Gnomes Of Zurich And Pandora’s Box

“Switzerland boasts that it has more banks than dentists. There are, in all, 4,200 banking outlets, or one for every 1,300 people.”--TIME, 1965.

“The Grand Lodge Alpina is the largest Freemasonic lodge in Switzerland and therefore attracts much attention from anti-Masonic conspirirologists. European conspiracy buffs have long believed the GLA controls the finances of the Western World through the banks they own in Zurich, Basel, and Geneva.”--Robert Anton Wilson, Grand Lodge Alpina. Everything Is Under Control. (1998) pg. 210.

As an avid reader of the late great trickster, Robert Anton Wilson, the phrase, “The Gnomes Of Zurich” has been burned into my neurons for over two decades. In my minds-eye, when I hear those three words I get flashes of the film Amelie and the kidnapped Gnome, mixed with blurred images of the Kabouter on the label of the strong Belgian beer, La Chouffe’ a meme of Gnome Chomsky and now a Gnome/Pandora mythical hybrid creature.   

Gnome entered our language by way of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, and grew a little since the 19th century due to the fad of garden gnome statues, probably how most people encounter them in the wild. Gnomes are related to Dwarfs and sprites, to magic mushrooms and mischievous little people who fuck with you if you fuck with them. But it’s the Swiss species of Gnomes that interest us here, or the 1960’s British Labour M.P’s interpretation of Swiss Gnomes that resulted in their comparison with secretive underground Swiss bankers.

Mischievous little men in underground bunkers, weaponsmiths, guards of gold mines, and other mines. This mixing of metaphors creates a toxic gaseous mixture, indeed, I’d say something that would piss the Gnomes right off. Using them as scapegoats for very simply put...bad and sad greedy men who seize power by any means and adore private men’s clubs, Rolex watches and whiskey. 

The term Gnomes Of Zurich was minted on record by Labour M.P George Brown in 1964, which by osmosis soon appeared to Harold Wilson’s speeches, charging a secretive Swiss banker cabal of selling Britain short and pushing the value of the Pound down. “More powerful than all the governments of Europe” Harold once said. What were the public to make of these mysterious Gnomes? What if they'd been called the Dwarfs Of Zuruch? (Ask's the MGT)

Like any seemingly new idea, minted into the public arena, Swiss Bankers and other bankers and their secretive (for profit) practices, disruption and questionable collaborations have been tracked and addressed by a small but significant lineage of brave independent investigative journalists. Give thanks to those bringing scrutiny and meaningful critique.

Wilson recommend some early-mid 20th century economists C.H Douglas, Silvio Gessel, John Maynard Keynes, plus the economic ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Karl Popper, (social credit a.k.a universal basic income) to add clarity to a critique of international unrestricted finance capital. As a counter perspective to the premise of these banker conspiracies to put public funds into private pockets with exceptionalism (offshore tax loopholes) and a mostly male underground culture of secret societies and private members groups. Priviliged to the highest degree.  

I suspect R.A.W was drawn to the term Gnomes Of Zurich for a number of reasons. Firstly, he devoured literature on folk history, mythical tales, phenomenology and magical entities. Gnomes are a somewhat popular manifestation and continued folkloric tradition in gardens worldwide. Iconic. RAW commented, or joked that he was no relation to UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson, when rapping on Gnomes. Typically in RAW's writing and speech, the GOZ are one group of suspiciously secretive entities at play in his operatic investigative performance, more than 40 years deep. Gnomes also thread into RAWs on-going research into the Grand Lodge Alpina, and “alp” has significance to fans of James Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake, alp represents the ubiquitous feminine entity Anna Livia Plurabella. I digress. RAW ties this together neatly in his book Coincidance: A Head Test, which I highly recommend.

Pandora's Buried Box

In light of the Pandora Papers leak/release, we can bridge some time gaps in this epic narrative horror. Surfing in the wake of unrestricted international finance capitalism. Bankers, spies, oligarchs and kleptocrats operate within the laws they create and outside of them. This much seems clear to me.
What the Pandora papers show, after a first brief reading of some articles--and I feel is important for all researchers to keep in mind--is the international reach of these elite bad-money actors. Not only Swiss, most of Europe, America, Russia, Arabia, the nationality of the bad actors is not the focus here, get a grip! It’s the criminality and the greed, the dodging of regulation, the dodging of paying a fair-share of tax, the collaboration with violence prone thieves from all parts of the world, that I feel needs to be addressed, curtailed. 

Like the Panama Papers previously, the Pandora Papers are a part of the tale of the tribe, the once hidden counter-forces, highly funded and manipulating world-around economies, finance, culture and politics, the polar opposite of the artistic endeavour to tell this tale honestly for the benefit of all the people and the general heart.

Today, 23 years after RAW published Everything Is Under Control, the latest findings from the Pandora Papers seem to confirm aspects of these pre-existing banking and finance conspiracies, operating in the present day (2021). This quote from a feature on Fidinam criss-crosses with Angleton’s operations traced by RAW in his essay TSOG.
“One of Fidinam’s longtime clients, Delfo Zorzi, was under investigation for decades for his alleged involvement in two deadly terror attacks: a 1969 Milan bank bombing that killed 16 people and a 1974 bombing, also in Italy, that left eight people dead. He fled to Japan shortly after the second attack and became a successful fashion entrepreneur.”--ICIJ, Leak reveals how Swiss wealth consultants shield global cast of suspects.

This perspective on Swiss banking practices from a BBC News item (2010), sprawls out and down, into the horrors of WW2, begging the question who benefits?

“The secretive Swiss were seen as helping ruthless international capitalists and dictators avoid taxes and protect their wealth. In World War II, neutral Switzerland appeared to help Nazi Germany financially, while taking deposits from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It failed to return many of the assets after the war and in recent years some Swiss banks have agreed multi-million pound settlements with families to avoid being sued.--Why Are Swiss Bankers Called Gnomes? BBC, 2010.

One way to help bring scrutiny to these entities is to support independent investigative journalists and those who exhibit integrity and brevity while uncovering facts and sharing them. It strikes me that most but not all 2021 popular conspiracy culture is stuck in supernatural goo, oversimplified fantasy and outright crazy, as if Netflix shapes the majority of global perspectives on conspiracies, aliens, Covid, serial killers and MK Ultra. Although there are a handful of documentaries (Inside Job,) and fictional renditions of global banking conspiracies (The Big Short), I feel that there should be way more of them. Every one of these stories from the Pandora Papers deserves a non-fictional documentary feature, and a series of fictional interpretations to help get at the truth and the occulted history of international finance capital at its worst.

I hope not to come across as banker bashing here, I’ve known bankers who have been very kind and decent people. To put on their leather shoes for a moment, no doubt many people would make the choices they make in the tricky positions they are in, bankers are not exclusively all bad actors. Browse the Pandora papers and make up your own mind, and if you wish to dive down a rabbit hole or two, latch onto Robert Anton Wilson’s research based thinking on the history of international finance and practice his recommended techniques for better processing of information: linguistic relativity, falsification, model agnosticism, maybe logic, semantic hygiene, good cheer! It's a jungle out there, take care. Be good to each other.

--Fly

“In David Yallop’s anti-Vatican blockbuster “In God’s Name,” he alleges several suspicious links between the P2 conspiracy in Italy and the Grand Lodge Alpina.”
“Other writers on P2 agree that it took money from both the KGB and the CIA, had over 900 agents in the Italian government, used the Vatican Bank to launder Mafia and CIA drug money, fomented fascism in Latin America, and was allegedly plotting a fascist coup in Italy when, after the mysterious deaths of ringleaders Roberto Calvi and Michele “The Shark” Sindona, the whole house of cards came tumbling down.”
--Grand Lodge Alpina. Everything Is Under Control. (1998) pg. 210.

"From this story has grown the idiom "to open a Pandora's box", meaning to do or start something that will cause many unforeseen problems. A modern, more colloquial equivalent is "to open a can of worms"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box

"I am not an enemy of funding systems.... But every bank of
discount, every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of
any kind made by the deponent, is downright corruption. It is
taxing the public for the benefit and profit of individuals; it is
worse than the old tenor, continental currency, or any other paper
money...--John Adams, Letter to Benjamin Rush, 1811.

The Panamamamatrix: Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!

The CIA Nazi Tsarist Alliance, rolled in Panamamamatrix.

The Panama papers are hitting headlines everywhere, hard, from the tabloids to the more respected journals, to the underground. It seems to me that the 99 % of humanity are justified in the distrust of the 1%, or to narrow it down further, the inner secret sanctuary of international unrestricted finance. The racket, robbing the world, cheating the rest of the 99% of the worlds population out of their equal share of the worlds resources, technological innovations and freedom.

