There is a sizeable
portion of the otherwise reading population that refuses to look at
ANYTHING connected to Lyndon Larouche. In its most acute form, this
intellectual close-mindedness centers primarily on his lack of what some
believe is an essential positive regard for the British royalty. Perhaps
the most "outlandish" OR "true-blue" publication has been Chapter VII of
EIR, DOPE, INC. (3rd Ed. 1992). Following the chapter is a fragmentary
chronology of events. True or false. You decide for yourself.
In the spring of 1980, a book appeared called
The Aquarian Conspiracy that put
itself forward as a manifesto of the counterculture. Defining the
counterculture as the conscious embracing of irrationality -- from rock
and drugs to biofeedback, meditation, "consciousness-raising," yoga,
mountain climbing, group therapy, and psychodrama.
The Aquarian Conspiracy declares
that it is now time for the 15 million Americans involved in the
counterculture to join in bringing about a "radical change in the United
States."
Writes author Marilyn Ferguson: "While outlining a not-yet-titled
book about the emerging social alternatives, I
thought again about the
peculiar form of this movement; its atypical leadership, the patient
intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck
me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their
recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not
merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. It -- this
movement -- is a conspiracy!"1
Ferguson used a half-truth to tell a lie. The counterculture is a
conspiracy -- but not in the half-conscious way Ferguson claim -- as she
well knows. Ferguson wrote her manifesto under the direction of Willis
Harman, social policy director of the Stanford Research Institute, as a
popular version of a May 1974 policy study on how to transform the
United States into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The counterculture
is a conspiracy at the top, created as a method of social control, used
to drain the United States of its commitment to scientific and
technological progress.
That conspiracy goes back to the 1930s, when the British sent Aldous
Huxley to the United States as the case officer for an operation to
prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs. We will
take this conspiracy apart step-by-step from its small beginnings with
Huxley in California to the victimization of 15 million Americans today.
With 'The Aquarian Conspiracy', the British Opium War against the United
States has come out into the open.
The Model
The British had a precedent for the counterculture they imposed
upon the United States: the pagan cult ceremonies of the decadent
Egyptian and Roman Empires. The following description of cult ceremonies
dating back to the Egyptian Isis priesthood of the third millennium B.C.
could just as well be a journalistic account of a "hippy be-in" circa
A.D. 1969: "The acts or gestures that accompany the incantations
constitute the rite [of Isis). In these dances, the beating of drums and
the rhythm of music and repetitive movements were helped by
hallucinatory substances like hashish or mescal; these were consumed as
adjuvants to create the trance and the hallucinations that were taken to
he the visitation of the god. The drugs were sacred, and their knowledge
was limited to the initiated . . . Possibly because they have the
illusion of satisfied desires, and allowed the innermost feelings to
escape, these rites acquired during their execution a frenzied character
that is conspicuous in certain spells: "Retreat! Re is piercing thy
head, slashing thy face, dividing thy head, crushing it in his hands;
thy bones are shattered, thy limbs are cut to pieces!"2
The counterculture that was foisted on the 1960s adolescent youth
of America is not merely analogous to the ancient cult of Isis. It is a
literal resurrection of the cult down to the popularization of the Isis
cross (the "peace symbol") as the counterculture's most frequently used
symbol.
The
High Priesthood
The high priest for Britain's Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the
grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Roundtable group
and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on
the RIIA council for nearly fifty years, headed the Research Division of
British intelligence throughout World War II, and served as wartime
briefing officer of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Toynbee's "theory"
of history, expounded in his twenty-volume History of Western
civilization, was that its determining culture has always been the rise
and decline of grand imperial dynasties. At the very point that these
dynasties -- the "thousand year Reich" of the Egyptian pharaohs, the
Roman Empire, and the British Empire -- succeed in imposing their rule
over the entire face of the earth, they tend to decline. Toynbee argued
that this decline could be abated if the ruling oligarchy (like that of
the British Roundtable) would devote itself to the recruitment and
training of an ever-expanding priesthood dedicated to the principles of
imperial rule.3
Thomas H. Huxley and
his grandson Aldous Huxley
Trained at Toynbee's Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the
initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a Dionysian cult comprised of
the children of Britain's Roundtable elite.4 Among the other initiates
were T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir Oswald Mosley, and D.H. Lawrence,
Huxley's homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch
the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence's pornographic novel Lady
Chatterley's Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it
was a misunderstood "work of art."5
Aldous Huxley, along with his brother Julian, was tutored at
Oxford by H.G. Wells, the head of British foreign
intelligence during
World War I and the spiritual grandfather of the Aquarian Conspiracy.
Ferguson accurately sees the counterculture as the realization of what
Wells called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World
Revolution. The "Open Conspiracy," Wells wrote,
"will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of
intelligent and quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men, as a movement
having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of
the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an
incidental implement in the stages, a mere movement of a number of
people in a certain direction who will presently discover with a sort of
surprise the common object toward which they are all moving . . . In all
sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of
the ostensible government."6
What Ferguson left out is that Wells called his conspiracy a
"one-world brain" which would function as
"a police
of the mind." Such books as the Open Conspiracy were for the
priesthood itself. But Wells's popular writings
(Time Machine,
The Island of Dr. Moreau, and so forth), and those of his
proteges Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George
Orwell (1984 and
Animal Farm), were
written as "mass appeal" organizing documents on behalf of one-world
order. Only in the United States are these "science fiction classics"
taught in grade school as attacks against fascism.
Under Wells's tutelage, Huxley was first introduced to
Aleister
Crowley. Crowley was a product of the cultist
circle that developed in
Britain from the 1860s under the guiding influence of Edward
Bulwer-Lytton -- who, it will be recalled, was the colonial minister
under Lord Palmerston during the Second Opium War. In 1886, Crowley,
William Butler Yeats, and several other Bulwer-Lytton proteges formed
the Isis-Urania Temple of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. This
Isis Cult was organized around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by
Madame Helena Blavatsky, in which the Russian occultist called for the
British aristocracy to organize itself into an Isis priesthood.7
The subversive Isis
Urania Order of the Golden Dawn is today an
international drug ring said to be controlled by the Canadian
multi-millionaire,
Maurice Strong, who is also a top operative for
British Intelligence.
In 1937, Huxley was sent to the United States, where he remained
throughout the period of World War II. Through a Los Angeles contact,
Jacob Zeitlin, Huxley and pederast
Christopher Isherwood were employed
as script writers for MGM, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney Studios.
Hollywood was already dominated by organized crime elements bankrolled
and controlled through London. Joseph Kennedy was the frontman for a
British consortium that created RKO studios, and "Bugsy" Siegel, the
West Coast boss of the Lansky syndicate, was heavily involved in Warner
Brothers and MGM.
Huxley founded a nest of Isis cults in southern California and in
San Francisco, that consisted exclusively of several hundred deranged
worshipers of Isis and other cult gods. Isherwood, during the California
period, translated and propagated a number of ancient Zen Buddhist
documents, inspiring Zen-mystical cults along the way.8
In effect, Huxley and Isherwood (joined soon afterwards by Thomas
Mann and his daughter Elisabeth Mann Borghese) laid the foundations
during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture, by
recruiting a core of "initiates" into the Isis cults that Huxley's
mentors, Bulwer-Lytton,
Blavatsky, and Crowley, had constituted while
stationed in India.
