Hallowe'en Countdown 2018: Julian Assange, Manchurian Candidate?

The Australian cult, 'The Family,' was certainly connected to Julian Assange in his childhood. But the extent of that connection is not well known. Image Source: The Age.

This week in the Hallowe'en countdown, I am covering arcane secrets which lie in plain sight. It is a common theme now that appearances are deceiving. Famous people and politicians hide behind glittering reputations, concealing sinister private realities, backroom deals, abuses, corruption, and weird spiritual beliefs. Another theme is the opposite idea that these truths aren't hidden. The common people are blind to self-evident facts, sitting right under their noses.

Free information reveals those facts. It blows open circles which, in the past, may have been secret, or may have been merely exclusive. This dynamic is being radicalized and is transforming the political landscape. Socialism is passé. The Red Pill - or the more extreme Black Pill - is the new calling card of the common man or woman.

Among those who have weaponized information against the establishment, none is more prominent than Julian Assange, publisher at WikiLeaks.

Image Source: Aangirfan.

However, whistle-blowing and leaks are no certain testament to credibility. Free information can be suppressed, discredited, or counter-weaponized by the establishment in order to harness its radical power.

Cyber activists are paranoid enough to know that there is a level of Millennial horror beyond Black Pilled disillusionment. See through all the façades, and you will reach a point at which you can trust no one, especially when they come to you bearing gifts of revelations. You cannot rely on those new populist leaders and anti-establishment whistle-blowers, who could be controlled opposition, agents meant in the final analysis to lead the flock back into the fold of a compromised establishment. Seeming reforms will come to naught and online freedom will revert to slavery. In this vein, you can read a scathing alt-attack on Assange and his intelligence connections, here.

This is why, where Assange is concerned, the jury is out among his Red Pilled followers. My last post summarized the work of Sam William, who vlogs about London, UK. When the vlogger visited the city's Ecuadorian embassy, his audience elaborated in the Youtube comments section on Assange's background:

"Assange was raised in a cult called 'The family' in Melbourne which was run by a wom[a]n called Anne Hamilton Byrne. The family conducted trauma based mind control on many white haired children. Anne was on the board of the Newhaven private hospital that was found guilty of administering LSD to patients as late as the 1980s. Anne was close fr[ie]nds with Lord Casey, founder of ASIS, Oz Secret intelligence service. Anne was on the run for many years from the FBI, hidden in the USA until they eventually got her. In 1994, she evaded prison and was only fined AUS $5000. These are my observations."

And:

"The cult was called The Family and the great leader was an Australian woman Ann Hamilton-Byrne. All of the children had bleached blonde hair and matching bowl cuts, like Children of the Damned- not just for aesthetics, but to take away individually and institute more control. The cult also dealt in child-trafficking and the sameness was useful in transporting them around with passports that may not be their own. The leader's daughter found she was not her biological daughter and was basically stolen as a baby and wrote a book on her upbringing. The children were systematically abused, drugged, sleep-deprived, trauma-based abuse. It was definitely a Tavistock cult, many cults are CIA/Tavistock inventions or they are co-opted when they show up on their radar and are useful grounds for experimentation. Julian got into the cult through his mother's boyfriend but I don't know if he has ever discussed it. All that matters are the actual wikileak documents and their legitimacy, not who he is. He could be a total Tavistock/CIA/shadow govt/reptilian overlord created persona and it doesn't really matter. It is striking that one would keep the culty hair-do after leaving the cult, unless you never really left ...)."

And:

"After I left this comment, I checked out what the daughter is up to, she is a doctor now- and I saw a comment she made, maybe on twitter, about how Julian couldn't have grown up in this cult and have been a teenage hacker when they didn't even have electricity. So he either did not grow up in the cult or was never a teen hacker. He is a constructed persona, used as a front for politically motivated leaks. The cult of personality built around him is pretty impressive though."

There is a lot to consider here, not least that the daughter mentioned above, Sarah Moore, died in May 2016 at the age of 46. Beyond the possibility that Julian Assange may have been partly raised in a cult, there is a question - as the commenters imply - of whether the cult was connected to a much larger picture. If so, we must ask whether that larger picture had any bearing from the start on Julian Assange's integrity, and on WikiLeaks's founding and agenda.

The Cult: "I Love Children"

The leader of the cult, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, bleached the children's hair to make them look alike. Image Source: Label Distribution/Daily Mail.

