would be upgraded to an ambassadorship.

While Bush was placed in charge of the RNC, an old spy named David K.E. Bruce was sent to China, prior to the official establishment of diplomatic relations, as head of U.S. Liaison Office in Peking (now Beijing). Bruce held the office from March 15, 1973 until September 25, 1974 and was replaced by Bush, who remained until Christmas 1975. In 1976, Bush was appointed Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

From 1985 until 1989, the man named Ambassador to China, Winston Lord, was, like Bush, a member of Yale secret society, Skull and Bones. Lord had been on the planning staff of Nixon's National Security Council, served as National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger's special assistant who accompanied him on his secret trip to China in 1971. He not only went with Nixon to China the following year, but he engaged in talks with the Chinese leader in which the Secretary of State himself was not involved.

Bush's predecessor in China, David K.E. Bruce, had married Ailsa Mellon Bruce, daughter of former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. Mellon had been in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet at the same time the Dulles' uncle Robert Lansing was Secretary of State. Ailsa's cousin, Margaret Mellon, had married Tommy Hitchcock, a polo-playing investment banker who on the same polo team with Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush's senior partner at Brown Brothers Harriman. Their son, Billy Mellon Hitchcock, was a friend of LSD guru Timothy Leary, and during the same time that the heroin coup was in the works, Billy was caught up in a scandal involving the CIA-tested hallucinogen, LSD. In 2002 I wrote a series called "Follow the Yellow Brick Road," about the collapse of Enron, in which the following paragraph appeared:

The Mellon family had close ties with the O.S.S. London station chief David K.E. Bruce was married to Andrew Mellon’s daughter. Also, the Mellon uncles were social friends of CIA director Richard Helms during the late 60s and early 70s. Bobby Lehman, who gave Billy Mellon Hitchcock a job at Lehman Brothers in 1961 also had participated with W.A. Harriman and Co. in aviation issues (Lehman, Billy's father Tommy Hitchcock and Averell Harriman were on the same polo team). Lehman Brothers also financed David Sarnoff’s Radio Corporation of America, which served as Sir William “Intrepid” Stephenson’s headquarters in New York until the O.S.S. was established. Like Drexel & Co., Lehman Brothers would also be bought out by European old-money families. It first merged with Kuhn Loeb and later with the company formed by the merger between Shearson Hayden Stone and Loeb Rhoades--forming Shearson Lehman American Express, which in 1992 was controlled by Edmund Safra and Carl Lindner (each with about 4%). This leads us to wonder who Lindner was fronting for. Could it have been the same old-world aristocrats, heavily involved in the global drug trade?...

[Paul] Helliwell also set up the Castle Bank in the Bahamas to launder money flowing from the sale of drugs from Burma and Thailand used to finance [Claire] Chennault's airline. Castle Bank would eventually be connected to Billy Mellon Hitchcock's profits from selling LSD to California college students....In 1967 Hitchcock left his job at Lehman Brothers to become a partner in Delafield and Delafield, based on the institutional account he brought in from IOS. It was the Delafield bank which handled the stock for the conversion of Mary Carter Paint to Resorts International. In 1969 Hitchcock left Delafield. By then he was living in Sausalito, California and already enmeshed in operations to spread the use of LSD among the youth of California. To learn more about Billy Mellon Hitchcock's role in bringing LSD to America, see Chapter 2 of Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, New York: Grove Weidenfeld. ©1985 by Lee & Shlain at http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/dreams2.htm

[American Dream]

http://www.ee0r.com/trepan.html

Warning: Certain icky bits that follow are NOT for the squeamish. You have been warned.

From Eccentric Lives & Peculiar Notions by John Michell.


The People With Holes In Their Heads

Amanda Feilding lives in a charming flat looking over London's river with her companion, Joey Mellen, and their infant son, Rock. She is a successful painter, and she and Joey have an art gallery in a fashionable street of the King's Road. Another of her talents is for politics. At the last two General Elections she stood for Parliament in Chelsea, more than doubling her vote on the second occasion from 49 to 139. It does not sound much, but the cause for which she stands is unfamiliar and lacks obvious appeal. Feilding and her voters demand that trepanning operations be made freely available on the National Health. Trepanation means cutting a hole in your skull.

