Mendacious metaphors

Inception, this summer's sci-fi thriller blockbuster, ranks at the time of writing at number 3 in the all-time movie rankings on IMDB. A similar phenomenon was seen two years ago with director Christopher Nolan's Batman relaunch sequel The Dark Knight, which reached similarly dizzying heights on IMDB and has only now fallen out of the top 10. While The Dark Knight does not pretend to be anything but a well thought out take on a classic comic book action story, Inception broaches far more philosophical topics and has loftier ambitions. Though it is a textbook example of narrative complexity, and derives tremendous tension from its pinnacle of quadruple jeopardy, in essence it says absolutely nothing. Though the script is full of references to the subconscious, and the entire story takes place in a multi-layered dream, the movie makes no effort to discuss the importance or relevance of dreams or what psychologists call the subconscious, they are mere tools and excuses used to create dramatic tension. It is an outstanding example of modernist filmmaking, concerned only with form, only with the cinematic experience of watching it. Philosophically speaking, it is totally vacuous. The concepts and references are just there for the sake of creating a point in the story where the success or failure of the protagonists rests not on a single or dual factors, but on a succession of well-sychronised 'kicks' that wake our heroes from several successive 'levels' of 'dream state'. The twist at the end appears to be the rather obvious in-story joke that the entire thing is one big dream of Leonardo Dicaprio's character. As far as cop-out, obviously leaving it open for a lucrative sequel endings go, it was a tour de force of which Nolan is presumably very proud.

The movie is a well designed trick. It convinces people that it must be about something, because there's always something going on and you have to add it all up to make sure you follow the plot correctly. But that is all it is about - the plot itself. As an intellectual experience, it is completely insular. An analysis of the essential plot points and creative decisions made in the story telling process illustrate that this can only be intentional. The movie is ostensibly set in a world different to ours, but the only exploration of the way in which it is different is the existence of a technology that allows people to enter other people's dreams. Basically they all sit in a room together, wired up to a silver suitcase. The only other information that we're offered about the world is when a Japanese businessman (cliche alert!) hires Dicaprio and his anonymous, one dimensional band of associates to attempt 'inception', the use of the technology to try to plant an idea in a rival businessman's head.

Briefly, it is explained that the rival is about to inherit a monopolistic energy company with which no one can compete, and so the Japanese businessman wants to implant the idea that the rival should split up the monopolistic company and sell it off. This is the only other information we're given about the 'real' world in which the story occurs. Unlike virtually every other sci-fi story set in a different world, the narrative conceit of setting isn't used to say anything about our own world. It simply isn't part of the story.

Instead we are invited to try to get interested and engaged by Dicaprio having a dead wife, who for reasons that are too tedious to get into, he is wrongly thought to have killed and hence he is separated from his children. The last Dicaprio movie I watched was Shutter Island, which also involved having to sit through two hours of his shitly-bearded face try to convey the emotion of having a dead wife. The central character in Memento (which is identical to Inception in several regards) also has a dead wife. As does as least one contestant on The X-Factor every year. Indeed, the story of 'man with dead wife' is about as overused as having a fat black guy play the busdriver. There is, incidentally, a lovely moment in season two of The Wire where McNulty jokes about having a dead wife in a playful attempt to curry interest from Beadie. Nolan himself shows that he knows this is a cliche by making this plot element entirely subservient to the story. That is to say, there is no exploration of the experience of a man who has lost his wife, it is merely a fact that is necessary for the climax to happen in the way that it does.

Indeed, several other factors are likewise subservient, to the extent that the entire plot is supporting one climactic sequence of cutting between successfully dependent events. Ignoring the storyteller's mantra to 'show' rather than 'tell', we are told virtually the whole story explicitly through dialogue to make sure that even the thickos at the back can grasp what's going on. We are told that in order to plant the idea (incept? inceive?) in the business rival's head they need a three-layered dream - a dream within a dream within a dream - so they can ensure the idea goes 'deep' enough. (This is only one of a dozen different uses of the word 'deep' in the script, more on that lower down) Why is this the case? Why a three-layered dream? Purely because the plot demands it. We are told that three layers is highly unstable. Why is this the case? Why would dreaming within dreaming within dreaming involve experiencing a reality that is less stable than mere dreaming within dreaming? No explanation is given. It is purely because the plot demands it.

So, they drug the target with a powerful sedative, and drug themselves with it too. Once in the first level of the dream, we are told that because of the sedative if they 'die' in the dream that they won't wake up, but will go into another, apparently parallel, dream state they call 'limbo'. No one bothers to ask 'what happens if you die in limbo, do you wake up then?' which is important, because the film has no answer for that rather obvious question, at least at that point in the story. Again, the whole 'limbo' diversion is an excuse for something else that needs to happen so that the narrative conclusion can be what the writers want it to be. It isn't saying anything about the nature of experiencing death within a dream, or being conscious of experiencing death in a dream, and it sure as hell isn't saying anything about humans being the only creatures that know that they are going to die. It's just a piece of a jigsaw. If people are satisfied with themselves for having put the jigsaw together by the end of the movie then they will go home happy with the cinematic experience, happy to have consumed Inception as a product.

And here is the crucial factor in the deception of Inception. It isn't even Titanic. Titanic was a largely meaningless blockbuster, also starring Dicaprio, but at least it gave its audience a good emotional work out. It may not have taught them anything, it may not have informed them, it may not have inspired them, but at least it made people feel something. Inception doesn't even accomplish that. All it is offering its audience is the prize of being able to follow the plot, which isn't even that complex relative to, just for example, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It is the cinematic equivalent of a Sudoku puzzle. In many tabletop games, in particular most board games, the multiplayer aspect means that one is testing oneself against other people within the framework of the rules. There is an unpredictable exchange that requires an ad hoc mental process. In Sudoku, either one 'gets' it and completes the puzzle, or one doesn't. In Inception, either you follow the plot, or you don't. In a movie where so much is at stake for the characters, virtually nothing is at stake for the watching audience.

Indeed, even the title is misleading gibberish. The word 'inception' means the beginning of something. It does not mean planting an idea in someone's mind through their subconscious. 'Insertion' would be more accurate. However, Nolan clearly isn't concerned with actually using words to mean what they mean, but solely with finding a single-word, cool sounding title for a movie that says nothing about anything. Calling a movie 'insertion' would make it sound like an unimaginative porn film, presumably based around people placing objects in their bodily orifices. The title 'Inception' plays the same role as the sunglasses and long leather jackets in The Matrix. It is almost empty data - signifying nothing other than the filmmaker's desire to be thought of as having made a cool movie. All the talk, in both films, of perception of reality is not an effort to explore ontology through cinema, but as part of a carefully arranged group of symbols which are collectively meaningless but individually compelling enough to appear meaningful at least for the duration of the film. The film is not only driven by almost pure formalism, it engages in a form of psychological deception.

That is not to say people shouldn't find the movie enjoyable, more so that they should realise what it is that they are enjoying. That is, their own ability to follow a reasonably complex plot, their own capacity to solve a puzzle so that they can buy into the dramatic tension of the climactic sequence. Inception does make its audience work a little harder than most mainstream action thrillers, but this is only to make the film more compelling as a physical, formal experience. It's the equivalent of using more contrasting colours in a painting, or slightly cruder language in a sitcom. Not subtle, not particularly clever and most certainly not philosophical. David Denby of the New Yorker twigged this:

Christopher Nolan(...) appears to believe that if he can do certain things in cinema—especially very complicated things—then he has to do them. But why? To what end? His new movie, “Inception,” is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly...

...“Inception” is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else...

...Bizarre oddities, which complicate the puzzle but are meaningless in themselves, flash by in an instant. The actors, trying to suggest familiarity with the task of dream invasion, spin off gibberish in the most casual way. Parodies, I assume, will follow on YouTube...

