Kenn Thomas interview for the Belgian e-zine Karmapolis

Kenn was kind enough to send me his interview for Karmapolis to run with the previous one.

http://www.karmapolis.be

Kenn Thomas

Specialist in parapolitics, the American conspiracy theorist and writer Kenn Thomas analyzes important historical facts, current situations and future trends to integrate them in a global approach of Contemporary Conspiracy. Questioned on FEMA camps, Kenn explains the difficulty to go on the rumor as well as the necessity to adopt a larger vision of current issues. While underlining the lack of interest and the disengagement of the Government in civil protection matters, Kenn highlights the passivity of a vast majority of American citizens as well as an orchestration of parapolitics events which has been conducted by the State for a long time. No need to declare the martial law, the authoritarian and regimented structures are already in place.

Kenn Thomas has tackled various subjects from extraterrestrials abductions to secret societies as well as parapolitical affairs such as the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks. In 1992, he founded the Steamshovel Press magazine, a forum for his theories. He is currently working on a second volume of Secret and Suppressed for Feral House which will include a chapter on US concentration camps.

An interview with Kenn Thomas

Kali : FEMA detention camps have been subjected to a lot of writing and speculation during these last years in United States. Videos, images and detailed descriptions of these camps are available on the net. It is difficult to source the origin of these descriptions. Do they really exist? What are their final purpose ?

Kenn Thomas : Activists in parapolitical studies—let’s call them “conspiranistas”—come up with these identifications to underscore the idea that America still has disaster areas that suffer from federal emergency mismanagement. As Randy Newman sings, “free to live in a cage in East St. Louis and the south side of Chicago,” with the obvious most recent example being post-Katrina New Orleans. The kind of detailed thing you refer to, with video images and all, rarely reaches a level above rumor. The conspiracy-denial world sees it as benign neglect; the conspiranistas would call it a deliberate, planned effort to corral the poor and dispossessed for future execution. I would characterize it more as malevolent neglect. Certainly when George Bush patted former FEMA management head Michael Brown on the back and said “Good job!”, he was rubbing it in, and announcing that he really didn’t give a damn about taking responsibility for the Katrina aftermath. Brown previously had been professionally wrapped up in cosmetic surgery for horses. On the other hand, someone like Lt. General Russell Honore, who led the relief convoy into New Orleans, is certainly not anyone people would expect to round up and execute civilians. He was a real hero, in fact, heading the largest military deployment in the American south since the Civil War in order to rescue people. But whether or not the concentration camps you describe exist, no one doubts the existence of large lots of empty, unused FEMA trailers while people displaced from disasters supposedly managed by FEMA remain homeless.

Kali : Are these camps the same ones that were used for Japanese and German civilians during World War II ?

Kenn Thomas: No. Different thing entirely. The equivalent of the old internment camps for the Japanese would be something like having a camp for people of Middle eastern ethnic origin. The Japanese camps, for instance, were in very specific places in Arkansas, California, Utah and Wyoming and were closed by official order in December 1945. These are not the places where the current FEMA camps are rumored.

Kali : Most of these camps are reported empty. Do you know if this is really the case? Is there a temporary or any other use "in the meantime" ?

Kenn Thomas : Empty is kind of the point, like all the empty FEMA trailers. It could be an abundance of advance planning and, hence, wasted resources. The idea that the Iraq war was all planned way before the 9/11 attacks. Of course this is true. At any given point, these neocon think tanks have war contingency plans for the entire world. So it wouldn’t be surprising if large, empty camps are in the ready in case a round-up of citizens under some kind of martial rule becomes possible.

Kali: Phil Schneider revealed the existence of railroad boxcars fitted with shackles aiming at deporting populations within the US. Did you hear about that ? Do you happen to have concrete facts confirming the existence of these potential human convoys?

Kenn Thomas : I have nothing more on it than Phil Schneider had. He died under unusual circumstances, after having done some interesting research on the early deaths of many prominent UFO researchers. I did a lecture following up on this for the International UFO conference in Laughlin one year. In the case of the Japanese camps, when detainees were released, many fled the areas where they had been detained by train.

Kali : Is there a link between FEMA camps and the underground military bases reported by many researchers such as Richard Sauder ?

Kenn Thomas : Sauder’s original research was all based on publically available documents on official government underground facilities and tunneling technology. People have been critical of that but who else took the time to collect all that data, and this is hard information, not rumor. As for taking a real-world look at the rumors of underground military bases, I would recommend Greg Bishops book, Project Beta, about Paul Bennewitz, who largely was responsible for the reports about humans working side-by-side with aliens at an underground base in Dulce, New Mexico in the 1980s. So far, Greg’s is the definitive work on the subject.

I last met Richard Sauder at Roswell a couple of years back. He’s a great, outgoing guy, although we had a bit of a clash about the nuances of our approaches to the 9/11 conspiracies.

Kali : Do you think their use could be imminent ? Considering the current political situation, what could lead to the declaration of martial law?

