Why didn't the hippies get into the jfk assassination ?

[Albert Rossi]

I never understood why the returning soldiers, sailors, marines were vilified

Agents provocateurs? at least in some cases?

[Steve Minnerly]

Marlene wrote - I was 11 in 1963, when Ruby shot Oswald I knew it wasn't a lone gunman.
______________________________________________-

Same here.

My parents had moved to the Sunny Valley housing development the year before located in New Milford, Connecticut ( Arthur Miller had invested his money in Sunny Valley ).

It was filled with young baby boomers and we use to hang out in gangs of 5 to 10 kids sometimes more. I was 10 years old.

When Oswald got shot all the kids in the neighborhood knew the official story we were being told was a lie and we openly discussed it. You have to figure that young kids all over the country had watched lots of TV detective shows, mysteries and court room shows. They were all familiar with the concept of framing someone.

By the way New Milford was where JFK had attended prep school at Canterbury which was only a few blocks away from my Catholic school.
Let me tell you those nuns made sure we knew that JFK had gone to school at Canterbury so when he got shot it was almost a personal insult.

How bad is your cover up BS when a bunch of kids from about 8 to 12 years old can figure out that its a big lie by the 24th of November.

I know lots of people say their teacher broke down and cried but Mrs. Periman ( my 5th grade teacher at St. Francis Xavier school ) did not. Of course being that young i had no idea what her politics were. Maybe she was a right winger. Regardless she was a very good teacher.

[Marlene Zenker]

Steve wrote:
"I know lots of people say their teacher broke down and cried but Mrs. Periman ( my 5th grade teacher at St. Francis Xavier school ) did not. Of course being that young i had no idea what her politics were. Maybe she was a right winger. Regardless she was a very good teacher."

I was in 6th grade, all of a sudden the P.A. system went on and we heard a live radio feed saying "president has been shot" and we all wondered "what president?" - it never occurred to us it could be our president. My teacher (Mrs. O'Brien) didn't cry, at least that I remember, I know they sent us home and the rest of the weekend was a blur...

[Albert Rossi]

I was two or three years younger than you, Marlene and Steve (8 in 1963), and to be honest, much of that weekend is a blur. I too, at a parochial school, remembering the PA announcement, and my third-grade teacher, a nun, breaking out in tears (she was rather old). Of course, being in Catholic school, I also remember the immediate comment was, "First Pope John XXIII (Pope Roncalli), now the other John." What I do remember clearly from the PA announcement, because it struck me as peculiar that anyone would do this, was a report that the assassin was firing from a sewer and had possibly escaped through it. I swear on scout's honor (OK, I never was a scout) that I am not projecting backward here. It was very much a bizarre image in my mind at the time.

However, most of that weekend passed without my taking much notice of anything. My father ran out onto the porch where I was playing on Sunday morning and grabbed me so that I could at least witness the replay of Oswald and Ruby in the DPD basement. And then of course we watched the funeral.

When I finally came to realize, four years later, what all of this was about, I greatly regretted having been too young or perhaps silly-hearted to have paid enough attention at the time.

[Tracy Riddle]

Al, interesting memory about the sewer news story. I've never seen anything like that in all the contemporary news accounts I've collected.

I wasn't born yet, but my father was a young engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works in Los Angeles in 1963, and he recalled that several right-wingers at the plant were quite happy when news of the assassination came.

[Albert Rossi]

Al, interesting memory about the sewer news story. I've never seen anything like that in all the contemporary news accounts I've collected.

I've always wondered what the origin of that information was, but this was I believe a live radio broadcast they had piped over the intercom. It would be interesting to do some research. I was living in Indianapolis at that time. It was really early news, because I remember it as being around 1 PM. Is that possible? It was probably more like 2, since Indianapolis was supposedly on eastern time in 1963 (talk about local recalcitrance, check out the time zone history of Indiana).

Come to think of it, I probably remember 1 PM because of the time of JFK being officially pronounced dead; so that's not a valid indicator of when I heard the news.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The gates open

I trip therefore...

What?

we are one?

Where have the boundaries gone?

Crowleyian occultists and street hustlers play the role of shamanic guides

And gangster chic rubs up against Mick and Keith

Brian sinks in the pool - Death is real and final

The bard loses his mojo

His sense of invulnerability shatters

The forking paths of Borgesian time and space conjoin

Watch the Performance here:



Give me my boundaries back

Withdrawal into the private sphere is what allowed the 80s and 90s to happen. It is personally depressing to me to think of 1968, and then fast forward to 1984, with Reagan winning by an 80% landslide. What happened to all those bodies on the streets? Did all the hippies become yuppies?

