The St Gallen Mafia

No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.

Morning Routine - American Psycho (1/12) Movie CLIP (2000) HD

Woke Fate*

All one can really say for all the post-T2 Terminator films up until 2019 was that at least they weren't boring. Terminator: Dark Fate manages to be not only offensively boring but boringly offensive. In fact boringly offensively offensive and boring more or less sums it up.

Of course the first Terminator was genuinely scary. The body horror was genuinely horrible and horrific. Its first sequel, like Aliens, was a high-octane action thriller, complete with a cute kid and gun-toting mommabear. And all the others have been footnotes not to the original concept but to that later derogation. Because Rise of the Machines was both disappointing and toe-curlingly bad, though it was at least amusingly so. Arnie's ditching Ed Furlong and teaming up with Mel Gibson cast-off Nick Stahl certainly didn't save it. Then Salvation was head-spinningly mad, and not quite redeemed either by Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese or by a typically over-the-top Christian Bale as John Connor. And finally Genesis was just bad full-stop, marred mainly by abysmal casting choices and even more abysmal liberties with the franchise's characters and ideas - although a silly plot and ropy special effects certainly didn't help.

The Alien franchise actually waited until number 4 before going self-consciously campy and kooky. But already by Alien3 it had ditched any sense that it was building a long-running saga by using its first few minutes to undo the happy ending of the previous film. The difference between that and the termination of John Connor in the first few minutes of Dark Fate is that casually (off screen!) killing off a cute little girl, a handsome young man and a cool funky robot was in retrospect very much in keeping with the bleak soulless Godlessness of the Alien universe - where there is no fate, but also no good and evil, and there probably shouldn't really be any happy endings. And that doesn't quite work in the Terminator universe, where the moral is supposed to be that we're all supposed to be in charge of our fates, because destiny is nothing but what we make of it.

So having seen unborn baby John Connor, bratty but adorable kid John Connor, twinky teen John Connor, angry adult John Connor and finally baddy (FFS!) John Connor, in Dark Fate we see boy John Connor go the way of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and that's before we've even got so far as the opening credits. And as with the Star Wars characters the moral apparently is simply that we don't need white men to save the world anymore. We can make do with a young Latina call Dani Gomez. Or Ami Diaz. Or... or whatever her name is.

And she doesn't need no help from no man neither, be he machine or otherwise! Because she's got her super-butch blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend to rescue her, and to help her to get across the Mexican border illegally (yes, really!).

And that's before we've even mentioned the return of kick-ass sexagenarian† Linda Hamilton!

Well, the biggest disappointment of Rise of the Machines was that Hamilton and Furlong weren't in it. The biggest disappointment of Dark Fate is that now they're both back, only he got no more than a computer "de-aged"†† cameo after the manner of Princess Leia in Rogue One, and she's little more than a Carrie Fisher clone from circa The Force Awakens. Her beauty has gone, as has any trace of wit or charm. All that's left is some dried-up aged sass.

Sarah Connor herself now seems to be doing little more than channeling Hillary Clinton. She's old, she's embittered, she's out for revenge, and she doesn't just hate machines anymore, because now she also hates both men generally and indeed motherhood. One can only assume therefore that Ami Gomez is supposed to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is presumably supposed to be... Arnold Schwarzenegger? He was a baddy, but now he's a nice liberal gun-toting Republican Texan who just wants to help.

What else? Well it's possible the writers may have tried to be wise to potential "Mary Sue"-type criticisms, because their (literally, physically) strong female characters do get bumped around a little bit. But the truth is than one never really feels for any of them. (Sarah Connor alone in one scene manages to bounce burly security guards around like babies.) And I'm normally the last person to demand more "sex" in my films, but sex is leaking out of modern films not because of some new wave of Puritanism or even because of the dreaded PG-13 rating but simply because of the Chinese market. (The Chinese don't like slow build-ups either, of course!) And I suppose in a movieverse where women don't need men to rescue them, why should they have any other sorts of "needs" either?

So fair's fair! This isn't a film the Terminator franchise needed, and it's certainly not one that anyone will want either to re-watch or to remember. Its possible fate can be termination, and with extreme prejudice.

