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December 8, 2005

"You Can't Take Power Without a Struggle"

The Lost John Lennon Interview (1971)

By TARIQ ALI and ROBIN BLACKBURN

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Editors' Note: It was twenty-five years ago today that John Lennon was murdered outside the Dakota building on Central Park West in New York City. We doubt many CounterPunchers have read the following 1971 interview with Lennon done by CounterPunchers Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn. It's a lot more interesting that the interminable Q and A with Lennon done by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner. Tariq and Robin allowed Lennon to talk and spurred him on when he showed signs of flagging. Lennon recounts about how he and George Harrison bucked their handlers and went on record against the Vietnam War, discusses class politics in an engaging manner, defends country and western music and the blues, suggests Dylan's best songs stem from revolutionary Irish and Scottish ballads and dissects his three versions of "Revolution". The interview ran in The Red Mole, a Trotskyist sheet put out by the British arm of the Fourth International. As you'll see, those were different days. The interview is included in Tariq Ali's Streetfighting Years, recently published by Verso. AC / JSC

Tariq Ali: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?

John Lennon: I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere.

I mean, it's just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system.

In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around '65 or '66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit--religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, 'Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?'

But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.

I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us--it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.

TA: What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?

JL: Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That's the choice they allow you--now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit.

Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

Robin Blackburn: Of course, class is something the American rock groups haven't tackled yet.

JL: Because they're all middle class and bourgeois and they don't want to show it. They're scared of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in America, clinging on to their goods. But if these middle class groups realise what's happening, and what the class system has done, it's up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeois shit.

TA: When did you start breaking out of the role imposed on you as a Beatle?

JL: Even during the Beatle heyday I tried to go against it, so did George. We went to America a few times and Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did. At that time this was a pretty radical thing to do, especially for the 'Fab Four'. It was the first opportunity I personally took to wave the flag a bit.

But you've got to remember that I'd always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams. It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.' So in its way the second political thing I did was to say 'The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us. Up to then there was this unspoken policy of not answering delicate questions, though I always read the papers, you know, the political bits.

The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn't saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me. Of course, going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.

RB: Wasn't there a double charge to what you were doing right from the beginning?

Yoko Ono: You were always very direct.

JL: Yes, well, the first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC. They were only comedians but that's what came out of Liverpool before us. We refused to play that game. After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.

TA: In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?

JL: Ah, sure, 'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'. The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too; I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution--but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

On the version released as a single I said 'when you talk about destruction you can count me out'. I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt--I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.

At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain.

RB: This analyst you went to, what's his name. ..

JL: Janov ...

RB: His ideas seem to have something in common with Laing in that he doesn't want to reconcile people to their misery, to adjust them to the world but rather to make them face up to its causes?

JL: Well, his thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life--it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.

As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Janov doesn't just talk to you about this but makes you feel it--once you've allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself.

When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it.

The therapy is like a very slow acid trip which happens naturally in your body. It is hard to talk about, you know, because--you feel 'I am pain' and it sounds sort of arbitrary, but pain to me now has a different meaning because of having physically felt all these extraordinary repressions. It was like taking gloves off, and feeling your own skin for the first time.

It's a bit of a drag to say so, but I don't think you can understand this unless you've gone through it--though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

RB: Do you see the family in general as the source of these repressions?

JL: Mine is an extreme case, you know. My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it was the same....

YO: Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It's like when you're hungry, you know, it's worse to get a symbol of a cheeseburger than no cheeseburger at all. It doesn't do you any good, you know. I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.

JL: And Yoko's family were middle-class Japanese but it's all the same repression. Though I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, 'Goodbye mummy, goodbye daddy'.

TA: What relation to your music has all this got?

JL: Art is only a way of expressing pain. I mean the reason Yoko does such far out stuff is that it's a far out kind of pain she went through.

RB: A lot of Beatle songs used to be about childhood...

JL: Yeah, that would mostly be me...

RB: Though they were very good there was always a missing element...

JL: That would be reality, that would be the missing element. Because I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing else would have driven me through all that if I was 'normal'...

YO: ... and happy ...

JL: The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: 'Now, mummy-daddy, will you love me?'

TA: But then you had success beyond most people's wildest dreams...

JL: Oh, Jesus Christ, it was a complete oppression. I mean we had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell ...

YO: It was depriving him of any real experience, you know...

JL: It was very miserable. I mean apart from the first flush of making it--the thrill of the first number one record, the first trip to America. At first we had some sort of objective like being as big as Elvis--moving forward was the great thing, but actually attaining it was the big let-down. I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.

I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is.

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(PART TWO CONTINUES IN BLOG ENTRY IMMEDIATELY BELOW)

(CONTINUES FROM BLOG ENTRY ABOVE)

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RB: Well, in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren't they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment ...

JL: ... they're doped ...

RB: And the culture that's doping them is one the artist can make or break...

JL: That's what I'm trying to do on my albums and in these interviews. What I'm trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I'm trying to tell them.

RB: Even in the past, you know, people would use Beatle songs and give them new words. 'Yellow submarine' , for instance, had a number of versions. One that strikers used to sing began 'We all live on bread and margarine' ; at LSE we had a version that began 'We all live in a Red LSE'.

JL: I like that. And I enjoyed it when football crowds in the early days would sing 'All together now'--that was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in America took up 'Give peace a chance' because I had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing 'We shall overcome' from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution now ...

RB: We only have a few revolutionary songs and they were composed in the 19th century. Do you find anything in our musical traditions which could be used for revolutionary songs?

JL: When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids. We were a bit conscious to begin with of being imitation Americans. But we delved into the music and found that it was half white country and western and half black rhythm and blues. Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.

Though I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple. They sort of saidshake your arse, or your prick, which was an innovation really. And then there were the field songs mainly expressing the pain they were in. They couldn't express themselves intellectually so they had to say in a very few words what was happening to them. And then there was the city blues and a lot of that was about sex and fighting.

A lot of this was self-expression but only in the last few years have they expressed themselves completely with Black Power, like Edwin Starr making war records. Before that many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.

RB: You say country and western music derived from European folk songs. Aren't these folk songs sometimes pretty dreadful stuff, all about losing and being defeated?

JL: As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices-'I worked in a mine in New-cast-le' and all that shit. There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.

But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.

RB: Your album, Yoko, seems to fuse avant-garde modern music with rock. I'd like to put an idea to you I got from listening to it. You integrate everyday sounds, like that of a train, into a musical pattern. This seems to demand an aesthetic measure of everyday life, to insist that art should not be imprisoned in the museums and galleries, doesn't it?

YO: Exactly. I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn't be frightened of creating themselves--that's why I make things very open, with things for people to do, like in my book [Grapefruit].

Because basically there are two types of people in the world: people who are confident because they know they have the ability to create, and then people who have been demoralised, who have no confidence in themselves because they have been told they have no creative ability, but must just take orders. The Establishment likes people who take no responsibility and cannot respect themselves.

RB: I suppose workers' control is about that...

JL: Haven't they tried out something like that in Yugoslavia; they are free of the Russians. I'd like to go there and see how it works.

TA: Well, they have; they did try to break with the Stalinist pattern. But instead of allowing uninhibited workers' control, they added a strong dose of political bureaucracy. It tended to smother the initiative of the workers and they also regulated the whole system by a market mechanism which bred new inequalities between one region and another.

JL: It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult--even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. I expect this happens in Cuba too, with Che and Fidel. In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers' image of themselves as the father-figure.

RB: That's a pretty cool idea--the Working Class becomes its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion, as long as there was a real workers' power. If a capitalist or bureaucrat is running your life then you need to compensate with illusions.

YO: The people have got to trust in themselves.

TA: That's the vital point. The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can't be done just by propaganda--the workers must move, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France...the workers began to feel their own strength.

JL: But the Communist Party wasn't up to that, was it?

RB: No, they weren't. With 10 million workers on strike they could have led one of those huge demonstrations that occurred in the centre of Paris into a massive occupation of all government buildings and installations, replacing de Gaulle with a new institution of popular power like the Commune or the original Soviets--that would have begun a real revolution but the French C.P. was scared of it. They preferred to deal at the top instead of encouraging the workers to take the initiative themselves...

