Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

Red Army Faction Blues



What did Peter Green walk into on that infamous trip to Munich where, according to some, he took too much LSD and was never the same again? That’s just what author Ada Wilson wanted to find out.

A coalition government. A widely mistrusted ruling elite. Riots in the streets and heavy-handed police tactics. Welcome to West Berlin, 1967. An island surrounded by a hostile state. A diced and quartered city of Chinese Whispers. With a wall running right through it. Where agent provocateur Peter Urbach is caught in the middle, but ultimately uncertain who’s issuing the orders. And pretty soon just as unsure where his real allegiances lie.

But what does Swinging London care about Berlin in 1967? London’s having a party. London’s conquering the world with its fashion and art, its beautiful people and especially its music. And London groups like Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac are on a mission to bring the urban blues of Black America to new and ever-growing audiences. Another Peter then, on another journey, in its way just as perilous and uncertain.

One day soon their paths will cross. But first there will be chicanery in Chicago, LSD in LA, Voodoo in New Orleans. And bombs in Berlin – where soon everyone will know the names Baader and Meinhof. Drawing heavily on real characters and recorded facts, Red Army Faction Blues brings together two previously unconnected sides to the story of the death of 1960s optimism.



http://redarmyfactionblues.com/

[American Dream]

http://redarmyfactionblues.com/watch/pe ... in-munich/

Peter Green in Munich



Peter Green and members of Fleetwood Mac give their accounts of the infamous LSD party at the Highfisch-Kommune in Munich. Band manager Clifford Davis claims that this was the night that Peter Green and Danny Kirwan became ‘seriously mentally ill’. Peter Green says, ‘I had a good play there, it was great.’

[American Dream]

http://redarmyfactionblues.com/2012/08/ ... ey-owsley/

Augustus Owsley Stanley



A tribute to Augustus Owlsey Stanley who died in a car crash in 2011.

Peter Green tilts back on his stool.

‘What do you know about Owsley?’ Looks at Alwyn, then at me. Turns back. ‘Augustus Owsley Stanley. The Third, to give him his full title. Or the Bear, as they all called him.’

Alwyn shrugs and grins.

‘Less than zero,’ he says.

‘Interesting bloke.’ Peter Green stares at me through the smoke expectantly now, shadows dancing behind him. ‘Soundman for the Grateful Dead at one time.’

‘Ah, of course,’ Alwyn says. ‘Now I’m making a connection.’

‘The visual stuff that you see when you take acid is like noise, Owsley said. Stuff that’s there all the time, but you ignore it, see. It’s filtered out. What did he say, Mister Novak?’

‘The background noise of your visual system,’ I can’t help myself saying. Emboldened, serene. ‘Both in your eye and your brain. Opening up all the portals. Deactivating the filters, that’s what he thought it was all about.’

‘Deactivated mine alright,’ says Peter Green. ‘The guitar used to speak for me, as you know. And I was over at Owsley’s place once, across the bay in San Francisco, with Suzy, on acid of course. Suzy Wong took care of us back then, knew everybody out there. All the heads, the freaks. And of course, we were swimming in it, melting into each other and the furniture. Nobody had a clue what was going on. And there were owls everywhere, pictures and coffee cups, forks and spoons, salt and pepper pots. Owls on the blotting paper. Melting owls in the curtains, on the cupboards, in the carpets, Even in the toilet – you know the flusher thing? Had an owl on the end of it. I remember pulling and it would stretch out of shape, and then standing there for a time. And eventually, it came off in my hand, put it in my pocket, forgot about it. But somehow things stay with you. That’s what I’ve brought here today.’

[American Dream]

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/trip ... s_birthday

[American Dream]

Red Army Faction Blues: Trailer #1





http://redarmyfactionblues.com/2011/11/ ... trailer-1/

[American Dream]

"Dragonfly" is a song written by British musician Danny Kirwan with lyrics taken from a poem by Welsh poet W. H. Davies. Kirwan's former bandmate Peter Green said of "Dragonfly": "The best thing he ever wrote... that should have been a hit."

Fleetwood Mac - Dragonfly



And when the roses are half-bud soft flowers
And lovely as the king of flies has come
It was a fleeting visit, all too brief
In three short minutes, he had been and gone

He rested there upon an apple leaf
A gorgeous opal crown sat on his head
Although the garden is a lovely place
Was it worthy of so fine a guest?

Dragonfly...

[American Dream]

http://redarmyfactionblues.com/2012/01/ ... wilson-qa/

Ada Wilson Q&A
Posted on January 30, 2012 by routepublishing



Ada Wilson answers questions on his novel Red Army Faction Blues.

Q. What was the genesis of Red Army Faction Blues?

Football and rock music are the cultural glue for many people, myself included, but I’d never read a compelling piece of fiction about either, really, and was somewhat at a loss to explain why. Until The Damned United.

Besides being terrific, I found it both shocking and liberating in what it suggested in terms of potential subject matter and how to shine a new light on the immediate past. It’s about football, but at the same time, not at all. It’s about a real person, a well-known celebrity, turned symbol or cipher. Much of modern culture, for a number of reasons, appears to have been closed off to imaginative fiction and I think there is a hunger for alternatives to ‘official’ versions.

I was already corresponding with David Peace a little, and I’d mentioned the story of the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, how the band’s initial disintegration had assumed mythical status – become another symbol really, for the end of 1960s optimism and experimentation. In particular, what the surviving members of Fleetwood Mac in interviews referred to as ‘The Munich Horrorshow’, which they attributed to the start of the sad decline of Peter Green, the band’s original creative force.

I initially tried to make Green the protagonist, but it was hopeless – the known facts forced out any freedom and the clichés flowed!

Q. What was the source of your fascination with Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac?

As a kid I was a big fan of Peter Green and one of the first albums I ever owned was The Pious Bird of Good Omen – the one with the nun holding an albatross on the front. When I started to learn to play guitar it was Green I initially tried to copy. Perhaps because it seemed simple – deceptively so, of course. With hindsight, they were a very effective singles band, while never quite making the classic album they threatened to. But that run of singles – ‘Need Your Love So Bad’, ‘Black Magic Woman’, ‘Albatross’ ‘Man of the World’, ‘Oh Well’ and ‘Green Manalishi’ – is quite staggering in its breadth and originality. And then of course, what happened to the three guitarists is awfully tragic – even as Fleetwood Mac went on to being the best-selling band of the 1970s. The 60s ended when I was ten, so the story was initially skewed through the prism of childhood for me, when the generation above me all seemed to be speaking in magical and exciting codes I had only a very limited understanding of.

