I've been warming up to this for a while. Let it be my final rant on Leonard Cohen, who he was, who he was not, and why it's important to sort this out now.
In a few weeks, in Montreal, a month-long Leonard Cohen event is being organized that will permanently establish his cultural dominance over the city of his birth. Two huge murals have already been erected on buildings to commemorate his towering presence, greater than any living idol, politician or saint of the past. Bigger than Brother André, or Maurice Duplessis. Or Rocket Richard. A bigger runner, coast to coast, than Terry Fox. I think this is unprecedented in Canada, a country that rarely erects statues or honours its heroes, apart from the dead of two world wars.
You have to ask: what is behind this sanctification? Money, perhaps. Festivals are big business, and the arts organizations must be falling all over one another to be part of this massive effort to commemorate the life of Montreal's most famous citizen.
But what are we actually commemorating? After all those interviews in which he explained himself endlessly, do we really know who Leonard Cohen was? I don't, although I lived around the corner from him for two decades. Or at least, I didn't, until I began looking into him. Which is how I learned that the 'real Leonard Cohen' - if there actually was such a person - is far different from the pontificating self-salesman we grew accustomed to, over the years.
Leonard Cohen captured the attention of millions around the world in the course of a career as a writer, singer, and prolific giver of interviews. I can't think of a singer who has been interviewed more often. I have personally read dozens of interviews he gave over five decades or so. He was a remarkably articulate, entertaining and clever conversationalist, widely read, and capable of delivering profound insights on numerous subjects, all connected, as it happens, to a massive agenda.
He was also a very disturbed individual whose life was - in many ways - a glittering disaster. Secretly, he was a triumph of social engineering. A sociopath who transformed himself into a saint.
Perhaps most concerning: he was a servant of powerful forces who owned and controlled him from birth to death. Is it any wonder he is buried in Mount Royal Cemetery, the scene of cult activity (including ritual murder) involving Montreal's wealthy elite and their Mafia cronies, going back decades?
His honorary degree from McGill University marked a lifetime of service to the gangs that turned it one of the world's most corrupt institutions, catering to secret military projects like MKULTRA in the 1950s, when Leonard Cohen was an undergraduate student politician volunteering in Donald Hebb's sensory isolation experiments, while presiding over the Debating Union and writing his first poems, including A Hallowe'en Poem with its detailed description of children's games of animal torture .
In fact, he never lived more than a short walk from McGill and the Allan Memorial, and his Westmount family connections always ensured he would rise in the world - the question was, How?
Nothing in Leonard's life was left to chance. It was determined, from the outset, by generations of family involvement in secret societies. Leonard grew up in a neighbourhood where the fathers all worked for Tibor Rosenbaum, the head of PERMINDEX, linked to the Bronfmans, Rothschilds, the international drug and arms trade, as well as to Operation Gladio and the Kennedy assassination. The death of his father left him the man of the house at age 8 - in a world of highly placed criminals. His uncles, who took over his upbringing, included a senator and member of the Bronfman's law firm.
As a teenager, he learned hypnotism - one of the techniques the CIA was exploring for use in mind control - and hypnotized the family maid in order to have sex with her. According to her daughter, the the 'Cohen bloodline" were practitioners of rape and torture.
No, you can't believe everything you read on Facebook, but she goes on to say she met Cohen in Denver where both were involved in a porn film, she as the unwitting victim-"Star." She became the Muse for his most-relentlessly-covered song, Hallelujah, and and says he boasted of being a CIA agent and 33rd degree Mason, as well as John Lennon's real assassin. Some say Cohen also killed Janis Joplin -- all but admitting to it in an early version of Chelsea Hotel (#1) which gives the impression he was in the room with her when she died. In fact, he comes close to confession in this 1976 interview somewhere around the 8:00 mark:
At McGill, in the 1950s, he joined a cult that included well-respected professors, literary figures, their wives and students, and the notorious Dr. Ewen Cameron - ruled by a shadowy inner circle that welcomed Nazi scientists employed by the CIA. Admirers of Aleister Crowley, they would meet for late night rituals, which Cohen described in early unpublished poems.
In a vertical career move to England, in 1959, he met Jacob Rothschild, who sent him to Hydra, where he hooked up with a community of artists, in what would become another social experiment attracting people from the world of military intelligence, gun running, spying, entertainment and publishing.
