Felix qui potuit rerum
cognoscere causas.
Fortunate [was the one] who could recognize the
causes of
things.
Virgil
“I feel like Galileo. They
couldn't kill him because he'd figured
out how to navigate.”
“It's all about maps.”
“It's all about maps. Right.”
Conversation between the
author and Mike Ruppert
Eulogy
Written upon request for one of several
memorials for Mike.
Mike Ruppert was a complex, brilliant,
infuriating, funny, impossible, honest (usually), never boring, enraged,
musical, competitive, generous, contradictory, dog-loving, horse-whispering,
childlike giant who happened to be right about the most important problems
facing the world today.
A psychologist once said, “You can’t have just
a baby’s foot,” meaning, you can’t have the cute parts of a baby without the
sleepless nights and dirty diapers. Similarly, you can’t have Mike’s
unique gifts to the world without the upheaval he generated around him.
To lionize him does not do him justice; he
doesn’t need it. He had his demons, both internal and external. In
fact, he epitomized the old saw, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean
they’re not following you.”
He once said, “There is a deep flaw in me and
that is the source of everything I’ve done.” Driven to flee his own
devils, he fought far greater ones on the global stage. And although he
didn’t succeed in single-handedly shifting the paradigm of the global economy,
he got further than just about anyone else.
You don’t have to perform the mind-bending
feat of accepting death by self-inflicted gunshot wound as a peace offering in
order to show him respect. To paraphrase Mike’s own eulogy to Gary Webb
who also killed himself, only Mike knows why he finally did it after
threatening for at least eight years.
Some of Mike’s
accomplishments: From uncovering CIA drug-dealing, he went on to found fromthewilderness.com which revealed how the US banking system looted
Russia after the fall of the USSR. FTW also published documents which
helped secure the release of CIA spy Edwin Wilson who had been convicted on the
basis of perjured testimony by a CIA Executive Director.
But one of his
greatest achievements occurred around 9/11. At FTW and in his book, Crossing the Rubicon, Mike showed that
four months before the attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney had been put in
charge of war game exercises; and that in spite of the multiple warnings from
foreign intelligence agencies to the White House concerning a terrorist attack
the week of September 9, at least five war games had been scheduled for that
morning which drew planes away from the East Coast, where they would have been
able to intercept the hijacked planes, to Alaska, Northern Canada, Greenland
and Iceland. FTW also revealed insider trading – exorbitant numbers of
put options on the airlines involved in the attacks; a sure red flag that a
major disaster was about to take place.
(Added later: The US
government monitors put options in real time.)
The
best way to honor Mike is to understand and educate others on the
fundamental lessons he taught. First, his favorite line: “Until
you change the way money works, you change nothing.” An economy based on
infinite growth cannot continue indefinitely on a finite planet. Resources are
being depleted as population growth marches on. The population currently
stands at seven times what it was when oil started being used to fuel the
economy. No matter how smart our technology becomes, as easy oil inevitably
wanes, the replacements cannot fill in at the same rate, certainly not without
poisoning the air, water and soil as well as huge swaths of people. If we don’t
deal with this now, it will deal with us later and at far greater
cost. That’s what Mike’s been trying to tell everyone for ten years.
Re-localize. Grow food not lawns. And end our current economic system
of fiat currency, fractional reserve banking and interest. Do that and Mike
will be able to rest in peace.
Introduction
On April 13,
2014, investigative journalist and subject of Chris Smith’s documentary, Collapse,
Michael C. Ruppert, shot himself in the head.
The following account
was published blog-style in the aftermath of his suicide for the
benefit of his thousands of shocked fans and less shocked circle of close
friends. It is reproduced here with minimal editing in order to preserve
the hectic sense of those days which echoed the hectic sense of the collapse of
the newsletter he’d founded a decade and a half earlier, www.fromthewilderness.com, an event which is recounted within. In one
or two places, identifying details of private people have been changed.
Thus, inconsistencies emerged as the blog
evolved. At first, in the interest of clarity, I cleaned up some of
the typos in Mike’s emails.
Then the better part of valor seemed to be to leave them
but flag them with the usual “[sic.]” That effort quickly
showed itself to be on the way to absurdity so the rest are presented as
is, or was.
This account is in no way a full depiction of
Mike. It does not touch on his accomplishments, for its audience
when the blog first appeared was steeped in knowledge of those. Any
reader who chances here without an awareness of why there was such keen
interest in and mourning for a relatively little known figure is advised to
seek out Mike’s original work: www.fromthewilderness.com; his book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of
the Age of Oil; his video, The Truth And Lies Of 911, among others; and Chris Smith’s
aforementioned documentary, Collapse.
Scout is
followed by a different sort of end-of-life saga, Against the Dying of
the Light, about the decline and death of my mother, the former
Broadway dancer, Gisella Svetlik Orkin.
Also see Mike's archive website: From the Wilderness
and the active blog in his name.
Mike's archive website: From the Wilderness SCRUBBED?
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