The founder of the trepanation movement is a Dutch savant, Dr Bart Hughes. In 1962 he made a discovery which his followers proclaim as the most significant in modern times. One's state and degree of consciousness, he realized, are related to the volume of blood in the brain. According to his theory of evolution, the adoption of an upright stance brought certain benefits to the human race, but it caused the flow of blood through the head to be limited by gravity, thus reducing the range of human consciousness. Certain parts of the brain ceased or reduced their functions while others, particularly those parts relating to speech and reasoning, became emphasized in compensation. One can redress the balance by a number of methods, such as standing on one's head, jumping from a hot bath into a cold one, or the use of drugs; but the wider consciousness thus obtained is only temporary. Bart Hughes shared the common goal of mystics and poets in all ages: he wanted to achieve permanently the higher level of vision, which he associated with an increased volume of blood in the capillaries of the brain.

The higher state of mind he sought was that of childhood. Babies are born with skulls unsealed, and it is not until one is an adult that the bony carapace is formed which completely encloses the membranes surrounding the brain and inhibits their pulsations in repsonse to heart-beats. In consequence, the adult loses touch with the dreams, imagination and intense perceptions of the child. His mental balance becomes upset by egoism and neuroses. To cure these problems, first in himself and then for the whole world, Dr Huges returned his cranium to something like the condition of infancy by cutting out a small disc of bone with an electric drill. Experiencing immediate beneficial effects from this operation, he began preaching to anyone who would listen to the doctrine of trepanation. By liberating his brain from its total imprisonment in his skull, he claimed to have restored its pulsations, increased the volume of blood in it and acquired a more complete, satisfying state of consciousness than grown-up people normally enjoy. The medical and legal authorities reacted to Huges's discovery with horror and rewarded him with a spell in a Dutch lunatic asylum.

Joseph Mellen met Bart Huges in 1965 in Ibiza and quickly became his leading, or rather one and only, disciple. Years later he wrote a book called Bore Hole, the contents of which are summarized in its opening sentence: 'This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skullto get permanently high.'

[A few paragraphs that detail Joseph Mellen's early experiments with LSD, and how he finds out about Bart Huges have been removed for brevity.]

The time came when Joey felt he had preached enough and that he now had to act. He did not agree with Holingshead that the third eye was merely a figure of speech, believing in its physical attainment through self-trepanation. Support for this can be found in archaeology. Skulls of ancient people all over the world give evidence that their owners were skillfully trepanned during their lifetimes, and many of these appear to have been of noble or priestly castes. The medical practice of trepanation was continued up to the present century in treatment of madness, the hole in the skull being seen as a way of relieving pressure on the brain or letting out the devils that possessed it. By his scientific explanation of the reasons for the operation, Bart Huges had removed it from the area of superstition, and Joey Mellen proposed to be the second person to perform it on himself in the interest of enlightenment.

Bart had become a close friend of Amanda Feilding, and they went off to Amsterdam together while Joey took care of Amanda's flat. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for to bore a hole in his head.

The most gripping passages in Bore Hole describe his various attempts to complete the operation. They are also extremely gruesome, and those who lack medical curiosity would do well to read no further. Yet to those who might contemplate trepanation for and by themselves, Joey's experiences are a salutary warning. It should be empahasized that neither he, Bart nor Amanda has ever recommended people to follow their example by performing their own operations. For years they have been looking for doctors who would understand their theories and would agree to trepan volunteer patients as a form of therapy Strangely enough, not one member of the medical profession has been converted.

In a surgical store Joey found a trepan instrument, a kind of auger or cork- screw designed to be worked by hand. It was much cheaper and, Joey felt, more sensitive than an electric drill. Its main feature was a metal spike, surrounded by a ring of saw-teeth. The spike was meant to be driven into the skull, holding the trepan steady until the revolving saw made a groove, after which it could be retracted. If all went well, the saw-band should remove a disc of bone and expose the brain.

