Kerry Thornley

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Kerry Wendell Thornley (* 17th April 1938 ; † 28. November 1998 ) was an American author, who as co-founder of Discordianism (along with his childhood friend Gregory Hill he usually), in the context of Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst is called, known has been.

Life

Thornley is believed to be the author of a version of the Principia Discordia . Less well known is a series of Zenarchy articles that he wrote for Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger under the pseudonym "Ho Chi Zen". Zenarchy is described in the introduction to the collective edition as "the social order that arises from meditation" and as "a non-belligerent, non-participatory, non-political view of anarchy ".

Raised a Mormon , the frequency with which the adult Kerry changed his worldview was equal to that of any other serious figure in the counterculture of the 1960s. In addition to Discordianism, atheism , anarchism , objectivism , neo-paganism and Buddhism were among the topics to which he devoted himself. Thornley believed, among other things, that he was included in MK ULTRA's LSD- soaked assassin conditioning program and that it was the result of a Nazi Vril breeding initiative.

After being a reservist for some time , Thornley was drafted into active service with the Marines in 1958 at the age of 20, shortly after he had completed his first semester at the University of Southern California .

It was around this time that he and Gregory Hill report having had their first eristic vision. Thornley served briefly in the same unit as Lee Harvey Oswald at El Toro Marine Base in Santa Ana, California in 1959 . He and Oswald were acquaintances who shared a common interest in culture and politics. Whenever the roster brought them together, they discussed topics like literature and communism , with Oswald particularly interested in the latter. Some time after the two men parted ways as a result of reassignment, Thornley learned from a military newspaper that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union . Kerry wrote eagerly of his observations as a Marine, and Lee served as inspiration for the book. The aspiring author saw Oswald as an allegory of the soldier in peacetime, trapped by the totalitarian structures of military life. In later years Thornley was of the opinion that Oswald was an intelligence agent who was supposed to track down Communist sympathizers.

It was then that he wrote a fictitious report called "The Idle Warriors", which was extraordinarily prophetic for its time, about his experiences with the then unknown Oswald and the Marine Corps . The manuscript was completed in February 1962, a year before the Kennedy assassination . Kerry Thornley had written the only book on Lee Harvey Oswald that was completed before President Kennedy's assassination in 1963. Because of the contents of the book, Thornley was called to the Warren Commission on May 18, 1964 to testify. A copy of the book, which was only published in 1991, requested by the Commission, was kept in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

In January 1968, Thornley was summoned to a criminal trial by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison , who tried to refute the Warren Report's lone perpetrator theory, to question him about his relationship with Oswald and his knowledge of other suspects. Thornley requested that the subpoena be set aside and eventually appeared before the Circuit Court .

Kerry Thornley, who was seriously ill in his final days, died on 28 November 1998 at the age of 60 years in Atlanta ( Georgia ) after a sudden cardiac arrest . His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean. 23 people attended the Buddhist memorial service the following morning. Before the end of his life, Thornley is reported to have reported that he felt "like a tired child who comes home from a very wild circus," a reference to a passage by Gregory Hill in the Principia Discordia:

“And so it is that we, as humans, don't exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existing things, and order and disorder it, and so it should be that non-existence should take us back from existence, and that nameless clergy return to nothing like a tired one Child that comes home from a very wild circus. "

Works

  • Thornley, Kerry; Oswald , New Classics House, 1965
  • Thornley, Kerry; Zenarchy , IllumiNet Press, June 1991 ISBN 0-9626534-1-1
  • Thornley, Kerry; The Idle Warriors , IllumiNet Press, June 1991 ISBN 0-9626534-0-3
  • Malaclypse the Younger ( Greg Hill ); Principia Discordia, or, How I found Goddess and what I did to Her when I found Her , 5th Edition, September 1991, IllumiNet Press (Introduction by Kerry Thornley) ISBN 0-9626534-2-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XI, pp. 96-97; 109; 112-115
  2. ^ Writer Seeks Cancellation Of Subpoena . In: St. Petersburg Times , January 20, 1968. Retrieved March 18, 2013.