JL: Great, but there's a problem about that here you know. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state. They haven't woken up yet here, they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer. You should get these left-wing students out to talk with the workers, you should get the school-kids involved with The Red Mole.

TA: You're quite right, we have been trying to do that and we should do more. This new Industrial Relations Bill the Government is trying to introduce is making more and more workers realise what is happening...

JL: I don't think that Bill can work. I don't think they can enforce it. I don't think the workers will co-operate with it. I thought the Wilson Government was a big let-down but this Heath lot are worse. The underground is being harrassed, the black militants can't even live in their own homes now, and they're selling more arms to the South Africans. Like Richard Neville said, there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it's in that inch that we live....

TA: I don't know about that; Labour brought in racialist immigration policies, supported the Vietnam war and were hoping to bring in new legislation against the unions.

RB: It may be true that we live in the Inch of difference between Labour and Conservative but so long as we do we'll be impotent and unable to change anything. If Heath is forcing us out of that inch maybe he's doing us a good turn without meaning to...

JL: Yes, I've thought about that, too. This putting us in a corner so we have to find out what is coming down on other people. I keep on reading the Morning Star [the Communist newspaper] to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals.

We should be trying to reach the young workers because that's when you're most idealistic and have least fear.

Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them. But it's difficult to know where to start; we've all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I've grown away from most working-class people--you know what they like is Engelbert Humperdinck. It's the students who are buying us now, and that's the problem. Now The Beatles are four separate people, we don't have the impact we had when we were together...

RB: Now you're trying to swim against the stream of bourgeois society, which is much more difficult.

JL: Yes, they own all the newspapers and they control all distribution and promotion. When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days.

Even now it's the same; if you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio--it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again. And they control distribution. We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated. They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn't like it. With the last record they've censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocritical--they have to let me sing it but they don't dare let you read it. Insanity.

RB: Though you reach fewer people now, perhaps the effect can be more concentrated.

JL: Yes, I think that could be true. To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'.

Also when Yoko and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters--you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers.

Now workers are more friendly to us, so perhaps it's changing. It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don't pass on your own awareness then it closes down again. That is why the basic need is for the students to get in with the workers and convince them that they are not talking gobbledegook. And of course it's difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather* anyway. [Ed. Note: Vic Feather 1908-76 was General Secretary of the TUC from 1969-73.]

So the only thing is to talk to them directly, especially the young workers. We've got to start with them because they know they're up against it. That's why I talk about school on the album. I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.

YO: We are very lucky really, because we can create our own reality, John and me, but we know the important thing is to communicate with other people.

JL: The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.

YO: We mustn't be traditional in the way we communicate with people--especially with the Establishment. We should surprise people by saying new things in an entirely new way. Communication of that sort can have a fantastic power so long as you don't do only what they expect you to do.

RB: Communication is vital for building a movement, but in the end it's powerless unless you also develop popular force.

YO: I get very sad when I think about Vietnam where there seems to be no choice but violence. This violence goes on for centuries perpetuating itself. In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history. There's no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns.

TA: No ruling class in the whole of history has given up power voluntarily and I don't see that changing.

YO: But violence isn't just a conceptual thing, you know. I saw a programme about this kid who had come back from Vietnam--he'd lost his body from the waist down. He was just a lump of meat, and he said, 'Well, I guess it was a good experience.'

JL: He didn't want to face the truth, he didn't want to think it had all been a waste...

YO: But think of the violence, it could happen to your kids ...

RB: But Yoko, people who struggle against oppression find themselves attacked by those who have a vested interest in nothing changing, those who want to protect their power and wealth. Look at the people in Bogside and Falls Road in Northern Ireland; they were mercilessly attacked by the special police because they began demonstrating for their rights. On one night in August 1969, seven people were shot and thousands driven from their homes. Didn't they have a right to defend themselves?

YO: That's why one should try to tackle these problems before a situation like that happens.

JL: Yes, but what do you do when it does happen, what do you do?

RB: Popular violence against their oppressors is always justified. It cannot be avoided.

YO: But in a way the new music showed things could be transformed by new channels of communication.

JL: Yes, but as I said, nothing really changed.

YO: Well, something changed and it was for the better. All I'm saying is that perhaps we can make a revolution without violence.

JL: But you can't take power without a struggle...

TA: That's the crucial thing.

JL: Because, when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they won't let the people have any power; they'll give all the rights to perform and to dance for them, but no real power...

YO: The thing is, even after the revolution, if people don't have any trust in themselves, they'll get new problems.

JL: After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it--but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order. I don't know what the answer is; obviously Mao is aware of this problem and keeps the ball moving.

RB: The danger is that once a revolutionary state has been created, a new conservative bureaucracy tends to form around it. This danger tends to increase if the revolution is isolated by imperialism and there is material scarcity.

JL: Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running.

RB: Yes, but a repressive bureaucracy doesn't necessarily run the factories or trains any better than the workers could under a system of revolutionary democracy.

JL: Yes, but we all have bourgeois instincts within us, we all get tired and feel the need to relax a bit. How do you keep everything going and keep up revolutionary fervour after you've achieved what you set out to achieve? Of course Mao has kept them up to it in China, but what happens after Mao goes? Also he uses a personality cult. Perhaps that's necessary; like I said, everybody seems to need a father figure.

But I've been reading Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself--but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty.

If we took over Britain, then we'd have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.

RB: ...In Britain unless we can create a new popular power-and here that would basically mean workers' power--really controlled by, and answerable to, the masses, then we couldn't make the revolution in the first place. Only a really deep-rooted workers' power could destroy the bourgeois state.

YO: That's why it will be different when the younger generation takes over.

JL: I think it wouldn't take much to get the youth here really going. You'd have to give them free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

And the women are very important too, we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority.

It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She's a red hot liberationistand was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women.

RB: There's always been at least as much male chauvinism on the left as anywhere else--though the rise of women's liberation is helping to sort that out.

JL: It's ridiculous. How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes.

YO: You can't love someone unless you are in an equal position with them. A lot of women have to cling to men out of fear or insecurity, and that's not love--basically that's why women hate men...

JL: ... and vice versa ...

YO: So if you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that. So you always have to take the chance: 'Am I going to lose my man?' It's very sad.

JL: Of course, Yoko was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world--the art world is completely dominated by men--so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met. There was never any question about it: we had to have a 50-50 relationship or there was no relationship, I was quick to learn. She did an article about women in Nova more than two years back in which she said, 'Woman is the nigger of the world' .

RB: Of course we all live in an imperialist country that is exploiting the Third World, and even our culture is involved in this. There was a time when Beatle music was plugged on Voice of America....

JL: The Russians put it out that we were capitalist robots, which we were I suppose...

RB: They were pretty stupid not to see it was something different.

YO: Let' s face it, Beatles was 20th-century folksong in the framework of capitalism; they couldn't do anything different if they wanted to communicate within that framework.

RB: I was working in Cuba when Sgt Pepper was released and that's when they first started playing rock music on the radio.

JL: Well hope they see that rock and roll is not the same as Coca-Cola. As we get beyond the dream this should be easier: that's why I'm putting out more heavy statements now and trying to shake off the teeny-bopper image.

I want to get through to the right people, and I want to make what I have to say very simple and direct.

RB: Your latest album sounds very simple to begin with, but the lyrics, tempo and melody build up into a complexity one only gradually becomes aware of. Like the track 'My mummy's dead' echoes the nursery song 'Three blind mice' and it's about a childhood trauma.

JL: The tune does; it was that sort of feeling, almost like a Haiku poem. I recently got into Haiku in Japan and I just think it's fantastic. Obviously, when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind you're left with great precision.

Yoko was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Long fellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say 'Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table' which gives you the whole picture, really....

TA: How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain, John?

JL: I think only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country. They've got cars and tellies and they don't want to think there's anything more to life. They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They're dreaming someone else's dream, it's not even their own. They should realise that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next.

As soon as they start being aware of all that, we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over. Like Marx said: 'To each according to his need'. I think that would work well here. But we'd also have to infiltrate the army too, because they are well trained to kill us all.

