Sinister Forces blog

A few days ago, a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a Northwest flight from London to Detroit, a la Richard Reid. 

He appeared at the check-in counter with no passport, no luggage,  and an expired visa for the United States.  He paid for his ticket in cash.  His father -- a prominent Nigerian banker (a real one, not the one who sends you those scam emails) -- warned the United States that his son was a potential terrorist.  His son's name was placed in a database of possible suspects, a database containing more than 500,000 names.  According to eye-witnesses at the scene of the check-in, the man was accompanied by another individual -- a "sharp-dressed man" to plagiarize ZZ Top -- who virtually escorted the seemingly impoverished young Nigerian through the red tape at the airport, claiming that the Nigerian was actually a Sudanese refugee.

With all of these warning signs, with all of this impossible lack of documentation, the young Nigerian man with a crotch full of high explosive boarded the flight and as the Northwest airliner made its approach into Detroit attempted to detonate the bomb.

Why do we believe in conspiracy theories?

Yours truly, the author of this post, has himself been on the watch list.  I myself have had the boarding passes with the dreaded "SSSS" designation, requiring security officials to haul me off the line and put me and my carry-on in a special area to be thoroughly searched for explosives.  And that was for domestic flights to New York,  Boston, and  Washington DC.   That list contains about 20,000 names.  An elite group, to be sure.  It's not the "no fly" list, which is somewhat more rigorous and more dreaded, but it's still a much smaller list than the 500,000 name database in which our terrorist appeared.

How is it possible that I appear on this list, and a man who had all the warning signs did not?    We can say this was simply a snafu, but what snafu puts me on the list and not him?  How did the system go out of its way to ensure that this undocumented guy boarded the flight, replete with explosives? 

How did the system go out of its way to ensure that I -- a writer, a businessman, a thoroughly non-violent person with no criminal record -- is flagged as a potential bomber? 

This is why we believe in conspiracy theories.  Not all of the theories.  Not even most of them. 

But some of them, because some of them make sense in light of the available evidence.  To paraphrase, "if you don't believe in conspiracies, then you don't have all the facts."

There could, of course, have been another -- somewhat less palatable -- explanation. 

On Christmas Eve, I emailed some friends of mine predicting that there would be a terrorist incident involving an airplane.  Now, if you were a suspicious person (and who, reading this blog, is not?) you would suspect that I had some kind of advanced and guilty knowledge of the event.  But that was not the case.

I would wake up every morning for the past week with a melody running through my head.  I tried to take no notice of it, but it would come back to haunt me during the day, just below conscious awareness.  Finally, I sat down and "listened" to it, realizing that it was Franz Schubert's Piano Sonata in A, one of the last he ever wrote.

Many readers are probably familiar with this piece, without knowing it.  It was the theme song for the television sit-com Wings. 

Wings was produced by David Angell, who is perhaps more famous as writer and producer for Cheers and Frasier. 

David Angell died on 9/11, as his flight slammed into the North Tower. 

With these and other bits of connective tissue, I came to the conclusion that there was another terrorist incident involving an aircraft and that it was imminent.  I was not one hundred percent convinced of this, but I thought it merited at least a quiet mention to someone, so I chose friends of mine who specialize in studying synchronicity and who have a website devoted to it.  I asked them not to publish it, but to keep their eyes open for a possible incident even as I hoped I was wrong and just being fanciful. 

(You can see the Synchronicity post here:  http://ofscarabs.blogspot.com/)

And then, a few days later, it happened.  A terrorist incident involving an aircraft.

As I write in Sinister Forces, sometimes what we think is a conspiracy in the literal sense may be the result of dark actions taking place on another level of experience altogether.  When we live in an era in which religion and religious conflicts have taken on this intensity, and when spiritual ideologies threaten the survival of tribes, races, and nations, it is possible that this level of social focus and concentration enables or facilitates the flow of these "sinister forces", clouding individual judgment and arranging circumstantial events in such a way as to create the perfect "space" for these phenomena to take place.   

Either that ... or there really is a conspiracy on a very high level of participation.  You pick the scenario that makes you the most comfortable. 

The Hutuktu of Narabanchi related the following to me, when I visited him in his monastery in the beginning of 1921:

"When the King of the World appeared before the Lamas, favored of God, in this monastery thirty years ago he made a prophecy for the coming half century. It was as follows:

"'More and more the people will forget their souls and care about their bodies. The greatest sin and corruption will reign on the earth. People will become as ferocious animals, thirsting for the blood and death of their brothers. The 'Crescent' will grow dim and its followers will descend into beggary and ceaseless war. Its conquerors will be stricken by the sun but will not progress upward and twice they will be visited with the heaviest misfortune, which will end in insult before the eye of the other peoples. The crowns of kings, great and small, will fall . . . one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. . . . There will be a terrible battle among all the peoples. The seas will become red . . . the earth and the bottom of the seas will be strewn with bones . . . kingdoms will be scattered . . . whole peoples will die . . . hunger, disease, crimes unknown to the law, never before seen in the world. The enemies of God and of the Divine Spirit in man will come. Those who take the hand of another shall also perish. The forgotten and pursued shall rise and hold the attention of the whole world. There will be fogs and storms. Bare mountains shall suddenly be covered with forests. Earthquakes will come. . . . Millions will change the fetters of slavery and humiliation for hunger, disease and death. The ancient roads will be covered with crowds wandering from one place to another. The greatest and most beautiful cities shall perish in fire . . . one, two, three. . . . Father shall rise against son, brother against brother and mother against daughter. . . . Vice, crime and the destruction of body and soul shall follow. . . . Families shall be scattered. . . . Truth and love shall disappear. . . . From ten thousand men one shall remain; he shall be nude and mad and without force and the knowledge to build him a house and find his food. . . . He will howl as the raging wolf, devour dead bodies, bite his own flesh and challenge God to fight. . . . All the earth will be emptied. God will turn away from it and over it there will be only night and death. Then I shall send a people, now unknown, which shall tear out the weeds of madness and vice with a strong hand and will lead those who still remain faithful to the spirit of man in the fight against Evil. They will found a new life on the earth purified by the death of nations. In the fiftieth year only three great kingdoms will appear, which will exist happily seventy-one years. Afterwards there will be eighteen years of war and destruction. Then the peoples of Agharti will come up from their subterranean caverns to the surface of the earth.'"

                                                -- Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 1921

The above citation is worthy of examination.  It was supposedly revealed to the explorer, spy, and author Ossendowski during his sojourn in Asia after the First World War and the collapse of the Russian monarchy.   He, along with other White Russians, escaped along a treacherous route of more than a thousand miles into Mongolia via Tibet and China only to find himself embroiled in another campaign in Mongolia.  It was his reference to Agharta/Agharti that caught my attention in the first place, engaged as I am on research involving Rene Guenon and others of that period, but I took a few moments off and began to do the calculations.

If the "fiftieth year" of the next century is taken to mean 1950, then 1950 plus "seventy-one years" of happiness leads us to 2021, after which there will be eighteen years of warfare, ending in the appearance of the peoples of Agharti:  the mystical Shangri-La or Shambhala of Saint-Yves Alveydre, Rene Guenon, etc.  This would happen about the year 2039-2040.

However, if by "fiftieth year" is meant fifty years from the date of the revelation -- 1890 -- then the fiftieth year would be 1940 and the seventy-one years would end in 2011 ... bringing the revelation more or less in line with 2012 hysteria.  The three kingdoms could be, conceivably, the US, Russia and China.  The Crescent, of course, is a reference to Islam.

I only mention all of this in passing.  Since I already jumped into the "birther" fray, I figure I might as well contribute to 2012 fantasies of destruction. 

A fellow-traveler in the ways of Nazi occultism, Dr Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, wrote in his The Occult Roots of Nazism, the following intriguing sentence:

            Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action.

Are 2012 fantasies such a symptom?  Do the fantasies anticipate change and action in some telepathic sense, or do they create change and action?  What, I wonder, is the causal link?

As mentioned in my previous post, it is possible -- in an extreme, quantum-consciousness kinda way -- that the birther phenomenon of 2008-2009 somehow "caused" the asing announcement next to Barack Obama's birth announcement in 1961.  Traditional ideas of  cause and effect may not be the appropriate paradigm, however, when dealing with the time-warping (and hence cause-and-effect-challenging) ways of the quanta. 

Is Hollywood's perennial fascination with catastrophe films an indication that something dire is about to happen?  Does it reflect some deep-seated death wish of the American people?  Is it actually contributing to a future, cataclysmic event?  Or are all of these statements equally true?

The eccentric gothic horror author H.P. Lovecraft wrote, in the seminal text of what became known to some as the Cthulhu Mythos, "The Call of Cthulhu", that an impending catastrophic event caused poets and artists to sense the event long before it took place.  In my own work, I have pointed out this bizarre circumstance, one that has been carefully documented in several places. 

In Norman Mailer's study of Lee Harvey Oswald -- Oswald's Tale -- we learn, for instance, of a letter written to Marina Oswald (now living in Texas with her husband, Lee Oswald) from Russia.  Their good friend from Minsk, Pavel Golovachev, writes (on September 15, 1962):

            By the way, Marina ... the basic idea of Pogodin's play A Man with a Rifle is contained in the words "Now we do not have to fear a man with the rifle."  This,            as doctors say, is a quintessence ...  (p. 312)

It was a mysterious statement in that context.  Pogodin died on September 19, 1962: only  four days after the letter was written.   His play, A Man with a Rifle, was published in 1937 and concerns a soldier who joins the October Revolution in 1917. It is based on a conversation overheard by Lenin, an old woman saying that no one need fear a man with a rifle anymore, because since the Revolution such a man would be on their side now.   Why would that statement come up in a letter to Marina Oswald more than a year before the assassination of a president by a man with a rifle, a man who had been to Russia to, ostensibly, join forces with the Soviet state?

And the use of the term "quintessence" in this context is intriguing.  It means, literally, the fifth essence, the fifth element after earth, air, fire and water: spirit.  It is an alchemical term, related to the concept of transformation and transmutation. 

As an aside:  in an e-book offering by a contemporary writer of Russian birth, Valentina Filina-Pattison entitled To the Horizon and Beyond (Canada, 2003), we read of a scene in modern Russia where a young woman is going to see the Pogodin play with her boyfriend (p. 97).  The young woman's name is Marina ...

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All of these curious circumstances lead us to wonder if the process is irreversible.  Can we cause change to occur through fantasy, through art, through various transformative processes, rather than be no more than passive observers?

What if we were, then, to become a bit more pro-active in this process and insist on imagining a more perfect world:  one that comes into being without bloodshed, without cataclysmic events, without malice? 

Or is that too much like a John Lennon song?

My apologies to everyone for having been MIA this past year.  Part of this was due to the strange behavior of this website, and the fact that once I had published my angle on Presidential candidate John McCain as a "Manchurian candidate" ... a story that was widely distributed, and which appeared in Wonkette as well as in some Polish and Asian websites (for some reason) ... the site went down and the McCain story (as well as a number of others before it) disappeared into the ether.

I suspect foul play.  But I have no proof.

What I want to discuss here is something that I have been holding onto for quite some time.  I have resisted publishing it because I did not want to contribute to the national insanity on this issue.  However, now that Sister Sarah has jumped on the mule train, I figure it is about time I joined the fray.

Now before I go much further, I want to be explicit:  I am not a "birther."  I do not believe that Barack Obama was born outside the United States.   I believe that the arguments set forth by the "birther" movement are without foundation because one would have to believe that a conspiracy existed as long ago as the day of Obama's birth  in 1961 (or even earlier) to defraud the presidential election process in 2008.  I study conspiracy theories, as you know, and this one is beyond the pale.  Efforts to prove that Obama was born in Kenya (for instance) have been demonstrated to be false and the result of amateurishly-forged documents, etc.  I feel that there is a tangible element of racism and paranoid hysteria in these allegations that devalue honest journalistic investigation.

 Okay, that being said ...

There is a synchronistic element hidden within the "birther" allegations that no one has noticed so far.  It is truly bizarre, and its existence suggests to me that the fury of the birthers has its origin in the "sinister forces" of which I write.  I even hesitate to bring this up, knowing full well what the reaction will be among the birthers and how they will use this synchronistic piece of "evidence" to add more fuel to their fires, full as they are of heat and no light.  But, here it goes:

In the two birth announcements from the Hawaii newspapers mentioning that a son was born to Mr and Mrs Barack Obama on August 4, 1961 we notice that the next announcement in the series, directly below that of Barack Obama, is for a son born to a Mr and Mrs Norman Asing on the same day.

Okay.  Wait for it.  Wait for it ...

"Asing" is a word in the Indonesian national language, Bahasa Indonesia, and means ... "foreign"!  

 (You will recall that Barack Obama spent four years in Indonesia growing up and still has a good command of that language.) 

 Now the birthers will say that this is evidence that there was a conspiracy back in 1961 when Barack Obama was a week old, and that the birth announcement for Mr Asing was a coded message to their followers that "the eagle has landed" or something (much, I assume, to the real Mr Asing's dismay). 

 My interpretation, of course, is somewhat different.  I believe that the birther movement was so intense that it created a ripple in space-time (I write about this in Sinister Forces, you may recall, in connection with the Kennedy assassinations, the Texas Tower Sniper, etc. all of which were predicted in novels and plays long before the events took place).  I believe that this announcement is a clue, but not of a conspiracy.  It is a prediction of what would occur, a prediction created by the intensity of the debate and the passions of the individuals involved whose quantum effects were felt not only in the present and presumably in the future but -- like the Kennedy assassination prefigured in the work of Maurice Maeterlinck -- also in the past.

 I would never have noticed this had I not spent many years living in Malaysia which uses a national language quite similar to Indonesia's, and in which the word "asing" has the same meaning, so it was only serendipity that brought my attention to the birth announcement where the word "Asing" jumped out at me because, you see, in Malaysia and Indonesia I was also "asing":  a foreigner.

Thus, in the immortal words of Linda Ellerbee, "and so it goes."