Portrayed as a lonely outsider, Cohen was in fact a central player in a massive program designed in London and Washington -- a post-war intelligence project whose totalitarian intention was to destroy and weaken families and individuals, and pave the way for world dictatorship by a chosen few, with narcotics and popular culture serving the agenda.
Leonard Cohen was their representative, and embodied all the aims of this program. So when Montreal gets together to celebrate his life and career, what we are actually celebrating is the triumph of MKULTRA.
**********
Let's count the ways Leonard Cohen was Dr. Cameron's biggest MK success, along with Lee Harvey Oswald.
1. Leonard received Manchurian Candidate programming at McGill in the days when the main goal of top secret mind control research was to produce controllable spies and assassins who could carry out missions and later have no memory of their own actions. (Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of this programming, not that he actually killed JFK: he was at the scene in Dallas as a patsy while a CIA hit team fired the fatal shots at the President). Leonard's first big mission was as a spy in Havana during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. It was partially successful, in the sense that it brought him embarrassing publicity.
3. Cohen's early writing shows just how heavily he was influenced by Dr. Cameron and his psychiatric collaborators. As a freshman at McGill, Cohen organized a debate on the question "Should Germany be allowed to re-arm?" which was one of Cameron's pet themes at the time. Cameron wrote extensively about the need to re-engineer the German people to prevent them from starting another world war. In his early twenties, Cohen rented a room near McGill where he wrote his first unpublished novel, Ballet of Lepers, which explored themes like sado-masochism from the point of view of a young man from a wealthy Jewish family. By then, Cohen was under the influence of the Tavistock programming that was taking over arts and culture -
4. Another of Cameron's obsessions was "the authoritarian personality" which inspired Cohen's 1964 poetry collection Flowers for Hitler. Despite his iconoclastic stance, Cohen was still listening to his Master's Voice.
5. In 1959 in London where he met the Rothschilds while writing his first novel, Beauty at Close Quarters (later published as The Favourite Game) Cohen was deepening his contacts with Tavistock (the Rothschilds created and funded it, as the birthplace of MKULTRA) and the Fabians he had known at McGill. Rothschild would send him to Hydra, where he met Axel and Marianne Jensen, who were under the same influences that would take the western world by storm in the sixties: the drug culture à la the Huxleys (Aldous' niece lived on Hydra), promiscuity carried to mechanistic extremes, destruction of the Old Order via all the mind-expanding techniques and beliefs that became the counter culture.
6. Despite moments of rebellion, Cohen always remained fundamentally obedient to authority. He was one of the cultural spokesmen who advocated "turning inward" and away from overt political action. All the while, he was deeply political in his choices, aligning himself with Zionism, in love with Ronald Reagan, and even joining the IDF in the mid-70s.
7. Late in life, he moved to a monastery - partly for tax purposes and as a stepping stone to retirement that was derailed when his retirement fund turned up empty in 2004. His glorious final decade, when he toured and made millions, turned him into the wise old man of popular culture. In many of his interviews after 2000, he spoke of how little he remembered, and how little he really knew. Let's just say, he knew too much that was healthier to forget.
8. Throughout his career, he was befriended (and used) by the powers that be, even European royalty and the folks at Buckingham Palace. This is one consistent fact of his career: that he always aimed "high" and worked for the darkest forces on earth. At the same time he cultivated a popular image as a man of the people, the perfect exemplar of "sensitivity" and "democratic ideals."
9. His personal life was an astounding mess, which is what one would expect of someone with multiple personalities, a few of which were capable of murder and espionage. You don't get far in a marriage if you're constantly switching alters, and disappearing to go on missions. But when you're Leonard Cohen, your relationship failures end up looking glamorous and evoking envy.
So in the end, Leonard Cohen's most lasting achievement might be fulfilling Dr Cameron's specifications to the letter. Not only was he a controlled public figure throughout his life, but he turned his own slavery into a powerful form of Mastery, through music. We'll be listening to his songs, and absorbing their deep messages, for the rest of our lives. His dark, Satanic programming - courtesy of the CIA -- is now mainstream culture. Hallelujah!
We need to think more deeply about all this before we leap onto that bandwagon.
