We will get to the Third Wave in just a minute. First I want to provide a context for it.
A few years ago I took some Sanskrit classes. What I will describe here is a weekend class. The teacher's name is Vyaas Houston. He is an American in his forties (must be over 50 now). He looks and talks just like Dick Cavett.
His classes start Friday evening. There are usually about 15 or 20 students, drawn from all walks of life. There are usually some sweet old ladies and retired gentlemen who are interested in yoga. They haven't been in a classroom in decades and may be a little nervous about it. There are some who might be described as hippy dippy. They are not academically oriented at all - they are the sort of people who flunked ninth grade math and believe everything they hear about astrology and macrobiotic foods. They are also a little antsy about being in a classroom. And there are some professional people - doctors, programmers, etc. Some people in this latter group are very competitive. They have been straight-A students all their lives, and their egos depend on being able to learn anything better than anybody. What's about to happen will be even worse for them than for the others.
Vyaas starts by asking everyone to listen to him chant a line of Sanskrit, and repeat it. "Ah au aha." Well, that's easy enough. We all go Ah au aha. Each one repeats this, all the way around the group.
Then he adds another line. (These are case endings, by the way, but we don't know that yet.)
Ah au aha,
am au an.
At this point, since these are nonsense syllables that we have never heard before, it starts to get a little confusing. He tells us, "You don't have to get it right. If you don't remember the exact sound, just make something up. You can recite Mary had a Little Lamb if you want to. It's okay if you don't get it right." Of course, no one believes this. We have to get it right. Ah au aha; am au an. So far, so good. Anybody can remember six little words long enough to repeat them.
He adds a third line:
Ah au aha
am au an
ena abhyam aih.
We are supposed to repeat this. It's harder than it may appear. Three lines is a big jump beyond two. The words sound alike and run together. Our short-term memory registers only have so much capacity. We start trying to find some mnemonic trick to help us remember, but there isn't time. (Try reciting what you just read, without looking. Ah au... )
Vyaas reminds us that we don't have to get it right. Most of us, with great effort, do get it right, at least to a close approximation. Ah au aha; am au an; ena abhyam aih. Some people resort to making something up when their turn comes, but this is unusual. We get through this part, somehow, but we are beginning to feel fear, a fear that threatens our egos, a fear of failure, humiliation, public exposure... We feel many things; very primitive things. Our minds are in turmoil. If somebody is going to fail, let it be the other guy. Don't let it be me.
Then he adds a fourth line.
Ah au aha
am au an
ena abhyam aih
aya abhyam ebhyaha.
We are supposed to repeat all this. It is almost impossible. Four lines is an enormous step beyond three. It's like going to a juggling class, and being expected to juggle four balls the very first time. We try, but it's hopeless. Ah au aha; am au an; ena abhyam aih... and what's the rest? As the other members of the class recite, you remember the last line - but then you forget the first line. Your turn to recite is coming up... FEAR... you can't hold all that stuff in your mind at once... you are going to fail... everyone is going to laugh at you... everybody will know your secret, that you've been a phony all these years... your world is collapsing... you may lose your job and all your friends and end up a street person... PANIC! (I'm exaggerating a little, but only a little.)
Miraculously, most of us do manage to repeat most of the syllables. But our hearts are pounding.
Of course, when someone does fail, no one laughs. No one cares. It's not the end of the world. Our fear of failure was an illusion, but nevertheless a real fear at the time. It's amazing how much fear can be generated by this simple exercise. Hardly anyone can go through this without being shaken.
When we finish, Vyaas asks us what has been going through our minds. We spend the rest of the evening talking about the fact that we did not listen to the sounds, experience them, and repeat them; instead, we were thinking about ourselves, our inadequacies, the competitive situation, how we appeared to the other students... We thought about everything except the sounds we were supposed to be listening to. We defeated ourselves. More precisely, he set us up so we would inevitably defeat ourselves - he is driving at something.
He asks us to enter into an agreement. For the rest of the class, we agree to "follow the point." In other words, when he is saying something, we just listen. When he is pointing to something on an alphabet chart, we just look. If we find ourselves drifting off, we come back to the present. When we are called on to recite, we just think about the problem at hand. When someone else recites, we give them our full attention and support (instead of thinking about what we are going to say when it's our turn).
We also agree to interrupt and ask questions any time we are lost - we give ourselves permission to do that, and we also give everyone else permission to do the same. No doubt you have had the experience of being in a classroom and being so lost that you didn't even know what to ask. You are afraid that if you ask a dumb question, you will embarrass yourself. Of course the guy sitting next to you is just as lost, but he is afraid to ask a question for the same reason. Everybody sits there wishing someone would stop the professor and ask a question, but no one does, so the professor keeps talking and leaves everyone farther and farther behind. Vyaas wants to avoid this situation at all costs, so we agree in advance to stop him any time we are not able to follow the point.
There is no more Sanskrit Friday night. We spend the entire evening talking about how we defeated ourselves, and what we can do about it. The agreements are the key to the whole thing. Everybody has to understand what we are agreeing to do, and why. We have to get the agreements nailed down before proceeding.
He is teaching us the elements of yoga (not hatha yoga).
When the Sanskrit class proper begins Saturday morning, we are in a different space. Everyone follows the point. Everyone asks questions. This is like no classroom I have ever been in before. We learn at an incredible speed. By Saturday night, we have all learned the alphabet, and we are able to read sutras in Sanskrit, in the devanagari script. I mean everybody - not just the A students, but the old ladies too. Waiting for the slow students doesn't hold the fast students back - it helps us to go even faster.
After a few hours of this, there are no class divisions, no smart students and dumb students. We are all there together, in a way that we have seldom been together with anybody in our entire lives. Not only that, the effort of sustained concentration has a remarkably energizing effect. By Sunday afternoon we may be physically tired, but we hardly notice that. The class gives us an energy boost that lasts for weeks.
Sunday night, when the class is over, we go back to our separate lives - back to The World. But we carry with us the knowledge that life doesn't have to be the way it usually is. Something better is possible.
One afternoon I was looking around the bookstore at the University of Texas. I picked up a textbook for a social psychology class and looked through it. It was a collection of essays. One of them was called "The Third Wave" by Ron Jones. I started reading it. I had heard about The Wave before, but it didn't make much of an impression the first time I heard about it. This time, for some reason, it did.
Mr. Jones was a high school teacher in Palo Alto, California (the area now known as Silicon Valley) in 1967. He was teaching a 10th grade world history class. When they studied Nazi Germany, he decided to let them experience Nazism, instead of just telling them about it. He started this experiment on a Monday. The essay I read described what happened that day, and in the next four days.
He started by telling them that strength comes from discipline. Most people in the class already had some experience of discipline. Athletes, musicians, and ballet dancers have to spend many hours practicing. Straight A students have to spend many hours studying. But no one had ever made an issue of discipline. It had always been in the background, one of life's necessary evils.
The 1960's were a rebellious time. "Individualism" was the watchword. Everybody wanted to do their own thing. Students were defying the authorities. They had the first riots at Berkeley in the fall of 1964, and in the following couple of years the unrest spread everywhere, even to small colleges in remote areas, and even to some high schools (including Cubberley). There were civil rights marches and anti-war rallies. Some students talked openly of revolution.
Meanwhile, The Pill had been introduced in 1964. Before that, girls had to be very careful about sex. A girl who got pregnant could ruin her whole life. Now, all of a sudden, you could take this little pill and have as much sex as you wanted, with no consequences...
This was also the time when psychedelics first became popular. In the 1963-64 school year, drugs were practically unknown in white middle class schools. By 1966, millions of people were dropping acid. 1967 was the year of the flower children. Boys were letting their hair grow. The button-down era of the 1950s was giving way to the era of hippies. The San Francisco area, including Palo Alto (especially Palo Alto), led the way.
