Monday, December 7, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Thucydides: Factional Warfare on Corcyra
During the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, both sides had an ideological rationale for their war aims - the Spartans claimed to be the liberators of Hellas while the Athenians claimed to be the champions of democracy. In 427 BCE the democrats on the island of Corcyra took advantage of Athenian protection to massacre their oligarchic "pro-Spartan" adversaries. Thucydides elaborates on this episode, commenting on the nature of factional strife throughout Hellas. In reading the ancient historians what is most striking is not how far removed from our times they are, but rather how contemporary they are - human nature never changes. When we look closely at the past more often than not we find a reflection of the present ... or future.
(3.81) .... When the Corcyraeans perceived that the Athenian fleet was appoaching, while that of the enemy had disappeared, they took the Messenian troops, who had hitherto been outside the walls, into the city, and ordered the ships which they had manned to sail round into the Hyllaic harbour. These proceeded on their way. Meanwhile they killed any of their enemies whom they caught in the city. On the arrival of the ships they disembarked those whom they had induced to go on board, and despatched them; they also went to the temple of Herè, and persuading about fifty of the suppliants to stand their trial condemned them all to death. The majority would not come out, and, when they saw what was going on, destroyed one another in the enclosure of the temple where they were, except a few who hung themselves on trees, or put an end to their own lives in any other way which they could. And, during the seven days which Eurymedon after his arrival remained with his sixty ships, the Corcyraeans continued slaughtering those of their fellow-citizens whom they deemed their enemies; they professed to punish them for their designs against the democracy, but in fact some were killed from motives of personal enmity, and some because money was owing to them, by the hands of their debtors. Every form of death was to be seen; and everything, and more than everything, that commonly happens in revolutions, happened then. The father slew the son, and the suppliants were torn from the temples and slain near them; some of them were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus, and there perished. To such extremes of cruelty did revolution go; and this seemed to be the worst of revolutions, because it was the first.
(3.82) For not long afterwards nearly the whole Hellenic world was in commotion; in every city the chiefs of the democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lacedaemonians. Now in time of peace, men would have had no excuse for introducing either, and no desire to do so; but, when they were at war, the introduction of a foreign alliance on one side or the other to the hurt of their enemies and the advantage of themselves was easily effected by the dissatisfied party. And revolution brought upon the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and always will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circumstances. In peace and prosperity both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities; but war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master and tends to assimilate men's characters to their conditions.
When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. (For party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good; they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest.) The seal of good faith was not divine law, but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received them not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self-preservation. Any agreements sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding as long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity first took courage, and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would have had in an open act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken the safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. In general the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness; men take a pride in the one, but are ashamed of the other.
The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to the very utmost,73 neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving.
(3.83) Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed; for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety, and could not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacity of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off their guard and easily destroyed.
(3.84) Now in Corcyra most of these deeds were perpetrated, and for the first time. There was every crime which men could commit in revenge who had been governed not wisely, but tyrannically, and now had the oppressor at their mercy. There were the dishonest designs of others who were longing to be relieved from their habitual poverty, and were naturally animated by a passionate desire for their neighbour's goods; and there were crimes of another class which men commit, not from covetousness, but from the enmity which equals foster towards one another until they are carried away by their blind rage into the extremes of pitiless cruelty. At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them underfoot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could any one have preferred revenge to piety, and gain to innocence? But, when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future, and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.
From:
http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=3.77-81
http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=3.82-86
JDS
__________________________________________(3.81) .... When the Corcyraeans perceived that the Athenian fleet was appoaching, while that of the enemy had disappeared, they took the Messenian troops, who had hitherto been outside the walls, into the city, and ordered the ships which they had manned to sail round into the Hyllaic harbour. These proceeded on their way. Meanwhile they killed any of their enemies whom they caught in the city. On the arrival of the ships they disembarked those whom they had induced to go on board, and despatched them; they also went to the temple of Herè, and persuading about fifty of the suppliants to stand their trial condemned them all to death. The majority would not come out, and, when they saw what was going on, destroyed one another in the enclosure of the temple where they were, except a few who hung themselves on trees, or put an end to their own lives in any other way which they could. And, during the seven days which Eurymedon after his arrival remained with his sixty ships, the Corcyraeans continued slaughtering those of their fellow-citizens whom they deemed their enemies; they professed to punish them for their designs against the democracy, but in fact some were killed from motives of personal enmity, and some because money was owing to them, by the hands of their debtors. Every form of death was to be seen; and everything, and more than everything, that commonly happens in revolutions, happened then. The father slew the son, and the suppliants were torn from the temples and slain near them; some of them were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus, and there perished. To such extremes of cruelty did revolution go; and this seemed to be the worst of revolutions, because it was the first.
(3.82) For not long afterwards nearly the whole Hellenic world was in commotion; in every city the chiefs of the democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lacedaemonians. Now in time of peace, men would have had no excuse for introducing either, and no desire to do so; but, when they were at war, the introduction of a foreign alliance on one side or the other to the hurt of their enemies and the advantage of themselves was easily effected by the dissatisfied party. And revolution brought upon the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and always will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circumstances. In peace and prosperity both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities; but war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master and tends to assimilate men's characters to their conditions.
When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. (For party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good; they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest.) The seal of good faith was not divine law, but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received them not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self-preservation. Any agreements sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding as long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity first took courage, and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would have had in an open act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken the safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. In general the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness; men take a pride in the one, but are ashamed of the other.
The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to the very utmost,73 neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving.
(3.83) Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed; for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety, and could not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacity of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off their guard and easily destroyed.
(3.84) Now in Corcyra most of these deeds were perpetrated, and for the first time. There was every crime which men could commit in revenge who had been governed not wisely, but tyrannically, and now had the oppressor at their mercy. There were the dishonest designs of others who were longing to be relieved from their habitual poverty, and were naturally animated by a passionate desire for their neighbour's goods; and there were crimes of another class which men commit, not from covetousness, but from the enmity which equals foster towards one another until they are carried away by their blind rage into the extremes of pitiless cruelty. At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them underfoot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could any one have preferred revenge to piety, and gain to innocence? But, when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future, and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.
From:
http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=3.77-81
http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=3.82-86
Friday, December 4, 2009
The looming crisis in human genetics
The looming crisis in human genetics
Nov 13th 2009
Some awkward news ahead
Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.
About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them. Companies such as Illumina and Affymetrix produced DNA chips that allowed researchers to test up to 1m genetic variants for their statistical association with specific traits. America’s National Institutes of Health and Britain’s Wellcome Trust gave huge research grants for gene-hunting. Thousands of researchers jumped on the GWAS bandwagon. Lab groups formed and international research consortia congealed. The quantity of published GWAS research has soared.
In 2010, GWAS fever will reach its peak. Dozens of papers will report specific genes associated with almost every imaginable trait—intelligence, personality, religiosity, sexuality, longevity, economic risk-taking, consumer preferences, leisure interests and political attitudes. The data are already collected, with DNA samples from large populations already measured for these traits. It’s just a matter of doing the statistics and writing up the papers for Nature Genetics. The gold rush is on throughout the leading behaviour-genetics centres in London, Amsterdam, Boston, Boulder and Brisbane.
GWAS researchers will, in public, continue trumpeting their successes to science journalists and Science magazine. They will reassure Big Pharma and the grant agencies that GWAS will identify the genes that explain most of the variation in heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and ageing itself. Those genes will illuminate the biochemical pathways underlying disease, which will yield new genetic tests and blockbuster drugs. Keep holding your breath for a golden age of health, happiness and longevity.
In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled. They hold small, discreet conferences on the “missing heritability” problem: if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often? The DNA chips should already have identified some important genes behind physical and mental health. They simply have not been delivering the goods.
Certainly, GWAS papers have reported a couple of hundred genetic variants that show statistically significant associations with a few traits. But the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait. In fact, classical Mendelian genetics based on family studies has identified far more disease-risk genes with larger effects than GWAS research has so far.
Why the failure? The missing heritability may reflect limitations of DNA-chip design: GWAS methods so far focus on relatively common genetic variants in regions of DNA that code for proteins. They under-sample rare variants and DNA regions translated into non-coding RNA, which seems to orchestrate most organic development in vertebrates. Or it may be that thousands of small mutations disrupt body and brain in different ways in different populations. At worst, each human trait may depend on hundreds of thousands of genetic variants that add up through gene-expression patterns of mind-numbing complexity.
Political science
We will know much more when it becomes possible to do cheap “resequencing”—which is really just “sequencing” a wider variety of individuals beyond the handful analysed for the Human Genome Project. Full sequencing means analysing all 3 billion base pairs of an individual’s DNA rather than just a sample of 1m genetic variants as the DNA chips do. When sequencing costs drop within a few years below $1,000 per genome, researchers in Europe, China and India will start huge projects with vast sample sizes, sophisticated bioinformatics, diverse trait measures and detailed family structures. (American bioscience will prove too politically squeamish to fund such studies.) The missing heritability problem will surely be solved sooner or later.
The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.
We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that some human groups experienced a vastly accelerated rate of evolutionary change within the past few thousand years, benefiting from the new genetic diversity created within far larger populations, and in response to the new survival, social and reproductive challenges of agriculture, cities, divisions of labour and social classes. Others did not experience these changes until the past few hundred years when they were subject to contact, colonisation and, all too often, extermination.
If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals. The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies.
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=14742737
Nov 13th 2009
Some awkward news ahead
Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.
About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them. Companies such as Illumina and Affymetrix produced DNA chips that allowed researchers to test up to 1m genetic variants for their statistical association with specific traits. America’s National Institutes of Health and Britain’s Wellcome Trust gave huge research grants for gene-hunting. Thousands of researchers jumped on the GWAS bandwagon. Lab groups formed and international research consortia congealed. The quantity of published GWAS research has soared.
In 2010, GWAS fever will reach its peak. Dozens of papers will report specific genes associated with almost every imaginable trait—intelligence, personality, religiosity, sexuality, longevity, economic risk-taking, consumer preferences, leisure interests and political attitudes. The data are already collected, with DNA samples from large populations already measured for these traits. It’s just a matter of doing the statistics and writing up the papers for Nature Genetics. The gold rush is on throughout the leading behaviour-genetics centres in London, Amsterdam, Boston, Boulder and Brisbane.
GWAS researchers will, in public, continue trumpeting their successes to science journalists and Science magazine. They will reassure Big Pharma and the grant agencies that GWAS will identify the genes that explain most of the variation in heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and ageing itself. Those genes will illuminate the biochemical pathways underlying disease, which will yield new genetic tests and blockbuster drugs. Keep holding your breath for a golden age of health, happiness and longevity.
In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled. They hold small, discreet conferences on the “missing heritability” problem: if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often? The DNA chips should already have identified some important genes behind physical and mental health. They simply have not been delivering the goods.
Certainly, GWAS papers have reported a couple of hundred genetic variants that show statistically significant associations with a few traits. But the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait. In fact, classical Mendelian genetics based on family studies has identified far more disease-risk genes with larger effects than GWAS research has so far.
Why the failure? The missing heritability may reflect limitations of DNA-chip design: GWAS methods so far focus on relatively common genetic variants in regions of DNA that code for proteins. They under-sample rare variants and DNA regions translated into non-coding RNA, which seems to orchestrate most organic development in vertebrates. Or it may be that thousands of small mutations disrupt body and brain in different ways in different populations. At worst, each human trait may depend on hundreds of thousands of genetic variants that add up through gene-expression patterns of mind-numbing complexity.
Political science
We will know much more when it becomes possible to do cheap “resequencing”—which is really just “sequencing” a wider variety of individuals beyond the handful analysed for the Human Genome Project. Full sequencing means analysing all 3 billion base pairs of an individual’s DNA rather than just a sample of 1m genetic variants as the DNA chips do. When sequencing costs drop within a few years below $1,000 per genome, researchers in Europe, China and India will start huge projects with vast sample sizes, sophisticated bioinformatics, diverse trait measures and detailed family structures. (American bioscience will prove too politically squeamish to fund such studies.) The missing heritability problem will surely be solved sooner or later.
The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.
We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that some human groups experienced a vastly accelerated rate of evolutionary change within the past few thousand years, benefiting from the new genetic diversity created within far larger populations, and in response to the new survival, social and reproductive challenges of agriculture, cities, divisions of labour and social classes. Others did not experience these changes until the past few hundred years when they were subject to contact, colonisation and, all too often, extermination.
If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals. The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies.
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=14742737
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
TRUTH
Here is my truth - dedicated to all the sincere "seekers" out there:
1. CONSCIOUSNESS IS A MEAT BYPRODUCT.
Your mind IS your brain, and that includes your so-called "spirituality" - all the warm bullshit fuzzy feelings that make you feel like you are the fucking center of the universe when you are not.
You are a collection of neural flaring encased in meat and your meter is running. You are the result of rats fucking for generations. Your ancestor rats fucked and you were shit out of your mother's womb with no more reason or meaning than any other rat, cockroach, maggot or other vermin crawling transiently on the face of the earth.
Which brings us to point two:
2. DEATH IS FINAL.
There is absolutely NO reason to believe you will survive your carnal death. ALL of your "ideas" and "feelings" about the "afterlife" or "spiritual plane" are the products of your own subjective neural experience, usually functioning in abject HORROR of DEATH and the prospect of your own total annihilation. Every so-called "near death" experience is just that - a subjective inner dream of your own processes shutting down.
Here's the news: there is nothing that being NEAR death is going to tell you about DEATH. Any more than being NEARLY PREGNANT is going to tell you about being pregnant. DEAD IS DEAD.
So if, in the face of total nihilistic meaninglessness of your own existence, the RAW FACT that your life is SEVERELY limited in time and scope of influence, and that all the rats and maggots will continue to breed and live and die with NO awareness that you ever crawled on the face of the earth .... if you can face this fact - of your own brutal mortality and total irrelevance - and still choose LIFE over DEATH - then that sets up it's own chain of inferences and implications regarding the QUALITY of life you have chosen to continue with, AND what you will choose to tolerate in your environment - and that includes in other people.
Apparently most people have not clawed their way to SQUARE ONE - the point of NO or FEWEST ASSumptions about life and the meaning of life, or truth, or reality, and worked their way forward.
Instead you buy the whole catalog of bullshit propaganda and fairy tales from whoever was close enough to pass the infection into your brain.
GO AHEAD, believe your BULLSHIT. It doesn't matter anyway. Your clock will stop and someday no one will have to hear your BULLSHIT anymore.
I look forward to the day when RATS and COCKROACHES rule the earth and humans aren't even skeletons in the dirt anymore. Of course I won't be there to enjoy it, but I can enjoy thinking about it now.
Love,
JDS
Friday, November 27, 2009
Pop Culture from the Third Reich
Another home run from National-Socialist Worldview:
In these film clips from the Third Reich you will see song-and-dance routines similar to some presented in Cabaret. We even get to see the Hungarian-born actress Marika Rökk and a female jazz-pianist wearing a men's clothes. Supposedly all that fun was shut down and replaced with a nonstop playlist of martial music and Wagner. As with many representations about the Third Reich, it turns out not to be the case.
Much of the music in these clips qualifies as "jazz," which we are supposed to believe was banned in the Third Reich.
The director of these films, Georg Jacoby (Marika Rökk's husband), was a member of the NSDAP. At the bottom is a film clip from another director, Helmut Käutner.
I took a course on interwar German culture at a major university that gave no hint that any of this kind of film existed or was even permitted in the Third Reich. In fact, we were told that there was "no art" in the Third Reich. I think I can fairly say, regarding the tuition for that course, that I was robbed.
As far as film goes, much of the content that we associate with the decadent culture of the Weimar period is still there, with the more objectionable elements removed. There is American-style jazz and dancing, and even some women dressed in men's clothes -- just no men dressed in women's clothes and no sympathetic portrayal of sex-criminals (as in Fritz Lang's M,1931, starring Peter Lorre). Given a fair representation, most Americans would find the pop culture of the Third Reich much more agreeable than that of the preceding Weimar period, and certainly not stale and narrow as American propaganda has portrayed.
"Ich Brauche keine Millionen," (I need no millions) from Hallo Janine!, 1939 (not 1936)
"Ach, ich hab ja so viel Rhythmus" (Oh, I have so much rhythm!) from Und du mein Schatz fährst mit!, 1937
Finale from Und du mein Schatz fährst mit!, 1937
"Schlangentanz" (Snake Dance) from Kora Terry, 1940
In a similar vein, Ilse Werner, Wir Machen Musik, 1942. This was directed by Helmut Käutner, who began his career in the Weimar period and came to great success in the Third Reich.
In these film clips from the Third Reich you will see song-and-dance routines similar to some presented in Cabaret. We even get to see the Hungarian-born actress Marika Rökk and a female jazz-pianist wearing a men's clothes. Supposedly all that fun was shut down and replaced with a nonstop playlist of martial music and Wagner. As with many representations about the Third Reich, it turns out not to be the case.
Much of the music in these clips qualifies as "jazz," which we are supposed to believe was banned in the Third Reich.
The director of these films, Georg Jacoby (Marika Rökk's husband), was a member of the NSDAP. At the bottom is a film clip from another director, Helmut Käutner.
I took a course on interwar German culture at a major university that gave no hint that any of this kind of film existed or was even permitted in the Third Reich. In fact, we were told that there was "no art" in the Third Reich. I think I can fairly say, regarding the tuition for that course, that I was robbed.
