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Operation Chaos Lives
By Paul Krassner
If a psychologist testing you in a free association method said “Vietnam War deserters” you most likely would reply “Canada.” However, Matthew Sweet, the British author of Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves, would definitely respond “Stockholm,” as proven by his nonfiction book’s comprehensive research. By 1968, more than a thousand deserters and draft resisters had escaped to Sweden.
     Many of them formed a group named the American Deserters Committee.  That ADC might just as well have served it as insane inadvertently satire. For example, a few friends kept a woman in her in her apartment, playing Beethoven in an attempt to reprogram her brain. An individual insisted that the Beatles were created as an instrument of psychological warfare. And the author himself became to believe the genocidal ambitions of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s secret plot to start World War III. And now, for whatever purpose, Donald Trump has met the same Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
     Back In January 1974, journalists and activists whistle-blowers revealed the truth that there was a takeover by the CIA of the United States. Indeed, Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a growing cult, spoke as his longtime alias, Lyn Marcus, to the audience in a New York shabby ballroom. He began describing the second phase of a psy-war game designed by the CIA, conducted on four continents, turning some of their most trusted colleagues into killers, drugged and imprisoned, reconditioned their minds, erased their memories of the experience, and returned to their friends as unknowing vehicles of a murderous conspiracy.
     The American CIA was then to be performed at a secret facility near Stockholm, where Marcus explained how brainwashed candidates were hypnotized, subjected to electric shocks, forced to eat their own excrement, endure sexual humiliation, and tortured until they whined like puppies. Once they had been reduced to mental pulp, the programming began.
     A literal kind of programming, following the rules of the computer age. Numbers linked to functions. Infinite loops of coded instructions, drilled into the subject by repetition, violence, the application of electrodes to bare skin. Finally, cyanide pills had been secreted inside their bodies, in order to eliminate the killers once they had fulfilled their programs.
     No wonder Sweet admitted, “If I were to die without finishing this book, then someone out there would undoubtedly set up a Web page claiming that I’d been bumped off, by either the CIA, the Swedish secret services, or the bizarre political group that had once counted many of my interviewees as its members—and would, by the time my research was concluded, come to regard me as an enemy infiltrator. And that was then I knew I’d been swallowed by my own story. Swallowed, but not brainwashed.” He’s still alive.
     Back in New York, at the National Caucus of Labor Committees, Marcus was the leader of Students for a Democratic Society. For better or worse, he was delivering a charismatic economics lecture to an enthusiastic SDS crowd. In 1968 that summer, they protested the Vietnam War at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. The Yippies nominated a pig as a presidential candidate, and I started a rumor that we planned to drop LSD into the reservoir. And yes, Lyndon LaRouche decided to drop his alias into pure manure.
     He was an unlovable conspiracy theorist who ran for the U.S. presidency eight times. He played himself as a cartoon character in an episode of The Simpsons in which aliens kidnapped presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Immersing them in tanks of bubbling pink liquid. Homer shouted, “Oh my God! Lyndon LaRouche was right!” And Saturday Night Live featured “Lyndon LaRouche Theater,” in which Randy Quaid played LaRouche, with a bald wig, bow-tie and spectacles, narrating melodramatic twists, conspiracies, and confessing “I am insane.”
*    *    *
     Not mentioned in the book, near the end of March 1981, I delivered a keynote address at the Youth International Party convention in New York. These were the latterday Yippies, originally launched as the anti-Yippie “Zippies” during the 1972 both conventions in Miami. I asked the audience a rhetorical question, “How would you like to be a Secret Service agent guarding Ronald Reagan, knowing that his vice president, George Bush, is the former head of the CIA?”
     Once again, satire would be outdistanced by reality. On March 30, the president was shot by John Hinckley in order to make a favorable impression on actress Jodie Foster so that he could take her bowling on a date. Ironicallly, Hinckley came out for gun control, and Reagan came out against it.
I was scheduled to perform stand-up at Budd Friedman's Improvisation comedy club in Hollywood in April. He asked me to try and get some advance publicity. On April 2, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner quoted a dispatch from the New Solidarity International Press Service:
    A group of terrorists and drug traffickers linked to Playboy magazine met in New York City's Greenwich Village area and publicly discussed an assassination of President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush. The meeting convened by the Yippie organization, featured former Playboy editor Paul Krassner and numerous individuals associated with High Times magazine, Hustler magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times.

    In a statement this afternoon, national Democratic Policy Committee advisory board chairman Lyndon LaRouche urged that this information be made public at this time as a means of assisting government investigators pursuing the assassination attempt against President Reagan. Playboy magazine, as an international dossier released in the March 30, 1981, issue of New Solidarity indicates, is at the center of an international apparatus that has in the past been directly implicated in high-level political assassinations.

Playboy’s response: “Absolute, unequivocal nonsense.” And Budd Friedman said, “Paul, that's not exactly what I meant by advance publicity.” My show went fine, but in July, New Solidarity escalated the attack and published a whole dossier on me:
In the early 1950s, Paul Krassner was recruited to the stable of pornographers and “social satirists” created and directed by the British Intelligence’s chief brainwashing facility, the Tavistock Institute, to deride and destroy laws and institutions of morality and human decency. Among Krassner's circle of Tavistock iconoclasts, peddling smut in the name of humor and “creative expression,” were Lenny Bruce…

These people were taken seriously in certain quarters. LaRouche received enough campaign contributions to qualify him for matching funds from the government. And the U.S. Labor Party’s newsletter, Investigating Leads, was subscribed to by police departments across the country.
In fact, when two thousand demonstrators protested the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, LaRouche's private intelligence network briefed a state police lieutenant that the demonstration would be “nothing but a cover for terrorist activity”--the exact same phrase the governor would use to the media a few days before the rally.
Incidentally, I was never in England. Moreover, Tavistock…Tavistock…I just couldn't seem to remember anything about ever having been brainwashed at the Tavistock Institute. They must've deprogrammed it right out of my consciousness.
*    *    *
Although LaRouche and I both taught at the Free University of New York in 1966, we didn’t cross paths. One student said that “LaRouche presented the most credible, most articulate, and best-argued version of Marxist economics that I ever heard.” My class was titled, “Journalism and Satire and How to Tell the Difference.” My countercultural friend Ed Sanders—leader of the Fugs band and publisher of Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts—taught “Revolutionary Egyptology.” In 1967, he orchestrated the levitation of the Pentagon.
LaRouche and his followers spent the year 2016 snickering behind their hands at the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency. The organization even recorded a satirical song suggesting that the candidate’s core constituents were mentally ill. The singer trilled: “He’s a festering pustule on Satan’s rump! Don’t you be a chump for Trump!”
     But when Hillary conceded defeat, the tune changed. Suddenly, Trump was not, as had been previously thought, a maniac poised to legalize heroin and govern on behalf of Wall Street, but America’s best chance to defeat the British Empire and forge a new alliance with Russia.
It has been said that LaRouche’s wife, Helga, “keeps him on a tight leash.” She is a German political activist, and founder of the LaRouche movement's Schiller Institute, an international political and economic think tank, one of the primary organizations, with headquarters in Germany and the United States, and supporters in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Russia, and South America, among others.
     Helga outlines the great potential for the world if a Russia, China and U.S. partnership develops to fight terrorism and develop the world economy. Trump’s successful meetings with China's president Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin is promising. However, that relationship will only improve if the American people step up to the challenge to ignore the British media campaign attempting to subvert his presidency, and fight to implement LaRouche's Four Law economic development program.
     Helga believes that only with the support of the population will Trump be able to fulfill his campaign promises to the American people to restore Glass-Steagall and rebuild the country. The Glass-Steagall Act was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 as the Banking Act, which prohibited commercial banks from participating in the investment banking business. Helga makes an appeal from abroad to the American people not to miss this great historic opportunity. Dictator Trump has evolved from FDR’s fireside chat to morning tweets. Feckless cunt, anyone?

Zapped by the God of Absurdity: The Best of Paul Krassner will be published in 2019 by Fantagraphics with an introduction by Andy Borowitz.