Joey's first attempt at self-trepanation was a fiasco. He had no previous medical experience, and the needles he had bought for administering a local anaesthetic to the crown of his head proved to be too thin and crumpled up or broke. Next day he obtained some stouted needles, took a tab of LSD to steady his nerves and set to in earnest. First he made an incision to the bone, and then applied the trepan to his bared skull. But the first part of the operation, driving the spike into the bone, was impossible to accomplish. Joey described it as like trying to uncork a bottle from the inside. He realized he needed help and telephoned Bart in Amsterdam, who promised he would come over and assist at the next operation. This plan was frustrated by the Home Office, which listed Dr Huges as an undesirable visitor to Britain and barred his entry.

Amanda agreed to take his place. Soon after her return to London she helped Joey re-open the wound in his head and, by pressing the trepan with all her might against his skull, managed to get the spike to take hold and the saw- teeth to bite. Joey then took over at cranking the saw. Once again he had swallowed some LSD. After a long period of sawing, just as he was about to break through, he suddenly fainted. Amanda called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital, where horrified doctors told him that he was lucky to be alive and that if he had drilled a fraction of an inch further he would have killed himself.

The psychiatrists took a particular interest in his case, and a group of them arranged to examine him. Before this could be done, he had to appear in court on a charge of possessing a small amount of cannabis. The magistrate demanded another psychiatrist's report and demanded him for a week in prison.

There followed a period of embarrassment as the rumour went round London that Joey Mellen had trepanned himself, whereas in fact he had failed to do so. As soon as possible, therefore, he prepared for a third attempt. Proceeding as before, but now with the benefit of experience, he soon found the groove from the previous operation and began to saw through the sliver of bone separating him from enlightenment or, as the doctors had predicted, instant death. What followed is best quoted from Bore Hole.

'After some time there was an ominous sounding schlurp and the sound of bubbling. I drew the trepan out and the gurgling continued. It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out. I looked at the trepan and there was a bit of bone in it. At last! On closer inspection I saw that the disc of bone was much deeper on one side than on the other. Obviously the trepan had not been straight and had gone through at one point only, then the piece of bone had snapped off and come out. I was reluctant to start drilling again for fear of damaging the brain membranes with the deeper part while I was cutting through the rest or of breaking off a splinter. If only I had an electric drill it would have been so much simpler. Amanda was sure I was through. There seemed no other explanation for the schlurping noises I decided to call it a day. At the time I thought that any hole would do, no matter what size. I bandaged up my head and cleared away the mess.'

There was still doubt in his mind as to whether he had really broken through and, if so, whether the hole was big enough to restore pulsation to his brain. The operation had left him with a feeling of wellbeing, but he realized that it could simply be from relief at having ended it. To put the matter beyond doubt, he decided to bore another hole at a new spot just above the hairline, this time using an electric drill. In the spring of 1970, Amanda was in America and Joey did the operation alone. He applied the drill to his forehead, but after half and hour's work the electric cable burnt out. Once again he was frustrated. An engineer in the flat below him was able to repair the instrument and next day he set out to finish the job. 'This time I was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the pulsation of the brain.'

The result was all he had hoped for. During the next four hours he felt his spirits rising higher until he reached a state of freedom and serenity which he claims, has been with him ever since.

For some time now he had been sharing a flat with Amanda, and when she came back from America she immediately noticed the change in him. This encouraged her to join him on the mental plane by doing her own trepanation. The operation was carefully recorded. She had obtained a cine-camera, and Joey stood by, filming, as she attacked her head with an electric drill. The film shows her carefully at work, dressed in a blood-spattered white robe. She shaves her head, makes an incision in her head with a scalpel and calmly starts drilling. Blood spurts as she penetrates the skull. She lays aside the drill and with a triumphant smile advances towards Joey and the camera.

Ever since, Joey and Amanda have lived and worked together in harmony. From the business of buying old prints to colour and resell, they have progressed to ownership of the Pigeonhole Gallery and seem reasonably prosperous. They have also started a family. There is nothing apparently abnormal about them, and many of their old friends agree in finding them even more pleasant and contented since their operations. There is plenty of leisure in their lives, mingled with the kind of activities they most enjoy. These of course include talking and writing about trepanation. They have lectured widely in Europe and America to groups of doctors and other interested people, showing the film of Amanda's self-operation, entitled Heartbeat in the Brain. It is generally received with awe, the sight of blood often causing people to faint. At one showing in London a film critic described the audience 'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'. Yet it was not designed to be gruesome. The soundtrack is of soothing music, and the surgical scenes alternate with some delightful motion studies of Amanda's pet pigeon, Birdie, as a symbol of peace and wisdom."

