Time and Politics 22: The Masks of Simple Politics

Image Source: Archillect.

For today, see the Adam Curtis documentary, HyperNormalisation, which opened in the UK on 16 October 2016 and is circulating on the Internet. Produced by the BBC, it is reproduced here under Fair Use non-commercially for review and discussion. Told from a liberal-left perspective, this film starts in the mid-1970s and discusses big banks, Donald Trump, Brexit, Vladimir Putin, hypertechnology, and Syria.

Current Crises and Public Justice

Image Source: Fine Art America.

I have a new post up at Patreon, for $1 subscribers.

Actions will have Consequences: Leaving the Christmas Moment of Arrested Development

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This post asks how we got to a point where the Federal Reserve was printing USD$1 trillion per day in March, 2020. We live in a world where cause and effect do not connect; where our leaders can do anything, hit bottom and dig, and no one can stop them.

As I discussed in this post at The Dragonfly, our whole global system is based on a disconnection between actions and consequences. Not only that, but this standpoint has moral, psychological, emotional, and spiritual consequences. Everything is based on simulated approximations and substitutes, materialistic proxies for the real thing. At the most profound level, this includes consumer goods and social status as replacements for love and compassion.

Crimes at the highest levels go hidden and unpunished. The everyday person is blamed for this great gap in accountability, which originated in the Second World War. Are there punishments for authorities' transgressions and violations of public trust? Or can the global public be endlessly plundered with no justice?

"They got away with it." "How did they get away with it?" crimes and misdemeanors (3 June 2009). Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) © Orion Pictures. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Video Source: Youtube.

I am developing a general argument that pandemic crises will lead to a moment when actions will finally have consequences, thereby devastating the current order and all who have most profited from it. In order to understand this outcome better, today's Patreon post examines how we got here, by responding to the philosophical origins of our present, irresponsible materialism.

Those origins are summarized in the documentary below. They concern philosophical concepts of positive and negative liberty, which were developed in the 1950s, and which were combined by global policy-makers from the 1980s to the 2000s.

The Trap 1 - Fuck you Buddy! - Adam Curtis | Documentary (11 April 2016). Video Source: Youtube. Reproduced under Fair Use.

The Trap 2 - The Lonely Robot - Adam Curtis | Documentary (13 April 2016). Video Source: Youtube.

The Trap 3 - We Will Force You to Be Free - Adam Curtis | Documentary (16 April 2016). Video Source: Youtube.

The Patreon post explains how the abuse of negative and positive liberty has led to a mendacious system, filled with illusions of prosperity, security, and love, rather than the real things. In our own personal lives, these lies start out early and seemingly innocently - as with traditions around Santa Claus (below).

A FEW NOT SO RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE MYTH OF SANTA CLAUS (21 May 2020). Video Source: Bitchute.

This whole philosophical view is dangerous. It constitutes a distorted form of freedom, the freedom for blue-pilled, mainstream, conformist citizens to believe in universal lies, illusions, and proxies. These lies lead straight to totalitarianism. The way through and out of this problem depends on a reappraisal of freedom and the development of a system which demands that truth be reinstated as a basis for systemic architectures, private life, and public justice. My upcoming Patreon posts will discuss the path back to reality and the most creative individuals and projects committed to that end.

Orwell 1984 - O'Brien: Freedom and reality (2+2=5) (4 February 2013). Video Source: Youtube.

Lincoln Park after Dark

Opi nail polish colour: Lincoln Park after Dark. Source: Opi.

Revealed: if you believe the claims of underground whistleblowers like Fiona Barnett or Cathy O'Brien, you would have heard that one of the legacies of the Second World War was a rash of human rights abuses inside the so-called 'Cathedral' of western civilization.

You can watch three documentaries below about the barely-acknowledged Cold War history of MKUltra mind control experiments. In Canada, the exploitation of mental patients has a confirmed paper trail, to the eternal shame of McGill University. This was a moment when medicine morphed into  'technology' and horrendous attempts to control the brain as a programmable system, or wetware.

