The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a statement defending itself and expressing “grave concerns” about a House Intelligence Committee memo due to be released in days.
The memo reportedly details abuse by senior Obama Justice Department and FBI officials in obtaining a surveillance warrant against Trump foreign policy campaign adviser Carter Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“The FBI takes seriously its obligations to the FISA Court and its compliance with procedures overseen by career professionals in the Department of Justice and the FBI. We are committed to working with the appropriate oversight entities to ensure the continuing integrity of the FISA process,” said the statement.
“With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” it said, referencing FBI Director Christopher Wray’s viewing of the memo on Sunday.
“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” it said.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) immediately fired back at the FBI in a statement:
Having stonewalled Congress’ demands for information for nearly a year, it’s no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies.
The FBI is intimately familiar with ‘material omissions’ with respect to their presentations to both Congress and the courts, and they are welcome to make public, to the greatest extent possible, all the information they have on these abuses. Regardless, it’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign.
Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.
The four-page memo reportedly summarizes some classified information that committee staffers were allowed to view in a secure setting and take notes on, but not to keep.
Republicans on the committee have used the words “shocking” to describe the memo, but they also say it is based on facts.
Democrats on the committee have offered shifting explanations as to why the memo should not be released — that it was dangerous to national security; that readers would not understand; and that it is a distortion of the facts.
They have drafted their own memo, which they argue will dispute the Republican memo and give their own context. The committee voted earlier this week to make that memo available to all House members first, before it is made public, as with the original memo.
The memo is slated to be released this or next week, barring any objections from the president.
The New York Times on Wednesday reported that FBI officials “say privately” that Trump, in approving the memo’s release, is “prioritizing politics over national security” and “putting the bureau’s reputation at risk.”
Republicans argue that the FBI opposes releasing the memo since it will expose its own wrongdoing, and that there is no reason to submit a memo exercising oversight on the DOJ and the FBI to those agencies to approve the release of.
Earlier this week, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe announced he was going on terminal leave, after FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly viewed a Justice Department inspector general report that said McCabe did nothing for three weeks after learning there were Hillary Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is reportedly mentioned in the memo for extending the spy warrant on Page, visited the White House to meet with Chief of Staff John Kelly on Monday for a “last-ditch effort.”
Kelly, however, said on a Fox News radio show Wednesday morning that he expected the memo to be released “pretty quick.”
Head of the Reich Bureau for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare
Of all the measures introduced in the new Germany those bearing on National Socialist racial policy caused the greatest stir internationally, for here was a State setting its feet upon paths hitherto almost untrodden and leading through untouched preserves, whose aims were in many respects liable to clash with established Liberal views. Relevant legislation served to corroborate and achieve these aims and it was no wonder, therefore, that – in the beginning at least – this particular phase of National Socialist reconstruction met with universal misunderstanding and prejudice.
We are happy meanwhile to be able to discern that other nations have come to realize that Germany is, indeed, taking to new paths, but they are right ones and are necessary and, more than that, Germany is in many respects blazing a trail for others; mention need only be made of our law for the prevention of the transmission of hereditary diseases (Sterilization Law) which has been followed in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland by similar laws or draft proposals. However, no one will wholly understand or sympathize with our legislation who is not wholly familiar with the fundamental change in the philosophical. conception of life which has come with National Socialism in the light of history.
Whereas formerly, and more especially under the powerful influence of Marxist teachings, the development and decline of States and civilizations was attributed to economic or purely political causes, we see to-day the determining role played by the human being in sustaining and shaping economy, the State, culture, politics, art and intellectual thought.
We have come to feel that the protection and preservation of the people who, after all, are originally responsible for the achievements of the State and culture, is the chief factor in retaining these achievements; for good blood and the strength that comes from good blood is given a people only once and if allowed to degenerate cannot be regenerated as one would rebuild a city or restore devastated lands.
Thus, wise statesmanship will place the preservation of the biological, that is, racial energy of its people before its political and economic concerns. The endless series of past empires and civilizations which have flourished and declined forcefully remind us how inexorable are the consequences of ignoring this truth.
History and the study of the science of population show that there are three biological stages which inevitably lead to the destruction of the vitality of a people and with it the destruction of the foundations of the State and culture as such. These three stages are:
A decreasing population,
An increase of the hereditary unfit,
The promiscuous mingling of races.
In these respects, Germany’s position in 1933 was alarming. A declining birth-rate among the fitter inhabitants and unrestrained propagation among the hereditarily unfit, the mentally deficient, imbeciles and hereditary criminals, etc., had led, for instance, to a state of affairs in which the increase of the healthier section of the population in the past 70 years was only 50 per cent., while the unhealthy and, in fact, those only fit to live in asylums, had multiplied ninefold in the same time, or 450 per cent.
The care of the latter costs the working population of Germany the not inconsiderable sum of 1 billion reichsmarks yearly, while the entire administrative costs of the Reich, Provinces and Communes amount to 713 million reichsmarks. It was, therefore, an act of self-preservation which caused the National Socialist State to promulgate the Law to prevent the transmission of hereditary disease. It was a measure taken in self-defence and much more besides. For a large portion of the hereditary unfit had brought children into the world in ignorance of the consequences of their own afflictions, and many – those still possessed of a sense of responsibility – were horrified at seeing the “sins of the fathers” visited upon their children. To this unfortunate category the National Socialist State lends a helping hand in freeing them from possible mental torment. Sterilization relieves their conscience of the frightful burden of causing further pain and suffering to innocent beings.
It is frequently claimed abroad in circles hostile to Germany that the politically undesirable are hauled up for Sterilization. Anyone versed in German Law and the thoroughness and precautions attendant on the whole procedure knows full well the absurdity of such allegations and that no one can be sterilized simply on request or as a result of political pressure.
The law for the prevention of the transmission of hereditary disease is only applicable in acknowledged cases of physical and mental deficiency such as congenital idiocy, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, hereditary epilepsy, chronic St. Vitus dance, hereditary blindness, deafness and serious bodily defects; in addition, it applies to chronic inebriates. The procedure in regard to the act of Sterilization can take place upon application being lodged with the special Court of Heredity by the person concerned, his relatives, a local physician or such official persons as are connected with matters of public health.
The competent Court, which is composed of an officiating judge, a medical officer and a doctor, decides whether Sterilization is called for or not. If the applicant or person under consideration does not agree with the decision of the Court, an appeal may be lodged with the Higher Court which has a similar composition as the Lower Court, although the individuals are never the same. The decision of the Court of Appeal is final. Even then the operation may be avoided by taking life-long sojourn – or at least for as long as the faculty of procreation exists – in a private home, provided such sojourn entails no costs for the Government. This clause was included in order that possible adherents of the Catholic faith who might have conscientious objections on the grounds of the Papal encyclical be given the opportunity of observing their religious tenets at all costs.
These measures of the National Socialist State, despite their broadmindedness, have been attacked mainly for political or dogmatic reasons. Such criticism is based on a number of objections which appear unfounded and extravagant. They may be summarised in three groups.
The first arises purely from the individualist standpoint which resents any intrusion into the life of the individual. According to its advocates, the individual has the right to be without children if he prefers or, despite obvious hereditary afflictions, procreate at will, or indeed, by transcending all frontiers and racial barriers, to contract marriage to his own taste. Fundamentally, that is, any restriction on the life of the individual demanded by the collective interests of the community is categorically rejected. Obviously, such an attitude must be deplored in every State since, if applied in all spheres, it would render communal and State institutions, both economic and cultural, impossible.
Civilisation is only possible through the individual becoming part of the whole and just as collective authority in the interests of all limits the egoism of the individual by, say, taxation laws or measures to combat epidemics, etc., it similarly has the right to implement such measures for the benefit of the community as are scientifically proved expedient in the way of population policy or eugenics. The need for such action prevailed in Germany.
The second set of objections is mainly based on humanitarian grounds. It is argued, for instance, that the act of sterilisation represents such a weighty sacrifice for the person concerned that society should only accept it if made voluntarily. But it is not humane that among civilised peoples the standard of living of that section of the population which is fit and able to work is lowered by burdening it with the excessive levies necessary for the maintenance of and keeping within its midst the hereditarily diseased who, despite these heavy costs, can never be healed of their ailments. After all, the healthy members of the race are also entitled to a share of compassion and humane considerations.
Nor is it justifiable to argue that sterilisation will not do away with the possible recurrence of similar cases. In arguing thus one might just as well refrain from putting out a fire because another might happen to break out elsewhere at some other time. Incidentally, sterilisation is and remains a humane duty to the individual. How great is the mental agony of a person suffering from some hereditary disease in the pitiful knowledge that not only he himself is incurable but that his children frequently begotten in ignorance of the complications of his own trouble, are doomed to a similar or worse fate. Timely sterilisation rids the hereditarily unfit of such mental torment.
Other objectors insist that the operation should only be performed with the consent of the individual. It is foolish, however, to want acquiescence from a human being who has no command over his morbid instincts or of one who is to be prevented from procreation for the very reason that he is suffering from some mental debility.
Everywhere in organised society, justice and morals are bound to interfere with personal liberty to a greater or lesser extent, even with that of the healthy individual. If an epidemic breaks out endangering the welfare of the community everyone, whether he wants to or not, must be vaccinated; similarly, just as the doctor takes preventive measures on this score, the specialist in the sphere of hereditary transmission, both medical and legal, backed by the knowledge of biological necessities must, if called upon, take upon his shoulders the responsibility which the individual patient is unable to bear.
A third and last group fears lest the suggestion of a biological stratification of society or the racial classification of humanity should lead to serious conflicts. As to this, it may be said that racial peculiarities are natural and any social or human system of differentiation will last only so long as it is in harmony with natural phenomena. Why, the very knowledge and acknowledgment of the social claims of the race, of racial hygiene, and its practical application, is calculated to limit, even prevent wars.
For war, even if successful, signifies biologically an irretrievable loss of the best hereditary tendencies. Since National Socialist Germany frankly thinks along biological lines she wants nothing but peace. The National Socialist idea of State is the most peaceful conceivable, for it of all others sees its duty in the preservation of the pure racial continuity of its people. Nothing but sheer want of sense could accuse the new Germany of hankering after war. For we are only too well aware what irreparable damage has been done and how heavy has been the toll taken of our people in the way of hereditary values through centuries of retrogressive selection, declining birth-rate and, finally, through the frightful decimation of the flower of our manhood in the War.
If we need peace and quiet for the political and economic regeneration of our people tried almost beyond endurance, we need it doubly so to effect the reconstruction and vital racial aspirations of our population policy directed along biological lines, for nothing could be more disastrous than war with its ruthless destruction of the best and consequent indirect preferential selection of the less valuable.
Even a victorious war is biologically a loss. The true statesman is aware of this and will never take to the sword except as a last necessity. Here it becomes manifest that the national-racial principle – contrary to the aims maliciously attributed to it – is in itself the surest guarantee for a policy fundamentally peaceful.
Most open to misinterpretation are National Socialist views on the relations between the various races of the world. It has been questioned whether the fundamental racial principles of the new world theory must not breed condescension, even contempt of people of different race. Quite the contrary; these very principles offer the very best guarantee for mutual tolerance and for the peaceful co-operation of all.
We appreciate the fact that those of another race are different from us. This scientific truth is the basis, the justification and, at the same time, the obligation of every racial policy without which a restoration of Europe in our day is no longer practicable. Whether that other race is “better” or “worse” is not possible for us to judge.
For this would demand that we transcend our own racial limitations for the duration of the verdict and take on a superhuman, even divine, attitude from which alone an “impersonal” verdict could be formed on the value or lack of such of the many living forms of inexhaustible Nature. But we of all people are too conscious of the inseparable ties of the blood and our own race to attempt to aspire to such an ultra-racial standpoint, even in the abstract.
History, science and life itself tell us in a thousand ways that the human beings inhabiting the earth are anything but alike; that, moreover, the greater races are not only physically but especially spiritually and intellectually different from each other. Yesterday one passed this fact by, and in attempting to unify political, economic, cultural and religious standards for all nations of the earth, one was sinning against Nature, violating the natural attributes of various racial and national groups for the sake of a false principle. To-day we bow to the racial differences existing in the world. We want every type of being to find that form of self-expression most fitted to its own particular requirements.
The racial principles of National Socialism are, therefore, the surest guarantee for respecting the integrity of other nations. It is incompatible with our ideas to think of incorporating other nationalities in a Germany built up as a result of conquests, as they would always remain – because of their alien blood and spirit – a foreign body within the German State. Such foolhardy thoughts may be indulged in by a world which has as its goal economic power or purely territorial expansion of its frontiers, but never by a statesman thinking along organic, racial lines whose main care is the preservation of the greatness and along with it the essential unity of his people held together by the ties of blood relationship.
For this reason, we have nothing in common with chauvinism and imperialism because we would extend to other races peopling the earth the same privileges we claim for ourselves: the right to fashion our lives and our own particular world according to the requirements of our own nature.
And if National Socialism would wish to see the unrestricted mixing of blood avoided for the individual, there is nothing in this to suggest contempt. After all, we Germans ourselves, viewed ethnologically, are a mixture. The National Socialist demand is only that the claims of the blood and the laws of biology should be more closely observed in future.
Here again our standpoint is not so very far removed from that of other people with a sound mental outlook. The American Immigration Laws, for instance, are based on definite racial discrimination. The Europeans and the inhabitants of India, the Pacific Islands, etc., have instinctively held aloof from a mingling of the blood, and both sides genuinely regard any transgression as very bad form. Nevertheless, this natural attitude in no way detracts from the possibility of close co-operation and friendly intercourse. And, speaking on behalf of the new Germany, let me once more emphasise:
We do not wish our people to intermarry with those of alien race since through such mingling of the blood the best and characteristic qualities of both races are lost. But we will always have a ready welcome for any guests who wish to visit us whether of kindred or foreign civilisation, and our racial views only lead us to a fuller appreciation of their essential peculiarities in the same way as we would want our own peculiarities respected.
On the basis of this reasoning, the National Socialist State was bound to object to the imperialistic designs of the Jewish people on German soil. Thus it is purely an internal concern of the German people who could no longer tolerate the domination – a result of political errors in the past – of an alien race having neither sympathy nor understanding for them. During the political regimes of the past the Jews had managed to obtain an increasing hold on politics, art, culture and commerce. Since 1910, as many as 13 of them had immigrated every day into Germany from the East. Thus Berlin had –
No people on earth with a vestige of pride in itself and its national honour will be willing to put up with such domination of the key professions by members of a completely alien race. At the same time, the Jews were a determining factor in those political parties which were against any reconstruction on national lines. As to the so-called State Party, for instance, 28.6 per cent. of its parliamentary members were Jews, and in the Social Democratic Party the figure was 11.9 per cent. It is of some political significance that the founders of the German Communist Party, a branch of the Moscow Comintern, that destructive force, were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, both Jews.
This predominance of alien influence foreign to the German nature in politics, science and things cultural, provided the objective for the law for the restoration of professionalism in the Civil Service and what has since come to be known as the Nuremberg Laws.
The Jews in Germany constitute a group of aliens who can expect to enjoy the hospitality of the country just like the members of other races. But no Frenchman would wish to have his leading offices of State occupied by Englishmen, and no Englishman would want to see the key positions in the politics, art and culture of his country occupied by, say, Japanese. Who then can reasonably object to the Germans removing the Jews from the prominent positions in their country?
As to the higher percentage of crime which is an additional factor of importance in judging the Jewish question in Germany, it may be mentioned that the majority are immigrants from Eastern Europe, whose cultural and moral ideas could never be in harmony with those of the German people. The Nuremberg Laws, therefore, exclude members of the Jewish race from obtaining Reich citizenship.
Persons of mixed parentage – some 300,000 in all – can become citizens of the Reich, but are excluded from holding office in the Civil Service, the Army and the medical and legal professions. Exemptions are possible as provided for in the Laws. The regulation forbidding marriage between a Jew and a German and making illicit intercourse liable to punishment was designed primarily with a view to preventing the birth of further individuals of mixed blood whose fate is a sorry one everywhere in the world, because they are neither one thing nor the other. For those already in existence a distinction is made between those having two Jewish grandparents and those with only one.
The former require the approval of the authorities for contracting marriage with someone of German or allied blood. The latter may not marry a Jew or a member of the former category. They may only marry people of German blood and their children are exempt from the restrictive regulations (Army Laws and the Law for the restoration of professionalism in the Civil Service, etc.). In short, their children become full members of the German community.
These measures were necessary because we realized that a nation or a people can only preserve its culture and its intellectual individuality by keeping the blood pure. It has been said that “every race is a divine inspiration” – a shaft incidentally aimed at the racial policy. We would re-join, however, “just because every race is a divine inspiration, the foremost task of civilization is to keep that inspiration pure and reject the least contribution towards detracting from its purity.”
Today we finish reviewing this post by Dmitry Lyskov. Where we left off, we saw that the new Bolshevik-led government, with its official Decree of Peace, hastened to fulfill a decade-old promise it had made … NOT to the German General Staff, as some anti-Communist ideologues still claim (without any facts to back up this assertion), but to the Second International, and to the world’s “conscious proletariat” represented by that organization. The Bolshevik delegations to the Congresses of the Second International, especially those meetings of 1907 and 1912, had voted for the peace resolutions and hence obligated themselves to carry them out to the best of their abilities. Which abilities had improved significantly since taking over the actual government of Russia (one of the warring parties) in October of 1917.
Next Lyskov deals with still another myth perpetuated by those same Great Russian chauvinist forces, amongst whom one can count such anti-Soviet dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was the bug-eyed Jew-hating fanatic Solzhenitsyn who popularized to the West, not only the “Gulag” meme (which is not exactly a myth, Stalinism was a real thing, but was greatly exaggerated in his telling of it), but also the myth of Russia’s “Stolen Victory” in World War I.
According to this myth: Russia was perched on the threshhold of victory against Germany. Tsar Nicholas II was prepared to fight to the bitter end. But then the Revolution happened, and prevented Russia from marching triumphantly into Berlin at the head of the Victors Parade. In which case, according to everybody’s What-If Machines, Russia would haveshared the spoils of war with the other Entente victors; Russia would have snagged herself some juicy pieces when the planet was subsequently carved up like a Christmas goose.
Defeated German troops return to Berlin, December 1918
What this theory has going for it, is the actual fact that Germany did lose the war, in the end. And was forced to pay reparations to the victors. Hence, it might actually be logical to assume that Russia could have taken her rightful share of the pirates booty.
Aside from that one point, the facts do not support this theory. One should always remind oneself, that the Tsar abdicated before the Revolution broke out in Petrograd. Nicky simply quit the game, because he couldn’t deal with the disarray his policies had caused. The revolution was sparked by the collapse in transport, the lack of food coming into the cities, actual hunger. The war was lost, not at the front, but at the rear. No revolutionary agitators, however skilled their oratory, even were they born with a hundred of Cicero’s golden tongues, could not have produced such an effect.
More to the point, the Tsar was forced to abdicate, not by revolutionary firebrands, but by his own General Staff. I suppose one could say that even Tsarist Russia had something like a Deep State!
Another fact: Decree #1 of the Petrograd Soviet, which is often cited as a defeatist document, since it ordered the troops to disperse, was technically directed just to the Petrograd garrison, not to the Russian army as a whole. As it so happened, the decree then got passed from hand to hand over the entire front line, almost at the speed of light. The men went “yay, we can go home!” and took off for home. The officers had simply lost control over the soldiers. There was no command left. There was no military discipline. The solid flesh of the Russian army had melted, thawed, and resolved itself into a dew.
Under such conditions, could Russia have possibly continued fighting the war unto the eventual victory? Lyskov answers his own question.
Building A New Army
At the start of 1918 the Bolshevik government started to build a new army for the nation: the Red Army. On the surface this would not seem like a promising project, given that the entirety of Russian manhood had just voted en masse with their feet that they didn’t want to be in the army any more.
And now we see the paradoxical situation which even General Denikin had commented on: That the same soldiers who kept whining for years that didn’t want to fight, suddenly wanted to fight. What, oh what, could have changed their minds, what could possibly turn these army sad-sacks and deadbeats into Spartan warriors? (Maybe the fact that they had just finished partitioning up the landlords estates and then come to find, that they have to take up the gun again, to keep their newly acquired land?)
Having something valuable to fight for, understanding precisely what one is fighting for, doesmake a difference, oddly enough. Motivation is an important thing, psychologically speaking. Still, it was an amazing feat for the Bolshevik government to reunite literally millions of soldiers with their weapons and send them back out there into the fray! Only this time, not to fight against Germans, but to fight against their former masters and bosses!
Woman! Learn how to read!
How did the Bolsheviks do this? With threats and cajolings? Maybe that too. But primary via the hackneyed and old-fashioned tactic of education. In the year 1919 alone, the Red Army newspapers reached a circulation of almost 150 million. In Soviet Russia, 68 million books and brochures were published. In 1918, the Red Army became the Well-Read Army: building 3033 libraries for the troops; by 1919 this number had increased to 7500 stationary libraries, and 2400 mobile libraries. The Army also set up around 6000 “Literacy Schools” for the troops, along with theaters and other forms of education and entertainment. The written word was, of course, supplemented by the speeches of the professional orators who accompanied the army and engaged the soldiers in political agitation.
All of these means of education served an important function: They transformed the “dark masses” into enlightened masses; patriots of the new Soviet Republic, who were able to discuss, in a halfway-intelligent fashion, the political needs and interests of their brand-new country. In this way, a new nation was formed from the lowliest members of the former Russian Empire.
Continuing to review and work through this post by Dmitry Lyskov, concerning Russian history of 100 years ago. Lyskov has done a good job in countering historical revisionism, often of the hysterical brand, e.g., “Lenin hated Russia and Russians, Lenin wanted to destroy Russia, etc.” People who emote those kind of views frequently equate “Russia” with the ruling Romanov dynasty and lament the untimely end of little Alexei and Olga and Tatiana and Maria, and the others. I am guessing these are the same kind of people who send their small daughters to “Princess School” at Disney World and follow the marriages and spawnings of the ruling English monarchy in the tabloids. Such people are hopeless sycophants to anybody calling him- or herself of “royal blood”, and simply cannot understand the concept of Democracy. Nor the idea that ordinary people can actually be political actors; elect their own government; and even have some say in the decisions made by that government. Through a process of vanity combined with projection, these innate anti-democrats identify their own inner selves with royalty, and somehow believe that they are internally a member of the elite, except that they are not! They are just ordinary hicks. Such people are born to be slaves and servants, and so they shall be. Just probably not to anybody with actual royal blood! Instead, they will serve the needs of corporate bullies.
Baby girls dressed as Disney Princesses
There are, however, some bourgeois democrats of the Westie variety, who believe the Romanov dynasty had it coming, but that the Rusian people should have then thrown their broad-shouldered support to the “democratic” Provisional Government. A government which would then continue the Entente’s war against the enemy of mankind, Germany. This point of view contains a not-so hidden assumption, that the Germans were the bad guys in all of this. I’m not saying the Germans were any great shakes, but look at the alternative, from the point of view of the oppressed colonial serf: Who was the most brutal colonialist beast when it came to Africa? Probably the French and Belgiums, I reckon. Compared to them, the Germans were practically benign.
First Attempts To End The Bloodshed
Speaking of the bourgeois democrats, we saw in our previous episode, that the new government which took over in February, did actually experience a burst of anti-war conscience. The Socialists in that government remembered their past pledges, made in 1907 and 1912, to prevent/oppose imperialist wars. Hence, one month later, in March 1917 they issued the very popular manifesto “To the peoples’s of the world”, calling for the proletarians of the world to step up to the plate, and end the slaughter.
After the Bolsheviks assumed governmental authority in October/November, they issued the first official governmental decree; as mentioned before, this was the famous “Decree Of Peace”. The Decree was penned mainly by Lenin himself and shows his vigorous and crystal-clear no-B.S. writing style. The Decree was presented to the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies on 26 October (old style dates); was passed by the Congress; and published in Izvestiya the following day.
Lyskov debunks the popular notion that this decree ended the war immediately. It wasn’t quite that simple.
The first paragraph of the Decree contained a shout-out to all warring sides and their governments to sit down at the bargaining table and hammer out a “just” peace that left all sides intact, with no annexations. All sides (not just the defeated) were to pay into a reparations fund to help rebuild the nations after the war.
In essence, this was a call to return to the status-quo, without declarations of victory or defeat. At the same time, the Bolshevik government expressed itself willing to consider any other reasonable propositions on the table; and in the meantime, there should be a ceasefire. No more killing! The Bolsheviks encouraged all warring soldiers to put aside their weapons and fraternize with each other. “Fraternization” consisted of singing, dancing, drinking beer, having sleepovers in the trenches, and telling old army jokes.
Bolshevik propaganda encouraged Russian and German soldiers to dance the Polka together on the front lines.
The Decree was a complex document. In essence it set the tone for Soviet foreign policy, and even post-Soviet foreign policy, for decades to come. In essence, it called for complete transparency in the conduct of foreign relations — i.e., no secret deals. To prove their bona fides in this matter, the Bolsheviks went so far as to publish the secret treaties signed by the Tsarist regime.
There was one piquant twist in the Bolshevik attitude towards international diplomacy: As Communist revolutionaries, they maintained the right to speak directly to the peoples of the world, over the heads of their governments and bypassing the usual diplomatic channels. This was a “revolutionary” idea, no pun intended. For example, this paragraph:
“The workers and peasants government of Russia appeals, in particular, to the conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind, as well as the 16 most important participating governments in the war.” The appeal to the “conscious workers” [as opposed ot the “unconscious workers”] over the heads of their governments, called upon them to step up to the plate and “assume their responsibilities, such as the liberation of mankind from the horrors of war and its consequences”. It was the duty of these workers to help the new Soviet government bring peace to Europe.
Stolen Victory? Russian propaganda poster of 1915 shows Russia humiliating Germany.
Such phraseology came directly from the Stuttgart and Basel resolutions, proving that all that Socialist Congress verbiage was not just for naught. The Bolshevik assertion that the war was purely imperialist and had no value whatsoever for the toiling masses, achieved a huge resonance in Russian society. The “dark masses” chided by General Denikin for their “lack of patriotism” were reaffirmed, by the Bolsheviks, that their instincts had been correct all along. This war did not belong to them, nor were they to blame for any defeats! The guilt-tripping of the war-mongers now fell on deaf ears.
Lyskov: “The Decree of Peace was indeed a fulfillment of a commitment made by the Bolsheviks. But not to the German General Staff. It was a commitment made to the Second International. And this is why it found such resonance among the Russian people.”
Next: Lyskov addressed the meme of the “Stolen Victory”… an ever-popular propaganda device of the Russian Nationalists and Great Russian Chauvinists.
Continuing to review and work through this post by Dmitry Lyskov.
Entente propaganda portrayed the Germans as gorillas.
Where we left off in our previous episode, we were attending the Seventh Congress of the Second Socialist International in Stuttgart Germany, where we were having a roaring great time and meeting some very interesting people. This Congress passed many important resolutions, including one that obliged all socialists everywhere to oppose the looming world war (which the Congress accurately foresaw); and — here is the most important point— that if the war should break out despite all our best efforts, then we, socialists, are obliged to take advantage of the situation to do away with the imperialist governments that started it for their own mercenary ends. In other words, the war would put the socialist revolution directly on the agenda in each one of the participating nations. The corollary being so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated: That no socialist should ever ever ever ever give support to his own government in the conduct of such a grotesque and unjust war. Socialists are supposed to be immune from patriotic rah-rah propaganda that conceals an unsavory truth about Big Capital and its colonialist aims.
I think the discerning reader already guesses what I am leading up to, namely, the shocking reveal that many, if not most, socialists turned out, in the end, to be not so immune to the war frenzy, once the Big One did actually break out. In the end, it takes more testicular fortitude than people can even imagine, to stand up to the ravings of mass hysteria, once soldiers start shooting and dying, and the government and police assume a self-righteous attitude about “supporting our boys”, etc.
The Basel Congress
But I am getting ahead of myself. We need to return to the year 1912, two years before the real slaughter began. Delegates of the Second (Socialist) International met again, this time in Basel, Switzerland, to formulate their response to the Balkan War. This was an emergency meeting. The Balkan War was a big deal, and turned out to be the precursor to World War I. The Congress seated 518 delegates representing almost every nation in Europe. As the piece (I just linked) notes: “Congresses in Stuttgart in 1907 and Copenhagen in 1910 had agreed on opposition to war, but had not been able to resolve the differences between those who wanted the International to call for a strike in the event of war, and those who believed that such a commitment was unrealistic and should not be made.”
The Russian delegation was led by Alexandra Kollontai, of the Menshevik faction (later to switch to the Bolshevik faction). Georgiy Plekhanov was also there, representing the Russian proletariat, as a good professional revolutionary is supposed to do. You can think of Plekhanov as the Obi-Wan Kenobi to Lenin’s Luke Skywalker (or Darth Vader, depending on your political views). Lenin regarded Plekhanov as a mentor and was said to fear his rebuke. Which makes it doubly sad that the old friends eventually had to part ways. Again, on the issue of the war. The war was the true litmus test. Of everything. (As it turns out, when war did break out, Plekhanov supported the Russian government and the Entente powers against Germany. Hence, it follows from this, that he would not have endorsed mass strikes intended to disrupt the war effort.)
Lenin did not attend the Basel Congress, but still followed the proceedings very closely. One could expect nothing less from this professional revolutionary and Congress-connoisseur. And Lenin could see, even from a distance, that the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) was starting to go squishy on the war issue, even before the war broke out! Despite the dissenting Leftist faction, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the majority SDP leaders were already angling to prevent resolutions mandating general strikes in the warring nations. Now, this could be a legitimate tactical issue; it is not always a good idea to mandate certain tactics in advance. Or it could show a certain lack of will…
In the end the Congress passed a compromise resolution which held back on the tactical issue of the General Strike, but was still radical enough to satisfy everybody, even Lenin. Kollontai was pleased with the result, delighted with her own experiences, and wrote to a friend: “One felt the need to frighten Europe, to threaten it with the ‘red specter,’ revolution, in case the governments should risk a war. And standing on the table which served as a platform I did threaten Europe!”
Turn Imperialist War Into Class War
We return to Lyskov’s analysis, and his reading of Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war (when it broke out in 1914) into a “civil war”. By “civil war”, Lenin did not have in mind the actual Russian Civil War (1918-22). In his vocabulary, he meant “civil war” as a synonym for “class war”, aka Revolution. Revolution is an intra-society war of the oppressed and exploited masses against those who oppress and exploit them. It is a war intended to switch the government from one ruling class to a different ruling class. Because the government is a civil institution, hence the phrase civil war. All of this vocabulary is important. Westies, especially, have lived for decades in a state of brain-washing, where the very language itself is used against them, to control their brains and make them see things in a certain way. This especially pertains to ruling class propaganda against actual social revolutions, which are described in terms such as “seizing power” rather than “switching the government”, etc. And the term class war is presented as something particularly bloody and undesirable; which it is, of course, except that the actual ruling class wages class war every minute of every day, just invisibly, most of the time. Only very honest capitalists such as Mr. Warren Buffett even admit that this war is still on-going, when he was quoted as saying, “There has been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won.” Except, just expand that 20 years to, oh, say, 10,000 years or so!
Anyhow, leaving that last bit to professional anthropologists, we saw that many international socialists sort of had their fingers crossed when they voted for the anti-war resolutions in Stuttgart and Basel. In the end, they could not find the testicular fortitude to call for the defeat of their own government and ruling class. Lenin had no such qualms. When war broke out, he openly called for the defeat — not of the nation of Russia, but of the Russian monarchy. A fine distinction, of course, since, according to monarchs everywhere, l’état c’est moi, but others might beg to disagree.
Lenin was never one to waffle around with words: His definition of the Russian defeat that he desired, was Über-clear: “In Russia, due to its [economic] backwardness, and not having yet completed even the bourgeois revolution, the main tasks remain as before, with three main conditions for a functional democratic transformation: A democratic Republic (with complete rights and self-determination of all nations); the confiscation of landowner plots; and an 8-hour working day.” In other words, according to Lyskov, Lenin was not calling for the military defeat of Russia, there is nothing in there proposing German occupation and administration of the former Empire. Lenin was calling for the fall of the Romanov monarchy and the formation of a Rusisan Democratic Republican government in its place. Quite a distinction!
The February Revolution toppled a 300-year-old dynasty.
And this is precisely what Lenin had in mind when he called for the “defeat of one’s own government” and “turning the imperialist war into a civil war”. All of which terrible phrases, which have frightened children for decades, conceal a much more benign meaning. Lyskov also remarks, ironically, that nowadays the word “Revolution” sounds benign to most people, but “Civil War” sounds horrible; but a hundred years ago, it was the other way around!
When the February (1917) Revolution broke out, the Romanovs left town, and the reins of government passed into the hands mainly of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. And something clicked in their heads around this time, and these old socialists remembered the resolutions that they had voted for, in Stuttgart and Basel. Hence, in March 1917 they published a manifesto addressed “To The Nations Of The World”. The manifesto called on the proletarians of all nations to shrug off the yoke of the ruling classes, and to work together “to end this awful war, the shame of humanity”.
The Manifesto found resonance in Russian society and coincided with the thoughts and desires of the vast majority of the Russian people.
Continuing with this post by Dmitry Lyskov, who has been writing great pieces in VZGLIAD about the Russian Revolution(s) and ensuing Civil War.
Where we left off yesterday,we saw that ordinary Russian peasants did not always “get” the foreign policy aims or methods of the Romanov dynasty. Nor were they able to grasp the cunning dynastic schemes nor the geo-political brilliance behind all of this Marching and Dying. It’s one thing for a, say, Ivan Susanin to pledge his “Life For the Tsar” when Poles are invading your native village and threatening your children. Quite another to die for the dynastic glory of the English monarchy. So, these peasants didn’t understand why Russia had to go to war against Japan, or why it later had to align with England/France against Germany. But they’re just dumb peasants, after all. What about the noble and intelligent Russian working class? Whether they knew it or not, or liked it or not (!), the Russian proletariat belonged to an international entity known as the “international proletariat”. Whose political representatives and leaders consisted of the various socialist parties, mainly the parties of the Second International.
European socialists, being highly intelligent men and women, could clearly see what was going to happen, years before it did. In 1907, at the Seventh Congress of the Second International, 884 representatives from 25 nations gathered in the beautiful city of Stuttgart, Germany, to write important resolutions, including ones involving women’s suffrage (in favor of), and colonialism (against). The delegates passed a resolution which nobly attempted to prevent the bloodshed of the future imperialist war, which they all foresaw with Nostradamus-like clarity.
All the delegates, not just the Russian ones, had a very clear idea, that the slaughter to come was to be a purely imperialist war, that is to say, a war launched by very narrow segments of the ruling classes, including Big Capital, for purely mercenary ends: Dynastic intrigues, the right to plunder colonies, scrapping like dogs over new markets for capitalist exploitation. Nothing in any of this had even the tiniest earmark of a just or defensive war; nor any ends that could be supported by the toiling masses. Most prescient of all, the delegates defined exactly how socialists should behave if and when the war broke out: “If war should break out regardless [of our attempts to prevent it], then [the workers of the participating nations, along with their representatives] must actively call for the soonest possible end to it, and to strive, with all their strength, to take advantage of the ensuing economic and political crisis, to awake the masses, and to hasten the fall of capitalist rule over the masses.”
In other words, the Socialist International would do all in its power to prevent the war; but if and when the war broke out nonetheless, they would at least use it to their advantage, to hasten the socialist revolution. An act of true prophecy: the Oracle of Delphi could not have done a better job!
Future Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov was one of the delegates!
All of the Russian delegates to the Stuttgart Congress voted unanimously “DA” to the above resolution. The Russian delegation consisted mostly of the Social-Democrats, whose leader was Georgy Plekhanov, along with his loyal apprentice, V.I. Lenin; but there were also at least a couple of Socialist-Revolutionaries there (or former “Land and Freedom” party, representing the Russian peasantry). A quick google could not find me a complete list of the Russian delegation, but the following individuals are mentioned in various sources:
Of the above, a special shout-out should go to Maxim Litvinov. born with the hilarious Jewish name Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkenstein. Of all the delegates, I believe he lived the longest thereafter, dying only in 1951! Litvinov survived not only WWI but WWII as well, not to mention the Stalin purges, and even outlived many of the Western figures involved in both wars, with whom he had dealings, as a Soviet diplomat!
[What follows is cribbed mostly from wiki, except for the judginess and moral outrage]:
H.G. Wells was a close friend of Litvinov’s father-in-law
Finkelstein was born into a Lithuanian-Jewish banking family in Białystok (now Poland, but in those days part of the Russian Empire). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (SDLP) in 1898. The party was illegal at that time, so it was common for members to adopt aliases, and also might as well Russify their names, while they were at it; hence, Meir Finkelstein became Maxim Litvinov. Litvinov joined the Bolshevic faction of the party as early as 1903. He experienced everything in life that a Bolshevik could, including prison time and exile. Most of his exile involved wasting away in that hell-hole London, where he married Ivy Low, the daughter of a Jewish university professor, Walter Low, who was a close friend of the writer H.G. Wells! During his stint in London, Litvinov at one time (that same year as the Stuttgart Congress, 1907) shared a rented house with Joseph Stalin; and also apparently worked with Stalin as the bag-man on several bank robberies. This tender friendship and camaraderie with Stalin may explain why Litvinov was not purged in the mid-1930’s, like most of the Old Bolsheviks were. (Although he came close, in 1939, as we shall see.) It also proves that Stalin was not the anti-Semite that some people accuse him of, since he did indeed have several close Jewish friends. Litvinov could even be said to have been a member of Stalin’s inner circle. Until he fell out of favor with Tsar Djugashvili.
A Veteran Diplomat
Litvinov is best known in his role as a veteran and highly seasoned Soviet diplomat. Living in London as he did, when the October Revolution broke out, Litvinov was a natural choice to be the Soviet of Peoples Commissars unofficial Ambassador to Great Britain. For many years subsequently, Litvinov represented the Soviet Union in many nations, and at many international conferences. In 1930 he was promoted to People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Litvinov was known as a “moderate” in international affairs, pursuing excellent diplomacy even with noted class enemies such as the English and French governments. In the early 1930’s the Soviet Union still preserved (this was to change during the Spanish Civil War) a division of labor between the Comintern (The Communist International, aka The Third International) and the Foreign Office. As the leader of the latter, Litvinov knew his place in the scheme of things, and did a good job, as best he might.
Litvinov performed Marxist vaudeville shtick with fellow Jew, Harpo!
In 1933 Litvinov achieved an amazing diplomatic victory: Official recognition by the United States of America! Well, everyone knows that President FDR was a secret commie, as was later proved by Senator Joseph McCarthy!
According to wiki: “[President] Franklin D. Roosevelt sent comedian Harpo Marx to the Soviet Union as a good-will ambassador, and Litvinov and Marx became friends and even performed a routine on stage together.” One would give a fortune to see what kind of vaudevillian shtick those two clowns came up with, but, alas, as far as I know, those films or tapes have been lost to posterity!
Iago to Othello: “Thou art a cuck…”
In May 1939 an ever-more paranoid Stalin began to suspect his old bank-robbing buddy of disloyalty. Hitler may have also had something to do with this, as he didn’t like dealing with Jews, yet he craved a temporary pact with the Soviet Union. Hitler could envision a “Molotov-Ribbentrop” deal, but not a “Finkelstein-Ribbentrop” deal. But Litvinov had an enemy closer to hand, and far more dangerous, than Hitler: Vyacheslav Molotov. We all know, and have had the misfortune, to work with these Iagos of the Office Place: Back-stabbers, gossips, ferocious cliquists. Suckers-up to the boss. Otherwise known as “Kiss Up, Kick Down” (KUKD) kind of guys and gals! OFFICE POLITICS, in other words.
Molotov (on the right): Office back-stabber and KUKD.
So, Litvinov was summarily fired, replaced with Vyacheslav Molotov. To add to his humiliation, NKVD troops surrounded the home of the old revolutionary and cut his telephone lines. Several of Litvinov’s aides were arrested and tortured, apparently in an attempt to get kompromat on their boss. Molotov, an ethnically pure Russian who benefited at Finkelstein’s expense, was said to have expressed horror at the number of Jews he found working in the Foreign Office, and “thank God” they are being purged out! Later, after Litvinov’s death, Molotov was to write, unsympathetically, that Litvinov was “not a bad diplomat — a good one” but also “quite an opportunist” who “greatly sympathized with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.Litvinov remained among the living [in the Great Purge] only by chance,”Molotov declared. As opposed to Molotov himself, who knew how to stab a fellow office worker, twist in the knife, and then climb the corporate ladder on the backs of his victims! As expertly as any Iago, using the weak point of the boss’s personality to gain some unfair advantage for self.
On the bright side, Litvinov survived this horrible ordeal. Although kicked out of the inner circle, he got to stay alive, and even received a new (plum!) job as Ambassador to the United States. If that Ambassador gig hadn’t worked out, he probably could have done Broadway tours with the Marx Brothers. The old diplomat died in 1951, most likely of a heart attack, after a long and productive life. They say that revolutions, like tigers, eat their young; and yet Litvinov was able to travel a long road from that Stuttgart Congress way back in 1907!
So, after yesterday’s Intro, let us get started with this post by Dmitry Lyskov, who has been writing great pieces in VZGLIAD about the history of events from 100 years ago.
As Lyskov mentioned, the Decree of Peace was the very first act of the new Bolshevik-dominated Soviet government, after they assumed responsibility to administer the former Russian Empire (October/November, 1917). It was an important priority of the Bolsheviks to get Russia out of the war pronto.
Lyskov begins with the anti-war attitude of the Russian peasantry, at the start of the 20th century, which was shown in the earlier war (the Russo-Japanese war of 1905), as well as the big war, World War I. He links this earlier piece of his, concerning the failure of the Stolypin agrarian reforms, and the rebellious attitude of the peasantry, who participated massively in the 1905Russian Revolution. The disgruntled Russian peasants apparently did not harbor Rah-Rah “patriotic” feelings about the war against Japan. The Romanovs may or may not have had valid geo-political concerns, but the bottom line is, they were unable to sell this war to the masses.
For example, the peasants of the village of Gariali of the Sudzhansky region (Kursk) wrote the following complaint (to the Duma) during their rebellion against the authorities: “Our only means of survival is being able to rent land from our neighboring landowners. But now they have stopped leasing the land, and we don’t know if that will resume. We are sustained by earning wages, but now, because of the war, the work has stopped as well, everything is more expensive, and our taxes have increased…”
Similarly, the peasants of the village of Kazakov (Nizhniy Novgorod) wrote the following complaint: “We subscribed to a newspaper (because there are literate ones among us), and started to read about the war, what is happening over there, and what kind of people the Japanese are. It turns out that they walloped us. And because of that, we will have to pay in full, we peasants and workers, in the form of various taxes…”
Residents of the village of Veshka (Tver) were even more ideologically inclined in their opinions of the Russo-Japanese war: “This ill-fated, ruinous and destructive war must become an issue for all the people, for which it is necessary to gather representatives from the people and inform them about everything that is known about this war. Then we can determine whether or not we should continue it, or seek peace.”
And that was just a regional war. When World War I rolled around, it was way bigger, the defeat was bigger, and the Russian peasantry were even less thrilled with the conflict.
The War To End Wars
General Denikin
At the beginning of WWI, Russia, like the other participants, experienced a wave of flag-waving patriotism. The first regiments marched off to the front with orchestras playing and people running alongside shouting “Hurrah!” But a lot of this patraiotism was just skin deep. White General Anton Denikin was later to pen this plaint: “Blinded by the thunder and crash of the usual patriotic phrases… we overlooked the internal, organic deficiency of the Russian people: A lack of patriotism…. They did not want this war. With the exception of the heated-up military youth craving to be heroes, [most of the people] believed that the government would take all measures to avert actual combat.” Denikin, apparently believing that Russia’s alliance with such back-stabbers as England and France was an act of “self-defense”, went on to lament: “The notion of national self-defense was not understood by the dense masses [literally: the dark people], who went off to war obediently, but without any sense of enthusiasm and without a clear notion of the necessity to make great sacrifices.”
According to Lyskov, Denikin was correct in the sense, that most peasants of this era did not regard the entire Russian Empire as their fatherland; for them, the “fatherland” was mostly just their village and region. And they had little care for the vast geo-political concerns of the Romanovs. As Denikin also noted, the Tambov peasant did not feel any concern that the German soldier would reach his village or do anything to him. [And he was probably right about that: This was WWI not WWII!]
Ordinary Russian peasants simply did not understand why they had to sit in trenches and get killed by incoming artillery strikes.
[Next: the Role of the Socialist parties in the anti-war movement — to be continued]
Today I start a new series, based on this post by our old friend Dmitry Lyskov from VZGLIAD. Lyskov has written a stunning series of historical posts about the events of 100 years ago. In which he subtly refutes those who have sought to distort this history. I just barely finished (a few days ago) reviewing his piece on the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917. Today’s piece is about the Bolshevik Decree of Peace, which was issued after the October/November Revolution of 1917. The Decree was the first official act issued by the new Soviet government.
Russia entered the war with only the noblest of intentions …. !
It was always fashionable among the elites of Russia’s former “allies”, especially England and France, to call this decree a “treacherous” or “treasonous” act. As if Russia owed so much to England and France, how dare the barbarians pull out of the war and leave their dear civilized friends hanging in the wind? Nowadays, sadly, you will also find many “Great Russian chauvinists” among the Russians themselves, and even in the pro-Russian blogosphere, who lament the Bolshevik “treachery” against their erswhile allies.
This point of view is not new, actually. Among the anti-Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was notable, in his novel August 1914, of promoting this view. Some call it the “Lost World” view, as it is also fashionable among monarchists who rue the downfall of the Romanov dynasty. These people, who all possess accurate “What-If” time machines in their homes, assert that if only the treacherous Bolsheviks had not pulled Russia out of the war, if only they had not “stolen defeat from the jaws of victory“, then Russia would have defeated Germany, would have saved the monarchy, would haveavoided revolution and bloody Civil War. These are generally the same Great Russian chauvinists who call Lenin a Jew, a German spy, and worse. As if being pro-German (or a Jew, for that matter!) is somehow way more reprehensible than being pro-English! (Besides, technically, despite Lenin’s admittedly Germanophile tilt, the Bolsheviks as a Party were officially neutral, not pro-German. Still, even if….)
Anyhow, what would have been so horrible about a German victory? My own What-If machine, which is of German make and very finely calibrated, like all German technology, tells me that a German victory in WWI would have prevented a later Hitler! In which case, there would be no need for me to build this new time machine, go back in time, and kill Hiter, because Hitler would have just remained an obscure and harmless house painter. See, two can play this game of Teleological Chess!
But back to Comrade Lyskov… Who asks the pertinent question: What was so important about the Decree of Peace that the Bolsheviks chose this as the very first decree of the new government they led? Lyskov lists the various theories surrounding this act: A humanitarian diplomatic initiative intended to end the international slaughter. Fulfillment of an obligation made previously to the German General Staff. A deliberate betrayal of the Entente allies. The first step to a “Separate Peace” as later came to pass in Brest-Litovsk. The reality, Lyskov says, is much more complicated than each and all of these various theories combined.
Nearly twenty years ago, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh – still basking in his agency’s residual glory from the Mt. Carmel Massacre of April 1993 – visited Moscow to sign a joint cooperation accord with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). After touring the Lubyanka Square headquarters of the Russian secret police, Freeh observed that “Our nations have more in common than ever before.”
At the time I thought it was shocking that Freeh would traduce his country, and his agency, by offering that comparison to the renamed KGB. Roughly two decades later I’ve come to understand that if the comparison is offensive, the Russians have the stronger claim to be the insulted party.
Like their Russian and Soviet siblings, the FBI’s primary role is that of fabricating crimes in the service of the state. Since 1991 – more particularly, since 2001 – the FBI has engaged in this behavior far more extensively than the Russians, both in terms of the volume of fabrications and the geographical reach of its operations. And evidence is accumulating that the Bureau has added assassination to its proto-totalitarian toolkit.
In his study The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzenitsyn records that “the creation of fabricated cases began back in the early years of the Organs” – that is, immediately after the Soviet secret police agency was created in 1917. The routine fabrication of offenses was done by the Chekists “so that their constant salutary activity might be perceived as essential. Otherwise, what with a decline in the number of enemies, the Organs might, in a bad hour, have been forced to wither away.”
From its inception, the Soviet secret police agency was engaged in what we now call “Homeland Security Theater.” The same could be said of the FBI, which actually had a nine-year head start on its Soviet counterpart. J. Edgar Hoover’s two chief priorities were the collection of what the Soviets would call kompromat on significant public figures – politicians, policy-makers, celebrities – and the management of his secret police agency’s public image. With the advent of COINTELPRO in the 1950s, the FBI became fully engaged in a campaign of surveillance, harassment, disruption, and assassination (if only by proxy) targeting political dissidents. Since that time, the FBI has been a fully realized political police organization, in every evil sense of that expression.
Like their Chekist forebears, FBI Special Agents don’t solve crimes; instead, they extract confessions through intimidation or blackmail. Where confessions aren’t forthcoming, FBI interrogators will routinely deploy the usefully ambiguous and self-ratifying charge of making a “materially false statement to a federal agent” to punish those who refuse to submit.
Mind you, FBI agents – like all other law enforcement personnel in the United States – are trained and encouraged to lie as an “investigative” technique. They face no criminal, civil, or administrative punishment for lying in the course of an interrogation. Once again, they share this trait with their Soviet and Russian kindred.
“We lambs are forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like,” observed Solzhenitsyn. “Those articles of the law did not apply to him…. He could confront us with as many documents as he chose, bearing the forged signatures of our kinfolk and friends – and it would be just a skillful interrogation technique” rather than a prosecutable deception.
A victim who is manipulated, intimidated, and barraged with unfamiliar and often contradictory details and accusations will inevitably say something that could be considered incriminating – or that he might later contradict in some trivial way. Those who are drawn into FBI interrogation sessions suffer from an additional disadvantage: The Bureau’s inquisitors, as a matter of inflexible policy, refuse to permit an objective record of their investigative interviews.
“FBI agents always interview in pairs,” writes the indispensable constitutional scholar Harvey Silverglate. “One agent asks the questions, while the other writes up what is called a `form 302 report’ based on his notes. The 302 report, which the interviewee does not normally see, becomes the official record of the exchange; any interview who contests its accuracy risks prosecution for lying to a federal official, a felony. And here is the key problem that throws the accuracy of all such statements and reports into doubt: FBI agents almost never electronically record their interrogations; to do so would be against written policy.”
A 2006 internal FBI memo obtained by the New York Times insisted that laying bare the Bureau’s interrogation sessions to the unenlightened eyes and untutored ears of the lay public would be an offense akin to tearing the veil away from the Holy of Holies. The common public might mistakenly believe that “perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques” may involve “unfair deceit,” and question “the quality of evidence” produced thereby.
In the Stalin-era Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn recalled, victims of secret police interrogation would be handed a “206” form to sign attesting to the accuracy of the official report, and the propriety of the methods used to extract information during the session. Defense Attorney Sam Fields points out that subjects of FBI interrogations – whether they are potential witnesses or potential defendants — will sometimes be given a copy of the resulting 302 document prior to trial.
“If your interview lasted more than thirty seconds, it is guaranteed you will find numerous discrepancies,” Fields advises us. “Some of them will be insignificant; some of them could be material…. Whether or not the `302’ discrepancies are a result of stupidity or cupidity makes no difference. Testify in opposition to the `302’ and you are in the crosshairs of the Feds. If they believe your testimony cost them the case, the next thing you [are] likely to hear from the FBI will be: `Please place your hands behind your back.’”
Furthermore, as trial attorney Norm Pattis warns us, 302s can be used to incriminate and convict defendants, but never to exonerate them. In 2007, Pattis notes, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut “moved in limine to preclude the defense from using a 302 to impeach witnesses.” What that meant, in substance, was that the US Attorney in that case admitted “that FBI 302s aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on” – unless, of course, they can be used in a retaliatory prosecution of a witness or defendant who has somehow thwarted a U.S. Attorney’s ambition, or frustrated an FBI agent.
Another Chekist-approved method favored by the contemporary FBI is the entrapment of innocent people, either as a pure exercise in Homeland Security Theater or in order to compel them to act as informants or provocateurs. Over the past decade, this has become the FBI’s métier. The case of Portland, Oregon resident Mohamed Osman Mohamud is a museum-quality exhibit of the first approach. The Bureau’s relentless harassment of Muslims at a mosque briefly attended by Mohamud offers numerous examples of the latter tactic in action.
At age 18, as the Somali-born Portland resident got caught in an undertow of jihadist radicalism, his father made the fatal error of contacting the FBI to express concerns. The Bureau very thoughtfully braced the young man with two of its “terrorism facilitators,” who took charge of the young man’s indoctrination. Then they prevented him from flying to Alaska to take a commercial fishing job.
After eliminating any possibility that this alienated young man could have found a way to make an honest living, the FBI’s Homeland Security Theater troupe played out the familiar script: They played to the entirely justifiable outrage felt by this young man over the US government’s treatment of Muslims in Somalia, then carefully manipulated him into pushing a button on what he thought was a bomb at Portland’s 2010 Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
While one element of the Portland, Oregon FBI office was targeting Mohamud, another was focusing its malign attention on a young Eritrean-born man named Yonas Fikre, who, like Mohamud, had attendedPortland’s As-Saber mosque. In April 2010, Fikre traveled to Sudan, where he planned to start a cell phone business. His first stop was at the US Consulate in Khartoum, where a State Department representative advised him to file paperwork for a Sudanese business license.
Shortly thereafter, Fikre received a phone call from a man named David Noordeloos, who represented himself as an official at the embassy. He told Fikre that he was one of several U.S. citizens in Sudan who had been invited to a luncheon at the US Embassy the following day in order to receive a briefing about safety concerns.
When Fikre showed up at the Embassy the following morning, he was taken into a small room and held for interrogation by Noordeloos and another man named Jason Dundas, who identified themselves as FBI Special Agents. Fikre immediately demanded that he have access to his attorney before being questioned. The FBI agents told him that he had been placed on the “no-fly list” and thus couldn’t return to the United States in order to confer with his attorney.
Leaving aside the fact that there is a common technology called a “telephone” that would make the distances involved irrelevant, it’s worth underscoring the fact that the FBI uses the “no-fly list” as a kind of virtual Berlin Wall: The Bureau used it to trap Mohamud in the continental U.S., so he could be indoctrinated by its terrorism facilitators, and they used it to trap Fikre overseas so he couldn’t have access to his attorney.
During that April 22, 2010 conversation (appropriately enough, it occurred on Lenin’s birthday), Noordeloos explained that the FBI wanted to conscript Fikre as an informant within the As-Saber mosque. He promised that he would be well-compensated to act as a stukach, that he would enjoy “the good life” if he were to become a snitch. He also made it plain that refusal to cooperate would have awful consequences.
“Don’t you love your wife?” Noordeloos asked ominously at one point in the interrogation. (“One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved,” observed Solzhenitsyn of NKVD interrogation techniques.)
Since Fikre couldn’t go back to the U.S., he was released from the US Embassy. A few days later, he received an e-mail from Noordeloos that said, among other things, that “The time to help yourself is now.”
Over the next two months, Fikre noticed that he was being followed by plainclothes police. In June 2010 he left Sudan, eventually arriving in the United Arab Emirates. A year later, after moving to the city of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi, Fikre was kidnapped from his home by agents of the UAE secret police, who blindfolded him and took him to a dungeon, where he was held captive and tortured for 106 days.
The interrogators who tormented Fikre had been given detailed information about him by the FBI, and repeatedly demanded that he cooperate with the Bureau. When he resisted answering questions, or inquired as to whether his jailers were working as proxies for the FBI, he was “repeatedly beaten severely on his head, back, legs, and feet with plastic pipes, required to assume stress positions for hours, and threatened with death by strangulation by use of a flexible pipe,” Fikre recalls in a recently filed lawsuit. “One particularly painful torture method his interrogators used was to force plaintiff to lie on his stomach with his sandals off, whereupon he was beaten severely on the soles of his feet; thereafter, he was required to stand on his feet, which … caused him great pain.”
One repeated line of inquiry dealt with Mohamed Osman Mohamud – the 18-year-old from Portland who had been lured into playing a leading role in a Homeland Security Theater production. It is quite possible that the FBI was trying to torture Fikre into providing “evidence” against their patsy, in the event that they confronted that rarest of things, a conscientious federal jury.
In July 2011, Fikre’s family and friends, working through an attorney, reported that he had gone missing and was likely in the custody of the UAE secret police. A consulate employee made a perfunctory visit to his cell, and concluded that the victim – who had dropped thirty pounds, and had been told that he would be tortured to death if he revealed the abuse he had received – was in “good shape.” The consulate representative was assured that Fikre would be released “tomorrow.” He was held for another eight weeks. When he went to the airport, Fikre was told that he was forbidden to return to the U.S. because his name was still on the no-fly list. An involuntary exile, Fikre was eventually offered political asylum by a relatively free country, Sweden.
Fikre was one of at least five men who attend the As-Saber mosque whose names have been inscribed in what we could call the “Berlin Wall Registry” – or what the Regime calls the “no-fly list.” None of them has been charged with terrorism or related crimes. None has been told why he is on the list.
Among the other victims was Libyan-born US citizen Jamal Tarhuni, who was kidnapped by the Feds in Tunis while trying to return from a humanitarian trip to his war-afflicted homeland in January 2012. Tarhuni had provided translation and consulting services on behalf of a Christian charitable organization called Teams International. After being told that his name was on the Berlin Wall Registry, he was drawn into a protracted interrogation by a set of FBI agents under the lead of Special Agent Brian Zinn.
In Tarhuni’s case, the victim was told that he would be released if he took a polygraph test. A female FBI agent requested that Tarhuni sign an electronic release form on her computer. As he examined the document, Tarhuni realized that it was a waiver of several constitutionally protected rights. He quite sensibly refused to sign the form. As punishment, he was effectively imprisoned for three weeks in Tunis before his Portland-based attorney, Thomas Nelson, was able to arrange for him to fly home via Paris and Amsterdam.
Yes, this was an extra-judicial murder.Todashev was unarmed, surrounded by FBI agents, Massachusetts State Troopers, and officers from the Orlando Police Department. The original story – ventilated by an anonymous source to a credulous Regime-aligned news outlet — was that Todashev, who was supposedly prepared to confess involvement in an unsolved triple murder, suddenly snapped and threatened the bold and valiant G-Men with a knife. That story has since been “rectified”; the new version is that the unarmed and outnumbered young man threatened the Chekists with a metal rod – or perhaps he threw a table at one of the interrogators — and simply had to be gunned down.
None of this would explain why there was a bullet entry wound in the back of Todashev’s head, a location suspiciously close to the spot preferred by the NKVD executioners who fed condemned political prisoners a “Lubyanka breakfast” – that is, a cigarette and a bullet to the back of the head.
That variety of lethal room service was a standard feature of the basement cells of the facility toured by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh on July 4, 1994, before he correctly observed that his agency and the one that maintained that dungeon had “more in common than ever before.” Truer words have rarely, if ever, departed the tax-devouring skull cave of a federal bureaucrat.
Multiculturalism oppresses individualism. In a nutshell, that is the simple yet astute view of Nima Gholam Pour, a conservative writer and brave member of the board of education in the small Swedish southern city of Malmö.
A massive influx of migrants has overwhelmed Malmö. An estimated 20 percent of its 300,000 population is Muslim. This city, once considered a “nice, beautiful, safe” place, is now considered by police to be one of the no-go zones of the region.
Historically, Swedes were good nationalist folk. They were not so-called “white nationalists” or “haters.” They were kind neighbors, a generous and loving people with good values in general. Swedes are altruistic. They try to be fair, empathetic and “do the right thing”; or “rite ting,” as my grandfather would say with his Swedish accent. But they were not doormats. Times have changed.
Recently, Malmö became the new home to the largest mosque in Scandinavia. No doubt sensing that this news would not be well-received among locals, Swedish media chose to completely hide the story – much to the ire of Mr. Pour. For him, it seemed to be the final straw.
In most democratic countries, the media should be critical of those who hold power. In Sweden, however, the media criticize those who criticize the authorities. Criticism is not aimed at the people who hold power, but against private citizens who, according to the journalists, have the “wrong” politicallly incorrect ideas.
TV4 and all other media refused to report that it was Muslims who interrupted the prime minister because they wanted to force Islamic values on Swedish workplaces. When the Swedish media reported on the event, the public were not told that these “hijab activists” had links with Islamist organizations. Rather, it was reported as if they were completely unknown Muslim girls who only wanted to wear their veils.
The Swedish media are politicized to the extent that they act as a propaganda machine. Through their lies, they have created possibilities for “post-truth politics”. Instead of being neutral, the mainstream Swedish media have lied to uphold certain “politically correct” values. One wonders what lifestyle and political stability Sweden will have when no one can know the truth about what is really going on.
However, what Mr. Pour failed to identify is who’s behind “the media.” This is the eternal question we ask at TNN: Who is doing this? Was this an oversight or a deliberate omission for the sake of being “politically correct”? No, probably not the latter, because that would make him a hypocrite. Rather, it’s more likely that he himself – as well as the majority of the world – hasn’t come to grips with the fact that, by and large, radicalized Jewish leftists and globalists are the owners and operators of the “politically correct” mainstream media and the wealth spring of the vile, self-destructive, hyper-liberal ideology it spews. This is becoming abundantly clear in U.S. as well as European media.
Sweden is no exception. Conglomerate groups Bonnier, Schibsted and Stampen dominate the media market. The following is a list of Sweden’s top seven daily newspapers and their owners:
1. Aftonbladet, Schibsted
2. Dagens Nyheter, Bonnier
3. Expressen, Bonnier
4. Goteborgs-Posten, Stampen
5. Svenska Dagbladet, Schibsted
6. Sydsvenskan, Bonnier
7. Dagens Industry, Bonnier
The Jewish family Bonnier owns the Bonnier media empire, and the Jewish family Hjorne owns Stampen. Major international banks with Jewish CEOs — such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon — own and control Schibsted publications. Among smaller publications and television, the pattern of ownership is similar. Even when the owners are not Jewish, the persons placed in controlling positions within the organization most often are. Yet, on the whole, Jews make up a tiny percentage of Sweden’s population. There are only an estimated 20,000 in this country of 10 million.
Even media from outside Sweden try to bully and shame Sweden’s leaders into submission on the migration issue. A perfect example of this is an April episode of “Conflict Zone,” a hyper-liberal/globalist program produced by German state television news agency Deutsche Welle (DW). DW correspondent Michael Friedman interviews (in English) Sweden Minister for Justice and Migration Morgan Johansson about how the country is dealing with the migration crisis. I recommend the entire 25-minute video; but, if you don’t have the time or patience, jump to 8:00-11:00 during which Friedman, with extreme sarcasm, tries to shame Johansson for not accepting more migrants faster.
It should be noted that Friedman, on staff at DW as a “journalist,” is a German lawyer from a Polish-Jewish family. He was also vice president of the German Jewish Council but was forced to resign from this position in 2003 over charges of drug possession and prostitution. Many of the news articles on his fiascos have been scrubbed from the Internet, so this brief story from The Los Angeles Times must suffice:
His crime was discovered almost by chance. Police were investigating an Eastern European prostitution ring when wiretaps led them to the name “Paolo Pinkel.” According to the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Friedman used that name when he invited three Ukrainian prostitutes to the Inter-Continental Hotel in Berlin and offered them cocaine. Investigators raided Friedman’s home and offices last month and found small amounts of the drug.
Friedman left Germany and lay low in Venice, but the ensuing scandal marred both his public and his private life. His talk show “Vorsicht! Friedman” — or “Watch Out! Friedman” — was suspended and his girlfriend, Baerbel Schaefer, also a talk show host, ended their relationship. …
Paul Spiegel, chairman of the Jewish Council, accepted Friedman’s resignation. “The drug affair is a human tragedy,” he said. “But time heals all wounds. After a certain time, he will reach out for a second chance, and I’m sure he will get it.”
Indeed, he did — at DW.
So we have a country, that just five years ago ranked among the world’s top economies and high in indexes for quality of life and happiness, trying to face the economic, cultural and security burden of mass migration followed by civil unrest and coupled with attacks and propaganda by domestic and international radicalized Jewish-leftist mainstream media.
Washington’s pell-mell rush to the brink of war against the giants of Eurasia is awesome in its recklessness. “The feverish pace of the Asia pivot meant to encircle China is matched only by the plan to dispatch Russia economically – and ultimately, militarily.”
Because of American intervention, Ukraine is embroiled in what can only be described as a civil war. For the past two weeks, the Ukrainians coupists supported by the United States and NATO have openly massacred their fellow citizens with the tacit approval of the White House and without exposure from the American corporate media.
The United States behaves like a caricature of action movie villains, an evil empire which foments violence around the world in order to have its way. Yet there is nothing cartoonish about the dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia and Syria and now Ukraine. There is no great mystery to America’s awful but very simple motive.
The United States wants to maintain its status as the world’s only superpower and makes the rest of humanity its enemy in the process. If the United States controls the world the dollar will remain the world’s reserve currency. In order for this to happen the upstart BRIC nations have to remain upstarts and that means that they must be destabilized whenever and wherever possible. The project for a new American century can be realized and every nation will have to bow to America’s whims. That is the nightmarish vision of this president and of anyone who yearns to capture that position after him. The feverish pace of the Asia pivot meant to encircle China is matched only by the plan to dispatch Russia economically – and ultimately, militarily. American imperialism is on the march.
The Ukrainian catastrophe was unknown to most Americans until this February, when the elected prime minister was forced to step down by a mob financed and directed by the United States. But the chaos had been conducted in secret for a long time, part of a plan by a succession of American presidents from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama to expand NATO and surround Russia with unfriendly nations.
On May 2, 2014, Americans would have been shocked to see what their government had wrought, but one can’t be outraged if information is hidden. On that date, opponents of the newly installed government were attacked by neo-nazi gangs in Odessa. They were peacefully protesting when their encampment was attacked and burned down. They fought back before seeking refuge in a trades union hall where estimates of between 50 and 100 died. Some were shot and some burned to death when the building was set on fire by the mob. Euromaidan PR even posted gruesome footage of the inferno victims and labeled the dead as “terrorists,” making no effort to hide their role in the massacre.Those acts were repeated one week later on May 9th in the city of Mariupol where a police station was set on fire and more deaths and injuries occurred.
The United States and its media allies are repeating the proven plan of attack which has worked so well in the past. Their propaganda ceaselessly demonizes the next target, in this case Russian president Vladimir Putin. Putin did not overthrow the Ukrainian elected government and light the stick of dynamite. The United States and the rest of NATO did that. Yet media outlets ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to MSNBC ceaselessly repeat the Putin as villain canard.
Putin even tried to dissuade the eastern Ukrainian regions from holding referendums which would allow them to become part of Russia. He moved his troops away from the Ukrainian border and presented his own peace proposal but none of these actions made a difference to the people determined to destabilize his government or to the media who follow them compliantly and repeat their lies.
“If there were questions about the legitimacy of the separatist referendums in eastern Ukraine, the farcical names of the entities on which people were asked to vote — the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk or Luhansk — surely answered them.” This juvenile mockery from the New York Times is a sorry substitute for journalism. Instead of examining why large segments of the Ukrainian population want no part of the west’s puppet government, they sneer at the call for self-determination.
The blame for this crisis can be placed squarely with the western nations and blame will also be placed on them if hostilities become more widespread. Obama and his cohorts in all likelihood don’t want a war, but may stumble onto one because of their desperation. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that unintended consequences brought ruin to millions of people.
The CIA director thought he was sneaking into Kiev covertly, as if no one knows what he looks like. Diplomat Victoria Nuland was caught speaking on an unsecure line clearly admitting that the United States was choosing the new Ukrainian leadership. Obama and his team are not as smart as they think and that makes it likely that they will make decisions that are costly to the entire world.
But it is important to remember that the rest of the world hasn’t acquiesced completely. Russia’s Gazprom handed Ukraine a $1.6 billion bill to continue supplying natural gas and China and Russia will soon sign their own 30-year energy agreement. While Russia makes the best of a bad situation, Vice President Biden’s son takes a position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. The gangsterism is all too blatant.
The American plan for domination doesn’t just assume coups and interventions but also its own invincibility. The road to hell isn’t just paved with good intentions but with arrogance and stupidity and America has an excess of both.
Most timid Americans would avoid any serious discussion on the true causes of a continuous failed foreign policy that only benefits Israel while costing our own country any chance of real national security and a prosperous society. The mere mention of the term Jew is usually enough for being banded to the back of the room and shunned as one of those haters. Unfortunately, President Trump has succumbed to this fallacious political correctness. In order to correctly understand the framework of the detrimental circumstances that propagate the decline of the American Empire, the clear-headed observer must confront why the United States remains a vassal to the Zionist myth that Israel is a valuable ally to our country.
Essentially the question boils down to a sober outlook. Does one place the interests of the foreign agents that swear allegiance to Israel above that of America, or are you content to bow to the dictates of Zionism, especially when they directly conflict with the betterment of our own people?
A genuine America First mindset rejects both attitudes and rests upon a basic non-interventionism whenever possible. In the case of Israel, there is no germane special interest that places their objectives above ours. Yet, the facts of the matter are that the practical reality in domestic politics has a virtual Jewish veto factor that makes wimps out of even the most courageous warriors. At the end of the cultural and governmental administration process; the influence of the pro-Zionist media, legal and court system, the Wall Street cabals of Banksters, socially progressive academia, culturally correct government schools, Big Corporatist Business and Christian-Zionist apostates all promote and perpetuate that Israel is a friend.
Ask yourself, exactly what did America gain by our involvement from decades of Middle East conflicts or from the trillions of dollars spent on bribes or military campaigns and deployments? The honest answer is nothing. We have been under the yoke of intimidation from the primary victimhood industry post World War II; namely the impact from false guilt to compensate for the hyperbolic holocaust claims that doom any objective discussion on the Khazar exodus to Palestine.
The final solution for these proclaimed Jews is to establish a Zionist political region within the expanses of the Middle East.
Global Research published this document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government, the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. (Article first published by Global Research on April 29, 2013).“Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East. Reading this account which includes documentation by Israel Shahak and Oded Yinon will be ignored by most proponents and apologists for the Zionist State.
In the case of one of the most repulsive supporters of this bellicose apartheid regime, Daniel Pipes casts dispersions and objections in his 1994 account, Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny. His exceptions to the historic reality that is the basis of this eternal conflict are all based upon a condition of denial and a fraudulent defense for the rogue band of supremacists.
“Turning to the United States, reducing apprehensions about Greater Israel is good American policy. Americans agree it’s in the their interest to end the Arab-Israeli conflict; because the fantasy of Greater Israel impedes resolution of that conflict, American diplomats and politicians should seize every opportunity to calm fears among their Arab and Iranian counterparts that Israel plans to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. Here are a few steps for U.S. officials to keep in mind:”
Piper goes on to instruct how American foreign policy should shield Israel from the crucial criticisms that only benefit the Khazars who pretend to be descendants of Abraham. How many times have you heard such sophistry that attempts to shame you into supporting what Revelation 3:9 calls the synagogue of Satan and if that does not work, condemn opponents to the Talmud Temple as anti-Semitic?
“He is declaring war in the Middle East, he is declaring war against 1.5 billion Muslims (and) hundreds of millions of Christians that are not going to accept the holy shrines to be totally under the hegemony of Israel,” Hassassian added.
Reaction from the UK follows.
In the meantime, Britain itself expressed concern over the change in American policy on Jerusalem, with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson saying: “We view reports that we’ve heard with concern.”
He told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday that Britain thinks “Jerusalem obviously should be part of the final settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians — a negotiated settlement that we want to see.”
The actual Statement by President Trump on Jerusalem on the surface seems reasonable. However, the needed question that begs a rational answer asks: What existential benefit does the United States gain from such reorganization without a comprehensive peace agreement among all parties within the region?
Manifestly, we all know that it would take divine intervention to achieve this objective. Sorry, even for the most avid Trump supporters, we all will have to wait for the Second Coming.
I’m not sure, to be perfectly honest. I think that most people that are skeptical about this change don’t see enormous benefits.
Obviously it will make the people, like Sheldon Adelson, who were pushing him to do this, happy, and this guarantees their support. You could argue this nails down support among the evangelical community and the right wing parts of the American Jewish community. By taking this largely symbolic step he solidifies that base a little bit.
You could also argue that this shows he’s a man of his word – he made a promise in the campaign and now he’s going to fulfil it.
But in a larger sense it’s not clear what the United States or really anybody actually gains from this, or why he chose to do it at this moment.
Now who among the ranks of the State Department can provide a distinct and clear response on how this departure will bring a positive improvement within the region?
Surely, President Trump’s response does not provide that clarity.
“After more than two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It would be folly to assume that repeating the exact same formula would now produce a different or better result.
Therefore, I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
“The new document states the Islamist movement it is not seeking war with the Jewish people – only with Zionism that drives the occupation of Palestine.
The new document also insists that Hamas is a not a revolutionary force that seeks to intervene in other countries, a commitment that is likely to be welcomed by other states such as Egypt.
The policy platform was announced by the head of the movement’s political bureau, Khaled Meshal, at a press conference in Doha. “Hamas advocates the liberation of all of Palestine but is ready to support the state on 1967 borders without recognising Israel or ceding any rights,” he said.”
And what was the response from Israel?
“Israel rejected the document before its full publication, with a spokesman for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, saying: “Hamas is attempting to fool the world, but it will not succeed.”
Maybe this is the actual folly that President Trump makes reference to in his White House statement. So why should America care about Israeli’s belligerent chutzpah? Must have something to do with genuflecting to AIPAC.
The Zionists are the driving force behind the covert creation of ISIS and the Mossad is the disruption operations behind making Iran the next target for the Amerika’s legions so the Israelis can further their plan for their own Shalom. This diabolical alliance will end in a radioactive cloud. But when that happens the irony will be missed by most brainwashed mass media news followers. The nukes the Zionists will use came from the U.S. labs, paid for by U.S. taxpayers and delivered by U.S. military technology.
Pope Leo XIII once given a most terrifying vision wherein he beheld Satan and his agents soon to be reigning triumphantly over the world. The Holy Father died a short time later, on July 20, 1903. On that mournful occasion Cardinal Sarto, knowing of the unequaled evils of the times to come, said that the Church must choose only a very holy man for her next pope, and he urged Venice to “pray that God may send to His Church a Shepherd after His own Heart.”
The prayers were answered, though hardly in the way that the Patriarch expected — or wanted. God, however, did send one of the greatest and holiest supreme pontiffs in history — only the second pope in five hundred years to be canonized a saint.
Pius X is called “the reluctant Pope” because few have so strongly resisted the call to succeed the Prince of the Apostles as he. Did he do so out of humility? Yes, of course. But true humility in a saint is a practical virtue, not an empty social mannerism.
Giuseppe Sarto knew what tremendous ordeals and sorrows would befall the next Roman Pontiff, and as the conclave votes increasingly mounted in his favor, he vigorously protested, claiming to be an “unworthy and incompetent” candidate. The holy prelate was dissuaded only by Cardinal Ferrari’s sobering suggestion of a worse fate in refusing: “Go back to Venice, if you wish, but until your dying day you will be plagued with qualms of conscience.”
Giuseppe finally resigned himself to the inevitable and declared, “I accept the Pontificate as a cross.” For days after the election he could not restrain the tears welling up from his profoundly sad and humble heart. This great agony that he willingly accepted with the Papacy, thereby becoming a saint, cannot be fully understood, however, without some awareness of the little-known background of those forces that met in collision impact against his stormy Pontificate.
Masonry aka; Weishaupt’s Illuminati Greed Gang.
NWO Totalitarianism Scheme ~ Evil Out Of The Closet.
In the Eighteenth Century two groups ranked foremost amongst the enemies of Catholicism: The Masons, and the so-called “free-thinking philosophers.” The Masons were bonded together in their wicked conclaves by a covetousness of the Church’s supreme authority in the world and a determination to destroy her.
So too with the “free-thinkers” — men like Rousseau, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and others, whose degenerate doctrines had been condemned by the infallible Guardian of Truth — who likewise shared a consuming hatred of the Catholic Faith.
“It must be destroyed by a hundred invisible hands,” they brazenly proclaimed. “It is necessary that the philosophers should course through the streets to destroy it, as its missionaries course over the earth to propagate it. . . . Let us crush the wretch!”
The very worst of these elements later were welded into a much stronger, rigidly unified, and infinitely more ambitious force, thus producing the greatest menace of all time both to the Church and society. By its earliest identity, it was known as the Order of Illuminati (Enlightened Ones).
It was founded on May 1, 1776 — the original May Day now celebrated as the central holiday of the Communist empire — by Adam Weishaupt, who was also an apostate Catholic, whose genius for evil seems to have been inspired directly by the fallen Angel of Light himself, Lucifer.
Weishaupt’s diabolical plan was to tear down all existing forms of government and order, to abolish all “religious superstition,” and to replace them with a universal tyranny he called the “New World Order”: “These powers [priests and princes] are despots, when they do not conduct themselves by its [the Order’s] principles; and it is our duty to surround them with its members….
We must do our utmost to procure the advancement of Illuminati into all important offices.” And he added, “By this plan we shall direct all mankind. In this manner, and by the simplest of means, we shall set all in motion and in flames.”
Weishaupt never had any intention of competing with Masonry in that regard. On the contrary, because its secretive structure was tailor-made for his designs, he wanted to take it over. And that is exactly what he did, by infiltrating key influential positions of Masonic ranks with his own agents. Masonry by this time had spread like a vaporous plague across Europe and much of America.
When its international convention, called the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, was held in 1782, “Illuminated Freemasonry” was unanimously acclaimed as the only “pure” Masonry. The Order of the Illuminati thereby took control of Masonic lodges and their associated secret societies through the western world, and used them as the principal means of advancing the Order’s conspiratorial network into every sphere and activity of life.
The undiminished ambitions and successes of this satanic force for over two centuries make for a horrifying study in themselves. We can catch some tiny glimpse of it, and at the same time shatter the fatal fantasy of Masonry’s being just another “benevolent fraternity,” through the incredibly bold and candid Letter to the Sovereign Pontiff, written in 1937 by Albert Lantoine, a thirty-third degree Mason who proposed a “truce,” if not a reconciliation, between the Church and Freemasonry.
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology and political philosophy founded/created by Rothschild to usurp nation state wealth into his controlled central bank. Communism/Sovietism was officially based upon the theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels whom Rothschild hired to create the ideology. This ideology was first put into practice when he financed Vladimir Lenin to usurp Russia’s Monarchy.
Here are some of his random remarks: “We are freethinkers–you are believers.” “Freemasonry seeks to exalt man; the Church to exalt God.” “We are the servants of Satan. [He later corrected himself: “I should have said; servants of Lucifer.’”] You, the guardians of truth, are the servants of God.” “…Your God cannot pardon the Rebellious Angel, and that Angel will never submit or renounce his dominion. But need we remain enemies?”
Freemasonry is incompatible with the Catholic faith. Freemasonry teaches a naturalistic religion that espouses indifferentism, the position that a person can be equally pleasing to God while remaining in any religion. Masonry is a parallel religion to Christianity.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia states, “Freemasonry displays all the elements of religion, and as such it becomes a rival to the religion of the Gospel. It includes temples and altars, prayers, a moral code, worship, vestments, feast days, the promise of reward and punishment in the afterlife, a hierarchy, and initiative and burial rites” (vol. 6, p. 137).
The Illuminati aka; Free Masonry attempts at all things to mimic Christianity in the opposite direction aka; diaboline.
1914-1922
Pope Benedict XV (1854-1922 ~ Pope 1914-1922)
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
“The coming of a world state is longed for by all the worst and most distorted elements. This [Ed. Note: one-world] state, based on the principles of absolute equality of men and a community of possessions, would banish all national loyalties. In it no acknowledgment would be made of the authority of a father over his children, or of God over human society. If these [Ed. Note: one-world government] ideas are put into practice, there will inevitably follow a reign of unheard-of terror.” (In Bonum Sane, 1920)
— Pope Benedict XV
“Thou art Kepha and upon this kepha I will build my Church.” Original Aramaic
“Thou art Rock and upon this rock I will build my Church.”
Matt 16:18
“and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock”
Matt 7:24-25
Pope Pius X
The Illuminati found great advantage in fomenting violent insurrections such as, and beginning with, the French Revolution in 1789. The same terrorists began in 1791 to confiscate the papal States.
In 1797 they invaded Italy. The following year Napoleon, having been raised to power by the conspirators, seized all the Papal States, and Pope Pius VI was taken captive. These vile enemies of the Faith “were already rejoicing that the Papacy and the Church had come to an end” when the captive Pontiff died. The their dismay, in 1800 Pius VII was elected — in exile. the Papal States were recovered, but only for a time.
French Revolution Illuminati
Meanwhile, the seizure of the other ecclesiastical properties went on. Terrorist activities were renewed in 1830 during the brief Pontificate of Pius VIII. And throughout most of the Nineteenth Century the revolutionaries and secret societies — including Socialists, the Carbonari, Circulo Romano, and “Young Italy” — continued their vicious assaults on the popes, who served as the focal point for inciting hatred of the old order standing in the way of “democracy.” None, however, suffered more than Pius IX. Bloody insurrections exploded again during his reign. The Papal States were finally seized forever.
His prime minister and a papal prelate were brutally murdered. The Pope himself was forced to flee from Rome in disguise to escape death. And once more the radicals were openly boasting that they had at last annihilated the Catholic Church through the Papacy.
The advantages of revolution to those arch-conspirators who fostered it were many. Not the least of these was that it drew suspicion away from their primary means of amassing power in their hands — that being the quiet infiltration of their agents into the most important levels of influence and authority. And this method of subversion, once begun, was never interrupted.
Druidism has become so accepted socially that Queen Elizabeth II and the Prince of Wales both accepted posts as honorary Druids in the Wales Gorsedd. (Sophie Moore, The Gnosis Interview)
Illuminati Attempt To Install A Vicar For Their Cause But Fail.
“Beloved Son-Greetings and Apostolic Blessing. The eminent virtues which, in the course of your long sacerdotal career, you have shown with such resplendent light added to the high consideration in which you are held by Our Venerable Brother, Jauvier Granito di Belmonte, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Bishop of Albano, as also by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, have prompted Our decision to honor you with a great homage.
“We do know that you fulfill the obligations of your sacred ministry in the most exemplary manner; that you have the most ardent solicitude for the eternal salvation of the faithful and that with constancy and courage you have upheld the rights of the Catholic Church — and have done so even at the peril of your own life. You have worked against the enemies of religion and We know that you spare neither work nor expenses to spread among the people your great works on those questions . . .”
The learned scholar Monsignor Join was alert to the impending success of their monstrous scheme, when Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, who was later discovered to have a close affinity with the French Masons and who Jouinwas certain belonged to a lodge, entered the conclave of 1903 favored with sufficient popularity to become the next Pope. Jouin implored Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria to use his archaic — yet seemingly still valid — power of veto to block Rampolla. It is clear that the Emperor was in no way pleased in having to interfere with the sacred function of a papal election. Yet it seemed to him an unescapable task.
Letter : from His Eminence Cardinal Gasparri to Monseigneur Jouin on June 20, 1919.
From the State Secretary of His Holiness.
“The Sovereign Pontiff with his paternal benevolence has accepted the homage of your new study on ‘Laguerre Maconnique ‘ (The Masonic War).
“It is with unerring judgment that in the work which you have undertaken, you have endeavored to project light, by means of documentation and irrefutable proofs, upon the inept and essentially anti-Catholic doctrine of Freemasonry, a doctrine issued from deism born of the Reformation, a doctrine which, as it is today clearly evident, leads fatally to the very denial of God, to social atheism, to irreligious teaching and impiety and is greatly detrimental to nations; it aims at removing from every association every trace of religion and every church mediation.
“Above all, in spite of all lies which oftentimes deceive the Catholics themselves, you have carefully and most particularly clearly shown the identity of Freemasonry evident everywhere and always, and the continuity of the plans set by the Sects and whose master design is the destruction of the Catholic Church.
“His Holiness takes pleasure in congratulating you and encouraging your work whose influence can, indeed, be so fruitful. It can induce the faithful to be vigilant and help them to fight efficaciously against everything tending to the destruction of the social order as well as of religion.
“As evidence of the celestial gifts bestowed upon you and as a testimony of his paternal benevolence, the Holy Father, from his heart bestows upon you the Apostolic Blessing.
“Thanking, you also for the copy of your book which you graciously sent me, and with my personal congratulations, I pray you to believe, Monseigneur, in the assurance of my complete devotion.
(signed) + P. Cardinal Gasparri .”
The conclave of sixty-two cardinals was sealed off in the Vatican on July 31. At the first scrutiny Cardinal Rampolla led with twenty-four ballots; Cardinal Sarto, unknown to most of the Scared College, had only five — the fewest number of votes of any of the candidates. The second scrutiny increased Rampolla’s votes to twenty-nine, and it was then the Cardinal Puzyna conveyed the Austrian Emperor’s intention to use his veto. (This obviously was the most respectable manner Franz Joseph could find to pursue his unhappy duty.)
Rampolla Caught & Stopped
Rampolla 1913
Years later it became known that a certain Bishop Jouin, founder of the renowned journal R.I.S.S (Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes / International Revue of Secret Socie-ties), had undeniable proof that Cardinal Rampolla was not simply a member of some Freemasonry lodge or other but that he was Grand Master of an extremely secretive sect, the ‘Ordo Templi Orientalis’. Scribd
It is remarkable that this point agrees entirely with what is stated in the articles written by Mr. Hubert Luns:
Publications containing crucial revelations regarding and warnings
against Freemasonry have,
very quietly and in mysterious circumstances,
been removed from practically all libraries,
public or otherwise.
It is not difficult to guess at whose hand is at work here…
Rampolla rose quickly and with skill to stir the indignation of the conclave, saying, “I thoroughly deplore this serious blow aimed by a civil power at the dignity of the Sacred College and at the liberty of the Church in choosing its Head, and therefore I protest with the utmost vehemence.” None of the cardinals knew the reason for the intended veto, of course, and so the sentiment was widely supported. Nevertheless, Austria was the one daughter of the Church still faithful to her, and this also had to be considered. Rampolla’s ballots did increase, but only out of protest, only briefly and only one vote before they diminished.
Cardinal Sarto Becomes Pope Pius X 1903-1914
Meanwhile the votes for Cardinal Sarto grew — all the more so as the humble soul tearfully begged that he not be considered any further. Bishop Merry del Val tells of discovering Giuseppe in the darkened chapel, praying and weeping profusely before the tabernacle, some time after the fourth balloting when it was apparent that the Patriarch might be elected. “Never shall I forget the impression produced upon me by the sight of such intense anguish….I felt I had been in the presence of a saint.”
The Sacred College disregarded Giuseppe’s pleas, and on the fifth scrutiny chose him to be the Vicar of Christ. When finally persuaded to accept the election as the will of God, he was asked what name he would take. Reflecting on the recent past and on the trials he knew to lie ahead, he answered: “As the Popes who have suffered much for the Church in the last century have been known as Pius, I too shall take that name.”
The City of London is a district of Greater London. ~ The Root Of World Control By Free Masonry Aka; Illuminati Finances.
VATICAN BECOMES AN INDEPENDENT STATE 11 FEBRUARY 1929
1922-1939
Pope Pius XI St. Edith Stein, a Catholic convert from Judaism, wrote Pope Pius XI in 1933 asking him to condemn Nazi ideology. The letter was published for the first time Feb. 19 in German and Italian newspapers after scholars were given copies of the original from the Vatican Secret Archives. (CNS file photos) (Feb. 19, 2003) See STEIN-PIUSXI Feb. 19, 2003. (b/w only)
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
For the first time the word “Laicism” (which means irreligious teaching) is to be found in a Pontifical document; it is the fatal and sought for result of both the Masonic doctrine and its direct action.This fact allows me to add to the list of all the Sovereign Pontiffs who denounced and condemned Judeo-Masonry; the name of our present Pope, Pius XI, in his Encyclical “Maximam grasissimamque“ of July 18, 1924, the Pope most clearly has lifted his voice against “Laicism” (irreligious teaching) in the following terms:
“Whatetier Pius X did condemn, We likewise condemn it. Every time that the word ‘Laicite‘ (irreligious teaching) is used to convey a feeling or an intention contrary or foreign to God or religion, We condemn it. We fully reprove this ‘Laicism’ and We openly declare that it must be reproved.”
In my own case, during the private audience which on November 16, 1923, he granted me, His Holiness, Pius XI, asked me to continue my fight against Freemasonry because, said he:
“Masonry is our mortal enemy.”
Later, as I was recollecting the kind words addressed to me by Pope Benedict XV in the decree “Proestantes“:
“With constancy and courage you have upheld the rights of the Catholic Church and have done so even at the peril of your life.” and adding that so far I had not yet become the victim of Freemasons, His Holiness replied in a paternal manner:
“Did not Saint Augustine, who is the patron of your parish in Paris, speak of the martyrs of the pen? (The Parish of which Monseigneur Jouin was head for many years and until his death was called Saint Augustine.)
Such a denunciation of “Laicism” as well as the encouragement given me to continue the fight against Masonry confirm the Pontifical condemnations pronounced since Pope Clement XII; it also follows the inspired words of Pope Leo XIII:
El Cristo de la Concordia statue in Cochabamba, Bolivia
“In the realm of spiritual salvation, there is no middle way:
one either follows the road to perdition or else fights without limit to the very end.”
“Instaurare Omnia in Christo”
Establish All In Christ
Pope Pius X
His Holiness Pope Pius X issued his first encyclical letter on October 4, 1903, recalling “with what tears and urgent prayers” he had tried “to fend off the formidable burden of the Papacy.” “We were terrified beyond all else,” He explained, “by the disastrous state of human society today. For who can fail to see that society at the present time, more than in any age past, is suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady, which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction?”
One senses in these remarks a foreknowledge of World War I, which immediately was to follow the saint’s death, and the coming of still greater horrors, which were revealed at Fatima fourteen years later. “You understand, Venerable Brethren, what this disease is: apostasy from God…”
His language becomes more prophetic: “All who consider these matters have a right to fear that such perversion of mind may be the beginning of the evils predicted for the end of Time — their first contact, as it were, with the world — and that in very truth the son of perdition, of whom the Apostle speaks, may have already appeared in our midst. . .
“Without any doubt there is a desire in all hearts for peace….But how foolish is he who seeks this peace apart from God; for if God be driven out, justice is banished, and once justice fails, all hope of peace is lost. . .
1939-1958
Pope Pius XII The charity and work of Pope Pius XII during World War II so impressed the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, that in 1944 he was open to the grace of God which led him into the Catholic faith. As his baptismal name, he took the same one Pius had, Eugenio, as his own. Later Israel Eugenio Zolli wrote a book entitled, Why I Became a Catholic.
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
“…the roots of modern apostasy lay in scientific atheism, dialectical materialism, rationalism, illuminism, laicism, and Freemasonry – which is the mother of them all.”
– Pope Pius XII, Address to the Seventh Week Pastoral Adaptation Conference in Italy (1958).
It is this accursed Sect whose perversion was stigmatized by Pope Pius IX when he named it: ‘THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN.’” — Monseigueur Jouin, speaking of Judeo-Masonry
The successors of Pius XII approved the Code of Canon Law of 1917 which explicitly condemned the Masons: “All those who enroll their names in the sect of Freemasons or similar associations which plot against the Church or the legitimate civil authorities incur by this very fact the penalty of excommunication, absolution from which is reserved simply to the Holy See.” (Canon 2335). The revised Code of Canon Law of 1983 stipulates: “One who joins an association which plots against the Church is to be punished with a just penalty; one who promotes or moderates such an association, however, is to be punished with an interdict.” (Canon 1374)
We have spread the spirit of revolt and false liberalism among the nations of the gentiles so as to persuade them away from their faith and even to make them ashamed of professing the precepts of their Religion and obeying the commands of their Church. We have brought many of them to boast of being atheists, and more than that, to glory in being descendants of the ape! We have given them new theories, impossible of realization, such as Communism, Anarchism, and Socialism, which are now serving our purpose….The stupid Gentiles have accepted them with the greatest enthusiasm, without realizing that those theories are ours, and that they constitute our most powerful instrument against themselves….”
“We have blackened the Catholic Church with the most ignominious calumnies, we have stained her history and disgraced even her noblest activities. We have imputed to her the wrongs of her enemies, and have thus brought these latter to stand more closely by our side…. So much so, that we are now witnessing, to our greatest satisfaction, rebellions against the Church in several countries…. We have turned her clergy into objects of hatred and ridicule, we have subjected them to the contempt of the crowd… We have caused the practice of the Catholic Religion to be considered out of date and a mere waste of time….”
“We have induced some of our children to join the Catholic body, with the explicit intimation that they should work in a still more efficient way for the disintegration of the Catholic Church, by creating scandals within her.”
“We know well that there are many who…unite together on the side of order, as they call it. Alas, their hopes are vain, their labours wasted! Only those can be on the side of order and have the power to restore calm in the midst of this upheaval, who are on the side of God…
Paul A. Fisher [1991] reports in his book Their God is the Devil, that between 1829 and 1836 the legislatures of the States of New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts investigated Freemasonry and found it to be “a moral evil — a distinct independent government within our own government, and beyond the control of the laws of the land by means of its secrecy, and the oaths and regulations which its subjects are bound to obey, under penalties of death” (p. 18.)
“This return of nations to reverence for the Divine Majesty and Sovereignty, whatever other efforts may be made to bring it about, can only come through Jesus Christ….Now what is the way that will lead us to Jesus Christ? We have it before us: the Church. Behold, therefore, Venerable Brethren, the great work that is entrusted to Us, to Us and to you also. We have to bring back mankind, now straying far from the Wisdom of Christ, to obedience to the Church….”
By “the Church,” His Holiness did not mean some vague, unspecified entity, generally defined today by modern theologians as the boundless “spirit” of Christianity. when Bishop Delany of Manchester, New Hampshire, met in audience with Pius X, the Pope asked him how many Catholics there were in his diocese. “Their number is about one-third of the population,” the bishop replied. ‘You must strive to make the remaining two-thirds Catholics also,” said Pius, and “good Catholics” at that.
Thus the Shepherd of mankind set down in his first encyclical the goal he would pursue to his last breath:
Pope Pius X
4 August 1903
– 20 August 1914
(11 years, 16 days) was the first Pope canonized since St. Pius V in 1672.
“The sole aim of Our Pontificate will be to restore all things in Christ (instaurare omnia in Christo).”
In this purpose the holy Pontiff’s efforts were directed before all else at restoring piety among the faithful — the same remedy he had used so often and so effectively in the past. And toward that end his most outstanding achievements followed from the two great devotions he sought to renew in increased measure.
One was to the Blessed Mother. The Golden Jubilee of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception provided Pius with the opportunity to urge this intensified devotion in his second encyclical, issued in 1904.
The encyclical was as beautiful and inspiring as Saint Louis Marie de Montfort’s True Devotion to The Blessed Virgin. (In fact the language of both writings is strikingly similar, which is not surprising, since Saint Pius highly esteemed True Devotion and granted an Apostolic Blessing to all who read it.)
Mother Mary With Baby Jesus
His Holiness said, “There is no surer or easier way than Mary in uniting all men with Christ….It is necessary to recognize that upon Her, as upon the noblest after Christ, is built the faith of all ages….It is chiefly through Her that a way has been opened to obtain the knowledge of Christ; as no one ever knew so profoundly as She did, so no one can be more competent as a guide and teacher in knowing Christ.”
The other great devotion, by which to restore holiness in the faithful and thus “restore all things in Christ,” was to Christ Himself, in the Blessed Sacrament. Over the centuries the concern for safeguarding the sacredness of this precious Gift from irreverent reception or even sacrilegious abuse had led to certain prescribed limitations as to how often the Sacrament should be received. Unfortunately, by the turn of the present century, such caution, with the perverse influence of the still-surviving heresy of Jansenism had been so exaggerated as to give rise to the notion that frequent Communion was only for holy people. Many received the Holy Eucharist no more than once a year. Communion more frequent than once a week was allowed only by special permission, and at that only in select instances.
“Holy Communion is the shortest and surest way to Heaven,” said Saint Pius. “The custom of keeping the faithful away out of pretended respect for the august Sacrament had been the cause of numerous evils.”
And so in 1905 he issued a decree: “Let Holy Communion, frequent and even daily, a thing so desired by Jesus Christ and His Church, be available to all the faithful of whatever condition of life they may be, so that it may never be denied to anybody who is in the state of grace and has a right intention.”
A few weeks later he set forth further instruction:
“It is necessary that children be nourished by Christ before they are dominated by their passions, so they can with greater courage resist the assaults of the devil, of the flesh, and their other enemies, whether internal or external.”
For it regrettably was also a custom that children not be allowed to make their First Communion before the age of ten, twelve, or sometimes even fourteen, and then they usually would have to wait another year to receive Our Lord again. A second decree was issued, determining seven years as the average age for a child’s first reception of the Eucharist, although it could even be earlier in many cases.
“Children from their tenderest years should cling to Jesus Christ, live His life, and find protection from the dangers of corruption.”
A woman once brought her little boy to receive the great Pope’s blessing. Pius asked, “How old is he?” And the mother answered, “He is four, and in two or three years I hope he will make his First Communion.” His Holiness then spoke to the child who had crept onto his lap: “Whom do you receive in Holy Communion?” Without hesitation the boy replied, “Jesus Christ.” “And who is Jesus Christ?” “Jesus Christ is God.” Needing no more assurance than that of the child’s sufficient use of reason, Pope Pius instructed his mother: “Bring him to me tomorrow and I will give him Holy Communion myself.”
Hundreds of First Communicants made pilgrimages to Rome to thank their beloved Holy Father for allowing them by his decree to receive Jesus at an early age. Saint Pius always welcomed them with tears in his eyes, embracing each one individually. Such was the Pontiff’s tender, Christlike love for children. And the little innocents, known for their sometimes amazing powers of discernment, loved him as much as if he himself were the Savior. When he would bend to them and offer a word of paternal guidance, some looking up into his gently and holy face would answer in touching simplicity, “Yes Jesus!” Indeed, was his majestic countenance unlike what might be imagined of the Beatific Vision?
Catholic Action was still another offensive strategy set in motion by the saintly apostle, to counter directly the snares of modern error and falsehood.
The social and economic spheres were the areas where the Socialists, directed by the higher powers of Masonry, were making the greatest headway towards the destruction of civilization, with their treacherous lies about “liberty, equality, brotherhood, and peace.”
So it was in those spheres that the Church would have to present herself, drive out Satan’s accomplices, and begin to guide society in all its endeavors back to Christ. “The field of Catholic Action is exceedingly vast: from it nothing whatsoever is excluded that in any way directly or indirectly pertains to the divine mission of the Church,” wrote Pope Pius.
“There is no need to remind you. Venerable Brethren, what prosperity and well-being, what peace and concord, what respectful obedience to authority, what excellence in government might be obtained and maintained in the world, could we but realize the ideal of Christian civilization.”
The blessing and protection of Heaven are at all times necessary but especially so in times of public distress and danger. The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier, defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.
~ General George Washington
But he did not fail to mention the insidious forces already arrayed to do battle against the Church in the same field:
“The Church knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. She knows, too, that she will ever encounter opposition, that her apostles go forth as lambs among wolves, that her faithful will always encounter hatred and disdain, just as her Divine Founder encountered them in full measure. But the Church moves forward unafraid, and while she spreads the Kingdom of God to regions which have hitherto not known the Gospel she also strives to repair the losses in the Kingdom already established.
To make all things new in Christ has ever been the watchword of the Church, as in a particular way it is Ours in the fateful moments through which We are now to give history its fulfillment by resuming everything in Him, all that is Heaven, all that is on earth, summed up in Him: to restore in Christ not only what properly pertains to the divine mission of the Church, in bringing souls to God, but also, as We have said, those things which spontaneously flow from this divine mission — Christian civilization in all and the single elements that make it up.
“In this second task the faithful laity must use all their forces to restore the social order, conscious of the necessity of rolling back the tide of ‘anti-Christian civilization,’ and of bringing Jesus Christ back to the family, the school, the whole of society….”
1958-1963
Blessed Pope John XXIII
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
“Justice, right reason, and the recognition of man’s dignity cry out insistently for a cessation to the arms race,” he wrote. “The stockpiles of armaments which have been built up in various countries must be reduced all round and simultaneously by the parties concerned. Nuclear weapons must be banned. A general agreement must be reached on a suitable disarmament program, with an effective system of mutual control.”
In an unprecedented move, the United Nations held a conference to examine the contents of the encyclical.
Pope John XXIII proposed a new world order to be built on four pillars: truth, justice, love and freedom.
Recall that the Illuminati attempt to mimic all things in the opposite direction of The Roman Catholic Church. This has to do with especially when speaking about ‘New World Order’.
The Great Jubilee of the 3rd. Millennium of Christianity which began in the year 2000, is referenced as New Order or New World Order.
The Illuminati counters this with ‘New World Order’ but not based upon Truth, Justice, Love, & Freedom , but upon totalitarianism aka; lies, injustice, racism/hatred, & serfdom to their banking City of London.
1. Truth will build peace if every individual sincerely acknowledges not only his rights, but also his own duties towards others.
2 .Justice will build peace if in practice everyone respects the rights of others and actually fulfills his duties towards them.
3. Love/Charity will build peace if people feel the needs of others as their own and share what they have with others, especially the values of mind and spirit, which they possess.
4. Freedom/Liberty will build peace and make it thrive if, in the choice of the means to that end, people act according to reason and assume responsibility for their own actions.
This encyclical represented for the first time a fundamental Catholic embrace of the human rights tradition as found in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Many in the church at the time saw this as a church reversal and a moment in which Catholic values and wider values based on human dignity finally met on common grounds.
It was at this time The U.N. was not so corrupt, but as anyone can see now (2013), the Freemasons did not stand idly by for this union on Human Rights. The Popes now see the U.N. as archaic, debauched, and dead (2013).
If the “son of perdition” had not “already appeared in our midst,” as Saint Pius X speculated in 1903, there is no question that his prophets were busy preparing for his arrival — and had been for a long time. The grieved Supreme Pastor looked out all through his Pontificate upon a world that was recklessly abandoning the security of proven traditions and moral values to pursue the false promises of utopian paradise. The consequence was that many countries soon were found teetering on the brink of tyranny.
Italy, for all intents and purposes, might have been regarded as a mere colony, annexed to France by Masons who controlled both nations. So tragic, in fact, was the degenerate state of Italy that even in Rome itself, the seat of all Christendom, a Jew named Ernesto Nathan, who thoroughly despised Catholicism, had been installed as Mayor. Every year, on the anniversary of the armed entry into Rome of that blasphemous and brutal thug, Garibaldi, Mayor Nathan celebrate the occasion by delivering public addresses in which he contemptuously heaped unlimited insults on the Church.
Saddest of all to the venerable Pontiff were those countries in which Catholics were being openly persecuted, such as Germany, Portugal, Ecuador, and Macedonia. Elsewhere, as in Mexico and Russia, the same affliction was visibly approaching, promising even crueler torments. These and other grave problems existing in so many separate countries weighed oppressively on poor Pius, who was said to have “the greatest heart of any man living,” and who was moved to tears by the very sight of suffering. But let us briefly recount just one situation that by itself characterizes the whole rising tide of human misery with which the noble Pope had to contend.
The government of France was held firmly in the grasp of Masons like a tyrannical noose which they were anxious to tighten. Since France was an almost totally Catholic nation, however, their biggest obstacle was the Church. For this reason they had long ago avowed that “the Church and religion must be shattered.”
Albert Pike
Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) played a key role in advancing this monstrous conspiracy. He was a follower of the occult Cabbalism (or Lucifer worship) that is the basis of Illuminism and Freemasonry. (See Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.)
“We are the Fathers of all Revolutions-even of those which sometimes happen to turn against us. We are the supreme Masters of Peace and War. We can boast of being the creators of the REFORMATION! Calvin was one of our Children; he was of Jewish descent, and was trusted by Jewish authority and encouraged with Jewish finance to draft his scheme in the Reformation.”
“Martin Luther yielded to the influence of his Jewish friends, and again, by Jewish authority and with Jewish finance, his plot against the Catholic Church met with success….”
“Thanks to our propaganda, to our theories of Liberalism and to our misrepresentations of Freedom, the minds of many among the Gentiles were ready to welcome the Reformation. They separated from the Church to fall into our snare. And thus the Catholic Church has been very sensibly weakened, and her authority over the Kings of the Gentiles has been reduced almost to naught….”
“We are grateful to Protestants for their loyalty to our wishes-although most of them are, in the sincerity of their faith, unaware of their loyalty to us. We are grateful to them for the wonderful help they are giving in our fight against the stronghold of Christian Civilization, and in our preparations for the advent of our supremacy over the whole world and over the Kingdoms of the Gentiles.”
“We must destroy her without the least delay and without the slightest mercy. Most of the Press in the world is under our Control; let us therefore encourage in a still more violent way the hatred of world against the Catholic Church.”
– From speeches at a B’nai B’rith (Jews Only Masonic Lodge) Convention held in Paris, France: February 1936, as published in “Le Reveil du Peuple,” a Parisian Weekly.
Arago, a French Senator, in 1876 burst out with this infamous blasphemy:
“Get Thee hence, Crucified One, Who for 1800 years has held the world bound beneath Thy yoke. No more God, no more churches — we must crush the Infâme…. We must eliminate from French society all religious influence, under whatever form it presents itself.”
Another prominent Mason said at the close of the Grand Orient’s general assembly in 1902:
“Until we have completely done away with the religious congregations,…as long as we have not broken with Rome, denounced the Concordat, and re-established lay teaching definitely throughout this country, nothing will have been accomplished. This same apostle of “liberty” went on to add, “I drink to the Republic. For the Republic is simply Freemasonry emerged from its temples, as Freemasonry is the Republic masked by the aegis of our traditions and symbols. He was joined on this occasion by a like-minded comrade: “The triumph of the Galilean [Christ] has lasted twenty centuries. He is dying in His turn. The mysterious voice which in olden days on the mountains of Epirus announced the death of Pan, today announces the end of the deceitful God.”
Free Masonry with Eye in the PYRAMID not Triangle.
The Masons/Illuminatis have also usurped the ‘All Seeing Eye Of Providence’ from The Roman Catholic Church, mock The Catholic’s Eucharist, etc.etc.etc.
All-Seeing Eye: The All-Seeing Eye of God looks out from the triangle, which represents the Trinity. This reminds us that God always watches over us in love (Ps. 33:18).
Never the less, the symbols really take a backseat to works. IOWs, the tree is known by its fruit.
With the same such hateful antipathy holding sway, therefore, the following resolution was carried at a Masonic assembly:
“It is the strict duty of a Freemason, if he is a member of Parliament, to vote for the suppression of the Budget des Cultes, for the suppression of the French embassy at the Vatican, and on all occasions to declare himself in favor of the separation of Church and State without abandoning the right of the State to police the Church.”
Accordingly, French Premier Waldeck-Rousseau determinedly sought after a breach with Rome without actually taking that final step himself. Why his reluctance? Combes, who later was to succeed the Premier, explained to the Senate in 1903:
“To denounce the Concordat just now, without sufficiently having prepared men’s minds for it, without provoking it and rendering it inevitable, would be bad policy on the part of the Government, by reason of the resentment which might be caused in the country. I do not say that the connection between Church and State will not some day be severed; I do not even say that that day is not near. I merely say that the day has not yet come.”
1963-1978
Pope Paul VI
** FILE ** President John F. Kennedy and Pope Paul VI talk at the Vatican in this July 2, 1963 file photo. Kennedy’s meeting with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican was historic: the first Roman Catholic president of the United States was seeing the Roman Catholic pontiff only days after his coronation. Kennedy _ who struggled against anti-Catholic bias during his presidential campaign. Kennedy was later murdered after he signed the Executive orders for The U.S. to print their own money instead of rothschild’s Federal Reserve Cartel. (AP Photo/File)
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
Now Contrast Henry Kissinger, responsible for genocide, receiving his Freemason/NWO recognition as a type of saint for freedom.
REMEMBER:
The New Catholic Encyclopedia states, “Freemasonry displays all the elements of religion, and as such it becomes a rival to the religion of the Gospel. It includes temples and altars, prayers, a moral code, worship, vestments, feast days, the promise of reward and punishment in the afterlife, a hierarchy, and initiative and burial rites” (vol. 6, p. 137).
The Illuminati aka; Free Masonry attempts at all things to mimic Christianity in the opposite direction aka; diaboline.
Pope Paul VI was attacked mercilessly for his Encyclical On ‘Humanae Vitae’ (Defense Of Life) which was Given at St. Peter’s, Rome, on the 25th day of July, the feast of St. James the Apostle, in the year 1968, the sixth of Our pontificate. This Encyclical was a death blow to the NWO designs for depopulation.
Venerable brothers, beloved sons, all men of good will, great indeed is the work of education, of progress and of charity to which We now summon all of you. And this We do relying on the unshakable teaching of the Church, which teaching Peter’s successor together with his brothers in the Catholic episcopate faithfully guards and interprets. And We are convinced that this truly great work will bring blessings both on the world and on the Church.
For man cannot attain that true happiness for which he yearns with all the strength of his spirit, unless he keeps the laws which the Most High God has engraved in his very nature.
These laws must be wisely and lovingly observed. On this great work, on all of you and especially on married couples, We implore from the God of all holiness and pity an abundance of heavenly grace as a pledge of which We gladly bestow Our apostolic blessing. Humanae Vitae & Credo Of The People Of God
Pope Pius VI exposed & censured ‘modernist’ Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for sedevacantism (alleging ‘ironically’ Popes after Saint Pope Pius X promote modernism and thus ‘the seat is vacant’). So Lefebvre goes about doing his own thing in the name of Catholic ~ which is a big no no. On July 2, 1988, Pope John Paul II declared Archbishop Lefebvre, the four bishops illicitly consecrated by him, and those who adhere to Lefebvre’s movement to be in schism.
Pope Paul VI’s Post-Vatican II Announcement: Modernism “is the most dangerous revolution the Church has ever had to face and it is still scourging her severely”. Pope Paul VI went on to identify that Modernism’s Revolution is a process of self-demolition and it aims at driving the Church to the end of the road to perdition. The trinity of parents responsible for the perversion known as modernism are:
Its religious ancestor is the Protestant Reformation;
“We are the Fathers of all Revolutions-even of those which sometimes happen to turn against us. We are the supreme Masters of Peace and War. We can boast of being the creators of the REFORMATION! Calvin was one of our Children; he was of Jewish descent, and was trusted by Jewish authority and encouraged with Jewish finance to draft his scheme in the Reformation.” “Martin Luther yielded to the influence of his Jewish friends, and again, by Jewish authority and with Jewish finance, his plot against the Catholic Church met with success…. Albert Pike 33rd. Degree Freemason
Illuminationism” was simply the carrying out of the principles of “enlightenment”; in other words, it was Freemasonry and practical Liberalism adapted to the requirements of the age. New Advent
Pope Pius X
A series of measures were initiated, all calculated increasingly to provoke Saint Pius X to rash retaliation, or otherwise to force him to cower before the might of the Masonic “Republic” for the sake of saving Church properties. In the latter instance, of course, since the socialistic dogma, “Private ownership is theft,” was widely accepted in France, the Pope would appear to fit the role contemptibly described by the anticlericals — that of a capitalistic theocrat, hoarding Church wealth which had been wrung from the proletariat.
The Rothschild’s Illuminati Banking Cabal Worth $100 Trillion “The Rothschild Dynasty” by a Dr John Coleman asserted that the wealth of the Rothschild family (if all assets were liquidated) would reach $300 trillion.
And so the noose began to tighten, beginning with legislation that “laicized” school and State. The next step was the outlawing of the teaching of religion in the schools. Religious then were forbidden to teach anywhere in France. Furthermore, a law was enacted which provided that no Religious Order or Institute could exist unless approved by the government. Subsequently Church patrimony was seized. Religious Orders were suppressed and forced into exile. Bishops were denied contact with Rome. and the “Republic” demanded the prerogative of appointing its own bishops free of Rome’s interference.
Aug. 26 to Sept. 28, 1978.
Pope John Paul I
Pope John Paul I Died Within 33 Days Of His Papacy. 33 Was The Age Of Our Lord When He Was Crucified.
Make sure you click the cc at the bottom of the video screen to read the captions.
About John Paul, Mother Teresa was quoted as saying, He has been the greatest gift of God, a sunray of God’s love shining in the darkness of the world.
Soon To Be Pope John Paul II Pledges Obedience To Pope John Paul I.
It isn’t a surprise that John Paul, reigning for only thirty-three days, among the shortest reigns in papal history, is remembered in Italy as Il Sorriso di Dio: God’s Smile.
He died on September 28th, 1978.
Pope Pius X
The ultimate break was reached in 1905 with the Law of Separation of Church and State, nullifying the Napoleonic Concordat of 1802. The law established “Associations of Worship” whose function was to administer the property of churches. Very simply, it meant that the State set itself up as the supreme authority over the Church, confiscating all ecclesiastical property and reserving to itself the right to regulate all religious activities. If, then, Catholicism hoped to survive in France, it appeared that the Pope would have to submit — or rather surrender — to the usurped power of the Masonic regime.
With victory over the Church now seemingly imminent, and the way apparently clear for the total de-Christianization and subjugation of the country, the Masons were jubilant. “We have bound ourselves to the work of anti-clericalism, a work of irreligion,” boasted Viviani. “We have extinguished in the firmament lights which shall never be rekindled.”
But it was not to be. Saint Pius steadfastly refused to compromise with the government.
“Our conscience would not permit Us to tolerate any form of experiment on this question in order to save the French Catholics from the dangers which threaten them.”
In his encyclical, Vehementer, he condemned the theory of separation of Church and State as being completely false and an insult to God.
It is the primary duty of the State to assist its subjects in every way possible to reach their eternal salvation. In any Christian State separation from the Church is reprehensible….” Concerning the loss of ecclesiastical properties, he wrote to the French bishops:
“The Church has not yielded up her right to these possessions. They belong to the worship of God and have been ruthlessly confiscated.
The Church was faced with the choice between material ruin and the surrender of the rights given her by God. She courageously refused the latter though this meant the loss of all the world holds valuable….We lose our churches, but the Church remains secure. It is better to sacrifice property than freedom.”
By his firmness in an impossible situation, His Holiness not only saved the Faith in France, but revivified it through the immense admiration on the part of the French people for his courage and patience. He thereby roundly defeated the conspirators in their primary objective. Clemenceau, a Mason, as much as conceded this moral defeat when he said, “No one foresaw what resistance the Pope would show to the new law.”
Maid Of Orléans ~ Joan d’Arc! Lead The Armies Of France & Pushed The Corrupt British Back To England! Born January 6, 1412 burned at the stake May 30th. 1431 by the British.
The great Pontiff’s example in the French crisis served notice to the enemies of the Faith the world over. And in 1909, symbolically at the time of the beatification of Saint Joan of Arc, he verbally reiterated this warning, specifically addressing himself:
“to politicians who detect an enemy in the Church and therefore perpetually oppose her, to members of secret societies who with all the hatred inspired by Satan increasingly calumniate, vilify and attack her, to the false champions of Science who by sophistry of every kind strive to render her objectionable, as if she were a foe to liberty, civilization and intellectual progress….”
“Divine Mercy In My Soul,”
Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska.
Sister Faustina heard these words as she prayed for Poland; “I bear a special love for Poland, and if she will be obedient to My will, I will exalt her in might and holiness. From her will come forth the spark that will prepare the world for My final coming.” — Notebook VI 1732
Karol Wojtyla (John Paul) was born in Wadowice, Poland, where later he moved to Krakow begining his journey in the priesthood. Five years after his birth, Helena Kowalska from Glogowiec, Poland applied for the second time to the “Congregation of The Sister’s of Our Lady of Charity” on August 1, 1925. This time she was accepted. She was nearly 20 at this time. After completing her postulancy she received her veil, and on April 30, 1926 she received her habit and her name in religion. From now on Helena would bear the name of, Sister Mary Faustina.
Pope John Paul II Called For A New World Order Of Subsidiarity (Which Is By The People) (Which Is Opposite) From The Rothschild Gorbachev Freemason Totalitarian New World Order.
“He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?” Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St. Ambrose put it: “You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.” These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional.
No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life. In short,
“as the Fathers of the Church and other eminent theologians tell us, the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good.”
Mehmet Ali Agca, a Muslim was forgiven by Pope John Paul II at a meeting in his prison cell just after Christmas 1983.
POPE JOHN PAUL II CITED THE OFFICIAL ROMAN CATHOLIC STANCE ON DEFENSE WEAPONS!
The John Paul II cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church # 2265 that ‘…legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life, the common good of the family or of the state.’ Pope John Paul stated, ‘Unfortunately, it happens that the need to render the aggressor incapable of causing harm sometimes involves taking his life.’” — Pope John Paul II
Wojtyła was made a cardinal in June 1967. As cardinal archbishop of Kraków, he worked closely with Poland’s powerful primate cardinal, Stefan Wyszyński, archbishop of Warsaw, who declared that Christianity, not communism, was the true protector of the poor and oppressed.
On July 2, 1988, Pope John Paul II declared Archbishop Lefebvre, the four bishops illicitly consecrated by him, and those who adhere to Lefebvre’s movement to be in schism.
In December 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev became the first Soviet leader to visit the Vatican. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred two years later.
An infinitely greater danger than the open persecutions against the Church — and not unrelated in their origin — were the attacks on the Faith from within.
Pope Pius spoke of both in his encyclical Communion rerum, in which he told how his heart bled continually because of the assaults on the Church, waged in an “internecine and domestic war, all the more perilous because it was unknown to most. Carried on by unnatural sons who hide in the bosom of the Church to wound her in silence, this war strikes more directly at the very roots, at the soul of the Church; its purpose is to muddy the springs of piety and Christian living, to poison the founts of doctrine, to corrupt the Deposit of Faith, to overturn the foundations of divine constitution, to mock all authority, whether of the Roman Pontiff or of the bishops, to give a new form to the Church, new laws, new tendencies, according to the pretensions of certain monstrous systems of thought, in short, to deform the beauty of the Spouse of Christ by forcing upon her the empty glitter of a new culture, a pseudo-science.”
Pope John Paul II when addressing ‘evolution’ cautioned the scientific community that science must be validated and they are not to bring it into the philosophical arena, by doing so, they are guilty of not science but mete-science.
The perfidious war against the Faith by subversion was waged under the banner of Modernism, described by the Pope as “the seed-plot of errors and perdition” which “broods like a poison in the bowels of modern society, alienated from God and from His Church.”
What is Modernism? It is a dogmatic medium for the “humanitarian tendency of contemporary society — the ambition to eliminate God from all social life,” says one writer. It “is denial of God and His Christ in their living reality, to be replaced by replicas which it can adore without needing to leave the self or submit to any other person,” says another. More specifically, it “is an organized and methodic skepticism of thought in the matter of Scripture, Theology and Church History,” as our own Sister Catherine summarized it.
2005-2013
Pope Benedict XVI
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is isolation. If we look closely at other kinds of poverty, including material forms, we see that they are born from isolation, from not being loved or from difficulties in being able to love.
Poverty is often produced by a rejection of God’s love, by man’s basic and tragic tendency to close in on himself, thinking himself to be self-sufficient or merely an insignificant and ephemeral fact, a “stranger” in a random universe. Man is alienated when he is alone, when he is detached from reality, when he stops thinking and believing in a foundation[125].
All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies and false utopias[126]. Today humanity appears much more interactive than in the past: this shared sense of being close to one another must be transformed into true communion. The development of peoples depends, above all, on a recognition that the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side[127].
Pope Benedict XVI
Joseph Ratzinger celebrates Mass at a mountain site near the Bavarian town of Ruhpolding, Germany in the summer of 1952.
Newspapers, blogs, talk-shows on radio and television are full of discussion over Pope Benedict XVI’s supposed call for a “new world order” or a “one-world government.” These ideas are, however, neither based in reality nor a clear reading of the Pope’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, the release of which spawned heated discussion.
The Pope actually speaks directly against a one-world government,and, as would be expected from those who have read his previous writings, calls for massive reform of the United Nations.
Confusion seems to have come from paragraph 67 of the encyclical, which has some choice pull-quotes which have spiced the pages of the world’s news, from the New York Times to those of conspiracy theorist bloggers seeing the Pope as the Anti-Christ.
The key quote which has led to the charge reads: “To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.”
Pope Benedict XVI
Tens of thousands of people attended Pope Benedict XVI’s traditional angelus prayer in Saint Peter Square, on Jan. 19, 2008.
Pope Benedict XVI Speaks The Language Of Subsidiarity While Globalists Speak The Language Of Totalitarianism aka; Fascism.
However, in paragraph 41, the Holy Father specifically differentiates his concept of a world political authority from that of a one-world government. “We must,” he says “promote a dispersed political authority.” He explains that “The integrated economy of the present day does not make the role of States redundant, but rather it commits governments to greater collaboration with one another.
Both wisdom and prudence suggest not being too precipitous in declaring the demise of the State. In terms of the resolution of the current crisis, the State’s role seems destined to grow, as it regains many of its competences.
In some nations, moreover, the construction or reconstruction of the State remains a key factor in their development.”
Later in the encyclical (57) he speaks of the opposite concept to one- world government –subsidiarity (the principle of Catholic social teaching which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority) – as being essential.
“In order not to produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature, the governance of globalization must be marked by subsidiarity,”
Giordani explains Modernism as an ostensible “desire to modernize the Church, as if it had become senile, adapting Catholicism to the needs — intellectual, moral, and social — of the new times; or as declared in the Program of the Modernists (answering the encyclical Pascendi), it was the desire to live in union with Christians and Catholics who had adopted the spirit of the epoch: a desire to emancipate the faithful from ecclesiastical authority, science form dogma, the State from the Church, the heart from the head….” And he says the inevitable result would be to make of Catholicism “a sort of Protestantism: a mere noisy religious opinion, to be modified from generation to generation, to be changed from person to person, resolving itself at length into a system of natural ethics.”
To be still more specific, Modernism was inspired by the “free-thought” philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who actually coined its very name. It was institutionalized by the Subjectivism of Immanuel Kant.
But it was germinated and nurtured like a deadly fungus on the body of the Church by the same “enlightened” disciples of Lucifer who long have contrived to “infiltrate that place” and to “bore from within until nothing remains but an empty shell.”
The subtlety of Modernism is that under the presumptuous guise of bringing “Reason” to the Faith, it provided the means by which to compromise that infallible Faith with condemned heresies — to “reconcile truth with falsehood,” as Saint Pius X observed. Hence he described it not as a mere heresy itself, but as “the synthesis and poison of all heresies which tend to undermine the fundamentals of the Faith and to annihilate Christianity.”
SUBSIDIARITY DEFIES THE TYRANNY OF CONTROL BY THE FEW OVER THE MANY ~ CALLED COLLECTIVISM AKA COMMUNISM AKA ROTHSCHILDISM AKA MODERNISM.
SUBSIDIARITY
The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention. It aims at harmonizing the relationships between individuals and societies. It tends toward the establishment of true international order.
Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”
The responsibility of the state. “Economic activity, especially the activity of a market economy, cannot be conducted in an institutional, juridical, or political vacuum. On the contrary, it presupposes sure guarantees of individual freedom and private property, as well as a stable currency and efficient public services.
Hence the principal task of the state is to guarantee this security, so that those who work and produce can enjoy the fruits of their labors and thus feel encouraged to work efficiently and honestly. Another task of the state is that of overseeing and directing the exercise of human rights in the economic sector. However, primary responsibility in this area belongs not to the state but to individuals and to the various groups and associations which make up society.”
Despite repeated stern warnings from the holy Bishop of Rome, the heretical poison continued to spread, particularly amongst the clergy. And so he issued the decree Lamentibili on July 3, 1907, condemning sixty-five erroneous propositions taken from the writings of the arch-Modernist, Alfred Loisy. One learned scholar writes:
“It arrived as a thunderbolt. That…. August the Modernists had the audacity to gather at Molveno in the Trentino to organize their resistance… They protested their innocence to the Pope in an open letter entitled ‘That which we wish.’ But in secret they decided to cloak their revolt by remaining within the Church, to help her evolve according to their plans.”
Pius, however, well knew the treachery of his enemies and was not to be fooled.
In September of that same year, he intervened even more solemnly by issuing his famous,
Encyclical PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS
A lengthy and masterly exposition of the heretics, their false principles, and their evil purposes: “…Through pride the Modernists have overestimated themselves. They are puffed up with the vainglory which allows them to regard themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge, and, elated with presumption, makes them say,
‘We are not as the rest of men,’
and which leads them, lest they should seem as other men, to embrace and to devise novelties even of the most absurd kind. It is pride which …causes them to demand a compromise between authority and liberty. It is owing to their pride that they seek to be reformers of others while they forget to reform themselves.
“….These very men who pose as Doctors of the Church, who speak so highly of modern philosophy and show such contempt for Scholasticism, have embraced the one with its false glamour, precisely because their ignorance of the other has left them without the means of recognizing the confusion of their ideas and of refuting sophistry. Their system, replete with so many errors, has been born of the union between Faith and false philosophy.”
A storm of criticism and insult rained down on Christ’s holy Vicar after this final and inescapable condemnation of the heresy. Typical was this insolence from George Tyrell, a former Jesuit:
“The Modernist movement had quickened a thousand dim dreams of reunion [with what? or whom?] into its enthusiastic hope, when lo! Pius X comes forward with a stone in one hand and a scorpion in the other.”
Exemplifying the pompous arrogance for which they had been cited, other Modernists attempted to belittle the solemn condemnation by calling the Sovereign Pontiff, in his own humble words, a “country curate,” by which they meant to imply that he was no intellectual like themselves.
The Anti-Catholic Puritans Landed In Massachusetts While The Roman Catholics Landed In Maryland And Who Established The United States Of America Based Upon Religious Liberty.
In 1611, Jesuit missionaries first set foot on our continent. Within forty years eight of them, (whose feast day is October 19th) gave up their lives near the Georgian Bay and in upstate New York. This quadricentennial of the Jesuit mission gives us cause to look to our spiritual roots.
The truth, of course, is that for all his humility Saint Pius X was a brilliant theologian and philosopher, as Pascendi ably demonstrated. In fact, their having to stoop to base insults — many far worse than these — proves in itself that the Modernists were without any defense against this intellectual giant.
Pascendi is a literary monument to the splendid holiness, to the luminous wisdom, to the alert perspicacity, to the unflinching courage, to the uncompromising firmness and yet also the paternal gentleness — in short, to all the magnificent attributes of this contemporary Pope and Saint, whose disarmingly modest stature cast an awesome shadow on a worldwide battlefield.
Brazen and determined enemies of the divinely founded Church, both within and without, who were emboldened by the very powers of hell, had unexpectedly met far more than a match for their sinister craftiness in the person of one soft-spoken little man, Giuseppe Sarto. Those within the Church were forced to retreat back into dark shadows, and the ugly contagion of their Modernism was arrested — at least for a time.
Melchizedek. Mosaic of “San Vitale” in Ravenna.
Reforming the Priesthood
But Pius knew that neither the devil nor his disciples ever rest — much less do they ever give up. With characteristic action, therefore, he moved positively against the lingering “atmosphere of poison,” focusing on the infected clergy. Recalcitrant Modernist priests were excommunicated, and the warning of like justice was directly conveyed to all — regardless of ecclesiastical rank — who entertained notions of defying the Holy Office in its condemnation.
All priests were required to take an oath against Modernism. Moreover, the Pope issued his encyclical Pieni l’amina, in which he commanded the bishops to ordain only those whose discipline, obedience, and mental docility were completely assured. “You will have just the kind of priests you have educated,” he reminded them, and he ordered them to be particularly attentive to the seminaries:
“Let bishops furthermore exercise the most scrupulous vigilance over professors and curricula, recalling to their duty any who might be inclined to follow dangerous novelty, and removing from teaching posts any who do not profit by admonitions given them…. Discipline in seminaries must be constant and vigilant….”
All his sacerdotal life, Giuseppe Sarto had regarded unholy priests as a menace and a main reason why so many evils were able to flourish in the world — even more so in recent times because of the many abuses of the sacred ministry. And so as Pope in 1908 he wrote his famed Exhortation to the Catholic Clergy, a spiritual formula urging those ancient prescriptions of the Church — prayer, meditation, the study of holy works, and other practices conducive to an interior life — as the means by which to acquire priestly sanctity.
“The priest is not a man who can be good or bad just for himself alone; it is impossible to realize what an influence his manner and habit of living have on the faithful. A genuinely good priest is a treasure beyond compare!”
It is “interior holiness” that makes for a good priest: “If this holiness — the supereminent wisdom of Jesus Christ — is lacking in a priest, everything is lacking in him. Because — without holiness — a vast store of the finest learning (which We Ourselves are trying so hard to cultivate in priests), keenness and efficiency in management, while they may occasionally be of some service to the Church or to individual souls, are much more frequently the deplorable cause of harm to the Church and to souls.
How much a priest, even the lowliest, can do if he be holy, how many salutary works he can conceive and accomplish for the benefit of the faithful, all this is evident from the experience of every age of the Church. Suffice it to recall the comparatively recent Curé d’Ars, John the Baptist Vianney, whom We Ourselves are happy to have declared Blessed.”
(It was most fitting that His Holiness should have cited as an example for priests the Curé d’Ars, who is now canonized and is the Patron Saint of the priesthood. But it was all the more fitting that Saint John Vianney, the country curate to whom this Pontiff had a great devotion, should have been beatified by Saint Pius X, another model priest who called himself a “simple country curate.”)
“In this connection the point of first importance is to spend a part of our time every day in meditation on things eternal. No priest can omit this meditation without being notably careless, without causing detriment to his soul.”
Consider the example of priests who are lax about meditation: “In them you see men in whom the sensus Christi, the inestimable treasure, has become dimmed; men entirely attracted to worldly things, followers of mere vanities, giving themselves over to frivolities; priests who treat sacred things remissly, coldly, perhaps even unworthily… Among these priests, however, who are loathe, or who neglect entirely to consider their heart, there are some who do not try to hide the poverty of their souls, but they excuse themselves with the pretext that they have given themselves over entirely to the duties of their ministry and are spending themselves for the good of others.
The vestments of the Holy Curé of Ars.
As a matter of fact they are miserably mistaken. Unaccustomed as they are to speaking to God, when they talk of Him to men or try to teach men the counsels of a Christian life, they are utterly lacking in divine inspiration, so that in their mouth the word of God seems to be something that is almost dead.
Their voice, no matter how renowned for prudence and eloquence, is not at all like the voice of the Good Shepherd, to which the sheep well hearken; it is but an empty vainglorious noise, at times productive of dangerous example, and not without detriment to religion and scandal to the faithful.”
The Broken Heart of a Saint
Pope Pius achieved magnificent reforms among the priesthood. In fact, he brought numerous practical reforms to many aspects of Church life: ecclesiastical music and art, Canon Law, the Breviary, the Roman Curia, the study of Sacred Scripture, among so much more. And certainly his most notable reform was in restoring to the faithful in a great measure the spirit of Christian piety which had been rapidly shrinking.
It would be very difficult to account for all the splendid works of this loving Pastor of Christendom who labored and prayed tirelessly “to restore all things in Christ.” Nor would such an account, for that matter, really help us to know the true greatness of so saintly a Servant of the Servants of God.
For that appreciation comes from knowing the man not as the Pope, but rather as a tremendously holy and fervent priest who merely obediently accepted that supreme duty. As his Secretary of State and closest friend, Cardinal Merry del Val, wrote, “He gave me the impression that in his private life, it required a definite act on his part and an almost positive effort to realize that he was the Supreme Pontiff, endowed with all the prerogatives of that great office.”
Heroic sanctity is a requisite for canonization. Giuseppe Sarto, like all other saints, did not consciously seek to be heroic. He merely wanted to be holy, and God rewarded him by providing the occasion for his heroism as Pope Pius X.
We see the beautifully glowing sanctity of Saint Pius in his simplicity, his humility, and his complete dedication to God and His Church. But the key to all these shining virtues lies in his spirit of poverty and his loving charity — two qualities in Pius that were inseparable.
Detachment from worldly desires and comforts constitutes a proper spirit of poverty. And, indeed, Giuseppe Sarto practiced not merely the spirit, but the poverty itself. It is said that he was poorer as the Head of the Church than he had been as a pastor at Salzano. As Bishop of Rome he could no longer travel about a village, a city, or a diocese dispensing alms, as he routinely had always done in lower ecclesiastical offices. So instead he received the poor in vast numbers at the Vatican.
Moreover, those in need throughout the whole world benefited from his immense and unceasing generosity. He was impoverished at the time of his death, but he managed to provide a sizable endowment for the homeless children who had survived a terrible earthquake in 1908. And at the time of that disaster, it was Pius who rushed with large sums of his own money to bring relief to the stricken area.
But perhaps his being poor in spirit was the greater attribute than his material poverty. Was it not a supreme sacrifice for him to accept the Pontificate which he beheld as an unbearable cross? To leave the Venice he loved so much, never to see it again? To spend the rest of his eleven years of life as “a prisoner” inside the Vatican walls, enduring the unimaginable trials and sufferings of his lonely office? Some tell of finding the melancholy Pope on occasion sadly staring at a postcard picture of a railroad station in Rome — the escape route, as it were, back to the world. Others mention his ready alertness to the sound of a distant train whistle: “Do you hear it? That is the train for Venice!”
Just as much a part of that spirit, however, was his practice of shunning as much as possible all pomp and ceremony customarily due his noble office. Typically, on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination, tells Father McAuliffe, Pope Pius celebrated “his jubilee Mass not as Pope, but as a simple priest. Clad in snow-white vestments, without pontifical regalia, he walked to the altar simply, humbly and devoutly, just as he had done fifty years previously in the little village church of Riese; the only difference now being that he was surrounded by four hundred bishops and over fifty thousand people.”
And we can be sure that it was by this same spirit that he ever remained aloof from adulation and praise — the certain pitfalls of pride. Thus he was able to maintain his conscience and clearmindedness to make decisions and to act justly in critical matters, free of the flattering persuasions of those who had vested interests.
2013-
POPE FRANCIS I
“TO FIGHT AGAINST PAPACY IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY AND CONSTITUTES THE CONSTANT DUTY OF FREEMASONRY.”
And I say to you, that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound, even in heaven. And whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed, even in heaven. Matthew 16: 18-19
The first Pope of the Americas Jorge Mario Bergoglio hails from Argentina. The 76-year-old Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was born in Buenos Aires on 17 December 1936, the son of Italian immigrants.
His father Mario was an accountant employed by the railways and his mother Regina Sivori was a committed wife dedicated to raising their five children.
He graduated as a chemical technician and then chose the path of the priesthood, entering the Diocesan Seminary of Villa Devoto. On 11 March 1958 he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus.
Pope Francis I
“Peace in the whole world, still divided by greed looking for easy gain, wounded by the selfishness which threatens human life and the family, selfishness that continues in human trafficking, the most extensive form of slavery in this twenty-first century; human trafficking is the most extensive form of slavery in this twenty-first century! Peace to the whole world, torn apart by violence linked to drug trafficking and by the iniquitous exploitation of natural resources! Peace to this our Earth! Made the risen Jesus bring comfort to the victims of natural disasters and make us responsible guardians of creation.
Dear brothers and sisters, to all of you who are listening to me, from Rome and from all over of the world, I address the invitation of the Psalm:
“Give thanks to the Lord for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever. Let Israel say: ‘His steadfast love endures for ever’” (Ps 117:1-2).”
“The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.”
–Pope Francis I
“Please, do not be stealing hope.” An appeal clear, though full of unspoken references to the historical moment we are living. So Papa Francesco, in the homily of Palm Sunday, addressed a packed St. Peter’s Square from 250 thousand faithful to listen. “At this moment – said the Pope – is the devil disguised as an angel and often insidiously tells us his word. Do not listen to him, we follow Jesus. ”
“God does not look powerful means: it is the cross that has overcome evil.” Still, “God does not choose the strongest, the bravest, He chooses the last one, the one that no one has considered. What matters is not the earthly power. ”
–Pope Francis I
Cardinal Bergoglio surprised many in 2001 when he washed and kissed the feet of 12 AIDS-related patients at Muñiz Hospital in Buenos Aires, saying “society forgets the sick and the poor”.
In 2010, he opposed legislation in Argentina designed to promote homosexual marriages. In addition, he spoke out against the adoption of children by gays and lesbians, saying such adoptions would deprive children “of the human growth that God wanted them given by a father and a mother.”
He wrote in a letter to monasteries in Buenos Aires:
“Let’s not be naive — we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”
–Pope Francis I
On the matter of homosexual civil unions, the Church’s teaching is laid out in a 2003 document approved and ordered published by Pope John Paul II and written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was is currently Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law. Homosexual acts “close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved”.
In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.
The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions
Meanwhile, additional information has come out strongly refuting contentions that Francis in some way supported the concept of giving recognition to homosexual unions.
Catholic News Agency reports today its Argentina director, Miquel Woites, told the agency that claims by Sergio Rubin that then Cardinal Bergoglio “proposed that the bishops [of Argentina] adopt a moderate position and perhaps leave room for civil unions as a compromise” are in fact “not true, they are totally inaccurate.” CNA adds Woites emphasized “It’s wrong to invent something like this out of thin air.”
This spectacular ìblue marbleî image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date, using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of Earth. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASAís Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. REUTERS/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Handout (UNITED STATES) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY
Let us ask the intercession of the Virgin Mary. She teaches us the joy of meeting Christ, the love with which we must look to the foot of the Cross, the enthusiasm of the young heart with which we must follow him during this Holy Week and throughout our lives. May it be so.” Pope Francis, Palm Sunday Homily, March 24th, 2013
–Pope Francis I
Pope Pius X
In discussing the charity of this blessed soul, the subject could never be exhausted. For we speak here of charity in its highest sense: spiritual love — a virtuous commodity that Pius possessed in boundless measure. So much so, that it would seem it was the Heart of Jesus beating within his bosom, motivating his every act. And anyone in his presence always sensed it. Monsignor Benson commented, “Who that has seen him can ever forget the extraordinary impression of his face and bearing, the kindness of his eyes, the quick sympathy of his voice, the overwhelming fatherliness that enabled him to bear not only his own supreme sorrows, but all the personal sorrow which his children laid on him in abundance?”
Another visitor said, “My attention was completely captivated by his expression and his eyes.” And another, “You cannot go near him without loving him.” But all who met him almost universally commented, “He is a saint!” One visitor told him so in Italian, and the Pope genially replied, “You have made a mistake in your consonants. I am a Sarto, not a santo.”
How fortunate were those ever to be in the presence of Saint Pius X, to have some relic of his, or to receive his blessing.
Many were miraculously cured of their infirmities. One nun, dying from abdominal cancer, swallowed a particle of the Pope’s clothing. All pain instantly vanished and she was restored to health. The Mother Superior of a girls’ boarding school in Ireland contracted a disease of the hip, which gave her excruciating pain and forced her to take leave of her work.
The disease spread rapidly, and before long she had to be continually on her back. One of her students, a six-year-old, wrote to the Holy Father to ask him to pray for the afflicted Superior. One evening, a short time later, the pain suddenly left the ailing nun along with all traces of the disease.
A man once brought his child, paralyzed since birth, to a public audience with Saint Pius X. His holiness beckoned to the man, “Give him to me,” and sat the youngster on his lap while he talked to other visitors. After a few moments the small child slipped off the Pontiff’s knee and began running about the room.
There were many such miracle associated with Pope Pius X, all of which the Saint humbly attributed to the power of “the Keys,” dismissing his own personal sanctity. One of the more dramatic of them is worth telling.
A cab once carried two Florentine nuns, both suffering from an incurable disease, to the Vatican. They asked the cab driver to wait while the two, badly afflicted and barely able to walk, met in private audience to beg the Pope to cure them. “Why do you want to be cured?” asked the Holy Father. They answered, “So that we may work for God’s glory.”
Laying his hands on the nuns’ heads and blessing them, His Holiness said, “Have confidence; you will get well and do much work for God’s glory.” In that same moment the nuns were cured, but Pius bade them to keep the matter silent.
As it turned out, the charge immediately presented some difficulty, for when the two now healthy women returned to their waiting cab, the driver refused to admit them. They insisted that they were the same sisters he had brought, but the man could not be convinced: “The two I brought were half dead. You are not the least like them.”
The compassion of Saint Pius X was indeed Christ-like as well. We have already mentioned how the blessed man would weep at the sight of suffering. Consequently there was nothing that could arouse his anger more than cruelty.
Once, as Patriarch, he heard from the streets the cries of a small child being unmercifully punished. He rushed toward the direction of the cries and yelled up to an open window, whence they came, “Stop beating that child!” A woman appeared at the window, then quickly retreated at the sight of the infuriated Cardinal-Patriarch on her doorstep. Needless to say, the beating stopped.
So much the greater was he agonized as Pope, witnessing the inhuman treatment accorded to South American Indians; the Sultan ruler who took perverted pleasure of having his victims tortured to death; and the barbaric persecutions inflicted on Christians by Communist revolutionaries in many different countries. And in every instance he tried to intervene with all the might and indignation of his sacred office.
Perhaps the most painful of such afflictions was World War I. Pius prophetically had foreseen its coming years before the actual outbreak, and his soul bore that terrible vision as the body would an unhealing wound that progressively deepened as the war approached.
Cardinal Merry del Val recalled that as early as 1911, Pope Pius spoke to him of the matter:
“Your Eminence, things are going badly; there will be a terrible war! I am not speaking of this war [the Libyan campaign], but of the big war!”
The Cardinal, not really knowing what this meant, tried to console the Pontiff with more optimistic observations. But the Holy Father raised his hand in gesture to indicate the gravity of the matter: “Things are going badly; we shall not get through 1914.” Dr. Bruno Chaves, a retiring Brazilian minister to the Holy See, heard these comments in his last audience with the Pope on May 30, 1913: “You are fortunate, Dr. Chaves, to be able to return to your home in Brazil. Thus you will not be here for the world war.”
Dr. Chaves assumed that the reference was to the then ongoing Balkan conflict, but Pope Pius X, seeming to read the minister’s thoughts, added:
“The Balkans are but the beginning of a world conflagration that I am helpless to prevent and which I shall not be able to withstand.”
In his last months Saint Pius X became increasingly preoccupied with the thought of the impending cataclysm. While walking one day with Monsignor Bressan in the Vatican Gardens, he stopped before a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and exclaimed in words that seemed cryptic to his confused guest:
“I feel pity for my successor. I shall not be here. Truly ‘devastated religion’ is upon us.”
Pope Benedict XV
Benedict XV, born Giacomo Paolo Giovanni Battista della Chiesa, reigned as Pope from 3 September 1914 to 22 January 1922. His pontificate was largely overshadowed by World War I and its political, social and humanitarian consequences in Europe.
(Giordani notes that religio depopulato was the prophecy of Saint Malachy for the reign of Pope Benedict XV.)
In 1913 the Federal Reserve Bank was born, with Paul Warburg its first Governor. Four years later the US entered World War I, after a secret society known as the Black Hand assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his Hapsburg wife.
The Archduke’s friend Count Czerin later said,
“A year before the war he informed me that the Masons had resolved upon his death.” [5]
That same year, Bolsheviks overthrew the Hohehzollern monarchy in Russia with help from Max Warburg and Jacob Schiff, while the Balfour Declaration leading to the creation of Israel was penned toZionist Second Lord Rothschild.
When in July of 1914 the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, the great Pontiff knew that the time of the inestimable human suffering which he had long anticipated had finally arrived. Pius lapsed into a state of such aching sadness that it could only be compared to Our Lord’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane.
Within a few weeks, on the Feast of the Assumption, Saint Pius X became ill. It did not seem serious — a mild inflammation of the throat that settled into his chest. But on the nineteenth of August the meek, white-robed figure collapsed.
In a few hours the great bell of St. Peter’s was tolling the Pro pontifice agonizante.
“Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction,”
Cardinal Merry del Val records, “were administered to him…in the simplest form possible.
On a little table by the bedside, covered with a white cloth, a crucifix and two lighted candles were the only evidence of the ceremony. I could not help thinking that after all Pope Pius X was receiving the rights of the Church in the way most congenial to him…. It was not unlike the scene one might have witnessed in the humblest cottage of a dying laborer, without pomp or splendor of any kind.”
In this modest disposition the quiet little Saint, who had courageously and firmly stood up against Satan’s soldiery like a colossal warrior, happily was to depart from this world, clutching a small crucifix, in the same poverty and simplicity in which he was born.
At about one o’clock on the morning of August 20, 1914, in the gentle peace of sleep, the magnificent fatherly heart that had loved and suffered so much was stilled by the Finger of God and beat no more. The glorious and beautiful soul of Pope Saint Pius X at last was blissfully where it had always longed to be — with the Heavenly Father. And his body was left perfectly incorrupt till this day as relic and testimony of his exceptional sanctity.
Pope Pius X died in the early hours of August 20, 1914. His last act was to kiss the crucifix he is shown holding. In the sleep of death his countenance was peaceful and almost seemed youthful again.
One cardinal announced, “The Holy Father has died of a broken heart.” That was very true. But Cardinal Merry de Val also reported that the saintly Pontiff possessed an “extraordinary serenity” in his last moments of life. And we are certain that this was because Saint Pius was immeasurable happy, knowing that in Heaven he could now interceded for us ever more powerfully against the wiles of the devil.
St. Nick brings the gifts, and Krampus brings the pain. Here are some things you might not have known about Santa’s demonic companion.
1. KRAMPUS IS A CHRISTMAS DEMON.
Who is Krampus? In Austria and across the German-speaking Alpine region, the demonic character is a crucial part of the holiday season. He’s a devilish figure, with long horns and a goaty beard, much like typical portrayals of Satan. You might see him posed harmlessly on a greeting card or reproduced in chocolates or figurines. But you might also encounter a procession of Krampuses stalking through the town, laden with bells and chains, intimidating onlookers or whipping them with bundles of sticks.
2. DECEMBER 5 BELONGS TO KRAMPUS. IF YOU SURVIVE, YOU MIGHT GET PRESENTS.
December 5 is Krampusnacht, when Krampus reigns. In the real world, people might attend Krampus balls, or young men from the local Krampusgruppe might don carved wooden masks, cowbells, chains, and elaborate costumes to run through town in a Krampuslauf (Krampus run), frightening and sometimes beating bystanders. According to legend, Krampus will spend the night visiting each house. He might leave bundles of sticks for bad children—or he might just hit them with the sticks instead. He might toss them into a sack or basket on his back and then throw it in a stream, or he might straight-up take them to hell.
The next day, though, is Nikolastaug, St. Nicholas’ Day—the same St. Nicholas whose Dutch name, Sinterklass, evolved into “Santa Claus.” In other words, it’s time for presents for all the little girls and boys … that is, all the ones who haven’t already been beaten, damned, or drowned.
3. KRAMPUS MAY BE A MONSTER, BUT HE PALS AROUND WITH SANTA.
Originally, Krampus was a purely pagan creation, said to be the son of Hel from Norse mythology. But he got grafted onto Christian tradition as a sidekick of St. Nicholas, similar to figures like Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands and Knecht Ruprecht in Germany. Since the 17th century, the two have been linked in a sort of Christmasy yin-yang, with Krampus as St. Nick’s dark companion. Costumed figures of the two traditionally visit houses and businesses together on Krampusnacht: St. Nick brings the gifts, and Krampus brings the pain.
4. KRAMPUS REVELERS WILL HIT, PUSH, AND WHIP SPECTATORS AT THEIR PARADES.
The Krampus of legend whips people with his birch bundle, but he’s a literal demon. Surely the costumed human Krampus partiers wouldn’t engage in such violence, right? Wrong. Here’s a description of the Salzburg Krampuslauf from a tourist who expected mere costumed buffoonery and came home with welts:
The narrow streets in the Old City section of Salzburg were packed with pedestrians as the Krampusse stomped through. Many people were caught unaware and reacted with terror. Some would flee and try to seek refuge in a shop or restaurant, only to be pursued by a determined Krampus. With so many easy targets, we again managed to escape largely unharmed. At times we were chased, jostled and struck, but compared with the brutality we witnessed, it was obvious we had been spared the full brunt of what Krampus could muster.
This writer went to Krampuslaufs in three cities and described “savage beatings” to people’s thighs and shins, as well as a Krampus chasing down and sitting on a teenager. But despite the fear and bruises, it’s all in good fun, and hey—at least they aim for the legs.
5. THE APPEARANCE OF KRAMPUS VARIES, BUT HE OFTEN HAS ONE HUMAN FOOT AND ONE CLOVEN HOOF.
EARLY 1900S KRAMPUS GREETING CARD VIA WIKIMEDIA // PUBLIC DOMAIN
The Krampus costumes at Krampuslaufs are aesthetically varied—they may be reminiscent of devils, bats, goats, Abominable Snowmen, or something out of a Guillermo del Toro movie. There are usually some kind of horns and hides involved, but there’s also a lot of free rein.
Krampus has also been a fixture on Austrian holiday greeting cards since the 1800s, where he’s shown pursuing women or menacing children. On the cards, Krampus traditionally has a long tongue that sometimes lolls halfway down his chest, and sports one human foot and one cloven hoof—no one is entirely sure why.
6. SOME AUSTRIAN HOUSEHOLDS HAD YEAR-ROUND DÉCOR MEANT TO REMIND KIDS TO STAY GOOD OR KRAMPUS WOULD GET THEM.
A 1958 article about the Krampus legend in Styria (a state in southeast Austria) reports that Krampus would deliver gold-painted bundles of birch sticks to children, small versions of the bundle of twigs he would use to beat people. The families would hang the birch twigs on the wall for the rest of the year as decoration—and to remind kids to stay in line. The article rather primly notes that the twigs are hung “particularly in those houses where the behaviour of the children merits the application of corporal correction.”
Between 1934 and 1938, when Austria was under Fascist rule, Krampus was seen as a symbol of (variously) sin, anti-Christian ideals, and Social Democrats. The newspaper of the Austrian Catholic Union called for a Krampus boycott, and the government of Lienz, the capital of East Tyrol, forbade Krampus dances, and further mandated that all aspiring St. Nicholases must be licensed by the city. They also pledged to arrest Krampus whenever they saw him. Though it didn’t rise to the level of a ban, in 1953 the head of Vienna’s kindergarten system also published a pamphlet calling Krampus “an evil man” and warning parents that celebrating him could scar their children for life.
8. KRAMPUS MASKS ARE VALUABLE PIECES OF FOLK ART.
Sure, you could probably pick up some plastic horns at Tyrolian Target, but that’s not really in the right spirit. Traditionally, the masks worn in a Krampus procession are made of wood, hand-carved by specialist artisans. For instance, Ludwig Schnegg makes the masks for all 80 members of the Haiming Krampusgruppe—and he’s been making them since 1981. Antique masks often wind up in museums; either folklore museums, or ones explicitly devoted to the Krampus. The towns of Kitzbühel and Stallhofen both feature Krampus museums that collect old costumes and masks, and until recently, there was a museum in Suetschach as well.
9. YOU CAN CELEBRATE KRAMPUS EVEN IF YOU’RE IN THE U.S.
Krampus has become increasingly popular on this side of the pond—he’s shown up on Venture Brothers, Grimm, Supernatural, The Colbert Report, and American Dad, and there’s a Krampus-inspired horror movie. And in an increasing number of American cities, you can go to a Krampus party, Krampus costume contest, or even a traditional Krampuslauf. Los Angeles in particular has a burgeoning Krampus scene, and the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn hosts a yearly costume party. You can also get down with Krampus in Chicago, D.C., Philadelphia, Richmond, Orlando, and other cities in the U.S. and Canada.
Of course, for some people the holidays are scary enough without throwing a demon beast with a penchant for physical assault into the mix. But if you’re the kind of person who goes to extra-scary haunted houses at Halloween, take heart: That terror doesn’t have to stop just because we’ve entered a season of togetherness and joy.
Santa Claus as we know him today has only existed since the 19th century, and he first slid down the chimney in a 1812 book by Washington Irving. But the fireplace served as a venue for magical visitors long before Santa Claus. During the 15th century, the French scholar Petrus Mamoris became concerned about a widespread belief that witches could pass through solid objects like walls and closed doors in order to enter homes. Believing Christians were granting too much power to the occult, Mamoris offered a practical explanation: witches, elves, and the like simply entered via thechimney. This idea gained widespread cultural currency. In Renaissance-era fairy tales, fairies appeared via chimneys, and during the same period, witches were said to fly up their chimneys on broomsticks to attend Sabbat meetings.
Throughout European folklore, the hearth and chimney act as a liminal space connecting the natural and supernatural worlds. According to legend, many supernatural creatures exploit this special intermediary space to enter homes—for good or ill. Scottish and English legend feature the brownie, a household spirit that aids in domestic tasks, but only at night, and enters and exits via the chimney. In Slovenia, a shape-shifting fairy called the Skrat brings riches to human families who cultivate his favor, flying down the chimney in a fiery form when delivering money. According to Celtic lore, a nursery bogie calledthe bodach sneaks down chimneys and kidnaps children. Some chimney-traveling spirits appear specifically during the winter holidays. In Greece, goblins known as Kallikantzaroi slip down the chimney to wreak havoc during the Twelve Days of Christmas. Italy’s La Befana, sometimes called the Christmas witch, delivers gifts the night before Epiphany, leaving her presents in shoes set by the fireplace.
While La Befana wasn’t making widespread deliveries in the early United States, other mythical holiday gift-bringers were. Pelznichol—also called Pelznikel, Belsnickel, or Bellschniggle—traveled among German immigrant communities in 19th-century Pennsylvania, scaring naughty children and rewarding good ones. This whip-wielding wild man was a bit more intimidating than jolly old Santa Claus, but he served a similar purpose.
According to a December 19, 1827 issue of the Philadelphia Gazette, “He is the precursor of the jolly old elfe ‘Christkindle’ or ‘St. Nicholas,’ and makes his personal appearance, dressed in skins or old clothes, his face black, a bell, a whip, and a pocket full of cakes or nuts … It is no sooner dark than the Bellschniggle’s bell is heard flitting from house to house … He slips down the chimney, at the fairy hour of midnight, and deposits his presents quietly in the prepared stocking.” Pelznichol comes from the German word pelz, meaning hide or fur coat, and Nichol, meaning Nicholas. Literally “Furry Nicholas,” Pelznichol was a forerunner to the American Santa Claus—and a mythical companion of the same ancient saint.
ISTOCK
While the character of Santa Claus draws from numerous mythical sources, his namesake is St. Nicholas, the 4th-century Bishop of Myra, an ancient town in what is now Turkey. In the most famous tale involving St. Nicholas, the bishop anonymously delivers bags of gold to a poor family to use as dowries for their daughters, keeping the father from selling the girls into prostitution. Early versions of the story have the saint tossing the money through the window—appropriate, given that St. Nicholas lived during the 3rd and 4th centuries, 900 years before the chimney. But as the story changed over time, St. Nicholas began dropping the gold down the chimney. A 14th-century fresco in a Serbian church shows the chimney had become part of the legend by the early Renaissance period.
Thanks to his generous dowry gifts and a host of miracles—including resurrecting a group of murdered boys who had been chopped into pieces—St. Nicholas became the patron saint of children, and his feast day was associated with special treats for the little ones. By the 16th century, it was tradition for Dutch children to leave their shoes on the hearth the night before the Feast of St. Nicholas. They would then wake to find the shoes filled with candy and presents, which they believed the saint had lowered down the chimney. Though Catholic saints were renounced during the Reformation, St. Nicholas stayed popular in the Low Countries, even among some Dutch Protestants, and Dutch settlers brought their traditions to North America.
The name Santa Claus is an Americanized version of the abbreviated Dutch name for St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas, but Dutch colonists did not popularize him, as most of these were saint-averse Reformation Dutch, and their influence waned once New Amsterdam became New York. In 1809, it was writer Washington Irving who helped spark an interest in St. Nicholas when he featured the saint in his satirical Knickerbocker’s History of New York, which made fun of antiquarians obsessed with the city’s Dutch heritage. In an expanded version of Knickerbocker’s published in 1812, Irving added a reference—the first known—to St. Nicholas “rattl[ing] down the chimney” himself, rather than simply dropping the presents down.
It was the famous poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”—that popularized the idea of Santa Claus tumbling down the chimney. Initially published anonymously, the poem first appeared in print in 1823 and it wasn’t until 1844 that Clement Clark Moore, a professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at a bible college, claimed the work, though his authorship is still disputed by some. The poem features Santa Claus descending down the chimney “with a bound,” then rising up the chimney after delivering his gifts. The poem began to be published annually in newspapers and magazines, and the illustrator and political cartoonist Thomas Nast cemented its vision of Santa Claus with his drawings of a plump, cheerful, bearded man delivering gifts in a sleigh.
Millions of American children came to believe that Santa Claus slid down the chimney to deliver their presents. But what does Santa do if there’s no chimney? As coal and wood stoves took the place of open fireplaces in many American homes, a parallel tradition developed: Santa squeezed down the stove pipe. By 1857, this image was common enough that The New York Timesreferred to it as a given.
It might seem ridiculous to imagine the portly gift-bringer somehow stuffing himself into a six-inch stove pipe, but during the mid-19th century, Santa Claus was envisioned differently in one key way: he was miniature. In his poem, Moore calls Santa “a jolly old elf,” suggesting his size is elfin: he is a “little old driver” in a “miniature sleigh” with “eight tiny reindeer.” He has a “droll little mouth,” and it’s his “little round belly” that “shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.”
Illustrations from the time, including many of Nast’s drawings, show a miniature Santa who needs to stand on a chair to reach the stockings on the mantelpiece. But while this elfin Santa could slide easily down the chimney, even he would have difficulty squeezing through a stove pipe. In published letters to Santa, some children inquired about his method of entry: “Do you crawl down stove pipes?” Of course, Santa Claus is magical, so while children may have been curious about the practicalities involved, it wasn’t a barrier to belief. One boy told Santa confidently in 1903, “I watch for you every night in the stove.”
BY THOMAS NAST – ‘THE INVENTION OF SANTA CLAUS’ EXHIBIT, PUBLIC DOMAIN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Adults were not as sanguine. In 1893, Harper’s Weeklypublished a worried opinionpiece about the decline of Santa Claus. The stove pipe made it harder to believe in Santa, the author observed, but the rise of steam radiators and hot-air heating made it essentially impossible:
“We know of no contemporary personage who is suffering more from allowing himself to drop behind the times than our friend Santa Claus. […] The downward course of Santa Claus began with the introduction of the cast-iron stove. As long as the old-fashioned fireplace lasted he was secure. As the children gathered around this romantic old fraud, toasting their toes while their backs gradually but surely congealed, the story of Santa Claus and his chimney-descending habits seemed entirely probable. There was scarcely a single stumbling-block for faith. […] But after the arrival of the comfortable albeit unromantic stove, when the child was told of Santa Claus, he simply looked at the pipe and put his tongue in his cheek. Still, he tried to believe in him, and succeeded after a fashion. Then even the stove disappeared in many households, to be succeeded by the steam-radiator or a hot-air hole in the floor. The notion of Santa Claus coming down a steam-pipe or up through a register was even more absurd than the idea of his braving the dimensions of a stove-pipe. […] Now it occurs to us that all this might have been avoided if people had had the wisdom to keep Santa Claus up with the times. […] When the air-tight stove was introduced, a mode of ingress other than the chimney should have been provided.”
This author needn’t have worried; Americans were not about to let Santa Claus disappear from cultural memory. Indeed, as the 20th century dawned, he became only more popular, as businesses enlisted him for copious advertising campaigns, like the famous 1930s Coca-Cola ads designed by Haddon Sundblom.
Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.
Think of Charles Dickens and Christmastime and your mind will probably go instantly to A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s classic tale of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and his magical yuletide conversion proved an immediate success on its release about a week before Christmas 1843: The initial print run reportedly sold out in just five days, and the book continued to sell well even after Christmas and well into the following year.
Despite that success, A Christmas Carol wasn’t quite the money-spinner its author might have hoped. Dickens had offered to cover the book’s printing costs himself to make up for the lukewarm reception his serialized novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was receiving from readers and reviewers, but his expensive and exacting tastes meant that he initially only cleared a disappointing profit of £230 from 6000 copies sold. Nevertheless, A Christmas Carol proved popular enough with readers and reviewers alike for Dickens to attempt to repeat its success several more times in the mid-1840s, publishing a new Christmas story almost every year until 1848. But such was the success of A Christmas Carol that the four festive stories he published in this time—some overlooked classics, others critical flops and missteps—have since largely become eclipsed by their better-known predecessor, and today remain among the least well-known of Dickens’s back catalogue.
1. THE CHIMES: A GOBLIN STORY OF SOME BELLS THAT RANG AN OLD YEAR OUT AND A NEW YEAR IN (1844)
In June 1844, six months after the publication of A Christmas Carol, Dickens signed a new publishing deal, part of the contract of which was a Christmas-themed tale set for publication that Christmas. The story he wrote was The Chimes.
Dickens spent much of 1844 staying in a villa in Genoa, Italy, but away from the clamor of London’s streets he struggled to find inspiration, and suffered a prolonged bout of writer’s block. “Never did I stagger so upon a threshold before,” he wrote to his friend and biographer John Forster. “I seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire-terrace [his home, near Regent’s Park] and could take root no more until I return to it.” That was until one morning, while sitting on the terrace of his villa, Dickens lost himself in what Forster called the “tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration” of the church bells below. A few days later, he again wrote to Forster enigmatically saying, “We have heard THE CHIMES at midnight.”
The Chimes tells the story of an elderly messenger (a “ticket-porter”) named Toby “Trotty” Veck. After a series of chance meetings with several other characters—from a poor orphaned girl to a money-grubbing politician—Trotty finds himself questioning the growing inequality he sees around him every day and, disillusioned, wanders off into the night after hearing the church bells call to him. Finding the local church open, Trotty climbs the bell tower and discovers that the spirits of the church bells have come to life, surrounded by their goblin attendants. There, they present him with a series of visions showing the future of his family and the characters he has encountered that night—culminating with a terrifying vision of his 21-year-old daughter, Meg, contemplating suicide by throwing herself from a bridge. Just as he reaches out to try to save her, Trotty wakes to hear the bells of New Year’s morning ringing; Dickens leaves it up to the reader to decide whether or not Trotty’s awakening was really a dream or not.
After the success of A Christmas Carol, there was much anticipation for Dickens’s follow-up story, and The Chimes ultimately proved a lucrative success: Some 20,000 copies were sold in the first three months alone. But the story’s harsh social commentary divided critics and in the shadow of its predecessor, A Christmas Carol, the popularity of The Chimes has failed to stand the test of time.
Probably the best known of Dickens’s Christmas stories that isn’t A Christmas Carol, The Cricket on the Hearth tells the story of John Peerybingle and his young wife Dot. Informed by a miserly local toymaker, Tackleton, that his wife is having an affair, John consults the family’s guardian angel—in the form of a cricket chirruping away on the household hearth—for advice. It eventually transpires that there has been a grave misunderstanding, and in typically festive Dickensian fashion the hard-hearted Tackleton sees the error of his ways in a Scrooge-like revelation in the conclusion of the story.
Like its predecessor, The Cricket on the Hearth was a huge commercial success for Dickens—although its schmaltzy and sentimental storyline did not sit well with everyone. While Dickens’s frenemy and fellow author William Thackeray called it “a good Christmas book, illuminated with extra gas, crammed with extra bonbons, French plums and sweetnesses,” The Times went so far as to demand that “we owe it to literature to protest against this last production of Mr Dickens.” You can decide for yourself by reading it here.
3. THE BATTLE OF LIFE: A LOVE STORY (1846)
Written while on holiday in Switzerland in 1846, Dickens’s fourth consecutive Christmas story was The Battle of Life. It told the story of two sisters, Grace and Marion Jeddler, Marion’s fiancé Alfred, and her apparent lover, a gentleman named Michael Warden. Through a series of machinations and misunderstandings, Marion vanishes from the village having supposedly abandoned Alfred and eloped with Michael, and in her absence Alfred grows closer to and eventually marries her sister, Grace. The years pass by and Marion eventually returns—whereupon the real reason behind her disappearance is revealed, and the sisters are reconciled.
The Battle of Life was not a critical success: Reviewers lambasted its unrealistic and underdeveloped plot and characters, and it has remained among the least admired and least remembered of Dickens’s works. Nevertheless, riding on the back of A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth, the book sold a staggering 23,000 copies on its day of release in 1846—Dickens’s fans, if not the critics, were suitably won over. You can make up your own mind here.
4. THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST’S BARGAIN (1848)
After a year off from the Christmas market, Dickens returned in 1848 with The Haunted Man, a tale that brought him back to the supernatural theme that had proved so successful in A Christmas Carol. In the story, a Mr. Redlaw, a reclusive and cynical scientist tormented by the death of his sister, is visited by his own döppelganger late on Christmas Eve night and given the gift of forgetting all the painful memories that have haunted him since his sister’s passing. The catch, however, is that anyone who comes into contact with Redlaw is also made to forget their memories—and as the story progresses, Redlaw’s influence goes on to ruin the lives of all those around him. You can find out what happens here.
The Haunted Man sold an impressive 18,000 copies on release in December 1848, but the critical reception to the story was mixed. Perhaps as a result—and perhaps in light of his longer novels becoming ever more serious and weighty in their political and social commentaries (Bleak House, Hard Times, and A Tale of Two Cities were all still works in progress at this point)—Dickens did not revisit the Christmas genre in book form again.
Newly-released Snowden documents show that the British and American spy agencies gathered and stored many millions of images from Yahoo web cam streams … and that a large percentage are naked or pornographic images.
The stockpiling of sexually explicit images of ordinary people had uncomfortable echoes of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” where the authorities — operating under the aegis of “Big Brother” — fit homes with cameras to monitor the intimate details of people’s home lives.
***
The collection of nude photographs also raise questions about potential for blackmail. America’s National Security Agency has already acknowledged that half a dozen analysts have been caught trawling databases for inappropriate material on partners or love interests. Other leaked documents have revealed how U.S. and British intelligence discussed leaking embarrassing material online to blacken the reputations of their targets.
And Bill Binney – the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, a 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees, an expert on spying by the Soviets, interviewed by virtually all of the mainstream media, including CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others – told Washington’s Blog:
This is just one of the ways to make controlling people possible. Standard KGB/Stasi tactics.
Anyhow, what would have been so horrible about a German victory? My own What-If machine, which is of German make and very finely calibrated, like all German technology, tells me that a German victory in WWI would have prevented a later Hitler! In which case, there would be no need for me to build this new time machine, go back in time, and kill Hiter, because Hitler would have just remained an obscure and harmless house painter. See, two can play this game of Teleological Chess!