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

MANIFESTO

OF

SURREALISM


BY

ANDRÉ BRETON

(1924)

There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. That madness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.

http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T ... ealism.htm

[American Dream]

http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/390- ... urrealism/

Influencing Machines, Intuition Pumps, Paranoia & The Poisonous Cobra of Surrealism
Including the Perilous Enchantments of Dreams

by Penelope Rosemont

Fifth Estate # 390, Fall, 2013

Madness & the Surrealist Imagination

The common denominator of the sorcerer, the poet and the madman cannot be anything but magic…the flesh and blood of poetry.
–Benjamin Peret

Surrealists have celebrated madness as a means of exploring the possibilities of the human mind. Madness provides that window into how people put together reality; how thoughts are often assembled in an unusual and creative way.

Surrealism has looked to madness for inspiration, for that convulsive image that shakes up the ordinary and affects us deeply; the insight into the way the mind functions.

Paul Garon wrote in “Fate of the Obsessive Image,” prepared for the 1972 Conference on Madness convened in Toronto, that “surrealists insist that the world be populated by absolutely unfettered people who can only be described in the language today as insane… [T]he early surrealists, in their cultivation of delirium, were not behaving with romantic evasion, but with desperate lucidity in their intrusion into the realm of cultural and mental insubordination…”

Neither race nor class play much of a role in the amusing new psychologies of today; they seem to think they are beyond these or perhaps realize fundamentally that mentioning this elephant in the kitchen will doom their grant money forever, so studies are kept cheerfully practical and adaptable to advertising, to propaganda and, quite possibly, to social control.

This does not mean that we should ignore them; anything about the mind, the brain, the self, is of interest to surrealists. Quite possibly this is linked to a comparison between the human brain, how it thinks and the computer; is it thinking or what?

Surrealists and Dadaists were concerned with madness quite early. Andre Breton, a founder of surrealism, and others of his friends saw WWI first hand the physical and mental suffering involved.

Jacques Vache, Breton’s best friend in the army, was a suicide just as the war came to a close. In Nadja, Breton’s novel, he speaks of the mentally ill and “the well-known lack of frontiers between madness and non-madness.” Nadja is locked away in a mental institution though she poses no threat to anyone and lives a poetic life.

Madness has long been associated with genius, poetic and otherwise. From 1928 on, Breton and his friends immersed themselves “in the personal exploration of unconscious life.” Decades later, Chicago surrealist Franklin Rosemont wrote in about the influences of Freud’s new science of Psychoanalysis on them, “discoveries regarding infantile sexuality, dreams, daydreaming, slips of tongue and other chance actions (parapraxes), etc., enabled surrealists to view the poetic problems that preoccupied them in an entirely new light.” They explored and tried to immerse themselves in various mental states.

Today, psychology has moved for the most part to a new phase and has re-labeled itself and repackaged itself as Neuroscience. One no longer finds the words id, ego, super-ego, etc., anywhere. In their place there is subliminal, cognitive illusion, identity, narrative bias, pattern recognition. The findings of neuroscience, bolstered by experiments, are often quite similar to surrealist games. Frederic Bartlett’s whisper game study of the 1900s is used to demonstrate that people impose their own bias on any subject they attempt to remember. This game was very popular with surrealists.

Many contemporary books concern themselves with the exploration and functioning of the mind and revelations about how people make decisions and what they choose; what they desire. Subliminal: How the Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, concern themselves with the exploration and functioning of the mind and revelations about how people make decisions and what they choose; what they think they desire.

They have just discovered the irrational, something that is very basic to surrealism.

Mlodinow talks about the “new unconscious” to distinguish it from Freud’s idea of repressed desires. The new unconscious is considered normal architecture of the brain; no deeply hidden sexual impulses here. Have you noticed neurotics are gone but every other person has Aspergers? This new science is quite applicable to advertising and social conditioning.

The Influencing Machine is a concept that goes back to 1919, used by psychoanalyst Victor Tausk. It describes the idea possessed by schizophrenics of being influenced by a “diabolical machine” that operates on their thoughts and influences their actions from a distance.

