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Thread: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

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    United States Administrator ThePythonicCow's Avatar
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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Quote Posted by araucaria (here)
    Either I was very lucky or someone fed me the information’. Well, precisely. And he thought he was doing science... This last is more commonly known as channelling, and on this website at least, the practice very properly does not meet with the Avalon administration’s approval. Maybe some of his science does fly; some of it probably does. That is not my point. My point is that it is self-avowedly only a little more methodical than the self-avowed baseline serendipity being exposed in this thread. Let me just state at this point with regard to myself that there is no one feeding information to me: this has been hard graft all the way. Maybe I’m just not very lucky, but I do try to be methodical.
    I'd agree that in his physics work, Mathis is not following any variation of what I'd call a scientific method. However, I'd not call his method "channeling" either. I take channeling to be passing along, more or less verbatim, the communications of a spirit being. Mathis, as you describe, is chasing a "red string" of connections that tickle his fancy.

    The physics of Mathis, in my view, provides an interesting model for the nature of the ether and how it forms the matter and forces that conventional material physics studies. His model has a variety of interesting connections with known experimental data, but it is a limited and simple model.

    As with his studies of history, events, people and art, his strengths are in his eye for the visual, his memory for details, and his persistence in connecting the dots that seem, to his eye, to be related. His strengths are imbalanced - strong in specific ways, quite weak in other ways. One should not take things that Mathis concludes as likely true just because Mathis does, nor does Mathis provide a solid case to back his conclusions. Rather he will notice many things that might otherwise go unnoticed, and one might choose to pick amongst what he's observed for insights or evidence that are useful to one's own work, within one's own framework.

    ==

    P.S. -- See this recent post by Omniverse for a more detailed discussion of how "channeled" material is generated: Technological Channeling Psy Ops -- Post #8.
    Last edited by ThePythonicCow; 15th December 2016 at 04:23.
    My quite dormant website: pauljackson.us

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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Yesterday I had a David Wilcock moment on making the last post of my essay. Wilcock likes to note ‘synchronicities’ when a few numbers are repeated in his viewer stats, which can happen pretty easily if you are not fussy about the actual numbers. Yesterday on the other hand, I got 6 significant figures: 19 posts, 2222 views. Taking these as a date, 1922/2/2 was the precise day of publication of Ulysses, expressly timed to coincide with Joyce’s 40th birthday. No big deal, just a nice coincidence.

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    I apologize if I provided rather more material than anyone could yet take on board. The main thing is that it is out there, if and when required. You don’t need to read it all to get my self-evident point that more information about an individual will show that person in a possibly different, and likely more favourable light. It is not often you get a case like the Clintons, where seemingly everything comes as confirmation of what we already thought. Having got these posts out of the way, I can start addressing some of the extremely interesting points that other posters have already raised.

    First Paul, thank you for all your helpful comments. Just one thought for the moment: when you say Mathis thinks outside the box, I am wondering whether that is enough any more: the box meme has become so much part of the picture, what we appear to have now are multiple boxes; certainly, he seems to have jumped into a box of his own making. Whether or not it is a nested box is neither here nor there: it is still a box, into which he is cramming material at least some of which does not belong. I personally am less interested in out-of-the-box thinking than in totally boxless thinking. Otherwise you are still in the hammer-and-nail configuration: everything goes in your box = everything is a nail for your hammer. It boils down to an issue of overgeneralization that I want to look into some more.

    Now Runningdeer: I wholeheartedly agree with your basic point, Paula: my (rough) analogy would be a huge poker game, where the bidding is fast and furious and obviously a lot of people are bluffing, some massively so. At this stage, all hands are equal with the bluffers intent on undermining the confidence of those with a better hand. That is the only way they can win because if their bluff is called they have nowhere to hide. Conversely, the better your own hand, the more confidence you can have that you can prevail. You can work out the statistical probability, approaching certainty if you actually hold the best cards, although that rarely happens. But since the best hand doesn’t always win, the game is rigged in favour of a small amount of overconfidence. But we are not talking about a game with random cards; we are talking about real people (or mostly real people: there are a few jokers in the pack), and the overconfidence stimulated by the will to win is actually ruining people’s lives.

    As you remind us in such timely fashion, the feminine gut brain tells us that we should be steering clear of this game altogether, which is obviously true; but it is a little late for that. The masculine head brain tells us that we should be enjoying it, which is manifestly false. If we combine the two, which we surely need to do, we may see that the way forward is to get the game over and done with once and for all, which means sitting it out till the end with all our chips on the table, to face final disclosure. Since it is only fun for the ‘winners’, killing the game means resoundingly reversing the usual outcome by being smart and working to have an unbeatable, unimpeachable hand when the bluffing stops.

    The thing is that by simply walking away we would be abandoning a vital part of ourselves. I see it rather like a messy divorce. The husband has already removed both himself and the money, and is wanting everything else as well, including their child. This is the crunch point when the wife and mother cannot just walk away. This is the stuff of tragedy, as exemplified both historically in Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly and massively in our own time when child abduction and the horrors of what this entails has gotten totally out of hand. Why? Because it has not been adequately dealt with: women alone have not been getting heard. It took the judgement of Solomon to save a baby, not in his wisdom but in the wisdom of its mother; all he had to do was voice the difference between a real and a fake mother. Things appear vastly more complicated nowadays, because the problem has been allowed to fester for so long. What I mean by being smart is this masculine/feminine combination which is, I think, what David Icke has in mind in this Pizzagate video, in which he calls for the utmost caution in getting the facts exactly right, with no overspill into fake information that would immediately be pounced upon.



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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Finally finished reading all your posts, araucaria.....WHEW! Of course I learned much I did not know about before because of my narrowminded upbringing; but I certainly enjoyed your concluding that both the male & the female minds are needed. I don't even know how to play Poker, but I DO enjoy listening to the exchange of ideas! I also, from experience, understand that some people's personalities seem to require that there be some sort of "challenge" in order to make their lives worth living; or at least more interesting. (Just the musings of a Grandmother!)

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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    This synchronicity-no big deal thing is paradoxically important. Synchronicity I find has as a wry sense of humour. Yesterday I was out in the car and the thought came back of the above post. Immediately I passed two cars with the number 832. What could this number mean? Joyce uses 432, being the year St Patrick (‘St Peatrick’ is his colourful nickname) brought Christianity to Ireland, and 32 represents the fall aspect of his rise-and-fall cycle, being the acceleration of gravity in feet per second per second. And 11 (a new start after 10) symbolizes the rise (hence the figure 1132). But what could 832 mean? Puzzled, I added the two occurrences: 832*2 = 1664. Now 1664, just two years before the great fire of London, was the year Kronenbourg first brewed what is now one of the most ordinary, readily-available beers in France. I know this because the brew is called... 1664. So that makes 832 a half of 1664: very small beer indeed.
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    I am reminded of Jung’s publication of the I Ching in English, for which he... consulted the I Ching. The answer he got was that it was a good idea, but not to expect too much any time soon. Here synchronicity is using synchronicity to confirm it is no big deal. Interpreting this in the light of this thread, I observe that we are very good at finding patterns, which is very important. It is what enabled science to take over from ‘the gods’ or ‘chance’. Things we formerly ascribed to the god of this or that we now understand. But we still have a god called Murphy and his famous law of cussedness... But we are now so good at seeing patterns everywhere that we need to learn to focus on the exceptions to the rule. Music for example is all about patterns: rhythm, harmony, repetitive tunes, all these things are patterns; but the interesting moments are always when those patterns are broken, by a syncopation, an unexpected disharmony, or a variation. Otherwise it becomes predictable and boring. ‘Make it new’, says Ezra Pound: Miles Mathis was new once, maybe a few times...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Quote Posted by Helene West (here)
    Lazy Helene West wants to cut corners
    Hi there Helene, good to talk with you. You are doing your own research and floating a bunch of interesting ideas; there is nothing lazy about that. I don’t think anyone would accuse Miles Mathis of laziness either, nor for that matter a reader of this thread. David Icke says he takes 10 hours to explain things that cannot be understood in 10 minutes: this is more of the same.

    However, the notion of short cuts is an important one. We desperately need shortcuts: indeed the key issue of our time is precisely to determine what humanity as a whole is, needs and wants without getting bogged down in the needs and wants of individuals and small groups. But, as I was saying in my last post but one, we have to be careful – how to generalize without overgeneralizing, that is the question.

    Your 3 bullet points starting ‘many...’ are an example of this. ‘Many’, which starts out as a string of individually examined cases, is a shortcut or generalization halfway to ‘most’ and possibly ‘all’, which is usually going to be an overgeneralization. However, in this particular case, we have the opposite. It is Mathis who is saying ALL of the people I look at are fake deaths and/or intelligence assets, and you who are basically diluting that figure into something more statistically likely by including others who do not fit the pattern. The paradoxical fact that your comments suggest is that Miles Mathis would be more credible if he told us about some of the times he got it wrong.

    We can say ‘all humans need clean water’, a generalization that leads to a general solution, namely the provision of a mains supply of clean water. You don’t need to worry about the contents of Mrs Jones’s teapot when you do it on this large scale, but you do have to err on the safe side to make it work for everyone all or nearly the time. Mrs Jones herself generalizes when she adds a spoonful of tea per person plus ‘one for the pot’. The result is that the tea will be too strong for some and for others the mains water will be too full of purifying chemicals.

    There are very few things you can say about ‘all humans’, yet as I said, the key issue facing us is precisely to determine what we can and must say about humanity as a whole. Hence a radical generalization is needed that misses out nothing important and yet does not overgeneralize. One of the other very few things you can say about ‘all humans’ then is paradoxically that they all call for individual treatment, i.e. not as a statistic. Doctors know perfectly well the chances of survival of a given patient, but they leave the statistics literally at the door. Patients going out the front door give the recovery rate, those leaving out the back door represent the death rate. But before and until they leave, every one of them is a special case, a Schrodinger’s cat, for whom everything and more will be done to defy the odds – ‘everything’ being state-of-the-art care, ‘and more’ being the ongoing research whereby we prefer to bend, i.e. improve, the statistics rather than lose a single patient who can be saved.

    The same happens in the justice system: conviction rate is a police statistic; it can be high either because of good policing or because of inadequate defence lawyers; if your conviction rate drops, this would be a good thing if it is because every individual is getting a fair trial. So statistics are a generalization based on case-by-case treatment: a useful generalization if used correctly. Another way they can be misused is at another embedded level of generalization when numbers are so large that sampling is required. Election polls are one area highlighting – spectacularly so this year – the problem of defining a representative sample. Another is war casualties, unfortunately far too numerous to allow the exhaustive and exhausting individual count they really require. The best you can do is count the number of train passengers arriving at Auschwitz and subtract the number of survivors at the liberation, or compare a prewar and a postwar census to assess the overall damage to a given population. This is a ballpark figure to be revised downward as specific exceptions are found, or upward as minimum figures are revised. Hence it is possibly, but not necessarily, an overgeneralization for both serious revisionist historians to adjust, and and others to adjust to suit an ideological agenda; see here:

    Dud data is an integral part of proper research. Take a medical trial (I have read a few research papers). Typically they will try several drugs against a control group on placebo. The results will be, Drug X was pretty good half or most of the time, Drug Y was not so good, and Drug Z was little better than placebo – which is not to say that placebo had no effect at all. So there is no black and white, just shades of gray: no miracle cure that works all the time, and even crushed chalk can occasionally do some good.

    This is what I found with the material given in ‘The Stolen Century’ where Mathis found nothing but spies – not only that, but for him all spies are CIA Nazis. I did not find white instead of black, namely that none of these people had anything to do with intelligence activities: I found a range of grays. I found that John Quinn was very likely involved in intelligence as described, on a part-time basis, but for laudable reasons; that, again for laudable reasons, Hemingway was also, on a part-time basis, i.e. at least during the war, and on fishing trips off Cuba at moments when he wasn’t reeling in a fish or otherwise having a good time. I found that Ezra Pound was very likely talking politics in very concrete terms with John Quinn, but not at all with a view to furthering fascism. And lastly, I found that James Joyce was close to the perfect dud, having turned his back on Ireland and the Irish leaders he knew personally more than ten years previously. The only absolute value I turned up, even allowing for anachronism, was zero Nazi spy, nothing but anti-Nazis in fact – not a single bona fide fascist. That is a disturbing figure, because normally speaking that should not happen. True, it was a very small sample.

    At best, this suggests an experimental artefact. When I see everything is dark, before wondering what is happening to the world, I begin by removing my shades Likewise, serious climate scientists faced with hockey sticks galore begin by discarding the hockey-stick algorithm. Hence Miles Mathis strikes me as either wearing conspiracy spectacles or running a conspiracy algorithm – not, I hasten to add, as a conspirator, but as a conspiracy theorist; but you see how the two camps can be joined at the hip. This is precisely the sort of thing that has David Icke worried were that mindset to be applied to Pizzagate.

    Having said that, I am not going myself to fall into the very trap of overgeneralizing that I am describing. This is why I ended with a reference to Mathis’s work on The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, as a counter-example (I had completely forgotten about that material, or that it was the same guy behind it). In that piece, he applies my concept of fiction to a piece of writing in an unprejudiced approach that enables him to come away knowing more than he brought with him. To begin with, he has no author, but he knows somebody wrote it; the authorship problem is a side issue. Compare this with the Clinton emails, all of which have identified authors: authorship, albeit for different reasons, is a side issue; the only (superficial) battleground is provenance (Russia/NSA/FBI/CIA/China, or the DNC?), while the only real issue is what they actually say. In other words, as a document, the Protocols are totally real; they can only be a fake if ascribed to someone who did not write them, or a total fiction in the ordinary sense if totally unconnected to our reality. Mathis then applies textual analysis to paint a portrait of the type of person who could have authored the piece, which is the best he or anyone can do with the document alone. But to achieve this much, I am afraid he has used Modernist tools such as the ‘death of the author’ meme, although Modernism is anathema to him.

