Thursday, January 31, 2008

Argentina: Fireball Fell from the Sky

San Juan, 25 Jan 2008 - The people of Santa Lucía were surprised yesterday when a black porous rock fell from the sky.

CASLEO (the Leoncito Astronomical Complex) has been analyzing the rock today to determine whether it is a meteorite.

"It was like a fireball that crossed the sky", several witnesses said yesterday.

Profesor Eloy Actis, director of the Félix Aguilar Observatory, is amongst those who do not believe it is a meteorite; he claims that "it should weigh more than 20 kg, when in fact it is only a rock of 2 kg. It could be a volcanic rock - but due to the area where it fell, this would be highly unlikely."

Signs of the Times News
Photograph © Diario de Cuyo

Wednesday, April 26, 2006


Flame On! The Human Torch discovers what he can do ...

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, there are women who see "men all in fire walking up and down the streets". They see with their inner eyes a portent of doom, at this time of crisis for the State apparatus and society.

But this isn't just doom and gloom - it's a sign of the times. Some have knowledge of what is going on: that's light. And some even act on that knowledge: that's fire.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Men all in fire walk up and down the streets

Dear reader: you probably know all this already. But when I was young I had absolutely no idea about lies and the lying liars that tell these lies - I was completely and totally clueless. And when I say clueless, I mean really CLUELESS.

So please forgive me if I'm going over old ground here.

9/11 is a good place to start, because - as both the government, and its opponents agree - everything changed on that date.

The 9/11 operation was years and years in the making. A lot of money was spent trying to make sure everything went the way they wanted. ('They' in this case being the real conspirators - rather than any guys on the airliners with Muslim names.)

But once the dust had settled from the Twin Towers, and the fire had been put out at the Pentagon, this didn't mean that they could just pour themselves a few martinis and congratulate each other. That's not what happened after JFK's assassination, and it's unreasonable to assume that the same sort of thing could happen in this instance.

Basically, after the deed had been done, and all those people had died, they had to get on with a clean-up operation - because it's not as though everyone would just fall for the lies, and deny what their eyes were telling them. There would be emergency services personnel to intimidate, there would be whitewash reports to produce (as with the Warren Commission after JFK), there would eventually have to be a show trial or two (e.g. Moussaoui and his stun-belt).

The conspirators are most probably harder at work than ever, trying to keep a lid on things. They're confident, I guess, that they can do this, because of JFK. He was the President - they killed him - and we're in a situation now where you can't say 'grassy knoll' without being cold-shouldered or laughed into silence even by your friends.

One of the greatest dangers, though, comes from journalists. These are the people that society trusts to ferret out political truth and present it bravely and responsibly. But that's only an ideal: pretty nearly all journalists know that their job is on the line if they talk about this 9/11 stuff.

Basically, it's JFK all over again. You can talk about it as a journalist - but say goodbye to any chance of a reasonable career.

Because society itself has problems dealing with this sort of thing. If 9/11 was a government operation designed to secure greater control over a populace regarded as 'degenerate' in some way (common enough thinking among authoritarians everywhere), then government itself is not merely corrupt, it is irremediably broken. If that's the case, then we're all up sh*t creek anyway - and it's a whole lot easier to simply enter into a state of denial (common enough thinking among just about everybody everywhere - including you and me).

So the conspirators hold all the cards.

Except that they don't quite - because there's a Rebel Alliance.

These are the people in alternative news media, which is principally on the Web. In effect they're amateur journalists who are independent of the 'respectable' (and heavily compromised) news media organisations.

Anyway, alternative news media (though often enough thought of as lightweight, because it doesn't have the so-called gravitas of major news organisations, and because it's frequently satirical or darkly funny, because they've seen the Emperor's new clothes) does pose a danger to the conspirators. It's samizdat stuff - like the underground photocopied journalism that posed a long-term danger to the Kremlin in the last years of the Soviet Union. Basically, its influence can mount over the years.

The way the government deals with this stuff in a totalitarian state is to arrest the people responsible, torture them, put them in labour camps, or shoot them. In a democracy they institute programmes of CoIntelPro - counter-intelligence programmes. In the US in the 70's this was how they dealt with groups like the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Earth First, etc, etc. In Britain the targets were the IRA, CND, the trades union movement, etc, etc - and ultimately the Labour Party, which until the 80's was softly anti-authoritarian, and left-wing in its understanding of economics.

Essentially, what they're doing in CoIntelPro is secretly infiltrating the organisation that they're worried about, and trying to co-opt it. Rumour has it that Tony Blair was just such a agent of CoIntelPro in the 80's when he was a member of CND - in other words, he never gave a damn about nuclear disarmament, but was simply there to help co-opt or disrupt elements of the organisation on behalf of MI5's Counter-Subversion section. Okay - that is just a rumour. But just because it's a rumour doesn't mean that it's not true.

CoIntelPro is about secrets and lies, put to work by agencies like MI5 or the FBI in order to minimise the effectiveness of any organisation that is critical of the government, or threatens to disrupt its rule. One way of doing this is to encourage an organisation to violence - the dictum is that you can easily spot the CoIntelPro agent: he's the one who suggests we blow something up, and then says he knows where we can get the dynamite.

That's a classic agent provocateur, and governments have been using such assets since at least the 19th century. It gives the police a free rein to round everybody up and put them in jail - and to paint everybody else involved in the issue (black rights, environmental issues, home rule for Ireland, anarchist theory - whatever) as violent extremists who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Even though the real people who will stop at nothing - including the murder of innocents - to get what they want, are actually the government and its agents.

Another way to paint such idealists as violent whackos is for the government to set up its own organisation of violent whackos - who are actually all CoIntelPro agents: a classic example was the Symbionese Liberation Army in the US in the 70's. Plus, they can now do innovative things with torture, drugs and hypnosis to turn normal people into CoIntelPro agents, through the establishment of a maze of different personalities within the one individual: Sirhan Sirhan, who was implicated in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968, is probably the best-known victim of this programme, known in America as Project Artichoke.

The 9/11 truth movement can't be co-opted in quite such a dramatic way, because, as a revolutionary movement, all it's trying to do is shed light on historical truth. It's not trying to change society, or put in place its own political policies. CoIntelPro in this case works by trying to fracture the movement through the promotion of some bits and pieces of the truth, which are then compromised with a politically important lie - politically important from the point of view of the government and conspirators, that is.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is probably an instance of this. This film, apparently a brave attempt to get out the truth of 9/11, is a distraction to buy the government some time. It indicates that the Bush administration, because of long-standing business connections with the bin Laden family, allowed the attacks to happen. In other words, the administration is corrupt - which everybody pretty much knew anyway, and the administration itself is at no pains to conceal. Fahrenheit 9/11 has all the feel of revolution, but it's actually nothing at all. It's a distraction - another clandestine victory for CoIntelPro. You can practically hear the martini glasses being clinked together jovially at wherever it is these guys get together to congratulate themselves.

With the 9/11 truth movement, the idea for CoIntelPro is to minimise the damage, fracture the movement, shift attention away from the obvious, buy themselves just a little bit more time before the hammer falls, and their position is secured long-term. 9/11 is JFK Phase II - and if Phase II succeeds, then Phase III gets rolled out.

That's not to say that Michael Moore is a CoIntelPro agent.

When St Francis came along, the Pope, or some other ecclesiastical hierarch, could have had him executed. Job done. But he was useful in other ways. He was totally orthodox in his understanding of the Christian faith, and was completely faithful to the authority of the Pope - unlike a whole slew of other mendicant friars, who were far more revolutionary and socially aware. Francis was the Papacy's weapon against them - the acceptable face of revolution, which wasn't all that much of a revolution at all. It gave honest Christians a spiritual outlet, while preserving the status quo. Eventually, another order of friars, the Dominicans, actually became forceful and effective agents of repression in Spain, forming the best part of the Inquisition there.

Michael Moore's perhaps much the same - full of fire and light, but not asking the real questions. Which makes him acceptable to the administration. He openly supports the Democrats - who today are scarcely different from the Republicans in their policy choices, and just as venal. Or at least the top dogs in the party are, and in reality only the top dogs count.

The 200lb gorilla in the living-room is the Pentagon attack. It was struck by a plane - probably a Global Hawk drone converted to carry missiles and painted in American Airlines colours. That (I reckon) is the best explanation from the evidence available. Global Hawks are about the size of a business jet, while a 757 is enormous. There's absolutely no evidence of an airliner at the Pentagon. It's so obviously not there, and never was there.

Not only is it obvious, but if the truth about this came out, then the administration is completely finished. No one can claim that Bush and Cheney simply turned a blind eye. This was manufactured - no airliner, but they keep on saying that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. CoIntelPro can't really deal with something of this magnitude, of this order of duplicity, with a public realisation that this was solely due to careful, deliberate, centralised military planning.

If this fact becomes accepted (that there was no airliner at the Pentagon), then the tanks roll out on to Pennsylvania Avenue, either as a military coup, or (more likely) as part of Phase III: the Dictatorship, the state of national emergency.

And the same will happen here, because our government is so attuned to Washington: tanks in Whitehall, and the troublesome top brass purged - and we're all screwed, because everything will become much more overtly repressive.

Of course, it won't change anything much, because they're planning to do this anyway, at the precise point (I suppose) when they pull the plug on our somewhat fictitious economy - except that the government will have had their hand forced before they were completely ready. They won't yet have had time to build the infrastructure for a really effective Big Brother state, where nobody can voice dissent without being stomped on straight away.

Furthermore, people will know. They'll know that the government is their enemy. There won't be any room for denial any more. They won't be able to tell themselves that the government is just trying to protect our way of life from fictitious terrorists, or a fictitious right-wing take-over - when all along the real right-wing state terrorists are finally firmly in charge.

However - what do I know? :) I could be so wrong.

But then - where's the airliner?


The Kennedy Assassination
Cosmic CoIntelPro Timeline
Destruction of the 911 Truth Movement

Monday, April 17, 2006


Smoke and Mirrors: evidence submitted recently at the ongoing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui - click on the picture to enlarge. (With thanks to 9/11 Blogger and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.)

Spot the airliner.

A Boeing 757 is a pretty big aircraft, a whole lot bigger than the buses and fire engines in the picture - so where is it? Where are the wings? Where are the cars that would have been tumbled over in the wake of a massive aircraft's near ground-level approach into the wall of the Pentagon?

Something's not right here, and it has implications for us. This isn't just an attack on the Pentagon - it's a psychological attack on us all.

Certainly there's debris here, and certainly something has hit the Pentagon. But an airliner?

What's going on? Am I manipulating the evidence to fit some spaced-out conspiracy theory? Or do the eyes confirm what the Heart already knows full well: that there is indeed manipulation going on here - but it comes from powerful interests in the US administration itself. No doubt years in the making, this piece of performance art is nevertheless all about pulling a fast one.

As any Las Vegas stage magician knows, one of the ways they manage to pull off such astounding magic tricks and illusions is by spending an unfeasible amount of money on it, and doing an awful lot of preparation, with a good number of hidden stage-hands. The audience is bamboozled - partly because they would never have guessed that anyone would have put so much effort into such a seemingly effortless bit of quick theatre. But that's how stage magicians earn a living. They take advantage of the audience's better nature, and more or less simplistic way of thinking.

This is how the murderer tries to get away with his crime in an Agatha Christie novel: he simulates an attack on himself, though never one where he actually gets seriously hurt, in order to put himself in the clear. The actual crime here is the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the financial rip-offs that went with it; the bit of distraction on the side is the Pentagon attack.

Though not much of an attack at all, as the aircraft which hit the Pentagon has caused very little real damage. Those who died in their offices, we can be fairly sure, meant little to the real movers and shakers. They were as expendable as those who died in the Twin Towers - mere Army staff and a few others, who weren't with the real programme.

It sounds all wrong, doesn't it? Nobody would do a thing like that - unless, of course, they were part of that sneaky untermenschen, the Ay-rabs. White people don't do things like this. Dick Cheney wouldn't do something like this - he's a guy with a respectable and responsible position in society: he's the Vice-President, for crying out loud. It's not as though he's the sort of guy who would, say, shoot someone in cold blood.

It sounds all wrong - but what are our eyes telling us? Isn't it ironic that we never take ourselves all that seriously? Even though the guys and gals who did this take each of us very seriously indeed. They know we're a danger to them. But if they can get away with this, then we'll have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage. And good luck to us - because we'll need it.

All they need is just a bit more time, and then everything will fall into place for them. Martial law will be in place - even if they never actually call it that. We'll have lost everything - including our own souls, because the truth never really meant all that much to us.

Of course, there is another way: to stand up for the truth, to start to take ourselves seriously, to learn to shed the self-deception. It's scary - especially at first - but it's fun.

Because this is the path from Fear to JOY.


Some useful links (imho):
Pentagon Strike - a flash presentation;
Frozen Fish - an article by Joe Quinn, one of the editors of:
Signs of the Times - alternative news;
Physics 911 - scientific panel investigating nine-eleven;
9/11 Blogger - 9/11-related alternative news;
Stevenwarran - eyewitnesses at the Pentagon.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006


Antiquity and Modernity: or is it all much of a muchness?

Under the Pyramids

Ancient Egypt possesses an undeniable attraction. Its monuments are heavy with the weight of years. They call to us out of the past with a vision of stability - with a vision of progress. The Egyptians, 5000 years ago, moved from a 'primitive' lifestyle to something much more metropolitan, much more recognisable to our own culture. There's familiarity there - and yet, in the hieroglyphs and composite creatures with the heads of jackals and hawks, something mysterious too.

They could do so much - witness the pyramids which startle the imagination, even in their ruinous condition, without the smooth limestone facings they used to possess. These were the first skyscrapers, still doing the work they were designed for, to impress those who saw them.

But is this impression a positive or a negative thing? Is it impressive or repressive? Surely, Egyptian science must have been truly advanced for such monuments to have been erected?

Otto Neugebauer, however, the foremost historian of ancient mathematics, pointed out some fifty years ago that Egyptian maths was appallingly primitive compared to the level found in Babylonia. For a 3000 year old culture that speaks volumes. To have remained at such a primitive level for such a long period of time, they would have had to have rather cut themselves off from the rest of the world.

Plus, their literature was poor at best - in fact, rubbish might be a more appropriate term for it. It doesn't compare to the better parts of the Old Testament or Homer or the Epic of Gilgamesh - the Book of the Dead notwithstanding. Additionally, they couldn't get a grip on the alphabet, even though, from the Late Bronze onwards, alphabets were being used fairly extensively all over the eastern Mediterranean.

So, anyway, Egyptian culture was fixed, moribund, stagnant. They had traded progress for security - and that security wasn't really much of a security at all.

It was all about illusion and self-deception.

And so you get a culture that mummifies corpses - again, illusion and self-deception. Who could believe that mummification would give someone a better start in the afterlife? What sort of basic thinking processes would promote such a patently misguided belief? Presumably one that's conservative to the nth degree - that wants everything to remain just the way it's always been.

To me that looks like a turning in upon oneself - a desire for sleep, a desire for oblivion. I'd rather choose life.

So, anyway, the ancient Egyptians seem to have prized conformity above all things. Which makes it not so dissimilar to the way things are in our own culture. Or certainly, the way things seem to be going. Perhaps that's what dumbing down is really all about - the search for illusory security through deliberate ignorance.

The Egyptians faced some tough times during the period of the Ptolemys, when serious cracks appeared in the social structure. Over-taxation to maintain an increased bureaucracy put a good number of Egyptians (possibly most) in penury. That, and the subsequent assimilation of Egypt into the Roman Empire, made Egyptians little better than serfs. Again, there are parallels with our own culture.

It was difficult for Egyptians to get out of this fix without jettisoning pretty much the whole of their culture - which may be why Christianity could make such successful inroads into the country; it offered a completely new template when people were at their most vulnerable.

That's when Egyptian literature becomes interesting and even challenging for a modern reader. Suddenly there was a new type of conformity: Christianity. But at the same time, a new exploration, because the culture had fractured to such an extent that anything was possible - which was why you also got new experimentation, with an explosion in Pachomian monasticism and Gnostic literature in Coptic.

But getting back to ancient Egypt (rather than Egypt in the Classical period) - there seems to have been a love of the straight line in things: all those obelisks and square-cut ashlar blocks. It's so very different from the artistic motifs and architecture found in the ancient British Isles, where you get spirals and curved lines and the deliberate roughness of Stonehenge, for instance.

There's a bludgeoning effect about Egyptian architecture which I really don't like - it seems to be about keeping you in your place, about informing you that you are nothing compared to the elite for whom these structures were created. There's not much that's homely or courteous about Egyptian temple architecture - it's about state control, and the reinforcement of an attitude of subservience through religion. A religion that you can't qualify or object to, because it's so heavy with the weight of years; that you can't reject without seeming to reject everything else that your society stands for.

All those straight lines in the architecture indicate an enforced straightening out of human beings into perfect machines for the use of the state. That makes ancient Egypt an exemplar of synarchism: a polite term for fascism.

Of course, human beings don't altogether take kindly to that kind of abuse. When the Egyptian state tried to move into Phase II of their synarchist dream, with the establishment of Atenism under Akhenaten, there was, after a few years, a revolt. It's unfortunate that some Christian theologians seem to regard Akhenaten as some sort of monotheistic hero. Of course, you can see where they're coming from when you compare the Hymn to the Sun-Disc with Psalm 104, where there are striking parallels.

There are parallels with Atenism in other parts of the Old Testament, too - parallels with Phase II of the synarchist dream, which envisioned a divine triad of the Sun-Disc in the sky, its hypostasis in an earthly temple, and its manifestation in a human figure, the Pharaoh.

And so we get in the Old Testament a similar triad: Yahweh in heaven, the worship of him in the Temple at Jerusalem (with the Ark of the Covenant as his footstool), and an embodiment of him in the King of Judah: David, the one who sings praises to the Lord, the anointed - but also the man of blood (ish haddam), the foreshadowing of a future Messiah who will put the other nations to rout.

In turn, this transfers fairly seamlessly to the devotional ban (herem), when Samuel commands that whole villages be exterminated simply because they are of the 'other' nations, and killing them all is a divine necessity - an aspect of the worship due to Yahweh.

Nonsense, really, isn't it? Just the sort of thing the true Prophets denounced. And not a million miles from what is happening in Palestine today.

It's trading life for security, or freedom for cucumbers - as some of the Israelites wanted immediately after the Exodus from Egypt.

Hosea said, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son".

I think that's sort of a first stage in spiritual work, the stage of a child: to turn your back on Egypt, and not to keep on thinking nostalgically (and erroneously) about how good it all was - even though it remains attractive in a glittery sort of a way to lots of people even today. Especially in New Age circles.

But then, we all tend to fall for the Glorious Spectacle - and miss the hidden meanings, the darker notes, underneath.

Which might be something to bear in mind - especially if they try to foist The Nine upon us once again.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006


Gynoid Maria: the future is now.

Metropolis

What's it like to live in the 21st century? Can we see it as it really is? Can we make out the wood for the trees?

Or do we need dreams to make sense of it?

In 1924 Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou set about creating the silent film Metropolis. Several million Marks later, the film was released in 1927 - to mixed reviews. Visually stunning, even today, it was perhaps too much for many people to grasp. The storyline, too, seems somehow distant and otherworldly: evocative of something vaguely other, and yet rooted in the world of today, the world we know. Or think we know.

A world of dreams - and making the same sort of sense that dreams do.

Metropolis was speculative cinema, speaking in archetypes straight through the eyes to the heart with its dystopian vision of the future - the future of the early 21st century.

Fritz Lang had been impressed by the visual spectacle of the Manhattan skyline, and incorporated a Raygun Gothic version of this into his sets for the film. That's the same skyline that speaks to us too - but in a different way. For us, it's a scarred skyline, marked as it is by the absence of something. Where are those ugly 60's twin towers?

Metropolis - the city that never sleeps, the city that does not need to lose itself in dreams. Because it's living the dream, isn't it?

But who actually is asleep, and who is awake?

The plot of Metropolis involves the creation of a robot woman - a gynoid - who mirrors the human character Maria, and creates mayhem amongst the upper-class men through her exotic dancing - an inversion of the way in which the human Maria is consolidating a worker's movement amongst the serfs in the lower levels of the city, and encouraging peace.

As a fictional device, though, robots weren't new. A few years before Lang and von Harbou set about creating Metropolis, in 1921, Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) was premiered in Prague. It created quite a sensation, being translated into English shortly after, and put on the stage in London in 1923, with Basil Rathbone playing the part of Harry Domin, the General Manager of the robotics plant.

Except that these are not the normal robots we think we know. These robots are fully fleshed - more the result of biological research than research into electronics. One of the characters in the play, Helena, burns the formula for making the robots, and when the robots have revolted against their human masters and killed all but one of them, they cannot make more of their kind; all they can turn out on the robotics factory line are bloody chunks of meat.

Aldous Huxley (a Kropotkinesque Anarchist, as he mentions in the foreword to a later reprint of Brave New World, and thus an enemy of the State), envisaged a more satisfying scenario of foetuses grown in a factory to specific requirements - for example, for the production of epsilon semi-morons, the lowest class of human, who would do the menial work for the society in which they lived, without having the perspicacity to see that they were being used.

Capek's robots are highly intelligent, but they have a specific limitation. They remember everything, but have no real creativity; they can see the past very well, but cannot envisage the future. As Harry Domin says at one point, they would make excellent university professors.

Karel Capek always pointed out, though, that it was not he who had come up with the term 'robot'. That had been the suggestion of his brother Josef. Josef had also been a writer, and the word 'robot' was taken from the Czech for drudgery; 'robotnik' means 'peasant' or 'serf'.

Years later Josef entered Belsen concentration camp as a guest of the Nazis. The motto for this system of Arbeitslager, or 'work camps' was of course 'Arbeit macht frei' - 'Work makes us free'. Josef himself did not survive this kind of work, this extreme form of serfdom.

But even before Capek's play, G. I. Gurdjieff had been promoting and exploring the idea that people were not necessarily who they thought they were. People were really machines, he said - and had to learn how not to be machine-like. They had to develop their free will in order to become truly human, and lose their robotic nature. They had to wake up.

The Ukrainian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who studied under Freud in Vienna, also worked along similar lines. In the 1920's he came to understand humans as constrained by something he called 'Character Armour': sets of personality characteristics which would protect the individual, not just from the blows of life, but from one's own desires and instincts - desires of which the individual is actually afraid.

Further experience in the Soviet Union, and then in Berlin, indicated to him that the State could use this weakness in the human individual for its own ends. Fascism, he suggested, is the "basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilisation and its mechanical-mystical conception of life".

In this political model, reinforcing a person's Character Armour through enforced self-control, and encouraging him or her to find a deranged fulfilment in 'purity', has a specific purpose: the paralysis of the will to rebel. Not only would the individual be unable to rebel, they would not even know that there was something which ought to be rebelled against.

Unable to properly anticipate the future, freedom would become their greatest fear - though a fear so locked in the depths of their subconscious that they would not even be able to properly identify it as a fear. Instead, they would tend to characterise the future as always at the mercy of some unholy 'anarchy', i.e. the end of their world - the end of 'purity' - and the fulfilment of their real, subconscious, desires. It would mean the Triumph of the Heart, and thus the loss of all the tiny controls in life which allow the individual to feel secure.

Thus the good citizen of a fascist state and economy would become unimaginative, controlling, intentionally dumbed down, fractured to the depths of his psyche, overconfident, unable to see where the State was taking him, and a natural bully.

Naturally, such a situation could never happen today, since fascism has been abolished by our enlightened leaders.

Seeking a free place to pursue his work, Reich was ironically sent to prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, on technical charges brought by the US Food and Drug Administration. Copies of his books were burned by government officials at the Gansevoort Incinerator in New York on 23rd August 1956. The books burned included perhaps his most important work, the Mass Psychology of Fascism, which outlined how and why people fell for the lies of authoritarian states, becoming robotised in the process.

But of course that book-burning can't have actually happened, because only the Nazis did that sort of thing, and America is the land of the free - isn't it?

People tend to think, "I cannot be a robot, because I am flesh". But isn't that part of the lie? Robots aren't necessarily like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. They might be made of flesh like Capek's robots were - or like the citizens of Huxley's Brave New World (1932). All it takes is to stop asking questions, and to identify ourselves with the bland culture presented to us every day on television - the manufacturer of consent.

Who is awake, and who is asleep?

As the astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit says: "Sleep, the Principal Investigator of my Heart".

But the Heart can be suborned by the State, because, as Reich said, the social order will create character forms that support the social order in a closed cycle.

And thus the Hive is born, the type of society most useful for an authoritarian leadership - where freedom and free will are celebrated, but only as a part of the general lie. Where books are freely available - and yet seldom, if ever, read. And those who do read widely are discreetly marginalised as eccentrics - or even feared as subtle enemies of the social order. Where robots imagine they are free when they have been conditioned to be nothing of the sort - and are thus the more easily controlled.

So even our dreams can be controlled by the State, here in the Hive of Metropolis.

Maria, and her robotic double, were the fictional creations of Fritz Lang and of Thea von Harbou. And in a sense these two Marias stood for Thea von Harbou herself. She could develop into one or the other: the gentle Maria who serves others, and becomes human in the process - or the manipulative gynoid Maria, who serves herself by controlling others, and masks her true nature as a robot.

