Conspiracy theories that were true

Richard Nixon

On Twitter, Jesse Walker and others on conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.

As there are people who don't have access  to Twitter, here is a summary with links:

Jesse Walker: "People debate whether it's fully proven, but this may be the clearest-cut case of a story that was described as a conspiracy theory when I first encountered it and now has mainstream historians endorsing it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/nixon-tried-to-spoil-johnsons-vietnam-peace-talks-in-68-notes-show.html

@ValoisDuBins: "Operation Gladio is about the only one I can think of. It arguably stands as the exception that proves the rule." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio (Includes stuff RAW wrote about).

Miguel Madeira: "The death of the Portuguese Prime Minister Sá Carneiro have being an assassination? It is not 100% established, but today is ab hypotheses much more accepted in the mainstream than in the last century, where it was considered a conspiracy theory." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_S%C3%A1_Carneiro

Several mentioned the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which included a second "attack" that was not real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

James Shelby Downard gets his due

Adam Gorightly's latest book shows his skills as a publisher and editor, rather than a writer; Stalking the Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard is a collection of writing by the late American conspiracy theorist. 

Here is a review by Robert Guffey. Excerpt: "Highly Recommended: James Shelby Downard's recently published book, STALKING THE GREAT WHORE, is a compelling read. Editor/publisher Adam Gorightly went to a great deal of trouble to preserve this neglected manuscript, most of which was no doubt written in the 1970s. If not for Gorightly's herculean efforts, these posthumously discovered writings would have remained lost forever. Whether seen as fictional or nonfictional, sane or insane, the fact is that Downard's reality tunnel had an incalculable effect on pop culture."

You can also read a long piece by Michael  Hoffman. 

Joseph Matheny's free stuff

Announcement from Joseph Matheny, from  his newsletter: 

Archive.org Free Version

As is my habit, I am making a free version of Statio Numero available via Archive.org.

This project has recouped its production costs, so I am making it available as a free PDF download. As always, this is shared under a creative commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Kindle Version Now Available

There is a Kindle version of Statio Numero for people with Kindle apps or devices. This is provided as a convenience for people who are Kindle device dependent. The definitive version is still the PDF. Reminder: Statio is designed to be experienced in landscape mode.

The Kindle version is free this week only until Friday, July 14th.

Reviews Appreciated

If you download it for free or have purchased one of the commercial versions, please leave a review or rating on Goodreads, Amazon, or The Internet Archive.

Archive.org download

Goodreads review page

Amazon page

Be well.

Tom again: A couple of footnotes. Statio Numero is the third book of the Liminal Cycle; Liminal is just $2.99 on Amazon, and the second book, Xen: The Zen of the Other has the same low price. 

Also, the recording Matheny issued some years ago, Robert Anton Wilson: The Lost Studio Session, remains available free at the Internet Archive. 

Today's listening tip

Garaj Mahal (Facebook photo). 

Steve Fly, e.g. Steve Pratt, on Twitter: "One my fav. Garaj Mahal tunes, called "Be Dope" here live in San Francisco 2001 at the DNA Lounge. Some memorable heavy funk. Many thanks to Archive for such an expansive GM collection."

Garaj Mahal is a jazz fusion band that Steve sometimes has performed with, with Steve performing as a DJ on turntables. Here is another performance Steve likes. 

I should explain that some bands, not just the Grateful Dead, allow their performances to be recorded live by fans and posted on the internet. The Internet  Archive hosts many such recordings.  I am a fan of one the bands that allows this, the Gin Blossoms.

You can browse a Garaj Mahal collection at the Internet Archive, and a Gin Blossoms collection. 

