IN the era of star whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and massive leaks or releases of classified, often highly disturbing information, it is difficult to surprise the public with disclosures about clandestine activities, past and present of governments, yet the book A Shining City on a Hill, Novus Ordo Seclorum by French scholar and international relations analyst Come Carpentier de Gourdon, a long-standing part-time resident of India makes, in a highly readable, suspenseful manner, a number of stunning assertions which he backs with a wealth of published and unpublished documents and with testimonies from high-level witnesses.
The book contains an account of the author’s first months in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains in the 1980s. He calls it a biovel as he narrates in a lively manner the many meetings and experiences he had with often eminent people who enlightened him about various secret and often unsavory aspects and episodes of America’s recent history and about hidden mechanisms and forces that operate behind the façade of democracy. A vast range of issues is covered, going from the days when the Republic was founded on the basis of combined Christian, Greek philosophical and Masonic Occultist ideas, to the era of the global American empire following the Second World War, when a triumphant military and a sprawling national security apparatus, allied with huge business corporations and banks became hegemonic by reinforcing their influence on the country’s domestic and foreign policies.
The author does not engage in a scholarly study but provides numerous published references for those who wish to know more and draw their own conclusions. De Gourdon writes as an observer, collecting and reflecting the informed opinions and views of the many people he came in contact with or learnt about with during his stay. From Ben Franklin to Steve Jobs, from Dwight Eisenhower to George HW Bush, from Abraham Lincoln to David and Nelson Rockefeller, from Ayn Rand to Marilyn Monroe, from Ralph W Emerson to Edgar Poe among many others, well known and not so well known, alive or long departed, the book weaves the tapestry of the American nation through disclosures and anecdotes.
Discussions about the mass transfers of Nazi scientists to the US, the transfer of nuclear technology to the USSR, the Cold War, subversions of foreign governments, illegal wars, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and of other famous figures may not reveal many new facts to those who have already informed themselves about these stories but there is a lot more that comes to light as the author carries on his investigation among experts and witnesses who bolster widespread suspicions of drug trafficking and gun running by certain State agencies.
The existence of a major, ominous mystery at the core of the US ‘deep state’, becomes increasingly probable, as testimonies, documents and circumstantial proofs confirm and corroborate each other, leaving the reader with little room to reject the conclusion to which the book leads, to wit certain sectors and agencies of the USA have been aware of and in contact with one or several highly advanced and powerful entities which have played a covert but critical role in earthly affairs for a very long period of time. Decades-long officious and clandestine interaction with those forces account in part for the explosion of technological inventions and advances that we have experienced since World War II. In the Indian traditional context, however, would such a disclosure not give renewed relevance to the cosmological insights provided by the Vedas, Puranas et al. about devas, asuras and such, hitherto regarded by the ‘scientifically minded’ as mere mythological imaginings or symbols?
In retrospect, movies such as Close Encounters or Star Wars and of TV series like The X Files may be closer to the ‘classified‘ reality than most people suspect, according to this ‘remarkable, original, audacious and disturbing… but extremely readable book’.