Thea chose the second of these options. In 1931 she separated from her husband, Fritz Lang, and they were soon divorced. The split was perhaps as much an ideological one as anything else. In 1932 Thea joined the Nazi party, one year before Hitler came to power. Fritz, however, was forced to flee Germany after his 1934 film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, was banned by the Nazis because of the film's criticisms of Nazi thinking.

In 1937 Thea wrote the screenplay for Der Herrscher (The Ruler or Director), a film which celebrated complete submission to absolute authority, eventually finding reward in total victory. Detained by the British after the end of the War, Thea found work clearing rubble from the bombing of Berlin. She died in 1954.

Der Herrscher centres on the character of Clausen, the wealthy director of a munitions firm. This family-owned company has been running for more than a century, and is clearly based on the Krupp dynasty, which owned the largest industrial concern in Europe at the time. Metropolis, because it had run so far over budget, had put its film studio (Universum-Film AG or Ufa) into financial difficulties. In 1927, Ufa was taken over by Alfred Hugenberg, himself a close friend of Gustav Krupp. Eventually, in 1937, the Nazi party bought up most of Ufa's shares, making it a vehicle for their propaganda.

Gustav Krupp had opposed the Nazis until 1930, when they had convinced him that the party was good for business: the trade unions would be robbed of power, and the growth of the armed forces would bring Krupps more revenue. At this, Gustav threw in his lot with them, becoming chairman of the Adolf Hitler Spende, a political fundraising organisation for the NSDAP.

The Corporation, a recent Canadian documentary, details how large companies assume the same characteristics as human psychopaths. Devoid of any significant degree of empathy, the aim always is control of larger market share, at minimal cost. That constitutes profit for the company; and nothing else - not even worker happiness - is allowed to get in the way of that. The conditioning of our culture is such that possibly most people would say that this is obvious, because you can't run a company any other way. That's profit, which is intrinsically good.

Robots can only think this way, and that is their tragedy. They can see the past, but cannot creatively understand the final outcome, what the future promises to deliver to us if we carry on thinking and working in this way.

In Capek's play R.U.R., Harry Domin asks Helena what she thinks would be the perfect employee. She answers that it would be the one who is most honest and dedicated. Domin replies: "No, it's the one that's the cheapest. The one with the fewest needs... [Young Rossum] chucked out everything not directly related to work, and, [in] doing that, he virtually rejected the human being, and created the Robot."

Krupp evidently felt the same way. Seventy thousand concentration camp victims died working for Krupps in their forced labour programme, for example at their fuse factory near Auschwitz. In 1947, when a U.S. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was trying Gustav's son Alfried (Gustav himself being too senile at this stage to stand trial), it was found by the judges that the Krupps factories were marked by a brutality exceptional even under Nazism.

Alfried denied any guilt. He stated: "The economy needed a steady or growing development. Because of the rivalries between the many political parties in Germany and the general disorder, there was no opportunity for prosperity. ... We thought that Hitler would give us such a healthy environment. Indeed he did do that. ... We Krupps never cared much about [political] ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business."

Convicted of slave labour, Alfried was sentenced to twelve years in prison. However, it was not long before he was free (being released to applause in 1951), and had resumed control of the firm.

Before Der Herrscher, Thea von Harbou had written another influential screenplay: Frau im Mond (Girl in the Moon). This film, released in 1929, dealt with the launching of a rocket to the Moon. Hermann Oberth, the rocket pioneer who played such an important part in the development of the V2, was involved in creating a rocket for the special effects department at Ufa. His involvement with the film studio didn't last long, but the film probably had a lasting effect on German militarists, who became conditioned to the idea of long-range rockets as a workable idea. The engineers working on the V2 project were highly enthusiastic about the film, one of the first V2's even having Frau im Mond painted on its tail. However, Frau im Mond was at last withdrawn by the Nazis, as being too close to the truth of research then underway.

There was something undeniably dramatic about the V2, especially at launch. It was a weapon, not just of Vergeltung or vengeance (which is what the V in V2 stands for), but of shock and awe. It was also a stealth weapon, undetectable through its supersonic ballistic flight, until it hit its target. And the primary targets were significant too: it was the metropolis of London and the city of Antwerp. This was a weapon of terror, designed to strike at the densest concentration of civilians.

Of course, only the Nazis do this sort of thing. Allied bombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin was designed to destroy only munitions production - and when Churchill declared that the purpose was really to strike terror into the heart of German workers, he must obviously have meant something else; after all, the British unfailingly believe in fair play. Naturally, the same goes for the bombing of Baghdad and Fallujah in more recent days. The shock and awe involved were only ever directed at Baathist cadres and Islamist terrorists. Civilian casualties are regarded as regrettable - even though civilians are the ones who bear the brunt of such assaults, and their after-effects. Still, can't be helped, can it?

Work on the V2 (and on the V1, an early cruise missile) was carried out by slave workers at Peenemunde on the German Baltic coast. Development of the technology for the V2 was done by possibly one third of Germany's research scientists, most of them knowing nothing of where their research was heading. Today, scientific research is only carried out to improve our living standards, and the work done by scientists and engineers working for defence companies and government research agencies is really only directed towards refining existing technologies, like ruggedising laptops for desert use, or something. Pioneering new weapons and technologies like the V2 are now over and done with - because only the Nazis did crazy off-the-wall things like that.

Eventually, after a heavy Allied bombing raid in 1943, research and production shifted to other sites in Germany - including underground facilities. Again, such facilities - obviously - do not exist today, because scientific research now is an open book, with the general welfare of everyone its prime concern.

No longer do governments hide the results of their research. The Northrop B2 Spirit bomber, for instance, though a secret plane, is nevertheless actually flown at air shows for the admiration of the general public. Which of course makes it anything but secret. Rumours that in fact such aircraft are only pale copies of the real B2 - capable of flying at speeds of Mach 10, and giving the United States a strike capability of within two hours to any point on the earth from their base in Missouri - well, this is just pie-in-the-sky. The fact that they cost $2 billion each is only another instance of military overspend. And anyway, any sort of magneto-hydrodynamic technology would allow passenger aircraft also to travel at such speeds - and where are they? It's hardly likely that our governments would conspire to keep such things secret, when they might have such useful civilian applications.

Because of course there is no such thing as conspiracy. Only the Nazis did that sort of thing, when they conspired in the Final Solution, for instance. Or when they put together their secret plans for world domination. Only James Bond villains in their cavernous underground lairs do that sort of thing today - and that, of course, is fiction: technothriller, the diet of teenage boys and other immature individuals.

The Nazis are gone. We know this because no one wears jackboots or goose-steps any more - unless, of course, they're a bunch of sad losers meeting in some secluded semi in Beckenham, to drink schnapps, watch a rerun of Triumph of the Will on the video, and dream of a Fourth Reich. That a military coup was in the process of happening against Harold Wilson in the 70's, with lorry-loads of paratroopers on the road from Aldershot to take over the Houses of Parliament - again, such things don't happen. This is a stable democracy. It always has been - and therefore, by extension, it always will be.

Our world depends on us being complicit in the lies told to us by the State. We must be complicit in their official narratives, to maintain the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. The State implies that each of us has little worth, other than as members of the societal form that the State has provided for us.

This societal form is the Metropolis.

Metropolis is a Greek compound. It means the mother-city, the mother-state. And we, poor souls, feel we need a parent in order to feel secure. That's why we buy into the lies - so that we can feel secure in the protection afforded us by our parent.

But what security do we really have under the State's protection? Is this security real, or just another of the State's illusions?

In 1984, George Orwell's vision of a society founded on lies to the disintegration of all forms of mutual aid and true love, rockets are landing daily on London. Julia, the girlfriend of the chief character in the novel, Winston Smith, recognises what is happening. These rockets are being fired by their own government, as a means of maintaining support for the war against whoever is the enemy of the day.

In New York, on 9/11 2001, two airliners crashed into the Twin Towers. They collapsed, and though the death-toll was tiny compared with the ongoing massacre of the innocents in Iraq, the effect as a televised spectacle was probably unique in the history of humanity. It was a new Pearl Harbour, which ensured the beginning of a war without end, and an excuse for the government of possibly the most moronic of presidents to assume unprecedented powers over its people. The citizens had been frightened into the ever-closer embrace of the Metropolis.

Fear stops thought. The State knows this. Fear means that people will no longer ask questions, but will instead accept whatever baby-food the State feeds it with. These are the official narratives, the acme of impudence. No longer can people see what happened to World Trade Center Building 7, which collapsed despite being hit by no aircraft - the dust raised by the Twin Towers' collapse being nothing compared to the clouded thinking of our frightened and bewildered infant selves.

Likewise, few of us can question the strike against the Pentagon. There is no trace of an airliner there, for there never was one there. There never was one there, for the simple reason that it's too difficult to fly by remote control a whopping great 757 into the side, rather than the roof, of such a building - and thus minimise the damage caused. It is the Pentagon, after all - the place where they plan their stupid wars.

And so another sort of aircraft had to be used. The State knows that the populace will never enquire further, because the Lie is too big to be questioned. Only Nazis would use a pimped-up modern equivalent of the V1 flying bomb - i.e. a missile-bearing Global Hawk drone - to create their own Reichstag fire. And the Nazis, of course, are now safely in the dustbin of history.

The plentiful CCTV footage of the incident, naturally, has never been released.

There are no government conspiracies, for the simple reason that if there were, then our Metropolis would be seen to be nothing but a sham, and we would have lost our parent. Nobody wants to be an orphan - which is why there is no conspiracy.

The Metropolis makes robots out of otherwise sincere individuals - individuals who possess such astonishing potential for growth into love of others, and knowledge. This is the social and psychological order that opposes the Triumph of the Heart. They want to make serfs out of us all, and their means for doing this are fear and lies.

And when another false-flag terror attack occurs here in the West, it will be done to reinforce the power of the State over us - as will the rain of bombs on Teheran and Damascus from the city-killer B2's.

But though cities are destroyed, the Metropolis remains.

For the real target is us.


[Peter Straughan's radio play, Metropolis, an adaptation of Thea von Harbou's novel and screenplay, provided a good deal of inspiration for this essay. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 24th March 2006 - and, like the first ever television science fiction presentation, a version of Capek's R.U.R., aired in 1938 on the BBC, is now sadly unavailable.]

Sunday, April 02, 2006


Here Comes the Gas: cover of the GasCD featuring Gil Scott Heron, Ani Defranco, Bruce Cockburn, Michael Franti and Free Radicals. Photo by Nick Cooper from the demonstration against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Quebec City, April 2001.

The Treachery of the Snow

It gets cold on the prairies in the winter - and when the snow comes, it can come in fast.

At first, just a few gentle flakes in the air, which you could catch on your tongue. But then it changes - just like it does on the Russian and Ukrainian steppes.

Pushkin describes it thus in The Captain's Daughter:

A light snow was falling, which suddenly changed to thick, heavy flakes. The wind began to howl; it was a snowstorm. Within a moment the dark sky had merged with the ocean of snow. Everything disappeared.

"Looks bad, sir," shouted the coachman. "A blizzard!"


Winnipeg Free Press: Army to Occupy Downtown - Spring Exercise to Turn City into 'Battleground':


More than 500 army troops, backed by helicopters, armoured vehicles and artillery, will turn downtown Winnipeg into an armed camp as part of a military exercise to train soldiers for the modern battlefield.

[Note: In fact, as Lieut. Col. Jim Fitzgerald of the 38th Brigade has more recently pointed out, no helicopters will be used, and only four light armoured vehicles will be deployed from Princess Patricia's Light Infantry in Edmonton.

However, not mentioned here is the fact that there will be 40 US military personnel from Minnesota taking part in the exercise, so that Canadian forces can learn to work with their American counterparts.]

Exercise Charging Bison will unfold for seven days and nights beginning April 30 ... in what is believed to be the largest urban warfare training exercise of its kind ever held in Canada.

There won't be live ammunition, but there will be laser weapons and a variety of blanks and 'simunition' - or simulated munitions - that make noise and smoke or discharge harmless projectiles.

The drill is designed to simulate the kind of complex conditions soldiers would encounter in places such as Afghanistan...

Sarah Chayes, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - perhaps Afghanistan's even more complex than many Canadian senior officers realise:


The "suicide bombings" in Afghanistan that have garnered mentions in the Western press of late are often something else. In one case I investigated carefully - the target, an Afghan official, was a friend of mine - much evidence contradicted the notion that the attack was a suicide bombing, as it was immediately labeled: the condition of my friend's body, the type and location of the survivors' wounds, and eyewitness descriptions. Everything pointed to a remote-controlled mine planted ahead of time. But no Afghan or U.S. official bothered to collect this evidence or to examine it seriously when it was presented to them.

Why such sloppiness? Because the terrorist suicide bombing explanation suits everyone. Americans are comfortable spending their resources searching for the Al Qaeda bogeyman; the real perpetrators take cover behind the Al Qaeda label; and Afghan officials are absolved of complicity or incompetence and the responsibility to properly investigate. [...]

This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban. They reason that America, with its power and riches, could bring an end to the "insurgency" in a month, if it so chose. They figure that America remains a close and munificent ally of Pakistan, the country that is sponsoring the "insurgency," and so the continuing violence must be a deliberate element of U.S. policy.

Resist Operation Charging Bison - Canadian military deployments at home:


In Quebec City in 2001, 1000 soldiers were deployed against protestors of the Summit of the Americas, to stifle dissent against the governments' push for corporate control of the hemisphere.

In Ts'peten, also known as Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia, in 1995, native demonstrators trying to protect their land from further encroachment were met with armoured peronnel carriers, .50 calibre machine guns, and land mines. The federal and provincial governments rejected any involvement by an impartial, independent, international adjudication process to settle the conflict, and even the presence of neutral peacekeepers, with the famous declaration "There shall be no alien intervention into the affairs of this state."

Jeff Wells on the political state of play in Canada - Stand on Guard, Run like Hell:


We're living at a time when all the pieces are coming into play, and that includes the other North America. If the next move is a Harper victory [Note: this was written in January, just before Stephen Harper became Prime Minister of Canada], I think we can expect a certain destabilization that will be welcomed by some in Washington who will be ready to exploit it. Because there will likely be an election in Quebec next year that will almost certainly elect a separatist government bent upon holding a new referendum on sovereignty. These Conservatives, led by alienated Westerners, have no love or understanding of Quebec, and many of them hope for its departure from Canada as its predominantly left values are regarded as impediments to untrammelled rule by the far right. Harper is already cutting deals with the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, whose leader has pledged not to bring down a minority government for three years.

That could be enough time to see the end of Canada, both conceptually and factually. There would then be nothing for us but Fortress North America. So US residents seeking shelter from the storm will need to look further. And may have some company.


No doubt this will all be great fun for the individual reservists involved in this exercise. But that's not the point. It's the slow ratcheting-up of domestic clamp-down: getting peace-loving Canadians used to the unprecedented idea of troops on the streets, preparing Canadian soldiers for a role in quiet cities like Winnipeg and Edmonton - and for missions in concert with US forces - and testing the waters to see what level of resistance such exercises smoke out.

It's not primarily Albertan oil that America wants - it's unlimited access to more basic stuff when their money turns to dust: wood and grain, and most of all, water.

The first flakes of the snowstorm.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006


Why acquiesce in our own destruction? Isn't this the time to take off the rose-tinted glasses and take a good, hard look at the character of those who govern us? What do they really stand for? Peace at home, and death in Iraq. Bread and circuses in the UK and US - and a free rein to spread mayhem abroad.

Is Blair our Dad, taking us for pleasant summer outings to the zoo, and buying us ice cream? You bet he is - but when he's drunk in the evening, it's best to stay well out of the way. Bush and Blair and all the others are our alcoholic, abusive, violent Dads. Let's cut the ties before they drag us down to the abyss.

That's not to say any of us need to resort to violence of any kind. That's their game - and they pretty nearly always win. We don't even need to resort to politics. Again, that's their game, and the odds are stacked pretty firmly in their favour.

Our game is a better one - the game of Truth, where everything is open for scrutiny, and where the foundations are a good deal more rock-solid. But let's face it, too many of us are scared of the Truth, because of the lies we've built on in our own lives.

That's where the pathocrats have the advantage over us: they know we've sold out to them, so that we can enjoy a temporary security under their protection.

Security? That kind of security is nothing but a will o' the wisp. Unchallenged, we're allowing them to build and consolidate their position, until finally the destruction they've visited on Fallujah becomes a destruction they visit on us.

The axe is gonna fall. Let's get ready to at least dodge the blow, or slip the net, if we can do nothing else.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

The War Against Global Pathocracy

The following article, by Mathew Kristin Kiel, does a good job, I think, of summarising what Anarchism is really all about. It's not class war, or any of that nonsense. It's about co-existence, mutual aid and trust; about growing up, for goodness' sake.

But there's a reason why life on Earth is so hard, even though most of us fall so readily into patterns of mutual support. The reason is the Leopards - the monsters all around us.

These are the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the predators - who look like us, use much the same language as us, but are not the same as us. We are their prey. If we are the logical, the kind, the co-existers - then they, on the other hand, are the pathological, the cold, the selfish.

They mimic us. They don't understand us - so much of what we do makes no sense to them - but they have to mimic us because they are a minority (albeit one that has taken over the rulership of this world); they need us to believe in them, so that they can continue to enjoy power over us. Like scum, they tend to rise to the top. They are con-artists - and ultimately, they wish us either dead, or their cowering slaves.

Take a calm and measured look at people like George Bush or Dick Cheney. What is it about their smirking self-assurance, their easy ways - most of all, their eyes? How can they seem to know so little of real life, to be so shallow, so unbearably glib?

But that's what psychopaths are like.

It's the banality of evil.

Mathew pretty much hits this nail square on the head. The urgent contest now is against the psychopaths amongst us, and against their collaborators.

We Grow Up, Now, or We Die
by Mathew Kristin Kiel
8th December 2005 - completed and revised 1st January 2006
Final Revision and Expansion, 19th January 2006

An Analysis: Many among the current "opposition" and its alternative and independent media, press and online journalism are actively delivering us to the Pathocracy.

The Human Race must build a united and coordinated resistance to the advancing, plutocratic, global Pathocracy, all of us together, or we will lose everything. The so-called opposition to this global menace is, thus far, a worldwide laughingstock, either utterly ineffectual against the Pathocracy's advance or else downright collusive in its antihuman insanity. The Pathocracy's deviousness in devising means to prevent our becoming aware of its nature and its foul intentions has, thus far, been succeeding far too well, and there are no limits in the harms it will inflict on all the Peoples of the Earth if not stopped.

We must now become determined to examine ourselves and to subsequently change as required, in every way. Our ways of doing things, our thinking, our concepts about the way this world works, and most of all our assumptions and understandings about the nature of the people in it, especially the nature of the people now running it, MUST be brought into alignment with the Facts. It is imperative that we find and face, now, and then broadcast the world around, to all who will and can listen and learn, the Facts about our own Natures and the Nature of the Pathocratic Enemy. The false givens and assumptions we hold, conditioned into us, for the most part, by our would-be destroyers, are working against us all and still empowering them. If we are to have any hopes of surviving, let alone of defeating the tyranny that has been unleashed upon us, we must reach a new, deeper and far more accurate awareness of what is happening and why.

Unfortunately, as if by design, not a far fetched possibility, a simple element of basic semantics, dialectics, the terms and names with which we identify, describe and ultimately understand the Enemy, ourselves and all else, is making it far more difficult for us to confront and defeat the Monster. If we do not find and establish a new and far more precise set of terms that all of Humanity can understand, clearly and carefully defining just who and what it is that we oppose, we will have no hope of successfully resisting the Pathocratic juggernaut. We are perishing under a multiplicity of descriptions so widely variant across Human languages and cultures as to render them contradictory, divisive, baffling in the extreme and all but meaningless.

As but one example of this problem please consider: The precise, same group of individuals, comprising a global, semi-sovereign and massive fiduciary, commercial, paragovernmental bureaucracy, with Paul Wolfowitz currently at the head of their largest international front, the World Bank, are being identified, globally, by two diametrically opposite terms. All of the organization's members are part of the same, solitary, imperial, world destroying, extralegal financial, commercial and economic consortium. They pursue their policies with a ruthless unanimity of focus and purpose. Ever since the end of WW II, they have been devising and utilizing international trade, banking, development and commerce regulations, policies and "laws" to conduct what amounts to a worldwide war of economic rape, robbery and pillage against the humble peoples of the Earth.

These members of the global Elite are identified, on two or more continents, in one separately established and largely ineffectual opposition movement, as the "Neo Liberals." Every nuance of their policies and practices is identified by the signature, supposedly representative and accurate label of this older of their two opposition movements as "Neoliberalism." However, simultaneously, on another continent or two, in another, separately established, slightly younger and also largely ineffectual opposition movement, the exact same consortium, with all of the exact, same members and players, right up to the World Bank with Paul Wolfowitz at the helm, is identified, known and opposed, by the signature and supposedly accurate label of "Neo Conservatives." The identical set of activities, effects and goals is labeled "Neoconservatism."

It IS the same devouring Monster, gobbling up the resources, sustenance and rights, wealth and health of the world's humble peoples. It IS the same society and economy deforming, hideously destructive and globally present Monster being called by two different, opposite names, and described in contradictory, opposite terms. This semantic confusion gravely endangers all of Humanity. It is drastically slowing and often outright defeating our responses by scattering our counteractions in multiple directions, nearly all of them either misleading or outright false.

In the particular example of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the International Development Agency, among other consortium fronts, neither of the terms currently used to represent that Monstrous Elitist racketeering enterprise is in any regards descriptively, economically, politically, socially or ideologically correct. Both terms, again not coincidentally, disguise and deny the truth of the design, nature and purpose of the devouring Monster. However, this dismal failure to find and hold an essential unity of focus and purpose cannot be assigned only to the deplorably imprecise and contradictory semantics in use. Neither can it be allayed entirely to the appalling lack of access to mainstream media and press outlets by opposing voices.

Many dedicated purveyors of hysterical thinking, hatred, divisiveness, myths, illusions, cons, lies and plain old, nasty, low down in-group vs. out-group programming, in somewhat cosmetically revised "packages," are firmly lodged in the center and heart of the ranks of "truth movement," "opposition," "alternative," "independent" and other counter cultural media, press and online information outlets and forums. It is they who could and should have long since begun addressing these glaring semantic problems and begun working toward establishing a workable and uniting, global, pan-Humanity dialogue.

But, being apparently arrogant unto the death of all Humanity, they would rather keep on spewing out the standard, confusing and fragmentary fare, often repeating purely false information and reinforcing prevailing lies, illusions and myths, keeping the burgeoning Pathocracy going and growing contentedly. Such "journalists" seem to be too busy loudly grinding their own various "axes," to bother taking the time and making the efforts to ascertain whether the information and conclusions they declare to be factual are in fact supported by evidence, solid data and documentation. Writing an article that is one third fact, one third self-posturing hype and one third Pathocratic Lies is not helpful.

We are also being mislead by allegedly truth-based and fact-based material that deliberately compounds the serious semantic difficulties, raising the levels of confusion and obfuscation. Present among us, without possibility of doubt, is a dedicated element of COINTELPRO. Those who seem the most astute in either revealing or at least admitting that such agents of chaos, strife and disinformation do exist and are deliberately setting various groups of dissidents against one another, who turn out to be the most guilty of doing exactly those things themselves.

They too frequently just happen to, coincidentally, be subtle false flag wavers, distraction action jockeys, tall tale spinners and repeaters of fabrications and rumours in the fields of countercultural and opposition media, journalism, information services and research. For some baffling reason, it seems that those who receive the hystericized outpourings and exhortations of this new generation of quieter, more seemingly reasonable and objective sensationalists consider that all which is proclaimed to be done in and for the sake of Truth and Fact must then automatically be beyond suspicion of being less than reliably objective and accurate.

To make the point clear, only those information sources where active links, bibliographies, references, etc., are freely provided, so the reader or viewer can go to the unaltered, original source materials and documentation, and where the readers or viewers are urged, strongly, to check things out for themselves and not to take anyone's word for it automatically, are fit to be at all trusted any longer. Even then, it is up to each of us, personally, to take responsibility for the contents and quality of the information we allow to guide our decisions and to influence our very thought processes themselves. We must stop assuming that what is seen or heard from any media or press, not only in the obviously tainted and collusionist mainstream, is necessarily free of willfully incorrect, carelessly unchecked or downright fraudulent content.

The modern resistance fails to investigate, find, challenge, expose and evict from among its own information sources and communications those publications, networks, organizations and persons not providing reliable, factual, unbiased and well documented content. An even worse defeat is assured by the failure to acknowledge and address this lack of attention to and concern for the need to maintain strict standards of accuracy, unbiased truth, reason and ethical behaviour in reporting from among the prevailing counterculture's own ranks. Often the most truthful, factual and honest information content and sources are simply out shouted by or ignored in favour of the false and misleading, especially in the case of sensational and hystericized content or presentation.

A body of persistent, conditioned, irrational beliefs and "factual" information that proves patently false under careful, logical scrutiny sits within the heart of the so-called opposition, alternative and independent media, press and punditry. It is indicative of both the scope of the problem and of the deplorable content of some "opposition journalists" that the word "punditry" is a correct evaluation of their output, behaviour and attitudes. That such manipulative and irrational content, regardless of the inclination of its slant, is lodged within the very fabric of what purports to be a truth-based, freedom of information and thought movement is a dangerous reality.