 

These and similar secret Cold War programs raise questions about how many Nazi officials and staff integrated into post-war institutions in the west and brought with them their science, culture and politics. Operation Paperclip was the means by which Nazi policies seamlessly continued. Nazism became a fifth column in western institutions and the western establishment after 1945. You can see a list of Nazi scientists who moved to the USA, here. 

Moreover, this list only refers to the hard sciences. Less discussed are the ongoing influences of 1930s' and 1940s' era Germanic psychology and social and economic philosophies. Some of these leading thinkers were anti-Nazis. But the lines begin to blur if one pushes further back into the 1920s and 1930s. Consider Adam Curtis's 2002 classic documentary, The Century of the Self, which exhaustively revealed a line from the modern developed west straight back to Central Europe (see all my posts on Adam Curtis here). We need to ask how much of pre-Nazi, Nazi, and post-Nazi philosophies affected the whole west. Remember Leonard Cohen's immortal lines: 

"Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich"

There is a viewpoint which speculates that The Man in the High Castle was not fiction, rather an elaborate metaphor, implying that the Nazis covertly won the war by decoupling from the nation-state of Germany, hiding their overtly racist policies behind civilized window dressing, reconstituting as a liberal NGO in Switzerland, and integrating themselves into the post-war western establishment. Officially and superficially, we enjoyed a liberal consensus as the supposed standard of superior humanistic values and civil society, coupled with unprecedented legal rights and stable prosperity. Unofficially, there were (and are) signs all over the place that something had gone dreadfully wrong.

The Man in the High Castle (Season 3, 2018), adapted Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel. Not fiction? Source: Amazon Adviser.

As war dissolved into the Cold War's clandestine espionage, we see the promotion of the fictional UK spy, James Bond, who reveals to us in stories and films the architecture of mind control training. Bond receives his real orders from MKUltra agents with sexual programming. This is why he is always shown having a tryst with a random female who pops up before he starts his mission. The Bond films glamorize Bond as an ice cold, sex-addicted assassin. Really, he displays all the symptoms of a torture victim. This character raises questions about mainstream popular culture, if a brainwashed Tavistock slave, trained to the point of psychopathy to murder people, has been held up to us as a suave, fearless hero.

We know that the CIA authorized MKUltra on 13 April 1953, through its Office of Scientific Intelligence and the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. The Agency was still releasing files on this project as late as 2010, which explains why this historical information is still trickling into public awareness. In the CIA's online Reading Room, the Agency kept a copy of a CBS transcript dating from 23 December 1984 for a new show of 60 Minutes, which refers to the human mind control experiments in Canada and to James Bond in the same paragraph. This document at least proves that the CIA felt that a TV investigative report which associated the two issues - the real life case and the fictional spy - merited attention.

If you want to know more, check out a 2020 book by Timothy Shelley: Stories When Little: Growing Up under MK-ULTRA. You can read it here or here. The blurb states:

"This book is the first of a five-volume series regarding the author's abuse, from 1969 to 1986, under CIA PROJECT MONARCH, ARTICHOKE, SLEEPING BEAUTY, and MK-ULTRA in connection with world history. It describes mind control methods employed by the Tavistock Institute and the Central Intelligence Agency involving drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, and sexual abuse as well as the use by MI-7 of popular culture from Playboy to MAD, from The Banana Splits to Wonder Woman, and from James Bond to the Dukes of Hazzard."

Another conspiracists' example - well known in the underground - analyzes the use of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as nefarious UK and US training texts.

Lincoln Park

Opi colour: Lincoln Park after Dark. Source: Pinterest.

When you look at the description of the Opi nail polish colour, Lincoln Park after Dark, the company writes: "This aubergine is as deep as evening shadows in Lincoln Park. A near-black purple, this color is ready for neighborhood night life." To which Lincoln Park does Opi refer? Is it Lincoln Park in Chicago? The former Lincoln Park in Santa Monica? Or is it Lincoln Park in Calgary, Alberta, Canada? Officially, in another nod, the band Linkin Park is named after the park in Santa Monica. But online rumours suggest that lead singer Chester Bennington (1976-2017) actually named the band after the military forces base in Calgary, to hint at what happened there.