As far as film goes, much of the content that we associate with the decadent culture of the Weimar period is still there, with the more objectionable elements removed. There is American-style jazz and dancing, and even some women dressed in men's clothes -- just no men dressed in women's clothes and no sympathetic portrayal of sex-criminals (as in Fritz Lang's M,1931, starring Peter Lorre). Given a fair representation, most Americans would find the pop culture of the Third Reich much more agreeable than that of the preceding Weimar period, and certainly not stale and narrow as American propaganda has portrayed.
"Ich Brauche keine Millionen," (I need no millions) from Hallo Janine!, 1939 (not 1936)
"Ach, ich hab ja so viel Rhythmus" (Oh, I have so much rhythm!) from Und du mein Schatz fährst mit!, 1937
Finale from Und du mein Schatz fährst mit!, 1937
"Schlangentanz" (Snake Dance) from Kora Terry, 1940
In a similar vein, Ilse Werner, Wir Machen Musik, 1942. This was directed by Helmut Käutner, who began his career in the Weimar period and came to great success in the Third Reich.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The Devil Knows Latin
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Mr. Kopff talked about his book The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition, published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The author argued that Latin and Greek should be basic subjects in public school education and that the absence of these languages has severed our culture from its mental infrastructure. There was no question period.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/125188-1
Creative Taxidermy by Juan Cabana
From: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/life-after-death-taxidermy-most-macabre-creations/17697
Celebrated and self-trained, Tampa Bay-based taxidermy artist Juan Cabana has been delighting and disturbing audiences with his strange, lifeless life-forms since 2001. Mermaids are his special fascination, but he presents many variations on this theme.
Celebrated and self-trained, Tampa Bay-based taxidermy artist Juan Cabana has been delighting and disturbing audiences with his strange, lifeless life-forms since 2001. Mermaids are his special fascination, but he presents many variations on this theme.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Jewish Film-maker Debunks ADL
Israeli director Yoav Shamir exposes the ADL as a hallow con-job.
The ADL is a $50 million a year fund raising hustle that promotes extreme far-left politics under the guise of “fighting antisemitism.”
The ADL is at the forefront of almost every extreme left-wing political cause in the US. However, to critize them will immediately get you labeled an “antisemite.”
The ADL is a $50 million a year fund raising hustle that promotes extreme far-left politics under the guise of “fighting antisemitism.”
The ADL is at the forefront of almost every extreme left-wing political cause in the US. However, to critize them will immediately get you labeled an “antisemite.”
Monday, November 23, 2009
NEWSBREAK to Americans Afraid of a Race War: YOU ARE ALREADY IN ONE
Three Blacks murder White family of five and burn house down: "Martin declined to offer any motive for the attack and said there is a gag order in the case, so he couldn't answer media questions.Court documents say that Springer, Conway and Pickney targeted those killed in robberies intended to obtain television sets and expensive car-wheel rims."
SOURCE: http://www.todaysthv.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=94771
White student driven out of school for being white:
SOURCE: http://www.todaysthv.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=94771
White student driven out of school for being white:
Sunday, November 22, 2009
32 feral niggers arrested in Denver for racially-motivated attacks.
Denver police arrest 32 in series of downtown assaults
Racially motivated downtown attacks
By Jordan Steffen
The Denver Post
Posted: 11/21/2009 01:00:00 AM MST
Updated: 11/21/2009 08:38:53 AM MST
The Denver Police Department arrested 32 men and juvenile boys after a months-long undercover investigation into what police said were racially motivated assaults and robberies in downtown Denver, including the LoDo entertainment district.
A task force composed of Denver police, the FBI and the Denver district attorney's office investigated 26 incidents in which groups of black males verbally harassed, assaulted and at times robbed white or Latino males, according to Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman.
All of the suspects are young black males, most of whom told police they were associated with either the Rollin' 60s Crips gang or the Black Gangster Disciples gang.
They are charged with varying counts of bias-motivated assault and, in some cases, robbery — all felony crimes.
The investigation determined that there was no single mastermind behind the summer and fall assaults, District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said. It is clear, however, that the two groups communicated, he said.
Groups of four or five black men would approach a victim late at night or early in the morning and attempt to spark a fight by verbally berating him, Whitman said.
The suspects made references to the victims' race during the assaults.
Victims were punched in the head, resulting in head injuries, broken noses and shattered eye sockets, according to Whitman. No one was killed during the months of attacks.
Some victims' wallets, iPods, cash and other small items were stolen after the assault.
Whitman said it might be the largest racially motivated criminal group effort ever in Denver.
"We have seen coordinated efforts before, but not by this large of a group," Whitman said.
A pattern emerged
Assaults were often recorded on video cameras mounted throughout parts of the city. The first of the assaults was in July.
As a pattern emerged, police dispatched undercover teams to areas near clubs and late-night restaurants where assaults were occurring to intervene.
In September, police asked the public for help in solving 14 downtown muggings but chose not to alert the public to the racial nature of the crimes, or the scope of the investigation underway, out of concern that the undercover effort would be compromised.
Denver police are still looking for suspects and victims involved in six unreported robberies and assaults captured on video.
The footage indicates that they may be related to the 26 reported instan ces.
Victims involved in the assaults may not know that their attacks were part of a larger pattern, Morrissey said.
Fifty-five warrants were issued for the 35 suspects. Some suspects may have been involved in more than one assault.
24-hour sweep
All 32 suspects arrested during the 24-hour sweep know one another, Morrissey said.
But finding almost all of the people they wanted surprised police.
"I was surprised we only missed four of them," Whitman said.
A short time after he spoke, one more was caught.
Three suspects, Allen Ford, Torrence McCall and one juvenile, are still at large.
Suspects are being held on $1 million bail for each count.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13837397
The secular religion of “the Holocaust”, a tainted product of consumer society
JDS
___________________________________________
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The secular religion of “the Holocaust”, a tainted product of consumer society
By Robert Faurisson
The religion of “the Holocaust” is a secular one: it belongs to the lay world; it is profane; in actuality, it has at its disposal the secular arm, that is a temporal authority with dreaded power. It has its dogma, its commandments, its decrees, its prophets and its high priests. As one revisionist has observed, it has its circle of saints, male and female, amongst whom, for example, Saint Anne (Frank), Saint Simon (Wiesenthal) and Saint Elie (Wiesel). It has its holy places, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It has its sacred (and macabre) buildings and its relics (in the form of cakes of soap, shoes, toothbrushes, …). It has its martyrs, its heroes, its miracles and its miraculous survivors (in the millions), its golden legend and its righteous ones. Auschwitz is its Golgotha. For it, God is called Yahweh, protector of his chosen people, who, as said in one of the psalms of David (number 120), recently invoked by a female public prosecutor, Anne de Fontette, during the trial in Paris of a French revisionist, punishes “lying lips” (by, incidentally, sending them the “sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper”). For this religion, Satan is called Hitler, condemned, like Jesus in the Talmud, to boil for eternity in excrement. It knows neither mercy, nor forgiveness, nor clemency but only the duty of vengeance. It amasses fortunes through blackmail and extortion and acquires unheard-of privileges. It dictates its law to the nations. Its heart beats in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem monument, in a land taken over from the natives; in the shelter of a 26-foot high wall built to protect a people who are the salt of the earth, the companions of the “Holocaust” faith rule over the goy with a system that is the purest expression of militarism, racism and colonialism.
A quite recent religion whose growth has been meteoric
Although it is largely an avatar of the Hebraic religion, the new religion is quite recent and has exhibited meteoric growth. For the historian, the phenomenon is exceptional. Most often a religion of universal scope has its origins in remote and obscure times, a fact that makes the task of historians of religious ideas and institutions rather arduous. However, as luck would have it for that type of historian, in the space of fifty-odd years (1945-2000), right before our eyes, a new religion, that of “the Holocaust”, has suddenly come into being and proceeded to develop with astonishing speed, spreading nearly everywhere. It has conquered the West and intends to impose itself on the rest of the world. Any researcher interested in the historical phenomenon made up by the birth, life and death of religions ought therefore to seize the occasion, never so much as hoped for, thus offered to study from up close the birth and life of this new religion, then calculate its chances of survival and the possibility of its demise. Any specialist of war watching out for indications of a coming conflagration would owe it to himself to survey the risks of a warlike crusade such as the one into which this conquering religion may take us.
A religion that embraces consumerism
As a rule, consumer society places religions and ideologies in difficulty or danger. Each year, growth in both industrial production and business activity creates in peoples’ minds new needs and desires, truly concrete ones, lessening their thirst for the absolute or their aspiration towards an ideal, factors that religions and ideologies feed on. Besides, the progress of scientific thinking makes people more and more sceptical as to the truth of religion’s stories and the promises it gives them. Paradoxically, the only religion to prosper today is the “Holocaust” religion, ruling, so to speak, supreme and having those sceptics who are openly active cast out from the rest of mankind: it labels them “deniers”, whilst they call themselves “revisionists”.
These days the ideas of homeland, nationalism or race, as well as those of communism or even socialism, are in crisis or even on their way to extinction. Equally in crisis are the religions of the Western world, including the Jewish religion, and in their turn but in a less visible manner, so are the non-Western religions, themselves confronted by consumerism’s force of attraction; whatever one may think, the Moslem religion is no exception: the bazaar attracts bigger crowds than the mosque and, in certain oil-rich kingdoms, consumerism in its most outlandish forms poses an ever more insolent challenge to the rules for living laid down by Islam.
Roman Catholicism, for its part, is stricken with anaemia: to use Céline’s phrase, it has become “christianaemic”. Amongst the Catholics whom Benedict XVI addresses, how many still believe in the virginity of Mary, the miracles of Jesus, the physical resurrection of the dead, everlasting life, in heaven, purgatory and hell? The churchmen’s talk is usually limited to trotting out the word that “God is love”. The Protestant religions and those akin to them are diluted, along with their doctrines, in an infinity of sects and variants. The Jewish religion sees its members, more and more reluctant to observe so many peculiar rules and prohibitions, deserting the synagogue and, in ever greater numbers, marrying outside the community.
But whereas Western beliefs or convictions have lost much of their substance, faith in “the Holocaust” has strengthened; it has ended up creating a link – a religion, according to standard etymology at any rate, is a link (religat religio) – that enables disparate sets of communities and nations to share a common faith. All in all, Christians and Jews today cooperate heartily in propagating the holocaustic faith. Even a fair number of agnostics or atheists can be seen lining up with enthusiasm under the “Holocaust” banner. “Auschwitz” is achieving the union of all.
The fact is that this new religion, born in the era where consumerism expanded so rapidly, bears all the hallmarks of consumerism. It has its vigour, cleverness and inventiveness. It exploits all the resources of marketing and communication. The vilest products of Shoah Business are but the secondary effects of a religion that, intrinsically, is itself a sheer fabrication. From a few scraps of a given historical reality, things that were, after all, commonplace in wartime (like the internment of a good part of the European Jews in ghettos or camps), its promoters have built a gigantic historical imposture: the imposture, all at once, of the alleged extermination of the Jews of Europe, of camps allegedly equipped with homicidal gas chambers and, finally, of an alleged six million Jewish victims.
A religion that seems to have found the solution to the Jewish question
Throughout the millennia, the Jews, at first generally well received in the lands that have taken them in, have ended up arousing a phenomenon of rejection leading to their expulsion but, quite often, after leaving through one door, they have re-entered through another door. In several nations of continental Europe, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the phenomenon appeared once more. “The Jewish question” was especially put in Russia, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, Germany and France. Everyone, beginning with the Jews themselves, then set about looking for “a solution” to this “Jewish question”. For the Zionists, long a minority amongst their coreligionists, the solution could only be territorial. The thing to do was to find, with the accord of the imperial powers, a territory that Jewish colonists could settle. This colony might be located, for example, in Palestine, Madagascar, Uganda, South America, Siberia, … Poland and France envisaged the Madagascar solution whilst the Soviet Union created in southern Siberia the autonomous Jewish sector of Birobijan. As for National Socialist Germany, she was to study the possibility of settling the Jews in Palestine but wound up realising, from 1937, the unrealistic nature of the idea and the great wrong to the Palestinians that such a project would entail. Subsequently the 3rd Reich wanted to create a Jewish colony in a part of Poland (the Judenreservat of Nisko, south of Lublin), then in its turn, in 1940, it seriously considered creating a colony in Madagascar (the Madagascar Projekt). Two years later, beset by the necessities of a war to wage on land, sea and in the air and taken up with the more and more distressing concerns of having to save German cities from a deluge of fire, to safeguard the very life of his people, to keep the economy of a whole continent running, a continent so poor in raw materials, Chancellor Hitler made it known to his entourage, notably in the presence of Reichsminister and head of the Reichskanzlerei Hans-Heinrich Lammers, that he intended to “put off solving the Jewish question till after the war”. Constituting within her a population necessarily hostile to a Germany at war, the Jews – in any case a large portion of them – had to be deported and interned. Those able to work were made to do so, the others were confined in concentration camps or transit camps. Never did Hitler either desire or authorise the massacre of Jews and his courts martial went so far as to order the death penalty, even in Soviet territory, for soldiers found guilty of excesses against Jews. Never did the German State envisage anything else, as concerned the Jews, than “a final territorial solution of the Jewish question” (eine territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage) and it takes all the dishonesty of our orthodox historians to evoke incessantly “the final solution of the Jewish question” and deliberately evade the adjective “territorial”, so important here. Up to the end of the war, Germany kept on offering to deliver interned Jews to the western Allies, but on condition that they then stay in Britain, for example, and not go and invade Palestine to torment “the noble and valiant Arab people”. There was nothing exceptional about the fate of Europe’s Jews in the general blaze of war. It would have deserved just a mention in the great book of Second World War history. One may therefore quite rightly be astonished that today the fate of the Jews should be considered the essential feature of that war.
After the war it was in the land of Palestine and to the detriment of the Palestinians that the upholders of the “Holocaust” religion found – or believed they’d found – the final territorial solution to the Jewish question.
A religion that, previously, groped along with its sales methods
(Raul Hilberg’s recantation)
I suggest that sociologists undertake a history of the new religion by examining the extremely varied techniques in line with which this “product” was created, launched and sold over the years 1945-2000. They can thus measure the distance between the often clumsy procedures of the beginning and the sophistication, at the end, of the packagings designed by our present-day spin doctors (crooked “com” experts) for their presentations of “the Holocaust”, henceforth a compulsory and kosher mass-consumer product.
In 1961, Raul Hilberg, first of the “Holocaust” historians, “the pope” of exterminationist science, published the first version of his major work, The Destruction of the European Jews. He expressed in doctoral manner the following thesis: Hitler had given orders for an organised massacre of the Jews and all was explained as somehow coming of those orders. This way of displaying the merchandise was to end in a fiasco. With the revisionists asking to see the Hitler orders, Hilberg was compelled to admit that they had never existed. From 1982 to 1985, under the pressure of the same revisionists asking to see just what the magical homicidal gas chambers, in technical reality, looked like, he was led to revise his presentation of the holocaustic product. In 1985, in the “revised and definitive” edition of the same book, instead of taking an assertive, curt stance with the reader-customer, he sought to get round him with all sorts of convoluted phrases, appealing to a supposed taste for the mysteries of parapsychology or the paranormal. He expounded on the history of the destruction of the European Jews without in the least bringing up any order, from Hitler or anyone else, to exterminate the said Jews. He explained everything by a kind of diabolical mystery through which, spontaneously, the German bureaucrats told themselves to kill the Jews to the very last.“Countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” took part in the extermination enterprise by virtue of a “mechanism”, and did so without any “basic plan” (p. 53); these bureaucrats “created an atmosphere in which the formal, written word could gradually be abandoned as a modus operandi” (p. 54); there were “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations”; “it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization”; “no one agency was charged with the whole operation”; “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process” (p. 55). In short, according to Hilberg, this concerted extermination had indeed taken place but there was no possibility of actually demonstrating it with the aid of specific documents. Two years previously, in February 1983, during a conference at Avery Fischer Hall in New York, he had presented this strange and woolly thesis as follows: “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”. To sum up, that vast project of destruction was executed, magically, by telepathy and by the diabolical workings of the “Nazi” bureaucratic genius. It can be said that with Hilberg, historical science has thus turned cabalistic or religious.
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, at their end, wanted to set off on the same road of fake science when they called upon French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac for assistance. For several years the poor Pressac strove to sell the tainted product in a pseudo-scientific form but, realising the imposture, in 1995 he did a complete turnaround and admitted that, all things considered, the dossier of “the Holocaust” was “rotten” and fit only “for the rubbish bins of history”; such were his own words. The news of his change of heart was to be kept hidden for five years, emerging only in 2000 at the end of a long book by Valérie Igounet, another Shoah peddler, entitled Histoire du négationnisme en France (Seuil, p. 652).
A religion that has at last discovered the up to date sales techniques
It was then that the spin doctors came onto the scene. What with the product having become suspect and potential customers starting to ask questions, the “Holocaust” religion’s management had to steer an altogether different course and give up defending the merchandise with ostensibly scientific arguments: their new approach would be a resolutely “modern” one. It was decided to set only the very least store by efforts at logical argumentation and to replace serious research with appeals to sentiment and emotion, in other words with art: the cinema, theatre, historical novels, shows, story telling (the contemporary art of throwing together an account or framing a “testimony”), the media circus, stage designs in museums, public ceremonies, pilgrimages, worshiping of (false) relics and (false) symbols (symbolic gas chambers, symbolic numbers, symbolic witnesses), incantations, music and even kitsch, the whole thing matched with assorted ways of forcing people to buy it, including various kinds of threats. The filmmaker Steven Spielberg, a specialist in dishevelled and extraterrestrial fiction, has become the leading instigator for holocaustic films as well as for the casting of 50,000 witnesses. In order to sell their tainted product better in the long term, our fake historians and real junk dealers have sought and obtained the primary school “franchise”, with which they instil a taste for “the Holocaust” in the very youngest clientele: for it’s in the earliest years that appetites are acquired, making so that, later on, the customer need hardly be enticed: he’ll demand on his own what he enjoyed as a child, be it sweets or poison. Thus has it come to be that no one involved could care less about history: all serve the sole cause of a certain Remembrance, that is a jumble of legends and slanders that give the public the pleasure of feeling good andrighteous, ready tosing the virtues of the poor Jew and curse the intrinsically wicked “Nazis”, to call for vengeance and spit on the graves of the defeated. At the end it only remains to collect a flood of cold hard cash and receive new privileges. Pierre Vidal-Naquet was but an amateur: in 1979, he had shown himself from the outset to be too basic, too rough in his “Holocaust” promotion. For example, when asked by the revisionists to explain how in blazes, after a gassing operation with hydrogen cyanide (the active ingredient in the insecticide “Zyklon B”), a squad of Jews (Sonderkommando) could enter unharmed into a room still full of that terrible gas, then handle and remove up to a few thousand corpses infused with poison, he, along with 33 other academics, replied that he simply need not provide any explanation. Spielberg, a more skilful man, was to show in a screen drama a “gas chamber” wherein, for once, “by a miracle”, the showerheads sprayed… water and not gas. Subsequently, in his turn, Vidal-Naquet had, quite awkwardly, attempted to answer the revisionists on the scientific level and made a fool of himself. Claude Lanzmann, for his part, in the film Shoah, sought to produce testimonies or confessions, but his result was clumsy, inept and hardly convincing; that said, at least he’d grasped that the main point was to “make movies” and occupy the public forum. Today there is no longer a single “historian” of “the Holocaust” who makes it his business to prove the reality of “the Holocaust” and its magical gas chambers. All of them do like Saul Friedländer in his latest book (L’Allemagne nazie et les juifs / Les années d’extermination, Seuil, 2008): they leave it as understood that it all existed. With them history becomes axiomatic, although their axioms aren’t even drawn up. These new historians proceed with such self-assurance that the reader, taken aback, doesn’t realise the trick being played on him: the smooth talkers go on endlessly about an event whose reality they haven’t established in the first place. And so it is that the customer, believing that he’s bought some goods, has actually bought the smooth talk of the one giving him the sales pitch. Today’s world champion of holocaustic bluff is a shabbos goy, Father Patrick Desbois, one hell of a trickster whose various productions dedicated to “the Holocaust by bullets”, notably in the Ukraine, seem to have reached the very peaks of Judeo-Christian media hype.
A success story of the great powers
A veritable success story in the art of selling, the holocaustic enterprise has acquired the status of an international lobby. This lobby has blended with the American Jewish lobby (whose flagship organisation is the AIPAC) which itself defends, tooth and nail, the interests of the State of Israel, of which “the Holocaust” is the sword and shield. The mightiest nations in the world can hardly allow themselves to annoy such a network of pressure groups which, under a religious veneer, was at first a commercial concern only to become later on military-commercial, constantly pushing for new military adventures. It follows that if other countries, called “emerging”, want to be in good graces with a certain more powerful one, then they would be well advised to bend to its wishes. Without necessarily professing their faith in “the Holocaust”, they will contribute, if need be, to the propagation of “the Holocaust” and to the repression of those who dispute its reality. The Chinese, for example, although they have no use at all for such nonsense themselves, keep well away from any calling into question of the “Jewish Holocaust”; this enables them to pose as the “Jews” of the Japanese during the last war and so point out that they too have been victims of genocide, a formula which, they think, may open the way to financial reparations and political profits, as it has done for the Jews.
A particularly mortal religion
The future trouble for the religion of “the Holocaust” lies in the fact that it is too secular. Here one may well think of the Papacy, which, in centuries past, drew its political and military strength from a temporal power that, in the final analysis, ended up causing its downfall. The new religion is hand in glove with, all together, the State of Israel, the United States, the European Union, NATO, Russia, the big banks (which, as in the case of the Swiss banks, it can force to knuckle under if they show unwillingness to pay out), international racketeering and the arms merchants’ lobbies. This being the case, who can guarantee it a solid base in the future? It has made itself vulnerable by endorsing, de facto, the policies of nations or groups with inordinate appetites, whose spirit of worldwide crusade, as may be particularly noted in the Near and Middle East, has become adventurist.
It has come to pass that religions disappear with the empires where they used to reign. This is because religions, like civilisations, are mortal. That of “the Holocaust” is doubly mortal: it spurs countries to go on warlike crusades and it is rushing to its doom. It will rush to its doom even if, in the last instance, the Jewish State vanishes from the land of Palestine. The Jews then dispersed throughout the world will have only one last resort, that of bewailing this “Second Holocaust”.
***
Translator’s note: The italicised English words are in English in the original.
NB: Already in 1980, in my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (“Statement of case against those who accuse me of falsifying history”, La Vieille Taupe, Paris), I dealt with “the new religion” of “the Holocaust” (p. 261-263). In 2006 I wrote two articles on the subject: “La ‘Mémoire juive’ contre l’Histoire ou l’aversion juive pour toute recherche approfondie sur la Shoah” (“‘Jewish Remembrance’ versus History, or the Jewish aversion to any thorough research on the Shoah”) and “Le prétendu ‘Holocauste’ des juifs se révèle de plus en plus dangereux” (“The Alleged ‘Holocaust’ of the Jews is proving ever more dangerous”).
The second may be found here in English translation.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Mussolini 'brain for sale on web'
Mussolini 'brain for sale on web' The granddaughter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has said that blood and parts of his brain have been stolen to sell on the internet.
Alessandra Mussolini, a former showgirl turned MP, said she immediately informed the police when she found out.
The listing, on auction site Ebay, reportedly showed images of a wooden container and ampoules of blood.
Ebay, which does not allow the sale of human matter on its site, said that the listing was removed within hours.
The initial price requested for the material was 15,000 euros ($22,000; £13,000).
"This is very serious, these are the kinds of things we have to guard against," said Ms Mussolini, who was attending a seminar on internet crime when the listing was discovered.
Doctors' denial
The BBC's Mark Duff, in Milan, says that Alessandra Mussolini is a colourful character in her own right who has remained doggedly faithful to her grandfather's political legacy.
Ms Mussolini said that the remains were stolen from Milan's Policlinico hospital.
After Benito Mussolini was killed in 1945 his body was put on public display in a Milan square. It was then taken to the hospital for an autopsy.
However, doctors at the hospital denied any remains of the former Italian leader were kept at the premises, saying they were destroyed in the years that followed.
A spokesperson for Ebay said that the listing violated its own regulations and was promptly taken down.
"It was removed before 11am, a few hours after it was put online and before anyone had made any bids," said spokesperson Irina Pavlova.
Story from BBC NEWS:
Thursday, November 19, 2009
THE MEXICAN HAPPINESS FAIRY
After the Mexican checks out, she says “How you doing today?”
I reply “Do you really want to know?”
This is when the Mexican turns to me and says “No negativity, only POSITIVE thoughts!”
She looks at me and shakes her head in disgust.
As I’m leaving, I see the Mexican scumbag walking into the Drug/Alcohol rehab place behind the 7-11.
My first thought was “What a stupid subhuman piece of shit.”
Then, completely out of character, I thought “Maybe I’m being too judgmental.”
It was only then, when I had for a split second allowed the glorious ray of supernal light, love, and tolerance into my heart, I realized that Mexicans are actually ELVES moving among us to spread their MAGIC PIXIE DUST of LOVE, HAPPINESS, and POSITIVITY!
Today I am living in a whole new world!
Love,
JDS
Friday, November 6, 2009
Benito Mussolini - My Favorite Atheist
Mussolini's earliest political pamphlet was titled God does not exist. He was known to refer to priests as "black germs", he had a secular civil wedding, and during speeches before large crowds he dared God to strike him dead.
He also said:
"Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind."
"The God of the theologians is the creation of their empty heads."
"The history of the saints is mainly the history of insane people."
"Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd."
In his book Mussolini, British historian Denis Mack Smith writes that Mussolini;
"forcibly denounced those...who thought religion a matter for individual conscience or had their children baptised. [In Mussolini's opinion] Science had proved that God did not exist and the Jesus of history was an ignorant Jew whose family thought him mad... Religion, he said, was a disease of the psyche, an epidemic to be cured by psychiatrists, and Christianity in particular was vitiated by preaching the senseless virtues of resignation and cowardice."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Religious_beliefs
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
No Bond For Sex Offender Who Posted Bizarre Videos
A Church of Satan associate has informed me that Ed Muscare was a well-known Arizona "Creature Feature" host under the stage-name "Edmus Scary." Yes, I'd say this guy is a little scary!
He also looks like he could have been an illustration of a Jew from Julius Striecher's THE POISONOUS MUSHROOM.
JDS
____________________________No Bond For Sex Offender Who Posted Bizarre Videos
A man who calls himself a “YouTube legend” was a no-show in court Monday. Police say the registered sex offender first broke the rules by posting bizarre videos online.
He is being held without bond. His public defender pleaded not guilty in court, but no changes were made to the 77-year-old's bond status.
Edward Muscare was first arrested for molesting a 14-year-old boy in Orange County back in 1986, but he has a long line of problems following court orders.
Muscare moved out of a now overgrown Lady Lake house on Sunshine Avenue (see map) and moved to South Carolina in 2007. He didn't report his new address to authorities and as a result he got five years probation. Now he’s violated the terms to his release from jail.
Edward Muscare won't be making any new YouTube videos in the near future. He is still being held without bond. Muscare was arrested Saturday for posting 130 videos of himself on the website YouTube, which is a violation of his probation.
When Muscare appeared on YouTube lip-syncing songs, along with other strange antics, cops had him arrested at his South Carolina home and brought him back to Lake County.
Muscare is a former host who went by the name ‘Uncle Ed’ on late night television and on a children's program in Kansas City.
“Let the man live his life, there's not much left. He's old, he's feeble,” former neighbor Chrystal Guemble said.
His former neighbor insisted that Muscare is not a threat to society.
“He's never been a threat he's been a helpful, warm, loving, kind, friendly neighbor who's always there when you need him,” she said.
There were some neighbors, though, who've watched his videos and said he looks scary.
“Just creeped out. If anybody has seen it they'd know, he's definitely a freaky kind of guy,” parent Todd Whitney said.
But officers don't care about the bizarre videos. It's their contention that Muscare continually disregards court orders.
He was specifically told not to post the videos and so he thought he'd have a friend do it. -That's a violation according to prosecutors.
Online, some fans have offered support and in his old neighborhood, friends say they are amazed by his digital fame.
“I'm proud of him, I'm so proud of him,” Guemble said.
Investigators found videos and pictures on Muscare's computer, but nothing of a sexual nature. The only new allegation against the man is that he didn't obey the judge.
SOURCE: http://www.wftv.com/news/21415561/detail.html#
Muscare's Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=edarem#p/u/7/X3xoWk7OsqI
Monday, October 26, 2009
Interview with Kevin MacDonald
This will be of interest to anyone who appreciated Bloom's THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE, Evolutionary Psychology, or possibly even my afterword to Nietzsche's THE ANTICHRIST:
The Dark Side of the ‘Special Relationship’
The Dark Side of the ‘Special Relationship’
Posted By Justin Raimondo On October 20, 2009 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 15 Comments
A silent battle has been raging right under our noses, a fierce underground struggle pitting the U.S. against one of its closest allies. For all its newsworthiness, the media has barely noticed the story – except when it surfaces, briefly, like a giant fin jutting above the waves. The aggressor in this war is the state of Israel, with the U.S., its sponsor and protector, playing defense. This is the dark side of the "special relationship" – a battle of spy vs. spy.
Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard – now serving a life sentence – stole secrets so vital that an attempt by the Israelis to get him pardoned was blocked by a massive protest from the intelligence and defense communities. Bill Clinton wanted to trade Pollard for Israeli concessions in the ongoing "peace process," and he was only prevented from doing so by a threat of mass resignations by the top leadership of the intelligence community.
The reason for their intransigence: among the material Pollard had been asked by his Israeli handlers to steal was the U.S. attack plan against the Soviet Union. According to Seymour Hersh, then-CIA director Bill Casey claimed Tel Aviv handed over the information to Moscow in exchange for relaxation of travel restrictions on Soviet Jews, who were then allowed to emigrate to Israel.
The Pollard case is emblematic – but it was just the beginning of a years-long effort by U.S. counterintelligence to rid themselves of the Israeli incubus. Law enforcement was – and presumably still is – convinced Pollard was very far from alone, and that a highly placed "mole" had provided him with key information. In his quest to procure very specific information, Pollard knew precisely which documents to look for – knowledge he couldn’t access without help from someone very high in government circles.
In addition, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli intelligence officer and his boss in Tel Aviv, during which they discussed how to get hold of a letter by then-secretary of state Warren Christopher to Yasser Arafat. The Washington spy suggested they use "Mega," but his boss demurred: "This is not something we use Mega for," he averred.
The search for Mega and his underlings continues to this day, as U.S. counterintelligence attempts to rip up what appears to be a vast Israeli spy operation by its very deep roots. That’s why they went after Ben Ami Kadish, who handed over U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv and shared a handler with Pollard, and why they indicted Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two top officials of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. That’s why they were listening on the other end as Jane Harman promised an Israeli agent to intervene in the Rosen-Weissman case. And now a new front has been opened up in this subterranean war with the arrest of Stewart David Nozette, a top U.S. scientist who worked for the Pentagon, had access to the most closely guarded nuclear secrets, and was the lead scientist in the search for water on the moon.
Nozette’s case is interesting because of his impressive resume: he held top positions with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and NASA, and he served on the White House National Space Council under George H.W. Bush. From 1989 until March 2006, he held "Q" clearance, which means he had access to "critical nuclear weapon design information" and vital information concerning 20 "special access programs" – secrets only a very few top government officials had knowledge of.
In other words, this wasn’t just some mid-level schmuck who wanted to sell out his country for cash: he was one of the big boys – the principal author of the Clementine biostatic radar experiment, which allowed U.S. scientists to discover water on the moon – a kind of J. Robert Oppenheimer figure, whose singular contributions to the U.S. space program and its military applications granted him security clearances available to a very select few.
The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint [.pdf] alleging espionage is terse, vague in parts, and brimming with implication. Taking their cues from the Department of Justice press release, most news reports state, "The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under U.S. laws," leaving out the last three words in the DOJ’s sentence: "in this case."
In this particular case, it’s true, prosecutors are going after Nozette for violations that occurred while they were reeling him in, with a federal agent pretending to be a Mossad officer offering him money (not very much, by the way) in exchange for secrets. The real question, however, is what caused them to zero in on Nozette? A Washington Times piece cites Kenneth Piernick, a former senior FBI agent, who opined:
“He must have made some kind of attempt, which triggered the FBI’s interest in him. They cut in between him and whoever he was trying to work with and posed as an intelligence officer, agent, or courier to handle the issue, and then when he delivered what he intended to deliver to that person, his contact was likely an undercover FBI agent or [someone from] another U.S. intelligence service.”
Yet Nozette may have made more than a mere "attempt." The affidavit alleges that, from 1998 to 2008, he served as a consultant to "an aerospace company wholly owned by the government of Israel," during which time "approximately once a month representatives of the aerospace company proposed questions, or taskings, to Nozette." He answered these questions, and, in return, received regular payments totaling $250,000.
This indicates the Feds had been on to Nozette for quite some time, and with good cause. The affidavit also notes that, at the beginning of this year, he traveled to "a different foreign country" in possession of two computer "thumb" drives, which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared upon his return some three weeks later. What was on the drives – and who were the recipients?
In 2007, federal authorities raided the offices of Nozette’s nonprofit company, the Alliance for Competitive Technology (ACT), purportedly because ACT, having procured several lucrative government contracts, had defrauded the federal government by overcharging. The affidavit cites an anonymous colleague of Nozette who recalled the scientist said that if the U.S. government ever tried to put him in jail he would go to Israel or another foreign country and “tell them everything” he knows.
Perhaps the real reason for the raid, however, had to do with the FBI’s growing suspicion – if not certainty – he was funneling U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv. ACT is a curious creation, a "nonprofit" group that nevertheless generated over half a million dollars last year according to documents filed with the IRS, with over $150,000 in salary and benefits paid out to Nozette. But it wasn’t just about money. ACT’s mission statement reads like a spy’s dream come true:
"The Alliance for Competitive Technology … has been created to serve the national and public interest by conducting scientific research and educational activities aimed at expanding the utilization of National and Government Laboratory resources. The National Laboratories possess significant technology, technologists, and resources, of great potential value to growing U.S. industrial organizations, both small and large. Recent changes in national policy (the Stevenson-Wydler Act of 1986 and the NASA Technology Utilization Program) have sanctioned the pursuit of technology transfer from these organizations. However, the capabilities and resources present in National Laboratories are often difficult to access by small and medium sized organizations with limited resources. ACT will research the best mechanisms to facilitate this transfer through focused research on technology transfer mechanisms, and educational and instructive programs on technology transfer from National Laboratories. In addition, ACT will enable U.S. organizations to utilize the resources of National Laboratories through existing established mechanisms (e.g., the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technology Affiliates Program).Transfer of commercially valuable technology is significantly enhanced by such direct support of private sector efforts."
In short: ACT is all about technology transfer – from the U.S. to Israel. This, as is well-known, is one of the favored activities of the Israeli intelligence services, which regularly pilfer the latest American technology (especially military applications) to such an extent that a General Accounting Office investigation once characterized the effort as "the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."
ACT had contracts with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Va., and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It is hardly a leap of faith to conclude that vital data flowing from these projects was fed directly into the waiting maw of the Mossad.
Nozette was a key figure in developing and promoting the "Star Wars" ballistic missile defense system. His colleague in the "High Frontier" movement – and the official director of ACT – is one Klaus Heiss, like Nozette an enthusiast [.pdf] of space colonization (who also has some strong views on other subjects).
Contacted by an FBI agent masquerading as an Israeli intelligence agent, Nozette didn’t blink when told his lunch companion was from the Mossad: "Good," he said. "Happy to be of assistance." This was well before the issue of money was raised. Later in the conversation, Nozette boasted of his top-level security clearances and the range and depth of his knowledge of U.S. secrets, adding, "I don’t get recruited by the Mossad every day. By the way, I knew this day would come." Questioned further by the undercover agent, Nozette said, "I thought I was working for you already. I mean, that’s what I always thought [the foreign company] was – just a front."
Which it no doubt was.
Nozette agreed to be a regular "asset," yet he clearly felt his position was increasingly precarious. He inquired about the right of return and raised the possibility that he might go to Israel. He wanted a passport as part of his payment, in addition to the few thousand dollars the FBI was putting in a post office "dead drop" for him on receipt of stolen secrets.
Well, then, so what? Don’t all nations, even allies, spy on each other? What’s the significance of this particular case?
On the surface, our relationship with Israel is encompassed by the terms of the "special relationship," which has so far consisted of the U.S. giving unconditional support to Tel Aviv’s every action, no matter how brutal [.pdf] or contrary to our interests – and tolerating, to a large degree, its extensive covert operations on U.S. soil (or, at least, keeping quiet about them). On a deeper level, however, the tensions in this one-way love affair have frayed the specialness of the relationship almost to the breaking point.
This is not just due to the election of Barack Obama, who is widely perceived in Israel as being biased against the Jewish state. These tensions arose during Bush’s second term, when U.S. policy began to perceptibly tilt away from Tel Aviv. A particularly telling blow to U.S.-Israeli relations was the decision by the U.S. to clamp down on visa requirements for Israelis entering the U.S.: potential visitors from Israel are now required to undergo an interview, restrictions on their length of stay have been extended, and admission to the U.S. is no longer assured.
In the secret world of spooks spying on one another, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is increasingly adversarial, while in the diplomatic-political realm, it has nearly reached the point of open hostilities. This is thanks to the objective conditions that determine relations among nations: in the post-Cold War world, Israel necessarily became much less of an asset to the U.S. In the post-9/11 world, as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have so trenchantly pointed out, it is an outright liability.
Our self-sacrificial policy of unconditional support for Israel has earned us implacable enemies in the Arab world and granted our adversaries a priceless propaganda prize – and the growing awareness of this disability is something the Israelis no doubt find disturbing. The distortion of our foreign policy by the power of the Israel lobby is also being widely noted, and this is their real Achilles heel.
In this case, too, the Lobby will no doubt rush to exert their influence to downgrade Nozette’s crime and even depict him as an innocent victim of entrapment. Defenders of the AIPAC duo conjured a vast "anti-Semitic" conspiracy within the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI to explain the alleged persecution of Rosen and Weissman, and the same tactics are bound to be trotted out in this instance.
That is nonsense. The FBI didn’t just pick Nozette arbitrarily and conjure his crimes out of thin air. Their target was already deeply involved with the Israelis, and this is what brought him to their attention in the first place.
The nature and extent of Israeli spying in the U.S. is not a subject you’ll see the "mainstream" media very often touch with so much as a 10-foot pole, but when it does the results can be ominously disturbing. I, for one, haven’t forgotten Carl Cameron’s four-part series on Israeli spying in the U.S., broadcast by Fox News in December 2001. According to Cameron, his sources in law enforcement told him the Israelis had been following the 9/11 hijackers and had foreknowledge of their plans but somehow neglected to tell us. And then there were those dancing Israelis, leaping for joy at the sight of the Twin Towers burning…
This is the dark side of the "special relationship," so dark that hardly anyone wants to acknowledge it, let alone consider its implications.
URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/10/20/the-dark-side-of-the-special-relationship/
Posted By Justin Raimondo On October 20, 2009 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 15 Comments
A silent battle has been raging right under our noses, a fierce underground struggle pitting the U.S. against one of its closest allies. For all its newsworthiness, the media has barely noticed the story – except when it surfaces, briefly, like a giant fin jutting above the waves. The aggressor in this war is the state of Israel, with the U.S., its sponsor and protector, playing defense. This is the dark side of the "special relationship" – a battle of spy vs. spy.
Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard – now serving a life sentence – stole secrets so vital that an attempt by the Israelis to get him pardoned was blocked by a massive protest from the intelligence and defense communities. Bill Clinton wanted to trade Pollard for Israeli concessions in the ongoing "peace process," and he was only prevented from doing so by a threat of mass resignations by the top leadership of the intelligence community.
The reason for their intransigence: among the material Pollard had been asked by his Israeli handlers to steal was the U.S. attack plan against the Soviet Union. According to Seymour Hersh, then-CIA director Bill Casey claimed Tel Aviv handed over the information to Moscow in exchange for relaxation of travel restrictions on Soviet Jews, who were then allowed to emigrate to Israel.
The Pollard case is emblematic – but it was just the beginning of a years-long effort by U.S. counterintelligence to rid themselves of the Israeli incubus. Law enforcement was – and presumably still is – convinced Pollard was very far from alone, and that a highly placed "mole" had provided him with key information. In his quest to procure very specific information, Pollard knew precisely which documents to look for – knowledge he couldn’t access without help from someone very high in government circles.
In addition, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli intelligence officer and his boss in Tel Aviv, during which they discussed how to get hold of a letter by then-secretary of state Warren Christopher to Yasser Arafat. The Washington spy suggested they use "Mega," but his boss demurred: "This is not something we use Mega for," he averred.
The search for Mega and his underlings continues to this day, as U.S. counterintelligence attempts to rip up what appears to be a vast Israeli spy operation by its very deep roots. That’s why they went after Ben Ami Kadish, who handed over U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv and shared a handler with Pollard, and why they indicted Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two top officials of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. That’s why they were listening on the other end as Jane Harman promised an Israeli agent to intervene in the Rosen-Weissman case. And now a new front has been opened up in this subterranean war with the arrest of Stewart David Nozette, a top U.S. scientist who worked for the Pentagon, had access to the most closely guarded nuclear secrets, and was the lead scientist in the search for water on the moon.
Nozette’s case is interesting because of his impressive resume: he held top positions with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and NASA, and he served on the White House National Space Council under George H.W. Bush. From 1989 until March 2006, he held "Q" clearance, which means he had access to "critical nuclear weapon design information" and vital information concerning 20 "special access programs" – secrets only a very few top government officials had knowledge of.
In other words, this wasn’t just some mid-level schmuck who wanted to sell out his country for cash: he was one of the big boys – the principal author of the Clementine biostatic radar experiment, which allowed U.S. scientists to discover water on the moon – a kind of J. Robert Oppenheimer figure, whose singular contributions to the U.S. space program and its military applications granted him security clearances available to a very select few.
The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint [.pdf] alleging espionage is terse, vague in parts, and brimming with implication. Taking their cues from the Department of Justice press release, most news reports state, "The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under U.S. laws," leaving out the last three words in the DOJ’s sentence: "in this case."
In this particular case, it’s true, prosecutors are going after Nozette for violations that occurred while they were reeling him in, with a federal agent pretending to be a Mossad officer offering him money (not very much, by the way) in exchange for secrets. The real question, however, is what caused them to zero in on Nozette? A Washington Times piece cites Kenneth Piernick, a former senior FBI agent, who opined:
“He must have made some kind of attempt, which triggered the FBI’s interest in him. They cut in between him and whoever he was trying to work with and posed as an intelligence officer, agent, or courier to handle the issue, and then when he delivered what he intended to deliver to that person, his contact was likely an undercover FBI agent or [someone from] another U.S. intelligence service.”
Yet Nozette may have made more than a mere "attempt." The affidavit alleges that, from 1998 to 2008, he served as a consultant to "an aerospace company wholly owned by the government of Israel," during which time "approximately once a month representatives of the aerospace company proposed questions, or taskings, to Nozette." He answered these questions, and, in return, received regular payments totaling $250,000.
This indicates the Feds had been on to Nozette for quite some time, and with good cause. The affidavit also notes that, at the beginning of this year, he traveled to "a different foreign country" in possession of two computer "thumb" drives, which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared upon his return some three weeks later. What was on the drives – and who were the recipients?
In 2007, federal authorities raided the offices of Nozette’s nonprofit company, the Alliance for Competitive Technology (ACT), purportedly because ACT, having procured several lucrative government contracts, had defrauded the federal government by overcharging. The affidavit cites an anonymous colleague of Nozette who recalled the scientist said that if the U.S. government ever tried to put him in jail he would go to Israel or another foreign country and “tell them everything” he knows.
Perhaps the real reason for the raid, however, had to do with the FBI’s growing suspicion – if not certainty – he was funneling U.S. secrets to Tel Aviv. ACT is a curious creation, a "nonprofit" group that nevertheless generated over half a million dollars last year according to documents filed with the IRS, with over $150,000 in salary and benefits paid out to Nozette. But it wasn’t just about money. ACT’s mission statement reads like a spy’s dream come true:
"The Alliance for Competitive Technology … has been created to serve the national and public interest by conducting scientific research and educational activities aimed at expanding the utilization of National and Government Laboratory resources. The National Laboratories possess significant technology, technologists, and resources, of great potential value to growing U.S. industrial organizations, both small and large. Recent changes in national policy (the Stevenson-Wydler Act of 1986 and the NASA Technology Utilization Program) have sanctioned the pursuit of technology transfer from these organizations. However, the capabilities and resources present in National Laboratories are often difficult to access by small and medium sized organizations with limited resources. ACT will research the best mechanisms to facilitate this transfer through focused research on technology transfer mechanisms, and educational and instructive programs on technology transfer from National Laboratories. In addition, ACT will enable U.S. organizations to utilize the resources of National Laboratories through existing established mechanisms (e.g., the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technology Affiliates Program).Transfer of commercially valuable technology is significantly enhanced by such direct support of private sector efforts."
In short: ACT is all about technology transfer – from the U.S. to Israel. This, as is well-known, is one of the favored activities of the Israeli intelligence services, which regularly pilfer the latest American technology (especially military applications) to such an extent that a General Accounting Office investigation once characterized the effort as "the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."
ACT had contracts with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Va., and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It is hardly a leap of faith to conclude that vital data flowing from these projects was fed directly into the waiting maw of the Mossad.
Nozette was a key figure in developing and promoting the "Star Wars" ballistic missile defense system. His colleague in the "High Frontier" movement – and the official director of ACT – is one Klaus Heiss, like Nozette an enthusiast [.pdf] of space colonization (who also has some strong views on other subjects).
Contacted by an FBI agent masquerading as an Israeli intelligence agent, Nozette didn’t blink when told his lunch companion was from the Mossad: "Good," he said. "Happy to be of assistance." This was well before the issue of money was raised. Later in the conversation, Nozette boasted of his top-level security clearances and the range and depth of his knowledge of U.S. secrets, adding, "I don’t get recruited by the Mossad every day. By the way, I knew this day would come." Questioned further by the undercover agent, Nozette said, "I thought I was working for you already. I mean, that’s what I always thought [the foreign company] was – just a front."
Which it no doubt was.
Nozette agreed to be a regular "asset," yet he clearly felt his position was increasingly precarious. He inquired about the right of return and raised the possibility that he might go to Israel. He wanted a passport as part of his payment, in addition to the few thousand dollars the FBI was putting in a post office "dead drop" for him on receipt of stolen secrets.
Well, then, so what? Don’t all nations, even allies, spy on each other? What’s the significance of this particular case?
On the surface, our relationship with Israel is encompassed by the terms of the "special relationship," which has so far consisted of the U.S. giving unconditional support to Tel Aviv’s every action, no matter how brutal [.pdf] or contrary to our interests – and tolerating, to a large degree, its extensive covert operations on U.S. soil (or, at least, keeping quiet about them). On a deeper level, however, the tensions in this one-way love affair have frayed the specialness of the relationship almost to the breaking point.
This is not just due to the election of Barack Obama, who is widely perceived in Israel as being biased against the Jewish state. These tensions arose during Bush’s second term, when U.S. policy began to perceptibly tilt away from Tel Aviv. A particularly telling blow to U.S.-Israeli relations was the decision by the U.S. to clamp down on visa requirements for Israelis entering the U.S.: potential visitors from Israel are now required to undergo an interview, restrictions on their length of stay have been extended, and admission to the U.S. is no longer assured.
In the secret world of spooks spying on one another, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is increasingly adversarial, while in the diplomatic-political realm, it has nearly reached the point of open hostilities. This is thanks to the objective conditions that determine relations among nations: in the post-Cold War world, Israel necessarily became much less of an asset to the U.S. In the post-9/11 world, as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have so trenchantly pointed out, it is an outright liability.
Our self-sacrificial policy of unconditional support for Israel has earned us implacable enemies in the Arab world and granted our adversaries a priceless propaganda prize – and the growing awareness of this disability is something the Israelis no doubt find disturbing. The distortion of our foreign policy by the power of the Israel lobby is also being widely noted, and this is their real Achilles heel.
In this case, too, the Lobby will no doubt rush to exert their influence to downgrade Nozette’s crime and even depict him as an innocent victim of entrapment. Defenders of the AIPAC duo conjured a vast "anti-Semitic" conspiracy within the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI to explain the alleged persecution of Rosen and Weissman, and the same tactics are bound to be trotted out in this instance.
That is nonsense. The FBI didn’t just pick Nozette arbitrarily and conjure his crimes out of thin air. Their target was already deeply involved with the Israelis, and this is what brought him to their attention in the first place.
The nature and extent of Israeli spying in the U.S. is not a subject you’ll see the "mainstream" media very often touch with so much as a 10-foot pole, but when it does the results can be ominously disturbing. I, for one, haven’t forgotten Carl Cameron’s four-part series on Israeli spying in the U.S., broadcast by Fox News in December 2001. According to Cameron, his sources in law enforcement told him the Israelis had been following the 9/11 hijackers and had foreknowledge of their plans but somehow neglected to tell us. And then there were those dancing Israelis, leaping for joy at the sight of the Twin Towers burning…
This is the dark side of the "special relationship," so dark that hardly anyone wants to acknowledge it, let alone consider its implications.
URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/10/20/the-dark-side-of-the-special-relationship/
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Vampire/Cannibal Article from the New York Times, November 5, 1892
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Music of Harry Partch
Partch was born on June 24, 1901 in Oakland, California soon after his parents, both Presbyterian missionaries, fled the Boxer Rebellion in China. He spent his childhood in small, remote towns in Arizona and New Mexico, where he heard and sang songs in Mandarin, Spanish, and American Indian languages.
Partch was sterile, probably due to childhood mumps, and most of his loving relationships were with men.[1] As a child, he learned to play the clarinet, harmonium, viola, piano, and guitar. He began to compose at an early age, using the equal-tempered chromatic scale, the tuning system most common in Western music. However, Partch grew frustrated with what he felt were imperfections of the standard system of musical tuning, believing that this system was unsuitable for reflecting the subtle melodic contours of dramatic speech, and as a result, he burned all of his early works.
Interested in the potential musicality of speech, Partch invented and constructed instruments that could underscore the intoning voice, and he developed musical notations that accurately and practically instructed players as to how to play the instruments. His first such instrument was the "Monophone," later known as the "Adapted viola."
Partch secured a grant that allowed him to go to London to study the history of tuning systems and text-setting. While there, he met the poet William Butler Yeats with the intention of gaining Yeats' permission to write an opera based on the poet's translation of Sophocles' Oedipus the King. In his opera, Partch transcribed the inflections of actors from the Abbey Theatre reciting lines from Sophocles' play, and Partch performed this music on his Monophone while intoning "By the Rivers of Babylon." Yeats responded enthusiastically, saying, "A play done entirely in this way, with this wonderful instrument, and with this type of music, might really be sensational," and he gave Partch's idea his blessing.
Partch then set out to build more instruments with which to realize his burgeoning opera. However, after his grant money ran out, he was forced to return to the U.S., which was at the height of the Depression. There, he lived as a hobo, traveling around on trains and taking casual work where he could find it. He continued in this way for ten years, chronicling his experiences in a journal named Bitter Music. The entries frequently included overheard bits of everyday vernacular speech, wherein Partch transcribed the speaker's pitches on musical staves. This technique, which had been used earlier by the Florentine Camerata, Berlioz, Mussorgsky, Debussy, Schoenberg, Leoš Janáček and others and would be later used by Steve Reich), was to become a standard approach to vocal scoring in Partch's work.
In 1941, Partch wrote Barstow, a work whose text comes from eight pieces of graffiti Partch had spotted on a highway railing in Barstow, California. The piece, originally for voice and guitar, was transcribed several times throughout the composer's life as his collection of instruments grew.
In 1943, after receiving a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Partch was able to dedicate more time to music. He returned to his Oedipus Project, although the executors of Yeats' estate refused to grant him permission to use Yeats' translation, and he had to make his own (a recording with Yeats' translation has since been released, Yeats' text having passed into the public domain). While living briefly in Ithaca, New York,[citation needed] he began work on US Highball, a musical evocation of riding the rails as a Depression-era hobo.
In 1949, a book Partch had been working on since 1923 was eventually published as Genesis of a Music. It is an account of his own music with discussions of music theory and music instrument design. Today, it is considered a standard text of microtonal music theory and takes his concept of "Corporeality," the fusion of all art forms with the body, as its central focus.
He went on to write the 'dance satire' The Bewitched, and Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a work based in large part on Euripides' The Bacchae. Delusion of the Fury (1969) is considered by some[who?] as his greatest work.
Partch is famous for his 43-tone scale, even though he used many different scales in his work and the number of divisions is theoretically infinite.
Partch created and maintained his own record label, "Gate 5", to release recordings of his works and generate income. Towards the end of his life, Columbia Records made recordings of some of his works, including Delusion of the Fury, which helped increase public attention to his work. He remains a somewhat obscure figure, but is well known to experimental musicians (especially those interested in microtonality) and instrument-builders, and he is considered by many[who?] to be one of the most significant composers of the 20th century.
In 1974, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Percussive Arts Society, a music service organization promoting percussion education, research, performance and appreciation throughout the world.
Partch died on September 3, 1974 in San Diego, California of a heart attack.
In 2004, U.S. Highball was selected by the Library of Congress' National Recording Preservation Board as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Harry Partch's desire to use a different system of tuning inspired him to modify existing instruments and create new ones. He was, in his own words, "a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".
His adapted instruments include the Adapted Viola (a viola fitted with a cello neck which extends the range by a fourth, and has changeable bridges to allow triple-stops to be sustained) and three Adapted Guitars: a guitar with the equal tempered frets replaced by a complex system of justly tuned frets, a guitar tuned in octaves, or 2/1's, played by moving a pyrex rod along the strings, much like a slide guitar, and a 10-string fretless guitar played in a similar manner to his other fretless guitar, but with a wildly different tuning.
He re-tuned the reeds of several reed organs and labeled the keys with a color code. The first one was called the Ptolemy, in tribute to the ancient music theorist Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose musical scales included ratios of the 11-limit, as Partch's did. The others were called Chromelodeons, a portmanteau of chrome (meaning "color") and melodeon.
Partch also designed and built many instruments from raw materials:
The Diamond Marimba is a marimba with keys arranged in a physical manifestation of the 11-limit tonality diamond.
The Quadrangularis Reversum inverted the key layout of the Diamond Marimba with sets of alto-range auxiliary keys on either side.
The 11-key Bass Marimba and the 4-key Marimba Eroica have more traditional linear layouts, and are very low in pitch. The Eroica's range extends well below that of the concert piano.
The Mazda Marimba is made of Mazda light bulbs and named after the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda.
The Bamboo Marimbas, nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo II", are marimbas made of bamboo, using the concept of a tongued resonator to produce the tones.
The Cloud Chamber Bowls is a set of pyrex bowls from a cloud chamber, suspended in a frame.
The Spoils of War is a collection of several instruments, including more Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal whang-guns, and several wooden tones.
The Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs are two separate instruments often played by the same player. The gourd tree is a bough of eucalyptus supporting several singing bowls attached to gourd resonators. The cone gongs are two fuel tank nose-cones, mounted on a stand low to the ground.
The Zymo-Xyl (from the Greek words for "fermentation" and "wood") is a xylophone augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps. (Partch lamented that there was no Greek word for "hubcaps".)
The Kitharas (named after the Greek kithara) are large upright stringed instruments, tuned by sliding pyrex rods underneath the strings, and played with fingers or a variety of plectra. Their sound is one of the most unmistakable in Partch's music.
The Harmonic Canons (from the same root as qanún) are 44-stringed instruments with complex systems of bridges. They are tuned differently depending on the piece, and are played with fingers or picks, or in some cases, unique mallets.
In 1990, Dean Drummond's Newband became custodians of the original Harry Partch instrument collection, and the group frequently performs with and commissions new pieces for Partch's instruments.
The instruments have been housed in the Harry Partch Instrumentarium at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey since 1999. In 2004, the instruments crossed campus into the newly constructed Alexander Kasser Theater, which provides a large studio space in the basement. Concerts by Newband and MSU's Harry Partch Ensemble may be viewed several times a year in this hall.
Many people have duplicated partial sets of Partch instruments including John Schneider, director of Microfest[1]. His West Coast ensemble includes replicas of the Kithara, Cloud-Chamber Bowls, Adapted Guitars, Adapted Viola, Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, Chromelodeon, and two Harmonic Canons.
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch
Monday, October 12, 2009
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
This is one of my favorite books in the history of European letters. If Poe had one book in mind when he referred to a "curious volume of forgotten lore" I would be amazed if it wasn't Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. JDS
Here is a good review from: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/divphil/burtonr.htm
The complete review's Review:
If one had to pare down one's library to the barest minimum, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is a volume that one could never cull. If one had to prepare for a desert-island exile and could take only a handful of books along, then The Anatomy of Melancholy is surely a volume one would insist on taking. Those that have a copy of the long hard-to-find volume(s) treasure and cling to it -- one reason why you'll rarely find a copy at your local second-hand bookstore.
It is a famous book. A well-known title. But rarely seen. It has been, essentially, out of print for some time (the recent scholarly Clarendon Press edition being out of most reader's price range -- and, apparently, already itself out of print). Now The Anatomy of Melancholy has been republished in a convenient single volume by New York Review Books. A barely ballyhooed event, it should be the talk of the town, the publishing triumph of the season.
There are few essentials that belong on the bookshelf in every cultured English-speaking household. A collected Shakespeare. The Riverside Chaucer. Grudgingly: a King James Bible. And Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
Certainly, other titles belong there as well, but one can debate the specific novels and the poetry that are worthy of inclusion. Not Burton's Anatomy. No question there. And, given the propensity of the title to fall out of print (as it has recently, and did previously -- for a particularly long, dark stretch between 1676 and 1800), we can only advise you to get your copy while you can.
What is this book ? Well, it is, nominally, an anatomy, an overview, a dissection, an analysis of melancholy. But melancholy is a broad term, a common affliction with many causes, symptoms, and, possibly, cures. And Burton is determined to consider each and every variation on the theme.
What is this book ? Well, it is, nominally, an anatomy, an overview, a dissection, an analysis of melancholy. But melancholy is a broad term, a common affliction with many causes, symptoms, and, possibly, cures. And Burton is determined to consider each and every variation on the theme.
I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method. I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated.
Burton did, indeed, read many books. Every book ever written or published until that time, it would seem. Indeed, he appears to quote from every one of these books in The Anatomy of Melancholy -- from the earliest Greeks to his recent contemporaries. Arguably, the Anatomy is the last book that encompasses the entire learning of Western culture, the last successful effort to cram it all into one volume.
It is a strikingly odd book, in that it consists almost entirely of quotes and references to the thought of others. It is a book of references woven together. But what a tapestry. Burton builds his arguments and his explanations by constantly referring to what others have said before. Acknowledging that there is nary a new thought under the sun he dispenses with feigning originality. Newton may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but they remain largely unseen; in The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton stands on the shoulders of all of learned humanity, a small speck atop a very tangible, teeming mass. There is both madness and method here. The book is overwhelming. It ranges across nearly all subjects: medicine, astronomy, philosophy, literature and all the arts, politics, nature. It runs from quote to quote to reference. Still, it is carefully constructed, partition upon section upon member upon subsection. Neat synoptical tables illustrate how each partition unfolds. All possible issues are brought up and dealt with, exhaustively -- but never exhaustingly. The style is an odd one, with run-on sentences that seem to want to break off every which way, but Burton's hand is a firm one and, amazingly, he keeps things under control.
The book is presented as being by "Democritus Junior", the pseudonym Burton chose to publish the book under; it is dedicated to George Berkeley (giving some sense of Burton's own philosophical inclinations). The book begins with a Latin poem "Democritus Junior to his Book", with which he releases it into the open day. An explanatory poem gives "The Argument of the Frontispiece" (see here or, if you have the patience, here for reproductions of the frontispiece) Next: "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy".
There is then a long introduction, "Democritus Junior to the Reader", and finally a warning "To the Reader who Employs his Leisure Ill". Then it is on with the melancholy show. The focus is on this perceived malady, but in essence it is also an excuse to discourse about all matters and manners in the world (and, occasionally, beyond).
The first partition is devoted to the more common, generic sort of melancholy, focussing on causes and symptoms. Melancholy can, apparently, be found everywhere. Burton explores every possible reason for that sinking melancholy feeling. From God to bad nurses, bad diet to overmuch study, "Self-love, Vainglory, Praise, Honour, Immoderate Applause" to covetousness, "An heap of other Accidents" to education ("if a man escape a bad nurse he may be undone by evil bringing up") -- it seems anything can cause it.
The symptoms are more straightforward, though also more varied than one might expect. From "Windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy" to the female variations -- "Maids', Nuns', and Widows' Melancholy" -- Burton gives a neat little overview.
The second partition suggests cures for melancholy, ranging from lifestyle-changes to medical solutions (from blood-letting to herbal alternatives). Burton himself suggested: "I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy." (And he was very busy at it.)
The last partition then is devoted to the most complex and irrational mind-ailments: love-melancholy and religious-melancholy.
The fun and the brilliance of the book lies in Burton's presentation. Melancholy is his springboard, but it is the entire human experience -- so melancholy-tinged -- that is his subject. Example after example is heaped on the reader, quote after quote after story after anecdote, all condensed to their very essence. A mad fill, an overabundance, literary profusion on the most extravagant scale.
On every page there are a dozen -- at least -- examples or citations or tales or ideas, each of which any author could spin out into a full-length novel or treatise. Indeed, The Anatomy of Melancholy is the ultimate writer's resource book. Many a career could be built on it -- and several have been.
Laurence Sterne carried on the Burtonian tradition, stealing extensively from The Anatomy of Melancholy for his own Tristram Shandy (a theft that was not discovered for decades, as Burton was barely remembered or read at the time). For many others the volume was also favoured reading (and, occasionally, cribbing) material, from John Keats to Samuel Beckett.
The Anatomy of Melancholy is almost unreadable. Densely packed, it defies reading as it is now generally practised. And yet it is the ultimate book, a volume that one can not but return to over and over, constantly. Perusal of the rich Anatomy is addictive, each passage like a snort of crystallized literary erudition -- with a healthy dose of humour.
It is a book that lasts a lifetime. It is bottomless: both a pit and a reprieve. Burton himself, in his lifelong melancholy fit, could not help but constantly add to the text. The first edition had some 350,000 words, the sixth over half a million. He was a man possessed, the text burgeoning to bursting, Burton always -- just -- in control.
It is a unique, and grand achievement. Modern efforts at so-called hypertexts and hyperfiction pale beside it. On only the printed page Burton goes far beyond what most have conceived in virtual worlds.
If you only buy one book this year, let it be this one. And if you buy hundreds of books this year, let this one be on the top of the list.
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/divphil/burtonr.htm
Norse Mercenaries vs. The Democratic Republic of the Congo
It is always good to be reminded there is more going on in the world than you can imagine.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_French_and_Tjostolv_Moland
Joshua Olav Daniel Hodne French (born 7 April 1982) and Tjostolv Moland (born 28 February 1981), sometimes referred to by the aliases John Hunt and Mike Callan respectively, are two Norwegian nationals arrested in May 2009 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, accused of murdering their driver by gunshot and of espionage for Norway. They are both former soldiers in the Norwegian Armed Forces, who later worked in the private security industry. The men claimed that their driver was murdered by gunmen who waylaid them. On September 8, 2009, they were both found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death by a military tribunal in the regional capital, Kisangani.[1][2][3][4][5] The Congolese government insists that the defendants were active duty Norwegian soldiers, contradicting the Norwegian government's insistence that they had had no connection with Norway's military since 2007.
French grew up in the municipality of Re in Vestfold county and has both Norwegian and British citizenship. Moland is from Vegårshei in Aust-Agder county.
Until 2006, French served in the Norwegian Armed Forces and was also employed in the British Army where he trained as a paratrooper.[6] In 2006, he was admitted to the Telemark Battalion, the Norwegian Army's elite infantry unit, but was allegedly forced to resign in 2007 as he and his friend Moland were accused of having recruited military personnel into employment with private security companies.[7]
Moland also has a Norwegian Army background, having served in The King's Guard and later the Telemark Battalion, where he held the rank of second lieutenant before his resignation in 2007.[8] French and Moland later worked as security guards in several places, including pirate guards for a Korean company in the Gulf of Aden. French and Moland were also involved in security missions in various African countries, such as Angola, Sierra Leone, and lately in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[9]
There are conflicting stories as to their reasons for being in the country. French and Moland claim they intended to set up their own security company. In May 2009, they were arrested and charged in the killing of their hired driver, 47-year-old Abedi Kasongo, which is said to have occurred on May 5, 2009. French was arrested on May 9 in the Epulu game reserve, around 200 kilometres (120 mi) from Kisangani. Moland was arrested two days later in the Ituri Province, a few hundred kilometres farther northeast.[10]
After their arrest, French and Moland were charged with killing Kasongo on an isolated section of road between Kisangani and the Ugandan border. The prosecution did not disclose their theory as to the motive for the crime. Additional charges against the two included attempted murder of a witness, espionage, armed robbery and the possession of illegal firearms.[11]
Their trial, held on August 14, was allowed to take place before a military court because firearms had been used in the crime.[10] However, according to Mirna Adjami, a local representative of the International Center for Transitional Justice, only Congolese police and army soldiers can be tried before a military tribunal; this raised questions as to the court's legality.[12]
During the criminal investigation, the Congolese authorities found Norwegian military ID cards, counterfeit United Nations caps, and employee ID badges with both the correct and false names of French and Moland. The employee badges were from a little-known security company named Special Interventions Group (SIG) which is owned by and mostly staffed by Norwegians. The investigators also found SIG-Uganda employee ID badges which bore the identical SIG logo and the false names of "John Hunt" and "Mike Callan" accompanying French and Moland's respective photographs.[11] During a raid on French and Moland's apartment, authorities also confiscated at least one rifle and a camera containing images of French and Moland on their recent travels in Africa. In one image, believed to have been taken by French, Moland is seen smiling as he washes what is alleged to be the blood of Abedi Kasongo from the inside of their car. French and Moland have said that Kasongo was murdered by gunmen who attacked them on a road.[5]
Two individuals, Gina Kepo Aila and Kasimu Aradjabo, said they were both present during the killing. Both witnesses told the court that Moland shot Abedi Kasongo, while French threw himself over Gina Kepo Aila, whom he tried to kill. According to both witnesses, several shots were fired, most probably three.[13]
On September 8, 2009, French and Moland were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death. Along with the death sentence for both, the tribunal ordered the Norwegian government to pay a US$1 compensation to each Congolese citizen, an amount Judge Claude Disimo, head of the military tribunal, said totals more than US$60 million.[4] The prosecution had sought the death penalty for the five charges made against the men.[2] Norwegian authorities have denied that the men were involved in espionage for Norway, and have expressed concern they were not receiving a fair trial.[14] Initially the Congolese claims of compensation had amounted to more than US$500 billion.[15]
The men appealed their conviction on September 9, 2009.[16] According to Judge Claude Disimo, they will not be extradited back to Norway.[17]
Although it remains on the statute books, the death penalty is currently not applied in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[10] The last known execution occurred in 2003, and today capital punishment is usually commuted to life imprisonment.[18]
Norway immediately condemned the sentence and rejected the allegations of espionage. Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said the sentence was "completely unacceptable" and that he would protest to his Congolese counterpart.[10] "We wish to distance ourselves from the conviction of espionage on Norway's behalf," Støre said. "We also wish to distance ourselves from the court's decision that the Norwegian State is responsible for paying damages. Norway is not a party in this case."[17]
Friday, October 9, 2009
Letters From Charlie
I corresponded with Charles Manson for several years (in the early 90s), an unexpected result was the number of “family” people on the outside contacting me at Charlie’s behest, including Sandy Good. Occasionally I would photocopy clusters of photos and artwork on the back of letters. One included a couple photos of myself, after that Charlie started addressing me as “Manson II.” There are assholes out there who would try to make a career out of having that in writing. Some early Manson correspondence was forwarded to me by Michael Moynahan who I had never heard of at that time. Eventually Corcoran prison stopped accepting my mail, returning them stamped "Contents Inappropriate."
JDS
Stuff from others:
I Have a Dream: A World Without Blacks
PRICELESS: Blacks riot at a black college over a sprinkler going off in a dorm room, the college tries to suppress the surveillance videos of the students acting, well, like a bunch of ignorant violent niggers (which they are), then tries to imply the police are "racist" for calling the riot a riot (approx. 100 people involved). The NAACP steps in. The videos get released and all the blacks involved from the students to the college faculty and NAACP wind up looking like a bunch of fucking assholes (which they are). The one good thing about Daytona is the Police Chief, he doesn't take any shit.
JDS
October 08, 2009
Police chief fires back at university president
Officials say dorm director hit student
By LYDA LONGA
Staff Writer
DAYTONA BEACH -- The war of words between Police Chief Mike Chitwood and Bethune-Cookman University President Trudie Kibbe Reed heated up Thursday as the controversy surrounding a campus fight escalated.
Calling her an "inept leader who has lost control of her students," Chitwood said Reed owes him and his officers an apology for labeling them racists.
The chilly relations between the chief and the college president were fueled by a fracas at the university on Sept. 29. They grew even colder last week when Chitwood said the college was trying to hide something from police when the administration failed to hand over all the surveillance video of the brouhaha inside the Bronson Hall dormitory.
To obtain all the videos, police issued a subpoena against the school last week.
In response to the subpoena, as well as to comments made by Chitwood that the incident was a "melee" and a "free-for-all," the Florida chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent a letter Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Justice, asking the agency to investigate the Police Department's handling of the incident.
Reed could not be reached for comment Thursday.
In a written statement Thursday, college spokeswoman Liz Poston reiterated that the college was "fully cooperative" and gave a police investigator the videos university officials thought police requested. However, Poston's statement also said that when the investigator asked for the video, he said, "Give me what you have."
Poston also noted there are no surveillance cameras inside the dorm director's office where witnesses have said the director hit a student, sparking the student response.
Images of the Sept. 29 incident on the first-floor hallway of the dorm were caught on tape by surveillance cameras and students' cell phone cameras. The fight erupted after dorm director Arthur Miles took a student's ID, then hit the student in the head, police said Thursday.
Reed said last week that student Demetrius "DJ" Wilkerson was attempting to retrieve his ID card from Miles. Miles could be charged with battery, Chitwood said. In addition, four students - including Wilkerson - could face charges of inciting a riot, the chief said.
Miles declined comment on the possible charges Thursday night and continued to deny that he struck Wilkerson. Both he and Emerson Beckles, another dorm director involved in the conflict, have been fired by the university.
Last week, Reed expressed support for her young charges, saying the students got angry only because Wilkerson was struck. She also said Wilkerson is small and both Beckles and Miles are large men and that it was hard to believe they could have felt threatened by Wilkerson.
But videos released by police Thursday show Wilkerson leading a group of fellow students toward Miles' office and screaming, "Let's Go!" after he was struck.
"It didn't look like he had a seizure, did he?" the chief said as he and several members of the media watched the videos.
The chief said the videos contradict everything Reed said last week.
But Larry Handfield, chairman of the university's board, defended Reed.
"I am deeply disturbed that the chief of police would make personal statements about President Reed, particularly as he has no knowledge or understanding of her performance as University president," Handfield wrote in a statement to The News-Journal.
"She has my 100% confidence and support. She has done an outstanding job in difficult times," Handfield said in another section of the statement.
Others in the black community however, are not happy with Reed or the NAACP's response.
Norma Bland, a member of the local chapter of the NAACP and also president of the Citizens Coalition to Improve Race Relations in Greater Daytona Beach, said the chief is doing his job.
"I have all the confidence in the chief of police," she said. "It is his job to investigate criminal activity and he should never feel he is being gagged by any special interest group."
Bland said she has seen videos of last week's melee and called them "extremely disturbing."
She also said the state NAACP may have jumped the gun in calling for an investigation and claiming Chitwood's actions were "racially tinged.
"Sometimes the NAACP makes statements without having the facts," Bland said.
Local NAACP President Cynthia Slater, also went to the police station on Thursday and looked at the videos of the Bethune-Cookman incident. Earlier this week, Slater was critical of criticized the Police Department and the way how the media has reported on the Bethune-Cookman situation.
She did not return several telephone calls for comment Thursday.
JDS
October 08, 2009
Police chief fires back at university president
Officials say dorm director hit student
By LYDA LONGA
Staff Writer
DAYTONA BEACH -- The war of words between Police Chief Mike Chitwood and Bethune-Cookman University President Trudie Kibbe Reed heated up Thursday as the controversy surrounding a campus fight escalated.
Calling her an "inept leader who has lost control of her students," Chitwood said Reed owes him and his officers an apology for labeling them racists.
The chilly relations between the chief and the college president were fueled by a fracas at the university on Sept. 29. They grew even colder last week when Chitwood said the college was trying to hide something from police when the administration failed to hand over all the surveillance video of the brouhaha inside the Bronson Hall dormitory.
To obtain all the videos, police issued a subpoena against the school last week.
In response to the subpoena, as well as to comments made by Chitwood that the incident was a "melee" and a "free-for-all," the Florida chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent a letter Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Justice, asking the agency to investigate the Police Department's handling of the incident.
Reed could not be reached for comment Thursday.
In a written statement Thursday, college spokeswoman Liz Poston reiterated that the college was "fully cooperative" and gave a police investigator the videos university officials thought police requested. However, Poston's statement also said that when the investigator asked for the video, he said, "Give me what you have."
Poston also noted there are no surveillance cameras inside the dorm director's office where witnesses have said the director hit a student, sparking the student response.
Images of the Sept. 29 incident on the first-floor hallway of the dorm were caught on tape by surveillance cameras and students' cell phone cameras. The fight erupted after dorm director Arthur Miles took a student's ID, then hit the student in the head, police said Thursday.
Reed said last week that student Demetrius "DJ" Wilkerson was attempting to retrieve his ID card from Miles. Miles could be charged with battery, Chitwood said. In addition, four students - including Wilkerson - could face charges of inciting a riot, the chief said.
Miles declined comment on the possible charges Thursday night and continued to deny that he struck Wilkerson. Both he and Emerson Beckles, another dorm director involved in the conflict, have been fired by the university.
Last week, Reed expressed support for her young charges, saying the students got angry only because Wilkerson was struck. She also said Wilkerson is small and both Beckles and Miles are large men and that it was hard to believe they could have felt threatened by Wilkerson.
But videos released by police Thursday show Wilkerson leading a group of fellow students toward Miles' office and screaming, "Let's Go!" after he was struck.
"It didn't look like he had a seizure, did he?" the chief said as he and several members of the media watched the videos.
The chief said the videos contradict everything Reed said last week.
But Larry Handfield, chairman of the university's board, defended Reed.
"I am deeply disturbed that the chief of police would make personal statements about President Reed, particularly as he has no knowledge or understanding of her performance as University president," Handfield wrote in a statement to The News-Journal.
"She has my 100% confidence and support. She has done an outstanding job in difficult times," Handfield said in another section of the statement.
Others in the black community however, are not happy with Reed or the NAACP's response.
Norma Bland, a member of the local chapter of the NAACP and also president of the Citizens Coalition to Improve Race Relations in Greater Daytona Beach, said the chief is doing his job.
"I have all the confidence in the chief of police," she said. "It is his job to investigate criminal activity and he should never feel he is being gagged by any special interest group."
Bland said she has seen videos of last week's melee and called them "extremely disturbing."
She also said the state NAACP may have jumped the gun in calling for an investigation and claiming Chitwood's actions were "racially tinged.
"Sometimes the NAACP makes statements without having the facts," Bland said.
Local NAACP President Cynthia Slater, also went to the police station on Thursday and looked at the videos of the Bethune-Cookman incident. Earlier this week, Slater was critical of criticized the Police Department and the way how the media has reported on the Bethune-Cookman situation.
She did not return several telephone calls for comment Thursday.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
J.F.C. Fuller: British Military Genius, Occultist, and Fascist
Major General John Frederick Charles Fuller CB, CBE, DSO, commonly J.F.C. Fuller, (1 September 1878 – 10 February 1966), was a British Army officer, military historian and strategist, notable as an early theorist of modern armoured warfare, including categorising principles of warfare. He was also the inventor of "artificial moonlight" and an occultist. Fuller was born in 1878, in Chichester, West Sussex, England and educated at Malvern College and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst from 1897 to 1898. He was commissioned into the Oxfordshire Light Infantry and served in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. He then attended Staff College at Camberley and served as an adjutant to a territorial battalion. During World War I, he was a staff officer with the Home Forces and with 7 Corps in France, and from 1916 in the HQ of the Machine-Gun Corps' Heavy Branch which was later to become the Tank Corps. He planned the tank attack at Cambrai and the tank operations for the autumn offensives of 1918. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanised army was never implemented in his lifetime, and after 1918 he held various leading positions, notably as a commander of an experimental brigade at Aldershot.
His ideas on mechanised warfare continued to be influential in the lead up to World War II, ironically more with the Germans, notably Heinz Guderian, than with his countrymen. In the 1930’s, the Wehrmacht implemented tactics similar in many ways to Fuller's analysis, which became known as Blitzkrieg. Like Fuller, practitioners of Blitzkrieg partly based their approach on the theory that areas of large enemy activity should be bypassed to be eventually surrounded and destroyed. Blitzkrieg style tactics were used by several nations throughout World War II, predominantly by the Germans in the invasion of Poland, Western Europe and the Soviet Union. While Germany, and to some degree the Western Allies, adopted Blitzkrieg ideas, they were not much used by the Red Army which developed its armoured warfare doctrine based on deep operations. Deep operations was developed by Soviet military theorists, among them Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, during the 1920s based on their experiences in World War I and the Russian Civil War.
On his retirement in 1933, and impatient with what he considered the inability of democracy to adopt military reforms, Fuller became involved with Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist movement. As a member of the British Union of Fascists he sat on the party's Policy Directorate and was considered one of Mosley's closest allies.
On 20 April 1939 Fuller was an honoured guest at Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday parade and watched as "for three hours a completely mechanised and motorised army roared past the Führer." Afterwards Hitler asked, "I hope you were pleased with your children?" Fuller replied, "Your Excellency, they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognise them."
Fuller was a vigorous, expressive and opinionated writer of military history and of controversial predictions of the future of war.
Fuller was an early disciple of English poet and magician Aleister Crowley and was very familiar with his, and other forms of, magick and mysticism. While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry he had entered, and won, a contest to write the best review of Crowley's poetic works - his entered review was an unsurprising success as he was apparently the only entrant to the contest. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West. After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical Order, the A.A.. within which he became a leading member, editing Order documents and its journal, The Equinox. During this period he wrote The Treasure House of Images, edited early sections of Crowley's magical autobiography The Temple of Solomon the King and produced highly-regarded paintings dealing with A.A. teachings: these paintings have been used in recent years as the covers of the journal's revival, The Equinox, Volume IV.[1] [2]
After the Jones vs The Looking Glass case, in which a great deal was made of Aleister Crowley's homosexuality (although Crowley himself was not a party to the case), Fuller became worried that his association with Crowley might be a hindrance to his career. Crowley writes in chapter 67 of his Confessions:
...to my breathless amazement he fired pointblank at my head a document in which he agreed to continue his co-operation on condition that I refrain from mentioning his name in public or private under penalty of paying him a hundred pounds for each such offence. I sat down and poured in a broadside at close quarters. "My dear man," I said in effect, "do recover your sense of proportion, to say nothing of your sense of humour. Your contribution, indeed! I can do in two days what takes you six months, and my real reason for ever printing your work at all is my friendship for you. I wanted to give you a leg up the literary ladder. I have taken endless pain to teach you the first principles of writing. When I met you, you were not so much as a fifth-rate journalist, and now you can write quite good prose with no more than my blue pencil through two out of every three adjectives, and five out of every six commas. Another three years with me and I will make you a master, but please don't think that either I or the Work depend on you, any more than J.P. Morgan depends on his favourite clerk."[3]
After this contact between the two men faded rapidly. However Fuller continued to be fascinated with occult subjects, and in later years he contrinued to write about topics such as the Qabalah and to a lesser extent yoga (which was at the time seen as potentially dangerous in Western eyes).
Fuller was a prolific writer. The following is only a small selection of his works.
- The Star in The West: a critical essay upon the works of Aleister Crowley (Walter Scott Publishing Co., London, 1907)
- Yoga: a study of the mystical philosophy of the Brahmins and Buddhists (W. Rider, London, 1925)
- The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (Murray, London, 1929)
- Grant & Lee: a study in personality and generalship (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1933)
- Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (Nicholson & Watson, London, 1936)
- The First of the League Wars (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1936) [About the Italo-Ethiopian War]
- The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah: A Study in Jewish Mystical Thought (W. Rider & Co., London, 1937)
- The Second World War, 1939-1945: a strategical and tactical history (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1948)
- The Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History, 3 vols. (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1954-6). A two-volume edition, abridged by John Terraine to omit battles outside the European continent, was published in the early 1980s.
- Volume 1: From the earliest times to the battle of Lepanto
- Volume 2: From the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the battle of Waterloo
- Volume 3: From the American Civil War to the end of the Second World War
- The Generalship of Alexander the Great (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1958). On Alexander the Great of Macedon.
- Julius Caesar: man, soldier and tyrant (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1965)
- A Military History of the Western World, 3 vols. This is the American publication of The Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History. Titles of individual tomes are same as in the British edition. Originally published: (Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1954-7). Republished: (Da Capo Press, New York, 1987-8).
- v. 1; ISBN 0-306-80304-6.
- v. 2; ISBN 0-306-80305-4.
- v. 3; ISBN 0-306-80306-2.
- Fuller, J.F.C.; Aleister Crowley (1994). The Pathworkings of Aleister Crowley: The Treasure House of Images. James Wasserman (ed.). New Falcon Publications,U.S.. ISBN 1561840742.
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius KircherFrom his birthplace he was accustomed to add the Latin epithet Bucho, or Buchonius, to his name, although later he preferred calling himself Fuldensis after Fulda, the capital of his native country. The name Athanasius was given him in honour of the saint on whose feast he was born.
John Kircher, the father of Athanasius, had studied philosophy and theology at Mainz, without, however, embracing the priestly calling. As soon as he had obtained the doctor's degree in the latter faculty, he went to lecture on theology in the Benedictine house at Seligenstadt. Athanasius studied humanities at the Jesuit College in Fulda, and on 2 Oct., 1618, entered the Society of Jesus at Paderborn. At the end of his novitiate he repaired to Cologne for his philosophical studies. The journey thither was, on account of the confusion caused by the Thirty Years' War, attended with great danger. Together with his study of speculative philosophy the talented young student devoted himself especially to the natural sciences and the classical languages, for which reason he was shortly afterwards called to teach these branches at the Jesuit colleges in Coblenz and Heiligenstadt. In Mainz, where Kircher (1625) began his theological studies, he attracted the notice of the elector through his ability and his skill as an experimentalist. In 1628 he was ordained priest, and hardly had he finished his last year of probation at Speyer when the chair of ethics and mathematics was given to him the University of Würzburg, while at the same time he had to give instructions in the Syrian and Hebrew languages. However, the disorders consequent on the wars obliged him to go first to Lyons in France (1631) and later to Avignon.
The discovery of some hieroglyphic characters in the library at Speyer led Kircher to make his first attempt to solve the problem of hieroglyphical writing, which still baffled all scholars. At Aix he made the acquaintance of the well-known French senator, Sicolas Peiresc, whose magnificent collections aroused in Kircher the highest interest. Recognizing in Kircher the right man to solve the old Egyptian riddle, Peiresc applied direct to Rome and to the General of the Jesuits to have Kircher's call to Vienna by the emperor set aside and to procure a summons for the scholar to the Eternal City. This generous intention was favoured by Providence, inasmuch as Kircher on his way to Vienna was shipwrecked near Cività Vecchia, and arrived in Rome before the knowledge of his call thither had reached him. Until his death (28 Nov., 1680), Rome was now to be the principal scene of Kircher's many-sided activity, which soon developed in such an astonishing way that pope, emperor, princes, and prelates vied with one another in furthering and supporting the investigations of the learned scholar. After six years of successful teaching in the Roman College, where he lectured on physics, mathematics, and Oriental languages, he was released from these duties that he might have freedom in his studies and might devote himself to formal scientific research, especially in Southern Italy and Sicily. He took advantage of a trip to Malta to explore thoroughly the various volcanoes which exist between Naples and that island. He studied especially in 1638 the Strait of Messina, where, besides the noise of the surge, a dull subterranean rumble attracted his attention. At Trapani and Palermo his interest was aroused by the remains of antediluvian elephants. But before all else he tried to discover the subterranean power of the volcanoes of Etna and Stromboli, then in eruption; public attention had been called to such mysterious phenomena by the frightful eruption of Vesuvius in 1630. 
Thus in the most varied branches of science Kircher played the rôle of pioneer. Even medicine received his attention, as is shown for example by his treatise, "Scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosæ luis, quæ pestis dicitur" (Rome, 1658). He also tried to form a universal language ("Polygraphia seu artificium lingarum, quo cum omnibus totius mundi populis poterit quis correspondere", Rome, 1663). His scientific activities brought him into scientific correspondence with scholars labouring in the most different fields, as the numerous volumes of his extant letters show. It is to his inventive mind that we owe one of the earliest of our counting machines: the speaking-tube and æolian harp were perfected by him. He was also the inventor of the magic lantern which has since been brought to such perfection and is today almost indispensable.
That the most varied judgments should be formed and expressed on a man of such encyclopædic knowledge was only to be expected. He tried to find a grain of truth even in the false sciences of alchemy, astrology, and horoscopy, which were still in his time much in vogue, nor is it surprising that in the province of astronomy he did not at this early date defend the Copernican System.
With all his learning and vast amount of adulation which he received on all sides, Kircher retained throughout his life a deep humility and a childlike piety. In 1629 he had intimated to his general his desire to devoted his life exclusively to the spreading of the Faith in China, but this wish remained unfulfilled, and, to console himself for this disappointment, he erected during his last years a sanctuary (della Mentorella) in honour of the Mother of God on the crest of the Sabine Hill near Rome, whither, during his lifetime as now, thousands made pilgrimages and found help and consolation. In this sanctuary Kircher's heart was buried, and at the beginning of the twentieth century this place of pilgrimage was distinguished by a gigantic statue of our Divine Redeemer on the neighbouring crest of Guadagnole.
To give an approximate idea of Kircher's literary activity it is only necessary to remark that during his sojourn in Rome no less than forty-four folio volumes came from his pen. A full list of his writings is to be found in Sommervogel, "Bibl. Scriptorum S.J.". Besides the works already named, it is sufficient to mention here: "Magnes sive de arte magnetica" (Rome, 1640; Cologne, 1643, 1654); "Lingua ægyptiaca restituta" (Rome, 1643); "Ars magna lucis et umbræ" (Rome, 1644); "Musurgia universalis sive ars consoni et dissoni" (Rome, 1650); "Itinerarium extaticum s. opificium coeleste" (Rome, 1656); "Iter extaticum secundum, mundi subterranei prodromus" (Rome, 1657); "Obeliscus Pamphylius" (Rome, 1650).
More Links at Wikipedia:
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Ahmadinejad has no Jewish roots
Photo: Photoshop and the internet - a propagandist's wet dream.
Basically post-WWII anyone could say whatever they wanted about Hitler and the Nazis, credentials or not, and not be called out on it because no one wanted to be perceived as defending Hitler or the Nazis. A bulleted list of unwarranted hypotheses about Hitler would be amusing; that he had three testicles, had sex with his pubescent niece, liked young girls to defecate in his mouth, he was gay, and that he was Jewish, etc.Likewise people have claimed Charles Manson was part black and/or Jewish and people eat it up because it would be ironic and something negative about someone unpopular.
Now Ahmedinejad is getting the same idiotic treatment.
Propaganda blowback masquerading as historical scholarship is like a macrocosmic version of High School gossip.JDS
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Ahmadinejad has no Jewish roots
Rumours that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's family converted to Islam from Judaism are false.
In fact, they are proud Shias
Meir Javedanfar guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 October 2009 11.14 BST
In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's meteoric rise from mayor of Tehran to president of one of the most influential countries in the Middle East took everyone by surprise. One of the main reasons for the astonishment was that so little was known about him.
One recently published claim about his background comes from an article in the Daily Telegraph. Entitled "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past", it claims that his family converted to Islam after his birth. The claim is based on a number of arguments, a key one being that his previous surname was Sabourjian which "derives from weaver of the sabour, the name for the Jewish tallit shawl in Persia".
Rumours that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's family converted to Islam from Judaism are false.
In fact, they are proud Shias
Meir Javedanfar guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 October 2009 11.14 BST
In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's meteoric rise from mayor of Tehran to president of one of the most influential countries in the Middle East took everyone by surprise. One of the main reasons for the astonishment was that so little was known about him.
One recently published claim about his background comes from an article in the Daily Telegraph. Entitled "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past", it claims that his family converted to Islam after his birth. The claim is based on a number of arguments, a key one being that his previous surname was Sabourjian which "derives from weaver of the sabour, the name for the Jewish tallit shawl in Persia".
Professor David Yeroshalmi, author of The Jews of Iran in the 19th century and an expert on Iranian Jewish communities, disputes the validity of this argument. "There is no such meaning for the word 'sabour' in any of the Persian Jewish dialects, nor does it mean Jewish prayer shawl in Persian. Also, the name Sabourjian is not a well-known Jewish name," he stated in a recent interview. In fact, Iranian Jews use the Hebrew word "tzitzit" to describe the Jewish prayer shawl. Yeroshalmi, a scholar at Tel Aviv University's Center for Iranian Studies, also went on to dispute the article's findings that the "-jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. "This ending is in no way sufficient to judge whether someone has a Jewish background. Many Muslim surnames have the same ending," he stated.
Upon closer inspection, a completely different interpretation of "Sabourjian" emerges. According to Robert Tait, a Guardian correspondent who travelled to Ahmadinejad's native village in 2005, the name "derives from thread painter – sabor in Farsi – a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan province, where Aradan is situated". This is confirmed by Kasra Naji, who also wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad and met his family in his native village. Carpet weaving or colouring carpet threads are not professions associated with Jews in Iran.
According to both Naji and Tait, Ahmadinejad's father Ahmad was in fact a religious Shia, who taught the Quran before and after Ahmadinejad's birth and their move to Tehran. So religious was Ahmad Sabourjian that he bought a house near a Hosseinieh, a religious club that he frequented during the holy month of Moharram to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hossein.
Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Male members are given the title of Seyyed, and include prominent figures such as Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Judaism, this is equivalent to the Cohens, who are direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. One has to be born into a Seyyed family: the title is never given to Muslims by birth, let alone converts. This makes it impossible for Ahmadinejad's mother to have been a Jew. In fact, she was so proud of her lineage that everyone in her native village of Aradan referred to her by her Islamic title, Seyyede.
The reason that Ahmadinejad's father changed his surname has more to do with the class struggle in Iran. When it became mandatory to adopt surnames, many people from rural areas chose names that represented their professions or that of their ancestors. This made them easily identifiable as townfolk. In many cases they changed their surnames upon moving to Tehran, in order to avoid snobbery and discrimination from residents of the capital.
The Sabourjians were one of many such families. Their surname was related to carpet-making, an industry that conjures up images of sweatshops. They changed it to Ahmadinejad in order to help them fit in. The new name was also chosen because it means from the race of Ahmad, one of the names given to Muhammad.
According to Ahmadinejad's relatives the new name emphasised the family's piety and their dedication to their religion and its founder. This is something that the president and his relatives in Tehran and Aradan have maintained to the present day. Not because they are trying to deny their past, but because they are proud of it.
The Necronomicon: Fine Art Bookbinding by Dario Ustino & Jeanne Antoinette Biagi
The Necronomicon.
Antique manuscript in ink cover in vellum.
Excellent gallery of other fine art bindings here: http://www.chartaonline.com/lista%20libri.htm
Monday, October 5, 2009
Daytona Beach: Mecca of Broken People
My wisest friend said "Daytona is the Mecca for broken people." She lives in Washington state, basically as far away as you can get from Daytona Beach in the continental USA.It is rumored that Daytona International Speedway is built on an ancient indian burial site that was discovered as they were breaking ground, but too much money was at stake so they hushed it up and continued construction.
While I was picking up dinner the gal at the restaurant got off the phone and said the person on the other end of the line was on beachside and witnessed a HUGE freakish SWARM of river rats running up the main drag, for some unknown reason. I said "maybe they'll eat all the homeless people." At first they all laughed, then stopped and said "that's sick" when they realized what they were laughing about.
In any event, Daytona Beach is a freakish pit of subhuman scum. I hope to do some photo-blogging in the near future.
JDS
Saturday, October 3, 2009
William Dudley Pelley
A few years ago an elderly woman came into my place and said her late brother knew me and stipulated that on his death they were to give me his collection of William Dudley Pelley books, because I was "spiritually attuned." For the life of me I don't know who the old man was but I still have the collection.Fairly bizarre "spiritual" stuff for the most part, although I reserve judgment until I've read most of it. Also included many obscure works by George Hunt Williamson, including OTHER TONGUES - OTHER FLESH, and other UFO/Alien-communication-slanted esoteric material. Also included are a lot of fliers and period articles on all of the above. If I ever get a scanner up and running I'll start blogging some of it.
JDS
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WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dudley_Pelley
William Dudley Pelley (March 12, 1890–June 30, 1965) was an American extremist and spiritualist who founded the Silver Legion in 1933, and ran for President in 1936 for the Christian party.
Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, William Dudley Pelley grew up in poverty. He was the son of William George Apsey Pelley and his wife Grace Goodale. His father was initially a Southern Methodist Church minister, later a small businessman and shoemaker. [1]
According to "The Door to Revelation" (1939), the autobiography of Pelley, he could not remember his early life in Lynn. His earliest memories dated to when he was about two-years-old, residing in Prescott, Massachusetts. Pelley reports "My first observations of life that impressed themselves upon my mind and caused me to marvel at the mortal status in which I now found myself, began in that parsonage beside a country church. My father was pastor in that church. ... and took a vast amount of pride in the assumption that the Tribe of Pelley could trace its genealogy back in an unbroken line to one Sir John Pelley, knighted and sponsored by Good Queen Elizabeth which attested, of course, that the Pelleys were English." [2]
Largely self-educated, Pelley became a journalist and gained respect for his writing skills, his articles eventually appearing in national publications. Following World War I, Pelley traveled throughout Europe and Asia as a foreign correspondent. He particularly spent a great deal of time in Russia and witnessed atrocities of the Russian Civil War. His experiences in Russia left him with a deep hatred for Communism and Jews, whom he believed were planning to conquer the world.[3]
Upon returning to the United States in 1920, Pelley went to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter, writing the Lon Chaney films The Light in the Dark and The Shock[4]. By 1929, Pelley became disillusioned with the movie industry, and moved to Asheville, North Carolina.
In 1928, Pelley said he had an out-of-body experience, detailed in the pamphlet "My Seven Minutes in Eternity." Pelley became fascinated with metaphysics and Christianity and gained a new-found popularity with his numerous publications on the subjects.
When the Great Depression struck America in 1929, Pelley became active in politics. After moving to Asheville, Pelley founded Galahad College in 1932. The college specialized in correspondence, "Social Metaphysics," and "Christian Economics" courses. He also founded Galahad Press, which he used to publish various political and metaphysical magazines, newspapers, and books.
In 1933, when Adolf Hitler seized control of Germany, Pelley, an admirer of Hitler, was inspired to form a political movement and founded the Silver Legion, an extremist and antisemitic organization whose followers (known as the Silver Shirts and "Christian Patriots") wore Nazi-like silver uniforms. The Silver Legion’s emblem was a scarlet L, which was featured on their flags and uniforms. Pelley founded chapters of the Silver Legion in almost every state in the country, and soon gained a considerable number of followers. [5]
Pelley traveled throughout the United States and holding mass rallies, lectures, and public speeches in order to attract Americans to his organization. Pelley’s political ideology essentially consisted of anti-Communism, antisemitism, racism, extreme patriotism, and isolationism, themes which were the primary focus of his numerous magazines and newspapers, which included Liberation, Pelley's Silvershirt Weekly, The Galilean, and The New Liberator. Of these publications, the February 3, 1934 edition of Liberation contained The Franklin Prophecy, which claimed that Benjamin Franklin warned Americans not to allow Jews to benefit from the United States Constitution. [6]
Pelley was also an opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and founded the Christian Party, running for president in 1936. His activities angered Roosevelt and his supporters, and charges were drawn up against the Silver Shirts in 1940. His Asheville headquarters was raided by federal marshals, his followers there arrested, and his property seized. Pelley was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Despite serious financial and material setbacks to his organization resulting from lengthy court battles, Pelley continued to oppose Roosevelt, especially as the diplomatic relationships of the United States with the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany became more strained in the early 1940s. Pelley accused Roosevelt of being a warmonger and advocated isolationism, stances which would give political ammunition to the enemies of fellow isolationist Charles Lindbergh (according to A. Scott Berg's biography, Lindbergh had never even met Pelley). Roosevelt enlisted J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to investigsate Pelley for libel, and the FBI interviewed Pelley's subscribers. [7] Although the Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 led to the collapse of the Silver Legion, Pelley continued to attack the government with a magazine called Roll Call[8], which alarmed Roosevelt, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. After stating in one issue of Roll Call that the devastation of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was worse than the government claimed, Pelley was arrested at his new base of operations in Noblesville, Indiana and charged with high treason and sedition in April 1942. In a much publicized trial, the major charges against Pelley were dropped, but he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for the minor charges.
After the long trial, an impoverished Pelley was unable to launch an appeal, and remained in prison until 1950, when his relatives and supporters raised enough money to appeal his case. He was paroled later that year, on the condition that he never engage in political activity again. Pelley subsequently returned to Noblesville, where he founded Soulcraft Press and began publishing metaphysical and political magazines and books once again.
In his political publications, Pelley frequently attacked Roosevelt’s legacy and espoused anti-United Nations, pro-segregation, and antisemitic sentiments. In his final years, Pelley dealt with charges of securities fraud that had been brought against him while he had lived in Asheville. Pelley died on June 30, 1965, at the age of 75 in Noblesville, where he is buried.[9]
LINKS:
Fascist Apocalypse: William Pelley and Millennial Extremism David Lobb, Department of History, Syracuse University
New Age Nazi: The Rise and Fall of Asheville's Flaky Fascist
William Dudley Pelley's 'Challenge To The American Legion' booklet
The Greater Glory a novel by Pelley at archive.org
The Fog a novel a novel by Pelley at archive.org
http://www.come-and-hear.com/supplement/pelley.html
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Negro Altar from Aleister Crowley's Black Temple
"During this time, magical phenomena were of constant occurrence. I had two temples in my flat; one white, the walls being lined with six huge mirrors, each six feet by eight; the other black, a mere cupboard, in which stood an altar supported by the figure of a Negro standing on his hands. The presiding genius of this place was a human skeleton, which I fed from time to time with blood, small birds and the like. The idea was to give it life, but I never got further than causing the bones to become covered with a viscous slime. In The Equinox, vol. I, no. 1 is a story, "At the Fork of the Roads", which is in every detail a true account of one episode of this period. Will Bute is W. B, Yeats, Hypatia Gay is Althoea Gyles, the publisher is Leonard Smithers."--From The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, p. 181.
"It was a skeleton that sat there, and blood stained all its bones. Below it was the evil altar, a round table supported by an ebony figure of a negro standing upon his hands. Upon the altar smouldered a sickening perfume, and the stench of the slain victims of the god defiled the air. It was a tiny room, and the girl, staggering, came against the skeleton. The bones were not clean; they were hidden by a greasy slime mingling with the blood, as though the hideous worship were about to endow it with a new body of flesh. She wrenched herself back in disgust. Then suddenly she felt it was alive! It was coming towards her! She shrieked once the blasphemy which her vile master had chosen as his mystic name; only a hollow laugh echoed back. "
--From "At the Fork of the Roads", The Equinox, Vol. 1., No. 1., p. 107.
The Niding Pole (Nithstong or Scorn-Post)
"In the Viking age the most spectacular way of cursing an enemy was by the Niding Pole (the Nithstong or Scorn-Post). They were poles about nine feet (2.75 meters) long upon which insults and curses were carved in runes. Ceremonies were performed to activate the destructive magic of the pole. A horse's skull was fixed to the top of the pole, and it was stuck into the ground with the skull facing towards the house of the accursed person. The pole channeled the destructive forces of Hela, goddess of death. These forces were carried up the pole and projected through the horse skull. The runes carved on the pole defined the character and target of the destructive forces. Among others, triple Thorn [Thurisaz] runes and triple Is [Isa] runes, were used to smite the enemy. When used maliciously, these had the effect of disempowering the accursed's will and delivering him or her to the forces of destruction. Here, the Thorn rune invokes the power of Thurs, the demonic earth-giant sometimes called Moldthurs. An example of this comes from Skírnismál, where the spell used by Skirnir against Freyr's reluctant lover, Gerdhr invokes harm using the Thorn rune. This provides the power for three other runestaves: 'I shall inscribe Thurs for you, and three runestaves: lewdness, and rage and impotence.Magically, the Niding Pole was intended to disrupt and anger the earth sprites (Landvaettir, Land-Wights or earth spirits) inhabiting the ground where the accursed's house was. These sprites would then vent their anger upon the person, whose livelihood and life would be destroyed. Niding Poles were also used to desecrate areas of ground. This technique is called álfreka, literally the 'driving away of the elves', by which the earth sprites of a place were banished, leaving the ground spiritually dead...
On the Niding Pole, the horse skull invokes the horse rune Ehwaz, using the linking and transmissive power of the rune for the magical working. The horse is sacred to Odin, god of runes and magic..."
From Rune Magic: The History and Practice of Ancient Runic Traditions, by Nigel Pennick.
Monday, September 28, 2009
The head Nazi-hunter’s trail of lies
From The Sunday TimesJuly 19, 2009
The head Nazi-hunter’s trail of lies
Simon Wiesenthal, famed for his pursuit of justice, caught fewer war criminals than he claimed and fabricated much of his own Holocaust story
Since the early 1960s Simon Wiesenthal’s name has become synonymous with Nazi hunting. His standing is that of a secular saint. Nominated four times for the Nobel peace prize, the recipient of a British honorary knighthood, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Légion d’honneur and at least 53 other distinctions, he was often credited with some 1,100 Nazi “scalps”. He is remembered, above all, for his efforts to track down Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals.
His reputation is built on sand, however. He was a liar — and a bad one at that. From the end of the second world war to the end of his life in 2005, he would lie repeatedly about his supposed hunt for Eichmann as well as his other Nazi-hunting exploits. He would also concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career. There are so many inconsistencies between his three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous documents, that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative from them. Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.
Some may feel I am too harsh on him and that I run a professional danger in seemingly allying myself with a vile host of neo-Nazis, revisionists, Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. I belong firmly outside any of these squalid camps and it is my intention to wrestle criticism of Wiesenthal away from their clutches. His figure is a complex and important one. If there was a motive for his duplicity, it may well have been rooted in good intentions. For his untruths are not the only shocking discoveries I have made researching the escape of Nazi war criminals. I found a lack of political will for hunting them. Many could have been brought to justice had governments allocated even comparatively meagre resources to their pursuit.
It is partly thanks to Wiesenthal that the Holocaust has been remembered and properly recorded and this is perhaps his greatest legacy. He did bring some Nazis to justice; but it was in nothing like the quantity that is claimed and Eichmann was certainly not among them. There is no space here, however, for my forensic examination of his claims as a Nazi hunter. I will confine myself to some famous episodes before and during the war that are at the heart of the Wiesenthal myth.
He was born in 1908 in Buczacz, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now in Ukraine. After the first world war, Buczacz changed hands frequently between Poles, Ukrainians and Soviet forces. In 1920 the 11-year-old Wiesenthal was attacked with a sabre by a mounted Ukrainian who slashed his right thigh to the bone. Wiesenthal regarded the scar as part of a long line of evidence that he was protected from violent death by an “unseen power” that wanted him kept alive for a purpose.
His background was ideal for any aspiring fabulist. Like many from Galicia, Wiesenthal would have spent his childhood immersed in the Polish literary genre of tall stories told over the dinner table. In a place such as Buczacz in the 1920s, truth was a relatively elastic concept. At 19 he enrolled as an architectural student at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he found his metier as a raconteur and appeared as a stand-up comedian.
His studies went less well. Although most biographies — including that on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s website — say he graduated, he did not complete his degree. Some biographies say he gained a diploma as an architectural engineer at Lvov polytechnic in Poland, but the Lvov state archives have no record of his having studied there and his name is absent from Poland’s pre-war catalogue of architects and builders. He claimed fraudulently throughout his life that he did have a diploma; his letterheads proudly display it.
Similarly, there are large discrepancies in his dramatic stories of the second world war. He was in Lvov when it fell to the Nazis in 1941. He claimed he and a Jewish friend called Gross were arrested at 4pm on Sunday July 6, one of the few dates that remain constant in his ever-shifting life story. Whenever he is so specific, however, he is usually lying.
Frogmarched to prison, they were put in a line of some 40 other Jews in a courtyard. Ukrainian auxiliary police started shooting each man in the neck, working their way down the line towards Wiesenthal. He was saved by a peal of church bells signifying evening mass. Incredibly, the Ukrainians halted their execution to go to worship. The survivors were led to the cells, where Wiesenthal claims he fell asleep. He was woken by a Ukrainian friend in the auxiliary police who saved him and Gross by telling them to pretend they were Russian spies. They were brutally questioned — Wiesenthal lost two teeth — but were freed after cleaning the commandant’s office.
The story of this sensational escape — one of the most famous of Wiesenthal’s war and one that has helped to establish the notion of his divine mission — is in all likelihood a complete fabrication. Certainly the Ukrainians carried out brutal pogroms in Lvov in early July 1941; but there was then a pause and they did not start again until July 25. According to testimony Wiesenthal gave to American war crimes investigators after the war, he was actually arrested on July 13 and managed to escape “through a bribe”. By subsequently placing his arrest on July 6, his story fitted the timing of the pogroms.
By the end of the year Wiesenthal was in Janowska, a concentration camp outside Lvov. Given the task of painting Soviet railway engines with Nazi insignia, he made friends with Adolf Kohlrautz, the German senior inspector at the workshop, who was secretly anti-Nazi. On April 20, 1943, Wiesenthal was apparently selected for a mass execution again. The SS at Janowska picked him among some Jews to be shot in a grim celebration of Hitler’s 54th birthday. They silently walked towards a huge sandpit, 6ft deep and 1,500ft long. A few dead bodies were visible in it. Forced to undress, they were herded in single file down a barbed-wire corridor known as the hose to be shot one by one at the edge of the pit.
A whistle interrupted the gunshots, followed by a shout of “Wiesenthal!” An SS man called Koller ran forward and told Wiesenthal to follow him. “I staggered like a drunk,” Wiesenthal recalled. “Koller slapped my face twice and brought me back to earth. I was walking back through the hose, naked. Behind me, the sounds of shooting resumed but they were over long before I had reached the camp.” Back at the workshop he found a beaming Kohlrautz, who had convinced the camp commander it was essential to keep Wiesenthal alive to paint a poster that would feature a swastika and the words “We Thank Our Führer”.
On October 2, 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and its prisoners were shortly to be liquidated. The German gave him and a friend passes to visit a stationery shop in town, accompanied by a Ukrainian guard. They managed to escape out the back while the Ukrainian waited at the front.
Yet again he had seemingly cheated death in a miraculous fashion. But we only have his word for it. According to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz was killed in the battle for Berlin in April 1945. He also told a biographer, however, that Kohlrautz was killed on the Russian front in 1944. And in an affidavit made in August 1954 about his wartime persecutions, he neglects to include the story at all. In both this document and in his testimony to the Americans in May 1945, he mentions Kohlrautz without saying the German saved his life.
From this point in Wiesenthal’s war it is impossible to establish a reliable train of events. With at least four wildly different accounts of his activities between October 1943 and the middle of 1944 — including his alleged role as a partisan officer — serious questions must be raised. Some, such as Bruno Kreisky, the former Austrian chancellor, repeatedly accused Wiesenthal in the 1970s and the 1980s of collaborating with the Gestapo. Kreisky’s claims were supported by unsubstantiated evidence from the Polish and Soviet governments. Wiesenthal took him to court and won.
Whatever the truth, by November 1944 Wiesenthal was in Gross-Rosen, a camp near Wroclaw. He told Hella Pick, his biographer, that he was forced to work barefoot in the camp quarry and soon learnt that the team of 100 prisoners assigned to the work kommando shrank by one each day. After a few days he felt sure his turn was about to come. “My executioner was behind me,” he recalled, “poised to smash my head with a rock. I turned around and the man, surprised, dropped his stone. It crushed my toe. I screamed.”
Wiesenthal’s quick reactions and yell apparently saved his life because there was some form of inspection that day — he thought it may have been by the Red Cross — and so he was stretchered away to the first-aid station. His toe was cut off without anaesthesia while two men held him still. The following day, Wiesenthal said, he was in agony. “The doctor came back and saw that I had a septic blister on the sole of my foot. So they cut it open and the gangrene spurted all over the room.”
Yet again, one of Wiesenthal’s “miracles” is open to doubt. First, the story appears in no other memoir or statement. Secondly, if the Red Cross really was inspecting Gross-Rosen that day, then the SS would have temporarily halted any executions. As it was, the Red Cross was not allowed access to concentration camps at that time. Thirdly, the medical consequences seem entirely implausible.
Soon afterwards, according to Wiesenthal’s account, he managed to walk 170 miles west to Chemnitz after Gross-Rosen was evacuated. Walking on a gangrenous foot with a recently amputated toe would have been hellish. Instead of a shoe, he had the sleeve of an old coat wrapped around his foot with some wire. For a walking stick he had a broomstick. Of the 6,000 prisoners who marched out, only 4,800 arrived in Chemnitz. With his infected foot, Wiesenthal was lucky to be among them.
From Chemnitz, the prisoners ended up at Mauthausen camp near Linz in Austria. Wiesenthal arrived there on the frozen night of February 15, 1945. In The Murderers Among Us, he tells how he and a fellow prisoner, Prince Radziwill, linked arms to make the last four miles uphill to the camp. The effort was too great and they collapsed in the snow. An SS man fired a shot that landed between them. As the two men did not get up, they were left for dead in the sub-zero temperature. When lorries arrived to collect those who had died on the march, the unconscious Wiesenthal and Radziwill were so frozen that they were thrown onto a pile of corpses. At the crematorium, however, the prisoners unloading them realised they were alive. They were given a cold shower to thaw out and Wiesenthal was taken to Block VI, the “death block” for the mortally ill.
In 1961, when Wiesenthal was interviewed for the Yad Vashem archive by the Israeli journalist Haim Maas about his war years, Wiesenthal mentioned that the infection from his foot had now turned blue-green and had spread right up to his knee. He lay in the death block for three months until the end of the war. Too weak to get out of bed, he claimed he survived — incredibly — on 200 calories a day, along with the occasional piece of bread or sausage smuggled to him by a friendly Pole.
Mauthausen was liberated on May 5, 1945. Despite weighing just 100lb, Wiesenthal struggled outside to greet the American tanks. “I don’t know how I managed to get up and walk,” he recalled. If he was able to walk, his severely infected leg must have been cured during the previous three months by either amputation or antibiotics. We know the former did not take place, and the latter was emphatically not a common treatment for ailing Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Once again, it appears as though a miracle had taken place.
The rapidity of Wiesenthal’s recovery is so astonishing that it is doubtful whether he was as ill as he claimed. Just 20 days after the liberation, he wrote to the US camp commander asking whether he could be involved in assisting the US authorities investigating war crimes. Claiming to have been in 13 concentration camps — he had in fact been in no more than six — Wiesenthal supplied a list of 91 names of those who he felt were responsible for “incalculable sufferings”.
According to most accounts, Wiesenthal asked if he could join the American war crimes investigators, but they refused, telling him he was not well enough. After he had gained some weight, he returned and was assigned to a captain with whom Wiesenthal claimed to have captured his first “scalp”, a snivelling SS guard called Schmidt. “There were many others in the weeks that followed,” Wiesenthal later wrote. “You didn’t have to go far. You almost stumbled over them.”
A curriculum vitae Wiesenthal completed after the war does not mention his work for the Americans but lists his occupation as the vice-chairman of the Jewish Central Committee for the US zone, based in Linz. Its task was to draw up lists of survivors that other survivors could consult in their hunt for relatives.
For at least a year after the war, Wiesenthal’s other task was to lobby hard for his fellow Jews; he became president of the Paris-based International Concentration Camp Organisation. He also forged contacts with the Brichah, which smuggled Jews out of Europe to Palestine.
It was not until February 1947 that he formed the organisation that would make him famous, the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz. Its aim was to collate information on the final solution with a view to securing the indictments of war criminals. Wiesenthal claimed to have started it because of an anti-Semitic remark made by an American officer, which made him realise that the allies would never hunt down the Nazis to the extent that was required.
Sadly, he was to be proved right. He and his band of 30 volunteers travelled around the displaced persons’ camps, collecting evidence on the atrocities from former concentration camp inmates. In all, Wiesenthal’s team compiled 3,289 questionnaires, which is a far more impressive feat than anything the allies achieved.
Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96 and was buried in Israel. The tributes and eulogies were many and fulsome and at the time it would have been churlish to have detracted from the many positive aspects of the role he played. He was at heart a showman and when he found a role as the world’s head Nazi hunter, he played it well. As with so many popular performances, it was impossible for the critics to tell the public that the Great Wiesenthal Show was little more than an illusion. Ultimately, it was an illusion mounted for a good cause.
© Guy Walters 2009
Extracted from Hunting Evil by Guy Walters, to be published by Transworld on July 30 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6718913.ece
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Tailgunner Joe McCarthy
The VENONA Project files, declassified in 1995, provided indisputable evidence that nearly all of those McCarthy accused were traitors to America. Not surprisingly, the media ignored these documents completely, instead choosing to run yet another round of anti-McCarthy propaganda. As if that wasn't enough, in 2005 Hollywood released the greatest propaganda film since "Triumph of the Will", an anti-McCarthy slander picture known as "Good Night and Good Luck". Dead for fifty years, McCarthy's body has now been tarred, feathered, crucified, cremated, and his ashes shot into space by a leftist media who cannot handle the truth of their own miserable existence. The anti-McCarthy media claims the Senator wrongly implicated many. Despite their accusations, no critic has ever brought forth a single documented case of someone being wrongly accused by McCarthy.http://www.senatormccarthy.com/
Kevin I. Slaughter: A Fine Mind In Fine Condition
If you don't bookmark this and read it regularly, you are an AIDS-ridden loser:
http://www.kevinislaughter.com/
JDS
http://www.kevinislaughter.com/
JDS
Monday, September 21, 2009
Forces Occultes
Forces occultes (Occult Forces - subtitled The mysteries of Freemasonry unveiled for the first time on the screen) is a French film of 1943, notable as the last film to be directed by Paul Riche (the pseudonym of Jean Mamy).
The film recounts the life of a young député who joins the Freemasons in order to relaunch his career. He thus learns of how the Freemasons are conspiring with the Jews to encourage France into a war against Germany.
The film was commissioned in 1942 by the Propaganda Abteilung, a delegation of Nazi Germany's propaganda ministry within occupied France by the ex-mason Mamy. It virulently denounces Freemasonry, parliamentarianism and Jews as part of Vichy's propaganda drive against them and seeks to prove a fake Jewish-Masonic plot. On France's liberation its writer Jean Marquès-Rivière, its producer Robert Muzard and its direction Jean Mamy were purged for collaboration with the enemy. On 25 November 1945, Muzard was condemned to 3 years in prison and Marquès-Rivière was condemned in his absence (he had gone into self-imposed exile) to death and degradation. Mamy had also been a journalist on L'Appel under Pierre Constantini (leader of the Ligue française d’épuration, d’entraide sociale et de collaboration européenne) and on the collaborationist journal Au pilori, and was thus condemned to death and exectued at the fortress of Montrouge on 29 March 1949.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forces_occultes
More on the John Dee Quatercentenary Conference
John Dee Quatercentenary ConferenceSt John's College, Cambridge
21 – 22 September 2009
2009 marks the quatercentenary of the death of the great Elizabethan polymath, John Dee (1527–1609). This international and interdisciplinary conference will commemorate the occasion by bringing together scholars and students from a range of fields, including intellectual and cultural history, history of science and mathematics, literature, and history of the book, to consider the extraordinary range of Dee's interests and enterprises. The conference is hosted by Dee's old Cambridge college, St John's, and provides a unique opportunity to examine some of Dee's own books in the Old Library. Speakers include Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University of London), Nicholas Clulee (Frostburg State University), Glyn Parry (Victoria University of Wellington) and Stephen Pumfrey (Lancaster University).
The conference will be preceded by a half day colloquium on 'Western Esoteric Traditions in the Renaissance' at Anglia Ruskin University, as part of a programme of Cambridge-based events celebrating the intellectual legacy of the Renaissance.
The John Dee Quatercentenary Conference is hosted by St John's College, Cambridge, and supported by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (University of Cambridge), the Bibliographical Society, the British Society for the History of Science and the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Conference information
Presentations
Programme
Registration
Directions
Anglia Ruskin Colloquium
Download the conference poster
Scholars try to rescue reputation of royal wizard John Dee
Scholars try to rescue reputation of royal wizard John DeeScholars are trying to restore the reputation of the last English royal wizard, Dr John Dee, over claims dating back 400 years that he was involved in sorcery.
By Andrew Hough
Published: 1:09PM BST 21 Sep 2009
Dee is regarded as one of the period's leading scholars, who cast horoscopes for Queen Mary and her Spanish husband, Philip, and suggested the most auspicious date for the coronation of Elizabeth I.
But he was also said to use crystal balls to communicate with angels and collaborated with a conman who assured him the angels had suggested a spot of wife-swapping.
Now a group of international scholars gathered in Cambridge has tried to restore his reputation, four centuries on.
Jenny Rampling, who organised the weekend two-day conference at Dee's old college, St John’s - where he became an undergraduate aged 15 - to celebrate him as a forgotten hero of English intellectual life.
It was at college where he suffered the first of many accusations of sorcery after a spectacularly successful stage effect for a production of Aristophanes's Pax, according to The Guardian.
"There was never a single blockbuster discovery with Dee as with Galileo or Newton, because his interests spread so wide," she told the paper.
"So if you're looking for a founding father of modern science, he's probably not the man.
"But if you're looking for one of the most original thinkers of his day, in touch with all the major intellectuals of Europe, consulted by princes, right at the cutting edge of mathematical theory, author of the preface of the first English edition of Euclid, owner of the greatest private library in England and one of the best in Europe, that's Dee.”
She added: “But even by the 17th century that part of his reputation was overshadowed by the stories of sorcery and conjuring.”
He is credited with coining the phrase "the British empire" and advising on some of the great Tudor voyages of exploration, including the search for the North-west Passage through the Arctic and is said to have inspired Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.
He also proposed the reform of the Julian calendar to bring it into line with the astronomical year two centuries before it was implemented in England while he also presented Mary with a detailed plan for the first national library.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6213913/Scholars-try-to-rescue-reputation-of-royal-wizard-John-Dee.html
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
September 20, 2009
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
By SARA CORBETT
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
{snip}
THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.
{snip}
What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”
Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”
Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.
Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”
And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.
{snip}
Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”
{snip}
Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.
While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”
{snip}
“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
{snip}
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.
{snip}
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”
The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.
Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”
After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”
{snip}
Read the whole article here:
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
By SARA CORBETT
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
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THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.
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What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”
Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.
What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”
Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.
Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”
And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.
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Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”
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Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.
While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”
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“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”
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And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.
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ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”
The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.
Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”
After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”
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