One event that never fails to perk my attention is the
launch of a new Adam Curtis documentary. As you'll see in the background links,
I've reviewed others. Adam Curtis' mixture of information, insights, technical
style and subtle humour makes his films avid viewing. The BBC have just
released his new one on IPlayer and I've watched Part 1. The series consists of
six seventy-five minute episodes so it's best I deal with each one in its own
article. The first has the alarming title of
Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain; this refers to a Chinese film, see:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p093wpgw/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-series-1-1-part-one-bloodshed-on-wolf-mountain. Alternative link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME. The opening narration goes:
"We are
living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised;
not just in politics, but across the whole culture. There is anger at the
inequality and the ever growing corruption and a widespread distrust of the
elites. Yet at the same time, there is a paralysis, a sense that no one knows
how to escape from this. Even in America, where there is now hope with the new
president, there are also fears that despite the growing crisis the system will
just return to normal." Not a good start. Curtis is right about the
first bit, but he then demonstrates that he misunderstands the cause of the
corruption. Joe Biden is not the new president, he is a fake president. His
staged ascendancy to the White House is not a sign of hope, but quite the opposite,
see here for details:
http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/01/donald-trump-portal.html.
I learned a lot of history though. The programme has an entire segment on the
wife of Mao Zedong who was an actress (they call her an "actor") called
Jiang Qing. She's an interesting figure because Mao and his comrades arranged
for her to return to drama as a secret subversive force intended to change the
psychology and culture of the people; something which is still going on today
across the world via mind control and media propaganda, see:
https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-bbc-and-mind-control.html.
Of course no BBC programme would be complete without a good dose of white guilt
and in this programme it brings up the Kenya Emergency in which the British
colonial government struggled to hold onto control in the face of the Mau Mau uprising.
The government went to the extremes of putting people in concentration camps
where torture and mass executions took place. It also talks about the abuse
experienced by the Windrush generation in the 1950's. It would be nice to have
an honest discussion about this period of British history. I know I would be
justified in feeling upset over these incidents; however I, like many white
people, have developed a lot of scar tissue over our natural empathy for things
like this, because we know that the moment we express any sorrow it will be
weaponized against us. In the 1950's there was also a collective terror called
the "Red Scare" where Americans feared that communists were taking
over their government. This terror sometimes went way over the top, for example
see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/12/ayn-rand-denounced-its-wonderful-life.html;
but there was a reality underlying it. All the people got wrong was that the
"communists" were not from the
Soviet Union,
they were from the forces that controlled both the
USSR
and the West in the Cold War. The programme refers to the Bavarian Illuminati,
which was a short-lived organization that was fairly inconsequential outside
Germany
and only existed for a few years in the late eighteenth century. The Bavarian
Illuminati must not be confused with
the
Illuminati. I think Curtis must have been reading Robert Anton Wilson because
the next part is all about Discordianism, which I had assumed had been invented
by RAW, but apparently it emerged from a discussion between two young men at a
bowling alley in 1958, both of them fans of Ayn Rand. One of the creators of
Discordianism, Kerry Thornley, then became friends with Lee Harvey Oswald, the
man who did not...
not shoot JFK, see:
https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-kennedy-assassination-50-years-on.html.
Ironically Kerry Thornley had contact with Jim Garrison, the public prosecutor
who launched a lawsuit for the conspiracy which killed President Kennedy. Thornley
had written a novel with a character thinly disguised as Oswald. It turns out
that Garrison had read the book which may be where conspiracy theorists,
including people like me, emerged. Garrison even accused Thornley of being
involved in the Kennedy assassination. Thornley believed that conspiracy
theories were just another form of control because they made people believe in
an all-powerful cabal from which a sense of weakness and powerlessness emerged;
and such a cabal doesn't exist. Obviously I disagree. The cabal does exist and
I think I've provided evidence to support that; but in no way does it make me
feel weak and powerless. On the contrary; an awareness of the true nature of how
this world works is the first step to finding a way to fight the cabal and find
a solution. The Discordians even carried out what in the internet age would be
called a "troll". This involved writing fake letters to Playboy
magazine about an imaginary conspiracy theory to see if they had an effect. It
was appropriately called "Operation Mindfuck". Thornley's delusion is
ironic considering what was really going on.
One of the other people featured is the Irish writer Ethel
Boole who was also a leftist radical. She was married to Wilfred Voynich who
found the famous manuscript. This is an ancient book that appears to be some
kind of occult textbook written in a language nobody has ever heard of before,
see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/10/ben-emlyn-jones-on-cry-freedom-radio.html.
Ethel Boole's father was a mathematician called George Boole who was a
controversial figure in the nineteenth century because he began to apply
mathematics to psychology and, again, we have a connection to the modern world
and current theories of the mind, like Freudian psychoanalysis, which has been
adapted into a tool of control. This is a subject that Curtis has explored many
times in his past works. It also formed the basis of computer logic processes,
what we call "algorithm". At the time Kerry Thornley was raving
against JFK assassination theories, the CIA had a mind control operation
running called MK Ultra. In a way this was part of the same idea that Mao
Zedong and Jiang Qing were promoting in
China.
Curtis ties these threads together at the end by explaining how fake conspiracy
theories merged with real conspiracies and when the internet appeared, the
ideas resulting spread online in a wave of what he calls "dark
paranoia". Obviously I am a part of that. But in fact most of these ideas
are neither dark nor paranoid; nor are they fake. What I have been doing with HPANWO
all these years is to describe that truth. The poignant tagline of the show is
"The ultimate hidden truth of the
world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently".
This is a quote by the Occupy leader David Graeber, who died last year. Most of
the time we tend to see the cycle of crises that the world constantly lurches
around, like a broken carousel, as something we have no control over; almost as
a force of nature, like the weather. However, it is not. It is, as Bill Hicks
said, caused by decisions we all make. Yes, some of these crises are deliberate
and controlled by the elite, not by us; but the elite only rule us because we
let them and they need our cooperation. Nobody is innocent, that's the bad
news; but the good news is that this means nobody is helpless either.
See here for
background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/hypernormalisation.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2009/04/britons-more-fearful-than-ever.html.