The output from such sources is replete with emotional "hot buttons," reactionary trigger words, name calling, spear chucking and a multitude of mind twisting, unity defeating, and truth slaying Lies, myths and unfounded beliefs presented as givens or facts. In perpetuating myths, illusions, irrational beliefs and lies, and in triggering conditioned, irrational, emotional responses in readers and audiences, the producers of such materials are enhancing the Monster's abilities to Deceive, manipulate and control us. Even if such fare is couched in a somewhat altered iteration, or when attempts are made to ameliorate its pejorative nature, twisted facts or just plain Lies, by an author's personal disclaimers that the biases, inflammatory nature or other obviously "loaded" flaws of the content didn't come from himself or herself, it is simply not acceptable. Those individuals who choose to produce and distribute such materials are actively betraying Humanity. Every such work is a direct assault on the reader's mind, an attempt to block or reduce crucial critical faculties.

At a time when the ability to think logically and dispassionately is imperative for each and every one of us who does or would stand opposed to the Monster, deliberately seeking to fan the flames of unreason is inexcusable. The modern resistance is being destroyed from within by its own failure to tune out and shut out those who continue to pour further inaccuracy, deceit and fragmentation into the already chaotic clamour and deliberate confusion as to what is and is not true and factual.

Some of the most respected and widely known counter cultural leaders and voices are among the worst of the spear-chuckers and muckrakers, railing vehemently against all but their own rigidly defined political and demographic identity groups. Only by dint of their also bashing Bush or other figureheads and fragments of the most visible arm of the Pathocracy, the U.S. government, have they managed to gain what little credibility they have. It is a poor substitute for objective, hard hitting facts. Any journalist who resorts to name calling and inflammatory rhetoric is actively creating more problems, not helping to solve them.

Possibly the most devious peddlers of disinformation are those members of the mainstream media and press, or highly regarded alternative journalists, and a number of well regarded academics and other experts, who will go after the U.S. government and the Bush administration's manifest wrongs, but turn around and serve as outspoken excuse makers, defenders, blame shifters and deniers for all of Zionism's and Zionist controlled Israel's wrong doings.

The reprehensible actions of Zionists, worldwide, in designing, fueling and even, in regard to many Ashkenazi "Jews" and their founding, medieval fathers, deliberately acting as an integral part of the global Monster of doom, is historically well documented. The Zionist/Ashkenazi/Israeli complicity in the instigation, establishment, escalation, planning and conduct of each day's increase in the war mongering and other antihuman insanity being undertaken by the U.S. government and the Bush administration is far from difficult to ascertain and document. Those who claim to speak the truth while still behaving as apologists for or defenders of Israel's racist, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and rigidly, murderously theocratic policies and activities are either severely deluded or seriously and dangerously collusive with the Monster. Any of us who continue to grace their words with one iota of attention, let alone credence, are enabling them to get away with actively contributing to the enslavement and mega destruction coming down upon all Humanity, very soon, and brutally raining down upon the Palestinians in the here and now.

There is one last "camp" in the anti-totalitarian movement deserving of mention for the harm they're doing to truth seekers and sincere opponents of the Monster. They are the entrenched new-era dogmatists. Despite a thinly modernized "fact based" or "truth movement" cover, they're still touting and spouting, from between the deceitful few revelatory facts they place in their outpourings, a solid stream of old school muck raking incantations and exhortations to engage in hatred. Rather than to help us unite in making our common cause against a far more lethal Real Enemy, these habitual mudslingers still depict the old, standardized and demonized "enemies", such as the communists, or the socialists, or the Democrats, or the liberals, or the Republicans, or the conservatives, or whites, or blacks, or anglos, or gringos, or Asians, or immigrants, or atheists, or Catholics, or Jews, or hippies, or right-wing, or left-wing, or Neoliberals, or Neoconservatives, or whatever else, etc., etc., et al, ad nauseum and nearly ad infinitum, as being, the sole and total cause of the problems.

Each of these "alternative" rabble rousers vows, as always, that his or her own most despised group is the one and only real and true "enemy" of us all, or the one and only "wrong" or "bad" ideology, philosophy, political party, economics, religion, or whatever, that has caused this entire mess. It really is, with a few rare and notable exceptions, a truly worn out and noisome crock of tired old cliches passing itself off as "opposition" journalism. The only thing it actually opposes are straw figures, and opposing a straw figure, then knocking it down is one of the classic tactics of the disinformation specialist.

Simple logic dictates that there cannot be so very many "one and only true enemies" out there. Logic says that either none of these groups is the Real Enemy or else that all of them are a part of it, but absolutely not the heart of it. Betting on the latter would be the wiser choice by far. It is all just the same, old in-group, an arbitrarily and narrowly defined, patently enhanced and egotistical "us" pitted against the, same old, tried and false, exaggeratedly dangerous and demonized out-group of "them."

The formulaic output coming from some of these "journalists" is making a direct contribution to the ongoing failure of Humanity to effectively identify and resist the destruction unleashed against us all. As one small example, the ceaseless anti-Islamic, anti-Muslim rhetoric coming out of the mainstream press and media is bad enough, but there is more than enough of it also being foisted upon us from the "new right" voices among alternative and independent sources to cause trouble. All rhetoric, no matter whose, no matter how cleverly subdued or disguised, promotes scapegoating and finger pointing, two habits of conditioned pathological thinking that I would personally vote as being among the top 10 intellectual and emotional habits most likely to get us all killed. Both are operand patterns of denial and projection. Denial and projection are more lethal in this regard than in most, and they are, in fact, two of the Enemy's favorite weapons.

If these self-proclaimed insiders and experts, each claiming to be the revelator of entirely factual content, do sincerely desire to inform and alert the rest of us to the dangers and threats we face, in contrast to basking in the glows of their own self-inflamed egos, they might want to first commence making some real efforts to educate themselves as to the Facts of the global menace. All they have done up to now is to guarantee an old fashioned, ongoing "divide and conquer" victory to the real Enemy. So far, that old strategy is working superbly. We have fallen for it and continued to give both merit and credibility to a bunch of self-important posturers who as yet care nothing for the truth of our dreadful situation.

To persist in their customary tactics is no longer a simple matter of free speech or style. It is a significant part of the defeat, thus far, of many appeals and attempts to make possible an effective and dedicated pan-Human opposition to the global menace now being deployed against us. They need to stop inflaming the emotions of their readers, which only adds thoughtless reactivity and senselessly provocative vulgarity to an already massive public confusion. They need to stop increasing the contradictions and errors in a situation that is already being desperately misidentified, even by many of the well-intentioned among us, and that is being at best poorly understood, if at all, by the vast majority of those to whom the thinking public turns for elucidation.

While the use of terms such as pathological, psychopathic, delusional, disturbed, demented, plutocratic, autocratic, dictatorship and the like are indeed becoming much more frequent in the more sincerely dedicated truth movement sources lately, it is far too slow and too limited in scope to convey the Reality. That specific type of awareness needs to increase exponentially and to be made known worldwide in order for us to have any working chance to build the unity we so desperately need. If we cannot and do not root the divisive Lies and the Liars who purvey them out from among our own ranks, we will fail to build the global, Human trust and community that is now imperative. The honest and profoundly honourable commitments, built upon that trust that we desperately need to achieve, will never happen. We must now reach across every previously known "difference" between one another, every previous barrier to our unity, and find the commonality that is the critical and real foundation of our ability to effectively resist and counter the advance of the Monsters.

As for the hard core hate mongers and myth pushers, we cannot permit them to continue with impunity in their total disregard for the consequences of their, at best, mistaken and misguided assumptions and assertions being presented as facts. If they make no attempt whatsoever to amend both the inflammatory rhetoric and the faulty "informational" content and tone of their missives, they need to be "outed" publicly as deliberate disinformation specialists and propagandists, given publicly the Truth demanded by their lies, and then soundly ignored until they cease to have enough readership or audience to keep themselves afloat.

If any of these self-proclaimed journalist-patriots are real fighters for the good of all Humanity they will stop the hype, dispense with the emotional button-pushing and the political name-calling, stop all of the petty and divisive crap, and immediately begin dealing with the Truths of who and what is really destroying us all and how we can all go about fighting back. They are selling us all to the Enemy with every rant and rave that pits one demographic, racial, social, political or religious group of psychologically normative Humans against another, or that portrays any one group as either more wronged or more right than another. They are encouraging us to keep on being the blinded victims of artificially constructed "differences" that were foisted upon us to deliberately confuse us and to obfuscate the Truths about our Nature, the Enemy's Nature and our dire situation as a race and a planet.

Of course, with them as with any of us, the hardest battle to win is the one that takes place internally. It is at the level of their personal responsibilities to achieve the highest possible levels of honesty, integrity, courage, humility, and much else, (in the individual and supremely personal war for control of their own Minds and Souls) that these journalists have truly failed. They seem to not yet have bothered attempting to fight for even their own freedom from the lifelong indoctrination in bigotry, bias, prejudice and other entirely erroneous assumptions about our "human nature" that has been drummed into us all. Lodged within that most resistant place of all, their own minds, the conditioned, irrational beliefs they are ignoring are working, through them, to keep us all powerless.

Those old and comfortable terms reinforce the habituation with which, for all of our lives until now, we have all been conditioned, whether subtly or openly, to either love or hate one group or another, to think that external differences are causes to either accept or reject one group of our brother and sister Beings or another. By making their constant exhortations for us to continue to either love or hate those same old things right along with them, they are helping to deliver us all to the slaughter houses of the real Enemy.

While the behemoth coming to devour us is all of these old things, and more, those are all but symptoms of the Enemy's Real nature and presence. Fighting the symptoms, one at a time, from a hundred different directions, will not cure the cause of the cancerous and pandemic disease of the Body Human that is eating us all. Treating the symptoms, only, will result in the death of the patients, in this case potentially the entire human race and Planet Earth. This time we must confront the cause and eradicate its ability to ever again harm or attack us, or else all will perish.

The Truth over and above all other geopolitical, socio-economic, demographic, military, personal and psychological Truths is that we are nearly all targeted for extermination by a truly global Pathocracy.

These are the Real stakes, and the Real issues. Let it sink in. Get used to it.

Pathocracy is the first and only accurate term that Humanity has ever yet had to convey the meaning of the Evil that has always stalked the halls of power and the realms of privilege, in all times, in all civilizations, and in all governments. Learn it. Learn its meaning and spread it as far and as wide as you possibly can. Read it and learn its lessons as if your very own life and the lives of everyone and everything you hold most dear depend upon it, for, in Truth, they do.

The term Pathocracy contains within it both the cause(s) of the condition afflicting us and the keys to a means of establishing the necessary unity to fight back. It even holds the hope of a real and lasting means to at last cure this world of the specter of Evil in human form. Anyone who seeks to learn what is really wrong with this world, and how things got to where they are today, needs only to click on the link to Political Ponerology, (provided in the column of links to the left, near the top of the Signs of the Times web page each day) then read. Read it as many times as needed for the full import to sink in. There will the seeker find the Facts, the Truth. There is no word in it that should be skipped or skimmed over lightly. There is no means to overstate or even begin to estimate the value of the gift that the aged Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski, MD., has given to all Human Beings.

You'll know when you've gotten there, when you've reached an Awareness of the Objective Reality. There will come a moment of such visceral response to this potent and imperative Knowledge Dr. Lobaczewski has saved from destruction and passed on to us, that you will Know. In the depths of your Mind and Soul, nothing will ever be the same for you again, your Thinking, Seeing, Feeling, Living, and especially your Being, will NOT be the same again, ever. About the middle of my third reading of Political Ponerology, the Truth of it finally broke through completely.

No, Toto, we are NOT in Kansas any more, and we can never go back to Kansas, not to the same one that we left behind, not ever again. We can only go forward. It is crucial for us to begin living and acting in accordance with this new and essential knowledge about ourselves, Pathocracy and our two Human Natures. We can only go forward through the trials to come and have faith that, if we learn to live by this new awareness, we will have the hope of someday building a new Kansas that will be in Reality what we had only been deceived into believing it was before.

The survival of our Human Race and of the only planet that is our home depends upon each and every one of us learning the Facts found in this text and then informing as many others around us of the basic truths in them as we possibly can. Until the majority of us, globally, have learned the truth, the danger will keep getting worse, as will the horrors being inflicted upon ever greater numbers of us by the day. However, even the first, quick read through of Political Ponerology will provide the reader with the first real clarity yet found, the first sense that it really IS possible to understand, at last, long last, through the evidence of solid facts, scientific research and proofs, the causes of the whole nightmare that afflicts our modern Reality. Those who do want to know the truth will find it there. It is not pleasant, but it is, at last, the only Sane answer to "What is WRONG with?"... These people.... This world.... This government, and much, much more.

Once you have read it, once you have absorbed its meaning, then you too will understand another Fact.

All of the following are equally wrong, equally false, and now equally OBSOLETE terms: capitalism, socialism, communism, federalism, republicanism, democracy, monarchy, constitutional monarchy, liberalism, conservatism, and all other isms, archies, and ocracies.

With one notable exception, tribal matriarchy in hunter-gatherer and nomadic herder societies, and pure, one-on-one bartering and trade, everything that is now ruling, or has ever ruled, over human beings in a system with one of those endings, ism, archy and ocracy is a Pathocratic Lie, a deliberately deceptive means of control devised to gradually bring ever greater numbers of human beings into living under pathological systems of governance and control.

The seed of Pathocracy has been extant within every inherently rigid and/or hierarchical human social, religious, economic, political and governmental structure ever to have been invented, from the oldest to today's. With each new generation of humans, historically, Pathocracy has increased, exponentially, in the numbers, kinds and degrees of its control over non-pathological human beings. Now, we live in the times when its control has at last extended to almost 100% of the normative human populace across almost 100% of the earth's habitable surface. Any action we now take that does not help us to confront our previous failures, grasp the Reality of our situation and henceforward respond appropriately is the same as acting on behalf of the Pathocracy.

Dr. Lobaczewski sums up well the denials of the old school thinkers and blamers who just cannot and will not change their minds, refusing to even examine let alone accept, support and report the facts, "The defenders of the natural world-view have traditions, belles-lettres, even philosophy on their side. They do not realize that during the present times, their manner of comprehending life's questions renders the battle with evil more problematic."...

When the self-proclaimed opposition, independent and alternative pundits keep on handing out the old, false labels, fables and myths, when they keep plucking on the old harp strings and lines, they are selling us all out, and it is time we stopped accepting it. It matters not whether they do so from a basic lack of personal integrity, or to make a few more bucks, or to get away with laziness in researching the facts. They do grave harm to us all whenever they reinforce and reiterate things that have now been clearly shown to be false, or when they use words that are designed to create the kind of emotional reactivity that is intended to cancel out our capacity for higher thought.

In fact, the flogging of emotionalism and reactivity in others is classic Pathocratic mind control tactic, and a favorite Psychopathic spellbinding weapon against the normative Human Being.

Let us from now on keep that in mind. When we peruse online journals or read the newspapers, when we hear a pundit expounding on any topic, or view the speeches of public figures, let us ask ourselves whether the material is appealing to our Reason and our Minds or seeking to stir up and elicit a purely emotional response that does not necessarily relate to the information or matter at hand. Doing so may prove invaluable in teaching us to identify exactly who is and who is not a contributor to the pathological drive for the destruction of this world and humanity. By keen observation, we can, and must, determine who is and who is not working for the Pathocracy in one way or another.

All hopes of our own simple survival, depend upon our winning, personally and collectively, this central battle to confront and defeat the emotionality, inaccuracies, distortions, irrationality and Lies, the "dark glasses" of the learned and conditioned projective processes, denials and the habits of pathological thinking lodged within ourselves.

As Dr. Lobaczewski himself puts it "Developing and popularizing the objective psychological world-view could thus significantly expand the scope of dealing with evil via sensible action and pinpointed countermeasures."

That we, the Truth movement, the independent, alternative, and fact-based, freedom of information proponents, writers, journalists, press members, publishers, bloggers, forum posters and you name it, should and must make the implementation of this "developing and popularizing the objective psychological world view" our number one priority is obvious. It is perhaps the most crucial service to the good of all Humanity that any generations of communicators have ever undertaken. With the facts now before us, confirming beyond dispute the existence of an organized and globally active, highly sophisticated Ponerological Pathocracy, front and center in all this world's affairs, we must make the exposure of the literal and readily provable Insanity of our current leaders, and other prominent figures worldwide, our primary focus and goal.

The front page, day in and day out news of the world, at least in our own corners of it, must expose to the public's view the literal Insanity of the world's leaders and their irrational, basic and well demonstrated incompetence to fill the requirements of their positions. When we fight them on political, social or economic grounds, or on any of the other conventional grounds, we are fighting them on their own terms, and we will lose every time. Their terms are all Lies, all disguising the central, most important point about themselves and all that they have done and will do. THEY ARE INSANE.

Let us fight them then on the basis of Fact: The sole and entire cause of all that ails them, and thereby us, is their fundamental Insanity, their pathological, ponerological, collective and individual Insanity. It is extremely doubtful whether many of those residing in the heights of power in and over this planet and her peoples, could, or would, pass the basic mental competency and psychological fitness exams as used by the military, police departments and courts.

It is time for us to make common and constant before the public all these words and more in the same vein: Pathological, psychopathic, sociopathic, delusional, personality disordered, disturbed, pre-senile dementia, congestive dementia, paranoid, ideation, conspiratorial, fixated, irresponsible, irrational, and add to them the new and profoundly Truthful terms Pathocrat, Pathocratic, Pathocracy, Ponerogenic, Ponerological, Ponerology, Psychophage, Psychophagia, Psychophagic, (a more accurate word to describe psychopathy and psychopaths, it means a Mind and Soul eater).

All of these are factual, scientific and clinical terms. All of them accurately, truthfully describe the behaviours and ideation displayed daily by our world's rulers. Their Insanity is obvious in their speeches, their acts and all else about them in every moment. Exposing those public figures who fit those terms so well, assigning to them the Facts of their Insanity at every hand, ought to be our number one focus, because this IS the Truth told to all of their countless Lies. The cause of the Lies IS, and always was, their Insanity.

We must simultaneously identify and eliminate our own conditioned viewpoints as to the nature of the evil we confront. The minds of all Human Beings are and will continue to be the primary and hardest to win of all the battlegrounds in this war for our own survival. All of us who seek and value the objective, factual truth, about ourselves, our societies, our world-view and even our very Universe itself, are the most Real combatants there may ever have been.

We are now standing on the front lines of the War to Overcome Human Evil. That is no longer a statement of religious, philosophical or moral principles but a simple, worse than dreadful, scientific Fact.


Essay: Only one dividing line between Humans is Real, or ever was. We must learn what it is and learn to live by it.

All of the human race, every last single member thereof, suffers an equal jeopardy. To quote that notable and humble man of Truth, Benjamin Franklin, "If we do not all hang together, they will hang us all separately." In other words, it is already a serious, worldwide threat.

We are now in the mega crisis of Humanity's ultimate confrontation with the Evil that stalks this Earth in Human form. It has engulfed most of our world, and far too many of us who do sincerely care about others and who want both the earth and the ordinary folks therein to live in peace, are caught up in fighting with each other over just what kind or flavour of evil is afoot. We have, until now, been unable to discern just which direction is, in reality, opposite to them, the Pathocracy, so as to then apply resistance in the correct direction or manner. However, our thinking of them and responding to them by a hundred different negative words that they have invented, manipulated, twisted and long been expert at using to divide us IS now OVER.

We have been callously and deliberately boxed in by a multitude of utterly meaningless, rigidly defined and terribly confining compartments, the illusory justifications for various groups of Human Beings to be reflexively conditioned to despise each other. All of our existing and historical group related "differences" are now irrelevant in the discovery of the One Factual, scientifically established and demonstrable Difference made clear to us by the works of Andrew Lobaczewski, MD., author of Political Ponerology.

His chillingly factual, objective scientific research, clinical data, case studies and analysis reveal that there is but one point of distinction that ever has held or ever will hold validity in dividing human beings into two separate camps. Those two camps truly and absolutely cannot ever coexist in harmony with one another. They never have yet. The sole cause of this inability to coexist harmoniously is that one of these two groups, the one that has finally developed a globally organized and sophisticated Pathocracy highly likely to kill us all, is constitutionally incapable, by right of its very Nature, of according to all the rest of Humanity the simple rights to exist unmolested, live in freedom and be able to, without restrictions, interference or fear of harm, choose and peacefully pursue their own courses in life.

The two camps of Humanity are comprised of the innately cooperative type, the "live-and-let-live," normative Human majority, a good 80% or more of the total Human Race, and the innately aggressive and predatory type, a very small minority of 20%, at the most, who are utterly helpless to control their inherent needs to prey upon, dominate, and even torture or kill, in one degree and regard or another, anyone who is unlike themselves. It is probable that the real ratio is an even greater split than 80% vs 20%, likely as much as 90% vs 10% or more.

Why and how then can such a small minority of the Human Race have wound up in control of almost all the territories and peoples of the Earth? Because they are endlessly deceitful, cunning, cruel, calculating and ruthless in their aggression against normative Humanity, having no capacity for either conscience or sincere bonding and attachment to others. The closest they ever approach to such things as loyalty, family and love are the intuitive, ponerological bonds they have with one another. Such bonds are then always turned, in a very typical, predatory, hunting pack mentality and methodology, to the formation of ponerological unions, associations, and, now, in the ultimate extreme, a global ponerological Pathocracy with one another, always and ever in their endless, headlong pursuit of more and better predation against normative Human Beings.

They have gotten us to this day's brink of annihilation simply by cheating, lying, stealing, converting, spellbinding, intimidating, aggressing, killing and brutalizing against normative Humanity since prehistory. Their favorite and most effective tactic is deceit. It is also their greatest weapon against us. What they most crave to steal, by way of their incomparable deceitfulness, is the belief, the good faith, the trust and even the love of normative Human Beings, and taking all of our sustenance, goods and works too is a nice "fringe benefit" for them.

This is nowhere more a fact than in their means and ways to evoke from us, and then betray for their own selfish gains, our own beliefs and trust in them to do what and as they've said they would do, to keep their words, uphold the oaths they've sworn, to deliver on promises they've made or honour the deals they've agreed upon with us in good faith. They never do, never have and never will: It is NOT in their Nature to do so. They cannot behave with either honesty or integrity, not ever, not even within their bonds, unions and associations with others like themselves. Even in their relationships with each other, they will con and cheat, violate and betray. They are born without the capacities for either empathy or truth.

This article has required several revisions, because attempting to deal with some of the most life and death matters in Human history is not done both well and also done quickly, or easily, at least not by me. The whole works got blocked up when I found myself seeking in vain for a single word that would clearly convey the true depth and breadth of the chasm that separates a normative Human Being from the born, humaniform predators known as a Psychopaths. No matter how I hashed up suffixes, prefixes and roots, Greek, Latin and other, nothing could and would describe their inner desolation, their absolute lack of Empathy, Love, Loyalty, Fealty, Fellowship, Compassion, Mercy and all other such normative Human characteristics that is at the core of the psychopath's Nature.

After more than a week stuck on it, I e-mailed Laura Knight-Jadczyk, publisher of the original version of this analysis and essay, and explained the difficulty to her. She said she'd get back to me on it a few days later. She certainly did. When I first read her suggestion, chills ran down my spine. She has provided a word we would all be wise to learn, and make use of it in addition to, and perhaps even in lieu of psychopath. With it we can truly describe these spiritually vacant, malevolent humaniform predators who walk among us, disguised as us. They do unimaginable amounts of damage, of literal evil to us just as easily, as automatically and as persistently as they draw breath.

Laura wrote this in her reply: "..It occurred to me that the true nature of the psychopath is a 'black hole' so to say - a 'soul eater.' .. So, then I thought: what about psychophagia - soul eating. What we call a psychopath is really a psychophage - a soul eater."

Anyone who has had the "benefit" of a close, personal encounter with a Psychophage, the most malevolent of humaniform predators, will Know exactly what this new term means and how powerfully appropriate it is. Those who haven't had such an experience are best advised to take this word to heart and let it serve them not merely as Knowledge but as warning.

There is the chasm that cannot be bridged by either side of the line. In addition to the manifold material, emotional and psychological harms they do, they are PSYCHOPHAGES; they EAT away at our SOULS. As individuals, as nations and as a worldwide ponerological Pathocracy intent on enslaving and destroying the Earth and the Human Race, they eat our souls. Since Psyche is from the same root as Psycho, Psychophagia also includes their eating away at our seat of consciousness, at our brains, our emotions, our Minds. And of course, among all else that they steal, some of the worst, most lasting damage done by them is their theft of our emotional well being, our trust, self confidence, hopes, dreams and, worst of all, our hearts. It is an even more powerful, fit and correct description then. They consume eagerly all of those things most essential to our very Beings and Nature. They eat away at our minds and souls and hearts first, and then at all else of necessity to us as well.

The single most powerful weapon that we have and can use against them is to know and tell the Truth of their Nature, as near to universally as possible throughout the global, Human community and consciousness. The only way to surely defeat them is to rob them of all ability and chance to continue pretending to be like us, to expose them before the face of all Humanity as the humaniform predatory Psychophages that they are.

Inevitably we must deny to the Pathocracy, and to all of their psychophagic kind, permanently, any chance for gaining access to positions of power over the lives and affairs of others. If we do not now unite and stop their Pathocracy, then humanely confine them away from the company of susceptible normative Human Beings ever more, they will succeed in rendering the Earth a smoking, ruined cinder in the very foreseeable future. That they will also destroy themselves, in their uncontrollable drive to destroy us, is something that has literally no meaning for them. It is beyond their abilities to conceive of let alone to contemplate the negative consequences of their own actions.

The old terms that have previously separated us into opposing groups, all of them, deceitfully pitted us against each other on the sole basis of a group identification or affiliation. Individuals who are essentially far more like than unlike have been divided into groups by facile and deceitful definitions based upon surface characteristics that have nothing to do with questions of the true, core and essential, individual Human Being's Nature. The one and only dividing line is whether any given individual, without regard to any and every group definition ever yet known or devised, is Sane or Insane, Rational or Irrational, Logical or Pathological, Merciful/Empathic or Psychophagic.

This is, in fact, the only existing or historical division of Human Beings into separate and irreconcilable groups that is scientifically valid. It stands the test of being fully predictive of any given individual's solitary behaviour toward another individual, throughout the course of a lifetime, and across every conceivable demarkation of race, sex, creed, demographics, language, culture, age, religion and all else. This is it and, in a nut shell all of it: Whether the person is Sane, Rational, Logical and Empathic, or whether he or she is Insane, Irrational, Pathological and Psychophagic.

Until now, we humans have been indoctrinated to despise, fear, separate from and abuse one another on the basis of "differences," such as being a transsexual or a heterosexual, having dark skin or light skin, being rich or poor, being formally educated or illiterate, male or female, and, most and worst of all, on the basis of religious choices and/or indoctrination. None of these aspects of collective or aggregate Human behaviours denotes any lasting and universally applicable predictors of individual behaviours whatsoever. We have been programmed to view our very Humanity as secondary in importance and subservient to our group-related identifications. These group aspects have been entirely defined by our juxtapositions to and affinities with others, not by the nature of our own Beings.

This is one of the key, foundational Lies used to establish and maintain Pathocratic manipulation and control. It is one of the biggest, baddest, oldest, meanest and costliest Lies ever told to the Human Race, that one's group "membership" whether chosen or an effect of genetics, adverse or felicitous events or societal views and/or coercion, is more valid and more important than one's own, individual, basic Human Nature. Think it over for a moment, let this too sink in.

Those religions based upon dogma and doctrines all profess the certainty that theirs is the one and only true religion and the one and only true god. All such religious constructs have been used, for the past few thousand years, to create excuses for the killing, torturing and conquest of others. They have provided justifications and rationalizations for committing the thefts of entire continents from their rightful, indigenous inhabitants. Now, finally, they are the causes for embroiling the entire planet in an unwinnable doomsday game of slaughter, all being done for the sake, the glory and in the name of one or another of these multiple "one and only true" gods and religions.

Doing every conceivable and inconceivable harm to other Human Beings, wreaking unbearable horrors and devastation globally, and doing every Evil there is, ever was or will be, all in the name of their righteousness and their gods, the Truth is that all of the organized, dogmatic religions on the face of this Earth are ponerological, psychophagic, spellbinding constructs used to build up to today's state of Pathocratic global crisis. Whatever sources may have been their original inspirations, the Truth of all dogmatic religions is that they've all, and always, been used by greed-infected, Insane, malevolent humaniform predators to convert, indoctrinate, coerce, dominate, rob, abuse and even kill all of those normative, rational and Sane Humans who dared to disagree with their assertions of ultimate authority and right. EVIL IS AS EVIL DOES.

Even outside of the constructs of dogmatic religions, all of the standard dividing lines and group associated identifying terms demonize and emphasize variations of Human character, behaviour, appearance, functioning or culture that actually exist only at the social, outer and surface levels of Being. External difference do not necessarily reflect any significant differences in the essential, individual natures of fully Sane, Logical, Rational and Empathic Human Beings. They are merely made to seem insurmountable by Insane, Irrational, Pathological, Psychophagic, ponerological deceit, exaggeration, manipulation, and conditioning. This deception, costly beyond all reckoning down through the ages, is what we now must learn to recognize and soundly reject, naming it for what it is, ponerological spellbinding, paramoralsims, tricks and Lies. We must come to See it, Know it and refuse to ever be taken in by it again.

Surely, if we have learned anything yet at all, it is this: The nature of ourselves, who and what we are when no one else is watching, when no penalties for bad behaviour or rewards for good acts will ever befall us, is the most important and largest part of our Beings. That solitary and unseen Being IS who and what we really are.

The fact is that when the internal, essential character of the individual is fully normative, fully sane, rational and empathic, then that Being is deeply opposed, irrevocably opposed, to the core nature of the Pathocracy. Humanity can now, at long last, undo the group-think conditioning and stop throwing our friends out with the Pathocratic bilge of bigotry and negative typecasting over petty differences in appearances only. And if we do not do so, we will have only ourselves to eventually blame for our ultimate annihilation by the Pathocracy.

We must now cease to have pasts: No more adherence or allegiance to any of the past affiliations, identifications and perspectives we've wasted our time on thus far. We cannot be what we were, never again, in light of this new awareness. If any of us, maybe even most of us, are to survive, we must become what is needed now. Today holds a threat that is total, and failing to meet it because we want to hang on to those old and false differences, deliberately conditioned into us to prevent our unity, is not acceptable. All Humans capable of sane, logical, behaviour, conscience, compassion and love are the born allies to one another and the born enemies of the Pathocracy. Those who persist in clinging to the old divisions, labels and externally defined compartments, those who continue to be vehemently bigoted and determined to foment divisions between people for the sake of Lies, must be recognized and revealed for what they Truly are, the agents of pathocracy, Insane, Irrational, Pathological and Psychophagic themselves.

We now must correct our previous errors and begin work immediately to eliminate the reactive emotional triggers from not only our public discourses but from our own thoughts, words and communications. Instead, let us make the fullest use, in every way and at every opportunity, of these new words and accurate terms, true terms. All of us who have been opposing it have fallen right into one of its biggest traps: "define the battle in your own terms." Until now.

Well, here are some of our new terms: They are a literal, global, PATHOCRACY, the Insane, united by their innate drive and determination to destroy all who are not of, among, with and like themselves. In other words, they hunger to do away with the vast majority of the Human Race and enslave the remainder to serve and entertain them. The Real threat IS Pathocracy, the Real cause of it IS Insanity, and the Real issue IS exposing and stopping the Pathocracy's War Against Humanity.

It is no longer a matter of politics, or wealth, or race, or class, or sexual preference, or sex, or religion, or any of the other divisive labels we have been indoctrinated to place upon, around and between ourselves and each other. As a worldwide Human Race, we can no longer afford the childish luxuries of homophobia, heterophobia, racism, classism, sexism, or any other phobia or ism, especially not of any form or brand of bigotry and fanaticism, religious or otherwise.

To change the language, the words of our thoughts and speech, consciously, diligently, and logically, is to change both the inner Being and our relationships to all else. That is known as dialectics, and it is one of the most powerful tools for human growth and change that there is, when used in a sane, logical and truth-affirming manner and applied consistently, permanently.

When used as the Enemies of humanity use it, dialectics is a powerful weapon in the mind control arsenal. Until this very moment, they have invented and controlled the entire dialectics of our awareness and of all of our discourses regarding themselves.

Again: they have invented and controlled the entire dialectics of our awareness and of all of our discourses regarding themselves, until now.

We can and must take control of our own dialectics by establishing and utilizing our own set of terms and names for them, employing the True words to confront their Lies. Then we must spread our Dialectics of Truth to all the world. We can, and must, force them to fight on our terms by refusing to refer to them by, or allow them to get away unchallenged with referring to themselves by any other terms. They must and shall be confronted, at every turn with the Facts of themselves. They are individually psychophages, and collectively they have formed a ponerological, political, global Pathocracy.

The certainty is that those Insane and Irrational individuals in positions of power, when challenged with the Fact of their personal and specific symptoms of Insanity, in the open public view, will not be able to establish that they are, in fact, mentally competent and psychologically fit to fulfill the requirements and responsibilities of their offices, appointments or other positions of power and public trust. Exposing the Truth, the one cause of the ills in this world toady, an aggressive form of Insanity that creates malevolent humaniform predators devoid of all scruples or conscience, and that it has literally infected and sickened almost to death the entire structure of power, influence and governance the world around, IS the beginning to a real solution. When we control the subject and terms of the dialogue, by making know the Truth, indisputable and demonstrable readily, that they are NOT Sane, the entire balance shifts, and not it their favour.

They know one very powerful Fact: Much of the real power lies in owning and defining the terms of the conflict. That is why they keep changing the WORDS they use to describe themselves, their motivations, their goals, to describe and define their enemies, etc., etc. Slippery, confusing, Lying, shifting words are their greatest weapons. That is why our allowing them to define the battleground by continuing to use their old terms and by automatically adopting their new terms has cost us so dearly.

That is why, no doubt, one of the highest of the high among their Global Pathocracy's Elite, Zbigniew Brzezinski, killed the publication of Dr. Lobaczewski's book many years ago. Had Humanity been able, then, to learn these facts, apply this science and especially to name these two, universally definitive Human types, the current totalitarian nightmare, the Global Pathocratic War Against Humanity would have been seen, known, and most importantly Named for what it is and stopped in its infancy.

There is but ONE valid dividing line.

All humans fall into one of the two following types, behaviourally, psychologically, emotionally, intellectually and in all other regards. All other declared differences are but superficial variations. These are the differences that divide Humanity at the core of the brain's fundamental structures governing personality formation and reasoning abilities, in other words these are the divisions of Heart, Mind and Soul, of Being and Nature.

Type 1 Humans: Those who are devoid of conscience and empathy. They are pathologically selfish, self-involved and self centered. They crave and seek to own, control and consume without restraint or consideration for others' needs and rights to live and be. Even unto all of the earth, and their drive to either enslave or eliminate every human being thereupon in the pursuit of their selfish pleasures and purposes, there is no such thing as "enough" for them, not in all of creation, to satisfy their insatiable lusts and greed for whatever is the target of their desires. To get more of what they most want, in the case of the Global Pathocracy until they own and rule everyone and everything of a material nature on this planet, one way or another, and to do so without regards as to who is hurt or what gets destroyed by them, is all they care about. And when they get it all, they will still want more. They are without the capacity to become full. Material, worldly, psychological, or other, satiation in any form or regard is impossible for them to achieve. They cannot feel its presence.

(Note: At most, 6% of all Humans will be totally, dedicatedly Type 1, with a maximum of another 12% who can easily become enslaved to Type 1 individuals and groups. A figure taken from Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, MD. and the companion commentaries to it from Laura Knight-Jadczyk.)

Type 2 Humans: Those who do have conscience and empathy inherent in their natures. They have a full capacity to identify with and share in the experiences and emotions of others, and are capable of applying restraint to their own behaviour, imposing limits upon themselves based upon reason, logical parameters and consideration for the needs of others. If initially acquisitive, they are capable of becoming filled at a certain point, and they will not engage in deliberate acts of harm or deprive others of necessities and rights in order reach their goals, nor will they willingly lie, cheat and steal to do so. They prefer and strive to live in a state of peaceful, mutual live-and-let-live, in a sharing, respectful, give and take manner, seeking an interactive and integrated, dynamic community with others, regardless of what differences from themselves those others may have.

TYPE 1 HUMANS ARE THE INSANE , the psychophagic, the humaniform predators, truly and incurably, pathologically selfish and greedy. These people are absolutists: they cannot reason; they cannot negotiate; they cannot compromise; they cannot peacefully agree to disagree; they are driven to convert others to their own ways and control them and to destroy those who cannot be converted or controlled; they cannot, ever, not in the slightest regard, live-and-let-live as the coequals of others; they cannot and do not form loving, interdependent attachments, bonds and relationships with others. The sole exception to this is that THEY CAN AND WILL FORM PONEROLOGICAL UNIONS, GROUPS AND ASSOCIATIONS WITH ONE ANOTHER for the purposes of getting more of whatever they want, by collectively plotting against, harming and taking more of everything, up to and including life itself, from Type 2 Humans.

They are the ruthless, the unjust, bigoted, unfair and deceitful, the pathologically egotistical, disrespectful, arrogant and hateful, the absolute competitors, the destroyers, the takers and users, the discompassionate, the cheaters and liars.

TYPE 2 HUMANS ARE THE SANE, the traditional prey of Type 1: They are the satiable, the rational, the logical, the cooperative, the predominantly, preferentially truthful, the humble. When they do crave gains or achievements, for them there IS a limit, a point at which they will stop acquiring and be content with what they have. They are able to share what they have with others. To live and let live with others, to be at peace in a world where there is enough for all is their real goal and desire. They are capable of making reasonable compromises, of making and living by good faith negotiations with others, of behaving with objectivity, self-discipline, restraint and honour, of considering the good and the needs of the many to be a higher priority than the satisfaction of their own personal wants. When they find themselves in the wrong or discover they've inadvertently harmed another, they will admit to their errors, feel genuine guilt, shame and pain for having committed them, and do everything within their abilities to correct the wrong or make restitution and compensation to the victim.

They are the coexistentialists, the reasoners, the responsible, the apologizers, the remorseful, the negotiators, the carers and sharers, the peacemakers, the compassionate, the givers and builders, the generous, the objective, fair-minded, respectful and amenable.

The old ideas and old habits of our group identities are a stinking (as in rotten and deader than a five day old fish out in the summer sun) way of thinking, and they will get us all killed if we do not relinquish them. The entire planet and most of the human beings and other life forms upon it, will perish unless we grow up and stop calling each other and ourselves by names that were taught and assigned to us by the Type 1 Human, Global Pathocracy now making every possible kind of covert and overt War upon us all.

Let us begin by simply telling it like it is:

WE ARE THE SANE.
THE ENEMIES OF HUMANKIND ARE THE INSANE.

WE ARE THE LOGICAL.
THE ENEMIES OF HUMANKIND ARE THE PATHOLOGICAL.

WE ARE THE RATIONAL.
THE ENEMIES OF HUMANKIND ARE THE IRRATIONAL.

WE ARE THE EMPATHIC AND MERCIFUL.
THE ENEMIES OF HUMANKIND ARE THE PSYCHOPHAGIC AND MERCILESS.

TO BREAK OUR VERBAL CHAINS AND HABITS IS TO BREAK THE CHAINS THEY HAVE PLACED UPON OUR MINDS, EMOTIONS AND THOUGHTS.

There are Four Definitive Characteristics of Pathocracy. They provide us with all of the terms we need to use in addressing and referring to the groups, systems and structures inherent in all Pathocracies. With these terms we can at last have some accuracy and reliable descriptive clarity when referring to the pathological conditions and structures to which we've become accustomed and by which we've been indoctrinated all of our lives. Learning and using the correct names for them, we will have four more clear, precise and unshifting word weapons to use in our new dialectics of Truth.

This time, the Pathocracy itself can no longer tell us Lies about who and what they are. In every nation, every government, the people can use these Characteristics to make a rational, objective, factual assessment of their own politicians, leaders, rulers, governments and laws. If the symptoms of Pathocracy are there so is the disease of ponerogenesis. That disease is always the result of the collective behaviour, the lying, plotting, cheating and tricks of the psychophagic individuals who have pushed for and created the Pathocracy. This time, just this once, we will fight them from and with the rock bottom truth of their very Nature exposed to public view as our weapon. This disclosure, their essential Insanity, is the one thing they have fought hardest of all to prevent us from ever finding out. It is the one thing they most deeply deny about themselves. It is their Achilles heel.

The Four Definitive Characteristics of Pathocracy:

1. For the system of government they seek to inflict upon all of humanity: ABSOLUTE TOTALITARIANISM .

This term, long in use, describes any system that deprives any of the people under its control of their personal rights, liberties, and freedoms to live, associate and express themselves as they choose, in every regard. Even if they do not commit or cause, nor specifically threaten to commit or cause, any deliberate acts of physical harm or grave emotional, psychological or material harm to others, (the sole legitimate causes for any normative system to ever deprive it citizens of their full and free rights to Choose and Be and Do) the citizens will be subjected to punishments for "crimes" that amount to nothing more than variations from the dominant social, religious and/or cultural behaviours of their society, such as forming multiple partner marriages, engaging in public nudity, practicing birth control, not wearing a veil, etc. From monarchies, to democracies and other elective systems, to military dictatorships, theocracies and all else, if and when any government punishes or imprisons its citizens for any of the following four types of offences it IS totalitarian: We must never again allow ourselves or any who would demand either our attention or respect for their opinions and actions to use any other terms to describe any government or other entity with the authority to command the actions and lives of others when that government or authority engages in the 4 activities listed below.

"BY THEIR WORKS YE SHALL KNOW THEM." EVIL IS AS EVIL DOES:

TOTALITARIAN IS AS TOTALITARIAN DOES.

The 4 essential characteristics of all totalitarian systems:

a) Convicting and punishing its citizens or other subjects for committing behavioural "crimes."
This category of "crimes" is created by the outlawing of the individual's rights to engage in certain lifestyle choices and activities that actually do no specific harm to others than themselves. Excellent examples are anti-drug laws, anti-smoking laws, anti-adult oriented pornography laws, and anti-homosexuality statutes, among many others, mandatory seatbelt use, motorcycle helmet laws, etc. Behavioural crime laws are obtained through the terrorising and intimidation of the public by means of using false statistics and "scientific" or other invented "factual" information, in other words myths, hyped into propaganda and prominently run in news and other media programmes, to brainwash the public into allowing or supporting the passage of such laws in the name of "the public good."

b) Convicting and punishing citizens or other subjects for violating the "rights" and "safety" of material goods and property as a crime placed above or equal in importance to violating the rights and safety of organic human beings and other organic life;
A prime example was the utilizing of the police, National Guard and military to shoot or arrest looters while thousands were still drowning in the attics and on the rooftops after hurricane Katrina, or ruling that a homeowner in Florida who shot and killed a clearly unarmed burglar who was fleeing from him and already outside of his house had acted in "self defence."

c) Convicting and punishing citizens or other subjects for breaking laws designed to censor, stifle or destroy those who dispute the government's "rights" to do as it does to its citizens or who seek to freely disseminate information; Includes banning certain political parties or activities, demanding complex registrations, permits, licenses and so forth to assemble and speak or to produce and distribute written materials, insisting upon governmental, covert or overt monitoring and/or police control of peaceful marches, meetings, demonstrations, festivals, etc.

d) Convicting and punishing citizens or other subjects for breaking any one of a large body of obscure and complex business regulations and codes, tax laws and other personal and private financial conduct laws;
Such laws are passed to gradually and surely increase governmental or other authorities controls over the lives, finances, employment, career choices, sharing and distribution of resources, efforts and wealth, including both material and interpersonal assets and activities, of all whom it governs.

EITHER A GOVERNMENT OR OTHER CIVIL CONTROL SYSTEM IS TOTALITARIAN IN ITS ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OR IT IS NOT. NO OTHER DEFINITIONS OR NAMES NEED BE CONSIDERED.

All other terms are just distractions from the Fact of totalitarianism. Not coincidentally, there is not one government of any nation on this earth at this time that has NOT crossed the line into at least the mildest attributes of totalitarianism as defined by these criteria.

We need never again waste our efforts and time in discussions of which current or previous government or part thereof is the "best" or "right" one, because they are ALL infected with the seed of totalitarianism. All else is but a matter of degree, with the underlying reality being they will inevitably get to absolute totalitarianism, with time, unless we use this new awareness to keep them in check and/or reverse the trend.

2. For Pathocratic Social Structure: ORWELLIAN.
Rigidly conformist in every regard, with very limited access to factual information and intellectual pursuits, such as higher education, public libraries, and open press or media sources, for the citizenry. An abundance of mindless pastimes will be provided, strongly supported and encouraged, with nearly unlimited access to pointless entertainments and distractions available for all. Many of them, such as television shows and competitive sports, are given far more attention and importance than is reasonable or even sane, and are used skillfully to programme the populace to ignore the realities of their circumstances and the nature of their governments.

3. The Pathocratic Economic System: FEUDALISM.
Fascism (which is the best, in purely economic terms, to describe the current "globalist Corporatocracy") is but a stepping stone to where the Pathocracy wants to take us. They will, in the end, if not stopped, have the very few of us left alive on the wasted Earth living in conditions at best equal to that of the average feudal serf or peasant, and serving the Pathocracy from birth to an early grave. Feudalism is the hidden character within any and every economic system allowing the few at the top to have far more than is necessary, or even reasonable, without first providing that all have enough. All economic systems in which this attribute is present will inevitably lead to absolute feudalism if allowed to continue unrestrained. That is their sole purpose, kept hidden until now.

4. The Pathocratic State Religion: BLIND FANATICISM.
The flavour is utterly irrelevant to them. They use religions to achieve mind control, spiritual blackmail, conformity, emotional control, etc. They care only that a religion's followers be programmed to sufficient fanaticism to then be easily manipulated by their religious beliefs and conditioned emotional responses. Despite the appearances the Pathocracy carefully maintains, all that any religion is to them is a very useful tool for stifling logical thought and inciting emotional reactions in individuals and thus controlling the masses. (Like it or not, Marx was right about that part.) They are as incapable of sincere religious feelings as of any other profound or normative emotions.

These four terms clearly describe the essential attributes and goals of those now attempting to make themselves the rulers of this planet, and, in most regards, of all their dedicated followers and cohorts.

Now we can Know them, and See them, and Name them as they are, not as they have claimed to be.

Using these four terms will empower reasonable people to communicate with one another about the Pathocracy sweeping down upon us without bringing the old and useless, divisive concepts into the discussion. It will lead to far greater clarity in our thoughts, our dialogues and most of all our abilities to See who is and is not among the members of the Type 2 Human Family.

No more does one need to say whether oneself or another is this, that or the other old label, for all that truly matters is whether anyone is LOGICAL or PATHOLOGICAL, SANE or INSANE, EMPATHIC OR PSYCHOPHAGIC. Type 2 or Type 1.

All else is mind cluttering noise, junk, only confusing and obscuring the reality, the facts. The Sane, Logical and Empathic are innately opposed to the Four Goals of Pathocracy, and the Insane, Pathological and Psychophagic innately embrace them and seek to impose them upon others.

All who would join me in a do-or-die-trying battle to halt and bring down the Insane, Pathological and Psychophagic, Pathocratic individuals, governments, religions, economies and all else of theirs in this world, are invited to join me in using these terms in that struggle. This entire struggle is the Final Invitation to us to mature into fully aware, fully conscious, fully focused and fully, personally and collectively responsible Beings who can and will embrace one another in a unity of purpose never seen before, globally. We must now become, act and live as a True Human Family, dedicatedly giving all that we are and have to bringing the ways of peace and community into a full, global flowering, and equally dedicated to defeating and extinguishing the destruction of the fully matured and no longer latent Pathocracy that has been unleashed upon us. Now is the moment, Humanity, when we either grow up or die.

Thursday, December 29, 2005


Saint Moses the Ethiopian: Apostle of Non-Violence.

As a young man, Moses cut a large and imposing figure, and was widely feared in the Nile Valley as a ruthless gang-leader. He later became a monk in the Egyptian desert, but had difficulty adjusting to monastic discipline. Saint Isidore, his abbot, took him to the monastery roof before dawn, and as they watched the sun rising, said, "Just as the sun rises slowly and banishes the night, so only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative."

Round about the year 407, when he was 75, Moses stayed behind with seven other brothers in his monastery when bandits were about to attack, and greeted the bandits with open arms. All eight of the monks were killed.

Tookie Williams: requiescas in pace.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Prayer for Today

The boundless forms cannot be awakened:
I vow to help awaken them.

The infinite chain of attainment cannot be escaped:
I vow to escape it.

The limitless questions cannot be asked:
I vow to ask all of them.

The knowledge of self and God cannot be attained:
I vow to attain it.

Okay, so this may not look like a prayer - more like a vow, maybe, or statement of intention. But then, what is a prayer, anyway?

This comes from The Gnostic Prayerbook at The Palm Tree Garden. Highly recommended, especially if you're a bit fed up with the usual Christian, "Bless Granny, and bless Grandad, and please look after all those people in the snow in Kashmir."

Which is alright - but it's not as though all these people weren't in the centre of Her thoughts already.

So, anyway, what is Prayer?

Terje Bergersen, writing in The Gnostic's Philokalia, suggests that:
A Prayer does not consist of words, a Prayer is not done in thought. All communal "prayers" are songs of thanksgiving.

The silent prayer of the solitary devotee consists of ourselves becoming the witness of the need, in the heart, to express its concern and its attraction gravitating towards the Divine Reality; supplication, thanksgiving, beseeching, wishing and so forth - standing aside, allowing the interchange between that Real One that dwells within it and itself.

Well, maybe that's not quite so clear - but I bet it's clearer in the original Norwegian. Intercession, petition, thanksgiving, beseeching, and just plain wishing aren't really prayer - unless the heart is completely engaged in it. Perhaps that sort of "prayer" is just self-deception.

Prayer: that's all about the heart, isn't it? The heart calling to the heart, allowing a stream of love to flow between the God who's hidden in Reality, and the God hidden within oneself. One divine spark to another - in the company of a cloud of witnesses: the other divine sparks contained in other people.

All these divine sparks, bogged down in the mud, longing for freedom: I think that's why Anarchism appeals to the best part of ourselves - the Heart.

Sunday, December 11, 2005


Outer Space. Nope, nothing much out here at all. Except for this really big eye.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

And Now I'm Back. From Outer Space.

But, really, there's not much to report - certainly not from Zeta Reticuli, at any rate.