*I thought of Snark Bait, but there's a certain sense in which this may have been the high point of Trump-era wokeness. For various reasons, Hollywood may be about to turn a corner politically.
†In one scene I think she literally kicks the arse of a muscular twenty-something security guard. (OK boomer?)
††What with this and the de-aged kids in [Sh]It, last year was perhaps the creepiest year ever for Hollywood boylovers.

Was The Big Bang Theory the most conservative TV comedy ever?

When I first watched (or perhaps I should say caught sight of) The Big Bang Theory in daily early-evening repeats on E4, my initial response was simply to write it off as a cross between Friends and Frasier - those two 1990s stalwarts of America's sitcom export market, who taught us between them that it's OK to jump into bed with anyone you feel like provided you're young and attractive, make lots of arch, quippy remarks about everything, and somehow make enough money in your dead-end job to live in a palatial high-rise apartment.* It took a while for the penny (ahem!) to drop that this was actually quite a good formula for a sitcom - tried and tested, and only eventually (i.e. after a decade or so) becoming tired and testing.

The oddest thing for me about The Big Bang Theory in retrospect though isn't even its longevity, so much as its particularly peculiar brand of conservatism. For all its obsession with making up-to-date references to geek culture and "real world" science, there was actually something strangely old-fashioned about the multi-camera/studio-audience format. In fact although the sexual mores were 21st century, The Big Bang Theory was pretty much hawking the same American Dream as its sitcom predecessors had in the heyday of comic-books and astronauts in the early 1960s. The characters all live in clean and tidy houses and apartments. Religion, it has to be said, doesn't get much of a look-in, but at the same time when married female characters get pregnant "choice" is not even mentioned. And by the end of the series it turns out that friendship and family, intelligence and hard work, and eventually marriage and children - in that order, unusually enough - are the important things that make for personal fulfillment and happiness.

What made it feel even more old-fashioned in the dying days of the Obama era (not to mention amidst the woke hysteria that greeted Trump's election) was that it was a survivor from the time of Dubya. Back in them thar days, for example, it was still acceptable to have dark-skinned comedy characters like Apu and Rajesh in mainstream TV-shows. (Once the One become President, interestingly enough, it became politically incorrect to make fun of such people: for all their talk about not punching down, it was only once they finally had an opportunity to punch up that America's comedians stopped punching at all. I suppose it's funny how nakedly political political correctness can be!)

In actual fact the sub-textual racism of the way Raj's character was treated is quite troubling, dramatically at least as much as politically. Yes, it's lamp-shaded from time to time. Raj does occasionally call out his friends' ignorance about his culture. But it never changed the fact that the show's writers' fundamentally didn't know anything about people like him or indeed know what to do with him in particular. Even Enoch Powell thought that to all extents and purposes Indian people are basically like white people, but as far as the The Big Bang Theory was concerned they may as well be from Mars. So for most of the show's run Raj says and does comparatively little, and when there's a female character in the room he doesn't say anything at all (because he has selective mutism - hilarious!) and by the show's end he's the only one of the main cast who's still single (but he still has a Felix and Oscar-style relationship with Howard - hilarious!). In short, that Rajesh Koothrappali was only ever in the show as the token ethnic was definitely "problematic", and not just in the hip modern sense of the word. (The only other non-white regular character in the series is a black lady who works in HR. I'm not quite sure what that means, but just saying.)

Even more absent than unwanted pregnancies and ethnics, oddly enough, were gays. Perhaps one underestimates how spoiled one was for gay gags when watching actual Friends and actual Frasier (not to mention Ellen, or indeed their 1990s contemporary series on this side of the pond Absolutely Fabulous), but so far as I can remember there were no gay characters in The Big Bang Theory to be laughed either at or with. Indeed, most of the "comedy" of Raj and Howard's relationship depends on the ancient gag that they're not gay but they behave as if they are. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, actually came out of the closet during the show's run, but his character on screen remained fussily heterosexual. And if there was an episode when one of show's character's started questioning his or her sexuality (like Frasier did one time, as did Malcolm and Reese, etc. etc.) I certainly don't remember it.