LSD: 'Visitation from the Gods'
"Ironically," writes Ferguson, "the introduction of major
psychedelics like LSD, in the 1960s, was largely attributable to the
Central Intelligence Agency's investigation into the substances for
possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses,
under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands
of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing
their own 'acid.' "9
The CIA operation was code named
MK-Ultra, its result was not
unintentional, and it began in 1952, the year Aldous Huxley returned to
the United States.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was developed in 1943 by
Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz A.B. -- a Swiss pharmaceutical house
owned by S.G. Warburg. While precise documentation is unavailable as to
the auspices under which the LSD research was commissioned, it can be
safely assumed that British intelligence and its subsidiary U.S. Office
of Strategic Services were directly involved. Allen Dulles, the director
of the CIA when that agency began MK-Ultra, was the OSS station chief in
Berne, Switzerland throughout the early Sandoz research. One of his OSS
assistants was James Warburg, of the same Warburg family, who was
instrumental in the 1963 founding of the Institute for Policy Studies,
and worked with both Huxley and Robert Hutchins."10
Aldous Huxley returned to the United States from Britain,
accompanied by Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the Huxleys' private physician.
Osmond had been part of a discussion group Huxley had organized at the
National Hospital, Queens Square, London. Along with another seminar
participant, J.R. Smythies, Osmond wrote Schizophrenia: A New
Approach, in which he asserted that mescaline -- a derivative of
the mescal cactus used in ancient Egyptian and Indian pagan rites --
produced a psychotic state identical in all clinical respects to
schizophrenia. On this basis, Osmond and Smythies advocated
experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs as a means of developing a
"cure" for mental disorders.
Osmond was brought in by Allen Dulles to play a prominent role in
MK-Ultra. At the same time, Osmond, Huxley, and the University of
Chicago's Robert Hutchins held a series of secret planning sessions in
1952 and 1953 for a second, private LSD mescaline project under Ford
Foundation funding.11 Hutchins, it will be recalled, was the program
director of the Ford Foundation during this period. His LSD proposal
incited such rage in Henry Ford II that Hutchins was fired from the
foundation the following year.
It was also in 1953 that Osmund gave Huxley a supply of mescaline
for his personal consumption. The next year, Huxley wrote
The
Doors of Perception, the first manifesto of the psychedelic drug
cult, which claimed that hallucinogenic drugs "expand consciousness."
Although the Ford Foundation rejected the Hutchins-Huxley proposal for
private foundation sponsorship of LSD, the proposal was not dropped.
Beginning in 1962, the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, California
began a four-year experiment in LSD, peyote, and marijuana. The Rand
Corporation was established simultaneously with the reorganization of
the Ford Foundation during 1949. Rand was an outgrowth of the wartime
Strategic Bombing Survey, a "cost analysis" study of the psychological
effects of the bombings of German population centers.
According to a 1962 Rand Abstract, W.H. McGlothlin conducted a
preparatory study on "The Long-Lasting Effects of LSD on Certain
Attitudes in Normals: An Experimental Proposal." The following
year, McGlothlin conducted a year-long experiment on thirty human guinea
pigs, called "Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes
and Performance." The study concluded that LSD improved
emotional attitudes and resolved anxiety problems.12
Huxley At Work
Huxley expanded his own LSD-mescaline project in
California by recruiting several individuals who had been initially
drawn into the cult circles he helped establish during his earlier stay.
The two most prominent individuals were Alan Watts and the late Dr.
Gregory Bateson (the former husband of Dame Margaret Mead). Watts became
a self-styled "guru" of a nationwide Zen Buddhist cult built around his
well-publicized books. Bateson, an anthropologist with the OSS, became
the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo
Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Under Bateson's auspices, the
initiating "cadre" of the LSD cult -- the hippies -- were programmed.13
Watts at the same time founded the Pacifica Foundation, which
sponsored two radio station WKBW in San Francisco and WBM-FM in New York
City. The Pacifica stations were among the first to push the "Liverpool
Sound" -- the British-imported hard rock twanging of the Rolling Stones,
the Beatles, and the Animals. They would later pioneer "acid rock" and
eventually the self-avowed psychotic "punk rock."
During the fall of 1960, Huxley was appointed visiting professor
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Around his stay
in that city, Huxley created a circle at Harvard parallel to his West
Coast LSD team. The Harvard group included Huxley, Osmund, and Watts
(brought in from California), Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert.
The ostensible topic of the Harvard seminar was
"Religion
and its Significance in the Modern Age." The seminar was
actually a planning session for the "acid rock" counterculture. Huxley
established contact during this Harvard period with the president of
Sandoz, which at the time was working on a CIA contract to produce large
quantities of LSD and psilocybin (another synthetic hallucinogenic drug)
for MK-Ultra, the CIA's official chemical warfare experiment. According
to recently released CIA documents, Allen Dulles purchased over 100
million doses of LSD -- almost all of which flooded the streets of the
United States during the late 1960s. During the same period, Leary began
privately purchasing large quantities of LSD from Sandoz as well.14
From the discussions of the Harvard seminar, Leary put together
the book The Psychedelic Experience, based on the
ancient cultist Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was this
book that popularized Osmund's previously coined term, "psychedelic
mind-expanding."
The Roots of the Flower People
Back in California, Gregory Bateson had maintained the Huxley
operation out of the Palo Alto VA hospital. Through "SD experimentation
on patients already hospitalized for psychological problems, Bateson
established a core of "initiates" into the "psychedelic"
Isis Cult.
Foremost among his Palo Alto recruits was Ken Kesey. In 1959,
Bateson administered the first dose of "SD to
Kesey. By 1962, Kesey had
completed a novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
which popularized the notion that society is a prison and the only truly
"free" people are the insane.15
Kesey subsequently organized a circle of "SD initiates called
"The Merry Pranksters." They toured the country
disseminating SD" (often without forewarning the receiving parties),
building up local distribution connections, and establishing the pretext
for a high volume of publicity on behalf of the still minuscule
"counterculture."
By 1967, the Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of "SD that
a sizable drug population had emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury
district of San Francisco. Here Huxley collaborator Bateson set up a
"free clinic," staffed by **Dr. David Smith -- later a "medical adviser"
for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML);
**Dr. Ernest Dernberg an active-duty military officer, probably on
assignment through MK-UItra; **Roger Smith-a street gang organizer
trained by Saul Alinsky. During the Free Clinic period, Roger Smith was
the parole officer of the cultist mass murderer Charles Manson; **Dr.
Peter Bourne -- formerly President Carter's special assistant on drug
abuse. Bourne did his psychiatric residency at the Clinic. He had
previously conducted a profiling study of GI heroin addicts in Vietnam.
The Free Clinic paralleled a project at the
Tavistock Institute,
the psychological warfare agency for the British Secret Intelligence
Service. Tavistock, founded as a clinic in London in the 1920s, had
become the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II
under its director, Dr. John Rawlings Rees.16
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no
criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic
"mind-expanding" drugs
are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a
Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by
Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and
advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would
soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and
Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All
of them -- Leary, Osmund, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly
publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the
cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the
antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD,
hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late
1960s.
'The Beating of Drums . . .'
In 1963, the Beatles arrived in the United States, and with their
decisive airing on the Ed Sullivan Show, the "British sound" took off in
the U.S.A. For their achievement, the four rocksters were awarded the
Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen. The Beatles and
the Animals, Rolling Stones, and homicidal punk rock maniacs who
followed were, of course, no more a spontaneous outpouring of alienated
youth than was the acid culture they accompanied.