During this long hiatus away from blogging, I've been doing a number of things, viz. reading yer actual books (e.g. Mark Hedsel's excellent 'The Zelator' and Peter Kropotkin's stupendous 'Memoirs of a Revolutionist'), getting my Breathing Apparatus qualification so I can go into yer actual burning buildings and rescue small puppies, and switching jobs. I'm now working for this really lovely small healthcare company which aims to help people out who have lymphoedema.

I do the credit control stuff, as well as various other bits and bobs - which is just as well, because I don't think I'd like to do accounting all the time. I mean, what would that do to your soul?

Anyway, it's Advent - which is a terrific season, and I aim to drink a lot of excellent wine, and eat the finest fruit crumbles known to humanity.

Sunday, September 11, 2005


Astonishing - this just in from Sky News! (But I think we already knew this some years ago ...)
[Thanks to Rinf.com]

Worst. President. Ever.

Bush didn't know the Hurricane damage was bad until THURSDAY AFTER IT STRUCK
by John in DC.

[Original story here.]

Newsweek has just published a horrifying story entitled "How Bush Blew It." This is must-read for everyone, and this story must be shared widely. Bush should resign, now. He is the worst president in modern history. This is criminal what he did.

What we learn in the Newsweek story:

1. Bush's aides are SO afraid of telling him bad news that they practically drew straws to see who would have to tell him, on TUESDAY, that the hurricane was so bad he'd need to come home.

2. Even on Thursday AFTER the storm, Bush didn't realize how bad the storm was: President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One. So Bush didn't realize how bad the storm damage was until Thursday night, almost the fifth day AFTER the storm hit. Good God. He was going to watch the weekly news Friday for the FIRST TIME to get a sense of how bad things were.

3. No one wanted to tell Bush the truth. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

4. Rumsfeld opposed sending in troops as cops.

5. "Bush created a disaster within a disaster." A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

6. Washington just wouldn't listen. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said.... The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."

7. 8pm on Monday, the day of the storm, the governor asked Bush for everything he's got. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

8. Instead of helping New Orleans Monday night, Bush went to bed. Here are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

9. Wednesday morning, while Bush was STILL on vacation, he wouldn't take the governor's call for help. Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics.

10. FEMA improved under Clinton, then was hurt under Bush. Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat.

11. Bush wanted to hear good news, so that's all they gave him until Friday. Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday.

12. It took local officials ripping Bush a new one on Friday for him to finally wake up - a full 5 days after the disaster. The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin.

© RINF.INFO All Rights Reserved

A balanced and incisive account of Bush's presidential manner (and the origin, it seems, of the term "reality-based community") can be found here, in Ron Suskind's New York Times article on wilful rejection of reality in the White House. The comments by the Christian preacher Jim Wallis are particularly helpful in understanding something about the man.

Bush was pretty much absent for many days after Katrina. And it's right to ask, Why? But just as important, I'd have thought, is: What's the deal with Dick Cheney during this same period? Where was he? Aren't Vice-Presidents supposed to have a role too?

Perhaps Bush's fundamental lack of curiosity was one of the main reasons why he was selected by the real power-brokers to occupy the Oval Office. If you don't ask questions, you can so easily be manipulated.

Which, of course, applies to all of us.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005


Scared of monsters.

50 Things About Me

This may seem terribly self-indulgent - and well, yes it is.

To give some background to this, however: Andy Trenier said the other day that I should probably write something about myself on this blog, because I haven't very much so far - ottershrews being notoriously shy and reclusive.

And Ran Prieur and Tim Boucher - bloggers I admire tremendously - have both written 100 things about themselves. What they wrote was completely gripping and interesting - probably because they just happen to be people who are naturally interesting, I guess! In any case, I thought I could have a go at the same thing, even if I only cover 50 points instead of 100.

So here it is:

1. I bite my nails – I mean really hard. I must be some sort of super-nervy guy - and, really, with the world in the state it’s in, can you blame me? Well, yes, of course you can. I mean, this is like some sort of self-harm kind of thing going on, isn’t it? But maybe not – it doesn’t actually hurt at all – it just means I have trouble doing things that the fully-nailed community can do. Like opening pistachios, for instance. Basically, I feel like a rat in a cage a good deal of the time.

2. Like Ran, I’m a Virgo slob. He says he has no trouble leaving an oat on the kitchen floor. But, blimey, you should see the state of my flat: you’ve got clothes all over the floor (clean, okay, but not actually folded and tidied away), dusty piles of books, the washing-up gets done when I’ve psyched myself up for it. It’s like ‘Withnail and I’ quite a lot of the time. But then I’ll get to actually tidy up, and the place will get spruced-up no end – like when I know there are guests coming. Otherwise – bombsite.

3. I was born in Oxford - but, what with the family moving around a good deal, it took a long time before I came back to Oxfordshire, like a spawning salmon. And I’m very happy here in this little market town near the border with Bucks. I’ve been here more than five years now, which is like a record with me – normally I’m moving around like an albatross. Or a restless albatross, even. Or an albatross pursued by Furies. Do albatrosses get pursued by Furies?

4. I must be the moliest guy I’ve ever met. I mean, not just in the sense that I’m like a mole, burrowing away underground, and shunning the sunlight. I do that anyway, at least figuratively, in that I love coming home and just collapsing on the couch for a quick snooze – or standing at my kitchen door, looking out into the garden, with a roll-up of Dutch tobacco in one hand and a mug of strong, sweet Kenya tea in the other. Bliss! But I’m not as good-looking as moles are; they’ve got to be some of the smartest-looking creatures that ever there were. Just made for stroking – but I’m not sure they’d like that. I don’t think you could tame them to the point where stroking would be possible – and actually that’s another excellent characteristic of moles. There was that mole in ‘Wind in the Willows’, though – he looked pretty tameable. Or at least tameable by water-rats, at any rate. Have you ever read ‘Wind in the Willows’? Crap, isn’t it?

5. And I’m going to have to tell you about my couch: it’s shit-brown, slick leatherette and kind of organic-looking in the most obscene way – like the pods in ‘Alien’. You only have to look at it and something primal in you starts screaming …

6. My family are pretty horsey, and I even had a horse of my own once. They’re noble creatures, horses are, and I’ve got every respect for them – but I don’t like riding them all that much, all the same. I seem to fall off a lot - and what’s the fun in that? The last time I was on a horse was in the hills of southern India. Actually, that was really good – you could scamper away from the fierce buffaloes, and at one point I was cantering along this dirt road through a forest in the rain, and came across this massive troop of woolly black monkeys. I mean, it’s memories like that which really keep you going in life, isn’t it?

7. Another time, I was coming down on foot through a really dense forest in the French Pyrenees, and I hadn’t seen anyone all day, since I left a group of hunters at the top of this mountain. It was raining pretty hard, and I didn’t really have a very clear idea of where I was. And then all these golden-yellow bug-eyed salamanders came out of the undergrowth on to the path, and they were like saying, ‘This is where we live; what the hell are you doing here?’ Strange, and at the same time, deeply good.

8. Forests are great - but deserts are brilliant as well. Probably because there are so few people there. People are wonderful, but I find them really quite unnerving as well. I probably come across as rather shy, because I tend not to say very much when I’m in company – actually I’ve got this inner dialogue going on, which I don’t like interrupting. That doesn’t mean I’m misanthropic though – I’m just a dreamy space-cadet type of a person. Well, not a cadet exactly – more a Flight Lieutenant on scouting duties somewhere near Zeta Reticuli. In the Anarchist Space Militia.

9. Where would I like to go on my holidays? The North Pole. Or Mars. Hang it all – let’s go for the big one: the Martian North Pole.

10. I’m really into science fiction - but the dreamy, poetic, somewhat horrific kind of science fiction. Like Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick. Or H.P. Lovecraft even. I like it when they teasingly test your sanity – but like anyone, I’m not sure I could stand a really intense shock to my mental system. My ego would probably go into emergency defensive overdrive, and take the rest of me at warp factor 9 into some roaring black hole of its own devising. Or maybe not.

11. I’ve just come across this amazing bit of music from the 1960’s for a film by Yasujiro Ozu: ‘An Autumn Afternoon’. God knows why I’m finding it so appealing – but I think it’s this sense of nostalgia that it creates. Nostalgia, though, in the Russian sense of the word: the remembrance of home, and the strong desire to return to it. Plus the waking up to the recognition that where we are now isn’t really home at all. Do you ever feel that? I think that’s why I’d find Mars to be no less alien than this place.

12. I wear these scuffed old black Vans on my feet. Not because I go skateboarding, but because I can slip them on pretty quickly if I’m woken in the night – and slip them off equally quickly when I get to the station to put my boots and leggings on. Apart from that, I’m a jeans-and-tee-shirt kind of a person. Other stuff I’ve got on me at the moment: an expensive steel watch from Denmark (a present from my mother, who likes anything Danish), wax (on my hair), plasters on my knuckles (from getting burnt in a field fire), a brown leather belt I bought in San Francisco, a little black alerter with disco-lights on the top which flash, blue sports socks which have faded to mauve. My government-issue fire-retardant underpants have an embroidered waistband reading ‘Oxfordshire County Council’, and teasingly sport the words ‘HOT STUFF’ with a red-and-yellow flame motif underneath.

13. Actually, I may have lied about one of those items.

14. Some of the things on my bench at work: a roll of solder (‘I love the smell of hot solder in the morning’), lots of old tools (much nicer to handle than new tools), multi-purpose oil, an old novel (‘Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone’ by James Baldwin), a book from the 1970’s on CIA mind control experiments, a tape recorder (mostly playing sitar music at the moment – some comments from co-workers: ‘Where’s that peshwari naan?’, ‘Is that king prawn jalfrezzi ready yet?’, etc.).

15. Two of my favourite tools: a yellow-handled 3-inch German CeKa screwdriver, with a lovely sharp tip; a very old monkoosh (a hoeing tool) which I got when I was doing archaeology at Qadesh-on-the-Orontes in Syria in 1986. Very good for opening coconuts.

16. I think of life as a massive riddle. I’m not sure that I’m really going to figure it all out in time – or if I have any allies at all, either. I think that’s why I get a bit nervous. In Oxford they have this maze-like building called the smokehouse. It’s called that because they fill it with smoke, and then, once you’ve got your self-contained breathing apparatus on, they boot you inside and shut the door. I feel like life is like a smokehouse, and there you are, in the dark and heat and smoke, hunting for the exit, and running low on air. And your team-mates are either slumped against the wall waiting to be rescued, or they’re panicky, or going round in circles, or whatever. At any rate, communication is difficult, because the sound of your own breathing is so loud, and you can only talk through a voice diaphragm and facemask, which distorts what you’re saying. I think life’s a whole lot more of a challenge than a lot of people seem to imagine it to be.

17. Did I say I was the moliest? Yup – quite possibly. Plus I’ve got all these little red Campbell de Morgan spots as well. But my grandmother was very moley as well – she came from Saskatchewan, and when she was young she used to skate alone on moonlit winter nights for miles and miles along frozen rivers in heavy skirts, while Indians watched. She could speak a bit of Cree and Blackfoot, but her main language was Ukrainian, because her parents had come from a village in Galicia. Her father was a carpenter, and helped to build churches on the prairie, with onion domes like in the old country.

18. She was a great cook – her beet tops were my favourite.

19. I’m a Canadian citizen through my father, who comes from Manitoba. He’s a pilot, and used to fly two-seater T-33 Silver Stars for the Royal Canadian Air Force. They were a bit of a flying bomb: if the engine caught fire, the pilots would have to eject straight away before the thing exploded. When he was teaching, he’d say to the student, ‘If I say Eject, and you say What?, you’ll be talking to yourself.’ I love that story!

20. I’m pretty heavily into Castaneda and Gurdjieff at the moment.

21. I’ve been a vegetarian over the last nine years. I think the way animals are treated generally is a complete disgrace; abattoirs in particular fill me with loathing.

22. I don’t do drugs at all – although I did smoke pot once or twice when I was on holiday in Egypt. Didn’t have any effect on me, though. Perhaps I ought to have a go at psychedelics? DMT looks particularly intriguing, but I’d need a teacher.

23. My eyebrows meet to form a monobrow. They don’t taper or anything in the middle – it’s just like one long furry caterpillar. Mad!

24. I love running – miles and miles and miles.

25. I love motorbikes as well. I got my first motorcycle licence on Vancouver Island, and then had to repeat the whole process here in England. But I’m too broke to own a bike at the moment. I used to have a little Honda H100 when I was young. On hot summer days, with the smell of ripe wheat in the air, I used to go tooling around the narrow country roads of Essex. It was like floating, two thousand times better than being in a car, something very close to heaven. The countryside felt intoxicatingly ancient as it unwound in front of me. Extraordinary.

26. I was once on the London stage during a production of ‘Blood Brothers’ in the West End. I didn’t actually intend to be on stage – I just took a wrong turn while trying to get out of a restaurant, and after going through all these dark tunnels, ended up spotting daylight. Only it was a lot stronger than daylight – I never realised how bright stage lights are! They were doing some crummy duet, and one of the actors gave me a particularly dirty look. I hate musicals.

27. I’ve written a novel called ‘Mudfordshire’ - which, as the title might suggest, is about earth and the soil. I’ve been trying recently also to write a second novel called ‘The Bitch of the Gods’, which is going to be about fire. ‘Mudfordshire’ covers one week in the life of country folk. I like all the characters, who all represent some aspect or other of myself. I think it’s a universal world-bestriding masterpiece, like Moby-Dick (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) - but can I get it published? Can I heck.

28. I grew up in the countryside of Hertfordshire, West Lothian (in Scotland), and Cheshire. Scotland, where I lived between the ages of 10 and 16, was particularly grim. When it grew dark at the end of the day, I’d begin to feel an abiding dread. Dread? No, terror, really. I still get a little bit afraid at night, and sometimes sleep with the lights on. Go figure. But I am scared of monsters, all the same.

29. My favourite bloggers are Jeff Wells (Rigorous Intuition), Ran Prieur and Tim Boucher (Pop Occulture). These guys are incredible. I mean really, really incredible. Something within me weeps whenever I read their stuff. Finally, after all these years, I realise that there are people out there who’re a bit like me. Who would have thought it? But it’s going to take a lot of work before I get up to their standard – if indeed it’s possible. Did I mention how incredible these guys are?

30. I used to be a specky four-eyes, until I had my eyesight corrected with laser surgery. I laughed all the way through the operation. What does that say about me?

31. My predictions for the future? Economic collapse in the West, tactical nuclear attacks on Iran and Syria, mind-controlled assassins all kicking off at once, flu pandemic, and martial law in the UK and US (though they won’t actually call it that). Followed by the first wave of a cometary shower. Aliens step in to give us a hand, then enslave our collective ass, before we’ve realised they’re not nearly as nice as they seemed. And not really aliens either, but fourth-dimensional ultraterrestrial stockbreeders. Basically we’ll get what we’re currently dishing out to the Iraqis; that’s karma for you. Then the rest of the comets will hit home. I doubt that any of us will see 2020.

32. I really love anarchism – but the thoughtful kind of mutual-aidy type of anarchism, where everybody’s fluffy and kind. My slogan is: What would Kropotkin do? But I do like the kick-ass Spanish Civil War type of anarchism as well. As a project, though, it’s all rather doomed, isn’t it? At the end of the day, at least five per cent of the population is hard-core psychopathic, with no morals or scruples of any kind. I mean, they just don’t understand ethics – it’s like a huge blind spot or weird autistic kind of disability. And they’re the ones in power, like Tony Blair and George Bush, and pretty much all world leaders. Other than Hugo Chavez, naturally – the president who reads Walt Whitman to the people; how cool is that? And the late lamented Yassir Arafat – another good guy who slipped in under the radar. And Clement Attlee, for that matter. So, anyway, the whole culture’s pretty much psychopathic now, thanks to the insane divide-and-rule ideology of capitalism, and the scum who’ve risen to the top. Madness!

33. On this date in 1969: I was living on the coast near Athens, doing lots of colouring-in with my sister, reading my new book about the Solar System, eating lots of watermelon, learning how to go down stairs two at a time, collecting bottle tops from the dust at the side of the roads, and going to watch this really neat dancing bear. And water-skiing, which I wasn’t very good at.

34. I’m a member of the Fire Brigades Union – largely because they’ve been just about the only people in the country to square up to Slugger Prescott (the Deputy Prime Minister – God help us), and more or less stand their ground. But I haven’t really been a member of any union before this, apart from the National Union of Students, which doesn’t really count, because they’re dickheads. Allegedly.

35. I don’t watch television any more. I ditched it about a year ago, when I realised I didn’t have the money for the licence, anyway. Devilvision: key mind control tool, plus Drug of the Nation. Though I did like ‘Will & Grace’ a lot. And ‘The Book Group’. And ‘Black Books’ – GENIUS!

36. When I was at school I was in a band. We really weren’t very good. Really. It was like a fusion of James Taylor and Black Sabbath, with a Christian Contemporary ‘edge’. Hmmm. I did the vocals, because I can’t play any instrument whatsoever. Really, the band was toe-curlingly embarrassing. But very, very good fun.

37. But I did do some proper singing, though, some years later, in the early 1990s. I went to this gay theological college in Yorkshire. And I don’t mean ‘gay’ the way it’s often used these days, as in ‘ineffectual, not very well co-ordinated, half-hearted, a bit of a mess’, e.g. Annie: ‘Hi, Bob, how are you doing? I see you’re making mince pies. How have they turned out?’ – Bob (with disdain): ‘Yeah, the pastry was far too short, so the pies are all falling apart. They’re completely fucking gay.’ That’s a somewhat pejorative use of the word ‘gay’, and I was actually using it in its more positive (or at least neutral) sense, i.e. same-sex oriented. I’ve nothing against being gay – if that’s the way you are, then that’s the way you are. When I was at this college I reckoned I was probably gay myself, and even had a boyfriend for a short while round about that time. But I think now that labels are altogether too constricting, and can have the danger of fusing you into one particular way of thinking, and one particular way of life. I think we’ve all got to get a lot more flexible and open-minded if we’re to have any chance of making progress and become truly selfless people. Otherwise the ego’s just going to get right in the way. And anyway, learning’s fun, isn’t it? Aren’t we trying to edge closer and closer to the truth? So – labels – I’m not very happy with them, even though this 50-point summary is full of them.

38. Anyway, they were really hot on music at this college, i.e. plainsong – all that Gregorian chant kind of thing, plus a bit of Eastern Orthodox church singing. It’s really beautiful and liberating to sing that sort of stuff.

39. We lived in Queensland for a bit more than a year when I was very young. We had this house on a cliff looking out to Magnetic Island on the Great Barrier Reef. When my parents were packing to leave, I went missing. They eventually found me in the park where I’d wandered off to look at the colourful birds. I was about two.

40. When I was a kid I wanted to be a zoo-keeper, because I was really into zoology. I reckon what happened was that, when it was hot, my parents would put me out to sleep on the porch through the night, and possums would come and sniff round me and sleep next to me. There were flying foxes everywhere, so the air was thick with big creatures.

41. When I was at university in Liverpool I was really into chaos magic, which was just getting started, with a lot of activity in the north of England in the mid-1980s. I’ve never really tried to do any kind of ritual magic, and I don’t have time for rituals of any sort now, but it was just really refreshing to read something that was just totally different. And no, it’s not satanism – that’s top-down hierarchical sicko stuff, which hates life and doesn’t care if everybody else gets hurt; they’re also in league with similarly-minded ultraterrestrials, which makes them particularly dangerous. There are some people who call themselves satanists who just prance around, and find the whole evil thing just delicious, darling; they’re fairly harmless, but the hard-core satanists are some very sick and twisted bastards indeed. Chaos magic, on the other hand, is like one of many openings into spirituality for anarchists, and very funny and irreverent as well. I don’t know what it’s like now, but at the time it was generally left-wing rather than lefthand-path. Or so it seemed.

42. I did my degree in Oriental Studies. I had to do two languages: Akkadian was my main language, which was basically various dialects of Babylonian and Assyrian over a two thousand year period, all in this wacky cuneiform script, and classical Hebrew was my second. It was a crazy thing to study, because it marks you out as a weirdo for life. Actually, for that reason alone it was a brilliant choice, and I don’t regret it at all, even though I’m a bit crap at languages, and only got a II:2. But I was mad keen on the Epic of Gilgamesh, so – what can you do? You’ve got to follow the heart, haven’t you?

43. I went on a few archaeological digs though at this time. It was excellent fun to do something practical, rather than just language study, which could be a bit dry. I went on digs in Scotland, Galilee and Syria. I got thoroughly brown in Galilee, because I was working in just a pair of shorts. It’s wonderful scrabbling about in the hard-packed earth with a dental pick or a trowel, or taking spot-heights while trying to avoid the hornets. We were uncovering the remains of these Stone Age people, and you actually felt you were becoming a bit Stone Age yourself, which was really liberating. Plus, most of the team were French, and French people are effortlessly cool.

44. I was walking over to the main ruin-mound, which was about ninety feet high, at Qadesh in Syria. There was an air base nearby, because Qadesh was right at the top of the Beqaa Valley near the border with Lebanon; in other words, pretty much on the front line with the Israelis, who had invaded Lebanon at the time. Anyway, there was this amazing rumbling behind me as I was walking along, and then this MiG-21 shot over my head – and as it did so, its afterburner suddenly flashed on, showing these incredible colours. It was all so close it practically singed my eyebrows. Difficult to know why it affected me so much, but I imagine it’s all rather phallic …

45. I can’t stand sport. I know, it’s like one massive blind spot. I’ve been to events like the Grand Prix, the St. Leger, Euro 96 (England v. Germany, i.e. some sort of ‘grudge’ match), and just felt completely bored. How does a person get interested in this sort of banality? When people are talking about sport, for me it’s like: Must ... keep ... eyelids ... open, must try to focus, sound interested. But really, I just want to say: Dickhead, why are you boring me with this stuff? Don’t you know you sound like a fucking trainspotter? Get a life, for fuck’s sake. But of course you can’t do that – it’s far too hurtful, especially when people construct whole sections of their lives around support for some football team or other. And we’re all dickheads one way or another, anyway. Playing sports seems to be another matter altogether, because at least you’re doing something. I got quite into orienteering once – for about two or three days.

46. I was a monk for a while – a Little Brother of Christ and St Richard. It was a bit like being a kind of Franciscan, or Petit Frere of the Charles de Foucauld sort. Actually, it was a bit like being in a sort of hippie commune. ‘Little Brothers’ always sounded a bit wet to me - I preferred the term ‘Stormtroopers of the Infant King’. The comradeship was fantastic. I did this for three years.

47. Some of us went out to Uruguay to set up a community in Montevideo. I really wanted to buy a horse and get out on to the pampas, but it never happened. Instead we were stuck in the city, and a country boy like me gets a bit depressed when there’s nothing but houses everywhere. Plus, I was massively uptight, and needed to loosen up a good deal. We got this really nice house in one of the barrios, though. It was old and crumbling, with stained glass in some of the windows. Plus a wild garden. We all got ringworm.

48. My mother and stepfather live in a castle in Shropshire, and that’s where I wrote the first quarter of ‘Mudfordshire’. It’s old, old, old, with carved stone heads on the battlements, towers, walls several feet thick, stained glass coats of arms. It’s quite Tolkienesque. Everyone should have a castle like this - and perhaps one day we all will.

49. I don’t get on very well with police officers. A couple of weeks ago, I more or less told this (perfectly pleasant) policeman to get lost – it’s just a natural reaction with me, and I think I need to become a whole lot more polite. I used to respect the police quite a lot, but I found a couple of years ago they could be really quite unpleasant when it came to moving on anti-war protestors. One policeman pretty nearly dislocated my shoulder. I’ve not been arrested yet though – only detained for a while in a holding pen outside the American embassy.

50. I’m black – only you can’t tell from looking at me. But if you go back only a little way in my family tree, it becomes more apparent. I don’t really go in for this ethnic identity kind of thing, though. If you’re a human being, I reckon that should be enough.

So there it is - as Tim would say: BAM! Finito ... until I write another 50 things.

Sunday, August 07, 2005


Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos: neither a pipe-smoker, nor a horseman, nor even a subcomandante - but a human being.

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Who Is Subcomandante Marcos?

"Marcos" (not his original name) is the main spokesperson for the Zapatistas - the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), based among the indigenous peasants of the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas.

In public, he always wears a mask. This makes him look either like a terrorist - or like Zorro. Take your pick on that one - here in our god-awful culture we always prize style over content - but the real reason he does this is to avoid being recognised in the street by government forces, and shot in the head. So I think that's a pretty sensible precaution, don't you?

The Mexican government think they know who he is, and if they're right he has a masters' degree in Philosophy, and was once a professor at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. But then again, they could easily be wrong.

At any rate, he's something of a poet.

Here's his own description of who he is:
"Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio.... A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighbourhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker... an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Marcos is a human being, any human being, in this world. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, 'Enough'!"
So who is Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos? Well, he's not anyone in particular, really - if we take seriously what he says about himself.

He's just a human being, who's standing up and saying, "Ya Basta! Enough!"

Which is something very few of us actually seem to do.

Why is this? A recent article in Media Lens explores this discrepancy by looking at the amount of angst poured out over the loss of life suffered in the London bombings - compared to the multitude of equally terrible tragedies experienced recently in Iraq, which seemed to go by with not much more than a shrug of the shoulders from people here in Britain:

They Just Never Meant Very Much to Us
by David Edwards
[25 July 2005]

Extract:
[...] At time of writing, the death toll from the London bombings stands at 56 dead. In the early evening of March 28, 2003, the media reported the killing of 55 Iraqi civilians (the final toll was 62) by an American missile in the al-Shula district of Baghdad. Hours later, David Sells of the BBC's Newsnight programme devoted 45 seconds to the atrocity 16 minutes into the programme - less than one second per death.