By 2012, the old Canadian Forces Base in Calgary was "cleaned up" and resold as a business park and residential area. Today, Lincoln Park is an upscale suburb with McMansions and glossy condos. From Justin Havre Real Estate: "The name of the district is borrowed from a small area of military housing located between 54th Avenue S.W. and Glenmore Trail, which was reserved for United States Air Force members stationed at the airfield during World War II." 

What happened at CFB Calgary (Lincoln Park) prior to that has been swept under the rug, and only bits and pieces remain of abusive MKUltra Canadian programs from the Cold War period. Alternative sources maintain that covert Nazi experiments continued in Calgary, overseen by UK and US intelligence. There's this testimony from Saskatchewan. There is this underground text from a contentious researcher (viewer discretion advised, NSFW). There is this testimony from the spouse of a survivor of military medical experimentation from 1954 to 1984. Worst of all, and most harrowing, is this blog, which in 2007 and 2008 recounted earlier abuses in Canadian institutions. Make of it what you will, but it indicates that in some places, the war with the Nazis did not end in 1945. We have to ask about the bourgeois, superficial illusions cherished by so many nice people who potentially live over a site of secret, unmentionable exploitations and atrocities. 

ADDENDUM (30 June 2025): Class action lawsuit for MKUltra victims of human experiments in Montreal, Canada.

 

ADDENDUM (21 June 2026): I particularly wish to highlight this post, "Merry Christmas," from 1957 and the words that haunted me from that testimony: "Always remember I love you." "Always remember God loves you, always remember."

Productivity: The Last Domino to Fall in the Old System

Image Source: Seen Best Website Development.

In a previous post, Subliminal Slavery of the Subconscious Self, I summarized a BBC 2002 documentary, The Century of the Self, in which director Adam Curtis maintained that the mid-to-late 20th century was a time in which cause was divorced from effect, actions separated from consequences, in the name of preventing world war and genocide.

Curtis claimed that post-World War II mass culture became a giant pressure cooker experiment. The hypothesis ran that pre-World War II societies were repressed by old social values and religions. When societies became psychologically and emotionally over-repressed, they could suddenly blow and all the dark instincts of the community would surge out in racism, mass psychosis and murder. Psycho-social repression was the hypothesized cause of the Holocaust.

Image Source: Aussie Cool Story Club.

The prescribed remedy in western cultures, and later, global cultures, was to indulge the Jungian collective unconscious and mass shadow in a thousand different ways. Smaller vices were continually encouraged to give the big collective pressure cooker a way to let off steam. Celebrities came forth to personify aspects of the Freudian Id or Jungian Unconscious, in order to push those buttons in audiences. Derived from Austrian psychoanalysis, transported into American mass entertainment and mass politics, the pressure cooker slow release experiment wasn't a great idea.

A famous, early example of the 1960s' Hell-Sell technique, used in an actual Kent cigarettes ad, with explanation of the subliminal images and colours employed from a leaked advertising training manual. Part of the blurred-out message includes giant spiders mating on the girl's leg. Images Source: Whale.

As a result, as the Cold War wore on, any kind of inhibition in the name of old-fashioned social mores was condemned as social repression, an attack on liberty. Gone was the idea that norms reflected customs based in everyday life, and that norms connected people to habit, sanity, and reality. This is the kind of freedom that really enslaves people! The adoration of the libertine came at a price, because there was one place left where actions still connected to consequences.

Creation, making things, building things, was still directly related to making money. That correlation became more and more harshly enforced, more industrial, an assembly line governed by line managers, as time went on. Productivity was also unconsciously and in real terms wedded to the rise of the computer, so that we were expected to work like machines, battling against the continual threat of lack and loss. Space and time for productivity became supreme luxuries, reserved for the top few producers.

