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I dunno whether I ever catch up with all this.
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by Hammer of Los » Wed Aug 14, 2013 5:37 am
by vanlose kid » Mon Aug 19, 2013 6:35 pm
by vanlose kid » Mon Aug 19, 2013 6:41 pm
by vanlose kid » Mon Aug 19, 2013 6:48 pm
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was a Satanist and had a coven of 12 SS Officers. He was the 13th member. He worked diligently with along with Adolf Hitler to destroy Christianity. Christian symbols, characters [which are all Jewish], and rituals, were replaced with original Pagan [Pagan means 'Gentile'] rites.
“So too, had the form for two principle ceremonies adapted from pagan rites to replace Christian festivals – those of the summer and winter solstices. An English visitor attended a summer solstice festival in 1936: a circle of Hitler Youths chanted consciously pagan litanies in preparation for the moment at midday when the sun reached its zenith. As it hung overhead there was silence, ‘then a paean of praise rang out for the Aryan God.” 1
[The Aryan God is Satan].
"The source of all life is Got." "The word was given only one ‘t’ in the transcription, allegedly the old German spelling, but it was chiefly useful, to distinguish the SS God from the conventional Christian God." 2
“Himmler was fascinated by the Far East and its religions. “He hated Christianity and carried a pocket book in which he had collected homilies from the Hindu Bhagavadgita.” 3
Reichsführer Himmler conducted numerous black magick rituals at Wewelsburg Castle. These rituals were conducted in the utmost secrecy. They included necromancy [communication with the dead]. Wewelsburg had many powerful Satanic symbols, most of these were white-washed and removed from walls and pillars in early 1945. 4 In 1945, under orders from Reichsführer Himmler, Wewelsburg was blown up to keep it from the invading armies. Some of the castle survived and much has been restored. True Paganism which is synonymous with Satanism is known for its emphasis on the Sun [666].
Blacksun Symbol on the floor of the "Obergruppenführersaal" (SS Generals' Hall)
“Himmler and his inner circle of Twelve Gruppenführers would engage in mystic communication with the dead Teutons and perform other spiritual exercises. Secrecy was the key element in the SS and most especially at Wewelsburg.” “Foreign Intelligence Chief Walter Schellenburg observed Himmler: ‘I happened to come into the room by accident and to see these twelve SS leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight.’” 5
Reichsführer Himmler worked diligently to destroy Christianity within the Third Reich. He fully understood the nefarious program of Christianity and how it was a most powerful tool created by the Jews for the enslavement humanity and the destruction of Aryan peoples. Jews have a long history of working to destroy their enemies from the inside. This is done mostly by their infiltration or the infiltration of Gentiles in their employ. Book after book has been written about the Nazis being Christian. Nothing could be further from the truth. The many rune symbols, most notably the SS and swastika speak for themselves. Adolf Hitler played the Vatican.
Reichsführer Himmler on Christian marriage, 3rd May, 1943:
“Marriage as it is today is the evil work of the Catholic Church. Regarded dispassionately and without prejudice, our present marriage laws are absolutely immoral. The marriage laws of today, presumably designed to protect the family, in fact led to a decrease in the size of families. After the war…monogamy will cease to be enforced upon promiscuous mankind. The SS and the heroes of this war will have special privileges. They will immediately have the right to take a second wife, who shall be considered to be as legitimate as the first. The permission to have two wives will be a mark of distinction.
SS Officer Otto Rahn SS-Obersturmführer wrote a book, titled ‘Luzifer’s Hofgesind’ [Lucifer's Court Servants]: “He spoke before a large audience on January 9th, 1938 at the Dietrich-Eckart Haus in Dortmund, Germany. Rahn set a new limit to the spirit tied to the Romans, to the belief in a life after death, and the fear of hell; he rejected Yahweh and the Jewish teachings, and professed ‘Luzifer’s Hofgesind’ in whose name Kurt Eggers closed the evening with the following greeting: ‘Lucifer, who has been done wrong to, greets you.’ 6
Here is an excerpt from Luzifer’s Hofgesind:
“There is much more [light] than in the houses of God—cathedrals and churches—where Lucifer neither is able nor wishes to enter due to all the somber, stained glass windows wherein are painted the Jewish prophets, apostles, and saints. The Forest, that, that was free!”
“Lucifer’s Servants is at least partly a genuine Nazi propaganda tract and several passages make a good case for the worship of Lucifer. Indeed, this idea of Lucifer as a benign or divine being was familiar and congenial to the “white light” Theosophists of the 1920′s who, after all entitled one of their official German publications Lucifer.” 7
“For Rahn, the Grail was an emblem set up in opposition to the established Church—indeed, was a Luciferian symbol—and for this the Nazis were grateful.” “…the eternal struggle between Light and Darkness. Light in this case was represented by—not Jesus or Jehova— but by another spirit, the “Light-Bearer.” To Rahn, this Entity represented the highest good. To Rahn, the Nazi Reich in general—and the SS in particular—became servitors of an ancient pagan cult whose God was known to the medieval Christians not as Jesus but as Lucifer.” “…and having established that they celebrated—as the numerous examples have proved—the marvels of the Crown of Lucifer, it is permitted to believe that they had faith in the existence of a Luciferian crown of eternal life. And if we follow this thought to its logical conclusion, we will say that, for them, the God of Love was none other than Lucifer in person. The God Amor is the God of Spring, as is Apollon. Apollon brought back the light of the Sun: he is a light-bearer, or “Lucifer.” According to the Apocalypse of John, Apollyo-Apollon was equated with the Devil, and according to the belief of the Roman Church...Lucifer is Satan.” 7
SS men were strongly discouraged from participating in Christian religious ceremonies of any kind and were actively encouraged to formally break with the Church. Pagan religious ceremonies took the place of Christian ones. Winter Solstice ceremonies replaced Xmas.8 “Starting 1939 the word “Christmas” was forbidden to appear on any official SS document” and the Summer Solstice was formally celebrated. These ceremonies were celebrated the old way with sacred fires, and torch lit processions.”
“Weddings and baptisms were replaced by pagan SS rituals and gradually the entire Christian liturgical rubric was in the process of being replaced by a completely pagan version. Even the Hitler Youth were not immune. A so-called “Nazi Primer” published during the war contains many examples of pagan ideology and anti-Christian sentiment designed for its youthful readership.” 9
An SS officer took the place of an Christian priest/minister in presiding over weddings, baptisms and funerals. A manual titled “The SS Family Procedure for Conducting Family Celebrations” was issued to every SS man and woman. Therein contained Pagan celebrations for all eight of the important Pagan holidays of the year.
“Himmler’s dream was to create, out of the SS, a new religion based on the pagan elements of what he perceived to be the original, Ur-Aryan religion of Ancient India and Europe. However, many Germans were devout Christians. Hitler himself realized this, and knew that he had to play politics with them for as long as the churches held power and as long as the people felt they owed spiritual allegiance to the churches and what they represented. In this he was cynical in his dealings with the Church as he was pragmatic with the Capitalists.” 10
Unbeknownst to many, daily meditation was the requirement of the SS. “Himmler set up a school of occultism in the Berlin Branch and many of the leading ranks of the Totenkopf SS, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo were ordered to attend courses in meditation, transcendentalism and magic. It was in this establishment that Himmler was persuaded to found the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Occult Bureau. The Ahnenerbe incorporated the membership of Crowley’s spurious Templar Order, the Vril, and the Thule Gesellschaft into the Black Order of the SS.” 11
Temple of Set Founder Michael Aquino visited Wewelsburg several times during the early 1980′s and was very impressed. He performed a ritual in the North Tower to ressurect the energies of Wewelsburg on the world and incite a “Satanic renaissance: to jump-start the next phase of human evolution. Certainly, this theme is to be found all through Nazi writings and speeches from the very earliest days.” 12
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http://spiritualwarfare666.webs.com/Reichsf%C3%BChrer_SS.htm
The Third Reich and Christianity
"We will have to deal with Christianity in a tougher way than hitherto. We must settle accounts with this Christianity, this greatest of plagues that could have happened to us in our history, which has weakened us in every conflict. If our generation does not do it, then I believe it would drag on for a long time. We must overcome it within ourselves."
-- Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler; Speech to top leaders of the SS, June 9, 1942 Berlin
“National Socialist and Christian conceptions are incompatible. The Christian churches are build upon men’s ignorance; by contrast [National Socialism] rests upon scientific foundations. When we [National Socialists] speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naïve Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God. The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest.”
–Martin Bormann
Many people due to misinformation, mistakenly believe that Nazi Germany was friendly to Christianity. This is not true by any stretch of the imagination. For those who are utterly confused, this website proves beyond any doubt that not only were the Nazis anti-Christian, but the Third Reich Leaders were actively working to destroy Christianity, both the Catholic and Protestant Churches.
The numerous occult symbols, namely the swastika, and the SS rune symbols are not only anti-Christian, but are labeled as 'Satanic' by the Christian Churches. Each of the links here provide numerous references and documented quotes by each of the top Third Reich Leaders concerning their hatred of Christianity and their intent to completely destroy it and return to pre-Christian Paganism. In truth, if one does enough research, "Satanism" is a catch-all label for Paganism. "Satan" means 'ENEMY' in Hebrew. 'Satan' is the enemy to the Jewish people. Satan is the God of the Gentiles. The Leaders of the Third Reich knew this.
'Satanism' is a collective label for Paganism. 'Pagan' means 'Gentile.'
[See 'What the Jewish Rabbis have to say about Satan'].
