Long in the shadows of the great European powers, the United States emerged after WWII to command the world’s greatest economic engine centered around her merchants of steel, oil and gunpowder, aka the military-industrial complex.
The smoke of WWI had barely cleared before the Morgan-Rockefeller-DuPont axis began fomenting an even bigger boom-and-bang. Right after the “war to end all wars,” IG Farben was manifested through John Foster Dulles’ magic wand (and some massive Wall Street loans). The company was designed as a European mirror of Standard Oil, which was owned by Dulles’ cousin by marriage, David Rockefeller.
Farben swiftly transformed into the dominant cartel in Europe, as well as Hitler’s biggest booster. Perhaps best remembered for its creation of a petrochemical poison known as Zyklon B (designed originally for insect infestations, and later deployed to exterminate “useless eaters,” i.e. Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, disabled), Farben conducted business with Standard Oil throughout the hostilities.
Although the corporation was split into pieces after the war (much like Standard Oil was divided by anti-trust laws), one of Farben’s divisions now owns Monsanto, leading to speculation on who won the peace.
Elements of the Nazi empire were secretly imported into the USA to construct NASA and the CIA, among other projects. NASA was built on the back of German rocket science and the CIA was built on the back of the Gestapo science, some of which seems to have involved forbidden substances and mass mind control. Despite promises never to engage in operations on native soil, the CIA immediately corrupted our media, banking system and major universities, while launching a mind-control program known as MK/Ultra that mixed hypnosis with LSD in the hopes of creating robot slaves.
In 1963, the CIA asserted their dominance by assassinating President John F. Kennedy while deploying Nazi and MK/Ultra assets during the planning, execution and cover-up. There are numerous dirty secrets held close to the vest, but JFK’s murder remains the CIA’s most worrisome secret, and through the decades they’ve launched a thousand memes to divide, misdirect and confuse anyone attempting to penetrate the truth. This blog concerns one of those memes, a spoof religion called Discordianism.
Meet the founder: Gregory Hill. Aside aside from the name, however, virtually nothing is known and it took decades for the name to emerge because he was known only as Malaclypse the Younger. (And who knows if Greg Hill is a real name anyway.) However, we do know some details on Hill’s sidekick and co-conspirator, Kerry Thornley, who was in boot camp with Lee Harvey Oswald. In hindsight it seems possible Hill’s real bio might contain some link to military intelligence, just as Thornley and Oswald may have been subjected to MK/Ultra experiments. The duo were forever entwined after the assassination. Thornley helped concoct a clever brew of fact and fantasy to create the CIA’s original Tin Foil Hat Patrol, and spread a cloud of chaos over the case, one that has defined the spook-infested world of conspiracy theory. Thornley became an important witness for the Warren Commission, providing evidence Oswald was devoted to the communist cause. You see, it was very important a communist kill Kennedy.
You can tell by the photo Thornley was a flower child influenced by the Beats, Merry Pranksters and Maynard G. Krebs, among others. But after his Warren Commission testimony, he attended at a spook-infested summer camp in Colorado popular with the Koch family, co-founders of the conspiracy-mongering John Birch Society. And upon graduation of that program moved to California to become chummy with Johnny Roselli (one of JFK’s assassins.) Thornley then moved to Atlanta and commenced a long correspondence with Robert Anton Wilson during a time Wilson was letters editor of Playboy magazine, the first and perhaps only national magazine to interview DA Jim Garrison. Garrison was a rare public official with balls enough to go up against the CIA.
Wilson was mesmerized and soon heavily influenced by Thornley’s tales of secret societies secretly running the world, a cosmology that bore similarities to the suddenly popular Morning of the Magicians, a text published in France in 1960, but released in America in 1963.
One online reviewer sums the book up thusly: “Medieval alchemists producing atomic bombs and atomic fusion; the Nazi movement inspired by memory/dreams of Atlantis; the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside; the Moon, Mars and Jupiter and the stars are made of ice; and three Moons have crashed into Earth, producing great evolutionary jumps and de-evolutionary lapses, like “Gypsies, Negroes and Jews.”
Hill and Thornley wrote a similar opus for their goof religion published in the style of an underground fanzine, a confusing mix of parody rituals, little-known Illuminati facts tossed with horror fantasies plucked out of Edward Plunkett and H.P. Lovecraft, who’d invented terrifying tales of monstrous conspiracies at the beginning of the century. Horror fantasy held a magnetic attraction in the LSD-fueled Sixties, and the higher people got, the harder it became to discern facts from fantasies, especially when so many fantasies revolved around the JFK assassination. It seems possible counterintelligence realized the Kennedy assassination could best be concealed by wrapping it inside stories of magic powers and alien visitations to deceive the gullible and lead them into the rabbit holes.