...But who cares if Cobb gets back to two kids we don’t know? And why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. - Inception review, New Yorker

There is something much more important at stake than Nolan's aesthetic philosophy, and that is that Inception works as a corporate psychological operation, as mass propaganda. This is most obvious in its treatment of dreams-within-dreams. The characters are seen entering a dream, and then falling asleep within it and entering another dream, and then falling asleep within that and entering another dream. These dreams are arranged in a linear, vertical formation so to fully wake up they need to wake up from the 'deepest level' (3rd dream) to the 'deeper level' (2nd dream) to the merely 'deep level' (1st dream) and from there wake up to reality. The neat planning and execution of these four successive 'wake ups' is what creates the quadruple jeopardy - to successfully wake up, all four must work in the right way and the right order.

However, this isn't how dreams work. No one falls asleep in a dream and finds themself in another dream. Sometimes, people experience 'waking up' in a dream but that is usually the beginning of the dream (insofar as they remember it), not a transition from a prior dream state, and certainly not a passage up some imaginary ladder of different dream states. No one actually experiences lucid dreaming in the manner portrayed in Inception. The film is also asexual. Aside from Dicaprio's dead wife, there is no indication that any of the characters even have a sexuality or any kind of romantic emotion whatsoever, and yet this is perhaps the number one topic for real dreams. This confirms that Nolan has no interest in discussing people's real experience of dreams.

In reality, most people experience dreams within dreams laterally, not vertically. As is portrayed in the far superior film based on a very, very similar premise Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we tumble sideways, never in full control, finding the world of our own mind a constantly shifting, unsteady ground, rather than the rigid military formation demanded by Nolan's plot. But Nolan could have created the same quadruple jeopardy without arranging the dreams vertically. Had the various dreams been parallel, he could have simply had the characters explain with their psychobabble that they needed to exit the dreams simultaneously at the same time as the target, the rival businessman, so he didn't realise he'd been in a dream all along while they were planting the idea. Or whatever. It could have not been dreams at all, but three or four events needing to happen in different places for the desired conclusion to happen. Instead of parallel dream states one could have Sliders-style parallel universes, causally interconnected. There are an infinite number of possible scenarios where four stories or situations have mutually dependent influence.

So why all the crap about dreams, the subconscious, perception of reality, and saying 'levels' and 'deep' like there's a legal quota to be hit? Two key reasons springs to mind. The first is to make the film appear to be about far more than it really is. Bombard people with words that sound clever, and a fair number of them will think you are being clever. Whether you are saying anything meaningful is irrelevant. It's akin to the infamous Milgram Experiment in the 1960s, where participants were told they were to give electric shocks to subjects. The experiment found that in a scientific setting, told to do so by an apparent authority figure, the majority of people would gladly administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks. This experiment has been recreated several times, including by the BBC:

In these experiments, the symbols of authority are that of science. The authoritarian white, middle aged male wearing a lab coat, in a room with the sort of functional equipment one would expect in a lab experiment. In Inception, the symbols of authority are those of science fiction, pseudo-psychological and technical dialogue, paradoxically complex plots reminiscent of those in the Back to the Future films, and pretty young things/swarthy middle aged hacks doing the walking and talking. But Inception is solely concerned with its own exposition, with blending the established elements of the sci-fi thriller in a sufficiently familiar but sufficiently fresh way to attain blockbuster status. It is an exercise in the balance of entropy and redundancy, the predictable and the unpredictable.

As such, using metaphors like 'deep' and 'levels' to describe different dream states/parts of the story is a reasonably cunning move. These are extremely common metaphors, the Swiss Army Knives of critical language. 'On one level' 'an another level' 'on different levels' are used to fill in spaces in sentences where the analysis is lacking, or even where it fails. Commonly, 'deep' is used to mean 'profound' but, significantly, it is also often used to mean 'compelling'. The two meanings are quite different. An illusion can be compelling, people who think they've seen ghosts and UFOs (or maybe actually have seen ghosts and/or UFOs) find their visions compelling. Whether those visions are profound, or the results of a superficial failure of the senses, or a deliberate illusion, or of a willing mind seeing what it wants to see, remains uncertain. Inception plays on this dual meaning, as it is very compelling to watch, but ultimately lacks any kind of profundity. Its adherents will defend it, claiming to see all sorts of fabulous and wonderful meanings (or just appreciating it technically) but the conjunction of the signs in the film show that this is probably not the case.

'Subconscious' and 'subconsciously' are likewise overused, from pop-psychological studies of why women eat less when men are around to highly convenient and misleading explanations of what motivates terrorists. Again, the 'sub' prefix implies a vertical arrangement, a hierarchy, though ironically most claims about the subconscious grant it great authority. The word 'subconscious' is mentioned throughout Inception, but no notable exploration of its role takes place. It is merely the place where the anonymous team of nubiles and veterans have to plant the idea in the target. All this language firmly encourages the audience to phrase their thoughts, not just about the film, in a language which presumes hierarchy, which presumes authority, which assumes some kind of chain of command. Shit rolls downhill.

Of course, people repeat this nonsense, further encouraging these thought patterns. People come to accept the hierarchy, because they find it difficult to articulate thoughts in the absence of such hierarchical metaphors. Not only does Inception dupe its audience into thinking it is about far more interesting and complex things than it really is about, it further encourages them to accept a top-down order of things, by further propagating and entrenching a vocabulary that wholly presumes and affirms such an order. That it does so while satisfying people through the use of their own minds, feeling as though they are getting a mental workout when they are actually being blinded by propaganda, makes Inception a work of supreme doublethink. It rewards you for accepting its precepts and presumptions, which themselves entail you thinking in such a way that is wholly unrewarding. Well done for staying in your designated place. We thank you for not smoking.

I refer again to George Orwell's essay Politics and the English language. In the essay, Orwell criticises several passages of writing for their 'staleness of imagery' and 'is lack of precision'.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not...

...As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. - Orwell, Politics and the English language

Inception is guilty of many of the charges Orwell was levelling at writers several decades ago, in particular 'dying metaphors' ('deep') and 'pretentious diction' ('subconscious'). My interpretation of the film outlined above is not an exposition of a meaning contained within it, but of the role it plays linguistically. It has a carefully arranged veneer of appearing meaningful, but is ultimately meaningless. Yet in duping its audience in this way, it makes use of words (and indeed, images and plot elements) that maintain in the audience habits of thinking that keep them susceptible to this sort of deception. Indeed, 'deception' would be a far more accurate title for the film.

Ultimately, Inception makes a philosophical error common to many sci-fi films, namely of upholding the dualism and binary opposition of appearance and reality. The danger implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the movie's dramatic height is that while the characters could simply be woken from their dream state, that they would have lost their grip on reality. The conceit at the end of the film indicating that Dicaprio is still in a dream, having lost that grip, firmly upholds this opposition and dualism. But dreams are not mere appearance, they are compelling fantasy, apparent visions that we generate for ourselves when asleep. They conform to a different logic to waking life, but they aren't the opposite of waking life. They are experienced in much the same way, and have very real effects, perhaps more than we presently understand. It is an opposition of convenience - asleep/awake appearance/reality falsity/truth - but not one that is easily upheld. You can dream and know you are dreaming. You can be awake and think you are still dreaming. The line is far from clear, without the need for any ludicrous, convoluted, jargon-laden exposition through cinema.

The most famous assault on this binary opposition came a century before poststructuralism in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. He argued that there is only appearance, that when we replace one 'appearance' with 'reality' (for example, due to a new observation or deduction) then all we are doing is replacing one appearance with another. The metaphysical realism and rationalism of Immanuel Kant in particular would have us believe that if only we use our faculty of reason to disengage from our particular subjective motives and interests is the knowledge we produce an adequate presentation of reality. This understanding has reality as a thing in itself, out there, which we generally only understand through the veil of our subjective perceptions of it. For Nietzsche, this distinction is a nonsense, an attempt by philosophers to look round a corner they haven't reached. Appearance is reality, as far as we can ever know. While this idea is contested and explored through Nietzsche's work, perhaps his most simple deconstruction of the opposition of appearance and reality came in Twilight of the Idols:

HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE. The History of an Error
1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )
3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

And so, as he concluded:

The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world reduced to the antithesis "world" and "nothing." - Nietzsche, Will to Power §567

As such, I am not calling Inception 'shallow' or 'superficial' as these are analogies of the same type, language from the same wrongheaded conceptual scheme Nolan seems to subscribe to. Rather, the film is vapid, meaningless and willfully deceitful, a carefully constructed psychological operation that will only contribute to a world of mendacious metaphors that make clarity of thought and word that much harder.