The social theory of rock was elaborated by musicologist
Theodor
Adorno, who came to the United States in
1939 to head the Princeton
University Radio Research Project.17 Adorno writes:
"In an
imaginary but psychologically emotion-laden domain, the listener who
remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the
person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of
many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will
feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the
community of "fans." In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of
socialization, although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of
the moment his isolation continues unchanged . . . The comparison with
addiction is inescapable. Addicted conduct generally has a social
component: it is one possible reaction to the atomization which, as
sociologists have noticed, parallels the compression of the social
network. Addiction to music on the part of a number of entertainment
listeners would be a similar phenomenon."18
The hit parade is organized precisely on the same principles used
by Egypt's Isis priesthood and for the same purpose: the recruitment of
youth to the dionysiac counterculture.
In a report prepared for the University of Michigan's Institute
for Social Research, Paul Hirsch described the product of Adorno's Radio
Research Project.19 According to Hirsch, the establishment of postwar
radio's Hit Parade "transformed the mass medium into an agency
of sub-cultural programming. Radio networks were converted into
round-the-clock recycling machines that repeated the top forty hits."
Hirsch documents how all popular culture -- movies, music, books, and
fashion -- is now run on the same program of preselection. Today's mass
culture operates like the opium trade: The supply determines the demand.
The
Vietnam War and the Anti-Vietnam War Trap
But without the Vietnam War and the "anti-war" movement, the Isis
cult would have been contained to a fringe phenomenon -- no bigger than
the beatnik cult of the 1950s that was an outgrowth of the early Huxley
ventures in California. The Vietnam War created the climate of moral
despair that opened America's youth to drugs.
Under Kennedy, American military involvement in Vietnam -- which
had been vetoed by the Eisenhower administration -- was initiated on a
limited scale. Under Lyndon Johnson, American military presence in
Vietnam was massively escalated, at the same time that U.S. efforts were
restricted -- the framework of "limited war." Playing on the President's
profile, the anglophile Eastern Establishment, typified by top White
House national security aide McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara, convinced President Johnson that under the nuclear "balance of
terror," or the regime of Mutual and Assured Destruction, the United
States could afford neither a political solution to the conflict, nor
the commitment to a military victory.
The outcome of this debacle was a major strategic withdrawal from
Asia by the United States, spelled out in Henry Kissinger's
"Guam Doctrine," adoption of the spectacular failure known as
the "China Card" strategy for containing Soviet
influence, and demoralization of the American people over the war to the
point that the sense of national pride and confidence in the future
progress of the republic was badly damaged.
Just as Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the
United States thirty years before its consequences became evident to the
public, Lord Bertrand Russell began laying the foundations for the
anti-war movement of the 1960s before the 1930s expired. Russell's
"pacifism" was always relative -- the means to his most
cherished end, one-world government on the imperial model, that would
curb the nation-state and its persistent tendency toward republicanism
and technological progress.
Lord Russell and Aldous Huxley cofounded the Peace Pledge Union in
1937 campaigning for peace with Hitler-just before both went to the
United States for the duration of World War.20 During World War II, Lord
Russell opposed British and American warfare against the Nazis. 1111947,
when the United States was in possession of the atomic bomb and Russia
was not, Russell loudly advocated that the United States order the
Soviets to surrender to a one-world government that would enjoy a
restrictive monopoly on nuclear weapons, under the threat of a
preemptive World War III against the Soviet Union. His 1950s "Ban the
Bomb" movement was directed to the same end-it functioned as an
anti-technology movement against the peace-through-economic development
potentials represented by President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace"'
initiative.
From the mid-1950s onward, Russell's principal assignment was to
build an international anti-war and anti-American movement. Coincident
with the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam under British
manipulation, Russell upgraded the old Peace Pledge Union (which had
been used in West Germany throughout the postwar period to promote an
anti-capitalist "New left" wing of the Social Democratic Party,
recruiting several future members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang
in the process) into the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.
In the United States, the New York banks provided several hundred
thousand dollars to establish the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS),
effectively the U.S. branch of the Russell Peace Foundation. Among the
founding trustees of the IPS was James Warburg, directly representing
the family's interests.
IPS drew its most active operatives from a variety of
British-dominated institutions. IPS founding director Marcus Raskin was
a member of the Kennedy administration's National Security Council and
also a fellow of the National Training Labs, a U.S. subsidiary of the
Tavistock Institute founded by Dr. Kurt Lewin.
After its creation by the League for Industrial Democracy,
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the umbrella of the student
anti-war movement, was in turn financed and run through IPS -- up
through and beyond its splintering into a number of terrorist and Maoist
gangs in the late 1960s.21 More broadly, the institutions and outlook of
the U.S. anti-war movement were dominated by the direct political
descendants of the British-dominated "socialist movement" in the U.S.A.,
fostered by the House of Morgan as far back as the years before World
War!.
This is not to say that the majority of anti-war protesters were
paid, certified British agents. On the contrary, the overwhelming
majority of anti-war protesters went into SDS on the basis of outrage at
the developments in Vietnam. But once caught in the environment defined
by Russell and the Tavistock Institute's psychological warfare experts,
and inundated with the message that hedonistic pleasure-seeking was a
legitimate alternative to "immoral war," their sense of values and their
creative potential went up in a cloud of hashish smoke.
'Changing Images'
Now, fifteen years later, with nearly an entire generation of
American youth submerged in the drugs that flooded the nation's
campuses, the Aquarian Conspiracy's Marilyn Ferguson is
able to write: "There are legions of [Aquarian] conspirators.
They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties
of public schools, in factories and doctors' offices, in state and
federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state
legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of
policy making in the country."22
Like the British inundation of China with drugs in the nineteenth
century, the British counterculture has succeeded in. subverting the
fabric of the nation, even up to the top-most levels of government.
In 1962, Huxley helped found the Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California, which became a mecca for hundreds of Americans to engage in
weekends of T-Groups and Training Groups modeled on behavior group
therapy, for Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist transcendental meditation, and
"out of body" experiences through simulated and actual hallucinogenic
drugs.23
As described in the Esalen Institute Newsletter:
"Esalen
started in the fall of 1962 as a forum to bring together a wide variety
of approaches to enhancement of the human potential . . . including
experiential sessions involving encounter groups, sensory awakening,
gestalt awareness training, related disciplines. Our latest step is to
fan out into the community at large, running programs in cooperation
with many different institutions, churches, schools, hospitals, and
government."24
Esalen's nominal founders were two transcendental meditation
students, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, both graduates of Stanford
University. Price also participated in the experiments on patients at
Bateson's Palo Alto Veterans Hospital. Today Esalen's catalogue offers:
T-Groups; Psychodrama Marthon; Fight Training for Lovers and Couples;
Religious Cults; LSD Experiences and the Great Religions of the World;
Are You Sound, a weekend workshop with Alan Watts; Creating New Forms of
Worship; Hallucinogenic Psychosis; and Non-Drug Approaches to
Psychedelic Experiences.
Several tens of thousands of Americans have passed through Esalen;
millions have passed through the programs it has sired throughout the
country.
The next leap in Britain's Aquarian Conspiracy against the United
States was the May 1974 report that provided the basis for Ferguson's
work. The report is entitled "Changing Images of Man,"
Contract Number URH (489~215O, Policy Research Report No. 414.74,
prepared by the Stanford Research Institute Center for the Study of
Social Policy, Willis Harman, director. The 319-page mimeographed report
was prepared by a team of fourteen researchers and supervised by a panel
of twenty-three controllers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead,
psychologist B.F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations, Sir
Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence.