In the midst of all this, Ron Jones decided to introduce the idea of Nazism to his sophomores.
He asked them to sit up, erect, instead of slouching in their seats. Put your feet flat on the floor, straight ahead of you, he said, and keep your back straight. Look up here and pay attention. They did. They were intrigued. This was a new concept to them.
He asked them to get up and mill around the room. They did. Then he said "Take your seats." There was a scramble for seats. He said "Let's do it again, but this time do it more precisely. Quietly. Go straight to your seats, with no wasted motion, and don't get in each other's way." They tried it again. And again. After a few times they could take their seats in five seconds, noiselessly.
He told them to stand up and address him as "Mr. Jones" before answering a question. "Who was the leader of Nazi Germany? Andrea?" Andrea stood up and said "Mr. Jones. Hitler." Then she sat down, briskly. "When did Germany invade Poland? David?" David stood up and said "Mr. Jones. 1939." He too stood up and sat down briskly.
The students suddenly found that they were all there together. Paying attention to the teacher, following the same guidelines when they sat and when they stood, they entered a new space.
Now, let Mr. Jones tell the story -
Students who responded in a sluggish manner were
reprimanded and in every case made to repeat their behavior
until it was a model of punctuality and respect. The
intensity of the response became more important than the
content. To accentuate this, I requested answers to be
given in three words or less. Students were rewarded for
making an effort at answering or asking questions. They
were also acknowledged for doing this in a crisp and
attentive manner. Soon everyone in the class began popping
up with answers and questions. The
involvement level in the class moved from the few who
always dominated discussions to the entire
class.
Even stranger was the gradual improvement in the quality
of answers. Everyone seemed to be listening more intently.
New people were speaking. Answers started to stretch out as
students usually hesitant to speak found support for their
effort.
That was the first day. The real surprise came on Tuesday. Mr. Jones walked into his classroom, and found the entire class sitting silently, at attention, feet flat on the floor, backs erect, just as he had taught them. This was unprecedented. This was incredible. Mr. Jones surveyed the room, amazed, unsure what to do. He had not expected this. He must have wondered, at least momentarily, if they were being sarcastic. But they obviously weren't.
He went to the blackboard and wrote
STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE.
Then, below this, he wrote
STRENGTH THROUGH COMMUNITY.
Let him continue the story -
While the class sat in stern silence I began to talk, lecture, sermonize about the value of community. At this stage of the game I was debating in my own mind whether to stop the experiment or continue. I hadn't planned such intensity of compliance. In fact I was surprised to find the ideas on discipline enacted at all. While debating whether to stop or go on with the experiment I talked on and on about community. I made up stories from my experiences as an athlete, coach and historian. It was easy. Community is that bond between individuals who work and struggle together. It's raising a barn with your neighbors, it's feeling that you are a part of something beyond yourself, a movement, a team, La Raza, a cause.
Before dismissing the class on Tuesday, Mr. Jones created a class salute - "without forethought," he says. He called it the Third Wave salute. Now his creature had a name. The students were part of The Third Wave. They exchanged the salute whenever they saw each other. Naturally this attracted attention from other students, who wanted to know what was going on. Many of them wanted to join The Wave.
On Wednesday, thirteen new students joined the class. Mr. Jones issued membership cards. Then he introduced another principle,
STRENGTH THROUGH ACTION.
On Wednesday and Thursday, he found that his creation had a life of its own. The whole school was aware of it. For many students, The Wave had suddenly become the center of their existence. They had left their old lives behind and entered a new life.
I too got caught up in this "experiment." Remember, I was reading all this in the bookstore. I started feeling faint. It was hard to breathe. I had to sit down. There were no chairs. I found a pile of textbooks and sat on them, and continued reading, entranced. This story was a revelation to me. It was like coming out of a bad dream and waking up to a beautiful sunlit day.
Mr. Jones told his students that there would be a rally on Friday. When they were all assembled in the auditorium, he brought the experiment to an abrupt end. He told them that the whole thing was a hoax. They were stunned. So was I.
I won't describe all the details here. You can read the rest of it online, on the Third Wave web sites (which are anti-Wave, of course). The story of The Wave has been told several times, and the version I read that day in the bookstore doesn't seem to be available anymore, but the online version will give you the idea.
At the rally, in his closing remarks, Mr. Jones said
Through the experience of the past week we have all tasted what it was like to live and act in Nazi Germany.
Of course, this was supposed to be a Very Bad Thing. Mr. Jones told his students that their brief experience of the Nazi mentality was a shameful secret that they would carry with them forever.
That's what he told them. He told them what to think about the events of the past week, and they accepted what he said. But they didn't feel that way themselves. To them, there was nothing shameful about The Wave. It wasn't something to be forgotten, it was a precious memory to be cherished forever.
If you read between the lines, it is clear that Mr. Jones himself didn't really believe his own lesson. Throughout the week, he had been ambivalent. He kept telling himself it was just a history lesson, just an "experiment." He was going to give his students a brief experience of Nazism, and then tell them they should feel guilty about going along with it and liking it. But it is clear that he was as caught up in it as they were, he loved it as much as they did, and at the end, he was as devastated as his students. Let's let him finish his story:
For a week in the middle of a school year we had shared fully in life.
The Third Wave had ended. I glanced over my shoulder. Robert [a student who had been particularly caught up in The Wave] was crying. Students slowly rose from their chairs and without words filed into the outdoor light. I walked over to Robert and threw my arms around him. Robert was sobbing. Taking in large uncomfortable gulps of air. "It's over. It's all right." In our consoling each other we became a rock in the stream of exiting students.
Some swirled back to momentarily hold Robert and me. Others cried openly and then brushed away tears to carry on. Human beings circling and holding each other. Moving toward the door and the world outside.
The Third Wave story as Ron Jones himself told it
A page of references about the Wave
Some of the details in the previous section came from the movie, not the original article.
This page has evolved over a period of years. When I first put this material on my site, the Sanskrit story and the Third wave story were on separate pages. Later I decided to put them on the same page. I thought the juxtaposition would make a point by itself. There was no discussion. What you have seen so far was the whole thing. At that time I had no intention of debunking the Third Wave. I believed that it happened just as described. I also believed what Ron Jones said: "Through the experience of the past week we have all tasted what it was like to live and act in Nazi Germany."
Now for the debunking. In 2002, I added the following discussion. In this section I jumped to a false conclusion. There is a paragraph which is not true. I'm going to leave it here, for the record. It is printed against a dark background.
In my retelling of the Third Wave story, I shifted the point of view to emphasize the similarity to the Sanskrit class. In both cases a group of people left their previous lives behind and entered a new space, where they had a glimpse of a better life, and then returned to the world outside.
In my version of the story, I passed over the rally, which was the main point of the original story. Ron Jones presents The Wave not as a good thing, but rather as a temptation that has to be resisted. I will come back to that in the main discussion below. First I want to attack the story on another level. It's not what it purports to be.
The Third Wave didn't actually happen, at least not as Ron Jones described it. It may have some basis in fact, but most of it is fiction. It's a fable, intended to make a political point. However, it is not presented as a fable. It is supposed to be historical fact. It isn't.
When you read the story and get caught up in it, suspension of disbelief kicks in, and it's easy to believe that it all happened just as described. I believed it myself for a long time. I read the Third Wave story in 1981. I'm writing this in 2002. It was only a few days ago that it finally occurred to me to question whether it happened.
But if you stop and think about it in the hard light of common sense, many of the details are implausible. The rally could not have happened as described. I'm going to discuss five examples of things that are unrealistic in his story, and then look at the external evidence.