A legitimate question then I suppose is Why? Until he started fornicating with Amy (and he'd use the word himself), Sheldon Cooper was arguably the most moral character on American television (at least since Capt Janeway returned to Earth) - hardworking, clean-living, generous to a fault and (for all his annoying quirks) utterly loyal both to his friends and to non-optional social conventions. One possibility is that an old-fashioned format leads to an old-fashioned sort of show, complete with old-fashioned characters and golden oldies-type humour. After all there's only so much in-depth character development you can do when you have a studio audience always waiting for the next gag, and so the tendency is to cleave to perennial archetypes (or, if you like, the same sorts of stock characters who have been serving comedy for literally thousands of years). And so the show's first episode started with the original straight man joined with the idiot savant with a heart of gold, who were then in turn joined by the blonde bimbo with hidden strengths (the chief of which ends up being an ability to hold her liquor), the quippy Jew-boy with hidden weaknesses (especially his mom and his blonde Catholic wife), and, of course, the token ethnic.

By the end of the series, interestingly enough, all the important story-arcs have been tied up. Having started their first episode with a single timeless male-male relationship†, the show then built outwards eventually to include suitable female partners for all its male characters (apart from Raj, of course, but even including Stuart!). Penny meanwhile has given up drink (because she's up the duff), and Raj and Howard have accepted that their friendship is special but in a non-gay way. Most importantly though, Sheldon has got a Nobel Prize and used his speech to thank and apologise to his friends and to tell them he loves them. If this is "conservatism" then it's both old-fashioned and unapologetically elitist to boot.

Wisely though, the show's writers end the final episode with a final scene that is a return to the show's beginning. Nobody gets on a 'plane to LA. No one goes off to become President. No one gets married who wasn't already. We see the same group of friends, albeit with their relationships deepened and their circle expanded, returning to the same apartment and to their same positions, eating together around the same table and implicitly (slightly Simpsons-style) in front of the same TV-screen. And so even the show's ending is comfortingly conservative: a reminder that true growth and prosperity are ultimately spiritual in nature, and that "change" is not always either necessary or desirable.

*The Simpsons at the same time could somehow afford to live in a similarly palatial suburban villa, though their show at least had the sense to hang a lampshade on that from time to time.
†Apparently the only thing that worked in the show's ill-fated pilot episode was the relationship between Parsons's Sheldon and Galecki's Leonard.

Are Vox spreading American propaganda?

I couldn't honestly watch this and think that they aren't. Indeed, at 6:44 there's a real head-spinner of (at best!) a half-truth!

The Iraq War was stage one in Saudi Arabia's undeclared project to dispose of its various unfriendly neighbours, starting with Saddam but with the Ayatollahs and/or Assad to follow. The deal with Uncle Sam - whether explicit or implicit - was obvious: you deal with Saddam Hussein and we'll deal with al-Qa'eda.

Initially my attitude to this video was wryly amused agreement. (I.e. Vox wouldn't have dared say any of this when Obama was on the throne, but now that it's Trump, well, who cares? Yes, American memories really are that short!) Now though, I'm wondering.

They do seem to be getting a lot of their info from one Mr Kenneth Pollack, a man who "used to" work at Langley as an "analyst". I suppose it's to their credit that they at least admit that. Because, duh, Iran-Contra, and America's covert support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq War = NOT MENTIONED. The Sunni Awakening, and Gen Petraeus's role in arming the "Sunni tribesmen" who would go on to form Isis's Iraqi backbone = NOT MENTIONED.

See where I'm going with this? This may have the cool hip Vox logo in the corner, but this is the CIA's version of history. And yes, Mr Pollack even uses the phrase "no one could have predicted". It's effing textbook.

And the final LOL? Describing the "rebels" in Syria (who only murder soldiers and policemen, so that's alright then!!!) as Saudi proxies! I mean, really? Yes, the Saudis are in it up to their necks. And FFS we (the British) are in it up to our elbows. But the Qataris are in it up to the hairs on their heads.

