7/7, Alex Cox and The Parallax View

Earlier on today I posted links to a couple of videos - one about 7/7, the other about 9/11

A few issues came up, either in the posts themselves or as comments underneath the posts, which have just converged for me in a nicely synchronisitic way

In my post about Tom Secker's 7/7 documentary I mentioned that there was a time, 15 or 20 years ago, when the State Broadcasting Company would occasionally air material of a parapolitical nature which nowadays it wouldn't touch with a barge pole. The example I chose to link to was the Timewatch documentary on Operation Gladio broadcast in 1992

In a comment underneath my post about James Corbett's excellent 9/11 satire I drew a parallel with the montage at the end of Corbett's video and the brainwashing scene that pops out of nowhere in the middle of The Parallax View - made back in the 70s when off the hook conspiraloonery and six minute long photo montages appeared with satisfying regularity in major motion picture productions (that decade gets an undeservedly bad rap imho)

That would be this scene...

Here's the nice convergence

Whilst watching that scene from The Parallax View I recalled an interesting introduction film director Alex Cox (maker of the 'intense' Repo Man) gave to The Parallax View when it was aired on Cox's Moviedrome series back in the late 1980s/ early 1990s

And, joy of joys, the Cox introduction is currently available on Youtube...

That was shown on BBC2 in 1993

The chances of Cox getting away with stuff like that on the State Broadcasting Company are now absolutely, no doubt about it whatsoever, fuck all

Which is a shame as Cox had one or two things to say about 7/7 in his blog which, in turn, kicked off an extended debate on the now defunct Alex Cox forum. That was back in the distant days of 2005 when the Official 7/7 Narrative was still being defended by 'official' 7/7 survivors engaged in frontal assaults, rather than the more indirect defence of the Official Narrative being mounted today by peddlers of perfidious harm and faulty arguments

Cox's original 7/7 article and the subsequent debate are now preserved for whatever passes for posterity these days on the J7 website here

I mention all this because it's only when, and fortunately I'm old enough to do this, I concentrate and think back to how wide the range of permitted public discourse used to be, in comparison to today, that I realise just how much has been taken away from us

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7/7: Crime & Prejudice

Tom Secker's sequel to his 7/7 film 'Seeds of Deconstruction' is now up and running on Youtube...

and, like Secker's first video, it's littered with nuggets which have been the stock in trade of the J7 Forum and J7 Inquest blog but not covered in any other 7/7 film...

The Walsall Anarchists, the Aldwych bus bombing, a comprehensive summary of the numerous acts of pre-conditioning aired by the BBC prior to 7/7, the possiblity of false trails of breadcrumbs laid for 'truthers'...

This is a film which pushes no theories of its own but presents a mass of reasons, and a whole lot of context, for doubting the Official 7/7 Narrative. Unlike state-friendly tosh like 7/7 Ripple Effect, you'll never see the BBC attempting a hit piece on the opinions expressed in this film because they are just too well supported. Come to think of it, until 15 or 20 years ago, the BBC used to occasionally put out documentaries just like it

No doubt, 7/7: Crime and Prejudice will be a little too nuanced, open-minded and facty for some but that's no criticism at all. Far from it

Reasons why I (for the moment anyway) love James Corbett pt.22

Here follows a master class on how to succinctly demolish an Official Narrative, without knocking up one of your own...

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The Corbett Report

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The Right Stuff

As a postscript to my previous post about scepticism of the Official Apollo Narrative I’d like to mention the first conscious recollection I have that all was not quite right with the NAZA’s take on history

Back in the early 1980’s I went to see ‘The Right Stuff’ in a real, actual cinema

And even though I was a young slip of a thing, inexperienced in the ways of loonacy and alternative accounts of how the world works, I couldn’t help picking up on the fact that a core objective of the entire movie was to portray the second American in space, Gus Grissom, as an utter, utter loser

Gus Grissom

I’ve subsequently seen the film several more times and I personally have no doubt that it was a deliberate hatchet job. In fact, the film goes so way over the top in besmirching Grissom’s character that, even as a kid, I left the cinema with a strong sense of grievance on Grissom’s behalf. Slagging off a dead man who is incapable of defending himself, through the medium of a multi-million dollar epic movie, is pretty low behaviour

If you ever watch ‘The Right Stuff’ you’ll learn that Grissom was a coward, greedy, dishonest, a clumsy buffoon and unfaithful to his wife - a frustrated, shrew-like character who was clearly unfulfilled sexually; implying that Grissom probably had a small cock as well

The producers left absolutely nothing out

This was back in the dark days before the Internet and even though I tried to do some reading up on Grissom after seeing the film I wasn’t able to get much of handle on why Hollywood and NAZA would go out of their way to so blatantly defame a dead man

I did however, establish that...

