Considering the crazies

By Jerry Mazza
Apr. 02, 2007

I’ve often wondered how one accounts for the appearance of a murderer like Adolph Hitler. Psychiatrists have blamed it on a too-small sexual apparatus, others on inflated testicles, still others that he lived with his “half-niece,” presumably the child of a half-sibling, who in her young womanhood committed suicide or, as others pose, was murdered by a newly risen Adolph who feared the bad press.

That would make him guilty of “half-incest,” pedophilia, murder and excess of ambition. Not the industrial-strength mass-murderer who rattles through history like a mile-length train of boxcars bearing lost souls to Bergen-Belsen. To have drawn this character from scratch defies imagination. To assemble mere personal psychological facts leaves much of the puzzle empty.

To get a full picture, we have to fill in the history of Europe at that time. Germany was defeated and weighed down with war debt and reparations laid on by the Allies from World War I. The national ego was humiliated, impoverished, looking for someone to blame, a likely scapegoat lacking the strength, numbers or awareness to resist or organize. We have to perceive a minority chosen for victimization through the centuries, yet with a survivor’s success in this devastation, nitrated glycerin quietly mixed, shaken with money and aid from American Elites like Prescott Bush, Henry Ford, and Thomas Watson of IBM.

We have to feel the pressure building up in one soul in this cauldron, and at one exceptional point in history, how this mustachioed house-painter/paper-hanger morphs into the maniacal leader of an unbound strain in the national character. He becomes a sizzling fuse, a clock whose rhetoric starts ticking to obliteration, a rocket whose tail is the populace, heading for a thousand-year run, smashed to smithereens in little more than a decade.

In the wake of this historical montage Hitler kills millions -- Jews, gypsies, intellectuals, Christians and homosexuals -- and leaves his death factories behind as deadly reminders. Sorry folks, I’m not a Holocaust denier. As a boy I grew up with the WW II newsreels, photos in papers, magazines, books, the ghost survivors clinging to fences, the survivors I met as a young man, the camps’ numbers tattooed on their arms, the stories they told, the nightmare they lived. By the way, this doesn’t mean I approve of the brutal militaristic policies of Israel or the ongoing Diaspora of the Palestinians. Rather, let me examine another world-class crazy, this one from America, 24 years past 1945.

Manson be my metaphor

Charles Manson’s “Family” committed the Sharon Tate Murders, which took place on the night of August 9, 1969, at her rented home on Cielo Drive, in Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon. The murders of the pregnant, beautiful actress, her unborn son Paul Richard, her once boyfriend, Jay Sebring, family friends Steve Parent, Voyteck Frykowski and his girlfriend, coffee heiress Abigail Folger (who worked among the poor as a social worker) rocked the nation with their viciousness.

Tate’s husband, film director Roman Polanski was shooting in Europe at the time. Ironically, Polanski was a Holocaust survivor. It was as if the Holocaust had followed both of them to America, and a reincarnated Hitler, with the same mad stare in his eyes, came back to haunt their lives -- and all of ours.

The Tate murders were emblematic of a war being fought in America, between the lunatic fringe of the counterculture, i.e., the Manson Family, and the population at large. I think it scared the crap out of us all because Manson was an equal-opportunity hater: of blacks, Jews, plus the Haves and Have-Nots of any faith.

He was anticipating an apocalyptic race war in 1969. And when it didn’t happen, he instigated his brain-and-soul-washed family to commit these atrocious murders, which they signed for in blood with the Black Panther paw, and “death to the pigs,” and “political piggy” to give the impression black radicals were the perpetrators.

The Tate Murders and LoBianco murders that followed were committed to form a kind of pattern, the last two to connect to a brutal stabbing murder of a musician that a male member of the Manson Family had committed several months before. Since he was in custody during the last two, the thinking (or nonthinking was) that the police would then suspect somebody else, i.e., the Black Panthers.

The Los Angeles Police Department originally blamed a harmless young caretaker on the Tate property, who was later exonerated, but by then was pretty much a shattered human being. He moved to the Midwest, and offered no more testimony until 35 years later on an E-channel television documentary. The police also implied the murders were the result of a drug deal gone bad. That wasn’t true either.