My standing thesis is that the ongoing Saudi-Qatari stand-off (aka "the Second Arab Cold War"*) is down to the Saudis' getting cold feet about the Syria project and trying to get the Qataris (who own Harrods, and half of London, and are friends with the Prince of Wales, and who in a couple of years' time are going to host the World Cup - and no one knows how that happened) to JUST DROP IT! Yes, Trump and the Israelis are supporting the House of Saud. And yes, Iran is supporting the other side (as has Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, for some reason). But the truth is clear enough.

The election of Trump heralded a blip not just in the long march through the institutions of the western world but also the end of the West's barmy "Arab Spring" project in the Middle East. For now they're sitting tight†. (And, perhaps, thinking of something else.)

So, is Sam Ellis formerly of the CSIS? Google would seem to suggest that why, yes, he is. So why, then, is he now writing for a supposedly impeccably left-leaning website like Vox, and indeed scripting their flagship current affairs vids on YouTube?

You may very well ask!

*Actually it does sort of fit. After the 1952 revolution in Egypt, the Arab world was split along a fairly straightforward left-right axis - dodgy oily monarchies with America, dodgy revolutionary tyrants with the other guy. It was only after the 1979 revolution in Iran threw the West a curveball that the Arabs started playing friendly with each other again. And now that Trump is not so sure that Iran's section of the Axis of Evil really is the Big Bad (because, duh, ISIS!) they're back to having their feuds and spats again.
†The occasional assassination notwithstanding! 

The Nazi Legacy

Not so long ago I remember there was an anti-baldness shampoo advertised on the telly which, like several other products at the time, made a positive virtue of being German. In other words it followed very much in the footsteps of car manufacturers such as Audi and of course Volkswagen (of which of course Audi has been a subsidiary since 1966) in proclaiming loud and clear that its German-ness was a mark of quality. In a country like England, which still has a passion for Holocaust movies and documentaries about the Battle of Britain, this was of course quite remarkable. But just imagine what other products could try the same trick.

Let's start with cars then. Not only was Volkswagen famously Hitler's favourite car manufacturer, but he actually named its most famous model - 'the Beetle'. And whether or not you drive a German car, you're quite likely to be insured by a German car insurance company - namely Allianz, whose director general in the early 1930s Kurt Schmitt went on to become Hitler’s Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 until January 1935*. Schmitt also became a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS, rising to the rank of Brigadeführer, the equivalent of a one-star general. Eduard Hilgard, a member of the board of Allianz, became head of the Reich Group for Insurance in 1934. He represented the insurance industry in a conference summoned by Hermann Göring after the November Pogrom of 1938. Hilgard reported on the material damages caused during the Kristallnacht Pogrom and the estimated sums insurance companies had to cover.

Of course it was not merely German car manufacturers who invested in the Nazi war machine! Albert Speer himself acknowledged that the Blitzkrieg of 1939 would not have succeeded without the support of General Motors - or, more specifically, its German subsidiary Opel. And of course Ford too supported the Nazis - although his support was ideological and only in their early years. Time magazine though went so far as to make Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938. (The cover was an anti-Hitler cartoon by a German Catholic exile, but the magazine's founder, rather more ambiguously, referred to Hitler as the year's most influential man 'for better or worse'.)

But where better to drive your Nazi car than on a Nazi autobahn - on which, thankfully for the European economy, there is still no speed limit. At least one of Hitler's dreams lives on - even if it is the same as Jeremy Clarkson's! And if you need to refuel, there'll probably be an ExxonMobil, Chevron or BP somewhere along the way - the successor companies of Standard Oil, which was the Nazi war-machine's most important fuel manufacturer.

Not that it's just cars, of course! Various industries found much to be gained by cooperating with the Nazis. During the war years Siemens, who now make the trains I go to work on in the morning, were making switches for military use and even had their own slave labour camp actually inside Auschwitz. The most notorious beneficiary of the Nazi regime though was of course the chemical industry. Kodak and Agfa, who nowadays make cameras, and BASF, who make pesticides, as well as the pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-Aventis and Bayer - whom we have to thank for first producing aspirin - were all members of the German chemical conglomerate I G Farben, whose directors after the War eventually ended up being put on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

