Pillars of Our Society

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

One of these days I'll get around to watching Century of the Self.

Anyway, one of the things this makes me think of is how enjoyable and gratifying it is to use Facebook (or Twitter, or whatever) features exactly as they were meant to be used, in ways or to degrees that were never intended by their makers.

However, the sense I'm getting now is that they have most of the population accepting advertisements, accepting reduced functionality, reduced communication, reduced purpose of these media and they have reached the point where they are very much approaching the interactivity of TV.

Sure, there's the illusion of interactivity, but clicking "like" or leaving a one-line comment on a near-stranger's update is roughly as meaningful as voting for the next American Idol... and it keeps you there while advertisements bombard you from the sidebars, from your erroneously-named "newsfeed", and now from pop-up windows. NONSTOP.

[Elder Iptuous]

i think i'm doing facebook wrong. 

the only people's stuff that ever pops up for me are from my friends.  (or at least people that i know enough to care what they think)
How do i get random strangers to appear with their irrelevant thoughts that i might irrelevantly comment on them?!

and they'd better get advertisements on their phone app version, because that's all i ever use, and there aren't any ads on it, and I DON"T KNOW WHAT TO BUY!

maybe i need to make a twitter account...

[Cain]

So, this is interesting:

They [the Mertle family] joined the church in 1970 and stayed with it through thick and thin for the next six years.  When they left in 1976, they were afraid for their lives.  They campaigned vociferously against it, and did what they could to inform government and civic leaders of the threat it posed to society.  They spoke of beatings, sexual abuse including the rape of men, women and children, public humiliation, torture, brainwashing, and the mind control of children, including sleep deprivation and being made to witness terrible punishments meeted out for the slightest of offences and, sometimesm for no discernible offence at all.  Their leader considered himself a God, said he was the reincarnation of Jesus and Lenin, and demanded absolute obedience from his followers, who numbered in the thousands.  It was Charles Manson writ large and fine-tuned.

In November of 1979, the Mertles published a book about their experiences.  In February 1980, they were murdered in their home along with their teenaged daughter, each shot in the head execution style by person or person's unknown.  Their triple homicide remains unsolved to this day.

The Mertle's had published their book under a pseduonym: Jeannie Mills.  It was entitled: Six Years with God and was subtitled Life Inside Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple.

Of course, that doesn't prove anything, but suspicious deaths of people spilling the beans is usually a bad sign, regardless.

Jones did have something of a murky background, he was in Brazil during the early 1960s.  And he was associated with Dan Mitrione, a former Indiana cop who was also in Brazil in the 1960s.  Mitrione saw action during the Tupamaros insurgency in 1970, as an "interrogation" specialist providing training to the Uruguayan forces under Agency for International Development cover - naturally these are the kind of interrogations where pliers are considered a necessary tool.  He was later kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros forces.

Jones had been preaching since he was a teenager and, by all accounts, his gospel was once of racial tolerance - and virulent anti-Communism.  However, after his visit to Brazil, he underwent some changes in his beliefs.  It is worth noting that also in Brazil at the time were John Mittinger "the MK-Ultra program's resident genius", along with Andrija Pucharich (a story unto himself) and Arthur Hochberg (CIA agent who frequently worked with Howard E. Hunt).

Not much is known of what happened in Brazil, but when he came back, he was preaching what was essentially Gnosticism.  Jesus was a socialist, the God of the Jews was the real Satan (a claim made by many Christian Identity movements, and which seems to originate in modern times from Nazi Germany and Nazi theologians) and Lucifer, the "lightbringer" was the true God.  Jones also preached reincarnation - another popular Gnostic belief.

It was demonstrated conclusively by the documentary maker Jim Hougan that the CIA kept a file on Jones, which was opened at the time Dan Mitrione started to work for AID, and that was closed when Mitrione was killed in Uruguay 10 years later.

Jones visited Cuba in 1960, in the midst of the revolution.  His role there seems to have been encouraging Cubans to defect to America.  He seems to have been working with anti-Castro rebels at the time, too, as a picture of him next to an aircraft used to bomb the sugar cane fields belonging to Castro's guerrillas attests to.