“For the Mosaic religion is really nothing but a doctrine for the preservation of the Jewish race. Hence, it embraces nearly every branch of sociological, political, and economic knowledge that could ever come into question in connection with it.
Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf
“Inside the dining hall, Himmler and his Inner Circle would perform various occult exercises, which included attempts to communicate with the spirits of dead Teutons and efforts to influence the mind of a person in the next room through the concentration of will-power. There was no place for Christianity in the SS, and members were actively encouraged to break with the Church.”
New religious ceremonies were developed to take the place of Christian ones; for instance, a winter solstice ceremony was designed to replace Christmas (starting in 1939 the word ‘Christmas’ was forbidden to appear in any official SS document), and another ceremony for the summer solstice. Gifts were to be given at the summer solstice ceremony rather than at the winter solstice.
Besides Christmas, weddings and christenings were also replaced by pagan rituals, and pagan myths, as we saw earlier in this chapter, influenced Himmler’s choice of Wewelsburg as the SS order castle. The meticulous work of Peter Levenda [ Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda (May 24, 2002)] in unearthing previously unpublished documents from the period allows us to consider the pagan world view of the Ahnenerbe and the SS. The files of the Ahnenerbe contained an article by A. E. Muller originally published in a monthly journal called Lower Saxony in 1903, which describes the celebration of the summer solstice at the Exsternsteine monument near the Wewelsburg in the mid-nineteenth century.”
“As Levenda notes, these motifs are common in the volkisch underpinnings of Nazism, with the serpent, thought of as an archetype of evil in Christianity, considered sacred by the Aryans.”
Above quote taken from: Invisible Eagle: The History of Nazi Occultism by Alan Baker © 2000
“Central to the secret initiation that these senior SS generals received was the real significance of the anagram ‘SS’ itself. For the ‘rank and file elite’ of the SS, the initials stood for the word Schutzstaffel, a term meaning. loosely a special staff or military unit. But to the initiates, there was another meaning of ‘SS’ altogether, a meaning with roots deep in the occult and in ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and to a certain extent, Egyptian belief. For these initiates, the letters ‘SS’ referred to the die Schwarze Sonne, the Black Sun.”
Above quote taken from "Reich of the Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons & the Cold War Allied Legend" by Joseph P. Farrell © 2004
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http://spiritualwarfare666.webs.com/Third_Reich.htm
by vanlose kid » Wed Aug 28, 2013 6:37 pm
It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.
Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.
In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.
Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.
http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Renaissance ... 0226123162
Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano (5 January 1950 – 21 May 1991) was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. He served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago from 1988 to his death, and had previously taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.
An expert in gnosticism and Renaissance magic, he was encouraged and befriended by Mircea Eliade, though he gradually distanced himself from his mentor. Culianu published seminal work on the interrelation of the occult, Eros, magic, physics, and history.[1]
Culianu was murdered in 1991. It has been much speculated his murder was in consequence of his critical view of Romanian national politics.[1][2] Some factions of the Romanian political right openly celebrated his murder.[1] The Romanian Securitate, which he once lambasted as a force "of epochal stupidity", has also been suspected of involvement and of using puppet fronts on the right as cover.[1]
...
Career
Culianu was born in Iaşi. He studied at the University of Bucharest, then traveled to Italy where he was granted political asylum while attending lectures in Perugia in July 1972. He later graduated from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.[1] He lived briefly in France and the Netherlands, before leaving Europe for Chicago, in the United States. There, after a stint as visiting professor, he became a professor at the University of Chicago. He took a Ph.D. at the University of Paris IV in January 1987, with the thesis Recherches sur les dualismes d'Occident. Analyse de leurs principaux mythes ("Research into Western Dualisms. An Analysis of their Major Myths"), coordinated by Michel Meslin.
Having completed three doctorates and being proficient in six languages, Culianu specialized in Renaissance magic and mysticism. He became a friend, and later the literary executor, of Mircea Eliade, the famous historian of religions. He also wrote fiction and political articles.
Culianu had divorced his first wife, and at the time of his death was engaged to Hillary Wiesner, a 27-year-old graduate student at Harvard University.
Death
Minutes after concluding a conversation with his doctoral student, Alexander Arguelles, at noon on a day when the building was teeming with visitors to a book sale, Culianu was murdered in the bathroom of the divinity school, Swift Hall, of the University of Chicago. He was shot once in the back of the head. The identity of the killer and the motive are still unknown.
Speculation arose that he had been killed by former Securitate agents, due to political articles in which he attacked the Communist regime. The murder occurred a year and a half after the Romanian Revolution and Nicolae Ceauşescu's death.
Before being killed, he had published a number of articles and interviews that heavily criticized the Ion Iliescu post-Revolution regime, making Culianu one of the government's most vocal adversaries. Several theories link his murder with Romanian Intelligence, which is widely perceived as the successor of the Securitate;[1] several pages of Culianu's Securitate files are inexplicably missing. Some reports suggest that Culianu had been threatened by anonymous phone calls in the days leading up to his killing.[1]
Ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist involvement, as part of an Iron Guard revival in connection on the nationalist discourse of the late years of Ceauşescu's rule and the rise of the Vatra Românească and România Mare parties, was not itself excluded from the scenario;[3] according to Vladimir Tismăneanu: "[Culianu] gave the most devastating indictment of the new union of far left and far right in Romania".[4] As part of his criticism of the Iron Guard, Culianu had come to expose Mircea Eliade's connections with the latter movement during the interwar years (because of this, relations between the two academics had soured for the final years of Eliade's life).[1]
The FBI also investigated the possibility of an occult group having been involved in the killing, owing to Culianu's work in that field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioan_P._Culianu
Volume 2, No. 6 - September/October 1992
The Killing Of Professor Culianu
By Ted Anton
ON THE LAST MORNING OF HIS LIFE, a charismatic University of Chicago Divinity School professor named Ioan Culianu taught a class on gnosticism, the study of secret mystic sects. One of his graduate students, Alexander Arguelles, was presenting a paper to the faculty for the first time that day. "I was nervous. He said, it's nothing to fear, just a rite of passage," Arguelles recounts. "He patted me on the back and smiled." Arguelles stops. "I'Il never forget that smile."
Two hours later Culianu was dead of a single .25-caliber bullet wound to the back of the head. His execution-style murder in a campus bathroom stunned the school, terrified students, and stumped the Chicago police and the FBI. Now, after sixteen months, the crime looks more and more like what Culianu's friends suspected it was all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.
AT FIRST, the police thought the killing might be the act of a disgruntled student or colleague, perhaps even a practitioner of the occult arts Culianu studied. But investigators tumed up no evidence to corroborate these theories. What they did discover is that for almost two years, Culianu, a Romanian emigré, had been attacking the new Romanian govemment in joumals, broadcasts, and inteniews around the world. He had received death threats, as have other Romanians-in-exile since his murder.
At 41, Professor Culianu was adored by students and admired by scholars from Umberto Eco to Harold Bloom. Fluent in eight languages, the author of seventeen books, and the holder of three Ph.D.'s, Culianu was "brilliant, famous in Europe," says Dr. Moshe Idel, a Hebrew University professor and expert on Jewish mysticism. Tall, with a dimpled smile and deep eyes that looked somewhere beyond you, Ioan Culianu proposed that multiple universes coexist, that the mind creates reality, and that magic can outperform modern science. In the weeks before his murder, on May 21, 1991, he was finishing three books, planning his wedding, preparing for a long anticipated return to Romania, and hosting a conference in Chicago with the retrospectively haunting title "Other Realms: Death, Ecstasy, and Otherworldly Tourneys in Recent Scholarship."
But it is the prophetic quality of the victim's own political statements and Borgesian fiction that add the eeriest dimension to this chilling story. A specialist in the occult, Culianu liked to tell his students' futures and often came up with predictions that were unnervingly on target. At one Hyde Park party he uncovered a graduate student's concealed panic over her career; he told another that she was "humiliating herself in a love triangle" and his accuracy, she says, "knocked the wind out of me." In the fantasy and detective stories he published in avant-garde literary magazines like Exguisite Corpse, Culianu wrote of political events that materialized months or years later, of secret sects, and murders remarkably like his own. This crime is an academic whodunit, touching on the tortured intricacies of Romanian history, on myth and mysticism, and on the buried connections between a scholar's political and intellectual passions. As fiction, it makes uncanny tragedy. The tragedy is, it's not fiction.
AS A TEACHER, Ioan Culianu was open, funny, and unforgettable, but as a friend he was secretive and insular. He was born January 5, 1950, into a prominent family in the Romanian town ofIasi near the Soviet border. Iasi had majestic boulevards, stone cathedrals, crooked cobbled alleys and, for Culianu, ghostly memories of his boyar family's former glories. Culianu's great-grandfather and grandfather had presided over its university, Romania's oldest. During Romania's era of fascism and Axis alliance, his grandfather was famous for defending Jews by wielding a marble-handled cane against their tormentors.
The boy grew up under the Communists, who came to power just after World War II. The party seized his family's mansion, confining them to four rooms infused by the "bitter smell of decomposing upholstery," Culianu later wrote. Forbidden to play with other children, he amused himself with solitary games in the estate's walled garden. On his office desk after the murder, police found three walnuts from the tree in that garden.
"We lived in fear of Securitate, the secret police," recalls Culianu's sister, Therese Petrescu, now married to one of Romania's leading dissidents. His father, an opposition lawyer and mathematician, could not publish or find a job; he died, a broken man, at 51.