Today, our world is filled with such apparatuses of all sorts: computers, movies, music, phones, i-pads, etc. This earlier concept almost seems like a prophecy. Social conditioning begins with the foods that reward us as children and intensifies in the schools where we learn what are socially acceptable ideas, socially acceptable ways of acting, and especially socially acceptable goals; all very boring and mediocre.

Somehow, our toxic social system tries to make a distinction between murdering your neighbors and massacring people in foreign countries (Movie theater, work place, and school massacres show this doesn’t seem to be working as well as it once did.)

Fredy Perlman, in his 1969 pamphlet, The Reproduction of Daily Life, comments with insight, that it is the everyday practical activity that reproduces a social system, “a specific social response to particular material and social conditions.”

It seems that since Noam Chomsky’s idea of innate syntax in linguistics, there have been studies to see what else could appear to be innate. A most interesting one is Narrative Bias, another pattern recognition.

According to popular writer David McRaney, “You make sense of life through narrative…All your assumptions about reality come together in a sort of cohesion engine that runs while you are awake and reassures you that things are going as expected.”

One of his examples in his best selling, You Are Not So Smart, is the famous case of the Three Christs of Ypsilanti, where a social psychology professor from Michigan State University brought together three mental patients all who thought they were Jesus Christ and who persisted in their beliefs even after many meetings with each other.

McRaney concludes, “We make sense of the world through narrative (stories, myths). You and the three Christs are not so different…their delusions are just much easier to see through…you too are unaware of how unaware you are.”

According to Benjamin Peret, a French surrealist, in his wonderful, “Magic, the Flesh and Blood of Poetry,” says, “the sorcerer, the poet and the madman have a common denominator. But the madman, having broken off with the exterior world, drifts on the wild ocean of his imagination and we cannot see what he is looking at.”

With a bit of insight into poetry, McRaney claims, “All brains are bards, all selves audiences to the tales of who they are.” He came to the conclusion, “You might find it alarming to learn that neuroscience and psychology have teamed up over the last twenty years and used their combined powers to reach a strange and unsettling conclusion: the self is not real, it’s just a story…created by your narrative bias.”

French-Brazilian sociologist and philosopher, Michael Lowy, already had a more far reaching insight when he said, ” Narratives have kept whole societies together. The great mythologies of the ancients and moderns are stories made up to make sense of things on a grand scale.”

McRaney brings forward the idea of “negation delirium” from Jules Cotard, a French neurologist, who in 1870 used it to describe people who were paralyzed, but denied it. Quite applicable to a social critique in that we slave at work but are quite convinced that we are free. Buy the most advertised product, but are sure we chose it freely. We are estranged from our own desires because social desires have been implanted.

Intuition Pumps is a useful phrase coined recently by philosopher Daniel C. Dennet to describe little stories “designed to provoke a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition…about whatever thesis is being defended.” Who we are is the “stories we tell ourselves.” This could be right out of Nadja, who claimed to tell herself stories all the time.

Intuition pumps do not need to be true, they do not need to be logical, they could be quite magical for all that, but they must provoke the mind on some level

A well-known surrealist practice is the Paranoid-Critical method invented by Salvadore Dali in the 1930s. Developed from an idea of Andre Breton on the phantom object. Also, surrealist artist Max Ernst’s phantom images.

The Paranoid-Critical method was based on the idea that the brain looks for patterns unceasingly. Dali described it as “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” Sounds like the surrealists had quite a few insights into how the brain works that are being explored today by psychologists.

Don’t conclude that since there is so much to be found of interest in madness that it is pleasant; it is heart-braking, it is dangerous, it devastates lives. It is, to a great extent, manufactured by our social system.

Walking down Chicago Avenue near Main street in Evanston, Ill., I encountered a book on the sidewalk. It was being tossed out by The Book Den, but it was unusual in that it was over a hundred years old; a bound copy of Century Magazine from 1888.

In very bad condition, true, but could be mined for the gold of collage material. Opened at random to page 758, there was an article on Russia regarding the “Effects of Solitary Confinement;” subheads: “Breaking Character” and “Delusions of the Insane Political Convicts.” They weren’t insane when they were sent to prison, but were totally destroyed by solitary confinement. What is madness in this context? Often a last and desperate attempt of the mind to make sense of the world.