Q. How did the connection between Peter Green and the political activity in Berlin open up to you?

I first found a clip in a German celebrity magazine – about antique cars, of all things – in which Rainer Langhans first spoke about meeting Peter Green at Munich Airport, and the guitarist’s visit to the High Fish Commune. The anecdote has subsequently been bandied around internet chat sites. At that point, Langhans was someone I instantly recognised as this media icon from the 1960s, but I can’t say I was that familiar with the whole saga of Kommune 1.

Political action and music were so tightly entwined for a while, and then there was the whole hippy thing of ‘the journey’ – of self exploration and expanded consciousness which sounds rather laughable now. Total freedom – whatever that may be – is what both Kommune 1 and Peter Green thought they were pursuing on their own ‘journeys’. They went about it recklessly, and as we know, it didn’t end so well. The very differing conception of what the 1960s represented to that generation in England and Germany was another thing I was seeking to draw out.



Q. Little is known of Kommune 1 outside of Germany, what can you tell us about them?

K1 was a group of Berlin-based students who came together to explore the idea of living in a different way, inspired by the anti-consumerist doctrines of writers like Marcuse, and also by the Situationists. One of the left-wing theories floating around at the time was that the smallest cell of the state was the nuclear family, and it was this that had to be smashed if history wasn’t to repeat itself. It was very much a reaction to the terrible legacy of their parents’ generation and fascism.

K1 attracted almost instant notoriety for an alleged assassination attempt on the visiting vice-president of the United States – which turned out to have involved custard pies and flour bombs. It became all about political ‘actions’, demonstrations for a time – the most notable being what’s acknowledged as the turning point of the German student movement, when the unarmed Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police officer called Kurras (who much later turned out to be an informer for the East German Stasi).

Satire and provocation though, was what K1 excelled at, particularly Langhans and Fritz Teufel.Their perceived lack of seriousness, however, alienated many, and the commune was eventually expelled from the high-minded German student’s movement, the SDS.

Tensions arose between K1 over the direction it should take, and eventually Langhans came more to the fore and was surrounding himself with beautiful people, most notably the model Uschi Obermaier. The rest of the original communards became ostracised and there was a lot of jealousy, especially after Langhans declared the intention was to make a lot of money by doing very little – being famous for just being famous – a very 21st Century concept, more Simon Cowell than Che Guevara. It worked too, for a while – Langhans and Obermaier became a kind of German John and Yoko.

But the circumstances leading up to their leaving Berlin for Munich – in order to make that mythical meeting with Peter Green a few months later – are incredibly shocking, and a pivotal part of my book, so I’ll say no more here.

Today, Langhans is probably as famous now as he’s ever been, having last year appeared in the German version of I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of Here! – spending a night in a coffin filled with maggots at the grand old age of 71. Nothing much fazes him.

Q. How much research was involved with the book and how did you approach it?

It’s interesting, but I don’t think this book could have been written pre-internet. Some of the channels just weren’t open. The ability to source what’s there in a click, and connect with people who may know other things in two clicks and a sentence. This is of course, a fairly recent method of gathering information.

And my German language skills are rudimentary. I understand much more than I’d be confident to attempt speaking – the typical British paralysis, probably. I can do taxis and hotels, and bond after a pint or two. But with Google Translate, for instance, I can manage much more. Although it’s a different sort of reading – not in a straight line at all – like you’re pulling the key words you don’t quite get out of a sentence and then imposing an order on the sentences. Another very internet type of activity. So the truth you’re going to arrive at will be different to that in the past, but probably no less relevant. The New Currency of Communication.

There’s a wonderful novel by Francis Spufford called Red Plenty. It’s about the economic system in Stalin’s Russia, but don’t let that put you off. It’s not about that, really. It’s about the hopes and aspirations of many very interesting people over the past century. It’s utterly wonderful, and pure fiction in this new way. Maybe the term ‘speculative fiction’ should now be applied to the past, rather than the way it was once intended, about the future? What does that imply?

At the end of that book, Spufford fesses up to being unable to read a word of Russian. So in a way, he was only getting what was available already in translation too. But as a result of the internet, this is much greater, yet only a fraction of what could be researched in libraries, with time and patience. And financial resources. I probably went a bit further, in razoring apart entire German page texts that I couldn’t get via the internet and feeding them through the scanner and then into Google Translate. The research got a bit like panning for gold, I guess.

Meeting Rainer Langhans and Christa Ritter, who’s the archivist for all the Kommune 1 stuff, was equally illuminating, and as frustrating in a different way. Their versions were what I already had. They couldn’t tell me about the texture of a table, the colour of a cigarette packet, the smell of a street scene in 1967. That was down to imagination. It made me realise there wasn’t even any point in approaching anybody to do with Fleetwood Mac, that story being even more layered in the retelling – and buffered by an entire industry propagating the ‘official’ version.

If the past is, as has been said, ‘another country’, then it’s already over-populated with ‘official’ guides. The interest, as always, is in ducking down the side lanes, yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

Q. The narrator of Red Army Faction Blues, Peter Urbach, was an agent provocateur who infiltrated Kommune 1. What can you tell us about him?

He’s real, just like Brian Clough. My symbol and cipher.

He came from Poland, apparently, and he didn’t fit in from the start, which just goes to show how pure the intentions were, how trusting and idealistic these people were, at the start. He was married with kids – the epitome of that nuclear family K1 was so opposed to. And very working class, with a job – or at least a cover – on the East German-run railway service that ran through West Berlin at the time. But the rich, well-educated members of K1 were in thrall to a genuine prole. Especially such a charismatic one, who could make things happen.

It’s quite curious – the more I researched and got my sequence of events straight, the more Peter Urbach kept pushing himself forward. He was everywhere: taking care of practical things and chivvying along the subversion at Kommune 1; putting the earliest bombs in the backpack of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke; driving Fritz Teufel and Bommi Baumann around Berlin with a van full of molotov cocktails, in search of the villa of newspaper magnate Springer; turning up outside the intellectual Republican Club with a case full of grenades. Later, shooting up Dieter Kunzelmann and many more with cheap heroin and having Andy Baader and the disgraced lawyer Horst Mahler – the key figures in the development of what quickly became the demented and dangerous Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Gang – dig up cemetery plots in a vain search for a cache of WW2 pistols. To name but a few of his wheezes.

And then, all of a sudden he turns up as a key prosecution witness for the West German government in the first Red Army Faction trial, of Horst Mahler alone, in 1971. But his testimony is rubbished, and he subsequently disappears forever.

I like to think that much of that spirit of the times – Imagination is seizing power – rubbed off tremendously on him too. He wouldn’t have done what he did otherwise.

Wherever he might be.