    The bottom line then is that, on the basis of these two essays at least, Miles Mathis’s ‘main premise’ is not clear, at least to himself. On the one hand, his Modernism=fake theory leads him to a bunch of antifascist Nazis or anti-Nazi fascists. On the other, his implicit acceptance of Modernism in that other essay leads him to a stance that I wholeheartedly approve of. This is the Miles Mathis I can agree with on pragmatic grounds. As I said, the generalizing of the fakery meme inevitably grinds to a halt as soon as one hits something really real, such as self. When you hit that point, you either begin to doubt yourself, or you dismiss the whole thing as being itself unreal, fake or a gross overgeneralization. This other work, in contrast, has pragmatic validity in providing a basis for concrete action such as I describe here.

    Overall, I think his heart is in the right place, but he is trying too hard. He doesn’t need to be a CIA asset himself to be playing into their hands. If you follow Paul’s link above to the Omniverse material you will find, among others things, this:
    Quote “It relies on the average person’s tendency to generalize
    a single sample point to a whole group and use binary thinking.”
    ~Ex-CIA Engineer Dr. Robert Duncan; From the Out of Print Book: The Matrix Deciphered
    Overgeneralization – a category which includes all the –isms (sexism, racism, antisemitism...), phobias (xenophobia, homophobia...) and the mis- words (misogyny, misanthropy) – is an ‘average person’s tendency’. We need to do much better than average.

    In the above-mentioned medical studies and other research, an effect becomes statistically significant with a probability of 0.05, i.e. odds of 20/1. Interestingly, if you take Wilcock’s synchronicities, a string of 3 identical digits is a 100/1 chance, so 3 identical digits in a five-digit string would be about 33/1. Hence Wilcock is seeing something statistically significant provided he only looks once; he only needs to look twice to fall under the threshold. But statistically significant is still small beer most of the time: unlikely things happen all the time (improbability is highly probable!); they only become important when say you are looking for a molecule to improve people’s health. I only had to think that synchronicity is the background placebo effect to read in the local paper a piece about a band called Placebo playing with a band called Phoenix, along with a cartoon. There is no end to this stuff.
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    And most of all, there is no beginning. What happened before the Big Bang?
    From post #10:
    Quote I tend to feel if you're going to start a new thread start it fresh so someone reading for the first time gets the gist without having to sink time into backtracking.
    I fully understand and sympathize, Helene, but the problem is nothing new. 2,000 years ago, the Latin poet Horace pointed out how Homer started ‘in medias res’: ‘he always hurries to the main event and whisks his audience into the middle of things as though they knew already’, without going all the way back to the egg from which Helen of Troy was born. Wikipedia mentions Laurence Sterne’s sendup of this idea, when Tristram Shandy records the night of his own conception as being the time his father forgot to wind up the clock, which really puts a spanner in the works from the getgo – a kind of time sink, to quote your words.

    The fact is that an egg is no better a place to start, as there always has to have been a chicken first. We ourselves start life in medias res: the memorable form of consciousness kicks in after a few years and we need our parents to tell us what we were like before that. The idea of original sin is that we all have ‘previous’. We enter this world as you join an ongoing conversation; we go to school to get up to speed so as to be able to join in meaningfully – if that is still possible. The thing is, so many have been jumping in for so long that the conversation has gone round in circles to the point of becoming largely meaningless.

    Heraclitus said you can never jump in the same river twice: without contradicting him, James Joyce is saying you jump every time into the same loopy river in a cycle of ‘forget remember’. And the kabbalists say that the Bible actually starts with ‘In the beginning – well, not quite the beginning...’. See this post.


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Quote Posted by Foxie Loxie (here)
    Finally finished reading all your posts, araucaria.....WHEW! Of course I learned much I did not know about before because of my narrowminded upbringing; but I certainly enjoyed your concluding that both the male & the female minds are needed. I don't even know how to play Poker, but I DO enjoy listening to the exchange of ideas! I also, from experience, understand that some people's personalities seem to require that there be some sort of "challenge" in order to make their lives worth living; or at least more interesting. (Just the musings of a Grandmother!)
    Foxie Loxie, please don’t belittle yourself: a grandmother is a mainstay of any human family and hence society at large, potentially impervious to a narrow-minded upbringing. This much is obvious since you are still game for this ride, and yes, it is all about reconciling the male and female minds. This next few posts are mostly about the male side of the equation; we’ll come eventually to the feminine side, and later to the balancing. There is a generational aspect to this: from squabbling children to young men and women searching for a way to prosper together (and often coming a cropper), under the stabilizing influence of grandparents who have usually come to some peaceful working relationship. I am trying to make this thread as convivial as I can, not easy I know; I hope you enjoyed the glass of beer the other day. Today I am offering coffee and croissants, with a few grannies as well to keep you company

    One of the stumbling-blocks, I find, is having a destination or goal such as proving a point or fulfilling some agenda. Another way to look at things is as going on an exploratory stroll, which may take you off the beaten track, maybe getting lost when the end point momentarily disappears from view. So often in life, we only see what we expect to see, i.e. what we have seen many times before. We wouldn’t recognize novelty even if it slaps us in the face. Intellectually, if you (think you) know in advance what you are looking for, then you are going to find it, even if it isn’t there, and you are not going to find the interesting stuff that really is there. The same mechanical, instinctive approach is at work. This ties in with what I was saying about shortcuts: sometimes we need them, but to make them work, sometimes we need to take the long route. Marcel Proust’s huge novel In Search of Lost Time aka Remembrance of Things Past does exactly that. He has two Sunday walks, the short Swann’s Way for rainy days, and the longer Guermantes Way for fine weather. It is only at the very end that he learns that Swann’s Way is a shortcut to the Guermantes estate. This is an on-the-ground example of the epiphany, the blissful moment when laborious remembrance is short-circuited and he actually relives a blissful childhood moment with his mother, simply by dipping a madeleine cake in his tea – liquid and solid forming an intermediate pap. You don’t get the bliss of the shortcut until you have experienced the full distance. We here are taking the long walk, without worrying about getting anywhere, because the weather is fine and the walk is meant to be enjoyable in itself. We have all the time in the world.

    Miles Mathis rushes us to his destination: Intelligence. Very briefly on the way, he casts suspicion on the diminutive William James for his membership of the theosophical society. ‘I also encourage you to notice that Wikipedia downplays James' founding of the Society for Psychical Research as well as his membership in the Theosophical Society. We get one short sentence on each.’ He complains of brevity, and for his own ‘brief’ (statement of his case) he keeps returning to Wikipedia, which is never more than the tip of the given iceberg. What I have done so far has been to expand a couple of his paragraphs into 25,000 words. James himself in Pragmatism presciently describes how verifiability is a handy shortcut for verification; but for this to work, occasional verification is necessary:
    Quote Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth. But beliefs verified concretely by SOMEBODY are the posts of the whole superstructure.
    So, what might be a legitimate justification for James joining the theosophical society? Well, always supposing a legitimate justification is needed without descending into censorship, we might see it in terms of research value. An interest in all kinds of unsavoury things can be justified in this way. One can make no judgement, for example, about the personal morals of a doctor on the basis that he treats venereal disease. It so happens that James delivered a series of lectures (the Gifford Lectures) in Edinburgh on The Varieties of Religious Experience (later turned into a book). This is a broad-ranging study that likewise says nothing about the author’s personal religious views. Not only does it not necessarily imply approval of anything, it has some critical things to say about certain forms of saintliness: ‘excessive devoutness as fanaticism’, notably when it affects a ‘feeble intellect’ and becomes a ‘theopathic condition’ (‘theopathic absorption’; p.293 of my edition).

    James does quote Helena Blavatsky, on page 559, to illustrate his contention that ‘many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions’, when they do not ‘awaken laughter’. James’s conclusion is that ‘mystical states carry authority for him who has them’ but that ‘no authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.’ He goes on to say that ‘as a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition (...) It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view.’ (pp.560, 564) That is a pretty neutral thing to conclude about mystics and their critics, and it also shows James’s – doubtless imperfect – understanding of who Helena Blavatsky was and what she stood for in a totally innocent light. This is no more surprising that if we were told that he joined the Freemasons and knew nothing about what goes on beyond the 32nd degree. Hence ‘Freemasonry’ and other secret societies are labels that are far too general, unless you are slinging mud and are happy to see it stick on a lot of harmless bystanders as well.

    The problem with this attack on James is that it can be turned back on its author. For, by the same token, does not Mathis disqualify himself by taking a look, not just at the CIA but also at The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion? I wonder, does that interest make him an antifascist Nazi or an anti-Nazi fascist? Having just discovered where I put my biography of Wyndham Lewis (Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: a Life of Wyndham Lewis, London, Jonathan Cape, 2000), I am going to talk about him, as another owner of the Protocols, instead of Mathis, of whom I know nothing. Wyndham Lewis, you will recall, is the artist-writer guy that fought in the first war and in Ezra Pound’s poem has a close brush with death while relieving himself. The version presented here is slightly different: Lewis was not relieving himself but relieving someone else on duty behind the line, while a couple of men got hit standing where he normally would have been posted. So while a bit of poetic licence has crept in, the basic story is very true, and so very banal, even though the biography as a whole undeniably portrays a man perhaps a little too full of himself and (to pursue the textile analogy) capable of embroidering a story to his personal advantage.

    Here is Miles Mathis’s only reference to Wyndham Lewis.
    Quote We have even more evidence that all these people were Intelligence assets in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan. I was alerted to this by a reader. In a February 1952 letter to Ezra Pound, McLuhan says this:
    Quote Last year has been spent in going through rituals of secret societies with fine comb. As I said before I'm in a bloody rage at the discovery that the arts and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn't make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals as a basis for art activity...
    You may say by secret societies he meant Thelema or Golden Dawn or something. But he is obviously aware that the secret societies themselves are in the pockets of Intelligence, since he adds,
    Quote Now that I know the nature of the sectarian strife among the Societies I have no intention of participating in it any further, until I know a good deal more. To hell with East and West.
    Note that “east and west.” Who was mainly concerned with the battle of east and west in 1952? The CIA, of course. The editor of these Letters reminds us that Wyndham Lewis also complained of the same thing in the same period, mainly in his Time and Western Man.
    Notice how Mathis’s claim that ‘he is obviously aware that the secret societies themselves are in the pockets of Intelligence’ is contradicted by the very quote he uses to back up that statement, which carries the proviso ‘until I know a good deal more’. What you have is a gap in McLuhan’s knowledge being filled by something Mathis thinks he knows. This is an egregious example of twisting someone’s words to make them mean what you want them to mean. I very much doubt if back in 1952 McLuhan was thinking of the CIA (founded in 1947) with reference to the likes of Joyce (died early 1941)... Now reread this: ‘Note that “east and west.” Who was mainly concerned with the battle of east and west in 1952?’ My answer: any concerned citizen despairing over the political pages of their daily newspaper and forming opinions to take to ballot box on election day or to some other political activity before that. What we get time and again from Mathis are anachronisms due to absence of context. Context includes everyday things people were doing back then, and also interactions between the given individuals, about which we can find out much more. As soon as you start fleshing it out, the picture looks absurd.

    On the subject of newspapers and everyday things, a page from Time Regained, the final novel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time shows how during World War I even the pseudo-nobility reacted to news, albeit with zero empathy. This passage takes the experience of unreality (one aspect of ‘fakery’) to extreme lengths, since the unreality of war is placed a degree further away even than the unreality of play-acting, itself a world apart from the here-and-now of one’s creature comforts:
    Quote One might say the Verdurins did, nevertheless, think about it,
    since they had a political salon where the situation of the armies and
    of the fleets was discussed every day. As a matter of fact, they
    thought about those hecatombs of annihilated regiments, of engulfed
    seafarers, but an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what
    concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does
    not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly
    affects us more unpleasantly than a draught. Mme. Verdurin, who
    suffered from headaches on account of being unable to get croissants
    to dip into her coffee, had obtained an order from Cottard which
    enabled her to have them made in the restaurant mentioned earlier. It
    had been almost as difficult to procure this order from the
    authorities as the nomination of a general. She started her first
    croissant again on the morning the papers announced the wreck of
    the Lusitania. Dipping it into her coffee, she arranged her
    newspaper so that it would stay open without her having to deprive her
    other hand of its function of dipping, and exclaimed with horror, "How
    awful! It's more frightful than the most terrible tragedies." But
    those drowning people must have seemed to her reduced a thousand-fold,
    for, while she indulged in these saddening reflections, she was
    filling her mouth and the expression on her face, induced, one
    supposes, by the savour of the croissant, precious remedy for her
    headache, was rather that of placid satisfaction.
    (Notice in passing how the function of dipping the croissant into her coffee parodies the madeleine effect; it is a parody because no distance is overcome in time or space, and there is no mother/son or other interpersonal empathy felt at all, just the opposite in fact: placid (self-)satisfaction instead of bliss.)
    Life goes on. Transpose this to the early 1950s. In 1951, people were scared to death with the Cold War, and had their kids at school learning to ‘Duck and Cover’ with Bert the Turtle in the event of a nuclear attack. I am sure ‘To hell with East and West’ was a sentiment shared by many of these toddlers in their own childish way, for how could they feel the slightest concern for, or at all get their little heads round the idea of Armageddon when this drill was just more evidence that the grown-ups had everything under control to protect them. They were among the first to be ‘concerned with the battle’ and the very last who should have been. In the service of intelligence they were not. They should have been out playing.