We've got to start all this from where we ourselves are oppressed. I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.

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Tariq Ali is author of the recently released Street Fighting Years (new edition) and, with David Barsamian, Speaking of Empires & Resistance. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

Robin Blackburn, a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, is the former editor of The New Left Review and author of the excellent history of the slave trade, The Making of New World Slavery and the new book from Verso Banking on Death: the Future of Pensions

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http://www.counterpunch.org/lennon12082005.html

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_300.shtml

(Supporting Links at Source URL)

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Commentary

On the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination, imagine . . .

By Jerry Mazza

Online Journal Contributing Writer

Dec 7, 2005, 01:08

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Imagine that the classic lone gunman could be Mark David Chapman. And if so, you may be as mind-controlled by system hype as he was that Monday night at 10:50 pm, December 8, 1980, just one month after Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Imagine that night John Lennon took four of five shots fired from a .38 caliber snub nose revolver: two in the left shoulder, two in the upper left side of the back, as he walked through the dark entryway of the Dakota at West 72nd Street and Central Park West. What's strange is that afterwards three bullet holes were found in the glass lobby doors.

Imagine that earlier that day, about 5:15 pm, when Lennon and Yoko were about to limo from their Dakota apartment to the Record Plant, Lennon had stopped in the walkway to autograph a copy of his Double Fantasy album for Chapman. He even spoke with him, asking if there was anything else he wanted. The photographed smile on Chapman's face seemed to be of a man who'd just gotten the keys to heaven.

Imagine at 10:50 that night, the wounded Lennon ran some 20 feet from Chapman towards the lobby stairs, staggering past the front desk in the main lobby. He fell facedown by the concierge stand. Yoko, who had preceded John by some 40 feet from their limo, screamed to the clerk to call the police, "John's been shot," and ran to cradle his head.

Imagine that Chapman called out, "Mr. Lennon," and when John turned, Mark squared off and fired five shots. But Chapman told a judge later at his sentencing hearing that he didn't say a word to Lennon. Nor did he run away. There is a subway station to descend maybe 60 feet away. But perhaps innocent (even if programmed) people don't run.

Imagine the doorman on duty, one Jose Perdomo, supposedly screamed "Leave! Get out of here!" Then he asked Chapman, "Do you know what you've done?" "I just shot John Lennon," Chapman said matter-of-factly. Then we're told, Chapman threw down his gun, took off his coat, folded it at his feet, and calmly started reading a paperback, Catcher in the Rye. Perdomo kicked the gun away. One wonders why Perdomo told him to leave, after reminding him of his crime. Perhaps Perdomo was the shooter and planted the gun.

Imagine, minutes later, Perdomo identified Chapman as the killer as the cops arrived. Patrolman Peter Cullen didn't believe it. He thought Chapman looked too straight. But Perdomo insisted and Officer Steven Spiro arrested Mark. The cops could also see that Lennon was dying. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, they lifted him into a patrol car and rushed him to nearby Roosevelt Hospital. But Lennon died in the emergency room.

Who Was Jose Perdomo?

Imagine Jose Joaquin Sanjenis Perdomo. According to Cuban Information Archives and Salvador Austucia, author of Rethinking John Lennon's Assassination, Perdomo was also known as "Joaquin Sanjenis," and "Sam Jenis." He was mostly known as an anti-Castro Cuban exile and a member of Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, a miserably failed CIA operation, which cost Company Head Allan Dulles his job, and maybe John F. Kennedy his life, also by a mythic lone gunman, who turned out to play patsy, too. In fact, during that evening, while Chapman waited hours for Lennon's return, Perdomo had spoken at length with him about the invasion and Cuban American politics. Strange topics for strangers, one waiting for a rock star.

Imagine Officer Cullen remained troubled with Perdomo's claim that Chapman was the killer. Cullen later told reporter James R. Gains of People Magazine in a Feb. 23, 1987, piece, "The Man Who Shot Lennon" that: "He [Chapman] looked like a guy who worked in a bank, an office. Not a loser or anything, just a guy out there trying to earn a living. I remember taking a look at him and saying, 'Why? What did you do here?' He really had no answer for it. He did say several times, 'I'm sorry I gave you guys so much trouble.'"

Imagine Perdomo had reason to insist Mark was the man. Perdomo, aka Sanjenis, had worked side by side, ah yes, with convicted and now deceased Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis for about a decade on the CIA payroll. Sturgis misleadingly claimed Joaquin Sanjenis died of natural causes in 1974. He claimed it was the Company's way of keeping Sanjenis' anonymity. His family wasn't even notified of his supposed death till after the funeral. In fact, Sanjenis/Perdomo may still be alive, plumbing in some near or far outpost. There's always work for anonymous men who know how to do what needs to be done and vanish. Ole!

Imagine Perdomo was so invisible that he wasn't identified by name for more than six years after Lennon's murder. He was mistakenly referred to first as Jay Hastings, the bearded, burly desk clerk who worked in the lobby, and was on duty the night Lennon was killed. In fact, Lennon ran from the shooter, and collapsed before Hastings and Yoko. This information is mentioned in the book, The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles, written by one of the group's management team, Peter Brown -- along with Steven Gains.

Imagine from the book, The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro, by Warren Hinckle and William Turner, these descriptions of Sanjenis/Perdomo:

"Sanjenis was an opportunistic little man who managed to punch a CIA meal ticket the rest of his life. When he met [Frank] Sturgis he was filling a bucket or rotten eggs, which would become Operation 40 -- the secret police of the Cuban invasion force. The ultrasecret Operation 40 included some nonpolitical, conservative exile businessmen, but its hard core was made up of dice players at the foot of the cross -- informers, assassins-for-hire, and mob henchmen whose sworn goal was to make the counterrevolution safe for the comfortable ways of the old Cuba. They were the elite troops of the old guard within the exile movement, who made effective alliance with CIA right-wingers against CIA liberals . . .

"Sanjenis got Sturgis a CIA maildrop and gave him the right phone numbers, and Sturgis agreed to coordinate his own operations with Sanjenis and work on a contract basis on special agency assignments . . .

"Sanjenis had launched scores of ships and planes on clandestine raids against Cuba and had sent hundreds of men on missions from which there had been no return. . . . There were no official missing-in-action reports in the Secret War against Cuba. It was Joaquin Sanjenis' job to keep his troops, as himself, faceless." And so he was, and lived up to his character references.

The Entry Wounds on the Left Side of Lennon's Body

Imagine the theory we've been told: that Lennon had walked past Chapman, who was to the right and then rear of him in the dark entryway. If Chapman had called out, "Mr. Lennon," and John stopped and turned, it was possible though difficult for him to hit Lennon in the left shoulder, and then as Lennon turned to flee, to hit him in the upper left back. Yet Chapman told Judge Dennis Edwards at a sentencing hearing that he didn't say anything to Lennon, just that he fired.

Imagine a second theory: Perdomo or another operative fired from the doorway leading to the service elevator, which was at the left of the walkway and in front of Lennon. There are two series of two shots. First, two shots hit the left shoulder. As Lennon runs towards the lobby stairway, two other shots hit his upper left back. Shooting from that doorway seems a more plausible way to make those hits. Since the autopsy was not made public, we don't know if three of the five shots exited, grazed or missed Lennon to hit the glass lobby door.

Imagine crime scene witnesses varied in their accounts of whether or not Chapman called to Lennon. No convincing evidence was presented that Chapman had caused Lennon to turn. Also, this wasn't a trial since Chapman had already confessed. It was simply a sentencing hearing. There was no official testimony or any witnesses. The case was declared closed on the night of the murder, and the police report is lacking in any substantive detail. Yet what it does say is that Chapman was carrying $2,201.76 in cash when arrested and declared himself unemployed. You wonder why eyes didn't open at that, and a complete inquiry wasn't made into the death of a figure like John Lennon. Could it possibly be a cover-up? Had assassinations liked this ever happened before?