In a few weeks, in Montreal, a month-long Leonard Cohen event is being organized that will permanently establish his cultural dominance over the city of his birth. Two huge murals have already been erected on buildings to commemorate his towering presence, greater than any living idol, politician or saint of the past. Bigger than Brother André, or Maurice Duplessis. Or Rocket Richard. A bigger runner, coast to coast, than Terry Fox. I think this is unprecedented in Canada, a country that rarely erects statues or honours its heroes, apart from the dead of two world wars.
You have to ask: what is behind this sanctification? Money, perhaps. Festivals are big business, and the arts organizations must be falling all over one another to be part of this massive effort to commemorate the life of Montreal's most famous citizen.
But what are we actually commemorating? After all those interviews in which he explained himself endlessly, do we really know who Leonard Cohen was? I don't, although I lived around the corner from him for two decades. Or at least, I didn't, until I began looking into him. Which is how I learned that the 'real Leonard Cohen' - if there actually was such a person - is far different from the pontificating self-salesman we grew accustomed to, over the years.
Leonard Cohen captured the attention of millions around the world in the course of a career as a writer, singer, and prolific giver of interviews. I can't think of a singer who has been interviewed more often. I have personally read dozens of interviews he gave over five decades or so. He was a remarkably articulate, entertaining and clever conversationalist, widely read, and capable of delivering profound insights on numerous subjects, all connected, as it happens, to a massive agenda.
He was also a very disturbed individual whose life was - in many ways - a glittering disaster. Secretly, he was a triumph of social engineering. A sociopath who transformed himself into a saint.
Perhaps most concerning: he was a servant of powerful forces who owned and controlled him from birth to death. Is it any wonder he is buried in Mount Royal Cemetery, the scene of cult activity (including ritual murder) involving Montreal's wealthy elite and their Mafia cronies, going back decades?
His honorary degree from McGill University marked a lifetime of service to the gangs that turned it one of the world's most corrupt institutions, catering to secret military projects like MKULTRA in the 1950s, when Leonard Cohen was an undergraduate student politician volunteering in Donald Hebb's sensory isolation experiments, while presiding over the Debating Union and writing his first poems, including A Hallowe'en Poem with its detailed description of children's games of animal torture .
In fact, he never lived more than a short walk from McGill and the Allan Memorial, and his Westmount family connections always ensured he would rise in the world - the question was, How?
Nothing in Leonard's life was left to chance. It was determined, from the outset, by generations of family involvement in secret societies. Leonard grew up in a neighbourhood where the fathers all worked for Tibor Rosenbaum, the head of PERMINDEX, linked to the Bronfmans, Rothschilds, the international drug and arms trade, as well as to Operation Gladio and the Kennedy assassination. The death of his father left him the man of the house at age 8 - in a world of highly placed criminals. His uncles, who took over his upbringing, included a senator and member of the Bronfman's law firm.
As a teenager, he learned hypnotism - one of the techniques the CIA was exploring for use in mind control - and hypnotized the family maid in order to have sex with her. According to her daughter, the the 'Cohen bloodline" were practitioners of rape and torture.
No, you can't believe everything you read on Facebook, but she goes on to say she met Cohen in Denver where both were involved in a porn film, she as the unwitting victim-"Star." She became the Muse for his most-relentlessly-covered song, Hallelujah, and and says he boasted of being a CIA agent and 33rd degree Mason, as well as John Lennon's real assassin. Some say Cohen also killed Janis Joplin -- all but admitting to it in an early version of Chelsea Hotel (#1) which gives the impression he was in the room with her when she died. In fact, he comes close to confession in this 1976 interview somewhere around the 8:00 mark:
At McGill, in the 1950s, he joined a cult that included well-respected professors, literary figures, their wives and students, and the notorious Dr. Ewen Cameron - ruled by a shadowy inner circle that welcomed Nazi scientists employed by the CIA. Admirers of Aleister Crowley, they would meet for late night rituals, which Cohen described in early unpublished poems.
In a vertical career move to England, in 1959, he met Jacob Rothschild, who sent him to Hydra, where he hooked up with a community of artists, in what would become another social experiment attracting people from the world of military intelligence, gun running, spying, entertainment and publishing.
Portrayed as a lonely outsider, Cohen was in fact a central player in a massive program designed in London and Washington -- a post-war intelligence project whose totalitarian intention was to destroy and weaken families and individuals, and pave the way for world dictatorship by a chosen few, with narcotics and popular culture serving the agenda.