Nazi culture has in fact survived in various other ways as well. Nobody had heard of Hugo Boss before he was chosen to design those beautiful SS uniforms. Nowadays he's one of the modern fashion world's biggest brands. Ditto IBM, until they helped to compute the numbers of Jews being rounded up during the so-called "Holocaust". The Swedish founder of Ikea too was also a Nazi sympathiser. And Fanta, which is nowadays simply an orange-flavoured version of Coca-Cola, was actually invented by Coca-Cola's German distributor as a wartime alternative to the (famously/notoriously American) soft drink because at the time they couldn't get the ingredients for the Real Thing. The German film company UFA, which distributed such Nazi hits as Triumph of the Will, is still going strong today - though it is now owned (ultimately) by the Nazi publishing giant Bertelsmann, who also own Random House. The Nazi holiday camp Prora has recently been reopened.

So, you can still wear Nazi designer clothes and use a Nazi computer whilst working for a Nazi investment bank. At the end of the day you can return from the office on a Nazi train to a home furnished with Nazi furniture. When you go on holiday you can drive a Nazi car, insured by a Nazi insurance company and fuelled at a Nazi petrol-station by the side of a Nazi road, and you can then stay the night in a Nazi youth hostel. You can even take your holiday snaps using a Nazi camera. If it all gets too much for you then why not take a Nazi painkiller and relax by reading a Nazi book published by a Nazi publishing house or by watching a Nazi film distributed by a Nazi production company - whilst sipping a Nazi soft drink.

So, where's all this headed? Well, in all probability the Euro-sceptics really have been right all along. The "new" Europe will, in fact, end up looking very much like it was always going to - at least from the 1930s onwards. Even such modern and politically correct causes as "ethnic diversity" nowadays have their own Nazi heritage. Many European ethnic minorities are today represented by FUEN, which was originally founded in 1949 to support displaced Germans who had supported Hitler but found themselves on the wrong side of the new borders that had been drawn up by the Allies. A similar organisation is the YEN or Youth of European Nationalities organisation. And if you're a budding young politician who has successfully contributed to the "harmony" of Europe's different peoples and nations then you may even end up being a candidate for the Robert Schuman Prize, which is presented by the Alfred Toepfer foundation, which was itself founded by (you've guessed it!) a German entrepreneur with close ties to the Nazi regime.

UPDATE: And if you fancy some Nazi running kit and training shoes (or at least some trainers made by a company founded by and named after a man who used to make jackboots for the Wehrmacht) then there's always Adidas. That's 'Adi' as in 'Adolf', the Adolf in question being Nazi Party member Adi Dassler (after whom the company was named). His brother Rudolf or 'Rudi' Dassler, who was also a Nazi, went on to found his own footwear manufacturing company, called Ruda - later renamed Puma.

*Schmitt's successor as Economics Minister was Hjalmar Schacht, who had been deputy director of Dresdner Bank. Dresdner Bank was also complicit in the Nazi regime, although since the war it has thrived and prospered, now owning investment bank Kleinwort Benson. Another bank that was useful to the Third Reich was Chase Bank.

The X-Files: The Shape of the Conspiracy - Part One: Sceptics and Secret Smokers

Carl Busch and Ronald Pakula - the assassin and the liar?

The "shape" of the conspiracy in the early episodes of The X-Files is actually remarkably simple. Mulder and Scully go out to investigate UFOs, and Mulder repeatedly stubs his toe against the US military, who are responsible (a) for recovering crashed alien spaceships and harvesting their technology and (b) for keeping this secret from the public - which explicitly is all for the sake of national security. Governments have the right to keep their military secrets under lock and key, after all, and the inference is left dangling that if the public were to find out that "we are not alone" there would be mass panic. And if that also means covering up that the aliens are abducting human children and doing obscene experiments on them then that's just too bad! (We later find out that the abductions in the first episode were actually all about turning humans into super-soldiers, so we can perhaps legitimately infer some background military interest there as well. But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves!)

All this is more or less confirmed later on. We find out in 'Redux' that in 1947 the Majestic 12 (MJ12) organisation was set up by the US Government to investigate the Roswell crash, and by inference we can connect the dots with other "military" episodes such as 'Deep Throat', 'Fallen Angel' (and its sequels 'Tempus Fugit' and 'Max'), 'E.B.E.', 'Little Green Men' and of course the 'Dreamland' episodes, in which we actually meet named MJ12 agent Morris Fletcher (not to mention his wife and children).