This is the logical inconsistency embedded in post-World War II global culture. Where all the other leashes were loosened, the last one, productivity, was inhumanly tightened. Normally, productivity is associated with discipline; that discipline was somewhat mitigated when other areas of life moved in parallel. But in developed countries, social limitations, personal restraints, and boundaries were erased. A lack of discipline rewarded and eased suffering in the personal realm. Meanwhile, all base survival was tied - with threats and desperation - to machine-like performance and productivity. The only place we were still connected to reality was through productivity, measured in time and money.

This paradoxical arrangement caused enormous social and cultural stresses, glossed over by blinking, flashing mass entertainment, bent on stating and restating: "It's all right. It's all right. It's all right." When, in fact, it was not all right and it did not correlate. One could not have no inhibitions on off hours, yet turn up bang on the dot on Monday to work like a robot. Or these days, turn up bang on the dot any time of the day or night, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to work like a robot, while also somehow simultaneously blowing off crazy steam in Id-dominated playgrounds.

Social theorists, political ideologues, and cultural gurus arose to reconcile the paradox and explain it away. For a time, the paradox could be cloaked, such that it offered the only ethical way to behave. Given its original historical premise, it was always presented as the only possible social structural counter-argument to racial genocide and world war. That is, workers were asked by broader culture to suppress their own souls in the name of making money or helping others to make money. But in all other respects, it was the height of right-thinking and social correctness to invert all previously-held values and to destroy self-limitations.

This post is not a conservative screed, moralizing or condemning libertinism. I merely observe that the formula was inconsistent and thus, the pattern is not sustainable. The paradox cannot hold for much longer. This must give way: the forceful over-expectation in Millennial working life, that this is the only way that cause can lead to effect, that actions can lead to consequences, that one must work oneself into the ground, second by second, to make money. While at the same time, in all other areas of life, irresponsibility and the divorce between actions and consequences prevail. One is minute-by-minute bombarded with media messages of war, disaster, chaos, and unbridled instinct. And counter to the pressure cooker experiment, our world is becoming more, not less, brutal, savage and potentially genocidal. It is a place where online beheadings and extreme porn are the norm and barely stir any profound response in the desensitized populace. Can you even remember what outrages you saw on the television or computer two weeks ago? Or what you ate for supper?

Further, as I noted in my post, Post-Apocalypse Rehab, mass media messages insist that the money you earn while acting like a robot rewards you by removing restraint in off hours. This is why we are surrounded by images of conspicuous consumption, which beg citizens to be irresponsible and disconnected from themselves and from reality in non-work areas of life. Supermodel sumptuousness and cinematic fictions of carnage create dreamlike distances from ongoing collective trauma. They allow the carnage in, so one engages, but from a quasi-safe position of cocoon-like detachment from the weirdness of living in this heaving, struggling world.

All of this must finally give way to a different way of living. The last domino to fall will be the outmoded way productivity is inflexibly correlated to money. This domino will fall in the name of consistency. You cannot train human beings to be hedonistic libertines for half a century, but deny them access to that final realm of freedom, within their own souls. Thus, in the last area where they are ordered inflexibly to be obedient, making money, they will rebel, because all other rules have been relaxed, inverted, abrogated, redefined, or overturned. The manner in which they redefine productivity and profitability may go either way: a soulful path or a libertine one.

The Internet is Ground Zero for this change. Cyberspace was supposed to broaden libertinism; it was a fantasyland, a computer playland. Cyberpunk was an extension of 1960s' and 1970s' drug culture. What a surprise, then, that after the initial wallowing in porn and LOLcat bullshit, computerland instead turned out to be a tough-as-nails Spartan training ground, which is now having radical impacts in the real world.

