In August of 1964, U.S. warships, under Morrison's command, claimed to have been attacked while patrolling Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf. Although the claim was false, it resulted in the U.S. Congress passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which provided the pretext for an escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. Morrison never spoke publicly of his father's role in creating the "false flag" that was used to deceive the American people into accepting a war against Vietnam.
More intriguing was Morrison's lack of interest in music until he transformed into one of the most glorified rock stars of all time. As the Door's lead singer, Morrison played a major role in forming the band's identity. He chose its name from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Huxley's "doors" opened through the use of psychedelic drugs. He was also a key player behind the use of MK-Ultra's research into mind control. In a 1949 letter to George Orwell, Huxley described psychedelic drugs as far more efficient than prisons.
As an acolyte of the Greek god Dionysus and the Dionysian Mysteries Morrison reveled in the use of drugs, drink and frenzied dancing. MK-Ultra's objectives had much in common with the Dionysian Mysteries and Morrison's philosophy of life, who said "I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown." Morrison was also described as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Doors manager Paul Rothchild explained, "You never knew whether Jim would show up as the poetic scholar or the kamikaze drunk.
Americans need to look back and reconsider the turning points that brought our country to this crossroad of endless war. How did we come from being so much against war in Vietnam into preparing for a war against everyone on the planet today? Was the Laurel Canyon scene the only operation sabotaging the legitimacy of the anti-war movement by co-opting its message? Was the CIA responsible for permanently wrapping the anti-war movement and public dissent in a cloak of freaked-out hippies, communal sex and acid trips on LSD?
The 1950s and 1960s saw America in direct competition with the Soviet Union, not only for military superiority but also for the world's hearts and minds. The Cultural Cold War waged by Washington embraced activities that were intended to outshine anything done by its communist rival in literature, music and the arts. A psychological-warfare campaign to break down traditional patterns of behavior had already been laid out in 1953 by the CIA's Psychological Strategy Board's doctrine for social control known as PSB D-33/2. With an emphasis on the strange and avant-garde, the CIA began bringing artists, writers and musicians into what was known as its "Freedom Manifesto". The CIA came to view the program as a landmark in the Cold War, not just for solidifying its control over the non-communist left and the West's intellectuals, but for enabling the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never know it.
As the historian of the CIA's secret co-optation of America's non-communist left, Christopher Lasch wrote in 1969, "The modern state is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as 'free' intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions."
While declaring itself as the antidote to communist totalitarianism, one CIA officer viewed PSB D-33/2 as interposing "a wide doctrinal system that accepts uniformity as a substitute for diversity," embracing "all fields of human thought--all fields of intellectual interests, from anthropology and artistic creations to sociology and scientific methodology." He concluded "That is just about as totalitarian as one can get."
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