So far, so simple! No hybrids or clones, no Alien Bounty Hunters or Black Oil, no Syndicate or Rebel Colonists!

So, what then of the X-Files?

We're invited to imagine at the end of the pilot episode that Mulder's superiors at the FBI want to shut him down partly because they view him as an embarrassing crank who'll give the Bureau a bad name and partly because they see the X-Files themselves as a waste of money. It's only right at the end, with the appearance of the Smoking Man (the latterly named Carl Gerhard Busch, aka C.G.B. Spender) and his Spielbergian government warehouse in the bowels of the Pentagon, that we first get a suggestion that beyond the sceptics in the FBI there are other government agents out there who are actually rather interested in Mulder's work. The CSM clearly works for the Pentagon, who are apparently content for the time being to allow Mulder to investigate alien and/or "paranormal" activity on earth provided (a) it can all be kept under wraps and (b) they get to keep any physical evidence he discovers. (We see the Smoking Man filing away Ray Soames's tracking device, and in the first season's final episode he does the same with the alien foetus from Fort Marlene. And in the second season a not dissimilar fate awaits Dr Banton himself in 'Soft Light', thanks to Mulder's connexion with X - who is supposedly Mulder's contact at the Pentagon, not to mention his friend in the FBI, even though it's not always clear which of them is working for the other.)

In the second episode, the military situation is fleshed out, and we discover not only that the air force are flying their own UFOs but also that they're well up to date with the old government mind-control experiments. Indeed, they can pinch your most recent memories right out of your head if they want to. And we're introduced to another military secret agent who is also interested in Mulder's work and who, like the CSM, is also (we later learn) free to come and go at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

In fact Deep Throat is even more interested in Mulder than the Smoking Man is. In fact he's willing to provide Mulder with inside information, the implication being that Ronald Pakula fancies himself as a latter day Mark Felt and that Mulder and (presumably) Scully are going to be his Woodward and Bernstein. He wants to expose the government conspiracy that he's been involved in "for a long, long time", but he'll need their credibility in order to do so. And he's well aware what will happen to him if he's caught.

For a few episodes at least, this arrangement holds. Deep Throat gives Mulder some scraps of background on a couple of military projects that people weren't supposed to know about (a mad computer, a creepy kiddy cloning programme, etc.*) He also winds him up something rotten by helping him land a couple of really big extraterrestrial fish (in 'Fallen Angel' and 'E.B.E.'). And he gets back... what exactly? It's worth bearing in mind that he initially approaches Mulder not to give him inside knowledge but to warn him off investigating Ellens Air Force Base. The quid pro quo may as well be that Mulder will get inside information provided he's prepared at times not to dig too deeply. So, is Deep Throat's job to control Mulder as much as it is to encourage him? (To be fair, that's often how UFO researchers have been treated by government agents in real life.) All we can say for certain is that he's testing and training Mulder and gaining both his trust (in a world where one should trust no one) and his personal loyalty (which, in a world of conspiracies within conspiracies, is an important thing).

We find out at the end of 'Fallen Angel' though that Pakula isn't just helping Mulder in secret. He's also protecting him from on high. When Section Chief McGrath asks him why he's protecting Mulder, he replies enigmatically

I appreciate your frustration, but you and I both know Mulder's work is a singular passion - poses a most unique dilemma. But his occasional insubordination is in the end, far less dangerous ... [t]han having him exposed to the wrong people. What he knows...what he thinks he knows... Always keep your friends close, Mr. McGrath... but keep your enemies closer.

By implication then, Pakula is telling Mulder that he's helping him to get at the truth whilst at the same time reassuring the FBI that it's better to keep Mulder on a short leash (or at the very least to have him inside the tent pissing out) - working under the supervision of a section chief (not to mention people like the Smoking Man), writing up X-Files that can then be safely buried away, and, of course, having Scully "spying" on him the whole time. Who are "the wrong people"? Again by implication (and it's a daring double bluff by Deep Throat) they're probably people like Deep Throat himself. (Of course, also by implication, Pakula is also admitting to McGrath that the military does indeed have secrets that it would be dangerous for Mulder to uncover.)