The same documentary confirmed that a jailhouse confession by one of the female family members to fellow inmates pointed the police to the killers and their motives: a cover-up for a previous murder and an attempt to precipitate a race war.

All four murderers, including Manson, were originally sentenced to death in October of 1970, but were later spared by a repeal of the California death penalty, and are serving life sentences in prison. The murders, mostly committed with knives -- multiple stabbings and slashings -- couldn’t have been more bestial. Several of the victims were shot point blank with a powerful pistol. Nevertheless Manson remains America’s most popular convict, and receives an average of four pieces of fan mail a day. His cult following, like the devil’s himself, continues to grow. The story could easily be a Polanski movie.

The point is that Manson like Hitler came out of nowhere. He spent most of his adult life in prison for car theft, forgery, credit card fraud and pimping. In the late 1960s, he migrated to California, wanting to become a musician. He somehow became the charismatic leader of said disenfranchised young people and called them his “Family.”

Manson gathered this family of lost souls, both men and women to his side to live in ramshackle houses in the California desert. He sent his crew to forage for produce from LA dumpsters. He sent crews of willing killers to murder white innocents and blame black innocents. To understand Manson and his followers, we have to look at all that was going on during that volatile period.

The world that gave us Charlie

In 1968 “Danny the Red” shut down France with a general workers strike. It was also the year of massacres at Hue and Mylai; the year American casualties in Vietnam passed 30,000; the year Czech workers took to the streets to duke it out with Stalin’s thugs; the year the Beatles left for more meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and then produced Hey Jude and Revolution. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Its events may seem randomly shuffled from the deck of days. Nevertheless there was a pattern: the spirit of revolution and social change always created reactionary waves of brutal violence, and, in turn, a surge towards freedom.

For instance, 1968 was the year that gave us the infamous August riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which the antiwar candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was the people’s choice going in, and the political doughboy, Hubert Humphrey, was the party’s choice coming out, overturning the antiwar motion by 1,567 votes to 1,041. Thousands of young people fought the nightsticks of the chaotic Chicago Police and got their heads bashed in for trying to protest this injustice. Yet those pictures on TV convinced millions of Americans something was seriously wrong with the war and our political process.

1968 was also the year feminists picketed the Miss America pageant and black students demanded black studies programs. It was the year the civil rights movement mushroomed in Northern Ireland. Yet 1968 was the year that Martin Luther King, leader of the non-violent civil rights movement, after supporting a strike of garbage collectors, was assassinated, purportedly by a lone gunman, James Earl Ray in Memphis. It was the year the antiwar, civil rights crusader Robert Kennedy was also purportedly killed by a lone assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, in Los Angeles, though neither lone gunman turned out to be the killer. Instead, the killer came from cadres associated with the CIA, Army Intelligence, crime, and local police.

1968 was the year that Lyndon Johnson ran from running, after dragging the United States even deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam, signing off on escalation two days after JFK was murdered, in part for wanting the bring the troops home by the end of 1965. Yet 1968 was the same year Johnson entered into secret peace negotiations in Paris with the Vietcong, later sabotaged by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

1968 was the year the CIA’s Far East Division head, William Colby, was made director of the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. The program’s aim was to seek out and eliminate activists (Vietcong) at the village level. Colby’s Phoenix’s CIA stealth program assassinated nearly 40,000 Vietnamese from 1967 to 1972. Nevertheless, estimates for the Phoenix Program range as high as 60,000 people killed, although Colby put the number at 20,587. As the program’s head, Colby rose like the Phoenix from the ashes to become Richard Nixon’s CIA director in 1973.

By war’s end, 58,000 Americans were dead and 2 million Vietnamese perished. I could go on, but you get the picture. 1968-69 framed a world seeking and achieving freedom from oppression although always mixed with an intensely violent response. It was a world turned upside down that spilled out the Helter Skelter Manson and his family. To see them as isolated freaks is blindness. And today -- today it begs a question . . .

From what world did George W. Bush step?