Hougan's research shows Jim Jones was issued two passports.  One was issued in Chicago on the 28th of June, 1960, and the other was issued in Indianapolis in 1962.  Jones was in Cuba during the time the first passport was issued, which is...odd.  There is also documentary evidence from newspapers that Jones was considering setting up a commune in Guyana from 1960.

In 1961, Jones was named director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission.  He resigned in the October of that year, complaining of having heard "extra-terrestrial voices".  Most claim he went to Hawaii to recover, but again there is evidence to show he was in Guyana.  He also spent some time in Mexico City.

It is worth noting that Jones did receive psychiatric care....from Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Fran.  The Institute conducts experiments on behalf of ARPA as it was known back then, the Adanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department.  The same Institute also treated "virtually every survivour of the Jonestown massacre".  The Institute has refused to release Jones's medical files.

Between October 1961 and April 1962, apart from his noted trips to Guyana and Mexico City, his biography is a black hole.  On April 11th, he shows up in Sao Paulo, Brazil...from Cuba, according to a friend who knew Jones at the time.  The friend also said Jones showed a picture of him with Fidel Castro.  Please note, this was less than a year after the Bay of Pigs, and only six months before the missile crisis.

As you may know, Brazil was in the grips of its own crisis during the time period when Jones arrived...namely, the elected President, Goulart, was seen by the American government and by the Brazilian Army as a Communist.  According to Hougan, Jones was officially there to study the preaching techniques of a David Miranda, a Pentecostalist faith healer who started his own church, the Church of God is Love.  Hougan speculates that Jones may have been there to study mass conversion techniques...it is known at this time, the CIA took a great amount of interest in "primitive religions".

Andrija Pucharich was in Brazil studying a certain "Arigo", a faith healer, at the time.  Pucharich had a military background, and had worked with the CIA and various military intelligence branches while investigating various paranormal claims in the 1950s, at  Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories and Camp Detrick.  Was Pucharich there on the behalf of an agency?  Possibly.

Jones left Brazil a few months before the military took over and kicked out Goulart.  Jones went to California, and started recruiting for the People's Temple.  During this time, Jones made some interesting in-roads into Californian state politics, and the health-care industry.  Jones was the foreman of the grand jury in Mendocino County, and his flunkly, Timothy Stoen, was an assistant district attorney for the same county.  Marceline Jones was a state nursing home inspector, and the temple opened three convalescent homes during the same period.

Congressman Leo J. Ryan was, during the same period, making a name for himself as a government watchdog.  He helped author the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which in theory put covert action under the control of Congress, and was asking questions about possible MK-Ultra involvement in the SLA business - specifically whether Donald DeFreeze, the "commander" of the group, had undergone any kind of experiments during his time in Vacaville.  DeFreeze himself was a police informant, and despite the official ideology of the SLA being Maoist, one it's more unusual ventures was attempting to make the murder of Marcus Foster look like it was done by blacks, perhaps in hope of instigating race riots.  It's also worth noticing that the SLA was the inverse of the People's Temple - a revolutionary, socialist organization whose leader was black, but whose members were almost entirely white.

Congressman Ryan's investigation was stonewalled by the CIA, who claimed they had never used anyone by the name of "DeFreese" during their experiments at Vacaville. Of course, the misspelling is an old lawyer's trick.  Secondly, the section of the CIA archives which dealt with the experiments at Vacaville was destroyed in a fire in 1973.

A month after Congressman Ryan got this letter, he was killed in Jonestown.

It is worth noticing that the site of Jonestown was the same place that, in 1845, a Reverend Smith convinced local Indians that the Millenium was at hand, and they subsequently committed suicide when it did not materialize.  All 400 of them.  They also apparently believed they would be resurrected as "white people".  Hmmm.

During the Jonestown period, the temple approached both Cuba and the Soviet Union about relocating, via their embassies in Georgetown.  Jones also encouraged his female followers to seduce members of the Guyuanan government, and bribed many officials there.

Strangely, during Congressman Ryan's visit, none of these details were provided by the State Department representative who met him before heading to Jonestown himself.  This is noteworthy because the official in question was Richard Dwyer, who has a background in intelligence work and was suspected of being the CIA Station Chief in the country, under State Department cover.  In fact, he offered very little assistance at all to Ryan, when all logic would suggest that the presence of a Communist inspired religious cult subverting the nation's politics would be of a great deal of interest, and have potential US national security implications.

