Re: <nettime> Rausch, Rebellion, and Drug Wars

[Julian Dibbell <julian@mostly.com>]

Well, then there's this follow-up, from nettime's resident post-LaRouchie,
Mark Stahlman. Good for a laugh. Maybe.

Julian

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Ed:

This Thompson fellow has got to be kidding.  No, I don't think that he is. 
Psychedelic drugs as "liberation"?  This is too rich. I'm ROTFL.  Where the
hell has this guy been all these years?  San Francisco?

American, British and Canadian (and then Russian and Czech) intelligence
services *jointly* "invented" psychedelics (specifically LSD and
psilocybin) as a way to accelerate their re-design of humanity into docile
operator/slaves for the post-industrial society.  This is a widely
documented history.  Hasn't he heard of MK-ULTRA?  Has he ever wondered who
the Grateful Dead really were?  This is very much the point of the
collaboration of the Frankfurt School with the OSS and CIA on these same
"projects" to promote irrationality -- such as the lying-through-its-teeth
but crucial 1948 book "The Authoritarian Personality" by Horkheimer and
Adorno. Maybe this guy should head on back to the library.

No one can still be falling for any of this crap about chemical
"liberation" anymore, can they?  I would have thought that we would all
have learned much more by now.  Why, even Stewart Brand figured out that
the mouse and windows interface was much more capable of "enlightenment"
than Mescaline way back in the 1960's.

And, it's is brutally bad scholarship to refer to the Enlightenment as
"neo-classical" (along with laughable but long standing claims used to fund
electronic music in 1950's Germany that the Wagnerian Nazi's were
"neo-classical", too). And, then to pretend that "Romanticism" (the "mad
artist" fetish) wasn't an integral aspect of the yin/yang of the "English
Ideology" which gave us fascism in all its forms is just stupid. I wonder
if he's listened to "Tristan und Ishold" lately?  

It makes far more sense to view Benjamin and his buddies "experiments" in
irrationality as cultural precursors to Nazism than as it's fundamental
enemy.  C'mon, dude, Heidegger was *personally* a very nasty and aggressive
Nazi and it was that fun-loving "mad artist" Nietzsche who made Hitler
possible.  We have to stop making excuses for these sociopaths just because
they underpin the post-modern canon.  Screw the canon.  Screw
post-modernism.

As the Thompson paper exhibits, mystical occultism -- not humanist
spirituality -- was at the heart of *both* the Nazi and the Frankfurt
School agenda just as it became the core religious program of the post-WW
II control freaks.  It's all about creating a new "image" for humanity and
with it a new synthetic religion.  What you do to the masses is control
them and the best way ever invented to do this is through controlling their
desires.  So, let's build a religion around those desires.  This is quite
elementary, isn't it?  The Nazi's were very good at it.  Just because their
religion wasn't mescaline-driven shouldn't obscure the basic facts.  We are
scholars, aren't we?  Or, are we DEVO?

And, just like the falsified history of homosexuality in the Third Reich
(Hitler was most likely bi-sexual, many of his top aides were openly
"queer" and the very real persecution of homosexuals at the time is best
described as "leather-boys" attacking the "femmes"), this drug story is
pure falsification.  It unfortunately has a lot of company in the
false-history department but, then, that's no excuse unless being accepted
in this crowd is a personal goal.

There has been a factional battle from the beginning among the oligarchs
about whether psychedelics were best used only be the elite (Huxley,
Osmond, Hubbard) or whether they should be put in the water supply (Kesey,
Leary).  To be mistaken about this and to identify the "War on Drugs" as a
continuation of Nazi policy -- in this stupid fashion -- is laughable.

Yes, the U.S. "War on Drugs" -- which somehow has more kids doing more
drugs than when it began and has more of us on the verge of becoming slave
Info-Age machine-operators (gee, aren't we all "liberated", pass the bong)
-- has some very fascistic elements to it; like the fact that it isn't a
real war at all.  This "War on Drugs" has far more to do with involuntary
searches, property seizures, 80% of the U.S. prison population in on petty
drug charges, narco-terrorism in the Andes, the Contras, crack cocaine in
South Central and money laundering in Soros' Quantum Fund's home-town in
the Dutch crown colony of Curacao than it has anything to do with the topic
of this paper.  But, then a competent understanding of fascism as a system
of global looting would be needed and, alas, that task must be left to some
rather better equiped scholars.  Somehow, I don't think that they'll be
presenting papers in Amsterdam, however.

[I expressly forbid anyone from tossing this post into any electronic
hot-tub, such as the WELL and related systems, out of the fear that they
might thereby electrocute themselves.  Other, safer, cross-postings are
encouraged.]

Mark Stahlman
New Media Associates
New York City
newmedia@mcimail.com  

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