Imagine author Salvador Astucia's somewhat offbeat scenario: "As Lennon passes Chapman, a member of the FBI's assassination squad somehow transmits an audible message to Chapman . . . which places him in a semi-hypnotic trance . . ." Perhaps Jose Perdomo simply whispered in his ear something that had been programmed into Chapman's psyche earlier: "Kill Lennon." Chapman had claimed he heard a voice, although Astucia believes he is clearly not psychotic. I don't agree, and will address that point in a moment. The message, however delivered, does trigger Mark's mind to think he is about to kill Lennon. And so for me, we have a classic patsy on autopilot.

Who Was Chapman and How Did He Get to Be a Patsy?

Imagine as British author Fenton Bresler reports in his book -- Who Killed John Lennon? -- that from 1950 the CIA had begun work on mind control, and specifically called it PROJECT BLUEBIRD. In two years it turned into a larger PROJECT ARTICHOKE, no joke. And it was noted in a Company memorandum . . ."To exploit operational lines, scientific methods and knowledge that can be utilized in altering the attitudes, beliefs, thought processes and behavior patterns of agent personnel. This will include the application of tested psychiatric and psychological techniques, including the use of hypnosis in conjunction with drugs."

Given the 30 years the Agency had to refine these techniques, neither their reality, use, nor effectiveness would be surprising. Certainly, Mark Chapman had all the credentials for a very "special agent." And here's where I disagree with Salvador Astucia about Mark's state of being.

Imagine as Fred McGunagle did in his article for Court TV's Crime Library, Mark David Chapman: The Man Who Killed John Lennon, that Chapman was vulnerable and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He had been seeing "little people" from his boyhood, some encouraging him to do good and some to do bad things. They lived first in the walls of his house, then in the deepest recesses of his brain, maturing into full-blown demons, causing Mark to have several nervous breakdowns and attempt suicide twice by the time he was 24.

Imagine how Mark had become increasingly fixated on Holden Caulfied, the fictional hero of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, a confused teenager, upset by the discovery that the world seems to be made up of phonies. Mark's other fixation was rock superstar John Lennon, whom he alternately admired and hated, the latter for John's quip that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Lennon offended the Jesus freak in Mark.

Imagine, on an equally dark note, Mark White in his political comic strip, Dead Silence in the Brain, reports that as a young man Mark Chapman began working at a Laotian refugee camp. The camp was run by World Vision, an evangelical charity which runs refugee camps worldwide. It has assisted in numerous CIA operations. Its camps along the Honduran border, for instance, were used to recruit the death squads of El Salvador . . . Researcher John Judge writes, "World Vision appears to be an elaborate cover for the recruitment, training and placement of assassins worldwide." So I don't think Chapman was picked from a hat from the general population. I think he had had intense behavioral conditioning for the Lennon assassination, though I don't think he was the triggerman. I believe he was too much of a risk as a Manchurian Candidate, even at close range. So Perdomo & Associates lent a helping hand.

Imagine, as Bresler tells us, Chapman buying a .38 Special revolver from J&S Enterprises, a gun shop in midtown Honolulu, the city where Chapman lived. Bresler gives the serial number as 577570, yet no one at the NYPD mentions if that is the number on the .38 used in the crime. That is an amazing oversight. Serial numbers are put on guns for crime-tracking or theft. Then too, this wasn't the first time Chapman had been to New York to peruse Lennon. Chapman made two trips to New York City, one from October 29, 1980, through November 10, 1980. Another on December 6, 1980.

Imagine that on the first trip Chapman must have carried the aforementioned .38 revolver with him. In fact, Bresler describes in detail how Chapman brought the gun to NYC on October 29 but forgot to bring bullets. And so he flew to Atlanta to get hollow-point bullets from a policeman friend, Dana Reeves (aka, Gene Scott). He went to Atlanta because NYC forbids the purchase of ammunition by anyone not living in New York State. Bresler also mentions at some point that Chapman told his wife Gloria, "that it was time he grew up. He was a married man now and ought to be able to support a family. What he needed to do first, however, was to go off by himself for awhile, to think things over. He had decided to return to New York. She needn't fear that he would do anything wrong. He had thrown the gun and bullets into the ocean."

Imagine why Bresler doesn't challenge that last statement, so we know if it's a fact or a convenient lie for Chapman to cover his tracks with his wife. And perhaps Reeves, aka Scott, was not just a cop, but an FBI or CIA handler involved in shaping Chapman's plan of action and behavior. Mark then goes back to New York, supposedly via a stop in Chicago to see his grandmother, a sidebar that goes nowhere. Bresler also presents the notion that Chapman has repressed homosexual tendencies. The gay theme also kind of comes out of and goes nowhere, except to guarantee that post-prosecution Chapman would never give Bresler a personal interview. Chapman seriously resented Bresler's "gay" insinuations about him.

What Is the Motive for All This?

Imagine even though it was the Nixon White House that originally panicked, i.e., that Lennon might join a "Drop Nixon" series of concerts (an untrue rumor that Lennon blamed Jerry Rubin for spreading), how it proved to be the beginning of trouble for Lennon. FBI kingpin J. Edgar Hoover got wind of it and opened a file on Lennon. The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) began deportation proceedings against Lennon. His political activism was curtailed over the next few years as he fought legal battles to stay in the US. In 1975, after the Watergate scandal, which some say was actually engineered to dump Nixon, Lennon won his green card. But he was worn out from the battles, retired from public life, and put his love and energy into his home life. Luckily, during this time the Carter administration kept the intelligence bow-wows at bay.

Imagine how in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president, it was a whole new story. But then, too, John had gotten his energy back and was in the studio recording and making plans to resume his activism. I believe it was then that the Great Communicator plus VP, former CIA Head and operative George H. W. Bush & Company, put together a preemptive strike against Lennon. As usual, they needed a certified nut, conceivably capable of a random act of violence, and so they put their MK-ULTRA to work putting it together. Rock music was an enormously powerful force, then as now. I would imagine that Reagan and friends feared Lennon might interfere with their vicious policies in South and Central America, not to mention Iran, Russia, and America. Alley-oop, he had to go.

Imagine how tragic it is that the man who wrote "Give Peace A Chance" had to die at the hands of assassins. But imagine John Kennedy trying to stop the "Bay of Pigs" incident and trying to pull back on "Vietnam" -- or RFK trying to battle organized crime, Martin Luther King trying to non-violently integrate the south. All were gunned down supposedly by lone crazies, when in reality the assassinations were carefully orchestrated ops involving many people.

Imagine that was the case right down to Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt (only three months after Lennon's assassination) by John Hinckley, Jr., the son of John Hinckley, Sr., an old Texas oilman crony of George H. W. Bush. The two families had a history, going back to the1960s in Texas, when Bush and John Hinckley, Sr., got filthy rich together in the oil business and both circulated in the same elegantly greasy circles. Rumor has it the older Hinckley son, Scott, was scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush on the night Reagan was shot. What some have called a Bushwhack occurred at about 2:30 in the afternoon of March 30, 1981, as Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton, after making a speech. Bush was conveniently out of town.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Imagine how John Hinckley, Jr., stepped from the press corps, crouched on the sidewalk, and called out, "Mr. President, look over here." With both hands leveling his .22-caliber pistol, he opened fire on Reagan. In the melee that ensued, the sixth slug found its mark. The shot as it was originally reported, ricocheted off the armored sedan's fender into Reagan's armpit and punctured his lung. A slightly more direct hit and Bush would have stepped into the presidency, forgoing eight more years of being number two. Ah life.

Imagine the troubled Hinckley, Jr., patterned himself after Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. Failing at killing a presidential candidate, in search of a just cause in what he felt was a corrupt world, Bickle later shoots the oppressive pimp of a young prostitute played by Jody Foster, with whom the young Hinckley had become totally obsessed. Hinckley had seen the film at least 15 times. Like Chapman with Catcher in the Rye, Hinckley, Jr., read and reread the book it was based on. He also listened to the film soundtrack for hours on end. His ego was totally immersed in the Bickle/DeNiro character. Some would say, given his shaky mental state, Hinckley was fresh meat to be programmed by some of Bush's former spooks to seek out and destroy the Gipper, this time a la The Manchurian Candidate, that is, he was the shooter/patsy, and even mission failure could be considered a successful warning to play ball.

