Visiting Aleister Crowley Artifacts

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

IF A TREE FALLS: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
I have always held the opinion that while the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, they are still occasionally useful. That epitomizes my position on the Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, and kindred hard-line activist organizations operating against human forces harmful to animals and nature. While I find the degenerate radical leftist hippy-types generally affiliated with ELF and similar organizations viscerally repulsive, and useless as anything beyond cannon fodder against deserving targets, I regard their common enemies as valid targets although from a very different political position, and I regard political violence as legitimate where the ends justify the means. I’m not concerned so much with who successfully harms the enemy, or who gets the credit in most cases, so long as the enemy is substantially harmed. Of course this only applies where the enemy is not amenable to reason or less corporeal punishment.

IF A TREE FALLS is centered on the case of Daniel McGowan, who comes across as one of those deeply neurotic garden variety far-left mopes thrown into self-absorbed clinical depression about problems over which he has no personal control yet egomanically assumes he has some personal responsibility for. It is easy to see how someone with slightly more self-loathing could be manipulated into committing suicide attacks.

The documentary follows his trajectory into the environmental protest movement and process of “radicalization” as the result of specific events and in the milieu of specific individuals. The film contains several important lessons for anyone engaged in this type of activity for whatever cause.

One of the radicalizing events was a local case involving the removal of several very old and beautiful trees from a park area, for the purpose of putting in a parking lot. The ELF group and others were keyed to make an appearance at a public meeting airing objections to the project. In a manner common to “developers” and local government sleaze, they changed the dates of the meeting to insure the trees would be removed before the meeting could take place. To counter this, the ELF group organized a non-violent protest, forming human shield-type barriers to the park, as well as climbing and lashing themselves into the trees. The protesters were eventually extracted after well-documented episodes of the police hosing them down with chemical/pepper spray. Footage proving to be a public relations disaster for the police includes officers holding women’s eyes open to be sprayed directly into their eyes, and using fire lifts to reach the protesters in the trees, cutting their pants off so they could spray their genitals with pepper spray.

Ultimately the protesters were removed, hospitalized for burns from the chemical sprays used by the police, and jailed, while the trees were demolished to make room for the parking lot.

The scenario demonstrated explicitly that democratic process is a farce because in virtually every location at all times government is run by self-serving prostitutes, and that non-violent resistance accomplishes nothing where real profit is at stake. A democratic government is only as good as the people who comprise it, unfortunately the only motive to occupy these diminutive local political slots is to exploit the position of petty authority for the profit of the clerk and his cronies – usually this takes the form of “development” and construction contracts paid for by public tax money.

That protestors typically stereotype themselves as preachy dope-smoking hippies only serves to make their issues more easily pigeonholed and dismissed by “establishment” types and only further marginalizes nonviolent protest as a viable strategy - the same retarded scenario that has repeated itself with mind-numbing monotony since the 1960s. I enjoy seeing dreadlocked protestors clubbed and hosed-down with pepper spray almost as much as I hate seeing trees cut down to build yet another parking lot for yet another bovine shopping center.

This scenario was also a prime example of the kind of sleaze you encounter when dealing with “developers” and local government types, who are invariably compulsive meddling control freaks and/or self-serving pricks. In my opinion these are the exact type of people who deserve to be targeted personally, their homes, businesses, and families, by violent resistance to their ignorant short-sighted selfish and destructive self-aggrandizement. They should have their eyeballs smeared on the wall in a Manson Family style home invasion to send a proper message to the rest of their ilk.

The ELF activists were correct to conclude that large corporations motivated solely by profit will not heed any message and certainly not modify their behavior unless they are hit hard, financially.

This resulted in a series of impressive arsons targeting the offices of logging operations, meat packing plants, and corporations involved in genetically engineered agriculture. Overall the direct actions were effective. The cell was very good at insuring complete destruction of the facilities targeted. On the other hand, in several cases, the operations were based on poor or dated intelligence resulting in the destruction of property no longer owned by the corporations targeted or no longer engaged in objectionable activity.

After this series of targeted arson, individuals of the cell eventually went their separate ways. Years pass before the individual who was a key instigator behind most of these actions was arrested for drugs. In turn, facing conviction, he chooses to inform on his former associates rather than face the consequences of his own degenerate lifestyle.

First lesson here being that not only will the most hardcore instigators and coordinators usually be the first ones to fold under pressure, virtually everyone involved will turn states evidence under pressure and testify against their cohorts; thus a strong case for "lone wolf" type actions vs. these kinds of "cell" type actions.

In this case, the principle scumbag avoiding his drug conviction actually wore a wire to entrap his former associates. This is how Daniel McGowan was implicated, arrested, and convicted. Rule of thumb: If someone you committed crime with years ago shows up out of the blue and wants to talk about the “good old days” of committing crime together, assume they are recording the conversation.

The only people who will not fold and testify under government pressure are those who fear retribution from the organization they were associated with. ELF is not an organization who punishes informers – the Mafia and MS13 are. Therefore assume if you are breaking the law for a soft-core non-retributive organization, such as ELF or ALF, that everyone will inevitably take a plea bargain and testify against each other if caught. Fear engenders more discipline than self-respect does.  

This group was generally effective at direct actions but there are several instances of very poor preliminary intelligence gathering that resulted in them targeting facilities that weren't even committing the offenses they thought they were inflicting revenge for or making statements about. The ELF people interviewed in this documentary are of barely average intelligence. I imagine most of them ARE that mis/un-informed and unintelligent.

IF A TREE FALLS is a very well done, objective, and thoughtful documentary film and one I highly recommend to anyone interested in these issues at all.

JDS

"Invisible Children" vs. Joseph Kony

Prior to the appearance of this “Invisible Children” buzz surrounding the video "Kony 2012", I had recently pointed out in conversation the almost complete media-silence on the previously controversial US intervention in Uganda.

Since the appearance of the viral “documentary” online, my two blog pages about the probable reality behind the intervention have been receiving a drastically increased number of hits:

Sunday, October 16, 2011: US Intervention in Uganda, Why Now?
Sunday, October 16, 2011 What's The Real Motive For U.S. Military Deployment In Central Africa?

To summarize, I think the real reasons for US intervention in Uganda are:

1. Oil: The recent discovery of oil reserves in the Uganda/Congo region and the impending oil development contracts with large Chinese, French, and British corporations, all of which include a “stabilization” clause. Note: I’m not 100% certain that this means “stabilization” in the military/political sense, but it probably does. This would require the suppression of any “insurgency” (from Kony or anyone else) that would destabilize the situation.

2. AFRICOM: A decisive US military presence in Uganda, along with a long-term commitment to “development” would provide a likely inroad for the establishment of a full-scale US command center that is actually on the African continent, instead of in Stuttgart Germany where it is now.

The “humanitarian” reasons for intervention absolutely do NOT hold water, especially considering that Kony has been at this for nearly thirty years, and especially considering that if recent history has established anything at all it is that there is no single instance of US “intervention” improving anything for anyone on the African continent.

While Uganda probably does not pose any imminent threat to Israel (a typical factor for US intervention) they do possess oil and a strategic position for the USA in relation to Chinese (and probably Russian) “investments” in the Dark Continent.

Obama came under considerable criticism for US involvement in Libya and the overall “Arab Spring” uprisings, especially his “humanitarian” pretensions. A leading question was why “humanitarian” intervention in Syria, rather than somewhere like the Congo or any number of other places in Africa where atrocities and “war crimes” occur on a near-constant basis? The answer to that question is simple – there is no profit motive. Now in Uganda there is a profit motive, a lesser strategic motive, and another motive in an election year – namely to convince all the dimwits at home that people should support Obama because he really has the best interests of people around the world at heart.

It is worth noting that the “Invisible Children” charity organization has been coming under increased scrutiny for lack of “transparency” in their financial dealings. It is also worth noting that they were previously responsible for “S.1067: Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009” being introduced to congress and passed into law.