The aim of the study, the authors state, is to change the image of
mankind from that of industrial progress to one of
"spiritualism." The study asserts that in our present society,
the "image of industrial and technological man" is
obsolete and must be "discarded": "Many of our present images
appear to have become dangerously obsolete, however . . . Science,
technology, and economics have made possible really significant strides
toward achieving such basic human goals as physical safety and security,
material comfort and better health. But many of these successes have
brought with them problems of being too successful -- problems that
themselves seem insoluble within the set of societal value-premises that
led to their emergence . . . Our highly developed system of technology
leads to higher vulnerability and breakdowns. Indeed the range and
interconnected impact of societal problems that are now emerging pose a
serious threat to our civilization . . . If our predictions of the
future prove correct, we can expect the association problems of the
trend to become more serious, more universal and to occur more rapidly."
Therefore, SRI concludes, we must change the
industrial-technological image of man fast:
"Analysis of the
nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that .
. . the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be
inadequate for the post-industrial era."
Since the writing of the Harman report, one President of the
United States, Jimmy Carter, reported sighting UFOs his National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski made speeches proclaiming the
advent of the New Age, the Joint Chiefs of Staff every morning read
so-called intelligence reports on the biorhythms and horoscopes of the
members of the Soviet Politburo. The House of Representatives
established a new congressional committee, called the Congressional
Clearinghouse on the Future, where the likes of Ferguson have come to
lecture up to a hundred congressmen.25
What began as Britain's creation of the counterculture to open the
market for its dope has come a long way.
The
LSD Connection
Who provided the drugs that swamped the anti-war movement and the
college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized
crime infrastructure which had set up the Peking Connection for the
opium trade in 1928 -- provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s
it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same network
Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s. The
LSD connection begins with one William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock.
Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the
millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the
same family had been the U.S. Treasury Secretary throughout
Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard,
Hitchcock rented a fifty-five-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, where
the entire Leary-Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later
move back to California.26
Hitchcock was also a broker for the Lansky syndicate and for the
Fiduciary Trust Co., Nassau, Grand Bahamas --- a wholly owned subsidiary
of Investors Overseas Services. He was formally employed by Delafield
and Delafield Investments, where he worked on buying and selling vast
quantities of stock in the Mary Carter Paint Co., soon to become Resorts
International.
In 1967, Dr. Richard Alpert put Hitchcock in contact with Augustus
Owsley Stanley III. As Owsley's agent, Hitchcock retained the law firm
of Babinowitz, Boudin and Standard 27 -- to conduct a feasibility study
of several Caribbean countries to determine the best location for the
production and distribution of LSD and hashish.
During this period, Hitchcock joined Leary and his circle in
California. Leary had established an LSD cult called the
Brotherhood of
Eternal Love and several front companies, including Mystics Art World,
Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran
lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from
Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established
directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to
import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD with financing
from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney
dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and
hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968. 28
Toward the end of 1968, Hitchcock expanded the LSD-hashish
production operations in the Caribbean with funds provided by the
Fiduciary Trust Co. (IOS). In conjunction with J. Vontobel and Co. of
Zurich, Hitchcock founded a corporation called 4-Star Anstalt in
Liechtenstein. This company, employing "investment funds" (that is, drug
receipts) from Fiduciary Trust, bought up large tracts of land in the
Grand Bahamas as well as large quantities of ergotamine tartrate, the
basic chemical used in the production of LSD.29
Hitchcock's personal hand in the LSD connection abruptly ended
several years later. Hitchcock had been working closely with Johann F.
Parravacini of the Parravacini Bank Ltd in Berne, Switzerland. From
1968, they had together funded even further expansion of the
Caribbean-California LSD-hashish ventures. In the early 1970s, as the
result of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, both
Hitchcock and Parravacini were indicted and convicted of a $40 million
stock fraud. Parravacini had registered a $40 million sale to Hitchcock
for which Hitchcock had not put down a penny of cash or collateral. This
was one of the rare instances in which federal investigators succeeded
in getting inside the $200 billion drug fund as it was making its way
around the "offshore" banking system.
Another channel for laundering dirty drug money -- a channel yet
to be compromised by federal investigative agencies is important to note
here. This is the use of tax-exempt foundations to finance terrorism and
environmentalism. One immediately relevant case makes the point.
In 1957, the University of Chicago's Robert M. Hutchins
established the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI)
in Santa Barbara, California. Knight Commander Hutchins drew in Aldous
Huxley, Elisabeth Mann Borghese, and some Rhodes Scholars who had
originally been brought into the University of Chicago during the 1930s
and 1940s.
The CSDI was originally funded 1957 to 1961 through a
several-million-dollar fund that Hutchins managed to set up before his
untimely departure from the Ford Foundation. From 1961 onward, the
Center was principally financed by organized crime. The two funding
conduits were the Fund of Funds, a tax exempt front for Bernie
Cornfeld's lOS, and the Parvin Foundation, a parallel front for
Parvin-Dohnnan Co. of Nevada. IOS and Marvin-Doorman held controlling
interests in the Desert Inn, the Aladdin, and the Dune -- all Las Vegas
casinos associated with the Lansky syndicate. IOS, as already
documented, was a conducting vehicle for LSD, hashish, and marijuana
distribution throughout the 1960s.30 In 1967 alone, IOS channeled
between $3 and $4 million to the center. Wherever there is dope, there
is Dope, Inc.
REFERENCES:
-
Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy (Los Angeles: J.P.
Archer, 1980), p.19.
-
Paul Ghalioungui, The House of Life: Magic and Medica'
Science in Ancient Egypt (New York: Schram Enterprises, 1974).
-
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1935).
-
Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence
in England after 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
-
See Ronald William Clark, The Huxleys (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1968).
-
H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and
Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (New York: Harper
and Row, 1902), p.285.
-
Helena P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, A Master Key to the
Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (Los Angeles:
Theosophy Co., 1931).
-
Francis King, Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (New York:
Citadel, 1974), p.118.
-
Ferguson, Aquarian Conspiracy, p. 126n.
-
Institute for Policy Studies, "The First Ten Years,
1963-1973," Washington, D.C., 1974.
-
Humphrey Osmund, Understanding Understanding (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974).
-
Rand Corporation Catalogue of Documents.
-
Gregory Bateson, Steps to the Ecology of the Mind (New York:
Chandler, 1972).
-
Ralph Metzner, The Ecstatic Adventure (New York: Macmillan,
1968).
-
See Clark, The Huxleys.
-
Michael Minnicino, "Low Intensity Operations: The Reesian
Theory of War," The Campaigner (April 1974).
-
Theodor Adorno was a leading professor of the Frankfurt
School of Social Research in Germany, founded by the British Fabian
Society. A collaborator of twelve-tone formalist and British
intelligence operative Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno was brought to the
United States in 1939 to head the Princeton Radio Research Project.
The aim of this project, as stated in Adorno's Introduction to the
Sociology of Music, was to program a mass "musical" culture that
would steadily degrade its consumers. Punk rock is, in the most
direct sense, the ultimate result of Adorno's work.
-
Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New
York: Seabury Press, 1976).
-
Paul Hirsch, "The Structure of the Popular Music Industry;
The Filtering Process by which Records are Preselected for Public
Consumption," Institute for Social Research's Survey Research Center
Monograph, 1969.
-
Ronald Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1976), p.457.