The point of the scene apparently though is simply to show that Deep Throat, like the Smoking Man, is an important figure at the FBI as well as in the "defence establishment". The assumption always seems to be that they belong to the "executive branch", which for some reason in the X-Files universe is far more influential than it is in real life, so presumably these people have enough clout with the Clintons and/or Janet Reno to be able to do and get effectively whatever they want. (According to X in 'Ascension', 'They have something on everyone, Mr Mulder. The question is when they'll use it.')

Of course in 'Fallen Angel' Mulder is to all extents and purposes working as Deep Throat's secret agent, spying for Pakula personally on an MJ12 UFO salvage and containment operation. We learn later on that the Syndicate have done a secret deal with the colonists, but the rest of the MJ12's policy is still to shoot first and ask questions later. So this may well be Deep Throat's cover plan if and when he gets found out by the Smoking Man - to claim that Mulder is his asset rather than vice versa.

The first real suggestion that Deep Throat himself is giving Mulder the runaround though (after a certain amount of unsubtle, dramatically ironic foreshadowing) comes in 'E.B.E.' Deep Throat is giving Mulder the truth in this story, but he's also giving him lies. Is he misdirecting him from time to time in order to protect him - because he claims that he's protecting Mulder from truths that (by inference) Mulder is not ready to know? Possibly! But he also tells Mulder that "they" are closely observing him electronically and can "still hear" him. The suggestion then, presumably, is that when Deep Throat says he lied to Mulder to protect him from "the truth", the real truth that he's trying to protect Mulder from is that he suspects that he, Deep Throat, has been rumbled, and so he is now bluffing his colleagues by openly (i.e. in Mulder's apartment) handing Mulder disinformation. Whichever way one slices it though, the point of the story is that by this point Deep Throat has got cold feet and therefore to some extent is prepared to help his military colleagues mislead Mulder. (And arguably this allows him to save Mulder's own arse at the end of the episode when - yet again, implicitly - his colleagues trust him enough to apprehend Mulder and then let him go again.) By the end, however, Mulder doesn't know which lie to believe, however much he wants to.

One subject about which Deep Throat may be telling the truth, on the other hand, is what is later referred to (in the Smoking Man's apocryphal 'Musings', that is†) as UNSCR 1013:

After the Roswell incident in 1947, even at the brink of the Cold War, there was an ultrasecret conference attended by the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Britain, both Germanies, France and it was agreed that should any Extraterrestrial Biological Entity survive a crash, the country that held that being would be responsible for its extermination.

Conspicuously missing from this little list of countries are the three "former Axis" nations represented by the officials who end up calling the CSM (and by implication Garnet) in 'Anasazi', specifically Italy, Japan and (presumably, rather than Germany!) Austria. In '731' we learn that the Japanese government is prepared to do a deal with Dr Shiro Zama to take on his still living human-alien hybrid (and, presumably, sponsor his research). So one can speculate that the reason these governments are interested in the MJ12 files is that unlike the goody-two-shoes UNSC permanent member nations they are still officially open to the possibility of doing deals with extraterrestrials. (Have they even, albeit unwittingly, been sponsoring the Syndicate from afar?)

The next time we see the CSM, in 'Tooms', he seems to have graduated up the food chain from Section Chief Blevins's desk to that of Assistant Director Walter Skinner. It's confirmed that, unlike Mulder's superiors at the FBI, the CSM's concern with the X-Files is not that he thinks they're a waste of time and money but that Mulder may be too good at what he does - getting near the truth.