I call surrealism the poisonous cobra because it still has the power to counter and fight this repressive civilization. Once you have been bitten by this snake, you never see things in the same way again. It has the power of revelation, the perilous enchantment of dreams, and all the force of liberated desire.


Penelope Rosemont met with Andre Breton and the Paris surrealist group in 1965-66. She edited and introduced Surrealist Women: An International Anthology published by University of Texas Press in 1998. Her latest book is a memoir, Dreams & Everyday Life: Andre Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola published by Charles H. Kerr Company.

[Hammer of Los]

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Who the heck let Daniel Dennet in here?!
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[American Dream]

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Who the heck let Daniel Dennet in here?!
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Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett

[American Dream]

http://www.herbmuseum.ca/content/big-brothers-brain

Big Brother's Brain



The man who was to become the greatest LSD producer of his time had unpromising beginnings for a super-criminal. Ron Stark's interest in bio-chemistry may have dated from his juvenile delinquent days in the 1950s, when he was introduced to psycho-active drugs by a New York psychiatrist. FBI file number 812020, opened in 1962, records that Ronald Hadley Stark, alias Clark, born “Ronald Shitsky' in September 1938, who gave his occupation as 'research laboratory', was convicted of making a false job application for Government service. After violating parole, Stark then served a short stretch in Lewisburg federal prison.

In 1967, Stark's wealth was recorded as $3,000 but by the following year he had somehow become a millionaire and was living in a flashy apartment in Greenwich Village, decorated with Picasso and De Kooning originals. Some people knew Stark as a scion of the Austrian branch of the super-rich Whitney family; to others he was the son of a rich biochemist who had fled from Germany to Switzerland in the 1930s to escape anti-Jewish persecution.

Stark claimed to have studied biochemistry at Harvard and Rockefeller Universities and at the Bellevue Mental Hospital; and to have held a post as a biochemist at Cornell University. He undoubtedly had considerable knowledge and ability in this field, even if his claims about training, qualifications and university affiliations would prove to be bogus.

Stark also claimed to have served in the Kennedy administration at John McNamara's Department of Defense, working on top secret projects. He said these 'disgusted him' so much that he resigned his post. Almost certainly he was referring to a secret CIA project called MK-Ultra in which experiments with LSD were conducted for possible use in psychological warfare.

Anti-Vietnam War Movement


There has been much conspiratorial theorizing about MK-Ultra. Some have even argued it was actually responsible for the LSD explosion of the 1960s and '70s, as part of a plot by some all-powerful secret society. Not surprisingly considering the part that LSD played in the world of Ron Stark – and vice versa – he has figured in some of the more paranoid projections and 'alternative histories'.

In Jonathan Vankin's bestseller, 'Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes', for example, we are told that MK-ULTRA altered a generation through intervention in 'the clandestine and counter-cultural side of the LSD revolution, and that the tale of Ron Stark may provide the connection between the radical-Left, spawned by the Anti-Vietnam War movement, and the CIA.

Vankin is content to refer his readers to other books on the CIA/LSD connection and which mention Stark, such as 'Acid Dreams' by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain. Vankin also throws in the statement that: “around the time Manson was prowling the West Coast, Stark was pre-eminent in the acid trade there.” In itself this has some basis in fact. Manson himself has been accused by conspiracy theorists of being manipulated by the CIA through his alleged association with a sinister cult called the Process Church, spawned by the Scientologists.

Fans of the 'X-Files' and such classic paranoia movies as 'The Manchurian Candidate' and 'The Parallax View' will recognise the factual basis of some of their plot-lines in the following examination of covert experimentation.

To those who knew Stark in the 1960s and '70s, talk of a CIA 'mind control' program utilising hallucinogens and other techniques was based largely on rumour and imagination, the actual existence of the CIA MK-Ultra project which was launched in 1953, was not made known to the American public until 1975, when it was revealed by the Rockefeller Report to the President. Admiral Stansfield Turner, presenting the findings, said: “The drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior, Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment principles.”

Turner revealed that unfortunately all operational records on MK-Ultra projects were destroyed in 1973 by order of the outgoing CIA Director Richard Helms. Back in the 1960s, Helms, as a senior officer in Clandestine Services, had been reprimanded by the CIA Inspector General for concealing the existence of the MK-Ultra project from the incoming CIA Director and Kennedy appointee, John McCone.

