the timboucher experience

I know basically nothing about Lyndon LaRouche, except that his name is more or less synonymous with “conspiracy theory” among most circles (and also that he seems to be more or less universally reviled). However, I just came across something that’s part of his theorizing that’s interesting enough to me to bear further research: his belief that the Grateful Dead was created by intelligence agencies. Check this out:

LaROUCHE: That was an Allen Dulles period operation which was run together with the occult types in British intelligence, such as Aldous Huxley. And also Gregory Bateson who creared, for example, the Grateful Dead out of an MK-ULTRA operation at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Hospital where he was supervising. The first United States-grown rock group of that type, the Grateful Dead, was generated as a British intelligence operation by the Occult Bureau of Huxley and bateson out of the Palo Alto Veteran’s Hospital where they were doing LSD and related experiments.

80 Greatest Conspiracies: Why would British intelligence want to put out a rock group?

LaROUCHE: Well, this is part of the Satanism business. Call it the counterculture. Call it the Dionysius model of the counterculture. Rock is essentially a revival of the ancient Dionysic, Bacchic rituals. Lots of people for long periods of time in that kind of particular rhythmic ritual which was probably struck upon empirically many thousands of years ago for this type of cult. It does have a relationship to the Alpha rhythms of the brain. It does produce these sorts of states. If combined with a little alcohol and more, shall we say, mood shaping substances, with youth, with funny sex, this does produce a profound change of a countercultural type.

Another word for it: New Age. the longer term: age of Aquarius. People were experimenting with various utopian models, constructing small groups experimentally which were considered New Age types. How to create experimental types that might survive the aftermath of a general nuclear war.

I guess that’s an excerpt with him from a book called 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. If anybody knows a good location for finding out more on LaRouche’s ideas, specifically this thing about the government controlling the drug culture in the sixties, and the shit about experimental groups that might survive a holocaust and presumably carry on culture. While I don’t totally “buy” all of this, it really gives you something crazy to consider.

Hm, I also found this bit on an old bulletin board by somebody named Mark Stahlman, who may or may not be a LaRouche man.

Begun as the house band for the Merry Pranksters (an intelligence creation spawned by psy-war maestro Gregory Bateson at the Palo Alto VA hospital’s LSD experiments) and responsible for the earliest public efforts to put LSD in the water supply (yup, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests), the band previously-known-as the Warlocks is not very usual at all. Yes, Stuart Brand (EFF, Global Business Network, MIT Media Lab and, of course, the Whole Earth/WELL) was the publicist for the Pranksters. Yes, the acid came from the KGB (the Czechs supplied both the finished product and the Ergot precursors for Owsley after Sandoz pulled out). Yes, the band created the largest group of zombies since the voodoo “night-of-the-living-dead” cults of the colonial Caribbean.

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