-
Illinois Crime Commission Report, 1969. The Institute for
Policy Studies (IPS) was established in 1963 by Marcus Raskin, a
former National Security Adviser under NSC Director McGeorge Bundy,
and by Richard Barnet, a former State Department adviser on arms
control and disarmament. Among the board of trustees of IPS were
Thurmond Arnold, James Warburg, Philip Stern, and Hans Morgenthau,
with seed money from the Ford Foundation (later to be headed by
McGeorge Bundy). IPS has functioned as the "New left" think tank and
control center for local community control, community health
centers, and direct terrorist organizations. In its report "The
First Ten Years," the Institute lists among its lecturers and
fellows, members of the Weathermen group, and known associates of
the Japanese Red Army, the Puerto Rican terrorist Armed Forces of
National Liberation (FALN), and the Black Liberation Army. See also
Carter and the Party of international Terrorism, Special Report by
the U.S. Labor Party, August, 1976.
-
Ferguson, Aquarian Conspiracy, p.24.
-
Criton Zoakos et al., Stamp Out the Aquarian Conspiracy,
Citizens for LaRouche monograph, New York, 1980, pp. 60-63.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid., pp. 10-12.
-
Mary Jo Warth, "The Story of Acid Profiteers," Village Voice,
August 22, 1974.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Hutchinson, Vesco.
FRAGMENTARY AQUARIAN CHRONOLOGY
In the 1820s De Quincy confessed to the high incidence of opium
eating among the English aristocrats and artists of his day. Among
habitual users of Laudanum and morphine have been included Coleridge,
Dickens, Carlyle, Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the poet
Laureate Tennyson. Britain's Foreign Minister, Lord John Russell and
Anthony Ashley Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury)
"guided the
political training of ex-American George Peabody, founder of the Morgan
financial empire." In 1857 Morgan and Peabody were saved by an
emergency line of credit (800,000 pounds) furnished by the Bank of
England with Barings a guarantor of the loan. Peabody later become
friends with the "top racial ideologues in British science,
Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin."
The American Museum of Natural History, of which the main
functions are education, research, exhibition, and publication, was
founded in 1869 by a group of wealthy men, among whom was the elder J.
P. Morgan. Inspired by the urging of a young naturalist, Albert Smith
Bickmore, and by the theories of Darwin and Huxley which had suddenly
given a new interpretation to the origin of life, the group resolved to
found a museum that would be the "means of teaching our youth to
appreciate the wonderful works of the Creator."
The British biologist Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975),
contributed to knowledge in embryology, systematics, genetics, ethology,
and evolutionary studies. He studied the development of many organisms,
writing, with Sir Gavin De Beer, Elements of Experimental
Embryology (1934). Huxley presented many of his ideas of
evolutionary mechanisms in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
(1942). In 1946 he was appointed the first director general of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO). In 1948 Sir Julian Huxley, called for a radical eugenic policy
in UNESCO: "Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical
eugenic policy of controlled human breeding will be for many years
politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for
UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest
care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake that
much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable." The
fact that emergence of an organized youth-counterculture around
"post-industrial" utopianism reflected the emergence of the
forementioned types of psycho-social conditioning, should not be read as
evidence that the emergence of the movement itself was in any sense
"spontaneous," or
"natural." Very little in
modern history has been less natural, indeed more unnatural, than the
self-styled nature cult which has grown up,
"on behalf of the
environment," around the 1961 initiatives of Prince Philip's and
Prince Bernhard's reactionary World Wildlife Fund. The members of the
new youth-counterculture were virtually campus-laboratory guinea-pigs,
whose behavior was induced and directed, from the top-down, from the
outset.
The environment preparing this operation was established as early
as the 1920s, under British Brigadier Dr. John Rawlings Rees of the
London Tavistock Clinic. The entire operation was dominated by
relatively highly refined methods of mass-brainwashing, assisted by such
networks as the Lewin centers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the network of Freudian and
kindred brainwashing networks, such as "MK-Ultra," spun out from under
the direction of Julian Huxley at the UNO and the London Tavistock
Clinic. His humanistic beliefs were set forth in the classic
Religion Without Revelation (1957). "I use the word
'Humanist' to mean someone who believes that man . . . his body, his
mind, and his soul were not supernaturally created but are all products
of evolution," Julian Huxley once said. In 1957 Julian Huxley
wrote: "And the relation to practical existence may be one of
escape, as in asceticism or pure Buddhism; or of full participation, as
in classical Greece or the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia; or of
rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesars's, as in usual
Christian practice." The IUCN has lately produced the UN's
Global Biodiversity Assessment, which suggests that the human population
should be reduced to one billion. From the very beginning key UN figures
such as Brock Chisholm, Julian Huxley and Paul G. Hoffman
"were
promoting anti-natalist policies." The United Nations is a
specific example of Humanism at work. The first Director General of
UNESCO, the UN organization promoting education, science, and culture,
was the 1962 Humanist of the Year Julian Huxley, who practically drafted
UNESCO'S charter by himself. The first Director-General of the World
Health Organization (WHO) was the 1959 Humanist of the Year Brock
Chisholm. One of this organization's greatest accomplishments has been
the wiping of smallpox from the face of the earth. And the first
Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organization was British
Humanist John Boyd Orr. The poppy seed from which it is derived was long
known to the Moguls of India, who used the seeds mixed in tea offered to
a difficult opponent. It is also used as a pain-killing drug which
largely replaced chloroform and other older anesthetics of a bygone era.
Opium was popular in all of the fashionable clubs of Victorian London
and it was no secret that men like the Huxley brothers used it
extensively. Members of the Orphic-Dionysus cults of Hellenic Greece and
the Osiris-Horus cults of Ptolemaic Egypt which Victorian society
embraced, all smoked opium; it was the "in" thing to do.
Entering the University of Vermont (which was located in
Burlington) at the early age of fifteen, Dewey still evinced no special
talent, until in his senior year he led his class and won the highest
marks on record in philosophy. This transformation in Dewey's scholastic
record was occasioned by his accidental perusal of a physiology textbook
written by Thomas Henry Huxley, the foremost supporter in England of
Darwin's theory of evolution. Awakened to the excitement of the effort
to understand the world, and beginning to doubt his early moralistic
beliefs, Dewey delved into philosophy for an answer to the conflict
between revealed dogma and the findings of science. This was the
beginning of Dewey's lifelong task of reconciling these two poles.
In 1890 Fabian Havelock Ellis saw the leadership of women as a
source of renewal.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Surrey,
England. He was "the beloved son of English intellectual
aristocrats." His father Leonard was an editor and minor poet.
His mother was the former Julia Arnold. A granduncle, Matthew Arnold
(1822-1888) was a celebrated poet and critic.
Aldous's Round Table father,
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), was
a Victorian scientist, essayist, defender of Darwin (evolutionist) and
an agnostic. T.H. Huxley, on the eve of the publication of Darwin's The
Origin of Species, promised to support Darwin's thesis. However, he
warned that he had burdened his argument unnecessarily. He was so
vociferous in his defense that he earned the nickname
"Darwin's
Bulldog." He once said: "It is the customary fate of new
truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions."
Huxley's Man's Place in Nature (1863) embroiled him in
further controversy; it espoused the idea that the closest relatives of
humans are the anthropoid apes. Having studied under Professor Thomas H.
Huxley, H. G. Wells went on to teach school in North Wales. Huxley
described his Church of Humanity as
"Catholicism
minus Christianity". To Huxley the only good Church was a dead
Church. Huxley adopted David Hume's philosophy. He professed belief in
God and cut the ground from under every argument for his existence. Sir
Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography pronounced him
"the acutest thinker in Great Britain in the 18th Century"
and exposed the clerical libels about his last hours. Huxley was not
only one of the most decorated men of science of his time, but all his
life an outspoken agnostic (a term which he himself coined to avoid the
harshness of atheist). Pious folk spread a myth about conversion late in
life but his son Leonard shows in his biography of his father that all
this is nonsense. A few months before he died he said to his son:
"The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe
for 18 centuries his own superstitions."
