And Now for Some Real Heretics, Part 3

Continued from Part 2:

Since Gnosticism and early Christianity can be excessively complex a re-cap and a map would be helpful at this point.

Standard, or Orthodox, Christianity, developed in opposition to Gnostic Christianity. Most of orthodox Christianity’s earliest texts were written for just that purpose. Orthodox Christians held that the story of Jesus really took place, that he was crucified and resurrected as the Christ, that the Yahweh was the same as “the Father” referred to by Jesus and, therefore, the Jewish scriptures were still useful in that they prefigured and prophesied the life of Jesus. Some consider them to have been “moderates” between Gnostics on one side and Jewish followers of Jesus on the other. All this took place mostly post-70 AD after the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome which ended the temple-centered Jewish system. Some have even suggested that Christianity and Judaism (that is, the post-temple, rabbinic Judaism we know now) both developed at the same time as two separate strands differentiating themselves against each other. Gnostic traditions already preexisted this period in Judaism itself.

Gnostic Christians, as we have seen, associated the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh with the Demiurge. Here is what the Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04707b.htm) says about the Demiurge:

The word means literally a public worker, demioergós, demiourgós, and was originally used to designate any craftsman plying his craft or trade for the use of the public. Soon, however, technítes and other words began to be used to designate the common artisan while demiurge was set aside for the Great Artificer or Fabricator, the Architect of the universe. At first the words toû kósmou were added to distinguish the great Workman from others, but gradually demiourgós became the technical term for the Maker of heaven and earth. In this sense it is used frequently by Plato in his "Timæus". Although often loosely employed by the Fathers and others to indicate the Creator, the word never strictly meant "one who produces out of nothing" (for this the Greeks used ktístes), but only "one who fashions, shapes, and models". A creator in the sense of Christian theology has no place in heathen philosophy, which always presupposes the existence of matter. Moreover, according to Greek philosophy the world-maker is not necessarily identical with God, as first and supreme source of all things; he may be distinct from and inferior to the supreme spirit, though he may also be the practical expression of the reason of God, the Logos as operative in the harmony of the universe. In this sense, i.e. that of a world-maker distinct from the Supreme God, Demiurge became a common term in Gnosticism. The Gnostics, however, were not satisfied merely to emphasize the distinction between the Supreme God, or God the Father, and the Demiurge, but in many of their systems they conceived the relation of the Demiurge to the Supreme God as one of actual antagonism, and the Demiurge became the personification of the power of evil, the Satan of Gnosticism, with whom the faithful had to wage war to the end that they might be pleasing to the Good God. The Gnostic Demiurge then assumes a surprising likeness to Ahriman, the evil counter-creator of Ormuzd in Mazdean philosophy. The character of the Gnostic Demiurge became still more complicated when in some systems he was identified with Jehovah, the God of the Jews or of the Old Testament, and was brought in opposition to Christ of the New
Testament, the Only-Begotten Son of the Supreme and Good God. The purpose of Christ's coming as Saviour and Redeemer was to rescue us from the power of the Demiurge, the lord of the world of this darkness, and bring us to the light of the Good God, His Father in heaven.

The Catholic Encyclopedia then goes on to describe Valentinian and Marcionite Gnosticism. First Valentinus:

… According to Valentinus the Demiurge was the offspring of a union of Achamoth (he káta sophía or lower wisdom) with matter. And as Achamoth herself was only the daughter of Sophía the last of the thirty Æons, the Demiurge was distant by many emanations from the Propatôr, or Supreme God. The Demiurge in creating this world out of Chaos was unconsciously influenced for good by Jesus Soter; and the universe, to the surprise even of its Maker, became almost perfect. The Demiurge regretted even its slight imperfection, and as he thought himself the Supreme God, he attempted to remedy this by sending a Messias. To this Messias, however, was actually united Jesus the Saviour, Who redeemed men. These are either hulikoí, or pneumatikoí. The first, or carnal men, will return to the grossness of matter and finally be consumed by fire; the second, or psychic men, together with the Demiurge as their master, will enter a middle state, neither heaven (pleroma) nor hell (hyle); the purely spiritual men will be completely freed from the influence of the Demiurge and together with the Saviour and Achamoth, his spouse, will enter the pleroma divested of body (húle) and soul (psuché). In this most common form of Gnosticism the Demiurge had an inferior though not intrinsically evil function in the universe as the head of the psychic world.

Now Marcion:

According to Marcion, the Demiurge was to be sharply distinguished from the Good God; the former was díkaios, severely just, the latter agathós, or loving-kind; the former was the God of the Jews, the latter the true God of the Christians. Christ, though in reality the Son of the Good God, pretended to be the Messias of the Demiurge, the better to spread the truth concerning His heavenly Father. The true believer in Christ entered into God's kingdom, the unbeliever remained forever the slave of the Demiurge. To this form of Gnosticism, the Demiurge has assumed already a more evil aspect.

To this they add a third variety, one more radical that the Encyclopedia labels “weird:”

According to the Naassenes the God of the Jews is not merely díkaios, but he is the great tyrant Jaldabaoth, or Son of Chaos. He is Demiurge and maker of man, but as a ray of light from above enters the body of man and gives him a soul; Jaldabaoth is filled with envy; he tries to limit man's knowledge by forbidding him the fruit of knowledge in paradise. The Demiurge, fearing lest Jesus, whom he had intended as his Messias, should spread the knowledge of the Supreme God, had him crucified by the Jews. At the consummation of all things all light will return to the pleroma; but Jaldabaoth, the Demiurge, with the material world, will be cast into the lower depths. Some of the Ophites or Naassenes venerated all persons reprobated in the Old Testament, such as Cain, or the people of Sodom, as valiant resisters of the Demiurge. In these weird systems the idea of the world-maker was degraded to the uttermost.

Three forms of Christian Gnosticism can be identified in the second century. The accomodating Valentinians, accomodating because they instructed their pneumatic followers to participate in the same rituals as the psychic, “Pistic,” or faith-based Christians, which actually frustrated the orthodox theologians even more, seeing them as deceitful. Second the Marcionites, large in number and perhaps dominant in many areas, and third and most radical, the Naasenes.

We find many references in Gnostic literature to “secret teachings” of Jesus of Paul, but nothing we have seen so far has been kept secret by anyone except Gnosticism’s Literalist opponents. Was there anything else? There are a couple of avenues we can pursue to answer that question. One might lie in the division of people into hylics, psychics and pneumatics. The other might be this: can Gnosis or Gnostic salvation be as easy as it seems? To identify with the One? Or is it more difficult than it seems? If so, why?

To be continued.

Bob Scheer Hanging with Rockefeller

Back in 1975, the journalist Robert Scheer, who now writes for the Los Angeles Times, spent several weeks with Nelson Rockefeller. His account of that encounter can be found in a collection of his articles published in 1988 called Thinking Tuna Fish and Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power (New York, Hill and Wang, 1988). I highly recommend the collection since even though they were written in the 1970s, they don’t feel dated. If anything Scheer was amazingly prescient, writing for example about the neocons before there was even a word for them, or about cold-blooded technocrats of the Empire in an article on Daniel Ellsberg and Vietnam that is unfortunately relevant today. In any case, I find his essay on Nelson Rockefeller revealing of how power is exercised in this country.