    To give another example of how contemporary context is needed to understand things, note how Mathis makes a big deal about John Quinn’s 1913 Armory Show being held at a (disused) military facility. My first thought is that an exhibition on this scale (‘a show of giant proportions’ that ‘displayed some 1,300 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works’) could not be held at any old venue and indeed, this material consideration is borne out with the fact that later, in Chicago and Boston, ‘due to a lack of space, all the work by American artists was removed’ (See a Wikipedia article with photos of two exhibition organizers, neither of whom is John Quinn). My second thought relates to security, which could only be a nightmare with so many artworks, albeit recent and not yet priceless, and so many visitors; a military facility might be better than any other to provide tight enough security. Why would tight security be such an issue at that particular time, a century before it became routine? Quite simply because throughout the Armory Show, from the planning stage through the actual exhibition period and beyond, the Mona Lisa was missing from the Louvre, whence it had been stolen in August 1911 and whither it was not returned until December 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenzo_Peruggia

    If you need a different sort of corroboration for what I’m saying, the historian Michael Parenti uses the same argument to refute Noam Chomsky’s dismissal of CIA involvement in the JFK assassination, which is the sort of thing that makes Chomsky a shill in the eyes of many:
    Quote Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky’s assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration’s interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963. (Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1996, p.178)
    Mathis is making the same two ‘mistakes’: hindsight, and from the wrong side of the fence: to accept his assumptions, we need data that focuses not on the policies ‘that festered in intelligence circles’ but on ‘the more private sentiments’ that characterize the mindset of the artist/writers he takes to task. Those sentiments are not so very private, being actually published, albeit in the form of art of one kind or another such as requires a degree of competence and understanding that appears to be lacking. These are important points I am making, probably applicable on occasion to many bona fide researchers as well as disinfo agents – hence something for their readers to keep in mind.

    .../....
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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Started at the end, 19 post left to read, going backward.... Ouf!

    Although more "verbuous", and eloquently written, you feel more and more like Carmody to me 😱😰😝. It would certainly help if I would have had earlier exposure to Joyce or Mathis or the whole anglo saxon literary writings.

    So, like with Carmody, i need to reread some of these posts.

    However, the tiny zest of understanding i reached reading you, Arsucaria, not only impressed me, but made me go further in developing a clearer comprehension of the nature of things, of thinkings, of mind errors as well as mind brillancy and just thinking.

    Thanks for furthering my own thinking process and enhancing my own world views.
    Last edited by Flash; 29th December 2016 at 01:50.
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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Quote Posted by Flash (here)
    Started at the end, 19 post left to read, going backward.... Ouf!
    Thank you Flash, as always, for your kind words: they are much appreciated. I have no problem being compared to Carmody, because while his subject matter is very difficult, his presentation is no more difficult than he can help: there is a way through. So it is nonetheless a form of clarity, since the writer at least understands what he is talking about. That is not as common as you might think. Most of us, at least some of the time, stumble over our formulations, paper over the cracks instead of trying to mend them, and ultimately don’t really know what we are talking about.

    However, I am not sure reading my posts in reverse order is going to help at all – for a start, my next posts are going to catch you on your blind side! There is a definite linear component to my exposition whereby certain statements follow on from each other in the given order, as you will have noticed in the post you read. Joyce’s prose is notoriously terribly difficult, notably because of the cyclical element This means that on the largest scale the end flows back into the beginning, but it is in no way a palindrome that reads the same both ways. His own expression is ‘tellibly divilcult’, which I take to mean (on the basis on internal clues) there is a ‘tellable’ component with a 'beginning', 'middle' and 'end', hindered by a ‘devil cult’ of satanic reversals. If you want to see how reversal leads to a very different story, read Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. See here and here.
    Last edited by araucaria; 29th December 2016 at 10:22.


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    .../....
    My point here is that, as with William James above, creative artists and writers (intellectuals, not children) not only have a need to know for the practice of their art: they have a way to know through the practice of their art. Politics are an integral part of that. Politics are not like religious observance restricted for some to Sunday mornings: church and the Sunday papers. They inform everything one does, especially when this is art. And as a corollary, this is what makes, or should make, any individual life a work of art. And sometimes this gets into the mainstream press, like only yesterday, presenting James Joyce in a positive light, as someone forward-looking, wanting to embrace “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world”.


    I have a double problem with the status of Wyndham Lewis in Mathis’s essay: I have a problem with his absence from the list of suspects – the above mention is all we get, and he is presented as one of the plaintiffs; I also have a problem with his double presence in the above extract: Mathis appears not to have noticed that the Lewis referred to by McLuhan between Joyce and Eliot is not McLuhan’s Texan wife Corinne née Lewis but the selfsame Wyndham Lewis, presumably complaining about himself – talk about ‘sectarian strife’! This at least is another knot in the thread Mathis is trying to unravel that I want to explore because when we find someone on both sides of an argument we have a chance to move away from an area of conflict into an area of possible resolution.

    Being on a parallel course to Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis should really be another prime suspect. He picked up an abiding reputation as a Nazi sympathizer after publishing a book in 1931 called Hitler that showed early sympathy to the Führer before he rose to power although apparently no understanding of antisemitism, and despite bringing out another book in 1939 totally disassociating himself from Nazi Germany, and a third against antisemitism. You are not allowed to change your mind, anything you say will be carved in stone; you are labelled once and for all. But if one takes something he actually wrote, the labels fade away behind the meaning of his words. Clearly he is not using the word Fascist in the expected manner; he is talking to ordinary people in their ordinary lives:
    Quote a word to the Fascist at large. You stand to-day where Socialism stood yesterday – for the Poor against the Rich. You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the middleman; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism. (British Union Quarterly, 1937). (Some Sort of Genius, p.366)
    Ezra Pound makes the same point more succinctly in the Cantos: ‘“No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, / Wealth ain’t, “ said President Jackson.’ Notice how Wikipedia makes a couple of changes in the above quote: ‘Machine’ for ‘middleman’, and dropping the reference to Socialism altogether. This is critical, because Lewis is pointing the finger at the way the labels have been changed. Socialism (or communism) is a dirty word especially when aimed at ordinary people. The same ordinary people then get tarred with the other brush, the brush of fascism. Ordinary people are fascists; people at the top are liberals, or maybe capitalists, nothing nasty of course. The people are actually not one thing or the other; they are simply doing what they have always done, scraping a livelihood and being demonized one way or the other, when the real Fascist Communists are the elite in charge of both shaping the theories and meting out the punishment on the ground. Lewis is not talking to them or as one of them, but as one of the people. That is the simple fact that is further demonized as populism or demagoguery, while power is wielded on a permanent basis by a coalition of ‘compassionate’ conservatives and champagne ‘socialists’. Not all these people are scoundrels: some or many are perfectly decent, with the best of intentions; but their elitism is like the air they breathe, they simply don’t see it. If you take another 19th century novel, not Dickens but Anthony Trollope, you see how good and bad operate together in a vacuum from which the populace is excluded. See these posts here and here.

    Coming back to Mathis’s treatment of William James, the final chapter of O’Keeffe’s biography, ‘Post mortem’, describes something that happened at Lewis’s dilapidated and soon-to-be demolished flat, when one Patricia Hutchins came to recover some soggy documents that had been left behind. One of these, possibly ‘hidden away behind furniture’ according to his widow, was The Protocols of Zion, which she claimed never to have seen before and which she confiscated. Here is Paul O’Keeffe:
    Quote As the author of a book on anti-Semitism, Lewis had, of course, an impeccable excuse for possessing a copy of the infamous text. Indeed, in The Jews Are They Human? he specifically referred to it, as one extreme of his own even-handed approach to the subject:
    Quote I am proof against The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and also against invitations to pro-Jewish excesses. I neither regard the person of Jewish race as a devil nor as a darling.
    Ironically, Lewis’s little volume of 1939, deploring the treatment of Jew by Gentile, has acquired, on the basis of its too-clever title alone [‘a parody of Gustaff Renier’s best-selling humorous study of national stereotypes: The English: Are They Human?’ p.390], as evil a reputation as The Protocols of Zion itself. So too the glib, under-researched defence of Hitler, published in 1931 at a time when not even the most prescient of political commentators could have imagined the full horror of the Third Reich, has, with hindsight, caused its author to be branded ‘Fascist’. Left Wings Over Europe and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! are remembered, if they are remembered at all, not as anti-war books, but as pro-Mussolini and pro-Franco respectively. Finally even his 1939 anti-Nazi book, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End, written, it is argued, too late in the day to be at all convincing as a genuine change of heart, is seen as damage-limitation rather than recantation. ‘These are long vendettas,’ he had written in 1933, of present and future detractors, ‘a peculiar people, neither forgivers nor forgetters.’
    Today, almost 70 years later (...) The stigma remains. His widow had good reason to be protective. (p.635-6)
    This story has an interesting parallel, for Lewis himself was alarmed to discover his Hitler book at some friends’ house a few years after its publication, not wanting his friend’s wife to get the wrong idea. So the friend hid the book behind some other books, later discovering that Lewis had made off with it (O’Keeffe, p.484). Sometimes a writer can disown a book he has written.
    This labelling trap which Miles Mathis falls into with his notions of intelligence assets, modernist fakes and so on, really does tie us in knots. From Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s The Controversy of Zion: How Zionism Tried to Resolve the Jewish Question, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996, pp.198-9, where that word ‘many’ starts quite a cascade:
    Quote many of the Bolsheviks in Russia itself [were Jewish], too many for their own good. The October Revolution had given a new stimulus to antisemitism in the West, which was shaken by revolution, expropriation and terror. A high proportion of the Bolsheviks were Jews, most notably Leon Trotsky whose nom de guerre concealed his original name of Bronstein but scarcely disguised his origins. This did not escape notice; it kindled much hatred in return, and even saw a reprise of a classic antisemitic fantasy. ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was a fabrication which purported to set forth a great world-wide Jewish conspiracy. It had circulated in Russia before the war and made its way west after. It was a comment on the climate of the time that the ‘Protocols’ were taken seriously by The Times in May 1920, and that the editor of another London paper, H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post, wrote a respectful introduction to them. Even Winston Churchill – in whose extraordinary and chequered career philosemitism was generally a fixed point – could denounce ‘the international Jews’. Their ‘world-wide conspiracy’ was dedicated to the overthrow of civilisation’, he wrote in 1920, and warned of ‘the international Soviet of the Russian and the Polish Jew’, as well as of a ‘very powerful’ lobby of English Jews. This was a man who had and was to have many Jewish friends and associates, Weizmann among them. The aberration can only be understood in terms of the violent anti-Bolshevik mood in which Churchill was caught up. (...)
    After another war, times had changed, and so had Churchill. He was not one thing or the other, he was both at different times: a work in progress as Avalonians like to say. From The Second World War, Vol. I, The Gathering Storm, Cassell & Co., 1948, pp.43.-4, he explains how Hitlerism and antisemitism are totally synonymous... to the black-and-white thinking of the Führer himself:
    Quote The main thesis of Mein Kampf is simple. Man is a fighting animal, therefore the nation, being a community of fighters, is a fighting unit. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is doomed to extinction. A country or race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin; for it means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence. (...) The aristocratic principle is fundamentally sound. Intellectualism is undesirable (...) Nothing could have been effected by the bourgeois virtues of peace and order.
    One thing Lewis did not like about Joyce was his ‘bourgeois’ side: Joyce admits only to be an ordinary middle-class person. Anthony Burgess, who edited A Shorter Finnegans Wake and of course himself later mangled the English language in his A Clockwork Orange, once joked with Jorge-Luis Borges that they shared the same name, meaning burgher or... bourgeois. In ‘Joyce the bourgeois’ wryly refers to himself in mangled form: ‘poorjoist’. There is nothing wrong with being middle-class per se; it is the swing-vote class that can choose to side with the rest of the people or with the elite; among them, the intelligentsia are a special (influential) and potentially easy target inasmuch as they tend to see themselves as an intellectual elite. Ezra Pound puts it this way in the Cantos: ‘“Artists high rank, in fact sole social summits / which the tempest of politics can not reach,” / which remark appears to have been made by Napoleon.’ This would be a good reason for attacking this group – and for defending it too. See this post.

    We know something of what happened to Lewis to change his mind: he made two trips to Germany, in 1934 and 1937. On the second occasion, he came to Berlin from Warsaw, where he had seen the Ghetto first hand – and recommended that anyone anxious to form an opinion about the Jewish problem should do likewise. He visited Berlin ‘en touriste’ having declined to fall in with an arrangement made by ‘an English admirer of Herr Hitler’ to meet the Führer (O’Keeffe, p.370). So apparently his mind was made up by that time. O’Keeffe speculates that the ‘English admirer’ was another Joyce, William Joyce, aka the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, who broadcast out of Germany during the war and was executed for his trouble (no doubt justifiably, I really don’t know; but the parallel with Pound in Italy is worth exploring, for similarities as well as the differences), and with whom Lewis once dined at British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley’s place. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that Lewis was a fascist, I would say that you can share a meal with someone without sharing their views (one man’s meat is another man’s poison as the saying goes), and speculate that Lewis stood up Herr Hitler precisely because he had heard enough first hand already. Some people are not ‘jung and freudened’ (Joycean for young and frightened), but mature and not so scared that they cannot take a look for themselves.

    .../...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    The basic point I am making can be summed up by the formula, When is an X not an X? When is a Jew not a Jew? When is a Churchill not a Churchill? General answer to them all: when these labels are found to be too one-dimensional. When is a phallic symbol not a phallic symbol? According to Freud, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ Which brings us back to Joyce, who says, ‘When is a man not a man?’ ‘When he’s a sham’ (a pun on the name Shem, one of his warring twins). Likewise, when is a river not a river? When it’s a cloud; i.e. when it becomes part of a loop formed by the cycle of water reaching the sea then making its way back to the mountain. In other words, labels like ‘man’ and ‘river’ are for convenience only. A river is also not a river when it is the land around it. Its visible source is only one of thousands of sources coming from all directions along its course. And it works both ways: land is simply a drier form of a geography with the river at the wetter end of the same spectrum. In wet weather, the land drains into the river; in dry weather, the river is drained into (irrigates) the land. That is the bigger picture of the thing we call ‘river’. It is an example of what Terence McKenna means in saying that Finnegans Wake is all about ‘dissolving boundaries’. I would add that the masculine counterpart to the feminine river is the city, which can extend its boundaries through urban sprawl but resists dissolution.