Patrick Geddes (1854- ) held summer meeting at the Edinburgh
school, utilizing the Outlook Tower to preach his three S's; 1) sympathy
for people and the environment, 2) synthesis of all factors relating to
a case, and 3) synergy -- the combined cooperative action of everyone
involved (Boardman 15). As Meller wrote, "Geddes felt that he
had formed a new philosophy of education which incorporated the many
methods he had learned from Le Play, Comte, Huxley, and others during
his endeavors into biology civics, and geography."
In 1898 Havelock Ellis reported to the Smithsonian Institution:
"If it ever should chance that the consumption of mescal becomes
a habit, the favorite poet of the mescal drinker will certainly be
Wordsworth. Not only the general attitude of Wordsworth, but many of his
most memorable poems and phrases cannot -- one is almost tempted to say
-- be appreciated in their full significance by one who has never been
under the influence of mescal. On these grounds it may be claimed that
the artificial paradise of mescal, though less seductive, is safe and
dignified beyond its peers." At the turn of the century, both
William James and Havelock Ellis undertook their study of hallucinogenic
agents. James used nitrous oxide (apparently to avoid bad stomach
cramps) while Ellis used the newly discovered peyote.
In 1902 William James of Harvard
"redefined religion"
as an "experience rather than a dogma."
The Bakers were prominent in supporting eugenics and
utopian-feudalist social engineering. Captain James A. Baker, so the
story goes, the grandfather of the current boss of Foggy Bottom, solved
the murder of his client William Marsh Rice and took control of Rice's
huge estate. Baker used the money to start Rice University and became
the chairman of the school's board of trustees. Baker sought to create a
center for diffusion of racist eugenics, and for this purpose brought in
Julian Huxley of the infamous British oligarchical family to found the
biology program at Rice starting in 1912. Huxley was the vice president
of the British Eugenics Society and actually helped to organize
"race science" programs for the Nazi Interior Ministry, before
becoming the founding director general of UNESCO in 1946-48. James A.
Baker III (CFR) was born April 28, 1930, in the fourth generation of his
family's wealth. Baker holdings have included Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic
Richfield, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of Indiana, Kerr-mcgee,
Merck and Freeport Minerals. Baker also held stock in some large New
York Banks during the time that he was negotiating the Latin American
debt crisis in his capacity as secretary of the treasury. Secretary
Baker's family wealth and power came from their representing Harriman,
the international oil companies and George Bush's Zapata Petroleum, all
sponsors of the population control, or ban-dark-babies movement. This
movement is synonymous with the Scottish Rite.
Aldous Huxley's mother died when he was 14. Three years later an
eye infection left him blind for 18 months. Although his sight improved,
he was plagued with poor vision all his life. He was 6'4", thin and
fragile. His head was high-brow and had a lot of hair.
"He
tended to be a spiffy dresser, wearing suits in subtle colors, a watch
and chain, sometimes a reptile tie, other times a wide-brimmed hat."
He studied at Eton and than at Balliol College, Oxford. He wanted to
become a Doctor but an eye infection nearly blinded him which caused him
to abandon this dream and probably accounted for the bitterness in his
writings and his aversion to the human body. In 1916 he took a degree at
Oxford. He was friendly with Lord Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell --
famous leaders of the Bloomsbury group. It was at their country place
that he met D.H. Lawrence. Huxley said Eliot was
"curiously dull
-- as a result, perhaps, of being, at last, happy in his second
marriage." In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee. They
had one son -- Matthew. As a journalist, Huxley wrote and published two
volumes of symbolist poetry. "Following the war, he flirted
briefly with the then-triumphant, predominantly English imagist
movement."
Before the end of 1918, in the first postwar election, Captain
Sitwell was contesting Scarborough as a Liberal candidate for
Parliament. He lost the election, but secured 8,000 votes to his Tory
opponent's 12,000. Simultaneously, Sitwell entered upon another new
career as joint literary editor, with Herbert Read, of the quarterly
Art and Letters. A few years before, Sitwell had known no
contemporary writers but his own sister; he was now ideally placed to
remedy that lack. With his brother, he had taken a London house on Swan
Walk where there were more pictures than furniture, and French paintings
hung even in the kitchen. Sitwell's guest list at Swan Walk, and later
at 2 Carlyle Square, resembled the index to a history of modern
literature. Arnold Bennett, in his diary for June 15, 1919, approved of
the dinner and the decor he had found at Swan Walk and noted that his
dining companions included, among others, W. H. Davies, Lytton Strachey,
Siegfried Sassoon, Aldous Huxley, Leonard Woolf, and Herbert Read. The
sexual perversions of Bloomsbury were a deliberate statement of moral
autonomy. Homosexuality, according to Keynes and his sometimes lover
Lytton Strachey, was the supreme state of existence,
"passing
Christian understanding," and superior to heterosexual
relationships. The ethical superiority of homosexuality lay in its
striking opposition to the external morals of the Victorian era, and the
moral laws of God. As Deacon surmised, Keynes' homosexuality was
ultimately a rebellion "against the Puritan ethic: he hated
Puritanism in any form . . ." Although Keynes attended religious
services until in his teens, as he once explained to a friend, he was
confident that Huxley had exploded the whole Christian religion. He
wrote another friend, telling him that Christians were irrational and
exhibited stubborn pride: "They don't want to admit that a
position they've taken up with confidence is untenable."
According to Keynes, Christianity represented
"tradition,
convention and hocus pocus." As a young man at Cambridge Keynes
became involved with a secret society called the
"Apostles"
which included such notables as Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Clive Bell
and Leonard Woolf. It was an association that was to last a lifetime.
Many of the Apostles, including Keynes, were later to become regular
members of the "Bloomsbury Group" named after the
Bloomsbury district of London where the group regularly met. The
Apostles (and later the Bloomsbury group) were quite taken by the
philosophy of G. E. Moore, a once fervent Quaker who, losing his faith,
became a thorough philosophical sceptic. As Keynes's biographer, Robert
Skidelsky, concluded, as far as the Bloomsburries were concerned, the
value of Moore's book, Principia Ethica, lay chiefly in
its "rational justification of a rearrangement of values."
They were looking for an ethic which would release them from the duties
required of Victorian gentlemen. And in their eyes, Moore's book
provided just this.
In 1921 Huxley turned to more creative writing. After two volumes
of short stories, he began a series of novels. His sophisticated satire
caused him to become known as a prophet of doom for the cult of the
amusing. His reputation was firmly established by his first novel,
Crome Yellow (1921), a witty satire on the intellectual
pretensions of his time. In 1923 Aldous Huxley, 29, English
novelist-critic published Antic Hay. His most celebrated
novel -- Point Counter Point -- appeared ten years
following World War I. The hero was said to have been modeled after D.H.
Lawrence.
Huxley met the writer Gerald Heard who imparted to him a quasi
mystical notion of the evolutionary development of human consciousness.
Between 1923-1933 Huxley visited Italy where he saw much of
Lawrence and became "a kind of disciple." In 1933 he
edited the letters of the dead Lawrence.
Huxley's early comic novels, which include
Antic Hay
(1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and
Point
Counter Point (1928), demonstrated his ability to dramatize
intellectual debate in fiction; he discussed philosophical and social
topics in a volume of essays, Proper Studies (1927).
In 1924 a collection of Huxley's poetry was published.