It’s strange too, that as I was finalising this book, the stories of Mark Kennedy and other police officers who’d been put under deep cover to infiltrate left-wing protest groups in the UK were unravelling. What on earth could have been the reasoning there?

Q. What lessons can the young people of today draw from the book?

I think what might be striking to some younger readers is the fact that among the intelligentsia of West Berlin and elsewhere there was already so much anti-capitalist sentiment and abhorrence of materialism. This was almost fifty years ago, and it hadn’t even started! There was no McDonald’s or anything resembling it, the brands had yet to take any kind of hold, television and even central heating had yet to become common. It was only a few years after rationing in Britain and most of Berlin was still a bombsite. Yet there was this resistance; a recognition of the shallow rewards being offered. Was it Luddite? Hardly.

There was fierce opposition to the manipulation and excesses of the press too, and particularly newspaper baron Springer. Multiply those manipulations and excesses by a million and you’re somewhere near to where we are now.

Most important of all though, is the feeling of connectivity and the potential for positive change that existed. Kommune 1 and the greater student movement in Berlin and West Germany knew that what they were being sold wasn’t good enough. They quickly became adept at reading between the lines, and long before the internet, were opening up channels to counter the attempts of the powerful to exercise even tighter control over the many.

The daring and originality of much what happened back then should be inspiring. But everyone knows much more now – and not just those seeking change, but the small minority unwilling to share too.

They really have the power to make the world fantastic, for everyone, without giving up very much at all. People like Bill Gates have to be lauded for recognising this. I really wish the rest would consider it soon, before it ends in tears again.

[American Dream]

http://redarmyfactionblues.com/2012/06/ ... gone-cold/

Adrenalin Junkie: ‘The Trail Has Gone Cold’
Posted on June 19, 2012 by routepublishing



When Ada Wilson wrote Red Army Faction Blues, there were many things he knew about his protagonist Peter Urbach and many things he had to speculate on. It turns out he wasn’t that far off. Since Peter Urbach’s death in May 2011 – just after Ada had finished writing the book – more details about the life of this Polish undercover policeman have been revealed. Here, Ada shares some of the things he’s learnt.

In Red Army Faction Blues, I put him in Miami, which wasn’t too far off the mark in the end. Some thought South America, but it seemed logical that the US would be looking after him.

It turns out he’d been in California all these years, though it’s not certain for how many of them under his own name. The obituary that appeared on the web though, extracted from the Santa Maria Times, boldly named him Peter Urbach once more.

He’d worked for many years in the plumbing and pipefitting business over in the States, and helped build, among other things, the Diablo nuclear power plant.

His first wife didn’t last long in the USA, returning to Germany without her children back in the 70s. By the time of his death, he’d twice remarried and his third wife knew nothing about his time in Berlin. In the novel, I gave him a son and a daughter, but in reality he had two sons – Thomas and Martin – by the time he left Germany.

Günter Langer could have corrected that detail and is well qualified to talk about the key events in Germany which form the setting for Red Army Faction Blues. He was close by on 2nd June 1967, when fellow-student Benno Ohnesorg was assassinated in Berlin.

Later he founded the International News and Research Institute with Rudi Dutschke, and after Dutschke’s shooting, lived for a time in the Wieland Community and drifted with the Wandering Hash Rebels, a number of whom would go on to become the Movement 2 June.

He was the editor of the German underground magazine Agit883 which served as the mouthpiece for all of the underground groups. Today, he also lives in the USA, but for many years taught in Berlin.

He not only knew Peter Urbach, in those turbulent times in the late 1960s, but counted him both as a friend and ‘comrade’. Until 1971 when Urbach was revealed as an agent provocateur, a trained undercover police officer, who saw himself as boldly entering ‘the lion’s den’ in the frontline defence against Communism.

Not long after this, Gudrun Ensslin – the leader of the Red Army Faction who was eventually to die in Stammheim prison in 1977 along with Ulrike Meinhoff and Andreas Baader – would give Günter a photo of Urbach and ask him to print it in Agit883, under the slogan ‘Traitor!’, while implying he was ripe for assassination.

Langer demurred, although Agit883 was hardly reticent in printing inflammatory material – some of which would certainly see him behind bars were it to be published today.

‘In spite of his treachery, I wasn’t relieved to hear of Peter Urbach’s death,’ he says. ‘On the contrary, I always hoped to one day be able to take him to task for what he did. Even forty years later, all of the surviving RAF members who have deaths on their consciences are now free and can talk about their actions.’

According to his son, Urbach ‘smoked like a factory’ and drank heavily, ending up on a kidney dialysis machine and succumbing finally to renal failure.



Günter Langer, however, has put together a very detailed account of all the known facts about Peter Urbach and his activities in Berlin on the SDS website: http://www.isioma.net/sds120323.html

It’s in German, so for English speakers I’ll outline the key points here.

Peter Urbach is reported to have lost his parents in Poznan – a Polish city doomed too often by the tug and pull of expansionist national policies by surrounding empires – at the end of World War 2. He spent his childhood in a war orphanage in Berlin with his older brother Hartmut. There are many references to him later using these formative experiences to win friends and inspire trust.

He was a good police officer, it’s reported, and back then, a talented athlete – there was even talk of him making West Germany’s Olympic team.

But he set his sights on bigger kicks. He was, says Langer, an ‘adrenaline junkie’.

The first time the two met was at Kommune 1’s factory on Stephan Street in Berlin where Urbach’s practical skills – especially in pipelaying – proved pretty useful to the friends he’d recently made.

Later at the SDS headquarters at 140 Ku’Damm, he would show Langer a gun and ask if he wanted one.

‘I was pretty confused and declined. He even invited me to his home at that time, where I met his wife and kids.’

According to Reinhard Mohr, journalist for the newspaper Der Spiegel, ‘Peter Urbach worked for practically everyone. For the West German secret service, the Stasi and for Kommune 1.’

It’s a compelling idea, and certainly made him an attractive candidate as the protagonist of my novel.

Günter Langer, however, thinks this unlikely, laying the orders for his actions squarely with Berlin’s mayor of the time, Kurt Neubauer, and his State Office for Constitutional Protection (LfV). At the same time, he also mentions the continued presence in Berlin of many remaining members of the dissolved US agency, the CIC.

In the immediate post-war period, the CIC operated in the occupied countries, particularly Japan, Austria and Germany, countering the black market, and searching for and arresting notable members of the previous regime.

The CIC was also involved in the Alsos, Paperclip and TICOM operations, searching for German personnel and research in atomic weapons, rockets and cryptography. Recruits after World War 2 included Klaus Barbie, ‘the Butcher of Lyon’, a former Gestapo member and war criminal.