Mae Brussell came from a wealthy family, graduated from Stanford and Berkeley, and her father was a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles. She purchased all volumes of the Warren Commission as soon as available and launched a career as a radio host examining holes in the official story. Her files on the subject became as large as Mary Ferrell’s. Later, her research appeared in Paul Krassner’s Realist, and attracted the attention of John Lennon, who donated money to help publish her book. Much of the work involved Operation Paperclip and the MK/Ultra and Nazi connections to Kennedy’s assassination.
In 1977, after publishing Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson was interviewed in Conspiracy Digest about the JFK assassination, the Illuminati, Aleister Crowley, UFOs and other issues. Brussell wrote a scathing response accusing Wilson, John Lilly and Timothy Leary of being CIA stooges leading the youth into a fake drug-addled utopian fantasy involving space travel. “Ask Leary or Wilson anything practical about today’s miseries and they change the subject,” she wrote.
Wilson responded by denying he was a CIA dupe, insisting he was “a high official of the agency since July 23, 1973.”
One of the primary precepts of Discordianism was never believe anything about anything, and Wilson never wavered from his roll as a Prankster-deceiver. In hindsight, however, most of the nonsense people believe today about the Illuminati has roots in his fantasy trilogy, and his work shows little evidence of scholarly research into the history of the Illuminati. Wilson believed the-eye-in-the-pyramid was an Illuminati invention and ridiculed the suggestion the society could have been a Jesuit penetration of freemasonry.
Actually that is certainly one of many valid possible explanations, not something to be ridiculed. According to Wilson, the Illuminati were “good guys” fighting against royalty and religion, and not some devious intelligence operation deploying ends-justify-the-means morality codes. Wilson introduced the idea that the number 23 was an Illuminati concept (it never was) and usually insisted the society had died out shortly after being founded. He believed Oswald shot Kennedy and Garrison’s investigation was a fraud.
Wilson’s biggest contribution to Discordianism was called Operation Mindfuck or OM, and involved disturbing a person’s reality matrix with some mindblowing conspiracy information and then trailing off into some make-believe maze of confusion. Life as zen koan wherein any sufficiently ambiguous answer works for any question whatsoever. If you ever got really high on psychedelics and had friends fuck with your head, you’ll recognize the sadistic underpinnings of Operation Mindfuck, and how it runs contrary to real investigations into conspiracies.
Within a few years, however, Antony Sutton published a factual book revealing how Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones deploys remarkably similar rituals as the original Illuminati, and the Bonesman have successfully penetrated the upper levels of the CIA, investment banks and military industrial complex. Prescott Bush was a Bonesman and also acted as Hitler’s banker on Wall Street to the point of being chastised for trading with the enemy after the war. The society was created prior to the Civil War by the cousin of the heir of the American opium cartel (Russell & Co.) after visiting Southern Germany, and based off a secret fraternity he’d been inducted into while there. After establishing Bones, he became the biggest financial backer of John Brown, the terrorist who sparked the Civil War’s armed confrontation. No, this is not some Operation Mindfuck going down, just some simple truths that most people have yet to digest.
Brussell, in the meantime, was not up on Sutton’s research. Instead she began making outrageous claims, connecting dots that probably didn’t connect, accusing almost every celebrity death of being orchestrated by the CIA for some nefarious purpose, much the same way every school shooting is instantly branded a fake event by today’s Tin Foil Hat Patrol. Brussell claimed there were immense assassination plots to derail youth culture and even claimed Charles Manson was a Manchurian Candidate under hypnotic control. That was one of her wildest theories, and one that may actually have been true.
However, when Krassner began checking out her evidence for a potential book on Manson, he claimed it didn’t add up. Krassner suffered a paranoid meltdown at his dentist’s office and soon departed the plains of conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, Karl Koch was the son of a right-wing publisher in Germany, and he began rebelling against his dad as a teen. Karl had an early interest in computers as well as a fascination with the Illuminatus! Trilogy, claiming to have read the book 30 times. Karl may have been Wilson’s biggest fan and the two met briefly at a hacker convention. Karl was especially taken with the magic number 23 and seems to have swallowed Wilson’s imaginative suggestion that George Washington could have been assassinated and replaced by Adam Weishaupt, something based solely on a slight resemblance between the two men and the fact the eye-in-the-triangle appears on US currency (even though Weishaupt never used that symbol). Of course it was all OM and Karl got mindfucked.
Despite operating with only a primitive Commodore 64, Karl successfully penetrated a number of military-industrial websites around the world and sold passwords and other information to the KGB to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, a connection established by his cocaine dealers. Most of the money he earned from hacking flowed back into the dealers’ hands. Karl descended into a paranoid cocaine-induced psychosis for a while. Meantime the German authorities offered up a hacker’s amnesty in order to crack the subculture and Karl took the offer, but was soon found in a forest, burnt to a crisp. Strangely, his death was ruled a suicide, but a more likely explanation is the drug dealers killed him in retaliation for going state’s evidence.
Karl died on May 23, 1989.