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 Operations (mendacium perniciosum3), 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.
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
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 Mind Control and Psychological Warfare. Their “work” is meant to deceive swarms of naive admirers to become steppingstones for a totalitarian effort to obliterate populist democracy as the precondition for a post-human future to be imposed. I call it as I see it. 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. Hoffmann II in his must-read book Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare-Independent History and Research, (2001) (‘Read Hoffmann, 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.”
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 week off.
For an elucidation and “antidote”, cf. Jeremiah 9.
Today, the joke is on us. In the “Revelation of The Method” era, the Overlords of Operations do not object if we come to realise that there is something very wrong with the official and corporate-media 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.
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 !!
Or the words of the Kaiser Chiefs. I predict a riot !!!