Albert Rossi Wrote:My own particular ambivalences about all this I suppose arise from my humanistic training (I am a product of the 70s); I need to keep balanced to some reasonable extent in my own thinking what may be attributable to unconscious, impersonal, even evolutionary, social structuring and culturally systemic effects, and what is actually the result of purposeful social engineering (through the media, etc.). And then there is even the loop-back potential that presents itself between those two possibilities. Or perhaps even a kind of chicken-or-egg question which can be asked about where the ultimate explanation lies for any given event or its consequences. It is not a simple question. But then what interesting questions are? Even the most simple and elegant "solution" (in the realm of mathematics or physics) does not betray the complexity of the problem it addresses (that's why the result is often called 'deep').
I feel your pain, Albert. And not just because I too am a product of the 70's -- the decade in which my formal higher education took place.
One cannot overstate the importance of maintaining the analytical balance to which you refer. If I'm reading your subtext accurately, you (unlike Noam Chomsky) seem to be endorsing modes of inquiry that, far from being entrapped in the A or B frame, encourage and utilize the search for so-called "third alternatives"
Or as the other Marx might have put it: Sometimes, but not always, a cigar is just a cigar.
Albert Rossi Wrote:What presently astounds me is how a rather compartmentalized "interest" (that's too neutral a term, ethically; I should say "concern") of mine -- the realities of political and economic power, and the significance of the events of the 60s (and forward) -- has led me into a kind of discussion I would have never suspected.
Charles Drago Wrote:If I'm reading your subtext accurately, you (unlike Noam Chomsky) seem to be endorsing modes of inquiry that, far from being entrapped in the A or B frame, encourage and utilize the search for so-called "third alternatives"
Or as the other Marx might have put it: Sometimes, but not always, a cigar is just a cigar.
Yes, that is a fair assessment, Charles. In terms of what we call the "human sciences", I've always had a certain reluctance to embrace theoretical absolutisms; this was particularly true when I used to practice literary interpretation, many moons ago.
To inject a little levity here. A professor of Old French I knew years ago, who was a young boy in Poland during the war, once told this anecdote. Being so young and not knowing much about the real significance of the events he was witnessing, but with the glories of Roman history placed in his head from the schoolroom, saw one day a column of Italian tanks on their way through his town as they headed to the Russian front. Inspired to greet them with what little Italian he could muster, he yelled out, "Vittoria o morte!" [Victory or Death]. To which, a soldier riding on the turret of the passing tank, wagging his finger at him, replied, "C'e` sempre una terza via" [There's always a third alternative.]
Albert Rossi Wrote:A professor of Old French I knew years ago, who was a young boy in Poland during the war, once told this anecdote. Being so young and not knowing much about the real significance of the events he was witnessing, but with the glories of Roman history placed in his head from the schoolroom, saw one day a column of Italian tanks on their way through his town as they headed to the Russian front. Inspired to greet them with what little Italian he could muster, he yelled out, "Vittoria o morte!" [Victory or Death]. To which, a soldier riding on the turret of the passing tank, wagging his finger at him, replied, "C'e` sempre una terza via" [There's always a third alternative.]
This expression of the essence of my people truly resonates -- and explains much.
I know there are some that read this thread and think, "What a bunch of ..." Charles summed it up nicely: "Or not."
More than anything I wanted to attempt to piece together these things that have been running through my mind for awhile now. Blavatsky has certainly made synchronistic appearances in my inward life since I was a teenager. A few years ago this had no connection to the JFK assassination, but now? Much has changed. I don't expect this to be digestible to most, but it appears to make sense to some.
On a basic level, it appears to me now, a war of good and evil is being waged in the world. Light and darkness. Perhaps this battle has always been, but the stakes are so much higher on the current stage.
I do believe there is a new world calling us, if we are ready. But, we are going to have to shed this skin to be participants. No-thingness is the shedding skin into total being. Psychological death to everything. Empty. Perhaps that is truth.
I cannot escape this feeling that everything is wrong. All of perception is wrong. The murder of President Kennedy is not separate from that.
Thanks to the DPF for indulging me and to all the great contributions that have been made in this thread and "The Splintering Frame."
Albert Rossi Wrote:Certainly I agree with Fensterwald's assertion that a well-conceived intel op has multiple objectives, which may very well include the fostering of generalized confusion and a sense of impotence (please excuse the gendered metaphor).
Speaking of state-sponsored panic and confusion, I just got done watching that 3-part BBC piece from 1992 on Gladio. "La strategia della tensione" (the strategy of tension) is a phrase I remember hearing repeated quite often on Italian TV and in the press during the 1990s. Interesting that my wife (who missed the bomb in the Bologna station in 1980 by one day -- she had taken that same train the day before) says none of her acquaintances thought the Brigate Rosse responsible for Moro's assassination: it didn't make sense for the Left to kill their strongest advocate inside the DC. Sounds familiar. And of course, the BR didn't have the expertise or wherewithal to pull off an operation like that without help from infiltrators.
For those who can't find it, Alan Francovich's essential Gladio documentaries are linked at DPF here.
The films were broadcast under the radar and then suppressed. I touch upon that in the thread:
And Oswald LeWinter, who is interviewed in the Gladio trilogy.