At the University of Bucharest, Ioan Culianu and his fiends reveled in mind games, teasing their professors by inventing elaborate bibliographic citations to scholars with outlandish names. When he placed first in national literature and language exams, Securitate tried to recruit him, as it did most top graduates. A so-called Captain Ureche ("Captain Ear") took him "walking through many alleyways," urging him to inform on colleagues, Culianu wrote in a 1989 statement to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. When Culianu refused, he, like his father, found he could not get a decent job or publisher.
Unlike his father, though, Ioan Culianu escaped. On July 4, 1972, he defected while in Italy on scholarship. Romanian writers abroad have been beaten or killed, in incidents that usually suggest Securitate involvement, and Culianu's subsequent achievements all came as he moved in fear of reprisal through Italy, France, and Holland. Exile, however, gave him excellent contacts around the world, especially with another Romanian expatriate, the late Mircea Eliade, the University of Chicago's acclaimed religious scholar. Eliade encouraged the younger scholar's exploration of mysticism and astral religion and helped bring Culianu to Chicago as a visiting professor in 1986. At the time of his death, Culianu held a professorship in the history of Christianity and the history of religions; the University of Chicago had promised him tenure when his immigration proceedings were concluded.
In Hyde Park, Culianu expanded his research beyond the study of religion, working to recast our concepts of magic, sex, death and the self. His interests ranged widely—from the study of multiple universes to the mind's phantasms, from literary theory to the spiritual techniques of ecstasy. "He had," says Michael Fishbane, a divinity-school colleague, "the linguistic capacity, the originality, the boldness and the energy to produce an enormous life's work." His three posthumously published books suggest the scope of his ambition. One covers the history of gnostic sects, another explores after life journeys, and the third is a comprehensive dictionary of world religions.
Because he linked the occult, physics, magic, Eros and history, his scholarship was mislabeled New Age. It was far more. Culianu sought the underlying structure of fanaticism and faith to find "the patterned predictability of thought itself," writes Lawrence Sullivan, director of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. "He made two key contributions," says Carol Zaleski, a Smith College professor of religion; "One was in the sheer mass of his erudition. But his main interest was in understanding how the mind invents imaginary worlds and makes them so real, they in effect become real."
Yet more than his scholarship, it is his personality students still talk about. "He met us and greeted us by name," says former graduate student Michael Allocca. "I looked forward all summer to seeing him," says Greg Spinner, another of Culianu's students. "I'll just never know anyone like him again." Spinner and Allocca persuaded him to give them a course in his specialty, divination. The final exam was to predict the future.
On the university quad in 1986, Culianu met Hillary Wiesner, a Harvard graduate student with whom he would cowrite most of his later works. She became his fiancé, and the object of his mystical chivalry. "He invented a kind of religion focused on me," says Wiesner. "My friends couldn't believe him." When Culianu and Wiesner saw the movie Cyrano de Bergerac, though, she understood, at least a little. "He cried at that movie," she says. "In his mind he was Cyrano, alone, on a secret ideal quest against impossible odds to avenge his father and the past."
A WILLING EXPATRIATE, Ioan Culianu followed Romanian politics from a distance for seventeen years. But after the Romanian revolution in December of 1989, he became a firebrand. In his last fifteen months Culianu wrote more than thirty articles attacking Romania's new leaders in Lumea Libera (Free World) a New York-based émigré newspaper, and in Corriere della Sera, the Italian national daily. He made scathing Radio Free Europe and BBC broadcasts; the BBC even told him to tone them down. He wrote prescient short stories about a country called Tormania, his fictional version of Romania.
History helps explain his "latent explosion," Norman Manea's term for the belated political engagement of the Romanian intellectual in exile. Squeezed by the old Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, Romania is a poor, mountainous, oft-conquered country haunted by identity crises and susceptible to corrupt and sadistic leadership, both foreign and native. (The most famous Romanian, Dracula, is a fictional character based on the aptly named fifteenth century prince, Vlad the Impaler.) Democratic traditions have never really taken root; xenophobia and anti-Semitism have often flourished, and as Manea points out, kept many young intellectuals aloof from national politics.
In the late 1930s a fascist party called the Iron Guard grew in power. Nurturing its own version of blood-and-soil mythology, the Iron Guard, in the words of the historian Vlad Georgescu, "brought a death cult to Romanian politics," and took even the Nazis aback with the barbarity of its pogroms. Aware that much of this history had been suppressed in the post-war era, Culianu had called for an investigator like Elie Wiesel to uncover the full truth of the Romanian holocaust.
In 1944 Romania's young King Michael infuriated the Iron Guard by turning his back on Germany and bringing the country into the antifascist coalition-or, as the ultranationalists saw it, capitulating to the Russians. When the Communists took over in 1947, many Iron Guardists escaped—to the United States. As it happens, Chicago harbors one of the largest concentrations of these exiles. "You have an old but active fascist community here," says a source who asked not to be named. "They still recruit," adds another.
The revolution against Nicolae Ceausescu seemed at first a joyful reversal of Romania's dark history. But a number of recent books that examine the events of December 1989, including those by NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, joumalist Edward Behr, and Radio Free Europe correspondent Nestor Ratesh, have confirmed what Culianu and others said early on about Eastern Europe's last and bloodiest revolt. They argue that what began as a genuine popular uprising in the city of Timisoara was soon co-opted by factions within Securitate, the Army, and the party that had long been planning to topple the Ceausescu regime. Accounts differ as to how quickly and definitively the revolt was hijacked. Some commentators argue that much of the revolution we saw on TV was staged and even claim that the KGB had a hand in it; others say the uprising was genuinely popular and spontaneous but soon provided a pretext for the coup plotters to make their move. All agree that many officials in the postrevolutionary government are veterans of the Ceausescu regime and share much of its contempt for democracy. As Ratesh puts it, the struggles of December resulted in "the striking paradox of a basically anti-Communist revolution producing a regime dominated by former Communists." Romania's government faces a stagnant economy and frequent protests, but the opposition is fractured, and the current regime may well be returned to power in national elections this September. An anti-Semitic right—to which some of Ceausescu's former associates have gravitated and which appears to be funded by a faction of Securitate—is on the rise.
Unlike others in Eastern Europe, the Romanian government today retains most of its secret police force (though it does have a new, more benign-sounding name: the Romanian Information Service). Even abroad, the former Securitate, or at least remnants of it, apparently continue to engage in dirty tricks. An official in the FBI's Intelligence Division testified before Congress last November, for example, that while Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary have significantly scaled back their intelligence operations in the United States, "we cannot say the same thing for Romania.... We're still very concerned about their intentions."
Ioan Culianu was among the first and loudest to label Romania's revolution a coup. His fiction had been even more perceptive: Six months before anyone thought Ceausescu could fall, Culianu published a short story in Italy, "The Intervention in Jormania," that described a rebellion similar to Romania's. A second story, "Free Jormania," told of a coup in the midst of a genuine revolution, in which secret police factions battle and coup leaders film exhumed corpses to inflate the number of combat deaths and confuse the public. An ABC Nightline investigation later revealed that the leaders of the Romanian revolution had resorted to just such a grisly strategy—videotaping rows of corpses dug up from paupers' graves and claiming they were the bodies of demonstrators killed by Ceausescu forces. In Romania as in Culianu's fiction, political reality had become a mind game.
A month before he died, a wide-ranging interview with Culianu appeared in the Romanian dissident magazine 22. "He gave the most devastating indictment of the new union of far left and far right in Romania," says Vladimir Tismaneanu, a University of Maryland political science professor and author of Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel. At first reluctant to talk, Culianu went on to call Securitate a force "of epochal stupidity and yet unseen profundity." Asked about Romania's free elections and press, he replied that the main benefactors were newly free fascists. The professor antagonized not only far left and far right but even the interviewer, calling the revolution a "tragic waste" dictated by the KGB. "It was his death sentence," says Ion Pacepa, a former chief of the Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service who defected in 1978 and is now hiding in America.
It is not surprising that Ioan Culianu worried about retaliation, and thought he saw evidence of it. A month before the revolution, his Hyde Park apartment was ransacked. The Chicago police report shows that a TV, a computer, floppy disks, and bottles of wine were stolen. Culianu, who was petitioning to get his sister and brother-in-law out of the country, felt that Securitate was warning him, says his friend Stelian Plesoiu.
Others disagreed. "It was nothing political, just a bad neighborhood," says Greg Spinner, who helped his professor move out and into a high-security high rise on Lake Shore Drive.
Culianu never mentioned to university friends or the police the death threats he had begun getting. "He was a stiff-upper-lip type," says Spinner, to whom Culianu did once confide he was getting into "dangerous territory" in his poiitical writing.
One person to whom he did mention the threats was his friend Dorin Tudoran, a dissident publisher and poet. "They came in letters or over the phone. He didn't know the source," Tudoran says. "They said they would kill him if he kept writing about Romania. First he was amused. Then he became frightened."
Yet he got himself even more involved in exile politics. In April 1991, a month before he was killed, Ioan Culianu hosted the elderly King Michael at the University of Chicago, later concluding that the exiled monarch was the best hope for stability in their country. Three days before his murder, he decided to cancel his trip to Romania, during which he had planned to visit his ailing mother and attend a conference of the American-Romanian Academy, a scholarly group known for its anti-Communist activity. He told his sister he was receiving threats from the powerful far right group called Vatra Romaneasca (Romanian Hearth), "for all practical purposes an organ of the Romanian Information Service," according to a retired Securitate captain.
He then changed the locks on his office door.
The third-floor bathroom where Ioan Culianu was slain is a serene place. Etched into one toilet roll holder is a swastika, probably unrelated to the crime. Culianu died during the lunch hour on a sunny May afternoon, as hundreds of people filed through Swift Hall for the annual divinity school book sale. His killer apparently perched on a toilet seat in the stall next to Culianu's and pointed the gun down at his head. The single shot sliced through his brain and exploded out a nostril. No one saw the killer flee. The gun was never found. Culianu's keys and wallet were still in his pocket and his black opal watch was still fastened to his wrist. The killing was so precise that when a student entered the bathroom minutes later, there was almost no blood yet, just a bluish arm dangling below the partition.
"These people knew what they were doing," observes Cook County Chief Medical Examiner Robert T. Stein. "To kill with one shot from a gun as small as a .25-that's not easy." The former intelligence chief Ion Pacepa goes further: "It's a typical KGB-style type of execution, one shot to the back of the head."
Culianu's killing uncoiled a string of strange events, rumors, and instances of disinformation. A day after the murder a gift of his books that Culianu had sent to King Michael's home in Geneva, Switzerland, arrived in its Tiffy Pak envelope—opened and empty. The day before the murder, someone phoned the family and many of the business associates of Andrei Codrescu to tell them that Codrescu, a Romanian exile and a friend of Culianu's, had killed himself. Codrescu says he eventually leared that the calls had been made by "an individual in California." But he says that he is afraid to reveal the caller's identity, commenting only that "the spread of disinformation is a typical Securitate strategy."
In the following days the widow of Mircea Eliade, a woman Culianu doted on, began receiving menacing calls at her Hyde Park home. Eliade had named Culianu his literary executor, but in recent years the elder scholar, who died in 1986, had come under attack as an apologist for the Iron Guard and Culianu himself had criticized his mentor. Mrs. Eliade changed her number and has declined to talk.
A few weeks later, the American-Romanian Academy meeting in Bucharest fizzled when a number of scholars from the West who'd been scheduled to attend bowed out. "It was crucial for free opposition in our country," says Mircea Sabau, a physicist at the University of Chicago's teaching hospital and a friend of Culianu's. "But after the killing, few people showed up."
According to Culianu's sister, Romania's official newspaper, Libertatea (Freedom), then published what it claimed was a Chicago police report asserting that no foreign intelligence service was involved in the crime. But the Chicago police say they issued no such report. In a June 7, 1991 press conference Romania's President Ion Iliescu also commented on the crime, stating a "high American official" told him it was not a political murder. A State Department expert on Eastern European affairs, however, disclaims any knowledge of such a comment by an American official.
Other Romanian writers in the U.S. and abroad began getting death threats. The far rightist newspaper Romania Mare (Greater Romania), published by former Ceausescu supporters, attacked political science professor Vladimir Tismaneanu: "Watch out rat, the rat patrol is after you." In Washington, dissident Dorin Tudoran began receiving threats naming Culianu. "I got calls that said, 'We'll send you after your friend Culianu. We have a bullet with your name on it." The FBI eventually caught the Romanians making the calls, but neither Tudoran nor the bureau will say who they were.
In Athens, a Romanian writer and close friend of Professor Culianu was threatened twice during the week his article on the murder appeared. In New York, a journalist received threats similar to the others. In Chicago, a Romanian radio announcer who has sponsored the king's visits got menacing phone calls and a letter naming Culianu.
Some of the threats may be spurious, traceable to a lone exile nursing old resentments. But there is something odd, and perhaps significant, about the way most of these messages are worded: They borrow the archaic language of the Iron Guard's mystic nationalism. In Athens the letters even featured obsolete accent marks. Most observers say this is an old Securitate cover tactic. In his book Red Horizons, Ion Pacepa details international smear campaigns in which the Securitate used nationalist rhetoric to intimidate dissidents, sometimes inventing new rightwing groups.
A February 1992 article in Romania Mare adopted similar language to applaud Culianu's murder. Filled with vulgar references to the murder site, the article said Culianu was appropriately killed on a "lethal toilet prepared for him as if by destiny."
A MURDER SITE IS A TEXT, and on a quiet May afternoon divinity school professor Anthony Yu analyzes the bathroom site of his friend's murder, close to his book-lined office. "It's ritually significant," he says. "It conveys symbolic and physical humiliation, stain, impurity, a most profane site to end a life. In fact, I've wondered if this was a cult killing."
The police haven't ruled out the possibility that it was a cult killing—or the act of a disgruntled colleague, student, or lover. But if there is such a motive, it is well hidden. "He just didn't have any enemies," says Nathaniel Deutsch, Culianu's graduate assistant, and others concur.
On occasion, though, Culianu's avid research into the occult had gotten him into trouble. At a lecture he gave in France on Renaissance magic, three self-described witches objected to his meddling in their realm. He, his co-lecturer, and several in the audience became seriously ill. Lectures on that topic were "an enterprise," he noted wryly in his book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, "from which I shall refrain in the future."
Many Romanians themselves are skeptical about a political motive in this murder. Why would even an unbridled faction of the Securitate bother with a professor in Chicago who was not a player? The question is a cultural knot; its answer may lie less in the rational than in the mythical, indeed cultist, fanaticism Culianu studied and critiqued.
First, discard the idea that a professor's writings could not inspire enough anger to get him killed. Many compare Culianu's death to the 1940 murder of Nicholae lorga, a famous Romanian historian who had antagonized the Iron Guard and is thought to have been killed by them, outside of Bucharest. "I know the people who murdered Iorga," says Dr. Alexander Ronnett, an elderly dentist and general practitioner who is a self-proclaimed Chicago spokesman for the Iron Guard. "The only thing they did wrong was to be too kind," he says. "They should have skinned him alive in public."
To Romania's new far rightists, Culianu was a traitor to his kind—a writer whose attacks were more direct and personal than those of people like Tismaneanu, Codrescu or Manea, who are all Jewish and therefore excluded, in the neofascist view of things, from the circle of Romanian patriots. He was the intellectual heir to Eliade, one of Romania's most famous scholars abroad. But while the old Iron Guard had proudly called Eliade "one of our own," the new Romanian rightists loathed Culianu. The article in Romania Mare, signed by Leonard Gavriliu, the Romanian translator of Freud, offered its own harrowing commentary on the murder site: referring to the "seething, fermented vision of Culianu's fecal brain," it called him "a piece of excrement over whom not enough water was flushed." It said that Culianu, "a refugee in the gangster megalopolis of Chicago," had no right to criticize Romanian anti-semitism or to demand a reckoning with the country's recent past.
Securitate, too, reserves special vengeance for anyone who puts their criticisms of Romania in writing. In 1991 Dimitru Mazilu, a former high official of the ruling National Salvation Front who had just completed a manuscript critical of the new regime, was beaten and slashed in his Geneva apartment. The two hooded men who attacked him with razors spoke Romanian—and they left with Mazilu's manuscript. Other writers and publishers have been beaten or killed in France, Germany, and Canada. According to Ion Pacepa, the Ceausescu-era Securitate used radiation to surreptitiously poison dissident writers it had detained.
Still, even those who are convinced that Culianu's was a political murder are puzzled about why he in particular might have been targeted. One explanation may be the breadth and passion of Culianu's attack on Romania's new government. Appearing in April 1991, a month before he died, Culianu's interview with 22 was one of the first broadsides on the ruling National Salvation Front and the December revolution to be published in Romania itself. In it, he "combined the emotionalism of a poet with the depth of a political scientist," says Vladimir Tismaneanu. He castigated not only Securitate but the Iron Guard, cultist nationalism, the Orthodox Church, and Romanian culture. He called for investigation of Romania's genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Any one of these could provoke reprisal in a country that has never confronted its recent past. "His criticism was complex, nonlinear, subtle. You must put it together," says Mircea Sabau. "Then, it's devastating."
The 22 interview would have "hit them [the current Romanian government] hard," says Ion Pacepa. "They'd say,'This guy's trouble. He's only going to get worse. Let's get rid of him.' It may not even have been a govemment decision."
The fact that Culianu was not known outside the academic world may also have made him more vulnerable. "They go after those less well-known to confuse the police and scare the rest of us," says Sabau.
When it comes to Balkan intrigue, the Chicago police proceed pretty much as usual. "The FBI handles the international dimension," says Chicago Police Commander Fredrick Miller, who will say only that he's recently gotten a new lead in the Culianu case.
The enigmatic killing grips those who knew Ioan Culianu. "Losing him was like the burning of the Library at Alexandria. There's so much he knew, it'll take years to sift what he could tell you in a second," says Greg Spinner. "I can't stop thinking about him," says Nathaniel Deutsch. Beyond the senseless loss, the correlation between his research and his murder is the most unsettling element of this crime. Ioan Culianu believed in multiple universes--perhaps because he lived in multiple worlds himself. He taught his students to suspend disbelief to become good detectives of the occult; he believed Eastern Europeans had to do the same in order to uncover the occult political twists of a deeply divided region. He believed in the power of the past and the power to rewrite it, as he saw such power used in his country. "His scholarly interests were almost a mirror image of the organization that was plotting to kill him," says his fiiend Vladimir Tismaneanu.
Culianu's last short story, "The Language of Creation," appeared in Andrei Codrescu's magazine Exquisite Corpse the month Culianu died. It tells of a historian "forty years old, living in a high rise security building on the Lake." He teaches at a "grey and renowned Midwestern University." And one day he comes to possess a strange music box that contains in code the language spoken by God: the Language of Creation. The three former owners of the box have met with murder in centuries past.
The current owner considers using the box against a "distasteful political regime" but fears he will suffer the same fate as those who came before him. As much as he tries to break its secret code, he never can. After much indecision he finally leaves the music box at a yard sale and escapes to freedom from what had become the intellectual prison posed by its secret.
After twenty years of exile, with all those accomplishments behind him, and so many ahead of him, one wonders why Ioan Culianu didn't leave his own past at a yard sale. Did he sense the full extent of the danger he was in? At times it almost seems he did. If one looks deep enough into the story of his murder, one may see a professor unconsciously grappling in his fiction and scholarship with the very real forces that combined to kill him.
Ted Anton teaches in the Master of Arts writing program at De Paul University. He recently received a grant to investigate the Culianu case in Romania
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/ ... lianu.html
This book argues that modern science is born after the Renaissance, and represents an entirely new manner of acquring and working with knowledge. As such, Couliano argues, modern science does not represent a linear extension or progression of Renaissance science, but rather a wholesale replacement, which essentially abandons avenues of exploration opened by the Greeks and later re-opened by Italian Neoplatonists, such as Giordano Bruno and Marsilio Ficino. Couliano goes so far as to suggest that our trust in quantitative science is so central to our contemporary worldview that the subjectivity of a Renaissance-era thinker would strike us as fundamentally unrecognizable.
This book works both as a fascinating elaboration of this alien Renaissance mindset and a critique of the modern scientific worldview, with Couliano firmly rejecting the notion that its rise represents a kind of "progress." In Couliano's view, the Renaissance sciences-including astrology, alchemy, the art of memory, and demon-magic-serve as strategies for working with the unconscious or imagination, and that their abandonment serves as a sort of psychological crippling. Actually, as Couliano explains in his final chapters, these methods are less "abandoned" and are more supressed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, who jointly align these sciences with heresy and persecute the practicioners. (It is interesting to note that this alignment is still with us: see for instance the continued resonance of the Faust legend, which represents a man of knowledge as a servant of the devil, or any of the countless films or other cultural products which have depicted Satan as an erudite Italian.)
This book also makes a compelling case that these suppressed methods of knowledge-work continue to exist today in the form of various sciences and quasi-sciences: advertising, mass media, psychology, cryptography, and what Couliano calls "applied psychosociology." As these sciences are commonly used in the services of mass control, those of us who want to understand control logics would do well to attempt a more complete understanding of these techniques-which involves understanding their roots in the Renaissance. A difficult task, perhaps, but Couliano's book provides an excellent starting point.
First published by the Warburg Institute in 1958, this book is considered a landmark in Renaissance studies. Whereas most scholars had tended to view magic as a marginal subject, Walker showed that magic was one of the most typical creations of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Walker takes readers through the magical concerns of some of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, from Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples to Jean Bodin, Francis Bacon, and Tommaso Campanella. Ultimately he demonstrates that magic was interconnected with religion, music, and medicine, all of which were central to the Renaissance notion of spiritus.
Remarkable for its clarity of writing, this book is still considered essential reading for students seeking to understand the assumptions, beliefs, and convictions that informed the thinking of the Renaissance. This edition features a new introduction by Brian Copenhaver, one of our leading experts on the place of magic in intellectual history.
http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Demonic ... 22-8045868
by Sounder » Thu Aug 29, 2013 8:09 am
A month before he died, a wide-ranging interview with Culianu appeared in the Romanian dissident magazine 22. "He gave the most devastating indictment of the new union of far left and far right in Romania,"
by vanlose kid » Sat Aug 31, 2013 4:18 pm
Sounder » Thu Aug 29, 2013 11:09 am wrote:A month before he died, a wide-ranging interview with Culianu appeared in the Romanian dissident magazine 22. "He gave the most devastating indictment of the new union of far left and far right in Romania,"
Possible complicity between far- left and far right elements is a delicate subject indeed.
How is it that antagonists might be ally's at a deeper level?
We will find the answers when learn to frame our questions in a way that does not contain a subtext requiring answers that merely continue to enforce existing pretenses.
Great material, thanks vanlose kid
by vanlose kid » Sat Aug 31, 2013 6:24 pm
This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917. Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power.
Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.
James H. Billington is currently the Librarian of Congress. Before that, he served as director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has been a leading figure in American academic exchange programs, and served as past chairman of the Board of Foreign Scholarship, which directs the Fulbright Program. He is author of Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism and The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture.
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Minds-Men-Or ... 0765804719
by smiths » Sun Sep 01, 2013 1:43 am
by coffin_dodger » Sun Sep 01, 2013 6:39 am
by vanlose kid » Wed Sep 04, 2013 7:01 pm
The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
David S Katz
260pp, Jonathan Cape, £17.99
Scripture tells us that young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams. In these tales of Swedenborgians, theosophists, illuminati, Mormons and Freemasons, David Katz gives us much of both as we travel from neoplatonism to American fundamentalism via the Cock Lane Ghost.
Katz, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, sees the occult tradition as a coherent intellectual stream with its beginnings in Plato, flowing through the European Renaissance and industrial revolution to arrive at American fundamentalism with its detailed mythology about the End of Days based on an esoteric reading of the Bible.
He takes "occult" to mean hidden from the senses: the belief that there is knowledge accessible by covert means which allows practitioners to know the workings of the universe and even manipulate its operation. The occult tradition is a fusion of three streams of thought, Katz says, in a book for anyone excited by knowledge and the interpretation of ideas. First came the neoplatonists with their view that things had properties which were transferable: using the heart of a brave animal such as a cock or a lion would help promote bravery; eating the breast of loving creatures like sparrows or turtles would induce love.
The second store of ancient lore he notes is the mystical contemplation of the Judaeo-Christian gnostics. Finally come the writings that were supposedly handed down from the (mythical) figure Hermes Trismegistus, who represented a body of knowledge from Egypt, therefore predating Grecian and Roman civilisation.
These form a continuous core of belief which over the centuries has informed not just religion and politics but science, too. Katz follows historian Frances Yates in feeling it is not enough to construct a history of science by looking for thinkers in the past who got it "right"; we need to study the period when alchemy was evolving into chemistry and astrology into astronomy to see why experimental choices were made.
That makes this a deeply subversive book. Scientists, if they think about the philosophy of science at all, cleave to a 19th-century narrative [color=#000000][pure propaganda and indoctrination] which says that in all civilisations as they developed, superstition came first, then religion, then science, which at last was the truth.[/color] In fact the founders of modern science were swimming in a stream of occult lore, much of which they retained and passed on to us in disguised form.
Thus Paracelsus claimed to have discovered, by alchemical means, the very building blocks of the universe, and the key to their construction, which was chemistry. He passed on the occult notion of macrocosm and microcosm: anything true in the laboratory must be true in the universe at large. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for adhering to an Egyptian world picture with the sun as the centre of the universe and the chief divinity. The heliocentric universe could be analysed by Copernican calculations, but it was based on the Hermetic tradition.
Newton, the man credited with being the first modern scientist, devoted at least half his active working time to the interpretation of esoterica. Newton's conviction was that a misreading of the heavens goes along with a misreading of religion. God provided two alternative sources of information: the written book of scripture and the visible book of nature. Basic metaphysical truths are obtainable from both.
Coming closer to the present, Katz emphasises how much of the theory that fed into psychology and psychoanalysis was not about a sexual unconscious but a paranormal one. He invites us, in the 1870s at the height of the supposed battle between religion and science, to a seance which Darwin and Galton attended together. Co-evolutionary theorist Alfred R Wallace was preoccupied with spiritualism, eventually to the exclusion of other forms of investigation.
This is a coherent picture of the persistence of weird stuff in the lives of the famous, which will infuriate both believers and sceptics. A great deal in this book has been said before, as Katz acknowledges in his references to other scholars. His unique contributions go to show how the occult tradition continued into the 21st-century world. En route, Katz convincingly explains how India replaced Egypt as the supposed source of all ancient wisdom, a transition which pandered to the race theory popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - it permitted the replacement of a Semitic spiritual ancestry from the Middle East with [color=#BF0000]an Indo-European (Aryan) ascendancy.[/color]
So, with the introduction of power politics, the occult approaches its bizarre modern form in the predictions of Armageddon by American fundamentalists. The movement was so called after its emergence between 1909 and 1915 in the form of a dozen pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals" which were distributed by the American Bible League. They stressed the infallible literal truth of the Bible and the concept of the born-again evangelical Christian.
While this is no more than a restatement of basic Protestantism which would be familiar to Martin Luther, the evangelicals have woven into their beliefs a complex theology prophesying the last days of humankind that bears only the most tentative relationship to scripture. Thus we have belief in "the rapture", the bodily disappearance from the earth of true believers in the seven years of tribulations before the second coming of Christ.
In a controversial distinction, Katz differentiates between Christianity as generally practised and its incarnation as fundamentalism, which predicts the future through deciphering a document (the Bible) whose meaning is hidden. Thus, Katz argues, we find George W Bush making speeches which clearly echo prophetic biblical passages from Isaiah and Revelation. This is discernible to evangelicals but passes by the secular. Bush is truly preaching to the converted.
Some people's shelves groan with works on mysticism and the occult, and this would make an erudite addition for them. For those who will read only one book on the exegesis of ancient grimoires, this should be it.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/d ... anreview10
The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 88,00.html
De-masking the occult tradition
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL BURLEIGH
The Sunday Times
January 08, 2006
THE OCCULT TRADITION: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
by David S Katz
Cape £17.99 pp272
The critic Theodor Adorno once wrote that the defining characteristic of occultism was “the readiness to relate the unrelated”, rather like drawing a line of your own invention through several dots on a puzzle rather than following the numbers to draw a face. That is almost the mission statement of David Katz’s concise, erudite and often comic book: to restore a vast and coherent body of occult knowledge from the condescension of modern science or the demotic residue epitomised by the astrologer Russell Grant.
Katz covers much more than the past 500 years that he announces as his chosen period. His story begins with ancient Greece and ends with American Protestant fundamentalists planning their lives around the “Rapture”, when they will be beamed elsewhere for seven years, while the Beast busies himself with the unregenerate many. Plato believed that the universe was alive and that the world is a shadow of an ideal reality.
Neo-Platonist philosophers and the early Christian Gnostics developed these ideas. A neo-Platonist magus, or adept, could detect the hidden (or occult) properties in seemingly prosaic plants or animals, so as to redirect the “energy” in the heart of a lion to foster human fortitude; the elite Gnostics employed mystical contemplation to free the divine spark left in some people by the Higher God, while the majority made do with the botched bodies created by an evil lesser deity.
However, since the occult resembles a Russian doll, it was soon believed that Plato himself was but a conduit for a more venerable wisdom. This hailed from Egypt, which, until the relatively modern fascination with India, was regarded as the repository of truths hidden in pyramids and hieroglyphs. This belief is called Hermeticism — after the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. He was supposed to be a contemporary of Moses, an Egyptian priest, who translated the wisdom of ancient Egypt into Greek.
In fact, the relevant texts were written in about AD200, and passed off as ancient, a fact that did not curtail the enthusiasm of many Renaissance scholars for hermeticism, once a Macedonian monk turned up in Florence in 1463 bearing a selection of these writings. The translation of the entire works of Plato was put on hold so that Cosimo de’Medici could devour these occult texts.
As Katz argues, the Renaissance avatars of modern western culture inhabited a rich spiritual world to which alchemy, astrology, magic and the mysticism of the Jewish cabbala were as integral as what we might understand by science. By about 1600, the essentials of occultism were fixed, namely that the ancients possessed ultimate wisdom, and all one had to do to access this — so as to control things — was crack the hidden code.
The dividing line between occult beliefs, “religion” and “science” was diaphanous, for such august figures as Isaac Newton were obsessed with the idea that the divine architect had left hidden clues to the structure of the universe within the Bible’s descriptions of the Temple of Solomon. He devoted enormous energy to understanding the Apocalypse.
Belief in esoteric wisdom spawned esoteric societies, real or imaginary. Many people tried to join the Rosicrucian Order after its existence was rumoured, but they were destined for disappointment, since it never actually existed before being founded in the 19th century. Others transformed unremarkable medieval lodges for itinerant building workers into the equivalent of gentlemen’s clubs, where symbols derived from the building trades, such as trowels and levels, jostled with secrets allegedly brought to Scotland by the Knights Templar. When Bavarian freemasonry was itself infiltrated by a group called the Illuminati, powerful people, as well as the Catholic church, began to interpret such important events as the French revolution as the product of Masonic conspiracies. Ironically, the imaginary malign force behind the revolution became a reality in the form of the various secret societies of Napoleonic and Restoration Europe, not to speak of those progenitors of modern communism — Gracchus Babeuf and Filippo Buonarroti, the world’s first professional revolutionaries.
With his characteristically light touch, Katz outlines the main 18th- and 19th-century manifestations of the occult tradition. “Science” aided rather than impeded the rise of such things as spiritualism. The phonograph, transoceanic cables, camera and telephone actively fostered the belief that it was possible to communicate with and record the voices of the dead. After all, what was that crackling on the phone line? If occultism was rarely incompatible with high scientific endeavour, nor was it wholly divorced from religion.
The gloomy Emanuel Swedenborg, whose followers founded a sect, thought he could pass between the life to come and the present, transmigrations that enabled him to decode the “real” meaning of the Bible to which he added a book or two. In America, an angel gave Joseph Smith the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, and four years later a pair of magic spectacles enabling him to decode them, the miracle that underpins the Church of the Latter Day Saints in modern Utah.
With interest in Indian mythology stimulated by Max Müller, the Oxford anthropologist, Madame Blavatsky founded Theosophy as a means of communicating eastern mysteries to the western world, although ironically, it largely became a vehicle of Hindu nationalist self-assertion. Katz is amusing about Ernest Jones’s attempts to contain Freud’s occult enthusiasms lest these queer the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis.
Katz brings his story up to date by treating the “dispensationalist” fundamentalist strain within American Protestantism as a branch of occultism. Although these people predicate a dire fate for Jews who have not converted to Christianity before the Second Coming, they are among Israel’s keenest supporters since, without it, the battle of Armageddon and the thousand-year reign of Christ lack scriptural location. What began in the rarefied world of Renaissance courts has become integral to the creed of 50m people in the world’s most modern nation.
GHOST BUSTERS
In 1882, the formation of The Society for Psychical Research brought together eminent scientists and thinkers with the aim of investigating the occult. A key element of its work was the attempt to prove a pillar of Victorian religion, the reality of life after death. Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, was a keen member of the group. John Maynard Keynes said of Sidgwick, “He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true, and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was.” Others associated with the Society were Gladstone, Tennyson, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain.
http://www.freemasonrywatch.org/demaski ... ition.html
The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
The Occult TraditionThe Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
by David S. Katz
Pimlico, £8.99 (pb), ISBN 9780712667869
The main aim of occult practices is “to bring together widely disparate aspects of God’s Creation within a complex structure of connections, sympathies and affinities”. In other words, a supernatural Unified Theory. As Katz points out, this does tend to result in “the readiness to relate the unrelated”, a tendency seen in believers in general.
This is a thorough, highly detailed history of the occult, starting with the ancient Greeks, tracing its development through the Renaissance Neoplatonists, Hermeticists and Kabbalists to the Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Swedenborgians. He also notes the Hermetic roots of Mormonism, which were conveniently forgotten about.
In among the believers there were always sceptics; Hermeticism was debunked by Casaubon in the early 17th century, while the poet Blake challenged Swedenborg. But as ever, they were lone voices in the face of popular belief. The Victorian era was a fertile time, with a revived interest in all things supernatural, the start of psychology, psycho-analysis and anthropology feeding occult interest and Indian ‘mysticism’ thrown into the mix. Jung in particular tried to amalgamate psychoanalysis and the occult.
Meanwhile in America, fundamentalism was born. Perhaps the most speculative part of the book is Katz’s description of it as occult because, he says, fundamentalists believe “firmly in the supernatural world, its influences and manifestations”. Focussing on Revelations and Daniel, they “predict the future through deciphering a document whose meaning is occult, hidden”.
Although this element of fundamentalism is occult in that sense, whether the whole of it can be so described is not entirely proven here, as distinct from a more general (and perhaps more lurid) belief in supernatural forces or predicted events common to many religions, myths and superstitions. Belief in the rapture, speaking in tongues, public faith healing and fundamentalism’s grass-roots appeal rather than shrouds of mystery are perhaps a little too overt to qualify as occult.
That said, this is a useful resource, illustrating both the influences of different people and groups on the occult and the occult’s own influence on society, science and modern beliefs, from the born-again to New Agers.
Tessa Kendall
http://www.skeptic.org.uk/magazine/previous/2007/248
by vanlose kid » Wed Sep 04, 2013 7:03 pm
coffin_dodger » Sun Sep 01, 2013 9:39 am wrote:VK - staggering thread - thank you so much!
by vanlose kid » Wed Sep 04, 2013 8:30 pm
The Illuminati
The Bavarian Illuminati originated during an age replete with the growing belief in the acquisition of truth through observation and experience. The Age of Enlightenment was in full swing and by the end of the Eighteenth Century an explosion of natural philosophy, science, the resurgence of hermeticism and occult experimentation, all competed directly with the traditional teachings of the Church and the Jesuit monopoly in the Universities and Colleges. 5 Numerous ideologies owe an intellectual and political heritage to this period: skepticism, rationalism, atheism, liberalism, humanism, reductionism, modernism, communism, nihilism and anarchism - among the most apparent.
As the Eighteenth Century came to a close Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Voltaire (1694-1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), Comte de Mirabeau (1749- 1791), David Hume (1711-1776), Adam Smith (1723-1790), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) were famous in their own time. The instrument of reason became a new faith, no less susceptible to its own breed of dogmatism. The philosophers of the Enlightenment reasoned that the physics of Newton might become applicable in all fields of endeavor: the fundamental cosmic laws of nature could transform society and man himself into a "noble savage." 6
The idea of a "glorious revolution" attained widespread acceptance, but during Weishaupt's time it was still a relatively new concept to link political change with social change. The "imminent revolution of the human mind," promulgated by the "radical Bavarian Illuminists," coincided with Mirabeau's doctrine of a coming secular upheaval and universal revolution. Mirabeau proclaimed Prussia to be the most likely place for the start of the revolution, with the "German Illuminists as its probable leaders." History records, however, that it was Mirabeau himself who became one of the main catalysts to spark the "fire in the minds of men" during the French Revolution. 7
At about the same time Weishaupt was embarking on an academic career two important figures entered the world stage: Thomas Robert Malthus, 8 born in 1766, a major influence on Darwinism, population control and the eugenics movement; four years later we see the birth of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in Stuttgart Germany, the inventor of what would become known as the "Hegelian Dialectic." "For Hegelians," Antony C. Sutton reports, "the State is almighty and seen as 'the march of God on earth.' Indeed, a State religion. Progress in the Hegelian State is through contrived conflict: the clash of opposites makes for progress. If you can control the opposites, you dominate the nature of the outcome" (Introduction to the 2002 edition of America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, no pagination PDF copy).
Revolutionary radicals were impressed with the proof-of-concept displayed by the ruthless conspirators in France. Malthusian and Hegelian dogma became equally influential for anarchists, communists, the intelligentsia and the new breed of revolutionaries that surfaced in the 19th Century: Young Hegelians such as Bakunin, Proudhon and Marx took up the cause in the "spirit of the times" to "destroy in order to build."
The Bavarian Illuminati: The "Insinuating Brothers" of ☉
“Weishaupt . . . proposed as the end of Illuminism the abolition of property, social authority, nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in which it formed only a single family without artificial needs, without useless sciences, every father being priest and magistrate. Priest of we know not what religion, for in spite of their frequent invocations of the God of Nature, many indications lead us to conclude that Weishaupt had, like Diderot and d'Holbach, no other God than Nature herself. From his doctrine would naturally follow German ultra-Hegelianism and the system of anarchy recently developed in France, of which the physiognomy suggests a foreign origin.”
- Henry Martin, Histoire de France depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'en 1789, XVI. 533. 9
“Do you realize sufficiently what it means to rule - to rule in a secret society? Not only over the lesser or more important of the populace, but over the best of men, over men of all ranks, nations, and religions, to rule without external force, to unite them indissolubly, to breathe one spirit and soul into them, men distributed over all parts of the world? . . . And finally, do you know what secret societies are? What a place they occupy in the great kingdom of the world's events? Do you think they are unimportant, transitory appearances?”
- Adam Weishaupt, Nachtrag von weitern Originalschriften, II, pp. 44, 51.
http://therealoneilluminati.blogspot.co ... _1203.html
XI. The New Idol.
Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.
A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.
A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.
This sign I give unto you: every people speaketh its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understandeth not. Its language hath it devised for itself in laws and customs.
But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.
False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth, the biting one. False are even its bowels.
Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give unto you as the sign of the state. Verily, the will to death, indicateth this sign! Verily, it beckoneth unto the preachers of death!
Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!
See just how it enticeth them to it, the many-too-many! How it swalloweth and cheweth and recheweth them!
"On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God"--thus roareth the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees!
Ah! even in your ears, ye great souls, it whispereth its gloomy lies! Ah! it findeth out the rich hearts which willingly lavish themselves!
Yea, it findeth you out too, ye conquerors of the old God! Weary ye became of the conflict, and now your weariness serveth the new idol!
Heroes and honourable ones, it would fain set up around it, the new idol! Gladly it basketh in the sunshine of good consciences,--the cold monster!
Everything will it give YOU, if YE worship it, the new idol: thus it purchaseth the lustre of your virtue, and the glance of your proud eyes.
It seeketh to allure by means of you, the many-too-many! Yea, a hellish artifice hath here been devised, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honours!
Yea, a dying for many hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death!
The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all--is called "life."
Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft--and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them!
Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.
Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money--these impotent ones!
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness--as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne.--and ofttimes also the throne on filth.
Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.
My brethren, will ye suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air!
Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous!
Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices!
Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas.
Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!
There, where the state ceaseth--there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.
There, where the state CEASETH--pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman?--
Thus spake Zarathustra.
http://nietzsche.thefreelibrary.com/Thu ... ustra/13-1
by vanlose kid » Thu Sep 05, 2013 10:32 pm
Master Race of the Left
Forced sterilisations in Scandinavia have shocked the world. But the great founding fathers of British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis.
Jonathan Freedland,
The Guardian,
August 30, 1997
They will be searching their souls in Stockholm tonight. And in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, too. All over Scandinavia, people are facing up to the stain now spreading across their snow-white self-image, as they discover that their governments spent decades executing a chilling plan to purify the Nordic race, nurturing the strong and eradicating the weak. Each day victims of forced sterilisation, now deep in middle-age, have stepped forward to tell how they were ordered to have “the chop,” to prevent them having children deemed as racially defective as themselves.
Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were rounded up behind secure fences, in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually led off for “treatment.” One man has told how he and his fellow teenage boys planned to run away rather than undergo the dreaded “cut in the crotch.” Maria Nordin, now seeking compensation from the Swedish government, remembers sobbing as she was pressed to sign away her rights to have a baby. Told that she would stay locked up forever if she did not cooperate, she relented - spending the rest of her life childless and in regret.
In Sweden the self-examination has already begun. A government minister has admitted that “what went on is barbaric and a national disgrace,” with more than 60,000 Swedish women sterilised from 1935 until as late as 1976. What has shocked most observers is that all this was committed not by some vile fascistic regime, but by a string of welfare-minded, Social Democratic governments. Indeed, the few voices of opposition came from Swedish conservatives.
But the reckoning cannot be confined to Scandinavia: Britain has some soul-searching of its own to do. What's more, as in Sweden, the culprits are not long-forgotten fire-breathers of the far right. On the contrary: eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a rollcall of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman - even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian. Nearly every one of the left’s most cherished, iconic figures espoused views which today’s progressives would find repulsive.
Thus George Bernard Shaw could write: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Later he mused that “the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.” The revered pacifist, disarmer and philosophical titan, Bertrand Russell, dreamed up a wheeze that would have made even Nazi Germany’s eugenicists blush. He suggested the state issue colour-coded “procreation tickets.” Those who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way the high-calibre gene pool of the elite would not be muddied by any proletarian or worse, foreign, muck. The New Statesman agreed, explaining in July 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.” The bottom line is bleak but clear. Eugenics, the art and science of breeding better men, is not just the historical problem of Germany and now Scandinavia, nor even of the jackbooted right. It took root right here in Britain - pushed and argued by the left. Indeed, contempt for ordinary people and outright racism were two of the defining creeds of British socialism.
The trouble began with Charles Darwin. His breakthrough work, The Origin of the Species, did not restrict its impact to the academy and laboratories. Instead it transformed the very way mankind understood itself in the 19th century, its message fast spilling over into the realm of political ideas. Suddenly the religious notion that all life was equally sacred was under attack. Human beings were like any other species – some were more evolved than others. The human race could be divided into different categories and classes. When Karl Marx took on the task of charting human development and defining the class structure, he acknowledged his debt – dedicating an early edition of Das Kapital to none other than Charles Darwin.
From the beginning socialism regarded itself as the natural ally, even the political version, of science. Just as biologists sought to understand animals and plants, so scientific socialism would master people. According to Adrian Wooldridge, author of Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1860-1990, and a recognised authority on early ideas of human merit, progressives believed the only enemies of Darwin were reactionaries, the religious and the superstitious. Science, by contrast, represented progress. Crucially, these early leftists regarded science as an utterly neutral tool; something could not be scientifically right and morally wrong. In this climate, says Wooldridge, “eugenics became the political correctness of its day.” If you were modern, you believed in it.
The result was a Darwinian commitment to improving the quality of the nation’s genetic stock. Many of the reforms admired by today's leftists were not, in fact, borne of a benign desire to improve the lot of the poor, but rather to make Britons fitter – to guarantee their survival as one of the globe’s foremost races. Thus the Webbs pushed for free milk in schools not because their hearts bled for undernourished kids, but because they were alarmed by Britain’s performance in the Boer war, where troops had taken a good kicking at the hands of the black man: the Webbs believed a daily dose of calcium would improve the bones and teeth of the future working class.
The contemporary left has a similarly misguided and sentimental view of Marie Stopes’s campaign to bless the women of King’s Cross and the rest of working class Britain with contraception. The unrosy reality is that Stopes, Mary Stocks and the like were not motivated by a kind of proto-feminism, but rather by the urge to reduce the numbers of the burgeoning lumpenproletariat. This rather awkward fact was exposed earlier this year with the release of a long-suppressed essay by the father of liberal economics, John Maynard Keynes. He endorsed legalised birth control because the working class was too “drunken and ignorant” to be trusted to keep its own numbers down: “To put difficulties in the way of the use of [contraception] checks increases the proportion of the population born from those who from drunkenness or ignorance or extreme lack of prudence are not only incapable of virtue but incapable also of that degree of prudence which is involved in the use of checks.”
Many progressives were drawn to the hope that science could build up the strong parts of the nation, and slowly eliminate the weak. Dozens of them signed up for the Eugenics Society, which in the 1930s rivalled the Fabians as the fashionable salon of London socialism. Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson even wanted the society to form its own committee of Labour sympathisers. H. G. Wells could not contain his enthusiasm, hailing eugenics as the first step toward the removal “of detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” in their place.
For these early thinkers, eugenic socialism posed no contradiction: indeed, it made perfect sense. As Wooldridge points out, “the Webbs supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning.” If socialism was about organising and ordering society from the centre, then its most extreme advocates believed in extending that control – all the way into the wombs and testes of society's weakest members. What they wanted was a neat, clean, planned Utopia: eugenics was just one part of that dream.
One other doctrine was crucial - profound elitism. It strikes the 1990s ear oddly, but these leading lights of British socialism had no patience for equality. The communist and one-time editor of the Daily Worker, J. B. S. Haldane, considered equality a “curious dogma... we are not born equal, far from it.” Many on the left were members of the upper middle-class or lower aristocracy, convinced their higher intellectual capacities had to be preserved from proletarian infection. One popular idea of the time was to encourage artificial insemination – not to help the infertile, but to impregnate working-class women with the sperm of men with high IQs. Beatrice Webb was sure her genetic material was worth preserving, describing herself as “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world.” She and her fellow travellers envisaged a world run by an elite made up of people like her, able to determine who could reproduce and who could not. Always fond of gazing into the future, H. G. Wells pictured a caste of all-powerful super-talented Ubermenschen, who would wear Samurai-style dress, and order the affairs of the planet.
In this context, there was only contempt for ordinary people, who were regarded as “sub-men” to be tended and looked after – via the welfare state – like a bovine herd. The Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay felt no embarrassment in putting the attitude on record in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. Famously and loftily he declared, “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.” Non-Britons came even lower on the Darwinian pecking order. In those times it was the Jews who were regarded as posing the chief threat of alien dilution of English blood. Bernard Shaw described the Jews as “the real enemy, the invader from the East, the ruffian, the oriental parasite.” H. J. Hobson, a radical journalist who made his name covering the Boer war for The Guardian, declared that the Transvaal had fallen prey to “Jew Power.”
For years, leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler’s naming of his creed National Socialism. It has been dismissed as a perverse PR trick of the Fuhrer’s, as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths. The same view has infused the left’s understanding of the genocides committed in the name of communism, whether by Stalin or Pol Pot, as if those men were merely betraying the otherwise noble theory whose cause they proclaimed. But the early history of British socialism tells a different story. It suggests that socialism – with its unshakeable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite – contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later.
Eventually, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, the British left gave up its flirtation with eugenics. They saw where it had led. But, just like the governments of Scandinavia, their past was buried too quickly – and forgotten. The names of Russell, Webb and Shaw still retain their lustre – despite their association with the foulest idea of the 20th century. They escaped the reckoning. Perhaps now, posthumously, it's time to see them, and much of socialism itself, as they truly were.
by vanlose kid » Thu Sep 05, 2013 10:33 pm
Master Race of the Left
Forced sterilisations in Scandinavia have shocked the world. But the great founding fathers of British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis.
Jonathan Freedland,
The Guardian,
August 30, 1997
They will be searching their souls in Stockholm tonight. And in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, too. All over Scandinavia, people are facing up to the stain now spreading across their snow-white self-image, as they discover that their governments spent decades executing a chilling plan to purify the Nordic race, nurturing the strong and eradicating the weak. Each day victims of forced sterilisation, now deep in middle-age, have stepped forward to tell how they were ordered to have “the chop,” to prevent them having children deemed as racially defective as themselves.
Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were rounded up behind secure fences, in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually led off for “treatment.” One man has told how he and his fellow teenage boys planned to run away rather than undergo the dreaded “cut in the crotch.” Maria Nordin, now seeking compensation from the Swedish government, remembers sobbing as she was pressed to sign away her rights to have a baby. Told that she would stay locked up forever if she did not cooperate, she relented - spending the rest of her life childless and in regret.
In Sweden the self-examination has already begun. A government minister has admitted that “what went on is barbaric and a national disgrace,” with more than 60,000 Swedish women sterilised from 1935 until as late as 1976. What has shocked most observers is that all this was committed not by some vile fascistic regime, but by a string of welfare-minded, Social Democratic governments. Indeed, the few voices of opposition came from Swedish conservatives.
But the reckoning cannot be confined to Scandinavia: Britain has some soul-searching of its own to do. What's more, as in Sweden, the culprits are not long-forgotten fire-breathers of the far right. On the contrary: eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a rollcall of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman - even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian. Nearly every one of the left’s most cherished, iconic figures espoused views which today’s progressives would find repulsive.
Thus George Bernard Shaw could write: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Later he mused that “the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.” The revered pacifist, disarmer and philosophical titan, Bertrand Russell, dreamed up a wheeze that would have made even Nazi Germany’s eugenicists blush. He suggested the state issue colour-coded “procreation tickets.” Those who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way the high-calibre gene pool of the elite would not be muddied by any proletarian or worse, foreign, muck. The New Statesman agreed, explaining in July 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.” The bottom line is bleak but clear. Eugenics, the art and science of breeding better men, is not just the historical problem of Germany and now Scandinavia, nor even of the jackbooted right. It took root right here in Britain - pushed and argued by the left. Indeed, contempt for ordinary people and outright racism were two of the defining creeds of British socialism.
The trouble began with Charles Darwin. His breakthrough work, The Origin of the Species, did not restrict its impact to the academy and laboratories. Instead it transformed the very way mankind understood itself in the 19th century, its message fast spilling over into the realm of political ideas. Suddenly the religious notion that all life was equally sacred was under attack. Human beings were like any other species – some were more evolved than others. The human race could be divided into different categories and classes. When Karl Marx took on the task of charting human development and defining the class structure, he acknowledged his debt – dedicating an early edition of Das Kapital to none other than Charles Darwin.
From the beginning socialism regarded itself as the natural ally, even the political version, of science. Just as biologists sought to understand animals and plants, so scientific socialism would master people. According to Adrian Wooldridge, author of Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1860-1990, and a recognised authority on early ideas of human merit, progressives believed the only enemies of Darwin were reactionaries, the religious and the superstitious. Science, by contrast, represented progress. Crucially, these early leftists regarded science as an utterly neutral tool; something could not be scientifically right and morally wrong. In this climate, says Wooldridge, “eugenics became the political correctness of its day.” If you were modern, you believed in it.
The result was a Darwinian commitment to improving the quality of the nation’s genetic stock. Many of the reforms admired by today's leftists were not, in fact, borne of a benign desire to improve the lot of the poor, but rather to make Britons fitter – to guarantee their survival as one of the globe’s foremost races. Thus the Webbs pushed for free milk in schools not because their hearts bled for undernourished kids, but because they were alarmed by Britain’s performance in the Boer war, where troops had taken a good kicking at the hands of the black man: the Webbs believed a daily dose of calcium would improve the bones and teeth of the future working class.
The contemporary left has a similarly misguided and sentimental view of Marie Stopes’s campaign to bless the women of King’s Cross and the rest of working class Britain with contraception. The unrosy reality is that Stopes, Mary Stocks and the like were not motivated by a kind of proto-feminism, but rather by the urge to reduce the numbers of the burgeoning lumpenproletariat. This rather awkward fact was exposed earlier this year with the release of a long-suppressed essay by the father of liberal economics, John Maynard Keynes. He endorsed legalised birth control because the working class was too “drunken and ignorant” to be trusted to keep its own numbers down: “To put difficulties in the way of the use of [contraception] checks increases the proportion of the population born from those who from drunkenness or ignorance or extreme lack of prudence are not only incapable of virtue but incapable also of that degree of prudence which is involved in the use of checks.”
Many progressives were drawn to the hope that science could build up the strong parts of the nation, and slowly eliminate the weak. Dozens of them signed up for the Eugenics Society, which in the 1930s rivalled the Fabians as the fashionable salon of London socialism. Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson even wanted the society to form its own committee of Labour sympathisers. H. G. Wells could not contain his enthusiasm, hailing eugenics as the first step toward the removal “of detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” in their place.
For these early thinkers, eugenic socialism posed no contradiction: indeed, it made perfect sense. As Wooldridge points out, “the Webbs supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning.” If socialism was about organising and ordering society from the centre, then its most extreme advocates believed in extending that control – all the way into the wombs and testes of society's weakest members. What they wanted was a neat, clean, planned Utopia: eugenics was just one part of that dream.
One other doctrine was crucial - profound elitism. It strikes the 1990s ear oddly, but these leading lights of British socialism had no patience for equality. The communist and one-time editor of the Daily Worker, J. B. S. Haldane, considered equality a “curious dogma... we are not born equal, far from it.” Many on the left were members of the upper middle-class or lower aristocracy, convinced their higher intellectual capacities had to be preserved from proletarian infection. One popular idea of the time was to encourage artificial insemination – not to help the infertile, but to impregnate working-class women with the sperm of men with high IQs. Beatrice Webb was sure her genetic material was worth preserving, describing herself as “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world.” She and her fellow travellers envisaged a world run by an elite made up of people like her, able to determine who could reproduce and who could not. Always fond of gazing into the future, H. G. Wells pictured a caste of all-powerful super-talented Ubermenschen, who would wear Samurai-style dress, and order the affairs of the planet.
In this context, there was only contempt for ordinary people, who were regarded as “sub-men” to be tended and looked after – via the welfare state – like a bovine herd. The Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay felt no embarrassment in putting the attitude on record in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. Famously and loftily he declared, “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.” Non-Britons came even lower on the Darwinian pecking order. In those times it was the Jews who were regarded as posing the chief threat of alien dilution of English blood. Bernard Shaw described the Jews as “the real enemy, the invader from the East, the ruffian, the oriental parasite.” H. J. Hobson, a radical journalist who made his name covering the Boer war for The Guardian, declared that the Transvaal had fallen prey to “Jew Power.”
For years, leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler’s naming of his creed National Socialism. It has been dismissed as a perverse PR trick of the Fuhrer’s, as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths. The same view has infused the left’s understanding of the genocides committed in the name of communism, whether by Stalin or Pol Pot, as if those men were merely betraying the otherwise noble theory whose cause they proclaimed. But the early history of British socialism tells a different story. It suggests that socialism – with its unshakeable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite – contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later.
Eventually, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, the British left gave up its flirtation with eugenics. They saw where it had led. But, just like the governments of Scandinavia, their past was buried too quickly – and forgotten. The names of Russell, Webb and Shaw still retain their lustre – despite their association with the foulest idea of the 20th century. They escaped the reckoning. Perhaps now, posthumously, it's time to see them, and much of socialism itself, as they truly were.
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