Despite the loss of the operational archives, John Marks, a former State Department official, was able to access the financial records of MK-Ultra some of which yielded important information on its sub-projects. In addition, Marks tracked down documentation from non-CIA sources and interviewed CIA insiders who had been involved.

MK-Ultra, John Marks discovered, evolved out of earlier projects launched at the end of the Second World War which were run by the US military and Office of Strategic Research (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. The ethically questionable tone of the research was set just after the War when the US military hired 600 Nazi scientists, including many suspected war criminals, to work behind the scenes in top secret American projects.

Father of Space Medicine


One of these 'rehabilitated' Nazis, Dr. Hubertus Strughold, had been overseer of a 'medical research team' at Dachau concentration camp. In the name of what was termed aviation medicine, horrific experiments were conducted. Prisoners were frozen alive and crushed in high-pressure chambers to test the effects of abnormal atmospheric conditions; others were shot with firearms to test blood coagulants.

Strughold's data from these murderous projects was incorporated into the US military's own research programme. As early as 1947, US Navy scientists re-ran tests carried out at Dachau on the capacity of prisoners to resist interrogation when dosed with mescaline. For his work at NASA, Strughold was dubbed the 'father of space medicine'.

US experiments in the MK-Ultra programme tested materials and techniques for, “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self preservation.”

In April 1953, all research in this area was taken over by the CIA's Techinical Services Staff and given the top secret MK-Ultra code-name. This new phase of experimentation also had an operational 'policy and procedure' wing called MK-Ultra. MK-Ultra's overseers were going beyond the remit of the earlier experiments into interrogation techniques. In 1953, the Technical Services Section reported; “there is no question that drugs are already on hand (and new ones are being produced) that can destroy integrity and make indiscreet the most dependable individual”.

Mind Control


A MEMO dated 1955 spoke of interest in material, “which renders the induction of hypnosis easier... material and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use... substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.” Over a twenty year period, MK-Ultra launched 149 top secret sub - projects in collaboration with various other agencies.

In MK-Naomi, Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemicals Division, had an arrangement with the US Army Special Operations division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to procure biological weapons materials for testing as incapacitants and methods of assassination. Ray Treichler, a CIA contractor, was responsible for procuring samples for biochemical warfare research from American drug companies. Purchases from European companies were handled by Dr. Harris Isbell, a CIA consultant at Lexington Addiction Research Centre.

In his report, Stansfield Turner stated that the 'mind control' porgramme ended in 1972. However, his assurances only applied to MK-Ultra projects which were reorganised back in 1963 into an 'operational support program' named MK-Search. Other research functions of MK-Ultra were taken over by the CIA'S Office of Research and Development. No guarantee has been given that no new projects were developed after that time – and no files on that period were released.

Calming Effects


In 1947, Dr. Werner Stoll of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, a Swiss company, published a paper on lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a new drug synthesised by his colleague Albert Hoffman in 1943. Stoll emphasised the drug’s hallucinogenic properties, its ability to speed up the thinking process, and its apparent calming effects on schizophrenics. Following the founding of the CIA in 1948, Stoll's paper was studied with interest by the new agency's Technical Services Staff.

The CIA cut a deal with Sandoz for a consignment of 100 grams of LSD per week plus tip-offs on any requests from communist regimes for LSD shipments. A source of LSD also became available in the United States when the Eli Lilly company produced its own synthesis in 1953.

Suicide


One of the first experiments with the new drug took place in 1953 at fort Detrick on an unsuspecting gathering of Special Operations personnel from the Chemical Corps. CIA Chemicals Division chief, Sidney Gottlieb, spiked some drinks with acid and Dr. Frank Olson, a Special Operations officer and bio chemist, suffered a psychosis on leaving. Within days he committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window from the tenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York in the presence of Gottlieb's deputy, Robert Lashbook.