Dwyer did accompany Ryan on his visit - and boy, are there some interesting references to him by Jones during the massacre.  Several times, Jones can heard on the tapes saying that Dwyer be allowed to leave, and calling over the loudspeaker for him to be taken away.  He was very concerned with Dwyer's safety.

Dwyer was wounded during the assassination of Congressman Ryan, but it was apparently only a flesh wound, in the thigh.  No wound was ever seen, and whatever it was, it did not prevent him from running into the jungle to hide out with the other survivors.

After the assassination (which was done in the presence of Guyanese soldiers and police officers), Jones then turned his personal security force on the rest of Jonestown, after his unsuccessful attempt to get them to commit mass suicide.

Interesting, that the CIA had news of mass suicides in Jonestown a full six hours before Guyanese soldiers arrived on the scene.

[Cain]

There is also the interesting case of Larry Layton -the son of the boss of Pucharich, leader of the security team that assassinated Ryan, and the only person convicted in the USA for his role in the massacre. 

But that's way too long a story to follow a post like that.  Let's just say....if it's coincidence, it's hell of an interesting one.

[Elder Iptuous]

damn. that's some interesting information, Cain!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yep.  It confirms some of what I've heard, and more importantly, it fails to confirm other things I've heard.

I also didn't know that the dead congressman had been investigating MK ULTRA.

[Cain]

Yeah, that particular tidbit put a whole new spin on his death for me, too.

I still think it's probable that Jim Jones went "off the wire" in intelligence parlance, much like Bin Laden did.  You know, the whole "Colonel Kurtz", worshipped by his followers as a god, Langley doesn't know what the fuck he is doing anymore kind of thing, and that he wasn't too mentally stable towards the end. 

But in the beginning, I'm fairly sure he was being used by someone in the intelligence community, to give the black community in California the pomp and spectacle of revolution without, you know, actually threatening state power in any particular way. 

There's evidence to support other conclusions, but that's my take on it.

[Cain]

Disrupt the enemy worldview, bring them around to your way of thinking.  After the war, we discovered the best societies to experiment with psyops on are the ones we know the best...our own.

Just to prove my point:

http://newfocusintl.com/dprk-office-101-orwellian-fantasy-or-north-korean-reality/

Two anti-American video clips, which appear to praise North Korea's militaristic ideology, were uploaded in the period leading up to, and following, North Korea's third nuclear test. Not only do the two clips have in common an awkward production quality; both employ content that has been stolen from US video games. Despite what this latter point may suggest, it is almost certain that the clips were produced by Office 101, Section 3 of the United Front Department in the DPRK, which is responsible for psychological warfare.

Office 101, despite its Orwellian resonance, is so-called because it was ratified on October 1st, 1970 by Kim Il-sung. It is situated in Block 1 of Ryeonhwa in the Central District of Pyongyang. Towards the end of the 60s, when the North Korean economy was superior to that of South Korea, Kim Il-sung had hopes for the divided Korean peninsula to be joined according to a strategy of federal unification. In this context, Office 101 was charged with conducting psychological warfare operations against South Korean citizens. This included the creation and dissipation of pro-North Korean works among South Koreans, ostensibly written under the names of South Korean intellectuals.

In case these works might be suspected of having been created by North Korean officials, materials and equipment were imported from Japan in order to emulate South Korean typefaces and fonts. Office 813 is a publisher that specializes in printing books intended for a South Korean readership, and is in the same compound as Office 101. Until the 80s, a sizeable number of books that voiced dissent towards the South Korean dictatorship, and were read by South Koreans, were created and published in this compound.

After the Seoul Olympics of 1988 and with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the South Korean economy began to overtake that of the North, and the North Korean leadership quickly lost faith in the efficacy of conducting psychological warfare against South Korean citizens. From this time onwards, the resources and experience of Office 101 personnel were turned against the North Korean people. The primary objective of the department was transformed, with the goal being to convince North Koreans that Kim was both the revolutionary leader of the world, and the personage under whose leadership the unification of the peninsula would take place. Office 101 came to operate under five sections: newspapers, magazines, film, music and literature.