At the time he met the students of Kommune 1, Urbach told them he’d been sacked for stealing from his job on the Berlin S-Bahn – a service perversely controlled by East Germany through all of its West Berlin route stops during the city’s years of division. Langer believes Urbach may have been deliberately planted in that job in order to perform small acts of sabotage and so embarrass the East German regime.

It earned him his nickname ‘S-Bahn Peter’ and he went on to have a hand in a number of the key events in the history of the German counter culture of the late 1960s.

One was certainly the distribution of Molotov cocktails outside the offices of press baron Springer on the night Rudi Dutschke was shot, leading to the first real night of violent protest.

A second was the parking of a truck full of stones along the route of a demonstration in November 1968 which resulted in the ‘Battle of Tegeler Weg’, in which for the first time, the demonstrators gained the upper hand, with 130 police officers injured.

By February 1969, Urbach was asking many of the leading student groups to hide bombs for him – the existence of which gave the authorities grounds to conduct extensive house searches and led to a number of arrests.

‘The fact remains that the authorities were responsible for the original distribution of these devices,’ says Langer, while pointing out that they couldn’t really be classed as ‘explosives’ as such at all, with little more potential impact than Molotov cocktails.

One of these devices, however, would end up being planted in the Jewish Community Centre in Berlin on the anniversary of Crystal Night. A very significant date, 9th November 1969.

By that time, though, Langer says Urbach had lost all contact with the perpetrators.

In the end, he adds, Urbach’s actions were a contributing factor to the criminalisation of the Left in Berlin at that time, and also to the radicalisation of some of the urban guerrillas and their descent into madness.

The point of regular fiction is to bring characters to life, and – if they capture the general imagination – render them immortal. It’s strange to have done virtually the opposite with ‘Red Army Faction Blues’ – fictionalise a real person only to obscure the real facts, which it appears anyway, will now never be known.

Urbach apparently died on 3rd May 2011, although the obituary didn’t surface until after the novel was finally published.

Somehow for me, it feels like a personal slight. At the back of my mind – once I’d fixated on him – I had this idea that the book would, one way or another, get to him, and that he’d emerge from his long exile to set the story straight.

Now, of course, that won’t happen. This is how history is unwritten, then.

‘Kurt Neubauer is now ninety years old and demented,’ Langer concludes. ‘His former intelligence chief has disappeared and the files kept on Urbach have most likely been disposed of. The trail has gone cold.’

Ada Wilson, June 2012

[American Dream]

http://www.gerhard-wisnewski.de/Bucher/ ... ORISM.html

ENGLISH: THE PHANTOM OF TERRORISM
Geschrieben von Gerhard Wisnewski
Wednesday, 21. September 2005

WHO HIDES BEHIND THE LABEL "RED ARMY FACTION"?

Since more than twenty years the Federal Republic of Germany has graduously developed from a constitutional state to a security state. Fundamental rights of the accused and the defense have been massively restricted, people intimidated and harassed merely for having made use of their civil liberties, secret services and police have set up a system of surveillance and control barely limited by legal barriers. Undercover agents snoop on harmless citizens and carry out terrorist crimes with the consent of government. Innocent persons disappear behind prison bars for years. All these developments are publicly justified by the need to combat terrorism, and in particular, the "Red Army Faction "(RAF) initiated by the Baader-Meinhof group in the late 60ies.

Yet, not one of the perpetrators numerous attacks and murders imputed to the "RAF" since 1981 has been identified, let be arrested or put to trial. The impressing arsenal of anti-terrorist laws, the legal, technical and financial rearmement of criminal investigation authorities, secret services and police has proven totally ineffective in tracking the terrorists, but they are posing a growing threat to constitutional democracy in the EC's most powerful member state.

Who stands behind the mysterious crimes carried out under the mysterious label "RAF"? Is it really an ultra-leftist revolutionary group?

In a recently published book the three German authors an TV-journalists Gerhard Wisnewski, Wolfgang Landgraeber and Ekkehard Sieker, make a clean sweep of the longstanding and systematical attempts by the German security apparatus to hold the spectre of the "RAF" alive.

The authors are convincing when revealing the blatant inefficiency of official investigations, bizarre flaws of the vaste security structures set up for the protection of prominent victims and systematic deception of the public by government bodies and media trying to keep the "RAF"- phantom alive. The book becomes more speculative, when trying to find an answer to the crucial question of "cui bono?" (in whom's interest?). Yet, it is a must for any one trying to understand the effect of terrorism on Western states.


Three "generations" of one and the same terrorist organisation?
The book essentially focuses on the so called "third generation" of the "RAF". The authors makeout fundamental differences in the behaviour and the political background of this last generation as compared with its predecessors. While the "first generation", the so called Baader-Meinhof-group, was to some extent rooted in the radical German protest movement of the 60ies, already the "second generation" operating in the late 70ies and early 80ies rapidly became politically isolated. As for the "third generation", they are quite generally viewed as professional provocateurs by the German left as a whole.

Indeed, the opposition movement in Germany has changed since the 60ies marked by a leftist culture of universalist and intellectual criticism of capitalism and US-imperialism and some readiness to sympathise with "revolutionary" violence.

Since the beginning of the 80ies, the German left concentrated on basically non-violent "single-issue" movements such as those against the building of a new runway at the Francfurt airport, the stationing of Pershing II-missiles on German soil, nuclear power plants, the Gulf war, or the dismantling of Eastern German economy after the unification. All these movements were fairly non-ideological, aiming rather at wide support among average people than at proning insurrection.This was no longer a promising political recruiting field for the "revolutionary" violence of the "RAF".

The authors note a further difference between the various generations of the "RAF". From its very beginning, the "first generation" (Baader-Meinhof) was thoroughly infiltrated by undercover agents, its members permanently observed, hunted and tracked. A massive wave of arrests launched just three weeks after the first bomb attack of the group put an end to its activity. The self-taught "guerilla-fighters" had no chance even against the comparatively modest legal and police apparatus of the 6oies and early 70ies.

The same is true with regard to the "second generation", with one troubling difference however. Two of its leading figures, Christian Klar and Adelheid Schultz, twice miraculously escaped arrest (1977, 1978) in spite of uninterrupted close observation by intelligence. A frustrated Horst Herold, then head of the BKA (Federal office of criminal investigation) later made the following cryptical but noteworthy comment: "In this case one has allowed - and this with the participation of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Minister Baum -to withhold from the police the terrorists Klar and Schulz, whom the Verfassungsschutz [the FRG's internal secret service] of Hamburg had clearly tracked (...)After that, the secret service and the politicians make business with such things... all this is just intolerable."