It is my opinion that the “Invisible Children” charity organization is in all probability a sock-puppet of the petroleum industry and/or the pentagon – insofar as there can be said to be any substantive distinction between the two.

JDS

Links:
S.1067 - Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009
"A bill to support stabilization and lasting peace in northern Uganda and areas affected by the Lord's Resistance Army through development of a regional strategy to support multilateral efforts to successfully protect civilians and eliminate the threat posed by the Lord's Resistance Army and to authorize funds for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, reconciliation, and transitional justice, and for other purposes."

Invisible Children
"Invisible children uses film, creativity and social action to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Kony's rebel war and restore LRA-affected communities in central Africa to peace and prosperity."

VISIBLE CHILDREN
KONY 2012, viewed critically.

The Red Spectre 1907

Segundo de Chomón (co-director)
Ferdinand Zecca (co-director)
Segundo de Chomón (writer)

Mussolini and Gandhi: Strange Bedfellows

Saturday, March 3, 2012 8:45 PM EST
Mussolini and Gandhi: Strange Bedfellows
By Palash R. Ghosh

Politics not only make for strange bedfellows, sometimes they create bizarre, confounding, incomprehensible bedfellows.

It would be difficult to identify two historical figures from the 20th century who were more diametrically opposed than the gentle, saintly hero of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Benito Mussolini, the brutal Fascist dictator of Italy.

Yet, the “Mahatma” and “Il Duce” formed a mutual admiration society during the 1920s and 1930s.

According to a book entitled “Subhash Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany,” author Romain Hayes wrote that in late 1931, Gandhi accepted an invitation to visit Mussolini in Rome while the Mahatma was touring through Europe.

Reportedly, the two men – the vain Italian Fascist and the modest, unassuming Indian ascetic – got along extremely well and admired each other.

Hayes wrote that, among other things, Gandhi reviewed a black-shirted Fascist youth honor guard during his visit.

“Mussolini hailed Gandhi as a 'genius and a saint,' admiring as [Mussolini] did [Gandhi's] ability to challenge the British Empire,” Hayes wrote.

Regarding his visit with Il Duce, Gandhi wrote in a letter to a friend: "Mussolini is a riddle to me. Many of his reforms attract me. He seems to have done much for the peasant class. I admit an iron hand is there. But as violence is the basis of Western society, Mussolini's reforms deserve an impartial study.”

Obviously, Gandhi's enthusiasm for Mussolini was tempered by the dictator's questionable tactics.

Nonetheless, Gandhi's missive continued: “[Mussolini's] care of the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labor, seem to me to demand special attention... My own fundamental objection is that these reforms are compulsory. But it is the same in all democratic institutions. What strikes me is that behind Mussolini's implacability is a desire to serve his people. Even behind his emphatic speeches there is a nucleus of sincerity and of passionate love for his people. It seems to me that the majority of the Italian people love the iron government of Mussolini."

Gandhi also hailed Mussolini “one of the great statesmen of our time.”

But the Mahatma's affection was shared by many unlikely sources.

In the mid-1920s, Winston Churchill, who met Mussolini and was impressed by the sense of order and efficiency in Fascist Italy, once gushed: “If I had been Italian, I am sure I would have been with you from the beginning.”

George Bernard Shaw, the famed Irish playwright and Socialist (and avowed enemy of Churchill) one declared: “Socialists should be delighted to find at last a Socialist [Mussolini] who speaks and thinks as responsible rulers do.”

While Gandhi's relationship with Mussolini may seem strange and indefensible on the surface, if one considers the global political climate between the two World Wars, perhaps such linkages are not so unusual.

Following the devastation of World War I, extremist ideologies appealed to millions of people around the world who faced economic recession, starvation, joblessness, sectarian violence, among other seemingly insurmountable ills.

At that time, Fascism, Nazism and Communism were simply political “philosophies” which sought to find drastic solutions to overwhelming social problems.

Long before the horrors of the Nazi death camps and the mass exterminations perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung were exposed, many people of goodwill and with good intentions embraced these “extremist” ideologies.

From an Indian Nationalist perspective, Mussolini's Italy and Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany were viewed not only as bulwarks against British imperialism, but they were widely admired to creating strong, economically robust nations from the wreckage of war and devastation.

Tarak Nath Das, an Indian revolutionary, wrote glowingly of Fascist Italy in 1931: “Italy, under the leadership of Signor Mussolini, is roused to its very depths of national consciousness. It feels that it has a mission of introducing a higher type of civilization. It had the urge of becoming a great power again ... Italy must be great through her national power, achieved through the authority of an 'ethical State'. supported by national co-operation and solidarity.”

Das added: “Every Italian citizen must think first of his duty towards his self-development, welfare of the state and society and make his or her supreme effort to attain the ideal. Class harmony must take the place of the ideal of class-war. So-called democracy must give way to the rule of the aristocracy of intellect. ... Some superficial and prejudiced observers of new Italy have spoken of 'Fascist tyranny' and condemned the Fascist regime. To me it is clear that the Fascist government or a particular official might have made some mistakes on particular occasions; but Fascism stands for liberty with responsibility and it is opposed to all forms of license. It gives precedence to Duty and Strength, as one finds in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita."

By the time Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the mid-1930s, Gandhi (as well as Churchill, Shaw and other former admirers), completely disavowed Il Duce. Thereafter, Mussolini's prestige declined and completely evaporated in India.

However, Hitler and Nazism are an entirely different matter.

To this day, many right-wing Hindu Nationalists in India admire Der Fuhrer, and his infamous tract “Mein Kampf” remains widely popular, especially among the young.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

SOURCE.

The Ruling Class - Dem Bones

‎"All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears." -- Joseph de Maistre.

Heil Honey, I'm Home

Sitcom about Hitler and Eva Braun. First broadcast in 1990 on BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting). An ironic parody of American family TV comedies of the 1950s.

Dr. Revilo P. Oliver: After 50 Years (1969)

Jonathan Bowden: Julius Evola - The World's Most Right-Wing Thinker?

Idolatry: The Drugging of the Nations

Painted by Norbert H. Kox and William Thomas Thompson

(Copyright 2002, by William Thomas Thompson abd Norbert H. Kox)

Der Führer & Friend

The Toadman

A fun manufactured rarity of obscure occult research currently up for auction from Australia on Ebay, bound in Cane Toad Hide:

This is a very rare and very limited talismanic quarter-leather edition of The Toadman, by Nigel Pennick, which was published by the Society Esoteric Endeavour (S.E.E.), in 2012. According to the copyright information, this book was written, in its completed form, in 2010, but obviously, it has taken a couple of years for it to see the light of day! When it was finally released (a few weeks ago), there was a mad rush to obtain the 150 copies that were made available, and judging by the number of inquiries that I (and other successful purchasers), have received in the past few weeks - these books are worth their weight in gold! They look & feel fantastic, with the toad quarter binding to the spine, giving them that extra-special look & feel. Having just received this, I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I have browsed through the contents, and provided a few photos, of some of the illustrated pages, to give you a feel of the breadth & depth of this book. This book is in mint condition, is bound in quarter leather, including toad leather used on the spine, green cloth covering the boards, and goat leather on the oval onlay on the front board, with gilt titling to the front & spine. This beautiful book features marbled endpapers, measuers 18.5 cm x 16 cm (approx), has about 140 pages of text, and is numbered #66 of 150. All 150 copies sold out within hours of being first announced. 

The bidding starts at US $660.00

The auction can be found HERE, and another copy HERE.

