“You’re wasting your time appealing to the moral conscience of a bankrupt man like Uncle Sam. If he had a conscience, he’d straighten this thing out with no more pressure being put upon him…”
“That whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America; America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience. They don’t know what morals are. They don’t try and eliminate an evil because it’s evil, or because it’s illegal or because it’s immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence.”
Those being the words of Malcolm X, the human-rights activist and one of the previous century’s primary cultural, political and social icons; and also one of the most divisive.
There are of course numerous stirring, memorable, inspirational or provocative quotes that we attribute to him, being one of the most incisive, powerful orators in modern history. A divisive figure not just in America but even within the African-American civil rights community; though one whose power and influence is as strongly felt today as it was fifty years ago.
The shadow cast by Malcolm X, the spirit of the man, is seen to live on and be present in successive generations where social mobilisation and grass-roots responses to perceived persecution and injustice are occurring; his name and his numerous words of encouragement and empowerment were evoked, for example, among victims of matter-of-course police violence and their families as part of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, last year’s unrest, the numerous demonstrations and the attempt to bring longstanding grievances to the national and world stage.
Yet he is often as much a subject for debate, division and differences of interpretation today as he was all those decades ago, and as can be witnessed in the slew of articles written about him in the last few days (and just as much too in some of the particularly aggressive, hateful comments posted in response).
Yesterday marked the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination.
On February 21st 1965, Malcolm X, or El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom when someone in the 400-person audience yelled “Nigger! Get your hand outta my pocket!” When El-Shabazz and his bodyguards tried to quell the disturbance, a man rushed forward and shot him once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun, as two other men charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns.
Conspiracy theories of course abound regarding the true nature of Malcolm X’s death, just as they do with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John and Robert F. Kennedy. The sixties appeared to have been free-for-all decade when it came to US intelligence agencies and domestic assassinations; they seem to have been killing off political leaders and figureheads like there was no tomorrow. There is little doubt whatsoever for anyone who examines the wealth of evidence that both John F. Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated by either the CIA or some other amalgam of US intelligence-community operatives.
Although the conspiracy claims for the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X have been somewhat less emphasized in popular culture (as far as mainstream narrative goes) over the years, it seems highly likely that both of these enduring icons of the Civil Rights Movements and of African-American culture were the victims of much greater murder plots than the official narrative would have people believe.
There’s no doubt that the Nation of Islam, a highly questionable organisation at the best of times, hated Malcolm X and intended him harm (Louis Farakhan, for one thing, stated it out right and in the most undisguised terms); but it’s also very likely, as a number of researchers into the matter have always suggested, that elements of the Nation of Islam had been infiltrated by FBI informants or operatives (FBI ‘COINTELPRO’ tactics were known to create and exacerbate rifts among activists as a means of ineffectualising such movements), and that some manner of joint initiative may have been carried out to finish off the problem of Malcolm X once and for all.
Although three members of America’s Nation of Islam were tried and found guilty for the killing, two of them maintained their innocence and decades of research has since cast doubt on the outcome of the case.
Tens of thousands of declassified pages documenting government surveillance, infiltration and disruption of black leaders and organisations, suggest the conclusions drawn by law-enforcement were contrived and entirely self-serving. Nothing new in that for anyone familiar with, for example, the Warren Commission Report and officialdom’s complete and utter unwillingness to investigate the murder of its own President.
It is also highly likely that intelligence agencies continue to infiltrate and subvert activist organisations of all kinds today too: do a little digging and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest so.
In terms of the sixties, it’s been my view for a while that the reason particularly extreme measures were being taken domestically, particularly in terms of assassinations, was because that decade, more than any other, witnessed the generations that genuinely might’ve changed America and possibly even the world. There was a mass, multi-faceted movement of social, spiritual and political transformation occurring in America and the old-guard Conservatives and elites were in real danger of being swept away. This was the reason that everything from the hippy counter-culture movements and the utopian ‘flower power’ ideologies to the Civil Rights movement and the movements for African-American liberation were infiltrated and subverted by various means by government agencies and the reason too why at least four of the most powerful figures for change and progression all died violent deaths.
I’m not suggesting necessarily that had those mere four individuals survived the story would’ve turned out completely differently, but their absences certainly helped ensure the survival and success of the elites and the Conservative establishment and its various political and social agendas, both at home and abroad (including the survival and growth of the CIA, the prolonging of the Vietnam War and the vast expansion of the military-industrial complex), partly because those deaths brought with them a loss of hope and conviction for a great many people and a sense that the struggles were futile. You can read or watch coverage from the era demonstrating how, for example, the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King created a sense of hopelessness for so many of those who had previously had great hope for the future, and how idealists in particular took such events as coffin-nails to their cause.
There’s a television footage from the era I recently saw that showed the actress Lauren Bacall being interviewed in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s assassination and saying basically that the America she believed in was ‘finished’.
Americans are all still experiencing a world created in the interests and the vision of those forces. In my view of things, the assassination of Malcolm X is just as relevant in this context as the assassination of JFK.
This piece on the Black Agenda Report site looks into the claims in Roland Sheppard’s book Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Sheppard himself is one of the few remaining eye-witnesses to the assassination, which could be said to imbue his analysis with a sense of particular authenticity and weight. Sheppard describes the unusual absence of security on the day of Malcolm X’s assassination, and he recounts his personal observations of what happened in the crucial moments.
He tells of a second suspect apprehended that day by the New York Police, a man whose existence later disappeared from the official version of events (highly reminiscent of accounts of the Robert Kennedy assassination that followed a couple of years later). However, when Sheppard was interrogated at the Harlem Police Station, he saw this man walking freely into one of the offices and clearly recognised him as the assassin.
This site meanwhile provides a good resource on the assassination, having compiled an extensive collection of documents chronicling Malcolm X’s death. Included in this package are New York Police Department, FBI, prison, hospital, grand jury, and medical examiner records that have never previously been disclosed.
The question as to why the establishment would’ve wanted to assassinate him requires very little in the way of imagination: Malcolm X, like Martin Luther King, had the potential to galvanise and inspire revolution in America. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were both expanding the scope of their interests and intentions beyond their original philosophies and emerging as powerful advocates and mobilisers for a revolutionary shake-up of not just civil liberties but the entire American economic and political system.
This was especially the case with Malcolm X who, in his final few years, was vastly expanding his initial struggle against American racism to include broader struggles against poverty and war. In 1962 he supported striking hospital workers in New York City, for example, while he was also the first significant leader in the United States to publicly oppose America’s war against Vietnam.
There was another very significant level to the threat Malcolm X posed, which was the increasingly foreign-based agenda he was pursuing; the U.S. Government (rightly) feared El-Shabbaz’s growing international stature and the political connections he was making in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In particular, El-Shabazz’s founding of the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity and his committed devotion to the ideal of Pan-Africanism (a devotion that would be shared by other, including visionary, figures; most importantly the late Muammar Gaddafi) set him out as a serious force who could, given time, make things happen; things that weren’t just contrary to the agenda of the ruling elites in America but, as with Gaddafi decades later, to the global elite too.
It’s no coincidence that Gaddafi too was eventually the victim of a targeted assassination plot. “Colonialism in Africa represents an extension of racial segregation and of the unjustifiable contempt in which Black races are held by white races. There is no justification for one man to feel superiority towards another because of the colour of his skin. Black races must fight to be rehabilitated,” said Muammar Gaddafi, though it sounds precisely like something Malcolm X would’ve said, because both were people, among others too, who understood that the ‘Third World’ was destined to remain in its abject condition because it was being deliberately kept in that condition by a global, corporate elite that functioned essentially like a macrocosm of South-African apartheid.
And both understood that something needed to be done about it.
Less than a year before his murder, Malcolm X met with Che Guevara and the Cuban delegation to the UN in New York (December 1964). He had also been invited by Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian Revolution, to participate along with Guevara and other ‘independence movement leaders’ at a conference in Bandung beginning March 3rd 1965; a conference he wouldn’t live to attend (it may also be worth nothing that Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella was assassinated just four months after Malcolm X).
Curiously, he had also arranged for the issue of human rights violations against African-Americans to be discussed on March 12th 1965 by the International Court of Justice at the Hague; another event he wouldn’t live to attend. His assassination in New York on February 20th quite simply killed off this problem.
For the United States to have been taken to the Hague by one of its own oppressed citizens and to have its treatment of a large section of its population investigated by international authorities would’ve been unthinkable – it would’ve done enormous damage to the country and its international image and may have characterised America on the world stage in the same category as Apartheid South Africa.
A lesser-publicised example of Malcolm X’s growing international stature and ambitions is highlighted in this piece in The Guardian detailing his 1965 visit to Smethwick in Birmingham (England), regarded at the time to be the most colour-conscious, perhaps the most racist, place in Britain. Its Conservative MP, Peter Griffiths, had been elected in the previous year’s general election on the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
“I have come,” Malcolm X told reporters as he posed for pictures in Marshall Street, “because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being treated badly. I have heard they are being treated as the Jews were under Hitler.” When English reporters asked him what should be done; “I would not wait for the fascist elements in Smethwick to erect gas ovens,” he answered in typically direct form.
The point is that he had quickly become not only a major domestic threat within America but a cause for potential international embarrassment and controversy too. In this piece, Brice Smith writes; ‘It is no coincidence that Martin and Malcolm were killed when they were. Both men were killed within one year of making a profound extension of their goals and their personal ideologies – Dr. King’s civil-rights views led him to openly oppose the war in Vietnam; Malcolm X’s increased focus on human rights discredited the American government in favor of the United Nations and the World Court.’
The same article goes on to note, ‘Malcolm’s human-rights visit to Africa and the Near-East had turned him into a much greater threat to the United States government than he had previously been considered. After the meeting of the Organization of African Unity, at which he was the only American speaker allowed to be heard, the US State Department and Justice Department began investigating his activities much more closely, particularly at the insistence of CIA director Richard Helms who instructed his agents to do everything they could do to monitor the activities of Malcolm X. Malcolm X was also then mysteriously poisoned during his trip to Egypt and barely left the country alive.’
As is well attested, the attempts on Malcolm X’s life were already palpable prior to the assassination itself.
For one thing, his home was also fire-bombed. The perpetrator was never identified and the police actually blamed Malcolm himself and claimed he firebombed his own house to make it look as if he was being targeted by someone (!). In all likelihood, as many who’ve studied the events leading up to the assassination suggest, this was simply an earlier attempt on his life that had failed, with the possible poisoning in Egypt having also been evidence of a plot.
It was also evident from writings and the testimony of those close to him that he was fully aware of this plot against him and expecting more assassination attempts; the iconic photo of him holding a firearm at a draped window has often been used by his haters to paint him as a lifelong extremist and advocate of violence, but in actual fact would more accurately be perceived as an image of a man permanently on-guard to defend himself against assassination.
There is a misconception even now among many (particularly white) people not well-versed in the subject that Malcolm X was a total militant throughout his life, who hated white people or was utterly unwilling to compromise.
This wasn’t actually the case, and in fact one of the most interesting things about Malcolm X was the subtle evolution in his thinking; an evolving attitude and world-view that he himself openly admitted to and which is well explored by his biographers. His more militant “black supremacist” (as his many critics labelled it, primarily in order to paint him as a dangerous threat to the white majority) stance appeared to have been fading by his final years of life as various experiences, particularly his time in Africa and his pilgrimage to Mecca and conversion to Sunni Islam, tempered his originally militant attitude and made him more inclined towards reconciliation.
This recent article in the The Telegraph touches upon this theme somewhat, focusing on his famous life-changing experience; ‘He went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and was struck by the racial harmony among Muslims: “There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.”
As the article goes on to note, ‘Nowadays we’ve been trained by media portrayals to see Islam as politically radicalising and divisive. But it helped transform Malcolm from a black leader who preached separation into a proponent of the hope that African-Americans could advance as part of a broader coalition with oppressed people – something closer to a socialist.’
By June 8th 1964 when Mike Wallace interviewed Malcolm X, he had by this time denounced all discrimination or advocacy of ‘separation’ between white and black, saying: “I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation – every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of color,” he said.
Those who wish to continue to demonise or ridicule Malcolm X for various reasons repeatedly quote him from pre-1964, though the reality is his more aggressive views were fading after Mecca. More to the point, to vilify him based even on some of those pre-1964 statements is to miss the point that he was part of an oppressed, humiliated and generally maltreated minority in American society and that he was someone striving to both speak for that minority and to envision some possible path to dignity and rights in an age when it wasn’t being afforded.
Entirely the product of his life experiences and inevitably hardened by them, what else *but* militant could anyone in his position be if they were going to look at and speak about the situation honestly? “I see America through the eyes of the victim,” he once said. “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
When Malcolm X is discussed, you’ll still get comments like this one, posted by a reader of this recent Newsweek article; “Malcolm X was a horrible person, he thought violence was the answer and taking things was how to do it. I’m just glad he died how he lived.” The problem with a sentiment like that is that it is devoid of any understanding of the time, context and conditions that coloured everything someone like Malcolm X said or did. It’s the view of someone who permanently belongs to a class of people that has never been the persecuted or humiliated section of society, but the class of people that, throughout the world, has always held the power and always called the shots.
If anyone chose to view him as ‘racist’ or to take exception to that perceived racism (and it’s remarkable than anyone in 2015 would still think that, even if people at the time were), they’ve surely failed to bear in mind (or sympathise with) the rampant, ingrained racism towards the African-American community from Conservative America, which was determined to keep the Black community ‘in its place’ as second-class citizens; worse than just second-class citizens, but second-class citizens descended from people forcibly brought over in large numbers purely to be slaves.
This being in a time where, among other less overt symptoms of presumed and ardent white superiority, the KKK was highly active and vocal. As Malcolm X himself once said, ‘extremism’ for the cause of liberty was always justified. Those afraid of the status quo changing invariably are those who benefit from The Way Things Are and are therefore inclined to vilify the downtrodden for having the gall to demand better treatment.
For example, this letter sent to George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party in 1965, could be called ‘extremist’ or it could be called perfectly reasonable given the context. “If your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense — by any means necessary.“
‘By any means necessary’ is, for that matter, the phrase most associated with El-Shabbaz.
Part of the fascination and long-lasting allure with Malcolm X’s statements and speeches is just how uncompromising he was at most times. He didn’t try to play the game, didn’t try to win the favor or sympathy of the establishment or of mainstream America and didn’t see any dignity in trying to make his views more palatable to the very institutions of his oppression. He spoke plain truth as he saw it, albeit very eloquently. Another public figure of the same generation who can be said to have done the same was Muhammad Ali, but Ali was often used as a source of entertainment by the mainstream media, whereas Malcolm X never lent himself to that kind of ‘in-joke’ banter, performance or deliberate blunting of his message.
He rather famously labelled Martin Luther King Jr a “chump” and other civil rights leaders as “stooges” of the establishment. He called the 1963 March on Washington “the farce on Washington” and said he didn’t understand why so many black people were excited about a demonstration “run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn’t like us when he was alive”.
It’s easy to ascertain why the US establishment found him so threatening. Here, after all, was a Black American of enormous intellect and tremendous oratorical power, someone who could’ve – at one point – inspired major revolution, major upheaval against the Conservative white majority and could’ve substantially mobilised the oppressed. The “The Ballot or the Bullet” alone – in which he advised African-Americans to exercise their right to vote wisely but added that if the government continued to prevent African Americans from attaining full equality, it might be necessary for them to take up arms – would’ve sent alarm bells ringing all through the Conservative establishment, just as much as John F. Kennedy’s ‘secret societies’ speech or his threat to dismantle the CIA sent alarm bells throughout America’s leviathan intelligence community.
And the fact was that Malcolm X’s growing power to inspire debate and reach a broader diversity of minds on an international scale was making him an even bigger problem.
On his way home to the US from Africa, Malcolm X stopped in Paris where he spoke at the Salle de la Mutualité, and a week later, on November 30th 1964, he flew to the UK and on December 3rd took part in a now famous debate at the Oxford Union Society under the motion of “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is No Vice; Moderation in the Pursuit of Justice is No Virtue”.
British interest in the debate was so high that it was televised nationally by the BBC. It demonstrates again the extraordinary clarity of sentiment and power of expression that Malcolm X possessed; even those who didn’t agree with him couldn’t dismiss or ignore him.
That Oxford Union speech is one of the must-watch orations of the last hundred years. Whatever else we may or may not say about him, he also remains one of the greatest, most relevant orators of the twentieth century.
What’s also especially extraordinary to me is how much of what Malcolm X said resonates today and has relevance to today’s issues and struggles; for someone who died fifty years ago, his voice has a substantial echo long after his lifetime. This, for example, was what he said about the toxic relationship between the police and parts of the Black community, in the same Mike Wallace interview as quoted above; “They think they are living in a police state and they become hostile toward the policemen. They think that the policeman is there to be against them rather than to protect them. And these thoughts, these frustrations, these apparitions, automatically are sufficient to make these Negroes begin to form means and ways to protect themselves in case the police themselves get too far out of line.”
It’s an analysis that sounds like it could’ve been spoken weeks or months ago in reaction to the Ferguson shooting or other similar incidents; which also essentially indicates how little has changed in race relations in fifty years, despite some perhaps naively thinking otherwise.
Were he still around now, he would no doubt have a great deal to say; not just as a major figure in African-American politics and civil rights, but as an international figure, a cardinal proponent of Pan-Africanism and Third World struggles, and as a convert to mainstream Sunni Islam. I can’t help but wonder what he would have been saying, in regard to, for example, the Ferguson shooting or the Eric Garner incident in America. What he would make of Barak Obama’s presidency. What he would’ve had to say about US foreign policy in regard to Iraq, for example, or the much talked about ‘Clash of Civilisations’ many believe is occurring and post-9/11 climate in general. Or about the state of Pan-Africanism today and particularly the criminal NATO murder of Muammar Gaddafi and wrecking of Libya in relation to that goal of African unity and progression.
What we can know for certain is that he wouldn’t have been silent on these and other major matters of our time.
He would’ve had far too much to say, these passed fifty years (had he lived), and far too much to do, and it becomes obvious all over again that had he not been killed in 1965 he would’ve nevertheless been killed some time after; quite simply because he was too dangerous to be left alive. The Kennedy’s were ultimately too dangerous to be left alive too, but Malcolm X was more dangerous than both of them simply because he was unwilling to compromise with the establishment or the system even a little bit, wasn’t willing to play the long game, and didn’t have an ideology that could’ve been blunted or assimilated into the broader systems of social, cultural and political control.
As for those who balked at his perceived aggression and militancy and favoured the more peaceful, conciliatory approach of Martin Luther King, the irony is that Dr King ended up being assassinated just as Malcolm X was; demonstrating that Dr King’s more peaceful, non-threatening approach to the cause didn’t afford him any more respect or safety from the establishment as his more militant counterpart was afforded.
‘Playing nice’, in other words, didn’t spare MLK the same fate as Malcolm X. As far as those with their fingers on the trigger were concerned (if we assume government agencies’ involvement), there was no difference between Malcolm X and MLK: both were dangerous forces for social change and both were necessary to do away with.
Meanwhile the struggle that was briefly waged in the sixties by the various forces for social and political change against the elite corporate/political establishment was lost. America is owned and run by the latter.
Hello… I truly liked reading your post… I have recently watched a documentary on Malcom X and learned a bunch of facts related to his own story… I didn’t know he was muslims so I found that he led a fight representing two minorities somehow…
His assassination was said to be in hands of muslims who considered him a betrayer somehow, but I have doubts regarding that… Which is your personal opinion as to these point?…
Thanks for sharing… A great post, indeed. I will share it on Twitter right now. Best wishes :star: Aquileana 😀
My view, based on different source of information, is that people from within the Nation of Islam in America did assassinate him, but they working with FBI operatives who were known to have infiltrated the movement. The FBI was known to infiltrate all of the movements in the 1960s so that they could destabilise them.
Thanks for commenting, Aquileana, I really like your blog: but there’s so much content and information on your site that it takes some time to appreciate all of it 🙂
I thought the same when I watched that documentary… we are both supporters of the unofficial version, I guess…
Thanks for sharing your views as to that point and for your words regarding my blog!… It is great to connect with you! … All the best! Aquileana 😀
Likewise, great to connect with you too 🙂 And I’m sincere about your blog: it’s a fantastic resource.
Comprehensive, informative and bringing out the resonances with ‘today’ very effectively.
Hopefully you won’t burn me for saying this, or I missed it, but one name is missing here and two films … yep: Spike Lee, ‘Malcolm X’ and ‘When We Were Kings’. Any thoughts? I slightly disagree with you about Ali. He was/is cool!
You’re right, NP, Spike Lee is a big omission; but I didn’t want to get carried away with talking about the film as it would’ve made for an even longer post 🙂 Plus I haven’t seen that film for about fifteen years (when I was only a kid) and my memory of it is hazy. As for Ali, I wasn’t knocking him, NP – I love the guy too 🙂
And thanks for reading the whole post, I appreciate it; I know it’s quite long, I have a tendency to go on for too long sometimes.
Have you seen ‘When We Were Kings’?
I haven’t! I’m doing badly on the film front, it appears. Are you giving it your hearty endorsement? If so, it’ll move up higher on my to-do list of must-watch films.
Well I like it because it’s moving and inspiring and throws up a few contradictions … it seems to have gone straight to charity shop DVD release though … it’s easily as good as ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’.
Reblogged this on Blinded by the Darkness and commented:
Quite long but worth the effort … I was pleased that the BBC gave the 50th anniversary of his assassination a good bit of coverage, R4 in particular, which is probably still available online..
I didn’t notice any BBC coverage. If the Radio 4 thing is still available, I’ll check it out, thanks.
Malcolm X and the ‘American Nightmare’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b052zzg3
Thanks NP! Definitely gonna check that out.
It amazes me too, how much so many of the things he said so long ago actually resonate with me today, even though I’m not black and have never experienced the police state from that perspective. Quite a statement about the times we are living in I guess….
It is. I was going to do a post about some of his most relevant statements in regard to current affairs, but I didn’t get around to finishing it. The sixties in general seemed like a pretty amazing decade, even though it was a number of years before I was born.
Indeed, it does seem like in a whole host of ways, the Sixties was a time during which the Cabal made some fairly significant expansions to their power base and influence worldwide. Obviously they killed a lot of prominent folks who spoke in opposition to their agenda(s), but there wasso much more…
Curious, have u looked into the “moon landing” stuff much? I thought that was over in the too-crazy-to-take-seriously category for a long while, until eventually coming to believe that yes, they probably WERE faked! Although I still really can’t say I have much of a good guess as to why…
There was just so much great music made in the sixties too and so much going on in the culture, involving a massive spiritual, mental, social awakening. And it just got diverted into nothing, while the CIA expanded massively and the military complex grew and grew.
I was into the moon landing conspiracy stuff when I was young years ago (and lots of alien conspiracies), but I’ve kind of drifted away from it. My understanding was that there wasn’t that much of a case to be made for them being fake. Am I wrong? Hasn’t the thing always been that if they *were* faked, the Soviets would certainly have known that and they would’ve called it out straight away?
Speaking of the music of the Sixties, have you read/heard anything about the whole “Laurel Canyon” thing…? Fascinating stuff.
But yeah, I didn’t so much mean aliens and that stuff, but ever since I saw this documentary called “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon”, (I believe it’s on YT now) I’ve had a hard time accepting the official story anymore. Basically I haven’t heard anyone adequately explain how the Apollo astronauts supposedly travelled safely through the Van Allen radiation belts in basically a tin can with no radiation shielding…. Plus, in that doc there is found footage showing how they DID fake a shot of trying to look like they were way far away from earth, like halfway to the moon, when in reality they just dimmed the lights inside the craft and used the round porthole to make the Earth look far away, when in reality they are still in Earth orbit! It’s crazy, I could hardly believe, but yeah, they switch the lights back on and it’s like “Oops!” Plus, I do have to say that I find the explanations as to why there are no stars in any of the moon pics and stuff like that to be just too weird. There are so many little anomalies which really do seem to suggest it was all shot on some sound stage (don’t know if it was really done by Kubrick or not, but it wouldn’t shock me…)
Anyhow… When it comes to the Soviets, I am increasingly coming to believe that they were actually just as much under the ultimate control of the Internationalist manipulators as the “West” is, so in that light it wouldn’t be surprising if they didn’t blow the lid off a fake moon landing… I mean, don’t you think it’s a little bizarre that it was SO important to go there, and yet once they did, they almost immediately turned around and were like, “nah, that’s old news now, boring stuff!” and never went back?? Makes no sense to me, but anyhow…..
I don”t know, you’re making me think I should go back and re-look at some of that stuff. I used to be really into it and really into all the flying saucer stuff from the forties and fifties, and the alien ‘contactees’ and all that kind of stuff. So you don’t think there WAS a real Moon landing? What about these alleged alien bases the Chinese have found on the Moon…? 🙂
Um, no idea, haven’t read about the Chinese finding alien bases on the moon.. I mean, heck, nothing is impossible I suppose, but yeah, I have studied about Roswell and stuff like that of course, and really I’m not necessarily seeing a major connection between fake moon landings and ufos per se (although so many of the astronauts did see them…) But I basically see the ufos as most likely having something to do with Jack Parsons and the “Babylon working” being the thing that that probably kicked off a lot of that stuff. At least in the States anyways. Very “spiritual” origins to a lot of that I think. (Like Crowley’s “Lam” for instance…)
I don’t know… Maybe there was really a moon landing, but it seems weird that they would fake it the first time, only to really do it later. The footage is all so crappy, Bart Sibrel (the guy who made “A funny thing happened on the way to the moon”, talks about how the film itself would’ve been destroyed by the heat/radiation alone. FILM! Not digital pics of course… Enduring several hundred degrees farenheit? I saw one yt video a while back, where the took the “moon rover” footage, and sped it up, and oh my goodness, it’s amazing how the “moon dust” being kicked up by the tires very much appears to be behaving as if it were in normal earth gravity. hmmm…. (oh, and yeah, there’s other stuff like the flag being “blown” by some draft of air, in the vaccum of space!)
Yeah, I remember reading about a lot of that. Still don’t know what to make of it. I’m going to go back to some of that stuff. Not sure if that means Neil Armstrong, Buzz Lightyear and the other guy were bald-faced lying to us for all those decades after then?
Yeah, you should definitely go watch “Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Moon”… 🙂 Part of Bart Sibrel’s (the director) contribution to the project was going up to the various Apollo astronauts and asking them to swear on a Bible that they actually went to the moon. They were not amused of course, and I believe Buzz Aldrin punched him in the face…
It’s interesting though, part of the documentary shows all the astronauts at the first big press conference after getting back, and it’s really quite bizarre to see how stiff and stoic and just non-talkative they all are about what they just experienced… It was super interesting to go back and look at all that footage from a different perspective. Sometimes you just don’t even stop to think and question certain, almost too obvious things, until someone points them out ya know, like, the footage of the Lunar Lander taking off from the surface of the moon to join back up with the LEM. The camera is aimed at the Lander, and then as it takes off, the camera pans upward to follow it! (did they have remote control camera arms/tripods back then? even if they did, was it set up on the surface to film the launch? Or was it some kind of “timed” movement? Not to mention, how did they recover the film!? On a later mission? I thought each time they went to the moon they landed on a different spot….)
Anyhow, overall, it’s more just something that I find sort of “fun” to look into, but it’s really not something that I necessarily feel is anything vital to “prove” to anyone else. It’s really nowhere near as pivotal as digging to the core truth of something like say, 9/11, which is the psychological/political foundation for so much of the illegal government shenanigans going on today….