Imagine the correspondent Judy Woodruff appearing on NBC Special Reports that ran right after the shooting. She said she saw at least one shot fired from the hotel overhang above Reagan's limo. She later added that a Secret Service agent had fired that shot. Could friendly fire have brought down Reagan? Or could it be one more second shooter? Was the Secret Service lax that day? In any case, Woodruff's observation helped piece together how a slug hit Reagan when his limo's bulletproof door stood between him and Hinckley.

Imagine that Hinckley, Jr., flew to Nashville in 1980 to stalk Jimmy Carter and kill him, a la Arthur Bremer with Nixon and Wallace. Bremer succeeded in paralyzing Wallace in an assassination attempt. But Hinckley was busted at the airport when authorities found three handguns in his suitcase. Yet, after being held for just five hours, he was fined and released. Nor did anyone bother to look in the journal that he carried, in which he spelled out his plans to kill Carter, as once Arthur Bremer, on whom Bickle's character was based, had scribbled in his journal just how he was going to off Nixon or Wallace. What we have here is a line of "patsies" and assassinations.

Imagine the capper, that John Hinckley, Jr., was present on that rainy Sunday, December 14, 1980, in Central Park, when a hushed crowd of about 100,000, including myself and my wife, gathered near the bandshell. At Yoko's request we "prayed for John's soul" during 10 minutes of silence. Weeks later, Hinckley spoke his thoughts of that day into a tape-recorder. "I just want to say goodbye to the old year, which was nothing -- total misery, total, death. John Lennon is dead, the world is over, forget it . . ." Three months later, the world would hear all about Hinckley, Jr., as well.

The Record Company, EMI, Invisible Hand in 1966 Anti-Lennon Campaign

Imagine the summer of 1966. Just before the Beatles decided to quit touring, they were working on the album Revolver. For some reason Paul McCartney grew angry and walked out of the studio. This left John with just one tune on the American version of the album, in which all the Beatles played and sang. That was "Tomorrow Never Knows." In the British EMI version of the album, John sang five songs. Three were scraped by EMI offshoot Capitol records, so Paul's decision to walk out on "She Said She Said" was a form of sabotaging his colleague's work.

Imagine Derek Larsson saying, "The sloppiness from McCartney in some of John's records is something that you can hear right on the record itself which is why I think Lennon's complaint is validated. The sloppiness is the 'sabotage' issue that Lennon was referring to."

Imagine the larger issue here, that even though EMI stands for Electrical and Musical Industries, the company was also a military contractor to the British War Office. So a high-ranking American official could make a call to a high-ranking British official and complain about this Lennon fellow ramping up American youth against government policy, especially given his comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. That one's still kicking around today.

Imagine this would give then EMI Chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood the impetus to pull Lennon tunes on the American (Capitol) version of Revolver, which in fact EMI did. In a June '66 release of the Yesterday And Today album, the famous "butcher block photo" was also on the cover, showing the Beatles surrounded by bloody baby dolls. The guys claimed they had no involvement with Yesterday and Today's weird album cover. Nevertheless it tainted the album.

Imagine the Beatles were booed and jeered on July 5, 1966, in the Manila, capital of the Philippines, when they were mistakenly accused of not showing up at a party thrown by Imelda Marcos, wife of the president. Perhaps they didn't have the right shoes to wear, but the Beatles say they never got an invitation. So their security was cancelled as they tried to leave the country. They were pushed around at the airport by about 30 armed thugs.

Imagine the "more popular than Jesus" story surfaced not so innocently from an interview in Datebook, an American magazine, and caused a furor. It was something worthy of today's neocons and swift-boaters.

Imagine, in August, Revolver was released in America and three of five of John's songs were gone. Paul was presented as the creative prime mover. None of his songs were cut from the original EMI British version. McCartney admitted he walked out of the session for "She Said She Said" and actually not playing or singing on the tune at all. So the Beatles as a quartet played on only one of John's songs on the American Revolver. Politics had managed to worm its ugly head even into the lives of four closely knit, world-famous musicians.

Imagine in August 19, 1966, a member of the audience in Memphis threw a firecracker on stage. When it exploded the entire Beatles' crew figured John Lennon had been shot. Writer Salvador Astucia discovered that no less than British Prime Minister Harold Wilson had called Sir Joseph Lockwood in 1965. Exactly what was said was speculative, but then Lennon, as Astucia suggests, "was more influential than any head of state in the world."

Imagine it turns out that RCA, our own multinational media corporation and conglomerate, which was headed by "General" David Sarnoff, was EMI's silent partner, and also active in military and space electronics and satellite communications. It was subsequently acquired by General Electric in 1986 for $6 billion, the largest non-oil company merger to that day. It was a classic example of what President Dwight Eisenhower would have called the "military industrial complex," producing even the rebellious Beatles for a buck, so long as the boys kept their place.

The Last Hanger-On and Suspect, Fred Seaman

Imagine Fred Seaman, a Lennon staffer and look-alike, who was convicted of stealing personal effects from the Lennon estate, which was in part entrusted to his care (1979-80). He did five years of probation and surfaced with contacts to writer Bob Rosen, to whom he gave information to write a book called Nowhere Man. Before that, Rosen wrote speeches for the secretary of the Air Force, Hans Mark, who served from 1979 to February 1981. Seamon also fed Lennon information to Albert Goldman, which Astucia calls, "one of the most well-known efforts of posthumous character assassination of Lennon." Hans Mark and his father, Herman Mark, go back to Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, and friend of Henry Kissinger and Theodor Herzl, the papa of Zionism, a crowd of assassins if ever there was one, exactly the kind of folks Lennon would have gone after had he lived.

Imagine Chapman, Perdomo and Jay Hastings are put aside and there are accounts of a "handyman" who could have been the shooter. Astucia believes it could have been Seaman.

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Seaman had complete access to the Lennon apartment and elevator, and could be seen as a "maintenance man" or "elevator man," and could have been present on the night of the assassination, shuffling back and forth at any time. It's ironic that officer Peter Cullen had originally said it was the "handyman" who shot Lennon. Was it indeed Seaman, hiding in the dark doorway to the service elevator who did it? He certainly had the low-life credentials. So it goes for now, the search to find justice, and how life is stranger almost than anything we can imagine.

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Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer residing in Manhattan. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

Copyright © 1998-2005 Online Journal

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1207-28.htm

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Published on Wednesday, December 7, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

So Much for the Invisible Hand

by Stephen Fleischman

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Why is there so little discussion, in this country, about the pros and cons of capitalism, the economic system under which we live?

There are pros, you know, as well as cons. Capitalism has given us WalMart and cheap gas, skyscrapers and Alan Greenspan. And many other things that include the necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter. So why do we so rarely chat about capitalism?

The only two things I remember from my freshman college class in economics are Adam Smith and Laissez Faire. “The Invisible Hand” still sticks in memory—how the free market regulates itself and keeps us all on a steady course.

Many years later, I heard of another big hand out there concerned with the class struggle, the profit system and surplus value.

In college, the principles of capitalism are expounded to a fare-thee-well; elsewhere people just let it be, jump on the bus and don’t discuss much. That’s too bad because, at this point in history, capitalism may be at the root of all evil.

Karl Marx, even in America, can be regarded as a relevant economist (in most of the world he is considered one of the three giants of the 19th Century, the other two being Darwin and Freud). Some people say he’s old-hat. Marx was a century younger than Adam Smith, but Smith seems to get all the attention.

In Marx’s definitive analysis of capitalism, “Das Kapital”, he allows as how, in the sweep of history, capitalism served its purpose and brought humanity to a better place. And in the sweep of history, a time would come when it would be swept off the world stage—when it no longer served the masses.

Why aren’t we discussing these sweeps of history when the insights they can give us are so vital to our interests and our survival?

Of course, Marx was examining capitalism toward the middle and end of the 19th Century. After the Civil War, capitalism was in its vibrant period. Means of production were growing by leaps and bounds. The new nation had rid itself, finally, of the shackle of slavery. Capitalism had reached the point where wage labor was more productive and profitable.