Christian Klar was finally arrested in 1982. The event marked the end of the "second generation". Most of the remaining members of the group gave up terrorist activities and found sanctuary in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), where they returned to normal civilian life until their arrest in 1990, after the downfall of the Honecker-regime. Only a small group of seven alleged members of the "second generation" seemed to have literally vanished from the ground. None of them was ever seen or heard of again.


No "Stasi-RAF connection"
In a particular chapter, the authors convincingly refute allegations widely spread by Western media of a "RAF-Stasi (GDR-secret service) connection" responsible for the terrorist attacks of the "third generation". They even assert that the GDR's decisionto grant sanctuary to defecting "RAF"-Guerillas was secretly negociated between high-ranking politicians of the West German government and the central committee of the GDR's ruling communist party. At that time, the authors say, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was eager to get rid of the politically sensitive issue of terrorism.

When asked about such a secret agreement, the BKA sent the following statement to the authors: "There are no findings in hand of the BKA defeating arrangements between FRG and GDR politicians pertaining to "RAF" defectors in the GDR." The authors also bring evidence that the BKA knew that RAF-defectors were living in the GDR as early as 1985 and quote a pro memoria of the Interior Ministry of the FRG from 1991, according to which "there is no sufficient evidence for a collaboration between the [GDR] Ministry for State Security and the"RAF" ". All this did not prevent German mass media from further cultivating the legend of the "RAF-killers" trained and controled by the "diabolic" Stasi.


"We bomb, hence we exist!": the faceless professionals of the "third generation"
1985 marked the beginning of a new macabre wave of particularly spectacular and cold-blooded murders and bomb attacks against some of the most high ranking and best protected personalities of the country, among whom Ernst Zimmermann, head of the German armement corporation MTU (1985), Karl Heinz Beckurts (member of the board of Siemens (1986), Alfred Herrhausen, speaker of the board of Deutsche Bank (1989) and Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, chief of the "Treuhand-Anstalt", the public trust-company in charge of privatisation, respectively liquidation of the former East German public sector(1991).

The common characteristic of all these murders: They are carried out by professionals who often appear to have detailed insider knowledge not only of the localities and the victims' habits, but also of the loopholes in the security disposals.

As the authors' thorough investigations and detailed reconstructions, in particular of the Herrhausen and Rohwedder cases, show, they prepare their deeds with uncanny sureness, sometimes during months, and right under the nose of some of Europe's best equipped and trained anti-terrorist forces (the German MEK and SEK policeunits). They almost demonstratively leave traces on the places of their crimes - letters of confession with the "RAF"'s insignia, star and mp,a fieldglass, neatly assembled cartridge cases, detonators -, but thesetraces neither ever lead to a perpetrator, nor do they establish the authenticity of the messages of confession apparently linking the "RAF" to the crimes.

None of the "vanished" members of the "second generation" can be linked to the crimes. While Andreas Baader and his friends always tried to ideologically justify their deeds and left no doubt about the authenticity of their letters of confession, e.g. by applying finger print stamps, the alleged "third generation" is a pure phantom, a terror squad without members. As opposed to the preceding RAF-generations there are no traces of any logistical structures and preparations necessary for carrying out attacks of such a scale: no appartments serving as hiding places, no weapon or ammunition stocks, no bank robberies...nothing.


The total failure of Germany's internal security apparatus
In 1989 the then chief of the BKA, Kurt Rebmann dryly admits that there is no factual evidence linking the "RAF" to any of the murders occurred since 1985.

Nonetheless, the existence of a leftist terrorgroup by the name of "RAF" springing from the original Baader-Meinhof group is never questioned. The legend of the leftist killers of the "third generation" is, in contary, systematically cultivated by government agencies and the press.

Based on a troubling number of well researched cases the authors claim that the BKA and other judicial and governmental bodies do not hesitate to use means ranging from interference in legal procedures, biased expertises to outright blackmailing of witnesses and fake "terror attacks" carried out by... the state's anti-terrorist units in cooperation with the internal secret service - all this in order to "prove" the existence of the "third generation" of left wing terrorists.


The "letters of confession"
The BKA has spent a lot of time and money in deceiving the public on the alleged authenticity of letters of confession and other messages regarding the murders.

But based on the findings of some of Germany's most respected experts of crime technology, graphology and linguistics, the authors come to the conclusion, that the BKA's assertions regarding the authenticity of the texts concerned are unscientifical and biased. In a rare access of honesty the BKA itself admitted that the thermoprinter used for the letter of self-accusation in the Herrhausen case lacks any particular characteristics permitting its identification. Regularly confronted with such lack of usefull evidence, a regrettable consequence of modern printing technology, the BKA developed "TEXTOR", a computerised text matching program. By screen-matching all existing texts imputed to the RAF it was hoped to detect the "individual" stile (orthographic, grammatical, linguistic particularities) of a whole group. Writings of a number of individuals suspected to be sympathisers of the RAF were screened for ressemblances with the computerised "RAF-stile". One suspect, Andreas S. was held on remand for two and a half years, because of his habit to write the German abbreviation z.B. [in English: i.e.] with small letters, a current mistake in alleged RAF texts. The TEXTOR-expert's credibility only broke down, when critical colleagues discovered the criminal z.b.in one of his own writings. The court later found that many of the alleged letters of confession had simply been copied and compounded from old pressarticles and leaflets from various sources. This was, for the time being, the end of TEXTOR and the legend of an anonymous terror squad's "personal handwriting".

Since then, only one thing is beyond doubt: anybody could easily have fabricated the written confessions and "RAF" insignia.


The "repenter" Siegfried Nonne
The case of Siegfried Nonne is one of the spectacular attempts of German state bodies to forge evidence in view of their ever more obvious lack of success in tracking the terrorists.

In January 1992 the BKA organised a press conference with a scoop: A repenter turned statewitness had admitted that he had prepared the murder of Alfred Herrhausen together with two of the vanished members of the "RAF"'s second generation.A link between the crimes of the 80ies and known members of the "RAF" finally seemed established.

The "repenter", Siegfried Nonne, was a 35 year old drug addict with a long psychiatrical record and the Verfassungsschutz (VS) later admitted that he had been an under cover agent in the early 80ies. But this did not prevent the media from warming up the old "RAF" legend and once again speculating on Stasi involvment.

But in June 1992, Nonne, appearing in a TV-program, testified to the authors, that since November 1990 he had been bribed and blackmailed with threats to his life into his "confession" by high officials of the VS (the stunning story is told in detail in a long chapter of the book).


The "Celle hole"
In 1978 a bomb explosion tore a hole in the in the prison of Celle, a town in Nieder-Sachsen. The attack was immediately presented as a terrorist attack aiming at the liberation of "RAF"-convicts detained in the prison. As a result, the prisoners rights were massively restricted and the bombing served as a justification for more pro-active policing.

