- The Little Rock Nine, a group that integrated Central
High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in September 1957, observed its anniversary
Tuesday even as the protests in Jena, Louisiana underscored continued racial
strife in the US. But the plight of the Nine was not the only social oppression
that America suffered in 1957--the UFO cover up was in full flower and
UFO believers were handily marginalized and even prosecuted. The scientist
Wilhelm Reich was thrown in jail in part for exploring human energy potential
and therapeutic techniques not approved by the Food and Drug Administration,
but also in part because he was using the consequent cloudbuster technology
to battle UFOs in the Tucson desert.
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- Reich had been condemned as a medical quack, his books
had been burned and his "life energy" boxes, precursors to a
type cannon called a cloudbuster that harnessed atmospheric energy, were
destroyed. Reich had harmed no one and, indeed, had helped many with his
understanding and manipulation of what he called the orgone. He witnessed
several UFOs on his estate in Maine and used the orgone cloudbuster guns
to cause them to go away. He did the same on a famous trip to the desert
southwest that he documented in his last book, Contact With Space. By his
own estimation, he fought the first battle against space intruders, and
won. The FDA, of course, never truly followed Reich's scientific protocols
on either orgone boxes or cloudbuster guns, and convicted Reich only on
technical violation of its injunction to stop distributing orgone boxes.
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- Authorities threw Reich in a prison cell in Lewisberg,
PA from which he did not emerge alive. In memos to the prison chaplain
before his death, however, Reich continued to write passionately about
the social situation in the US. His note from September 1957 even includes
reference to the disturbance at Little Rock Central High School. He emphasized
the very psychological and emotional undercurrents he felt were being ignored
in the broader social arena of conspiratorial 1950s America, what prevented
many from seeing the space ships he saw in abundance:
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- "I am merely fulfilling my public duties as a U.
S. citizen and worker in planetary affairs if I continue to point out where
the true danger to our social and personal existence is placed: its is
Emotional Poisoning: disruption through sowing distrust throughout our
society, doping and drugging of our population, espec. our YOUTH; draining
us financially through areas [...]race, a camouflage of the true menace,
the Emotional Poisoning a la Little Rock racial upheavals; keeping our
high placed officials at bay through fear of sexual scandals [Clinton!--kt],
railroading efficient men and women into prisons or lunatic asylums through
[?] up there environments; subverting justice by whispered little lies
& frightening or using judges. Doing all this destruction unnoticed
as it were by all those responsible. It was clear from the very beginning
that [?] and now lyrics were subverted by such use of stupidities &
evasions on our part [rock'n'roll!--kt], especially by the staid reluctance
to talk bluntly and take the bull by the horns. The bull is really no more
tan a few slimy tape worms eating away at our emotional guts. It is high
time to start giving social power to the established functions of Love,
Work & Learning as bastions against the tapeworms."
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- The prison memo form includes this banal and perhaps
prescient statement: "Your failure to specifically state your problem
may result in no action being taken." Reich's imprisonment was in
part the end result of mis-reporting on him that appeared in the New Republic
under the editorial leadership of a now-confessed communist spy named Michael
Straight in a book entitled, After Long Silence. New Republic made its
own pronouncement about Little Rock in its July 7, 1958 edition, complaining
about the Supreme Court's failure to stop legal challenges that were slowing
down the integration process. The Supreme Court, opined New Republic, "must
stand the ground they themselves have assumed, or the grand experiment
they inaugurated will end in bitter farce, with consequences for the state
of the union that stagger the mind."
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- Clearly the magazine had a better view of the possible
consequences of Supreme Court actions than it did on its own. The consequences
of Reich's work with UFOs and otherwise, on the other hand, and the implications
of the study of character structure on the understanding of race issues
has continued over the years. Writing in a chapter called "Racism
and Slavery" in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), my old friend historian
George Rawick notes the impact of "that great underground classic
of modern thought, Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, 3d ed. rev., first
published in German in 1933, and its less well-known but significant companion,
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, first published in German in 1933. While
I cannot subscribe to all of Reich's system, this chapter could not have
been written without his monumental attempt to relate Marx and Freud which
loosened the ideological armoring of Western rationalism for me and many
others." Although Reich never stated it explicitly, clearly he saw
that same armoring as the block that keeps so many from accepting the realities
of the UFO issue.
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- Kenn Thomas' new book, The Conspiracy Files, as well
as the new issue of Steamshovel Press, is available through his website,
steamshovelpress.com.
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