My reading of Frederick Engels, Karl’s sidekick, tells me that all things in nature, including man and his institutions, are in a state of flux. Change takes place through the clash of opposites. The conflict of opposing forces leads to growth and development. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes as when water heats gradually to the boiling point then quickly changes from liquid to steam, or when nations change economic (and political) systems quickly, and oft times violently, through revolution, after years of prolonged incremental change.

By the time of the new century, the 20th, that is, the Robber Barons were stepping up to the plate and taking their place in the sweep of history. Early mergers and acquisitions were beginning the process that dominated the 20th Century and led us to where we are today—Monopoly Capitalism.

We’ve learned, repeatedly, that in the process of growth, capitalism leads to Monopoly, Imperialism and War. There’s been a lot of talk, lately, about war. I’ve heard little, or none, about capitalism, monopoly or otherwise. Discussion, anyone?

I think the American people, instinctively, know where we’re at.

Everybody knows that capital enterprise must grow or die—must cut and thrust to maximize profits. Everybody knows that capitalist profits are obtained from the surplus value that labor produces—your sweat and mine. Everybody knows that the corporate monopolies own and control the mass media, just about everything you see, read and hear. Everybody knows that the corporate monopolies will fight to the death to keep you from believing what everybody knows. That’s an oxymoron. Or you could call it one of the contradictions of capitalism.

Remember those pictures, during The Great Depression of the 1930s, of farmers spilling milk while children go hungry? Or men selling apples on the streets? If you aren’t old enough to remember it, you’re seen it in the newsreels. We had a wealth of productive capacity but the people had no purchasing power. Deflation had hit historic lows. The invisible hand was out to lunch.

When the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, high-flying traders began flying out of their office windows. By the 13th of November (when stock prices hit their lowest point), over 30 billion (in 1929 dollars) disappeared from the US economy. The greatest financial crisis in US history.

Franklin Roosevelt, through the New Deal, saved capitalism by re-distributing some of the wealth. He fought the economic royalists to a standstill and inaugurated the NRA and the WPA. Ironically, he had to save the capitalists from themselves. Instead of the invisible hand, we needed an iron fist. Strict controls and regulation of run-away capitalism, or they’d eat you out of house and home.

Originally, limited liability companies, now called "corporations" had to obtain charters from the State to do business. They are chartered to do a specific job. If they don't do the job or break the rules, their charters can be revoked. The State giveth and the State can taketh away. That's the way the system was set up in the States' constitutions. And this charter system is still in force in most states, today, but when was the last time you heard of a corporate charter being revoked?

Alas ...early in the 19th Century, when this country was young and still wet behind the ears, Congress gave corporations the status of people, with all the rights of people—freedom of speech and of the press. They could spend all the money they wanted to on advertising and propaganda, called “public relations”. They became carnivorous. The corporations soon began to eat congressmen and senators and judges and politicians of all stripes, and even presidents and nations.

So where are we at? We may well be at the threshold of another of those sweeps of history.

Bob Dylan, one of our great philosophers (and song writer) at another time of crisis in our country, said this:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt, Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows, And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

A sleeping giant is about to wake up. Wanna talk about it?

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Stephen Fleischman's career as a television writer-director-producer spans more than three decades, twenty years with ABC News, ten years with CBS News, starting in 1953. In 1959, he participated in the formation of the renowned Murrow-Friendly "CBS Reports" series. In 1983, Fleischman won the prestigious Columbia University-Dupont Television Journalism Award. In 2004, he wrote his memoir about his thirty years in Network News -" A Red in the House." For additional information, see: www.ARedintheHouse.com

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11242.htm

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Keepers at the Gate

He Who Controls Television Controls the Masses

By Manuel Valenzuela

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12/07/05 "ICH" -- -- In this age of modernity and technology, where the television monitor has become the center of the average American household, from cradle to grave acting as surrogate parent, teacher, role model and as influencer of human thought, it should come as no surprise that entire populations can be controlled with such facility and efficiency, turning once thinking humans into grazing sheeple. For in today’s day and age, he who controls television controls the masses, and he who controls the masses controls the nation.

Television has become, quite simply, the greatest tool of mass manipulation and thought control civilization has ever seen, an incarnation of the myriad of myths, fables, fictions, story telling, theologies and all other forms of ‘bread and circus’ history’s elite have concocted from which to retain power and control the lower echelons of man’s corrosive pyramid of hierarchy. In the television the elite have found the greatest weapon of mass control, seemingly able to dictate culture, politics, events, thought and destiny from the moment of birth to the time of death. It can even be said that it is they who can determine reality in twenty-first century America, magically making history disappear, altering the past, changing the present and molding the future. Reality is what they want it to be, shifting culture to their dictates, conditioning minds to fit their goals, pushing society in the direction that most benefits them and erasing from memory any manifestation that does not correspond to the reality they wish to create.

The ruling elite can, through clandestine programming and seemingly innocuous entertainment, influence the way millions of minds think, invariably transforming free thought into shackled reasoning. Over decades of methodical molding and development, beginning at the earliest possible age of a human being, those who control television oftentimes succeed in altering and indeed controlling the opinions, beliefs and thoughts of a person. Thus, the goals and views of the elite are transmuted onto those who stand not to benefit by the beliefs they now possess and the thoughts they have been brainwashed to accept.

This silent conditioning, achieved willingly by society, allowed inside the home by millions of families, absorbed into the mainstream and transported over the airwaves to all corners of the nation, creates entire armies of sentient beings conditioned never to question authority or the actions of governance. Over decades of assimilation and dumbed-down programming, the population comes to accept that fate has accorded them the role of sheeple in the games of social Darwinism and human caste systems. Thus, the interests of the elite and the control of the powerful are allowed to continue uninterrupted, without protest, dissent or challenge, assured of dominance, slavery and enduring reign over the sheeple of America.

In today’s day and age, those who control television are corporations and the fledgling corporatists now in possession of government. The rise of fascism in America has also given rise to the mutually beneficial interests of both government and corporations, making the use and control of television of utmost importance to the ruling elite. With government and business fusing together, the resources of both entities can join forces to achieve the desired regimen of thought control, thereby having a greater impact in controlling more of the population, for longer periods of time, and in greater capacity, both by mass manipulation and by offering exactly what the human/animal brain wants most, distraction. Thus, mass media serves a paramount importance in the rise of corporatism, using all tools at its disposal to condition, manipulate, indoctrinate, distract and transform the masses, steering the population in the direction both government and business wants us to head in, creating massive armies of drones marching lock step in service of, and controlled by, the corporatist few.

With Americans watching so much television on a weekly basis, discarding books of enlightenment for monitors of idiocy, preferring the drug of fantasy over the sobering realm of reality, no longer capable of analytical, logical thought, choosing to incorporate as their own the views, beliefs and opinions of corporate media, the keepers at the gate are free to do as they please, disseminating lies, distortions, manipulations, propaganda and fictions into our homes and the minds of our family, young and old, never discriminating and always flowing in the interest of the Establishment.

From birth they have us hooked with their highly addicting programming, from cartoons to sitcoms to movies to sports to newscasts to niche channels, using our animal emotions and passions to intravenously feed us their vast array of products and opinions and services and trends and beliefs. From birth the manipulation of brainwaves begins, altering development, robbing innocence, supplanting free thought with manipulated ideas tested in marketing laboratories, making consumers and producers of us and enslaving our biological and psychological needs to those outcomes that offer them the greatest revenue, profit and rise to power.

In time we are conditioned to become slaves to the system, their system, becoming unquestioning automatons never wondering why it is that the same system we are a part of is intent on keeping us subjugated and exploited, why we work the hours we work, why we work five days instead of four, why we devote more time to work than to our children, why we put up with office politics, why we put up with long and stressful commutes, why our pay is what it is, why we continue watching television, why we place blind faith in immoral politicians, why we ever supported an ill begotten war, why we vote against our own interests, why we continue shopping for goods we don’t need, why we purchase the products we buy, why we never question authority or speak truth to power.