First Problem. There is a jarring discordant note at the very beginning. Ron Jones says that when he encountered Steve, his former student who had been part of The Third Wave, he didn't recognize him at first. If Steve was a sophomore in 1967, then he was in the graduating class of 1969. They must have seen each other frequently around the campus for two years after the Wave. Cubberley isn't a big enough place to get lost in. Teachers don't forget students that soon, especially if the student was part of such an intense experience.
The meeting with Steve was the first discrepancy I noticed. When I caught on that this part of the story is fiction, I started questioning the rest of it, and it didn't take long for everything to fall into place.
Second problem. At the rally on Friday, Mr Jones said
The group seemed to be composed of students from many persuasions. There were the athletes, the social prominents, the student leaders, the loners, the group of kids that always left school early, the bikers, the pseudo hip, a few representatives of the school's dadaist click (sic), and some of the students that hung out at the laundromat.
No, I don't think that's possible. He's making this up. I could believe that something like The Wave could spread to all members of one segment of the school (it might spread to all the jocks, for example), but not to all the different cliques. Not in a few days. That's not how high school sociology works.
Third problem. He says he didn't plan the rally until Thursday, didn't even conceive it, but he managed to produce the event by 11:30 Friday morning. He arranged to have the use of the auditorium, he had several friends posing as reporters and photographers, he had Third Wave banners hanging like clouds over the assembly, he had a film of a Nuremburg rally ready to roll, and so forth, all in less than 24 hours, and it all went off without a hitch. No, I don't think so. An event like that has to be planned a long time in advance. It would take a week just to make the banners.
Fourth problem. At the rally, Mr Jones spends the first few minutes getting them worked into a frenzy with chants of "Strength through discipline." He turns the TV on at 12:05. Nothing happens. At 12:07, somebody stands up and says "There isn't any leader is there?"
This is absolutely unrealistic. A student in that situation would not jump to that conclusion after two minutes. When no picture appeared on the TV, everybody would assume that there must be a technical glitch. The program has been delayed for some reason. Well, delays happen. After the buildup they have been given, it would never cross their minds that the whole thing might be a hoax. That possibility wouldn't even occur to them. After a few minutes, the students would start talking to each other. The noise level would increase. They would still think there was a technical glitch. After twenty minutes, the ones with short attention spans would lose interest and start to leave the auditorium. But only a few would leave. Most of them would be stomping their feet and chanting "Strength through discipline!"
In Mr. Jones's imagination - and here I mean Mr. Jones the author of the story, not Mr. Jones the speaker at the rally - the audience is so receptive to his message that they have already anticipated most of it before he tells them. In his imagination, as he sits at his desk writing the story, they catch on immediately that there is no leader, and then it dawns on them: of course, we should have known! In Mr. Jones's imagination the students already know, in their heart of hearts, that they are guilty, and it only remains for him to spell it out while they sit there in meek silence.
In reality, he would be facing a crowd - not an audience, a crowd - of 200 teenagers who have been worked up to a fever pitch of excitement and then disappointed. If he tried to tell them there was no leader, they wouldn't believe him. At least not at first. Most of them don't even know Mr. Jones. They heard about the leader from their friends, and in their minds he exists independently of Mr. Jones. If Mr. Jones did convince them that the rally was a hoax, perhaps by showing them that there was no cable feeding into the TV, the reaction would be anger. When they realized that they had been set up and lied to, they would feel anything but guilty.
They thought the long-awaited revolution had finally started, and now it turns out to be a trick. The idea that they were in the wrong would be the last thing on anybody's mind. They would be in no mood for a sermon from Mr. Jones.
I wouldn't want to be there at that moment. Certainly not in his shoes. Do you remember what happened when Ross Perot suddenly withdrew from the Presidential race? His followers felt betrayed. They trashed his offices. They smashed his computers and threw his filing cabinets out the window. Some of them were irate enough to have killed Perot if they could have gotten to him that night. That's the kind of crowd Mr. Jones would be facing. What do you mean, there's no leader?! Fuck you!!!
The fifth (and most important) problem. Now we come to the crux of the matter. When he told them the rally was to remain a secret, all 200 students heard what he said and got the message. This is the most unrealistic thing in the whole story.
He tells the students (the ones just described in problem #4)
"If our enactment of the Fascist mentality is complete not one of you will ever admit to being at this final Third Wave rally."
And then at the very end he says
"And as predicted (!) we also shared a deep secret. In the four years I taught at Cubberley High School no one ever admitted to attending the Third Wave Rally."
If there was a rally, there would be no question of "admitting" anything. With 200 students missing from 4th period class, it would be obvious who was there and who wasn't.
But what I want to focus on is the idea that they all heard and understood what he said about their "enactment of the Fascist mentality." Anyone who has ever been in a classroom knows that that's not how it works. Students don't always understand what you tell them, even under ideal circumstances. If you have 25 students in a quiet room, when you tell them something they don't all hear it, let alone get it. With 200 students in a state of emotional upheaval, many of them wouldn't even hear his instruction about secrecy, and even if they heard it, how many would understand it?
Remember, we are talking about 10th graders. Many of them couldn't spell or define words like "enactment" and "mentality." Some of them are hearing about Nazi Germany for the first time. Some of them couldn't locate Germany on a map. Most of them aren't even in his history class. They just heard about the Third Wave from a friend the day before and don't know anything about how it started on Monday. They came to the rally in good faith, expecting to see the leader they have heard about.
Mr. Jones tells these kids that there is no leader, and then, assuming anybody is still listening at that point, he tells them that (a) they joined the Third Wave, therefore they have been enacting the Fascist mentality, (b) therefore they have taken the first step on a path that leads to war and mass murder, (c) therefore they should be deeply ashamed of themselves, and finally (d) since their enactment of the Fascist mentality has to be complete, and since they all know that denial is an essential part of the Fascist mentality, they will never admit to anyone that they attended the rally.
We are supposed to believe that 200 out of 200 students (the same ones described in problem #4) followed this train of thought and accepted the conclusion.
In Mr. Jones's imagination, when he shows them images of the Third Reich, they all recognize those images, they all feel the emotions the images are supposed to evoke, they all make the connection with their own behavior, and they all feel properly guilty. That takes us through step (c). In the real world, at the rally we are considering, it wouldn't happen like that. Some of the students wouldn't even recognize images of the Third Reich, and even if they did recognize the images, most of them wouldn't feel what they were supposed to feel. Their reaction, in most cases, would be "Huh?" or "So what?"
Mr. Jones's scenario up to step (c) isn't totally absurd. I can imagine some people reacting the way he imagines - not teenagers at a rally, but other people in other circumstances. I can imagine an adult being tempted by the fascist mentality, and then being ashamed of himself. Step (d), however, is totally absurd. The idea that 200 out of 200 students got as far as (c) is far-fetched enough. The idea that they made the step from (c) to (d) is simply preposterous. It could not and did not happen.
I think I have given enough examples to illustrate that the details of this story don't stand up under examination. Looking at the story as a whole, it's very implausible that so much could happen in five days. We are dealing with a story here - five days of dramatic time, not actual time. As Ron Jones himself said,
"It's taken three years. I can tell you and anyone else about the Third Wave. It's now just a dream, something to remember, no it's something we tried to forget."
What we have here is not factual history but a dream, on the hazy boundary between remembering and forgetting.
Now, let's turn to the external evidence. It could be argued that the story must be true, because if it had no factual basis at all, then someone from Cubberley High would have written a letter to the Whole Earth Catalog and said "Wait a minute, I was there in 1967 and no such thing happened." Stewart Brand is an honest man, and if he realized he had published an outright lie he would have retracted it in no uncertain terms. At least I think he would. I'm not absolutely sure of that. Maybe even Stewart Brand is willing to lie to make a point against National Socialism. Maybe someone from Cubberley did try to debunk the story when it first appeared, but no one wanted to listen.