The truth about the bombing came to light eight years later, in 1986. It had been planned and carried out by the VS in cooperation with GSG-9, a German anti-terrorist unit created with the support of the British SAS.

None of the high officials involved was ever sanctioned. In contrary: The then chief of the VS of Nieder-Sachsen was named vice-president of the federal VS and Gerhard Boeden, then vice-president of the BKA, is now head of the federal VS.

As Jürgen Trittin, now a minister in the Land of Niedersachsen remarked, one "does not any longer know which attacks must be answered for by the state and which by the terrorists."

The book contains further troubling evidence for state involvment in terrorist crimes, as for instance the case of a VS-undercover agent, Peter Schmücker, mysteriously murdered in a Berlin park in 1974. The case was finally dropped in 1990, after years of prison on remand for the official suspects, when the murder weapon was found in a cellar of the Berlin VS.


Cui bono?
Authorities periodically come out with the assertion that "RAF"-detainees command the terror squads from inside their high security prison cells. This is a good pretext for further restricting the rights of the detainees and their lawyers, each time a new attack has occurs, and for graduously extending police observation and infiltration to ever larger groups of persons suspected to form the"social environment" of the terrorists, but even the president of the German association of penitentiary directors insists that there is not the slightest evidence for any functioning command structure among the "RAF" detainees.

The political effect of the "third generation's" attacks is clear: The head of Deutsche Bank,Herrhausen, is murdered at a time of growing criticism of the role of the banking world in the impoverishment of developing countries, a machine gun attack against the American embassy in Bonn is carried out at the height of non-violent mass protests in Germany against the USA's role in the Gulfwar, Mr. Rohwedder, the chief of the "Treuhand" is shot dead only weeks before a planned mass rally of union members in Berlin against the brutal dismantling of East German economy by the "Treuhand". In all cases the effect is the same: The "acts of solidarity" of the "RAF" with popular mass movements deprives the latter in of their credibility and leads to the criminalisation of legitimate poitical opposition.

In several chapters the authors investigate the backgrounds and roles of some of the prominent victims. Alfred Herrhausen, for instance, is presented as the man who attempted to make the Deutsche Bank a "global player" in direct rivalry with mostly American financial institutes and as a strong advocate of cancelling the debts of Third World countries. Both policies are resented as a threat by US bankers. As for Rohwedder, the chief of the "Treuhand", he was facing growing criticism from neo-liberal financial circles in and outside Germany for placing social considerations before ever to hasty privatisations leading to mass unemployment. After Herrhausen's death, Deutsche Bank gives up its ambitions as a "global player", the new chief of the "Treuhand" proceeds with the ruthless liquidation of East German enterprises.

In other words, the acts of the "third generation" inflict heavy dammage to precisely the aims they pretend to serve: Improved conditions for the "RAF"-detainees, the preservation of civil liberties, peace in the Gulf region, Third World solidarity, employment in East Germany...

But then, if the terror attacks are not in the interest of popular opposition, in whom do they serve? Why were economical and politic leaders of Germany's economy killed and by whom?


"RAF" in Germany, Brigaterosse in Italy, "17 November" in Greece: A secret service plot?
In spite of years of terrorist hunt carried out by an ever more sophisticated security apparatus, nothing is known about the true authors of the attacks of the last decade and, as the magazine of the Germany's largest workers union, IG Metall, puts it: "Nobody has publicly raised the question, if really all traces are being investigated or perhaps only the obviously wrong ones, if we are really dealing with a totally unknown "RAF"-generation or perhaps rather with a quite known one, made up of international intelligence circles, if actually Zimmermann, Beckurts, Herrhausen and Rohwedder did not have ennemies outside the left, for instance inside the system of big money at home and abroad."

To investigate these "other traces" is precisely what the authors undertake in large parts of their book. Their findings are contained in interesting chapters on the policies and methods of secret services as the CIA, stunning cases of collusion between "anti-terror" units, secret services on the one hand, and the "RAF's" brother groups, the Red Brigades in Italy and the "movement of the 17thNovember" in Greece, counter-insurgency operations and secret combat structures as the NATO's "Gladio". All this is based on extensive and meticulous investigation.

Yet, the book can but fall short from producing evidence for what appears to be a strong suspicion of the authors, that the murders of Zimmermann, Rohwedder and Herrhausen, just as those of John F. Kennedy, Enrico Mattei and Olof Palme were planned and carried out with strong involvment of Western secret service networks.

The rare reviews of the book in the German press have derisively focused on this "plot theory"of the authors, thus escaping the more thornful task of commenting the authors' really crucial and well-established findings regarding the notorious inefficiency and sometimes criminal behaviour of the German security apparatus and their bitter remarks on the setting up of a control state.

"Yet, the authors bitterly note, in the presence of medecine which obviously does not have any effect, the only thing that comes in their [politicians and security experts] minds is to prescribe more of it."

"The intimidation of the population with "criminal investigations", the maintenance of a gigantic security and legal apparatus and, finally, the unrestricted spying on critical citizens, with an unidientified terror squad named "RAF" a sa pretext, are proceedings the citizens of this country should never accept."

Nicholas Busch


Das RAF-Phantom - Wozu Politik und Wirtschaft Terroristen brauchen, by Gerhard Wisnewski, Wolfgang Landgraeber, Ekkehard Sieker, December 1992, publisher: Knaur, Munich (ISBN3-426-80010-1), 464 p., in German.

[American Dream]

(Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below We're All Going To Go

[American Dream]

The Making of a Modern-Day Zen Master With Jun Po Denis Kelly

(I won't link to the publisher because I believe them to be a destructive cult...)

I went to California out of frustration. I certainly couldn’t find any help in the 1950s and ’60s in northern Wisconsin. So I went to the West Coast and discovered that there was this whole other universe, a whole other way of being and looking at things. I got into a relationship with a woman who introduced me to mescaline, and I began to have these extraordinary subtle experiences—vivid hallucinations, that whole classic experience of the subtle realm. When I looked through those eyes at the world, I could not believe America. I could not believe how people behaved or how they understood the nature of their emotional body or intentions. I went on to experiment with other compounds like ayahuasca and dimethyltryptamine [DMT], but it wasn’t until I encountered LSD in San Francisco that I finally penetrated back into that causal state again and slowly began to understand and realign for myself that experience I’d had when I was a child.