The cult is notable because it is one of the few led by a female, Anne Hamilton-Byrne (her birth name is Evelyn Edwards, born 1921). At its height, it had some 500 followers and 28 children imprisoned at a compound at Lake Eildon, in Victoria, Australia. You can see an extended report on the cult, The Family, here. A book about them is here.

The documentaries on Hamilton-Byrne's 'Family' puzzle over the fact that this was an upwardly-mobile cult, with upper middle class, well-educated professionals as members. Unbeknownst to them, Hamilton-Byrne came from an impoverished background, with an absentee father and a fortune teller mother from South London, UK, who was hospitalized in asylums for paranoid schizophrenia. The daughter changed her name, obscured her past, and built upon that cracked legacy by becoming a yoga teacher for Melbourne's unhappy wives and divorcées in the early 1960s. She encouraged these women to leave their domestic concerns and join her. From that base, she rapidly build a network of ever-wealthier connections.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne, cult leader, at the sect property at Lake Eildon. Image Source: Label Distribution/Daily Mail.

By all accounts she was at this time a mesmerizing and magnetic personality (she is still alive). She proved that in the hands of some individuals, a splash of Chanel perfume, pearls, a chic dress, and a floppy hat can go a long way. A young widow, she combined false glamour with faux compassion. To her followers, she was utterly convincing. In 1962 they began to congregate at Ferny Creek, a rural suburb of Melbourne, where Hamilton-Byrne lived. It was and is a town where Melbourne's prominent families had weekend cottages. At these meetings, the yoga-based group began to evolve.

Members of the Family received this photo of Hamilton-Byrne with one of the 'donated' cult children to keep in their rooms. Image Source: The Guardian.

One of her most significant supporters, a respected physicist and esotericist, Raynor Johnson (1901-1987), became a devotee after she slept with his gardener to find out personal facts about him. Hamilton-Byrne arrived at Johnson's door in the middle of the night, dressed to the nines, and made incredible 'ESP' predictions to him about his life. Seduced and overwhelmed by this enchantress, he never looked back.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne intended her illegally adopted children to resemble the fictionalized version of the real Austrian von Trapp children, popularized in a 1959 musical and 1965 film. Christopher Plummer - Edelweiss - The Sound of Music (15 June 2015) © Rodgers and Hammerstein/20th Century Fox. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

Climb Ev'ry Mountain Finale from The Sound of Music (11 December 2013) © Rodgers and Hammerstein/20th Century Fox. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

Hamilton-Byrne's fantasy was to have a family, with adopted children dressed like the von Trapp family singers in the popular 1959 musical and 1965 film, The Sound of Music. She would be the angelic Maria-like figure - or even better, a female avatar of Jesus Christ Himself - who would lead them out of the hell of an upcoming World War III.

A still from The Village of the Damned (1960) © MGM. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Image Source: Duane Vore.

Village of the Damned (1960) Official Trailer - George Sanders, Peter Vaughan Movie HD (1960) © MGM. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

But as Hamilton-Byrne had the children's hair cropped into bobs and bleached platinum, the reality drew closer to The Village of the Damned (1960) or its sequel, The Children of the Damned (1964). Since the platinum bleaching was the cult leader's idea, we have to wonder whether she consciously or unconsciously channeled Nazi-esque Aryan horror tropes, rather than Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer playing Austrian aristocrats, leading their children to freedom away from Nazi Germany and over the Alps. It was all part of the myth-making of a decade that was still digesting World War II. Even if the cult had not been helmed by a psychopath, it is not surprising that Germanic idealism could transform into Germanic horror so easily in Australia's Victorian Alps. Some critics claim that the cult was part of the white supremacist movement.

The Family Trailer (2017) HD (20 December 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

A German documentary on The Family, mostly dubbing the Australian exposé. ACA. Preview. Cult Compo. (The Family. Julian Assange. Anne Hamilton-Byrne.) (5 November 2017). Video Source: Youtube. A French documentary on this topic is here.

The children were kept at an isolated lodge at Lake Eildon. Two-to-three hours' drive from Melbourne, this is road trip, camping, dirt bike, and fishing country. Sunset at Lake Eildon (10 April 2013). Video Source: Youtube.

The Cult Belief System

Most accounts focus on the way the children were beaten, tortured and manipulated by their mistress and the adults who worked for her. During the cult's rise in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, all members were forced to follow Hamilton-Byrne's orders, often while she was living abroad in the UK and USA. She kept in touch by telephone and had adult members mould the children's minds with violence, starvation, and drugs. 'Mummy's Rule Books' included ordinances such as: "If David rocks or sways during meditation, he is to be hit over the head with a chair."

