In the summer of 1982 my girlfriend Rachel Kowalczyk wheedled $300 out of Marilyn Ferguson for me to spend three weeks working at her Los Angeles office in a rather undefined capacity. Goodness knows how she swung that one…charity perhaps. This was the office that published Brain Mind Bulletin and Leading Edge every three weeks and it was during my time at Marilyn Ferguson’s office that I bumped into Tom Robbins…author of Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Still-Life with Woodpecker (1980), Jitterbug Perfume (1984) and Skinny Legs and All (1990).
My weak memory of the great Seattle writer is of a scruffy individual…a slimmed-down better-kept version of Michael Moore with standard issue baseball cap before they became standard issue…wandering around behind a huge smile picking up anything and fascinated in the particulars of everything…something his writing reflects. I would be curious to know what he was writing during the spring and summer of 1982.
In my literary record under Articles is Bioelectricity (1982 bmb-la) and under Book Reviews is The Soviet Military (1982 le-la)…a review of three books on the Soviet Military Machine that came out in an issue of Leading Edge that praised the EastWest Institute and its non-governmental People to People bridging across the Iron Curtain. The pieces on Bioelectricity went into a special issue of Brain-Mind Bulletin on the subject.
Another interesting thing Rachel organised for me before we went our separate ways after a whirlwind romance was one of ten free places she had persuaded John Grinder…co-author of Frogs to Princes…to provide to anti-nuclear activists on his $2000 weekend NLP Hypnosis course in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Here I met Daniel Elsberg of Pentagon Papers notoriety who was married to the sister of Rachel’s friend Barbara Marx Hubbard. John Grinder was in private consulting but had spent much of his life with the CIA…and they are one of those firms you never leave.
The mind technology for doing people’s heads in…one day this will be known as the Mancurian Candidate Defence…was already available in 1982…and it scared the living daylights out of Daniel Elsberg and myself. There was no way to control it. Yet here were the CIA creating skilled practitioners. If it could be used for evil purposes then it would. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This was madness. Being linguistically based I thought there might be limits to Neuro-Linguistic Implanting…but that was almost 25-years ago. What was going on here?
My Anna Lindh Dossier currently has several appendices. One has tributes and obituaries, another has the facts of the killing, while a third includes essays about plans for the One World State and others about the neocons partial version of Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical ideas...which includes Heartlands vs Rimlands but airbrushes out Landsmen vs Seamen and Locality vs Interests. This is the version of Mackinder that Bush & Blair have been sold by the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz…Chris Fettweis at the University of Maryland is a much better guide.
Mackinder’s Heartland Theory is taught at the Pentagon. Here is an extract from an article from 2000 in Parameters the US Army War College Quarterly: ‘One of the reasons that Mackinder is being resurrected is because policymakers are searching for ways to deal with the heart of his Heartland - Central Asia and the Caspian Sea - which is a region that has the potential to become a major source of great-power contention in the next century. Some analysts estimate that the fossil fuels in the region will transform it into a ‘New Saudi Arabia’ in the coming decades.’
Talk about tired old generals fighting the last war. Mackinder barely gave a thought to America or China. Nobody in Europe did back then. They were much too tied up in their own little provincial historical disputes. Buckminster Fuller’s One World Island and the Earth’s Seven Oceans is the geography for this century…and confederations of hundreds of thousands of village states will be needed to impose some sense on it over the next hundred years…not a One World Government bombing us all…including themselves…into the Stone Age from 30000 feet, releasing Passover Bombs at Ground Zero for the occasional bit of clinical genocide and deploying Climate Weaponry at 60000 feet…and blaming global warming and carbon emissions for the inevitable side effects.
Governments need to be dismantled and governance dealt with some other way. Imagine if Anna Lindh had been talking this way…suggesting that each American State should have a seat at the United Nations…that the hegemony of the global Gun Running cartel…the UN Security Council…must be disbanded. It would be Olof Palme, Sweden and Vietnam all over again. There are some people who wouldn’t like that. And there are lots of very rich men in the world who can pick up the bill for surgical operations.
Yet it is a strange idea that puts assassinations into three categories: Governments who assassinate after democratic deliberations, Rogue States who sponsor terrorist groups to murder their enemies and Private Mafias who put out contracts and offer Killingry Services. Anyone with money can kill…not so much to order as to prejudice. The police seek the killer but his motive is only a means to conviction. It is not their job to look further. But someone should.