You may remember America was watching Clinton pilloried for Monica Lewinsky performing fellatio on him in the Oval Office. America hated and/or loved every minute of it. America was and still is paying for $8 to $10 billion in pornography yearly. Any connect here? So, regardless of this truth, playing pious helped to sell George W., which would indicate a certain contradiction in our values, and a misreading of ourselves not to mention George W. Bush, heir of a major crime family.

Also, $60 million was spent by the GOP, from the day Clinton took office, looking for a chink in his armor to dethrone him. They finally found it in a string of affairs. Meanwhile, morally righteous, conservative Christian, reformed alcoholic-found-God George W. Bush appeared on the scene, neat as a pin, down home, folksy, aw shucks, ready to change all that, to bring people together, not be a divider. I submit my own George W. Bush resume for your consideration.

A day after 9/11, which at the very least George Bush let happen, he declared a War on Terror (against Islam) and subsequently bombed Afghanistan and occupied it, looking for Osama bin Laden (the purported perpetrator and ex-CIA asset, whom he hasn’t found yet).

Bush waged an illegal war on Iraq based on that nation having weapons of mass destruction, none of which have been found.

The economy under that horny Clinton was prosperous, with a $260 billion dollar budget surplus his last year in office, about as much as the smallest deficit of Bush, this year’s $260 billion. The rest of Bush debt is staggering. And his War on Terror is the largest lie, because he, George W. Bush and his colleagues, many believe, are the real terrorists responsible for 9/11.

And that all happened because Americans tend to sleep on their feet. Scientists tell us we don’t get enough sleep. Perhaps we work too long and too hard, trying to buy all that advertising asks us to buy. Maybe we don’t get enough loving, so we get nasty inside, and think it is okay to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. Maybe our racism crept up and bonked us on the head again to accept the lie that all kinds and colors of Muslims were our major enemy and committed 9/11. FBI Director Mueller himself told us the so-called hijackers could not positively be identified as the perpetrators. Nor were their names on the plane manifests.

We have only the testimony of some beleaguered Muslim prisoners in CIA jails and Gitmo to confess to those crimes. Anyone sane knows that these guys were not sane at the time of their mock trials. But watching so much TV does a lot to people’s minds. The simple solutions of Fox News et al. satisfy far too many, and perhaps account for why the world thinks so little of us.

Could it be that the Fourth Reich runs the White House and the mad family behind it? After all, Grandpa Prescott Bush (and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker) bankrolled Hitler, until FDR put their Union Bank out of business under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942. Who knew that only 10 years later, Grandpa Prescott would be in the US Senate, the Senator from Connecticut?

But he could thank his old friends for that: John Foster Dulles, secretary of state to Eisenhower and legal counsel to the Schroeder Bank, a financial arm of the Nazis that also was partnered with United Fruit. And Prescott could thank Allan Dulles, the CIA director JFK fired for the Bay of Pigs incident, who later was one of leaders of the inquiry into JFK’s assassination, and found only a deranged lone gunman to blame for JFK’s multi-layered, incredibly planned death.

But strange things are still happening here, just as in Germany, just as in Manson’s late-60s California, producing very strange human beings. The question, dear reader, is where were you then? And where are you now? Hopefully not torturing frogs like little George W. Hopefully awake and ready to defend your country from our home-brand of crazies before they destroy us all, starting with a trumped-up attack on Iran as with Iraq, which could lead to a world nuclear conflagration.

Remember the one duly democratically elected President that Iran had in 1953, Mohammed Mossadeq, was toppled by the CIA in retaliation for nationalizing the oil industry. He was put in jail for life and replaced by the repressive Shah, who then was toppled by the people, who replaced the Shah with the exiled theocratic Ayatollah Khomeini, under whose rule the American embassy and its staff was captured, but not freed, as Carter was bargaining for them, until Reagan/Bush took office and the Iranians were paid off in guns, munitions, and money by the dynamic duo. Do we see an insane pattern in this wave? Yes, and it seems ready to hit the shore any minute.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writing living in New York. Reach him at [email protected].