As the brainwashing continues, and as the last remaining vestiges of free thought are chained to the gallows of corporate control, we fail to see that we have become a mere pawn to the system, an army of worker bees and soldier ants, one cog in a giant engine, exploited for our energy and our existence, a part easily replaceable, easily discarded, easily abandoned. Through the devastating dumbing-down mechanisms of television, along with the abandonment of education and the comfort of American middle class life, the Establishment is assured of a population acquiescent and pacified, remaining silent in times of disquieting conundrums, made merry by the plethora of bread and circus emanating throughout the land.

The genius of the American Establishment, learned after World War II, was in sacrificing a minute piece of the American pie to the growing middle class – that would have previously been greedily kept – in order to maintain the masses in an utter state of comfort, thus creating an environment of silent passivity, complacency and calm, where the masses would have nothing to protest or dissent over. The Establishment learned that a citizenry made comfortable in life would not protest the inevitable enslavement of their lives, or of their children. It learned that slavery could be maintained, and even sought by the slaves themselves, by offering a few more morsels, crumbs and bones than before, enough to live in comfort and thus never being given the opportunity to seek revolution, challenge authority or protest the status quo. By perpetually satisfying our mammalian passions, needs and emotions with a larger sliver of the prosperity pie, the Establishment saw that production increased, consumption rose exponentially, a calmer society permeated, citizens actually further enslaved themselves and, in the end, the same products produced by the middle class invariably were consumed by them as well, thus returning the allocation of resources back to the Establishment.

The television would only serve the interests of the Establishment even further by distracting the enslaved masses in search of escapism with fantasy-filled media, by programming young minds to the dictates of the system and by saturating the airwaves with the products and services produced by the masses, for the consumption of the masses, and the growing power of the Establishment. For years this worked marvelously, in the process helping to make American citizens the most comfortable people on Earth, given an overabundance of products by which to enjoy life, a growing standard of living and materialistic wealth beyond anything seen in human history. Yet the added morsels and crumbs and bones and fictions given us could not hide the control over our daily lives, our indebtedness to the system, our impotence versus power and our continued subservience to the Establishment.

The Soviet Communist Paradigm

The full introduction of the television would also be used for more sinister methods, arriving just in time to see the emergence of the elite’s control of the masses through fear and xenophobia, using the manufacture and marketing of enemies, such as the dreaded Soviet Communist, to better control the direction of the nation and the population. The Establishment became fully aware of a grave and growing danger to its power and control that if allowed to foment in the minds of the masses could spell a deep threat to the system. This fear by the elite was not of Soviet communism, which was a product of human greed, corruption and debauchery by the Russian government, but of the principles of socialism, which were gathering steam throughout the world in the years after World War II. The Establishment, both government and corporate, would use the television, and the newspapers and magazines it controlled, to preempt the principles of socialism, many of which espouse the teachings of Christ, conditioning in the population fears, lies, manipulations and hatreds regarding human socialism, thus assuring itself that such a threat to its existence would be squashed in America.

Through television and mass media Soviet Communism and socialism were fused together, fear of “Red Soviets” was made all-encompassing and the introduction of the Cold War, thanks to an easily-manipulated and fear-gripped populace, became a prosperous era for war profiteers, defense contractors and corrupt politicians. The Cold War established with the population the idea of America as benevolent and inherently good, always right and never wrong, fighting for the freedom of the free world, doing battle against the dreaded “Evil Empire.” Americans with social democrat tendencies were persecuted, anything anti-corporation was chastised, those pointing out the debased faults of the American system were ostracized and an entire nation was brought under the noose of fear.

An enemy had been created, and hundreds of millions of Russians were made subhuman monsters, all innocent and as decent as you and me, all fighting to survive a totalitarian regime. The brainwashing of Americans was so overwhelming, so successful, that for decades the Cold War raged on, living off the fumes of illusion and charades, creating bogey men lurking behind dark corners and making the principles of socialism a taboo subject to those whose unenlightenment is a cornerstone of the keepers of the gate.

Television and mass media were used to conjure up an enemy that was designed and marketed to last into perpetuity, granting perpetual war for perpetual profit, giving sustenance to the military-industrial complex. Fear oozed out the pores of average Americans as we were made to believe in mushroom clouds, told to build concrete bunkers, ‘educated’ in the inherent evil of communists, of evildoers hating us for our freedoms. We were spoon-fed the lies and manipulations and charades through sitcoms, movies, advertisements, newscasts and even cartoons. The conditioning was as pervasive as it was successful. It was corporate mass media, from newspapers to magazines to television, that transformed an entire nation into enemies, allies into rivals, millions of humans into communist monsters and a Cold War into tense periods of mutually assured destruction.

So invasive was the idea of Soviets and of communism as enemies, in fact, that to this day those brainwashed decades ago still see an enemy behind every progressive and left leaning American, still calling us “communists” when the new, hip, in vogue term is “terrorist.” Only with the fall of the Berlin Wall were we allowed to see the fallacy behind our lunacy, the façade finally evaporating, finally opening our eyes to a cold war that was designed for the salvation of the elite, not that of the masses, so that a perceived threat to the Establishment’s crony capitalism, profit, greed, wealth and power could be retained, so that the American people would be taught and conditioned to despise the principles of socialism, for the elite saw in it, and still do, a severe threat to their way of life.

For the salvation of the elite Americans were conditioned into hysteria; for our continued ignorance the Cold War subsisted, empowering itself and living off our programmed fears and hatreds, calculated to keep us on the path to crony capitalism and debauched democracy and away from other, possibly better mechanisms of human society. Our fears and hatreds made it easier for the elite to control us; our blind faith in the propaganda they spewed further degraded our lives. We were negated from seeing the beauty of Russia and Eastern Europe; their cultures and peoples were marginalized and denied us. A threat was over hyped on purpose, creating an enemy for geopolitical and power hungry goals.

Along with a cursory semblance of greater freedom, as well as the illusions of democracy, Americans were made to believe in the sanctity of the nation. America could do no wrong; jingoism and nationalism flourished, we were conditioned to believe in an America the righteous, defender of human rights, protector of democracy, cherished beholder of justice and equality, an upholder of all things good. All the while America’s government was unleashing hell on Earth upon the peoples of the south, creating wars, supporting dictators and despots, arming militaries, training soldiers of death, promoting murder, assassinations, torture, coup d’etats, death squads, creating slave labor, impoverishing millions, exploiting billions and condemning to limbo countless human beings whose only crime was being born in lands coveted by American corporate interests.

It was the mass media, using all tools at its disposal, that created good versus evil, cowboy versus Indian, American versus Soviet, masquerading the interests of the few for those of the many, spawning fear and hatreds, altering culture and opinion to the tunes of the Establishment, controlling the fate of an entire nation. The same exact thing has occurred in this fictional war on terror, simply the latest resurrected marketing ploy from the dusty bins of history.

What the Cold War shows us is that the population of a wealthy nation can be, through the corporate media, easily cajoled into doing the bidding of the elite, standing proudly by, and in furtherance of, the beliefs and goals created by the system. A nation can in the span of a few years or months be made to hate, fear and seek war, its collective emotions and psychology and passions exploited and manipulated by mass media, particularly television.

Reality is anything the corporate mass media wants it to be and, with a nation addicted to television, subservient to its hypnotizing glare, ready to absorb its opinions and visions, unquestioning and sedentary, kneeling in reverential attention at the images it generates and the sounds it emanates, the real danger becomes when the concocted reality of corporatists becomes the reality of the masses, when fiction and lies and deceptions become forgotten or ignored, and when fear, hatred, jingoism and xenophobia are birthed through the careful manipulation of our animal emotions and passions.

As has been seen during the Cold War, and now the fictional war on terror, it seems entire populations, no matter how civilized or comfortable their lives are, no matter how advanced or sophisticated they might claim to be, are impotent to the captivating powers of television and mass media, the weapons of choice for corporatists, creating citizens ready to do the bidding and dying for the interests of the elite, ready to sacrifice their freedoms, human rights, democracy and nation’s Constitution in furtherance of the growing plague of fascism.

Keepers at the Gate

Corporate mass media, today more than ever, has the ability to push exactly the right buttons, using the powerful images and sounds of television, by which to steer an entire population in the direction it wants it to head. Images from video can be manipulated, altered, omitted, repeated, inserted and given the aura of reality, while sounds can be used to further the interests of the mass media. Opinion can be and is oftentimes skewered in favor of the Establishment’s goals, as reporters, journalists and anchors assist in furthering the propaganda of their corporate owners, in the process censoring the debate and dissent necessary for the healthy function of democracy.

