Friday 22 November 2013

The Kennedy Assassination- 50 Years On

People often ask, where did the conspiratorial community come from? What is it that has made people begin to stand up against the New World Order in the way so many of us are today? Of course there was a wave of conspiratorial awareness several centuries ago, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/my-book-review-who-are-illuminati.html, but this is the 21st century; why are so many people resisting now? Why are the NWO having such a rough ride? Many things have happened over the years that have fuelled the modern conspiratorial period, but its origins can be traced back to a very precise point in time and a very specific location and event; it involved the murder of one man, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States. The day that happened was the 22nd of November 1963, fifty years ago today. It was 12.30PM and “Jack” as he was known to his family and friends, was visiting the city of Dallas, Texas. Part of his tour included a car ride around the city between his various appointments. Thousands of people lined the pavements to watch him pass in an open-top Lincoln Continental car and there was an atmosphere in the streets that has been described as like a carnival. His motorcade included several police motorcycles and cars full of Secret Service bodyguards, but none of them were in the Presidential car. At 12.29 PM the car turned of Houston Street and onto Dealey Plaza, a forked carriageway with small plots of ornamental parkland on either side and between the roads. Suddenly the sound of multiple gunshots rang out and the president slumped forward in his seat. A moment later, the horror of everybody watching, especially his wife Jackie who was sitting next to him on the back seat, he was explosively decapitated. The grisly demise of the young President was captured forever by an amateur cameraman called Abraham Zapruder in one of the most famous and disturbing films ever made, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqlib47cefM.

John F Kennedy was only forty-three when he was inaugurated as President of the United States in January 1961, the youngest ever; he was the first ever US President to born in the 20th Century, on May the 29th 1917. He was born into one of America’s elite families, his father was a highly successful industrialist and politician, he was US Ambassador to the United Kingdom; and the Kennedy bloodline comes out of European aristocracy, like most elite American families. The Kennedy branch was Irish Catholic and his lineage can be traced back to the 10th Century High King Brian Bornu MacKennedy of Ireland. He had a typical blue blood American education at the nation’s top schools and the London School of Economics, and when World War II broke out he joined the US Navy and took command of a motor torpedo boat. Once when his boat was attacked and sunk by the Japanese, he swam to the nearest shore dragging one of his badly injured crewmen, thus saving his life. After the war he moved into politics and ran for Congress representing the 11th Massachusetts District for the Democrats. In 1952 he joined the Senate alongside his brother Robert (one of only two brothers he had who was still alive, and who was also himself assassinated five years later; his family didn’t have much luck!). In January 1960 he entered the Democratic primaries for Presidential candidate and won; a few months later he ran in the 1960 US Presidential Election against the Republican Richard M Nixon (Yes, Tricky Dicky! It’s very unusual for a defeated Presidential candidate to be given a second chance to run for the White House). In his inaugural speech Kennedy famously said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!” He was renowned for his oratory skills and gained devoted support. Nobody knew it at the time, but his term in office would cover some of the most crucial few years in American history and this paved the way for its violent end. Politically Kennedy was probably as liberal as it’s possible to be in senior American politics. He became a hero of the black civil rights movement by tackling the unconstitutional racial segregation policies of many southern states and had long conversations with Martin Luther King and his wife. His term lay in the heart of the Cold War and therefore Kennedy’s foreign policy was dominated by confrontations with the Soviet Union. This conflict led to the creation of the Berlin Wall. In order to show his sympathy and support for the ordinary Germans caught behind the Wall, he travelled to the city and made a speech in which he passionately cried: “Ich bin ein Berliner!- I am a citizen of Berlin!” In April 1961 Kennedy took steps to depose Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba; this island nation off the coast of Florida was regarded as a rogue state and a thorn in the nation’s side by many American people. Kennedy trained a covert guerrilla force of Cuban exiles called Brigade 2506 and they carried out an invasion on the island at a place called the Bay of Pigs. When the Brigade was defeated by the Cuban army many senior politicians and intelligence officers assumed that Kennedy would immediately follow up with a full beachhead using overt US military force, but he did not. He cancelled the invasion and paid Castro millions of dollars of economic aid in exchange for the release of the prisoners. This made the President many bitter enemies in his own administration as well as the Cuban exile community in the USA. The following year a new crisis connected to Cuba kicked up. This time spy planes spotted Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles being stationed in Cuba, the USSR’s only ally in the Americas. Kennedy then had to decide whether to attack the missile sites and risk nuclear war with the Soviets or try to negotiate his way out of the situation and hope the missiles would not be launched in the meantime. He urgently called his opposite number in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev, and immediately dispatched the US Navy to blockade Cuba and prevent any more illicit Soviet shipping landing on the island. For thirteen days the world held its breath. Then Khrushchev “blinked”, as he said, and the Soviets struck a deal that involved the Cuban missiles being removed in exchange for some American missiles being taken out of Turkey. In June 1963 he became one of the most popular foreign state visitors Ireland had ever had and he addressed the Oireachtas Eireann, Ireland’s parliament, something no other foreign leader had ever done. He was granted an honourary degree from the University of Dublin and the freedom of the city. Like many Irish Americans he had a feeling of dual patriotism with his ancestral homeland, but this infuriated the Ulster Loyalist leader Revd. Ian Paisley. Despite his prickly relationship with Khrushchev, Kennedy managed to organize a pact with the USSR to limit nuclear weapons proliferation, the earliest of these measures that increased later in the Cold War. He attempted to break the power of the Federal Reserve banks by instituting a state currency of “greenback” dollars. Following the triumph of the Soviet space programme he announced NASA’s intention to land a man on the moon in his first State of the Union Address. He also was suspecting of hatching plans to pull out of the escalating Vietnam War, reform the CIA and reorganize all the US intelligence services into different outfits. The President himself led a high-power lifestyle and was a notorious philanderer, having numerous affairs with other women, including the superstar actress Marilyn Monroe. All in all, the Kennedy years were a time of revolutionary change, but also fear and doubt; but they were never boring! They were extremely turbulent and dynamic, and they released enormous historical energies. One of those energies was his own death.
Doctors at the Parkland Memorial Hospital admitted Kennedy and tried to save him, but watching the Zapruder Film one doesn’t need to be a doctor to see that this was a token act. The news reports were aired on radio and TV soon afterwards announcing that President John F Kennedy was dead, for example see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC-Y8Pm8RDU; everybody remembers where they were when they heard this news. In the aftermath of the shooting the police tore into Dealey Plaza in huge numbers, questioning the witnesses and making numerous arrests. Several police officers were reported to have chased a man carrying a gun from the grassy knoll area of the Plaza, over some railway tracks, but this was later denied. In the hours that followed more details of the assault emerged. The Texas Governor John Connally, who had been sitting in the front seat of the car, had also been struck by the first bullet to hit the President; he was hit in the arm and a bullet was found near an exit wound on his hand, although this bullet was surprisingly undamaged. The driver of the car, Agent Bill Greer (any relation to Dr Steven?), was unharmed. On scene police searches included the school book depository on the corner of Dealey Plaza where the manager reported that one of his employees was missing, a young man called Lee Harvey Oswald. A few minutes later it was announced that a policeman, Officer JD Tippit, had been shot and killed by a man answering Oswald's description. The police followed the leads and at 1.40 PM they entered a cinema nearby and arrested Oswald. He attempted to flee and even drew a pistol, but the cops overpowered and disarmed him. At the same time police in the depository found a Mannlicher Carcano M19/38 snipers’ rifle lying by the corner window of the sixth floor; it was confirmed that the gun belonged to Oswald. The next day he was formally charged with the murder of John F Kennedy. Today the school book depository is a museum and the space beside the sixth floor window is known as the “Sniper’s Nest” and thousands of tourists come and visit the museum every year.

That’s the basic story of what happened; it’s the one in the history books. It was established by the Warren Commission, an organization founded by JFK’s successor and former vice-President, Lyndon B Johnson, to investigate the Kennedy Assassination. It was chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren and delivered its report on the 24th of September 1964. These eleven months of study concluded that the assassination of the President was the brainchild of Lee Harvey Oswald and not one single other person was involved. Oswald killed the President by shooting him with his rifle from the school book depository window where the weapon was found; his motive was purely personal. No conspiracy, case closed, nothing more to worry about. Yet the majority of the American public did not believe them, and to this day, fifty years later, they still do not, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/usa-conspiracy-theory-poll.html. I agree with that majority, in fact I think the Warren Report has more holes than even the official story of 9/11. The criticism of it is complex and covers almost every aspect of the crime. The following is just a summary and the entire comprehensive critique of Warren would fill a good sized book.
1. The suspect: The first and only initial suspect in the Kennedy Assassination was Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four year old man from New Orleans, Louisiana who was one of the employees of the Dallas school book depository. (Another man was eventually charged, but I'll come to that later) Oswald was described as a fiery and unstable kind of person who had trouble with his reading and writing, and was occasionally violent to his parents and other family members. At the age of fifteen he vocally announced that he was a communist and began filling his bookshelf with volumes by Lenin, Trotsky and other Marxist writers. Yet despite this he was permitted to join the US Marine Corps in 1956; this is extremely odd. He was a youth of McCarthy's America in which a person could be accused of "unAmerican" activities if your sister's best friend's uncle's milkman was a communist. In fact in those days one of the lines of the oath new US Marines take is: "I swear that I have never been a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America". During his service he was often in trouble, fighting with other Marines, including senior officers, and discharging his weapon without authorization. He also continued to speak openly about his pro-communist beliefs. Yet despite this he was not medically or dishonourably discharged and completed an enlistment of almost four years. He then travelled to the Soviet Union, originally as a tourist, but later on he approached the authorities and announced his intention to defect. He walked into the US Embassy, handed over his passport and became a citizen of the Socialist Motherland. He married a girl called Marina and settled down, learning fluent Russian quickly. However after a year or two of first hand experience in Russia, he changed his mind. It wasn't the workers' paradise his books had led him to believe and he went back to the US Embassy and requested permission to return home to the USA and bring Marina with him. His request was granted. It is strange that neither the Soviet nor American authorities appeared to be terribly suspicious of him. His lifestyle has all the hallmarks of a spy or double agent, for either side! Indeed he was permitted to buy guns by mail order, including the Mannlicher Carcano rifle. In May of 1963, just seven months before Kennedy's visit to Dallas, Oswald was seen handing out flyers for the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee", an organization which supported Castro's governance of Cuba and opposed American intervention. What's more, and not many JFK researchers mention this, he'd already attempted to shoot somebody else, a man called Edwin Walker. All in all, Oswald was the perfect candidate for a traitor, foreign agent, dangerous dissident and enemy of the state; yet nobody thought to keep an eye on him during President Kennedy's visit to Dallas, when the presidential motorcade passed right past the front door of Oswald's workplace. The obvious line of enquiry for the Warren Commission would be to refer to the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald and interview him in jail but they couldn't... you see, Oswald himself was murdered two days later while in police custody.
2. Killing of the suspect: The arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald and all the evidence the police had gathered against him should surely have led to the biggest trial in American history, however two days later when Oswald was being led out of the police station in Dallas to the jail where he was to be held on remand, a man ran forward out of the crowd, drew a revolver and shot him in the abdomen. Oswald died the following day in hospital, ironically it was the Parklands where Kennedy had also been treated. The assailant was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, usually known as Jack Ruby, a local nightclub manager. His motive for killing Oswald is very nebulous. At his trial he muttered words to the effect of: "I wanted the city of Dallas to redeem its good name", "I wanted to spare Mrs Kennedy the trauma of having to attend a trial", and "That man killed my President!" The strange thing is that Ruby seemed to have carried out the attack spontaneously. There were no signs of premeditation at all; he may have had a gun on him, but of course lots of Americans do that all the time. He drove to the police station entrance just to watch, like hundreds of other people had, including TV reporters. He had his dog on the back seat of his car, as if he was on his way to take him for a walk. Also just before leaving for the police station he had taken a phone call from one of the staff at his club who asked him to send her wages to her by telegram cheque; Ruby did so at his local post office. Ruby is known to have been a psychiatric patient and was taking a drug to treat anxiety. Maybe he was also involved in a very different kind of psychiatric treatment. His behaviour is what we would expect from a "Manchurian Candidate" who had been triggered. Interestingly the movie The Manchurian Candidate, which is about a mind-controlled undercover assassin, was due to be released in November 1963, but this was postponed until a few months later. The murder was broadcast on live TV, see (Warning- disturbing image): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xU7Lhd7Wwo. Oswald had already spoken publicly to the press, declaring that he was innocent of all charges and that he was a "patsy", see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqNWsR87WCY. But now, Oswald would talk no more, and Ruby wouldn't either for much longer; he died of a pulmonary embolism in prison in 1967. He was originally on Death Row and only got his sentence reduced to life in jail on appeal.
3. Witness testimony struck: The Warren Commission is suspiciously inconsistent in the witness testimony. Many witnesses in Dealey Plaza that day heard the popping or cracking sounds of gunshots, but a large number mention hearing them coming from the grassy knoll area, on the opposite side of the Plaza to the school book depository. These witnesses include some of the police who ran over to the fence by the car park to investigate and persons were reported running away. Some people saw gunsmoke and smelled gunpowder coming from that area, and also the railway bridge above the far end of the Plaza. Other people were certain they heard rapid-fire shots of an automatic weapon, very different from the old-fashioned manual bolt-action rifle Oswald was supposed to have used, which the best marksman could only have fired once every couple of seconds. The Commission seemed to be cherry-picking only testimony that supported their conclusion, that all the shots came from Oswald in the book depository. Some witnesses also relate that they were intimidated and bullied by FBI agents into changing their testimony so that it fitted with the "right story".

4. Firearms forensics: The Warren Commission published a forensic report based on the ballistics study and the forensics of the gunshots fired in Dealey Plaza. These included three bullets found at the scene on the ground as well as three cartridge cases lying near Oswald's abandoned rifle on the sixth floor of the school book depository. The first bullet passed wide of the car; the second struck the President in the back, and the third was the fatal decapitation shot. On first perception this might seem to make sense because this fits with some of what we see in the Zapruder Film, however there's reason to believe that the Zapruder Film was also tampered with, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The film was taken by Abraham Zapruder, who was standing on top of a bollard with his camera trained on the President's car. We see the car drive towards the camera, momentarily it is blocked by a road sign and the mysterious "Umbrella Man", and as it emerges we see the president jerk forward and raise his arms defensively; this was his reaction to the impact of the second bullet which entered just below his nape, grazed his spine and emerged from his upper chest to strike Governor Connally in the arm. The third bullet was the decapitation shot that struck the back of his head square on creating the massive exit blast on his forehead. However this verdict is questionable for several reasons, firstly the number of shots reported by many witnesses which is far more than three. Warren says all the bullets recovered all match ballistics analysis of Oswald's rifle, however the bullets were standard lead ball; this gave them limited penetration depth, but wide explosive force, as the Zapruder Film shows. When such a bullet strikes a target it becomes dented and flattened; when it strikes two targets, in this case Kennedy and then Connally, it often breaks apart completely into fragments. What should have emerged from Governor Connally's arm was some misshapen pieces of lead shrapnel. Instead we see the bullet above, whole and undamaged. This has become known as the "Pristine Bullet". Was it planted at the scene afterwards by somebody who wished to fake the evidence? Other firearms experts have questioned the official report based on the fatal decapitation shot as it appears on the Zapruder film. This is a gruesome subject to talk about, but it is essential for understanding this question. Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIY3nIa50ck. A human head is similar in consistency to many of the objects destroyed by gunshots in that film. Believers in the Warren Report, those who have become known as "single bullet theorists", will point to the wound on Kennedy's forehead and say that it is an exit wound. The bullet from Oswald's rifle struck him on the back of the head creating just a small entry hole and the force of it disintegrated the front of his skull as it travelled through his brain. In the film above we can certainly see exit holes being at least as big as entry holes. However what concerns many sceptics of Warren is not the nature of the injury, but the movement of Kennedy's head. It reels from the impact, but it doesn't move forward; it is thrown backwards and to the left. We don't see that in the demonstration film. In fact on theoretical grounds we shouldn't expect this because of the simple laws of physics. Not complex LHC stuff, but Newtonian Mechanics, of the kind a physics student will be taught in his very first class. Newton's Laws talk about force and inertia. In the case of John F Kennedy, his head was hit by an object which exerted tremendous force on his head, yet that force was in a particular direction, a velocity. His head was a lot bigger and heavier than the bullet so because of its inertia, the unwillingness all matter has for changing its state of motion, it will move far slower than the bullet which imparted the force on it, however it has to move in the same direction. So if Kennedy's head was thrown backwards and to the left, the bullet can only have come from the opposite direction, from the front and to the right. In this direction lies not the school book depository, but the grassy knoll; where, if you'll recall, many witnesses heard gunfire coming from. Even the second bullet has been called into question in recent years. The angle of its path is too steep for it to have come from the sixth floor of the depository. The only place tall enough for it to have come from was the Dallas County Building on Houston Street, more behind the car and further away.
5. Zapruder film edited: The silent, colour motion picture shot by Abraham Zapruder on his amateur movie camera is the most important piece of evidence in the investigation. It came to the media's attention after it was used as an exhibit for the Warren Commission, but was only declassified by DA Jim Garrison, which I'll come to in a moment. It's historical significance has outweighed its graphic content and the film has entered the public domain; however calls have gone out many times claiming that the published film is different from the original, for example see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvLW3IBHHvA.


6. Backyard photo of Oswald: Another significant piece of the visual record is a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in his back garden posing with the snipers' rifle that he killed Kennedy with. This photo ended up on the cover of Life magazine (I'll be saying more about Life later). However you may notice there's something not quite right about the lighting. Analysis has shown the shadows of different elements of the photo don't match. Investigators into the faking of the moon landings have noticed similar things about that, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/i-went-to-godamn-moon.html. The photo was supposedly taken by Oswald's wife Marina, but it looks like it is in fact some kind of composite, a fake photo in other words.
7. Missing documents: After the Warren Report was published sceptics of it, which were large in number already, began sifting through it to see if it stood up to scrutiny, a bit like David Ray Griffin has done in more recent years with the 9/11 Commission Report, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmuYgP7-RfU. Their experience was remarkably similar to Griffin's; they tried to locate the same paperwork that Warren had quoted as sources and something strange happened. They were either stonewalled by the offices which kept those documents or given contradictory information. They were sometimes told that the documents were classified or that they had been lost. They were occasionally provided with papers so heavily redacted that they were useless. One investigator asked to see the pathology reports that the Warren Report sited. Two post-mortems were performed on the President's body, one by the Dallas Coroner's Office and another by the US Navy at Bethesda Hospital in Maryland. Warren used these path reports for a major part of its assessment of how Kennedy died yet the two reports contradict each other; the contemporary conspiracy researcher Chris Spivy explains in more detail here: http://www.chrisspivey.co.uk/jfk-the-case-for-conspiracy-photos-of-jfks-wounds/. There are several photoes that have "leaked out" from those reports and they're reproduced on this somewhat ghoulish website, see: http://www.celebritymorgue.com/jfk/jfk-autopsy.html. We can clearly see the recognizable features of John F Kennedy, yet one only has to watch the Zapruder Film from frame 313 to see that what that photo should have shown was a head reduced to something that no longer resembled what it had once been. So the original source documents were either missing, contradictory, classified or muddled to the point of confusion; yet this was the data that the Warren Commission supposedly used for its report.
8. Prouty's Law: Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty was Kennedy's Head of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the governing body of the US military. After his President's murder Prouty made some public statements which were rather cryptic, but were no doubt a hint that he suspected a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The most famous of these statements has become known as "Prouty's Law"; it states: assassinations do not happen, they are allowed to happen. The active role is played by those responsible for the security of the victim withdrawing their protection at a crucial time. which allows the assassin an opportunity to prosecute his target. In any investigation, don't look at the killer, look at those who were running security and failed their charge. Prouty's Law applies very clearly to the death of Diana when we see how the Princess and Dodi al Fayed were left alone in a car with just two bodyguards in the middle of Paris. It also fits the JFK assassination like a glove. This can be seen in the Zapruder film and also some of the still photoes taken in Dealey Plaza that day. The Presidential bodyguards in the USA are called the US Secret Service. The President's motorcade consisted of many vehicles. We see a car just behind Kennedy's with so many Secret Service agents in it some of them have to stand on running boards attached to the sides of the vehicle; we also see police motorbikes, yet all these vehicles are at least twenty or thirty feet behind the president's car. There was only one Secret Service man in the car with the President, Agent William Greer, and he was the driver. Kennedy was also in an open-topped car, today it's a museum piece. It's rare that a US President travels around in an open-topped car, in fact they usually ride in a custom-built armoured limousine; compare the two photoes below of JFK's car and the incumbent Barack Obama's. All in all, the President was exposed and vulnerable; a secret order had gone through and the usual security measures were absent, any killer would have an excellent opportunity... if there coincidentally happened to be one around.
JFK's car

Obama's car

9. Was Greer one of the shooters? In this interview with the late, great Milton William Cooper, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-NBVu8lN5I, suggests that a closer examination of the Zapruder Film shows that the driver, Agent William Greer, turns in his seat and fires a pistol at the President. Cooper also shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the crowd outside the book depository and not inside it. The problem with this theory is that Greer moves impossibly fast. He has less than a second to draw his weapon level it and fire; and then whip back round, conceal the gun and carry on driving. Although it is possible for somebody under MK Ultra mind control to move very quickly, can they really move that fast? Also the image is indistinct; there is what looks like a glint of sunlight reflected off Greer's head not his hand holding a pistol. However this is an idea I can't rule out; it is possible Bill Cooper is right this time, like he was about many other things.
10. Why did Oswald wait? Another problem with the Warren Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin is that the shooting took place on Dealey Plaza; an irrelevant question you might think, until you learn a few facts about guns. Actually one of the factors that have helped generate healthy scepticism of Warren in the United States is that so many of its citizens are firearms-trained. When a gun is fired at a target the bullet doesn't hit it instantly, it takes some time to travel there, depending on the distance to the target and how fast the bullet is moving; also whether the target is still or moving. If the target is moving laterally relative to the gun then the marksman has to "lead" it. This means the shooter must aim the weapon not at where the target is at the moment of firing, but at where the target will be when the bullet arrives. A bullet from a Mannlicher Carcano rifle travels very fast, at about a thousand feet per second as it leaves the muzzle, but Kennedy was in a moving car. He was eighty-eight yards away from the sixth floor of the book depository which means the bullet would take only about two tenths of a second to cover the distance in between, but in that time the target, Kennedy's head, would have moved over a foot. This means Oswald would have had to lead Kennedy's head by one foot. Any miscalculation of the lead and he'd have missed, any sudden changes of velocity of the car and he'd have missed; remember he only has a bolt action rifle and cannot blaze away like an automatic weapon could. However if you visit the Sniper's Nest at the Assassination Museum in Dallas you'll see that the sixth floor corner window opens out squarely onto Houston Street. It was up Houston Street that the motorcade came before turning left onto Dealey Plaza. At this time the target would have been driving directly towards the book depository and therefore it would have exhibited no lateral relative motion at all. All Oswald had to do was line up the sights, raise the crosshair slightly to take into account of the correct ballistic parabola for the distance, give or take an inch or two for any wind, and fire directly into the President's face. It would have been a comparatively easy shot. Why didn't he? Perhaps because there was more than one shooter and they were not in the book depository at all, they were arranged in a crossfire formation around Dealey Plaza.

I could go on and on for pages listing all the hundreds of pieces of suspicious anomalies connected to the Kennedy Assassination, but as I said I could fill a book. In fact several people have done just that, like Jim Marrs whose book about the Kennedy Assassination is called Crossfire; it inspired Oliver Stone to make the 1991 movie JFK, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW15dp3R-6U. The film tells the true story of Jim Garrison, the District Attorney in New Orleans who carried out the only ever independent investigation into the Kennedy Assassination which came to court. He charged and tried a local businessman called Clay Shaw with conspiracy to commit murder. He believed Shaw had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill the President. It was thanks to Garrison that the Zapruder Film became available to the general public. Garrison had it declassified under a subpoena; if he hadn't the film may well have remained secret to this day and we'd all be writing very different books and articles. Shaw was acquitted, but the repercussions of his trial can be felt down the decades.

So I think we can safely say now that the official story of the Kennedy Assassination, the one published by the Warren Commission, is wrong; in fact it's not just accidentally wrong, it's a whitewash, a cover-up, a lie! The next question therefore is why? Why was there a conspiracy inside the United States to kill their very own Head of State? Who wanted President John F Kennedy dead? This is best answered with an easier question: Who didn't want President John F Kennedy dead? There are so many people with a cast iron motive to kill JFK that, again, it's beyond the scope of this article to explore them all thoroughly. He had thousands of sworn enemies all around the world and right beside him.
1. The CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency had fallen out with Kennedy for several reasons, including ones I'll be discussing below. But the President was so angry that if he had been reelected the following year he may well have disbanded the entire organization; in his own words: "break it into a million pieces and scatter it to the winds!" Three men were found in Dealey Plaza by the police who were dressed as tramps; they were later positively identified as CIA agents.
2. The Military Industrial Complex: Just before Kennedy took his Presidential oath his predecessor Dwight D Eisenhower made a closing address in which he warned the American people about the dangers of the "Military Industrial Complex", see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY. Few people paid him any attention at the time, but his successor did. A lot of very powerful arms manufacturers had forecasted huge profits as the Bay of Pigs invasion was planned and also as the storm clouds of war gathered over Vietnam. Kennedy threatened both those revenue streams; many men wanted the President out of the way for reasons of pure greed.
3. Fidel Castro: The leader of the Socialist Republic of Cuba had an obvious reason to despise Kennedy. JFK's administration was the one which has posed the biggest threat to the security and sovereignty of his island nation. Castro must have been terrified Kennedy would change his mind over Cuba and follow through with a new invasion and regime change. A new President might have taken a softer approach.
4. The anti-Castro Cubans: The large expatriate Cuban community in the United States felt deeply betrayed by John F Kennedy. When Brigade 2506 had landed in the Bay of Pigs the community believed that their day of vindication had arrived, the Castro regime would be ousted and they'd be able to return to their homeland. When Kennedy failed to act after the defeat of the Brigade their hopes were dashed and Castro remains the leader of Cuba to the present day.
5. The Mob: There is some validity to the claim that organized crime syndicates were involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy. Documents that came to light after the publication of the Warren Report prove that the CIA was in league with several Mafia families over Cuba. The Mafia had always had a major stake in Havana's famous casinoes, but when Castro took power he cleaned them up, so the Mafia and the US Government united against a common enemy. The Mafia also had a grudge against Kennedy for another two reasons, the President's brother, Robert Kennedy was Attorney General and had "declared war on the Mob", determined to shut down, arrest and imprison them wherever they lurked; many politicians, judges and police chiefs in Italy have died for uttering those words. The boys' father Joseph Kennedy also owed a lot of money to a Mafia godfather called Sam Giancana whom he worked with to illegally import liquor during the Prohibition era. He had repeatedly refused to pay up and together with Robert's anti-Mafia stance, it is perfectly possible that the Mob took out the President as punishment, with or without CIA collaboration.
6. The Federal Reserve: Kennedy made many enemies of bankers during his administration for his attempts to break the stranglehold they had on the country. As I said above, he wanted to create a nationalized currency. Ninety-eight years before another US President had tried to do the same thing and had shared with JFK the dubious honour of being murdered while in office, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/lincoln-assassination.html. Coincidence?
7. The Russians: The Soviet Union had plenty of reason to want Kennedy out of the way, not least in revenge for his propaganda victory of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The KGB had an international squad of trained killers who were perfectly capable of quietly taking out dissidents or defectors with plausible deniability, as they had in 1940 with Leon Trotsky. A former Romanian communist agent, Ion Mihai Pacepa, once told a journalist that the KGB did have a death list of ten Western leaders whom they planned to remove in one way or another and JFK's name was on it.
8. The Ulster Loyalists: As I said above, one of John F Kennedy's most successful ventures was his state visit to Ireland where he was adored by the Irish people and he loved them back, considering himself to be one of them in national identity, as most Irish Americans do. The main Protestant political agitator at that time in Northern Ireland was the Revd. Ian Paisley (he's still pretty noisy today). Paisley was convinced that a conspiracy of Irish Catholics was plotting the genocide of his people and was terrified at the prospect of one of them occupying the Oval Office. He began circulating hysterical rumours that Kennedy planned to send a carrier battle group to bombard Belfast and kill the Ulster Protestants. The Anglo-Irish conflict has always been one played out in parallel in the United States. It is from America that the IRA organized a lot of their operations and the Ulster Loyalist Protestants had a community in the United States too, the Scotch-Irish, as they are called there. Notable Scotch-Irish Americans include Senator John McCain, Gen. George Patton and Elvis Presley.
9. Supporters of Marilyn Monroe: Shortly before her death the actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe had had an affair with President Kennedy, and later with his brother Robert. It's possible that these liaisons resulted in a murder conspiracy. Perhaps centred around her ex-husband Joe di Maggio, former baseball star and Mafia boss, brining in the Mob once more.
10. The Ku Klux Klan: Kennedy support for the black civil rights movement made him a bete noire for all the white supremacists in the United States. He was the first President to forcibly override the Segregation laws of many southern states. The Klan has shown itself capable of murder many times before, why not with Kennedy?
11. Lyndon B Johnson: LBJ had been vice-President to John F Kennedy. He was a much older man from a far more humble background. He may well have resented being ordered around by a posh young upstart like JFK and thought it only just that he becomes President instead.
12. The UFO conspiracy: This more bizarre theory is actually one of the most likely in my view. It is explored in detail in Richard Dolan's book UFO's and the National Security State as well as his many interviews and lectures, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CGG5gjsUNY. Dolan reports that soon after his inauguration Kennedy asked for information about UFO's and the "Breakaway Civilization" agreed to initiate the President into the secret. A summit was set up at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and he was shown fragments of UFO wreckage and alien bodies from the Roswell Incident. At this meeting he was told about the Truth Embargo and the need for total secrecy. Apparently he disliked the cover-up intensely and took steps to initiate unilateral UFO Disclosure with a capital D. This eventually got him listed for disposal. What's more he may well have told Marilyn Monroe about the UFO secret during their affair because shortly before her death she announced she was going to host a press conference that would reveal something which would "shock the world!" Was it the truth about UFO's? Possibly. Marilyn had two contacts who professed an interest and knowledge about UFO's. One was a fellow actress, Dorothy Kilgallen and another was a man she had an affair with, Robert Slatzer; rumour has it they were briefly married. She is believed to have been part of a ring that also included the President at that time, who had learned about a Roswell-type UFO crash at Caldbeck in Cumbria, UK in 1954. On the 7th of April 1952 Life Magazine ran a story about Marilyn in which she spoke about "interplanetary saucers", so perhaps her involvement with UFO's began before that with the President. Was she a mind-controlled sex slave like Cathy O'Brien, who had learned of the IUFO secret from her captors? In fact, did Kennedy really tell her or did she tell him? This could be why he demanded to know more, as Dolan reports. Another strange fact connecting the Kennedy Assassination with UFO's is that in Dealey Plaza that day was a highly enigmatic individual whose name turns up again and again regarding the UFO subject, Fred Crisman. He was the employer of Harold Dahl who saw the Maury Island UFO and counselled him after the incident. He is also reputed to be one of the "three tramps" at Dealey Plaza and was called as a witness at the aforementioned trial of Clay Shaw.

The moment President John F Kennedy died at 12.30 PM on the 22nd of November 1963 many people all over the world, especially those with Irish roots, heard a high-pitched piercing scream. This is said to be the keening of a banshee, a figure in Irish mythology who screams whenever something disastrous happens. It is particularly linked with the deaths of those descended from the Tuatha De Danaan, the legendary founding race of Ireland from which the lineage of kings came down from. As I said above, John F Kennedy's bloodline can be traced by to Brian Bornu MacKennedy, a High King of Ireland in the 10th Century. Did the banshee wail for the passing of a child of the Tuatha De Danaan? There are actually many other blatant occult elements to the death of President Kennedy. If the Illuminati were behind the killing then they would not have been satisfied with a mere random loss of life for somebody as important as JFK, especially if he was from a rival elite bloodline, it would have had to be a ritual sacrifice, and I think it was. Beheading has always been a very potent death and has been a favourite for the slaughter of a monarch since time immemorial. When King Charles I was executed in 1649 after the English Civil War there were any number of ways he could have been killed. Hanging was the most popular form of death, however his prosecutors chose to behead him. A century later the last aristocrats of France lost their heads to Madame Guillotine. These executions were always public, raucous and bloody. In the modern West many political leaders have been assassinated and it's very often a hidden bomb, or poison in their food, but President John F Kennedy was graced with a truly archaic and traditional royal death. Axes and guillotines are no longer used, instead bullets suffice. Dealey Plaza is a peculiar place; it's the site of Dallas' oldest Masonic temple and the ground opposite the school book depository has ornaments relating to the Freemasons, like an obelisk. Its street plan resembles an Illuminati pyramid with the capstone detached. On Kennedy's grave in Arlington National Cemetery you'll see a gas flame burning, the Eternal Flame. The lighted torch or flame is a common Illuminati symbol. It's their way of saying: "We did it, we're telling you and you're too stupid to see it, ha ha!" The day Kennedy died he was not alone. Two other famous men also passed away, two British writers who created great works of science fiction and fantasy. Their literature was laced with hidden messages and esoteric and gnostic symbolism. Both men were deep spiritual thinkers; they were Aldous Huxley and CS Lewis, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/everyone-knows-what-happened-on.html. The BBC is currently holding a big celebration at the moment which is because today is also the fiftieth anniversary of something else. The death of Kennedy happened at 6.30 PM Greenwich Mean Time so British people were settling down in front of the TV to eat their dinner when the news came on. They may have been so shocked that they didn't concentrate on the pilot episode of a new and unusual science fiction series. William Hartnell starred in it as an eccentric extraterrestrial who travelled round in a higher dimensional transport shaped like a blue police box; he had no name and was known simply as "the Doctor", see: http://www.doctorwho.tv/.   

The assassination of President John F Kennedy was the first and biggest of three. Just five years later JFK's friend and leading black rights activist, Martin Luther King, was shot dead too. The attack took place on April the 5th 1968 at a motel. From the first moment many people doubted the official story and suspected a conspiracy, possibly with Government involvement. The alleged killer, James Earl Ray, won a retrial shortly before his death in 1998. King's family were so sure Ray was not the killer that they paid their respects at his funeral. Amazingly this spate of high-level assassinations was not over yet. On the 5th of June that same year at the Democratic Party National Convention in Los Angeles, California, the most popular Presidential candidate was murdered. He was none other than Robert Kennedy, John F's brother. Bobby was running for President just like his brother had and if he had not been killed, he would probably have been elected. During his busy campaign speeches at various meetings at the Convention venue, the Ambassador Hotel, he was advised to take an unplanned... supposedly... short cut through the hotel's kitchen. At some point he was shot dead. The official story states that a young Palestinian called Sirhan Sirhan shot him, but Sirhan denies this. His legal team claim that the story was fabricated and the evidence planted. Sirhan claims to have no memory of carrying out the attack. Today he is still serving a life sentence at the California State Prison. Again, for the third time, an assassination was dismissed as the personal work of "just another lone nutter".

When things returned to normal with Johnson as President, the politics of the United States changed dramatically, especially in terms of foreign affairs and military intervention abroad. It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if Kennedy had lived, as does this New Statesman article, see: http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/what-if-kennedy-had-lived. Firstly he would almost certainly have won the 1964 Presidential Election and his second term would have lasted right through until early 1969. Generally, the hawkish foreign policy course the United States took for the remainder of the 1960's would not have happened or been eased considerably. We would have seen the Vietnam War left to its own devices without any American involvement which would have made it far shorter and infinitely less destructive. We wouldn't have vast areas of the rainforest poisoned by Agent Orange, millions dead and, back home, a lost generation of veterans and wounded casualties. Kennedy would probably have arranged further strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviets, something which didn't take place in the real world until the 1980's. This would have made Planet Earth a far safer place and, without all that internecine fear, could even have acted as a catalyst to initiate the post-communist changes that eventually swept Russia, but two full decades before Mikhail Gorbachev's presidency. We might have seen the Cold War over by 1970. Exploring these entertaining "what if" historical scenarioes even further, if Lyndon B Johnson had become President in 1961 then Cuba would probably be a radioactive cesspit today, if not the entire world; Kennedy's vice-President and successor reversed almost all of JFK's attempts to find peace and restrict war. Am I saying that John F Kennedy saved the world? Maybe. A drama has been produced about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days; and it's available free online, so the HPANWO-reader can make his or her own mind up, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tho5ZYLiuoc. But what if the differences Kennedy would have made went even further than that, into more outlandish areas unknown in current politics? What if he went ahead with UFO Disclosure? What if he admitted that a real manned moon landing was impossible?... From that point I can no longer speculate. You might think that I'm about to say that I'm a JFK fan. Not at all, I'm not for a moment claiming that John F Kennedy is an agent to free the world of the New World Order; he is not David Icke! In fact there's no way he'd have been allowed within a hundred miles of the White House if he had been. I'm not entirely sure what his true feelings and motivations were. However, there's no doubt he exhibited many qualities and attributes that are conspicuously absent from most, if not all, of his predecessors and successors. He seemed to have had at least a modicum of compassion, character and sense of duty. He definitely had a lot of courage; very few political leaders indeed have the balls to resist the influence of their "advisers". Kennedy must have realized that his life was in danger the moment he became aware of how the real political game is played; what happened to him that day in Dallas was something he probably expected. Does this mean Kennedy's appointment as President was a mistake made by "The Men in Grey Suits"? Probably, and almost certainly in retrospect. John F Kennedy is somebody I think I could have had a very interesting conversation with. He was a maverick, a revolutionary and probably America's last ever popular leader. His legacy is enormous and is still felt in the United States and around the globe today. However, it could have been so much greater had his term in office not been so brutally truncated. Was he a good guy? Was he a bad guy? I expect he was neither, in fact he did some bad things as well as good. At the end of the day he was human; and perhaps it is that which makes us warm to him so much more than any other US President, before or since. Whatever process used to beat the humanity out of other Presidents didn't work on him. He seems to have been somebody you either loved or you hated. Black Americans loved him with good reason; he was the first President to ever take their plight seriously. As I've said before, I'm opposed to political correctness, affirmative action, forced integration and similar ideas; they area product of cultural Marxism and are dangerous. However there's no doubt at all that black people in the USA, especially in many southern states, were subjected to immense cruelty and injustice, and that needed to be stopped. I'm not surprised black America cried when he was shot. I don't think Kennedy was ideologically opposed to the New World Order; he was just an employee who didn't do as he was told. In this way he's similar to Vladimir Putin today. Some people in the Truth movement are calling Putin a "white knight" and a saviour of humanity against the Illuminati. He is not. I know he refused an IMF loan for Russia and has taken a progressive line at other times, but I think he is just a wayward individualist and a Russian nationalist, not an anti-New World Order activist. John F Kennedy simply wanted to take the world a different way than the one decided upon by his lords and masters, so did his brother Bobby. This is why they took Bobby out too. To continue this "what if? historical game, it's very likely that Robert Kennedy would have become President after John, resulting in a White House dynasty greater even than the Bushes. This means we wouldn't have had Richard Nixon as President, and no Henry Kissinger holding his reins. The genocidal onslaught of bombing across Southeast Asia would not have happened and there would have been no burglary at the Watergate Hotel. The world in the intervening years, and up to the present day, would have been different beyond belief had it not been for three bullets... or however many were really used. So there is reason to be sad about the Kennedy Assassination. Sad partly because of JFK himself, the closest any US President has ever come to being somebody I could actually like. The JFK researcher Anthony Summers puts it very well when he explains what it felt like to alive in the Kennedy era. It was at the start of the optimistic and hopeful 60's counterculture generation, flower power, LSD, The Beatles etc. John F Kennedy was a young, handsome, approachable and down-to-earth man who seemed to symbolize that mood of change, that hope; and when he was killed, it felt like all that hope died with him, see: http://www.anthonysummers.com/. A political journalist during the bedlam of the late 60's described the day Kennedy was murdered as "the day everything started to go wrong." Skeptics claim that conspiracy theorists like me think that nothing happens in politics by accident; this is not true. Some things that happen in politics are indeed accidents, but not all. The changes that came over the world after the 22nd of November 1963 were definitely not an accident. That is sad, sadder than any man's death. However the biggest tragic aspect to the Kennedy Assassination is that it's still unsolved. I wonder if any of those early researchers into JFK's death thought that by the year 2013 we still would not know the answer. That the Powers-That-Be were truly capable of keeping a secret like this for half an entire century? If they had known, would they have despaired? I hope not. Those of us lucky enough not to have had to wait that long now need to take action. The Kennedy Assassination wasn't just the killing of one man, it was the metaphorical killing of us all. The killing of our sovereignty, our dignity and all regard for our humanity. It was a brutal, brazen and contemptuous act of oppression that is seldom matched in history. It unequivocally reveals what the rulers of this world truly think of us. It's been fifty years that we, the people, have allowed them to gloat over their conquest of our world, our bodies, our hearts and our minds. It's been fifty years too long.



Sunday 7 July 2013

Cloud Atlas

See here for an official trailer for Cloud Atlas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnAqFyaQ5s

A few months ago word reached me of a new movie coming out with the intriguing title of Cloud Atlas; most people in the conspiracy/paranormal community who had seen it were raving about it. I tend to be cautious about excessive hype because I find it is rarely deserved, and falling too much into the spirit of its enthusiasm tends to lead to disappointment when I view the object of it. I walked into the cinema thinking that surely Cloud Atlas couldn’t be that good, could it? Yes it could, and it was. I’m so accustomed to reviewing books and films I can’t stand, so please indulge me while I review one I love for a change.

The film is by Andy and Lana Wachowski the cinematic siblings who brought us such greats as the Matrix Trilogy and V for Vendetta. The film’s intricate plot requires concentration to follow, but it is well worth the effort. The film is based on a novel by David Mitchell and the greater story arc evolves across six independent sub-stories that are set in different eras over a time period of nearly five hundred years; three are in the past, one in the present and two in the future. Despite this the events in one tale influence those in succeeding ones, and amazingly, preceding ones too. The way this occurs is found in Oriental philosophy, a subject that has influenced the Wachowskis in other films they’ve made. The different characters in the various scenarios are actually separate incarnations of immortal souls. This is explained several times in different ways; for instance Sonmi-451 in Scenario 5 says: “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present; and by each crime and every kindness we birth our future”. In Scenario 3 the character Isaac Sachs experiences the same revelation although he describes it very differently because he’s a physicist: “Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood. As we understand the Theory of Relativity or the Principles of Uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives… These forces that remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be begin long before we’re born and continue long after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. At each point of intersection, each new encounter suggests a new potential direction.” What I find interesting is that the different souls incarnate as very different personalities playing very different roles. The various incarnations can be both protagonists and antagonists, depending on the scenario. Also some of them play major characters in one scenario and are virtually cameo in another. One of them, which I’ll call Soul TH because he’s played by the actor Tom Hanks, starts off as a murderous quack doctor then goes on to become a blackmailing hotel receptionist, a mild-mannered and thoughtful nuclear power station engineer, a violent Gypsy novelist, a movie actor and a troubled uncle. All the characters in the story have a birthmark on their skins resembling a comet; this suggests that they are what Michael Newton calls a “soul group”, a collection of separate spiritual entities who are, at a higher level, all one; excuse the cliché, but it is an accurate description. See: http://www.spiritualregression.org/. The soul reflects on itself by incarnating into these various alternating experiences.

The film takes a lot of stamina to watch and the most common criticism laid out is that it’s too long and complicated. It is epic in length, a hundred and seventy two minutes, and the film makers treat the viewer very roughly, but is this a bad thing? They want us to think and they demand the effort from us to do so. They consider the viewer an intelligent intellectual and provide a challenge that they feel is appropriate; they consider us up to the job and so push us hard. What a relief that is from a media whose role is normally the opposite! Cloud Atlas is definitely an art-house flick, not a general release film aimed simply at the mass market; if anybody doesn’t like it they can go vegetate themselves in front of Battle of Los Angeles! It is an independent production by the German producer Tom Tykwer; he also co-directed it along with the Wachowskis, and he composed its award-winning score. It’s one of the most expensive independent movies ever made, its $102 million budget coming mostly from German arts company sponsors. The production was deeply troubled; it almost went bankrupt and the film came perilously close to being cancelled more than once, but the cast and crew were determined to finish it and they even had a whip-round to fund some of it out of their own pockets; the thing was funded partly out of donations from the actors you see on the screen and the people behind the cameras who made it happen. I’m pleased to say that the film has so far grossed $28 million, with the DVD newly launched and home sales yet to come in. Along with the money problems were the logistics. The multiple scenarioes would have taken a couple of years to film with a single unit so the film was shot in parallel. The obvious problem was that any miscalculation of the schedule means that the actors or crew-members could be double-booked. Suppose the unit in the studio in Germany told Hugh Grant, or an indispensable technical expert, they needed him at the very same moment the location team in Edinburgh did? It must have given Tykwer nightmares! 
In discussing the plot it’s easiest to name the characters by the souls they have inside them through the entire film, not just the characters they play in the separate scenarioes. I’ve already mentioned Soul TH, played by Tom Hanks. The others I’ll call Soul HB, played by the actress Halle Berry; Soul JS, played by actor James Sturgess; Soul DB, played by actress Doona Bae; Soul JB, played by the actor Jim Broadbent; Soul BW, played by actor Ben Whishaw; Soul HW, played by the actor Hugo Weaving (Smith in the Wachowskis’ Matrix films of course); Soul JD, played by actor James D’Arcy; Soul ZX, played by actress Zhou Xun; Soul KD, played by actor Keith David; Soul DG, played by actor David Gyasi; Soul SS, played by actress Susan Sarandon; and Soul HG, played by actor Hugh Grant.

Scenario 1: This opening scenario is set in the South Pacific in 1859. Adam Ewing, Soul JS, is young newlywed lawyer from San Fransisco who is seeking his fortune as part of his father-in-law’s business, the slave trade. He sails to an island and falls ill from shock while witnessing the mistreatment of black slaves, including Souls DG and HB. He is treated by the ship’s doctor, Soul TH, a Dr Goose, who secretly tries to poison him while pretending to cure him. Luckily one of the slaves, Soul DG, stows away on board the ship and rescues him from the doctor’s clutches. He persuades the ship’s captain, Soul JB, to take him on as a member of the crew. His friendship with the slave causes him to question the morality of slavery. His father-in-law, Soul HW tells him that he is violating a “natural order”, a statement that recurs several times throughout the film. In fact there’s a quote first uttered by Dr Goose, Soul TH, which comes back more than once: “There’s only one rule which binds all people: the weak are meat and the strong do eat”. This is the basis of Social Darwinism and the “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Man!” ideal, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/charles-doing-washing-up.html. The outdoor scenes of Scenario 1 were filmed in the Mediterranean on the Balearic Islands.
Scenario 2: Souls BW and JD play a pair of homosexual men in Cambridge University in 1936 called Rufus Sixsmith and Robert Frobisher. As a gay couple in those days they have to keep their relationship secret, but they are eventually separated for good when Frobisher goes to Scotland to work for a famous, but elderly, classical composer Vyvyan Ayrs, Soul JB. Frobisher goes through a straight phase and has an affair with Ayrs’ younger wife Jocasta, Soul HB; but his musical partnership with Ayrs only really breaks down when Ayrs tries to plagiarize ones of Frobisher’s own compositions, the Cloud Atlas Sextet, which is also the score to the movie. When Frobisher challenges him, Ayrs threatens to publicize Frobisher’s homosexuality and disgrace him. Frobisher shoots himself after a very moving sequence in Edinburgh where he comes close to being reunited with Sixsmith. Sadly their plans are thwarted by the brief appearance of an avaricious hotelier, Soul TH, back on Earth as a similar person to Dr Goose. This part of the film includes an abstract scene in which Sixsmith and Frobisher are in a china shop breaking everything; it is very reminiscent of the scene in V for Vendetta where V topples dominoes. Oddly enough Frobisher comes across the published journal of Adam Ewing and becomes enthralled by it; this happens in all the scenarioes, a physical as well as a spiritual link, bonds each one with the previous one.
Scenario 3: This is set in San Francisco in 1973 but was in fact filmed in Scotland, mostly around Glasgow; I know somebody who went to watch while they were doing the street scenes there. Soul HB comes back as Luisa Rey, a roving reporter who lets nothing stand in the way of a good story. She is the daughter of a famous war correspondent, Soul DG, now deceased. She discovers that the manager of a nearby nuclear power station, Soul HG, who along with Soul HW, seems to always incarnate as unpleasant people, is secretly working for an oil company and wants to stage a nuclear accident to keep people using oil and not alternatives like nuclear fission power (This is not a real alternative in my view, but that’s a big subject that I discuss elsewhere, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ben-emlyn-jones-live-at-truth-juice-hull.html). Like many TV detectives she has a young child as a side-kick, a boy called Javier. She’s also helped by Soul KD, a former solider whose life was saved by her father, and an older Rufus Sixsmith, the only character who appears in more than one scenario as the same physical person. In this scenario, Soul DB plays a brief but essential role; she becomes much busier later on in the film. The most remarkable sequence is where Luisa meets up with Soul TH incarnate as a very different person, Isaac Sachs, the aforementioned mild-manner scientist. They’ve never met before, but they experience a strange and sudden sense of recognition. This has happened to me when I meet new people sometimes. The strange thing is that Souls TH and HB have not encountered each other before in the timeline, but they become very close indeed later. So they effectively experience a memory that is not from a past life, but from a future one! Along with Sachs she very much warms to Sixsmith too and uncovers the love letters he exchanged with Frobisher. She goes out and buys a rare vinyl disk copy of his Cloud Atlas Sextet. The man serving behind the counter has it on in the shop at the time. He says: “I only played it to check it wasn’t scratched, but I can’t stop listening to it.” This might be because the salesman is Soul JD and he composed it himself in a previous life.
Scenario 4: London 2012. This contemporary segment has a very different feel to the others; it’s much more light-hearted in style, almost a comedy. Soul JB is Timothy Cavendish, a successful publisher who is promoting his newest author, a rough and choleric Irishman or Gypsy called Dermot Hoggins, Soul TH, who has written his autobiography. At a party on the top floor of a hotel, they run into a critic who recently panned the book. Hoggins is so angry that he throws the critic off a balcony where he falls to his death. The scandal that erupts makes the book an overnight bestseller. Hoggins is in jail and so cannot earn royalties; this allows Cavendish to make even more profit, but unfortunately Hoggins’ brothers are not in jail and they are as violent as the author. So they come to Cavendish and threaten him for the money. Cavendish can’t afford to pay them and so asks his brother Denholme, Soul HG, to hide him in a hotel. There he hopes to continue his next project, a manuscript submitted by Javier, Luisa Rey’s kid detective right-hand man, an adult now of course, about the intrigue in Scenario 3. Things get worse when it turns out Denholme has tricked his brother into being signed into a secure old people’s home for Alzheimers sufferers, which oddly enough is Vyvyan Ayrs’ old mansion converted; this is because Cavendish had a secret affair with his wife previously. Cavendish and a few of the other residents have to make a jail-break style escape and are thwarted by Nurse Noakes, a huge, violent and very physically powerful woman, Soul HW. At the end Cavendish finds his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Soul SS, and goes to live with her. The interesting part of the story is that just before Hoggins attacks the critic he catches eyes with a nameless woman at the party and stops to look at her. This woman is actually Soul HB and he must have experienced another subconscious memory of her like he did when they met in Scenario 3.
In Scenario 5 we see Soul DB in her biggest role in the film, this segment features two Asian actresses, the South Korean Doon Bae and Chinese Zhou Xun, in their first major international parts. The setting is a megacity called Neo Seoul in Korea in the year 2144. Soul DB is a Sonmi-451, a genetically-modified human clone who is used as a slave in a tacky fast food joint. She breaks her programming when she forms a friendship with Yoona-939, Soul ZX, another clone who does not have the usual mind control that is supposed to be inbred in clones. She introduces Sonmi-451 to free thought; together they watch films, including a movie made about the adventures of Timothy Cavendish in Scenario 4, played by an actor animated by Soul TH. The customers at the burger bar treat the clones with contempt, insulting them and sexually harassing them for their amusement. Yoona-939 is killed by the manager, Soul HG, when she strikes back at one of the customers. She says: “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse!”, a line from Timothy Cavendish which she picked up from the film. Sonmi-451 is rescued by the leader of the anti-government resistance. It appears that the world, or at least Korea, in that future date is ruled by a despotic regime called “Unanimity”. The clones are fed from packets of processed food that are made in secret from the bodies of other clones who have been killed when they are no longer useful to the system. Oddly enough this obscene nutritional concoction is nicknamed “soap”; and when Cavendish is under the brutal charge of Nurse Noakes she threatens to force-feed him soap flakes. If I recall, the symbolism of soap comes up another time in the movie and other such curious connotations are woven into the story. Sonmi-451 escapes with the resistance leader, Soul JS. They go to Hawaii where Sonmi-451 makes a broadcast to the whole Earth and its colonies in space just before she is captured and executed.
Scenario 6 is set in the year 2321 in Hawaii, although it was filmed by the same unit who filmed Scenario 1 on Mallorca and the other Balearics. Zachry, Soul TH and his sister Rose, Soul ZX, live in a post-apocalyptic pastoral society on the Big Island of Hawaii. They speak in a peculiar constructed dialect that is very hard to understand; for instance “true-true” means “truth” “yeasoe” means to approve of something, “cog” means “to know” and “keeping eyewise” means to watch over somebody. This language is not subtitled and following it is one of the biggest challenges of the film. The community is unfortunately preyed upon by a tribe of violent cannibals called the Kona whose leader is Soul HG. To make matters worse Zachry, is tormented by visions of a demonic entity called “Old Georgie”, Soul HW; we get a bit of Karma or future-life-memory because the demon tells Zachry “the weak are meat and the strong do eat” like he, Soul TH, told Adam Ewing in Scenario 1. However they have a history in their society and they worship the memory of Sonmi-451, although they misinterpret her as a religion. The priestess of this religion is called the “abbess”, Soul SS. Zachry’s culture has contact with outsiders who have a much more technologically advanced civilization and they visit the island occasionally to trade. One of these is Meronym, Soul HB, who wants to locate the transmitter from which Sonmi-451 made her broadcast, and to find out if any of the off-world colonies still exist. Zachry takes her there and they receive a signal. The film begins and ends in Scenario 6 with a brief prologue and epilogue. At the start an elderly Zachry is relating a tale over a campfire in a troubled tone. At the end we realize that he is actually telling this story to his enraptured grandchildren and there’s a heartwarming scene in which we realize that he has moved to an off-world colony himself with Meronym, with whom he has fallen in love and started a family. Maybe this is why, as Isaac Sachs and Dermot Hoggins, he recognized Luisa Rey and the woman at the party. They were, quite literally, his soulmate.
Cloud Atlas really is a supreme cinematic achievement, if you don’t mind me lapsing into the kind of pretentious pseudo-intellectual terminology “duh cwitics” always use. The real critics are completely polarized over this film; it seems to be the kind of movie you either love or hate. When it premiered at the Toronto Film festival it received a ten-minute standing ovation, but others have called it “an honourable failure, but a failure nonetheless”. The Guardian said it “carried all the hallmarks of a giant folly” and Slant magazine considers is “a total and unparalleled disaster!” In my view, as a writer of fiction myself, the only way to deal with the critics is to develop a very thick skin and ignore them, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/critics.html; however tempting it might be to throw them off a balcony like Dermot Hoggins. I have nothing but praise for this mind-expanding, inspiring and uplifting movie. It has been nominated for several anti-prizes, such as the “Movie you Most Wanted to Love but Couldn’t” and the Village Voice Worst Film of 2012, but it won every German film award on the books and also got several accolades for its make-up. Best of all, it won a Golden Globe for its score, the classical Cloud Atlas Sextet, which was composed both inside the story and behind the scenes; like the film it is divided into six movements. The beauty of the score perfectly complements the joyous and adventurous spiritual intrigue of the film itself. It has a scope beyond what is almost comprehensible, and yet it is strangely so logical and tangible. “Everything is connected” is the motto of the movie. It means what your great grandfather’s postman decided to do on just one occasion can decide the outcome of a global revolution three hundred years later. This is not a new idea; on the contrary, the notion behind the story of Cloud Atlas is one of the most primeval themes in human thought. It can be found in the most ancient wisdom teachers of India and Ancient Egypt. The notion is that mankind is far more than the sum of its parts. Its parts being isolated physical beings, which come from oblivion and return to it having no effect we are not able to immediately induce with the brute force of our hands; an effect which fades back into the matrix of chaos soon after it is enacted. The more force, the longer delay before its inevitable extinction; the “bungled and the botched” of Friedrich Nietzsche’s worldview (in Bertrand Russell’s commentary). It is instead the perennial philosophy, one which came down from the Orient and Egypt; one which has always been the basis of indigenous cultures across the world and inspired and the wiser minds of Greece and Rome. It can be found in the gnostic heresy of Christianity and Islam, heresies for which their proponents endured lingering deaths and genocide at the hands of the Vatican authorities, because they merely spoke it. We are all spiritual beings having a human experience; this is a formula repeated so often that it has almost lost its meaning in the New Age and Spiritualism, despite the fact that it is so important and true. This is what I think Jesus learned during nearly all of his life that was edited out of the Bible, between his childhood and the last few months before the Crucifixion; did you really think that was all there was to him? I think he spent those years with the Essenes, the Jewish gnostics who lived mystical lives beside the Dead Sea and wrote Mary Magdalene’s lost gospels of Nag Hamadi. All these eternal and ubiquitous themes are explored in this magnificent film, Cloud Atlas. Not only the deep and profound, but the simple and everyday feelings, the divinity in the very ordinary humanity of people, especially in Scenario 4. Mr Meeks who helped Tim Cavendish break out of the old people’s home where his brother had imprisoned him, only uttered one thing for nearly all of the film: “I know”. But those two words sum up the entire film. “The weak are meat and the strong do eat” are the words Soul TH both uses and has to hear, the words of social Darwinism, the ethics of the Illuminati who have made it their “Great Work of Ages” to keep ancient knowledge from the people. The manifesto of Sonmi-451, Soul DB, are the death knell for everything they have done. We are coming close to a time in history when films like Cloud Atlas will truly be the illustrations of the end, and the new beginning. Sonmi-451 was a nameless, faceless GMO clone who spent every waking hour flipping burgers for “consumers” who were almost as mindless as she was expected to be. But she became one of the most important people who ever lived once she understood the secret that has been kept from us to maintain our servitude. We are all Sonmi-451’s; all of us are nobodies and all of us are everything. That is what Cloud Atlas describes and illustrates better than any film I’ve ever seen. So, do go and see it; it’s still showing in a few small picture houses and the DVD is now on sale in all good shops, and can be purchased online: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cloud-Atlas-DVD-UV-Copy/dp/B0095HHBRY