I was in my early twenties at the time. 1965. The kids were younger than I was; they were all teenagers, it seemed. Eventually, I got invited within the psychedelic community in San Francisco to consider getting involved in manufacturing LSD, and I thought of it as a vehicle for bringing deep and profound insight to our culture, so I agreed. I became the head of a “family”—an extended community in the psychedelic world—that produced a product called Clear Light, and then later Windowpane. There were twenty-eight people spread out around the world, mostly in the United States, and we made around thirty million doses over ten years. We gave away large, large quantities at concerts. This was very common during that time, with the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin and the Airplane. We’d go to the parties, the big concerts, which were the gatherings of the tribes, you know, the psychedelic music fairs, and the different families would come and give their LSD away.

I was the one who built up our distribution network. I hung out with the Grateful Dead. Took a few drum lessons with Bill Kreutzmann, as a matter of fact. I had a backstage pass, meaning I’d just walk in and out of the place. We called ourselves the Order of the Golden Toad. I melted down a seventeenth-century French Roman Catholic chalice and had it cast into golden frogs. We’d have a ritual initiation after you were with the family for a while, and everyone got a golden frog. So we all wore these frogs on chains. That was our symbol. I still have it on a necklace that I wear occasionally...

...By 1970, my face had become known, and I had to go underground. For the next ten years, I was actively being sought by the Drug Enforcement Administration, with a fifty thousand dollar cash reward for information leading to my arrest. So I disappeared into the forests of Oregon. My partner took over the distribution network, and I joined my other partner in the lab in actually synthesizing LSD.

I remember having several arguments around the issue of purity with Owsley Stanley—the Bear. We didn’t want anyone to adulterate our LSD; it had to be 250 micrograms of 100 percent “D-normal” so that you could have a nondual experience. It had to be perfectly dry and absolutely pure, and we were quite dedicated to that. To control the purity, we’d cast it in a thin layer of gelatin. Then we’d cut it into tiny one-tenth-of-an-inch squares that you could look right through, which is why it came to be known as Windowpane. So you could no longer adulterate the product. But now it would be subject to light, and LSD will equilibrate when light hits it. It flips from the D-normal to the “isomer,” and that makes LSD speedy. This was the argument I had with Owsley. He felt strongly about not subjecting it to light, and I was more interested in preventing people from polluting the product. Who leaves their LSD lying around in the sun anyway?

During that time, I also traveled around the country a lot. I went off to various spiritual retreat centers for training. I went to India and studied Ashtanga yoga with Pattabhi Jois a few times, and eventually did my teacher training at the Iyengar Institute in San Francisco. I studied Tibetan Buddhism with Trungpa Rinpoche and the Karmapa, but it was way too baroque for me. It’s like the Roman Catholicism of Buddhism, and there seemed to be no exit strategy. I saw how people were just helplessly bound toabhisheka [devotional practices and rituals] and this whole idea of the guru–chela [student] relationship. It never ends in that system. You’d have to live ten lifetimes sequentially to get through it all. So I always stayed on the periphery. I did a few retreats, cooked a few Japanese meals for Trungpa and the Karmapa, but eventually I had to return to my Zen roots...

... To clean up my past, I eventually spent ten and a half months in federal prison in 1981...

[American Dream]

A Book Review of David Black's Acid: A New Secret History of LSD

Cue the spooks

That the security services regarded LSD as an issue of 'national security' was confirmed when Lee began to follow leads on Ron Stark and discovered that the security services had been on the trail before him. When Lee went to see the security services about the loan of some high-tech surveillance equipment, he briefed them on 'the suspected international level of LSD trafficking and, more particularly, the probable involvement of terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof and the Angry Brigade'. Lee had noticed that the network he was investigating had 'a cell-like structure similar to that used by terrorist groups'. Lee was referring to the system of pre-arranged meetings places and dead letter-box drops in tins buried under trees to deliver the LSD to the distributors and collect payment.(16)

Lee had begun to suspect terrorist connections when, during surveillance of the Let-It-Be Commune in Wiltshire, a car used by a dealer suspected of working for the LSD network turned out to have been 'linked' in some (unspecified) way to the West German Red Army faction. A check on an associate of the distribution network in Wales showed him to be 'an associate of the Angry Brigade'. Although none of those arrested in Operation Julie were charged with political offences, the supposed 'terrorist connection' did emerge in the pre-trial press coverage. The Daily Mirror ran a piece on how Kemp and his colleagues were 'allegedly' preparing to put LSD into the water supply.(17) Documents from police files on the defendants' alleged political views were also circulated to the media. Richard Kemp, for example, was described as a 'left-wing revolutionary ... his motive for suspected acid activity: a catalyst of British revolution by youth brought on by the use of LSD'. Kemp told the police that he had supported festivals such as Windsor and Glastonbury and had given money to Release, the drugs legal help-line, and had supported 'Head politics' (but refused to name which groups).(18)

In fact the only drug dealers of an significance during this period with terrorist 'connections' of whom we know were Howard Marks - through the maverick Irish 'republican' Jim McCann - and Ron Stark. According to Tendler and May's book on the BEL, FBI reports passed on to the DEA in California and to the British police 'only showed what Stark was not, not what he actually was'. Inspector Lee's informant, 'Nancy', 'strongly suspected that Stark was involved with the CIA and had friends in the American Embassy'.(19)

In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks' name and address had turned up in the address book of arrested IRA volunteer, Dutch Doherty. (The address had been passed onto Doherty by McCann). MI6 did not appear to realise that the IRA had rejected McCann's efforts to involve them in drugs and that he was using his contacts with republican activists to boost his credibility as a smuggler.(20) Macmillan's scheme went awry when Marks decided to let McCann in on the secret of his 'deal' with MI6. (MI6's admitted involvement later sank the prosecutions of both men.) When the police learned of Marks' operation after his disappearance in 1974, they suspected that until 1973 he had been dealing with the BEL, and from then on with its remnants.

Ron Stark was not far from Marks' and McCann's scene. In 1971 McCann had taken two American journalists from the London-based 'head' magazine, Frendz, to Belfast, and, while showing them round, tried to fire-bomb Queens University and got them all arrested and charged. It was one of the Americans, Alan Marcuson, who subsequently put McCann in touch with Marks through another old Oxford friend, Graham Plinston.(21) In London, Stark, who was sniffing around radical circles, contacted the solicitor representing the American pair. He expressed some interest in McCann and promised financial support, which never came to anything.(22) Stark was thus poking his nose into the Marks-McCann operation nearly two years before MI6's Macmillan recruited Howard Marks.