The Keepers at the Gate are the creators of reality, of news and opinion, those that filter and whitewash and erase from memory, those whose job it is to distract and sensationalize and manage culture. It is they who possess the responsibility of altering mass thought and opinion in favor of the Establishment, pushing the goals of the few into the homes of the many. A nation that has been weaned away from the liberating mechanisms of knowledge and reason and free thinking must depend on the opinions it hears and the images it sees to create its own reality. Pushed away from and trained to detest reading, getting news only by watching television, trained to absorb the views of pundits and talking heads whose opinion always favors the interests of the elite, America’s population is robbed of divergent and diverse views, failing to grasp the dissenting opinions and debate needed for brains to analytically synthesize all angles of a story.

Instead, a population conditioned to have the attention span of ten second sound bites has been manipulated to hear the repetitive slogans and cheers and talking points emanated by the talking heads seen on television. Through repetition of catchphrases and words the opinion of the masses is generated, creating a consensus of mass appeal the easier to dictate the direction of the nation. In such a way, since 9/11, the corporate media, in partnership with the Bush administration, has methodically managed the “war on terror” through censorship of diverging opinion, by the repetitive use of slogans and catchphrases, by creating alternate realities and by controlling the views, images and sound bites allowed to fester on the airwaves.

For they are the Keepers at the Gate, the entities that decide what constitutes the programming and news and reality the masses should be made to watch. They are the puppeteers and we the marionettes, our actions and opinions controlled with the invisible strings of manipulation. We are mere pawns in their games of chess and monopoly, impotent to challenge their omnipresence. Our reality is their fiction, whatever they decide to filter into our lives.

They can manipulate us into an immoral and illegal war using the tools learned from Madison Avenue marketers, exploiting our mammalian passions, wants and emotions, tinkering with the buttons of human psychology. They can condition us to hate and fear and seek vengeance, using enemies, both real and imagined, to force us to give up freedoms and rights and democracy, in the process transforming once decent people into cheerleaders and supporters of torture, mass murder, illegal occupation, war crimes and the evisceration of both due process and habeas corpus. They can devise a fictional war on terror, using modern day bogey men to manipulate our fear-induced emotions, thereby enriching and empowering themselves, all the while we willingly concede our remaining freedoms and rights to the corporatists in power.

The Keepers at the Gate determine the morsels and crumbs and bones of information we are allowed to see and hear. It is they who have made the Bush/Iraq war a war invisible and unseen, hidden from our conscious, its ramifications on our soldiers and on Iraqis made to disappear. It is they who brazenly darken the arrival of dead and injured soldiers, they who censor the horrors of war and the war crimes committed in our name. Thanks to the Keepers at the Gate, the Iraq war exists in the clouds, as if taking place in another planet, inside a vortex of unknowns, away from our gluttonous reality, our comfort level retained and secure from the ghastly realities of a war of choice upon millions of innocent Iraqis.

Hidden wars that do not litter the landscape of American consciousness have a purpose, however. For a losing war that cannot be seen by the masses cannot create dissent, protest and shock. A quagmire that is unseen retains the aura of victory, refusing to give rise to revulsion and disgust in the minds of millions who, if allowed to see the true nature of man fighting man, might become a threat the Establishment does not wish to foment. For the Keepers at the Gate have decided that imperial wars for resources, wealth, power and geopolitical advantage must continue; the Iraq war must not be relinquished. And so, in the time honored tradition of controlling the masses, television has risen to hide what is not to be seen and disseminate only what is needed, feeding us morsels of news so that we do not become a threat.

It is corporate media that has been created to maintain the balance of news, used to expose the enemies of power and the pawns of the elite whose usefulness has served its purpose. The corporate media and its journalist hacks that masquerade as propagators of news manipulate us, deceive us and confuse us, using the power endowed to them to cover up the mistakes of the Establishment. They have become the loudspeakers and sycophants of power, employed to propagandize corporatists and their goals while suppressing and maligning those who question and those who speak truth to power.

News anchors have become corporate shills, pushing the products and services sold by the mother company, offering sensationalized news that serves only to distract, dumb down and make forget. Reporters propagate the government’s lies and deceptions, rarely, if ever, seeking truth and all its angles. The bottom line has replaced truth, propaganda has replaced reality and lackeys have replaced honorable journalists. The interests of those who control television and news bureaus are given precedence over informing the public, objectivity and truth becoming victims of religious, political and philosophical inclinations. Suppression of truth has given way to the pursuit of ideology and zealotry, with the beliefs and goals of reporters, producers and editors allowed to dictate what is and what is not considered valid news.

The Keepers at the Gate are the stimulators of our reality, suppressing what is not expedient to the Establishment, disseminating that which is, systematically concocting and perfecting the formulas to better control and manipulate the American public and knowing what buttons to push so that, in the end, we invariably take the road they have designed for us. The Keepers at the Gate dictate what is, what was and what will become, hiding behind cameras to push society in that certain direction that will be of most convenience to them. They are embedded throughout corporate mass media, becoming the gods of destiny for hundreds of millions of citizens, creating the invisible hand and the omnipotent consciousness of American culture, politics and society.

They can conjure up bogey men out of thin air, creating enemies and wars out of lies and embedded manipulations. They can ruin the lives and careers of honorable men and women; they can birth division and animosity between citizens. Presidents and politicians are born and made through the fictions and whitewashes at the disposal of the Keepers at the Gate, their careers eviscerated when falling out of favor with the Establishment. Populations are brainwashed through propaganda; dumbed down through the idiocy of circus-like programming; manipulated by subjective and skewered newscasts; distracted and made to forget by sensationalist bull manure; emotions and passions easily controlled by fear, hatred and warmongering.

For years the corporate mass media has been marinating our existence, taking our youngest, inculcating them to produce, consume, obey and be a good slave, reprogramming their innocent minds with the incantations of corporatist goals, taught never to question and always to follow, told to place blind faith in corporations and so-called leaders. The Keepers at the Gate are the arbiters of reality, determining our fates through the monitors we eagerly cherish like idols perched in the middle of our homes. Daily we sit and pray to the new religion of man, told to produce and consume and obey and follow, our thoughts calibrated to the tunes of power. The news chosen for our consumption is tainted with the ulterior motives of control; the shows and sitcoms we watch contain the poisoning allure of fiction and perfection that in the human condition is constantly sought yet can never be achieved; advertisements, the real purpose behind programming, saturate our minds, manipulating our emotions, needs and wants, compelling us towards purchase.

From our earliest days the Keepers at the Gate bombard us with their propaganda, using the seduction of television, with its vast array of brain altering mechanisms, its fantasy-laden programming, its opinion-transforming sound bites and its captivating role as parent, teacher and role model for millions of children no longer reared, taught or disciplined by overstressed, overworked and greed addicted parents. The Keepers at the Gate are the sentinels watching over our lives; the overlords of America’s destiny. They are allowed inside our homes, their technologies adapting and learning ever more each year how to control and manipulate us further. They are the Keepers at the Gate, the gods of information and the purveyors of the Establishment’s interests. Truth is their enemy; knowledge their poison; free thought the antidote to their dreadful virus; our incessant watching of television sustains and feeds them, granting them energy. Our ignorance is their strength; our acquiescence their ability to continue emaciating our lives.

The greatest weapon of mass control to ever arise sits proudly in our home, welcomed by us into the safe confines of where our children reside. The tool used by corporatists to gain dominion over our nation and lives has become our most cherished possession. We place full trust in its capacity and technology, in the escapism it can offer and the news it can provide. It is the only way the Keepers at the Gate can enter our homes, thereby penetrating our minds and that of our children. Yet we control the remote and the ability to leave the monitor off. It is up to us to kill our television before it kills us. Only then will the Keepers at the Gate dissipate from our minds, and our consciousness. For they can enter our home only if we allow them and today, more than ever, they need to be shown the door, with darkness enveloping their attempted passage into our lives.

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Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com  and at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe.  Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel.