Part One

I've been wanting to write about this for a while now. And the time has come.....

Not everything is a conspiracy. Not every conspiracy is true. And some have elements of truth, mixed with falsehoods.

Far too many people continue to be blind to any 'conspiracies' anywhere. Instead, they insist on seeing all world events as random happenings. 'Oooh, there's another war started up. Who would have guessed?' 'Ooooh look, Jimmy, energy prices have gone up again. Well I never.' For these people, things just happen, out of the blue. While if they simply plucked up the courage to do a few minutes of research in the right places, they would find out that this is far from the case. The word 'myopic' strangely comes to mind.

At the other end of the spectrum are people - and I know some - who look upon everything that happens as part of the great conspiracy, in which absolutely everything is meticulously planned, all to the finest detail, and the conspiracy directs everything. 

Reality is, I humbly submit, rather more complex, more nuanced if you like. Instead of knee-jerk surprise and randomness, and equally knee-jerk conspiracy, we may have to put in a bit of hard work and exercise a certain knife-like discernment. Maybe, horror of horrors, digging beneath the surface will sometimes reveal both extremes as erroneous, with what presents itself to us as 'the world' being a more complex interplay of different elements. 

A note on the word 'conspiracy'. I shall use it for convenience; but it's not a very good word to use, and comes with a truckload of problems. 'Conspiracy' is often used (misused) dismissively, to pigeonhole any ideas that differ from the official view of events that is rolled out by media, politicians, influencers, people who like to think they are important, and so on. Like 'racist', 'sexist', denier', 'anti-semite' and other terms, it is used as a weapon. It comes loaded with negative value, with the aim of demonising and silencing any opposition. That's all it is.

So here's a conspiracy theory that I wish to examine a little: 'The CIA created the hippie movement.' I first came upon this idea many years ago, from Jan Irvin. He had a thing about the Grateful Dead rock band especially, and the part they played in twisting the minds of '60s youth. Anything that Jan engaged himself with seemed to descend into polarised and unpleasant disagreements, so I don't recommend you go there.  

Rather more palatable is the work of Dave McGowan, and I include a link to a bit of his work at the end of this blog post. The idea that 'The CIA created the hippie movement' has gained a degree of traction, and I come across it sporadically as I investigate different people and things. It is often presented in this simple, bald fashion. Even Howdie Mickoski stated it in a video that I watched recently. 'The CIA created the hippies, did you know that?.... Laurel Canyon, that stuff....' Laurel Canyon often ends up in the mix: we'll visit the place shortly.

Actually, the CIA has a lot to answer for. 'The CIA created the New Age movement' is another one, which somebody wrote to me recently. I suppose it's so self-evidently true that no supporting material is necessary. Hmmm.

Now, I will be the first to admit that the CIA has dipped its dirty paws into all manner of thing in our fairly recent history, and never with benevolent intent. I wrote about the Gateway Process only recently. But the way that the CIA is sometimes spoken of makes them into a bunch of demonic gods, in whose hands the rest of us are all putty. Omniscient supermen. I don't buy that - and the evidence is there. 

 

Part Two

Let us take a closer look at the claim about the CIA and the hippies. Not just for the purposes of this one situation, but to more generally review the discerning attitude which I deem necessary if the 'alternative' is to be truly credible. We can focus on Dave McGowan's main points, and see how we go.

One thing that David emphasises is how many of the leading rock musicians of the hippie era - or, more specifically, those hanging out in Laurel Canyon - come from families with a military background. So the kids grew up in a world of establishment military, living in family environments of the armed forces, and probably getting carted around from base to base - not much of a life for a stable childhood.

Your dad's in the US military - maybe high up, as was the case with Jim Morrison's father, for example. And.....?

My dad was an executive engineer in telecommunications. Does this make me an undercover communications mole? A clandestine hacker, maybe? One of my grandfathers worked in the post office - communications again - while the other one was Town Clerk in a small town in Oxfordshire. That should be grounds for suspicion.

The 'family card' is often played in conspiracy circles. It can be valid, especially when a family with a clearly connected lineage is concerned. Think Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and so on. The topic is rolled out with politicians who have former Nazis on their family tree, Bill Gates and others with eugenicists as elders, Elon Musk and the family of technocrats; and so on. But in many cases, it is nigh-on irrelevant. Not everybody follows the family line. Some rebel. Some just go their own way.

Let's look at the case of Jim Morrison. His dad was a big thing in the US navy. He was in the vanguard of the Gulf of Tonkin incident - or so the story goes, it is debatable. This incident, whatever may or may not have really happened, was to influence the course of history. It was the (apparent) attack on US navy in Vietnam that triggered (apparently) American involvement in the Vietnam war. Big stuff.

Call me thick, but I can't see the connection with what Jim Morrison of the Doors got up to in his short and meteoric life. I have six books on my shelves about the Doors and Jim Morrison, including 'FBI   ' What's more, I've even read them all.   

Who knows what is visited upon the child behind closed family doors? What threats, what traumas, what manipulations. And it is true: in the case of anybody of high enough ranking in the US military, the CIA and other nefarious agencies will never be too far away. The psychopathic fascinations of the CIA for mind control have already been noted. And, by the way, don't imagine those fascinations have gone away....

Family life in the military is never going to be a recipe for a stable upbringing. In the first four years of little Jim Morrison's life, the family moved four times, as Morrison Senior was shunted here, there, and everywhere. Even so, he was a largely absent father.

As time passed, Jim Morrison seemed to more-or-less disown his family. The last time he saw any of them was in 1964, when he was twenty-one. A few years on, as the Vietnam War escalated, he penned 'The Unknown Soldier' ('Breakfast where the news is read/ television, children fed/ unborn living, living dead/ bullet strikes the helmet's head/ And it's all over. for the unknown soldier'). Meanwhile, Morrison Senior was aboard USS aircraft carrier 'Bon Homme Richard', blowing the shit out of communist forces in North Vietnam and North Korea.

 

Part Three 

Another piece of 'evidence' forwarded towards the hippie conspiracy theory is the way in which considerable numbers of prominent or to-become-prominent musicians all mysteriously gravitated in the direction of -yep, you've guessed it - Laurel Canyon. How could this be? Surely this can be no random happening. Surely they didn't all turn up there by magic, or by coincidence. Surely there has to be some conspiracy afoot.

At the very beginning of the 1960s, when I had only just began school, my family moved to a town in the English Home Counties called Aylesbury. The population was overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon; apart from in a handful of streets, literally two or three, including the one which housed our new home. Almost half the population of these few streets was Italian; and almost all of that was from southern Italy and Sicily. 

We could muse on the possibility of the CIA Italian conspiracy, but truth was rather more simple. There was a large brickworks just a few miles away, and it was in need of manual workers. Someone from Italy got wind of the job opportunities, and moved in. He was onto a good thing, and news travels fast among southern Italian friends and families. Within a short time the web of contacts had resulted in large numbers of Italians emigrating to Aylesbury, and specifically to this one part of town. Like attracts like; like likes to be with like.

Has anyone ever heard of ghettos?! Not all are the product of government pushing and shoving. Some are the result of folk from similar cultures preferring to live near kindred spirits. Artists, to use the term in its widest sense, tend to create their own enclaves. Not just in Laurel Canyon.

Maybe it's time to actually take a trip to Laurel Canyon.....

I have never visited, but Laurel Canyon appears to be a quiet and pleasant little place, tucked away a bit secretly but conveniently close to the city of Los Angeles itself. The inhabitants (some of whom came and went quite a bit) in the mid-1960s, and who are the players in this little episode, form an impressive roll-call of Californian pop-and-rock musicians. You've got Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, Stills and Young, members of the Doors, Mickey Dolenz from the Monkees (real revolutionaries, the Monkees....), plenty of other visitors like Eric Clapton.   

I've got just one question. This is Los Angeles. Wasn't the birthplace and major centre of 'the hippie revolution' in...... San Francisco???

This whole story is getting quite long and silly. Suffice to say that hippies were given birth in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco. They were invented by the media in 1965, and immediately publicised widely as curiosities. The folk involved never liked the word 'hippie'. During my youth I never came across anybody who admitted to being a hippie as such.

OK, I was a bit young, but my own entry into the counter-culture was from around 1969, I guess. I had a schoolfriend who called himself a weekend hippie, a term I despised, and which led to him descending in my estimation. A weekend hippie was someone who lived a conventional life Monday to Friday, but then put on a flowery shirt and maybe smoked some pot Saturday and Sunday. In other words, a fraud.

There are signs of CIA meddling in the whole affair; it would be surprising if there weren't. There were likely a few undercover CIA dudes lurking in the Canyon. More significantly, CIA connections can be seen in the mass production of LSD which accompanied the explosion of 'hippie culture' out of San Francisco from 1965 onwards.

 

Part Four

Here is a more plausible and documented narrative. Always on the lookout for ways to control and manipulate the minds of people (see the recent piece here on the Gateway Process, and the well-documented CIA programmes of MK-Ultra, Monarch), the CIA took a keen interest in the effects of the then-novel drug LSD. They noted that it seemed to render people incapable of logical thinking and action, and they saw it as an incapacitating agent.

As such, it could be used to confuse an enemy army. Equally, it might be useful for incapacitating and befuddling an increasingly troublesome generation of American youth. So the CIA aided the initial flooding of alternative America with strong psychedelics.

What they did not take into account - what they could not take into account, given their own limited viewpoint on reality, was the truly mind-expanding, 'spiritual', effects that LSD had on a significant minority of consumers. This factor catapulted individuals into the worst nightmare of the would-be-controllers of the universe: large numbers of people who began to genuinely see beyond the games of 'conventional society', with its crappy politics, social systems, endless warring etc. People who weren't interested anymore, and who began searching for alternatives, and who really wanted out.

And this is something that the CIA hippie conspiracy promoters remain silent on. How come from 1966 onwards, LSD - which according to the logic of the conspiracy theorists would be a weapon of choice against the hippie youth - came to be demonised like nothing by the mainstream media? How come such energy was put into eradicating its use, for example by lie after lie as to its danger in comparison with alcohol, heroin, etc? You might have thought its use would have been encouraged, or at the least tolerated, if it really was what the CIA talked it up to be.

To put it another way: the CIA messed up. It happens. They are not omnipotent gods. They are simultaneously smart and very stupid.

The CIA gets implicated all over the place. Timothy Leary was a CIA guy according to some, as was his counterpart for the next generation, Terence McKenna. Now, you would not be surprised if they were both approached by members of shady three-letter organisations, and a word quietly whispered in their psychedelic earholes. They may have been 'encouraged' to say and not say certain things. But this does not make them part of some overreaching conspiracy to fashion the alternative cultures of youth. 

And the conspiracists fail to take into account the realities of being a young person in the 1960s. Most of these theorists weren't there; I was, albeit quite young. It was a unique time, especially in the USA and UK.

My main aim as a kid was clear: to escape the 1950s. It was a cultural straightjacket, characterised by suffocating conventionality. Everybody led the same dull unsatisfying lives. I looked at the older generations and, in general, saw no personal fulfilment, no happiness. I saw a hamster wheel of misery and unacknowledged frustration. By age six it was clear to me: I had to get out. It was a matter of survival.

Sixties culture came along. OK, much was commercialised, fashioned by marketing, nasty music entrepreneurs, and the like. But there was something else - to fashion and distort something to your own advantage, something has to exist in the first place. And that 'something' was genuine. New, exciting, expansive, innovative, and eventually for some paradigm-shattering. And this was the cultural mix from which the hippie phenomenon - whatever that may prove to be - was born.

These theories of the CIA and the hippies appeal to those who see sex, drugs, and rock'n roll as evil, as the work of Satan, the devil. There are quite a few such folk in the modern 'conspiracy world'. Many are from the Christian right, and will call themselves conservatives. I am not one of those people. 

Similarly, they will look upon 'the occult' with horror, as another force of evil on this planet. Another error on their part. 'Occult' simply means 'hidden', and is neutral in value. The occult, magic, can be used for good or for bad; it is simply tapping into the unseen forces that impact upon the physical world that we believe we inhabit. 

'Hippies' didn't like the label. Maybe they didn't even exist.... 

 

Resources: If you want to check out David McGowan's work, a search engine will take you to YouTube videos and articles. His book is 'Weird Scenes Inside Laurel Canyon.'

Two books that are excellent on the topic and, in my opinion, far better researched, are: 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens and 'Acid Dreams' by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. Both make for really good reading, though 'Acid Dreams' is rather denser. These are my recommendations. 

Maybe the last word should go to one of those CIA stooges, in this case Robbie Krieger, guitarist of the Doors. From his autobiography, 'Set the Night on Fire':

'Laurel Canyon is a focal point of folk folklore. It's nestled in the hills about two miles north of the Sunset Strip, and the cottages along the twisty mountain roads were famously home to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Carole King, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and members of the Byrds, the Monkees, Love and so many other bands that defined the California sound of the mid-sixties. The rent was cheap, the air was quiet, and the views were stunning. There were parties, of course, but Laurel Canyon was more about hanging out than getting crazy. The hard-core party animals lived down in Hollywood. Those of us who were playing in loud clubs every night enjoyed having a peaceful retreat during the day.'