Solidarity?
A very short short story, with dedication to my English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish, friends.
Dear Flying Fish Reader,
A little gem of a short story by Italo Calvino can be read here today.1
May this piece be dedicated to all my Great British mates who I have many. Those of you at your most agreeable (clap hands), may you not have your loyalties taken for granted—it seems to me that Cognitive Operators2 might be stepping up their psychological infiltrations (mendacium perniciosum where “behavioral science” meets “public policy”3), so that. . . Ah, of the future I know and speak nothing.4
I kiss you on the mouth, my lion hearts. My you be, like I am, free from the BlackRock dollar and its legerdemain.
Tomasz Goetel
Ibiza, Spain
9 August AD 2024
Solidarity
by Italo Calvino
I stopped to watch them.
They were working, at night, in a secluded street, doing something with the shutter of a shop.
It was a heavy shutter: they were using an iron bar for a lever, but the shutter wouldn’t budge.
I was walking around, going nowhere in particular, on my own. I got hold of the bar to give them a hand. They made room for me.
We weren’t pulling together. I said, ‘Hey up!’ The one on my right dug his elbow into me and said low: ‘Shut up! Are you crazy! Do you want them to hear us?’
I shook my head as if to say it had just slipped out.
It took us a while and we were sweating but in the end we levered the shutter up high enough for someone to get under. We looked at each other, pleased. Then we went in. I was given a sack to hold. The others brought stuff over and put it in.
‘As long as those skunky police don’t turn up!’ they were saying.
‘Right,’ I said. They really are skunks!’ ‘Shut up. Can’t you hear footsteps?’ they said every few minutes. I listened hard, a bit frightened. ‘No, no, it’s not them!’ I said.
Those guys always turn up when you least expect it!’ one of them said.
I shook my head. ‘Kill ‘em all, that’s what,’ I answered.
Then they told me to go out for a bit, as far as the corner, to see if anyone was coming. I went.
Outside, at the corner, there were others hugging the wall, hidden in the doorways, coming towards me.
I joined in.
‘Noises from down there, near those shops,’ said the one next to me.
I took a look.
‘Get your head down, idiot, they’ll see us and get away again,’ he hissed.
‘I was looking,’ I explained, and crouched down by the wall.
‘If we can circle round without them realizing,’ another said, ‘we’ll have them trapped. There aren’t that many.’
We moved in bursts, on tiptoe, holding our breaths: every few seconds we exchanged glances with bright eyes.
‘They won’t get away now,’ I said.
‘At last we’re going to catch them red-handed,’ someone said.
‘About time,’ I said.
‘Filthy bastards, breaking into shops like that!’ the other said.
‘Bastards, bastards!’ I repeated, angrily.
They sent me a little way ahead, to take a look. I was back inside the shop.
‘They won’t get us now,’ one was saying as he slung a sack over his shoulder.
‘Quick,’ someone else said. ‘Let’s go out through the back! That way we’ll escape from right under their noses.’
We all had triumphant smiles on our lips.
‘They’re going to feel really sore,’ I said. And we sneaked into the back of the shop.
“We’ve fooled the idiots again!’ they said. But then a voice said: ‘Stop, who’s there,’ and the lights went on. We crouched down behind something, pale, grasping each other’s hands. The others came into the backroom, didn’t see us, turned round. We shot out and ran like crazy. ‘We’ve done it!’ we shouted. I tripped a couple of times and got left behind. I found myself with the others running after them.
‘Come on,’ they said, ‘we’re catching up.’
And everybody raced through the narrow streets, chasing them. ‘Run this way, cut through there,’ we said and the others weren’t far ahead now, so that we were shouting: ‘Come on, they won’t get away.’
I managed to catch up with one of them. He said: ‘Well done, you got away. Come on, this way, we’ll lose them.’ And I went along with him. After a while I found myself alone, in an alley. Someone came running round a corner and said: ‘Come on, this way, I saw them. They can’t have got far.’ I ran after him a while.
Then I stopped, in a sweat. There was no one left, I couldn’t hear any more shouting. I stood with my hands in my pockets and started to walk, on my own, going nowhere in particular.
THE END
Where Joe Rogan is chewing green
What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.—Wittgenstein
Beheading the heads
I must have arrived in the capital the day before a festival. They were building platforms in the squares, hanging up flags, ribbons, palm fronds. There was hammering everywhere.
There was a town where everything was forbidden
“What a lovely cat you have there, my dear. Wouldn’t it be terrible if something happened to it?”—or,—“Isn’t it nice to live the way you used to? It would be horrible to lock you back in, wouldn’t it?” One surely notices that all-time classic veiled mafia-style threat that Fizzer uses in a fairly recent TV advertising (take a look)
From Italo Calvino collection, Numbers In The Dark, (1996), translated by T. Parks.
The image on the title page is based on a painting, which I photoshopped a bit, by Käthe Kollwitz, titled Solidarity (1932).
Cognitive Operators? Who that? My own term. They know who they are, most of ’em, anyways. Agents of Change Through Psychodrama. Some of them, from the neuro-entertainment division, got their names mentioned in the Joe Roman piece I wrote, linked above. . .
Here’s Michael A. Hoffman II, in his must-read book Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare-Independent History and Research, (2001) (‘Read Hoffman, or die!’—if I may paraphrase Northrop Frye speaking about William Blake):
“In a study of mind control and psychological warfare, it is not enough to simply review the latest technology of coercion, the most recent gadgetry and techno-junk littering the hardware and supply depots of governments and cults.
“Far more dangerous than these appliances is the praxis behind them, the underground current which informs the modern project and this modern era. For life in our modern era is little more than life in an open-air mind control laboratory where a form of human alchemy has emerged to transform the mass of targeted percipients—targeted merely by virtue of their being urban dwellers plugged into the electronic and digital pageantry of the Establishment’s system-of-things.
“And what sort of creature inhabits the modern domain? Who is the modern man? The puppet-masters say he is the smartest, most advanced individual to ever strut the planet, the most relatively liberated being in history. But Louis-Ferdinand Celine said it well, ‘What does the modem public want? It wants to go down on its knees before money and before crap!’
“The public have been trained to do this by two principle methods: direct “speaking” archetypal messages of pure terror (“psychic driving” as the CIA’s Dr. Ewan Cameron termed it), encoded in massively publicized “lone nut” mass murders, and the sinister flattery heaped upon them by their masters in the cult of civilization and progress.”
Further, from Twilight Language (First edition, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 2021—Independent History & Research), we learn of Mr. Cass R. Sunstein.
Sunstein is “one of the Cryptocracy’s leading counter- intelligence and behavior modification specialists”, who is a “Harvard Law professor and former official in the administration of Barack Obama, having served as President Obama’s Director of the White House Office of Information. Sunstein’s specialty is psychological warfare contra populist and traditional Christian leaders and organizations. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him chairman of its technical advisory group on “Behavioral Insights”. As Cass R. Sunstein writes,
“Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a ‘crippled epistemology’ ... the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups ... our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories”.
One of solutions proposed is found in cognitive infiltration: “Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.”
It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the way of thinking and cognitively operating suggested to the enemies of you and I (we, the people), the liberal-globalist criminocracy. See Cass R. Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories” (2008), the gisst of which can be read in 5 minutes on wikipedia.
Then, there’s this frustrated china plate of mine caught in a moment when good reason possessed his tongue (link to the video, on X, in the caption below the photo):
Oh, well. Is that the time? Enough explanations for now. I’ll take the rest of the year off.
For an elucidation, and an “antidote”, cf. Jeremiah 9.
Today, the joke is on us.
“(…) by virtue of our front row seat in the alchemical laboratory of the pagan psychodrama, we are witnessing the efficacy of the Revelation of the Method, a stage in the scripted devolution of humanity—from angelic being to senseless beast.” (Cf. M. A. Hoffman II, here.)
In the Revelation of the Method era, the Overlords of Operations do not object if we (you and me, the people) come to realise that there is something very wrong with the official tale that is being woven (not yet fully revealed). Our “Guardian-Watchdogs” are lying to us and misleading us, and they anticipate our awareness of this truth; it is their jest—the killing joke is on us. Could that be a good thing? For more, lend your ear to Michael A. Hoffman II, here.
Or the words of the Kaiser Chiefs. I predict a riot !!!
Are you them or us. Who are they? who are us? Turncoat, renegade, deserter, defector, betrayer, Judas. Take your pick. Solidarity it aint. In the words of Jean Carne. Don’t let it go to your head !!