Marina Bychkova Dolls

Sharon Tate & Mao Tse-tung

(As originally appearing in Esquire magazine): The little red book which contains hightlights from The thought of Mao Tse-tung is the most influential volume in the world today. It is also extremely dull and entirely unmemorable. To resolve this paradox, we, a handful of editors in authority who follow the capitalist road, thought useful to illustrate certain key passages in such a way that they are more likely to stick in the mind. The visual aid is Sharon Tate and, to give credit where credit, God knows, is due, she will soon be seen in the Twentieth Century-Fox motion picture, Valley of the Dolls.

1. Every communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
“Problems of War and Strategy” (November 6, 1938)

2. Our fundamental task is to adjust the use of labor power in an organized way and to encourage women to do farm work.
“Our Economic Policy” (January 23, 1934)

3. How is Marxist-Leninist theory to be linked with the practice of the Chinese revolution? To use a common expression, it is by “shooting the arrow at the target.” As the arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are “shooting without a target,” shooting at random, and such people are liable to harm the revolution.
“Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” (February 1, 1942)

4.The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.
Talk at a meeting with Chinese students and trainees in Moscow (November 17, 1957)

5. …the flattery of the bourgeoisie may conquer the weak-willed in our ranks. There may be some Communists, who were not conquered by enemies with guns and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugar-coated bullets. We must guard against such a situation.
“Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party Of China.” (March 5, 1949)

6. Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. …If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.
“On Practice” (July, 1937)

What am I reading?

One of the most frequent questions I get in person is "What are you reading?" I hate answering this, especially to people I don't know, because 1) its none of their fucking business, and 2) usually they would have no idea what it is about or why I would be interested in it. I'm also irrationally protective of my privacy, like anyone really gives a rat's ass what I'm into or why, or when. This is the reason I rarely post book reviews even though I'm a voracious reader and typically read several books a week.

So for those who are interested at all, this is the tip of the iceberg, by way of highlights from my backlog/record of dot-com orders from the past two years or so. Remember this barely scratches the surface of what I read. I own an antiquarian/second-hand bookstore and typically bring home SEVERAL BOXES of books every week for my own use. There is no way I'm going to log all that, much less everything I actually read, skim, or browse through for specific pieces of information.

These are in reverse order, most recent first:

Gregorian Chant (A Midland Book)
Willi Apel

Solving in Style
John Nunn

Chess Wizardry: The New ABC of Chess Problems (American Batsford Chess Library)
John Rice

Scratchboard for Illustration
Ruth Lozner

The Art of Scratchboard
Cecile Curtis

Bonatti on Nativities
Guido Bonatti, Benjamin N Dykes

Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq
Michael Scheuer

Rene Guenon: A Teacher for Modern Times
Julius Evola

For My Legionaries (The Iron Guard)
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

The Prison Notes
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Julius Evola

The Complete Picatrix: The Occult Classic Of Astrological Magic Liber Atratus Edition
John Michael Greer, Christopher Warnock

Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery: The 1758-1760 Hertel Edition of Ripa's Iconologia with 200 Engraved Illustrations
Cesare Ripa

Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism
John Gage

Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Color & Culture)
John Gage

Syncretism in the West : Pico's 900 Theses (1486) : The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems : With a Revised Text, English Tr
Stephen A. Farmer, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery
Lyndy Abraham

A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635).
George. Introduction by Rosemary Freeman.

The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Quest Book)
Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith

An International Armorial: The Historical File of the House of Leopardi of Constantinople
Leopardi

The Greek Qabalah: Alphabetical Mysticism and Numerology in the Ancient World
Kieren Barry

Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence on Thought and Expression
Vincent Foster Hopper

An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines
Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage
Rene Guenon

Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts
Mircea Eliade, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona

Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art (2 Vol. Set)
Helene E. Roberts

Iconography of Christian art (2 Vol. Set)
Gertrud Schiller

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
Robert Darnton

Signs and Symbols in Christian Art: With Illustrations from Paintings from the Renaissance (Galaxy Books)
George Ferguson

Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged
Arthur E. Waite

Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator
Michael Camille

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Tim Weiner

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards
Michael Dummett

Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art
Adolf Katzenellenbogen

A Theory of Semiotics (Advances in Semiotics)
Umberto Eco

The Magical Calendar: A Synthesis of Magial Symbolism from the Seventeenth-Century Renaissance of Medieval Occultism (Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourcewo)
Adam McLean

The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Material Texts)
Mary Carruthers, Jan M. Ziolkowski

The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science
A. James Gregor

Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
Erwin Panofsky, Gerda S. Panofsky

A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World
Nicholas A. Basbanes

D'Annunzio
Tommaso Antongini

Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (Issues in contemporary civilization)
Renzo De Felice

Mussolini
Anthony James Joes

The First Duce: D'Annunzio at Fiume
Professor Michael Arthur Ledeen

The Book Of Symbols: Reflections On Archetypal Images (The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism)
Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, ARAS

Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art (A Guide to Imagery)
Matilde Battistini

"Boney" Fuller: The Intellectual General
Anthony John Trythall

Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance
E.H. Gombrich

The Forty Chapters of al-Kindi
Abu Yusuf al-Kindi

Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations
Joscelyn Godwin

Works of Sahl & Masha'allah
Sahl ibn Bishr, et al

Introductions to Traditional Astrology
Abu Ma'shar, et al

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies

Persian Nativities I: Masha'allah and Abu 'Ali
Masha'allah, et al

Persian Nativities II: 'Umar al-Tabari and Abu Bakr
Umar al-Tabari, et al

Persian Nativities III: Abu Ma'shar on Solar Revolutions
Abu Ma'shar

Astrological Roots: The Hellenistic Legacy
Joseph Crane

The Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology
Vivian E. Robson

The Judgments of Nativities
Abu Ali Al-Khayyat,

Mystical Astrology According to Ibn 'Arabi (The Fons Vitae Titus Burckhardt series)
Titus Burckhardt, et al

Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History
Anna Bramwell

The Transformist Illusion
Douglas Dewar

The Path of Cinnabar
Julius Evola

Principles of Tantra (Parts 1 and 2 bound in One) The Tantratattva of Sriyukta Siva Candra Vidyarnava Bhattacarya Mahodaya
Arthur Avalon, John Woodroffe

On the Genre and Message of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys
Bruce J. Malina

Book of Instructions in the Elements of the Art of Astrology
et al Al Biruni

The Beginning of Wisdom (Translation From Hebrew)
Avraham Ibn Ezra, et al

Primary Directions: Astrology's Old Master Technique
Martin Gansten

Ancient Astrology Theory and Practice: Matheseos Libri VIII
Julius Firmicus Maternus

Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things
Martin Lings, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales

Classical Music of North India the First Years of Study: The Music of the Baba Allauddin Gharana As Taught by Ali Akbar Khan at the Ali Akbar College
Ali Akbar Khan, George Ruckert

The Raga Guide: Survey of 74 Hindustani Ragas
Various Artists

101 Raga-s for the 21st Century and Beyond: A Music Lover's Guide to Hindustani Music
Haresh Bakshi

Ragas of Northern Indian Music
Alain Danielou

Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century)
Michael Nyman

Stockhausen on Music
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Robin Maconie

Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music
Derek Bailey

Homo americanus:: Child of the Postmodern Age
Tomislav Sunic

Against Democracy and Equality: The New European Right
Tomislav Sunic, et al

New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
Michael O'Meara

Let me hear your war cry

100% Cosmodromium Approved...

Tarot & Chess - Le Pape/Bishop

Another interesting parallel.

Bishop Chess Piece, 12th century English. Walrus ivory; 3 7/8 x 2 3/8 in. (9.8 x 6 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York image taken from: http://www.metmuseum.org/

32000 year old Idol of Narsimha found in Germany

This is interesting, even though I don't agree with the interpretation in this article. The artifact is very old (predating the Vedas and artifacts such as the Venus of Willendorf),  and Northern. In relation to Traditional studies it is interesting to note artifacts like this, and ruins such as the Goseck Circle, keep turning up older, and in the  North. - JDS.