    I would further add that there is also the smaller picture. Take a single molecule of water in that river as a conscious entity. It might have joined the river from any one of those sources, or it might have arrived directly through rainfall. It might have raced down the mainstream all the way, or possibly spent eons visiting the stagnant backwaters, hitching a lift from a fish to get from one to the other. It might have been recycled ten times though a city water system, going through a shower, a dish-washer or their owner before being flushed down the sewers. Or it might have recently arrived from the other side of the world as part of a cup of coffee drunk by some Japanese just before hopping on a long-haul flight. What we call a river is the combination of all the myriad lives of its individual molecules and their interactions. Now imagine some of those interactions and how they might lead to planetary awareness. Say a lifelong stay-at-home molecule notices how lately no one has been holidaying in hot arid places like they used to (desertification); or hears stories from the seafarers of seeing more of the coastal land above the horizon than they ever did before (rising sea levels); or meets many more molecules reporting hair-raising experiences inside typhoons and tornadoes (climate change); or encounters total strangers that have never been anywhere for many millennia (sinking water table). And of course these travelling molecules will be bringing souvenirs with them such as disease or radioactivity, eventually causing widespread contagion. See this posted by Jeff Rense.

    The same thing happens with language. Some Jews are Bolsheviks. Some Bolsheviks are evil murderers. To generalize is to spread contagion. We have to go in the opposite direction and restrict the application of these labels: this Jew is not a Bolshevik; that Jew is a Bolshevik but not an evil murderer. You could also go in the opposite direction by simply following Hitler’s logic, and say a Nazi/fighter is an antisemite/antipacifist, therefore a Jewish Nazi is a contradiction in terms. While such hybrids/hypocrites doubtless exist, they are not typical, still less stereotypical. Again, you could also go in the opposite direction by noting how within a few decades fascist Italy turned to a government in coalition with the Communists. Or you may note how the postwar papacy has swung from the far right to the far left twice over.

    .../...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    .../...

    I said earlier that Miles Mathis reads things into a piece of writing that are not there; he also puts thoughts into his reader’s mind. When he says ‘You may say by secret societies he [McLuhan] meant Thelema or Golden Dawn or something’, er no, I would not say any such thing; I would say ‘what the hell are these “rituals of secret societies” common to Pound, Joyce, Lewis and Eliot?’ The only rituals I know of in this connection are the Catholic rituals observed by McLuhan himself since he converted in 1937 after reading Chesterton, himself a convert, as if they are okay for not being secret. And they are perfectly okay: no one is accusing McLuhan of conspiring with Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who also converted to Catholicism, and Eliot, who converted to Anglo-Catholicism. They were each responding to some personal experience of a higher dimension. C.S. Lewis (no relation as far as I know) was another for whom religion became hugely important as he came under Tolkien’s influence. It seems no easier to point to any general phenomenon here than it would be in noting that C.S. Lewis died on the same day as Aldous Huxley, and... JFK.

    There are several knots to be unpicked here. Christianity is only okay if you identify with the grassroots and not with the embedded secret society known as the Vatican, or doubtless that other embedded secret society, the Society of Jesus. And conversely, any known value in truly secret societies may possibly be found hidden in plain sight in the work of published authors: where else would we hope to find it? This is again the insider-turned-whistleblower under suspicion simply for possessing secret information: how did they get it? It is tempting to become wary of Catholic converts since Tony Blair joined their ranks, but I shall not go there.

    A second sticking point is the notion of ritual: while I am unclear as to what is meant in relation to secret societies, which at least have such things, I fail to see how it would relate to dealings with the CIA – and I still have very little inkling as to the connection with the writers referred to. The commonality of secrecy is an obvious attractor, but is there a ritual component to this connection? This is a staple of the most lurid conspiracy theories, but I am not going there either. At the moment of writing I don’t actually know where I am going with this; the beauty of creative writing however is that formulating a question is a first step to finding the answer.

    There is more to the 1952 McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound than I have stated so far. Was he writing to the conspiracy theorist at that time locked up in an asylum having only just saved his neck on treason charges, or was he writing to Mathis’s intelligence asset hidden away at some unknown location?
    Quote Pound himself was also not aloof from political reality. An admirer of Mussolini, he lived in fascist Italy beginning in 1925. When World War II broke out, Pound stayed in Italy, retaining his U.S. citizenship, and broadcasting a series of controversial radio commentaries. These commentaries often attacked Roosevelt and the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war. By 1943 the U.S. government deemed the broadcasts to be treasonous; at war's end the poet was arrested by the U.S. Army and kept imprisoned in a small, outdoor wire cage at a compound near Pisa, Italy. For several weeks during that hot summer, Pound was confined to the cage. At night floodlights lit his prison. Eventually judged to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. He stayed in the hospital until 1958 when Robert Frost led a successful effort to free the poet. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ail/ezra-pound
    Was McLuhan trying to help Pound, as Robert Frost later did, and as Eustace Mullins did (by researching 'the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war’, including the Warburgs since the previous war, as we saw earlier)? Or was he hitting a man while he was down? I don’t know; but I do know that he had a bone to pick with Wyndham Lewis, or rather Wyndham Lewis had a bone to pick with him after the war. McLuhan, was a Canadian who hopped in an out of the US to avoid the draft. He arranged for Lewis to lecture in St Louis, with the promise of some good money on the side doing portraits. The money never materialized, and Lewis eventually cottoned on to the fact that McLuhan had been using him to get himself back to Canada as part of his draft avoidance. But let me quote the whole episode from Paul O’Keeffe.
    Quote It was not, however the harmless mangling of a press release [...but] a section of the article in which the local reporter had got his facts more or less correct that embarrassed Lewis and caused him to cancel the [speaking] engagement. In the second paragraph, he was described as ‘editor of the Blast, a magazine publishing the works of many well-known writers, including Ezra Pound.’
    Since his indictment for treason by a Federal Grand Jury in Washington DC on 26 July 1943, the author of The Cantos had become a potentially dangerous man to be associated with. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war against the Axis Powers, he had continued broadcasting on Rome Radio, thereby ‘adhering’ to his country’s enemies and ‘giving them Aid and Comfort’. There was a strong likelihood that, when the war was over and the time came for such scores to be settled, Ezra Pound would hang.
    Lewis was horrified at a 40-year-old association with an indicted traitor being publicised in a small community naturally mistrustful of strangers and in wartime positively xenophobic. He and his wife had already been the target of gossip and insinuations [...] (pp. 499-500)
    O’Keeffe describes how Lewis wrote McLuhan a letter which, apart from saying ‘I am ashamed to say you inveigled me down to St. Louis. You came up here to avoid the draft. We changed places’, was full of ‘generalities and longterm grudges’ which however failed to explain exactly what the problem was on this occasion: that explanation (‘You have made it impossible for me to give my lecture’) did not make it past the draft stage. The only subsequent mention of McLuhan in Lewis’s biography is of him writing to report his ‘evangelising’ Lewis’s novel Self Condemned as ‘a very important piece of work’ (p.605; this would be in 1955). Hence, without wishing to read too much into this limited information, McLuhan seems not to have understood the damage he did in mentioning Pound, meaning it may have been unintentional. This in turn would mean that he did not share the view of Pound as an American equivalent of Lord Haw-Haw during the war.
    .../...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    .../...

    If we are to make anything of this McLuhan quote, we need to understand better where he is coming from. He was not a creative writer like the men he is criticizing, but an academic (those who can’t, teach...). In the video below, explaining his ‘medium is the message’ theory, at 2.20 he says that the telephone environment as a ‘structure of awareness affecting everyone’ is much more important than any given conversation: it doesn’t much matter what you actually say. This is the direct opposite of what I, as a writer, mean by the phrase with respect to a piece of writing. For me the particular unique occurrence, the private conversation between A and B, is absolutely crucial for those two persons and for no one else. Equating the medium and the message for me is about managing the physical parameters of the given medium to the given content; for a very simple example by realizing that some things are ambiguous when spoken, e.g. over the phone.

    In contrast, the ‘structure of awareness affecting everyone’ sounds more like the NSA records of everything that was ever said over the phone – begging the question: If it doesn’t much matter what you actually say, then why the heck does Intelligence need to know? I hadn’t thought of it this way before, never having read the guy; but if he applies the same thinking to literature, then straightaway one sees the problem: it doesn’t much matter what X, Y or Z actually writes, the medium is all that counts, and all they are doing is contributing to the overall ‘structure of awareness’. No wonder then that they become an object of interest to spies instead of to readers. But of course the key difference is secrecy, or the lack of it: publication means publicity. Okay, so you try to influence what authors write: that would be self-contradictory, because it amounts to admitting that what they write is important after all. But worse than that, their writing is important first and foremost to themselves, precisely because they are ahead on their own turf and can resist unwanted influence. To influence someone like Joyce, you would need the skills of someone like Joyce. The CIA’s well-tried method for controlling a loose cannon is to silence him, there is no alternative. Of course, the censorship takes place at the level of the publishers, who only let through what they want and are more easily controllable. Back then, printers were also responsible for what they printed, and so the only way to publish Ulysses was to send it to a French printer in Dijon who could not read a word of English.

    McLuhan’s reading skills don’t sound too good either. He states (at 5 mins) that to read is etymologically to guess: ‘reading is actually an activity of rapid guessing’ (e.g. between multiple meanings of a word).He says good readers make good executives because they make all their decisions at high speed. So now we know why we live under a corporatocracy, sometimes aka fascism... speed-readers piling up the faulty guesswork.

    ‘Look it up in the big dictionary’ says McLuhan – okay, let’s do that. The Oxford English Dictionary, probably the very biggest, does attest, in its definitional section, that ancient usage from the year 1000, but also quotes Bede’s History from a century earlier in the sense ‘to have an idea; to think or suppose’. Going even further back, in the etymological section that precedes these definitions, you read the following:
    Quote The original senses of the Teut. verb are those of taking or giving counsel, taking care or charge of a thing, having or exercising control over something etc. (...) The sense of considering or explaining something obscure or mysterious is also common in the various languages...
    McLuhan is proving his point about ‘rapid guessing’ (and mine as well); and I am reading ‘reading’ in this more careful, responsible, advisory, considerate and helpful way. He has almost nothing to say about how a telephone conversation actually works. To learn a bit about that, one needs to take counsel from a great writer, Marcel Proust, in The Guermantes Way, whose explanations of some the arcanes are quoted below. McLuhan says (at 6 mins) that an artist sets a trap to catch your attention: ‘that is the nature of art’. Not true: the artist merely establishes a connection to his reader/viewer/listener through a medium; it is in the nature of that medium to present a few obstacles to perfect communication for the unpractised. Proust offers a few of these from the early days of telephony as being also germane to his own medium of writing: what he does to his reader is nothing to do with setting traps, more like putting in an old-fashioned trunk call. His reader may be out – with or without an answerphone – or may hang up on him.
    Quote One morning, Saint-Loup confessed to me that he had written to my
    grandmother to give her news of me, with the suggestion that, since
    there was telephonic connexion between Paris and Doncières, she might
    make use of it to speak to me. In short, that very day she was to give
    me a call, and he advised me to be at the post office at about a
    quarter to four. The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in
    use as it is to-day. And yet habit requires so short a time to divest
    of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that,
    not having had my call at once, the only thought in my mind was that
    it was very slow, and badly managed, and I almost decided to lodge a
    complaint. Like all of us nowadays I found not rapid enough for my
    liking in its abrupt changes the admirable sorcery for which a few
    moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the
    person to whom we have been wishing to speak, and who, while still
    sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my
    grandmother's case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather
    that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and
    worries of which we know nothing, but of which he is going to inform
    us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all
    the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach of our ear,
    at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained. And we are like
    the person in the fairy-tale to whom a sorceress, on his uttering the
    wish, makes appear with supernatural clearness his grandmother or his
    betrothed in the act of turning over a book, of shedding tears, of
    gathering flowers, quite close to the spectator and yet ever so
    remote, in the place in which she actually is at the moment. We need
    only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the
    magic orifice and invoke—occasionally for rather longer than seems to
    us necessary, I admit—the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen
    every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our
    Guardian Angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so
    jealously keep; the All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise
    up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the
    Danaids of the Unseen who without ceasing empty, fill, transmit the
    urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a
    confidence to a friend, in the hope that no one was listening, cry
    brutally: "I hear you!"; the ever infuriated servants of the Mystery,
    the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the
    Telephone.

    And, the moment our call has sounded, in the night filled with
    phantoms to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an
    abstract sound—the sound of distance overcome—and the voice of the
    dear one speaks to us.