Oz Fritz on Francois Rabelais

At his blog, Oz Fritz has a long essay up on the French writer Francois Rabelais, "The Hermetic Transmission of Francois Rabelais," tracing Rabelais' influence (or echoes) in figures such as Frank Zappa, Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson.  Here is one bit, to give you an idea:

"The enduring effect of Rabelais on entertainment culture, even in small ways, goes largely unnoticed these days. How many fans who have seen Pink Floyd play live post-Animals album realize that the flying pig at their concerts appeared in the third book of Pantagruel? A satire on semiotics, two characters communicating nonverbally through ridiculous signs and gestures happens twice in the Pantagruelian adventures. A skit riffing off the same premise would turn up some 400 years later in an episode of Monty Python and the Flying Circus called Michael Ellis. This episode strongly influenced writer Robert Anton Wilson as I document here.  Studies exist looking at the influence of Rabelais upon Monty Python. Someone writing as Dr. Karma calls Rabelais the father of modern sketch comedy in the piece The Quintessence of Rabelaisian Pythonesque."

PQ reviews books by Joyce

At his Finnegans, Wake! blog, Peter Quadrino reviews five different recent books about James Joyce.  Plenty of RAW fans are also Joyce fans, but PQ stands out as a serous scholar -- he describes making three trips to Dublin in the span of nine months, including one in which he delivered a paper at a Joyce symposium.

Of the five books  he reviews, one, The Book About Everything: Eighteen Artists, Writers and Thinkers on James Joyce's Ulysses, seems particularly aimed at nonspecialists like me: "Despite eighteen different voices with vastly different approaches to discussing a complicated novel, the prose throughout this book is refreshingly easy to consume, the collection feels well-edited and stands among the best recently published Joyce books for the general reader."

New book on secret societies and American history

 

A new book of apparent interest, out Tuesday.

From the publisher's website: "The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy.

"Cultural historian Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power, Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the most: the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it."

It sounds like it is indebted to Jesse Walker and references to Illuminatus! seem possible, but Amazon is not offering a search inside the book feature, at least not yet, so I don't know. 

Update: Here is an article by Dickey, "Did an Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Help Elect Thomas Jefferson?"

Jim O'Shaughnessy's RAW re-read

Jim O'Shaughnessy, the founder and CEO of O'Shaughnessy Ventures, has been re-reading Robert Anton Wilson and reposting some of his favorite passages on Twitter; here is an example and here is another example. (He hasn't mentioned whether he's been buying the Hilaritas Press editions.)

Also from O'Shaughnessy Ventures: "We are thrilled to announce that we have opened up our OSV Discord community to the public! If you're interested in being part of a creative, supportive, and exciting community - look no further!" The application form is here. 

I guess if  you brought up Robert Anton Wilson, there would be a good chance the boss would be interested. 

Here are biographies of people who have received $100,000 fellowships from the company. 

New publication date for RAW biography

Preorder page for the new Robert Anton Wilson biography. 

Prop Anon/Gabriel Kennedy reports in his latest newsletter that the publication date for his book, Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, is now listed for February 2024, as Strange Attracter/MIT Press continues the process of editing the book and preparing it for publication. We'll all just have to wait a little bit longer.

Prop's newsletter also plugs his recent interview on the F23 podcast. It's a good way to find out more about the upcoming book, Prop notes. As I've written before, everything I've seen from Prop, including this interview, suggests that a lot of research went into the book.

Prop also has reposted his 2003 interview with RAW, which covers a lot of ground. I wrote about part of it here.  Prop says, "I interviewed RAW the day after the documentary Maybe Logic premiered at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz on July 23, 2003. Feels like a good time to bring this interview outta the crates and put it on the figurative record player one more time."

Release of RAW book on Aleister Crowley seems imminent

 

The above photo ran in a Tweet from the RAW Trust, with the caption, "The living room shelf with the entire Hilaritas Press catalog.

"We expect to add the upcoming Lion of Light: Robert Anton Wilson on Aleister Crowley before the end of the month!

"Visit Hilaritas Press: http://hilaritaspress.com."

Rasa usually is very cautious about setting a date for when a book will be released, so the book must be done, or at least almost done. 

Alternatives to Twitter (and Facebook) for the RAW community

 

[Yesterday, I wrote about uncertainty in the RAW community over the future of Twitter. There are of course numerous Facebook groups devoted to Robert Anton Wilson, but Bobby Campbell also posted about other alternatives to Twitter as a comment to yesterday's post, and I'm reposting his comment as a guest post, to try to make sure everyone sees it. -- The Management.]

By Bobby Campbell
Special guest blogger

Tweetdeck, the app I use to manage the @RAWilson23 account, has been broken all day. So it goes!

The Maybe Logic Subreddit is showing some small signs of life, though is currently just aggregating this blog.

https://www.reddit.com/r/maybelogic/

The Only Maybe Arts Lab Discord is similarly starting to gain members, even if things remain a bit slow, there's potential for some action.

Invite link: https://discord.gg/upH8GUTRgW

I just discovered that Tumblr has had a bit of a bounce back since its death spiral some years ago. It was actually pretty decent for finding new/rare RAW novelties. So I'll fire this one up again:

https://rawilson23.tumblr.com/

No such thing as a failed experiment :)))

A few comments about Twitter

Parody of a Neil Young album cover, posted on Twitter of course by Mondo 2000. 

I got some interesting comments on my Friday post about the Modern Jazz Quartet, including this unrelated aside from Spookah: "Tom, as a side note, it seems that Twitter finally made the last step and for those of us without an account, even just reading a post isn't a possibility any longer. It's now basically get an account or get away." 

Twitter has been important for communications among RAW fandom, so maybe it's OK for me to do a blog post on the topic. 

Some of Elon Musk's worst moves have only been temporary, so I guess we'll have to see if what Spookah mentioned is a permanent step to make the site less useful. Twitter could not  be accessed for much of the day Saturday by registered users, for system maintenance reasons I don't really understand. 

Some of Musk's moves make sense to me, many of them don't. One that I particularly take issue with is restricting links to Substack, an odd move for a free speech advocate.

As I've mentioned before, I responded to the changes at Twitter by creating a Mastodon account. But relatively few people also did so, and many people who set up an account quit posting when they realized there was almost no audience for them at Mastodon. I haven't done a post lately at Mastodon, and Prop Anon's  last post is dated Jan. 19. And again, Prop's decision is correct. He has a book to promote! 

Because so few people went to Mastodon, I have had to limit my time there, since most of my Mastodon activity is a waste of time. I can't resist pointing out that if many of the people who complain about Musk had migrated to Mastodon, it might have become a  useful site. Prop and I tried to move, and it hasn't worked out. Remember when Mastodon got press coverage? I don't see many articles about it anymore. I thought Mastodon's decentralized structure was really interesting, but I guess many people didn't see the point, even as Musk has turned Twitter into a cult of personality. 

I remain at Twitter because it remains useful for me to keep up news about the world of RAW fandom, and about other news I'm interested in. (Mastodon is useless for following news about my favorite baseball team, for example). Maybe Twitter will survive Musk, and maybe a useful alternative will become available. I guess we'll see. 

Robert Shea's 'Shike'

I have now read all of Robert Shea's Shike, which is really one work of fiction but originally was published as two novels, Time of the Dragons and Last of the Ninja. I read the first volume a few weeks ago and I've now completed the second volume. 

Shike was first published in 1981, and it launched Shea's career, after he was laid off by Playboy magazine, as a successful historical novelist. Shike is set in thirteenth century medieval Japan, during the era of Kublai Khan (1215-1294) and the Mongol invasions of Japan. 

While Shea's All Things Are Lights remains a great favorite of mine, you could also make a case that Shike is his best work. It's very well plotted, very vivid with nonstop action and romance. The action roams across much of China and Mongolia as well as Japan.  There's a lot about Zen Buddhism, a big interest of Shea's, about Mongol and Japanese military weapons and tactics, and about Shea's mystical views. The word "Illuminati" is not mentioned, but the main hero belongs to a secret society, and it's explained that the group has ties to other groups, such as the Knights Templar. The analysis at the Wikipedia entry seems accurate to me. 

All Things Are Lights and Shike take place at about the same time in different parts of the world; Shea's other medieval historical work of fiction, The Saracen, also is set in about the same period of history, with events a little later than the events of All Things Are Lights.