32000 year old Idol of Narsimha (Lord Vishnu’s Avatar) found in Germany
Many news about prehistoric founds and their possible meaning reached the world in the last decades. One of them, found in South Germany, puts scientist around the world in amazement. The centerpiece is the “lion man”, an idol that is made from the tusk of a mammoth in the form of a human body with a lion head. Amazingly it is dated back 32,000 years from now.

This discovery brought a lot of attention in the archaeological circles in Europe. In Excavations around 1930-35 at the Lonetal area near Ulm, German scientist already found an immense cave system with lots of prehistoric artifacts in it.

First, only representations of birds, horses, turtles and even single lions where found but not a morphological combination of men and animal. Naturally the “lion man” was quite outstanding and unique. It became also clear during the later examinations that the “lion-men” was used for ritual purposes, unlike the other items which seemed to have accompanied the dead and so on.

The Idol was found exactly at the place in the cave where day and night meet, about 20 meters away from the entrance and buried 1,20 meter deep under the ground. Many parts of the figure were broken and where found a little away in this area. Therefore it took some time to finish the work of completing and reconstructing the figure and to see it as a whole.

From the viewpoint of Vedic culture of ancient India, Lord Vishnu appeared in a divine human form with a lion face to protect his devotee and to stop religiousness. A description of a standing idol form of this lord is found in the agama silpa shastra and is called “kevala narasimha”. In India still many ancient temples exist, where deities of Sri Narasimha Bhagavan are worshiped, often at special locations like on high mountain peaks or in caves.

Many ancient, highly developed cultures had some kind of idols or pictures of lions with a human face or torso. A purely ritualistic Relic, like for example the Sphinx of gizeh or the Egyptian goddess of war sekhmetm, with a lion head, or Mithra, the Sun god of Persia, with a lion face, the Assyrian Gate Guardians of Babylon or the Etruscan lion with wings at the entrance of the Temple mountain at Troy are well known examples for this.

An now this amazing discovery in Lonetal in a deep cave which is directed to north east towards the little river lone. Extraordinary is also the exact position of the found of the lion-man. It immediately reminded me of the ancient story from the Puranas, known to all devotees of LordVishnu, where Hiranyakashipu, the great demon, achieved nearly immortality by the blessings of Brahma. This demon asked for the boon that he could not be killed by a beast or man, nor in the sky or on earth, not inside or outside a house, not in the day or in the night, not with weapons or by hand and so on. Lord Vishnu then appeared out of a column to kill this demon. But to fulfill the boon Brahma gave, he appeared at dusk and killed him on the doorsteps of his palace with his sharp nails.

It is off course difficult or maybe impossible to finally judge if this idol was a part of a global Vedic civilization but nonetheless our visit of the exhibition, where one can see the figure in a cave like hall, and our later trip to the original place of discovery where very breathtaking and mystical and made us meditate deeply about our predecessors and ancient times long ago where god was present directly on earth, or later in his idol form in many temples all around the world.

SOURCE.

From Wikipedia:

A lion headed figure, first called the lion man (German: Löwenmensch, literally "lion person"), then the lion lady (German: Löwenfrau), is an ivory sculpture that is the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world and one of the oldest known sculptures in general. The sculpture has also been interpreted as anthropomorphic, giving human characteristics to an animal, although it may have represented a deity. The figurine was determined to be about 32,000 years old[1][2] by carbon dating material from the same layer in which the sculpture was found. It is associated with the archaeological Aurignacian culture.[3] The sculpture is 29.6 cm (11.7 inches) in height, 5.6 cm wide. and 5.9 cm thick. It was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife. There are seven parallel, transverse, carved gouges on the left arm. It is now in the museum in Ulm, Germany.

Its pieces were found in 1939 in a cave named Stadel-Höhle im Hohlenstein (Stadel cave in Hohlenstein Mountain) in the Lonetal (Lone valley) in the Swabian Alps, Germany. Due to the beginning of the Second World War, it was forgotten and only rediscovered thirty years later. The first reconstruction revealed a humanoid figurine without head. Between 1997 and 1998 additional pieces of the sculpture were discovered and the head was reassembled and restored.

Originally, the figure was classified as male by Joachim Hahn. From examination of some additional parts of the sculpture found later, Elisabeth Schmid decided that the figure was a woman with the head of a "Höhlenlöwin" (female Cave Lion).[4] Both interpretations lack scientific evidence.[4] European cave lions, male and female, lacked the distinctive manes of the African male lion, and so its absence here cannot lead to an interpretation as a 'lioness'.

Recently the ancient figurine has more often been called a lion headed figurine, rather than a 'lion man'. The name currently used in German, Löwenmensch—meaning "lion-human"—similarly, is neutral.

Interpretation is very difficult. The sculpture shares certain similarities with French cave wall paintings, which also show hybrid creatures. The French paintings, however, are several thousand years younger than the German sculpture.

After this artifact was identified, a similar, but smaller, lion-headed sculpture was found, along with other animal figures and several flutes, in another cave in the same region of Germany. This leads to the possibility that the lion-figure played an important role in the mythology of humans of the early Upper Paleolithic. The sculpture can be seen in the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, Germany, though it may be moved to a planned new museum of the Paleolithic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_man_of_the_Hohlenstein_Stadel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurignacian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Hohle_Fels

Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Signs

Witchcraft '70

Nazi-Themed Sports Day Draws Criticism in Thailand

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011, 11:49 AM SGT

Nazi-Themed Sports Day Draws Criticism in Thailand
By James Hookway

Questions are growing in Thailand about how school students in Chiang Mai were able to adopt a Nazi theme for their school sports-day on Friday, wearing outfits modeled on those of SS guards and waving huge swastika banners.

Children at the Sacred Heart preparatory school traditionally choose their own theme for their annual sports day, school officials have said. The idea is that it’s a surprise for both teachers and parents.

Last week’s event was a shocker, though. Photographs taken at the event show streams of children dressed up in Nazi regalia marching into the school displaying one-armed salutes. At least one girl sported a toothbrush mustache.

News of the sports day quickly spread, and a Jewish human-rights organization has asked Christian leaders in Thailand to condemn the parade. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles said in a statement that one youngster even dressed as Adolf Hitler before the march wound its way around the school, bewildering local expatriates, many of them European retirees.

Local honorary consuls from a number of countries visited the school on Monday to ask why the parade was allowed to take place and came back with the answer that the students didn’t realize it would upset anybody. The local private education authority also received the same response from the Roman Catholic school.

“It happened because the students were unaware and I have asked the school to make sure they are more careful in the future,” Chanwit Tuphsuphan, secretary-general of the Office of the Private Education Commission, was reported as saying in the Bangkok Post.

A person reached at the preparatory school said no one was available to discuss the matter.

One theory for the kids’ behavior is that they didn’t necessarily understand the consequences of their actions and merely considered dressing up as super-villains – even Nazis – to be fun. A similar incident occurred at a school in Bangkok four years ago and involved 200 students. And in 2005 Britain’s Prince Harry – then 20 years old – was pictured on the front of The Sun newspaper wearing a swastika armband to a friend’s fancy dress party.

The Swastika, in addition, is an ancient Indo-European symbol depicted in spiritual imagery for thousands of years, and is perceived as symbol of good luck among Buddhists, possibly softening the impact of the Nazi version among locals.

Many residents have ventured that the really didn’t understand the significance of the parade, as their teachers suggest. If that’s the case, though, it could suggest Thailand has more problems with its education system than it realized, even though the school involved is a privately-run, Christian institution.

Foreign investors have consistently pointed to poor education levels as a potential deterrent to plowing further money into the country, especially now that minimum wages are set to rise to 300 baht or around $10 a day – nearly doubling in some areas and not far behind Malaysia, where education levels are much higher and many ordinary people speak English comfortably.

The World Economic Forum recently published its annual competitiveness survey, and the quality of secondary and tertiary education in Thailand was ranked 77th out of 142 countries surveyed, compared with Singapore’s number 2 ranking, 14 for Malaysia and 61 for the Philippines.

Both the main political parties here recognized the problem during a recent national election campaign. The Puea Thai, or For Thais, Party eventually won after pledging, among other things, a tablet computer for every child. Concerned parents may hope they’ll google Nazism – and understand its consequences– the next time they are asked to come up with a theme for a sports-day parade.

SOURCE.

Symbols by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Symbols
by
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2 (Winter-Spring, 1980). © World Wisdom, Inc. www.studiesincomparativereligion.com

Symbols[1] and signs, whether verbal, musical, dramatic or plastic, are means of communication. The references of symbols are to ideas and those of signs to things One and the same term may be symbol or sign according to its context: the cross, for example, is a symbol when it represents the structure of the universe, but a sign when it stands for crossroads. Symbols and signs may be either natural (true, by innate propriety) or conventional (arbitrary and accidental) traditional or private. With the language of signs, employed indicatively in profane language and in realistic and abstracted art, we shall have no further concern in the present connection. By “abstracted art” we mean such modern art as willfully avoids recognizable representation, as distin­guished from “principal art”, the naturally symbolic language of tradition.

The language of traditional art—scripture, epic, folklore, ritual, and all the related crafts—is symbolic; and being a language of natural symbols, neither of private invention, nor established by conciliar agreement or mere custom, is a universal language. The symbol is the material embodiment, in sound, shape, color or gesture as the case may be, of the imitable form of an idea to be communicated, which imitable form is the formal cause of the work of art itself. It is for the sake of the idea, and not for its own sake, that the symbol exists: an actual form much be either symbolic—of its reference, or merely an unintelligible shape to be liked or disliked according to taste. The greater part of modern aesthetics assumes (as the words “aesthetic” and “empathy” imply) that art consists or should consist entirely of such unintelligible shapes, and that the appreciation of art consists or should consist in appropriate emotional reactions. It is further assumed that whatever is of permanent value in traditional works of art is of the same kind, and altogether independent of their iconography and meaning. We have, indeed, a right to say that we choose to consider only the aesthetic surfaces of the ancient, oriental, or popular arts; but if we do this, we must not at the same time deceive ourselves so as to suppose that the history of art, meaning by “history” an explanation in terms of the four causes, can be known or written from any such a limited point of view. In order to understand composition, for example, i.e. the sequence of a dance or the arrangement of masses in a cathedral or icon, we much understand the logical relation of the parts: just as in order to understand a sentence, it is not enough to admire the mellifluent sounds, but necessary to be acquainted with the meanings of separate words and the logic of their combinations. The mere “lover of art” is not much better than a magpie, which also decorates its nest with whatever most pleases its fancy, and is contented with a purely “aesthetic” experience. So far from this, it must be recognized that although in modern works of art there may be nothing, or nothing more than the artist’s private person, behind the aesthetic surfaces, the theory in accordance with which works of traditional art were produced and enjoyed takes it for granted that the appeal to beauty is not merely to the senses, but through the senses to the intellect: here “Beauty has to do with cognition”; and what is to be known and understood is an “immaterial idea” (Hermes), a “picture that is not in the colors” (Lankāvatāra Sūtra), “the doctrine that conceals itself behind the veil of the strange verses” (Dante), “the archetype of the image, and not the image itself” (St. Basil). “It is by their ideas that we judge of what things ought to be like” (St. Augustine).

It is evident that symbols and concepts—works of art are things conceived, as St. Thomas says, per verbum in intellectu—can serve no purpose for those who have not yet, in the Platonic sense, “forgotten”. Neither do Zeus nor the stars, as Plotinus says, remember or even learn; “memory is for those that have forgotten”, that is to say, for us, whose “life is a sleep and a forgetting”. The need of symbols, and of symbolic rites, arises only when man is expelled from the Garden of Eden; as means, by which a man can be reminded at later stages of his descent from the intellectual and contemplative to the physical and practical levels of reference. We assuredly have “forgotten” far more than those who first had need of symbols, and far more than they need to infer the immortal by its mortal analogies; and nothing could be greater proof of this than our own claims to be superior to all ritual operations, and to be able to approach the truth directly. It was as signposts of the Way, or as a trace of the Hidden Light, pursued by hunters of a super sensual quarry, that the motifs of traditional art, which have become our “ornaments”, were originally employed. In these abstract forms, the farther one traces them backward, or finds them still extant in popular “superstition”, agricultural rites, and the motifs of folk-art, the more one recognizes in them a polar balance of perceptible shape and imperceptible information; but, as Andrae says (Die ionische Säulle, Schlusswort), they have been more and more voided of content on their way down to us, more and more denatured with the progress of “civilization”, so as to become what we call “art forms”, as if it had been an aesthetic need, like that of our magpie, that had brought them into being. When meaning and purpose have been forgotten, or are remembered only by initiates, the symbol retains only those decorative values that we associate with “art”. More than this, we deny that the art form can ever have had any other than a decorative quality; and before long we begin to take it for granted that the art form must have originated in an “observation of nature”, to criticize it accordingly (“That was before they knew anything about anatomy”, or “understood perspective”) in terms of progress, and to supply its deficiencies, as did the Hellenistic Greeks with the lotus palmette when they made an elegant acanthus of it, or the Renaissance when it imposed an ideal of “truth to nature” upon an older art of formal typology. We interpret myth and epic from the same point of view, seeing in the miracles and the Deus ex machina only a more or less awkward attempt on the part of the poet to enhance the presentation of the facts; we ask for “history”, and endeavor to extract an historical nucleus by the apparently simple and really naive process of eliminating all marvels, never realizing that the myth is a whole, of which the wonders are as much an integral part as are the supposed facts; overlooking that all these marvels have a strict significance altogether independent of their possibility or impossibility as historical events.



NOTES

[1] A derivative of sumballo (Greek) especially in the senses “to correlate”, “to treat things different as though they were similar”, and (passive) “to correspond”, or “tally”.

Värttinä - Äijö

Finnish folk girl group Värttinä performs their song Äijö, which from what I can gather tells the story of a strange old man driven from a village, by the women who heckle him, into a swamp where he is bitten by a viper. He then lays a curse on the village.

Live version:


Original studio version, featuring the male vocal parts:


I'd like to hear a Diamanda Galas cover version of this.

Vanitas

Skull with magic quader 16/17th century

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu: A Few Remarks on Democracy

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corneliu_Zelea_Codreanu

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (Romanian pronunciation: [korˈnelju ˈzele̯a koˈdre̯anu]; born Corneliu Zelinski and commonly known as Corneliu Codreanu;[4] September 13, 1899 – November 30, 1938) was a Romanian politician of the far right, the founder and charismatic leader of the Iron Guard or The Legion of the Archangel Michael (also known as the Legionary Movement), an ultra-nationalist and violently antisemitic organization active throughout most of the interwar period. Generally seen as the main variety of local fascism, and noted for its mystical and Romanian Orthodox-inspired revolutionary message, it grew into an important actor on the Romanian political stage, coming into conflict with the political establishment and the democratic forces, and often resorting to terrorism. The Legionaries traditionally referred to Codreanu as Căpitanul ("The Captain"), and he held absolute authority over the organization until his death. ...On November 30, it was announced that Codreanu, the Nicadori and the Decemviri had been shot after trying to flee custody the previous night.[111] The details were revealed much later: it is most likely that the fourteen persons had been transported from their prison and executed (strangled or garroted and shot) by the Gendarmerie around Tâncăbeşti (near Bucharest), and it was shown that their bodies had been buried in the courtyard of the Jilava prison.[112][113] Their bodies were dissolved in acid, and placed under seven tons of concrete.

From: http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/eehistory/H200Readings/Topic5-R3.html 

Selection from: "Man, State and Society in East European History" Stephen Fischer-Galati, ed. pages 327-330 Translated by Stephen Fischer-Galati from Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, "Pentru Legionuri" (Bucharest: Totul Pentru Tara, l937), pp. 385-87, 396-98.

A FEW REMARKS ON DEMOCRACY
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

[The less violent and less visionary solutions proposed by the fascists were more palatable to the East European masses than were the Communist solutions. Among the several brands of fascism that flourished in Eastern Europe between the wars, the most representative of the historical tradition was the Rumanian populist variety expounded by the Iron Guard, which blamed the oppression of the peasant on the Jews and the "Jew-like" ruling establishment. Fascist populism rejected the democratic process and advocated reliance on the "Volk" for the attainment of the fascist revolution in Rumania. The following excerpt from the writings of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard, is characteristic of the views of the Rumanian fascists, who attracted a considerable following in the countryside and among industrial workers and intellectuals in the 1930s.]

I should like to make a few remarks, derived from daily experience, in a manner that can be understood by any young legionary or worker.

We wear the clothes and embrace the forms of democracy. Are they worth anything? We don't know yet. But we do know one thing. We know it for sure. That some of the largest and most civilized nations of Europe have discarded those clothes and have acquired new ones. Did they get rid of them forever? Other nations are doing their best to dispose of them and to get new ones also. Why? Have all nations gone mad? Are the Rumanian politicians the only wise men in the world? Somehow I doubt it.

Those who have changed them and those who want to change them must each have their own reasons.

But why should we concern ourselves with other nations' reasons? Let us rather concern ourselves with the reasons that would make us Rumanians ready to change the clothes of democracy.

If we have no reasons to do so, if the reasons are no good, then we shall keep the clothes, even should all of Europe get rid of them.

However, they are no good for us either, because:

1. Democracy destroys the unity of the Rumanian nation, dividing it among political parties, making Rumanians hate one another, and thus exposing a divided people to the united congregation of Jewish power at a difficult time in the nation's history.

This argument alone is so persuasive as to warrant the discarding of democracy in favor of anything that would ensure our unity--or life itself. For disunity means death.

2. Democracy makes Rumanian citizens out of millions of Jews by making them the Rumanians' equals. By giving them the same legal rights. Equality? What for? We have been here for thousands of years. Plow and weapon in hand. With our labors and blood. Why equality with those who have been here for only one hundred, ten, or even five years? Let's look at the past: We created this state. Let's look at the future: We Rumanians are fully responsible for Greater Rumania. They have nothing to do with it. What could be the responsibility of Jews, in the history books, for the disappearance of the Rumanian state?

Thus: no equality in labor, sacrifice, and struggle for the creation of the state and no equal responsibility for its future. Equality? According to an old maxim: Equality is to treat unequally the unequal. What are the reasons for the Jews' demanding equal treatment, equal political rights with the Rumanians?

3. Democracy is incapable of perseverance. Since it is shared by political parties that rule for one, two, or three years, it is unable to conceive and carry out plans of longer duration. One party annuls the plans and efforts of the other. What is conceived and built by one party today is destroyed by another tomorrow.

In a country in which much has to be built, in which building is indeed the primary historical requirement, this disadvantage of democracy constitutes a true danger. It is a situation similar to that which prevails in an establishment where masters are changed every year, each new master bringing in his own plans, ruining what was done by some, and starting new things, which will in turn be destroyed by tomorrow's masters.

4. Democracy prevents the politician's fulfillment of his obligations to the nation. Even the most well-meaning politician becomes, in a democracy, the slave of his supporters, because either he satisfies their personal interests or they destroy his organization. The politician lives under the tyranny and permanent threat of the electoral bosses.

He is placed in a position in which he must choose between the termination of his lifetime work and the satisfaction of the demands of party members. And the politician, given such a choice, opts for the latter. He does so not out of his own pocket, but out of that of the country. He creates jobs, sets up missions, commissions, sinecures--all rostered in the nation's budget--which put increasingly heavy pressures on a tired people.

5. Democracy cannot wield authority, because it cannot enforce its decisions. A party cannot move against itself, against its members who engage in scandalous malfeasance, who rob and steal, because it is afraid of losing its members. Nor can it move against its adversaries, because in so doing it would risk exposure of its own wrongdoings and shady business.

6. Democracy serves big business. Because of the expensive, competitive character of the multiparty system, democracy requires ample funds. It therefore naturally becomes the servant of the big international Jewish financiers, who enslave her by paying her.

In this manner, a nation's fate is placed in the hands of a clique of bankers.

A Letter on Saddam Hussein

This is another letter I just sent to my friend's private email group, basically backing him up against a handful regurgitating debunked arguments for US intervention in Iraq vs. Saddam Hussein:

Saddam Hussein brought Iraq into the 20th century, created an economic infrastructure, brought in "modern" technology, medicine, etc. and developed a national educational system that drastically increased general literacy in Iraq for adults and children.

Although he had stylistic similarities to Stalin, I see him in terms of his actual achievements more similar to Mussolini, and I think he came into conflict with the "Far West" (mostly the Anglo-American sphere) on much of the same terms as Mussolini and Hitler.

Somewhere there is an actual quote from Churchill to the effect that Hitler's first crime was against the international financial system, by opting out of the international finance networks conducting international trade directly in quantity in bartered materials, and becoming as domestically self-sufficient as possible. There are weird examples of this, such as American gas stations offering free Honer Harmonicas made in Germany for buying a specified amount of gasoline because they came in part of international materials bartering for petroleum with Germany. Hitler was establishing National autonomy that would not be subjected to international financial manipulation or pressures, much like Mussolini had already done in Italy. When the League of Nations enacted trade embargoes against Italy in retaliation for Italy's invasion of Abyssinia/Ethiopia it had little effect in Italy - Mussolini had developed the infrastructure to the point of National self-sufficiency that the embargoes had no substantial effect. Sound familiar with Saddam? If you look up "autarky" on wikipedia it includes a list of just about everyone the USA has considered a villian and gone to war with at some point or another. Apparently if a small state aims toward self-reliance refusing to be milked dry by the usual trans-national financial parasite institutions and networks they get moved to the top of the hit list.

Saddam stopped playing lapdog to the USA, who had been manipulating Iraq and Iran against each other for decades, probably to ensure regional instability in favor of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saddam was and always had been a more "secular" albeit nominally Muslim leader. Anyone who followed information on Al Qaeda or Saddam before 9/11 was aware their relationship was one of overt hostility - al qaeda making several assassination attempts against Saddam and there was an ongoing bloody "shadow war" between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda (as well as other radicalized Islamic groups) for years. The USA didn't invade Iraq because of connections with Al Qaeda, WMDs, or to "Free" the "people" of Iraq any more than they went to war with Hitler to "save" the Jews. There were a number of things bringing the relationship with Saddam to breaking point with the USA - he was on the verge of pegging petroleum to the EURO instead of the Dollar, and other things - basically not being a lapdog, which is unforgivable. That and his bellicose swaggering, lobbing SCUDs at Israel during "Desert Storm" etc.

The so-called "liberation" of Iraq is a train wreck, probably worse than the so-called "liberation" of Italy from Mussolini. Whatever anyone may say against Mussolini, he was a successful and popular leader for over a decade before Hitler even came into power, had he allied with Engand instead of Hitler he probably would have been in power as long or longer than Franco. Mussolini also essentially eliminated the Mafia and Mafia-controlled judges, politicians etc. until they were put back in place after the "liberation" by the USA who collaborated with them in the invasion in the first place. What kind of political stability or integrity has Italy had since Mussolini? Its corruption is the comical section of international news.