    It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how
    remote it is! How often have I been unable to listen without anguish,
    as though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, except after
    long hours of journeying, her whose voice has been so close to my ear,
    I felt more clearly the sham and illusion of meetings apparently most
    pleasant, and at what a distance we may be from the people we love at
    the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hand to
    seize and hold them. A real presence indeed that voice so near—in
    actual separation. But a premonition also of an eternal separation!
    Over and again, as I listened in this way, without seeing her who
    spoke to me from so far away, it has seemed to me that the voice was
    crying to me from depths out of which one does not rise again, and I
    have known the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice
    should thus return (alone, and attached no longer to a body which I
    was never more to see), to murmur, in my ear, words I would fain have
    kissed as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust.
    This afternoon, alas, at Doncières, the miracle did not occur. When I
    reached the post office, my grandmother's call had already been
    received; I stepped into the box; the line was engaged; some one was
    talking who probably did not realise that there was nobody to answer
    him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless block
    began squeaking like Punchinello; I silenced it, as one silences a
    puppet, by putting it back on its hook, but, like Punchinello, as soon
    as I took it again in my hand, it resumed its gabbling. At length,
    giving it up as hopeless, by hanging up the receiver once and for all,
    I stifled the convulsions of this vociferous stump which kept up its
    chatter until the last moment, and went in search of the operator, who
    told me to wait a little; then I spoke, and, after a few seconds of
    silence, suddenly I heard that voice which I supposed myself,
    mistakenly, to know so well; for always until then, every time that my
    grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she
    was saying on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so
    largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the
    first time. And because that voice appeared to me to have altered in
    its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me in
    this way alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features,
    I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps,
    too, it had never been so sweet, for my grandmother, knowing me to be
    alone and unhappy, felt that she might let herself go in the
    outpouring of an affection which, on her principle of education, she
    usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but also how sad it
    was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness
    drained almost—more than any but a few human voices can ever have
    been—of every element of resistance to others, of all selfishness;
    fragile by reason of its delicacy it seemed at every moment ready to
    break, to expire in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone
    beside me, seen, without the mask of her face, I noticed for the first
    time the sorrows that had scarred it in the course of a lifetime.

    Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me
    this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather
    that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, a presentation, a
    direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother,
    separated, for the first time in my life, from myself. The orders or
    prohibitions which she addressed to me at every moment in the ordinary
    course of my life, the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion
    which neutralised the affection that I felt for her were at this
    moment eliminated, and indeed might be eliminated for ever (since my
    grandmother no longer insisted on having me with her under her
    control, was in the act of expressing her hope that I would stay at
    Doncières altogether, or would at any rate extend my visit for as long
    as possible, seeing that both my health and my work seemed likely to
    benefit by the change); also, what I held compressed in this little
    bell that was ringing in my ear was, freed from the conflicting
    pressures which had, every day hitherto, given it a counterpoise, and
    from this moment irresistible, carrying me altogether away, our mutual
    affection. My grandmother, by telling me to stay, filled me with an
    anxious, an insensate longing to return. This freedom of action which
    for the future she allowed me and to which I had never dreamed that
    she would consent, appeared to me suddenly as sad as might be my
    freedom of action after her death (when I should still love her and
    she would for ever have abandoned me). "Granny!" I cried to her,
    "Granny!" and would fain have kissed her, but I had beside me only
    that voice, a phantom, as impalpable as that which would come perhaps
    to revisit me when my grandmother was dead. "Speak to me!" but then it
    happened that, left more solitary still, I ceased to catch the sound
    of her voice. My grandmother could no longer hear me; she was no
    longer in communication with me; we had ceased to stand face to face,
    to be audible to one another; I continued to call her, sounding the
    empty night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying.
    I was shaken by the same anguish which, in the distant past, I had
    felt once before, one day when, a little child, in a crowd, I had lost
    her, an anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought
    that she must be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I
    was searching for her; an anguish comparable to that which I was to
    feel on the day when we speak to those who can no longer reply and
    whom we would so love to have hear all the things that we have not
    told them, and our assurance that we are not unhappy. It seemed as
    though it were already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose
    herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone before the
    instrument, I went on vainly repeating: "Granny, Granny!" as Orpheus,
    left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife, is decided to leave the
    post office, to go and find Robert at his restaurant, in order to tell
    him that, as I was half expecting a telegram which would oblige me to
    return to Paris, I wished at all costs to find out at what times the
    trains left. And yet, before reaching this decision, I felt I must
    make one attempt more to invoke the Daughters of the Night, the
    Messengers of the Word, the Deities without form or feature; but the
    capricious Guardians had not deigned once again to unclose the
    miraculous portals, or more probably, had not been able; in vain might
    they untiringly appeal, as was their custom, to the venerable inventor
    of printing and the young prince, collector of impressionist paintings
    and driver of motor-cars (who was Captain de Borodino's nephew);
    Gutenberg and Wagram left their supplications unanswered, and I came
    away, feeling that the Invisible would continue to turn a deaf ear.

    When I came among Robert and his friends, I withheld the confession
    that my heart was no longer with them, that my departure was now
    irrevocably fixed. Saint-Loup appeared to believe me, but I learned
    afterwards that he had from the first moment realised that my
    uncertainty was feigned and that he would not see me again next day.
    And while, letting their plates grow cold, his friends joined him in
    searching through the time-table for a train which would take me to
    Paris, and while we heard in the cold, starry night the whistling of
    the engines on the line, I certainly felt no longer the same peace of
    mind which on all these last evenings I had derived from the
    friendship of the former and the latter's distant passage. And yet
    they did not fail me this evening, performing the same office in a
    different way. My departure overpowered me less when I was no longer
    obliged to think of it by myself, when I felt that there was
    concentrated on what was to be done the more normal, more wholesome
    activity of my strenuous friends, Robert's brothers in arms, and of
    those other strong creatures, the trains, whose going and coming,
    night and morning, between Doncières and Paris, broke up in retrospect
    what had been too compact and insupportable in my long isolation from
    my grandmother into daily possibilities of return.
    Hence we have one immediate unexpected consequence of the telephone medium: it can produce exactly the opposite to the desired effect: the more he is told to stay the more he wants to leave. Other errors also occur, producing a kind of synchronicity (a second granny calling another young man with a similar-sounding name), as the narrator continues:
    Quote "I don't doubt the truth of what you're saying, or that you aren't
    thinking of leaving us just yet," said Saint-Loup, smiling; "but
    pretend you are going, and come and say good-bye to me to-morrow
    morning; early, otherwise there's a risk of my not seeing you; I'm
    going out to luncheon, I've got leave from the Captain; I shall have
    to be back in barracks by two, as we are to be on the march all
    afternoon. I suppose the man to whose house I'm going, a couple of
    miles out, will manage to get me back in time."

    Scarcely had he uttered these words when a messenger came for me from
    my hotel; the telephone operator had sent to find me. I ran to the
    post office, for it was nearly closing time. The word 'trunks'
    recurred incessantly in the answers given me by the officials. I was
    in a fever of anxiety, for it was my grandmother who had asked for me.
    The office was closing for the night. Finally I got my connexion. "Is
    that you, Granny?" A woman's voice, with a strong English accent,
    answered: "Yes, but I don't know your voice." Neither did I recognise
    the voice that was speaking to me; besides, my grandmother called me
    _tu_, and not _vous_. And then all was explained. The young man for
    whom his grandmother had called on the telephone had a name almost
    identical with my own, and was staying in an annex of my hotel. This
    call coming on the very day on which I had been telephoning to my
    grandmother, I had never for a moment doubted that it was she who was
    asking for me. Whereas it was by pure coincidence that the post office
    and the hotel had combined to make a twofold error.
    McLuhan’s rapid guessing method will naturally cause him to see such phenomena as ‘traps’ – he is in such a hurry, he is bound to be tripping up all the time. He was taken in once or twice and is now rapidly guessing that the same holds generally. But if you see reading as a matter of interpreting mysteries, you will take things more slowly, investigate the contrasting features rather than being taken in by a putative sameness. ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’, says Joyce. Instead of unravelling Miles Mathis’s string, you linger over the difficulties, the ambiguities, which only resist you because of their richness. We are back with our notions of overgeneralization, hammers and nails.

    .../...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    WHEW! Again! I figured this would be a good New Year Day's project, to catch up on what you are writing! I AM learning things about Joyce I didn't know & I get your point that we all change as we progress through life. I must say you ARE stretching my mind & that is good! I DID like the statement, "Their elitism is like the air they breathe, they simply don't see it." Kind of applies to what we see on the World Stage now. The telephone monologue zeros in on one of my pet peeves in this day & age; the lack of human contact in a meaningful manner. It seems people are just saying what they are supposed to be saying & there is no real contact on an individual level. Do we really want to become just robots?! ARE you a man of genius on your journey of discovery?! It's late for me & I'm tired; hope you can make sense of what I wrote!

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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    .../...

    Here’s a shorter post to give New Year’s resolutions a chance

    The likes of Ezra Pound and James Joyce offer the biggest challenge to both the rapid guesser and the slow interpreter, but while the latter will warm to the challenge, the former is likely to lose patience. Take a phrase from Finnegans Wake: ‘punns and reedles’: the speed reader, if he ever gets as far as page 239, will have to slam the brakes on in order to ‘guess’ at the primary meaning of ‘pins and needles’, which of course refers to a painful numbness such as he may well be feeling; the slower reader will latch onto ‘puns and riddles’, but still has his work cut out to fit that in with the rest of the sentence and the rest of the paragraph; also he will have gathered that the book as a whole has him in a sense tingling all over. It is a very long book, over 600 pages, and the last sentence leading back to the first sentence suggests the reader should go back and start again, making it literally a Sisyphean task; Sisyphus, you will remember, was condemned to pushing a rock up a mountain, and it would always fall back down again.

    So the reader can carry on interpreting: the sentence begins ‘Lonedom’s breach is foulend up’. If McLuhan is expecting traps and looking for rituals, then he will find them in this kids’ singing game London Bridge is Falling Down. If one is expecting puns and riddles, then the next step might be ‘the city’ (a break for the lonesome) is ‘foul end up’, i.e. ‘is falling (upside) down’. Now take the whole sentence: ‘Lonedom’s breach is foulend up uncouth not be broched by punns and reedles’ [and could not be held or stitched together with the textile equivalent of ‘iron and steel’]. We are straying into Humpty Dumpty territory, a favourite nursery rhyme in these pages, and the stupendous cyclicity of world history, ‘rise afterfall’, is reduced to the level of child’s play. But you only play if you consent and are willing. The same paragraph beings, ‘These bright elects, consentconsorted, they were waltzing up their willside’ – consort with consent, up the steep hillside if you will; most will not bother, but lest any should, we have doorkeepers telling us ‘here be dragons’.

    Read the whole book again? Maybe not tonight Josephine. Since it no longer matters where Sisyphus is on the mountain, he can just as well take his time, breach his lonedom for a while and take another look at this single sentence. When is a bridge not a bridge? When it’s a breach. This single pun encapsulates the entire novel, like any single element of a hologram. A bridge is the very opposite of a breach: it is a link over a breach. But this makes a river a breach, from bank to bank, when it may equally be seen as a bridge, a link from upstream to downstream. So the pun itself is a pin: that’s what it does; it bridges the gap between two separate things or ideas. You would never have thought there might be a connection between a needle and a riddle either, but a reedle suggests at a crossing point over water a reed bed that indeed does not mend or replace a bridge. What might do that however is a read bed of papyrus/paper with a pen instead: not punns and reedles then, but pens and paper, author and reader. McLuhan ought to approve: the medium really is the message, this novel is the Novel; but he would not be able to verify that using his speed-reading method; you need to give it however long it takes. Joyce was nearly blind for most of his life and it shows. His genius is based mostly on hard graft.

    This is no bad thing, for if you remove the pointlessness and the punishment from the Sisyphus myth, you get the path of enlightenment: ‘chop wood carry water’. Today’s task is the same as every day’s, but today’s wood and water are not yesterday’s. Yesterday’s wood kept you warm and with the water, which also washed you and quenched your thirst, it cooked your food. Today you are cold, hungry and thirsty all over again. Such is life. You just bridge it from end to end, from start to finish, over and over. It just so happens that the female patron saint of Ireland who worked with St Patrick is St Bridget, Brigid or Brighid...

    .../...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    JAMES ANGLETON, the ultimate conspiracy theorist

    The next few posts somewhat unexpectedly move back into politics – not entirely unexpectedly, however, since the purpose of this thread is to explore the politicization of literature, whether it is done through some negative outside influence to suit a particular agenda (Mathis’s thesis) or through the internal workings of the writing process (my position), the latter also being a subversive activity, but not under outside control – which is actually what makes it truly subversive, and hence threatening to some. What is truly subversive to some is any manifestation of the divine feminine. Literature, poetry and the arts in general being at the forefront of that effort are almost by definition going to be targets. And great writers are going to be major targets, because what makes them great has nothing to do with a fancy prose style and everything to do with the expression of the divine feminine.

    I have not been doing very well explaining McLuhan’s use of the word ‘ritual’ regarding the writers Mathis is attacking. And frankly, it not really my problem at all. It is really McLuhan’s problem, and/or Mathis’s problem in misquoting/misinterpreting/overinterpreting him. Nevertheless I intend to take a stab at the subject with reference to Ulysses. But before I come to that, I want to deal with Mathis’s association of ritual with Intelligence via secret societies. How might dealings with the CIA work out as a form of ritual? Sounds crazy, right? I’ll start with Mathis mentioning a poet friend of Pound’s and later head of counter-intelligence, James Angleton, whose Mexican mother gave him the middle name Jesus. Jesus! Maybe names are not totally unimportant, even at the CIA.

    I have seen very little evidence in support of the Mathis hypothesis, despite the loud accusations. As we have seen, Joyce was a dead loss even as a passive source of intelligence. Hemingway was active, but the biggest fish he seems to have landed was a barracuda or maybe a shark, and his sole target was Nazis; he even changed sides to get a better look at them. Pound was befriended in 1938 by the younger Angleton, Angleton the poet, that is, son of James Hugh Angleton the OSS man. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cinna the poet is the innocent victim of a revenge murder after being taken for Cinna the sinner (conspirator). I contend that James Angleton played the roles of both Cinnas in succession, changing from one to the other when the poet in him was silenced and the conspirator awakened – perpetuating the suppression of the divine feminine.

    You are welcome to think that the 20-year-old Angleton became the handler of a mature 53-year-old writer of considerable notoriety and prestige, but it is such an unlikely configuration that I would need a lot more information about how it actually happened, along with concrete evidence regarding results. Here’s the deal. Pound turned against his own country in a manner viewed back home as treasonous. Either he was doing this on Angleton’s orders, which would also have been treasonous on Angleton’s part, would it not? – or he was not taking orders from Angleton: which is it to be? Another question would be: how was Pound’s conspiracy theory, for that is what it was, furthering a coherent prewar, wartime and postwar Intelligence agenda? Oh hang on: this raises another question: what might such a coherent agenda be? We are told that until 1945, it was anti-Nazi, and anti-Communist thereafter? How coherent is that? Let me disagree with the history books: in my humble opinion not very coherent at all.

    From Ezra Pound’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter either way. It doesn’t matter whether Angleton was acting treasonously before or after Pound’s interventions: Pound was speaking with rectitude, i.e. consistent straight talk; it was Angleton who deviated at some stage. We saw above how
    Quote these [broadcast] commentaries often attacked Roosevelt and the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ail/ezra-pound
    Accusing Roosevelt of involving America in the war was valid in view of what we have since found out about Pearl Harbor. And banker involvement has been established in books like Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. Pound was speaking the truth: did he get the truth from Angleton? Unlikely; he would have got deception from Angleton-the-spy. More likely Angleton got the truth from Pound, who had been doing what he was doing for decades. This is only conjecture until you read the actual Pound text that Angleton published in the one issue of his magazine Furioso: the same sort of reflections on money that I quoted earlier from his Cantos. It is not poetry at all, simply irrefutable quotes from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington’s Constitution, followed by a couple of short paragraphs, all under the title ‘Introductory Text-Book [In Four Chapters]’ (‘James Angleton and Ezra Pound’ by Carolina Hartley: see this website, where it is stated in commentary: ‘These are the ideas that brought Pound 12 years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Angleton deserves a lot of credit for publishing them in 1939’ (my emphasis)). Wow: that little bombshell establishes one fact, namely that Miles Mathis is correct in suggesting that one poet at least made the move from bona fide literature to hard CIA-type espionage/counter-espionage. A pity then that he failed to put the right name to his portrait: James Jesus Angleton.

    So at this point, I am going in the opposite direction to Mathis Mathis: instead of looking at writers as (pretty useless) spies, I am going to look at a spy as a (pretty useless) writer/poet. The two activities are indeed poles apart: very briefly, the creative writer seeks to broaden his and our horizons, which the intelligence, and especially the counter-intelligence agent seeks to restrict.

    On the subject of this middle name – pure poetry – the CIA (on its website, see below) dismisses the way everyone mentions it although Angleton himself never used it. A link in my previous post indicates how attached James Joyce was to having his birthday on St Bridget’s feast day (February 1st, spilling over into Feb 2nd), and having his books published on that day. Joyce was also very attached to his middle name Aloysius, after St Aloysius Gonzaga, canonized along with a fellow trainee Jesuit called Stanislaus. Joyce of course trained for a while under the Jesuits, and Stanislaus Joyce was his brother’s keeper. The twin arrangement gets into Finnegans Wake in various guises, such as ‘Enchainted, dear sweet Stainuless, young confessor, dearer dearest’( p.237). Another occurrence is in a paragraph referring to Pope Adrian IV, who infamously blessed England’s takeover of Ireland. Aloysius went to Pope Sixtus V for permission to join the Jesuits. Given that Sixtus means ‘sixth’ in Latin, this Pope Sixth the Fifth is the likely starting point for this sequence: ‘he looked the first and last micahlike laicness of Quartus the Fifth and Quintus the Sixth and Sixtus the Seventh giving allnight sitting to Lio the Faultyfindth’ (p.153). (True enough, while LI is 51st, the reverse is faulty: strictly speaking the forty-ninth of that name would be not the palindrome Lio IL but Leo XLIX.)

    The subtext here seems to be that much more sense can be made of a given name than when you get to choose your own name and come up with nonsense. Innocent is possibly the most egregious example of alltime papal misnomers: in particular III and X come to mind. So Angleton, who was an angler (trout fisher) and ended up at lAngley, didn’t use his middle name? Given the name in question, it comes as no surprise that everyone but the CIA finds it interesting, and the least likely explanation is that he found it totally irrelevant to who he was. Of course, if, say, it meant that he had an ounce of good in him, then that might be something to be covered up, including by the man himself. The CIA is confusing two very different things, presenting the fact of non-use as a non-fact. Carolina Hartley again:
    Quote ‘Angleton had some sort of breakdown in 1947 (...) In July [1948] James was called back to Washington to work in the newly-formed CIA’s counterintelligence division — despite deep depression. (...) Tom Mangold, another of Angleton's biographers, quotes a “Last Will and Testament” that Cicely Angleton says her husband wrote at this time:
    Quote ‘“Life has been good to me and I have not been so good to my friends,” he [Angleton] confessed. He further requested that “a bottle of good spirits” be given to Ezra Pound, e e cummings, and other poet friends from Furioso days.’
    This near-suicidal depression is explicitly put down to letting down his friends. Unfortunately good spirits doesn’t come in bottles. Here we have another implicit fact. Just as there is a middle name he didn’t use, there was a gun or a piece of rope that he didn’t use. What he did instead is on the public record: he worked for the CIA. His depression likely turned into the paranoia that had him seeing ‘the potential for communist infiltration everywhere’ that on its own admission actually hindered the CIA – hardly surprising: he was a sick man. There is indeed a psychiatric case in this story, but it was not Ezra Pound. What I am trying to explore here is seeing the man behind the legend, what made him tick, or rather what made him dysfunctional. When you deal with a legend instead of with the man, a normal meeting at the office becomes a religious experience. The CIA itself admits as much in the case of Angleton; from the CIA website :
    Quote – ‘Angleton was CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully but accepted on faith anyway.— David Atlee Phillip’
    Consulting the Delphic Oracle issued by the pythoness, a priestess under the influence of oleander smoke or possibly petroleum fumes, was notoriously dangerous not because it was unreliable, but because it was perversely all too reliable. When a king thinking of starting a war was told a great kingdom would be destroyed, he took that as a good omen, but the kingdom in question was his own. And the Oedipus story actually came about through two correct predictions, or rather the same prediction issued twice. The oracle was consulted first by his parents, and the answer got him out of the house; then again by his adoptive parents, which got him back in his parents’ house and his mother’s marriage bed. That is where acceptance on faith without a full understanding will get you. Except in the case of Angleton himself, who I contend, had Oedipal issues of his own still unresolved. To be sure, I do not have the credentials to make any diagnosis; but short of a proper diagnosis, I can and will present some evidence leading in that direction.

    In my personal experience, depression is caused by not being where you need to be: being forced by circumstance to share views or activities that are not right, or at least not right for you. Relief comes when you get back on track. It looks like Angleton never did get back on track. Like Shakespeare’s Cinnas, Angleton the poet got terminated and Angleton the conspirator lived on. Angleton the poet was not blaming the Russians the way the conspirator did after the war (and his ghost lives on to this day it would seem). Unlike Pound, who was saying the same things both before and after the war, he was clearly caught up in the right-angle-turn in American policy that makes it in my view outwardly inconsistent. He was apparently not alone –
    Quote While Angleton struggled during his first decade at the Agency, Pound’s case became a cause célèbre for American literati. Former Furioso contributors like William Carlos Williams and Reed Whittemore lambasted Pound in the pages of The New Republic — which seems to have been a premiere literary outlet for writers close to CIA leadership. Archibald MacLeish even had the gall to ask “What happened to American literature?” (Carolina Hartley, also at http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...-Angleton.html )
    The New Republic did however publish a more sympathetic account, ‘The Case of Ezra Pound’ by Jack LaZebnik on April 1, 1957. But William Carlos Williams and Reed Whittemore likely did not qualify for a bottle of good spirits, for they would be friends Angleton was good to in other ways; for all that, Pound is the one who gets lambasted by Miles Mathis...


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    I wasn't really sure where to post this, as this writer/researcher tends to go off on tangents and is talking not only about his concerns with Miles Mathis specifically, but also about a bunch of other "alt-media" personalities who he claims are limited hangouts (LH's) for various reasons (James Corbett, Sofia Smallstorm, Alex Jones, Joseph Farrell, etc.), including their pushing of the false narrative that Trump was a surprise upset to the PTB/MSM rather than the intended "winner" from the start. But I thought the title of this thread suggested this would be a good place to start.

    The author, Allan Weisbecker, makes an interesting point about why he believes MM is a limited hangout/intelligence operative: Mathis' outright dismissal of the Pizzagate story in particular and the existence of high-level pedo/satanic rings in general. This dismissal by someone who should know better raises major flags for me too. There's just too much evidence showing that high level persons in all countries are involved in this dark sick weirdo stuff and too many links/connections/relationships suggesting that Pizzagate is (in most aspects) legitimate too. Read both parts I and II for the author's full analysis.

    http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-happened-to-allan/

    http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-ha...llan-part-two/

    Apologies if this wasn't a good place to post....I haven't read through the thread yet.

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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    Quote Posted by awakeningmom (here)
    I wasn't really sure where to post this, as this writer/researcher tends to go off on tangents and is talking not only about his concerns with Miles Mathis specifically, but also about a bunch of other "alt-media" personalities who he claims are limited hangouts (LH's) for various reasons (James Corbett, Sofia Smallstorm, Alex Jones, Joseph Farrell, etc.), including their pushing of the false narrative that Trump was a surprise upset to the PTB/MSM rather than the intended "winner" from the start. But I thought the title of this thread suggested this would be a good place to start.

    The author, Allan Weisbecker, makes an interesting point about why he believes MM is a limited hangout/intelligence operative: Mathis' outright dismissal of the Pizzagate story in particular and the existence of high-level pedo/satanic rings in general. This dismissal by someone who should know better raises major flags for me too. There's just too much evidence showing that high level persons in all countries are involved in this dark sick weirdo stuff and too many links/connections/relationships suggesting that Pizzagate is (in most aspects) legitimate too. Read both parts I and II for the author's full analysis.

    http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-happened-to-allan/

    http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-ha...llan-part-two/

    Apologies if this wasn't a good place to post....I haven't read through the thread yet.
    Hi there, awakeningmom, and thank you so much for your very interesting contribution. I was just about to make a transitional post (see below), so you are not disturbing the flow in any way. Let me see how I might connect your blogger’s rant (no criticism intended) to my more scholarly approach (just a different kind of earnestness).

    First, he is dealing with the problem where a ‘glitch in thinking’ (his words) becomes something more sinister, such as a defence of Flat Earthers. I commented on FE only the other day, comparing it to ketchup. We all have glitches in our thinking: my position is that we are all very much learning to think straight. See this post. We think we’re smart: not yet, not smart at all yet. The elite, I suggest, are no smarter than the rest of us: they have simply taken dumbness to new levels. Dumbing down comes naturally to them.

    You catch me at a juncture where I am discussing the CIA, trying to put the Intelligence into the Central Intelligence Agency, which seemingly doesn’t know what the word means. James Angleton was head of Counter-Intelligence for twenty years. In a secret CIA document from 2011, released in 2013, analyzing his ‘fixation on moles’, it says under Education: ‘college at Yale (graduating in bottom quarter of his class)’. ('James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the "Monster Plot": Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations', Studies in Intelligence, Vol 55, No 4, (December 2011) - just google the title) I put it to you that the guy was perhaps not very bright. And that the organization that left him in charge for all of two decades was perhaps not very bright either.

    What is known as ‘intelligence’ in the secret services is anything but: it is raw data that can be interpreted smartly or otherwise. Angleton’s theories (the ultimate in conspiracy theories) merged into what was called the ‘Master Plan’ which others derided as the ‘Monster Plot’ – namely that ‘the United States and the Western world had been the targets of a vast, complex conspiracy that originated in the Soviet Union more than fifty years previously’ (p.39-40). This is all CIA operatives talking amongst themselves about internal business; the only connection with the outside world is of course Soviet spies, if any, within the CIA itself. They do have a bona fide ‘defector’ and a ‘plant’ at loggerheads: which is which? Angleton, the man in charge, makes the wrong call, thereby providing self-verification of the Master Plan/Monster Plot – being totally wrong made him absolutely right! This caused incalculable damage, and where this is all heading (see subsequent posts) is that the entire CIA registered the most spectacular (though largely unnoticed) catastrophic failure that any organization possibly could. Having been set up as the intelligence arm of the President of the United States, the worst thing it could possibly do was to destroy the very man/office it was designed to protect... and that is precisely what happened. The agency should have imploded, but did not. The same thing happened on a personal level to Angleton himself. He was suicidal to the point of writing a last will and testament, but somehow, instead of his unsound mind taking him to the cemetery, it took him to the CIA. At some stage, such an implosion will have to be triggered, but each missed opportunity takes the insanity up to a whole new level. Whatever that level actually is, judging by current affairs (the Soviet scare is back with a vengeance), the time is now.

    The current next level up from Angleton’s non-existent all-powerful KGB is the impenetrable and impregnable ‘PTB’ as described by Allan Weisbecker, with several levels above what we actually see enabling them to handle the foreseen, the unforeseen and the (unlikely) unforeseeable.
    Quote The power/cabal/whatever I’m talking about is potentially above the sorts of pay grades that might appear to be in charge.
    Those from whom no knowledge is kept.
    Since the PTB are a group or more than one group that undoubtedly have disagreements among them – this will come up again and again – we also have to take into account the complexity of that sort of power, i.e., that there might be minor ‘secrets’ among them; I’m trying to simplify here, hopefully to make a worthwhile point.
    ‘The Powers That Be’ as ‘those from whom no knowledge is kept’ is an entity that has no more reality for any individual than an Angletonian KGB. The concept itself is actually flawed. As we saw, we do have ‘more than one group that undoubtedly have disagreements among them’ – even within the CIA. Why do they disagree among themselves? Again as we saw, they disagree over converting raw data into intelligence. Weisbecker uses the word ‘knowledge’ as a synonym for secret service ‘intelligence’, in the sense of adequately processed data. The weakness of his analysis and therefore of his ‘Powers That Be’ is that as I explained, ‘knowledge’ is a synonym for raw data requiring smart interpretation.