The argument that "someone would have said something" can be turned around: if the Third Wave did happen, then some of the participants would have published their memoirs of the event. Some of the interested parties would have spoken up and said "I was there, and this is what happened as I remember it. This is how it affected my life." Some of them would have put up web sites. But there are no such web sites. As far as I can tell, no one who was there has ever written about the Third Wave. None of the 200+ students who were supposedly in The Wave, none of the students who were against The Wave and therefore under no obligation of secrecy, none of the other students who were there at the time, none of the teachers, none of the school counselors, none of the parents, none of his friends who posed as reporters and photographers at the rally... nobody who was there. You can do a google search to confirm this.
The Third Wave, if it happened - more precisely, if it happened as described - would have been the biggest event of the school year at Cubberley High, indeed the biggest event that ever happened there. It would have been the defining event for Cubberley, just like Columbine has its defining event. For the students involved, it would have been the biggest event of their young lives. Mr. Jones said "Many students were over the line. The Third Wave had become the center of their existence." After more than 20 years I still remember vividly the effect it had on me, just reading about it. But we are supposed to believe that this legendary event disappeared without a trace. The great Wave didn't even leave ripples in its wake, until Mr. Jones "remembered" it.
I know a man, an old friend of the family, who was a Marine in the Second World War. He fought at the battle of Iwo Jima. It wasn't fun, it was a harrowing experience, but it was the most intense experience of his life, and it left a permanent mark. To this day that's his identity: he's a Marine who fought at Iwo Jima. That's who he is, and everything else in his life is secondary. He has Iwo Jima license plates on his car. He's 81 years old now, but he and his fellow Marines (the few who are still alive and able to travel) still have reunions.
Again I invoke the hard light of common sense: an intense experience leaves a permanent mark. If the Third Wave happened as described, it would not have been forgotten. It would have been talked about for years. It would be part of the school folklore at Cubberley High. For most of the participants, the Third Wave would be their identity even now. They would be Wavers. They would still have reunions, just like my elderly friend and his fellow Marines.
At this point I may be belaboring the obvious, but I want to focus once again on the idea that everyone forgot about the Third Wave until Mr. Jones "remembered" it three years later. If the rally took place at noon on Friday, then what happened Friday afternoon, and over the weekend? When students who had not gone to the rally talked to their friends who had been there, and asked them what happened, what kind of response did they get? "Rally? What are you talking about? There was no rally." When parents asked their children about it, what response did they get? "Our enactment of the Fascist mentality is complete, Mom, so I don't remember anything about it."
What happened in Mr. Jones's history class the following Monday? Was there no followup discussion? Did they just move on to some other subject? Are we really supposed to believe not only that the Third Wave suddenly ceased to exist, but that even the memory of it was wiped out? What about the hundreds of students who heard about the Wave, but didn't go to the rally? Had their memories also been wiped blank? What about the three girls in the class who were specifically not invited to the rally? Had they also forgotten? Did they have nothing to say on Monday?
What about the school counselors who interviewed everyone in Mr. Jones's class, the cook who had been baking Third Wave chocolate chip cookies, the librarian who put a 30' banner over the library entrance, and the principal who gave Mr. Jones the Third Wave salute at a faculty meeting? Were their memories blanked out?
To sum up: his story doesn't make sense. Both the internal evidence and the external evidence (or lack of it) point to the same conclusion. The Third Wave did not happen as Ron Jones described it.
This is what I think must have happened:
This is the paragraph that's wrong:
Mr. Jones probably did introduce his students to the idea of "strength through discipline." He was surprised and dismayed by their positive response, so he gave them a lecture about the evils of Nazism. I think that much of the story is probably factual, and his imagination took over from there. He was even more surprised and dismayed by his own ambiguous feelings, and the story was written to exorcise those feelings. The rally was a dream that took place entirely in his own mind, and he was the one who went through steps (a), (b), and (c). If the rally was a dream, then everything makes sense. His audience was perfectly receptive to his message because he was both speaker and audience. No one remembered going to the rally because no one went to the rally. It wasn't an event in the external world.
I'm not saying the story is 100% fiction. There may have been a Third Wave of some kind. I would like to talk to some people who were at Cubberley, and find out what actually happened. There should be something about The Third Wave in the Yearbook for 1967 (or 1969), if it happened at all.
The preceeding remarks were written in September of 2002. At that time I was just using logic to try to figure out what happened. As of November, 2003, there is no need to speculate. I have started getting reports from former Cubberley students. I have heard from two, so far: Bill Parrish and Hal Sampson. They were photographers for the school paper. Hal Sampson attended the rally, but he was there as a journalist, not as a member of the Wave. Bill's photographs and Hal's statement can be found on the evidence page.
It turns out that I went too far last year. I concluded that the rally wasn't an event in the external world at all, it only happened in Mr. Jones's imagination. This is not true.
In the spring of 1967, Mr. Jones introduced the Third Wave concept to his second, third, and sixth period sophomore Contemporary World classes. That much is certain. The exact sequence of events remains to be determined. I will have more to say about this as more reports come in. (I still haven't heard from anybody who was in one of Mr. Jones's classes.)
I do know this much: The "rally" took place on Wednesday, April 5, in a lecture room with tiered seats, which has a capacity of 100-150 people. It was about two thirds full at the beginning of the meeting. There were no banners hung in the room, and no guards questioned the photographer when he came in. Mr. Jones did not get the students worked up with chants of "Strength through discipline." He turned on the TV, which showed only "snow" (like you get between channels). Then he left the room. After a few minutes, some students started to leave. The photographer decided there was nothing to photograph, and he left. At that time there were only about 40-50 students in the room. Mr. Jones eventually returned and told the remaining students that there was no leader, it was a hoax.
So the story is based on an actual event. It didn't happen as described in the story - as I said above, the rally as he described it could not and did not happen - but there was a rally, or at least a meeting that was billed as a rally, contrary to what I thought last year. It's odd that I failed to distinguish between "it happened" and "some of it happened," since I have made such a big issue of this distinction on other pages.
After the Third Wave was over, there was an article in the school paper, The Catamount, dated April 21, 1967. (Thanks to Bill Parrish for scanning this article!) The article said
"Most were disillusioned. As one second period Third Waver, Joel Amkraut, put it, 'Everyone feels stupid about it. He sure made fools of us. I guess I expected a national leader.' Another, Todd Austin, Mr. Jones's personal bodyguard, expressed the opinion that 'I really kind of liked it. I went to the rally because I was curious.' Steve Coniglio was pleased with the outcome. 'It was probably the most interesting unit I've had. It was successful in its goal to achieve the emotions of the Germans under the Nazi reign.' This is undoubtedly not the last attempt at a three party system as it came to a halt due to a disillusioned leader and not a disenchanted membership."
So much for the deep secret.
Two years later, some of the graduating seniors mentioned the Third Wave in their Yearbook entries. (Again, thanks to Bill Parrish for this information.) There was nothing secret about it.
Not only that, the Third Wave itself, i.e. the part before the rally, didn't happen as he described it. Hal Sampson says,
"Very few students outside his classes knew anything about the Third Wave in the year it happened, except perhaps from reading school newspaper coverage. It wasn't a big deal that year, except among some parents who objected to Jones' teaching style."
When Mr. Jones published his story, he didn't say it was a dramatization. It was presented as factual history when it first appeared in the Whole Earth Catalog, thirty years ago, and it's still presented that way now. Last year I thought he was simply lying about the rally, but now I see that it's not that simple. It is based on actual events: he told them there was a leader, got them assembled in a room, turned on a blank tv, and then (later, when he returned) he told them it was a hoax. That much is true. He started with that and added embellishments to make a political point. The question is whether the story with the embellishments is a true story or a lie.
Something did happen, but it didn't happen as he described it. So is he lying or not? It's a judgment call, but I would say he's lying. He is supposed to be a history teacher. He should stick to the facts. There is one lesson above all others that a history teacher should teach: history is about facts.
I still think the intent of the story is totally false: the accusation of "denial" is as absurd here as it is in the larger story which is the prototype for this one. Whatever happened at Cubberley, everyone remembered it and no one tried to deny it.
He confirms this himself back at the beginning of the story. When he met Steve, Steve didn't try to deny anything. He hadn't forgotten and didn't pretend he had forgotten. On the contrary, Steve gave him the salute. Steve reminded him of it: "Mr Jones do you remember the Third Wave?"
Ron Jones didn't just say there was a Third Wave rally, he said there was a Third Wave rally and everyone denied it afterward, or "forgot" about it. That is definitely a lie.
In the main discussion below, I'm going to consider the story as a story. At that stage the question won't be whether it's true on a factual level, but whether it's true on a thematic level. Is the moral of the story valid? Did the students who attended the rally have anything to be ashamed of?
However, I don't want to make light of the fact that the story is not literally true.
The fact that it didn't happen as he described it is important. The fact that it took me 21 years to catch on that he's lying is also important. It's hard to get things in focus and separate what's real from what isn't. That's the historian's job: to figure out what really happened. It's just as difficult as what scientists do. We are enmeshed in a web of lies, on many levels, and extricating ourselves is no easy task.
The fact that I went too far last year is also important. As long as I was just analyzing his story with logic, I could only arrive at part of the truth. It was only when I started getting reports from Cubberley graduates that I was able to get things nailed down. There is no substitute for evidence.
The message the students supposedly got at the rally is the message we are supposed to get from the story: denial is the essence of the "Fascist mentality." Nazis are dishonest. It's time for all of us to rethink the question of who is honest and who isn't. I'm trying as hard as I can to uncover the facts, and when I discovered that I was wrong about the rally, I admitted it and corrected my error. He's the one who's lying. He's lying about what happened during the Third Wave, he's lying about what happened afterward, and he's lying about what happened in the Third Reich. I will return to this below.
Before continuing the discussion of the Third Wave, I need to say something about my own personal background. From what I have said so far, you can already tell that I don't believe everything I hear.
When I was in high school, I hated pep rallies. We had them during homeroom period, the second period in the morning. Everybody would go to their home room first, then go to the gym for the rally. I would start out with the others, but instead of going to the gym, I would turn into a vacant classroom and spend the next half hour reading. When I heard the other students returning from the rally, I would go out into the hall and mix with them, and go to my third period class.
The teachers never caught on, but after a while some of my friends noticed that I was never at the rallies, and some of them started doing the same thing. By the end of my senior year, there were several of us who went to our own little secret study hall when we were supposed to be jumping up and down and screaming.
I have always been uncomfortable in groups, especially when they have a belief system. When people form a consensus among themselves, I make a point to separate myself from the consensus. When they start repeating words mindlessly, I leave.
So it seems totally out of character for me, of all people, to like The Third Wave. If something like that had happened at my school, I would have been anti-Wave. Nevertheless, when I read about it, my reaction was as described above.
As I said on another page, I used to eat lunch at the Hare Krishna restaurant, not because I believe in their religion, but simply because it was such a relief to get out of America for an hour or so. Reading about The Wave was exactly like that. It was a chance to escape. But it's hard to explain what I want to escape from. Television and Muzak, first of all, but there is a lot more to it than that. It's not exactly "America." Going to another country wouldn't help. I wish it were that easy.
I live in a world that trivializes everything. What if I found something I could take seriously? What a rush that would be!
There have been several occasions in my life when that happened. I guess the first time must have been when I read Atlas Shrugged. After reading two chapters, I knew my life would never be the same. I put everything else aside and read the book straight through in four days. When Dagny Taggart's plane crashes in Galt's Gulch, John Galt picks her out of the wreckage. Their eyes meet, and in this moment of recognition he says "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" In other words they never had to take the outside world seriously: but now, finally, she has arrived in a place where she can take something seriously. I thought I had arrived there, too.
The rush only lasted a few months. When I read For the New Intellectual, I knew Ayn Rand wasn't who I thought she was. Looking back now, with more mature judgment, I know that she was almost the opposite of what she presented herself to be. Nevertheless, reading Atlas Shrugged gave me a glimpse of what it would be like to escape from the triviality of everyday life.
A few years later I had my first acid trip. Again, I thought I had found something I could take seriously. Then there was the day I read about The Wave, as described above. Then came marijuana, which didn't reveal its magic until quite a few years after my first acid trip. Then Engines of Creation. My disillusionment with that book was the original subject of this web site. In 1990 there was the Sanskrit class. In 1997 I discovered German folk music, which was a revelation to me, and finally last year I discovered trance music, another revelation.
Thus I am a skeptical loner who has nevertheless been through quite a few conversion experiences. I think each of them was valid in a way, but none of them turned out to be what I was really looking for (at least none of them alone, by itself).
The word "trivial" originally meant "something that blows in off the street." If you saw American Beauty, think of the scene at the end where the piece of paper is blowing back and forth in the wind. That's the original idea of trivial, and that's what our lives are supposed to be like: random, aimless, unfocused, blowing in the wind. Work at a meaningless job, watch tv, listen to Muzak, play ego games, chat, shop, smoke cigarettes, play golf, watch more tv, go to a nursing home. That's what I want to escape from. More precisely, I want to escape from the people who tell me I can't do anything else with my life - it's immoral and/or illegal to do something else.
There is another way to look at this. Like everyone, I have an inner dialog that goes on all the time. There are voices in my head, and usually they are just a random group of characters making a lot of noise. Sometimes it's like the Jerry Springer show. That's what I want to escape from. I would like the voices in my mind to conduct an ordered, harmonious conversation, like Vyaas's Sanskrit class. "The Kingdom of God is within you."
As I said in Ministry of Illusion,
If we have gotten the idea that Nazi Germany was a nation of crusaders, and life was one ecstatic rally after another - these movies throw cold water on all such illusions.
In the Nazi era, most Germans went about their business. Life in 1936 wasn't that different from what it had been a generation earlier, before the war. Mr. Jones said "Through the experience of the last week we have all tasted what it was like to live and act in Nazi Germany." This statement is false. That's not what it was like to live and act in Nazi Germany.
Some meetings of the Hitler Youth may have resembled the Third Wave. There must have been at least a few occasions when everyone was there together, as in the Sanskrit class described at the top of this page, and the boys and girls were inspired by visions of a transcendent future. There is nothing wrong with this.
But such occasions were rare. I am certain that most Germans (including members of the Nazi Party) would not have recognized themselves in Mr. Jones's story. They recognized themselves in movies such as Request Concert and The Great Love, which have absolutely nothing to do with The Third Wave.
I realize that there is a gaping hole in my argument here. Almost nobody has seen the movies I have seen. You can read my review, but that's not the same as seeing them. What I need to do is put at least one of them on the site, or at least a trailer. If you could see ten minutes of The Great Love, that would be worth more than a 20,000 word article. Putting streaming video on the site is beyond my capability right now, but I will do it eventually.