The invasion of Iraq by the USA was self-serving only made worse by its own incompetence. Even if a traditional society wanted USA-style free-market "democracy" - which it probably doesn't - democracy requires a middle class, which requires an economic infrastructure, which requires security - which in a country with sharp religious or ethnic divisions can only be maintained by a strongarm leader - which is in such cases better for everyone insofar as he is capable of actually enforcing punishment if they kill each other. The US re-construction of Iraq was a bad joke - you have people without homes, electricity, or running water, much less businesses and any kind of 'status quo' to maintain - being ushered into "voting" for pre-selected and controlled candidates that can't set foot into an open street without being assassinated.

Ironically, if someone wants to argue that the real enemy of the USA was the Afghani Taliban, the best ally the USA could have had against the Taliban was Iran. The USA media maintains the constant portrait of Iran as dangerous paranoid Muslim religious fanatics on the verge of having nuclear weapons, as if Israel and Saudi Arabia aren't dangerous paranoid religious fanatics with nuclear weapons.

Of course Oil is a huge factor in all of this, but it is also worth looking at the opium export of Afghanistan, which is huge. Opium was largely suppressed by the Taliban, since the USA invasion opium production has increased over 200% if I have my numbers right.

The world runs on oil, weapons, and narcotics. Cash is just the wrapping-paper. At least historically Dictators usually know how to fix something they have broken, or at least how to establish order after the fact. What we have is just more mindless short-sighted profiteering disguised as idealistic nonsense leaving disaster and chaos in its wake.

Business as usual.

JDS
9.19.11

A Letter on "Evolution"

This was written to a good friend of mine of many years, he’s German, in his 80s, and his family left Germany for Chile when the tide shifted against Hitler. I’m on his email list comprised mostly of Germans over 80 years old from various places in Europe, S. America, and the USA. Most of them are from various political stripes, many “liberal”, mostly mainstream. My friend is very well-educated and very thoughtful, but you won’t hear him overtly praising anything like National Socialism. Mostly he comes across as a mainstream European conservative-socialist vs. American-style capitalism/consumerism.He baits his fellow senior citizen friends into debates over various subjects, especially since many of them are religious (which he detests) or have a Pollyanna view of the world, which he also detests. This was an email I sent to his list in the course of their discussion of evolution vs. mainstream Christian objections to Darwin:


H******,
The most amusing part of all this is that the Catholic Church has officially acknowledged evolutionary theory for some time and expanded their doctrine of creation to allow for Darwinian evolutionary theory as working within their theological worldview - that "evolution" is God's handiwork. It is only fundamentalist Islam and Protestant sects (such as dominate the religious element in US politics) that view Darwinian evolutionary theory as a threat.

So the next time you encounter a fundamentalist Christian railing against evolutionary theory, ask them, "How does it feel to be lagging behind the Catholic Church when it comes to science?"

The only thing I find objectionable about a man/ape evolutionary link is the embarrassment I feel on behalf of apes for being linked to the vile human race at any point in evolutionary history.

I'm essentially anti-modernist, highly skeptical of most of what the so-called "enlightenment" contributed to the current of Western intellectual history - such as the idea of "progress", human "equality", "the blank slate", the "noble savage", "democracy", etc., but in reality, as understood and practiced by actual scientists, that "evolution" does not imply "progress" (in the Enlightenment and Victorian sense). Adaptive changes are random. An adaptation that contributed to survival at one stage of "evolution" may contribute to a species extinction at another stage, so there is no real conflict with a doctrine of "the fall", or with the idea of devolving "ages" and cycles of time expressed in mythological terms in most Indo-European traditions - the Vedic "Kali Yuga", Hesiod's "Iron Age" and the "Age of the Wolf" mentioned in the Norse Eddas.

It is entirely likely that quantitive cumulative scientific "progress" is operating alongside an escalating qualitive devolution in human character and general intelligence. What "adaptively" becomes of a species that invents machines to do their "thinking" for them? In the early-modern era there were arguments against the printed book, that it would contribute to the decline of intelligence because men would no longer make the systematic disciplined mental effort to read and remember the contents of manuscripts that they could not keep for themselves, and sometimes had to make long perilous journeys to read. Famous scholars of the ancient and medieval world were known to have memorized long complex historical and philosophical works, being able to quote them exactly and in detail from memory. With the advent of the printed book men became content to know the knowledge was resting on their shelves, they no longer have to "know" it in a committed way, they have it stored at home and can dig it out when needed. Now people have pocket sized computers they carry with them and can look up anything they need to know on the internet, thus they no longer need to "know" anything. What becomes of "memory" for these people, or for the children coming up in a world where this is the norm and nothing is expected of them, intellectually? How does someone "reason" from no knowledge.

One of the weakest ideas that entered the mainstream of western thought in the so-called "enlightenment" of the 18th century is that of "the blank slate" - that humans are born with a mind that is "tabula rasa" - to be filled with knowledge and education like a blank notebook. I think they had it perfectly backwards - people aren't born with a blank slate, but now they are committed to erase what little they are born with, including basic instincts for individual and collective self-preservation, so most of them are walking around with "slates" (minds) that by any other historical and cultural standards are indeed BLANK.

At most times in history it seems the thinking minority observed the degenerate state of the general run of humanity and felt warranted to think they were in the "end times" of a long cycle of devolution. I think this time we may be right.

JDS

Hitler's Economic Revolution

For some reason I never archived this here. This was originally posted on another list c.2009, and subsequently archived on the IRONLIGHT blog.

Hitler’s Economic Revolution
by James D. Sass

In response to a bulletin in circulation I am posting this small fragment of a much longer article on the 20th century that I wrote in 1992 that I am in the process of rewriting, expanding and updating for a collection of essays on social/political topics. (Another earlier part of this longer essay was adapted for the afterword to the Underworld Amusements reprint of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist.) JDS

{SNIP}….Therefore the media-created picture of the Nazis as abject monsters and the German people either as barbarians or gullible fools and sadists, must be transcended in order to examine the years in which the monetarists emerged as a force in world affairs. Since reason and our knowledge of human nature and history forces us to reject the notion of one set of human beings as the epitome of evil while another set are the epitome of heroic liberators imbued with all the ideal qualities of human justice, there is no escaping the fact that the history of the twentieth century must be reexamined. ...Until the record of the last century, including specifically the distortion of historical events and personages in post-Weimar Germany, is corrected, we will be unable to make sense of our times.

....Once the fictitious layers of histrionic personality attacks have been peeled off to reveal the essential reality, then one must peel off the distortions of motives and events. The whole trajectory is suspect when viewed from a detached perspective. Hitler is a psychopath; Stalin is a sympathetic heavy-drinking avuncular figure, (yet somehow boding ill for the future); Churchill is the heroic archetypal Englishman fighting for freedom with his back to the wall; Roosevelt is the American aristocrat prepared to sacrifice his life for freedom, etc. The current view of Weimar Germany as a glorious Mecca of free artistic expression and culture is a gross distortion of the degradation and anarchic conditions that called out for renovation and renewal, which was just what the National Socialists brought to that cesspool of economic and social chaos, rapidly transforming Germany into the leading industrial nation in Europe with restored self-respect. The current mythology of Hitler as a demonic lunatic bent on world domination is perhaps the most pernicious distortion of facts in the whole spectrum of this time period. The irony of it being that England was in reality the country that had been and continued to be the country of global domination. As Hitler pointed out, “A minority of 45 million Englishmen rule 600 million inhabitants of the British Empire.” Yet according to status quo history Hitler’s alleged desire for “world domination” was a lunatic project that had to be stopped. What in fact did Hitler want? What was his world-view? What was his critique? How far was he right? What went wrong? All these questions must be answered within a framework allowing us to see the crucial matter of how and by what structural and dynamic methods did trans-national financial power come to dominate and control political entities.

It is worth noting that among the famous 20 Points of Hitler’s National Socialist Party was the commitment to “break the bondage of interest.” It is this that lies at the heart of the convulsive tremors that went through middle Europe in the twenties and thirties. It was also the failure of that era to realize what forces were in play, unleashed by the first significant attempt to allow a nationalist state power to control its own wealth system. In his monumental Military History of the Western World, J.F.C. Fuller, (the British Fascist, Major-General in the British Army, and respected military historian), writes, “Among these artists of power were two men possessed of a new philosophy – Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. They challenged the myth of Economic Man, the fundamental factor in Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism, and exalted in its stead the myth of the Heroic Man…. In Hitler’s eyes the aims of international Capitalism and Marxism were one and the same. Both, he said, repudiated ‘the aristocratic principle of Nature’; both were destroyers of quality, not of things but of life…. Unless this struggle between these two myths – Economic Man and Heroic Man – is accepted and understood, the cataclysm which in 1939 submerged the world is almost incomprehensible and the age to which it gave birth little more than the plaything of chance.” Aside from a natural gift for leadership, continues Fuller, “The demons that exalted him were the Treaty of Versailles, which bore no resemblance to Wilson’s Fourteen Points… the invasion of the Ruhr by Poincare in 1923, which debauched the German currency and wiped out the German middle classes; the influx of £750m. in foreign loans between 1924 and 1930, which debauched the German people, and lastly the crash on the American stock exchange, which begat the world-wide monetary depression of 1929-31. In 1930, 17,500,000 Germans were supported by the state, and in 1931 the Communist electorate in Germany rose to over five million. In that year the American journalist H.R. Knickerbocker… estimated that at least 15 million Germans were partially starving; that two-thirds of the voters were hostile to Capitalism, and more than half were hostile to the existing political system called democracy. In the following year these calamities led to Hitler’s triumph… Save by those who witnessed it, the exultation of the masses on Hitler’s advent to power is unbelievable… Whether this extraordinary man was devil or madman, as his enemies proclaimed him to be, in no way belittles the fact that he stamped out Bolshevism in Germany and accomplished astonishing things.”

Fuller further describes Hitler’s financial reforms as of foremost importance among these astonishing accomplishments, “Hitler’s goal was Napoleonic: to establish a German Continental System under the aegis of Germany. Also his means were not far removed from those of the great emperor: to liberate Germany from the shackles of international loan-capitalism, to unite all Germanic peoples into the Third Reich, and to establish in eastern Europe what he called the German Lebensraum (living space) which he considered as essential to the economic security of Germany as Napoleon had considered the confederation of the Rhine essential to the strategic security of France. Hitler held that, as long as the international monetary system was based on gold, a nation which cornered gold could impose its will on those who lacked it. This could be done by drying up their sources of exchange, and thereby compelling them to accept loans on interest in order to distribute their wealth – their production. He said: ‘The community of the nation does not live by the fictitious value of money, but by real production which in its turn gives value to money. This production is the real cover of the currency, and not a bank or a safe full of gold.’”

Fuller continues by outlining Hitler’s reforms, “He decided: (1) To refuse foreign interest-bearing loans, and to base currency on production instead of gold. (2) To obtain imports by direct exchange of goods – barter – and subsidize exports when necessary. (3) to put a stop to what was called ‘freedom of the exchanges’ – that is, license to gamble in currencies and shift private fortunes from one currency to another according to the political situation. And (4) To create money when men and material were available for work instead of running into debt by borrowing it.” This had a tremendous impact on the trans-national financiers, “Because the life of international finance depended upon the issue of interest-bearing loans to nations in economic distress, Hitler’s economics spelt its ruination. If he were allowed to succeed, other nations would certainly follow his example, and should a time come when all non-gold-holding governments exchanged goods for goods, not only would borrowing cease and gold lose its power, but the money-lenders would have to close shop… This financial pistol was pointed more particularly at the United States, because they held the bulk of the world’s supply of gold, and because their mass-production system necessitated the export of about 10 percent of their products in order to avoid unemployment. Further, because the brutalities meted out to German Jews by Hitler understandably had antagonized American Jewish financiers, six months after Hitler became Chancellor, Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy New York attorney, threw down the challenge. He proclaimed ‘holy war’ against National Socialism and called for an economic boycott of German goods, shipping, and services.” Hitler’s reforms also had a tremendous impact on his domestic economy, further arousing international resentment. Fuller continues, “Between 1933 and 1936, Hitler had reduced German unemployment from six millions to one, and prosperity had so far returned that… in 1936 Winston Churchill is reported to have said… ‘Germany is getting too strong and we must smash her.’” Fuller astutely observes of the world situation at this juncture, “When we consider these economic causes of the Second World War it must be borne in mind… that the struggle between the two economic systems is not a question of right and wrong but of survival values.”

Other political events brought the impending conflict to a head; Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, negotiating with Poland to secure the eastern flank, repudiated the arms provision of the Versailles Treaty and reintroduced conscription in 1935; then after dishonorably failing to fulfill treaty agreements with Italy over Abyssinia, the League of Nations was not only discredited but instrumental in driving Mussolini into strategic alliance with Hitler.

These and other crisis, Fuller writes, “…generated a violent propaganda against Hitler. Foreign affairs lost all objectivity and became wrapped in an explosive animosity which so perturbed Dr. Goebbels… that he appealed to the American Ambassador in Berlin, who replied that the ‘most crucial thing that stood between any betterment of American Press relationships was the Jewish question.” The situation deteriorated when a young Polish Jew assassinated the third secretary at the German Embassy in Paris (1938), precipitating an immediate pogrom against the Jews in Berlin, which added fuel to the anti-German propaganda mills in the United states.

Fuller quotes at length the very revealing report to the Polish Foreign Office from Count Jerzy Potoki, the Polish Ambassador to Washington, dated January 12, 1939; “Public opinion in America nowadays… expresses itself in increasing hatred of everything… connected with National Socialism. Above all, propaganda here is entirely in Jewish hands… when bearing public ignorance in mind, their propaganda is so effective that people here have no real knowledge of the true state of affairs in Europe…. It is interesting to observe that in this carefully thought-out campaign – which is conducted primarily against National Socialism – no reference at all is made to Soviet Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic group of countries. Thanks to the astute propaganda, public sympathy in the USA is entirely on the side of Red Spain. Side by side with this propaganda an artificial war-panic is created…. No effort is spared to impress upon the American mind that in the event of a war the USA must take an active part in a struggle for freedom and democracy. President Roosevelt was first in the field to give expression to his hatred of Fascism. He had a two-fold purpose in mind: firstly, he wanted to divert American public opinion from difficult and complicated domestic problems… Secondly, by creating a war-panic… he wanted to induce Americans to endorse his huge program of armaments…. Furthermore, the brutal treatment meted out to the Jews in Germany as well as the problem of the refugees are both factors which intensify the existing hatred of everything connected with German National Socialism. In this campaign of hatred, individual Jewish intellectuals such as Bernard Baruch, Lehman, Governor of New York State, Felix Frankfurter, the newly appointed Supreme Court Judge, Morgenthau, the Financial Secretary, and other well known personal friends of Roosevelt have taken a prominent part. All of them want the President to become the protagonist of human liberty, religious freedom and the right of free speech…. This particular group of people, who are all in highly placed American official positions and who are desirous of being representatives of ‘true Americanism’, and as ‘Champions of Democracy’, are, in point of fact, linked with international Jewry by ties incapable of being torn asunder. For international Jewry – so intimately concerned with the interests of its own race – President Roosevelt’s ‘ideal’ role as a champion of human rights was indeed a godsend. In this way Jewry was able not only to establish a dangerous center in the New World for the dissemination of hatred and enmity, but it also succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike camps. The whole problem is being tackled in a most mysterious manner. Roosevelt has been given the power to enable him to enliven American foreign policy and at the same time to create huge reserves in armaments for a future war which the Jews are deliberately heading for.”……..{SNIP}
….(c)2009 JDS.