New Left

The Cybernetics Group led the foundation for the counter-culture of the 1960s through the promotion of the use “mind-expanding” possibilities of “psychedelic” drugs, which—along with the antinomianism of the occult, rooted, ultimately, in Sabbateanism—were combined with left-wing causes to produce the New Left. As outlined by Aldous Huxley, the great fiend of the twentieth century, writing in Esquire in 1949, “We have had religious revolutions, we have had political, industrial, economic and nationalistic revolutions. All of them, as our descendants will discover, were but ripples in an ocean of conservatism – trivial by comparison with the psychological revolution toward which we are so rapidly moving. That will really be a revolution. When it is over, the human race will give no further trouble.”[1] Huxley clarified his vision in a speech to Tavistock Group at the University of California Medical School in 1961:

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.[2]

According to John Coleman, the leading groups of the New Left, like the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (UAW/MF) and Black Panthers and the Democratic Society (SDS)—which intersected with Situationism, postmodernism and CIA MK-Ultra projects—were a creation of the Tavistock Institute, through the agency of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), who were responsible for creating the leading radical groups of the 1960s, including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and the UAW/MF.[3] IPS was funded by the son of Paul Warburg, James Warburg, who had been Allen Dulles’ assistant in the OSS. It was founded in 1963 by Marcus Raskin, aide to McGeorge Bundy and president of the Ford Foundation, and Richard Barnet, aide to John J. McCloy.[4]

The New Left placed their hope for Marxist revolution in Third World liberation movements. Many New Left thinkers argued that since the Soviet Union could no longer be considered the world center of the proletarian revolution. New revolutionary Communist thinkers had to be substituted in its place, such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, and other Third World liberation movements, and struggles against capitalist imperialism, including Algeria’s war for independence and the plight of the Palestinians. The New Left upheld students and alienated minorities as the agents of social change, replacing the traditional Marxist approach of support of the general masses and the labor movement. That included support for the Black Power movement and protests against the Vietnam War.

Wilhelm Reich explained that sexual neuroses derive from the lack of gratification of natural sexuality. Natural sexuality is left unsatisfied and thereby creates neuroses due to suppression of these desires, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, by the authoritarian state. For Reich, this state is characterized best by the capitalist state that is based on the unit of the patriarchal family, within which the father mirrors the state as the absolute authority. While most interpret Nineteen Eight-Four, by Huxley’s former pupil George Orwell, as a warning about the threat of totalitarianism, there is a sub-theme that is of primary concern to the Frankfurt School, their Freudo-Marxist theories about the suppression of sexual instincts by authoritarian rule. With the Junior Anti-Sex-League, in Nineteen Eight-Four, the Party encourages its members to eliminate the personal sexual attachments that diminish political loyalty. In Part III, O'Brien tells Winston that neurologists are working to eliminate the orgasm because the mental energy required for prolonged worship requires authoritarian suppression of the libido. Several months Nineteen Eight-Four was published in 1949, Huxley wrote to Orwell:

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals—the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution—the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology—are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.

Frankfurt Schooler Herbert Marcuse acknowledged Reich’s work of as precedent for his own.[5] During WWII Marcuse first worked for the US Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. But in 1943 he transferred to the OSS to conduct psychological warfare against the Axis Powers. After the war, Marcuse worked for the CIA until 1952, when he was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section.1 Marcuse then worked at the Russian Institute of Columbia University in New York, funded by Rockefeller, before he became a professor first at Columbia, Harvard, then Brandeis from 1958 to 1965, and finally at the University of California, San Diego. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies.

Among Marcuse’s best-known works is Eros and Civilization, which discusses history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against the repression of our instincts. Thus, Marcuse came to be regarded as the guru of the New Left, by calling for the overthrow of the “establishment” because it was blamed for having imposed these “unnatural” inhibitions. It was Marcuse who coined the phrase, “make love, not war,” during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Marcuse’s ploy was to align left-wing causes with liberal values, so that ever since, the Left has been associated not only with Marxist politics and economics, but with what have come to be referred to as “liberal” values: environmentalism, feminism, anti-abortion, sexual liberation and multiculturalism.

Viva la revolución

The New Left upheld students and alienated minorities as the agents of social change, replacing the traditional Marxist approach of support of the general masses and the labor movement. That included support for the Black Power movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. The hero to many of the young members of the New Left was Bertrand Russell, who in early 1963, became increasingly vocal about what he argued were near-genocidal policies of the US government in Vietnam. The plight of the Palestinians was also a popular cause among the New Left, one they shared with Muslim terrorists. Criticism of America’s unconditional support for the on-going and brutal occupation of Palestine by the Zionists is one of two fundamental justifications offered by terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood for their actions. The second unresolved factor offered as justification for Islamic terrorism’s violent attacks are the numerous puppet regimes installed in the Middle East, through the assistance of Western powers, that succeeded the more direct control of Western colonialism.

After World War II, largely successful anti-colonial campaigns were launched against the collapsing European empires as many World War II resistance groups became militantly anti-colonial. In the 1960s, inspired by Mao’s Chinese revolution of 1949 and Castro’s Cuban revolution of 1959, national independence movements in formerly colonized countries often fused nationalist and socialist platforms in the 1960s. Arguments for anti-colonialist struggle were often based on the existentialist philosophies of men like Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. Heidegger, despite his support of the Nazis, helped shape several generations of European leftists and was the founder of postmodernism. Heidegger argued that, in order to escape the yoke of Western capitalism and the “idle chatter” of constitutional democracy, the “people” would have to return to their primordial destiny through an act of violent revolutionary “resolve.”[6] As Walter Newell described, in “Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left”:

Heidegger saw in the Nazis just this return to the blood-and-soil heritage of the authentic German people. Paradoxically, the Nazis embraced technology at its most advanced to shatter the iron cage of modernity and bring back the purity of the distant past. And they embraced terror and violence to push beyond the modern present–hence the term “postmodern”—and vault the people back before modernity, with its individual liberties and market economy, to the imagined collective austerity of the feudal age.[7]

In France, there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting Heidegger’s work, exemplified by Sartre and other existentialists, as well as by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille, who with Pierre Klossowski had founded the College of Sociology, which was closely associated with the Frankfurt School and the Eranos conferences.[7] Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the key figures in the rise of twentieth century existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer was the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the French army, but was captured by the Germans in 1940. It was during this period of confinement that he read Heidegger’s Being and Time, later to become a major influence on his own Being and Nothingness. After being released for poor health, he came back to Paris in May 1941, and participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with Simone de Beauvoir and others.

Sartre established a long-term romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986), a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist, best known as the author of The Second Sex, and together they challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered “bourgeois.” In 1943, she worked for Radio Vichy, founded by Pro-Nazi journalists, where she organized programs devoted to music through the ages. In that same year, Beauvoir was suspended for life from teaching for “behavior leading to the corruption of a minor,” when she was accused of seducing her 17-year-old lycée pupil Natalie Sorokine in 1939. It is well known that she and Sartre developed a “contract,” which they called the “trio,” in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre, who enjoyed taking girls’ virginities. According to a review of Carole Seymour-Jones’s book, Simone de Beauvoir? Meet Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Telegraph, “de Beauvoir’s affairs with her students were not lesbian but paedophiliac in origin: she was ‘grooming’ them for Sartre, a form of ‘child abuse’.”[8]

After 1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew, in which he tried to explain anti-Semitic hate. Sartre became a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created by Albert Camus who held similar beliefs. Sartre and de Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until 1951, with the publication of Camus’s The Rebel. Although Sartre was criticized for lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself, according to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote.

Sartre was an important inspiration to the rise of the New Left. Sartre embraced Marxism, but did not join the French Communist Party (PCF), though he sympathized with their cause. A period of tension followed between 1943 and 1952 as Sartre disagreed with the PCF’s Stalinist interpretation of communism. It was during that time that he established the fundamental principles of existentialism. Sartre then took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose US war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. Sartre went to Cuba in the 1960s to meet Fidel Castro and spoke with “Che” Guevara. After Guevara’s death, Sartre would declare him to be “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age” and the “era’s most perfect man.”

