Shawn Helton
21st Century Wire
The 1999 film Fight Club is an exploration into the underbelly of both radical and fascist social change in postmodern America. Beneath the film’s anti-establishment/anti-materialist veneer is a sardonic foray into cultural Marxism, archetypal motifs and dissociative identity disorder.
The highly symbolic feature directed by David Fincher was inspired by author Chuck Palahniuk‘s 1996 novel Fight Club, a transgressive-fictional account entrenched in anarchic nihilism, consumer culture and the pitfalls of a postmodern society. Since the film’s release 20 years ago, the darkly comedic psychological drama has reached cult-like status by heavily influencing pop culture through its sardonic memetic haikus and sociopolitical underpinnings.
During the course of this analysis we’ll examine Fight Club’s depiction of socially engineered mob rule, while also dissecting the film’s uncanny foreshadowing of the 9/11 attacks and other more esoteric elements observed throughout the film…
‘SHADOW BOXING’ – Fight Club’s Tyler Durden is emblematic of the ‘death drive’ impulse within the film’s narrator. (Photo illustration Shawn Helton of 21WIRE)
The Birth of Fight Club
From the outset, Fight Club’s kinetic universe calls to mind Jean Baudrillard‘s semiotic ‘copy world’ concept known as hyperreality. This alternative reality, set during the film’s opening credits, depicts a surreal simulacra where one is taken on a high-octane CGI point of view journey inside the inner workings of the human brain. The simulated imagery then flashes through neural pathways, as the POV exits out of the pores of the film’s narrator, sliding across the top edge of a blurred revolver coming into frame.
The graphic sequence begins in medias res or in the midst of things, and may be seen as a reference to the narrator’s own splintered psyche as well as a darkly absurd nod to the unfathomable ‘Big Bang’ mythos.
Over the years, many Hollywood films have employed an in medias res plot structure to great effect. Whether its enigmatic classics such as Citizen Kane (1941), the neo-noir mystery Mulholland Drive (2001) or the inverted dreamscape of Inception (2010) and beyond, this style of storytelling has made an indelible mark on Tinsletown.
Based in oral tradition, in medias res has been around for centuries and is rooted in a technique exemplified by Homer’s work in the Iliad and The Odyssey. The 8th century epic poem the Iliad saw the Trojan War well underway, while conversely, The Odyssey takes shape over a series of flashbacks with the journey of Odysseus already over.
One could assert that Fight Club is actually an inversion of the monomyth present in the Iliad and The Odyssey. This is observed when looking closely at the film’s adversarial antagonist Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), although celebrated by the initiated, the character exemplifies the rebel (revolutionary) archetypal motif, an inverted pseudo-philosophical persona largely based on the postmodern misinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche.
‘GREY MATTER’ – Fight Club’s high paced opening credit journey is a simulacrum of the mind.
The film’s charged opening action begins on the 31st floor of a downtown office building overlooking the headquarters of several credit card company buildings (in the novel, the fictitious 191 story Parker-Morris high-rise is laced with explosives) perched along a fictional almost New York-like skyline. The scene unfolds as Fight Club‘s unnamed narrator (portrayed by Edward Norton) has the appearance of being held hostage at gun point by the vitriolic persona Tyler. During the same scene, the viewer observes Tyler eagerly awaiting the outcome of a domestic terror plot meant to topple a sky full of financial institutions in an attempt to erase America’s debt record.
It’s significant to point out that as Fight Club‘s rebel leader Tyler revels in the deliberate creation of economic ruin via the heavily coordinated controlled demolition plot supported by his loyal mischief makers within Project Mayhem, in the real world – they’d likely be opening a door to another “Too Big To Fail” bank bailout scam. Put another way, the viewing audience should consider that Tyler’s postmodern revolution to crash the debt clock to zero, may have actually be seen as a proxy false flag operation acting as convenient cover for the economic terror inducing central banking cabal. The modern-day machinists of bank runs and capital seizures, have sought to weaken the sovereignty of nations through manufactured financial crises in an effort to consolidate resources for decades. Historically speaking, banking blackmail artists and economic hit men (EHM) like economist John Perkins, have stated that private contractors with ties to Western intelligence agencies have utilized organizations like the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to seemingly loan huge sums of money not to a country in need but to companies seeking to mine oil and other precious resources within a sovereign nation. All the while, ‘CIA-sanctioned jackals’ would be on the ready as an added strategy of tension in order to produce a specific geopolitical outcome. The purported whistleblower/insider Perkins’ has stated that an EHM system, also made use of by big business, with corporations that included the likes of Exxon, Walmart, General Motors and Monsanto to name a few.
In addition, another aspect that has gone virtually unmentioned in most analyses of Fight Club, is the existence of offsite file storage options in the event of disaster recovery in the corporate world. In fact, it’s very likely that the credit headquarters depicted in Fight Club would have had redundant backup systems in place in the event of mass casualty incident. Indeed, it is still a practice today, computer data has been routinely recorded on magnetic tape by some of the world’s largest corporations, even in the advent of cloud computing networks and data vaulting. Furthermore, Fight Club‘s depiction of an orchestrated attack on a financial district by a rogue terror group, only reinforces the false premise that these individuals were lone wolf actors. This would be an extremely improbable scenario, given the domestic spy capabilities not only in America, but massive data collection throughout the world already in existence over the past several decades.
On a geopolitical scale, the intelligence stagecraft of various Western allied nations has enabled the rise of terrorist groups and incidents throughout the world. In many cases, they are in fact often found to be behind the scenes engineers propelling much of the current conflict seen today.
One of the main architects prior to the ‘War On Terror’ era, was the now deceased former NSA head, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who developed Osama bin Laden as a US intelligence asset and built the al Qaeda network alongside the CIA in Afghanistan against then Soviet Russia. Fight Club‘s idea that a highly theatrical large-scale terror plot would go unnoticed by security agencies prior to the attack, in the era of mass surveillance, data encryption and cryptanalysis techniques via the NSA is mind-boggling. Truth be told, the existence of data collection through a secretive “Five Eyes” alliance agreed upon in 1947 (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) was further bolstered by the NSA’s ECHELON program established formally in 1971. In fact, the spy agency’s sophisticated data gathering was laid bare in an article written by investigative journalist Duncan Campbell that was published with the New Statesman in 1988 (See left photo). Duncan’s exclusive report was given even more credence following the whistleblower revelations of Margaret Newsham, a former employee of the Lockheed Space and Missiles Corporation, who for a time “worked in the US and Britain for two corporations which manufacture signal intelligence computers, satellites and interception equipment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed.” Following Newsham’s departure from Lockheed in 1984, she filed a lawsuit alleging corruption concerning US government “black projects.”
However, by 1988 rolled around, Newsham had an unwillingness to talk with journalists, citing a Ronald Reagan Executive Order that specifically warned against the “unauthorized disclosure” of classified material when it comes to national defense and foreign relations. Sometime later, Newsham’s role in intercepting conversions in real-time would be outlined by Cleveland’s daily paper, The Plain Dealer following leaked information by those on Capitol Hill. The shocking surveillance report detailed Newsham’s involvement in listening in on a call from US Senator Strom Thurmond during his tenure in office while she was stationed at the NSA’s Menwith Hill ECHELON facility in England. Although Thurmond was no stranger to controversy both politically and privately, the NSA end around on US citizen spying through the Five Eyes/ECHELON project, still raises major questions over the legality and ethics of mass surveillance.
Below is a compelling passage from Duncan’s “They’ve Got It Taped” piece published with the New Statesman in 1988:
“American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic surveillance system. According to information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and analyse civilian communications into the 21st century. Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the intelligence agencies of many other countries will be closely involved with the new network, including those from Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan-and, surprisingly, the People’s Republic of China.
New satellite stations and monitoring centres are to be built around the world, and a chain of new satellites launched, so that NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, may keep abreast of the burgeoning international telecommunications traffic.”
Many of the questions raised during the ECHELON spy revelations of the 1980’s still reverberate today, particularly when examining the FISA-gate fiasco and the false material ginned up by ex-spy Christopher Steele on behalf of the PR firm Fusion GPS, who was retained by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Regardless of a particular perspective on the Trump presidency, the startling spy games set in motion by political rivals and those in the intelligence community, has brought Orwell’s fictionalized surveillance state within the concrete halls of the seminal dystopian novel 1984 to life.
Over the past several decades, other spoken critics such as well-known journalist James Bamford and former high-ranking NSA official William Binney, have come forward to share the inner workings of intelligence services and bulk data collection well before the NSA spying outlined during the famed Edward Snowden saga of 2013.
When contemplating spy agency data collection, it wouldn’t be such a stretch to consider that Fight Club’s fictitious revolutionary-style plot to demolish credit buildings was in all actuality a highly orchestrated event involving multiple suspects that would likely be used to further increase the security measures of the state, similar to those seen in the aftermath of 9/11…
This is further confirmed in Fight’s Club‘s darkly lit opening scene (also the film’s climatic ending scene) as the black and bruised narrator later referred to as Jack, suddenly remembers a carefully planned plot involving a series of controlled demolition charges strategically set around the foundation of a dozen downtown financial district skyscrapers.
We’re told that the narrator knows this because the film’s main rival, Tyler, knows this. This revelation becomes the first major clue that Tyler is in fact an alter ego of the identity disorder plagued narrator in Fight Club.
When looking out on a sea of high-rise buildings at night, we learn that in three minutes “this is it, ground zero,” according to Tyler, in a scene that eerily conjures the real-life horror of the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center buildings. The narrator then remarks that the pair (as well as the viewing audience) will have “front row seats to this theater of mass destruction,“ following the detonation of explosives housed in the bowels of the corporate institutions. The dialogue during this part of the demonstrates the startling prescience of the film as whole, something which looms in the backdrop for the entirety of the film. It’s worth noting that the term ‘ground zero’ originated from military jargon and is believed to have first been uttered at the end of WW2 in the aftermath of the US atomic bombardment on Japan. When understanding this, we can view Tyler’s bellicose nature as a precursor for his paramilitary concoction known as Project Mayhem.
It should be mentioned, that the second phase of the WTC 9/11 attacks which occurred at the South Tower, happened just three minutes past the hour.
As Fight Club progresses, it becomes more apparent that Tyler has emerged from the narrator’s unconscious mind, something that immediately recalls the archetypal analysis of Carl Jung‘s Psychology of the Unconscious. More specifically, we can infer that Tyler is likely the daemonic shadow of the narrator’s psyche, and later the viewing audience will discover his role as a Psychopomp within the fight club/Project Mayhem construct. Thus, Tyler’s underground fight club is in reality a ritual initiation and in deeper sense actually represents a guide into the rungs of the underworld.
In Meeting the Shadow by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, we see a concise interpretation of Jung’s shadow concept:
“The shadow goes by many familiar names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin or brother in bible and myth, the double, repressed self, alter ego, id. When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent to the underworld, dark night of the soul, midlife crisis.”
One could contend that the passage from Meeting the Shadow above also accurately describes Fight Club‘s chief alter ego, Tyler Durden.
Similarly, Fight Club appears to reflect the mythos of Dante Alighieri‘s 14th-century epic poem the Divine Comedy. The narrator in Fight Club is promised a sort of enlightened individuation through Tyler’s darkly turbulent upheaval of his psyche. Later conflicted, the narrator descends into a hellish psychological abyss as in Dante’s journey through the 9 circles of hell. However, Tyler is a trickster, a paradoxical guide offering no true pathway to self, as his narcissistic quest in Fight Club betrays Vergil’s guided lessons of hell. In essence, Tyler wholly embraces perdition and so to does the narrator by proxy, whose life is sent careening over the edge, losing all morality with no real way to traverse towards inner peace (paradise). Fight Club‘s darkly comedic presentation masks this underlying allegory seen throughout its color saturated frames.
Over the years, there have been many interpretations concerning the true nature of Fight Club and at jackdurden.com, we see an artful, yet satirical analysis contending that much of the film’s characters and locations are merely an elaborate figment of the narrator’s fractured mind.
Although this concept is theoretically intriguing when looking at specific aspects throughout the film, it’s important to analyze many of Fight Club‘s overarching prefigured themes, while also examining its historical connections as well. In order for clarity throughout this analysis, we’ll keep descriptions of the narrator separate from any alternate identities observed in the film in order to focus our attention on the Machiavellian scope of Fight Club.
‘IN PLAIN SIGHT’ – Fight Club depicted a 9/11-like scene two years prior to the World Trade Center attacks seen in New York.
Window Into 9/11: Predictive Programming?
The opening and ending scenes in Fight Club are palpable and have an uncanny resemblance to the real-life 9/11 attacks that took place in New York. Some have suggested, that the multiple allusions to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings appear to also conjure the debated theory called predictive programming.
Predictive programming is a controversial theory contending that the masses have been socially engineered through fictional works in film, television programming and various other media formats in order to get the general public to acquiesce to preplanned future scenarios or eventual outcomes.
Since the inception of the ‘War on Terror’ era, the idea of predictive programming has gained traction, as there have been many uncanny 9/11 attack references both in film and TV that predate the tragic events of that day. Some of the most notable include the dystopian sci fi The Matrix (1999), the terror attack blockbuster The Siege (1998), the shape-shifting artificial intelligence nuclear warfare flick Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and the government conspiracy series The Lone Gunmen (2001), which depicted a plot to crash a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings just months prior to a nearly identical real-life attack in New York on September 11th, 2001.
As yet another dark anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy is behind us, researchers and investigators are still debating over the how of the 9/11 attacks and the who, as well as the various methodology used to carry out the crimes of that day. There’s an even more contentious dispute over the collapse of WTC Building 7 and since then, other 9/11 offshoot theories and ‘rabbit holes’ have also challenged the very nature of the attacks in both the New York and Washington DC area .
‘CRIME OF THE CENTURY’ – Many peculiar anomalies were witnessed in the wake of the WTC 9/11 attacks as well as those on the Pentagon. (Image Source: flicker)
Even more incredibly, a simulated exercise depicting an identical scenario as that of the 9/11 attacks on the very same morning as the attacks was run by the National Reconnaissance Office. According to a published piece with the Associated Press written by John J. Lumpkin, the pre-planned event composed of personnel from the CIA and the US military was evidently cancelled following the real life attacks, something which government officials quickly brushed off as merely a ‘bizarre coincidence.’
Global Research‘s Professor Michel Chossudovsky further explained the 9/11 crisis training overseen by the CIA on the morning of September 11th, 2001:
“On the morning of September 11 2001, within minutes of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the CIA had been running “a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building”. The simulation was held at the CIA Chantilly Virginia Reconnaissance Office.”
In addition, now more than sixteen years after the 9/11 attacks, somewhat recent court documents reveal that the The Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC may have funded a ‘dry run’ of the attacks. While this new set of details could be another red herring covering for an even more covert operation concerning the 9/11 attacks, the revelation appears to supply further evidence of prior knowledge of the attacks among the intelligence community.
When considering further analysis of Fight Club‘s fictional bomb plot on financial buildings, one is also reminded of the FBI’s real life role in ‘handling’ a disastrous sting operation that resulted in a 1993 attempted bombing on the World Trade Center. It turned out that the FBI trained some of those involved, while also supplying the explosive material that was later used to be detonated underneath one of the world’s tallest buildings – without stopping the plot.
Incidentally, after the 1993 WTC bombing, it was revealed that the FBI had ‘lured‘ former Egyptian army officer named Emad A. Salem into not only playing a role prior to the bomb plot but also becoming a prized undercover operative and confidential informant for the agency.
Another oddly predictive aspect of Fight Club included a scheme to destroy a corporate sculpture virtually indistinguishable from a minimalist sculpture formerly placed within the World Trade Center Plaza called ‘The Sphere’ (left photo). The domestic terror plot in Fight Club designed to take out a piece of corporate art was humorously titled Operation Latte Thunder. Although the satirical scene showed a similar spherical sculpture smash through a Starbucks replica, the imagery functions on a deeper level, perhaps not only eluding to Atlas personality psychology but a distorted perception of the Atlas myth as a whole. The underlying Titan myth is ascertained from the circular sculpture’s geometric human-like base which is no longer ‘holding up the heavens’ following its destruction from a series of planted explosives in the film. In addition, other researchers have noted that Fight Club‘s spherical sculpture may actually represent the sun, summoning the occult imagery of Freemasonry as the sun/sphere smashes into a faux Starbucks, we see the checkered tile floor or rather mosaic pavement bringing to light Masonic associations of good and evil.
World Trade, Global Think-Tanks & Terror
The World Trade Center complex along with the twin towers were brought to fruition by the powerful Rockefeller family and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), who also oversaw the infrastructure and public funding of the complex. However, the massive building project was ‘spearheaded’ by David Rockefeller to reignite the Lower Manhattan area. On an intriguing note, the towers themselves were said to have been nicknamed after David and his brother Nelson A. Rockefeller, a former New York Governor and Vice President under President Gerald Ford.
David Rockefeller (left photo) has been described as a philanthropist and banker, yet much of his legacy will forever be tied to the creation of the well-known think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission and his central role on the steering committee for the secretive ‘Bilderberg Group’ established in 1954.
The mainstream media continues to mask the significance of the Bilderberg Group’s regular gatherings of corporate CEO’s, barons of oil, government top brass and royalty. In fact, there’s a concerted effort to divert attention away from the group’s influence on foreign policy and world finance in general. However, due to the public’s growing curiosity, the Bilderberger’s exploits have slowly been uncovered with each passing year as the list of attendees seem to change and multiply with each new conference location.
There’s also been an immense sphere of influence held by various power-hungry groups such as The Trilateral Commission, which materialized in 1973 via Rockefeller and perennial US foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Commission was also joined by fellow Bilderberg attendee and longtime policy advisor Henry Kissinger. Contrary to what most people think – the vast majority of The Trilateral Commission’s members have been from countries outside of America.
For further evidence that a cadre of hidden hands direct global interests, one only needs to look into the high-powered pursuits of Bilderberg attendees that have been linked to creating a multi-national sovereignty override through many transnational corporations and world trade partnerships like the Transatlantic partnership (TTIP) and Transpacific partnership (TPP) over the past decade.
Following Rockefeller’s death in March of 2017, the NY Times reveled in the powerful political machinations of the globalist banker:
“He spent his life in the club of the ruling class and was loyal to members of the club, no matter what they did,” The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2002, citing the profitable deals Mr. Rockefeller had cut with “oil-rich dictators,” “Soviet party bosses” and “Chinese perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution.””
Rockefeller, like George Soros, is ultimately tied to globalism and vast social engineering programs. Soros has also been described as a philanthropist, yet many of the social movement projects funded by his Open Society Foundation, have led to violent civil unrest and societal instability in the form of color revolutions throughout the world.
Six weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks, Larry Silverstein aka ‘Lucky Larry’ (left photo) via his company Silverstein Properties and World Trade Center Properties LLC took title of the massive WTC complex in July of 2001 for $3.2 billion. Silverstein was eventually awarded $4.55 billion dollars in a catastrophic insurance payout from the 9/11 destruction. It was also reported that Silverstein and his backers who included Lloyd Goldman and Joseph Cayr, received some $98 million on their initial investment of $124 million. The WTC site was secured for a 99-year lease deal worth $800 million.
The payout-partnership with Silverstein in the aftermath of 9/11 didn’t end there, as WTC partner Frank Lowy (left photo) also benefited from insurance claims. All told, many of ‘unlucky’ Lowy’s properties have become the target of several dire warnings and terror atrocities. Whether it was the catastrophic attacks on Lowy’s Marriott Hotels in Islamabad, Jakarta and Kenya’s Westgate Mall, or the terror threats made against Westfield malls in recent years.
From this we can view Fight Club‘s destruction of a WTC-like complex not only as a symbolic ushering in of the War On Terror era but rather an uncanny albeit imaginary, 9/11-style horror that predated the real life attacks themselves. Due to the complex nature of the WTC crimes and those suspected to have played a role, as well as the various intelligence and think-tank links outlined above, one can only conclude that the actual attacks were part of a deep cover operation beyond anything a band of al-Qaeda terrorists could have ever conjured.
With this in mind, Fight Club‘s Project Mayhem planned destruction of the financial district buildings offers a window into the covert nature of the real 9/11 attacks.
Fight Club was first released two years and a day prior to the 9/11 attacks on Sept. 10th 1999 and although the opening and ending scenes were loosely set in New York, the scenes actually depict buildings across the Los Angeles skyline. In fact, the twin Century Plaza Towers of downtown Los Angeles are most prominently featured in the film’s skyscraper window view.
‘ART OF DESTRUCTION’ – Fight Club’s Project Mayhem destroy a replica of the WTC Sphere as Masonic symbols loom.
Alt-Left/Alt-Right: Revolution Mobs & the Rise of Antifa
Representing the shadow of the unconscious, Tyler is antithetical to the hero myth, as his methodology and actions could be interpreted as a postmodern distortion of the allegorical epic universal battle against political hierarchies. With this in mind, Tyler is exposed is a confidence man, a diabolically selfish alter of the narrator, who later becomes the de facto leader of the hive-mind cult organization known as Project Mayhem – a group arguably spawned from neo-Marxist pedagogy.
Project Mayhem, is an all-male group born out of basement brawls, public pranks and anarchic mischief that is later spurned towards violent and nihilistic political activism. The secretive alliance dissolves into a form of controlled opposition reminiscent of many real life insurrection groups at the end of the 20th century. This is seen when new recruits of Project Mayhem members aka ‘Space Monkeys’ are groomed to participate in mob action under the orders of Tyler.
Despite Fight Club‘s surface concerns with commodification in society, the hyper-real picture is wrought with identity politics, class warfare and an underlying false left/right paradigm that drives public perception towards a polarizing political choice that has no viable means of escape from established order.
‘DUPING DELIGHT’ – Fight Club’s narrator and identity alter Marla Singer, gleefully fake sickness at support groups for the terminally ill.
Cultural Marxism, Social Engineering & Class Warfare
Following the kinetic in medias res start to Fight Club the narrator is seen attending various support groups and one called ‘Remaining Men Together’ shows him join a group of men suffering from testicular cancer. Throughout the scene there’s a quirky air of absurdity as the dispassionate insomniac narrator becomes a tourist pretending to be as emasculated as those around him. Later on in the film, we learn that the narrator’s masculinity is metaphorically on life support as the commodification of his IKEA packaged life reduces him, giving rise to his narcissistic neo-Marxist tendencies personified in his alter Tyler.
The postmodern pact between the narrator and Tyler is a Faustian bargain that illustrates a deeper more esoteric ritual ironically promoting emasculation. The hellish origins of Fight Club emerged literally out of the Lou’s Tavern basement (possible reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy) serving as an alternate or inverted reality of the characters involved. This inverted world view is one entrenched in a perpetual subversive violence that can only be rooted in satanic texts.
Jay Dyer of Jay’s Analysis has astutely observed a larger overarching theme linking globalism, feminism as an intelligence driven construct shaped by think-tanks, NGO’s and elite blood lines. This thoughtful analysis should be considered when exploring Fight Club‘s perspective on gender:
“…the banking elite funded revolutionaries in Russia and China to destabilize the existing regimes, so with feminism and “women’s liberation,” the destabilization of the masses could be more easily accomplished, not just through altering social structures, but also through attacking gender. The attack on gender is a long, scientific process that began with women’s liberation and has now consummated in the synthetic rewrite of all nature. Along this long, technocratic and scientistic path the oligarchs reasoned that the inversion of all existing orders through subversion would result in the socialistic Brave New World of enforced androgyny – the feminization of men, and the masculinization of women.”
In this way, we can view the evolution of the narrator’s Lou’s Tavern fight club, imaginary or not, is an echo of Women’s liberation, as the naive participants of fight club are brought down a similar pathway ushering in a postmodern men’s liberation which if real, would likely be infiltrated and constructed by all the same intelligence agencies and oligarchs.
Sociopolitical issues concerning gender reverberate throughout Fight Club, conjuring the well oiled halls of the Royal Institute for Internal Affairs in London, as well as their American Doppleganger the Council for Foreign Relations.
Historically speaking, social movements have worked to erode the legitimacy of a democratically elected government through a series of artificial ‘color’ upheavals (color revolutions), and where possible – weakening a country’s national sovereignty through forced dependency on multilateral globalist institutions like the UN or IMF, while presenting shock and awe imagery in order to manipulate the public’s political perspective.
This is how the US and its CIA conduct their destabilization ‘color revolution’ campaigns overseas, and now astute observers will recognize these exact same methods being deployed here inside the US.
COINTEL PRO Carnival: ‘Known Wolf’ Terror
Throughout the saturated neo-noir frames of Fight Club, Project Mayhem functionaries dutifully carry out orders to propel the group’s activism. Whether it’s the destruction of private property, random assaults or large-scale politically charged violence directed at financial companies, Project Mayhem (although an imaginary cult) displays all the hallmarks of a controlled mob that has been coerced and infiltrated by an established intelligence apparatus.
Domestically in America, it has been well documented that the FBI created a counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, not only as a way to influence, but also a way to disrupt and coerce political factions from the inside out. The FBI program infiltrated countless groups and movements across the political spectrum. According to reports these groups included but were not limited to the following, “The Black Panther Party, The Communist Party of America, the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, the New Left, the Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Puerto Rican Liberation Movement, Communist groups, anti-war organizations, Hollywood stars sympathetic to these groups, and civil rights leaders.”
On March 8th 1971, ‘secret files’ from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania were allegedly stolen and subsequently released to media organizations, revealing for the first time the scope of the FBI’s domestic spying and infiltration on political and protest groups in America. After two months of planning, a group calling themselves “The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI,” decided to break-in to a small town FBI office the same night as the first historic bout between heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden.
Some of the Citizens’ Commission members involved in the Media office burglary were never revealed and rather strangely, the case was never solved – even though 200 FBI agents had worked the case. In fact, “there were no alarms, surveillance cameras, or locks on most of the filing cabinets,” at the FBI office in Media.
The courts later ordered the FBI to reveal part of their counterintelligence program, disclosing six operations run by FBI field offices throughout the country. The documents also revealed a specific emphasis to funnel covert aid to “White Hate Groups,” from 1964-71, that largely diverted those funds to the KKK, as long as they choose COINTEL PRO targets. Similarly, FBI efforts to infiltrate New Left groups and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fixating on ant-war, student and feminist causes.
Between 1956 and 1971 the FBI’s controversial program influenced and radicalized hundreds of left-wing and right-wing groups to control and neutralize political dissidents across America.
Also throughout the 1960’s and the 1970’s the CIA’s Operation CHAOS “collected substantial amounts of information on domestic dissidents from 1967 to 1973,” as admitted by the CIA. The secretive intelligence operation was also related to the overseas Phoenix Program (Operation Phoenix) which was used in Vietnam to tear apart the political infrastructure through the use of informants, agent provocateurs, and targeted assassinations.
Interestingly though, the prototype for modern deep state intelligence programs goes back to the formation of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) an intelligence propaganda agency in 1941 that was succeeded by Office of Strategic Services (OSS) a wartime intelligence apparatus created in 1942 that focused on psychological warfare. OSS agents also worked closely with British Security Coordination (BSC).
Similarly, on a global scale, NATO’s paramilitary-style stay-behind-armies were said to have comprised Operation GLADIO. The origins of GLADIO have been well documented and the secretive counterintelligence operation has been linked to a wave of right-wing ‘false flag’ terror attacks across Europe throughout the 1950’s into the 1980’s. The anti-communist organizational designs were directly connected to that of the CIA and MI6 in particular, with the US and British special forces reportedly facilitating the training.
From this, we can view global operations like GLADIO in addition to the post-9/11 War On Terror security surge as a form of ‘power politics’ used to aggressively influence the foreign policy of other nations through the use of covert militarization.
Here Dr. Daniele Ganser discusses his seminal 2005 book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Ganser asserts that covert armies were used to subvert the political interests of various nations through the implementation of a Cold-War era strategy of tension…
In 2014, it was revealed that a social science program directed by Minerva Research Initiative and the Department of Defense (DoD), was to study the behavior of peaceful activism and how political ideology shapes protest movements throughout the world at large. Resuscitating and partially reconstituting a 1960’s Cold War-era (Project Camelot) social science program used to detect, infiltrate and steer political protest.
Western allied nations and intelligence agencies regularly utilize double agents and informants under a flag of security, yet many in mockingbird controlled media halls continue to cloud the nature of such operations and their supporting role in directing foreign policy aims across the globe.
21 WIRE has documented many so-called shooting/terror/attacks that involve individuals being monitored by security services prior to an alleged act taking place.This is a notorious place where a ‘lone wolf’ graduates into the ranks of a known wolf. In fact, very often those being watched by authorities exhibit all the tell-tale signs of a patsy or an informant, working for either localized law enforcement or an intelligence agency to potential avoid jail time for previous criminal activity. Historically, government operators have often made use of low-life criminals, and mentally disturbed individuals to fulfill various roles in entrapment stings or sometimes as bonafide crisis actors during so-called terror attacks.
‘SHOCK & AWE’ – Fight Club reveals an undercurrent of occult ritual and psychological warfare lurking below the surface narrative.
COVERT CULTS: Mysteries & Secrets
A deeper underpinning of Fight Club‘s cult group Project Mayhem, is that it represents a postmodern interpretation of the many allegorical mysteries and secret societies of the initiated. Like a reboot of the pagan mysteries, along with that of the Eleusinian cult’s secrecy and ritualistic practices, Project Mayhem is also forever linked to the myth of the underworld. On the whole, several scenes in Fight Club display occult imagery, specifically symbols commonly inked to Freemasonry. Moreover, Tyler’s secretive fight club itself is actually a nod to mystery tradition and Masonic initiation.