An orgy of materiality

The gates close

The enlightenment of acid replaced by the hedonism of coke

I possess therefore I am

Of course, not all of this occurred "without help". The assassinations, cointelpro, and acts of sabotage and provocation like the murder of Hampton or Kent State, basically destroyed the active left, driving it back inside, into the confines of the university classroom, where it is much less threatening.

Lock up your daughters and fear freedom

"Manson killed the sixties" they screamed

Whilst the Phoenix Program deployed in America

Turned Heiress Patty into Tanya the Terrorist

And drowned the victims in kool-aid - injecting, strangling and shooting the captives with spirit

"Do the babies first, take out the babies first", said the Revd Jim Jones





The murder of hope

And the creation of fear

The many faces of the Strategy of Tension.

As John Judge wrote in 1985:

What Was Jonestown?

According to one story, Jones was seeking a place on earth that
would survive the effects of nuclear war, relying only on an
article in Esquire magazine for his list.[145] The real reason for
his locations in Brazil, California, Guyana and elsewhere deserve
more scrutiny.[146] At one point Jones wanted to set up in
Grenada, and he invited then-Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy to
visit the Temple in San Francisco.[147] He invested $200,000 in
the Grenada National Bank in 1977 to pave the way, and some
$76,000 was still there after the massacre.[148]

His final choice, the Matthew's Ridge section in Guyana is an
interesting one. It was originally the site of a Union Carbide
bauxite and manganese mine, and Jones used the dock they left
behind.[149] At an earlier point, it had been one of seven
possible sites chosen for the relocation of the Jews after World
War II.[150] Plans to inhabit the jungles of Guyana's interior
with cheap labor date back to 1919.[151] Resources buried there
are among the richest in the world, and include manganese,
diamonds, gold, bauxite and uranium.[152] Forbes Burnham, the
Prime Minister, had participated in a scheme to repatriate Blacks
from the UK to work in the area. Like all earlier attempts, it
failed.[153]

Once chosen, the site was leased and worked on by a select crew of
Temple members in preparation for the arrival of the body of the
church. The work was done in cooperation with Burnham and the U.S.
Embassy there.[154] But if these were idealists seeking a better
life, their arrival in "Utopia" was a strange welcome. Piled into
busses in San Francisco, they had driven to Florida. From there,
Pan American charter planes delivered them to Guyana.[155] When
they arrived at the airport, the Blacks were taken off the plane,
bound and gagged.[156] The deception had finally been stripped
bare of all pretense. The Blacks were so isolated and controlled
that neighbors as close as five miles from the site did not know
that Blacks lived at Jonestown. The only public representatives
seen in Guyana were white.[157] Guyanese children were "bought"
also.[158]

According to survivors' reports, they entered a virtual slave
labor camp. Worked for 16 to 18 hours daily, they were forced to
live in cramped quarters on minimum rations, usually rice, bread
and sometimes rancid meat. Kept on a schedule of physical and
mental exhaustion, they were also forced to stay awake at night
and listen to lectures by Jones. Threats and abuse became more
common.[159] The camp medical staff under Dr. Lawrence Schacht was
known to perform painful suturing without anaesthetic. They
administered drugs, and kept daily medical records.[160]
Infractions of the rules or disloyalty led to increasingly harsh
punishments, including forced drugging, sensory isolation in an
underground box, physical torture and public sexual rape and
humiliation. Beatings and verbal abuse were commonplace. Only the
special guards were treated humanely and fed decently.[161] People
with serious injuries were flown out, but few ever returned.[162]
Perhaps the motto at Jonestown should have been the same as the
one at Auschwitz, developed by Larry Schacht's namesake, Dr.
Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi Minister of Economics, "Arheit Macht
Frei," or "Work Will Make You Free." Guyana even considered
setting up an "Auschwitz-like museum" at the site, but abandoned
the idea.[163]

By this point, Jones had amassed incredible wealth. Press
estimates ranged from $26 million to $2 billion, including bank
accounts, foreign investments and real estate. Accounts were set
up worldwide by key members, often in the personal name of certain
people in the Temple.[164] Much of this money, listed publicly
after the massacre, disappeared mysteriously. It was a fortune far
too large to have come from membership alone. The receivership set
up by the government settled on a total of $10 million. Of special
interest were the Swiss bank accounts opened in Panama, the money
taken from the camp, and the extensive investments in Barclay's
Bank.[165] Other sources of income included the German banking
family of Lisa Philips Layton, Larry's mother.[166] Also, close to
$65,000 a month income was claimed to come from welfare and social
security checks for 199 members, sent to the Temple followers and
signed over to Jones.[167] In addition, there are indications that
Blakey and other members were supplementing the Temple funds with
international smuggling of guns and drugs.[168] At one point,
Charles Garry noted that Jones and his community were "literally
sitting on a gold mine." Mineral distribution maps of Guyana
suggest he was right.[169]