For the moment I will just say this: I saw 18 movies from the Nazi era, and I didn't see anything that I expected to see. They were the opposite of what I expected. There was very little violence, and what little there was came from the villains, not the heroes. There was nothing about the Jews. That whole issue never came up. The characters didn't resemble the "Nazi" stereotype at all. Skinheads would not recognize themselves in any of these movies. The world I saw in these movies had absolutely nothing to do with Castle Wolfenstein or any such cliché about Nazism, and it had nothing whatever to do with the Third Wave.
That's what I mean when I say Ron Jones is lying about what happened in the Third Reich. For further discussion of this, I refer you to Ministry of Illusion.
It may be true that the Wave was a reflection of Nazi ideals. The Third Reich was intended to be a cohesive society, as opposed to a random collection of individuals. National Socialism is the opposite of Social Atomism. Mr. Jones's story was designed to discredit the concept of a cohesive society. The lesson we are supposed to learn is that Nazi ideals lead straight to Auschwitz.
There are reasons for questioning whether the most notorious part of the Holocaust happened, i.e., the gas chambers. Nevertheless everyone, including the revisionists, acknowledges the obvious fact that the Holocaust, in a general sense, did happen. Jews were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps, where many of them died. Jews were also taken out and shot and buried in mass graves. This is not in dispute.
What I do want to dispute is the alleged causal link. If we lead disciplined, purposeful lives, then we are going to end up killing Jews. If we find strength in discipline, strength in community, and strength in action, then we are going to end up killing Jews. If we "share fully in life," as in the Wave and the Sanskrit class, then we will end up killing Jews. That's what we are supposed to believe. It's not true.
In fact it's so obviously absurd that I wonder how anyone could believe it. I also wonder why some people want us to believe it.
Why is this so important to them? That's the real puzzle.
Wait a minute... is it possible that I'm missing something here? Is it conceivable that they could be right after all? If we try to establish the Kingdom of God in our minds, and in our communities, then we will inevitably have to fight the Jews...?
Why? Why would that have to happen?
One reader took the trouble to send me some comments on an earlier version of this page. At that time the page just consisted of the first two sections, the Sanskrit story and my version of the Third Wave story. My correspondent probably wouldn't want his name mentioned here, so I will just quote a couple of his remarks, anonymously. He said
> The methods used in the Third wave are a form of
> collective thought control or even, you could call
it,
> hypnotism. A carrot is used to keep a persons
attention,
> in this case a repetitious drilling method (used
in
> modern armed forces and in several religious
cults)
> while any ideas the teacher puts in your head
> while in this state of stunned single mindedness
> have the air of gospel.
As I said on the No-rap page: a lot of people get very upset about "cults," without realizing that they are already in a cult. America is a cult. TV is a cult. Our thoughts are already controlled.
There are much more sophisticated ways to control thoughts than the Third Wave. Many decades ago, George Orwell said that the best way to enslave people is to tell them that they are free. The best way to control people's thoughts is to tell them that they are Critical Thinkers.
The reader mentioned above continued his comments:
> The brain becomes a human sponge incapable of
> abstract thought, no-one in under Ron Jones's
> (or Hitler's) spell was capable of tackling
> the complexities of metaphysics
> and independent thought IE thought not originated
> from the teacher, comes to a stand still.
Well, that's what they keep telling us. That's one of the things we are all supposed to believe: trance states are incompatible with creative thought. That's one of the lessons we are all supposed to learn.
In fact that's not how it works. The brain is a sponge anyway. Trance states don't make it any worse.
The idea that trance states are incompatible with creative thought is so obviously false that I wonder how anyone could believe it, and, just as in the previous case, I wonder why some people want us to believe it.
Creative thought didn't come to a standstill in the Third Reich. Far from it. Konrad Zuse invented the first computer in 1938, and had a working model in 1941, four years before Eniac. Zuse died recently, an unrepentant National Socialist to the end.
The Sanskrit class didn't interfere with creative thought. The trance state induced by marijuana encourages creative thought, at least for some people. In the early 1990's, after the Sanskrit class, I was smoking pot three or four times a week. That was one of the most creative times of my life. The ideas came so fast it was hard to write them down.
The real irony here is that the people who go on and on about "critical thinking" and "thought control" just keep repeating the same clichés and never think critically about them.
Ron Jones gives us all the clichés of Nazi "history" -
In ghostly images the history of the Third Reich paraded into the room. The discipline. The march of super race. The big lie. Arrogance, violence, terror. People being pushed into vans. The visual stench of death camps. Faces without eyes. The trials. The plea of ignorance. I was only doing my job...
When was the last time you heard anyone think critically about any of this stuff? They just keep repeating it over and over. In fact, if you look up what Hitler actually said about the Big Lie in Mein Kampf, it turns out he wasn't advocating it, he was complaining about it. But the self-styled "critical thinkers" never look anything up.
In fact the Third Wave story itself is just another instance of the Big Lie.
Let's return to the original question that Ron Jones raised at the beginning of his Nazi experiment:
Do you remember the question? It concerned a bewilderment at the German populace claiming ignorance and non-involvement in the Nazi movement. If I remember the question, it went something like this. How could the German soldier, teacher, railroad conductor, nurse, tax collector, the average citizen, claim at the end of the Third Reich that they knew nothing of what was going on?
The answer is supposed to be the "Fascist mentality." The Nazis found strength through discipline, strength through community, and strength through action, therefore they let the Holocaust happen. They let Hitler hypnotize them, therefore they pretended not to see their neighbors being taken away.
As I said above, the Holocaust, as a general phenomenon, is not in dispute. Yes, "it" happened, in some sense. But the lesson Mr. Jones wants us to learn is that there is a causal link: the Germans were disciplined and purposeful, and on certain occasions they let Hitler take them into a kind of trance state, therefore they stood by and let their neighbors be taken away. No, I don't think so. Their "Fascist mentality" had nothing to do with it.
People always stand by and let the police take their neighbors away. That's true everywhere.
Out of 70 million Germans, only a small fraction ever attended one of Hitler's rallies. As I said in Ministry of Illusion: for most Germans, as for most people in any country at any time, politics was a side issue. Most Germans didn't have a "fascist mentality" any more than most Danes, or most Frenchmen, or most people anywhere else, but they stood by and let the police take their neighbors away.
Do you know what happens in American jails and prisons? When the Drug Warriors arrest people for growing pot in their closets, this is what happens to them, and you probably don't want to know. Americans, like everyone else, watch their neighbors being taken away, and not only let it happen, but blank it out and pretend it isn't happening. Americans who have an anti-Nazi mentality, who have never been hypnotized, whose lives are utterly devoid of charisma, do exactly the same thing the Germans did. I wonder how the Critical Thinkers explain this phenomenon.
Now, let's put this subject into a larger context. The main theme of this site is transhumanism. Some of us are trying to evolve into a higher form of life. Our goal is a state of ultraintelligence.
This evolution takes place on more than one level. On one level, it's a matter of redesigning our cells. However, what I mean by evolution also involves a change of consciousness. It includes, among other things, the ability to go into trance states. It also includes the ability to engage each other's attention in such a way as to increase the bandwidth of our communication. Both the Sanskrit class and the Third Wave are examples of this. There are other ways to do this, which will be explored on other parts of the site.
Ron Jones said,
Even stranger was the gradual improvement in the quality of answers. Everyone seemed to be listening more intently. New people were speaking. Answers started to stretch out as students usually hesitant to speak found support for their effort.
The same thing happened in the Sanskrit class. The idea is not to restrict our intelligence, but to amplify it. What if other languages were taught the same way Vyaas teaches Sanskrit? What if calculus and computer science were taught that way? What if programmers engaged each other's attention when writing software?
When students are all there together, all focused on the teacher, they enter a new space in which their intelligence is amplified. That is our goal.
The question is how we can make use of trance states without falling into the trap of group-think. I know it can be done, at least by one person. Whether it can be done by more than one person is an open question. This is a non-trivial problem.
At the top of this page, I juxtaposed the Third Wave story with the Sankrit class, and retold the Third Wave story in such away as to suggest that it was not such a bad thing after all. At that time I still believed it, and my point was that The Wave (i.e. the first couple of days of it, before the membership cards and informers) was a good dream, not a nightmare. Nevertheless I recognize that Nazi ideals didn't materialize as Nazi realities. Nazi Germany wasn't the hellish place they tell us it was, but it wasn't the Camelot it promised to be, either. Hitler was a Sorcerer's Apprentice who unleashed forces he couldn't control, and National Socialism turned out to be a disaster.
Did it have to be that way? I don't know. Sometimes I think that if Hitler had died or retired in 1938 (or if he had thought things through in the first place, instead of going off half-cocked), the Third Reich might have led Europe and the world into a new Renaissance. But on reflection I doubt this. Nationalism is a false god, and anyone who tries to put the nation (any nation) at the center of the universe is going to come to a bad end.
The fact that the thought police are wrong doesn't imply that Hitler was right - and vice versa.
Now, I'm going to add some final comments a year later (fall of 2004). I have discovered a page which reveals who Ron Jones is -
The child of an interfaith marriage, Jones whose mother was Jewish, was not raised a Jew. His parents celebrated Christmas, "but we went to synagogue whenever the relatives came to town or for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs", he said.
He credits his Jewish grandmother with influencing his interest in storytelling. "What I remember most about Jewish life is the dinner table and listening to her stories."
Also, linked from that one, I found another page called "The Wave" Press Release which reveals what the Third Wave story is really about -
For the first time, breaking a long silence, Ron Jones tells "what really happened" in his classroom "experiment" The Wave. The video provides answers for Jews, educators, Holocaust survivors, religious groups and organizations on how the Holocaust could occur again, now, here, anywhere...
He warns of the destructive nature rooted in the pressure to belong or conform...
The importance of The Wave's message cannot be underestimated [sic], especially in lieu [sic] of the release of White House tapes revealing a past American President, Richard Nixon, voicing hostility towards the Jewish people.
What I wrote last year was naive. Of course history teachers should stick to the facts, but Mr. Jones wasn't trying to teach history. He was engaged in a very different kind of activity. What really happened in Palo Alto in 1967 is just beginning to emerge from the shadows.
From time to time there is a news story about somebody who paints swastikas on his own house or car, then calls the police to report a hate crime. The Third Wave was a vastly more sophisticated version of the same thing. Yes, the Third Wave was a form of thought control, but it wasn't the students whose thoughts were being controlled.
Ron Jones learned the art of storytelling from his Jewish grandmother. He learned his lessons very well. He set up an "experiment" in which he said was going to teach his students about Nazism. They unsuspectingly went along with it. Then he wrote a story in which we, all of us, are supposed to be guilty of secretly harboring a fascist mentality - which is a code word for anti-Jewish mentality - and this accusation still resonates in our minds today, more than three decades later. The Third Wave story is required reading in many high schools, in both Germany and America. This story, this accusation, is part of the dialogue we are all immersed in.
The idea of a social dialogue first emerged in ancient Greece. The Greek tragedies and comedies had actors saying their lines, and a chorus commenting on the action. This doesn't just happen on stage, it happens all the time, in our societies and in our minds. As Plato insisted, you can't really separate the social dialogue from the inner dialogue. The chorus was a fundamentally new thing - a new form of human consciousness. Tribal people didn't have a chorus. The emergence of the chorus was the dawning of "Western" civilization.
Meanwhile, in Israel, another kind of consciousness was emerging, reflected in another kind of dialogue, with prophets instead of the chorus. That too was a fundamentally new thing. When the Bible was introduced into Greece and other European countries, the two kinds of dialogue merged, and the result was the social dialogue that prevailed in "the West" for almost two millennia.
In the 20th century, the structure of the dialogue changed. Television has assumed the role of the chorus, and television, as we all know but aren't supposed to say, is controlled by... a certain unmentionable group. Anyone who even tries to point out what's happening is accused of "hate speech."
It's very difficult to think about this, for two reasons. The first reason is that it's complicated. The second reason is that it's a taboo subject. Some things can't be said in public, and since the inner dialogue is so closely entwined with the social dialogue, those things can't be thought either, except by a few intrepid individuals who are willing to stand outside of social reality.
Ironically, the lesson of the Third Wave, if it could be taken at face value, would be valid: the only way to understand what's going on here is to stand apart from the group and think for ourselves.
Unfortunately, however, it's not that simple. There is nothing simple about this. The Third Wave story can't be taken at face value. It is just a small part of an extremely subtle, multi-layered philosophical ju-jitsu.
The deep irony here is that the Jewish people in general, and the Holocaust in particular, are the one subject we are absolutely NOT supposed to think critically about. We are all subjected to a pressure to conform, as he says, but he is the one exerting the pressure, and it's not just psychological pressure. The Holocaust is the religion of our time, and heresy is not taken lightly. Anyone who questions the gas chamber story can get in serious legal trouble, and may be physically attacked or even killed. And yet THEY have the gall to lecture US about resisting conformity. The hypocrisy of this is just mind-boggling.
Equally amazing is the fact that people let them get away with it. Out of millions of people who have read the Third Wave story, almost everybody accepts it as genuine. As far as I can tell, I was the first to see through it and write an exposé, and it took me more than 20 years to catch on.
Why does this story have such a powerful resonance? Why is it still taught in schools after all these years? Why are so many people willing to accept his accusations of guilt and denial? Is it because the accusations are true? Not exactly.
In Mr. Jones's imagination, his audience is so receptive to his message that they have already anticipated most of it before he tells them. And he is right about that. In his imagination, as he sits at his desk writing the story, the members of his audience already know, in their heart of hearts, that they are guilty, and it only remains for him to spell it out while they sit there in meek silence. He is right about that, but the audience he has in mind isn't the students. When he was composing the story, he was thinking of the audience who would read the story.
The paragraph that I blacked out was wrong, but I was onto something. In a sense I was almost right: when someone reads the story, the rally isn't an event in the external world, it's an event in the reader's mind. It's the people who read the story (or see the movie) who are supposed to go through steps (a), (b), and (c). In ghostly images the history of the Third Reich parades into their minds. They recognize those images, they feel the emotions the images are supposed to evoke, they make the connection with their own behavior, and they feel properly guilty. That takes them through step (c) and sets them up for the accusation of denial in step (d).
But still, why are they willing to let him lead them through steps a, b, c, and d? How does it work, psychologically? Here is part of the answer:
Most people have an uneasy feeling that they are guilty about something, but they aren't sure what it is. It's there, but they don't want to bring it into full consciousness and identify it. Mr. Jones plays on that hidden guilt. That's what gives the story its energy. He reframes our vague feeling of guilt and tells us we are secretly harboring hostile thoughts about the Jews, and we are in denial about it. There is no way to challenge this, except to acknowledge the feelings we really do feel guilty about, which would involve bringing things into consciousness that we don't want to think about. So we accept his accusation, and pass it on to our children.
Well done, Mr. Jones. Freud would be proud. Not to mention your grandmother.
Further thoughts a year and three months later (winter of 2006)
As I said, the "hidden guilt" thing is only part of the answer, and I am not really sure it's valid, but that is the kind of answer we should be looking for. We have to understand HOW they do it. Even though Ron Jones is lying, somehow he ends up in the right and I end up in the wrong. When I point out that he is lying - and when I point out who he is (a Jew) and why he is lying - that's "hate speech." Instead of arguing with him on his own terms, the thing to do is get out of the box, and look at the system from the outside. Think about it like an engineer: HOW DOES IT WORK?