Leonard Cohen was their representative, and embodied all the aims of this program. So when Montreal gets together to celebrate his life and career, what we are actually celebrating is the triumph of MKULTRA.
**********
Let's count the ways Leonard Cohen was Dr. Cameron's biggest MK success, along with Lee Harvey Oswald.
1. Leonard received Manchurian Candidate programming at McGill in the days when the main goal of top secret mind control research was to produce controllable spies and assassins who could carry out missions and later have no memory of their own actions. (Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of this programming, not that he actually killed JFK: he was at the scene in Dallas as a patsy while a CIA hit team fired the fatal shots at the President). Leonard's first big mission was as a spy in Havana during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. It was partially successful, in the sense that it brought him embarrassing publicity.
2. Leonard has always supported the aims and goals of his programmers: a group at McGill that included Fabian socialists like F.R. Scott and Irving Layton. The Fabians' emblem is "a wolf in sheep's clothing." Their aim was to transform human beings, beginning in childhood, using new theories of education eg. "free" schools. Cohen even sent his mentally disturbed, adopted son, Axel Jensen, to the one at Summerhill in the UK, which was also where Leonard first met Rebecca De Mornay as a child.
3. Cohen's early writing shows just how heavily he was influenced by Dr. Cameron and his psychiatric collaborators. As a freshman at McGill, Cohen organized a debate on the question "Should Germany be allowed to re-arm?" which was one of Cameron's pet themes at the time. Cameron wrote extensively about the need to re-engineer the German people to prevent them from starting another world war. In his early twenties, Cohen rented a room near McGill where he wrote his first unpublished novel, Ballet of Lepers, which explored themes like sado-masochism from the point of view of a young man from a wealthy Jewish family. By then, Cohen was under the influence of the Tavistock programming that was taking over arts and culture -
4. Another of Cameron's obsessions was "the authoritarian personality" which inspired Cohen's 1964 poetry collection Flowers for Hitler. Despite his iconoclastic stance, Cohen was still listening to his Master's Voice.
5. In 1959 in London where he met the Rothschilds while writing his first novel, Beauty at Close Quarters (later published as The Favourite Game) Cohen was deepening his contacts with Tavistock (the Rothschilds created and funded it, as the birthplace of MKULTRA) and the Fabians he had known at McGill. Rothschild would send him to Hydra, where he met Axel and Marianne Jensen, who were under the same influences that would take the western world by storm in the sixties: the drug culture à la the Huxleys (Aldous' niece lived on Hydra), promiscuity carried to mechanistic extremes, destruction of the Old Order via all the mind-expanding techniques and beliefs that became the counter culture.
6. Despite moments of rebellion, Cohen always remained fundamentally obedient to authority. He was one of the cultural spokesmen who advocated "turning inward" and away from overt political action. All the while, he was deeply political in his choices, aligning himself with Zionism, in love with Ronald Reagan, and even joining the IDF in the mid-70s.
7. Late in life, he moved to a monastery - partly for tax purposes and as a stepping stone to retirement that was derailed when his retirement fund turned up empty in 2004. His glorious final decade, when he toured and made millions, turned him into the wise old man of popular culture. In many of his interviews after 2000, he spoke of how little he remembered, and how little he really knew. Let's just say, he knew too much that was healthier to forget.
8. Throughout his career, he was befriended (and used) by the powers that be, even European royalty and the folks at Buckingham Palace. This is one consistent fact of his career: that he always aimed "high" and worked for the darkest forces on earth. At the same time he cultivated a popular image as a man of the people, the perfect exemplar of "sensitivity" and "democratic ideals."
9. His personal life was an astounding mess, which is what one would expect of someone with multiple personalities, a few of which were capable of murder and espionage. You don't get far in a marriage if you're constantly switching alters, and disappearing to go on missions. But when you're Leonard Cohen, your relationship failures end up looking glamorous and evoking envy.
So in the end, Leonard Cohen's most lasting achievement might be fulfilling Dr Cameron's specifications to the letter. Not only was he a controlled public figure throughout his life, but he turned his own slavery into a powerful form of Mastery, through music. We'll be listening to his songs, and absorbing their deep messages, for the rest of our lives. His dark, Satanic programming - courtesy of the CIA -- is now mainstream culture. Hallelujah!
We need to think more deeply about all this before we leap onto that bandwagon.