Sartre chose to become a Marxist, not because he had any hope that the revolution of the workers would succeed, but for the revolutionary cause itself. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, adopting ideas from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, among others. Perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartre’s philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojève’s seminars.[9] Sartre is especially indebted to Kojève’s innovative approach to Heidegger’s philosophy of combining Heideggerian and Marxist elements. As Shadia Drury explains, “By reading Hegel through the lenses of Heidegger as well as Marx, Kojève gave birth to that curious phenomenon known as existential Marxism, which is epitomized by the works of Sartre.”[10] Kojève inspired Sartre by placing particular emphasis on terror as a necessary component of revolution. The fulfillment of the End of History is “not possible without a Fight” he said[11] Building on Hegel’s dialectic, Kojève perceived that the “slave,” to overcome his “master,” must “introduce into himself the element of death” by risking his life while being fully conscious of his mortality. As a result, scholars describe Kojève as having a “terrorist conception of history.”[12] As Kojève explains, philosophers are less restrained by conventions and more capable or resorting to terror, and other measures that may be deemed “criminal,” if such measures are effective in accomplishing the desired end.[13]

Sartre thought the best goals to pursue were those that were unattainable. Man needs to constantly come to terms with his existence by facing his own death and finality. That meant the acceptance of life without the existence of God. Every human encounter, he thought, is an attempt by one party to affirm one’s own humanity by dehumanizing the other by subjugating him. Several of Sartre’s writings dwell on the theme that “dirty hands” are necessary in politics, and that a man with so-called “bourgeois” inhibitions about bloodshed cannot usefully serve a revolutionary cause, and in some of his later writings suggested that violence might even be a good thing in itself. Even though Sartre joined Frantz Fanon in recommending socialist revolution throughout the Third World, it was merely because he believed that all-out struggle against the colonized oppressors would be rewarding in itself because it would give the colonized a taste of the humanity they lost.[14]

Sartre’s friend and protégé, Frantz Fanon, the celebrated Martiniquo psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, adapted the tradition of Freudo-Marxism in his critique of colonialism. In The Wretched of the Earth, published shortly before his death in 1961, Fanon defends the right for a colonized people to use violence in their struggle for independence. Mirroring the thought to Bakunin, Fanon from his perspective as a psychologist believed that violence had a purgative power, where it was necessary for colonized people to perpetrate acts of violence against the colonizers to free themselves from their colonial mentality. He argued that since colonized people have been dehumanized, they are not bound by humane principles towards their colonizers. Both Fanon’s books established his fame in much of the Third World, in particular on Ali Shariati who inspired the revolution in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X in the US and Che Guevara in Cuba. His work was also a key influence on the Black Panther Party. Barack Obama references Fanon in his book, Dreams from My Father.

Fanon became the primary ideologue of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria, one of the first anti-colonial groups to use large-scale violence. The OAS teamed up with Otto Skorzeny who trained leading components of both the OAS and the FLN. The OAS attempted to prevent Algerian independence by acts of sabotage and assassination in both France and French Algerian territories. This included several attempts to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, one of these being featured in a fictionalized version recreated in the 1971 book by Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal, and in the 1973 film of the same name. Skorzeny was at that time also reportedly providing assistance to the right-wing fascist Jabotinsky networks of the Israeli Mossad, through the services of James Jesus Angleton’s CIA operations in Spain.[15] Sartre became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War. As a consequence, he became a domestic target of the OAS, escaping two bomb attacks in the early 60s.

Postmodernism

In the 1970s, a group of poststructuralists in France developed a radical critique of modern philosophy with roots in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and became known as postmodern theorists. As an intellectual movement, structuralism was initially presumed to be the heir apparent to existentialism.[16] The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include Claude Lévi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jakobson, and Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (formerly École libre des hautes études), who inspired a renewed examination of Freud and Marx, and whose ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism. Lacan had meetings with Charles Maurras, and occasionally attended meetings of Action française.[17] Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.[18] Lacan’s attendance at Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, was formative for his subsequent work.[19] George Bataille’s first marriage was to actress Silvia Maklès, who divorced him in 1934 and later married Lacan.

However, by the late 1960s, many of structuralism’s basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals such as the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes.[20] An influence of Kabbalistic letter mysticism can be found in the field of semiotics and linguistics of Jacques Derrida, one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. Derrida, who was originally born in Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, is known for his development of “deconstruction,” a theory for philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis. Recently, the question of the impact of the Jewish mysticism on Derrida and deconstructionism has been addressed by two of the most influential modern scholars of Kabbalah, Elliot Wolfson and Moshel Idel, who argues for a direct influence of the kabbalah on Derrida’s thought through his interest in Medieval Jewish Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.[21] Abulafia developed a “Kabbalah of Names,” wherein he took apart the divine name of God and recombined the letters. His technique involved writing down the permutations, pronouncing them, and imagining them. Abulafia’s thought filtered through the Renaissance humanists Pico della Mirandolla and Johann von Reuchlin, impacting on contemporary philosophy from Derrida to Umberto Eco.[22]

Postmodernist critique drew from the Frankfurt School’s critical theory.[23] Major French philosophers associated with post-structuralism, post-modernism, and deconstruction, including Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, engaged deeply with both Marxism and psychoanalysis. As Foucault suggested, with reference to Wilhelm Reich, with regards to his notions of the relationship between sexual liberation and political power, sexual liberation might be interpreted as having ushered in “a more devious and discreet form of power.”[24] In 1948, after Foucault allegedly attempted suicide, his father sent him to see the psychiatrist Jean Delay at the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center. Delay, along with Ewen Cameron and Nolan D.C. Lewis, examined Rudolf Hess during the Nuremberg trials, and diagnosed him with hysterical amnesia but not insanity.[25] Delay was the first president of the Association for the Organization of World Congresses of Psychiatry when it was started in 1950. Ewen Cameron became president of the World Psychiatric Association at its formal founding in 1961.[26] Delay also pioneered research on drugs including LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.[27] Delay discovered with J.M. Harl and Pierre Deniker that chlorpromazine, the first neuroleptic, produced a considerable reduction in the agitation and aggression of those patients with symptoms of schizophrenia.[28] During the student protests of May 1968, a group of about five hundred revolutionary student followers of Leon Trotsky professing anti-psychiatry attacked his offices. The students believed that chemicals were straitjackets and demanded that psychiatry be removed from medicine. Within two years they forced Delay’s retirement.[29]

Foucault and Derrida were also exponents of anti-psychiatry, following Bataille’s reinterpretation of the mystical significance of Nietzsche’s mental illness. In “Nietzsche’s Madness,” prepared but not published for the last issue of Acéphale in 1939, Bataille reminded his readers of a proverb by William Blake, “that had others not gone mad, we should be so”: “Madness cannot be cast out of the human generality, for its completion requires the madman. Nietzsche’s going mad—in our stead—thus rendered that generality possibly; and those who had previously lost their reason had not done it as brilliantly.”[30] Foucault’s 1961 publication Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, marked a turning in his thought away from phenomenology toward structuralism: though he uses the language of phenomenology to describe an evolving experience of “the other” as mad, an evolution which he attributes to the influence of specific powerful social structures.[31]

Foucault called “one of the most important writers of his century.”[32] Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan were heavily indebted to the transgressive ideas of Bataille, whose interest in the excesses of the Marquis de Sade, according to Steven M. Wasserstrom, was associated with Gershom Scholem’s exposition of the notion “defeating evil from within,” as expounded by Sabbatai Zevi, the Jewish heretic who declared himself messiah in 1666.[33] After his death, Bataille had considerable influence on authors such as Foucault, and Derrida, all of whom were affiliated with the journal Tel Quel, a French avant-garde literary magazine published between 1960 and 1982. It published important essays working towards post-structuralism and deconstruction, and evaluation of literary, artistic, and music criticism that began in France in the 1960s.[34] Authors and collaborators include Roland Barthes, the famous professor of Semiotics. In 1965, Pierre Klossowski, who participated in most issues of Bataille’s Acéphale in the late 1930s, published Le Baphomet, a transgressive piece of experimental fiction. In the book, the ghosts of the Templars reassemble each year to commemorate their immolation, and engage in demonic possession of animals and small children. The Templar Grand Master, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Klossowski himself also assume animal forms during the dialogue.

