It’s really hard to look at where we are as a nation, where we seem to be heading, and not be at least a little concerned.
Everywhere we turn, the institutions that were intended to facilitate free thought, free expression, and accountability from our leaders are seemingly coopted by those who value none of that. Instead, they are actively working to suppress all that made this nation great, especially as they declare that we’re not and never were and insist on being celebrated for saying it.
What’s more, it’s happening to such a degree that it’s hard not to think it’s intentional, that there’s something behind this, driving it in an effort to destroy the America we all know and love.
But that’s just a conspiracy theory. No one is intentionally doing any such thing.
Or are they?
I’m now taking the idea a lot more seriously after a piece that I read this morning from The Federalist. Writer Larry Taunton noticed something in Fredrick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol.
There was a particular bit he heard on the audio version that struck him.
The Fourth Protocol is a political thriller in which the Soviets attempt to detonate a nuclear device next to an American military base in Britain. The novel contains fictitious letters from the very real English traitor Kim Philby — and still very much alive at the time of the book’s publication — to the general secretary of the Communist Party. A former MI6 operative and one of the infamous “Cambridge Five” in real life, the fictitious Philby, now in exile in Moscow, explains to his communist hosts how British democracy might be subverted from within via a classic “march through the institutions”:
…all history teaches that soundly based democracies can only be toppled by mass action in the streets when the police and armed forces have been sufficiently penetrated by the revolutionaries that large numbers of them can be expected to refuse to obey the orders of their officers and side instead with the demonstrators….
Our friends have done what they can. Since taking control of numerous large metropolitan authorities, through the press and the media, at every level high and low, they have either themselves, or using wild young people of the Trotskyite [i.e., communist] splinter factions as shock troops, carried out an unrelenting campaign to denigrate, vilify and undermine the British police. The aim, of course, is to vitiate or destroy the confidence of the British public in their police, which unfortunately remains the most affable and disciplined in the world….
I have narrated all of this only to substantiate one argument … that the path [to socialism] now lies though … the largely successful campaign of the Hard Left to take over the Labour Party from inside…
Paragraphs like these, numerous and detailing Marxist strategy, jolted me from the work of cutting hay for my horses. This was not merely fiction. It was a road map for the overthrow of Western governments. More than that, it was precisely what we were seeing taking place in America’s streets in the carefully orchestrated riots of Antifa, BLM, and the whole “Defund the Police” agenda.
With this touching so near to the focus of my own work, I decided to order a hard copy of the book to inspect these passages more closely. Squinting through dirt and sweat, I slipped off my gloves and thumb-typed the title into the Amazon search bar.
Curiously, the book was out of print.
How could this be? It was, after all, a major (if somewhat mediocre) movie starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan. Forsyth’s other books remain in print, so why not this one? From the seat of my tractor, I instead purchased a copy of the 1995 Bantam Books (US) edition from an online used book dealer. A few days later, it arrived.
These paragraphs were missing.
Eventually, Taunton found the passage in the first edition of the UK version of the book, which is apparently what the Audible book had used.
But what was interesting was that there was a notice in the Bantam version.
All of this, and yet the publisher’s page of the Bantam Books edition reads:
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
The capitalization is not mine; it is the publisher’s. And, of course, it’s not true. Whole pages had been omitted from the original hardback. But why? And did Frederick Forsyth know? After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that the author, though aged, was still alive and living in genteel retirement. But how to contact him?
Taunton spoke with Forsyth who was taken aback by the change, noting that he’d been “bowdlerized.” He was surprised that this is what was removed, not the parts of the book about how to build a nuclear weapon, which is pretty fair. I’d be surprised myself.
Now, Taunton notes above how what Forsyth wrote was, in fact, pretty much a guidebook on how to tear down this country and was also seemingly happening right before our very eyes.
He also acknowledges that Forsyth is an 85-year-old man and while he seems to have as sharp of a mind as ever, it’s possible that he authorized the changes, but I still don’t see why that would be the change.
Sure, some of it might be fear that someone would do this, but the problem is that someone has.
Now, I’m not claiming that there’s some entity orchestrating all of this from behind the scenes, directing some people to join the FBI, others to go into academia, and still others to get careers in the media.
Instead, what we have here is what a friend of mine refers to as a headless conspiracy. There’s no one calling the shots, but enough people of the same ideology all individually agree to pursue a certain course because it will help them fulfill their ultimate agenda.
It doesn’t take a shadowy cabal pulling the strings on such a thing if enough other people are willing to do the exact same things without prompting by some nebulous overlords.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter all that much. The impact is the exact same.
To call this disturbing is a bit of an understatement. We’re seeing that this pathway Forsyth laid out all those years ago is exactly what’s happening and someone tried to memory hole his words.
Part of me wants to believe that Bantam did so out of concern that someone would follow that passage as if it were an instruction manual, but publishing is one of the industries that has been thoroughly coopted. It’s unlikely they’d see this happening as a bad thing.
On the flip side, if they were in favor of it and it was a headless conspiracy, there’s no reason to hide it. On the contrary, they should try to amplify it in hopes that someone read it and do their own part.
It’s possible they didn’t want the other side to recognize what was happening, but even that doesn’t really feel like a plausible reason to remove something from a thriller.
The truth is that I’m not ready to scream about a true conspiracy—not yet, anyway—but it’s getting harder and harder to see stuff like this and not go down that road.
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"In the end, it doesn’t really matter all that much. The impact is the exact same."
Tom, you're wrong; it matters a lot. Because if the conspiracy is headless, then you can't counter it by killing the head and watching the body die. You have to persuade a mass of people to abandon their efforts, and failing that, you will have to kill them. The body count will be orders of magnitude higher.
What is also key in a Headless Conspiracy (You can say it's me) is the wannabe collaborators believe there is a secret leadership that they can please by acting in what they think is the conspiracy's interest, in the hopes that they can win an invite into the inner cabal.
And because there's no real leadership to gainsay them, there are some people who pretend they already have been, and try to gather the other suckers under them for their own personal power base. (You see that in operation with all the Local BLM chapters that may or may not be affiliated with the national. Or on the other side, the guys who decided to jump in front of the parade and pretend to be national Tea Party leaders in order to rook the movement out of cash.)