The children's food was drugged and they were directly given Valium, Largactil, Stelazine, Tofranil, Haloperidol and Mogadon. Hamilton-Byrne took LSD regularly, and so the adult and child cult members did too. The ill-fed, physically-abused children were injected with LSD at night (injection made for the most potent experience), sometimes every day for days on end as part of an initiation ritual. Individual children undergoing this experience were kept in windowless rooms. At the height of the trip, Hamilton-Byrne would enter the room, dressed in a white nightgown with a bucket of dry ice and a light behind her, a demented angel of mercy who would comfort the traumatized child.

When Victoria police investigated calls from suspicious neighbours at Lake Eildon, all 28 children were crammed into a hole in the wall, and a painting was hung over the hole, while the adult cultists served the officers tea. The Victoria police detective, Lex de Man, who investigated the cult and finally saw the children rescued on 14 August 1987, said Hamilton-Byrne was the "most evil person I ever met in my police career."

Beyond these details, information on exactly what the cultists believed (and believe) is sketchy. The system apparently drew from the I Am movement, founded in the 1930s in Chicago, Illinois, USA, about which I have blogged here. The movement exalts a pantheon of Ascended Masters and archangels to help us through a Great Awakening and spiritual ascension into the Age of Aquarius. Hamilton-Byrne also followed Hindu guru Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007), self-declared divine avatar Meher Baba (1894-1969), and pro-sex godman Rajneesh (1931-1990).

Hamilton-Byrne was a New Age admirer of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), who brought eastern mysticism to the west. Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophy Society, which I will discuss in my next post. I have also explained how these ideas have appeared in current-day Millennial politics.

Hamilton-Byrne used this mythos to cast herself as one of the Ascended Masters incarnate, a living avatar of the Christian Messiah. She declared that she had arrived on a divine motherly mission to train children who would become leaders of the post-apocalyptic, spiritually-aligned world. This was the Post World Order which would be born after a time of trials, tribulation, and the collapse of the old system.

Julian Assange: Part of the Cult?

This photograph has fueled speculation that Assange was part of the Family cult, although he denies it; some conspiracists guess that the child who may actually be Assange is furthest to the left. Image Source: imgur.

With the exception of The Guardian's report, the exposés on the cult almost never mention Assange, nor the cult's potential larger context. There are long MSM profiles on Assange's early days at Gawker and the New Yorker which mention The Family in passing. The Guardian dismissed the notion that Assange was ever part of the cult, based on Assange's own claim:

"A few years ago speculation emerged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had grown up in The Family. His hair colour didn’t help nor, possibly, his personality. Assange admitted that a man who was his mother’s boyfriend [musician Leif Meynell aka Leif Hamilton] in the late 1970s had been a member of the cult. The man had been 'a sinister presence' who sought to have 'a certain psychological power' over his family, Assange said, and they eventually went on the run from him. But he said he never met Hamilton-Byrne or had any direct contact with the group as a whole."

You can read an excerpts from Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (2011) in which he talks about his years dealing with Meynell, here. The way Assange describes it, the Family was interested in him and his half-brother, but his mother ensured that they got away. The book was based on a series of transcribed interviews; but in a roundabout way, Assange then denied his authorship and facts in this book.

Fake News: alt-speculation that Assange was a Family cultist. Julian Assange? and The Anne Hamilton-Byrne Cult Rumour (19 May 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

We may take Julian at his word. Surely, if he had been a member of the cult, the other children who were there with him and are now adult witnesses would have mentioned it, unless they have been asked (or paid) not to do so. Truly paranoid critics have speculated that Assange may have been brainwashed like a Manchurian Candidate, such that he does not even remember his experiences in the Family.

The only obvious sign that Assange's denial might not be true is the fact that he wears the trademark hairstyle of the cult's child initiates - a platinum bob.

This is interesting because online chatter asserts that certain Millennial hairstyles and clothing are symbols of the CIA's notorious MKUltra mind control program. For example, pink hair, which celebrities made fashionable over the past ten years, is widely considered to be a badge of sex slavery and brainwashing, especially when worn with animal print clothing (another such symbol). The pink hair is worn bobbed like the helmet on a robot. When the Australian cult was active from the 1960s to the 1980s, celebrities were pushing platinum bobs, and they never really stopped.