Klossowski’s 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced Foucault, Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. Derrida, along with French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, was co-founder of the International College of Philosophy, with Lyotard, who is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Henri Bergson is related to the growing influence of Deleuze within continental philosophy.[35] Although the Process Church’s “processean” theology is considered unrelated to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, after its leader DeGrimston was removed by the Council of Masters as Teacher, many former members of the cult joined Deleuze—on whom Whitehead had been influential—in his leadership of the Anti-Oedipal movement of 1968.[36]

In the tradition of Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality. As described by James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault:

Unfortunately, Foucault’s lifework… is far more unconventional—and far more discomfiting—than some of his “progressive” admirers are ready to admit… Foucault issued a basic challenge to nearly everything that passes for “right” in Western culture-including everything that passes for “right” among a great many of America’s left-wing academics.[37]

Foucault was obsessed with the idea of self-mutilation and suicide, and attempted the latter several times in ensuing years, later praising suicide in his writings. Delay examined Foucault’s state of mind, suggesting that his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality, because same-sex sexual activity was socially taboo in France.[38] At the time, Foucault engaged in homosexual activity with men whom he encountered in the underground Parisian gay scene, also indulging in drug use; according to biographer James Miller, he enjoyed the thrill and sense of danger that these activities offered him.[39] Foucault tragically concluded his life with a rampage through the San Francisco gay scene, indulging in promiscuous gay sex and sado-masochism, which he described as “the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.”[40] More disturbingly still, he claimed that the Marquis de Sade, a fanatic Satanist who inspired the most vile perversions and pleasure through violence, “had not gone far enough.”[41] Foucault finally died of AIDS in 1984.

Situationism

The European New Left appeared first in West Germany, and became a prototype for European student radicals, like the Situationist International (SI), an international organization of social revolutionaries, active from its formation in 1957 to 1972. The SI was formed in 1957 by a merger of Guy Debord’s Lettrist International and Asger Jorn’s International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB), two post-war continental art groups. Semiotics was also a major influence on Guy Debord’s Situationism, particularly through the work of his contemporary Roland Barthes.[42] The SI reached the peak of its influence in 1967 and 1968, with the publication of its most significant text, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, from a term first coined by Barthes, and which was greatly influential in shaping the student protests and massive general strikes of May 1968 in France. “New Solidarity,” a paper of the National Caucus of Labor Committee, reported that the SI was a “pig countergang created by the CIA from scratch.”[43]

The SI’s intellectual roots were derived from Marxism and the avant-garde art movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism, a French avant-garde movement established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou (a.k.a. Isidore Goldstein). Isou also felt that Abraham Abulafia was a precursor to his art:

Perhaps I would have been Abraham, son of Abulafia of Zaragoza, he who left in search of the mystical river, Sabbation, and wanted to obtain the knowledge of the veiled essence of God, by the permutation of the letters of the alphabet and the Talmudic numbers (Is the not my lettrism?).[44]

According to author and occultist historian Stewart Home, who had been associated with the Situationists, Lettrism was an advanced form of the Kabbalah, whose real purpose is hidden from the uninitiated under the guise of an “art” movement.[45] According Home, the SI was a Masonic organization. The founding document of the Situationist International was written by Ivan Chtcheglov, an exponent of Lettrism. As explained by Home, Chtcheglov revealed that the ‘secret chiefs’ who controlled the Situationist International were based in Tibet, as had also been the case with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[46]

The Lettrists were responsible for hosing the Notre-Dame Affair in 1950, a Situationist stunt where at the Easter High Mass at Notre Dame de Paris, in front of ten thousand people and broadcast on national TV, their member and former Dominican Michel Mourre posed as a monk, “stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead.”[47] André Breton prominently came out in solidarity with the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in the newspaper Combat.[48]

The first issue of Interionale Situationiste, published in June 158, featured an unsigned article called “The Struggle for the Control of the New Techniques of Conditioning” which takes up a discussion of Sergei Chakhotin’s study on propaganda and behavioral control, The Rape of the Masses. The SI believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics was deliberately cultivated by capitalist societies to protect them from criticism. Instead, the masses were deluded by the “spectacle,” by which they meant the mass media, a critique that is a development and application of Marx’s concept of “fetishism of commodities,” “reification” and “alienation,” as articulated by Georg Lukács. Central is the claim that alienation is a consequence of the climax of capitalism, as theorized by Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School. The Situationists argued that advanced capitalism manufactured false desires; literally in the sense of ubiquitous advertising and the glorification of accumulated capital, and more broadly in the abstraction and reification of the more ephemeral experiences of authentic life into commodities.

In response, situationist activity consisted of setting up “situations,” temporary environments favorable to the fulfillment of true and authentic human desires.[49] For example, the technique of the spectacle, sometimes called “recuperation,” is countered by Situationists with the “détournement.”[50] First developed in the 1950s by the Lettrist International, a détournement consist in “turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself,” like turning slogans and logos against the advertisers or the political establishment.[51] Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic that was reprised by the punk movement in the late 1970s and inspired the culture jamming movement in the late 1980s.

Olympia Press

An important connection between the Situationists and the London underground was Scottish author and pornographer Alex Trocchi, who claimed “sodomy” as a basis for his writing.[52] His novel Cain’s Book (1960) is often considered a Beat classic. Having met Guy Debord in Paris, Trocchi became a member of the Lettrist International, and a member of the Situationist International central committee in 1962. Before leaving the Situationists, Trocchi published in the Situationist Internationale which evoked the ideas of what would become the basis of his later Project Sigma. Trocchi called for a coup d’état not in a classic sense of a communist take-over of power, but believed the cultural revolt of the 1960s could succeed only by seizing the powerhouses of the mind. This “invisible insurrection” would have to be accomplished through art, in order to open the way to the international construction of what Trocchi called “the new underground.”[53]

Trocchi’s Project Sigma played a formative part in England’s version of the counter-culture. According to author Lynne Tillman, Trocchi “was considered the most evil man in England” and blamed for bringing heroin into the country.[54] Trocchi, a lifelong heroin addict who had a doctor’s subscription for the drug, was able to supply heroin for his close friend William S. Burroughs, who had moved to London in 1960 where he would remain for six years.[55] Trocchi and Burroughs were key figures of Swinging London. Trocchi was also friends with Leary’s LSD associate Michael Hollingshead. Hollingshead, who dubbed himself “the man who turned on the world,” is reputed to have introduced to LSD people such as Storm Thorgerson, Maynard Ferguson, Keith Richards, Paul Krassner, Houston Smith, Paul Lee, Pete LaRoca, Charles Mingus, Saul Steinberg and Alan Watts.

Like his friend William S. Burroughs, Trocchi’s books were also published by the synarchist Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press he inherited from his father Jack Kahane. Girodias had been involved in the synarchist circles of Postel du Mas, the reputed author of the Synarchist Pact with Aldous Huxley’s associate, Jean Coutrot, leader of the Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire (MSE). Girodias first became intrigued at lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti at the Theosophical Society in 1935, where Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo led a group dressed as Templar knights wearing red capes and riding boots. [56]

Olympia published Trocchi’s early novel Young Adam, which adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003. Olympia published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is best known for the first print of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Nabokov’s cousin was Nicholas Nabokov, who was deeply involved in the CIA-front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). As a composer, Nabokov was assigned to the music section of the Information Control Division of the Office of Military Government US (OMGUS), where his responsibility was to “establish good psychological and cultural weapons with which to destroy Nazism and promote a genuine desire for a democratic Germany.”[57] Considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century,[58] Lolita is the story of a middle-aged literature professor obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. According to Nabokov, “Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic.”[59] Simone de Beauvoir’s “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” an essay first published in Esquire in August 1959, extols Bardot’s beauty for retaining “the perfect innocence inherent in the myth of childhood.”

Although it polarized critics for its controversial depictions of child sexual abuse, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the novel into film in 1962 was nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. Though he was born Jewish, Kubrick, in 1958, married Christian Harlan, niece of infamous Nazi film-maker Veit Harlan (1899 –1964). Harlan’s most notorious film was Jud Süß (1940), which was commissioned by Goebbels for anti-Semitic propaganda purposes in Germany and Austria. Kubrick is recognized for imparting his films with his knowledge of deep politics, including Dr. Strangelove (1964), a former Nazi and scientist, suggesting Operation Paperclip, and A Clockwork Orange (1971) about mind-control. It has been claimed that when Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was in post-production in early 1968, NASA secretly approached him to direct the first three Moon landings.[60]

Other notable works published by Olympia included Beckett’s French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek; Henry Miller’s trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Nexus and Plexus; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille; and Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy. Sexus touched off a fire of controversy in France, with trials and arrests for obscenity. The “Affaire Miller” ended with Girodias out of jail, but bankrupt and no longer in control of Olympia.