Putting the 'Man' in Disaster Management

Recently, a new HBO series called Treme begun broadcasting in the US. From the creators of the epic political police show The Wire, Treme explores the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, showing the New Orleans locals struggle not only to re-establish their lives economically, but also to reinvigorate the city's world famous music scene. As such, the show moves beyond the analysis of failed institutions that comprised most of the content of The Wire, to the question of how to restore a cultural identity damaged by the same winds and water that flooded thousands of homes and businesses. While fans of The Wire will find familiar the rants of John Goodman's lecturer/novelist about the failings of FEMA and other disaster management agencies, Treme offers a more intimate spiritual journey to its audience. It is not aiming to merely garner sympathy for the victims of a natural disaster, indeed, an early episode includes a scene of a street musician laying into some young Christian whitebread do-gooders for their condescension and lack of realism. The intent appears to be to show the power of human resolve even in the face of the awesome power of nature, and horrific institutional incompetence.

By contrast, last year's epic disaster movie 2012 was a by-the-numbers film seeking to capitalise on a huge, and growing, alt-culture obsession with Mayan calendars and predictions of an apocalypse on December 21st, 2012. Director Roland Emmerich, who brought up the spectacular Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, alongside the less impressive Godzilla, took well over two hours to tell an extremely hackneyed and unoriginal story. The disaster scenario itself is relatively original - a huge solar flare heats up the earth's core, causes the crust to destabilise and ultimately displace. This causes huge landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and, once the crust displacement stops, massive tidal waves a bit like when you move too quickly in the bath and a load of water slops over the end. This is all portrayed through exceptional CGI, including a wonderful 9/11-inspired shot where a plane carrying our protagonists flies in between two collapsing buildings.

However, the creativity ends there. The story itself has been almost entirely lifted from previous movies - a man somewhat estranged from his wife/family - see Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day or Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow - leads a small group of survivors against the odds and ultimately rescues them from ever-impending doom. This basic story goes back millenia, at least as far as the Jewish exodus from Egypt (the probable reference point given the pre-eminence of Jewish writers and directors in Hollywood) and before that when nomadic civilisations travelled and travailed the earth's surface. As a story structure it isn't bad, but in the disaster movie genre it is a staple to the point of being hackneyed and tedious.

However, it is the movie's sexist and racist subtext which is most telling, in terms of what this highly unrealistic film tells us about how humans truly respond to crises. John Cusack plays the protagonist, the estranged husband and father whose former wife has married a plastic surgeon who is usefully and utterly predictably killed off so as to enable the reunification of the family unit by the movie's end. Anyone with half a brain, or who has seen prior Emmerich films or others in the genre, sees this resolution coming at least an hour before it happens. The family themselves are a pissy, whining, patronising mess. Beyond occasionally screaming 'mommy' or 'daddy' the children do absolutely nothing, and aside from a couple of feeder lines to allow Cusack to deliver punchlines used in the trailer, the wife does much the same. Throughout the film the wife and kids are treated as a composite unit, a thing that needs to be rescued because it is so incapable of self-determination. This is the classic 'women and children first' mentality - save the weakest because they cannot save themselves.  This is particularly evident in all of the vehicle sequences. The protagonists initially escape a huge earthquake, which destroys California and sees it break up and fall into the Pacific ocean, by Cusack driving them to an airport in the limousine he uses for work. The sequence involves a dozen near-misses, a tactic repeated so often that by the end it fails to have any dramatic impact because you know the clean white middle class picket fence family will survive. In particular, one moment sees Cusack drive the limo through a collapsing building and out the other side. The implication is that his macho bravado at confronting the unknown (he can have no idea if the building will last long enough for the car to get through it) is rewarded, that it is brave men who do the saving of incapable women and children. After the family get to the airport, they acquire a small plane, and then later a larger plane with a few more passengers including a moderately entertaining Russian billionaire apparently based on oligarch Alisher Usmanov, part owner of Arsenal football club and a close friend of Vladimir Putin. In every section where the plane is in flight, the men are up front doing the piloting while the women and kids hide in the back/belly of the plane as they continue to contribute nothing to the rescue attempt. At one moment, where the pilots discover that Hawaii (where they intended to refuel) is on fire and seemingly sinking into the ocean, the men are called up to the cockpit and the women and children left downstairs with Russian oligarch's collection of automobiles, again implying the family is merely an object in need of being rescued rather than a group of autonomous humans.  

This prejudice extends beyond the principal group of characters. Among the geologists and other officials who predict and attempt to manage the crisis there is not a single female of any note. They are exclusively male, barking orders and engaging in egotistical battles over authority and jurisdiction. Just in case the implicit message (that only men are useful and capable) wasn't clear enough, the opening scene offers one more slap in the face to anyone seeking to question the established order of disaster management. We see the chief geologist visiting India and meeting up with another geologist who has discovered dramatically increasing temperatures under the earth's surface. Our principle initially says hello to the Indian geologist's wife, who informs him that she has (in her dutiful, subservient role as female) made 'that fish curry you love'. Once she is out of the way, the Indian geologist returns her to 'her place' saying 'her fish curry is still awful'. Even the one moment where a woman contributes something, albeit in her domesticated role as food-preparer, she is derogated and sidelined. Even the newsreaders who appear sporadically are all male, ensuring all authoritative voices are those of men. Every woman is a supplemental character to a male - the president's daughter, the protagonist's wife and so on. One has to wonder at the personal background of the screenwriter, Harald Kloser, that he is so aggressively against any sign that women actually have something to offer the world.

The bias also extends to racism. Though there is the occasional black or Chinese face in the film, it is almost exclusively a tale of global crisis affecting white people. While the president and the chief geologist are played by black men (the sight of Danny 'I'm getting too old for this shit' Glover as the president is an amusing highlight), they are both suave, clean, articulate black men, obviously inspired to some extent by Barack Obama. They are the acceptable face of black men, in that they are bourgeois whites in everything but the colour of their skin. Similarly, the Indian geologist who discovers the phenomena in the first place is killed in a giant tsunami after playing a very minor role, and the Chinese are portrayed almost exclusively as labourers. The governmental plan for surviving the disaster is to build gigantic ships - essentially ferries - in the Himalayas, so that they can ride out the tsunamis. Though financed by selling tickets to the Russian billionaire and the like, the construction is done by the Chinese. When the American party arrives in the Himalayas to begin boarding the ships, there is a wide shot showing several ships side by side, and the US crisis manager mutters 'leave it to the Chinese'. The implication is that the autocratic, collectivist Chinese state is actually something to be praised, due to it being useful to the world's elite. Only passing reference is made to the right of the workers who produced the ships to a ticket on board them.  

Almost completely ignored is Latin America, alluded to through images of Christ the Redeemer crumbling and falling down, and the whole Arab world. The former is a particularly gross oversight, given that the whole story is based on the predictions of Mayan Indians, the 'aboriginal' population of the Southern American continent. Without the Mayan 'long count' calendar there would be no 2012 subculture, and therefore no movie. Despite this, Roland Emmerich saw fit to only make a fleeting reference to the inspiration for his work, through a news story playing on John Cusack's TV about a group of (white) 2012 obsessives committing suicide at an ancient Mayan site in a South American jungle. The treatment of Arabs is even more laughable. Though Mecca appears in the movie's trailer, Arabs are only referred to in a disparaging way. One of the billionaires who is sold a ticket is an apparent oil sheikh, who aside from buying a ticket only appears elsewhere in the film towards the end when the black geologist is expressing his disgust at the selections of passengers for the 'arks'. Putting that clearly in an anti-Arab context, the Russian oligarch is shown as a hero, sacrificing his life to save those of his sons, as he falls to his death ensuring they get on board just in time. That screenwriter Harald Kloser and director Roland Emmerich maintain this racist bias was admitted by Emmerich in an interview. He discussed why the film shows the destruction of other religious sites, including Christ the Redeemer and the Sistine Chapel, but does not show any damage to the Kaaba (commonly known as 'the big square thing in Mecca'). He said:

Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich says.
But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a
movie. And he was right. ... We have to all ... in the Western world ... think
about this. You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if
you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that
sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something
which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film,
so I kind of left it out. - SciFiWire

This logic has been criticised by some as cowing to Islam, but a semiotic study of the movie itself suggests the opposite. Rather than being intimidated by Muslims, Kloser and Emmerich show a clear racism towards Muslim and Arab peoples, assuming that the CGI destruction of the Kaaba would result in a fatwa. Nowhere is there any indication that they sought out the opinion of Muslim leaders to see how they would respond to the on-screen destruction of the Kaaba, they simply assumed that a fatwa would be the response. In the context of a movie which portrays everyone but white ruling class males (along with the occasional non-white useful pawn) as useless, this editorial decision, and the conversation Emmerich reports having with Kloser, is clearly motivated by racism rather than a rational or sincere fear of Islam or Muslims.

