Buford Furrow has military ID--and researcher John Quinn insists that it's Buford Jr., although most now acknowledge that it's likely Furrow's father--and belonged to Aryan Nations, run by 81 year old Richard Butler. (Yahoo quotes Butler as saying he had not seen or heard from Furrow, a former aerospace engineer, since 1994 or 1995. "He was a good soldier at that time," says Butler.) Pages 136-7 of Maury Island UFO have the Reverend Bob LeRoy talking about how Butler and William Gale started the New Identity movement under Wesley Swift in California. Gale worked for Hughes aircraft and was part of Charles Willoughby's spy net. According to Dick Russell (p. 195 in Man Who Knew Too Much), in 1962 Gale was building "an underground network for the conduct of guerilla warfare...some of the recruitment effort has been directed toward former military servicemen." These are the Rangers, aka the Minutemen, "composed of persons devoted to extremist racial and religious beliefs." Russell adds, "It was quite a time for Willoughby's old journalist acquaintance Mark Gayn to show up on the scene, authoring an article titled "The Far Right: America's Own Ultras" for the April 1962 Canadian Commentator magazine. The dateline was Los Angeles, and Gayn warned that "the Minutemen are known to have acquired some first-rate automatic weapons, and they thank big business for providing the funds for this..."
From The Invisible Writing, 1954:
" Two episodes concerning women with whom I was not personally involved deserve to be related here because they are characteristic of the atmosphere of Berlin during the feverish months of Gotterdamerung that preceded the Nazis' seizure of power. The first is pretty ghastly, and hard to believe for anyone who has not experienced the mass-hysteria that conquered the German people during the last days of Weimar. It happened to a colleague of mine at Ullstein's, whose name has slipped my memory-it sounded something like von Ehrendorf, so I shall call him that.
During the carnival season Of 1932, Ehrendorf went to a dance and picked up a tall, pretty blonde. She wore a large swastika brooch on her breast, was about nineteen or twenty, gay, uninhibited and brimful of healthy animal spirits-in short, the ideal Hitler-Madchen of the Brave New World. After the dance, Ehrendorf persuaded her to go back with him to his flat, where she met his advances more than half-way. Then, at the climactic moment, the girl raised herself on one elbow, stretched out the other arm in the Roman salute, and breathed in a dying voice a fervent 'Heil Hitler'. Poor Ehrendorf nearly had a stroke. When he had recovered, the blonde sweetie explained to him that she and a bunch of her girl friends had taken a solemn vow, pledging themselves 'to remember the Fuehrer every time at the most sacred moment in a woman's life'.
The tricoteuses of the French Terror had found their successors in the Valkyries of the Hitler era. I use this opportunity to confess that I have always held a reactionary view of the part played by women in politics. Taking history as a whole, female interference in matters of State seems to add up to a rather nefarious balance. The male tyrants of history are on the whole cancelled out by an equal number of reformers; but where are the female humanists to compensate for the long series of monsters, from Messalina to Catherine the Great, to Irma Griese of Buchenwald? There are countless books for boys about great men, and no books for girls about great women; yet an anthology about the harpies who left their imprint on history would be an international best-seller. I am talking of women who took a direct hand in politics; their indirect influence via husbands and lovers is a different problem altogether-though even here it seems that they have acted on the whole more as catalysts of ambition than as neutralisers of aggression.
The second story is the counterpart of the first. Alfred Kantorowicz, our cell leader, had asked a girl comrade to tea in his flat. There were only the three of us present. The girl, whom I had not met before, was dark and slim and would have been moderately attractive but for her slovenly manner of dressing, and a curiously distraught look. She took no part in the conversation, and did not even pretend to listen. Suddenly she said to Kantorowicz: 'Do look out of the window now, and see whether he is there; but be careful.'
Kantorowicz peered into the street from behind the curtain. 'There is nobody,' he said reassuringly.
'When I came in, he was hiding behind a lamp-post,' said the girl.
She spoke in a quiet, resigned voice, without any emotion. Kantorowicz now explained to me that comrade Hilda was in trouble: a man had been shadowing her for days, but he had been unable to gather from her story whether she suspected the Police or somebody else.
'It is not the Police,' the girl said, in the same resigned voice. We pressed her to explain, and after a long pause she said:
'It is a chap from the Bezirksleitung' (the District Committee of the Party).
With great effort and with lengthening intervals, during which the girl relapsed into silence and became incommunicado behind a fixed stare, we extracted from her a confused story to the effect that a man from the District Committee (our immediate superiors in the Party hierarchy) had wanted to sleep with her; that she had refused; that subsequently he had been accusing her of some unnamed crime against the Party, and was now following her round, hiding behind doorways and lamp-posts after dark.
Kantorowicz and I discussed this for a while, to to think of a way of helping her. But the girl no longer took an interest in us. She had now completely withdrawn into herself, her stare had become fixed and glassy. She had now completely withdrawn into herself; her stare had become fixed and glassy. She sat upright and immobile at the table, as if petrified. Gradually her upper began to lift, baring her teeth and her gums, and remained fixed in a snarl. A few tears detached themselves from the comers of her eyes and slid slowly down her face; but she neither sobbed nor gave any other sign of emotion and that snarl, like a dead rabbit's, had become a permanent feature. It obvious that a case of latent paranoia had suddenly entered its acute phase; the girl had gone insane before our eyes. We somehow got her into a taxi, and Kantorowicz drove her to a hospital.
I once took a rabbit, caught by a spaniel, from the dog's fangs. The rabbit was apparently unhurt but died a few moments later, probably from fright or shock. Comrade Hilda's face, with the bared gums and glassy stare, had worn the same expression. It was a pitiful and horrifying experience, that moments of anxiety haunted me for a long time. The transformation of face into a mask, of a human being into an automaton, bore the familiar sign that unfortunate girl would probably have gone insane in any case, Communist or not. But the particular form which her insanity took was characteristic of the atmosphere in which we lived. No doubt there was a grain of truth in the story around which her fantasies had crystallised. In former days, persecution manias focused on devils and incubi; for poor Comrade Hilda the fiend was 'a chap from the District Comniittee' denouncing her crimes against the Party.
The hysterical Valkyrie and Comrade Hilda certainly do not represent German womanhood; but they do represent, as extreme cases, the 'politically awakened' part of it, anno domini 1932."
"Wilhelm Reich - Wacko or Scientific Genius?" from San Francsico Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, 7/4/99
AMERICAN ODYSSEY
Letters and Journals 1940-1947
By Wilhelm Reich
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 453 pages; $27
Reviewed by Orson Bean
Wilhelm Reich was either stark raving mad or the greatest natural physicist in the history of the planet. One or the other conclusion may be reached by a reader of the letters and joumals in this collection, American Odyssey, depending on what that reader brings to the task.
A task it can be, on occasion, to wade through Reich's technical ob- scurity, which, in a memorable scene at Princeton, proves incom- prehensible even to Einstein.
Mercifully, the technical portions of the book are relatively few, though no doubt of great interest to students of Reich's scientific work. For most of the rest of the world, he remains an eccentric footnote to the career of Sigmund Freud. When the creator of modern psychiatry gathered a small group of doctors around him in Vienna, Reich was there, becoming, along with Jung, one of the master's favorite's.
In a follow-up study of Freud's patients, Reich observed that the few of them who had gone on after analysis to develop satisfying sex lives had seemingly become healthy and happy, whereas those who hadn't had not. This led him to believe that there must be a kind 6f sexual energy within people.
This energy, which he termed "orgone," builds up over time, he, postulated, and must periodically be released, or it starts to create trouble for its host. The method that nature has chosen to dispose of excess or- gone energy is the sexual orgasm. If the energy is not released, it becomes the fuel on which neurosis feeds and stays alive.
"Orgastic potency," per Reich, consists of the capacity to experience fully pleasurable sexual release. The method by which Reich hoped to bring about this uncommon condition involved jabbing at his patients' chronically tight muscles, thus loosening them up and enabling the patients to become more emotionally expressive - this in conjunction with classic Freudian therapy.
In time, Reich decided that orgone energy did not just exist within the body but also outside of it in the atmosphere. He told anyone who would listen that we all live at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy extending throughout the Cosmos, and that this energy lies at the heart of everything. Orgone is "the life energy and what people experience as 'God,' who is everywhere and is life and creates life," he wrote. American Odyssey, in addition
to informing the reader about Reich's psychiatric and scientific work, has a lot to tell us about Reich as a man. He emerges as arrogant, judgmental, lucid, charming or megalomaniacal. He expresses contempt for people in general: "This crop of human beings is the vilest bunch life has yet spawned," yet on the same page he aches for human contact. ("I would like to fall head over heels in love again!")
In the late '40s, Reich started to become famous in certain circles. His books were selling well, the New School for Social Research was offering a class on his work and stories about him were beginning to appear in the mainstream press.
As his popularity grew, so did his paranoia. "The more success I have, the more I sense that I am in mortal danger," he wrote.
Of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. In May 1947, the New Republic published a savage attack on Reich, dismissing him as a dangerous quack. This brought him to the attention of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. By book's end, the forces arrayed against him already portend the burning of his books and his early death in a federal penitentiary.
But what are we to make of this extraordinary man? Was he a wacko? Or, 500 years from now, will people say he was so far ahead of his time that he had to be killed?
It boils down to the existence or nonexistence of orgone energy. If it's there, we have to look seriously at all of Reich's theories. If it isn't, well, he's one more nut case that's fun to read about.
Want to find out for yourself? Here's what you do. This afternoon, go outside and look up into the sky. After a while, various shapes and forms will begin to pass sluggishly across your field of vision.
These are projections of your eye- sight. Be patient and gaze past or through these mirages. After a while, you may be astonished to behold tiny pinpoints of bright light. These are entirely different from the projections. They seem to have per- sonalities. They race and play with one another. They behave different- ly from day to day.
They are clearly there, and yet you will find no traditional scientist or professor or expert to validate them. "It's just something in your eyes," you may be told., The letters and journals in American Odyssey will still be of greatest interest to people already familiar with Reich's work. For such readers, the book is a treasure trove of in- sights into the life of an undeniable giant. ne translation (from Reich's original German) is expert and, except for the scientific jargon, extremely readable.
Actor Orson Bean is the author of Me and the Orgone, a book about his experience in Reichian therapy.
Rob Sterling's recent essay about Julia Butterfly got this response from Flatland's Jim Martin:
Dear Rob,
John Lennon once told Ken Kesey that behind the blinding spotlight of fame and publicity you will find the cross-hairs of a rifle scope.
I think you jeapordize Julia Butterfly by raising her to the status of an icon. I don't demean her actions and commitment. I'm pulling for her. But is she a Rosa Parks? Let me put it this way:
Ask a white, single-mother waitress to choose between transforming into a black woman in the Deep South in the 1950s, or her transformation into a Butterfly who lives in a tree house with a cell phone and a laptop and a domestic staff of sparse-bearded young field hippies who bring her fresh veggies and springwater and recharged nicad batteries, and who delicately dispose of her nightsoil in an environmentally correct procedure while she sips green tea and writes poetry whiling away the hours punctuated by journalists calling for interviews about her spirituality.
Call me a cynic, but most women will choose Treehouse Number Two. "Honey, show me the ladder!" Let's be real.
And Rob, for the love of Truth, don't be so mealy-mouthed when it comes to discussing the very real questions that remain about the Judi Bari bombing. I don't expect you to agree with the large and growing band of doubters up here on the North Coast, but you say that Flatland's stories on the bombing have been "promoted by news outlets... who have had a bone to pick with the political cause of Earth First!" That's not true! The only "outlets" that have covered the stories (by Ed Gehrman and Don Foster) were, for one, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, whose publisher, Bruce Anderson, is a strong supporter of the "political cause" of deep ecology. Both Ed Gehrman and I participated in Redwood Summer in 1990, despite the bombing. (Ahem. Where were YOU?) Bruce Anderson and Alexander Cockburn both spoke at that demonstration. Cockburn later reported about the Flatland stories in Counterpunch. That's it as far as media coverage goes. Who says these guys have a "bone to pick with Earth First!?"
Put yourself in my shoes for a minute. What's been going on here is that every paper, from the major dailies on down to the free papers of Northern California, along with the "public radio" stations, refuses to cover a major news story published by Flatland. We named names, solved the case, and the country's leading attributional scholar added a second opinion that Sweeney most likely did the bombing of Judi Bari. The Oakland Police, the FBI, the Justice Department, the Redwood Summer Justice Project, the SF Chronicle, KPFA, KZYX, KMUD, all agree on one thing: ignore Flatland.
Now, if it were true that all these oligarchic media outlets covered Flatland's casebook on the Bari bombing because they oppose the politics of EF!, then where are these articles? I saw none. Imagine yourself in my shoes as a publisher: you've got the biggest, best story you ever published, one with real newsworthiness, a hot yarn with sex and bombs and typewriters, well-researched, and ready to face any challenge in court. After a brief fizzle, a small band of liars and criminals succeeds in totally quelching the story, major newspaper reporters want to cover it, but are prevented from doing so by fine-haired corporate newspaper lawyers. Nobody sues Flatland (and I still say, make my day, punk.)
Now Robalini is caught up in Julia's star-power. You are going to blow her head up, if not her ass off, by shining your spotlight upon her, that spotlight with rifle-scope cross-hairs.
The major media have been ignoring the Bari bombing story big-time, mostly because they have been emasculated by bogus legal threats from Mike Sweeney, Judi Bari's ex-husband, who we believe should have been at least QUESTIONED about his role in the bombing. He is a Mendocino County bureaucrat who feeds at the public trough, yet no newspaper can mention his name, and neither did you. Doesn't that keep people totally in the dark about the facts of the case? And why are people afraid of being sued? Why is it that Sweeney hasn't sued me? Why hasn't he sued Bruce Anderson, who has openly accused Sweeney of the bombing in print?
You wrote that Flatland "published a story arguing that the bombing wasn't FBI related." My response: Gehrman and Foster's whole argument is that Sweeney presented himself to the FBI and the police as an confidential informant on his ex-wife, with whom he was fighting for custody of the children, and he tried to have her sent to jail. Sweeney was never a member of Earth First! He is a former member of Venceremos, a Stanford University-based Maoist group, which advocated and practiced violence, including bombings, back in the seventies. I suspect him of being a 30-year snitch, at the very least. Judi Bari was afraid of him, and he had the capacity and history for bombmaking.
Also, there is no "debate" raging on, because the proponents of the FBI-bombed-Bari theory have never agreed to meet the doubters in a public forum to explain and discuss the facts of the case. Why don't you facilitate a public dialogue on this topic? You should be able to discern the weakness their case when they trot out former FBI-agent "experts" to prop up their argument that the FBI did it. They tell us about this ex-FBI man who says Don Foster has no scruples, another one says the bomb was professionally made, and a third assures us that COINTELPRO still exists. Aside from the appeal to authority, isn't it hypocritical that they cite ex-members of an agency they believe orchestrated the bombing of Judi Bari? Their opinions might be true, but it doesn't answer the basic questions. Why won't Sweeney take a polygraph? Why did he offer two alibis for his whereabouts the day before the bombing?
Trust me on this, Rob, there are quite a few long-time Earth First! supporters and activists up here in Northern California and elsewhere who have serious questions about the bombing-myths created by the Redwood Summer Justice Project. You encourage people to donate money to these people while they are obstructing justice in the case. They have nothing whatsoever to do with Earth First, as far as I can see. They've recently used the Flatland articles as a centerpiece of their fundraising appeal, while acting as though it is beneath their contempt to answer our questions. They said that I am a part of an ongoing conspiracy against Judi Bari. Do you believe that, Rob?
With the lawsuit against the FBI, things are rapidly moving toward a out-of-court settlement by the feds to pay millions of tax dollars to a band of burnt-out disinformation agents and conspirators to obstruct justice (i.e., the Redwood Summer Justice Project) as well as to Mike Sweeney, the likely bomber, who has custody of the kids (which was what he wanted in the first place.) The FBI will pay rather than offer full disclosure of its own criminal misdeeds in the case. From where I sit, the whole thing looks like a scam. Sweeney gets a raise.
On the left, the whole star-system mentality of some-activists-are-more-equal-than-others must be abandoned, and that includes your well-intentioned article about Butterfly.
I'd like to ask you a favor, could you send this email of mine out to the people to whom you mailed "Transformation of a Butterfly"? And let them know they can read Ed Gehrman's article about the Bari bombing case and the new evidence at:
http://www.flatlandbooks.com/bariart.html
and follow up on the continuing scandal and cover-up of the case by the FBI, the Redwood Summer Justice Project, and the Corporate Media at the Flatland website at:
http://www.flatlandbooks.com/bari.html
and while I'm at it, don't forget to let people know about my forthcoming book, Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War.
http://www.flatlandbooks.com/wrcw.html
I'll post your article at flatlandbooks.com along with my reply and a link to your page. Give my best to Julia who has nothing to do with the Bari bombing mess and who does good work, and my best to Robalini, who honestly struggles with these things and does equally good work, too. If you don't like history, make some yourself,
thanks,
-Jim Martin Flatland POB 2420, Ft. Bragg, CA 95437 (707) 964-8326 http://www.flatlandbooks.com
Previous Things Are Gonna Slide! Column