Scheer begins,

On our first pass over the tiny mountaintop airfield, it seemed like we were going to hit the side of the mountain, which would have meant the end of me, Nelson Rockefeller, and my story. But it would have been a bonanza for conspiracy buffs. What was the ex-editor of Ramparts, who had done so many CIA exposes, doing on a little prop plane with the Vice President, who was just then completing his committee’s investigation of the CIA? (p. 199)

Why did Rockefeller let a left-wing journalist hang around him like that?

Rockefeller’s most striking quality is his total confidence in his ability to coopt anyone, even an aging New Leftist like me. Once it was clear that I was just another intellectual and not a potential assassin, I was able to hang around with him for over a month. He permitted it because of his deeply ingrained assumption that people with brains or pens who could possibly annoy him by what they write can simply be hired and made to forget “all that negative stuff…”

The man does not feel that he can be hurt by words. Rockefeller’s aides cannot even get him to read major articles about himself, unlike Henry Kissinger, who begins his morning by reading clips of everything said about him on the previous day. We may have social mobility in America, but we also have an economic class structure and
Rockefeller knows that this is his country and his government, while Kissinger has always believed that he is passing and living on borrowed time. (pp. 199-200)

Scheer then describes a typical day hanging with Nelson:

Once we stopped to have cocktails with the entire Supreme Court, another afternoon it was an hour with the Empress and the Shah of Iran, and on a third occasion Rocky spent a relaxing evening at the Kennedy center with Nancy and Henry Kissinger. In the process, I kept finding myself squeezed up against a lot of the people whom I had spent most of my adult life demonstrating against. They are not a bad bunch of people to have hors d’oeuvres with, if you can forget things like the Shah’s secret police or Attica. But I came away from all this with no doubts at all that America has a ruling class and that it gets along quite smoothly with its counterparts abroad.

Ironically, I had just published a book (America After Nixon) on the power of the top
multinational corporations and the ways they run this country. The day I was trying to get on the Rockefeller plane, Business Week had just come out with a long, serious review. Although the reviewer considered me a Marxist, he said my main thesis about the crisis of corporate power was valid. As I stood in Morrow’s office, I looked down on his desk and saw my picture and the review staring up at me. My immediate thought was “Damn, it’s all over and the Secret Service is going to hustle my ass out of here in two minutes.”

But it was just the opposite. Rockefeller greeted me with “Hey fellow, I see ya got a best-seller on your hands. Looks like a really interesting book.” Since the main point of my book, which was hardly a best-seller, is that people like the Rockefellers pretty much run this country at the expense of the rest of us, I was perplexed. But after getting to know the man, I came to understand that Rockefeller implicitly believes in the Marxist analysis of economic classes and struggle—he’s just on the other side. (pp. 200-1)

Then there’s this:

Rockefeller: I’m a great believer in planning.
Scheer: What kind of planning?
Rockefeller: Economic, social, political, military, total world planning.
Scheer: Does the question of class enter into this at all?
Rockefeller: Not for me.

I asked him when we were on that plane ride about any possible conflicts between the needs of the multinational corporations and labor, and he said there were none: “My feeling is that that segment [labor] is terribly important, but they’re going to be taken care of if our economic system works, which is what I was talking to these guys about—we’re hobbling the economic system by accelerating social objectives.

The “guys” that he had been talking with were Arthur Burns, head of the Federal Reserve Board, and Alan Greenspan, the President’s top economic advisor.”

…I knew something important must be happening, because as I crossed the lobby with Morrow, he suddenly said, “Oh, there’s David. Hi, David, this is Bob Scheer. Bob, this is David Rockefeller and his wife, Margaret.”

David was in a golfing getup and was very relaxed and friendly, as was his wife, who wanted to know if Nelson’s wife, Happy, had gotten in yet. Within the next half hour I saw Thomas Murphy, chairman of General Motors, and Edgar Speer, head of U.S. Steel. (pp. 201-2)

The event was a quarterly meeting of the Business Council a group of the top two hundred business leaders. Scheer writes that after the friendly greetings, he “wandered the lobby in a daze. After fifteen years of doubts, college debates with professors, and confusion about whether America really has a ruling class, I had suddenly found myself right smack in the middle of it.”
(p. 202)

Rockefeller then addressed the group after dinner:

I enjoy this opportunity because, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I feel that those of you in this room symbolize, really, the essence of what our country stands for… Now we find ourselves in a situation in which many of these values are challenged as never before… No group knows this better than you, because you men and women—so many of you representing much-maligned multinational corporations… we, as Americans, should be so grateful that your ingenuity and your imagination and your drive has seen the opportunities that existed in this world. (pp. 202-3)

On the plane ride back, Scheer asked Rockefeller about his brother David.

He said, “Well, David is concerned with the world, he’s the banker, so he has to take care of the global problems, and I started with the domestic—how to build domestic consensus for what needs to be done.” (p. 203)

Here’s how the day ended for Scheer:

On the flight back to Westchester, I wondered how I was going to get down to Manhattan, but you soon learn not to worry about things like that when you’re around Rockefeller. A limousine, chauffered, no less, with a phone in the back, was put at my disposal. Chauffered limousines just suddenly appear when you’re on the right side. And, of course, what’s really scary is that all of a sudden an important part of you wants to be on the right side. (p. 204)

The weird thing about reading this article thirty years later, is how everything that has happened since then was planned out by Rockefeller and his people.

There is no question but that in terms of the current planning within the executive branch of government, Gerald Ford is a bystander—a small-town politician—and that Rockefeller’s old club is running things. It is certainly spinning the big visions about where things should go in this country over the next forty years and making decisions that will very dramatically affect our world. And we are not, in any sense, participating in those decisions.

Rockefeller believes that American corporate capitalism is at a point of crisis in the world, and he is quite frank in stating that the working out of concrete plans for the survival of that system is the main contribution that he must make in what remains of his life… He told me: “A lot of people don’t want to be bothered or upset or disturbed by these awful things that are happening abroad, but more and more they are coming to realize that this is the fact, and I happen to be a great believer in Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest, those who can adapt to their environment. Okay, that’s the way I feel [and then he pulls me closer with those almost whispered tones of the Godfather]. This is a very exciting, open period, and if we are as smart and intelligent as I think we are as a nation, we’ll work these things out, and if we get rid of the emotional things, I mean get them behind us… our emotional traumas are, I think, going to pass and we’ll be able to settle down and sort this stuff out and approach it intelligently. I’m very optimistic about the future. I’m glad to see you. You really understand me.”

By “awful things,” he means poorer people in the world wanting a share of the pie; by “emotional issues,” he means all of the resistance from Vietnam to Attica that people put up to his rule; and by being glad to see me, he means he thinks he’s got me conned because I kept my mouth shut and nodded appreciatively every few minutes. (pp. 217-8)

There's also a lot in the essay on the cultural politics of the Rockefeller-era establishment. It was basically two-tiered. High art could be critical as long as it didn't reach the masses. That is one thing that is very different in the post-Reagan, cultural war era. The right-wing establishment, having allied themselves with religious fundamentalists, now won't even tolerate critical art for a narrow elite.

More on Hunter Thompson

Here is a great essay on Hunter Thompson by the editors of Signs of the Times:

We are all in great trouble.