Memes in the Chaos: The Plastic Landscape of Reality Journalism

"Cernovich didn’t own a car, much less a satellite truck or a video-editing suite. But he did have sources." https://t.co/CdAkbuO9nV

— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) April 6, 2017

One of the hotbeds where a new technological ideology is forming is alt-journalism. Alt-journalists operate with a post-tabloid, kinetic style which exploits that consciousness and assaults the senses. This blowhard style - exemplified by pro-Trump Periscoper and Youtuber Mike Cernovich - wins alt-journalists popularity among their Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, Gab, and 4chan fans. Cernovich sure doesn't have any fans at liberal outlet Media Matters! You can read their coverage of his work here; and similar hatred for him is here and here. When attacked, Cernovich gives as good as he gets.

In a 2 April article and 3 April 2017 video, Cernovich asserted that Susan Rice was at the centre of the Russian-Trump wire-tapping intelligence scandal. It was Cernovich's scoop, not because others did not also have the information, but because others in the MSM chose not to report it.

In appealing to his youthful audience, Cernovich made much of both points. His message: watch him to get the lowdown first on what is happening; and watch him because he has the guts to tell you what others won't. He also builds his brand through bragging, bluster, and brawling with other social media personalities in ways that wear down resistance to him as an unknown quantity:

"I'm starting to like this mythos created about me. The media has turned me into this James Bond villain who has connections to Russian hackers and foreign governments, and can lead hacking campaigns across the world and influence elections. I'm not even going to argue with that shit. I'm going to be like, 'Yeah, you caught me. You're right. I'm a fucking James Bond villain, you know? Thank God.'" 

He introduces his audience to his wife and daughter, and discusses random topics on Friday evening Youtube cigar nights from his patio. Compare this to Anderson Cooper at CNN or Stephen Sackur at the BBC, and you see Mike Cernovich - a late Gen Xer - operates in a Brave New World.

A caveat: my discussion of controversial symbols and ideas in this post in no way indicates my personal belief in, or endorsement of, those symbols and themes. This is an apolitical blog, and my intent in the current series of posts is to uncover the nature of an emerging technological ideology, not to take sides in political debates or support offensive content.

In Millennial Eyes 6: The Antarctic Fourth Reich and the Great Game

Frank Hurley's photograph, taken between 1914 and 1916, of Antarctic explorer Dr. Leonard Hussey with Samson - one of the Canadian sled-dogs on Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Endurance expedition. Image Source: Pinterest via Royal Geographical Society.

Today's post continues my coverage of the Millennial Antarctic Fourth Reich conspiracy theory and its meaning in terms of Internet psycho-politics. In this case, I will describe how this conspiracy theory relates to the revival of the 19th century contest between Britain and Russia for Asian lands and wealth: the Great Game.

I argue that Antarctica now replaces Central Asia, to serve as a cipher in a new virtual Great Game. The Antarctic Fourth Reich conspiracy theory appears to be an alarming Russian-sourced or pro-Russian form of propaganda, which endorses and then moves past the pro-Trump agenda, to encourage Americans to destroy their own country from within. The Fourth Reich theory also channels a folkloric and racist renewal of Anglospheric nationalism, in which Vladimir Putin is viewed as a strategic ally.

The Fourth Reich conspiracy theory depends heavily on the Nazis' merger of the occult, politics, and technology. Secrets of the Third Reich: The Rediscovery of Vimanas (uploaded 11 February 2013). Video Source: Youtube.

The conspiracy theory also seeks to isolate the Anglosphere from the Europeans. It hinges on the supposed historic continuation of German Nazism (with a conspicuous, ahistorical failure to mention Italian fascism, Japan, or affiliated Axis powers from World War II) and returns Anglospheric opinion of the Russians to the sympathetic year of 1944.

Despite the apparent Russian dominance of this online extravaganza, the Anglospheric aspect of the Fourth Reich narrative has an elusive introspective quality which may excise the Russian factor and even nationalist racism. That is, something about this conspiracy theory involves America, the UK, and affiliated Commonwealth countries chewing over internal identity in light of contemporary politics and evolving global techno-economies and societies. The outcome of that muddled cultural reevaluation may be completely independent and unexpected, regardless of whether or not the Russians try to interfere with, or benefit from, this process.