As a result, the movie is at base one huge sexist, racist, macho, technocratic narrative, leaving no pejorative stereotype unused, no blind prejudiced stone unturned. Even the English member of the scientific investigation and advice team speaks in that accent that only exists in the minds of Hollywood directors, because I assure you no one in England actually talks like that. Characters are invariably killed off as their dramatic purpose comes to an end, and the survivors are only those who conform to the precepts and biases of the writer and director. Despite this, the Daily Star provided the 2012 movie DVD release with the ideal reviewer tagline, calling it 'the best disaster movie ever'. Thought the paper has a female editor, it is owned by superrich pornographer Richard Desmond, so perhaps praising a remarkably misanthropic film is to be expected. The Daily Mirror, a tabloid newspaper supposedly aimed at a left-leaning readership, reviewed the movie very positively. Completely betraying the standards they like to claim they stand for (the 2003 anti-Iraq War march in London was partly sponsored by the paper), they gave 2012 a glowing review, bizarrely even praising the abysmal script.

Ironically, though Emmerich also told SciFiWire that he is 'against organized religion' he chose major story elements - the apocalypse, using 'arks' to save people and animals from a flood, focusing on a small group battling against the odds, an everyman prophet (played by Woody Harrelson) - that are more than familiar to readers of the Bible. In particular, the flood/ark narrative dominates the entire second half of the film. In the alternate ending, a cruise ship carrying the chief geologist's father is found perched on top of a rocky outcrop in the sea. This is reminiscent of a common story in conspiracy/alt history folklore - that the remains of Noah's Ark can be found on Mt Ararat in Turkey, near the border with Iraq. Though this has been common knowledge among those who care to look (see, for example, this thread from 2004), British tabloid The Sun reported on the story as a new one as recently as last month. As ever, the fringe is years ahead of the mainstream.

More significant that Emmerich's personal hypocrisy, or Kloser's sexism and racism, is the philosophy underpinning the whole story portrayed in 2012, which is also the philosophy of real life disaster management. In the film, those that survive do so due to making it to a dam on the Chinese side of the Himalayas that contains the arks. It is a parable of technology as our saviour, rather than the resilience of the human spirit as in the grand narrative of Treme, or Robocop as discussed earlier on this blog. But this is not just a technocratic philosophy, as the semiotic prejudices of 2012 demonstrate, it is above all a masculine ideology. That is not to say it is a male ideology, though it is one that conforms to the roles men have historically dominated far more that women.

Particularly instructive on this front is the work of French-Algerian philosopher Helene Cixous, who followed on from Lyotard's critique of grand narratives and Derrida/Lacan's critiques of language. In Deconstruction: A Reader, a collection of essays on poststructuralist theory covering many topics, editor Martin McQuillan wrote about Cixous' attack on the binary opposition of masculine/feminine. In his introduction, 'five strategies for deconstruction', he outlined Cixous' analysis of how a great many values are placed into such oppositions, typically privileging the male over the female, and the masculine over the feminine. The entire section on Cixous is worth reading, so is reproduced here.

What Cixous' essay Sorties ultimately showed is that the masculine prejudice of the monetary/labour economy examined in detail by feminists, postcolonialists and people who don't fit an '-ist' description are continued in the economy of spoken and written language. Expanding on Derrida's assertion that speech is privileged over writing, Cixous developed a theory where the masculine (and hence the Western, the rational, the cultural, the scientific) is historically privileged over the feminine (and hence the Eastern, the irrational, the natural, the mystical).

This is an evolution of what Derrida dubbed 'the metaphysics of presence', the linguistic tradition of privileging speech over language due to spoken meaning allegedly being 'present' at the moment of expression, an aspect absent from written meaning. What Derrida demonstrated, in his typically convoluted and obscure way, is that all language involves a deferral of meaning, most simply that the words used (in speech or writing) are necessarily distinct from other words. One would have to know the meaning of the words not being used in order to be certain of the meaning of the words that are being used, and hence meaning is deferred onto words that are not part of the sentence being spoken or written. Rather than meaning being simply present or absent, a common binary opposition in Western philosophy, meaning is suspended, neither entirely present nor entirely absent, like a ghost or spectre. This is the reason why Derrida uses spectral metaphors in so much of his work, including in the title of perhaps his most politically themed work Spectres of Marx.

As Derrida deconstructed the binary opposition of meaning being present/absent, Cixous expanded this to the binary oppositions of masculine/feminine, rational/irrational and so on. Her work showed not only how such values are bound into binary oppositions with one privileged term and one subservient term, but that each opposition is supported by many others. Hence, man is Western, rational, scientific, ordered, in control and woman is Eastern, emotional, mystical, chaotic and needs to be controlled. A further opposition - convex/concave is of particular relevance to the issue of how humans manage catastrophe. The masculine is convex - protruding, penetrative, a 'presence' in the world. The feminine is concave - receeding, enveloping, an 'absence' from the world. Though these words most obvious describe the difference between male and female genitals (the shaft vs. the crevice, crudely put) it is also a question of roles within the world.

The masculine answer to a problem is to create something anew, typically a technology or feat of engineering. In 2012, the answer to the global crisis is gigantic boats designed to preserve human life, ironically acting like protective wombs for those lucky, or white and male, enough to make it to the Himalayas. Likewise, when faced with a security issue in a specific country the stock response is a military invasion (the contemporary euphemism being 'intervention'). Space in the world is defined by the masculine by building stuff on it, ownership is declared by planting a flag. The feminine response is subversion and adaptation, seeking to alter conceptions of the problem, to dissolve the intellectual limitations on how we see the issue so that there is the possibility of an unexpected solution rearing its head. Space is defined by the feminine by clearing it of obstruction in the hope that something new presents itself in time to deal with whatever the problem is. The former is a rational process, beginning with standard premises and with the explicit aim and assumption of working to a solution. The latter is an irrational process, beginning without premises to avoid the limitations they inevitably present, and hoping that removal of limitations will allow human ingenuity to come up with something that would otherwise appear counter-intuitive.  

In 2012, women (and likewise all non-Western races, ideas, cultures, traditions, contributions) are sidelined in favour of an entirely masculine, technocratic solution that willingly trades billions of people's lives for the security of the elite few. Rather than try to adapt to the crisis, they seek to rise above it and prove man's superiority over nature. In reality, this approach and pursuit often fails, as seen in the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the response to Hurricane Katrina. One moment in the coverage of the rescue efforts after the recent Haiti earthquake was particularly telling. A seven year old boy named Kiki was dug out of the rubble after being trapped for nearly eight days. The image of Kiki, arms outstretched, was broadcast around the world as a triumphant message that the US-led rescue efforts were succeeding, and portraying the aggressive giant rogue state as a benevolent patriarch. However, the video tells another story.

With the cameras already in place, Kiki was presented to the world by US firefighters. Though his mother stood nearby, the firemen cheered as they pulled the child away from her and handed him over to his father. Once again, the woman was sidelined in favour of the man. Once the boy had been placed in the arms of his father, one of the fireman can be seen explicitly directing the father to face the onlooking international media, so as to ensure that the PR value of the rescue was capitalised on fully. Only then was the boy handed over to medical officials to check him for injuries and other damage caused by his ordeal. This footage from Sky News shows the fuller picture.

The implication of this is that the firemen, far from being the brave, noble, beneficent rescue service solely concerned with other people's welfare that they were portrayed as being, were in fact primarily concerned with the public image, with reinforcing the US's international image. They appear to have waited for the media cameras to show up before completing the rescue operation, or at least to have ensured media presence for the moment when Kiki was actually removed from the rubble. They largely ignored his mother, and made sure of the friendly image of a father lifting his boy aloft before he was given medical treatment. Largely ignored by the trumpeting Western media is that while Kiki and his sister were rescued, three of their siblings died in the aftermath of the quake, and the family now lives in destitution in a shanty town on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. While Kiki's story has been widely presented as an example of the success of the masculine rescue efforts of the US-led services in Haiti, the reality is that the same failings that meant Haiti's infrastructure could not withstand the earthquake remain, and affect ever more people in one of the world's poorest countries.

A further example of this masculine logic was on display in the recent British General Election. While the result was a hung parliament, and ultimately a tenuous Conservative-Liberal coalition, the most notable feature of the voting results was the concern with race, nationality and immigration. The parties that gained the most votes compared to the last election were largely right-wing nationalists - the BNP, UKIP, the 'English Democrats' and the Conservative Party. With immigration being blamed for everything from economic problems (they take our jobs) to security issues (every immigrant is a potential suicide bomber), a racist obsession with immigration by the country's most popular newspapers just about achieved the desired result of a Tory government. With the government running a huge deficit, the Conservatives and nationalists promised to 'get tough' on the problem, exhibiting the same confrontational, domineering, masculine philosophy of 2012, FEMA and the rest. Only a matter of days before the election took place, one event in particular lent yet more weight to the narrative that demanded that 'someone do something' about the problems. On May 1st a car bomb was found and defused in Times Square, New York. The following day it was widely reported that another bomb had been found in Pittsburgh 'in a microwave, near a half marathon'. As far as terrorism goes, this is pretty surreal. However, like so many of these stories, it turned out to be nothing of the sort. After the microwave was largely destroyed in a controlled explosion by bomb disposal officers, it became abundantly clear that the early reports of it containing a pipe bomb were wide of the mark - the microwave actually contained a tin of ravioli. Some amusing pictures can be seen here. The 'bomb' in New York has been widely called 'amateurish', comprised of propane gas cylinders and low-grade fireworks.

The car had been left in Times Square, one of the busiest parts of perhaps the busiest city in the world, with its engine running and its hazard lights switched on. Either the man arrested, Faisal Shahzad, was a total incompetent, or he never had any intention of the car blowing up. The aim appears to have been to remind people once again of the great brown threat of Islamic terrorism, at a time when it would have maximum impact on the British election. Suggestive of this event being a provocation of intelligence services, a Pakistani Army Officer reported to be in contact with Faisal was arrested in connection with attempted bombing.

There are two further aspects to this story that provide indications of something more elaborate than one man with a poorly constructed car bomb. The accused, Faisal Shahzad, is Pakistani-American, though different reports have him as either Kashmiri or Pashtun. But the CCTV footage released of a man supposedly responsible for parking the car in Times Square is a middle aged white man. Also, another man named Sheikh Mohammed Rehan was arrested in Pakistan due to his connection with Faisal Shahzad. Rehan is reportedly a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, one of numerous Pakistani militant groups with long-standing ties to the ISI, CIA and MI6. As noted by Paul Joseph Watson, the group was founded by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man who gave $100,000 to alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta at the behest of the ISI's General Mahmud Ahmed. At this stage, the indications are that this was either a thoroughly incompetent attempt at a car bombing, or a psychological operation sponsored by intelligence services. Either way, it helped reinforce the prejudices and misconceptions that influenced the British General Election result.

There are alternatives to this masculine ideology of tackling all threats and problems by 'getting tough' and declaring some sort of war on a range of collective and abstract nouns that cannot be targeted by bullets and missiles. A more mature, careful ideology would be to adapt to new threats and problems, using both the masculine approach of looking for innovations given the framework of knowledge we have and the feminine approach of avoiding the solution being a self-fulfilling prophecy of our precepts. Rather than try to destroy the problematic through the violence of a head-on confrontation (whether that violence be technological innovation, military invasion or something else) we should seek to reach accommodations with problems where it is possible to do so, and seek out the true causes of problems where an accommodation cannot be reached. Waiting for a natural disaster like the Haiti earthquake (or, if you're a raging conspiracist, creating them with HAARP) and then leaping in and showing our 'strong hand' via the rescue effort, we should have been helping Haiti develop the economy and education to build infrastructure that can withstand earthquakes. As the Kiki story shows, this has been completely ignored by mainstream politicians and press alike, in favour of cuddly pictures of a small black boy being rescued by noble white firemen. In that vein, to finish this time I have included one of my favourite videos regarding the 2012 phenomenon, showing Ian Xel Lengold explains some of the reasons why people are predicting not an apocalypse, but some kind of cosmic ontological-perceptual shift in a couple of years time. While I don't necessarily subscribe to Lengold's interpretations or conclusions, what I do subscribe to is that he offers a far more inspiring and multi-faceted view of human potential than Roland Emmerich's movie, etc.

History of a Hunter

Everette Howard Hunt was born in October 1918, in Hamburg, New York. He would go on to lead a life which perhaps more than any other represents the darker truths underpinning the history of the 20th Century. He would become known as E Howard Hunt, or just Howard Hunt, an author of spy novels, CIA agent, Watergate burglar and eventually John F Kennedy assassination accomplice. The true life legend that is his biography lives on, as do the debates about many of the events with which he was involved.

Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940, and shortly afterwards joined the US military to fight in World War 2. He served in the navy and air force, before getting involved with the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was a nascent proactive military counterintelligence agency, and was effectively reorganised after the war had finished to become the Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Act of 1947 solidified a process that had been happening for some time in the United States. Ground was broken for the construction of the Pentagon on September 11th 1941, a symbol of the development of a permanent large scale military industrial complex in America. The National Security Act set up America's first peacetime intelligence agency - the CIA - and merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into one entity, the National Military Establishment. Two years later, this would become the Department of Defense. It also created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and took effect on September 18th 1947, the same day that the first US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, took office. It was signed by President Truman, a 33rd degree freemason, aboard the Presidential aircraft Sacred Cow, the prototype for Air Force One.

Forrestal's life and death proved highly controversial, and serve as a suitable introduction to the story of Hunt's life. Despite his military background, Forrestal lasted only 18 months in the job as Secretary of Defense. Truman lost faith in him and asked him to resign, and amid fears over his mental state the administration had him sectioned and incarcerated at Bethesda Naval hospital. The same Bethesda Naval hospital where a little over 10 years later the secret autopsy of John Kennedy was carried out. Within weeks Forrestal had died in mysterious circumstances, falling from a kitchen window across from his bedroom at the hospital, a bathrobe sash knotted tightly round his neck. Though it was quickly ruled a suicide, there are a number of theories claiming he was murdered. According to Henry Makow:

When he realized Masonic bankers controlled Communism as well as Capitalism, he couldn't keep quiet. He was deemed "insane" and thrown from the window of Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a good guy. He lost. - Makow, Rense.com

This story appears to originate in conspiracy theory classic Pawns in the Game by William Guy Carr. Citing unspecified sections of Forrestal's diaries, Carr explains that:

In 1945 Forrestal had been convinced that the American Bankers were closely affiliated with the International Bankers who controlled the Banks of England, France and other countries. He was also convinced, according to his diaries, that the International Money-Barons were the Illuminati and directly responsible for the outbreak of World Wars One and Two. He tried to convince President Roosevelt, and other Top Level Government officials, of the truth. Either he failed, and committed suicide in a fit of depression, or he was murdered to shut his mouth for ever. - Pawns in the Game

However, this is profoundly contrasted by somewhat substantiated claims made during Forrestal's lifetime by journalists including Drew Pearson. Forrestal's background was in the same elite banking circles (he was also a corporate lawyer) as the stories above say he was warning Roosevelt against. During his time at Dillon, Read & Co the firmed loaned considerable money to Germany, which helped revive the industries that formed Hitler's war machine. Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler details Dillon, Read & Co loans of over $70 million dollars to German industrial cartels and 'Participation in German industrial issues in [the] U.S. capital market' of around a quarter of a billion dollars. The firm were also a Big Oil banker, and during Forrestal's tenure in charge of procurement and production for the US Navy in World War 2, he vastly overpaid the Arabian-American Oil Company to fuel the ships. The same Arabian-American Oil Company that was controlled through the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil monopoly. Was he a genuine whistleblower, or a shill, or a depressive?

There are other allegations. Forrestal opposed the partitioning of Palestine to create the Jewish State of Israel. Some consider this to also be a concession to the oil barons who had more to lose through alienating oil-rich Arab states through the creation of Israel than they did to gain from it. However, many of those same oil barons, and the bankers who form part of the same group, were and still are Jewish Zionists. Sometimes, religious conviction outweighs the desire for money and power. So it is hard to say whether Forrestal's opposition to the creation of Israel would have been seen as useful or problematic by those elite powers. It is thus a leap too far to isolate this as the reason for murdering him. The most esoteric of all the Forrestal murder-suicide theories is that he passionately opposed the secrecy of the MJ-12 group who were looking into UFOs and extraterrestrial life. William Cooper claims that this is the reason Forrestal was sectioned and imprisoned in a naval hospital, and notes that the day before his death his brother had notified authorities of his intention to remove James from Bethesda.

Whatever the truth, the end of Forrestal's life coincided with the rise of the permanent US military capacity, one able not just to defend the lands of the US but also able to launch offensive operations all over the world. This made possible the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 1949, and the permanent disabling of the German military industrial capacity and thus the necessity of a huge US military presence there. President Eisenhower, who was one of NATO's first Supreme Commanders, warned about this historical development in his farewell address some years later. He said:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

If Forrestal's comments to Roosevelt were blowing the whistle, then Eisenhower's farewell address was blowing a trumpet.

It was during the Eisenhower presidency that Howard Hunt participated in perhaps the textbook example of a CIA-sponsored coup. As the OSS became the CIA, its staff were almost entirely comprised of people who had fought counterintelligence battles during the war. Though the USSR and the Warsaw Pact presented a somewhat different challenge, the likes of Howard Hunt and Allen Dulles proved themselves capable Cold Warriors.

Guatemala in the years leading up to the 1950s was politically unstable, a succession of regimes had been quickly installed and removed and the weakness of the state apparatus had allowed the United Fruit Company to dominate the country. John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man discusses the influence of the 'corporatocracy' on this part of the world in detail, as he worked there for years. The incremental colonisation of Guatemala by United Fruit definitely fits the profile he describes.

The company owned vast tracks of land in the essentially agrarian country, and also the railways by which the produce was moved about, and the ports by which it was exported. Guatemala was the epitome of a 'banana republic': The people were poorly educated, there was little by way of national independent media, but they tried to stand their ground in the face of an economic and political invasion by a US company. They elected Jacobo Arbenz, a middle class man of Swiss heritage who promised massive economic reform. He assumed control in March 1951.

Arbenz issued Decree 900, the land reform bill. It enabled the government to seize uncultivated land from large plantations and turning it over to peasant farmers. Even Arbenz gave up land himself. While this may sound like communism, Arbenz was only influenced by Marxism. He still believed in private property, and the peasants to whom the land were given were to be private farming landowners able to sell their goods for a profit and potentially buy more land or advance their lives in other ways. Arbenz wasn't a member of the Communist Party, he had no significant association with the USSR.

However, United Fruit were mightily angry because he took over 200,000 acres off them and paid approximately $600,000 for it, in 25 year government bonds. This sort of 'play you at your own game' economic strategy is very similar to what Hugo Chavez has been doing in Venezuela. Arbenz paid what the company declared the land was worth for tax purposes, though when the US State Department got involved they were throwing around the figure of $15 million. Given that United Fruit barely paid for the land in the first place as far as I am concerned they were lucky to get the $600,000. If Arbenz was a 'proper' communist he probably would have had them shot.

So, United Fruit enlisted the help of the US State Department and the CIA. There were obvious reasons why their pleas found receptive ears. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, was a former President of the company's board, and a stockholder. His brother John Foster Dulles, Sec. of State, had worked as the company's legal counsel. Walter Bedel Smith was on the company's board of directors throughout this period, during which he was director of the CIA up until February 1953, when he was replaced by Allen Dulles and took the job immediately under John Foster Dulles at the State Department. Smith also helped found the Bilderberg Group and the National Security Agency. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was a stockholder, as was Assistant Sec. of State for Latin American Affairs, John Moors Cabot. Just in case that wasn't enough, Eisenhower's personal secretary Ann Whitman was married to United Fruit's chief of Public Relations.

A fuller story of the coup that overthrew Arbenz and replaced him with a military dictator called Castillo Armas is told by the CIA's declassified documents. Over 14,000 pages explain how they recruited Armas to lead a small band of rebels and mercenaries and used covert and overt propaganda to spread distrust of Arbenz within both Guatemala and the US. Hunt played a central role as Chief of Propaganda for the operation, codenamed PB/Fortune and later PB/Success. In his memoir American Spy, Hunt describes his unease at being United Fruit's 'lapdog' but says he says the issue of 'stopping the spread of Communism' motivated him to take up the role offered to him.

While still an embroyonic field at the time, psychological warfare was going to be one of the main ingredients of PB/Success. The foundation of the campaign would be guerrilla radio broadcasts blared over frequencies close to the Guatemalan national channel. Relatively few Guatemalans owned a radio at that time, but it was considered to be an authoritative source of information, and we knew that wherever interested ears tuned in, gossiping lips would soon follow, spreading the message...

...On D-Day, the station would direct a powerful blast directly at the Guatemalan government's radio beacon, overriding their transmitter with prerecorded fictional radio broadcasts in which non-existent Guatemalan military officers would spread terror by announcing that battalions of soldiers were streaming across the border. Additionally, we hired a group of Guatemalan newspaper reporters to bang out reams of anti-Communist articles for publication in Latin American countries. They wrote pamphlets that were passed out in the streets and leaflets that were airdropped to remote towns and villages in the mountains and jungles. Phillips also devised another interesting anti-Communist technique in Chile that we duplicated in Guatemala in which housewives were taught to riot in the streets banging pots and pans to protest Communist programs. - American Spy, p74-75

The operation was heavily leveraged - the army under the command of Armas numbered less than 400, and possibly even less than 200. If it had come to a direct military confrontation, Arbenz's army would definitely have won. However, the propaganda achieved two key purposes, enabling the coup attempt to succeed. Firstly, it focused on the rural population who had most benefited from Decree 900, portraying Arbenz as untrustworthy, a Soviet puppet, and a traitor. This was Arbenz's electoral base, but as the pots and pans tactic demonstrates, large numbers were turned against him. The propaganda also convinced Arbenz that the tiny army led by Armas was much larger and posed a realistic threat. On 'D-Day' this impression was exacerbated as ex-WW2 bombers piloted by CIA agents attacked Guatemala City. They dropped bombs, lumps of explosive attached to hand grenades, bottles filled with gasoline, and even empty Coca-Cola bottles. Anything that would make a noise and give the appearance of a much larger attacking force.

In the end, Arbenz resigned and fled the country while Armas's army sat about in a small village just inside the Guatemalan border with Honduras. They smoked cigarettes, told jokes, leered at the locals and showed off a Guy Fawkes-style effigy of Arbenz to the press. The crude dummy had a sign hanging around its neck saying 'go back to Russia'. This was a tiny part of what was an elaborate PR campaign designed just as much for the US population as it was for the Guatemalans. The faction leading the coup hired Tommy the Cork - Thomas Corcoran - a 'superlobbyist' who set about drumming up support in the US congress for the ousting of Arbenz. They also recruited Edward Bernays, who took a group of journalists to Guatemala to meet with anti-Arbenz officials who told them horror stories which they naively repeated in their articles.

Once Arbenz had been ousted the propaganda continued. Armas was invited to America, given a tickertape parade in New York City and awarded honorary degrees by US universities. Not long after, the US sent in Vice President Richard Nixon. Ironically, his role was effectively subservient to the program devised by Hunt, who as one of the Watergate burglars would also be partly responsible for the downfall of the Nixon presidency. Nixon flew into Guatemala and held a press conference with Armas, offering a public US endorsement of the new leader. They showed off Communist leaflets and books supposedly found in the Presidential palace, claiming this proved that the Arbenz 'regime' was 'controlled by foreigners' i.e. by the Soviets. Nixon praised Armas as a popular revolutionary and a democrat, though at the election which saw Armas returned as President, he was the only candidate. However, given some of Nixon's public statements he probably considered this a 'white lie'. In an amusing footnote, Hunt's CIA career took him to Uruguay some years later, where he lived just down the road from the exiled Arbenz, even meeting him occasionally at diplomatic functions.

The next major operation in which Hunt was involved was the notoriously scandal-ridden Bay of Pigs affair. In 1959 Fidel and Raul Castro overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista after two years of guerilla warfare fought from the Sierra Maestra mountain range. The CIA even provided some funding to Castro's rebels, among them Che Guevara, to try to get intelligence on the progress of the struggle. After the coup, Richard Nixon went to visit Fidel in Havana, and they had an apparently intelligent, peaceful exchange. However, as Castro later mentioned in an interview with highly respectable journalist Bill Moyers, Nixon wrote a memo to Eisenhower as soon as he returned to Washington. According to Castro the memo said that he was 'a Communist' who 'had to be eliminated'. Nixon's memo summarising his meeting with Castro, available courtesy of the National Security Archives, doesn't say this explicitly. However, it does liken Castro to Sukarno, the popular quasi-socialist leader of Indonesia who was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1965. It says Castro is 'naive' about Communism or 'under Communist discipline' and that he showed no concern about Communism coming to power in China. Nixon's concern is clear, and he went on to be a 'strong supporter' of the CIA's attempt to oust Castro.

The CIA recruited Castro's sister to inform on how the nascent government was developing. However, it appears Cuban machismo may have kept her in the dark about Cuban counterintelligence, which functioned very well. Thousands of Cuban citizens had fled the country not long after the regime, including many who had supported Castro and felt betrayed by him as he sought to take wealth and power from the middle class. They became exiles in Miami and this is where Howard Hunt came in. As the CIA trained a couple of thousand men in a camp in Guatemala to conduct the paramilitary operation, Hunt was in Miami in charge of the political operation. His job was to find a way to unify the hundreds of disparate Cuban exile groups, some consisting of only one or two people, under one leader. He chose Manuel Artime, a well educated man in his 20s, who would help lead the new government once Castro was toppled. However, the coup attempts failed for a dozen different reasons. Though the CIA had recruited Castro's sister, they had very little by way of reliable intelligence on the domestic opposition to the Cuban government. The exiles in Miami boasted of having far more contacts and support on the island than they actually had, as the more important they made themselves out to be the more money the CIA threw at them.

Hunt developed strong relations with the Cubans, and when the invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed he sympathised with the Cuban sense of betrayal by President Kennedy. In particular several of his close friends, including Artime, were captured and imprisoned by Castro. When the Americans finally paid a ransom for the release of the prisoners, Artime called up Hunt to tell him the good news.

"Feliz Navidad, amigo," said Artime. "I'm at Miami airport."

It felt so good to hear his voice that I cried...

...A few day later, President Kennedy visited Miami where he met the survivors of the 2506 [the exile brigade] at a televised ceremony at the Orange Bowl. There, Pepe San Roman gave JFK the brigade's flag to hold for 'safekeeping'.

Kennedy responded with the faulty promise, 'I can assure you that this flag will be returned to the brigade in a free Havana.'

Manolo visited me in Washington shortly after the beginning of 1963...

... He confided in me that the flag was a replica and that the presentation nearly didn't take place because of the animosity of the brigade members toward JFK. - American Spy, p122

Why did the Cubans, and by extension the CIA, hate Kennedy so much? He had made support for the Cuban exiles a major part of his electoral platform in the election of 1960, where he narrowly defeated Nixon. He made it virtually impossible for the CIA to conduct the covert operation (codenamed Zapata) by insisting on iron-clad deniability. When they launched an air raid against Castro airfields in the run up to the invasion, using planes painted to look like Cuban air force bombers, the cover was blown. The planes landed back in Miami, but one of the pilots was quickly identified as a member of the exile brigade, and the plane had nose guns demonstrating that it was in fact an American B-26, not a Cuban one. Kennedy called off the second air raid, which could have completely destroyed what was left of the Cuban air force. As it was, they still had three Mig fighters.

When the invasion came the exile-piloted B-26s circled over the beach where the brigade landed. This made it impossible for Castro to bring up tanks, heavy artillery, and large numbers of troops in case they were bombed en route to the battle. The handful of remaining fighters were launched shortly after dawn, and took on the sluggish and large targets that the B-26s presented. Five were shot down and the rest so badly damaged that they had to retreat. The brigade's communcations ship and supply ship were sunk, leaving them desperately short of supplies. Kennedy refused to send in the US armed forces, nestled a few miles away for a 'training exercise' in the Carribean. The Cubans, the CIA and the US military all had grudges to bear with Kennedy, blaming him for the brigade's failure and subsequent surrender. Any one, or possibly all of them, may be to blame for Kennedy's assassination two and half years later.

Kennedy forced the resignations of or just fired the top three men at the CIA - Allen Dulles, Richard Bissel and Charles Cabel. Cabel's brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy assassination, and Dulles went on to serve on the Warren Commission. Many of those still in the CIA who were somehow responsible for the failure, including Hunt, were moved to the newly created domestic operations division. This included the interception of phonecalls within the US, which is illegal. The responsibility for domestic law enforcement resides with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the police agencies, and a judge decides whether or not they can monitor phonecalls, at least until the Patriot Act was brought in. The domestic operations division were also involved in domestic propaganda, using journalists and publishers both to gather information and to try to manipulate public opinion. According to the 1975 Church Committee, which investigated the 'dirty laundry' of US intelligence agencies, Operation Mockingbird cost $265 million a year. According to a 1977 article by Carl Bernstein the operations included Joseph Alsop, Williarn Paley, Henry Luce, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Barry Bingham Sr. and James Copley. Luce, most notably, was also a member of Skull n Bones and according to Hunt a 'good friend' of Allen Dulles. The media organs in some way used by the CIA included ABC, the NBC, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System and the Miami Herald. According to the CIA's Family Jewels the operations also involved bugging journalists' telephones. It is interesting that the kinds of activities that would bring down the Nixon presidency began under JFK.

Hunt retired from the CIA in 1970 and the following year was approached by Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon. They asked him to join the President's Special Investigation Unit, now more commonly known as the White House Plumbers, so called because they were there to stop the leaks. Of particular concern was the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of US political and military involvement in Vietnam prepared by the Department of Defense. It had been leaked to the New York Times by one of its contributing authors, Daniel Ellsberg, who made copies of the classified documents and the study based on them and handed them to reporter Neil Sheehan. The Times prepared a series of articles of extracts from the papers and commentaries on what they indicated, but Nixon got a court order to prevent them from publishing. Ellsberg then leaked the documents to over a dozen other newspapers, and the Supreme Court overruled the White House and allowed the Times to publish their work.

The Plumbers hit back. They investigated Ellsberg and found he was educated at Cambridge University, historically a prime location for Soviet recruitment of spies, and had visited Sweden, which was a key entry point for Soviet agents looking to infiltrate Western Europe, and was a prolific womaniser. All this made Colson and Hunt suspect that Ellsberg was a Soviet spy and had leaked the full Pentagon Papers to the USSR. Keen to find confirmation of this, they broke into his psychiatrist's office with the intention of photographing his medical files. Hunt teamed up with Gordon Liddy, a Nazi-sympathising nutter who had worked for the FBI. They two donned disguises and cased the office of the psychiatrist, named Lewis Fielding. They wore wigs and inserted insoles in their shoes to alter the way they walked, and managed to gain entry to the office to take pictures of the interior using a camera disguised as a tobacco pouch. However, the mission was not without it's problems, as Hunt described:

All in all, everything went as planned, except for an amusing event in the park. Liddy told me that he had been sitting on a park bench when he was cruised by a gay 'seven-foot Navajo' who apparently found Liddy so inviting in his longish wig that Liddy almost had to fight off the large, amorous suitor. - American Spy, p185

For the burglary itself Hunt recruited Bernard Barker, and two Cubans named Felipe De Diego - a Bay of Pigs veteran - and Rolando Martinez - who had run sabotage operations inside Cuba as part of Operation Mongoose. Ultimately, the mission failed because though they successfully broke into the office, Barker and the Cubans were unable to find any files relating to Ellsberg. The burglary crew opened medicine cabinets and had strewn materials all over the floor and a few days later the local police arrested a drug addict who conveniently confessed to the Plumbers' crime.

That was in 1971, and the following year was a presidential election year. Nixon had taken the White House at the second attempt. Having been beaten by JFK in 1960 he also he failed in a 1962 attempt to become governor of his home state of California, then announced his retirement from politics, before staging a comeback to take the big job. However, he had steadily become intensely paranoid, and though he retained a large amount of the support that had seen him elected President, he believed there were dark forces working against him. The Plumbers were enlisted to try to help Nixon, and were largely funded by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, also known as CREEP. Project Gemstone was born - a multi-facted covert operation designed to not only gather intelligence on what the Democratic party were up to, but also to try to influence public opinion and therefore the election result. This included various subprojects named after precious stones.

Our highest priority, 'Diamond', was the counterdemonstration plan for San Diego, where the Republican convention was scheduled to take place. 'Garnet' was abother counterdemonstration program, in which we planned to hire various distasteful people to demonstrate against the Republicans, with the hopefull fallout that the American public would find their antics so repulsive that they would vote for Nixon, just to thumb their nose at the demonstrators (much like how today's American Idol television audiences often seem to vote for contestants whom Simon Cowell ridicules). - American Spy, p195

Gemstone culminated in the break-ins at the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington DC, where the Democratic Party's National Committee (DNC) had its headquarters. The team comprised Hunt, Barker and Liddy, two anti-Castro Cubans named Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez, a former CIA security specialist Jim McCord, and former CIA agent Frank Sturgis. Hunt, Barker, the Cubans and Sturgis all went back to Operation 40 and the Bay of Pigs invasion. The aim of the break-in was to photograph documents detailing Democratic campaign contributions in the hope of finding a connection to Castro or the Soviets, and to bug the office and phone of Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the DNC. The first attempt failed because Gonzalez, a locksmith by trade, didn't have the right tool to pick the locks and allow access to the DNC offices. The second attempt largely succeeded, but the entry team photographed the wrong documents and McCord cocked up the bugging part of the operation.

The third attempt was the big one. Not only were the entry team arrested, the entire White House covert operations team was uncovered, eventually forcing Nixon to resign and precipitating a series of inquiries into the actions of the US intelligence services. The team broke in on the night of 17th June 1972 and were discovered due to a sloppy mistake. The technique developed during the earlier break-ins was to have McCord sneak into the Watergate complex through the garage doors, and tape open the locks on doors allowing the others access to a staircase and thus the floor containing the DNC's offices. This was common practice among cleaners and maintenance crews, but a security guard found the doors taped open, removed the tape and then found them re-taped again hours later. He alerted the police, who located and arrested the entry team. Liddy and Hunt escaped that evening but phone numbers and the money trail led the FBI to both of them. Though Nixon was allowed to retire and his successor, Gerald Ford, gave him a full pardon the Watergate burglars were imprisoned. Hunt served 33 months, by which time his wife had died in a plane accident and he had essentially been bankrupted. Also imprisoned were several White House staffers, including White House counsels John Dean and John Ehrlichman, Nixon's Chief of Staff HR Haldemann, deputy director of CREEP Jeb MacGruder and Attorney General John Mitchell.

The Watergate scandal not only brought down a presidential administration and virtually ruined Hunt's life, it was also the basis for the Church Committee's investigation into illegal activities by US intelligence services and the Rockefeller's Commission's investigation into CIA activities within the US, both in 1975. President Ford reacted to the discoveries of these inquiries by enacting Executive Order 11905, which amended the National Security Act of 1947 by providing greater oversight of intelligence agency activities and banning political assassinations. Whether the CIA and the rest of the US 'intelligence community' really paid any attention is a matter of some dispute. The public pressure arising from the information reported by the two inquiries, particularly the Church Committee, led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), formed in 1976 and lasting until 1979. The HSCA looked into the killings of President John F Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April 1968.

Hunt testified before the Rockefeller Commission and the HSCA about his alleged role in the Kennedy assassination. Writers, in particular Tad Szulc, had written about infamous photographs taken in Dealey Plaza of three men that were arrested shortly after the shooting of JFK. The photos of these tramps have been the subject of tremendous debate.

Howard Hunt is allegedly the third man (L-R), the one wearing a hat. The first two men have been widely identified, perhaps correctly, as Frank Sturgis and Daniel Carswell (Carswell was also CIA). Sceptics, including Oliver Stone in his movie JFK, have pointed out that two of the men look quite young to be homeless in 1960s America, that all three men are clean shaven and the two whose hair can be seen shows it to be well kept. They appear to be wearing mostly new clothes with little or no sign of dirt, wear or fraying, and that if you were not told they were vagrants they wouldn't stand out as such. That they were arrested, questioned, and then released has caused some to suspect they were protected assets of the intelligence services involved in the assassination.

Hunt denied that he was in Dallas that day, affirming to both the Rockefeller Commission and the HSCA that he was at home in Washington on the day in question. He tells a tale of being out shopping for groceries when he and his wife heard about the shooting. They then collected their son from school, went home and watched the rolling TV coverage as events unfolded into the evening. However, this now appears not to be true. Though Hunt re-affirmed this version of events in his autobiography, published shortly after his death in January 2007, he sent his son St John Hunt a tape recording in 2004 making an extensive confession, and telling his son to release the recording after his death. Howard Hunt claims that he was in fact in Dallas that day, as a 'benchwarmer' rather than a key player in the assassination. He named then vice-President Lyndon Johnson as one of the main men behind the plot, and identified Cord Meyer and William King Harvey of the CIA as its progenitors. Harvey in particular played a key role in Operation Mongoose, the Pentagon-CIA plan to kill Castro (among other things). As picked up by Oliver Stone's movie Nixon, there is a suspicion that Mongoose 'got turned around' and became the vehicle for the Kennedy assassination, a suspicion held by Richard Nixon himself.

The story of Hunt's confession was first picked up by Prisonplanet and then by Coast to Coast radio. However, it has not gained any notable coverage in mainstream news media. His son St John offered his opinion on the tramp photographs, saying that the third man looked much like his father did in the early 1960s. But people quite often confess to crimes they haven't committed, such at the LA drug addict who said he broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. There is also the issue of why Hunt went to such lengths in his 2007 book to deny his involvement in the assassination when he knew he was dying and therefore that soon after his son would make his recorded confession a matter of public knowledge (at least to those who bother to look for such things). Most publishers would jump at the chance to publish an irrefutable posthumous confession by a CIA agent. It's ideal from a legal point of view because it can't be proven true or false because the guy making the confession is dead, the publisher doesn't even have to claim the confession as true in order to get people interested. Kennedy assassination theories are the most commonly believed type of conspiracy theory, with the possible exception of those concerning 9/11, so it is a guaranteed money maker, a very rare thing in publishing.

However, put against that Hunt knew of the CIA's infiltration of the publishing industry, and so if he had told his book publisher what he told his son then there was a reasonable chance of the CIA finding out his intentions. In any case, his book was edited by the CIA before publication, and so is perhaps not an authentic representation of Hunt's view of his own life. Hopefully some of these issues will be discussed in Alex Jones's forthcoming Kennedy assassination movie, which features St John Hunt in extensive interviews, alongside long-term investigator Jim Marrs. Though there is no release date available yet the preview indicates that it expands on the theories put forth in the mainstream films Executive Action and JFK.