Few people have looked into the heart of America, seen it for what it was, and written about it with such clarity of venom and horror as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Almost as few are those who read Thompson and understand how bad the situation really is, who see that the extreme language was only extreme because it was accurate. He was simply describing what he saw.

His readers laughed, but how many of them felt that subsequent shudderin the gut that tells them they are in danger? The warning was given over three decades ago during the Nixon years. We read and laughed, did nothing, and now the trap has sprung.

The praise for Thompson has been sung loudly since his suicide on Sunday. Yet how many of those really see how bad it is out there?

How many of those who praise Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are willing to look seriously at the idea that 9/11 was an inside job? Cockburn and St-Clair from CounterPunch, the online journal that posted Thompson's Nixon article in tribute, are not willing to look seriously at the truth about 9/11. Do they think the good doctor was kidding when he described the scenes of American law enforcement officers morphing into reptilian forms? Do they stop to consider the profound esoteric truth embodied in that description?

But they don't want to go there. They do not want to look into the heart of darkness and see how foul it really is, how rotten lies the American Dream when you scratch its surface...

If a sitting president was responsible for an attack on US property that killed 3000 Americans, while the blame was placed on innocent patsies thousands of miles away in order to justify the invasion, occupation, and control of the Middle East, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose only crime is to be Arab or Moslem, well then, Thompson's descriptions of Las Vegas would have a reality that these lefty scribes would be unable to stomach.

If it were so and you stood by and did nothing... like Cockburn and Chomsky and the other heroes of the progressive movement in the US... what does that make you?What would you see when you looked in the mirror?

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson saw US reality. He described it accurately. He also saw that it was part of himself, that insane, drug-addled, gun-toting persona that we were never certain was altogether real or just part of a public image to keep people away. But it is part of us all, and it was Thompson's admission that it lived within him, too, that was the clincher that he had SEEN it.

Once you've seen it in yourself, you either get violently ill, or you keep swallowing it back down and get about your business. But you can't beat it alone. There is always another bucketful of the "it's not as bad as that" bacteria being brewed inside.

But how much horror can one take? His public laughed at his descriptions, but they didn't really buy into it, not all the way. And they won't see what Hunter saw until they start to suffer, until the reality of it becomes physical and hits them in their stomachs and bank accounts and the repo man comes round to drive off with the SUV. For the moment, it is still only happening to other people, to someone else. Who is going to ACT when it is "only" happening to someone else?

Did Thompson see this, too? Did he recognise that it was too late, that with four more years the horror would begin to outstrip even his picturesque prose? We don't know and wouldn't even wish to speculate. Thompson is gone. It is up to you to decide for yourself. We know our answer.

And Now for Some Real Heretics, Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

Valentinus, a second-century follower of the apostle Paul, taught that Paul was actually a Gnostic who taught two gospels, one for Literalists and one for Gnostics. Who was Valentinus? Most of what we know of him comes from his Literalist opponents. According to Stephen A. Hoeller (http://www.gnosis.org/valentinus.htm),

He was born in Africa, probably within the territory of the ancient city of Carthage, around or before 100 A.D. He was educated in Alexandria and in the prime of his years transferred his residence to Rome, where he achieved a high degree of prominence in the Christian community between 135 and 160 A.D. Tertullian wrote that Valentinus was a candidate for the office of bishop of Rome and that he lost the election by a rather narrow margin. This same failed orthodox church father (Tertullian himself joined the heresy of Montanism) alleges that Valentinus fell into apostasy around 175 A.D. There is much evidence indicating, however, that he was never universally condemned as a heretic in his lifetime and that he was a respected member of the Christian community until his death. He was almost certainly a priest in the mainstream church and may even have been a bishop.

What were the teachings of Valentinus? According to Hoeller,

The often-debated cosmogony of Valentinus might be most profitably understood as being based on a single existential recognition, which might be summarized thus: Something is wrong. Somewhere, somehow, the fabric of being at the existential level of human functioning has lost its integrity. We live in a system which is lacking in essential integrity, and thus is defective. So-called orthodox Christians as well as Jews recognize that there is a certain "wrongness" in human existence, but they account for it chiefly in terms of the effects of human sin, original or other. Jews and Christians hold that whatever is wrong with the world and human existence is the result of human disobedience to the creator. This means, that all evil, discomfort, and terror in our lives and in history are somehow our fault. A great cosmic statement of "Mea Culpa" runs through this world view, which permanently affixes to the human psyche an element of titanic guilt. Valentinus, in opposition to this guilt-ridden view of life, held that the above-noted defect is not the result of our wrongdoing, but is inherent in the system of existence wherein we live and move and have our being. Moreover, by postulating that creation itself is lacking in integrity, Valentinus not only removes the weight of personal and collective guilt from our shoulders but also points to the redemptive potential resident in the soul of every human being.

Elaine Pagels in her book, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters, (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1992) examines the apostle Paul from a Valentinian perspective as opposed to the usual perspective derived from the anti-heretical Church Fathers Irenaeus, Origen and Tertullian. Irenaeus and Tertullian claim that Paul wrote the Pastoral Letters, then use those letters the claim that Paul was anti-Gnostic. The Valentinians, on the other hand claim that Paul wrote Romans , 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Pihlippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians and Hebrews. Note that modern scholars agree that the Pastoral Letters were written in the mid-second century and were written precisely to oppose Gnosticism.

From the Valentinian perspective, Paul taught two gospels, one for psychics (those who identify with the soul or psyche, the radius in the circle of the self, that which is connected both to the center, the one Consciousness and to the body and matter at the other end) and a secret one for pneumatics (those who identify with the Spirit or Consciousness, pneuma):

How can gnostic exegetes and theologians make this astonishing claim? Theodotus explains that Paul, having become “the apostle of the resurrection” through his experience of revelation, henceforth “taught in two ways at once.” On the one hand he preached the savior “according to the flesh” as one “who was born and suffered,” the kerygmatic gospel of “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2) to those who were psychics, “because this they were capable of knowing, and in this way they feared him.” But to the elect he proclaimed Christ “according to the spirit, as one born from the spirit and a virgin” (cf. Rom. 1:3) for the apostle recognized that “each one knows the Lord in his own way: and not all know him alike.” (Pagels, p. 5)

That is, Paul taught to the pneumatics that Christ represents the center or the one Consciousness at the center of the circle of our being.

The Valentinians claim that most Christians make the mistake of reading the scriptures only literally. They themselves, through their initiation into gnosis, learn to read his letters (as they read all the scriptures) on the symbolic level, as they say Paul intended. Only this pneumatic reading yields “the truth” instead of its mere outward “image.”

The Valentinians agree with other Christians, for example, that Paul intends in Romans to contrast that salvation effected “by works,” “according to the law,” with the redemption that the elect receive “by grace.” But most Christians read the letter only in terms of the outward image—in terms of the contrast between the revelation to the Jews and the revelation extended through Christ to the Gentiles. They fail to see what Paul himself clearly states in Rom. 2:28f, that the terms (“Jew/Gentile”) are not to be taken literally:

"He is not a Jew, who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision what is outward in the flesh; (but) he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, pneumatic, not literal."

The Valentinians take this passage as Paul’s injunction to symbolic exegesis. While on the literal level he discusses the relation of Jews to Gentiles, simultaneously he
intends his words to be read on a pneumatic (that is, symbolic) level. According to such exegesis, Paul’s discussion of Jews and Gentiles in Romans refers allegorically to different groups of Christians—to psychic and pneumatic Christians respectively.

Practice of such exegesis enables the Valentinians to interpret Paul’s letters in an entirely new way. They consider the “literal” question of the relation between Jews and Gentiles to be already (c. 140-160) a dated issue, limited to a specific historical and cultural situation. What concerns them in the present is a different issue: how they themselves, as pneumatic Christians inititated into the secret mysteries of Christ, are related to the mass of “simple-minded,” “foolish” believers. They perceive that this problem (i.e., the relation of the “few” to the “many,” the “chosen” to the “called”) has characterized Christian communities from the first—from the time when the savior chose to initiate only a few into the secret meaning of his parables and deliberately let them remain obscure “to those outside” (Mk. 4:11). They conclude that it is this perennial problem (i.e., the relation of the “chosen few,” the elect, to the “many psychics” who are “called) that Paul intends to expound in his letter to the Romans. (Pagels, p. 6-7)

What the Valentinians have done then, by claiming in the mid-second century that Paul did so, was to posit two groups of Christians: Literalists and Gnostics, or Pistic (from “faith”) and Gnostic (from “knowledge”) Christians, or pneumatics and psychics. The hylics, those who identify with matter are left out as they would not be Christian.

Can this distinction between the types of human beings be a clue to answering our question of why early Christianity was considered to be an "abominable superstition?"

To be continued...

Hunter Thompson, 1937-2005

This is to honor the passing of Hunter S. Thompson, who can now be considered the patron saint of bloggers even though he didn't blog. He didn't have to, he could get published writing things that no one else could get published saying.

Here is what he wrote in the Summer of 2003 in his ESPN column about Bush:

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

And,

The real shocker of the week, for me, was and remains the stunning collapse of the evil Bush administration, which I view with mixed feelings.

In truth, I could be a lot happier about the collapse of Bush and his people and his whole house of cards and everything he stands for, if it didn't also mean the certain collapse of the U.S. economy, and the vital infrastructure, and, indeed, the whole "American way of life."

It will not be anything like the collapse and Impeachment of Richard Nixon, which had little or no impact on day-to-day life in this country. Nothing really changed, except Some people went to prison, of course, but that was to be expected, considering the crimes they committed and the shameful damage they caused ... They were criminals, and the righteous American people punished them for it. Our system worked, and we were all heroes.

Ah, but that was twenty-nine (29) years ago, bubba, and many things have changed. The utter collapse of this Profoundly criminal Bush conspiracy will come none too soon for people like me, or it may already be too late. The massive plundering of the U.S. Treasury and all its resources has been almost on a scale that is criminally insane, and has literally destroyed the lives of millions of American people and American families. Exactly. You and me, sport -- we are the ones who are going to suffer, and suffer massively. This is going to be just like the Book of Revelation said it was going to be -- the end of the world as we knew it.

Counterpunch re-published Thompson's obituary of Richard Nixon yesterday. It is worth reading in full, but first let's look at a passage where he talks about journalistic objectivity:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Hunter Thompson showed that you can, through extreme subjectivity, reach objectivity better than if you had started out to be objective.

Here is the whole piece on Nixon. Now we will have to find someone else to write about Bush when he dies and the Gates of Hell open up and swallow one of its own.

He Was a Crook

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK
DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE
PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know Iwill go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, andI am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all theway to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by thehead with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabberingdupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values." Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of ObjectiveJournalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But themushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won everyoffice he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP
[From a Watergate era piece by HST]

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment. Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

The Bush Administration is Not Incompetent

Many of us have wondered how the Bush gang could be so stupid. Starting two losing wars that are only going to increase terrorism and destroy world peace. Implementing economic policies (massive tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, while fighting two expensive, losing wars) that will bankrupt the country and plunge the world into a depression. How could they be so stupid? The incompetence is so massive and incomprehensible, you can only conclude that it is deliberate. They are trying to bankrupt the US and plunge the world into war.

Kurt Nimmo today said as much:

[I]f Bush and the Israelis attack Iran, there will be hell to pay and large swaths of the Middle East will erupt in flames. I believe this is precisely what the Strausscons and the Likudites want—chaos, ethnic strife, endless suicide and car bombs, the current situation in Iraq magnified and spread across the Arab and Muslim Middle East. If Saudi Arabia catches fire—and you bet it will if Iran and in turn Lebanon explode—this will serve as an ideal pretext to seriously launch the Likudite-Strausscon version of World War IV and thus mobilize a sleepy American public, tired of war and terrorism (Strausscons call this a lack of “stomach"). Another “terrorist event” to rival September 11, 2001, blamed on Iran or Shia terrorists, would go a long way to mobilizing public sentiment, as did the sinking of the Maine, the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the bogus attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Not only that, but the economic devastation will solve the US military’s recruiting problems. That must be how they think they can invade Syria and Iran when they already don’t have enough troops to secure Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Now for Some Real Heretics, Part 1

As we have seen in the discussion of the movie The Truman Show, themes from Gnosticism and other heretical movements have been prominent in popular culture recently (and probably in all times; heresies that are suppressed go underground and pop up in cultural works when no one is looking). The phenomenal popularity of The DaVinci Code, as flawed as that is, see this by Laura Miller and this by a blogger and this and this by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, shows that there is an appetite for fundamental critiques of standard organized religion.

In their book, Jesus and the Lost Goddess, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have offered a simple, easy-to-understand schema for understanding Gnosticism. All religious traditions have Gnostic movements within them, so before looking at Christian Gnosticism, let us use Freke and Gandy’s opposition between Gnosticism and Literalism to get a handle on Gnosticism in general and, in particular, why Gnostics often end up being persecuted as heretics.

According the Freke and Gandy, “Gnostics are concerned with the inner essence of their tradition. Literalists associate their faith with its outward manifestations: sacred symbols, scriptures, rituals, ecclesiastical leaders, and so on. Gnostics see themselves as being on a spiritual journey of personal transformation. Literalists see themselves as fulfilling a divinely ordained obligation to practise particular religious customs as a part of their national or cultural identity.” (p.2) In addition,

Gnostics wish to free themselves from the limitations of their personal and cultural identities and experience the oneness of all things. They therefore have no reluctance in adopting the wisdom of other traditions if it adds something to their own. Literalists use religion to sustain their personal and cultural identity by defining themselves in opposition to others. This inevitably leads to disputes with those outside their particular cult. It is literalists who fight wars of religion with Literalists from other traditions, each claiming that God is on their side. Literalists’ enmity also extends to Gnostics within their own tradition who question their own bigotry. Most
spiritual traditions have a tragic history of the brutal suppression of Gnostics by intolerant Literalists. Interestingly, it is never the other way around. (p. 2)

We are all pretty familiar with Literalism. What do Gnostics “believe?”

At the heart of the perennial philosophy of Gnosticism is a simple but powerful idea… It is the idea of God as a Big Mind which contains the cosmos and which is becoming conscious of itself through all conscious beings within the cosmos. The purpose of Gnostic initiation is to awaken in us a recognition of this our shared divine essence. (p. 19)

Gnostics of many traditions introduced a threefold division of the cosmos and of the self into what we can call, using the Greek of the Christian and Pagan Gnostics, pneuma, psyche, and physis. These terms are usually translated as spirit, soul and matter. St. Paul in his epistles made use of those terms to divide people into pneumatics, psychics and hylics, hyle being matter. Unlike scientific materialism, in which matter is the only reality, for the Gnostics, matter is the least “real” of all three.

The modern conception of human identity, articulated by scientific materialism, is that we are a complex physical organism which, in some way we have yet to understand, has an inner life and is therefore conscious. [p. 62] From this perspective, Gnostic teachings sound like spiritual mumbo-jumbo. But to the Gnostics, it is the notion that matter could somehow be the cause of conscious experience which is truly fantastic and incomprehensible. In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus argues: ‘If the body came into being because of consiousness that is a wonder, but if consciousness came into being because of the body this is a wonder of wonders’. Science starts with the body and ends with Consciousness, moving from the outside inwards. The Gnostic approach starts with Consciousness and ends with the body, moving from the inside outwards. (p. 61-2)

The ultimate reality is spiritual or pneumatic. Matter is on the outskirts of existence and of creation. The center is the Spirit. Matter is just something for Spirit to experience and Spirit or Consciousness experiences matter via the psyche or soul. By this understanding, the body is in the soul, not, as we are usually led to believe, the other way around.

To explain their teachings, the Gnostics used the image of a circle. The circumference of the circle represents the physical body, which the ancients called physis, from which we get our word ‘physical’. This is our outer self.

The radius represents our psyche. This is traditionally translated as ‘soul’, although, as the ancient word ‘psyche’ has come into common usage since the advent of psychology, it is probably less misleading to leave the term untranslated. In relationship to the outer body, we experience the psyche/soul as our ‘inner self’. For the Gnostics, it is a deeper level of our identity than our body.

At the centre is our essential identity, which the ancients called pneuma or nous. Pneuma is usually translated ‘spirit’, but today this word has become all but meaningless. Nous is traditionally translated ‘intellect’, but this is misleading as we now associate the word ‘intellect’ purely [p. 61] with rational thought, whereas nous is the witness of all experiences whatever their quality. Plotinus describes nous as ‘a knowing principle’. It is that in us which knows. It is the sense of being in every human being. It is who we are. A more appropriate modern translation for both pneuma and nous is ‘Consciousness’. (pp.60-1)

Gnostics believe that when we are born, when we plunge into matter, we forget who we really are and where we came from. Like the Prodigal Son, we end up in the pigsty of matter in a “far country.”

As newborn babies we have no concept of who we are. We therefore come to conceptualize ourselves as who everyone says we are – the visible body. We identify how we appear to others, rather than how we are for ourselves. The Gnostics call our apparent identity the eidolon, which means ‘image’. The eidolon, like a reflection in a mirror, is who we appear to be, but not who we really are. In modern spiritual jargon the eidolon is the ‘ego’. In the Christian text Pistis Sophia, it is called the ‘counterfeit consciousness’. Basilides calls it the ‘parasitic psyche’. Plotinus calls it ‘the intruder’. Our word ‘idea’ – an image in the mind – comes from the same root as the word eidolon. The eidolon is the ‘I am the body’ idea. We have identified ourselves with this idea, rather than the Consiousness within which the idea arises. We have mistaken the image for the essence…This is the tragi-comedy of the human predicament. We are all God, but most of us think of ourselves as a somewhat shoddy person. (p. 67)

For Paul, people can be classified as to which part of the self they identify with. Hylics identify themselves with matter, psychics with the soul and pneumatics, or spirituals with the pneuma or Spirit, the Consciousness of the One:

The Gnostics divide human beings into categories according to their level of self-awareness. Paul, Valentinus and other Christians use the terms hylics, psychics, and pneumatics. Hylics, or ‘materialists’, identify themselves with the body – the circumference of the circle of self. Psychics, or ‘soulists’, identify with the psyche or soul – the radius. Pneumatics, or ‘spiritists’, are aware of themselves as spirit or Consciousness – the centre. (p. 68)

In Christian Gnosticism, Jesus represents the Consciousness at the center of the circle of the self and Sophia (the female figure of Wisdom) represents the psyche or soul, the radius, with one end of the line in the world of matter and the other connected with the Center. Thus in the Gospel of Thomas, a recently unearthed gospel that has layers older than the four gospels that the Literalists put in the New Testament, Jesus can say:

I will reveal to you what no eye can see,
What no ear can hear,
What no hand can touch,

What cannot be conceived by the human mind.

What else could that be but Consciousness? (p. 63)

Gnostics of different traditions speak of another being, the Demiurge, a sort of subcreator (think of the Christof character in the film, The Truman Show). According to Freke and Gandy, the Demiurge represents the ego, which is “an eidolon or image of our true identity as Consciousness.” (p. 162) In the same way, the Demiurge is a poor reflection of Consciousness in this fallen world of matter, not the real thing. Futhermore, “The original Christians equate the Demiurge with Jehovah, portrayed by the Old Testament as jealous, angry, vindictive, self-obsesses – a perfect symbol for the ego. Hence modern Jungian psychologists have named the neurosis of egotistical self-inflation the ‘Jehovah Complex.’”(p. 162)

This has led Christian Gnostics to to claim that Jesus was not referring to the Old Testament Jehovah when he spoke of “the Father” who is, in this scheme, the One Consciousness out of which everything comes.

Why don’t Christians learn that in Sunday School? A long story, of course, but as we all know history is written by the winners and the Gnostics lost. The interesting thing is, though, that Gnostics were dominant in Christianity for the first two centuries of the Christian era:

The traditional history of Christianity is that Literalism took the world by storm, whilst Christian Gnosticism remained a minor heretical fringe movement. This is nonsense. Christian Literalism was initially a minor school of Christianity which developed in Rome towards the end of the second century. By this time Christian Gnosticism was an international movement which had spread throughout much of the Mediterranean, flourishing in such cosmopolitan cities as Alexandria, Edessa, Antioch, Epheseus and Rome. (p. 41)

If Literalist Christianity had a founder it would be Justin the Martyr in the mid-second century. He led a faction based in Rome that believed that the Father referred to by Jesus and Yahweh were the same, that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament, that his life was predicted by the prophets and that Jesus really existed and his story really happened. This, according to Freke and Gandy, was a radical departure, since, for some Gnostics, it wasn’t necessary that Jesus was a real historical person, his life could be an allegory for spiritual seekers, like the leading figures in ancient mystery religions.

Literalists did not claim Christain teachings to be radically different from Pagan philosophy… Literalist Christians claim that their myth of the dying and resurrecting Godman had recently been realized in real life. This is Literalist Christianity’s one claim to uniqueness, which is made by Augustine, the great spokesman for Christian Literalism. As someone who had been a follower of both the Pagan Gnostic Plotinus and the Christian Gnostic Mani before becoming a Catholic, Augustine knew there was nothing exceptional about Roman Christianity but this one incredible idea: ‘Christ came in the flesh’.