Long before the Panama papers hit town, and before Bernie Sanders called out Panama as a bit of a dodgy 'offshore' financial operations centre, the late great Robert Anton Wilson spent a lifetime tracking the worldwide cabal of cheats, spies, financiers and all-around-the-world liars, he might refer to this topic of his research as the CIA Tsarist Nazi alliance. The alliance between spooks, Nazi’s like General Reinhardt Gehlen, American’s like James Jesus Angleton and J. Edgar Hoover, Brits like Kim Philby, and Russian’s such as General Vlasov. If nationality were to be the main method to categorize these global fire starters, and precursors to the skull-duggery revealed in the Panama papers.

Dr Wilson liked to source and reference all of his sources, and interestingly, his ‘historical illuminatus’ fiction, contain an equal amount of reliable, documented and published sources, with a particular bearing on the current story of the Panama papers, and the Tsarist Nazi CIA connections, plus the Vatican, Mafia and The Knights of Malta, for good measure. The murder of Lady Diana too, if you follow the Kashoggi trail.

The Panama papers, if they are what they claim to be, are outlines of a global conspiracy, a new ‘Octopus’ conspiracy. Kinging the network of deceit, and putting together some-but-not-all of the previous major themes of conspiracy theory, into a new map, self-evidential, well sourced context. In a nutshell, the secret financial elite at the heart of the scandal have Nazi, CIA and Tsarist affiliations, well documented all about the internet. “Ah-haa’ the Internet, i hear some skeptical voices say, anything is true on the internet!” Yeah, anything is true, false, meaningless and indeterminate both on, and off the web. Think for yourself. My best advice.

Be that statement as it may, the meticulous and diligent research by Dr Wilson for over 30 years, before the world wide web went world wide, remains a critical body of work, documenting and following the shadowy trail of Nazi’s, spies and banker elites, before during and after the second world war, right up to the moment at which he was writing. Right up to January 2007, when he sadly passed away, and for the most part, ignored by the worlds journalists and scholars. Now, in April of 2016, his work still helps me and with luck you, dear reader, to cut through the fog of mainstream disinformation, and lead the reader into new perspectives and a broader understanding of The Panama Papers. Smoke Em' Out.


My research for this article was done on the web for the most part, and includes ideas from publications by Robert Anton Wilson. Might i sign off with an important reminder that, from what i experienced, that Dr Wilson liked to promote thinking in probabilities, and warn the reader/researcher to avoid thinking in certainties, and wherever possible, adopt a language that reflects this proba-ballistic thinking, rooted in ideas from Alfred Korzybski, the creator or the field of general semantics. Make up your own mind, do your own research, question everything, especially authority.

For the rest of this article i will provide quotes, and some embedded media. Thanks to all the software developers, open source advocates, Pythonians, bloggers and journalists everywhere for your shared tools and open ended questions.

Seth Blake on The United States of Paranoia : A Conspiracy Theory.

A great book, and the chapter 'Operation Mindfuck' of particular interest to RAW fans and heads. Enjoy, steve fly.



 http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/

Seth Blake on The United States of Paranoia : A Conspiracy Theory

Walker proceeds to lay out a general taxonomy of American conspiracy theories, “five primal myths […]  archetypes that can absorb all kinds of allegations, true or not, and arrange them into a familiar form.” These he distinguishes as “The Enemy Outside” (foreign actors who plot society’s downfall from a distance); “The Enemy Within” (domestic threats to the status quo); “The Enemy Above” (conspiracies of the ruling classes); “The Enemy Below” (conspiracies of the lower classes and social pariahs); and “The Benevolent Conspiracy” (a secret force working behind the scenes to improve people’s lives).

Enumerating examples of these five primal myths and how they have recurred and recombined throughout American history, Walker is able to convincingly illustrate how conspiracy narratives that may appear at first glance to be isolated, episodic interludes specific to the idiosyncratic circumstances of a particular era or social sphere, though distortions, are also real manifestations of enduring facets of a national consciousness. Conspiracy theories, according to Walker, and contra Hofstadter, are endemic rather than aberrant phenomena, and manifest at every level of American society.

In a particularly telling example, Walker traces the myth of The Enemy Outside from the period between the Pequot and King Philip’s wars (when English colonists’ fears of a “universall [sic] combination” of Indians lead them to form The New England Confederation) to the contemporary misunderstandings by US policymakers concerning the diffuse nature of al-Qaeda (Walker cites a Washington Post from 2012 that referred to Bin Laden as a “terrorist CEO in an isolated compound”). In both cases, an inaccurate but powerful metaphor — diverse and diffuse Indian societies likened to the absolute monarchies of Europe on the one hand, a diverse and diffuse terrorist network likened to a private corporation on the other — opened up a space for conspiratorial thinking and mythical misreadings that lead to reaction-formations with devastating real-world consequences. For infamous conspiracy theorist John Todd — who for nearly four decades beginning in the late 1970s, wound a crooked path across the United States, speaking at churches and community centers about the intertwining plots of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, witches, Jesus movements, and the music industry — the toll of belief came at a no less devastating individual cost: estrangement from his friends and family, frequent arrests, institutionalization, and an early death.

Walker’s chapter on conspiracy spoofs and spoofers is a more lighthearted counterpoint to the personal and political tragedies detailed in much of the book, and also may be his most effective. Here he discusses the Church of the SubGenius (a wicked send-up of New Age religions and self-help guides, ostensibly led by the beatific, pipe-smoking übermensch “Bob Dobbs”) and The Realist, a magazine that often printed earnestly submitted conspiracy theories alongside deadpan satires of the same. Just as science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy came to serve as a sort of primary text for those who actually believe that its eponymous secret society manipulates global events, the communities fostered by these intended hoaxes were, in fact, very real. For a short time in the early seventies, Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist, even became convinced that people were following him: as Krassner’s explains: “I thought that what I published was so important that I wanted to be persecuted, in order to validate the work.”

If Walker has, as he claims, written a sort of contemporary American demonology, it is populated by demons of the antique tradition: not necessarily evil spirits, but ones capable, like the humans who invented them, of a wide range of behavior. Perhaps a better term to describe the form of The United States of Paranoia is a bestiary. What differentiates the bestiary as a form most from its more buttoned down cousin, the encyclopedia, is the transparency of its animating ethos. In contrast to the definitional, indexical project of the encyclopedia — whose scriptural tone foregrounds its status as the official book of record, as much as possible striving to erase the specter of human authorship — the bestiary is essayistic, speculative, and most importantly, allegorical. It is as much a work of moral instruction for the beasts that read it as the beasts with which it is ostensibly concerned.

Conspiracy theories, like religious beliefs, have the power to transfigure the believer, and our hardwired apophenia — our tendency to read meaning into random and meaningless data — may lead us to stretch even the most homely and harmless of these theories far past the point of credibility or charm. For all the scope of The United States of Paranoia, Walker’s moral is ultimately a humble one: as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “we are what we pretend to be.”

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/

Independence Day 2013, nothing left to lose in USA Inc.

Robert Anton Wilson: The Vatican / Cocaine / CIA connection (Video)

Robert Anton Wilson: The Vatican / Cocaine / CIA connection.

Machiavelli Mafia Atoms and Oil (MMAO)

Bob's grand encyclopedic writings on the subject of conspiracies covered a hell of a lot of ground, in this interview with Richard Smoley for Gnosis magazine, he highlights some of the more probable conspiracy theories, that since the interview in 1998 have proved themselves to be accurate predictions, based on earlier theories of Buckminster Fuller and deployed in Wilson's species of Maybelogic.

Smoley: Of all the conspiracies you've looked at over the years, which ones are you most inclined to believe in?

Wilson: I put them on a scale from zero to ten. With the ones I put above five, I'm more inclined to give then credit than to doubt theta. The ones I put above seven, that's pretty close to belief, except I try to shy away from belief, I think it's a dangerous state to get into.

Bucky Fuller has a theory of the Great Pirates - the sociopathic types who have always been the dominant force in history. The Great Pirates in modern times make up a group the abbreviates "MMAO": Machiavelli, Mafia, atoms, and oil. It's the international banks, the Mafia, and the atomic and oil cartels. He doesn't claim they work together, but they more or less make a singular force. But he also says that they're so engaged in conflicts with one another that they're steering Spaceship Earth in 50 different directions, which is why we^'re going around and we^'re not getting anywhere. I tend to find that fairly credi­ble. A simplification of it is Carl Oglesby's theory of the Yankee and Cowboy War - the war between Western and old Eastern wealth. Those seem fairly credible to me.--Robert Anton Wilson, 1998.

"What do MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union all have in common?

"What do MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union all have in common? They help you pay for what you want? Well, yes... that is unless you want to help WikiLeaks make the world a better place. To see the shocking details, please go to wikileaks.org/​

What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.

But, of course, "Watching the world change as a result of your work: Priceless."