These 45 seconds presented the slaughter as an Anglo-American public relations problem, and a predictable one at that: "It is a war, after all", Sells observed blandly over footage of Iraqi women wailing in grief, adding: "But the coalition aim is to unseat Saddam Hussein by winning hearts and minds."

Imagine if Sells had commented on the London bombings that [...], "It is a terrorist campaign, after all", but the bombers' aim was "to win hearts and minds".

I asked George Entwistle, then Newsnight editor, how he justified just 45 seconds of coverage. He replied: "As a current affairs programme we lead on a news story where we think we can add analytical value; i.e., can we take it on? We didn't feel we could add anything." (Interview with the author, March 31, 2003)

Something of "analytical value" would certainly have been found if the victims had been British or American. We can make all the excuses we like, but the fact is that tragedies of this kind just don't mean as much to us.

Last week, the Independent noted that an October 2004 report in The Lancet had estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at nearly 100,000, but that the methodology "was subsequently criticised". (Terry Kirby and Elizabeth Davies, 'Iraq conflict claims 34 civilians lives each day as "anarchy" beckons,' The Independent, July 20, 2005)

But the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which conducted the survey, is one of the world's most prestigious research organisations. And The Lancet is one of the world's leading science journals. I asked Terry Kirby, co-author of the Independent article, which criticisms he had in mind. Kirby replied: "So far as I am aware, the Lancet's report was criticised by the Foreign Office." (Email to the author, July 22, 2005)

On the same day, an Independent leader added that the Lancet findings had been reached "by extrapolating from a small sample... While never completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted." (Leader, 'The true measure of the US and British failure,' The Independent, July 20, 2005)

Lead author Gilbert Burnham from the Johns Hopkins School told me the sample size was entirely standard:

"Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!" (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to the author, October 30, 2004)

[...]

I've sometimes had discussions with people on the subject of altruism, love and compassion where someone has indicated, say, their wife and children, and declared: "I'd sacrifice my life to protect them."

Alan Wallace [the author of Buddhism With An Attitude, Snow Lion Publications, 2001] invites us to consider whether this kind of commitment is necessarily rooted in compassion and altruism, or whether it might involve an extension of selfishness. Are we in fact defending what we see as part of "me" and "mine", extensions of ourselves?

The media praise public outpourings of compassion and grief for the victims of London, New York and Madrid as signs of a nation's humanity. And surely they are. But how much of this concern is also rooted in a sense that we - our people, our security, our way of life - are under attack? How much is our reaction actually an expression of self-concern?

It is vital that we aspire to broaden and equalise our compassion for suffering. Not because it's "nice", not because we should "teach the world to sing". It is vital because otherwise there is a real danger that, in caring deeply for real and important 'us', and ignoring irrelevant 'them', we become utterly blind to the misery we are causing, and entirely ruthless in crushing those who cause us harm.

[...]

Many people believe there is a deep divide between ethics and politics. But a patriotic version of compassion is often the most potent weapon of realpolitik. It is used to persuade us to ignore our own crimes and to turn against "evildoers", official enemies often selected on the basis of carefully hidden agendas.

Compassion can also, however, be the most potent tool of liberation, breaking the links of greed, hatred and ignorance from which our political chains are formed. Power needs compassion to be partial, patriotic, rooted in self-concern. Humanity needs compassion to be universal, unconditional and equal.

The basis for this equalised concern is straight forward enough: everyone is identical in yearning from the depths of their hearts for an end to suffering and for lasting happiness. Recognising that this is so - that others truly are just like us in this respect - provides a basis for universal compassion. Or are we seriously to believe that suffering is somehow deeper and more important 'here' than 'there'? Suffering is simply suffering.

Every time our media present Third World people as anonymous crowds, as inconsequential extras in grand Western dramas, we might remind ourselves of the deeply humane words spoken by the cousin of a Palestinian man shot dead by the Israeli army in Nablus refugee camp. The man spoke of his shock at the events of September 11, but continued:

"I know what they feel. But I want them to know what I feel. I think many of them don't want to know about us, don't want to know what we feel. They think we are from another country, or from another star. We also, like them, we cry! We live! We feel sad! We feel happy! And we have minds, also! I want them to use their minds and to understand what happened here." (Through Muslim Eyes, Channel 4, September 6, 2002)


So, what to do? Subcomandante Marcos must seem to many people either hopelessly romantic in the way he views things - or dangerously quixotic, in that he's destabilising people's lives in southern Mexico, by advocating an impossible reorganisation of that society from the bottom up.

In other words, he must be a terrorist, because he's advocating a change in our "way of life" - the sort of thing Tony Blair instinctively finds threatening, instantly betraying his utter blindness to everything the Labour party used to stand for. And Marcos wants this change, not just in Chiapas, but throughout the world; the EZLN sees itself, after all, as part of the resistance to globalisation - which is of course, as the term implies, a global struggle.

And he carries a gun, so he must be a terrorist, right? Well, the Zapatistas only fought for a couple of weeks in 1994, right after the implementation of NAFTA - and in any case many of the "fighters" only had rifles carved out of wood - so I wonder if that's really the case today, or was ever the case, ever.

Of course, in our society, where schools and universities work hard to de-educate the masses, everyone assumes that society can only ever be structured the way it is currently. To question that renders you liable to suspicion, derision, incomprehension or fear.

Why is this? Allan Bloom, the American educationalist, has this to say in his book, The Closing of the American Mind:

"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."
Which is the de-educated, unimaginative, tyranny we find ourselves in today - where everyone is reduced to the status of epsilon semi-morons, purely for the benefit of our lords and rulers.

Who is Subcomandante Marcos?

A more pertinent question might be, "Who am I?" And if we answer, "I am a Project Manager for a FTSE 1000-listed company, a British citizen, a home-owner who drives a Mini Cooper, a graduate of a Russell-group university, heterosexual, with a husband/wife who loves me (I think), and a strong interest in home improvement, surfing, F1 and Pink Floyd," then we may have missed the fucking point.

We all pretty much do this sort of thing (myself included) - but it's little more than an ego-defence, an explanation of ourselves to ourselves, which, in the end, is false. That type of self-identification is largely pointless, because it's mostly just adulation and service of the self; that's you in the box, trying desperately to get somewhere else in the same box.

A box is a box, however you look at it. A box is a prison-cell; a box is a coffin.

It's all based on ignorance, anyway. If we had some real insight into other people's lives, we'd soon abandon our petty ambitions, and begin to think a bit more broadly and expansively - a bit more generously, in fact. After all, who's more important - me on this London bus, or Ahmed Ali in his beaten-up old pickup ferrying watermelons into Baghdad?

Both of us are vulnerable to instant destruction; both of us are struggling to make ends meet; both of us have been whipped into submission by our culture, our society, our schools, our families, our religion, our government, our defensive psychological reactions to all these years of conditioning - and finally by our general cluelessness.

Subcomandante Marcos, though, shows us a way out: made of the same clay, we all suffer exclusion, loneliness, dissatisfaction, ignorance - all these are forms of poverty. If we try to scramble individually out of this mire, we will never succeed - that's the whole point of "divide-and-conquer": atomise society and pit everybody against everybody else.

Game over.

But if we started recognising absolutely the same humanity in absolutely everybody else, things might just begin to unravel in a very positive way - the knots we've tied ourselves into might relax sufficiently for us to get some blood back in our limbs, some oxygen back in our lungs.

So who is Subcomandante Marcos?

It could be us.


More on the Zapatistas:
Indymedia UK - Zapatista
ZNet Chiapas Watch
Writings of Subcommander Marcos of the EZLN

Typical Mudfordshire countryside.

Mudfordshire

HarperCollins finally got back to me recently after I had submitted the manuscript of my novel Mudfordshire to them.

It took them a little while to get through it ... but at least it got a reading! A group of them read it and most of them thought it was really good, and they really liked it and all - and that's as far as it goes. No chance of publication there, then.

I can only guess at reasons why they wouldn't want to publish it: perhaps it's too psychedelic, doesn't conform to any particular genre, wouldn't make for a very good airport read (although I think it's pretty exciting), is a bit too challenging/upsetting for a comedy, is way too scary - and about 5 per cent of the book is written in a kind of Miltonic blank verse!

It's still a masterpiece, though. Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? :)

In case you're interested, here's the cast of main characters from the book:


Alex (25 years old)
Losing his job in the feed store at Taxbridge, Alex has little in the way of a future. He dreams of a life in Australia, but his inertia almost certainly means a life stuck instead in Mudfordshire - an obstinately rural county somewhere in the English Midlands. Meeting a black panther in the lanes is fairly disturbing, but at least there’s his local, the Wolf & Whistle, where he can seek solace in a quiet pint …

Maria (30 years old)
A village Primary School teacher, coming to terms with life after her parents’ fatal accident. (They had driven fast into the back of a slow-moving tractor and plough.) Maria undergoes a nervous breakdown after coming across some charming badgers - but her dead parents are there to pick up the emotional pieces. Though consistently distant, and having quite prominent ears, Alex falls heavily for her charms.

Mrs Jasmine (60 years old)
Another teacher, and Maria’s colleague. Self-consciously mysterious, and with a romantic family background in a Himalayan secret society, Mrs Jasmine seems confident that she has all the answers. But even she acknowledges that the wren she has befriended actually seems to know more than she does. She finds it difficult to acknowledge, though, how lonely she often feels.

Jim Glossop (50 years old)
A well-established farmer, powerfully built and commanding, Jim has murdered his wife and son, and subsequently become obsessed with the hidden glory in his crop of mangels. Aggressive and often savagely direct, he can scarcely contain the new forces that energise him. Murder comes easy to him, but it’s lonely work. Nevertheless, at least he can try and do his best by his new Master.

Mrs Cow (45 years old)
A breeder of Siamese cats, lascivious, and, due to a vast intake of Abernethy biscuits, powerfully built as well. Mrs Cow also turns to murder - not to mention rape - as the ready ally of Jim Glossop.

George and Kitty (both 55 years old)
Alex’s uncle and aunt. George is a gentle postman, perhaps excessively conscious of his obligations to the Post Office. Nervous but friendly, he is coerced into becoming Jim Glossop’s unwilling messenger. Straightforward, unassuming and domestic, Kitty lost all her children at birth. But she loves her kitchen, and readily adopts the crow thrown through the window of her cottage tied to a brick.

A Weird Stranger
The catalyst for major changes in all the characters, this stranger has rather an inflated opinion of himself - and an ambivalent regard for the sanctity of human life. Addicted to poetry.


All in all, it took about six years (off and on) to hammer this novel out - and my aim was to kind of summarise the whole of human existence in one week of life in the English countryside. And why not? Looking back on the project, I can hardly believe I managed to finish it at all - it was a bitch of a job. Aspiring novelists, please take note, and beware!

But at the same time, it kind of saved my life, in a strange sort of way. After all the work that went into it, Mudfordshire is a county I feel completely at home in, a parallel universe to the one we live in, and yet weirdly similar to it. In fact, it is the real universe, stripped bare of the lies we tell ourselves about the rural idyll - and yet with all the glories of the natural (and praeternatural) world pushed well to the fore.

Mudfordshire is weirder than weird - the idea being that only by exploring the weird can we have any hope of enlarging the confines of the world we find ourselves in.

Which can only be a good thing, if we want to get out of the prison-world we've constructed for ourselves.

But it's obviously a bit too weird for HarperCollins!

Saturday, July 23, 2005


Iranian women - photograph by Isabelle Eshraghi.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Wars, and Rumours of War

It's difficult what to make of this - but if it's true, it's undeniably scary. The source is Philip Giraldi, an ex-CIA man, writing in the latest edition of The American Conservative, of which he is one of the editors:
"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections."
Of course, as the Downing Street Memos have witnessed, attacks like these may begin earlier than any of us poor schmucks realise, with covert operations testing the waters, and trying to needle a foreign power into an armed response. Earlier on this year Giraldi indicated that something like this is already happening in Iran:

"The Bush administration still has the long-range goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East, writes Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine. Despite the burden of the Iraq war, he says US special forces have moved secretly into Iran in search of nuclear and missile sites that could be targeted in a military strike. A US government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told Mr. Hersh: 'The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.'

"President Bush's reelection made this military plan possible, writes Mr. Hersh. The White House feels it has popular backing for its Middle East policies and continues to assert more control over the military and the CIA. He adds it is also striving to reduce oversight of its actions by the US Congress.

"Some kind of US attack on Iran is likely, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA clandestine officer and co-publisher of Intelligence Brief:

"'Probably the wind has gone out of the sails of the people that would be inclined toward a full-scale invasion after what has happened in Iraq. Iran is after all much bigger and more populous than Iraq. I think basically what we are going to see is an escalating covert campaign.'"

And Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, also indicates that the war in Iran has already begun, in a recent (23 June 2005) article for Aljazeera:
"Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war. On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that 'I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary.'

"We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the 'execute' orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

"These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.

"President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

"The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

"This timeline of events has ramifications that go beyond historical trivia or political investigation into the events of the past.

"It represents a record of precedent on the part of the Bush administration which must be acknowledged when considering the ongoing events regarding US-Iran relations. As was the case with Iraq pre-March 2003, the Bush administration today speaks of 'diplomacy' and a desire for a 'peaceful' resolution to the Iranian question.

"But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.

"As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullahs to an 'axis of evil' (together with the newly 'liberated' Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of 'democracy' to the Iranian people.

"'Liberation' and the spread of 'democracy' have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.

"By the intensity of the 'liberation/democracy' rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration. But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

"As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream.

"The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

"The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

"President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

"The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

"It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

"Perhaps the adage of 'one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist' has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror. But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.

"To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.

"Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan's role in the upcoming war with Iran.

"The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.

"But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.

"In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.

"No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Arab Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.

"A much shorter route to Tehran now exists - the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.

"US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.

"Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.

"Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003. America and the Western nations continue to be fixated on the ongoing tragedy and debacle that is Iraq. Much needed debate on the reasoning behind the war with Iraq and the failed post-war occupation of Iraq is finally starting to spring up in the United States and elsewhere.

"Normally, this would represent a good turn of events. But with everyone's heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran - an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.

"Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

"We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran."
Perhaps this is the real reason why so many British forces are being mobilised into southern Afghanistan ...

Sunday, July 10, 2005

London Bombs

It's difficult to know where to begin as far as the London tube and bus bombings are concerned.

The most appalling thing, of course, about these attacks is the fact that so many ordinary working-class people died or were injured in them. The bombers had scant regard for ordinary people, and treated them (by which I mean, us) as so many insects.

This attitude, which supposes that one set of people is more important than another set, lies at the opposite extreme to anarchism; anarchists believe that all human life is holy, that nobody should be treated as less human than oneself, that all deserve respect and consideration.

"Love your neighbour as yourself" - that's the message we get out of that otherwise scurrilous book, Leviticus - and that's the message that Jesus considered the heart, the main point, of the Torah. Even if your neighbour is a psychopathic bastard, he or she has been put here on earth to play a part in the vast theological drama of our lives - and therefore deserves respect as a human being.

As the Cassiopaeans say, "All there is is lessons". We can learn from anybody: friends, neighbours, politicians - and even terrorists.

And the lesson here, I think, is prompted by the question: What did the bombers hope to achieve by these attacks?

One of the things they hoped to achieve, I think, was the instillation of fear in our hearts. As Frank Herbert has it in his sf novel Dune, "Fear is the mind-killer". Fear stops us from thinking critically about what is going on around us, and allows us to be herded along through the shambles of this world into the slaughterhouse beyond. Fear prompts us to shut our eyes to the dangers around us, and in this way renders us much more vulnerable. Or - even worse - as the venerable sage Yoda said, "Fear leads to the Dark Side!"

Intimidation - the favourite tool of fascists and synarchists everywhere. (Synarchists: the opposite of anarchists, who love top-down brutalist quasi-militaristic bureaucratic-nightmare hierarchies, and who think that Freedom is something to be managed, to be allowed out only in tiny doses; after all, you're just an insect to them.)

Should we be afraid? Yes and no, I think.

If a mad axeman is coming at you full pelt, then fear is a perfectly legitimate reaction. It prepares you rapidly for a totally appropriate "fight or flight" response. Sometimes we need shaking up a bit when there's danger around us, because we're naturally inclined to stick our heads in the sand, and say (presumably while spitting out mouthfuls of sand!), "Problem? What problem?"

So Fear can be very useful - in that it can help us to become conscious of the peril of our actual situation.

But fear needn't be maintained. As we become more aware of the perils around us (like the wandering knight in quest of the Holy Grail), we can begin to establish an attitude of Balance, rather than Fear. When we can see the dangers and pitfalls on either hand, then we can avoid them, and stick to the path through the tangly wood.

When we stick to the path - instead of rushing madly around like scared sheep, or buffaloes in a stampede, on course to a clifftop (as the bombers would rather like us to) - then we're exploring what it really means to be a human being.

And that's when the bombers start to fear us.

We're led to believe, by all sorts of forces around us, that individually we have no importance.

Nothing could be further from the truth. But the fascist/synarchist/bureaucratic forces want us to believe that we're unimportant and powerless - because then they can control us so much more easily!

But the truth is that Nobody is a nobody - even if, at this point in our progress along the path through the tangly wood, we're not yet in possession of all the facts.

This brings us to the second motive (or so I think) behind the bombers' attacks - Misdirection. Weirdly enough, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Likud Finance Minister, was warned to stay in his hotel room in London (he was due to give a speech close to Liverpool Street tube station that morning), before the first of the blasts on Thursday. But nobody else was warned.

Curious, no?

Of course, fascists everywhere would condemn the idea that the London bombings were (at least in part) a Mossad false-flag operation, by saying that such an idea smacks of anti-Semitism. Well, of course they would say that, wouldn't they? Once again, they're trying to rule by Fear - this time, fear of public censure.

After all, the Israeli government is the fluffiest, cuddliest little bunny, full of sympathy for the Palestinians and doing everything they possibly can to bring sunshine and lollipops to everyone. That concrete wall they're putting up around Palestinian settlements, bristling with remote-control machine-guns, is just a matter of self-defence - and is in no way analogous to the Nazis' creation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Yeah, right.

And if they don't call it anti-Semitic, then they'll call it a conspiracy theory. Again, rule by Fear - fear of public censure. Despite the fact that everybody knows that a conspiracy of some sort stands behind these bombs, whether a secret conspiracy of some al-qaida terrorist cell, or a secret conspiracy of government forces. The way these people talk, you'd have thought that governments never engage in terrorism or clandestine violence of any kind - as though the CIA, for example, had no hand whatsoever in the 1973 coup in Chile. That's it - on the count of three, heads in the sand, 3, 2, 1 - insert!

Cui bono? Who stands to benefit from these bombings? Certainly not Muslims, who are being reproached by all sorts of ignorant people (e.g. the mainstream media, police, government) for giving shelter to terrorists. Classic Misdirection.

Was this attack aimed at our fearless leaders, ensconced in a five-star hotel in Scotland, protected by zillions of heavily-armed Secret Service agents and burly coppers? Well, no, actually. It was aimed at ordinary Londoners, many of whom thought Tony had blood on his hands when he attacked Iraq, and marched against his stupid war in 2003. The whole affair looks rather like the Madrid train bombings, again directed at ordinary working people (90% of whom disapproved of the war, bringing Barcelona to a stop for days with continuous running protests) - rather than at the military or government.

But if you wanted to whip up hostility against Muslims, the scapegoat du jour, and promote the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (and possible further wars in Syria and Iran), then this is exactly the way to do it.

Or so they've calculated.

The morons.

After the Madrid bombings, the incoming leftist Spanish government got wise to the false-flag nature of those attacks, with its clumsy "Qur'an on the passenger seat" approach to shifting the blame - and did their own thing, staging a bogus terrorist suicide to defuse a dangerous diplomatic situation. And then pulled their troops out of Iraq anyway.

They weren't fooled or intimidated - so why should we be?

The bombers, and the powers behind them, see themselves as playing a game - a game where we're considered pawns or schmucks to be kept in the dark and pushed around. The thing is, the cards are stacked in their favour in this game. Because they always cheat and lie. We don't stand a chance of winning any of their games.

So what to do?

The best thing, I think, is to leave them to their stupid games, and refuse to play along. These players are devoted to serving themselves, which means they've reduced themselves to the level of zombies - the Undead. All they want to do is control the game-board, and score their ludicrous victories - "Mission Accomplished", and all that.

But their way is the way that spirals down into inactivity, into the sweet repose of the darkness where all their fears will be taken away, where nothing will ever stand a chance of changing them, where they can be king of their own tiny castle. This closed-in nature of their minds means that they, too, have a problem - and it's a problem which they're forced into trying to foist on us: they've got their heads in the sand.

In short, they're delusional. They think they've got everything sorted out, with everything in its own little box. And that's how zombies think, how robots think.

And they want - no, they need - us to become like them. Otherwise their stupid little game will fall into disorder.

Play the game - that way, you'll lose and they'll win.

Or, we could do something very different.

Instead of serving ourselves, like these bastards, we could serve each other in a spirit of tolerance and freely-given mutual aid - aiming always for the light of truth. Basically, we have work to do - real work, work that glorifies everybody, and gives us all a chance to breathe. If we don't do that, we're in real danger of becoming Zombies ourselves. And then the dark forces will have won.

As the sainted Joe Strummer sang in that song by The Clash. What was it called? Oh yeah, "London Calling":

London calling to the Imitation Zone:
Forget it brother and go it alone.
London calling upon the Zombies of Death:
Quit holding out - and take another breath!

Too right, comrade!

Wednesday, July 06, 2005


Ahhh - the Angel of Anarchy! Can you hear the rustle of her wings? And do you know her phone number? (Edinburgh, yesterday.)

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

G8: The Alliance for Global Impoverishment

I first got into Noam Chomsky when I was studying Akkadian and Hebrew at Liverpool University, back in the mid-1980s.

One of the fascinating things you could do with these ancient Semitic languages was identify their similarities and differences from each other, and then - by a lot of detective work - track back to an original Proto-Semitic language spoken around 10,000BC.

This must sound most awfully dry! But it wasn't at all - what you got at the end of it was a language spoken thousands and thousands of years ago, at the end of the last glaciation, when the ice was beginning to retreat from northern Europe. And that language was one that was spoken by hunters and gatherers on the lost savannah of northern Africa that has now become the Sahara Desert. We really don't know much about these people - apart from the reconstructed language that they probably used!

How freaky is that?

The detective work was the thing that was most particularly interesting, though. And that brought me to study Chomsky's work on transformational grammar - which usually sent my head spinning, since I'm quite a dim bulb when it comes to this sort of thing. But even I could see how exciting it was, and how satisfying it could sometimes be in the description of different sorts of languages.

So that's Chomsky - he's an unalloyed genius.

I didn't know at the time that he had an interest in politics. But he's pretty shrewd and clear-sighted here as well - because, as much as anything, he's not afraid of facts - and the implications of facts. When experts (so-called) refuse to attend to facts in order to maintain their carefully-constructed worldviews, they merely indicate how scared they are of real knowledge.

There was a good example of this on an interview on BBC Radio 2 today. The subject was the canonisation of Pope John-Paul II, and the attendant miracles that would need to be evidenced before he could be officially declared a saint by the Vatican. The whole process is obviously preposterous, and the defender of this pointless rigmarole (a former editor, I think, of The Catholic Herald) was at one point asked for her opinion of the validity of Hindu miracles.

Her voice rose an octave as she went on at some length about how this was beside the point, and she wasn't going to be drawn on addressing this (very reasonable, imo) question. If Hindus experience miracles as an answer to prayer, why should miracles experienced as a result of praying to John-Paul be so much more special? And shouldn't Krishna be officially recognised as a saint as well, if miracles occur as a result of prayers addressed to him?

The whole thing is so entirely bogus, it beggars the imagination how people could be suckered into giving the Vatican any real credence. But people are like that - they love their static two-dimensional fenced-in worldviews, and react with hostility when facts are presented which call their worldviews into question.

*sigh*

But Chomsky doesn't seem to be like that. He does seem to have a knack for drawing important connections between myriads of marginalised and excluded - what the philosopher Charles Fort called "damned" - facts.

Here he is recently [July 2005] on the fraud that is Third World Debt:

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9461

"Take Third World debt. First of all, does it exist? I mean, if I lend you money, and I know that it’s a very risky loan, and I therefore demand very high interest payments so I make plenty of money out of the loan that I give you – and then at some point you can’t pay – whose problem is it? Well, by capitalist principles, it’s my problem. If anyone believed in capitalism – which of course no wealthy sector’s willing to do – it would be my problem. I made a risky loan, I made a lot of profit out of it, but if by now it turns into a bad loan – well, too bad for me.

"But that’s not the way the international system works. If a bank makes a loan to, for example, General Suharto of Indonesia or some Argentinian neo-Nazi, and they know it’s risky, they use high interest rates to get a return on it. The bank makes plenty of money, and the debt stays about where it was. If then at some point Indonesia, Argentina or whoever it is can’t pay the debt, it’s not the bank’s problem because at that point the International Monetary Fund (IMF) steps in. The IMF was described accurately by its American Executive Director as the ‘Credit Community’s Enforcer’. That’s what the IMF is – now what does the IMF do?