It's only in the very last episode of the first season though that we really get the first incontrovertible hints that there's more to "Government denies knowledge" than just the MJ12. For the first time it is implied that the Smoking Man is both of the Government and yet somehow not of it, and that within the official Government's official cover-up "conspiracy" there is another conspiracy even more ruthless, with its own even darker purposes. Deep Throat seems to imply that Dr Berube's experiments in human-alien hybridization are being shut down simply because they got out of hand - they were "too successful", and when one of the test subjects not only survived the experiments but was found to be running around outside alive and well, it was time for the military in "Los Alamos" to bring them to an end. But he also talks about 'so-called "black organizations"' and '[g]roups within groups ['[i]nside the intelligence community'] conducting covert activities, unknown at the highest levels of power'. In other words, this is the Syndicate in all but name. He seems to be trying to suggest that he doesn't really know about the actual Syndicate, though we can guess from what we find out in later episodes that he is quite probably a member. (Presumably he wouldn't want Mulder to associate him with them too closely when the latter does eventually find out about them. And of course it's also possible that Deep Throat knows or suspects that the real reason that Purity Control is being shut down is to stop the Colonists from finding out its real purpose - i.e. following on from his old friend "Bill Mulder's project" - to find a vaccine for the Black Oil. Perhaps it's for Bill's sake that he doesn't tell Fox any of this just yet - and of course he'll never get the chance to later!)

Indeed several things point to this being an operation by what we will later come to know as the Syndicate:

1. we will later discover that although the 'Purity Control' experiments probably were originally about creating super-soldiers for the military, after 1973 they came to be about: (i) creating the means to turn the Syndicate (and their families) into human-alien hybrids so that when alien colonization begins they will be immune to the Black Oil (aka Purity) and thus survive the colonization process (and not have monsters jumping out of their tummies), whilst at the same time "hiding in plain sight" (from their fellow humans, especially any who've survived without being stung into becoming hosts for alien foetuses) in order to serve as a "Vichy Government" for the invading extraterrestrials; and/or (ii) creating a vaccine for the Black Oil that will allow them and the human race generally to resist the colonization process;
2. we will also later discover that cover-ups of this sort, both for "the Government" and for the Syndicate, are almost always delegated to CSM's group Garnet, so the Crew Cut Man and his and his fellow nameless "men in black" goons are almost certainly working for Busch††;
3. Deep Throat's little speech to Scully just before he dies about 'That's the kind of people you're dealing with!' suggests (as does his dying 'Trust no one.') that there's more going on here than just "Government" secrets - because these are the sorts of people who would happily betray the US government in order to save their own skins; and
4. fourthly, it's not explained why the alien foetus that Scully manages to abscond with from Fort Marlene then ends up in the CSM's Pentagon storage facility.

On this last point, it's just possible that what we're seeing here in 'The Erlenmeyer Flask' is the first real evidence that although the CSM has a cushty billet at the Pentagon and although he and Deep Throat have various mysterious ways and means of pulling strings both in the military and at the FBI, the two of them have actually been loyal to their own "government within a government". In closing down Dr Berube's experiments and bumping off a man who by leaking to Mulder (whether it was misinformation or the truth!) had become a liability, it's the Smoking Man's people who have ended up getting their hands on '[t]he wellspring ... the original tissue'. Although in 'One Son' it's slightly retconned (because apparently the alien foetus did end up back at Fort Marlene), the final scene, mirroring as it does not just the final scene of the pilot episode but also that of Raiders of the Lost Ark, leaves hanging a very heavy inference that the Cigarette Smoking Man is someone we will see again.

*In 'Young at Heart' Deep Throat talks about "the Government" being interested in the dodgy doctor's research, and Mulder, who has never seen him before, speculates that the CSM is from the CIA. But the fact that both of them are interested in the case, and the perfectly reasonable suggestion some have made that the military might want the secret of youth for their super-soldier project, would suggest that "the Government" even in this episode means the Pentagon. (OTOH we also learn, albeit from the man himself in 'E.B.E.', that Deep Throat is ex-CIA - and we know from JFK that you never really leave "the Agency".)
†In real life UNSCR 1013 is a fairly boring resolution passed in 1995 about arms flows in Rwanda.
††The CSM is clearly the head of Garnet, but as such he evidently has two "hats": sometimes, when working directly for the MJ12, he can call upon military personnel (such as as in 'Anasazi', when he's trying to recover the stolen MJ12 files, and in 'Apocrypha', when he's moving a UFO that's mentioned in the MJ12 files); otherwise, he uses his own MIBs such as Krycek and Luis Cardinal, who are (supposed to be) loyal directly to him.