To comprehend this well-financed, sinister operation, we must
abandon the myth that this was a religious commune and study
instead the history that led to its formation. Jonestown was an
experiment, part of a 30-year program called MK-ULTRA, the CIA and
military intelligence code name for mind control.[170] A close
study of Senator Ervin's 1974 report, Individual Rights and the
Government's Role in Behavior Modification, shows that these
agencies had certain "target populations" in mind, for both
individual and mass control. Blacks, women, prisoners, the
elderly, the young, and inmates of psychiatric wards were selected
as "potentially violent."[171] There were plans in California at
the time for a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,
expanding on the horrific work of Dr. Jos� Delgado, Drs. Mark and
Ervin, and Dr. Jolly West, experts in implantation, psychosurgery,
and tranquilizers. The guinea pigs were to be drawn from the ranks
of the "target populations," and taken to an isolated military
missile base in California.[172] In that same period, Jones began
to move his Temple members to Jonestown. The were the exact
population selected for such tests.[173]

The meticulous daily notes and drug records kept by Larry Schacht
disappeared, but evidence did not.[174] The history of MK-ULTRA
and its sister programs (MK-DELTA, ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, etc.)
records a combination of drugs, drug mixtures, electroshock and
torture as methods for control. The desired results ranged from
temporary and permanent amnesia, uninhibited confessions, and
creation of second personalities, to programmed assassins and
preconditioned suicidal urges. One goal was the ability to control
mass populations, especially for cheap labor.[175] Dr. Delgado
told Congress that he hoped for a future where a technology would
control workers in the field and troops at war with electronic
remote signals. He found it hard to understand why people would
complain about electrodes implanted in their brains to make them
"both happy and productive."[176]

On the scene at Jonestown, Guyanese troops discovered a large
cache of drugs, enough to drug the entire population of
Georgetown, Guyana (well over 200,000)[177] for more than a year.
According to survivors, these were being used regularly "to
control" a population of only 1,100 people.[178] One footlocker
contained 11,000 doses of thorazine, a dangerous tranquilizer.
Drugs used in the testing for MK-ULTRA were found in abundance,
including sodium pentathol (a truth serum), chloral hydrate (a
hypnotic), demerol, thalium (confuses thinking), and many
others.[179] Schacht had supplies of haliopareael and largatil as
well, two other major tranquilizers.[180] The actual description
of life at Jonestown is that of a tightly run concentration camp,
complete with medical and psychiatric experimentation. The
stresses and isolation of the victims is typical of sophisticated
brainwashing techniques. The drugs and special tortures add an
additional experimental aspect to the horror.[181] This more
clearly explains the medical tags on the bodies, and why they had
to be removed. It also suggests an additional motive for
frustrating any chemical autopsies, since these drugs would have
been found in the system of the dead.

The story of Jonestown is that of a gruesome experiment, not a
religious utopian society. On the eve of the massacre, Forbes
Burnham was reportedly converted to "born again" Christianity by
members of the Full Gospel Christian Businessman's Association,
including Lionel Luckhoo, a Temple lawyer in Guyana.[182] This
same group, based in California, also reportedly converted
Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt prior to his massacres there and
they were in touch with Jim Jones in Ukiah.[183] They currently
conduct the White House prayer breakfasts for Mr. Reagan.[184]
With Ryan on his way to Jonestown, the seal of secrecy was broken.
In a desperate attempt to test their conditioning methods, the
Jonestown elite apparently tried to implement a real suicide
drill.[185] Clearly, it led to a revolt, and the majority of
people fled, unaware that there were people waiting to catch them.

[Steve Minnerly]

Holy crap Albert. Thats really amazing that you heard a report about an assassin in the sewer.

Marlene -

This catholic school i went to was run on a shoe string budget. It had very good teachers but thats about it . No intercom system. If they had to make announcements the main office sent a kid around to each classroom with a message written on a piece of paper and the teacher would read it to the class. There was only one classroom for each grade anyway so a total of 8 classrooms.

A kid came with the first message which said president Kennedy was shot. About a half hour later another kid showed up with another message saying the president was dead and we were sent home.

[Steve Minnerly]

Jan wrote - I possess therefore I am
___________________________________________

Yeah that a nice way of describing the great leap backward that we made in the 1980s.

Most of that decade i walked around shaking my head and thinking why are we forgetting all the ideas that had enlightened us in the 1960s. It seemed like we were trying to get back to the 1950s.

[Albert Rossi]

Holy crap Albert. Thats really amazing that you heard a report about an assassin in the sewer.

I've often wondered if I have somehow effected a psychological closure here; but I swear that memory is vivid to me.

Maybe they should do to me what they did to Yates :nono:. Electroshock, here I come ...