Christian Literalism was designed to dominate the West with an iron fist for nearly two millennia, but it began as an insignificant sect with a macabre enthusiasm for the end of the world. The Gnostic myth that Jesus would appear at the culmination of time was an allegory expressing the idea that when all souls were reunited with the Consciousness of God there would be a return to the primordial state of Oneness and the cosmic drama would be over. Literalists took this myth literally, developing the grotesque idea that Jesus was about to arrive to destroy the world, rescue a small group of Christian Literalists and condemn everyone else to eternal torment.”

…However, replacing the mythical sacrificed Godman with an historical martyr led to Christian Literalism becoming a sort of ‘suicide cult’ which, much to the horror of Gnostics, encouraged its members to imitate Jesus by also seeking out a sacrificial death. In the Literalist version of Christian history the Roman authorities are pictured as singling out Christians for terrible persecution. Actually they were often appalled at Christian Literalists’ eagerness to be martyred.

Literalism replaced the enlightened Gnostic sage at the centre of a small group of initiates with a hierarchy of bishops at the head of an expanding evangelical cult.

… From the large number of Christian scriptures in existence, Literalists selected four gospels to form the canon of the New Testament. These gospels were then declared to be the only authentic gospels and all of the other Christian scriptures were denounced as heretical. The four New Testament gospels are variations on the Jesus myth originally used by different schools of Christian Gnosticism. Putting them together created the illusion of there being four (albeit contradictory) eye-witness accounts of the same historical events. The later triumph of Literalism has left us with the distorted impression that these gospels were always the most popular Christian scriptures, but this is not true.

To endorse their authority, Literalist bishops fabricated a lineage connecting themselves back to the fictional disciples of the gospels. They turned Paul from the ‘Great Messenger’ of the Christian Gnostics into a bastion of Literalism by simply forging letters in his name which made him condemn their Gnostic rivals. It’s a simple trick, but it worked. It was not until the last few centuries that scholarship
became sophisticated enough to see through it. (pp. 38-40)

What resulted from the victory of Literalist Christianity, a victory that was sealed by the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, who selected Literalist leaders to form a unified Church by purging, often violently, any opponents, making it in time the official religion of the Roman Empire, was a religioun comforable with, and comforting of, power and hierarchy.

What about the “real” Jesus. Freke and Gandy say there wasn’t one. They say for the Gnostics there didn’t need to be. It seems to me more likely that there was one who taught something and around whom myths accreted, and, moreover, may have taught something that was deemed dangerous. Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes:

What seems to be true is that the writers of both the Old and New Testaments couldn't just toss out the oral traditions. They used them in a very special way. It often seems that whatever was positive was twisted and turned backward. With an awareness of how history can by mythicized and then historicized, and any combination thereof, we can look at the scriptures with a different eye. We can theorize that there must have been a real person around whom the legend of Jesus - the mythicized history - was wrapped. We can theorize that he was teaching something important and dramatic for it to have made such an impact. We can also theorize that this "impact" was seen as very dangerous at first, but later - after many twists and turns had been introduced, it was thought that it could be useful to utilize the growing myth as the centerpiece of a Control System. But, as we also suspect, the very nature of the Matrix itself and our current day observations, as well as a broad historical review, suggest that whatever "Jesus" was really doing and saying, it was most certainly twisted, corrupted, and emphases shifted in fairly predictable ways.

Why, if in the schools of theology they are aware of the fact that, for example Paul didn’t write the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus) do preachers in the pulpit say he did. Why do they claim that the apostles “Luke” or “Matthew” or “John” actually wrote the Gospels when they know, at least in mainstream protestant faculties, that they didn’t, that they were written over a hundred years later? It does matter. Paul, for example, is thought by modern scholarship to have written Romans, Corinthians and others in his name. There are statements in the pastoral epistles that have had significant consequences down through the centuries, and consequences not at all positive. I will give one example now from Paul’s letter to Timothy that has caused incalculable pain and suffering: “Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor…” (1 Tim. 6:1). Or this from Titus, “train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be sensible, chaste, domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands…” (Titus 2:4-5) or, “Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to be refactory, nor to pilfer, but to show entire and true fidelity, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” (Titus 2:9-10). These passages have had serious social and political consequences down to this day. They have been trotted out to justify slavery, patriarchy and general submissiveness at every historical turn.

Burton Mack writes in Who Wrote the New Testament?

Women, for instance, would have to be subject to their husbands, be silent at church, dress modestly, and not wear their hair braided (1 Tim. 2:9-15)… Thus the author created a marvelous fiction in order to place a church manual of discipline from the mid-second century at the very beginning of the apostolic tradition. One wonders whether Paul would have been pleased by this honor. (p. 207)

Why would people in a position of authority pretend something is true when it isn’t? Of course, this happens all the time with people in political authority, but we expect more out of religious leaders, but should we? In fact, a lot of the lies inserted into the Bible were put there for political reasons. By the mid-second century, leaders of the type of church that would eventually win out, were concerned about “what the neighbors will think,” in other words, whether they would be seen as respectible citizens of the Roman Empire or not. Was there anything else besides radical egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism that made early Christianity such a threat? Laura Knight-Jadczyk points out the following:

What is most revealing is the fact that the only writings contemporary to the times of early Christianity, which mention it specifically, remark that it was a "vile superstition." Yet, what we have as Christianity today is nothing more or less than the same religious practices of the peoples who branded it a "vile superstition." Tacitus tells us that in the time of Nero:

There followed a catastrophe, whether through accident or the design of the emperor is not sure, as there are authorities for both views, but it was the most disastrous and appalling of all the calamities brought on this city through the violence of fire. …a rumor had spread abroad that at the very time when the city was burning, Nero had mounted on his private stage and sung of the destruction of Troy, comparing the present disaster with that ancient catastrophe....

In order to put an end to these rumors Nero provided scapegoats and visited most fearful punishments on those popularly called Christians, a group hated because of their outrageous practices. The founder of this sect, Christus, was executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilatus. Thus the pernicious superstition was suppressed for the while, but it broke out again not only in Judaea, where this evil had its origin, but even in Rome, to which all obnoxious and disgraceful elements flow from everywhere in the world and receive a large following.

The first ones to be seized were those who confessed; then on their information a vast multitude was convicted, not so much on the charge of incendiarism as because of their hatred of humanity. [Leon, Harry J., trans., "Selections from Tacitus" in MacKendrick, Paul and Herbert M. Howe, Classics in Translation, Vol. II: Latin Literature, C 1952 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press)]

Pliny the Younger, who lived c. 62 to 113 AD, was sent by Emperor Trajan as a special representative to the Roman province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. His task was to keep the peace. When he had trouble dealing with Christians, Pliny wrote to the emperor asking how he should proceed against them describing what he knew about their religion:

However, they asserted that their guilt or mistake had amounted to no more than this, that they had been accustomed on a set day to gather before dawn and to chant in antiphonal form a hymn to Christ as if to a god, and to bind themselves by a pledge, not for the commission of any crime, but rather that they would not commit theft nor robbery nor adultery nor break their promises, nor refuse to return on demand any treasure that had been entrusted to their care; when this ceremony had been completed, they would go away, to reassemble later for a feast, but an ordinary and innocent one. They had abandoned even this custom after my edict in which, following your instruction, I had forbidden the existence of fellowships. So I thought it the more necessary to extract the truth even by torture from two maidservants who were called deaconesses. I found nothing save a vile superstition carried to an immoderate length.