• Grissom was an severe critic of the Apollo program who compared Apollo hardware to a lemon
  

"On January 22, 1967, Grissom made a brief stop at home before returning to the Cape. A citrus tree grew in their backyard with lemons on it as big as grapefruits. Gus yanked the largest lemon he could find off of the tree. Betty had no idea what he was up to and asked what he planned to do with the lemon. " 'I'm going to hang it on that spacecraft,' Gus said grimly and kissed her goodbye." (54) Betty knew that Gus would be unable to return home before the crew conducted the plugs out test on January 27, 1967. What she did not know was that January 22 would be "the last time he was here at the house". (55)"

• Grissom died in a fire whilst strapped in the ‘lemon’...

• Years later, I read that Grissom’s family were convinced that he was murdered because of his criticism of Apollo and that his son had found what he believed to be physical evidence which proved Grissom had been murdered

From the 'You couldn't make it up' photo archive - the crew of Apollo 1

It was when I started to encounter claims that Apollo was hoaxed in some way that I found a possible motive for dragging Grissom’s name through the gutter in the way it had been. Putting it briefly, I was predisposed to giving Apollo Hoax theories the time of day because I was already aware that NAZA was controlled by a bunch of devious, unscrupulous cunts

As a moderately interesting aside, at the same time as depicting Grissom as not having the ‘Right Stuff’ the movie of that title bent over backwards to eulogize someone who supposedly did...

Chuck 'The Right Stuff' Yeager

Chuck Yeager was portrayed as being a tall, good looking and fearless personification of All-American values. The beautiful, unshrew-like Mrs Yeager was clearly in receipt of a regular portion from a man as capable of controlling huge, thrusting projectiles on land as at near-space altitudes

He was so full of the right stuff he could barely walk

But what is this ‘right stuff’ exactly?

A couple of extracts from Yeager’s autobiography on the subject of his World War II exploits help fill in the blanks a little...

“Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort. Our seventy five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population. Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it. If it occurred to anyone to refuse to participate (nobody refused, as I recall) that person would have probably been court-martialed. I remember sitting next to Bochkay at the briefing and whispering to him: "If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side." That's still my view.”

“By definition, war is immoral; there is no such thing as a clean war. Once armies are engaged, war is total. We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between "innocent civilians" and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops. And because German industry was wrecked by constant bombing, munitions-making was now a cottage industry, dispersed across the country in hundreds of homes and neighbourhood factories, which was the British excuse for staging carpet bombing and fire bombing attacks on civilian targets. In war, the military will seldom hesitate to hit civilians if they are in the way, or to target them purposely for various strategic reasons. That's been true in every war that has ever been fought and will be fought. That is the savage nature of war itself. I'm certainly not proud of that particular strafing mission against civilians. But it is there, on the record and in my memory.”

Chuck 'I was only following orders' Yeager

So, it would seem that 'The Right Stuff' includes a capacity to set aside any moral concerns and machine-gun someone growing vegetables if told to do so

From what I have learned of Gus Grissom's character it is possible that in the same situation he would have told his commanding officer to go fuck himself or, more likely, he would have flown out and strafed some trees

Clearly not The Right Stuff

It’s a mystery to me why Yeager never actually became a NAZA Astronaut. Yeager would have got on with Wernher and the boys like a house on fire

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And, for some reason which I may go into another time, there's a been a small flurry of Apollo-related activity in the conspirasphere of late - most notably...

• There's the impending release of Apollo 18

• I've started seeing postings on 'Apollo 20' pop up here there again

For the first half of my adult life I accepted, without reservation, that humans had set foot on the Moon

The list of matters of faith that I once accepted without reservation also included...

• Life strains at the leash to spring up out of primordial sludge and evolve into complex organisms
• All physical impediments to viable space travel can be overcome
• The Universe is so big that it must be teeming with evolved Life forms

Nowadays I'm not so sure. In the absence of 3rd party intervention, the chances of Life just popping out of nowhere seem to me incredibly small; as small as the Universe is large. Space is a ludicrously hazardous environment and the distances between star systems are so absurdly vast as to present an all but insurmountable obstacle

Contrary to the belief system that pervades our culture, through 'popular' science and creative media, there is a distinct possibility that our existence is to all intents and purposes unique and that we live on the only inhabitable chunk of real estate that we're ever likely to have access to. There will be no Get Out of Jail Free cards and no Magic Space Friends are going to turn up and pull us out of the shit

This may come across as an abstract proposition, with no practical relevance to the here and now, but I believe that if a majority of people took on board the possibility that 'This' is It they might start to behave very differently

Imagine for a moment if, instead of whipping Apollo out of a hat, NAZA had announced that it had concluded that space represents an impassable barrier and that we are stuck on this fabulously unlikely and wonderful planet for the foreseeable future. Would our attitude to the world around us be tangibly different? I suspect yes

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