    We are here as part of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency to come up with the smart interpretation. The CIA had the smart (reality-based) interpretation but preferred Angleton’s insane one. So it is not enough to provide the smart interpretation: you have to formulate it with such power and conviction as to overcome the reticence and opposition of those influential crazies who do not want to know. That is the hard part.

    As I see it, the NSA qualifies as a part of ‘those from whom no knowledge is kept’ in this restricted sense. It is a repository of all electronically transmitted raw data. This sounds very much like an artificial form of the ‘Akashic Records’, not usually presented as a bad thing. Also some branches of monotheism have no issue with an all-seeing God, especially when the deity is seen as benevolent. Another thought is that the secret services saved a whole lot of money when Facebook came along and people started volunteering their personal information without the need to spy on them. Bona fide sharing is a natural, healthy reaction to exactly the same data as unhealthy suspicion based on incompetence and jealousy (sour grapes). People are only just learning to open up and warm to each other much more than ever before. This is happening both individually and collectively. It is what I would call... anthropic global warming. Not for nothing are coldness, dourness, withdrawal, alcoholism and suicide roughly correlatable to more inhospitable environments and sunnier temperaments to sunnier climates. But there is also a historical component: any given community is likely to have seen an evolution towards greater warmth; a father today is much physically and emotionally closer to his family than in Victorian times (and unsurprisingly, the nobility are behind the curve). Likewise in politics, hot/cold war must and will evolve into détente and cooperation.

    The Internet as the next stage in education after the printing press has led millions to express themselves publicly in ways they didn’t think they could. The choice is between standing up and with great conviction showing who you are, or sabotaging your own efforts on the basis that someone unwanted might be listening in. You cannot control your audience response, but your best chance of getting the desired positive response is by speaking out without inhibition, unambiguously presenting the real you in a grounded way. In contrast, Miles Mathis’s investigations into fakery are ungrounded, and even groundless, i.e. themselves a form of fakery, self-contaminated exactly like James Angleton’s fixation on moles. Weisbecker is right. You can take his raw data, as I have done, and rework it into something completely different and more intelligible. Weisbecker is also right in saying that MM is not alone; the alt media as a whole is part of the mix, to the extent that it fixates on fakery. But to avoid getting caught up in the process he needs to stop at some point and assert himself to be for real. That is what I am focussing on in this thread: great writers are for real; I know that because I am for real, and no one can take that away. This is what we mean by grounding. See this post.


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    This shorter post on World War II is separated as a parenthesis/an interlude to my train of thought developing above in my last post but one and to be continued in my next post.

    Let me first elaborate on this dogleg in Allied foreign policy as it moved almost seamlessly from combating Nazism to fighting Communism which I am suggesting was somewhat inconsistent, or at the very least questionable. The only direct path – apart from the current madness of actually inventing new enemies to replace old ones – would be to say that Nazi values were already in charge in the US and that Pound was appointed by Angleton to proclaim them from Italy. There is of course some evidence of the first part of this (and to date I have seen none of the second), in the shape of the German bankers on both sides of the Atlantic, notably ‘Daddy Warbucks’ – Paul Warburg, founder of the Fed in New York, his son James P. in Washington, and his brother Max in Hamburg. If all this were true, then the entire war against the Axis powers takes on a whole new meaning. If all this were the whole truth, then World War II was one huge false flag operation from start to finish, the real enemy from the outset being the Soviet Union. Either annexing/trampling across Germany and Italy was the most direct route to getting at Russia, and no more than that; or it was truly intended to eradicate Nazism, but the Russian ‘threat’ caused the anti-Nazi drive to be diverted by elements making off with the worst of the bunch instead of treating them as war criminals in the appropriate manner as advertised. The truth is of course doubtless somewhere in the middle: official government policy with an undercurrent of people implementing a different agenda which in wartime becomes treasonous. And there is also the time factor: at the time, there was only one narrative; it took years for the alternative picture to emerge. It may be simply a matter of change of POTUS and a change of policy when Truman took over from Roosevelt, whose presidency was neatly timed to end with the war. Except that Truman’s CIA was recruiting personnel from Roosevelt’s OSS.

    Here is Carolina Hartley again on a veritable Jekyll and Hyde. The problem being of course, as we shall see in due course, that Jekyll’s monster is reproducible.
    Quote Angleton’s job in Italy involved ferreting out enemy informants and developing a spy network for the Americans. He worked with mafioso figures to do this and was part of re-instituting the corruption that Mussolini’s regime had got under control. Biographers of Angleton describe him as a polished anglophile who by day ran American mobsters over Italy looking for Fascists; and read Pound in the dark of night. This must have been a tortured time for Angleton. The “liberation” of Italy had dubious results and the government he served was persecuting a poet he respected. Angleton must have rationalized the situation to himself: bad methods would serve America’s greater good.
    (...) Angleton’s new job with the Agency required him to root out communist spies inherited from the “Oh So Social” days of the OSS. http://www.counter-currents.com/2010...on-ezra-pound/
    Wow. If, like me, you were wondering how a nice guy like Ezra Pound could support Benito Mussolini, now you know. I know very little more about the guy than I have set out in this thread. If, like me, you were confident, on the basis of character, that there must be an explanation, then you will feel vindicated and your powers of discernment will be boosted in preparation for some future occasion. This is not to say Mussolini was a saint. But Pound lived in Italy and knew things we don’t. And Angleton was raised in Italy and understood Pound, at least until he learnt that mobsters were his friends. Ideological warfare is all well and good, until you deal with the jokers in the pack: organized crime.

    Jokers aside, I am not saying that it was unavoidably illegitimate for the Americans to turn on their Soviet allies after defeating Nazism. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible to be both anti-Nazi and anti-Communist: one well-tried way would be to pronounce both ideologies to be extremes and oneself a non-ideological centrist. While it would have been coherent to round up the German war criminals first, given the above, using them massively as a Cold War fighting force was more than simply opportunistic. What this meant for the Russians however who, remember, only entered the war when attacked by their ally, was that they could follow a consistent straightline policy of fighting Nazism in Russia then Germany during the War, and beyond during the Cold War. If there was anything consistent about enlisting the help of Communists to kill Nazis then enlisting the help of Nazis to kill Communists, it was simply the baseline position of fighting ideological wars. You can’t kill ideologies with a gun. You kill people. You don’t defeat nations, you covet their miles of farmland and confiscate miles of mud. Hitler at least knew what he was doing, which people he wanted to kill and which miles of mud he was going to confiscate; but his eyes were bigger than his stomach.

    Seen from this angle, we get a better perspective on the war as a whole: in terms of armed forces and men on the ground, it was massively a Russo-German war, and any Anglo-American involvement was frankly a sideshow. German expansionism, the desire for ‘Lebensraum’ (living space), meant that Hitler would naturally look eastwards, to Poland, and the vast expanses beyond, into the Ukraine and Russia itself. It is not by chance that this is where nearly all the Jews were, hence a genocide of the Jews became a major strategic objective, instead of the ravings of an antisemitic madman that we get to hear so much about. The Russian campaign had two objectives: obviously to reach Moscow and topple the regime there, but also, on the way, to have the Einsatzgruppen carry out mass-murder operations, notably but by no means exclusively, on Jews.

    That heading east was Hitler’s priority is evident from his first step: the invasion of Poland. Too much has been made of the false flag operation of disguising German soldiers as Poles; this was nothing more than window-dressing for German public opinion, otherwise they needn’t have bothered, because no one was duped by this act of naked aggression. It was a damp squib of a false flag compared with say Pearl Harbor, which duped most people for many decades. Why? because it was far too unsubtle, involved no diversionary element. Hitler was itching for Poland, say no more, and Hitler was the enemy anyway. Carry this argument further. Hitler had no inclination to invade boring old Belgium or to take on the world’s best-dressed army manning the Maginot line. Hitler had tasted French mustard gas in the earlier war and wanted no more of that. Unfortunately, the allies declared war, and unfortunately Hitler had a couple of gifted generals in Mannstein and Rommel who used Blitzkrieg tactics, already tested in Poland, to catch the French with their expensive pants down and give them a good hiding. Hitler reportedly said ‘I have never used the word Blitzkrieg, because it is a very silly word’. And he likely thought it was a very silly thing to do when facing in the wrong direction. So when his silly generals arrived at Dunkirk beach wanting to take the Brits home, he called them back. You don’t need to be a conspiracy buff to understand that this was not so much another moment of madness, a military blunder of the highest magnitude, as the political decision of someone not wishing to go any further off course. It looks like the Phoney War was the mutually preferred course. ‘The term "Phoney War" was probably coined by US Senator William Borah who commented in September 1939 on the inactivity on the Western Front, "There is something phoney about this war."’ The same Wikipedia article quotes two authoritative Germans giving evidence under oath to save their skin:
    Quote At the Nuremberg Trials, German military commander Alfred Jodl said that "if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions."
    General Siegfried Westphal stated, that if the French had attacked in force in September 1939 the German army "could only have held out for one or two weeks."
    These quotes are taken from this webpage, which calls Failure to Attack Germany After It Invaded Poland the Allies’ biggest mistake. Some mistake: nearly as big as trying to fight on both sides of a war. I’m thinking that maybe the Allies were wary of making an enemy of the Soviet Union as well, as the Russians had invaded Poland from the other side only a couple of weeks after Germany. One way this might have played out was for the Allies to join the Nazis and hasten the invasion of Russia. But as it turned out, the Phoney War suited them just fine, until the hawkish Churchill entered the fray and Hitler himself intervened to secure his rear – secure his rear – as far as the Atlantic.


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    Default Re: Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

    JAMES ANGLETON, the ultimate conspiracy theorist (II)

    The problem with ‘the truth’ is that it is rarely the whole truth; like other labels, it is overpretentious, it claims more than it delivers. ‘James Angleton’ is a label that may be adequate for the real person as far as it goes, but it stops short of the truth of ‘James Jesus Angleton’. As Alfred Korzybski wrote in Science and Sanity, ‘the map is not the territory’. A map may or may not mark roads or footpaths; car drivers will need roads but not necessarily footpaths, while hill walkers will need both; others may want neither. If you limit the real entity to ‘James Angleton’ as the CIA does, dismissing the rest as fictional, as opposed to potential or untapped, that means the culling machine has already been set loose on their own personnel. ‘Angleton the CIA man’ is even less than the real deal for the way it prunes away all the unwanted aspects of the family man, the poet, the gardener, aspects that are themselves not mutually exclusive in this way. Unfortunately for the CIA and for the rest of us, it was a dehumanized man making all those dubious decisions, not a robot – and another such who guided him through the War into the Cold War.

    The problem is compounded by the fact that the ‘CIA man’ label is a Platonic ideal, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept; with respect to that ideal – which may actually be an undefined concept – any given operative is going to be no more than a best fit. This implies both a lack and a surplus; some qualities will be missing or deficient, others unwanted. Hence, with the best will in the world, and the best personnel available, the CIA is going both to fall short of the ‘ideal CIA’ and to contain non- or even anti-CIA elements in its midst. This is of course transposable to any collectivity, but in the special world of intelligence, the latter element will function as a background level of a phenomenon known in its more acute form as a mole. Interestingly, a mole is also a unit measuring the amount of a chemical substance involved, say, in a chemical reaction. This is more than a simple analogy: what I am describing is a similar effect in what we call human chemistry. – An analogy would be to the arts: we are talking not so much about a finished painting, which is what it is, no more no less, as about a musical or dramatic composition, which is usually more, occasionally less, in terms of richness of meaning, than any given performance. On the other hand, in terms of dimensional fullness, any actualization is going to be infinitely richer than the concept, however elaborate; we are talking more in terms of an embodiment of a patent design or a building produced from an architect’s blueprint. – The CIA itself found Angleton oversensitive to this ‘mole-cular’, or rather molar effect (‘hyperconscious about security’, see below), and his oversensitivity appears to have been self-fulfilling or otherwise caused by his own input of too much ‘foreign’ material.

    Angleton’s obituary says this: ‘A number of senior CIA officials came under suspicion during Angleton's search for the elusive double agent, leading to inner turmoil and even an allegation that Angleton himself was the infiltrator. Then-CIA Director William Colby forced Angleton's retirement because the mole hunt was tying the agency in knots.’ The CI of Counter-Intelligence working against the CI of the CIA? He seems to have been tying himself in knots at any rate: the only reason I can see Ezra Pound, the alleged Nazi sympathizer, holding steadfastly to his views, and still in a mental hospital (as we know from multiple sources that he was) during these post-Paperclip years of massive Nazi infiltration of the CIA, is that Angleton and his ilk now considered him to be... a Communist.