Olympia published Trocchi’s early novel Young Adam, which adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003. Olympia published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is best known for the first print of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century,[61] Lolita is the story of a middle-aged literature professor obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. Other notable works included Beckett’s French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek; Henry Miller’s trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Nexus and Plexus; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille; and Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy. Sexus touched off a fire of controversy in France, with trials and arrests for obscenity. The “Affaire Miller” ended with Girodias out of jail, but bankrupt and no longer in control of Olympia. In 1965, Olympia Press published the first English edition of sado-masochistic The Story of O, written by Anne Desclos, for her lover Jean Paulhan, director of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) who was linked with the Frankfurt School and the synarchist of the Vichy Regime. Eliot Fremont-Smith of The New York Times called its publication “a significant event.”

Burroughs’ book Naked Lunch, which was included in Time magazine’s “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.” When Naked Lunch was published in 1959, it became the subject of the last major literary obscenity suit in the US. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition by Grove Press was not published until 1962. Grove Press’ founder was Barney Rosset, another graduate of the New School for Social Research. Rosset and lawyer Charles Rembar had fought and overturned in court in 1959 a ban against Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill. Both Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill were published by Obelisk Press of Jack Kahane and Olympia Press of his son Maurice Girodias.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was then published by Grove Press, with the complete opinion by United States Court of Appeals Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan, which first established the standard of “redeeming social or literary value” as a defense against obscenity charges. Grove is also the exclusive United States publisher of the unabridged complete works of the Marquis de Sade. Emmanuelle Arsan claimed The Story of inspired her to write her own erotic novel Emmanuelle, published in French in 1967 and later in English by Grove Press. In the 1960s, Grove Press published works by Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Régis Debray. In 1982, they published Martin Lee’s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.

Girodias was responsible for introducing Henry Miller to Grove Press who published Tropic of Cancer in 1961. That led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. The right to publish and distribute Miller’s novel in the US was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the First Amendment, which declared the book non-obscene. In 1966, after hearing testimony from his friend Allen Ginsberg and Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer, the Massachusetts State Supreme Court ruled that Burroughs’ Naked Lunch had social merit. This was despite the fact that the book featured child murder and acts of pedophilia. It is now widely regarded as an important masterpiece of twentieth-century literature.

Black Power  

Trocchi was also associated with Michael X, the founder of the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Michael X was born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad to “an Obeah- practicing black woman from Barbados and an absent Portuguese father from St Kitts.”[62] Michael X was involved in hustling and pimping, and served as a henchman for Peter Rachman, a Polish-born slumlord who operated in Notting Hill in the 1950s and early 1960s.[63] The word “Rachmanism” entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for the exploitation and intimidation of tenants. Rachman achieved notoriety after his death, when the Profumo Affair of 1963 hit the headlines and it was discovered that both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies had been his mistresses. In her autobiography Secrets and Lies, Keeler stated, Michael X “was typical of the nastier of Peter’s men; he would carry out orders without question. Michael was a nasty piece of work, a real head-case. He could intimidate you just by being in the same street.”[64] Barry Miles’s former wife, Sue recalled, “Malcolm (X) was probably hot stuff and for real; Michael was a pretty snaky character and he liked frightening people, he specialized in it. Michael wasn’t trying to address himself to the Race issue at all. He was trying to be a big frightening Black man, which he did quite successfully.”[65]

By the mid-1960s, Michael X became a well-known exponent of Black Power in London. In 1967, he was involved with the counterculture and hippie organization, the London Free School (LFS), through his contact with John “Hoppy” Hopkins, a British photographer and political activist, and “one of the best-known underground figures of ‘Swinging London’” in the late 1960s.[66] Involved with the Free School were Trocchi, the Warhol star Kate Heliczer, R.D. Laing, Anjelica Huston the daughter of John Huston, and Pink Floyd. In 1969, Michael X became the self-appointed leader of a Black Power commune in North London called the “Black House” which was supported by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.[67]

Trocchi was also a close friend of R.D. Laing, a psychiatrist associated with the Tavistock Institute, and a highly admired teacher at the Esalen Institute. Laing was the “celebrity psychiatrist to swinging London.”[68] Among his most celebrated admirers in the 1960s when he was a regular feature on television were the Beatles, Jim Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Laing administered Sean Connery LSD to deal with his struggles to come to terms with his new-found fame after appearing as James Bond in Goldfinger. As well as suffering from bouts of alcoholism and depression, Laing fathered 10 children by four women.

Along with Francis Huxley, the son of Julian Huxley, Laing was one of the directors the Society of Mental Awareness (SOMA), named after narcotic mentioned in the Vedus, the name used for the drug in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. SOMA was founded in 1967 by Stephen Abram, which ran the first human experiments with the active principle of cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), synthesized in their laboratory. Laing was leading exponents of a new form of cybernetic psychiatry, what came to be known as “anti-psychiatry,” a term coined by David Cooper who wrote Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry in 1971.[69] Cooper, an “existential Marxist” and also one of SOMA’s directors, coordinated the Tavistock Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation held in London in 1967 whose participants included R.D. Laing, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Bateson, Herbert Marcuse, Alex Trocchi and the Black Panthers’ Angela David and Stokely Carmichael.[70] Also in 1967, Cooper provided an introduction to Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

R.D. Laing opened conference, which involved political debate, poetry and performance art, whose participants included fellow Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, Alex Trocchi, Gregory Bateson and Marcuse.[71] The congress, which was described as the “numero uno seminal event of [London] 67,” emerged out of Trocchi’s idea for a “spontaneous university” as a “detonator” for revolutionizing contemporary existence.[72] Prior to her return to the US, Angela Davis, leader of the IPS creation, the Black Panthers, spent the summer at the conference. Davis, who emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA and the Black Panther Party, was a student of Marcuse, saying in a television interview that “Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.”[73]

Weather Underground member Naomi Jaffe was also a former undergraduate student of Marcuse. In 1971, Black Panther leader and former psychopath and convicted rapist Eldridge Cleaver encouraged the Weather Underground to bust Timothy Leary out of prison. After his break from prison, Leary and his wife Rosemary stayed with Cleaver in Algeria. According to Leary, “Panthers are the hope of the world,” he wrote to Allen Ginsberg. Cleaver, he added, “is a genial genius. Brilliant! Turned on too!”[74]

During the 1960s and 1970s, another prominent Black Panther member, James Forman, lived with and had two children from Constancia (“Dinky”) Romilly, the second and only surviving child of Jessica Mitford, of the infamous Mitford sisters, from her first husband Esmond Romilly. Jessica became a well-known writer, the author of The American Way of Death in 1963. In 1964, several leading African-American activists joined the staff and turned IPS into a base of support for the civil rights movement in the nation’s capital. During the 1960s and 1970s, prominent Black Panther member, James Forman, lived with and had two children from Constancia (“Dinky”) Romilly, the second and only surviving child of Jessica and Esmond. During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman received a PhD from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Jessica Mitford later married Robert Treuhaft, a Jewish-American lawyer, who founded the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein which represented CORE. In 1971, Hillary Clinton worked as a summer intern for Treuhaft’s firm, which also represented anti-Vietnam War protesters, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers.[75]

J.K. Rowling, author of the blockbuster Harry Potter series, named her daughter after Jessica Mitford. “Jessica Mitford has been my heroine since I was 14 years old,” explained Rowling.[76] Author John Hamer reported that he had been in contact with a “mystery man” who claimed to be the father of JK Rowling’s child. Jessica Mitford told the mystery man that his grandparents were her sister Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler, supplementing reports of such a child.[77] The man said that in the early 1990s, he, Jessica Mitford and Treuhaft—who was apparently JK Rowling’s “handler”—“brainstormed” the entire Harry Potter story on a long train ride while Rowling took extensive notes. The man also said that it was based loosely on the CS Lewis “Narnia” tales, but that he had no idea at the time that all the references to pedophilia, witchcraft and Satanism, were going to be incorporated into it. He also told me that the scar on Harry Potter’s head was the symbol of the British Union of Fascists, founded by Oswald Mosley, who married Jessica sister Diana.[78]

A number of parallels between the lives of the Mitford sisters and Harry Potter characters were noted in the American communist newspaper People's Weekly World.[79] Narcissa Black (analogue to Diana Mosley) married a Death Eater, Lucius Malfoy (Oswald Mosley). Her sister, Bellatrix (Unity Mitford), was herself a Death Eater, and a favorite of Lord Voldemort (Adolf Hitler). Andromeda (Jessica Mitford) married the Muggle-born Ted Tonks against her family’s wishes (as Jessica eloped with her cousin Esmond Romilly). Thus Andromeda was a “black sheep” of the traditionally pure-blood supremacists Black family. Rowling draws several parallels between the pure-blood supremacists and Nazism in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: the belief that pure-blood wizards have the right to subjugate the Muggle world and view themselves as a “master race,” laws requiring Muggle-borns to register with the Ministry of Magic, rounding up “Undesirables,” etc.