The Cult and Intelligence Agencies: The Broader Conspiracy Theories

The conspiracy theorists at Reddit have gone over this story. They find it odd that Hamilton-Byrne was never held accountable for her crimes, having been arrested only on minor fraud charges in the USA in the early-mid 1990s. She is now in a Melbourne home for the elderly, possessor of an AUS $150 million fortune (USD $106 million or GDP 81 million) and property overseas, although some reports claim the estate is worth much less. The cult - also called the Santiniketan Park Association and the Great White Brotherhood - still exists and administers the properties via a registered charity holding company, Life For All Creatures.

Conspiracists don't like the fact that an army of lawyers, engineers, architects, doctors, nurses, social workers, and psychiatrists joined the cult and aided its leader in bogus adoptions. They wonder about Hamilton-Byrne's easy access to free drugs and hospitals over decades. And they dislike her connections to Australian intelligence.

They also point to cases of child torture and experimentation in behavioural studies and brainwashing in Canada, with more rumours of establishment and intelligence involvement. Online sleuths allege that the CIA in the post-war period was searching for the perfect Manchurian Candidate, with full participation of highly respected scientists and the institutions at which they worked in the USA, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The children were typically highly intelligent and had familial connections to the military. See: the Duplessis Orphans in Quebec in the 1950s and 1960s.

Clip from the 1962 film, based on Richard Condon's 1959 novel: The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - I Wanted a Killer Scene (11/12) | Movieclips (20 June 2017) © United Artists. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

There is a strong controlling mother and Oedipus Complex narrative in the Manchurian Candidate story: The Manchurian Candidate (7/7) Movie CLIP - Decisions (2004) HD (22 November 2011) © Paramount Pictures. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

From the 2004 remake, which stresses that MKUltra's tortured trainees have no memory of their conditioning: The Monarch Activation Scene - "The Manchurian Candidate" (21 February 2018) © Paramount Pictures. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

The more they dig, the more the conspiracists think the grand drama orchestrated here was not one woman's vicious delusion of spiritual grandeur and rather some brainchild of the Tavistock Institute and the CIA, with Julian Assange as its centrepiece. In 1995, Hamilton-Byrne's adopted daughter argued that there was more to this story than her mother's demented ego:

"Why did she subject us to the bizarre and cruel regimen in which we grew up? Was it to demonstrate that she had the power to create a generation that would be reared with her beliefs and believing in her? I suspect perhaps that there were more sinister motives than these alone. Some of us had multiple birth certificates and passports. Only she knows why th[i]s was and why we were also all dressed alike, why most of us even had our hair dyed identically blond."

There are four layers to this story. First, there was the cult which pulled in the adults in the 1960s. Second, there was the lodge which tortured and drugged a gaggle of children in the 1970s and 1980s. Third, there is the now-international charity which peddles a New Age philosophy and makes unknown investments in the 2000s and 2010s. Finally, there is the disputed WikiLeaks connection. Add to this the rumours that the intelligence agencies somehow connect, via occult principles, to Nazism, neo-Nazism, and current far right and alt-right movements. This is a taste of the Reddit discussion:

"Members were typically well educated. It was well enough funded that they bought an entire psychiatric facility, where cult members who just so happened to be psychiatrists ran the institution. Which gave them access to both psychiatric and psychedelic drugs like LSD, electro-shock therapy equipment, and even lobotomy facilities.

During the late 1960s and the 1970s, Newhaven Hospital in Kew was a private psychiatric hospital owned and managed by Marion Villimek, a Santiniketan member; many of its staff and attending psychiatrists were also members.

Many patients at Newhaven were treated with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. The hospital was used to recruit potential new members from among the patients, and also to administer LSD to members under the direction of the Santiniketan psychiatrists Dr John Mackay and Dr Howard Whitaker. One of the original members of the Association was given LSD, electroconvulsive therapy and two leucotomies, also called lobotomies, during the late 1960s.

And, curiously, it's also a place where white children were kidnapped and deposited into ... [Hamilton-Byrne's] care. Where they were adopted, had their last names changed to Hamilton-Byrne, and forced to treat the woman as their mother. Where they all had their hair uniformly dyed blond like proper members of the Aryan Master Race. Member parents of youth gave up parental rights and were treated as Aunts and Uncles of their own children. Rather reminiscent of Hitler Youth.

Julian was trapped in this situation by no fault of his own. His mother had simply fallen in love with a nut who led her down this path into joining a cult. Where he was indoctrinated. Here's a photo of him as a child member. Note the blond hair, uniform with all the other kids. And how he dyes his hair even today.

It should be recognized that this cult was likely an MK-ULTRA like experiment run in Australia. With funding provided by the CIA and MI6 and oversight by the Australian Intelligence Service. Where else would these people have gotten the money? You know, to buy an entire psychiatric facility. And how else would they have continued operations running a private hospital without state intervention? But there's no proof of this. Only a lot of conjecture.