Kenn Thomas : I can’t remember who came up with the dictum, “why declare martial law when you don’t have to?”, but I think it fits your question. One part of America fits the description of a friendly fascist state: happy, SUV driving, George Bush supporting, McCitizens who have no need for a tank to be pointed at them in order to get them to obey. People with an awareness of the country’s parapolitics don’t need martial law declared to know they’re already in a fight against that kind of thing. We are in the middle of an election year, however, so expect to see various forms of manipulation, such as voter fraud and potential assassinations. In a sense, the Diebold voting machines, and the form of control they represent, already make the entire country a giant FEMA camp!

Kali : During these last 60 years, many executive orders enforcing the state control in case of martial law were issued. Specific military plans were designed such as REX 84 during the Reagan era, announcing a military state, still in case of martial law. Considering these historical elements, could the 9/11 be part of these long term plans to control and dominate citizenship ? Were the 9/11 attacks the major event that opened the path to the enslavement of the US, and possibly the rest of the World?

Kenn Thomas : It would be pretty long term, since it has been twenty four years since REX 84 and the great enslavement has yet to appear. I would just refer you back to my previous answer, that a certain structural apparatus has existed for some time that allows many dreadful things to happen without the kind of overt declaration of martial law that you suggest ever taking place. Take, for instance, the national security action memorandum signed by Lyndon Johnson that reversed the one signed by JFK to deescalate the Vietnam War—a draconian thing that long predates REX 84. Many American citizens are unaware that such a thing happened, or are in denial about it, or don’t care or find it perfectly acceptable, despite the enormous tragedy of the war. They live in a happy consumerist culture where such things are not given the weight they deserve. Announcing a military state would burst the bubble of an existing level of control.

Kali : George W. Bush is often connected to theocrats. Could these theocrats, these religious groups behind George W. Bush be able to influence or even create a fake war with Iran leading also to a civil unrest for instance within the United States ? Would they be able to create a major event as serious as a second Pearl Harbor that would lead to the implementation of a theocrat police state ?

Kenn Thomas : Unfortunately, theocracies span the globe. A certain percentage of the US population recognize American theocrats like Pat Robertson and the late unlamented Jerry Falwell as charlatans and buffoons, something not true of places like Iran. 9/11 actually caused a large backlash against religionism in America, helping to bring great popularity to such atheist writers as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens--although that was mostly due to radical jihadism supported by state theocracies in the Middle east. I often quote William S. Burroughs when considering religion in American public affairs: “Never trust a religious son of a bitch, not with the Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.” 9/11 mostly was an Islamic conspiracy but nothing about Christian and Jewish “morality”. In the US government prevented the ruling elite from using 9/11 to expand its power in unconscionable ways. The chaos started to erupt on that day and Dick Cheney thought, “hey, we can work with this”, and ordered a stand down to allow its completion. That’s my sense of it: half-perceived; half-created.

Consider also the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988—conducted by a supposedly secularist country and US puppet-if-not-proxy, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, against the Iranian theocracy. Neither that George Bush nor this one really seem very religious. Those are just constituencies they have to play to, as does any president. A conservative economist that certainly the first Bush must have read (and certainly not the second), Herman Kahn, once said, “hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice.”

Kali : What would be the use of FEMA camps within this scenario ?

Kenn Thomas : It’s just that such a scenario is offered with the same dull repetition of evangelists claiming that the end of the world is at hand. It hasn’t happened and it will not happen. America will continue to have these oppressed enclaves of poverty and ignorance and many, many people will happily live under the regimented, conformist, authority driven, volunteer military culture. If imagining the FEMA concentration camp scenario empowers students of the Conspiracy to think for themselves, fine. But many other areas of research exist that need to be understood in order to get a better grip on the global parapolitical situation that simply bleating that they’re coming around to lock us up and shoot us!

Kali : Is the economical crisis in United-states a manipulation as well as the first sign of an obvious forthcoming state of emergency that would allow the government to control everyone and everything ?

Kenn Thomas : Well, the economic crisis supposedly just started hitting today. 9/11 happened after a long period of supposedly relative economic prosperity of the Clinton years, although I knew just as many people then as I do now that live in economic crisis every day.

Yes, an argument could be made that it’s all orchestrated. The Situationists have been making that argument since the early 1950s, in fact—the Society of the Spectacle! And it truly has been going on during the entire post-war period. But it’s important to look at and work against what we face right now and not just be mindful of how bad we can imagine it will become.

Kali

Kenn Thomas’ web site is steamshovelpress.com, which makes available DVDs of his television and lecture as well as his renown conspiracy magazine, Steamshovel Press. His latest book, Conspiracy Files, is available from Murdoch Books. He can be reached at POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121 USA. Copies of the latest issue of Steamshovel cost $10 overseas. PDF copies are available over the internet for $7.

Kali © Karmapolis - Janvier 2008