In an ensuing cover-up of the incident, the truth was withheld from Olson's wife for twenty years, before she learned what had happened 'off the record', and went on to successfully sue the US Government for compensation, thus helping to trigger the revelations in the Rockefeller Report. But the death of Olson in 1953 did not stop the test which continued into the 1960s. In trials on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, interrogators tried to extract classified information from subjects after spiking their drinks with LSD during simulated cocktail parties. Soldiers were also given LSD in 'artificially created stress situations', and tested for their capacity to resist interrogation and for memory impairment and motor reaction.

Despite the dangerous nature of some of the MK-Ultra experiments, the Army Chemical Corps failed to tell volunteers which drugs would be administered. Of 7,000 soldiers who underwent experiments at Edgewood, 585 were given LSD and 2,490 were given 'BZ', a chemical called quinuclididinyl. With ten times the hallucinogenic strength of LSD, but none of its mind expanding attributes, BZ inhibits the bio-chemical process which transfers messages at nerve endings, thus causing complete dysfunction: headaches, giddiness, hallucinations and derangement. Those subjected to it have no memory of the experience but suffer traumatic after-effects lasting as long as six weeks.

Dr Solomon Snyder, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology claimed in 1975, that the Army's testing of LSD, “was just a side-show compared to its use of BZ.” It was developed into a battlefield weapon as low-floating aerosol mist which could be 'delivered' on the battlefield as a 750-pound cluster bomb. According to one report, BZ was stockpiled in large quantities and was used in Vietnam with deadly effect in at least one major engagement between US forces and the North Vietnamese Army.

Its potential operational value went beyond its use as a battlefield incapacitant in conventional war. For example, in guerilla war – such as Vietnam – not only would counter-insurgency forces intoxicate insurgent prisoners and civilians with BZ, thereby enabling them to extract information in interrogations; the victims would probably be unable to recall what information they had passed on.

In contrast LSD was found to be unusable as a battlefield weapon; the CIA tried out its 'delivery' potential as an aerosol spray but found it too heavy to stay in the air. Experiments with acid did however, continue with other uses in mind: especially for clandestine dirty tricks. In August 1960, the intelligence agencies of Americas NATO allies were secretly briefed by the US military on its drug testing programme. The Office of the Assistant chief of Staff Intelligence stressed that, “if this project is going to be worth any thing,” then the drugs “should be used on higher types of non-US subjects... staffers. This could be accomplished if the CIA was brought in... and maybe the FBI

pp. 24-32, Acid the Secret History of LSD by David Black (1998)

[American Dream]

Vito's Dancers Freak Out with The Mothers of Invention

[American Dream]

http://www.jimwoodring.com/

[American Dream]

http://furs.tumblr.com/post/16933970785

[American Dream]

Elihu Vedder - The Pleiades [1885]

[American Dream]

From his digs in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Cooke sent forth members of a small group who called themselves the Psychedelic Rangers...

--Mind Control, World Control - Page 103 by Jim Keith- 1997

[American Dream]

She has this fear
that she has no names
that she has many names
that she doesn’t know her names
She has this fear
that she’s an image
that comes and goes
clearing and darkening
the fear that she’s the dreamwork
inside someone’s else’s skull
She has this fear
that if she takes off her clothes
shoves her brain aside
peels off her skin
that if she drains
the blood vessels
strips the flesh from the bone
flushes out the marrow
She has this fear
that when she does reach herself
turns around to embrace herself
a lion’s or witch’s or serpent’s head
will turn around
swallow her and grin
She has this fear that if she digs into herself
she won’t find anyone
that when she gets “there”
she won’t find her notches on the trees
the birds will have eaten all the crumbs
She has this fear
that she won’t find the way back.

Gloria Anzaldua, La Frontera (1987)

[American Dream]

Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around



Extraordinary scenes filmed for new documentary showing the marine mammals in their natural habitats

ADAM WITHNALL Monday 30 December 2013

Dolphins are thought of as one of the most intelligent species in the animal kingdom – and experts believe they have put their ingenuity to use in the pursuit of getting “high”.

In extraordinary scenes filmed for a new documentary, young dolphins were seen carefully manipulating a certain kind of puffer fish which, if provoked, releases a nerve toxin.

Though large doses of the toxin can be deadly, in small amounts it is known to produce a narcotic effect, and the dolphins appeared to have worked out how to make the fish release just the right amount.

Carefully chewing on the puffer and passing it between one another, the marine mammals then enter what seems to be a trance-like state.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 30126.html