Saturday 28 September 2013

1976



A slice of life frozen moment of history, trapped in aspic, from the golden years that fell between the exposure of COINTELPRO and the formal imposition of NOINTELPRO

By Richard Sprague, 

To dramatize what might happen and probably did happen in 1976, this chapter has been prepared by assuming the attitude typical of today's innocent Americans. A new disease is sweeping America. No, it's not the flu; it's conspiracy fever.

 People afflicted by the disease imagine conspiracies everywhere. They believe, for example, that the CIA arranged for the takeover in Chile and the assassination of Salvador Allende. They even think Henry Kissinger had something to do with it. These poor feverish devils have the strange idea that J. Edgar Hoover was a fiend rather than a public hero. They imagine that he ordered a vicious campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King and a conspiracy against most of young America called Cointelpro. Some even think Hoover had King killed. There are some Californians with the west coast strain of this bug who imagine that the FBI and the California authorities created a conspiracy in San Diego and Los Angeles against black citizens. The California group also think there was something strange about Donald DeFreeze and the Symbionese Liberation Army. They suspect an FBI or California state authority conspiracy, complete with police provocateurs, double agents, faked prison breaks, and a Patty Hearst, alias Tania, all thrown in by our own government to create a climate that would make the public accept the prevalence of terrorism and demand a police state. 

The disease spread to Congressmen as well. It does not seem to be limited, as it was before Watergate, to people under the age of 30. There are even Congressmen with a more virulent form of the malady who are convinced their telephones are still being tapped. They, along with thousands of others who suffer, no doubt reached this conclusion just because they were told by a CIA-controlled media that hundreds of telephones were tapped a few years ago. 

Early forms of conspiracy fever are no longer considered to be dangerous. For example, all those sick citizens who imagined conspiracies in the incidents at Tonkin Gulf, Songmy, Mylai, the Pueblo and the Black Panther murders are now considered to be more or less recovered, since it turns out it was not their imaginations working overtime after all. Even the special variety of the fever which caused the impression that the CIA murdered a series of foreign heads-of-state is no longer on the danger list. 

There is still one form of the illness, however, that is officially considered to be very dangerous, virulent, and to be stamped out at all costs. It is the version producing the illusion that all of America's domestic assassinations were conspiracies. Those infected believe the conspiracies are interlinked in a giant conspiracy to take over the electoral process in the United States and to conceal this from the American people. Some citizens are known to have this worst form of the fever. They include a Congressman or two. Others have come down with a milder form in which they imagine separate conspiracies in four assassination cases (John and Robert Kennedy, Dr. King, and the attempted assassination of George Wallace). 

 Members of the Ford Administration, particularly David Belin, Mr. Ford's staff member on the Rockefeller Commission, went along with an analysis made by Dr. Jacob Cohen, a professional fever analyst, that the disease has been spreading rapidly because of a small group of "carriers" traveling around the country who are infecting everyone else. Some of these carriers, called assassination "buffs", were thought to have contracted the fever as many as twelve years ago. 

In the disease's worst form, the patient imagines that there exists a powerful, high level group of individuals, some of whom have intelligence experience. The highest level of fever in these patients produces the idea that this high level group, usually called the PCG, will eliminate presidential candidates not in their favor or under their control. Others imagine that Jimmy Carter has been brought into the PCG by threats against his children and careful briefings by George Bush. 

 It is worth analyzing the sick people with this domestic assassination conspiracy fever to see how far their imaginations take them. They calculate that the PCG, fearing exposure if any president is not under their control and influence, will go to whatever lengths are required to insure the election of the man they do control. The idea is that Gerald Ford was nicely in the PCG's pocket because he has been covering up for them ever since 1964. He has continued to help them through 1975 and 1976 by maintaining a steady cover-up effort on all four cases. Jimmy Carter was perhaps brought under control. The feverish "buffs" figure that the PCG would have been sure to eliminate Jimmy Carter unless he could be controlled. 

The scenario continues into the future. The more control exercised by the PCG, the stronger they become and the more people in the executive branch become beholden to them to continue covering up the cover-ups. 

So, wake up America. Wipe out this disease. It's just as dangerous as Communism, if not more so. Like the general in Z, Americans must realize that such a disease has to be eliminated whenever and wherever it appears. 



"Conspiracy Fever" is derived from an article with that title by Jacob Cohen, a psychologist, in Commentary magazine, October, 1975.

No comments:

Post a Comment