There are psychological reasons, structural reasons, why they can lie and still put us in the wrong. We have to understand how it works.
Years ago I read an article about the Disney theme parks. A Disney executive said
"It's really based on motion pictures, the relation of one idea to another as it would be laid out in a film. That's how the parks have been done. The only way to communicate with people is to lead them, step by step, with a clear relationship between the steps. That's obvious in motion pictures but most people ignore it. They don't realize form is its own language, which is what Walt knew so well."
In other words there is a science of leading people's attention from one step to the next.
Likewise, there is a closely related science of seizing the moral high ground and putting everybody else in the wrong. It's more important than Clauswitz. It's the most strategic thing there is.
I don't have all the answers yet, but I know this much: the first thing we have to do is name the issue. Get it out in the open.
May 7, 2006
Why can't I write about something simple and straightforward? Why do I have to write about things that are almost impossible to get in focus?
It has now been more than 25 years since that fateful day in the bookstore, when I read the Third Wave story. It has been more than three and a half years since that day in 2002 when I began to catch on that it could not have happened the way Mr. Jones described it. But I am only beginning to get it in focus. Some of what I said above needs to be revised, but instead of rewriting the page I am just going to add my new thoughts here at the bottom. I think it is important to record the progression of my thoughts as I penetrate new layers.
The part that needs to be reconsidered is this:
What I do want to dispute is the alleged causal link. If we lead disciplined, purposeful lives, then we are going to end up killing Jews. If we find strength in discipline, strength in community, and strength in action, then we are going to end up killing Jews. If we "share fully in life," as in the Wave and the Sanskrit class, then we will end up killing Jews. That's what we are supposed to believe. It's not true.
In fact it's so obviously absurd that I wonder how anyone could believe it. I also wonder why some people want us to believe it.
Why is this so important to them? That's the real puzzle.
I stand by my statement that the Third Wave is not an accurate description of life in the Third Reich, but the point that I missed is that it is an accurate description of the events that led up to the Third Reich. The SA was like the Third Wave. That is why this is so important to them. It's so glaringly obvious, I don't know why I didn't see it sooner.
"If we find strength in discipline, strength in community, and strength in action, then we are going to end up killing Jews" - no, that is a non sequitur, but if we found strength in discipline, strength in community, and strength in action, then we would be able to declare our independence from Jews. We would be able to free ourselves from the Jewish media, first of all, and that would make everything else possible.
Here is what prompted this line of thought. For some time now, there has been a Wikipedia article about the Third Wave, which had a link to my evidence page. That link has been removed. I put a new link on the page this afternoon, but who knows how long it will stay there. I investigated and found a discussion of the Third Wave page, which said they have "removed neo-Nazi links" - "Even apart from my doubts about Burkhead, his site doesn't qualify as a source for Wikipedia purposes." Excuse me?
There is not much I can do about this. The game is rigged. They own public space. They had enough foresight to start Wikipedia in the first place, and set it up so that it appears to be "neutral" but in fact isn't. The basic Wikipedia: Neutral point of view policy has been there all along, but so has the catch:
Morally offensive views - "What about views that are morally offensive to most Westerners, such as racism, sexism, and Holocaust denial, that some people actually hold? Surely we are not to be neutral about them?"
No, when you write a Wikipedia article you don't have to be neutral about "views that are morally offensive to most Westerners." That includes Third Wave denial. Not only that, you don't have to be neutral about FACTS that are morally offensive to most Westerners. You can't say that Ron Jones is a Jew telling a Jewish story, even though he is a Jew telling a Jewish story. If you say that, Wikipedia will delete links to your site. Of course "Westerners" is a code word, meaning the people who control the media, including Wikipedia itself. Wikipedia is no more neutral than the rest of the mainstream media.
The same thing happens again and again. They always end up owning public space.
Adolf Hitler recognized that the game is rigged, and he played a different game. He made an end run around the media. He went out and talked to people directly. Starting with just a handful of followers, he built up the SA until it had more than 2 million members when he took power in 1933. Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action...
And thus, for better or worse, Germany became an independent country. The Germans did not use their opportunity wisely. As I said before, anyone who puts the nation, any nation, at the center of the universe will come to a bad end. Nevertheless the Germans did establish their independence. They demonstrated that it can be done.
July 10, 2008
Another two years have passed. Yesterday I came back and read this page for the first time in quite a while. When I made this page, I juxtaposed the Sanskrit story with my version of the Third Wave story. My point was that the Wave phenomenon per se was a good thing. I still think so. Of course it depends on who does it and how it's done. If the teacher had been acting in good faith, like my Sanskrit teacher, the story would have a happier ending.
When the Sanskrit class was over, we went back to our separate lives - back to The World. But we carried with us the knowledge that life doesn't have to be the way it usually is. Something better is possible.
The Revolutionary Stories page - "Reality is, ultimately, our only weapon. Setting up an obvious contrast between unreality and reality is one of our basic strategies."
Six Reasons why the gas chamber story is a lie - The Third Wave story is a small lie which reinforces a much bigger lie. As I said above: this story, this accusation, is part of the dialogue we are all immersed in.
What is National Socialism - This is where I discuss the Big Lie and the post-Nazi concept, among other things. I have been rewriting this page in the spring of 2006, and I am not sure where I am going with it.
Why I am not a National Socialist - alternate title, "why I have deeply mixed feelings about the whole thing"
Agendas of Revisionists and anti-Revisionists - This page contains some information about my ambiguous background vis a vis the Jews. "I was, and still am, as close as you can get to being a Jew without being one. I only saw the positive side of Judaism for a long time..."
Epistemology 101, exercise 1 - Ayn Rand and the Law of Identity. For those who are interested in the philosophical aspect of this page - "We are enmeshed in a web of lies, on many levels, and extricating ourselves is no easy task" - the Law of Identity page is a continuation of that line of thought. I can tell from the log files that very few of my readers click through to the Law of Identity page. They are the ones I really want to reach. Incidentally, to avoid misunderstanding, maybe I should state here that I am not a follower of Ayn Rand. The Law of Identity page is another debunking page, like this one.
I would like to hear from anyone who was at Cubberley High School in the late sixties, especially anyone who was in Ron Jones's classes. I would particularly like to hear from Steve Coniglio, Todd Austin, Bill Klink, Joel Amkraut, and anyone who was in the Breakers.
But not only them... of course I want to hear from ANYBODY who can shed light on what happened.
I would also be interested in comments from Ron Jones and Stewart Brand, if they happen to read this. I think Ron must be aware of this page by now, but I don't really expect to hear from him. As for Stewart Brand... I hope you are proud of yourself, Stewart. I used to think you were an honest man.
I have started getting replies, and you can go to the evidence page to see statements from former Cubberley students. That page also has my address.
Lyle Burkhead
My address used to be on this page, right above my name. Last October I heard from another former Cubberley student. I won't give his name here, so as not to embarrass him. Like Bill Parrish and Hal Sampson, he was also a photographer for the Cubberley school paper, but he was a senior in 1967 and doesn't remember anything about the Wave. But the amazing thing is, he sent a message intended for Ron Jones to my address. He thought this page was written by Ron Jones!
How could anybody think that???
I keep wondering - who is reading my site? Is everybody out there just not getting it?
Here is an example of the Mickey Mouse level on which this page is discussed. This is from a discussion on metafilter.com:
"In any event, his entire debunking consists of him saying it seems unlikely to him. That's ridiculous. You can see a photograph of the banner that he claims couldn't have hung even after the rally was corroborated by a correspondent. The fact that it seems odd to you dosn't [sic] mean it didn't happen."
Am I talking to a vacuum?