"Well, money was actually borrowed by General Suharto – the most corrupt dictator of the modern period by far (as estimated by the British organisation Transparency International). He took loans, he enriched himself, he enriched his other friends, and so on. Indonesia can’t pay off its subsequent debt, so who’s supposed to pay it? Poor people in Indonesia are paying for it – they’re subjected to Structural Adjustment Programmes – so they get strangled in order to pay off the loans that they never borrowed in the first place. Meanwhile, what about the rich banker here? Well, you know, he’s not going to accept any risk – he has to be paid off by Northern taxpayers via the IMF, who make sure that the investors and lenders don’t have any problems.

"So the system works by the combination of imposing the debt – which they didn’t borrow in the first place – on the poor people of the South primarily, and to a secondary extent on Northern taxpayers. That’s called Third World debt. Why does this scam even exist? There probably is no Third World debt if we adopted just elementary capitalist principles. It’s a power system. And in fact sometimes it’s even worse.

"One of the most highly indebted countries in the world is Nicaragua. Its huge debt comes from two sources. The one is the US war against Nicaragua which practically destroyed the country in the 1980s. And the second is the enormous corruption – unbelievable corruption – of the governments that the US instituted in the 1990s, and have been running the place ever since. So between them there’s a huge foreign and also a huge domestic debt. Is that the fault of the people of Nicaragua? What did they have to do with it? They’re the victims.

"In fact, there’s a very simple way of getting rid of the international debt in Nicaragua – a very conservative way of doing it – the US should follow the law. After all, the US was ordered by the World Court, backed by two UN Security Council resolutions (which the US vetoed, with Britain politely abstaining), all of which demanded that the US terminate its terrorist atrocities and pay enormous reparations. There were modes for calculating reparations that were worked out and came up with internationally agreed estimates. These sums would’ve paid off the international debt and gone well beyond – enabling Nicaragua to reconstruct some of the wreckage. But that’s a conservative principle – following the law – and therefore it’s out of the question, just like capitalist principles are out of the question when you don’t gain from them.

"So Nicaragua has a huge debt, becomes a Highly Indebted Country, and is given a little leeway on paying its debt, and even this money goes into enriching the rich cronies of then President Aleman, and so on. The whole thing is just a scam. So maybe there is no Third World debt – or if there is it’s just marginal. You can be pretty sure that these questions are not going to come up at the G8, because they would harm the interests of the rich and powerful, and that’s not what the game is about."

An anarchist wedding, Spain, 1936: the bride wore black ('nuff said).

Sunday, July 03, 2005

Spain: A Place for Grown-Ups

There's something wonderful about Spain - which is why this blog keeps coming back there!

I remember my first visit to Spain, in 1993, when I took a bus from Sant Julia in Andorra to La Seu d'Urgel and Puigcerda in Catalunya, and then walked from there into the Spanish enclave of Llivia. Things felt timeless, well-ordered, relaxed, unfussy - a good combo, in my opinion.

And even now, arriving at Malaga airport, you step off the plane, and instantly you feel the weight pouring off your shoulders - and you can breathe again. And precisely the opposite happens when you return to Luton! *cough*

Ignoramuses in Britain still bang on about Spain's "manana" attitude - but the fact is that things aren't like that at all. Without fuss, Spaniards just get on with things, and produce results - while in this country, people are banging their heads against the wall, destroying their lives with more work than they can handle - and the end-result is usually rather lacklustre and behind schedule.

It has been suggested that the country was actually more productive in the early-70's during the 3-day week - though no one seems to have nailed the reason why. Possibly Robert Anton Wilson got it right when he suggested that the final stage of chaos is not anarchy, but bureaucracy. And I'm inclined to agree with the great Discordian there.

I'm not saying that everything's rosy in Spain - far from it; but the feeling you get there is that people are less whiny about trivialities, and more GROWN-UP in general, thanks to a broader sense of perspective and context.

Plus - they have a different history. Instead of tow-haired young Spitfire aces reclining on summer airfields that are forever England, playing whist and french cricket on the grass next to the control tower, before scrambling to shoot down a Bosch Dornier - in Spain there was the bitter struggle of anarchist and POUM militias against the Fascists, and a long existence under Franco to rub their noses in the true awfulness of Fascism.

People had tasted liberty, and that sweet memory could never entirely fade away. In Britain, however, we always felt that we had conquered Fascism under Churchill and Attlee - it was always out there, and we could stop it on the beaches, or in the skies over Kent. Instead it just snuck in with corporatist Fifth Columnists like Thatcher, Major and Blair - and thousands of careerist lobbyists, MPs, supposedly neutral civil servants (who were seldom anything of the sort), and various policy wonks.

Not to mention the god-awful journalists, who were either brow-beaten by their editors into hackdom, or who were only ever interested in maintaining a safe course through shark-infested political waters, while marvelling at their own deft yachtsmanship. Of course, they were being used - but they didn't seem to be bothered about that all that much. (Andrew Marr springs to mind, for some reason - but I'm sure I must be wrong there.)

So now, wonder of wonders, Britain is boringly fascist, and actually run by huge commercial and financial concerns (though we're not supposed to say so, of course - it is a Fascist state, after all), while Spain has become something more decentralised and interesting.

And again, I'm not saying that Spain's government is wonderful, while ours is rubbish - only that there's an interesting difference in approach, which might be instructive.

Take the Madrid train bombings, for example. Instead of allowing a right-wing government to milk that tragic event for maximum political advantage, Spaniards took to the streets in mass protest, and elected a Socialist prime minister - seeing a pretty direct link between the Madrid bombings and Iraq. There was none of this "we must stand up to the terrorists, and hit them hard" bullshit - which only serves to increase British politicians' sense of self-importance.

Instead, with a neat bit of theatre by Spanish special ops forces and firefighters, the new Spanish government defused the whole situation with no loss of life. After all, Spanish people know that the threat is likely enough from inside the country - from Fifth Columnists - not from fictional Moroccan terrorists outside.

[See http://www.vialls.com/myahudi/madrid.html for further details.]

A good example of the difference in approach comes from the recent decision by the Spanish government to legalise gay marriage. And why not?

And even more instructive is the text of the speech delivered by the Prime Minister, Zapatero, on the occasion of this bill becoming law. Can you imagine any of the gruesome non-entities in the British cabinet giving a speech like this?

[Text from http://direland.typepad.com/ ]

"We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families; at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

"In the poem 'The Family,' our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because, 'How does man live in denial in vain / by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?'

"Today, Spanish society answers to a group of people who, over many years, have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed. Today Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty.

"It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone's triumph. It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of Liberty. Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honorable members, there is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married. To the contrary, what happens is that this class of Spanish citizens gets the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage.

"Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in a profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.

"With the approval of this Bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them that many years ago, our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives. Today we can offer them a beautiful lesson: every right gained, each access to liberty has been the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our recognition and praise.

"Today we demonstrate with this Bill that societies can better themselves and can cross barriers and create tolerance by putting a stop to the unhappiness and humiliation of some of our citizens. Today, for many of our countrymen, comes the day predicted by Kavafis [the great Greek gay poet] one century ago: 'Later 'twas said of the most perfect society / someone else, made like me / certainly will come out and act freely.' "


Running in the annual Thame 10km race last weekend: (l to r) Firefighters Turkish, Brains, Fraser and Duracell. After a slow start, we made an excellent sprint finish!

Where There's Fire, There Must Be Smoke

We had a great time yesterday afternoon, putting out a field fire.

It's difficult to express what it feels like to be barrelling along on a country road in July in the rear crew cab of a fire appliance, and to see across the hedges in the sunshine a ragged line of black smoke.

But on the way to another field fire earlier on this week, Coke let out a whoop when the smoke came into view - of joy, I think - and my feelings were very much the same!

What you want to do in life (speaking very generally now) is engage directly with the enemy - something which present circumstances usually don't allow Cassiopaean sympathisers, and their fellow-travellers, to do. (Take a look at the blogs on the right to see what I mean - caged leopards, every single one of them, and each of them pacing back and forth with impatience.) But fighting fires is at least one way to vent the spirit of battle!

As it happened, this fire wasn't very much - i.e. not a standing crop, but mown hay - and pretty thin on the ground, as well. Still, you want to get going at it as quickly as possible before the fire line expands. And that's where it all gets very 19th-century - no high-tech solutions here, but short poles with 3-foot lengths of old hose lashed to the ends of them, which you use to beat the flames out.

It's fairly exhausting work, on a summer's day, in full fire kit - and for that reason I hadn't pulled down the visor on my helmet. So anyway, at one point I got caught in a thick cloud of hot smoke. It didn't do more than singe my eyelashes, the ends of which curled like the fuzzy side of velcro - but I snapped my visor down pretty smartish after that, and carried on!

Well, as we used to say in the Church, when I was a fresh-faced young curate - there's a sermon there somewhere.

The point, I think, is this - the real battles are going on in two places: in our minds (as we struggle to free ourselves from the prison of our robotic thinking), and on the Internet (where we get the chance, normally denied us in everyday discourse with family members and co-workers, to speak the unspoken truth about our perverted and thwarted humanity - and to warn of the fresh dangers to all of us on the horizon, like a ragged line of dark smoke). Blogland is one of the few places we've got, where we have the chance to encourage each other - before the powers that be (PTB) freeze up the Internet, and toss us all into detention camps.

Actually, of course, the two battlefields (the mind and blogland) are pretty much the same. Blogland, and discussion groups like Casschat, or websites like Signs of the Times, are places where we can wake up by learning more and more; after all, as the Cassiopaeans constantly say, Learning is fun! And, for that matter, Knowledge protects ...

Blogging is like fighting a field fire. Sitting down at the keyboard gives us a chance at some sort of action, of releasing something of our humanity as we try to express who we really are in the midst of a conformist, dumbed-down and sluggish society. It's exhausting, but somehow energising as well - as Gurdjieff indicated when he said that the need for rest was really just a dumb signal from our robotic self, and could pretty much as easily be ignored as attended to.

And if we get a little scorched by public censure - what does that matter compared with the chance of becoming truly free-will agents, completely attuned to the service of others? And with all self-deceit finally stripped away into the bargain?

O-my-gosh! Not to anticipate or anything - but wouldn't that be something?

Anyway, talking about smoke, one useful way of freeing up the thought processes is by having a cigarette. Or two.

I wrote the following comments about the benefits of smoking (based on stuff that Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Joe Vialls have written - I can't claim much original thought or inquiry here!), and posted it at Indymedia UK last summer.

[And talking about freezing up the Internet by the PTB, the whole Indymedia UK site was shut down at the end of last year when the FBI seized their servers in Middlesex. Down near Heathrow Airport. Where the FBI (theoretically) have no jurisdiction, whatever they may say to the contrary. See the following two sites for information on this:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/inte-o13.shtml
http://www.indymedia.org/fbi/

And, following the same theme - the FBI at Oakland has just got hold of a certain number of IP addresses for those at flag.blackened.net - see http://www.infoanarchy.org/ and here, for news of this emerging bit of Cointelpro.

Apparently we're all "terrorists" now - *yawn*]

Anyway - getting back to the point:

Tobacco Is Good for You

https://www4.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2004/06/293666.html
The fact is that smoking roll-your-own cigarettes - using unadulterated tobacco - might actually be GOOD for your health.

Consider the following:
1. There's an enormous amount of radioactive fallout in the atmosphere at the moment due to above-ground atomic weapons testing from the 1940's, 50's and later, not to mention the appalling catastrophe at Chernobyl (plus depleted uranium usage in the Balkan wars, and points further east). This fallout has spread all over the world by now, and decays slowly over thousands of years, so the chances of inhaling carcinogenic dust is actually pretty high.

The overall magnitude of lung cancer risk to humans from atmospheric radioactive fallout cannot be overstated. Before Russia, Britain and America outlawed atmospheric testing on August 5, 1963, more than 4,200 kilograms of plutonium had been discharged into the atmosphere. Because we know that less than one microgram [millionth of a single gram] of inhaled plutonium causes terminal lung cancer in a human, we therefore know that your friendly government has lofted 4,200,000,000 [4.2 Billion] lethal doses into the atmosphere, with particle radioactive half-life a minimum of 50,000 years.

One way of countering this threat is through smoking. Professor Schrauzer, President of the International Association of Bio-inorganic Chemists, testified before a U.S. congressional committee in 1982 that it had long been well known to scientists that certain constituents of tobacco smoke act as anti-carcinogens [anti-cancer agents] in test animals. He continued that when known carcinogens [cancer-causing substances] are applied to the animals, the application of constituents of cigarette smoke counter them.

Professor Sterling of the Simon Fraser University in Canada is perhaps closest to the truth, where he uses research papers to reason that smoking promotes the formation of a thin mucous layer in the lungs, "which forms a protective layer stopping any cancer-carrying particles from entering the lung tissue." This is probably as close as we can get to the truth at present, and it does make perfect scientific sense. Deadly radioactive particles inhaled by a smoker would initially be trapped by the mucous layer, and then be ejected from the body before they could enter the tissue. Please see the following site:

http://www.vialls.com/transpositions/smoking.html

2. Nicotine is one of the few things that can actually increase your red blood cell count, which is why doctors ask you if you're a smoker before they do a blood test - i.e. if they find a high haemoglobin count, then they'll know there's a reasonable cause for it, and that it's not due to a pathological condition. The body MAY actually over-compensate and increase the amount of oxygen flowing around your body. One well-known indication of this is that, when smoking, you are able to think a good deal more clearly and concentrate more closely.

3. Jeremy Narby Ph.D., an anthropologist who studied at Stanford University, and author of 'The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge', has studied shamanic use of tobacco. He points out that "A molecule of nicotine shares structural similarities with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and fits like a skeleton key into its receptor on certain neurons...

"In the human brain there are tens of billions of neurons, and they are of several sorts. Each neuron is equipped with approximately a thousand synapses, which are junction sites connecting the cells to each other. Each synapse has ten million or so receptors. The number of neurons is frequently estimated at ten billion; [some researchers put the number at a 100 billion to a trillion.] There are approximately 50 known neurotransmitters, and a given cell can have different receptors for several of these. The nicotine and acetylcholine molecules have different shapes, but the receptor cannot tell them apart because they have the same size and the distribution of their electrical charges is similar...

"The more you give nicotine to your neurons, the more the DNA they contain activates the construction of nicotinic receptors, within certain limits." Nicotine is used by Amazonian peoples as an hallucinogen and a remedy, and there does seem to be a commonly-understood link here in the West between creativity and tobacco use. I was struck by seeing David Hockney chain-smoking on a report on Newsnight recently, and it struck me - just how many writers and artists do I know of who DON'T smoke?

4. It's also well-known that smoking speeds up the body's metabolism, thus combating obesity - a real killer in all sorts of ways.

A somewhat freaky, though apparently well-informed site (make of it what you will) that deals with this whole issue is the following (scroll towards the bottom of the page):

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/diet.htm

One last point: During the 1950s an awful lot of children in the UK were screened for TB by giving them exceptionally high doses of X-rays - far in excess of the amount used to check for broken bones. This radiation was shot through the lungs, and the damage caused in terms of later lung cancer seems never to have been adequately assessed. Blaming lung cancer purely on smoking is a handy way, i believe, for the government to dodge their responsibilities.

Peace

OtterShrew

Anyway, that's enough blogging for the time being - I'm stepping outside for a smoke.

Saturday, July 02, 2005


"Sir! No Sir!" - a new film about the GI Movement, which played a decisive part in ending the Vietnam War.

Thursday, June 30, 2005

G.I.s' Victory in Vietnam

Some people have been claiming that Iraq is the new Vietnam. In other words, the war in Iraq is yet another instance of American corporate profiteering (under the guise of promoting freedom and democracy) - and that it's become the same sort of unwinnable quagmire.

Of course, there have been others claiming that it's nothing of the sort (e.g. "Don't be daft - there aren't any jungles in Iraq!"), but the similarities are actually quite striking.

President Bush's recent speech [28 June 2005] at Fort Bragg in North Carolina was embarrassingly reminiscent of General Westmoreland's Vietnam-era speech about "light in the tunnel" - except that, as an obvious psychopath, Bush has little sense of either embarrassment or irony.

In front of serried ranks of bored-looking service personnel, Bush attempted to draw parallels between the war in Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. Goebbels would have been proud of this sort of jaw-dropping dissimulation - if you're going to lie, make sure it's a whopper!

Bush rambled on about the shared "totalitarian ideology" of the Iraqi insurgents and Osama bin Laden's organisation, and how the best way to take these enemies on was to "defeat them abroad before they attack us at home." This time, apparently, the US would not "wait to be attacked".

An account of the Fort Bragg speech can be found here, and the cringe-making actual words are here.

But, getting back to Vietnam, what's not very well-known is that the defeat suffered by America there, wasn't really an American defeat at all. What really happened was that the ordinary soldiers, through great courage and doggedness, scored a tremendous victory over their own "superior" officers, and the murderous military-industrial complex.

Of course, all this has largely been whitewashed out of history - but it happened, all the same. In effect, this was an anarchist victory, in that the working class soldiers realised that they were being screwed over, exploited and exposed to intense danger - solely for the benefit of rich and powerful men. And so, in classic anarchist style, they took responsibility for their own lives by organising from the bottom-up - and refused to fight.

This was a victory both for American soldiers, and for the Vietnamese people - and only a defeat for the military bureaucracy.

Joel Geier has written an impressive article about this neglected aspect of the Vietnam War, which is very much worth reading in its entirety (in my opinion).

Vietnam: The Soldiers' Revolt
by Joel Geier
[International Socialist Review, 9, August-September 2000]

http://www.isreview.org/issues/09/soldiers_revolt.shtml
Extract: The most neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers' revolt - the mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. It is a great reality check in an era when the U.S. touts itself as an invincible nation. For this reason, the soldiers' revolt has been written out of official history. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement whose activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free Vietnam - described once by President Johnson as a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country" - from U.S. domination. The legacy of the soldiers' revolt and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam - despite more recent U.S. victories over Iraq and Serbia - casts a pall on the Pentagon. They still fear the political backlash that might come if U.S. ground forces sustain heavy casualties in a future war.

The army revolt was a class struggle that pitted working-class soldiers against officers who viewed them as expendable. The fashionable attempt to revise Vietnam War history, to airbrush its horrors, to create a climate supportive of future military interventions, cannot acknowledge that American soldiers violently opposed that war, or that American capitalism casually tolerated the massacre of working-class troops. Liberal academics have added to the historical distortion by reducing the radicalism of the 1960s to middle-class concerns and activities, while ignoring working-class rebellion. But the militancy of the 1960s began with the Black working class as the motor force of the Black liberation struggle, and it reached its climax with the unity of white and Black working-class soldiers whose upsurge shook U.S. imperialism.

In Vietnam, the rebellion did not take the same form as the mass stateside GI antiwar movement, which consisted of protests, marches, demonstrations and underground newspapers. In Vietnam, the aim of the soldiers was more modest, but also more subversive: survival, to "CYA" (cover your ass), to protect "the only body you have" by fighting the military's attempt to continue the war. The survival conflict became a war within the war that ripped the armed forces apart. In 1965, the Green Machine was the best army the U.S. ever put into the field; a few years later, it was useless as a fighting force.

"Survival politics," as it was then called, expressed itself through the destruction of the search-and-destroy strategy, through mutinies, through the killing of officers, and through fraternization and making peace from below with the National Liberation Front (NLF). It was highly effective in destroying everything that military hierarchy and discipline stand for. It was the proudest moment in the U.S. army's history.

[...]

The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War and the start of open, active soldiers' rebellion. At the end of January 1968, on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the NLF sent 100,000 troops into Saigon and 36 provincial capitals to lead a struggle for the cities. The Tet Offensive was not militarily successful, because of the savagery of the U.S. counterattack. In Saigon alone, American bombs killed 14,000 civilians. The city of Ben Tre became emblematic of the U.S. effort when the major who retook it announced that "to save the city, we had to destroy it."

Westmoreland and his generals claimed that they were the victors of Tet because they had inflicted so many casualties on the NLF. But to the world, it was clear that U.S. imperialism had politically lost the war in Vietnam. Tet showed that the NLF had the overwhelming support of the Vietnamese population - millions knew of and collaborated with the NLF entry into the cities and no one warned the Americans. The ARVN had turned over whole cities without firing a shot. In some cases, ARVN troops had welcomed the NLF and turned over large weapons supplies. The official rationale for the war, that U.S. troops were there to help the Vietnamese fend off Communist aggression from the North, was no longer believed by anybody. The South Vietnamese government and military were clearly hated by the people.

Westmoreland's constant claim that there was "light at the end of the tunnel," that victory was imminent, was shown to be a lie. Search and destroy was a pipe dream. The NLF did not have to be flushed out of the jungle - it operated everywhere. No place in Vietnam was a safe base for American soldiers when the NLF so decided.

What, then, was the point of this war? Why should American troops fight to defend a regime its own people despised? Soldiers became furious at a government and an officer corps who risked their lives for lies. Throughout the world, Tet and the confidence that American imperialism was weak and would be defeated produced a massive, radical upsurge that makes 1968 famous as the year of revolutionary hope. In the U.S. army, it became the start of the showdown with the officers.

Within three years, more than one-quarter of the armed forces was absent without leave (AWOL), had deserted or was in military prisons. Countless others had received "Ho Chi Minh discharges" for being disruptive and troublemaking. But the most dangerous forces were those still active in combat units, whose fury over being slaughtered in useless search-and-destroy missions erupted in the greatest rebellion the U.S. army has ever encountered.

A similar Tet offensive in Iraq seems quite possible. See:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9337.htm
for the latest communiqué [29 June 2005] from the Rafidan (Political Committee) of the Mujahideen Central Command in Baghdad.

And Joe Vialls draws interesting parallels between the current American situation and Vietnamese resistance against the French at Dien Bien Phu:
http://www.vialls.com/iraq/internment.html

Extract continues: The refusal of an order to advance into combat is an act of mutiny. In time of war, it is the gravest crime in the military code, punishable by death. In Vietnam, mutiny was rampant, the power to punish withered and discipline collapsed as search and destroy was revoked from below.

Until 1967, open defiance of orders was rare and harshly repressed, with sentences of two to ten years for minor infractions. Hostility to search-and-destroy missions took the form of covert combat avoidance, called "sandbagging" by the grunts. A platoon sent out to "hump the boonies" might look for a safe cover from which to file fabricated reports of imaginary activity.

But after Tet, there was a massive shift from combat avoidance to mutiny. One Pentagon official reflected that "mutiny became so common that the army was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead of 'combat refusal.'" Combat refusal, one commentator observed, "resembled a strike and occurred when GIs refused, disobeyed, or negotiated an order into combat."

Acts of mutiny took place on a scale previously only encountered in revolutions. The first mutinies in 1968 were unit and platoon-level rejections of the order to fight. The army recorded 68 such mutinies that year. By 1970, in the 1st Air Cavalry Division alone, there were 35 acts of combat refusal. One military study concluded that combat refusal was "unlike mutinous outbreaks of the past, which were usually sporadic, short-lived events. The progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period between 1968-71."

The 1968 combat refusals of individual units expanded to involve whole companies by the next year. The first reported mass mutiny was in the 196th Light Brigade in August 1969. Company A of the 3rd Battalion, down to 60 men from its original 150, had been pushing through Songchang Valley under heavy fire for five days when it refused an order to advance down a perilous mountain slope. Word of the mutiny spread rapidly. The New York Daily News ran a banner headline, "Sir, My Men Refuse To Go." The GI paper, The Bond, accurately noted, "It was an organized strike ... A shaken brass relieved the company commander ... but they did not charge the guys with anything. The Brass surrendered to the strength of the organized men."

This precedent - no court-martial for refusing to obey the order to fight, but the line officer relieved of his command - was the pattern for the rest of the war. Mass insubordination was not punished by an officer corps that lived in fear of its own men. Even the threat of punishment often backfired. In one famous incident, B Company of the 1st Battalion of the 12th Infantry refused an order to proceed into NLF-held territory. When they were threatened with court-martials, other platoons rallied to their support and refused orders to advance until the army backed down.

As the fear of punishment faded, mutinies mushroomed. There were at least ten reported major mutinies, and hundreds of smaller ones. Hanoi's Vietnam Courier documented 15 important GI rebellions in 1969. At Cu Chi, troops from the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry refused battle orders. The "CBS Evening News" broadcast live a patrol from the 7th Cavalry telling their captain that his order for direct advance against the NLF was nonsense, that it would threaten casualties, and that they would not obey it. Another CBS broadcast televised the mutiny of a rifle company of the 1st Air Cavalry Division.

When Cambodia was invaded in 1970, soldiers from Fire Base Washington conducted a sit-in. They told Up Against the Bulkhead, "We have no business there ... we just sat down. Then they promised us we wouldn't have to go to Cambodia." Within a week, there were two additional mutinies, as men from the 4th and 8th Infantry refused to board helicopters to Cambodia.

In the invasion of Laos in March 1971, two platoons refused to advance. To prevent the mutiny from spreading, the entire squadron was pulled out of the Laos operation. The captain was relieved of his command, but there was no discipline against the men. When a lieutenant from the 501st Infantry refused his battalion commander's order to advance his troops, he merely received a suspended sentence.

The decision not to punish men defying the most sacrosanct article of the military code, the disobedience of the order for combat, indicated how much the deterioration of discipline had eroded the power of the officers. The only punishment for most mutinies was to relieve the commanding officer of his duties. Consequently, many commanders would not report that they had lost control of their men. They swept news of mutiny, which would jeopardize their careers, under the rug. As they became quietly complicit, the officer corps lost any remaining moral authority to impose discipline.