    More from the CIA website
    Quote Biographical Backdrop
    Before venturing into an analysis of how others have depicted Angleton, the salient facts of his biography should be presented. Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, in 1917 and grew up mostly in Italy, where his father owned the National Cash Register subsidiary. He attended an English preparatory school before entering Yale in 1937. He majored in English Literature and edited a poetry review called Furioso that published the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others. He entered Harvard Law School and then joined the Army in 1943.
    Angleton was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services and first worked in the super-secret X-2 counterintelligence branch in London. It was here that Angleton learned to be so hyperconscious about security. X-2 was the only OSS component cleared to receive raw ULTRA material, intercepted German military communications sent via the Enigma encryption machine. He also knew about the DOUBLE CROSS and FORTITUDE deception operations that were paving the way for the Normandy invasion. The success of these operations was one reason for his later belief in Soviet “strategic deception.”
    Angleton next served in the X-2 unit in Rome, where he was codenamed ARTIFICE. He was an innovative field operative and rose to be chief of all X-2 operations in Italy by the end of the war. When the OSS disbanded in 1945, Angleton stayed in Italy to run operations for the successor organizations to OSS. After he moved into CIA’s espionage and counterintelligence component in 1947, he became the Agency’s liaison to Western counterpart services. In 1954, he became the head of the new Counterintelligence Staff. He would remain in that job for the rest of his career.
    So far so good. But the following is a gem of convoluted prose. It talks about ‘a conundrum for the historian and biographer’, which is what apparently itself sets out to be.
    Quote What makes Angleton such a conundrum for the historian and biographer is that he was losing his sense of proportion and his ability to live with uncertainty right around the time, 1959–63, when it became startlingly evident — agents compromised, operations blown, spies uncovered — that something was seriously amiss with Western intelligence and more aggressive CI and security were needed. Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s, and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized. However, there was no other source, human or technical, that he could use to guide him on the molehunt — only his favored source, KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, and their symbiotic relationship soon became professionally unbalanced as the manipulative and self-promoting defector’s allegations of international treachery grew more fantastical.
    Overall, Angleton’s negatives outweighed his positives. First, among the latter: While he was running CIA counterintelligence, there were no known Soviet penetrations of the Agency besides “Sasha” (the extent to which Angleton deserves credit for that is arguable). Information from, or assistance by, him and the CI Staff helped uncover, or prepared the way for later discovery of, Soviet espionage operations in several Western countries. He maintained good relations with the FBI at the working level, helping mitigate longstanding interagency hostility fostered mostly by J. Edgar Hoover. And he contributed to the establishment of counterintelligence as an independent discipline of the intelligence profession with resources and influence at CIA.
    The negatives preponderate, however. By fixating on the Soviets, Angleton largely ignored the threat that other hostile services posed — notably the East Germans, Czechs, Chinese, and Cubans. His operational officers were so deeply involved with defensive CI (molehunting) that they did not contribute nearly enough to offensive (counterespionage) operations. He became far too dependent on Golitsyn and consequently mishandled some cases (although in two of them, in Norway and Canada, the real spies were found eventually). He held to his disinformation-based interpretations of certain world events — the Sino-Soviet split, Tito’s estrangement from Moscow — long after they were discredited. His skill at bureaucratic infighting belied his administrative sloppiness. Lastly, he grew too isolated later in his career, and his security consciousness became self-consuming and stultifying for his staff.
    Let’s proceed with a few bullet points and take it from there:

    • Angleton was ‘losing his sense of proportion and his ability to live with uncertainty’: a fair description of being overcome by a monster.

    • This was ‘right around the time, 1959–63’: let’s not be so coy over names; they mean to include the Camelot era 1961-63: Castro, Cuba, Khrushchev, Jack Kennedy.

    • This is ‘when it became startlingly evident’ (we are told exactly what that means) ‘that something was seriously amiss’; when exactly? The above period covers two different administrations. As it stands, the evidence started arriving in 1959.

    • Angleton’s gradual deterioration is made to coincide with the startling evidence; when exactly? Again, it sounds as if it started in 1959. Why am I labouring this point? Because it suggests that if he had an issue with JFK (we shall see that he did), it was a problem predating JFK and therefore hardly of his making.

    • Rather than mere coincidence, perhaps there is a cause-and-effect relationship through the interaction of Angleton and the current political situation? The obvious clash would be between the Communist activity by Castro, Cuba, Khrushchev, and Angleton’s trademark anticommunism. Is the name JFK as unmentionable as ‘Macbeth’, euphemistically and superstitiously known as ‘the Scottish play’? Not in other contexts, no. Why then does it becomes context sensitive in connection with Angleton?

    • What also happened at the end of this time period 1959-63, when we stopped seeing agents compromised, operations blown, spies uncovered? The JFK assassination.

    • Rather than mere coincidence, perhaps there is a cause-and-effect relationship? Giving the CIA a huge motive for killing the president. Is that what the coyness was about? Cui bono? And for the sake of balance – although obviously both outcomes were not possible – Kennedy’s determination to emasculate the CIA.

    • ‘and more aggressive CI and security were needed’: this conclusion overlooks the previous statement that Angleton was getting out of control; doesn’t it suggest he was already overdoing the ‘aggressive CI’? Logically speaking, at this stage, his removal was maybe all that was needed.

    • ‘Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s’: oh yes? not very competent are we? But what is being forgotten is that this is Angleton’s basic thesis we saw earlier: ‘namely that the United States and the Western world had been the targets of a vast, complex conspiracy that originated in the Soviet Union more than fifty years previously’. Clearly the plot is feeding off itself.

    • ‘and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized’: this makes no sense, it amounts to asking someone to prove a negative. Angleton had been chasing Communists within the CIA for several years, and not found any. Ergo, we have a problem. Er no, maybe we don’t have a problem; or at least if we didn’t have a problem, how would we ever know? This is often called fear-mongering.

    • If you insist on having a mole and bring in a KGB defector to hunt the mole, then maybe you do have a mole after all, QED. Signs to watch out for: a manipulative and self-promoting defector; a symbiotic relationship; soon becoming professionally unbalanced; increasingly fantastical allegations of international treachery. Sounds like our KGB defector was doing a great job.

    • ‘no known Soviet penetrations of the Agency on Angleton’s watch besides “Sasha”’: if this is supposed to be a ‘positive’, it is bad news. For a start, it is almost annihilated by the qualification ‘the extent to which Angleton deserves credit for that is arguable’; too true: Angleton himself would see it as a failure since his position was that the penetrations did exist but were unidentified. Then note the internal contradiction: no penetrations means no ‘Sasha’. Would infiltration by Golitsyn’s alleged mole ‘Sasha’ be put to Angleton’s credit as effective counter-espionage or would blame be attached on account of effective penetration on his watch? But then again, since the only place ‘Sasha’ may have existed was in Angleton’s head, this is probably just a fine example of Angleton tying the CIA in knots.

    • No need to dwell on the preponderant negatives, the reds under the bed mentality, except to state that there is no way to prise apart Angleton the man from Angleton the CIA man; this was another symbiotic relationship that was not broken until the end of 1974. Until then Angleton’s relationship with the CIA mirrored Angleton’s relationship with Golitsyn: joined at the hip – begging the question, Why?

    That’s a lot of bullet points for a couple of paragraphs. I will just expand on the last point, about how difficult it is to get from the notion of the type ‘A. has a problem’ to the notion of the type ‘A. is a problem’. This can be seen as part of an extended sequence which might run as follows (and actually loop around): A. the man has a problem – A. joins the CIA – A. the CIA man has a problem – the CIA has a problem – A. the CIA man is a CIA problem – ... – the CIA is a problem.

    I too have a problem, actually two. I have a problem with a young man interested in literature and poetry, who became friends with Ezra Pound – by all accounts (all but one) a lovely man, always eager to help his friends – but whose life took such a disastrous turn, beyond suicide. And I have a problem with an organization that has a certain theoretical legitimacy that it would have even if its actual embodiment had been corrupt from the outset. This may be the case for the CIA, but as the successor to other intelligence-gathering organizations, it did have a virginity, a clean slate, that it lost at some subsequent stage. With the individual on the one hand and the corporate entity on the other, we have a typical chicken-and-egg situation expanding into an unstoppable chain reaction or viral effect. Where did the damage start? We know that a single damaged individual can cause havoc in a community such as a workplace (a mole is an example of that), and that corporate personhood enabling gangsters to thrive better than many unregistered criminal gangs will provide a sink-or-swim environment for innocent new employees. So it is more a revolving door that works both ways – but still an issue offering no purchase. It seems in the present instance as though Angleton was contaminating the CIA, but only because the intelligence people got to him first. If this were the whole story, then the situation would indeed be dire. However, the same mechanism also operates for ‘healthy’ individuals, who congregate in healthy communities, legal fictions included, that can cope with and even improve a certain number of ‘unhealthy’ individuals. But how, when and where this mechanism might kick in to this picture is largely theoretical at this point.

    Also from the CIA website, under the section ‘The Fictional Angleton’, meaning ‘Angleton as portrayed in works of fiction’ – as opposed to non-fiction, where you get ‘the “real” Angleton’, full of ‘gaps’ and ‘flaws and ‘lack (of) focus’ – we find this entry:
    Quote Aaron Latham, Orchids for Mother.
    One of the reviewers’ blurbs on the paperback edition of this roman à clef declares that “some things can only be said in fiction, but that doesn’t mean they are not true.” The problem with that statement is that little the book says about its main character is true. Latham’s often outrageous novel about the bureaucratic feud between counterintelligence chief “Francis Xavier Kimball” and DCI “Ernest O’Hara” (William Colby) is the source of more misconceptions about Angleton than any other work — starting with the title containing his supposed nickname, which nobody ever used for him.
    Well, actually, I do have evidence dating from 1968 that this nickname was indeed used. In Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, which has an undercurrent of espionage, (see this post for background), everything is ‘for Mother’, commemorating the author’s mother who died at Auschwitz. One of the characters showers his opera singer girlfriend with cargo planeloads of arum lilies (they might have been orchids, but the book avoids the letter E and the French word is orchidée). (Funnily enough, a couple of days after writing this, I find a topical link (‘demand your plane is filled with lilies’) in the Independent) This is one of countless elements for which I have predicted a mother connection, but had so far not found in this particular instance. Of course the exact mechanism varies each time, but this is a clearcut example that actually includes the dedicatory element that is most often only implicit. Perec was picking the brains of a friend, the investigative reporter Alain Guérin. Meaning that he was likely using then unpublished and well as published material. There is little or no mention of Angleton in Guérin’s book, Qu’est-ce que la C.I.A.? (What is the C.I.A.?), published in 1968, when Perec was writing, but there is a whole small chapter devoted to him in his later book, Les Gens de La C.I.A. (The C.I.A. People, Editions Sociales, 1989). So it is not anachronistic to refer to this work.

    Seeking to explain how Angleton’s career reached a peak that many others tried and failed to reach, Guérin puts it down to his status and corresponding mindset as a poet with a gift for ‘Byzantine plotting’, lending a ‘magic impunity’ to his wild constructions. He suggests in explaining this literary bent that it is somewhat in the nature of counter-espionage to work through a succession of working hypotheses but as they become further and further removed from reality, they would take on a life of their own just as some fictional character might take over control from their author.

    The book contains a quote from William Colby, who suffered humiliations as Angleton’s pupil. The original reference is his book Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (1978), with the proviso that the 1978 French edition contains a number of details expurgated from the US edition (presumably the translator was working from the typescript). Here is Colby describing what Guérin calls Angleton’s ‘délire obsessionnel’ (delirious obsessiveness) (translating clumsily back from the French):
    Quote For Angleton, all our agents and their contacts behind the Iron Curtain were being manipulated by the KGB, and all the defectors who managed to escape were in fact sent by them, everyone came under suspicion even within the agency. (...) I did my best to understand and accept his crackpot theories about an all-powerful and everpresent KGB that with diabolical skill had infiltrated all our allies’ secret services and everywhere else placed countless fake defectors and agents provocateurs it used to influence and counter American policy. I confess I failed to do so. Not only were Angleton’s explanations impossible to follow, but most of all, he backed them up with thoroughly inadequate evidence
    I now want to tie this all together in psychological terms: the repression of the feminine. According to the CIA, one of Angleton’s nicknames wasn’t Mother, or Orchids for Mother; but why would they need to say that? Only because someone (it just takes one person) had found him to be a bit of a mummy’s boy. This is the selfsame conflict that caused Aby Warburg to ditch a future career in banking and become an art historian, something that for whatever reason Angleton did not do. The thing about his passion for orchids is that the flower gets its name from the Greek word for testicle, on account of the two protuberances under the roots.

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    Hence, the symbolism of the orchid would be: beautiful flowers above ground for Mother, produced by growing some underground coglioni for Corleone, or some balls for Father/godfather. So while nature has no trouble combining these two elements through the phallic stem, it would seem that the man had some difficulty reconciling the two poles. The secret services literally knocked the bejesus out of James – that doubtless embarrassing middle name from his mother’s side indicating the divine feminine. And they did something to put the angle in Angleton, stultifying his natural upward growth as a poet into a controversial spy catcher specializing in a different kind of ‘eastern plant’.

    Guérin tells us that Angleton’s Counter-Intelligence/Counter-Espionage service was called ‘Sissy’ (pronunciation of CICE). I am wondering whether they were aware that in British English, a sissy or cissy is an effeminate or coward. He also tells us that Angleton’s wife was called Cicely, I note that CICEly is also readily abbreviated to Cissy... Incidentally Perec’s mother was called Cécile (Cyrla in Polish). Interestingly, Cécile/Cicely/Cecily/Cecilia is the patron saint of music and poets, and her feastday falls on... November 22. Alain Guérin mentions Angleton’s retirement home on the road to Langley, ironically very close, he says, to Arlington National Cemetery (ha! whatever is that supposed to mean? ...are we talking about JFK’s current address?), and his haunting of the CIA headquarters, where he and his friends (one of whom we will meet in my next post) continued to tout the Soviet infiltration meme notably by feeding intel to Edward Jay Epstein for his book Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.

    This may seem a very longwinded post to arrive at the conclusion that cold warriors and warriors generally have an issue with their feminine side. But this is not my conclusion; it is merely my introduction to what follows in another post – for which it may actually not be enough – and another post after that. I look at it this way: coming round to something so intuitively obvious is like spotting a familiar landmark: you know you have not lost your way. It is comforting to note that our spymasters are ordinary (flawed) human beings, and also unsettling to see how one man’s personal demons, his issues with his upbringing, can escalate out of all proportion all the way up to a planetwide threat from a largely imaginary enemy.

    .../...


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