John Middleton Murry (1889-1957) was prominent on the English
literary scene for three decades. Murry was editor of the literary
journals the Athenauem (1919-21) and
Adelphi>
(1923-48), the husband of writer Katherine Mansfield, and friend to such
luminaries as Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence. Huxley caricatured Murry
as the pretentiously "spiritual" editor, Burlap, in his
novel Point Counter Point (1928).
In the 1930s, biology professor Hermann J. Muller lost his job
(under the otherwise liberal president H.Y. Benedict) because he had
written for a Marxist student publication without obtaining permission.
Muller later won the Nobel Prize, at Indiana in 1946, for work he did at
Texas that led to blood plasma transfusions, which saved tens of
thousands of lives in World War II. A politically naive leftist in the
1930s, Muller won Julian Huxley's praise as
"the greatest living
geneticist."
In both fiction and nonfiction Huxley became increasingly critical
of Western civilization in the 1930s. Brave New World
(1932), his most celebrated work, is a bitterly satiric account of an
inhumane society controlled by technology, in which art and religion
have been abolished and human beings reproduce by artificial
fertilization. Huxley's distress at what he regarded as the spiritual
bankruptcy of the modern world led him toward mysticism and the use of
hallucinatory drugs. Huxley, suggested a world where people went to the
"feelies" rather than the movies, where men were
attended by "pneumatic girls" (a phrase borrowed from
T.S. Elliot's poem "Whispers of Immortality") and where
reproduction would be controlled by the state. The perfect psychedelic,
soma, was described:
"Euphoric, narcotic,
pleasantly hallucinant -- all the advantages of Christianity and
alcohol, none of their drawbacks." In the preface to his Brave
New World Revisited (p. viii) Huxley wrote,
"If I were now to
rewrite the book, I would offer a third alternative . . . the
possibility of sanity . . . Economics would be decentralist and Henry
Georgian."
In 1931 Aldous Huxley read Phantastica and wrote a scathing
condemnation of "all existing drugs" in the
Chicago Herald Examiner. He concluded that the solution was not
prohibition but the search for better drugs.
In 1933 the Tales of Jacob by Thomas Mann were
published. In October 1933 the magazine Esquire began
publication and included writing by Hemingway and Aldous Huxley.
In 1934 Aldous Huxley visited Central America.
In 1936 Aldous Huxley published
Eyeless in Gaza.
He termed chastity "the most unnatural of the sexual
perversions." Frederick Matthias Alexander -- one of the
founders of the Alexander method -- was used by Huxley as his model for
the anthropologist Miller. The novel portrayed its central character's
conversion from selfish isolation to transcendental mysticism. In 1936
Huxley's transition to mystical writings began.
"Because Crowley
had extensive contacts with the European secret societies his specialist
knowledge was used by the SIS [Britain's Secret Intelligence Service]
for 'Black Propaganda' purposes. Crowley had confided to the writer
Aldous Huxley in 1938 when they met in Berlin that Hitler was a
practicing occultist. He also claimed that the OTO had helped the Nazis
to gain power."
The story of the first LSD is well-known -- of concoction in 1938,
and then discovery of dramatic psychoactive effects when Albert Hofmann
five years later swallowed 1/4,000ths of a gram (250 micrograms).
Christopher Isherwood (1904-) was a follower of Swami
Prabhavananda, a playwright and fiction writer who translated the
Bhagavad-Gita and other Hindu writings from Sanskrit. He converted from
Anglicalism to Hinduism. During World War II he was a pacifist and
served alternative service with the Quakers. He became a convert to the
Vedanta Society.
Huxley became interest in
"eclectic mysticism" at
a time of the intense fundamentalist religious revival in California.
Huxley borrowed from Wells the phrase "Doors in a Wall."
This referred to the use of drugs in death cult rituals. Huxley called
drugs "modifiers of conscience" and said that
hallucinatory drugs had been used since the earliest recorded history.
Huxley dabbled in drugs such as the Mandrake plant. Many who have been
encouraged to use drugs have died prematurely through overdosing or by
suicide.
In a 1940 letter Aldous Huxley said that he was
"profoundly optimistic about individuals and groups of individuals
existing on the margins of society."
Orwell contested Huxley's vision in
Brave New World
because he believed that it did not provide an accurate picture of the
mechanisms of power in the totalitarian present and future. In a 1940
essay, Orwell wrote: "Mr. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a
good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia, the kind of thing that seemed
possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no
relation to the actual future. What we are moving towards at this moment
is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse,
thanks to the radio and the secret police." In an article on
"Prophecies of Fascism" in the same era, Orwell made similar claims: "In
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a sort of post-war
parody of the Wellsian Utopia, these tendencies are
immensely exaggerated. Here the hedonistic principle is pushed to its
utmost, the whole world has turned into a Riviera hotel. But though
Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present
(the present of 1930), it probably casts no light on the future."
Huxley wrote to his brother Julian that social transformation
could be obtained by an attack on all fronts -- economic, political,
educational and psychological. In 1942 Aldous Huxley published
The Art of Seeing.
Gerald Heard first visited Black Mountain with his friend Aldous
Huxley in 1937. He was so taken with the idea of learning communities
that he went on to found Trabuco College in Ventura, California, in
1942.
Huxley's writing culminated in a rather complete exposition of the
mystical way in 1945 -- The Perennial Philosophy.
At the close of World War II he wrote:
"Between ivory
towerism on the one hand and direct political action on the other lies
the alternative of spirituality. And between the totalitarian fascism
and totalitarian socialism lies the alternative of decentralism and
cooperative enterprise--the economic-political system most natural to
spirituality." What some called "dream killers" Huxley called
"bad artists."
"[(S)uch propagandists] accomplish their greatest triumphs, not
by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but
still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
By simply not mentioning certain subjects . . . totalitarian
propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they
could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling
of logical rebuttals. -- Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World
(1946, revised forward).
Huxley, who moved to southern California in 1947, was primarily a
moral philosopher who used fiction during his early career as a vehicle
for ideas; in his later writing, which consists largely of essays, he
adopts an overtly didactic tone. Like his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence
and George Orwell, Huxley abhorred conformity and denounced the orthodox
attitudes of his time. The enormous range of his intellect and the
pungency of his writing make him one of the most significant voices of
the early 20th century. "As political and economic freedom
diminishes, sexual freedom tends . . . to increase. And the dictator . .
. will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the
freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the movies and the
radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is
their fate." -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1948).
Huxley wrote a letter to Orwell in 1949 stating:
"The
philosophy of the ruling minority in 1984 is a sadism which has been
carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.
Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on
indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy
will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying
its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I
described in Brave New World."
The Societe Europeenne de Culture, a think tank created in 1950
through the efforts of Venetian intelligence operative Umberto
Campagnolo, has for the past three decades pulled intellectuals from
both East and West into organizing for an "international
culture," based on rejecting the existence of sovereign nations.
The SEC counted among its members the cream of the postwar
intelligentsia: Adam Schaff of Poland, Bertolt Brecht of East Germany,
Georg Lukas of Hungary, and Boris Paternak of the Soviet Union, as well
as Stephen Spender and Arnold Toynbee, Benedetto Croce and Norberto
Bobbio, Julian Huxley and Thomas Mann, Francois Mauriac, and Jean
Cocteau. Later, the SEC launched the Third World national liberation
ideology.
Andrijah Puharich was born in 1918. He received medical degree
from Northwestern University in 1947. Reportedly a friend of Aldous
Huxley. In 1952 he had first contact with "the Nine",
the highest minds in the universe, through a medium.
Aldous Huxley's 1952 book,
The Devils of Louden,
was inspired by a 1632 incident in Louden, France. Jeanne des Anges, a
nun, suffered nightmarish erotic hallucinations after being spurned by
Cure Grandier -- who was burned at the stake.
Psychedelics (hallucinogens) such as mescaline (derived from the
cactus peyote) and psilocybin (which comes from a Mexican mushroom) were
originally eaten by primitive men to induce visions. Huxley, in his
"remarkable work," reported his experiences with mescaline.
Huxley's persuasive book was one of the first modern works to put
forward any kind of argument for experimental drug taking and it is
generally believed to have been responsible for sparking off the wave of
semi-intellectual interest in drugs which finds its expression in
today's so-called 'drug culture.'"
In 1952, the first International Congress of the International
Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) was held in Amsterdam. IHEU represents
more than 3 million members in 30 countries. The early sponsors of IHEU
were also instrumental in founding the United Nations. They included
Lord Boyd Orr -- first head of the World Food Organization, Sir Julian
Huxley, first head of UNESCO and Canadian physician Brock Chisholm,
first head of the World Health Organization. In 1952 British
psychiatrists Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies published
"A New
Approach to Schizophrenia," theorizing that when the body is
confronted with extreme anxiety it produces the hallucinogen
adrenochrome, inducing schizophrenic or psychotic reactions. The next
year they flew out to bring Aldous Huxley a vial of mescaline. Huxley
later cabled his editor that mescaline was
"the most
extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this
side of the Beatific Vision." He then dashed off
The
Doors of Perception in a month. In The Doors of
Perception he wrote: "The man who comes back through the
Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.
He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied,
humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand
the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the
unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."
In 1953 Robert Hutchins quoted Aldous Huxley:
"But in
actual historical fact, the spread of free compulsory education, and,
along with it, the cheapening and acceleration of the older methods of
printing, have almost everywhere been followed by an increase in the
power of ruling oligarchies at the expense of the masses."
Hutchins added: "The case of the much-vaunted literacy of the
Japanese provides striking confirmation of the conclusions of Toynbee
and Huxley that the spread of universal, free, compulsory education had
promoted the degradation and enslavement of men."
Humphry Osmond experienced mescaline in the early 1950s, and in
May 1953 provided this to Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles. Huxley's report
to Osmond, The Doors of Perception, remains a milestone in psychedelic
history, as does the word that Osmond coined --
"psychedelic."
Currently, Osmond works as a psychiatrist in Tuskaloosa, Alabama. He is
coauthor of The Hallucinogens (Academy Press) and How to Live with
Schizophrenia, co-editor of Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of
Hallucinogenic Drugs (Anchor Books) and author of Understanding
Understanding. Osmond's interest in this field grew out of a
fascination with schizophrenia and alcoholism. He went into the Navy
once he had qualified for medicine at Guys Hospital in London in 1942.
Oscar Janiger had his first LSD experience in 1954. After a training in
botany, he entered the fields of teaching and psychiatry. He has
lectured at UC Irvine and the California College of Surgeons, was
research director for the Holmes (holistic health) Foundation, maintains
a private practice, and founded the Albert Hofmann Foundation. He
administered LSD to 875 people, many from the creative communities of
Beverly Hills and Hollywood. In 1955 Huxley's first wife died. In 1956
he married Laural Archera. In Heaven and Hell (1956) he
described the use of mescaline to induce visionary states of mind.
In its May 13, 1957 issue,
Life ran a feature
called "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." R. Gordon Wasson, a
J.P. Morgan Vice-President, and his wife, recounted their 1955 visionary
adventures among "psilocybe cultists in darkest Mexico."
Huxley called Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA
" the
greatest social architect of our time." Syanon, a revolutionary
rehabilitation program using AA, was founded in Ocean Park, California
by Chuck Dederich in 1958 and spread as drug use expanded.
In his Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley in 1958 described
a society in which war had been eliminated and where
"the first
aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making
trouble." He described a likely future:
"The completely
organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free
will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by
regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed
in by nightly courses of sleep teaching . . ." He predicted
non-violent tyranny: "Under the relentless thrust of
accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by
means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the
democracies will change their nature; and quaint old forms -- elections,
parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The
underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism.
All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly
what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the
theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a
strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its
highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and
mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
In 1958, in Brave New World Revisited , Huxley
wrote a diatribe against overpopulation and overconsumption. His comment
about Aryan drug use as part of an elite religious ceremony seems to be
historic in nature. There was a priesthood that was very knowledgeable
about the effects of drugs. The Isis cult seems to have also used drugs
in its productions. Hitler thought he talked to
"the evil one"
while on a mescaline trip. When alone or with his inner circle, did he
engage in religious ceremonies, evocations or incantations? Or did they
use drugs to get "high?" The Huxley quote does suggest
drugs and religious worship were connected as early as the Aryan
conquest of India. The word "Iran" derives from "Aryan."
In Brave New World Revisited Huxley contested
Orwell: "George Orwell's 1984 was a magnified projection into
the future of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past
that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written
before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the
Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In 1931, systematic
terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in
1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal
less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by
Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But
tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent
developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology
have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome versimilitude. A
nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions.
But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain
from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were
more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like
1984."
Neil Postman commented:
"What Orwell feared were those who
would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to
ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell
feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those
who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and
egoism. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley
feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared
we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a
trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the
orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave
New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are
ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's
almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In Brave New World, they are
controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we
hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
Purchased in 1960 for $285, this small substance may be said,
without exaggeration, to have perpetrated the most significant cultural
revolution of our time. John Beresford, a pediatrician of British
extraction working in New York City, purchased gram H-00047. Before
long, it passed into the systems of Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith
Richards, Paul Krassner, Frank Barron, Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley, Paul
Lee, Richard Katz, Pete La Roca, Charlie Mingus, Saul Steinberg, Timothy
Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Alan Watts, Jean Houston and
perhaps a thousand others. "There is some possibility,"
commented Michael Hollingshead, a main distributor,
"that my
friends and I have illuminated more people than anyone else in history."
In the summer of 1960 Timothy O'Leary used magic mushrooms for the
first time in Mexico. He realized his old self was dead, collaborated
with Dr. Richard Albert and discussed the meaning and implication of the
new world with Aldous Huxley. In the 1960-1961 school year Leary and
Albert began a series of experiments on Harvard graduate students --
using pure psilocybin -- and with a physician in attendance. When
students at Harvard were given mushrooms, they
"came up with
accounts of mystical experiences which largely duplicated accounts of
mystical experiences of Christian saints they had read in books. Takers
of mescaline commonly have similar experiences to Huxley's, just as
Huxley's were similar to those reported by earlier experimenters like
Havelock Ellis." In 1960 Leary tried psychedelic mushrooms while
on a vacation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The experience opened up a new
world for him: "I realized I had died, that I, Timothy Leary,
the Timothy Leary game, was gone. I could look back and see my body on
the bed. I relived my life, and reexperienced many events I had
forgotten. More than that, I went back in time in an evolutionary sense
to where I was aware of being a one-celled organism. All of these things
were way beyond my mind." Leary was in Mexico in August, 1960,
intending to work on a book.
Around 1961 Aldous Huxley said at a U.S. State
Department-sponsored conference at the California Medical School in San
Francisco: "There will be in the next generation or so . . . a
pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and
producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of
painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in
fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it,
because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel -- by
propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological
methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." Timothy
Leary recalled his conversation with Huxley who told him to be a
brain-drug cheerleader for evolution like he and his grandfather before
him. H