Finally, there's some interesting material from DPF member Ralf Anders here.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Albert Rossi Wrote:Certainly I agree with Fensterwald's assertion that a well-conceived intel op has multiple objectives, which may very well include the fostering of generalized confusion and a sense of impotence (please excuse the gendered metaphor).
Speaking of state-sponsored panic and confusion, I just got done watching that 3-part BBC piece from 1992 on Gladio. "La strategia della tensione" (the strategy of tension) is a phrase I remember hearing repeated quite often on Italian TV and in the press during the 1990s. Interesting that my wife (who missed the bomb in the Bologna station in 1980 by one day -- she had taken that same train the day before) says none of her acquaintances thought the Brigate Rosse responsible for Moro's assassination: it didn't make sense for the Left to kill their strongest advocate inside the DC. Sounds familiar. And of course, the BR didn't have the expertise or wherewithal to pull off an operation like that without help from infiltrators.
For those who can't find it, Alan Francovich's essential Gladio documentaries are linked at DPF here.
The films were broadcast under the radar and then suppressed. I touch upon that in the thread:
Albert Rossi Wrote:Jan, thanks for the pointers here. I didn't mean to hijack this thread ... apologies to Stan.
I have known something about Gladio for a while, but never followed the investigations deeply. I'm sure there is plenty there to contemplate.
Albert - agreed. We shouldn't divert Stan's thread.
However, the following exchange is, ahem, resonant of how murky this world is.....
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:
Ralf Anders Wrote:In the 2002 edition of "The Family", his book on the Manson Family, Ed Sanders talks about meeting a millionaire interested in celebrity porn flicks found at the Polanski-Tate residence. Some thirty years later, Sanders learned that the man had been Oswald LeWinter and, at least in 1970, quite possibly a CIA agent. See chapter 89 of "The Family" for a vivid description of the meeting. There are some people that turn up near the centre of more than one deep politics event: Ronald Stark (LSD, Strategy of Tension), Elio Ciolini (probably CIA, disinformant on the Bologna massacre, Gladio in Belgium), but LeWinter definitely takes the cake. Ralf
Ralf - I have a copy of Sanders' original "The Family", but had forgotten - or never made the link - to this.
Oswald Le Winter blew the whistle on the Strategy of Tension in Allan Francovich's Gladio triology as part of the Strategy of Tension.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
It's never been innocent the great pains, the murder and evidence tampering, the Federal Bureau of Investigation went to in order to conceal the role of Andreas Carl Strassmeier in the Oklahoma City bomb event, itself a continuation of the fascist assault using U.S. tanks and snipers to murder men, women and children in the Northwoods of Waco.
The public consciousness must from time to time be chased back into its cage by the torch-wavers.
The No-Mind Man would not be fazed, would continue his walkabout, away from the stalking tiger,
over the precipice, to grasp the jutting root and savor its sweet berry even as the tiger below bellows its hunger.
Ceding spiritual authority is the auto-manacling flight from Blake.
Will Western Civilization die in a Bangkok closet in the Kung Fu bag of the Kardashians
and how is that a bad thing
is it, then, on earth God's work must truly be our own
or does it cease to be work at the atomic level en route to
The Incredible Shrinking Man's slipping the surly bonds of earth
only to have one's hand become the One
In Escher's sketches we sinned all
Zappa's Brown Shoes:
Life is such a ball
I run the world from City Hall
Quote:Will Western Civilization die in a Bangkok closet in the Kung Fu bag of the Kardashians
This MUST go to the hall of fame of Phil Dragoo all-time classics. In fact, put it on the silver pillow, in a glass case. I don't even think David Carradine would mind...much. And, to answer the (perhaps rhetorical) question, I don't think it'd be a bad thing. At all.
I call your Zappa and raise you a Win Butler:
Between the click of the light and the start of the dream
Us kids know
there's a place where no cars go
Quote:Will Western Civilization die in a Bangkok closet in the Kung Fu bag of the Kardashians
This MUST go to the hall of fame of Phil Dragoo all-time classics. In fact, put it on the silver pillow, in a glass case. I don't even think David Carradine would mind...much. And, to answer the (perhaps rhetorical) question, I don't think it'd be a bad thing. At all.
I call your Zappa and raise you a Win Butler:
Between the click of the light and the start of the dream
Us kids know
there's a place where no cars go
Stan & Phil: dig it!
So, here I go, risking pretentiousness again.
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Phil, the Escher reference is well-chosen and astute, not only as a way of capturing my previous statement about loop-back and intention, but because the only way to make sense of the visual-logical paradox is by jumping out of the frame, to a higher dimension. In fact, the idea of escaping the frames is itself thematically represented.
Now, given that literary allusions abound, I thought I'd add another. One of my favorite American poets, Wallace Stevens, is concerned throughout his corpus with the frames of perception: "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Of Mere Being" ... to cite but a few of the more well-known poems. But perhaps his most Basho-like is this one, about dissolving subject/object boundaries, about having a "mind of winter" to see the winter for what it is.
Quote:The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
I don't think we can really enlist Wallace Stevens into the ranks of Deep Political Thought, but I couldn't resist the temptation to drop this text into our reflections on no-thing.