The questions asked but not answered

Stark was in prison in Italy in 1977 when Macmillan was posted to the British Embassy in Rome. Macmillan would have been in an ideal position at the MI6 station there to help Lee obtain the documents seized by the Italian police when they arrested Stark in 1975.(23) But the papers didn't arrive until a year after Lee made the request, by which time his investigation was being wound up. Stark's papers included formulas for the synthesis of LSD and THC, some of which were identical to Kemp's; documents on the BEL's tartrate dealings in England; letters to Stark at his laboratory in Belgium from Charles Adams, an 'economic counsellor' at the American embassy in London; and draft letters from Stark to Wendy Hansen, American vice-counsel in Florence which discussed the possibility of a coup in Italy (for which, he said, conditions, were not yet ripe).(24)

This raises this question: if Stark, the catalyst of the British LSD explosion, was an American asset, would his agency have allowed him to break the law and endanger the national security of America's most senior partner in NATO? The answer might be 'yes' if the agency had a joint covert operation with their British counterparts - say in the area of 'counter-terrorism' - which was important enough to justify the risks. Stark was in prison in Italy from 1975-79 following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. But he rubbed shoulders in prison with leading members of the Red Brigades, while maintaining contact with secret intelligence agencies on the outside. He is suspected by some of involvement in the Moro kidnapping.

In 1979 Stark appealed against his 14 year sentence. According to the judge who granted him bail and thus allowed him to flee Italy, 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' suggested 'that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services' and had 'entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organisations operating in that area and gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups' - a statement which raises as many questions as it answers.

http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2005/12/a ... iew-o.html

[American Dream]

ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

Chapter 10: What A Field Day For The Heat

On September 12, 1970, Leary slipped across the prison yard while most of the inmates were eating dinner. To scale the wall he had to climb a tree without being noticed. That was relatively easy. He removed his sneakers and padded barefoot along the roof, his silhouette exposed against an overcast sky. Extending from the other side of the roof was a thin steel wire -- his path to freedom. Quickly he donned a pair of handball gloves and grabbed the cable, kicking his legs up like a monkey. He could see the car lights on the highway as he pulled himself hand over hand, bouncing and wrenching with each heave, until exhaustion set in. Leary's body ached and perspired as he dangled precariously halfway across the highwire, unsure if he had the strength to continue. After pausing to catch his breath, he mustered every ounce of inner reserve and made it to a utility pole on the other side of the fence. Leary slid down the splintery wood, scrambled toward the road, and waited anxiously at a pre-designated spot.

A few minutes later a pickup truck signaled and pulled over. A woman called out the password, "Nino." Leary answered "Kelly" and jumped into the car, overjoyed to be in the company of two young strangers who had come to rescue him. As the vehicle sped away, they handed Leary ID papers for a "Mr. William McNellis." The acid fugitive changed into another set of clothes. His old gear was dumped at a gas station to mislead the police while he switched cars and traveled north to San Francisco. Only then did Leary learn that he'd been rescued by members of the Weather Underground.

Leary was taken to a safehouse in the Bay Area where he met with Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and other Weather leaders. In a communique mailed to newspapers across the country, the Weather Underground claimed credit for the jailbreak. It was a tremendous propaganda coup for the acid militants. They described Leary as a political prisoner who was "captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on us by Democrats, Republicans, Capitalists and creeps." LSD and marijuana, the Weather cadre asserted, would help make a better world in the future, but for the time being, "we are at war....we know that peace is only possible in the destruction of U.S. imperialism. We are outlaws. We are free."

Leary was grateful to the Weathermen and enjoyed their company. They got stoned together and planned their next move. Leary needed an effective disguise. He shaved the top of his head, grew a moustache, and dyed his hair. But more than just his physical appearance changed during the time he spent with the Weatherpeople. Leary now thought of himself as a psychedelic revolutionary. He expressed his new political perspective in a manifesto called "Shoot to Live." Disavowing his earlier pacifism, he called for sabotage and other acts of resistance. "To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in defense of life is a sacred act," Leary proclaimed. "World War III is now being waged by short-haired robots whose deliberate aim is to destroy the complex web of free wild life by the imposition of mechanical order.... Blow the mechanical mind with Holy Acid ... dose them ... dose them." He urged everyone to "stay high and wage the revolutionary war." In a postscript he warned, "I am armed and should be considered dangerous to anyone who threatens my life and freedom."

http://www.american-buddha.com/aciddrea ... isoner.htm

[American Dream]

Broccoli

https://plus.google.com/photos/10237034 ... 2140106252

[American Dream]

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... -buddhism/

The Influence of Orientalism on US Buddhism
Posted by: Kenji Liu Posted date: June 07, 2013




“The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.” —Gary Snyder, 1961

In contemplating Gary Snyder’s essay “Buddhist Anarchism” for my previous post on Turning Wheel Media, I came across the above phrase, which stuck out to me like a sore thumb. As an Asian American cultural critic and Buddhist practitioner, I have a finely tuned radar for phrases like “East-West,” “East meets West,” and other pithy phrases that set up a dichotomy between these two directions as if they were completely different, even complete opposites. To me, this is lazy thinking, though very much consistent with centuries of orientalist discourse.

Having roamed in US Buddhist circles in California for many years, it’s certainly not uncommon to hear such a phrase accompanied by other dichotomies like “feminine-masculine” or “intuitive-logical.” Many readily accept such binaries as somehow fundamental to the functioning of the universe rather than culturally constructed ideas. It forms a “cloud” of simplistic views easily called upon to replace the work of examining a complex world that doesn’t all fit into two categories. (Though all the causes and conditions that create a human being are what I might at times include as one of the Four Imponderables.) Gender doesn’t fit into two categories, so why should spiritual practice?

With regard to the supposed East-West dichotomy, there is a long history (centuries, really) of “Western” discourse that has posed the West as active, intellectual, modern, rational, and the East as passive, emotional, traditional (or primitive), and irrational (or intuitive). As Edward Said has written in Orientalism, this has a strong connection with European expansion into the Middle East and Asia, forming out of a soup of pseudo-scholarly thought that informed economic, military, scientific policy, institutionalizing a general stance towards “the East.” There are variations on this, for example during certain periods in the US the scenario has been flipped so that Asian men are posed as menaces, though mostly to (passive) white women.

Far from being simply an intellectual exercise, this “feminization” of “the Orient” had and still has on-the-ground reality because it is backed by power. It readily pops up in US media and policy decisions about Middle Eastern societies, stereotypes about Asians and Asian Americans, and, to bring it back to Buddhism, essentialist discussions about what “the East” has to offer “the West” and vice versa. These all eventually impact the material reality of human beings. Is the East actually mysterious, impenetrable, feminine, and passive, or is that centuries of racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, and imperialism talking? What is the East? Where does it start? Where does it end?

As for Snyder’s statement about the mercy of the West and that of the East, it’s not as if social revolution and insight into the void are exclusive innovations of the places Snyder attribute them to. There are mystic traditions in the West, and social revolutionary traditions in the East. Fortunately, the mercy of critical thinking is that everyone can practice it.