The contagion of the superstition has pervaded not only the cities but the villages and country districts as well. Yet it seems that it can be halted and cured. It is well agreed that temples almost desolate have begun
to be thronged again, and stated rites that had long been abandoned are revived; and a sale is found for the fodder of sacrificial victims, though hitherto buyers were rare. So it is easy to conjecture what a great number of offenders may be reformed, if a chance to repent is given. [ Heironimus, John Paul, trans., "Selected Letters of the Younger Pliny," in MacKendrick, Paul and Herbert M. Howe, Classics in Translation, Vol. II.- Latin Literature, C) 1952 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press)]

So we have these clues:

1 Christians were hated because of their outrageous practices.

2 Their beliefs were described as a pernicious superstition

3 The pernicious superstition had its origin in Judaea.

4 Christians were convicted, not because they were going around inflaming others, but because of their "hatred of humanity."

5 Pliny describes their practices as benign," but that the core belief was a "vile superstition carried to an immoderate length. "

6 This "vile superstition" was pervasive and apparently led to the temples and ancient rites including sacrifice, begin abandoned.

The question that comes to mind is: what would the peoples of that time have considered a "vile superstition" or "outrageous practices" when one is aware of what they considered normal religious practice which included dying god myths and gnosticism and sacrifice and all the other accoutrements of Christianity as we know it today? The only real clue we have is the remark: "not so much on the charge of incendiarism as because of their hatred of humanity - a vile superstition carried to an immoderate length."

Their what?

"Their hatred of humanity."

What would “hatred of humanity” possibly mean?

To be continued ...

Waving False Flags, Negroponte, etc.

The Israel connection to the Hariri assassination won’t go away. The Xymphora blogger wrote this:

I can't think of another example of a case where the party so generally accused of the crime was more harmed by the results of the crime. Are we supposed to believe that the Syrians are insane and/or stupid? Do they want to invite an American-Israeli attack? Do they want to provide the biggest excuse possible to force them to leave Lebanon?

Here, for example, is what Bill Van Auken said:

The timing of the assassination, barely a week after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced their truce in Egypt, is noteworthy. It is quite possible that any limited concessions the Israeli regime may agree to make as part of the “peace process” with the Palestinians will be repaid by Washington giving the green light for Israeli provocations and military actions against Syria.

… It is not just a question of motive, however. Israel has a long history of utilizing
assassination as an instrument of state policy. The Israeli regime has not infrequently carried out acts of terror and blamed them on its enemies.

Among the more infamous examples was the so-called Lavon Affair, in which the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad organized a covert network inside Egypt which
launched a series of bombing attacks in 1953. The targets included US diplomatic facilities, and the attackers left behind phony evidence implicating anti-American Arabs. The aim was to disrupt US ties to Egypt.

In its long history of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, many of them carried out in Beirut, the Israeli regime has routinely attempted to implicate rival Palestinian factions.

Car bomb killings in Beirut are a regular part of Mossad’s repertoire. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, such bombings were a fact of daily life, and many of them were attributed to Israel.

Among the more recent killings is that of Elie Hobeika, an ex-Lebanese cabinet minister and former Christian warlord, in January 2002. He was killed along with three bodyguards by a remote-controlled car bomb on a Beirut street. Hobeika, who participated in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1976, had announced just days earlier that he was prepared to testify on the role played by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the killings.

Last June, a Lebanese magistrate indicted five Arabs who were said to be working for Mossad in connection with a plot to assassinate Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. At least one of the defendants testified that Mossad had organized the Hobeika assassination.

In May 2002, Mossad carried out the assassination of Mohammed Jihad Jibril, the son of Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer commented cynically at the time, “Not everything that blows up in Beirut has a connection with the State of Israel.”

In August 2003, Ali Hassan Saleh, a leader of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Beirut. Israel denied any knowledge of the killing, but it was seen throughout Lebanon as a Mossad operation.

Since 2002, Mossad has been headed by Meir Dagan, who formerly commanded the Israeli occupation zone in Lebanon. Sharon reportedly gave Dagan a mandate to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad.

Washington has itself revived the methods of “murder incorporated” that were historically associated with the CIA, boasting of assassinations of alleged Al Qaeda
operatives in Yemen and elsewhere.

While the Washington Post and other US media outlets echo the White House in denouncing Syria as a “rogue regime” guilty of the Hariri assassination, the two governments responsible for the great bulk of the killing and political murders in the Middle East are Israel and the United States.

The fact that so many stories are percolating around accusing the US and Israel of the assassination explains Donald Rumsfeld’s frustration with the internet or, as he put it, “bloggers and hackers and chat rooms.” Or why Popular Mechanics put out a cover story trying to debunk 911 truth theories. See this, this and this about that. There is clearly a risk in high-level debunking that you are drawing more attention to the “conspiracy theory” itself. The good news is that, thanks to the internet, you don’t have to rely on the monopoly press and government propaganda for information. The bad news is that the internet can be shut down and you can believe that the Rumsfeld types are working on that. Sure you will be able to go “on-line” but it won’t be the uncontrollable, open and decentralized internet. It would be corporate owned.

The thing that always amazes me about Rumsfeld is his compulsive truth-telling. At the beginning on this “War on Terrorism” he said that the government would lie to us, that it will infiltrate groups, cause them to commit terrorist acts then use that as an excuse to wipe them out. He once referred to what hit the Pentagon on 911 as a "missile." He also said last December that the “same people” who shot the plane down in Pennsylvania were responsible for 911 and the beheadings in Iraq. Here is the quote:

And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word "terrorized" is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

We crazy heretics knew that, but who knew Rumsfeld would come right out and say it?

On another matter, the Pentagon announced that it is spending more than $100 billion on developing robot warriors. That, of course, is frightening, especially when combined with new drugs they are coming out with to make the biological soldiers more “effective,” such as the one that keeps you awake for days without getting tired (not the old fashioned stimulants that kept you awake but caused exhaustion and psychosis) or the one that prevents the formation of traumatic memories (a conscience-blocker, just what we need!). The military has always worked on this stuff. What seems new is they don’t keep it secret. It’s like they want to scare the crap out of the world hoping that no one will sink the dollar.

All in all, though, it has been a dark week. The news that John Negroponte has been nominated as head of all intelligence in the US or Deputy Reichsfuhrer or whatever they are calling it weighs especially heavily. He is the one in charge of training, ordering and paying for the people who raped and killed nuns, priests and social workers in Central America in the 1980s. The man who oversaw mass political murder in the US embassy in Saigon during the Vietnam War and who is currently US ambassador to Iraq. That is as clear a sign as any that things are going to get lots worse quickly.

Here is what Signs of the Times said about Negroponte when he lied to the congressional committee about the death squads during his confirmation hearings for the UN Ambassadorship:

He can certainly lie with a straight face. Of course, from his twisted, corrupt, and fascist way of thinking, killing women by throwing them out of helicopters doesn't amount to death squads. It's just a normal day's work. Look at the behaviour of US troops in Vietnam and now in Iraqi cities like Falluja.

Check out the Wikipedia entry on Negroponte. While he was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, US military aid to the country increased from $4 million a year to over $77 million! This money went towards the war against the democratically elected government in Nicaragua, and Honduran death squads that got their jollies from torturing women:

Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's
assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

A job well done dealing with "sub-humans" in Latin America, Negroponte went into the "private sector" to make a few bucks before he was made US ambassador to the UN in 2001, just in time to ram through the war on Afghanistan and the destruction of Iraq. After a stint as US ambassador to Iraq, he is now being rewarded with the newly created position of US National Intelligence Director.

But hey, every fascist leader needs a trustworthy, sadistic guy like Negroponte at the head of intelligence operations to torture and kill all enemies of "freedom and democracy", right? And if Negroponte supported the murder of US missionaries in Honduras, he certainly won't have a problem dealing with US citizens deemed to be "enemy combatants"...

These are the types of people rewarded by the Bush administration with positions of great power. Dave Lindorff put it, “The Scum Also Rises.”

More on Hariri

Wow. Maybe I should be scared after writing the last post. Even the normally fearless Robert Fisk could only bring himself to say this about the Hariri assassination:

That this also served Israel's interests--a substantially demilitarised Lebanon, the disarmament of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement and the humiliation of Syria--was never allowed to become part of the narrative.

A passive-voice negative! Come out and say it, Bob.

The boys and girls at Mossad are good at what they do, though. Look at this report from today:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Mourners holding banners saying "Syria Out!" crowded around the flag-draped coffin of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and his family warned the pro-Damascus government to stay away Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of people turned his funeral into a spontaneous rally against Syria.

Along the funeral route through downtown Beirut, the Lebanese flag was hung from balconies and pictures were posted of Hariri, who was assassinated Monday by a massive car bomb that also killed 16 others.

Angry mourners shouted insults at Syrian President Bashar Assad to "remove your dogs from Beirut" — a reference to Syrian intelligence agents, part of an overall contingent of 15,000 troops deployed here since 1976.

Suspicions over Syrian involvement in Hariri's death further charged the atmosphere, and pressure mounted from abroad to find his killers, with Washington recalling its ambassador from Syria and the U.N. Security Council demanding justice.

William Burns, an assistant secretary of state for Middle East affairs who attended the funeral, renewed a call for Syria to withdraw its troops.

"Mr. Hariri's death should give — in fact it must give — renewed impetus to achieving a free, independent and sovereign Lebanon," Burns said after a meeting later in the day with Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammod. "And what that means is the immediate and complete implementation of the U.N. security resolution 1559, and what that means is the complete and immediate withdrawal by Syria of all of its forces in Lebanon."

Who killed Hariri?

As soon as the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assasinated, the western press started quoting the usual unnamed sources saying that the Syrians did it. To me that makes no sense. Especially when you realize that the Bush administration and Ariel Sharon are chomping at the bit to invade Syria. What seems more likely is that the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad did it. They are the acknowledge world leaders in "false flag" operations, operations like bombings done by them and blamed on others. For more on this crucial story, see this and this.

Peak Oil: Truth or Disinformation?

A lot of people who have been critical of the Iraq War and of the official story of 911, have seized upon the Peak Oil theory to explain it all. That theory states that the Powers That Be know that oil production has peaked and that energy prices will surge and the whole power game revolves now around securing oil and natural gas reserves. Mike Ruppert has been the most prominent one flogging this, but all mainstream outlets have also done pieces on this. There have always been a few people who theorize that oil is abiotic in origin, that is, NOT a fossil fuel. That is is created deep within the earth from minerals, and that there may be way more of it than the Powers are letting on. I know very little about geology, so I can't really comment on it, but I would like to quote David McGowan, a proponent of the abiotic theory, on the politics of this:

The fact that 'Peak Oil' is an entirely manufactured construct does not mean that the doomsday scenarios painted by the 'Peak' crowd will therefore not become our new reality. This is not just another scam to further pad the pockets of the oil industry and other financial elites. The stakes are much higher than that. Much higher.

In order to clarify my position on 'Peak Oil,' it would be instructive to briefly review the areas of agreement, and the areas of disagreement, that I have with those who are selling the scam.

The Peakers claim that 'Peak Oil' is the single most important issue that we are facing today. I agree with that assessment (but not because 'Peak Oil' is a valid concept).

The Peakers claim that much of America's military might has been directed in recent years at conquering the key oil and gas producing regions of the world. And that is obviously quite true. Central Asia and Iraq have been seized, Venezuela has suffered through constant meddling by the CIA, the Sudan has been targeted for a future assault, and Saudi Arabia and Iran have been subjected to saber rattling.

But the Peakers also claim that these military ventures have been motivated by America's desire to seize what will soon be the last drops of the world's precious reserves of oil -- and that is entirely untrue.

The Peakers claim that we will very soon be facing a world where chaos reigns supreme -- a world of war, famine and death on a scale unknown in recorded human history. And that does, in fact, appear to be the case. And we're not talking about the distant future here, folks; we're talking about the very near future.

But the Peakers also claim that this global "die off" will be a regrettable, but quite natural, and entirely unavoidable, consequence of the world's oil taps running dry. And that is the really big lie. That is the lie that will very soon be used to rationalize the killing off of hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of the world's people. There are, you see, simply too many people in the world who, by merely being alive, are standing in the way of the aspirations of the global elite.

The people that the 'Peak Oil' pitchmen are fronting for are deadly serious about selling 'Peak Oil' to the masses -- and not just in theoretical terms, as a cynical ploy to raise prices and increase profits. No, it has become clear that the real goal is to actually cut off most of the world's oil supplies under the ruse that the oil simply no longer exists. The desired result is massive social unrest, widespread famine, and endless war. The majority of the world's people will not survive. Those that do will find themselves living under the overtly authoritarian form of rule that will quickly be deemed necessary to restore order. And if you think that we here in America are exempt, you are sadly mistaken.

...Contrary to conventional wisdom, I believe that the Central Asian adventure has been wildly successful. True, the West hasn't reaped the bounty of the region's oil and gas reserves -- but I don't think that was ever the goal. To the contrary, I think the U.S. has done exactly what it set out to do: deny anyone else the opportunity - by force if necessary, and it will become necessary - to exploit the area's resources.

Also contrary to conventional wisdom, I believe that the Iraq adventure has also been successful. Again, the goal was not to steal Iraqi oil; the goal was to shut down or severely limit the flow of Iraqi oil, and that goal has obviously been accomplished. Indeed, some reports have held that American troops (and American mercenaries) are responsible for at least some of the pipeline bombings and other attacks on the
Iraqi oil infrastructure.

For more on Mike Ruppert and his role in the 911 truth movement, see this by Joe Quinn. Both Quinn and McGowan point to Ruppert's proposal to set up a commission of world leaders including, in Ruppert's words,

An immediate convening of political, economic, spiritual and scientific leaders from all nations to address the issue of Peak Oil...This would, scientifically speaking, include immediate steps to arrive at a crash program – agreed to by all nations and in accordance with the highest spiritual and ethical principles – to stop global population growth and to arrive at the best possible and most ethical program of population reduction as a painful choice made by all of humanity. [my emphasis]

Any time anyone proposes such a thing, you know they are, wittingly or unwittingly, pushing the old Rockefeller agenda.