It appears the story hit some notice in 2010. Here's a combined text and podcast entry by David Emory. All of it is worth reading and listening to.

Although Assange ... claims to have been 'on the run' from the cult, his claims of links to Aus­tralian intel­li­gence plus his strange, 'plat­inum' col­ored hair (dis­tinc­tive of chil­dren raised in the group) sug­gest that the con­nec­tions may run much deeper. (Recall in this con­text that the group prac­tices rig­or­ous, sophis­ti­cated mind-control method­ol­ogy and Assange him­self may be sin­cerely unaware of the depth of his appar­ent links to the group. The orga­ni­za­tion also devel­ops mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties for the chil­dren raised in its ranks, as well as obtain­ing mul­ti­ple pass­ports for them. Assange’s mother claims his hair turned white fol­low­ing a dif­fi­cult cus­tody case involv­ing a child of his. As will be seen later, Assange claims that Aus­tralian intel­li­gence has advised him, and there is an appar­ent link between Aus­tralian intel­li­gence and the cult.)

Of inter­est and pos­si­ble sig­nif­i­cance, also, is the alle­ga­tion by Moore that Sandoz–part of the old I.G. Far­ben complex–was pro­vid­ing the group with free LSD. San­doz also bought the fam­ily busi­ness of Swiss Nazi financier Carl Lund­strom, thereby empow­er­ing him with the cap­i­tal with which he has real­ized his polit­i­cal endeavors.

Among those endeav­ors is the Pirate Bay down­load­ing web­site, with an asso­ci­ated polit­i­cal party (the Pirate Party) and PRQ server, which hosts WikiLeaks. As we will see in FTR #725, the Pirate Party is help­ing spon­sor Wik­iLeaks’ pres­ence in Sweden.

Also in 2010 was this Arthur Zbygniew blog post that referenced Cryptome founder John Young, who left Wikileaks in 2007 claiming it was a disinformation front.

Our Asian intelligence sources report the following: 'Wikileaks is running a disinformation campaign, crying persecution by U.S. intelligence- when it is U.S. intelligence itself.'"

Redditors argued over whether this makes Assange, in their terms, controlled opposition or a true leader of the cyber-resistance. One Redditor concluded that if Assange was tortured in the cult and he saw the Family operating as a secret part of the international establishment, then it explains his intention to destroy that international establishment. Perhaps the white hair he sports is a message, out in the open to cultists everywhere, that he is coming for them, and he wears the cult hairstyle as an ironic badge of honour. Or perhaps he is a deeply-controlled Manchurian Candidate, a tool. Worse, maybe he's both:

"[F]or Assange, this rebellion led to a total breakdown in trust for all large institutions. Because no large institution is completely free of corruption. So he seeks to destroy them. Because the people who run these corrupt institutions are bastards who abuse the vulnerable. And he enjoys crushing them.

He does this out of personal vengeance.

Which suggests his experience in The Family remains a crucial psychological foundation for why he's risked everything to reveal these state secrets. And also why he seems so emotionally blunted whenever he speaks.

What they did to him in childhood at that place did have a lasting effect. Just not the one most conspiracy theorists assume should happen from drug and hypnotic induced mind control. ...

He's a fucked up dude. But probably not a mind-controlled slave. Which gives hope for all the others abused by these secret programs. Maybe there's a way out for them too."

Today, the story continues. Below, see the weirdest conspiracy theory of 2018. This theory speculated that Donald Trump's uncle, John G. Trump (who is mentioned in my next post), is somehow related to Julian Assange. The speculation was started by Assange's own legal team in a tweet in June, 2018. One of Assange's security experts, Arjen Kamphuis, mysteriously went missing in August, 2018. Another WikiLeaks security expert James Dolan, committed suicide in January, 2018. Assange was replaced as Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks on 26 September 2018 and has been cut off from the Internet for the past six months. At time of writing, WikiLeaks displayed the change of editorship by launching a series of odd rabbit hole puzzles on its Twitter feed under the hashtag, #QuestOfRandomClues.

Just when @JulianAssange's detention couldn't get any stranger, internet users have spotted that Julian Assange is the "twin" of Donald Trump's uncle, John Trump, who also has a background in physics & engineering. pic.twitter.com/fuPyG2PVRC

— #FreeAssange! (tweets by campaign)⌛ (@JulianAssange) June 29, 2018

Images Sources: Twitter and Twitter.

Image Source: pinterest.

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