Woodstock 50 years/Taking Stock/ Our reclamation

By the beginning of 1969, the counterculture had begun to splinter and turn more contentious. The November 1968 election of Richard Nixon had brought about a counter-reaction. Eight years of Democratic liberalism ended with the republican's election as president.

The high era of utopian experimentation had come to an abrupt end with the assassination of our president on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. The horror of the murder of JFK had a hugely painful open wound our psyches. The moral purity of our youth had been silenced. Less than three months later, a delightful group from Liverpool, England came to America, and Beatlemania overtook us, plunging us mercifully into entertainment and carnal oblivion, a flight from memory and grief. We let go, for a time, of the shock and sorrow for the butchered president, and his family and the fall of Camelot.

In the United States the tidal wave of moral outrage that had overtaken the country out of its lassitude of conscience was by 1969, metastasizing into the behaviors of petulant narcissism and brainless exhibitionism. The Beatles, four philosopher poets, four evangelist saints, whose message was the Newest Testament, a divine revelation, gentle tender irony at the insanities of war, sorrowful laments for the bourgeois loneliness, delicate hymns to the glory of love, who had once been at the core of the counterculture, having changed the world for the better, we're not part of any of the events that defined the year of 1969. A new mood was taking place that did not comport with the Beatles' exuberant vision of love and collectivism.

Looking back, the Woodstock Festival, August 15-18, 1969, began the sunset rather than the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, as it had been billed by the media. Yet, it seemed as the high point of a new culture, as four hundred thousand young apostles of peace gathered for three days in the New York rain to listen to more than thirty rock bands.

In taking stock of America since the utopian Ideals of the Sixties, epitomized by the euphoric Woodstock Festival celebration, we must understand what was happening covertly behind the mask of our countries good intentions.

Confronting the need to address America's expanding urban decay, President Johnson, on August 20, 1964 signed the Equal Opportunities Act. The War on Poverty of the 1960's and LBJ'S Great Society program, as he termed it, did little to eradicate poverty. It provided another rationale for one of the largest increases in deficit spending and financial theft in modern history. It was a deficit essentially financed by surplus European dollars.

In 1963, McGeorge Bundy, a member of skull and Bones from Yale, the national security advisor to President Kennedy, signed the first draft of NSAM, the National Security Action Memorandum #273 on November 21, which was in direct contradiction to all previous Kennedy policies of getting out of Vietnam. Could this have happened unless, Bundy knew that JFK would be murdered the next day in Dallas?

Soon after, McGeorge Bundy, who had run the Vietnam War as Kennedy's and Johnson's White House national security adviser, by 1966 had gone to New York to make the United States into a new 'Vietnam,' as the director of the influential Ford Foundation. Soon Hegelian internal conflict ran rampant, with black pitted against white, unemployed against employed, in this Great Society, while Wall Street bankers reaped profits from slashed union wages, and reduced infrastructure investment, and transferred investments overseas to slave labor locations in Asia and South America.

Millions of the nation's high school were herded into college during the mid-1960's, as a sort of hidden unemployment. College student population increased from less than 4 million in 1960 to nearly 10 million by 1975. Wall Street was more than willing to comply, floating billions of dollars of state backed public bonds for university infrastructure. Investment in the growth of the real industrial economy was being moved into the post- industrial service economy. It was very much like the course traveled by England on its path to ruin late in the 19th century. Social Security and welfare spending skyrocketed, as entire sections of the American population were tossed into a desperate and permanent need for unemployment insurance.

With the Vietnam War and the new culture of drugs and sex, the 'flower power' counterculture became part of the Anglo-American liberal establishment, that was begun under a top secret CIA research project, code named MK-ULTRA, with British and American scientists carrying out experiments using psychedelic and other mind-altering drugs. By the mid- 1960's this project resulted in what was known as the Hippie movement, which brought forth the New Age Thinking or the 'Age of Aquarius.'

A new young elite, with their heads set on personal pleasure and cynical about the country's purpose, began to emerge from the American college campuses. To transform thinking corporations in the United States treated their managers to a new form of training, run by psychologists from the National Training Laboratories, known as 'T group sessions,' or 'sensitivity training.' The effect was to dumb down the wits in order to prepare the population to accept the coming shocks. People were so involved with being more sensitive and more understanding of the defects of others that they failed to see that their country was losing its sense of purpose.

In America in the 1950's a group of people emerged who created a counter-culture which was to change history. They were called "The Beat Generation." They were anarchist writers, philosophers, musicians and poets. They stood for the high minded visions and for individual freedom in a rejection and revolt against all bureaucratic, narrow minded systems. They met with Russian poets to denounce the Cold War. They had ecstatic sense of what they were trying to achieve. They were heirs to the long tradition of intellectual and artistic individualism that extends beyond national boundaries. The Beats used the electronic media to promote their agenda of higher consciousness, of peace and understanding. Ironically, more students in China and the Third World, knew the name of the Beats spokesman, Allen Ginsberg than any other Mexican writer. Allen was the king of the Czechoslovakian Students May Day in Prague, in 1964. The following day, after party officials along with covert operations of the CIA, realized what Ginsberg had been planning for the Czech youth, and they promptly deported him.

The Sixties revolution generated and continues to generate and grow a new post-political society based on a higher plane of consciousness, and the experience of individual freedom. The message of the movement was freedom. The anthem of freedom was brought to America and the world, when Martin Luther King "dreamed" out loud, chanting: "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, free at last." The thousands of faces assembled that day in the political orgy in Washington D.C., August 28,1963 were transported in an ecstasy of love and peace.

This chant of love and freedom would be done again at the First Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967. It was sung in Paris in 1968, at Woodstock in 1969, London in 1970, Amsterdam in 1971, and Madrid Barcelona. Bob Dylan sang for freedom: We ain't gonna work on Breznev's Farm no more. They sang it at anti-war demonstrations all over the country. Hell no! We won't go! It righteous rebellion with a smile.

In the 1970's American officials openly claimed in news conferences that they were "neo-Malthusians." Malthus, was an English clergymen who, in 1798, wrote an essay claiming that human populations expanded geometrically, while the growth of their food expanded only linearly. The Malthusians then came to believe that populations must be limited, and, if necessary, governments should enhance the operations of nature to produce needed mortality. Consistent with this craven pseudo-science, Henry Kissinger produced in April 1974, the highly classified National State Security Memorandum 200 (NSSM), directed to Washington high level officialdom, defining a program aimed at population reduction in Third World countries possessing needed raw materials. Kissinger listed 13 countries for population control, including Brazil, India, Egypt, Mexico, Ethiopia, Columbia, Irag, Iran, Africa and other countries.

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