-Caveat Lector- -- excerpt from: http://egodeath.com/new.htm -- The WOD is not "like" the old Inquisition, it *is* the old Inquisition. The best book explaining this is Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Patriarchy and the Drug War. Dan Russell. 11/98. The Catholic Church formula was to take all the money and possessions of anyone who used plants to have independent religious experiencing. The authorities forcefully insisted that life must be lived within the total framework they provided, mentally, experientially, and economically. To live outside that framework and to have religious or philosophical experiencing outside that framework was to break the law, which the church liked because then they could gain all your possessions and money. Science, democracy, and the renaissance were largely rejections of that sort of authoritarianism and forced hierarchical government which could treat people as having no rights and no property rights. America was founded on the principle of no martyrs, no victims of government campaigns, of inverting the power relation and rights-relations of citizen and government. The government exists to serve the people; the people do not exist to sustain the government. Property belongs to citizens, not to the king, pope, or governmental hierarchy, nor to the police/guard/soldiers. We need a better understanding of persecution by the church. People think it is about belief and doctrines at bottom, but as far as the power brokers in the top of the Church hierarchy is concerned, it is purely about worldly money and the power of money and the power to accumulate more money. Ultimately, the Church didn't directly care what people *believed*, but rather, what happened to the people's *money*, which was directly affected by people's beliefs. The police love druggies and hope for lots of them, because every identified or accused druggie means another property and batch of money to seize. The police-authoritarians love accused druggies for the same reason the Church-authoritarians loved accused witches -- these demarcated "devils" or boogiemen give the authoritarians the green light to take all the wealth which the person has accumulated, without the person having any recourse. The person is sent to hell either way, or some other realm, from which the person has no power to stop the authorities. Whether the person marked as a damned one is sent to jail for a long, long time, or killed and sent to hell or heaven or purgatory, it's all the same to the authorities' bank account: the person is removed, and their wealth is freed up to be confiscated by the authorities. It is crucial that we study the similarities between confiscation of the property of plant-using people (branded as "witches"), the Boston Tea Party, and forfeiture in the War On Drugs. These are all about the exact same thing at the core. I want to emphasize this above all: it is not an accident that the WOD is covered by the Boston Tea Party; or that drug use is covered by religious freedom. America was not started to prevent things *like* the war on drugs, it was started and the constitution and bill of rights were created to prevent specifically the war on drugs, not to stop things *like* the war on drugs. The Bill of Rights was not created to prevent this *sort* of thing; it was simply and frankly designed to stop this *very* thing. The WOD is not accidently covered by the Bill of Rights; the Bill of Rights was meant to stop the WOD and also other things like it. The Bill of Rights was crafted and designed expressly to block exactly what is really going on at the heart of the WOD, this dynamic of people being victims of arbitrary searches and seizures of contraband, money, property, wealth. Problem: authorities wield power to pillage and confiscate anything they feel like; all possessions potentially are the property of the State, on excuses so flimsy and accusations so vague, in the final analysis, no excuse or accusation is needed at all. Authorities see something they want, and they take it; this is complete and blatant government anarchy. Solution: restraints on government. The foundation of America is the idea of restraint on government to prevent arbitrary persecution, persecution which is most perfectly represented by the war on drugs, the war on contrabands, the war on alternatives to the governmentally enforced lifestyle and worldview. Such governments only permit one worldview, the one which causes all wealth to flow their way. If you adopt a worldview which doesn't willingly send your flow of wealth in the direction of the authorities, then they take your wealth against your will, by force and by fiat. Part of the strategy the authorties must use is propaganda designed to coerce the will of the citizens, the will of "the governed". So we see manipulation of beliefs and encouraging a sense of respect: respect for the King, for the Pope, for the police, for the media. Sure, many Americans favor police action against drug use, but what is the nature of this "favor"? Most Americas have no idea of the dynamics of forfeiture, no idea of the punitive jail terms and realities of jail, no idea of the alternatives, no idea of the debates going on, no idea of the destruction of prohibition itself; they are carefully fed a diet of lies, partial pictures, censored reporting, distortion, biased reasoning, propaganda. *Of course* most Americans favor police action against drug users -- that is what they are trained to think by the establishment media. Chomsky's idea of "manufacturing consent" explains that people will consent to whatever view and opinion the establishment media teaches them to hold, so the will of the people becomes uncritical, uninformed, just a puppet and a dumb mirror reflecting what the establishment media projects onto them. Citizens become clouded mirrors more or less simply reflecting what they are trained to believe by the media machinery of television and newspapers. Only when the parallels with, or repetition of, the Church witch burnings, and the British searches and seizures leading to the Boston Tea Party, and the McCarthy figurative "witch hunt" become painfully obvious to all tv viewers, does the persecution collapse, as the KKK collapsed in the early part of this century and as the persecution of gays recently collapsed, and as the Catholic Church collapsed and caused a backlash. We have reached the necessary bottoming-out point at which the WOD becomes so persecutive, it becomes obvious that it is the same dynamic as with the old literal witch hunt. Church indulgences (buying forgiveness) and forfeiture are seen to be the same thing, to accomplish the same thing, and people reject this when it goes too far. There are numerous historical parallels to give reformers hope and a sense that things are getting bad enough while awareness is spreading, that this situation will bring about its own collapse as long as we persevere. The WOD is wound up so tight now, it all stands or falls together, and becomes entirely brittle so that the slightest mishap explodes the whole thing. I sense more and more attention given to wholesale rejections of the fundamental idea of jailing people simply for drug use itself -- more mentions of the idea that we should legalize-and-regulate all drugs. The WOD and its propaganda must keep on ramping up to the point of being blatantly absurd and psychotic to everyone even when watching the official propaganda. When the propaganda becomes so extreme and foaming-at-the-mouth, with calls for the death penalty or worse, and declarations that drug use is worse than murder... at *some* point, the audience will turn against the punitive, alarmist prohibitionists. At *some* point, people ask "this story is obviously motivated, so what is the real goal and the real force driving this campaign to demonize people who use drugs?" However, if people are totally passive and totally apathetic, they will become cynical but inactive; they will gain understanding and have the truth, but won't take action. Even that could be an improvement; that inaction could be better than today's active support by citizens who ignorantly buy into the propaganda. Don't think of "witch hunt" and "martyrs" as a metaphor; these are literal terms. The WOD is literally a witch hunt, when you conceive of the persecution of witches in the dark ages as a programme of accusing people of taking entheogens for religious experiencing as a way around the Church's economic framework. One of the most paradoxical things about entheogens is that they provide real religion and cast doubt upon organized dogmatic wishful-thinking religion. Entheogens can reveal reality as opposed to wishful thinking. When people live in reality rather than childish wishful thinking that is controlled by manipulative authoritarians (who are not themselves true believers, but are just immoral materialist opportunists), people are unlikely to support the authoritarian manipulators by supporting forfeiture or indulgences or other ways the authorities line their pockets with the wealth of "the governed". Witches (entheogen users and freethinkers) are not inclined to support the manipulative systems which are designed especially to draw wealth from the people toward the authorities. Philosophy and religion are both directly related to psychedelics. Psychedelics do not mimic religious experiencing synthetically; they are the actual historical foundation of religion. Organized religion typically is a substitute for actual religion, which is plant-inspired religious experience; and organized religion is essentially motivated by financial opportunism, which requires declaring plant-based religious experiencing strictly forbidden. Plant-based religious experiencing and finance-driven, organized religion, are inherently mortal enemies. If anyone can continuously cultivate plants which give full-blown religious experiencing and full-blown philosophical experiencing twice a week, people have no need to buy their way to religious fulfillment. When a material is free and widely available, and you have a product to sell that addresses the same need as the free and abundant material, the only way to sell your product is to make an artificial scarcity. The governor of Mars in the movie Total Recall tried to hide and suppress the discovery of the alien oxygen-generator in order to sell air to everyone. Jesus said salvation is a free gift, gotten not through paying for sacrifices or paying for forgiveness, but simply through the non-monetary, abstract act of "believing in" the figure of Jesus instead. From reading Barbara Thiering, I believe he wanted every person to eat of the special sacramental loaves which were baked exclusively for the high priests. He said that everyone should be a high priest themselves, for free -- there is no need for church authorities and thus no way for church authorities to charge people a lot of money to be saved. The Catholic Church was, above all, a financial scam, selling people the fantasy of forgiveness and the fantasy of postponed bliss, conning them into experiencing themselves as guilty of invented abstract "original sin" in order to sell them Product. I do not believe that the religious leaders themselves believed in their own religious stories; the con man does not con himself but is only cynically manipulating the outlook of others, to fleece the sheep. Religious truth and philosophical experiencing are a free gift from psychoactive plants. There is no need to pay anyone for religious or philosophical fulfillment, since the fulfilment is already freely available in the form of plants. The only way to make money off of people's desire for religious and philosophical fulfillment is to absolutely suppress and demonize the use of plants to achieve that fulfillment. It's true that some people who don't stand to profit believe that drug use really is evil and that it is evil to not believe in the authoritarian religions. However, these misguided beliefs are only a symptom, not the main drive to demonize use of drugs. Those people are merely puppets dimly repeating what the authorities trained them to think. The real drive to tag druggies as demonic non-persons is driven not by beliefs, but by strategy for robbing people. People think they are tough on burglars, but the actual burglars, the main burglars who merely lead to burglary by heroin users, are the police. Violent crime in the WOD is primarily caused by police against "the governed", and only *secondarily* caused by drug users. Burglary in the WOD is primarily committed by the police, and only secondarily committed by drug users. When a news item starts off by talking about a burglary or a violent crime that has been committed, my first, natural assumption is that the crime is committed by police. Criminal means police. When hysteria escalates far enough, people are embarrassed by it and dissociate themselves from it. The WOD is blatantly becoming pure hysteria. The strangest thing is that the prohibitionists signed a pact with themselves that prohibition by definition would be absolute, with literally zero tolerance -- and cannabis counts too. Prohibition thrives on the ease of cannabis persecution and shall die by the absurdity of cannabis prohibition. The prohibitionists might as well have included air in their list of demon drugs: air is easy to bust people for carrying, so it's convenient to lump into prohibition, but by the same token, it's so absurd to prohibit air, that strategy is *bound* to backfire sooner or later. Cannabis makes prohibition easy to pursue and escalate, but the goodness of cannabis eventually brings down the entire prohibitionist programme. Cannabis is destined to have the center stage in prohibition and its repeal. Without cannabis, prohibition would not be worthwhile for the police. Cannabis use is so easy to detect and so easy to persecute, it's a suitable excuse for the profitable forfeiture industry. Leary claimed he was busted for a roach planted by police and was hated for his LSD and mind-freeing ideas -- this shows how useful cannabis is for the prohibitionists... their strategy is to fight hard-to-fight drugs by, in propaganda, equating easy-to-fight drugs (cannabis) with the hard-to-fight drugs (LSD is the most extreme), but then, instead of fighting the hard-to-fight drugs, fighting mainly the easy drugs. "Heroin is bad, cannabis = heroin, and we made all these busts of cannabis suspects and obtained all their wealth, therefore we are winning the war against heroin." Cannabis is convenient to persecute in the name of hard drugs, but cannabis itself is ultimately a *terribly* impractical drug to demonize, and when it inevitably falls and fails to be seen as demonic any longer, so does the rest of the drug persecution fall, all in one blow. The ability to practically continue the drug war depends on the ability to continue cannabis persecution, entirely in the name of protecting people from heroin -- so the WOD hinges totally on the gateway theory. If you disprove the gateway theory, the justification for persecuting cannabis collapses, and so the practical foundation of WOD forfeiture strategy collapses, so the entire WOD collapses. If the gateway theory is publically shown to be a myth and recognized as such, the entire WOD soon collapses. If voters accept cannabis, then the WOD becomes too much trouble for the authorities to bother with. -Michael Hoffman <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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