For every defiance in combat, there were hundreds of minor acts of insubordination in rear base camps. As one infantry officer reported, "You can't give orders and expect them to be obeyed." This democratic upsurge from below was so extensive that discipline was replaced by a new command technique called ''working it out.'' Working it out was a form of collective bargaining in which negotiations went on between officers and men to determine orders. Working it out destroyed the authority of the officer corps and gutted the ability of the army to carry out search-and-destroy missions. But the army had no alternative strategy for a guerrilla war against a national liberation movement.

The political impact of the mutiny was felt far beyond Vietnam. As H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, reflected, "If troops are going to mutiny, you can't pursue an aggressive policy." The soldiers' revolt tied down the global reach of U.S. imperialism.

Two eye-opening sites on the GIs' revolt in Vietnam can be found here:

http://www.infoshop.org/military.html
http://www.nlg.org/mltf/giresistance.html

Saturday, June 25, 2005


Downing Street: more a fenced-in cul-de-sac than an actual thoroughfare for the public. Nice hanging baskets, though.

Downing Street Wonkery

Well, blogland is all afire over the Downing Street Memos (DSM), leaked recently by The Sunday Times. And it's not surprising, really. When I read the first of them, I had to go and stand outside my kitchen door to get a breath of fresh air. Even though I shouldn't have been at all surprised over what they contained.

As originally published, the DSM can be found here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

But what really seemed surprising was the more or less total silence over them maintained by the rest of the mainstream media. When have you ever heard mention of them, for instance, by the BBC? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to be discussed on the Today programme? Seems like they've definitely got their tail between their legs after all the hoo-ha over Andrew Gilligan.

So anyway, it was the journalist Michael Smith who, after a lot of legal advice, first published the DSM - and here he is a couple of days ago, commenting for the Los Angeles Times on their significance:

The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
By Michael Smith
[23 June 2005]

It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.

At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He'd given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.

The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.

They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year's British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair's war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.

I did not then regard the now-infamous memo — the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting — as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was "necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."

But Downing Street had a "clever" plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong- footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old news.

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.


The USNS Bob Hope - one of the new Bob Hope class of heavy sealift ships for the US Navy. For f*ck's sake. Maintaining the illusion that the US is not just your ordinary megapower, but a megapower with a childlike sense of innocence and humour while invading oil-rich countries overseas. Soon, no doubt, to be deployed to Venezuela and/or West Africa.

Bob Hope - good at eye-rolling, leering and reading cue-cards.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Bob Hope & Real Hope

I used to really love those old Bob Hope & Bing Crosby films - e.g. "Like Webster's Dictionary, we're Morocco-bound." But that was when I was 10, when I also used to like Abbott & Costello and Norman Wisdom - and I find now that that sort of weak overplayed humour has definitely faded for me. In retrospect, those films seem like cartoons and not much more - but with the high production values characteristic of the 1940's.

Other comedians hit the mark much more effectively and subversively. Can you really mention Bob Hope in the same breath as Laurel & Hardy or the Marx Brothers, for example? I can't think of L & H trying to get that piano again and again up a steep flight of steps (a truly Sisyphian labour) - or Groucho Marx ("One night, I shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got into my pyjamas, I'll never know!") - without laughing!

The thing is that real comedians put a certain amount of effort and dedication into their work - and that turns it into a real work of art. But Bob Hope - effort? dedication? Nah.

Christopher Hitchens sums up Bob Hope's attempts at humour pretty well in the following article, which is definitely worth a look:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086499/

Extract: "I saw him twice, and both times he was playing, as he often did, to the soft-centered Brit or Anglophile culture. At an evening dedicated to Prince Philip at Merv Griffin's Beverly Hilton, Hope got up and told of how he left England at the age of 3. 'It was either that,' he said, 'or marry the girl.' The timing was OK, consisting as it did of a long pause. The next time I caught the act was at the British Embassy in Washington, where the ambassador did the intro and tried to wow the crowd by telling "Bob's" favorite reminiscence, which was that he left England at the age of 3, having discovered that he could never become king. These are the kinds of joke that keep things going at golf clubs or Rotary dinners: They are harmless and sentimental and have no intrinsic humor. A Bob Hope joke was no laughing matter: It was a bland attempt at what we would now yawningly call inclusiveness.

"There were many cringe-making references last week to Hope's doggedness in entertaining the brave boys overseas. I have met more than one veteran who says that those USO concerts were the last straw. Here's [obituarist Vincent] Canby, extracting the last ounce of brilliance from a Hope gag in Saigon after an officers' billet had been blown up by the Vietcong. 'I was on the way to my hotel, and I passed another hotel going in the opposite direction.' Nobody had the bad taste to recall the moment at which Hope was openly booed by the grunts in Vietnam: He was to the comedy of the war what Nixon was to its negotiation and what Billy Graham was to its husky religiosity."

A more appreciative (though still scathing) article on Bob Hope's career can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~tomreed1/cl091003/cl091003.html

The following article (from Camp News, vol. 3, no. 1 - part of the underground GI press during the Vietnam War period) describes responses to entertainment (both official, i.e. Bob Hope, and unofficial, i.e. the FTA) at the Okinawa miltary base, a jumping-off point for the US military against Vietnam.

[Original source here, and root archive here.]

"GI response to the FTA (Free the Army) and Bob Hope shows evidenced the increasing polarization between GIs and the military machine. The highly political FTA show, performed to support servicewomen and men struggling against the military and its oppressive policies, was given an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. Bob Hope struggled to maintain dignity.

"The FTA troupe could hold only one of its three shows as scheduled. 2000 GIs jammed the Okinawan auditorium, and at least another 1000 crowded around windows, jammed in the back stage area, and sat on walls across the street. The positive response was tremendous. At least 250 GIs rapped until late in the night in a lot across the street from the auditorium.

"FTA shows for the second and third nights were cancelled because the military imposed condition green, a regulation that makes it illegal to be off base. This was done because of a Zengunro (All-Okinawa Base Workers Union) strike. High Commissioner of the Ryukyus, General Lampert, told FTA representatives personally that he had specific orders from Washington not to grant the facilities on base which are regularly given to other entertainers despite the fact that his own aide, a colonel, had seen the show and witnessed the overwhelming positive response of GIs.

"FTA held a matinee on the afternoon before condition green came into effect. Over 1000 GIs slid off work to see the show which was held in a bullring in solidarity with Okinawans struggling against the take-over of an Okinawan hotel for brass Marine housing.

"During the Base Workers strike the FTA troupe joined the picketers and appealed to GIs to acknowledge why the Okinawan base workers are fighting and to join their struggle.

"The Bob Hope extravaganza was held two days after the FTA group was safely off the island. Many troops were given direct orders to attend the show. Members of the 3rd Medical Batallion at Camp Hansen challenged the order in regimental office hours. The order was rescinded, but liberty was secured until after 11:30. While GIs were sent to the show in conveys and marched in, generals sat in a special section reserved for them. Throughout the show GIs threw oranges from their packed lunches back and forth in the audience, making Hope repeatedly beg them to stop.

"Hope proclaimed that he is of the real anti-war contingent and that those shouting for peace are prolonging the war by aiding the enemy. Movement GIs were not fooled. The show started with a GI band scheduled to play for an hour. They started by saying, "We'd like to dedicate this to our childhood idol, Mr. Bob Hope" and went into their first song - War Pig. They were forced to leave after the first song.

"When High Commissioner Lampert appeared to introduce Hope there were loud jeers. The only applause he evoked was when he said, "I'll make it short." There was no laughter at any of his political jokes. Jim Nabors put on an officer's hat and was booed until he took it off. Typical of the attitude of the show, the same attitude that the GI movement is struggling against, was a Hope joke about GIs and Asian women, He said he hoped GIs had developed meaningful relationships while in Asia--maybe they could sneak a prostitute home in a duffle bag."

Sunday, June 19, 2005


An Abrams tank in Iraq, dug in at the sunset of empire.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

On Loyalty and Courage


An Open Letter to US Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq

by Stan Goff

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff06152005.html

I was a soldier for most of the time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments, with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

I thugged around in eight different places in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign policies­ - policies controlled, then as now, by the rich.

In the course of that career, I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have felt about "loyalty."

Tricky thing, loyalty.

Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you, I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could, and so did millions of other people around the world.

But that brain-dead piece of shit in the White House who is legally your boss, and all his handlers, starting with Vice President Dick "Halliburton" Cheney - they sent you to do this thing anyway.

They talked themselves into believing this would be ­ - and these are their words - ­ a cakewalk. They surrounded themselves exclusively with others who echoed what was already in their minds; and they punished and villified and isolated anyone who told them what they didn't want to hear. Because they made up their minds to conduct these invasions years ago, and with the attacks of September 11 ­ in which Iraq's role was exactly nothing­ they figured now was their chance to conduct the re-disposition of the old Cold War military into their new plan to build permanent bases in Southwest Asia.

Since they'd made up their minds, they didn't want to hear anything except rosy scenarios for their plans, because these reptile-minded, preppy gangsters are like spoiled children who can't abide anyone fucking up their toy-emperor fantasies.

But when those fantasies did get fucked up, by the realities they ran so hard to escape, they continued to pursue their grim agenda in spite of the mounting consequences, because they don't pay those consequences.

If I had my way, we would issue the whole shriveled, manicured lot of them their assault rifles, put them aboard an Air Force transport, tighten the leg straps on their static line parachutes, and boot their sorry asses out from 800 feet right over the middle of Ramadi ­ where they could drop their harnesses in the street and explain democracy to the locals.

But that's just ranting, because I do so despise them. I hate people who get away with shit just because they have money and power. And I hate people who sacrifice the lives of others to amplify or protect that power.

But I'm not telling you anything. You all already know by now what generation after generation has learned the hard way. When the rich start their wars, it's not the rich that get sent to fight them. Yeah, a few go get their time as part of putting together a political career, but we know who does the heavy lifting.

And in these conversations that many of you have with me and thousands of other people, we hear you say ­ more and more often now ­ that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to "do your job," because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that you have to back them up; and because if you don't go, someone else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.

But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, and because I care about you, and because my own son is back there for his second go-around.

A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told me, "My platoon sergeant tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that 'the Geneva Convention doesn't exist in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.'"

You all know that this is bullshit, and if you didn't know, let me give you a news flash about some ­ - not all, but some ­ - military lifers; and this is coming from a military lifer. Some of them are dumber than dog shit. Some of them say things when they don't have the foggiest fucking idea what they are talking about. Some of them will say any goddamn thing to get you to do what they want you to do.

But then again, there was a memorandum that came down that suggested the Geneva Conventions were void in Iraq. It didn't come from the Brigade level, though; it came from fucking George W. Bush's office. And it's a lie. That's why they sat there in front of Congress before they made the author of that memo into the Attorney General of the United States ­ - get your head around that - and denied that they meant it.

But it is a lie.

You do not have to follow illegal orders EVER, under any circumstances, and you ARE bound by International Law. You should also be bound by what you know is right, by your sense of plain common decency.

One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And "what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq." This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.

And I'm telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.

They know that many of you know that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint). So they know that many of you can't stay committed to this violent occupation out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC, who are busy every day at home undermining the same Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).

They know that you know that plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion, by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know that they can't rely on the loyalty of many of you to the chain of command any more either.

Where do they have to go with this, then, after all? What do they tell you?

"You get out there on that Humvee, and face those IEDs ­ together, as loyal buddies."

"You get out there and ransack people's houses in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry ­ together, as buddies."

"You get out there and set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation where you are tense and don't know, and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their children, and you have to live with that for the rest of your lives ­ together, because you are loyal buddies."

"You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies."

That's the pressure you have on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to Iraq so someone else doesn't take your place.

But let's look at the bigger picture here, and for that I'll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you were born. We heard this same bullshit then. Almost verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing factors was for getting us out of that war?

We quit being good soldiers.

The United States military got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting force, because US soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an officer who was using his men's bodies to chase medals might find himself on the wrong end of a Claymore mine. Now I'm not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it goes that far.

The other thing many soldiers did was become part of the political resistance at home. They looked at this question of looking out for their buddies and for fellow soldiers in the short term, but staying in a barbaric and immoral war. And they realized that the best thing they could do for their buddies ­ - not as soldiers, but as human beings ­ - was to enlist in the opposition to the war and bring it to an end.

In the process, many of them discovered that it took a lot more endurance and a lot more courage to oppose the war than it did to demonstrate that macho bullshit they were expected to display as they continued to do terrible things to those other human beings whose country they occupied.

Here's how you can exercise a deeper loyalty to the troops there now, and to all those who will continue to go as long as this obscenity continues:

Do everything you can to stop the war.

Question every order, and base those questions on the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare. Let them see you keeping a detailed journal of your experience. Send your stories home in letters. Open up discussions about the legitimacy of the war when you are in your billets, even if it does spark controversy. Spread around information you get about the war from sources other than those loud-mouthed news-mannequins on FOX. And email or mail your anonymous membership in to Iraq Veterans Against the War. The link is at the end of this letter.

The day this war stops and they put the last of you on an airplane home, is when you will never again have to smell that fresh-blood smell that stays in your head for hours after you've loaded someone onto a stretcher or rolled them into that big Ziploc bag. The day will come when you all pull out, because this was a losing proposition from the outset, but Bush and his crew were too fucking stupid to know it.

The best thing is that this war of occupation ends sooner than later, and ­ as an exercise of loyalty to your own conscience, of loyalty to those who are there and those who may go there, and loyalty to the principle of human decency ­ you can find ways to hasten that day. You can find ways to bring closer the day when the Iraqis can get on about the business of taking control of their own destiny, and you and your buddies can sleep in security and comfort in your own homes, play with your children, make love with your partners, and walk down familiar streets unencumbered by the rattling luggage of war.

If bringing this day closer for all of you is the goal, how much more loyal can you get?

Yours for walking unencumbered,

Stan Goff

US Army (Retired)

Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Iraq Veterans Against the War - www.ivaw.net

Ottershrew comments: Of course, we can look at this as a purely American problem. The US administration is obviously desperate to distance itself from the humane obligations of the Geneva Conventions, which it consistently ignores on a day-by-day basis, because their approach to warfare is actually more akin to terrorism than anything else.

But the problem is found amongst British forces too.

Years ago, as a fresh-faced young theology student, I spent a weekend with the Royal Army Chaplains' Department at Bagshot in Surrey. Their aim was to draw in a new stock of padres to fight the good fight and lift the morale of all and sundry - especially in the field where it all gets a bit gritty. And a good weekend it was, too.

But this Major comes in half-way through, and spends forty-five minutes saying that the Geneva Conventions don't really apply in "battle" conditions. Because, if there's one thing the Army wants, it's young, fit chaplains who can explain to the faltering squaddie that soldiering is the job for him, no matter what he's asked to do.

But the one thing they don't want is a chaplain with a conscience and a couple of neurons to rub together. Just focus on all the pretty hardware, and the outward-bound boy scout lifestyle in the woods and deserts. And the salary - considerably more than a parish priest makes.

And the camaraderie.

Ah - the camaraderie. That's where it all goes wrong - and Stan Goff has his finger on the button here. Loyalty to your buddies is excellent, of course. But it can so easily be twisted.

What does loyalty really mean? I'd say it was something to do with looking out for the best interests of your comrades-in-arms - but breaking International Law and rules of common decency only has the power to degrade a person. That degradation is of no use to anyone but to the bastard politicians who sent you into the warzone in the first place; who know, deep down, that the more degraded you're made by your actions, the more like them you'll have become - and thus more capable of doing yet more of their dirty work for them that comes along.

Politicians don't really care for the welfare of soldiers - just look at the stalling the MoD does on Gulf War Syndrome. And if you just say you've got a job to do and that's all there is to it - well, that's just a cop out, isn't it? It just means you've become a Good German.

But groupthink is difficult to resist - even when, as a padre, your rank means nothing; to all practical purposes, a padre has exactly the same rank as the person he's talking with, whether they're a private or a general.

And this is where courage comes in. What is real courage? The best example (imo) is the picture of Christ given in the Gospels. He had a natural authority that stemmed from an impeccability - impeccability meaning a bold and courageous desire always to do the right thing, and to say the right thing at the right time.

And if an officer or fellow-padre cold-shoulders you because you've made him feel a little uncomfortable, so what? Real soldiers aren't bands of thugs - they've got integrity, a conscience, can think for themselves and understand that there are consequences to any action. Real padres know all that, and can always fall back on the Geneva Conventions if they feel they're going out on a limb.

And if that makes you feel like a knight errant rather than part of the cavalry, so what? Standing up for what's right takes real loyalty and real courage - and genuine loyalty and courage often make you feel pretty isolated.

Just like Jesus, really.

But don't you then have unseen legions of angels at your side?

And that's the only army that ever counted for anything.

So, to use the British Army's efficacious word for a moment, I'd say to that Major - fuck you, and the Land Rover you just rode up in.


Some lemmings yesterday.

Western Dumbocracy

Dumbocracy - The Silence of Americans
by Kirwan
[16 June 2005]

http://rense.com/general66/dumb.htm

CONGRATULATIONS America: It seems that we have succeeded where no one else would ever want to go! This nation took a settled Republic and dismembered its form of government turning this democracy into something that looks a lot more like Dumbocracy - and then has had the temerity to wonder why the world thinks we're crazy.

Many writers, including this one, have been trying to figure out why Americans do not react to what this nation is doing in the world today, both at home and abroad. Perhaps the answer is much simpler than many of us imagined.

Initially it appeared that Americans were either just asleep or were willfully blind to all that is and was being done in our name.

It appears that the population is behaving like a herd of dumb animals, slavishly following orders from a certifiable "leader" who has no qualifications, no leadership skills, and no accompanying track record that could ever have justified the failures of GWB in the office that he now occupies.

His "cabinet" has been filled with equally unqualified people who collectively have no experience in military matters, or in the administration of anything meaningful or real. So why does this nation credit this spoiled offspring from a truly criminal family, this AWOL coward who ran away on 911 instead of doing anything at all to interrupt the attacks of that day? WHY has Bush not yet explained himself to the nation or the world?

In the mid nineteen-thirties Sinclair Lewis wrote "It Can't Happen Here" and in that novel he concluded: "Where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!"

Even today the US Senate cannot bring itself to apologize to the victims of lynching - "4,743 people killed (illegally) between 1882 and 1968" - and we call ourselves a civilized nation! We have taken a dire situation and intensified the risks, destroyed the impediments that might have slowed the rise of anarchy, and all the while we have remained deaf, dumb and blind to what we are creating - WHY?

If the dead of all those wars we entered into - to "Make the World Safe for Democracy" - were to be heard on this subject the chorus would be deafeningly opposed to our present course of action. Yet the public in its bubble world of profits and power continues on the one sure path that will bring death and ruination to all the Outlaws say they represent.

These men and women who died in our wars would not applaud what has been done with the sacrifice they did not really choose to make. In WWII 50 million died, for this?

In the two wars we have going now, there are officially over 1700 dead, and there have been over a hundred-thousand exposed to Depleted Uranium and the malignancy of that disease that continues to kill long after the guns have been silenced: this affects not only the GI's but their families as well - yet the public is still not concerned enough to demand real answers from those who got us into this situation.

How many more must die before we begin to scream ENOUGH? What's the magic number here 2,000, 10,000 - 20,000 dead? Who decides what that weighty number will be, who will stand against this injustice, not just for our dead but also for all the people that have been maimed or displaced or killed because of our belligerence?

Why is it so hard for Americans to understand that the people we kill for the OUTLAWS all have families, dreams and would have had futures, had we not slaughtered them, too!

Why do we seemingly not want to know who is responsible for pulling the strings on our homegrown Outlaws - the thugs who sign the orders - then lie about the facts of what they have done and continue to do hourly? One reason that seems to hold a lot of sway is that Congress no longer makes our laws, they've sold that privilege to the highest bidders.

The Government of the United States of America is now of, by and for the Corporations. These are the same corporations, the Corporatocracy, to whom the people of the USA have bequeathed a literal and legal eternal life, while at the same time allowing their own corporate "best interests" to override the needs and interests of the very citizens who made all that largess possible. All the terms of any agreements that the workers for such companies signed on for - are now subject to nullification at the whim of the corporations. The retirement funds, the health-care, and the long-term interests of those who made the profits happen, now represent nothing but "excessive costs" to the corporations that are failing on all fronts, because they have destroyed any incentive for anyone besides the upper-level managers to profit from their existence.

But it gets worse. Americans gave the newly minted outlaw corporations the legal right to exist - now those corporations have no further need for working Americans, because now they have foreign markets to buy their outsourced products, so the public here is overripe to become nothing more than a wage-enslaved herd of animals to be directed and controlled by what suits the corporations - at each and every turn in their corporate schedule for hegemony.

The answers to the above questions are not pretty, but it goes something like this. War is GREAT for business and it's especially good for stockholders, people with jobs at those corporations who hold the SECRET no-bid contracts, and for insiders. Normally Wars are good for the initiating country for the profits that are generated by that action. In this case, since the jobs have been outsourced, down to and including the manufacture of American Flags in China - this nation has actually lost millions of jobs because of the war, and its demands upon our outsourced corporate legions whose profits have never been greater. All this while the public was told to "just go shopping!"

Perhaps it is understandable if the above is the real reason why so many refuse to "know" what's going on - this could explain many things. For instance if the above is true, then it would definitely be understandable that many would indeed fear for the loss of their jobs, or the loss of the income generated in their 401K's, or their stock portfolios - IF they were to publicly demand accountability from those who created 911 and then started these wars to cover-up their crimes. No wonder all the little lambs chose silence over protest: that is what the "smart-money" always does!

Congratulations are in order - it took real perseverance to turn this democracy on its head, and to learn to worship Outlaws while we are killing everything that we have always professed to "believe in." Welcome to the Dumbocracy of the New United States of the Corporatocracy. We have created a prison of the mind that will destroy any rational thoughts we ever had of being human. Maybe, we have become nothing more than pod people without the capacity for critical thought. We have abdicated all that we would each have brought to being viable beings, opting instead to live as footnotes in the margins of the lives of faceless, soulless corporations. In the final analysis we are destroying all that makes each of us valuable - to ourselves or to others.

Think about it - do you really want to be the excuse given for the USA to continue to live as the world's sole Dumbocracy? Break the Silence - NOW!

- kirwan

Comment

Jim Mortellaro
[17 June 2005]

Kirwan -

You ask too much of our people. They no longer have a will. No longer have strength of spirit. No longer. And I'm not so sure that you are correct. That Americans fear for their jobs, etc. Maybe not as much as you credit them.

Maybe it's just a loss of interest and of strength of will. Maybe Americans are so dumbed down by their own media, by the "Free Press," dumbed down by the lies of their elected officials and those who seek public office, by their elected 'leaders,' that they are of the mistaken opinion that they will make it all better. After all, is not that the reason "The People" elected them?

Of course, this is all a cop out. Americans are merely lemmings, following the piper piping the same old worn out tunes, same promises which are rarely or never kept. Maybe.

One thing is certain, Kirwan, to ask that The People break their silence now, is foolish beyond measure. For they will not. The time for a silent revolution, a revolution aimed at changing the corrupt politicians in our government, ruled by money, not by their constituencies, has passed us by.

Only a real revolution will change us. And we've not the guts for that.

Those of us who want just that are too damned old. Those of us who do are too damned frightened. The rest of us just don't give a damn.

So much for speaking out.

More thoughtful articles by Kirwan at http://www.kirwanesque.com/politics/articles/articles.htm#row2003A

Thursday, June 16, 2005


Der Fuehrer. A majority of the German population failed to vote for Hitler - but also failed to resist him. Game, set and match to the NSDAP.

Old Right & New Right

A little more from Friendly Dictators ...

Mark Mazower, in his book Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, points up the differences between two sorts of 1930's Fascism: on the one hand, you had the regimes of the old Right, "who wanted to turn the clock back to a pre-democratic elitist era", and on the other the regimes of the new Right, who used techniques of propaganda, rabble-rousing rhetoric and grand display, to seize and sustain their control over nations.

So, amongst the old Right there were people like Franco in Spain and Dollfuss in Austria (both ardently pro-Church) - while amongst the new Right were anti-religious thugs like ...

Adolf Hitler
Chancellor of Germany

As German bombs fell on London and Nazi tanks rolled over U.S. troops, Sosthenes Behn, president and founder of the U.S. based ITT corporation, met with his German representative to discuss improving German communication systems. ITT was designing and building Nazi phone and radio systems as well as supplying crucial parts for German bombs. Our government knew all about this, for under presidential order, U.S. companies were licensed to trade with the Nazis. The choice of who would be licensed was odd, though: while Secretary of State Breckinridge Long gave the Ford Motor Company permission to make Nazi tanks, he simultaneously blocked aid to German-Jewish refugees because the U.S. wasn't supposed to be trading with the enemy.

Other U.S. companies trading with the Third Reich were General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Davis Oil Co., and the Chase National Bank. President Roosevelt did not stop them fearing a scandal might lead to another stock market crash or lower U.S. morale. Besides, the same companies that traded with Hitler were supplying the U.S., and some corporate leaders threatened to withdraw their support if Roosevelt exposed them. Henry Ford was a good friend of Hitler's. His book The International Jew had inspired Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Fuehrer kept Ford's picture in his office, and Ford was one of only four foreigners to receive Germany's highest civilian award. As for Sosthenes Behn, at the end of the war, he received the highest civilian award for service to his country - the United States of America.