Andy Warhol Ruined Art

Reflecting the sexual “liberation” of the 1960s, “free love” took place in Warhol’s studio in New York. Almost all Warhol’s work filmed at the Factory featured nudity, graphic sexuality, drug use, same-sex relations and transgender characters. By making these films, Warhol created a sexually lenient environment at the Factory of “happenings,” which included fake weddings between drag queens, porn film rentals and vulgar plays. Warhol also used footage of sexual acts between his friends in his work, such as in Blue Movie in 1969, with stars Viva and Louis Waldon in the act.

Warhol included the band he managed, The Velvet Underground, in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a spectacle that combined art, rock, Warhol films and dancers of all kinds, as well as live S&M enactments and imagery. The band’s 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, featured German singer and Warhol “Superstar” Nico, with whom the band collaborated. Nico, who had roles Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, was hanging out with Brian Jones and Bob Dylan before she started with the Velvet Underground. The band was headed by Lou Reed and John Cale, who had studied with John Cage.

Multiple people associated with Warhol’s Factory were residents of the Hotel Chelsea in New York, a hub of eccentrics associated with the underground. Warhol shot his experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), his first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films, which follows the lives of several of the young women who lived at the Hotel Chelsea, and stars many of Warhol’s superstars. The Chelsea has been the home of numerous writers, musicians, artists and actors, including Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and Viva, and it was where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, before he died himself four months later from a heroin overdose.

Poet Dylan Thomas also died at Hotel Chelsea in 1953 from alcohol poisoning after consuming 18 whiskeys. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying at the Chelsea. There, Clarke would meet with Arthur Miller who moved into the Chelsea after he and Marilyn Monroe divorced in 1961, and stayed for six years. Miller deemed Chelsea, “the high spot of the surreal.” “This hotel does not belong to America,” he wrote. “There are no vacuum cleaners, no rules and shame.”[80] In a short piece, “The Chelsea Affect,” describing life at the hotel, he commented, “The Chelsea in the Sixties seemed to combine two atmospheres: a scary optimistic chaos which predicted the hip future, and at the same time the feel of a massive, old-fashioned, sheltering family. That at least was the myth one nursed in one’s mind, but like all myths it did not altogether stand inspection.”[81]

Hinting at the extensive occult activity that must have taken place there, one tenant related in a BBC documentary on the hotel that, “there are things that go on here that are very far from the norm… I don’t think that most people realize how strange it really is.”[82] Dee Dee Ramone, the bassist of the Ramones, cited as the first band to define the punk rock sound. wrote a novel called Chelsea Horror Hotel, in which the hotel’s resident demons, including punk ghosts and Satanists lure bums into the basement and feeding them to piranhas, literally annoy the narrator to death.

Poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, as well as Brion Gysin and his lover John Giorno, chose it as a place for philosophical and artistic exchange. It was at the Chelsea that Burroughs met Arthur C. Clarke and wrote The Naked Lunch. Ginsberg also introduced Burroughs to Harry Everett Smith who was also living there. In 1971–1973, Smith recorded performances held at his room at the Hotel Chelsea of folk and protest songs written and performed by his long-time friend, Allen Ginsberg.

Also living at the Chelsea was Maurice Girodias, the founder of Olympia Press, where he met Valerie Solanas, who would later shoot Andy Warhol. Girodias offered to publish Solanas’ future writings, but Solanas became convinced that Girodias and Warhol were conspiring to steal her work. On June 3, 1968, after first seeking out Girodias, who was gone for the weekend, she then went to The Factory, where she found Warhol and shot him. After she turned herself in, Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to a three-year jail sentence. Olympia Press then published her SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, which urged women to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”[83]

The Manifesto also featured essays by Girodias and Paul Krassner, a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He was a close protégé of the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, and the editor of Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. In 1971, five years after Lenny Bruce’s death, Groucho Marx—who Krassner had accompanied on his first acid trip—said, “I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce.”[84] Kurt Vonnegut wrote the introduction to Krassner’s The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race: The Satirical Writings of Paul Krassner. Krassner edited and published The Realist, first published in the offices of Mad magazine, and often regarded as a milestone in the American underground or countercultural press of the mid-twentieth century. The magazine also published political commentary from Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller. His reviews have been highly complimentary. According to the New York Times “He is an expert at ferreting out hypocrisy and absurdism from the more solemn crannies of American culture.”[85] The Los Angeles Times wrote, “He has the uncanny ability to alter your perceptions permanently.”[86] The San Francisco Chronicle noted, “Krassner is absolutely compelling. He has lived on the edge so long he gets his mail delivered there.”[87]

According to the FBI files, Krassner was “a raving, unconfined nut.”[88] “The FBI was right,” said George Carlin. “This man is dangerous – and funny; and necessary.”[89] Krassner’s most notorious prank was “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” a gruesome article following the censorship of parts of William Manchester’s book on the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President. At the climax of the short story, Lyndon B. Johnson is on Air Force One committing necrophilia on the bullet-hole wound in the throat of JFK’s corpse. According to Elliot Feldman, “Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true.”[90]

It was also Krassner who lent the money to radical feminist Valerie Solanas to buy the gun with which she attempted to murder Andy Warhol. [91] When was asked in a 2005 interview by John McMillian of the New York Press how he had been able to rationalize supporting Solanas, her friend Ben Morea replied, “Rationalize? I didn’t rationalize anything. I loved Valerie and I loathed Andy Warhol, so that’s all there was to it.” He explained, “I mean, I didn’t want to shoot him.” He then added: “Andy Warhol ruined art.”[92]

Motherfuckers

In the 1960s and 1970s, anarchists, communists, and other leftists offered various interpretations of the avant-garde Situationist movement, in combination with a variety of other perspectives. Examples in Europe included the Provos, King Mob who were producers of Heatwave magazine, and the Angry Brigade. In the United States, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, The Weathermen, and the Rebel Worker also explicitly employed Situationist ideas.[93] The Motherfuckers (UAW/MF) were an anarchist group based in New York, which included Tom Neumann, the stepson of Herbert Marcuse.

The UAW/MF grew out of a Dada-influenced art group called Black Mask with some additional people involved with the anti-Vietnam War Angry Arts week, held in January 1967. Black Mask, formed in 1966 by painter Ben Morea and the poet Dan Georgakas, declared that revolutionary art should be “an integral part of life, as in primitive society, and not an appendage to wealth.”[94] The UAW/MF contributed to New York City’s counterculture by setting up crash pads, serving free food, starting a free store, and helping radicals connect with doctors and lawyers. They were opposed to and resisted on principle any attempt to impose order on the political demonstrations they participated in.

The phrase “Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers” was taken from the poem, “Black People!” by Amiri Baraka, which in turn was a reference to a phrase “supposedly barked by Newark cops to Negroes under custody.”[95] Most of the lyrics for the 1969 song “We Can Be Together,” by Jefferson Airplane, which the group played uncensored on The Dick Cavett Show on August 19, 1969, were taken from a leaflet written by Motherfucker John Sundstrom, and published as “The Outlaw Page” in the East Village Other. At various times, the line became popular among several groups that came out of the sixties, from Black Panthers to feminists and even “rednecks.” The line was famously shouted by Patty Hearst during a bank robbery, after she had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SAL).[96]

Researcher Mae Brussell, who studied Nazi connections to the assassination of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that the SAL “consisted predominantly of CIA agents and police informers.” The group was, she insisted, “an extension of psychological experimentation projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park.” Brussell went on to comment that “many of the current rash of ‘senseless killings,’ ‘massacres,’ and ‘zombie-type murders’ are committed by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental hospitals or prison hospitals, where their heads have been literally taken over surgically to create terror in the community.”[97]

According to Alex Constantine, “evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was obvious.”[98] The leadership of the SLA was trained by Colston Westbrook, a veteran of the CIA’s PHOENIX Program in South Vietnam, where he trained terrorists and death squads. In 1969, Westbrook worked as an administrator of Pacific Architects and Engineers, a CIA front in Southern California. Three of Westbrook’s minions, Emily and William Harris and Angela Atwood, a former police intelligence informer, were students of the College of Foreign Affairs, a cover for the CIA at the University of Indiana. Even the SLA symbol, comments Constantine, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted by the OSS and CIA to represent the principles of brainwashing.[99]

Hearst’s court-appointed doctor and brainwashing-theory proponent during her trial was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, a retired professor of psychiatry at UCLA, and one of America’s most notorious CIA mind control specialists.[100] West was trained in Group Dynamics at the British Tavistock Institute, and served as an expert in brainwashing for the Air Force and the CIA. West first achieved infamy as part of MK-Ultra when he injected LSD into an elephant and killed it.[101] He was also called upon by the government to examine Jack Ruby, who had killed Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald could stand trial. West eventually became director of the American Family Foundation, which is the parent organization of the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). He was a long-time friend of Charlton Heston.

West’s friend Aldous Huxley suggested that he hypnotize his MK-Ultra subjects prior to administering LSD, in order to give them “posthypnotic suggestions aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction.”[102] Dr. Colin Ross, a specialist in dissociative disorders, confirms that Dr. West’s work for the CIA centered on the biology or personality of dissociated states. In “Pseudo-Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults,” West detailed the creation of “changelings,” or dissociative personalities. “Prolonged environmental stress,” West observed, “or life situations profoundly different from the usual, can disrupt the normally integrative functions of personality. Individuals subjected to such forces may adapt through dissociation by generating an altered persona, or pseudo-identity.” [103]

After a 15-hour interview with Hearst, West concluded that she hosted an alternate personality named “Pearl.” According to West, Hearst was a “classic case” of coercive persuasion or brainwashing: “If (she) had reacted differently, that would have been suspect.”[104] At her trial, the prosecution suggested that Hearst had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own volition, and sexual activities between her and SLA members had not amounted to rape. Hearst was found guilty of bank robbery, though her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and she was eventually pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

The UAW/MF and Situationists mutated into King Mob, which promoted absurdist and provocative actions as a way of endeavoring to contribute to worldwide proletarian social revolution. King Mob were influenced by Heatwave and Rebel Worker, both inspired by André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour (1939).[105] Rebel Worker (IWW) was heavily linked to the 60s counterculture and published in Chicago by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as the Wobblies. Rebel Worker was started in 1960 by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, who were members of the Chicago Surrealist Group, who were in contact with Breton. The group also included Philip Lamantia, who was on the bill at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in 1955, when Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl. The Chicago group edited an issue of Radical America, the SDS journal.[106] One edition of Rebel Worker was published in London with Charles Radcliffe, who went on to become involved with the Situationist International.

Punk Rock

It was during his time with King Mob that Malcolm McLaren was inspired by the potential use of pop music for mischief-making to create the Sex Pistols as a Situationist stunt. Situationist Jamie Reid’s album cover artwork for the Sex Pistols, featuring letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note, came close to defining the image of punk rock, particularly in the UK.[107] Prior to creating the group in 1975, McLaren spent a brief period unofficially managing the New York Dolls, who were part of the No-Wave Scene in New York centered around William S. Burroughs. No-wave was an underground scene of music, Super 8 film, performance art, video art and contemporary art, which rejected commercial elements in general. No-wave would last a relatively short time but profoundly influenced the development of independent film, fashion and visual art.[108]

Having earned a “reputation as the first underground rock band,” The Velvet Underground inspired, directly or indirectly, many of those involved in the creation of punk rock.[109] The origins of New York’s punk rock scene can be traced back to such sources as late 1960s trash culture, and an early 1970s underground rock movement centered on the Mercer Arts Center in Greenwich Village, known as “The Kitchen.” The venue became known as a place where many no-wave bands like Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch and James Chance performed. Notable Kitchen alumni also include Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. Also performing at The Kitchen were the New York Dolls, who donned an androgynous wardrobe, wearing high heels, eccentric hats, and satin, predating the punk and glam metal movements. Regarded as “one of the most influential rock bands of the last 20 years,”[110] the New York Dolls influenced bands such as the Sex Pistols, Kiss, the Ramones, Guns N’ Roses, the Damned, and the Smiths.

Where LSD represented the idealism of the 1960s, and the hope of “expanding” one’s mind, heroin was a contrary indulgence, which served the self-destructiveness of the nihilism of the 1970s, which responded to what came to be seen as the only rational response to the disappointment of the failed idealism of the previous generation. According to no-waver Lydia Lunch, who was named one of the ten most influential performers of the 1980s, “The whole fucking country was nihilistic. What did we come out of? The lie of the Summer of Love into Charles Manson and the Vietnam War. Where is the positivity?”[111]

With the collapse of The Kitchen in 1973, a new scene began to develop around the CBGB club, the seedy area of Bowery Street in lower Manhattan, which simultaneously functioned as a site for the sale and consumption of drugs. As explained by Eric C. Schneider in Smack: Heroin and the American City, clubs like CBGB, “existed for those who consumed life at night, and they established alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and Quaaludes as an integral part of punk music making and lifestyle.”[112]

CBGB became a famed venue of punk rock and new wave bands like Television, Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Tommy Ramone recalled that, both musically and visually, “we were influenced by comic books, movies, the Andy Warhol scene, and avant-garde films.”[113] The Ramones, along with Patti Smith, who was called the “punk poet laureate,” were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement. Smith’s debut album Horses was produced by John Cale, as was that of the protopunk band The Stooges, led by singer Iggy Pop.

Being just a block away from his own “bunker,” Burroughs would visit the club to hear the performances of Patti Smith and Richard Hell who revered him as an icon. Burroughs had decided to relocate back to the US permanently in 1976, living in an apartment he dubbed “The Bunker.” Burroughs then began to associate with New York cultural players such as Andy Warhol, Brion Gysin’s lover John Giorno, Susan Sontag, Marshall McLuhan, Terry Southern and the key personalities of the “no-wave” scene. The Bunker also featured an example of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone box, which he believed that it could be used to ease or alleviate “junk sickness.” David Byrne of Talking Heads, noted that Burroughs and Ginsberg both lived nearby, “and their attitudes toward life and art were part of the mystique of the area.”[114] As Victor Bockris explained, “In 1979 when I started having dinner with him several nights a week, Burroughs was the worshipped King of the Beats and Godfather of Punk as well as King of the Underground.”[115]

Semiotext(e)

Semiotext(e), a journal which was founded in 1974 by Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University, sought the collaboration of artists like William S. Burroughs and John Cage to bridge the postmodernists to the new underground. A younger contemporary of Deleuze and Foucault, Lotringer is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e). Born to Polish-Jewish immigrants who suffered the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1949, Lotringer emigrated to Israel where he became a leader of the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer-Hatzair (“The Young Garde”). After returning to France, he studied with Roland Barthes. Lotringer’s PhD dissertation was on the novels of Virginia Woolf, in which he was aided by his friendship with Leonard Woolf and T.S. Eliot. He was hired to teach Semiotics at Columbia in 1972.

Semiotext(e) synthesized French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements. The magazine, which was initially devoted to readings of Nietzsche and Saussure, brought together the fathers of postmodernist philosophy. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. According to Lotringer:

[W]e were preparing the ground with all this French theory, and especially with Nietzsche. I knew we would have to work with America, in America, because that was where we were, and also because America was where the world was, I always thought to myself, “If you want to reach 5,000 people, you have to be visible to 250 million.” And American culture seemed to already embody, to live, the philosophical reality described by French theory. The problem was, no one seemed aware of it then, except maybe these extraordinarily sensitive people, like Cage, Merce Cunningham, William Burroughs.[116]

The provocative “Schizo-Culture” conference on “Madness and Prisons” in 1975 at Columbia University, brought together activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to discuss the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. More than 2,000 attendees witnessed “show-downs” between Michel Foucault, conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, Félix Guattari, feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, R.D. Laing, William S. Burroughs and others. According to Burroughs:

I think “schizo-culture” here is being used rather in a special sense. Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that this is a healthy sign.[117]

In 1978, Lotringer staged the Nova Convention in a three-day multimedia retrospective in honor of Burroughs’ work at the Entermedia Theater in New York. The event acclaimed Burroughs as “a philosopher of the future […] the man who best understood post-industrial society.” Burroughs’ The event featured readings by Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Burroughs himself. It had been announced that Keith Richards would perform, but after his heroin arrest in Toronto, his management decided that it would be unwise to appear at a festival honoring the legendary heroin addict. Frank Zappa was enlisted to read the “Talking Asshole” section from Naked Lunch. Patti Smith, who wore a fur coat and a pair of genuine iguana-skin cowboy boots protested having to follow Zappa but was assured by Burroughs confidant and organizer James Grauerholz who explained to her that Zappa’s appearance was a last-minute solution and not intended to upstage her. At the “event party” for the convention, the musical performances included Suicide, and Debbie Harry and Chris Stein from Blondie. The B-52s performed, though they hadn’t even released their first album yet. Burroughs’ personal assistant during the Nova Convention was Victor Bockris, an English poet, who over the following months brought over Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood, Joe Strummer, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and various others for tape-recorded dinners at Burroughs’ “bunker” in New York.

Also in 1978, in “The Danger of Child Sexuality,” for an edition of Semiotext(e) titled Special Intervention Series 2: Loving Boys / Loving Children, Foucault defended a petition of support of sex with “consenting” minors, signed a year earlier by himself and Deleuze, Derrida, Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard.[118] The petitions were issued after a 1977 trial in France where three men jailed for non-violent sex offences against children aged 12 and 13. “Three years in prison for caresses and kisses: enough is enough,” said one petition.[119] Newspapers such as Le Monde defended the idea of sexual relationships with minors, and Libération, co-founded by Sartre, championed pedophiles as a discriminated minority and ran personal ads by adults seeking children for sex.[120]

Baader-Meinhof Gang

Christopher Hitchens observed that the phenomenon of the German New Left terrorist group Baader-Meinhof Gang was actually was a form of psychosis, noting that one of the main recruiting grounds for the group was the Socialist Patient’s Collective (SPK), an experimental program at the University of Heidelberg using mental patients, in which the patients were indoctrinated according to R.D. Laing, where the insane were convinced that that their solution was treatment but social revolution.[121] The SPK, which was founded in 1970 by Wolfgang Huber, assumes that illness exists as an undeniable fact and that it is caused by the capitalist system. They believed that the sick formed a revolutionary class of dispossessed people who could be radicalized to struggle against oppression. The most widely recognized text of the PF/SPK(H) is the communique, “SPK – Turn illness into a weapon,” which has prefaces by both Huber and Jean-Paul Sartre. [122]

The Baader-Meinhof Gang, or the Red Army Faction (RAF), were founded in 1970 by Horst Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and his mistress Gudrun Ensslin, Hegel’s grand-daughter.[123] The RAF existed from 1970 to 1998, committing numerous operations, especially in late 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as “German Autumn.” The group targeted German politicians and businessmen, as well as US military installations in West Germany. Drawing on its New Left counterparts in the US, the RAF even began to borrow such phrases as “burn baby burn,” “right on,” and “off the pigs.”

Reflecting the influence of Marcuse, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a movie about the group, has Baader expressing the belief that sexual freedom and the fight against imperialism go hand in hand, exclaiming, “fucking and shooting are the same!” The RAF had links with East German intelligence and were also influenced in their support for Third World revolution by the theories of Frantz Fanon. Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof went to Jordan and trained in the West Bank and Gaza with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the PLO, looking to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance. The PLO consists of separate factions, the largest of which are Fatah, the DFLP and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which received support from Otto Skorzeny’s Paladin Group. Arafat was among several Palestinian refugees who received training in commando tactics for possible use against British troops stationed in the Suez Canal zone from Skorzeny, who planned their initial strikes into Israel via the Gaza Strip in 1953-1954.[124] Yasser Arafat, the nephew of “Hitler’s Mufti” al Husseini, founded Fatah with members of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954. In 1967, Fatah joined the PLO.

Abu Iyad organized the Fatah splinter group Black September in 1970, best known for seizing eleven Israeli athletes as hostages at the September 1972 Olympics in Munich. All the athletes and five Black September operatives died during a gun battle with the West German police. The PFLP, founded by George Habash in 1970, hijacked three international passenger planes, landing two of them in Jordan and blowing up the third.

After an intense manhunt, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were eventually caught and arrested in June 1972. During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Jean-Paul Sartre visited Baader in prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment. Meinhof committed suicide in 1976, and the remaining leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977. In October 13 of that year, the PFLP conducted a failed attempt to secure their release with the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, denominated Landshut. Following the capture of the hijackers in Somalia, Baader and Ensslin committed suicide.

[1] Lee & Shlain. Acid Dreams, pp. 127.

[2] John Coleman. The Committee of 300, “Tavistock Institute Of Human Relations.”

[3] Ibid.

[4] Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 107.

[5] Waller R. Newell. “Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left.” Foreign Affairs: The Weekly Standard (November 11, 2001).

[6] Ibid.

[7] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Three, Chapter 18: The Frankfurt School.

[8] Tim Martin. “Simone de Beauvoir? Meet Jean-Paul Sartre.” The Telegraph (April 12, 2008). Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3672534/Simone-de-Beauvoir-Meet-Jean-Paul-Sartre.html

[9] D. Auffret. Alexandre Kojève. La philosophie, l'Etat, la fin de l'histoire, (Paris: B. Grasset, 2002).

[10] Shadia Drury. Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 65.

[11] Alexandre Kojève. Introduction to a Reading of Hegel. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 69.

[12] Drury. Alexandre Kojève, p. 37.

[13] Ibid., p. 147.

[14] Ibid., p. 76.

[15] Pierre Beaudry. “Will Bush or Kerry Learn a Lesson from Charles de Gaulle?” Executive Intelligence Review. (June 18, 2004).

[16] Nasrullah Mambrol. “Structuralism.” Literary Theory and Criticism Notes (March 26, 2016-03-20

[17] E. Roudinesco, J. Mehlman & J. Lacan. Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 (University of Chicago Press, 1990).

[18] John Desmond. Psychoanalytic Accounts of Consuming Desire: Hearts of Darkness (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

[19] E. Roudinesco, J. Mehlman & J. Lacan. Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 (University of Chicago Press, 1990).

[20] Gilles Deleuze. “How Do We Recognise Structuralism?” In Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Trans. David Lapoujade. Ed. Michael Taormina. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents ser. (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 170–192.

[21] Moshe Idel. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 184.

[22] B. Goldman-Ida. “2016 Alchemy of Works: Abraham Abulafia, DADA, Lettrism.” Tel Aviv Museum of Art (June 16 - November 5, 2016).

[23] Raymond Geuss. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt school (Cambridge University Press, 1981). p. 58.

[24] Christopher Turner. “Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love.” The Guardian (July 8, 2011).

[25] “Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1: Report of Commission to Examine Defendant Hess.” Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School; David John Cawdell Irving. Hess: the missing years 1941-1945 (Macmillan, 1987), p. 375.

[26] “History of the World Psychiatric Association.” World Psychiatric Association. Retrieved from http://www.wpanet.org/detail.php?section_id=5&content_id=44

[27] Bruno Etain, M.D. & Laurence Roubaud, M.D., (September 2002). “Jean Delay, M.D., 1907–1987.” American Journal of Psychiatry. American Psychiatric Association. 159 (9): 1489.

[28] E. R. Kandel. In Search of Memory. The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (W. W. Norton & Co., 2007).

[29] Angela Woods. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 130.

[30] Georges Bataille. “Nietzsche’s Madness” (January 3, 1939 in October 36, Spring 1986), p. 44.

[31] J. Khalfa. Introduction. Foucault M. History of Madness (NY: Routledge; 2009). p. xiiv–xxv.

[32] Guido Giacomo Preparata. The Ideology of Tyranny: Bataille, Foucault, and the Postmodern Corruption of Political Dissent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

[33] Guido Giacomo Preparata. The Ideology of Tyranny: Bataille, Foucault, and the Postmodern Corruption of Political Dissent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Steven M. Wasserstrom. “Defeating Evil from Within: Comparative Perspectives on “Redemption Through Sin.” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 6 (1997).

[34] Richard Aplin & Joseph Montchamp. Dictionary of Contemporary France (Routledge, 2014). p. 454.

[35] Andrew Bailey. First Philosophy: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy (Broadview Press, 2002) p. 704

[36] “Reviewing Religions: The Process.” Frontline.

[37] James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 384.

[38] Didier Eribon. Michel Foucault. Betsy Wing (translator) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 26; James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York City: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

[39] David Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson. 1993), p. 30; Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp. 55-56.

[40] Ibid., pp. 26–27.

[41] Roger Kimball. “The perversions of M. Foucault,” The New Criterion (March 1993).

[42] Philippe Sollers. “L’antifascisme de Barthes.” Le Monde, Hors-Série Roland Barthes, (July-August, 2015).

[43] “New Solidarity” (paper of the National Caucus of Labor Committees) (28 August and 6 September 1974).

[44] Isou. Agregation. Cited in Sami Sjöberg. The Vanguard Messiah: Lettrism between Jewish Mysticism and the Avant-Garde (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015), p. 47.

[45] Stewart Home. “Occult Secrets of the Avant-Garde.” Retrieved from http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/holborn.htm

[46] Ibid.

[47] Greil Marcus. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) pp. 279–86.

[48] André Breton. “Lettre a Louis Pauwels” sur le ‘scandale’ de Notre Dame»” Combat (April 12, 1950), OC III, pp. 1024–5.

[49] Guy Debord. “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation.” Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris, June 1958).

[50] Robert Chasse, Bruce Elwell, Jonathon Horelick & Tony Verlaan. “Faces of Recuperation.” American section of the Situationist International, issue #1 (New York, June 1969).

[51] Douglas B. Holt. Cultural Strategy Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands (Oxford University Press, 2010), p.2

[52] “Scottish Writing Today.” Edinburgh Festival (1962); Charlotte Higgins & Andrew Dickson “Edinburgh festival turns clock back 50 years to momentous literary conference.” The Guardian (August 10, 2012).

[53] Niek Pass. “In Pursuit of the Invisible Revolution: Sigma in the Netherlands, 1966-1968.” Timothy Brown, Lorena Anton (eds), Between the Avant-garde and the Everyday: SSubversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present (Berghahm Book, 2011). p. 33.

[54] Stewart Home. “Walk on Gilded Splinters: In Memorian to Memory 13 April 1969. Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt at the Arts Lab in London.” www.stewarthomesociety.org

[55] Miles. Call Me Burroughs: A Life.

[56] Ibid., p. 149.

[57] Frances Stonor Saunders. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 8.

[58] Maria Popova. “The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors.” The Atlantic (January 30, 2012).

[59] Vladimir Nabokov & Alfred Appel. The Annotated "Lolita" Revised and Updated (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 16.

[60]  Clyde Lewis. “Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky!” Groundzeromedia.org. Retrieved http://archives.groundzeromedia.org/dis/gorsky/gorsky.html

[61] Maria Popova. “The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors.” The Atlantic (January 30, 2012).

[62] Margaret Busby. “Notting Hill to death row” (review of Michael X: A Life In Black And White, by John Williams), The Independent, (8 August 2008).

[63] John Williams. Michael X: A Life In Black And White (Century, 2008), p. 64.

[64] Christine Keeler & Douglas Thompson. Secrets and Lies - The Real Story of Political Scandal That Mesmerised the World - The Profumo Affair (John Blake Publishing, 2014).

[65] Christine Keeler. “Scandal from A Small World…” (February 2, 2018). Retrieved from https://theoccultbeatles.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/christine-keeler-scandal-from-a-small-world/

[66] Russell Reising. Speak to me: the Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005), p. 28.

[67] Dick Cavett. The Dick Cavett Show (September 11, 1971).

[68] Jonathan Brown. “R D Laing: The celebrity shrink who put the psychedelia into psychiatry” The Independent (December 29, 2008)

[69] Andrew Pickering. The Cybernetic Brain. p. 7.

[70] David Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation - Book information and Introduction.

[71] Herbert Marcuse & Douglas Kellner. The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, (New York: Routledge, 2005) Introduction, p. 19.

[72] “Dialectics Introduction.” Dialectics of Liberation. Retrieved from http://www.dialecticsofliberation.com/1967-dialectics/dialectics-introduction

[73] John Abromeit & W. Mark Cobb, eds. Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (Routledge, 2004) p. 2.

[74] Lee & Shlain. Acid Dreams, p. 267.

[75] Carl Bernstein. A Woman in Charge (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007). pp. 105.

[76] J.K. Rowling: “The First It Girl.” Sunday Telegraph (November 26, 2006).

[77] Fran Yeoman. “Did Unity Mitford have Adolf Hitler’s love child?” The Times (December 13, 2007).

[78] John Hamer. The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (Rosedale Books, 2012).

[79] Teresa Albano. “A summer of reading, struggle and Harry.” People’s Weekly World (September 8, 2007).

[80] “The 10 best Chelsea hotel moments,” The Guardian (December 19, 2010)

[81] Arthur Miller. “The Chelsea Affect” Granta Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20021019161352/http://www.granta.com/extracts/1691

[82] “Chelsea Hotel.” Arena (BBC, 1981) 3:38.

[83] Alexandra DeMonte. “Feminism: Second-Wave.” In Chapman, Roger (ed). Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2010), p. 178.

[84] Krassner bio. Retrieved from http://www.paulkrassner.com/pkbio.htm

[85] Ibid.

[86] Ibid.

[87] Ibid.

[88] Michael Dooley. “Here Lies Paul Krassner,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, vol.18, no. 2, 2000.

[89] Krassner bio.

[90] Elliot Feldman. “Paul Krassner and The Realist.”

[91] Paul Krassner. “Brain Damage Control: Phil Spector, Valerie Solanas and Me.” High Times Lounge (September 10, 2009).

[92] Eve Hinderer. “Ben Morea: art and anarchism.” Mondays (June 07, 2004).

[93] Sam Cooper. The Situationist International in Britain: modernism, surrealism, and the avant-gardes (New York: Routledge, 2016).

[94] Ibid.

[95] Ron Perstein. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008) p. 238.

[96] “American Experience--More about the film Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst--Transcript.” PBS.

[97] Alex Constantine. “The CIA & The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF)” The Constantine Report (July 20, 2010). Retrieved from https://constantinereport.com/the-cia-the-false-memory-syndrome-foundation-fmsf/

[98] Ibid.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Constantine. Virtual Government, p. 130.

[101] West, L.J., Pierce, C.M., & Thomas, W.D. “Lysergic acid diethylamide: Its effects on a male Asiatic elephant.” Science 138: 1100-1103 (1962).

[102] Chaitkin, “British psychiatry.”

[103] Constantine. Virtual Government, p. 130.

[104] Louis Jolyon West. “Psychiatrist pleads for Patty Hearst’s release”. Eugene Register-Guard (December 29, 1978).

[105] Cooper. The Situationist International in Britain.

[106] Penelope Rosemont. Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights (Black Swan Press), p. 5.

[107] Chris Heard. “Art and style of punk's shocking past.” BBC News (October 7, 2004).

[108] Marc Masters. No Wave (London: Black Dog Publishing 2007), p. 200

[109] Steven Taylor. False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), p. 49.

[110] Colin Larkin, ed. The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music 4 (2nd ed.) (Guinness Publishing, 1995). p. 3022.

[111] “Lydia-lunch.org – The Official Lydia Lunch Website – Biography.” Lydia-lunch.org; Marc Masters. “NO!: The Origins of No Wave” Pitchfork (January 15, 2008).

[112] Eric C. Schneider. Smack: heroin and the American city (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

[113] Stephen Colegrave & Chris Sullivan. Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution, (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), p. 67.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Victor Bockris interviewed by Dave Teeuwen. Reality Studio (May 27, 2010).

[116] “Under the Sign of Semiotext(e): The Story According to Sylvere Lotringer and Chris Kraus” (with Anne Balsamo) Critique 37.3 (Spring 1996). p. 205-221.

[117] “The Event, The Book” Sylvère Lotringer and David Morris. Schizo-Culture, 2-vol. set.

[118] Semiotext(e): Special Intervention Series 2: Loving Boys / Loving Children (Summer 1980).

[119] Jon Henley. “Calls for legal child sex rebound on luminaries of May 68.” The Guardian (February 24, 2001).

[120] Norimitsu Onishi. “A Victim’s Account Fuels a Reckoning Over Abuse of Children in France.” The New York Times (January 7, 2020).

[121] Christopher Hitchens. “Once upon a Time in Germany.” Vanity Fair (August 7, 2009).

[122] Wolfgang Huber. SPK Turn illness into a Weapon (KRRIM - PF-Verlag für Krankheit, 1993), pp. XVIII–XXIV.

[123] “Baader-Meinhof (RAF) - In love With Terror,” BBC Documentary.

[124] Infield. Skorzeny.

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio