Derrida deconstructed

 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

It is immensely ironic that this onslaught against Western universalism effectively rationalizes minority group ethnocentrism while undercutting the intellectual basis of ethnocentrism. Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception. This in fact appears to be the case for Jacques Derrida, the premier philosopher of deconstruction, whose philosophy shows the deep connections between the intellectual agendas of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School.115 Derrida had a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity despite being “a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist” (Caputo, 1997, p. xxiii). Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were thus crypto-Jews who retained their religious-ethnic identity for four hundred years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition.Derrida (1993a, p. 81) identifies himself as a crypto-Jew: “Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case whether we want to be or not, whether we know it or not”—perhaps a confession of the complexity, ambivalence, and self-deception often involved in post-Enlightenment forms of Jewish identity. In his notebooks, Derrida (1993b, p. 70) writes of the centrality that Jewish issues have held in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” In the same passage (pp. 72–730), he writes that he has always taken,

the most careful account, in anamnesis, of the fact that in my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said “circumcision” but “baptism,” not Bar Mitzvah but “communion,” with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I’ve always suffered from more or less consciously.

This is an allusion to the continuation of crypto-Jewish practices among the Algerian Jews and a clear indication that Jewish identification and the need to hide it have remained psychologically salient to Derrida. Significantly, he (1993b, p. 73) identifies his mother as Esther, the biblical heroine who “had not made known her people nor her kindred” (Est. 2:10) and who was an inspiration to generations of crypto-Jews. Derrida was deeply attached to his mother and stated as she neared death, “I can be sure that you will not understand much of what you will nonetheless have dictated to me, inspired me with, asked of me, ordered from me.” Like his mother (who spoke of baptism and communion rather than circumcision and bar mitzvah), Derrida thus has an inward Jewish identity while outwardly assimilating to the French Catholic culture of Algeria. For Derrida (p. 170), however, there are indications of ambivalence for both identities: “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts” (see also Caputo, 1997, p. 304).

Derrida’s experience with anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and inevitably resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. Derrida (1993b, p. 58) was expelled from school at age thirteen under the Vichy government because of the numerus clausus, a self-described “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends.”

The persecutions, which were unlike those of Europe, were all the same unleashed in the absence of any German occupier. . . . It is an experience that leaves nothing intact, an atmosphere that one goes on breathing forever. Jewish children expulsed from school. The principal’s office: You are going to go home, your parents will explain. Then the Allies landed, it was the period of the so-called two-headed government (de Gaulle-Giraud): racial laws maintained for almost six months, under a “free” French government. Friends who no longer knew you, insults, the Jewish high school with its expulsed teachers and never a whisper of protest from their colleagues. . . . From that moment, I felt—how to put it?—just as out-of-place in a closed Jewish community as I did on the other side (we called them “the Catholics”). In France, the suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared. . . . But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else. . . . Paradoxical effect, perhaps, of this brutalization: a desire for integration in the non-Jewish community, a fascinated but painful and suspicious desire, nervously vigilant, an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals. (Derrida, 1995b, pp. 120–121; emphasis original)

Bennington (1993, p. 326) proposes that the expulsion from school and its aftermath were, 

no doubt . . . the years during which the singular character of J.D.’s “belonging” to Judaism is imprinted on him: wound, certainly, painful and practiced sensitivity to antisemitism and any racism, “raw” response to xenophobia, but also impatience with gregarious identification, with the militancy of belonging in general, even if it is Jewish. . . . I believe that this difficulty with belonging, one would almost say of identification, affects the whole of J.D.’s oeuvre, and it seems to me that “the deconstruction of the proper” is the very thought of this, its thinking affection.

Indeed, Derrida says as much. He (1993b, p. 289) recalls just before his bar mitzvah (which he again notes was termed “communion” by the Algerian Jewish community), when the Vichy government expelled him from school and withdrew his citizenship:

I became the outside, try as they might to come close to me they’ll never touch me again. . . . I did my “communion” by fleeing the prison of all languages, the sacred one they tried to lock me up in without opening me to it [i.e., Hebrew], the secular [i.e., French] they made clear would never be mine.

As with many Jews seeking a semi-cryptic pose in a largely non-Jewish environment, Derrida (1995b, p. 344) altered his name to Jacques:

By choosing what was in some way, to be sure, a semi-pseudonym but also very French, Christian, simple, I must have erased more things than I could say in a few words (one would have to analyze the conditions in which a certain community—the Jewish community in Algeria—in the ’30s sometimes chose American names.

Changing his name is thus a form of crypsis as practiced by the Algerian Jewish community, a way of outwardly conforming to the French, Christian culture while secretly remaining Jewish.

Derrida’s Jewish political agenda is identical to that of the Frankfurt School:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. . . . The idea is to disarm the bombs . . . of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, . . . all of whom . . . are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death for Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 231–232)

Derrida sees undeconstructed architecture as reinforcing a sense of community which sees its architecture as its natural environment that closes the community off against “the other.” Vitale (2010, pp. 217–218) comments on Derrida’s views on architecture:

I would like to explain that deconstruction of architecture implies rather the deconstruction of the political and that it can be put into effect only through the actual deconstruction of the architectural structure which the Western tradition of the political has embodied itself into.

The tradition that is itself based on the link which strengthens the identity—of the individual and the community—to a supposed original space, to the stability of the frontiers separating it from the otherness in general, from what is therefore conceived of, simultaneously or alternately, as external, foreign, stranger or strange. . . .

In the Western tradition the (individual and collective) identity is thought of as an internal, permanent, stable space, autonomous and independent from the other in general, which is represented as external, stranger and, thus, is experienced as a possible threat. 

To do space for the other, to give a place for that relation is the task of deconstruction of the political. The achievement of this task necessarily requires deconstruction of the architecture which provides such axiomatics with a concrete and durable form, with a form imposing itself upon our experience as if it were our natural environment.

Derrida’s analysis is the diametric opposite to Richard Wagner’s (1850/1869/2022, pp. 13, 16) analysis of music in which he proposes that the musical works of Jews cannot resonate with the German spirit and cannot,

rise, even by accident, to the ardor of a higher, heartfelt expression. . . . The true poet, no matter in what branch of art, still gains his stimulus from nothing but a faithful, loving contemplation of instinctive life, of that life that only greets his sight among the Folk.

Thus architecture as an art form should resonate with the spirit of the people living in the area and reflect their natural tendencies—an evolutionary aesthetics in which architecture springs naturally from the biological tendencies of the people. Derrida’s deconstruction of architecture opposes any attempt for architecture to create a natural environment; it is thus aimed at creating an environment that would weaken the sense of a natural community because such a community might erect barriers between itself and “the other.” 

Derrida published a pamphlet advocating immigration of non-Europeans into France (see Lilla, 1998). As with the Frankfurt School, the radical skepticism of the deconstructionist movement is in the service of preventing the development of hegemonic, universalist ideologies and other foundations of gentile group allegiance in the name of the tout autre, i.e., the “wholly other.” Caputo ascribes Derrida’s motivation for his deconstruction of Hegel to the latter’s conceptualization of Judaism as morally and spiritually inferior to Christianity because of its legalism and tribalistic exclusivism, whereas Christianity is the religion of love and assimilation, a product of the Greek, not the Jewish, spirit. These Hegelian interpretations are remarkably congruent with Christian self-conceptualizations and Christian conceptions of Judaism originating in antiquity (see SAID, Ch. 3), and such a conceptualization fits well with the evolutionary analysis of Judaism developed in PTSDA. Reinterpretations and refutations of Hegel were common among nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals (see SAID, Ch. 6), and we have seen that in Negative Dialectics Adorno was concerned with refuting the Hegelian idea of universal history for similar reasons.

Hegel’s searing, hateful portrait of the Jew . . . seem[s] to haunt all of Derrida’s work; . . . by presenting in the most loyal and literal way just what Hegel says, Derrida shows . . . that Hegel’s denunciations of the Jew’s castrated heart is a heartless, hateful castration of the other. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 234, 243)

As with the Frankfurt School, Derrida posits that the messianic future is unknown because to say otherwise would lead to the possibility of imposed uniformity, “a systematic whole with infinite warrant” (Caputo, 1997, p. 246), a triumphal and dangerous truth in which Jews as exemplars of the tout autre would necessarily suffer. The human condition is conceptualized as “a blindness that cannot be remedied, a radical, structural condition in virtue of which everyone is blind from birth” (p. 313).

As with the Frankfurt School, the exemplars of otherness have a priori moral value.

In deconstruction love is extricated from the polemic against the Jews by being rethought in terms of the other, of les juifs. . . . If this organic Hegelian Christian-European community is defined as making a common (com) defense (munis) against the other, Derrida advances the idea of laying down his arms, rendre les armes, surrendering to the other. (Caputo, 1997, p. 248)

From this perspective, acknowledging the possibility of truth is dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be used against the other. The best strategy, therefore, is to open up “a salutary competition among interpretations, a certain salutary radical hermeneuticizing, in which we dream with passion of something unforeseeable and impossible” (Caputo, 1997, p. 277). To the conflicting views of differing religions and ideologies, Derrida,

opposes a community, if it is one, of the blind[;] . . . of the blind leading the blind. Blindness makes for good communities, provided we all admit that we do not see, that in the crucial matters we are all stone blind and without privileged access, adrift in the same boat without a lighthouse to show the other shore. (Caputo, 1997, pp. 313–314)

Such a world is safe for Judaism, the prototypical other, and provides no warrant for the universalizing tendencies of Western civilization (Caputo, 1997, p. 335)—one might term deconstruction as de-Hellenization or de-Westernization. Minority group ethnic consciousness is thus validated not in the sense that it is known to be based on some sort of psychological truth, but in the sense that it can’t be proved untrue. On the other hand, the cultural and ethnic interests of majorities are “hermeneuticized” and thus rendered impotent—impotent because they cannot serve as the basis for a mass ethnic movement that would conflict with the interests of other groups.

Ironically from the standpoint of the theory of Judaism developed here, Derrida (who has thought a great deal about his own circumcision in his “Circumfession,” 1993b) realizes that circumcision, which he likens to a shibboleth because of its usefulness as a mechanism of ingroup demarcation (i.e., as a mark of Jewish exclusiveness and “otherness”), is a two-edged sword. Commenting on the work of Holocaust poet Paul Celan, Derrida (1994, pp. 67–68, emphasis original) states:

[T]he mark of a covenant or alliance, it also intervenes, it interdicts, it signifies the sentence of exclusion, of discrimination, indeed of extermination. One may, thanks to the shibboleth, recognize and be recognized by one’s own, for better and for worse, in the cleaving of partaking: on the one hand, for the sake of the partaking and the ring of the covenant, but also, on the other hand, for the purpose of denying the other, of denying him passage or life. . . . Because of the shibboleth and exactly to the extent that one may make use of it, one may see it turned against oneself: then it is the circumcised who are proscribed or held at the border, excluded from the community, put to death, or reduced to ashes.

Despite the dangers of circumcision as a two-edged sword, Derrida (1994, p. 68) concludes that “there must be circumcision,” a conclusion that Caputo (1997, p. 252) interprets as an assertion of an irreducible and undeniable human demand “for a differentiating mark, for a mark of difference.” Derrida thus subscribes to the inevitability (possibly innateness) of group demarcations, but, amazingly and apologetically, he manages to conceptualize circumcision not as a sign of tribal exclusivism, but as “the cut that opens the space for the incoming of the tout autre” (Caputo, p. 250)—a remarkable move because, as we have seen, Derrida seems quite aware that circumcision results in separatism, the erection of ingroup-outgroup barriers, and the possibility of between-group conflict and even extermination. But in Derrida’s gloss, “spiritually we are all Jews, all called and chosen to welcome the other” (Caputo, p. 262), so that Judaism turns out to be a universalist ideology where marks of separatism are interpreted as openness to the other. In Derrida’s view, “if circumcision is Jewish it is only in the sense that all poets are Jews. . . . Everyone ought to have a circumcised heart; this ought to form a universal religion” (Caputo, p. 262). Similarly, in a discussion of James Joyce, Derrida contrasts Joyce and Hegel (as prototypical Western thinkers) who “close the circle of the same” with “Abrahamic [i.e., Jewish] circumcision, which cuts the cord of the same in order to be open to the other, circumcision as saying yes . . . to the other” (Caputo, p. 257). Thus in the end, Derrida develops yet another in the age-old conceptualizations of Judaism as a morally superior group, while ideologies of sameness and universality that might underlie ideologies of social homogeneity and group consciousness among European gentiles are deconstructed and rendered as morally inferior.

[←115] I noted briefly the anti-Western ideology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 2. It is interesting that Derrida “deconstructed” Lévi-Strauss by accusing him of reactivating Rousseau’s romantic views of non-Western cultures and thereby making a whole series of essentialist assumptions that are not warranted within the framework of Derrida’s radical skepticism. “In response to Lévi-Strauss’s criticisms of philosophers of consciousness, Derrida answered that none of them . . . would have been as naive as Lévi-Strauss had been to conclude so hastily in favor of the innocence and original goodness of the Nambikwara [an African tribe]. Derrida saw Lévi-Strauss’s ostensibly ethnocentric-free viewpoint as a reverse ethnocentrism with ethnic-political positions accusing the West of being initially responsible, through writing, for the death of innocent speech” (Dosse, 1997 II, p. 30). These comments are symptomatic of the changes inaugurated by postmodernism into the current intellectual zeitgeist. While the earlier critiques of the West by the Boasians and the structuralists romanticized non-Western cultures and vilified the West, the more recent trend is to express a pervasive skepticism regarding knowledge of any kind, motivated, I suppose, by the reasons outlined in this chapter and Chapter 7.

Culture of Critique

An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

Kevin MacDonald

Samuel Melia Legal, Truthful, Guilty: Diary of a Political Prisoner

Self published, 2026

British patriotic activist Sam Melia has just finished a new book chronicling his persecution at the hands of the state. Legal, Truthful, Guilty is a clear and accessible account of his strange experience being prosecuted and incarcerated for entirely legal political views.

In a time of pervasive censorship during the first Trump campaign, and seeing dissidents hit with measures as extreme as having their bank accounts closed, Melia was looking for a new way to take action. He had already been active in the civic nationalist pro-Israel party For Britain, but was expelled after comments he had made critical of Jews were brought to light by the far-Left pressure group Hope Not Hate. Reasoning that he needed a way to act outside of social media while remaining anonymous, he quickly arrived at the idea of a stickering campaign.

Melia took the name “Hundred-Handers” from enormous monsters who fought with one group of gods to overthrow another in Greek mythology. He organized a system whereby volunteers could print out their own stickers using only designs he personally approved. This meant that participants could remain anonymous, as they only interacted online and did not need to provide a mailing address for any supplies.

The stickers were placed in public locations such as lampposts and benches, not only in the UK but also in many other white countries, provoking a great deal of denunciation from politicians and the media. They featured phrases such as “It’s okay to be white” and “Tolerance is not a virtue,” which were enough to justify an investigation by the British counter-terror police.

It is often the case that oppressive regimes blame internal dissent on foreign influence to make any opposition appear illegitimate. The authorities initially charged Melia with international financial conspiracy, although thankfully this charge was quickly dropped for lack of evidence. After attempting unsuccessfully to pressure him to give up the password for an encrypted hard drive full of data on local activists, they ultimately charged him with “distribution of material meant to incite racial hatred” and “encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.” The lampposts were unavailable to testify regarding the latter charge.

The case hinged on his alleged intentions, as the prosecution conceded that none of the content of any of the stickers violated any law. Supposedly he intended to incite racial harassment of minorities, despite never actually insulting them himself. They cited a book in his possession by Oswald Mosey, leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, as well as a copy of a historical Nazi poster which a friend had sent him as a joke, in reference to the constant allegations against present-day pro-white activists. To the surprise of both his attorney and himself, he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. He was placed in “Category B,” the same category as terrorists, and was sent to a high-security prison with serious offenders.

Melia served nine months before being released to an “assisted premises,” a British term for a halfway house, for most of the remainder of the sentence. Thankfully, his recounting of his time in prison is free of some of the worst things reported to happen to convicts. He was never attacked by the other inmates, attributing this to his relatively unusual habit of never going into debt, as well as never developing a reputation as a snitch. Being mostly surrounded by white people may have also played a role. He was never abused by the guards, and in fact several times managed to gain greater privileges from the authorities by being a model prisoner.

The closest thing to a Hollywood depiction of prison he recounts is being held in solitary confinement for 48 hours. His supporters were holding a protest outside the prison, which somehow the authorities suspected him of secretly organizing using a contraband cell phone, but they could find no evidence of this, so he was spared any further isolation.


You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here.

He did however have considerable difficulty with the character of his fellow convicts. One cellmate who he had considered a friend was revealed to have spread rumors that he was an informant, while himself informing the guards of Melia’s diary, the basis of this book. This angered some of them, as he had noted their sympathy with his politics, but thankfully they returned it unharmed. The offender also denounced another prisoner, but the guards could find no evidence, and the newly exposed Judas was then shunned by the other inmates.

Although the strict “no snitching” code might seem to imply solidarity among the prisoners, they had very little regard for each other. Many were allowed to work at various jobs around the prison, but they rarely proved themselves trustworthy. Those employed in food service would routinely hoard various items for themselves and give double helpings to their friends, sometimes in exchange for drugs, so that others were left with nothing. He ultimately quit his job in “servery,” as it was called, as he found this unconscionable.

Some prisoners were friendly to Melia or even sympathetic to his work, but this did little to raise his opinion of them. One was excited to meet the man who was locked up for “anti-Zionist stickers,” and informed him that the reason the sunset was red at times was that he was using a mirror to counter Jewish influence over the weather. He was often accosted by “nutters” who would either recount their appalling life story or attempt to convey some questionable hidden knowledge.

Others were locked up for rioting after a deadly attack on young white girls by a second-generation Rwandan immigrant. One was sentenced to two years and eight months for chanting “Allah is a pedo” and for making another statement about the threat of Islam which a police officer agreed with on video. Although he sympathized with their anger, he had to admit that “I’ve only met two. . . who aren’t complete scumbags.” One had a record for weapons, robbery, and assault.

He had numerous cellmates, most of whom seemed to have endless complaints but no will to accomplish anything beyond acquiring drugs or shoes. He briefly attended a course to become an English mentor, but thought better of it after observing that his fellow prisoners were “not just thick but belligerently so,” and had no respect for teachers. As he put it, even his friends were “men who revel in violence and intimidation.” Ultimately, he concluded that all but a few of those he met during his time there were a terrible burden on society and should be executed.

Readers are presumably familiar with the hysteria on the part of Western governments in cracking down on anything perceived as “racist,” but they might still be shocked by the lengths the authorities went to in this case. Melia was told that he would be prohibited from having any contact with anyone under 18, including his own daughters, as an assessment was being done on the threat he supposedly posed to children. For approximately two months he was not allowed to see them for family visits, and even emails from his parents mentioning his nephews were rejected by the prison. The justification given by the prison was his dangerous “symbols and iconography,” in other words the Nazi poster he had been given as a joke. Thankfully, they were incompetent in enforcing these regulations, at one point letting him have a letter from his daughter, and ultimately relaxed them under public pressure.

Melia was assigned regular meetings with workers from three departments, Probation, Counter-Terror, and Prevent, the latter being a program to discourage terrorism, and had notably different experiences with them. His “intervention provider” seemed reasonable and friendly, although he described himself as “ex-far-Right,” and seemed to have only ever had a shallow understanding of politics. As his role was only to discourage violence and he never saw any evidence that Melia was violent, they got along well. Counter-Terror was similarly described as “cordial.”

His probation officers, however, were apparently very offended by his rejection of multiculturalism and would argue with him at great length. One officer in particular who he called Dick, although this may not be his real name, used every rhetorical trick the reader may be familiar with to delegitimize pro-white thinking. He accused Melia of merely presenting a façade of being level-headed and reasonable in order to advance his true agenda. The last he heard from Dick was that he had submitted a new referral to Child Services and had found it difficult to think of anything positive to say about him. He even asserted that the couple’s political views would be harmful to their children’s development because there might be “future political disagreements.”

One of the key weaknesses of highly unpleasant people is that they seem unable to put themselves in someone else’s place. They will fill in this embarrassing gap in their understanding by assuming the worst, as Melia saw repeatedly. During his trial, the prosecutor questioned him as to why he would care about the victims of the Pakistani rape gangs. He alleged that since none of the girls were friends or family, Melia could not possibly sympathize with them, and was even faking his tears when discussing the atrocities. This type of mentality may have made sense during the Ice Age, but seems quite out of place in a modern nation where rape has long been considered a crime, regardless of the victim’s connections.

Melia is described in the foreword as having high agency, and this is apparent throughout the book. During his time in prison, he found a number of things to occupy his time, including working at various jobs and building things out of matchsticks, such as a model tank and a guitar with rubber band strings. At one point he was held in a cell with a large gap under the door through which mice could get in. Rather than simply denounce these illegal immigrants, he built a matchstick skirt on the bottom of the door, which successfully sealed the border.

This attitude was also reflected in his interactions with the authorities. He and his wife Laura consistently took their own side, as they have long advocated for white people to do. At one point Child Services produced a report on them full of flaws, including the claim that Melia is “narrow-minded” and that he “does not commit to any shared social contract, including democratically adopted laws of the land.” There were various other biased or false claims which he objected to, and Laura successfully demanded that the report be considerably altered. Amazingly, one updated section largely consisted of material copied and pasted from Wikipedia. They also managed to dissuade Child Services from doing a third lengthy assessment of their family situation after the first two had found nothing untoward.

Most of this book is quite serious, but there are moments of humor. At one point after being released to the halfway house, Melia was faced with a new arrival named Max, the son of Nigerian immigrants. Max was a caricature of a black man, constantly playing rap music and boasting of his felonious exploits, both at a very high volume. At one point someone walked into the room with a banana and Max responded with “Yo! I’ll destroy a banana, me, fam! I’m a monkey!” Melia suspected he was being baited to say something “racist.”

Later the author walked in on a heated argument between Max and another newcomer named Alex over immigration, with the former extolling immigrants’ contributions in food and labor. It was not clear that Max could imagine how he would feel if he had not had breakfast that day, but the author still managed to reason with him. He asked him to imagine how he would feel if Nigeria was suffering a similar demographic decline as the UK and the government was preventing anyone from doing anything about it. Ultimately he agreed that immigration should be cut drastically, and that the British had the right to decide their own destiny. The author explains that he has often come to such an agreement in discussions with non-whites; the argument for self-determination is so compelling that at times even race is no barrier to understanding.

The only real flaw in this book is that it is mostly a diary, and as such covers details of everyday life which the reader may not have any interest in. The author himself admits that he abandoned the diary for some time as his experiences had become too repetitive to continue recording. There were also a few points where the facts were unclear; I was left wondering as to the “five spicy words” of his which he first mentioned halfway through the book as having been used by the prosecution to show criminal intent.

The authorities had the stated intention of “realign[ing] Mr. Melia’s mindset,” but they could not have been further from succeeding. On the contrary, his experiences only reinforced his view that he had done nothing wrong, and that the state’s mentality was appalling. He suggests that he would like to pursue qualifications in law, and once he finished his sentence he immediately rejoined a nationalist group which he had previously been active with. I wish him every success.

Howe Abbott-Hiss

https://counter-currents.com/

A hoaxer without his critic is like a bridegroom without his mother-in-law

The Don Juan Papers Further Castaneda Controversies Edited by Richard de Mille

Foreword

To kill an error, Darwin said, is as good a service to science as establishing a new fact or truth, and sometimes it is better. But you have to catch the error before you can kill it. The error we are hunting here is the foolish academic legitimation and irresponsible perennial promulgation of a social-science hoax. The hoax in question is ten years of reported desert field work, first published in three popular volumes, the third of which was accepted as a formal dissertation in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The hoaxer is Carlos Castaneda, prolific author of ingenious but suspect anthropological best-sellers. The hunters and catchers of the error give chase in this book, The Don Juan Papers.

In 1975, Richard de Mille, psychologist, academician, writer, and editor, was reading Castaneda's second volume, about "don Juan," the now legendary Mexican Indian teacher of universal wisdom, when he was struck by a stupendous scientifico-literary revelation: Castaneda's sage of the sagebrush was an invented Indian, and those eclectic metaphysical conversations in the desert were scholastic allegories. For the next six years de Mille pursued Castaneda up and down the stacks and across the realms of discourse, until he had produced Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory and The Don Juan Papers. These books, well-received by scholars and public alike, drill the didactic bones of Uclanthropus Pilt-dunides Castanedae and everywhere strike baloney — though, of course, many of Castaneda's fans, with or without Ph.D., still like to believe that Carlos and don Juan roamed Sonoran sands together, catching wild rabbits with bare hands while discussing Husserl and Wittgenstein.

Going beyond Darwin's maxim, the Don Juan Papers not only nail an academic error but ask how this quite detectable hoax could succeed so long and so well in the halls of higher learning and what that says about the morale and competence of our guardians of scholarly truth and teachers of the next generation.

James A. Clifton
Frankenthal Professor of Anthropology and History University of Wisconsin,
Green Bay Series Editor

Preface

Since the 1981 edition of this book, the positions of the disputants have changed little if at all. Carlos Castaneda has published further best-selling romances about his magico-mystical teacher, the mysterious don Juan, and continues to declare that he is not making anything up. Skeptics and subscribers go on arguing about whether his story is fact or fiction and whether the difference matters. Humanists are increasingly disappointed by his swift, unreturning flight into occultism. Occultists accuse him of muddying ancient wisdom with impudent hogwash. Parapsychologists learn from him how clever Trickster's disguises can be. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist, finds enough anomalies in Carlos's 22 wondrous drug trips to refute Castaneda's purported ethnobotany. Rodney Needham, a social anthropologist, discovers one more academic author don Juan must have been reading out there in the desert: Eugen Herrigel, who in turn pirated some of his sham zen from the German philosophical aphorisms of G. C. Lichtenberg. Bruce Bebb, a writer in southern California, recalls that in 1957, three years before Carlos met don Juan, Castaneda was already talking about meditating, saying he wanted clarity, and writing about shamans — as well as claiming to have been a barber, a tailor, a knifer of dogs, a thief, a veteran, the husband of a junkie, and a New York jazz trumpeter. Meanwhile, back at the campus, Castaneda's UCLA faculty patrons have not confessed the slightest error, and innocent students across the land are still being led astray by not entirely guiltless teachers who persist in offering Castaneda's pseudo-Yaqui, Euro-Asian wizard as an Amerindian guide to the invisible world.

From the visible world, since 1981, four important figures in this book have vanished. Ralph Beals, who roamed the real Sonoran sands and knew the Yaqui when they were still unencumbered by Wittgensteinian Upanishads, regretted in 1978 that some members of the department of anthropology he had founded had been outwitted or demoralized by a typewriting coyote; in 1985, he died at 83. R. Gordon Wasson, first recorded non-Indian to eat the psilocybic mushroom, identifier of the ancient soma, unveiler of the Eleusinian potion, finished his fifty-year ethnobotanic journey into prehistoric visionary realms; in 1986, he died at 88. Maria Sabina, shaman of Huautla, early model for don Juan, woman who spoke with God and with Benito Juarez, filled the deep sierran night with luminous language taught to her by the tiny "saint children" that had entered her body; in 1985, she died at 91.

Barbara G. Myerhoff, pilgrim in Wirikuta, witness at the waterfall, warrior in the jungle of Academe, turned to the study of her own people, saying: "I will never be a Huichol Indian . . . but I will be a little old Jewish lady." She was wrong about the second part. With scarcely a word of warning, fierce, implacable death overtook her at 49, in the midst of her work, unwilling to go, a mournful loss to all who knew her. On reading Alvaro Estrada's oral autobiography of Maria Sabina and contrasting it with the eclectic audacities of her friend Carlos Castaneda, Myerhoff wrote:

Indigenous traditions deserve accurate and respectful preservation, and these records must be distinguished from imaginative works. ... It is the obligation of the lettered to make written records of the lore of the unlettered simply a record—not a mirror of ourselves or our needs and fantasies.
And what of the fantasist himself? On 4 December 1981, I met him at last, standing at the top of the Up escalator in the Los Angeles Hilton Hotel, where (he said) he was waiting for Michael Harner. Exactly as I had imagined him in manner, he was in form surprisingly small and delicate, no longer the plump young scamp who is pictured on page 16. His elfin eyes were hollow and haunted, as if he had actually seen the other world and somehow wished he hadn't. Me, however, he was apparently delighted to see. He bounced up and down, put his hand on my shoulder, and said in a confidential tone, "We have so much to talk about." I listened for twenty minutes.

He described his strange adventures as though I knew nothing about them, contradicting specific things I had written about him, without mentioning that I had written them. He said he had no imagination at all and could only report what had happened to him. His former teachers no longer believed him, he said. Goldschmidt wouldn't talk to him. A writer he had met in the hotel bar was despondent over bad reviews. A businessman he knew had become a psychiatrist and found that both careers were empty. Fame was an illusion. "Look at Telly Savalas. Who remembers him today?" I tried to let him go. He clung to me. He said, "Ask me anything you want." I asked him about his so-called Toltecs. Toltecs was not their real name, he said; it was "just a denomination, like Democrats." Softly, solemnly he defined our inescapable, paradoxical, seriocomic collaboration: "You know, these people that I'm working with in Mexico have forbidden me—absolutely forbidden me—to read anything that is written about me. So, for that reason, I have not read your books. But I want to say that for me it is an honor—an honor — that anyone writes about me, even if he says that my books are crap." And in that moment I saw that no con has only one side, and a hoaxer without his critic is like a bridegroom without his mother-in-law.

Richard de Mille June 1989

The Shaman of Academe

Carlos Castaneda said he was bom in Brazil in 1935. His immigration record said he was bom in Peru in 1925. He said his father was a professor of literature. Time said his father was a goldsmith. He said he had no interest in mysticism. His former wife said mysticism was all they ever talked about.

In 1973 Castaneda received a Ph.D. in anthropology for interviewing a mystical old Mexican Indian named don Juan Matus on many occasions from 1960 to 1971, and for documenting the interviews at great length in three volumes of field reports, the third of which was accepted as his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles. In all of that, there is nothing particularly unusual.

The three volumes of field reports sold millions of copies coast to coast and around the world. That's unusual.
Don Juan, the mystical old Mexican Indian, was an imaginary person.

That's extraordinary.

“Is it possible that these books are non-fiction?" exclaimed Joyce Carol Oates. Novelists Oates and William Kennedy and science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon were quick to recognize Castaneda as a fellow story teller.

Carlos (as I call the young anthropologist in the story told by Castaneda) goes to Arizona to learn how the Indians use peyote but to his utter amazement is chosen by the imperious don Juan, whom he has accidentally met in a Greyhound bus station, to become “a man of knowledge," which means he will after long and arduous training enter “a separate reality" and see the essence of the world as mystics do.

Published during the psychedelic years, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality recount 22 wondrous drug trips through which don Juan guides Carlos, but as new-age consciousness gained favor in the media Journey to Ixtlan suddenly discovered a wealth of neglected drugless techniques in some piles of old fieldnotes Carlos had stupidly set aside. Tales of Power and The Second Ring of Power reflected later popular trends toward occultism and feminism.

If the trendy Castaneda could write at least five best sellers in a row, why did he bother with the anthropology hoax? An obvious economic reason is that competition was too steep in the fiction market. Defective Richard de Mille style, weak dramatic structure, poverty of detail, cardboard characters that do not develop (but are suitable for allegory), stereotyped emotions, and absence of ordinary human relationships make his books unsalable except as fact. Readers love a true adventure even if badly told.

A more important, psychological reason is that anyone who would keep up such a difficult and complicated pretense for eight years before getting any material reward is a person who habitually refuses to follow the rules of society and insists on winning the game of life by playing tricks. As with Castaneda, this lifelong pattern often includes personal charm, high intelligence, and some genuine accomplishments along with the con job.

Professors do get conned, admitted Clement Meighan, a member of Castaneda's doctoral committee, "but someone's going to have to prove this."

(...)

A second kind of proof arises from absence of convincing detail and presence of implausible detail. During nine years of collecting plants and hunting animals with don Juan/ Carlos learns not one Indian name for any plant or animal, and precious few Spanish or English names. No specimen of don Juan's hallucinogenic mushroom was brought back for verification, though Gordon Wasson had challenged its identification in 1968. Don Juan's desert is vaguely described, his habitations are all but featureless. Incessantly sauntering across the sands in seasons when (Hans Sebald will tell us) harsh conditions keep prudent persons away, Carlos and don Juan go quite unmolested by pests that normally torment desert hikers. Carlos climbs unclimbable trees and stalks unstalkable animals. With prodigious speed and skill he writes down "everything" don Juan says to him under the most unlikely conditions. No one but Carlos has seen don Juan.

Since it has recently come to light that Castaneda met serious early resistance from skeptics in the UCLA faculty, we must believe any supporting evidence he had at his disposal — Indian vocabulary, plant specimens, photographs of places, tape recordings he says were made, or Carlos's "voluminous field notes"—would have been promptly pre¬ sented to counter that resistance. No such presentation occurred, which leads to the reasonable inference that no such evidence existed and that the fieldwork that would have furnished it did not exist either, except in Castaneda's highly developed imagination.

A third kind of proof is found in don Juan's teachings, which sample American Indian folklore, oriental mysticism, and European philosophy.

Indignantly dismissing such a proof, don Juan's followers declare that enlightened minds think alike in all times and places, but there is more to the proof than similar ideas; there are similar words. When don Juan opens his mouth, the words of particular writers come out. An example will show what I mean. Though I have condensed lines and added italics, I have not changed any words:

The Human Aura is seen by the psychic observer as a luminous cloud, egg-shaped, streaked by fine lines like stiff bristles standing out in all directions.

A man looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles bursting out in all directions.

Of these two passages, the first comes from a book published in 1903, the second from A Separate Reality, a direct quote from don Juan. What I find piquant about this seventy-year echo is the contention that don Juan spoke only Spanish to Carlos. Somehow, in the course of translating don Juan's Spanish, Castaneda managed to resurrect the English phrases of Yogi Ramacharaka, a pseudonymous American hack writer of fake mysticism whose works are still available in occult bookstores.

Could such correspondence be accidental? Despite the close matching of words and ideas, one would have to allow the possibility if this were the only example, but it is not. Of the two following passages, the first is condensed from the Psychedelic Review, the second from The Teachings of Don Juan. Again I have added italics but no words:

My eyes were closed, and a large black pool started to open up in front of them. I was able to see a red spot. I was aware of a most unusual odor, and of different parts of my body getting extremely warm, which felt extremely good.
What was very outstanding was the pungent odor of the water.

It smelled like cockroaches. I got very warm, and blood rushed to my ears. I saw a red spot in front of my eyes. 'What would have happened if I had not seen red?' 'You would have seen black.' 'What happens to those who see red?' 'An effect of pleasure.'

This goes beyond accidental correspondence. These two passages, each of which is drawn from less than a page of original text, have in common at least five specific word combinations as well as seven ideas: drug hallucination, seeing black, seeing red, unusual odor, parts of the body, getting very warm, and pleasure.

How many stylistic echoes would be needed to prove that don Juan's teachings and Carlos's adventures originated not in the Sonoran desert but in the library at UCLA? The Alleglossary, at the back of this volume, lists some 200 exhibits many of which clearly demonstrate and all of which suggest literary influence of earlier publications on Castaneda's supposed field reports. The list convinces me, but it may never convince another contributor to this volume, who said the don Juan books are "beneficially viewed as a sacred text," which prepares us "to witness, to accept without really understanding." Could that be the voice of Baba Ram Dass addressing the Clearlight Conference? No, it is Professor Stan Wilk writing in the leading official journal of the American Anthropological Association. Do most anthropologists feel that way about Castaneda?

No again. Such views are held by a small but devout minority, who see Castaneda as an emissary to an ideal world of anthropological discovery now returned to teach his colleagues perfect fieldwork. In that other world, which so far only Carlos has been privileged to visit, the fieldworker completely shares /the worldview of his informant, unobstructed by language barriers, culture conflict, grant limitations, de¬ partmental demands, fashions in theory, or modernist conceptions of reality. This monumental achievement required many years and would have been impossible without the tutelage of don Juan, a unique and persistent teacher, now departed, but some comfort can nevertheless be derived from certain knowledge that one indomitable pioneer has scaled the heights. Though Carlos's admirerers could not accompany him into those Elysian fields, they can at least still lose themselves in reports of the fieldwork written by Castaneda.

Thousands of years before there were any priests or holy books or churches, human dealings with transcendental agencies were conducted by spiritual technicians who traveled between this and other worlds, convoying the dead to safety, retrieving souls lost by the living, finding cures for the sick, and bringing back power to control the elements and knowledge of hidden realms. To make those perilous passages easier they often ate, smoked, or rubbed their bodies with visionary plants that helped them fly into the sky. Anthropologists call such special men (and sometimes women) shamans, which is what they were called by the Tungus tribe of Siberia. Shaman means "one who knows." In his singular way, Carlos Castaneda is the shaman of the academy, the special person who goes to another world to bring back indispensable knowledge only he can obtain.

Richard de Mille

The greatest science hoax since the Piltdown man

 

CASTANEDA’S JOURNEY The Power and the Allegory

Preface to the Second Edition

This book tells the story of a rank newcomer to the field of anthropology gradually discovering how a brilliant pretender named Carlos Castaneda had brought off the greatest science hoax since the Piltdown man. Borrowing Castaneda’s mysterious tone, the account often imitates his narrative sleight of hand, thereby testing the reader’s ability to separate the plausible from the implausible—a test much like the one imposed by Castaneda’s books.

Some readers of this book whose view of things was rather more solemn and literal than mine hated the test, but others enjoyed being fooled occasionally by a quasi-Castanedic chronicle. A few fans were positively transported by a gleeful suspicion that the book had been written by Castaneda him- self, playing his most convoluted trick. This illusion was strengthened by minor coincidences such as both writers being scholars, of about the same age, having wives named Margaret, living in California, speaking Spanish, and providing (in my case) no personal history and (in Castaneda’s) no credible personal history. Delighted as I was with that reaction, I must state for the record that in spite of common interests in social science, religion, metaphysics, magic, ESP, visions, and trickery, Castaneda and I are definitely not the same person. Let me also certify that I am not playing any more tricks on the reader, and point out that when I did play them I also furnished plenty of clues, mostly in the notes, to what was straight and what was twisted. Of course, not everybody reads notes or picks up clues. To start things off right, I assure all readers past and present that the UCSB library door did break exactly as Chapter One says it did.

During the two years between editions popular critics flatly proclaimed the don Juan books a hoax—a belated illumination provoked chiefly by the outrageous extremes their generally vii dense credulity or timid skepticism had driven Castaneda to in The Second Ring of Power, published in 1977. Like many another hoaxer, Castaneda had worked hard to give himself away, only to be frustrated volume after volume by man’s capacity for self-deception and media’s enslavement to fads.

The same interval saw the anthropological profession openly acknowledging the hoax at last, and I think it would be fair to say Castaneda’s Journey was the main source of this newfound readiness to announce in public what most anthropologists had been saying in private since A Separate Reality appeared, in 1971.

Luckily for detective-story buffs, general recognition of the hoax did not spell the end of the Castaneda plot but barely the beginning. Writing in Religion (Autumn 1977), Stephen Reno said de Mille’s expose had merely changed the question from “Did it happen?” (it being Carlos’ strange adventures) to “How could it have happened?” (it now being the academic ratifica- tion of Castaneda’s fantasies, particularly UCLA’s covert acceptance of a retitled published novel as a dissertation in scientific anthropology).

The puzzle persisted. Ralph L. Beals, one of Castaneda’s early professors, complained at length in the American An- thropologist (June 1978) about his former student’s evasive- ness, improbable trips to Sonora, and invisible fieldnotes, but Michael Harner—from four of whose published works (Chap- ter Five proposes) Castaneda sequentially adapted some two-dozen ideas for don Juan—indignantly declared he was not familiar with any evidence of that borrowing (New York Times Book Review, 7 May 1978).

Given such persistence, the Castaneda plot remains largely intact. Don Juan still appeals to new-age consciousness as a fountain of wisdom and a model for personal growth. Likely sources of his lore await detection in obscure corners of the UCLA library. Of the hoaxer’s personal history meager details have been restored, while the depths of character from which the hoax arose go mostly unplumbed. Though speculations in Chapter Four are proving close to the mark, we are still not sure what happened at UCLA. Accumulating information fails to banish the specter of Sonoragate, an appalling scenario in which certain eminent academicians knowingly tolerate or enjoy a hoax, as others carelessly indulge what (to them if not to the general reader) should be a transparent imposture. Five years into the plot, when Time began the first skeptical in- quiry, the academy closed ranks to cover up what had been viii done, thus provoking eventual accusations of fraud and demands for investigation and censure from scholars who were not so amused as I.

Such shenanigans (don Juan would dub them) made it possible for a complete novice and utter outsider to write not only this book but an explanatory sequel to be titled The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies, a unique opportunity for which I am grateful and because of which—without intending any more irony than is already inherent in the situation—I rightly and gladly call Castaneda my teacher and don Juan my benefactor.

The Piltdown comparison is far from superficial. Though Eoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson’s dawn man) clung to the evo- lutionary tree for 41 years (1912–1953), whereas don Juan walked Sonoran sands no more than eight (1968–1976), the hoaxes are alike in several ways. This is particularly true if we compare them in the framework of Ronald Millar’s theory (broached in The Piltdown Men, 1972) that the hoaxer was not after all Charles Dawson, a Sussex solicitor and amateur geologist who found certain skeletal fragments in a local gravel pit, but Grafton Elliot Smith, a brilliant man of science given to playing mordant jokes on his colleagues.

In Millar’s closely reasoned speculation, Smith championed a theory of prehistoric cultural diffusion which would be well served by any discovery in English soil of a missing link be- tween ape and man, an evolutionary gap now filled by Austra- lopithecus. Preoccupied by his unfashionable thesis, Smith conceived a trick to draw attention to it. Over a period of several years, he deposited fragments of a modern human skull, suitably antiqued, and parts of an orang-utan’s jaw, stained to match, where the unsuspecting Dawson would be likely to find them. This was no careful forgery meant to stand the test of time but a clever concoction meant to explode in laughter at the expense of Smith’s scientific adversaries. Filed to resemble human teeth, the orang-utan’s molar surfaces bore tell-tale scratches of artificial abrasion. Much to Smith’s dismay (rea- sons Millar) nobody looked for those signs of fabrication. Since he could not openly question Dawson’s discoveries without risking exposure, Smith supplied new evidence of their spuriousness, to no avail. Instead of betraying the fakery, parts of a single skull planted at different sites gave rise to a second Piltdown man, and only untimely death kept the discoverer from being knighted. Despairing of exhibits preposterous enough to disillusion his credulous colleagues, the hoaxer went to his grave without confessing. Not until 1953, when he had been dead for two decades, did anyone scrutinize the Piltdown relics as a possible forgery.

In light of Millar’s theory, let me now list the features these hoaxes have in common:

Each could have been exposed at once by a competent skep- tical inquiry—into the shape of Piltdown’s teeth, into the existence of Castaneda’s voluminous Spanish fieldnotes, never offered for examination and now, alas, destroyed by convenient flooding of Castaneda’s basement.
Each was the product of a clever prankster who was very knowledgeable about the relevant science.
Each provided superficially plausible support for a particular scientific tendency—Smith’s cultural diffusion, the ethnosci- ence and ethnomethodology Castaneda encountered at UCLA.
Each was hailed by some as a giant step in science but was doubted by others.
Each wasted the time of or made fools of some trusting colleagues.
Each cast suspicion on an innocent party—Piltdown on Dawson, don Juan on Theodore Graves. When Don Strachan was reviewing Castaneda’s Journey for the Los Angeles Tinies Book Review (6 Feb 1977), a UCLA anthropology professor, who requested anonymity, told him “Graves was the prime mover” of Castaneda’s doctoral committee. In fact, Graves did not sign the dissertation but had left the country for New Zealand a year before it was signed by five other professors.
Each hoaxer presented ever more extravagant material in an apparent but long unsuccessful attempt to unmask the im- posture.

Neither hoaxer confessed. Castaneda, of course, can still do so, but frank confession would be quite out of character for him. His flagrant fourth and outlandish fifth books constitute a sort of implicit confession.

In certain other ways, the hoaxes are dissimilar. Grafton Elliot Smith seems to have had no accomplices, but credence is strained by the optimistic proposal that not one of Castaneda’s faculty sponsors knew what was going on during the five years in which he presented his suspect, unsupported, self-contradictory writings for academic approval.

The scientific cost of Piltdown man was high, of don Juan low. Some forty years Sir Arthur Keith played dupe to Piltdown; a quarter of a century Arthur Smith Woodward hunted additional fragments of him; countless lectures and  articles expounded his evolutionary significance. In contrast, few anthropologists subscribed to don Juan; no pits were dug to find him or monuments erected to him; trifling research funds were diverted by him. The spate of Juanist writings has been literary, philosophical, or occult, seldom scientific.

Piltdown did more harm than good, his only contribution a warning against further frauds. Even within the confines of science don Juan may do more good than harm, for he reveals the condition of anthropology, disclosing a widespread confusion between authenticity and validity—a false inference that don Juan must exist because some of his lore agrees with what Indians say—and manifesting the rift between those anthropologists who (in Colin Turnbull’s words) “regard anthropology primarily as a humanity and those who regard it primarily as a science”.

In 1955 J. S. Weiner convinced the world of Dawson’s appar- ent duplicity and Piltdown’s undeniable illegitimacy. Four years later, when Weiner’s Piltdown Forgery was galvanizing anthropology students much as The Teachings of Don Juan would electrify them ten years thence, Castaneda began his studies at UCLA. Reflecting on his subsequent career, dare we entertain the fantastic notion that the Piltdown hoax not only foreshadowed the don Juan hoax but also inspired it? I believe that if we do not entertain such fantastic notions we shall never understand Carlos Castaneda.

In Second Ring of Power Castaneda soared to his fifth level of incredibility, thus disillusioning a legion of don Juan’s disciples. As don Juan’s loyal debunker, I am not entirely pleased by this turn of events. Though fewer naive followers survive to accuse me of sacrilege, a small cadre determined to exonerate UCLA have seized upon Castaneda’s wild fourth and fifth books not as an implicit confession of hoaxing but as an abandonment of factual reporting. “Anyone reading the later books”, snorted one academic legitimizer, “would naturally conclude he was a fraud”. My considered judgment is that anyone carefully and skeptically reading the early books would also conclude he was a fraud. Castaneda’s first book, published by the University of California Press with faculty approval, and his third book, accepted as a dissertation, cannot both be factual accounts, because they contradict each other. Possibly under a spell cast by don Juan, I carelessly omitted a telling example of that contradiction. Let me add it here.

During the first two years of Carlos’ storied apprenticeship (narrative 1961–1962) don Juan speaks standard English one day, in The Teachings, slang the next, in Journey to Ixtlan, a remarkable counterpoint which can, of course, be laid to don Juan’s professed translator, Castaneda. Harder to explain away than this counterpoint of speech or translation is a corresponding counterpoint of mood.

The Teachings tells a gloomy, somber tale, in which excite- ment tends toward fear or wonder, seldom toward joy or amusement. When, in narrative-1968, the legendary Carlos takes up the second part of his apprenticeship (recounted in the second book, A Separate Reality), he finds “the total mood of don Juan’s teaching . . . more relaxed. He laughed and also made me laugh a great deal. There seemed to be a deliberate attempt to minimize seriousness in general. He clowned during the truly crucial moments of the second cycle”.

The text bears out this description, and when we get to Ixtlan, the third book, don Juan is a regular cut-up, a walking koan, a Zen buffoon, notwithstanding that Ixtlan is set back in the early period, of the somber Teachings. So we are asked to believe that “the total mood of don Juan’s teaching” changed from day to day during 1961–1962 in perfect concordance with our reading of either the first or the third book. Now I grant don Juan is a versatile fellow, and no doubt prescient, but I do not deeply believe he could infallibly assume the proper mood each day to fit the tone of one of two books in which his mood would be contradictorily described seven and eleven years later. Nor can I think of any authorly excuse for this contradiction. If don Juan’s chronicler could not distinguish smiling from frowning, or brooding silence from roaring laughter, throughout two years, or if he didn’t care which way he reported them, why should we credit his report? I judge this one systematic flaw, all by itself, unsupported by numerous other contradictions de- scribed in Chapter Three, to be fatal to Castaneda’s supposed fieldwork and to his nominal dissertation, now standing cheerfully on a shelf in the UCLA library.

Having erred once in don Juan’s favor, I also erred once against him. Chapter Three of the first edition argued hilari- ously but incorrectly that “pulling your leg” could not have been translated from Spanish; the Spanish, Juan Tovar has shown, is tomándote el pelo. My conclusion, however, re- mains unchanged: Except for occasional details, the conversations with don Juan were originally composed in English, by Castaneda alone. In this edition, leg-pulling gives way to an inquiry into the name Mescalito. Chapter Four adds a new view of Goldschmidt’s “allegory”. Chapter Six restores Barbara Myerhoff to her rightful place at the waterfall and digs up Michael Harner’s missing reference to Yaquis using Datura.

Further research has traced additional sources for don Juan’s wisdom and Carlos’ exploits. The fieldwork of just one of Castaneda’s fellow UCLA graduate students, for example, offers the following Juanist ideas: the spiritual warrior, the shields of the warrior, the warrior’s strange left eye, death threatening from the left, the soul-defender’s special fighting form, the spirit catcher, the head that turns into a bird, and the name Ixtlan (taken by Castaneda for Mazatec Genaro’s home town, though there is no Mazatec Ixtlan). Such details await publication in The Don Juan Papers, but one thing must be told here: the origin of ‘la Catalina’.

How Chapter Nine scrambles to explain that name! And what an odd name it is: ‘the Catherine’—in quotation marks!
Though I think my previous guesses still have peripheral merit, I now believe I have found the central source of the only significant female figure in Castaneda’s first four books.
‘La Catalina’, you may recall, was a beautiful but fearsome witch, who trapped Carlos’ soul and interfered with his hunt- ing for power. A worthy opponent, don Juan called her. To restore her personal history we have to go back to a rather surprising place, the Saturday Evening Post, where John Ko- hler’s article of 2 November 1963 was the first to name her.
In those early days, I have come to believe, Castaneda was an avid reader of the Post, where in October 1958 he undoubtedly read an article, “Drugs that Shape Men’s Minds”, by one of his favorite writers, Aldous Huxley.

“Stimulators of the mystical faculties” like peyote and LSD, wrote Huxley, “make possible a genuine religious experience” by which “large numbers of men and women [can] achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things”, which will constitute a religious revolution.

Castaneda was not the only spiritual revolutionary to take inspiration from Huxley. When professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Dass) got into trouble at Har- vard with their psychedelic evangelism, they set up a research and training center for members of their “International Federation for Inner Freedom” in the Mexican fishing village of Zihuatanejo, up the coast from Acapulco. There “If-If “ found a shoreline sanctuary in the charming little Hotel Catalina.

“I sat transfixed all evening before a tree, feeling in it the very treeness of trees”, said one chemico-spiritual tripper in Ko- hler’s account.

“I sensed it was a tree by its odor”, a drugless Carlos would recall in Tales of Power (200). “Something in me ‘knew’ that that peculiar odor was the ‘essence’ of tree”.

“Our favorite concepts are standing in the way of a flood- tide”, Leary and Alpert warned. “The verbal dam is collapsing”.

“I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave . . . held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor”, Castaneda would write in his drugless Ixtlan (267).

If-If proposed to liberate its members from their “webs”, so that they might soar through the infinite space of conscious- ness. Carlos’ be-mushroomed head would fly among silvery crows; his undrugged eyes would see a range of mountains as a “web of light fibers” (Ixtlan 202).

Though If-If adopted The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a drug-taker’s manual, don Juan would tell Carlos the book was a “bunch of crap” (Reality 194).

Dashing the hopes of some five-thousand acidophile appli- cants, the Mexican government, on 13 June 1963, “gave the 20 Americans then staying at the Catalina five days to clear out of the country”.

“If anybody can show us a better road to happiness”, the notorious Leary challenged, “we’ll drop our research. But we don’t think they will”.

A better road was already running through the unknown mind of Carlos Castaneda—don Juan’s path with heart— which would carry future readers away from what Castaneda saw as the haphazard drug-fiendery of the Catalina, toward a disciplined and eventually drugless mysticism. In this un- proclaimed competition for the hearts and minds of self- transcenders, Leary soon came to grief and Castaneda triumphed. The impact of a worthy opponent would elicit a warrior’s best efforts, don Juan said; the opponent he thought worthy of Carlos was ‘la Catalina’. In the fall of calendar-1962, If-If flourished in Zihuatanejo; in the fall of narrative-1962, Carlos survived six hair-raising encounters with his worthy opponent in Sonora.

A startling photograph in Kohler’s article shows a formidable young woman in a leopard-skin bathing suit wading into the Mexican surf after taking LSD, her long left hand extended downward toward the water. She is, the caption tells us, “feel- ing the power of the ocean”. That remarkable image, I believe, incubated four years in Castaneda’s brain, emerged in 1968 as a black bird, “a fiendish witch” who wanted to finish don Juan off—before Castaneda’s mythogenic power could be felt in the world through the don Juan allegory.

Richard de Mille

Life Behind the Mask

 Preface

I should write three prefaces rather than one. The first would speak of Didier Mouturat’s apprenticeship to an altogether surprising theater artist, Cyrille Dives, who created in Paris in the 1970s and early ‘80s a theater of masks with no direct debt to Japanese Noh, nonetheless akin. The apprenticeship under Dives’s guidance was all-encompassing, from the most basic of things—for example, walking on stage in such a way that a mask can find its own life—to an attitude of ceaseless search for more, for finer, for truer in the art of theater.

The second preface would address the subtle transformation of a theater apprenticeship into an encounter with oneself as both an unknowing slave of habit and as the bearer of astonishing freedom and creativity. “I am speaking of an intimate, progressive discovery,” Mouturat writes, “that we are not masters of our own way of being—that it is only the result of a system of reactions that tyrannize us…. This discovery opened the new and unexpected possibility that the practice of theater could become an instrument of self-knowledge.” That would be a worthwhile preface, capturing much that Mouturat wants us to understand and share, and certainly capturing Dives’s unspoken intention from the beginning of his association with Mouturat, then young and fresh from the wild Parisian student revolt of May 1968 with its street battles, brilliant slogans, and enjoyable chaos.

The third preface would address the qualities of Mouturat’s voice as author, which of course shapes all elements of the book. The end of apprenticeship—not necessarily mastery but deep confidence that one now belongs to a tradition and knows how to continue—is evident in the riches of that voice. A skilled narrator, Mouturat gives his readers a vivid account of ordeals and discoveries as an apprentice, still more intense in some respects when he became Dives’s right-hand man in creating and guiding a school dedicated to the new and largely untried theater of masks. “We were going to create an enterprise around the mask and, contrary to my expectations, there was no question of producing a play. Cyrille categorically refused. Of course that frustrated me, but I had to acknowledge the obvious: we were incapable of doing so. That would have been the quickest way to betray the search we were about to undertake.”

Two other elements of voice worth noticing from the outset: the maturity of Mouturat’s perspective as he looks back at the path traversed and the brief poetic statements, haiku of the inner life and the search for authentic being, which appear throughout the book between chapters. The fruits of the apprenticeship and later partnership, and all to which they unexpectedly led, are evident on every page. The book is compact, but long enough to place us as readers in a new and surprising context: the search for meaning, the search for oneself. It functions as a sample experience. One’s own search is unlikely to be identical to Mouturat’s in form, but in spirit there is much to be learned from him, and the learning is easy: he speaks as a friend.

The instigator of this narrative, Cyrille Dives, needs a few words here. A ferociously independent bohemian artist, willing to pay the price of recurrent poverty and little 

public recognition to go his own way, he recalls both the composer Erik Satie and the playwright and novelist Alfred Jarry. He had that style—that eccentricity, that love of provocation and underlying seriousness. It is an old French tradition, probably rooted in the sixteenth-century author of genius, François Rabelais. A sculptor of masks, painter, and theatrical director, Dives created hand-painted, accordion-fold books telling allegorical tales with rich illustrations and calligraphy—it was one of the things he found interesting to do. Why ever did he go to so much trouble to craft a handful of singular objects that defy reproduction? That is an invalid question; it pits an artist acutely aware of his private purpose and way of life against worldly values that left him cold. Looking at the few handmade books and masks that now survive, one feels that one is looking at the work of a very special soul. Mouturat recalls: “Cyrille used to say about his own ambition: to be able to create in his life one minute of beauty.”

Though the path toward it was long, eventually there was a theater in Dives’s lifetime. Many of the illustrations in this book reflect preparations for it and actual productions. After Dives’s death in 1982, at nearly age 70, Mouturat continued his research and productions for several years and interested two actors with a natural affinity for masked performance. They are still active today. Mouturat went on to direct theaters in a number of French cities, at greatest length in Choisy-le-Roi, just south of Paris. As he makes clear, apprenticeship is never quite over. One remembers the vitality and majesty of the teacher, the direction he conveyed. Moving through different circumstances, encountering new challenges, the influence remains active.

I thank my wife Susan for her ingenious help as a translator. Didier Mouturat’s book in French is beautifully expressed. Our shared aim was a fully idiomatic English translation, so much so that the author might ask himself whether it all happened in New York or London—where it could happen again.

ROGER LIPSEY

Silence is always there,

You need only devote yourself to it …

May I learn

From silence

***

Self-Remembering in the Teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff

Every human being is the bearer of a fundamental question concerning his or her presence in the world. It often emerges in early childhood as a feeling of lack more than as a mental question, and then it is gradually covered over. Everything is arrayed in the world, above all in today’s world, to turn one away from it. The encounter with this question is an encounter with oneself. It can sometimes emerge again accidentally, owing to a shock, an emergency, fear, an unforeseen event: a situation felt instinctively as a threat to the customary framework. Preoccupied by everything that confers the illusion of conducting our lives, of being sole master onboard, our attention suddenly frees itself and makes room for a larger attention that can no longer be claimed as one’s own. This larger attention seems to encompass our presence. Abruptly one experiences oneself as its object.

This is an unanticipated encounter in oneself with an unknown presence which, strangely, seems always to have been there. The encounter may only be the result of a passing combination of inner and outer conditions not under our control, which create an inner attitude suddenly favorable to the possibility of being more really who we are. The taste is given us of the presence of a more conscious life suddenly revealed in the midst of our lives, and it becomes clear in a flash that this more conscious life seems to have been dominated until now by a wholly mechanical way of functioning.

The impression is strange, yet it has a familiar taste and astonishing simplicity, like a reunion with oneself. Yes, suddenly it could not be clearer that we have always been lost, that we didn’t know it, and that nothing in us was present to suffer this absence and to watch for the return of oneself. In the space of an instant, we are both overwhelmed and cured of a profound amnesia. Having lived until now in the illusory certitude of unquestioned awareness, we awake from a sleep of which we had no knowledge. We are speaking of a rebirth, the rediscovered reality of what one was as a child. Everything becomes new again, everything around one acquires uncommon vividness. No word has the power to do justice to this state. We are one with the state at that moment, and silence prevails. There is an immediate reunification of everything in oneself that moments before seemed permanently shattered and chaotic. Presence returns to itself and resumes the place that has always been waiting for it.

Nevertheless, this sudden impression of plenitude doesn’t last. Inevitably and rapidly it is swept away by all the commentaries of one’s personality, which from earliest years has been educated to explain everything, to understand everything on its own terms, to answer all questions, to penetrate all mysteries, to dominate all situations.

The opening does not last, and the impression one has received of it can be erased forever without a trace, as if it had been a mirage. Or it can imprint itself in depth to the point that it becomes the embryo of a sense of absence which never leaves one at peace and orients a lifelong search. For this to be so, the emergence of the essential question must be recognized—the question of the real meaning of our existence. To keep that question alive, we must try to resist everything that rises up in us to deny it, to resist the strong need we have to preserve at all cost the carefully nurtured conditions of our inner comfort.

Of course, we are subject to the tyranny of the mind, to its greed to understand everything and reach conclusions promptly so as to move on to other things. Yet what appeared does not seem to be of the same order. Intuition orients and inspires us to attempt to hold at bay, at least for a while, the habitual mechanism of analysis and intellectual speculation. We feel that what appeared deserves something else: a widening of the current perspective by which we apprehend the world and ourselves.

For the first time, perhaps, we are in question to the point that we experience questioning as a real state: “I am the question.” Sensing the importance and gravity of what is offered, one resists opening yet another mental workshop to seize and twist this way and that the question that has just come to light. The invitation is to become oneself the workshop, at the heart of which the question can act on us. Instinctively one recognizes the need to conform to an entirely new inner attitude: “to feel that one is worked”—as a material is worked by time and the elements.

This is the beginning of a journey that will have no end and no goal, other than to recover from incessant stumbling and missteps, and to recover again and again the fragile balance of an orientation that justifies our presence on earth. A new perspective opens, and with it a profound wish to correspond to it. Yet one cannot help but discover how far we are from that, the extent to which all aspiration for progress and success constitutes one of the main obstacles. Everything opposes it in our way of life, which remains trapped in a network of habits. Willingness is no help at all, and it quickly becomes apparent that genuine will is absent. One had the notion it was there, but experience gradually shows that it was only an illusion: the resultant of a subjective aspiration torn between what one likes and what one doesn’t like, most often leading away from the current actually capable of fulfilling our thirst for being.

Despite repeated efforts, we are defeated every time. Every time one can’t help but acknowledge a stinging defeat.

And yet …

Behind this acknowledgment of our unstable will, the taste of a mysterious perseverance is there, and of a wish for being which, from experience to experience, never stops gaining strength.

The endless acknowledgment of defeat has no taste of condemnation, no taste of misfortune. Isn’t the one who is defeated the very same who pretended to be master of the situation, who thought himself well suited to set things right, to meet any new demand? Isn’t he the tyrant who we are for ourselves, who can only reduce unfamiliar impressions to the narrow and reassuring limits of his world? He has power: to smother a deeper level of being.

Through failure after failure, an irrefutable reality imposes itself: we do not know ourselves. Who are we, and who in us presumes to pose this question and, even worse, to answer it? Who observes whom in the effort to understand? In light of the injunction to “know thyself,” how to experience the inaccessible unity, the reconciliation of the endless duality between “me” and “I,” for the sake of genuine knowledge? The first dreams of the second rather than uniting with it.

Again we are caught in the trap of habitual means of investigation. How to accept to lay down our arms, to open ourselves and at last make room for a new feeling that might awaken, the feeling of belonging to a reality of another order in which we are invited to participate, to which we can entrust ourselves. It is not remotely a question of blind faith: on the contrary, truth must always be “verified” by experience and makes itself known only through experience. Uncertainty will remain the most precious motive for vigilance and the best guard rail of an authentic search. “To believe” is a lazy thing; genuine faith is born only of active, incessant doubt.

To yield to what surpasses us is an immediate, silent, and actionless act, an act of presence without past or future, completely engaging. The thinking apparatus strives to lose itself a little less in the incessant chatter of associations and imagination, in order to come home silently to the body. The body, at last recognized and taken into account, in turn awakens and responds, as if in echo, through the sensation that animates it. And this marriage in the moment of mind and body gives birth to feeling of a new quality and rebirth to a rediscovered presence:

I, here, now.

This is a moment of self-remembering.

This inner exercise has the property of being incomprehensible by ordinary means and, attempting now to speak of it, I can’t presume to exclude myself from the crowd of dreamers.

Self-remembering is the cornerstone of the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff. It bears no relation to any other method. He who has recognized the vital need to practice it in order to serve another life in himself, to strive to heal the evident fact that he is not who he is, will inevitably experience his solitude even if—to sustain the fire of a question that everything conspires to extinguish—he has no choice but to join fellow seekers pursuing the same aim. His elders may orient him but will not make the journey for him. Instructions, teachings, explanations, properly offered and properly received, will at best be able to correct missteps, but they will be of no help at all where the actual work is concerned. Transmission is possible only by contagion. If he has the privilege of being in the presence of a real master such as G. I. Gurdjieff, the seeker will recognize that the real master is one with the teaching, that he is its incarnation and can give nothing to those who are incapable of receiving. The master transmits an influence from beyond himself, it passes through him, and he strives to allow it to reach others in all its purity.

No guarantee is offered to those who enter the path of self-remembering. Whoever presumes to know and define it once for all presumes to know and define the mysterious energy of life itself. Nothing could more heavily compromise a real perception of its circulation.

This is the beginning of an unending struggle. The further one goes on this path, the more one encounters obstacles that oppose it. We are the plaything of forces we must learn to recognize through experience and know by taste. Perceived for a moment, they seem to let go, but they will return to assault us. I awaken to my absence, my dream, to the hypnotic state that dominates my entire life. For a moment I go against the current of what for a lifetime has immersed me in identification.

Here are lines from Henri Tracol about self-remembering:

I remember myself.

Who is this “I”? Who is “myself”?

Who?

Let us think of a rider on his horse, cantering along the side of a mountain. “I” is the rider, “myself” the horse; “I” this individual essence, this potential being, “myself” this power of functional manifestation.

But the vision fades all too quickly.

My horse, because of his faulty education and the mass of influences to which he has been subjected—and both of these aggravated by neglect—has become a monster of egoism. He has been badly broken in, obviously—for, lo and behold, if he is at this very moment perching on the shoulders of his rider and crushing him under his weight! Indeed, deprived of my mount, “I” am no longer a rider—not even a pedestrian, for “I,” by myself, cannot move.

Once again, I remember myself. Once again, order is established and the vision reappears. Now the “I” no longer dreams, for the rider is once more in the saddle. With his hand securely on the rein, his mount will have no chance of straying down the path that leads to the precipice. Wide awake, the rider keeps an eye on “myself,” the horse, and guides him unfalteringly along the ridge. The one keeping watch, the other carrying the watcher, they make a complete whole. Thus related, they will go far.

Today, more than 60 years after the death of G. I. Gurdjieff, despite the fraudulent and contradictory information spread everywhere about him and about his teaching, the secret remains well kept because the secret keeps itself. It remains secret also for those who seek with sincere need, and for those who try to grasp it for purposes of power or profit, it leads only to dreaming. The secret resides in the heart of Being and remains by nature inaccessible. Those who abuse the teaching, who presume to possess it, are either trapped in illusion or unscrupulous charlatans.

Throughout his life to his last breath, G. I. Gurdjieff remained a seeker. Knowledge is a living energy to which one may sometimes draw close thanks to well-oriented efforts, but it is not a set of conclusions that can be packaged and sold by the pound. Knowledge cannot be sold, it is shared directly, with as much profit for the teacher as for the student. Yet it remains elusive.

Who am I?

How not to be trapped by the limitations

Of the one who asks this question?

Didier Mouturat

A Judas Goat

 “A Judas Goat is a term used to describe a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse and in general animal herding.The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination.

“In stockyards,a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared.Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and onto trucks.The term Judas Goat is derived from a biblical reference to Judas Iscariot [who betrayed Jesus Christ to the Pharisees].

“The phrase has also been used to describe a goat that is used to find feral goats that are targeted for eradication.The Judas Goat is outfitted with a transmitter, painted red and then released.The goat then finds the remaining herds of wild goats,allowing hunters to exterminate them.

—From Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia.

“...Lambs were being led by a Judas goat into the chute.Two workers stood at the end, jolting the animals with enough electricity to render them brain dead. In an instant, prongs at the sheep's brains and in the fleece near their hearts delivered a zap that collapsed them, after which they were handed through . . . to the kill floor. The Judas goats . . . then returned to the pens, where they collected another batch of sheep. ” —From: “A Slaughter House Tour” at karlschatz.com

***
“Controlled Opposition” The Soviet “Trust” Model for Infiltration and Manipulation —Even the Actual Creation—of Opposing Forces:
Utilized Today in America by The Enemy Within The early 20th century so-called "Trust" model utilized by the Soviet Union to infiltrate and destroy its enemies is the foundation for the very techniques often used both by American intelligence agen-cies—along with Israel’s clandestine service, Mossad and its conduits such as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith—to infiltrate and destroy (or otherwise control the activities of) domestic dissident move-ments deemed hostile to the interests of Zionism and Globalism.
Those who fail to understand this age-old tactic will never be able to fathom the extent to which the American political system has been manipulated by these alien forces.
Although—even today—there are persons and organizations active within the so-called “nationalist” and “revisionist” and “patriotic” move-ments in America, who seem to “say the right things, ” the truth is that many of those in question are actually witting—sometimes unwitting— agents of discord,being used for the purposes of intelligence gathering, propaganda and disinformation, all designed to establish further influ-ence upon the American system for the purpose of consolidating the power of The Enemy Within.
Let us examine the Soviet “Trust” and how it operated.This little-known counterintelligence operation known as "the Trust" was estab-lished by the Cheka, the predecessor to the Soviet KGB, as a means through which to set up and control a "phony opposition" in order to flush out genuine opponents of the Bolshevik regime which, as histori-ans know, was under the control of non-Russians—mostly Jews.
When reading the following materials relating to the workings of the "Trust," simply substitute the word "Israeli" for the word "Soviet" and the word "Mossad" for the names "Cheka" and "KGB" and you will under-stand how the "Trust" technique has been applied by the Mossad, in manipulating groups that “seem” to be opposing Israeli interests.
(Likewise, a similar formula can be used substituting the terms “CIA” or “FBI” as it may be appropriate.) A brief description of the operation of "The Trust" appears in Chekisty:A History of the KGB by John J. Dziak:
Where no genuine internal opposition organization exists [a security service might] invent one—both to infil-trate the more dangerous . . . organizations abroad in order to blunt or channel their actions, and to surface real or potential internal dissidents. If an internal opposition already exists, it will be infiltrated in an attempt to control it, to provoke opponents into exposing themselves, and to cause the movement to serve state interests.
A more comprehensive account of "The Trust" appears in Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: U.S. Covert Action and Counterintelligence, by Georgetown University Professor Roy Godson who is known for his close ties to the Israeli lobby in Washington:
Sometimes, if circumstances allow and the practition-ers are skillful, counterintelligence can target its deception not only at the internal and emigre opposition but also at the intelligence services and governments of foreign adver-saries.The Soviet Trust was such an operation.
The Trust was created in the early 1920s and com-pletely controlled by the Soviet secret service, the Cheka.
Believing they were operating in league with an active and effective anti-Bolshevik movement,opponents of the regime within the USSR and in exile were lured by the Trust into exposing themselves and became targets of Soviet state security.
Using that information and controlling communica-tions between Western intelligence agencies, the Russian emigre community, and Russian dissidents inside the coun-try, the Cheka expertly neutralized anti-Communist opposi-tion at home and abroad.
The Trust was also able to use its contacts with Western intelligence services to pass along misleading and false information on the internal state of the Soviet regime to those same services’ foreign ministries and governments.
Essentially, the West was being told by its intelligence “assets” within the Soviet Union that support for the Bolshevik regime was weakening, and that the Soviet lead-ers were at heart nationalists who, if left in peace by the West,would gradually turn a state dedicated to revolution at home and abroad into one that would behave in a more tra-ditional and predictable fashion . . .

The organization’s actual name was the Moscow Municipal Credit Association—thus, the Trust. It posed as a financial institution operating within the liberal economic environment of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The bogus group’s clandestine name was the Monarchist Association of Central Russia. One ironic aspect of the Trust operation was that British and French intelligence services were paying the Russian emigres for the disinformation being supplied them by the Cheka through the Trust.Allegedly,at one point, money paid to these sources by the West was used to cover the expenses of the deception operation itself. In short, the West was paying to be deceived . . .
Given the fact that several generations of young KGB officers were shown that Trust operations were successful, it is not surprising that such operations were continued from the 1920s to the 1980s.
The "Trust" model for infiltration has been applied by the Mossad and its allies in the CIA and the FBI in this country to other dissident movements targeted for infiltration and take-over.Intelligence units such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are often part of the operation.
Careful study of recent ADL and SPLC bulletins will frequently (but not always) reveal precisely which "dissident" groups and leaders are being utilized (and promoted) to collect names and assemble dossiers on perceived or potential threats.The ADL and SPLC give a big “build-up” to their own controlled agents so as to give them “credibility. ” In other words, the average person will assume that because the ADL and SPLC happen to be attacking an individual or organization,that is some-how “proof” that the individual or organization is legitimate, as evi-denced by the ADL or SPLC attacks.Those who affiliate themselves with such "trust" operations do so at their own risk.
In the pages of The Judas Goats—The Enemy Within we will learn much more about the actions of Soviet-style “Trust” intrigues on American soil.We will name those who lead phony opposition groups.

We will demonstrate that there has been a concerted effort to control— or destroy—genuine grass-roots American political opposition that threatens the power of Zionism and its (often-uneasy) allies in the global corporate elite.We will meet some of the more infamous media shills who use their influence to defame those who stand in the way of the internationalist agenda. We will survey the way in which traditional American political movements have been infiltrated and taken over,sub-verted in their otherwise pro-American agenda.

None of this is going to be a pleasant story as it unfolds, but it is a story that must be told if Americans are going to reclaim their nation and their heritage . . .

***

The Fox News Phenomenon:How Zionist Plutocrats Created a “Media Alternative” To the Garbage of the Established Liberal Media

In the opening pages of this volume, we met a handful of quite notorious Judas Goats whose names and faces are familiar to millions of Americans: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham,Anne Coulter and—last but far from least—Bill O’Reilly.

All are tried-and-true (and high-salaried) water-carriers for the Zionist cause—and apparently enthusiastic ones at that. Neo-conserva-tives of the first (and worst) order, this crew (for want of a better term to describe them) owe much of their fame and fortune to the constant promotion that they, and their views, or rather the views of their mas-ters and handlers receive through the medium of Fox News.

While Fox is the actual sponsor of the televised rantings of Hannity and O’Reilly, the other Judas Goats are also regularly hyped by Fox which, for all intents and purposes, has become the foremost popular mass media voice for the Zionist “neo-conservative” propaganda line.

For this reason, it’s quite worthwhile examining Fox News and the manner in which this network has become a Judas Goat in and of itself.

Beyond question, Fox has emerged—perhaps even more so than the three “liberal” networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—as one of the most dan-gerous and divisive forces operating in our world today.

Fox, of course, is the broadcast network owned by the far-flung News Corporation, the media empire of Australian-born Rupert Murdoch. Let’s take a quick look at just what this formidable media empire constitutes:

• The Weekly Standard magazine, run for Murdoch by “neo-con-servative” William Kristol, son of the “ex-Trotskyite” neo-conservative godfather, Irving Kristol. (This magazine is one of the most loudly—not quietly—influential publications in America today, the virtual foreign policy bible of the “Dubya”Bush administration,and the one publication that can truly claim credit for laying the propaganda groundwork for the American debacle in Iraq.);
• 175 different newspapers including News of the World, The Sun, The Sunday Times, and The Times, published in Britain, and, perhaps most notably,The New York Post, the latter being one of the foremost voices for the Zionist cause in America;
• Twentieth Century Fox motion picture studios;
• Fox Television stations, in major metropolitan markets including:
Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore, Orlando, Cleveland, Phoenix, Denver, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Memphis, Greensboro (North Carolina),Austin, and Ocala (Florida);
• Direct broadcast satellite television, spanning five continents— notably Foxtel;
• Fox News (cable) Channel and other cable outlets, reaching 300 million subscribers;
• Major publishing houses, such as HarperCollins Publishers (which now controls such renowned publishing companies as William Morrow & Company, Avon Books, Amistad Press and Fourth Estate) as well as ReganBooks, and Zondervan.
C learly, this is a major media empire. How it emerged to have such power and influence, even dictating American affairs, is an instructive story, and quite illustrative of the machinations of The Judas Goats—The Enemy Within. In order to review the Fox phenomenon, we must go back to the mid-to-late 1960s.

During that time frame, many Americans began to perceive a determined and deliberate “liberal”slant in news coverage by the three major television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) with CBS and its anchorman-of-long-standing,Walter Cronkite, often considered to be the most “lib-eral” of the three.
Americans detected much liberal propagandizing in the content of daily television programming, with blatant political messages bring broadcast in the content of television dramas, situation comedies and made-for-television movies.
What’s more, the content of the programming began to focus on what can best be described as “sleaze”—and that’s putting it lightly.

Traditional American values became the target of vulgar bathroom humor and the Christian faith was constantly upheld as somehow being a virtual form of evil, responsible for the tragedies of the past. America’s Founding Fathers were painted as evil and counter-culture figures were held up as role models for American youth.The list of very valid com-plaints about the three major networks, their “news”coverage and their programming could go on and on.

As Americans became more and more aware of the filth and the “liberal” propagandizing, many people—but not enough, sad to say— began to take a closer look at the “who”—rather than the “what”—of the three major networks.That is, Americans began to recognize that the three major networks were tightly-controlled mega-corporations held in the hands of a tiny clique of interlocking families and financial groups who were largely of Jewish origin.

What’s more, the Jewish influence in the editorial and management levels in the “news” divisions of the three major networks was also becoming increasingly more obvious. In short, people began to recog-nize that the “liberal” networks were effectively the media voices of a Jewish elite whose values—and interests—did not, in any way, shape or form, represent those of the vast majority of the American people.
As a consequence of this, there began to emerge a distinct dissat-isfaction not only with the three major networks, but a growing talk in the heartlands about “Jewish control of the media. ” To be sure, many folks were not so vocal about discussing the Jewish aspect of the problem with the networks, but this remained a constant (if only quietly spo-ken) phenomenon.

And on occasion, some big names in American life—ranging from former Vice President Spiro Agnew to General George Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even Hollywood giants such as Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando and famed author Truman Capote—actually dared to say publicly that there was an inordinate Jewish influence upon (or control of) the major media outlets in America.
In the end, this disillusionment with the broadcast industry and its machinations actually set the stage, in many respects, for the rise of Ronald Reagan and his election to the presidency in 1980. Americans were looking for a change and while Reagan promised a “new conser-vatism, ” in the end it proved to be something entirely different. But Americans were eager for an alternative to the “liberal” media—and along came Rupert Murdoch to the “rescue”—or so it seemed.

Americans who were fed up with the “liberal” media now had a self-appointed savior,a colorful foreign-born media tycoon who seemed to share their dissatisfaction and who seemed to be willing to provide a real “alternative. ” But that “alternative” is not what most Americans were really looking for, and many folks don’t seem understand that they’ve been conned—in fact, conned big-time.

Although already well-established in Australia as a growing media power on his own, Murdoch quietly received the international sponsor-ship and financial backing of some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful Jewish families: the Rothschilds of Europe, the Bronfmans of Canada and the Oppenheimers of South Africa. With their firm support, he began expanding his empire into Britain and around the planet.

In short order, Rupert Murdoch became the “hottest” item in the global media,and soon was on his way to achieving vast wealth beyond his wildest dreams and immense political power through the rise of his News Corporation empire and the lucrative advertising industry. It is thus no wonder that Murdoch himself came to be counted, along with the Rothschilds, Bronfmans and Oppenheimers, as part of a group quite correctly described as “The Billionaire Gang of Four. ” Today, now well established, Murdoch’s media voices, particularly Fox News, press the “hot button” issues—such as abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools—that stir up animosities between so-called “Christian Right”organizations and the groups and institutions to which they stand in opposition.
Meanwhile, ironically, other Murdoch media outlets, such as Fox Television, are responsible for promoting some of the worst garbage ever to appear on American television screens.Yet, for some reason, the Christian Right folks who revel in Fox News’“conservative” slant seem to miss the point that Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate is raking in advertising billions by selling sleaze.
All the while, of course, the Murdoch media is busy promoting the interests of the Zionist movement.And that,above all,is the most impor-tant point that needs to be recognized.
Although Murdoch and his media play the game of providing an “alternative, ” they are, in fact, providing a “controlled opposition, ” keep-ing the “conservative” and “traditional”American ranks in line, touting the Zionist cause as an “American” one, a cause that is fully in line with not just “making America great again” (in the imagery of Ronald Reaganesque rhetoric) but, in reality making America an empire—and one that is ruled by the Zionist elite.
In other words, Fox News is loudly—and proudly—promoting the theme that America is the world’s voice for sanity and democracy and that it is, quite simply,America’s job to rule the world.
And that is precisely—as we documented in our earlier work, The New Jerusalem—the Zionist agenda today: America’s capital and resources, its military men and women, its massive arsenal, are to be used for the establishment of a global imperium to advance the agenda of the well-heeled Zionist plutocrats and their international network of allied corporate interests and ideological soulmates.
While there are many good Americans who believe the Fox News (that is, Zionist) propaganda line that America must use its power ‘for good, ”—even at the sacrifice of the thousands of lives of Americans and others—there are many more Americans (and others worldwide) who don’t share that philosophy.
However, Fox News—and other elements in the Zionist propagan-da network—have begun to advance the theme that anyone who stands in the way of this global agenda is somehow “anti-American” and cer-tainly “anti-Semitic” (and also, even,“anti-Christian”).

Legislation such as the so-called Patriot Act and other mechanisms of control are being put into place in order to suppress dissent against the Zionist agenda. And Fox News is on the frontlines promoting these Orwellian schemes.
We need say nothing more in this regard, other than to warn sin-cere American patriots that Fox News is not their friend. Sincere Americans need to be wary of Fox News and its talking heads.

Americans must surrender to the winds the idea that “well, Fox says many good things, ” and to abandon the rationale that such voices from the Fox stable (or should we say “gutter”?) as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and others are “often right. ” Fox and its adherents are dangers to America and they are dangers to the world.

Fox News certainly ranks as among the most dangerous of The Judas Goats—The Enemy Within.

THE JUDAS GOATS— THE ENEMY WITHIN The shocking never-before-told story of the infiltration and subversion of the American nationalist movement

By MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER