1) DID THE SON OF SAM WANT TO GET CAUGHT?
2) THE REAL STORY OF OSIRAK
3) THE MYSTERY OF USTICA
4) QUESTIONS ABOUT D-DAY
5) THE REAL STORY OF GALLIPOLI
6) THE WORLD OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
7) NIAGARA FALLS AND THE MOON LANDINGS
8) INSIGHT INTO 9/11
9) THE REAL BATMAN
10) AMERICA'S 75-YEAR MYSTERY
11) SYMBOLISM THEORY OF THE VATICAN AND THE HAGIA SOPHIA
12) THE PALACE ALLIANCE
13) THE VATICAN AND ST. PETER
14) ARYAN IDEOLOGY
15) MADE IN INDIA
16) THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF THE CINEMA REX
17) AMERICA'S WAR IN VIETNAM
18) THE REAL STORY OF HUE
19) THE VIENNA CAFE SCENE
20) THE UNIVERSITY RECRUITING DRIVE THAT REALLY CHANGED THE WORLD
21) THE WAY TO SAN JOSE
22) THE EXONERATION OF AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON
23) THE COLOSSEUM AND THE VATICAN
24) THE HOUSE OF THE REVOLUTION
25) MAYBE O.J. SIMPSON REALLY DIDN'T DO IT
26) THE NORWAY PLAN
27) THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT
28) THE ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
29) THE GLASSES OF JOHN HINCKLEY JR.
30) MARIJUANA
31) THE FLIGHT OF RUDOLF HESS
32) THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF FIDEL CASTRO
33) THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS
34) SUITCASE NUCLEAR WEAPONS
35) AMERICA'S ELECTORAL COLLEGE
36) RICHARD NIXON'S LIST OF ENEMIES
37) THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ALAMO
38) CANADA'S AVRO ARROW
39) THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE
40) THE FIRE AT NOTRE DAME
41) U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THE APOCALYPSE
42) THE REAL STORY OF AUNG SAN SUU KYI
1) DID THE SON OF SAM WANT TO GET CAUGHT?
In 1976 and '77, there was a serial killer in New York City called "The Son of Sam". This was the name that he gave himself in letters sent to newspapers. He killed six people and wounded seven, using a .44 caliber handgun.
Residents of New York State remember the summer of 1977 as "The Summer of the Son of Sam". I was a teenager at the time. He targeted young women with long, dark hair, usually shooting them when they were sitting in parked cars after dark. The only males that were shot were boyfriends that were with them. It was in the news every day. Hair salons did a brisk business with girls having their hair cut short or dyed blond. But his final victim was blond.
The Son of Sam wrote bizarre letters to the news that caused all of the printed copies to sell out. One letter was left with the body of one of his victims. New York City underwent possibly the largest manhunt the world had ever seen. He never killed anyone on Manhattan, all of the victims were in the Bronx, Queens and, Brooklyn.
The shootings were clearly ethnically targeted. Despite the demographics of New York City, none of the victims was black or Hispanic or foreign-born.
I walked into the house one day, August 11, and my mother gave me the news, "They've got him".
On May 30, 1977, a letter was received by Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News. In the letter, the Son of Sam gave some clues, "Here are some names to help you along. Forward them to the inspector". Many tips continuously came in, and the killer was caught on August 10, but the clues, consisting of four names, was never solved.
His capture was assisted by a parking ticket. He parked too close to a fire hydrant in Brooklyn, and then aimed shots at a woman but missed. She had seen him walking toward her from the direction of the car, and that the police had shortly before ticketed the car. That soon led to his being caught.
Upon capture, he quickly admitted to the killings and pleaded guilty.
I think I have solved the four names that the Son of Sam sent as clues to the New York Daily News. The names are as follows:
"The Duke of Death"
"The Wicked King Wicker"
"The Twenty Two Disciples Of Hell"
"John Wheaties"
The Son of Sam was giving a clue as to where he lived and worked. He lived in an apartment building, on Pine Street in Yonkers. He was arrested at night as he entered his car parked outside, apparently on his way out to another shooting.
The name that he gave himself in the letters, "The Son of Sam", is itself part of the clue. "Sam" turned out to be a neighbor named Sam Carr who had a dog in his yard. The killer's first story upon capture is that he took the barking of the dog as demonic instructions to kill. He had once wounded the dog with a bullet.
As for "John Wheaties", Sam Carr had a son named John and a daughter named Wheat. It was Wheat Carr who was the police dispatcher in Yonkers at the time. "Wheaties" was the name of a popular breakfast cereal.
The short side street that ran alongside Sam Carr's house, and ended on the street just behind the apartment building where the Son of Sam lived, was Wicker Street. That explains "The Wicked King Wicker".
The names that the Son of Sam gave as clues contain two titles of royalty and nobility, king and duke. The name of New York comes from England's King Charles II granting the lands to his brother, the Duke of York.
Pine Street, on which the Son of Sam lived, was a short street. At the end of the street, which he would have passed on his way into the city, was another large apartment building. The actual address of the building is on the main road, North Broadway. But the back was facing Pine Street.
This building is built in what is known as the Tudor Revival Style, which typically features the half-timbering that was popular in England centuries ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Revival_architecture#/media/File:Beaney_Institute_002.jpg
If the apartment building at the end of Pine Street had been built in the Tudor era as a palace, a duke, or even a king, might have lived there.
The large building with the black roof right in the center of the following image is the apartment building where the Son of Sam lived. Wicker Street is the short east-west street to the left. The large house on Warburton Ave., just north of Wicker Street, with the rust-colored roof is where Sam lived. His dog would bark in the area behind the house. The building in the lower center, with the light blue roof, is the Tudor Revival-style apartment building.
You may have to close the search window, to the left, to see it.
If you enter a search into the satellite imagery for 22 Pine Street, you can see that it points to this Tudor Revival apartment building. Although it's front, which would be the address, faces North Broadway. But if it's address was on Pine Street, it would be 22 Pine Street. if Wicker Street extended to Pine Street this is where it would intersect.
But since no address was posted at the back the only people who would know that, in the days before Google Maps, would be those who worked at the Post Office, and that is exactly where it turned out that the Son of Sam worked.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yonkers,+NY/@40.9464375,-73.8950244,287m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c2c0080943afa1:0xbe967384a4d8daa2!8m2!3d40.9312099!4d-73.8987469
So this explains where the king in "The Wicked King Wicker", as well as "The Duke of Death", comes from. The address of the rear of the apartment building shows where "The Twenty Two Disciples of Hell" comes from. This Tudor Revival-style apartment building was not the one that the Son of Sam lived in, but was the other apartment building on the street. But this is where Wicker Street would intersect if it extended to Pine Street.
If someone would have put all of this together, they would have zeroed right in on where the Son of Sam lived, as well as worked. If all of this had been run through the crude computers of the time, it might have noted that there was a family with a Sam, a John and, a Wheat living at the intersection of a Wicker Street.
In an earlier letter, left at the scene of a shooting, the killer wrote that "Sam sometimes locks me in the attic, where I watch the world going by through the window". He also wrote that "Sam sometimes locks me in the garage". But the "Son of Sam" did not live in this house, it was a clue as to where he did live.
The house in the following image is "Sam's" house, with two attic windows facing out to the main road, and the dual garage in front. Behind the house was where the dog was barking that he initially said was what was telling him to kill. The apartment building where he lived can be seen behind that. Image from Google Street View.
The following image, from Google Earth, shows behind the house, where the dog would bark.
When the police located his car, outside his apartment building, they noticed a rifle in the car. If a serial killer, the subject of probably the largest manhunt in history, really didn't want to get caught then would he not only give away these clues of where he lived and worked, but also leave a rifle visible in his car? The killings were done with a handgun and not with a rifle.
The Son of Sam made no effort to escape from the police, quickly confessed to the crimes, and pleaded guilty.
The subject of a possible satanic cult sacrificial killings later arose, of which David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. had been a member but not the only one who committed the killings. It was pointed out that some of the police sketches of suspects in the early killings did not look like him.
The two sons of Sam Carr, Michael and John who both died under mysterious circumstances after all of this was over, were supposedly involved. There is a park and public garden 2 km from where the Son of Sam lived that was known as a gathering place for satanists in the 1970s but, in prison interviews, he did take full responsibility for the killings.
2) THE REAL STORY OF OSIRAK
On June 7, 1981, the Israeli Air Force launched a surprise long-range mission which bombed and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Iraq had originally purchased the reactor technology from France. The purported reason for the raid was to prevent Iraq from gaining a nuclear weapon which could well be used against Israel.
The raid was condemned across the world. Even Iran, which was at war with Iraq, condemned the raid. But much of the condemnation seemed to be somewhat half-hearted. While one nation should not be allowed to launch an air raid against another, much of the world also felt that it would be a more dangerous place if Iraq had nuclear weapons.
Iran, in the course of the ongoing war with Iraq, had earlier bombed the reactor itself, in what was known as Operation Scorch Sword. But the reactor had not been seriously damaged in that raid. The first thing that is confusing about it is that there is information online that Iran actually supplied Israel with aerial photo reconnaissance of the site, yet Iran condemned the raid when it was bombed.
My conclusion is that the Israeli bombing mission was really directed at Iran.
The Iran Hostage Crisis, where Americans from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been held for 444 days, had recently ended with the hostages being released. On April 24, 1980, a rescue attempt had been made to free the hostages. The mission was aborted when it was decided that there were not enough serviceable helicopters left to ensure a successful mission. The tragic accident occurred after the mission had been aborted when the rotor blade of a helicopter struck an aircraft.
Two months before the Israeli air attack on Osirak, Iran had undertaken an extremely complex aerial mission against Iraq. On the far side of Iraq, near the border with Jordan and Syria, was a complex of airfields known as H3 to guard Iraq's western border area. A large number of military aircraft were parked there, some seemingly recently imported, out of the reach of the Iranian Air Force which would like to destroy the planes on the ground.
A fleet of Iranian planes flew all the way there on a very long-range mission. The planes had to refuel in the air several times. They flew at low altitude, to avoid radar detection, right along the borders between Turkey and Iraq, and between Syria and Iraq. That way, if they were picked up on radar, each country would conclude that they were just patrolling the border of the other country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-3_airstrike#/media/File:Operation_H3_map.png
Syria was supportive of Iran during the war and we have to wonder if the government of Syria was aware of the mission. Since H3 is not far from the border between Iraq and Syria, did it even inform Iran about the planes?
Two Boeing 747 planes were involved in the Iranian mission. One was an aerial command post and the other was a refueling plane. Both of these took off from Turkey, which was unaware of their mission, and joined the other planes. At the time of the operation, another Iranian air operation was launched elsewhere, to divert the attention of the Iraqi Air Force.
The mission was a great success and, as far as I can see, the Iranians suffered no losses and made it back home with no mishaps. They claimed to have destroyed 48 Iraqi planes on the ground. The Iraqis scoffed at the claims and said that only one plane was damaged in the raid. The data gained by the U.S. is that the raid was a success, but it was likely somewhat fewer than 48 Iraqi planes that were destroyed.
This complex Iranian mission was virtually a mirror image of the U.S. attempt to rescue it's hostages the year before. Except that the mission was to destroy planes rather than rescue hostages. The mission was, as much as anything, a jab at the United States. Iran wanted to show that it could pull off perfectly a mission that was just about as complex as the one that the U.S. attempted, Operation Eagle Claw.
But the successful Iranian bombing mission came uncomfortably close to Israel. The planes had flown a very long distance to get there, and the H3 complex was within 375 km (250 miles) of Jerusalem. It was closer to Jerusalem than it was to Baghdad. Israel was closely watching the Iran-Iraq War just as it is watching the war in Syria now.
Could this be what really prompted the Israeli bombing mission against Osirak? To remind Iran of Israel's capabilities in destroying a reactor that a similar Iranian raid had failed to destroy?
Israel surely knew that the world would condemn the raid. France was actively involved in operating the reactor that it had sold to Iraq and had assured Israel that it could not produce a nuclear weapon. But Israel thought it imperative to launch the raid anyway. Israel seemed to see that the Iranian raid on H3 was to show up America, so Israel followed the same formula and showed up Iran by a long-distance air mission that succeeded in destroying the reactor that an Iranian mission had been unable to.
But then this brings us to something else. Exactly three weeks after the Israeli bombing of Osirak, a massive bomb exploded during a meeting of Iran's ruling party. 73 of the most important people in the government were killed. The event is known as the Hafte Tir Bombing. It is really a credit to Iran's Revolution that it survived this.
My understanding is that a sound technician was setting up speakers. The speakers were brought in on a cart, and the bomb was hidden in the cart.
The blame fell on the organization known as the Mujahedin e Khalq. The organization, advocating a kind of blend of Islam and Marxist principles, had long been opposed to the Shah of Iran. They sided with Ayatollah Khomeini, and helped him overthrow the Shah, but the alliance didn't last long, and they had been vigorously opposing the Revolution, eventually siding with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War.
But there is a persistent story that the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service encouraged the bombing, and possibly supplied the bomb.
I do not really believe that Israel had anything to do with the bombing. But here is what I do believe.
In early 2018 Mossad agents broke into a warehouse in Tehran. They removed a vast archive of documentation about Iran's nuclear program. Benjamin Netanyahu went on television to denounce Iran for lying in claiming that it was not seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
But that was not what it was really about.
The real message was, going back to 1981, to show Iran up again. The operation to get those nuclear records is reminiscent of the U.S. attempt to get in, get it's people being held hostage, and get safely out. It was also reminiscent of the Israeli hostage rescue mission at Entebbe in 1976.
The message to Iran was to be very careful because Israeli agents can operate in Iran without getting caught. Also, whether or not Israel had anything to do with it, don't forget the Hafte Tir Bombing, which wiped out much of the Iranian Government, because it could happen again.
3) THE MYSTERY OF USTICA
On June 27, 1980, an Italian passenger jet crashed into the sea north of Sicily, near the island of Ustica, killing all 81 passengers and crew on board.
The news reports were that there had been some kind of encounter between NATO aircraft and a Libyan jet, and that the passenger plane may have been shot down in the crossfire. The plane had been late in taking off from Bologna, on it's way to Palermo, and it was after nightfall. After the plane disappeared from radar, two Italian Air Force jets were sent to investigate and look for possible wreckage.
I remember when this happened and it caught my attention because I had just finished a semester of school and was to fly to Europe myself in a few weeks.
Libya had been confronting foreign warplanes that flew near it's coast. But this incident took place more than 500 miles, about 750 km, from Libya, far to the north of Sicily, and stories began to emerge that something far more mysterious had actually taken place.
As a brief background, Flight 870 was lost at a time when the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution, and the accompanying Hostage Crisis, was going on. Two months before the disappearance of the flight the U.S. attempt to rescue it's hostages in Iran, Operation Eagle Claw, had ended in failure.
Libya, across the Mediterranean from Italy, was led by Moammar Gaddafi, who had come to power eleven years before by overthrowing the king of the former Italian colony. Gaddafi was, of course, a Moslem, but was more along the lines of Saddam Hussein than of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. Gaddafi was in the process of turning Libya into a socialist society. His philosophy of mixing Islam and socialism was detailed in his "Green Book", which had seemingly been inspired by Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book".
Gaddafi was a close ally of the Soviet Union and, considering that the Soviets had invaded the Moslem country of Afghanistan a few months previously, before anyone in Europe knew it there might be Soviet bases just across the Mediterranean.
But Libyan socialism was not a grassroots movement, as socialist movements typically are. It was being imposed from the top down, and at that top was Gaddafi. Wouldn't the west be safer if Gaddafi could be eliminated? As it turns out, he would be at a meeting in Europe in late June, after which he would be flying back home in his Soviet-made Tupolev.
Assassination while flying was not unusual at all. It was no secret that the Israeli Air Force was hoping to track Yasir Arafat to a flight in a private plane. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had been killed in a mysterious plane crash, after allegedly upsetting powerful interests while trying to bring peace in the Congo. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, died in a plane crash that many had suspicions about. Mohammad Khatami, former chief of the Iranian Air Force, died in another suspicious crash. Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama, died mysteriously in a plane crash a year after the Ustica crash. Later, of course, there was the death of Pakistani president Muhammad Zia ul Haq.
Neither was intervention in other countries to preclude Communism unusual at the time. Probably the most familiar example is the CIA-supported coup against the Communist government of Salvador Allende that had come to power in Chile.
NATO jets could shoot down Gaddafi's plane with a missile. Since they knew that it would be escorted by a Libyan Air Force jet, and that Libya had been confronting foreign military planes that flew near it's coast, they could say that the Libyan jet had fired first, at NATO jets on a routine patrol or training exercise, and that Gaddafi's plane had been shot down in the crossfire.
The story quickly emerged that the loss of Flight 870 was actually an attempt to assassinate Moammar Gaddafi, by shooting down his plane, that had gone horribly wrong. Gaddafi himself must have suspected such a plot which is why a Libyan jet flew across the Mediterranean to escort his plane home. Radio silence must have been in effect and the Libyan pilot mistook the late-flying passenger jet for Gaddafi's plane, and flew along with it. That then prompted the NATO jets that were going to shoot down Gaddafi's plane to mistake the passenger jet for it.
Flight 870 was shot down by a missile. No trace of the Libyan jet was found and it was presumed that it crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea. It would have had to cross Sicily to get back home, where it would have been detected. It didn't take long to find out that it was the passenger jet that had been shot down, not Gaddafi's plane, and a planeload of innocent people had been killed.
Considering the background of the times that we saw above, releasing the facts about the tragedy, that jets from one NATO member had shot down a passenger jet of an allied nation, would risk fracturing NATO, and possibly the European Union, at a critical time in the confrontation with both Communism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Since the disastrous assassination attempt had taken place well within Italian airspace, permission must have been given by Italy although it does not seem that Italian planes were involved. This would, if it became known, certainly drive Libya into the Communist orbit if it wasn't already there.
The tape of the radar activity, which would have shown what actually happened, was found to have been somehow erased. A number of air traffic controllers that were on duty at the time are reputed to have mysteriously died. Most of the plane was eventually recovered from the seafloor.
Francesco Cossiga, Italian Prime Minister at the time, blamed a French Navy jet for shooting down the plane. Many people, including four Italian generals, were tried for obstructing justice in the investigation of the crash, but none actually convicted.
It is not beyond possibility that some kind of technical failure caused the plane to crash, as with the Air France jet flying from Brazil in 2009, but air traffic controllers were in contact with the crew right up until the plane disappeared from radar. Everything was fine, the pilots expressed surprise at something, and then the plane vanished from radar. But the recovered black box of the plane apparently showed nothing that would indicate structural or mechanical failure.
Italians themselves refer to it as the "Ustica Massacre", meaning that it was no accident.
There is also a bomb theory, that the plane was destroyed by a bomb that was planted on it, and not by a missile from outside. This crash did take place during northern Italy's "Years of Lead" when there was political violence, including bombings, from both the right and the left. A British expert on terrorism involving planes, Frank Taylor, insisted that the plane was brought down by a bomb that exploded in a rear lavatory, even exploding a bomb in a retired DC-9 to display the results in comparison to those recovered from the wreckage.
But the bomb theory quickly became a minority opinion. Neither side during the "Years of Lead" ever targeted planes. The most likely place to conceal a bomb on plane is in the luggage, either overhead or the baggage compartment, certainly not in a lavatory. No one claimed responsibility for any such bombing of the plane.
Further investigation, after most of the pieces of the plane were recovered, focused on a missing piece of the fuselage just above the starboard engine. This area of the fuselage seemed to have disintegrated when an explosion took place just outside the plane. A heat-seeking missile would home in on the plane's engine, and then explode when it reached the source of heat, the starboard engine. The lavatory, where some believe a bomb to have exploded that brought the plane down, is on the inside of this section.
(Note-The Malaysian passenger jet that was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 was targeted by a radar-guided missile that exploded just outside the plane).
This is the starboard side of plane that crashed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870#/media/File:Itavia_DC-9_I-TIGI.jpg
The plane was heading south, toward Palermo, when this happened. That means that it's starboard side would have been facing west. This is the direction from where we would expect NATO jets to come from if they were going to assassinate Moammar Gaddafi by air, not from the other direction which would be closer to Italy from where it would have more chance of being witnessed.
There was a nearly full moon on the night of the disaster but the moon rises in the east, and the moon would have been in the eastern sky when it took place. If the NATO jets came from the west, the bright moonlight would have had the effect of blinding the NATO pilots to the name of the airline on the late-flying passenger jet, leading them to mistake it for Gaddafi's plane especially since it was being escorted by the Libyan jet.
The following month, July 1980, the wreckage of a Libyan military jet was found in a remote area of southern Italy. There had indeed been a Libyan jet but it had not crashed into the sea. Not much information was released about the crashed jet, except that the body of the pilot was still in the cockpit and that it may have crashed because it ran out of fuel.
But if evidence had been found that this Libyan jet had shot down the passenger jet, or had initiated action that caused the passenger jet to be shot down or to crash, there certainly would have been retaliatory action against Libya, as there was in 1986 in the bombing of Tripoli for the bombing of a Berlin disco. Yet there was no retaliation at all against Libya.
Furthermore, Italy was the European nation that was most friendly to Libya. Certainly, Gaddafi would rather strike at the U.S. or Britain than at an Italian plane.
Gaddafi himself seemed certain that this was an assassination attempt and became much more hostile to the west. He would become Ronald Reagan's arch-enemy, culminating in the bombing of Tripoli in 1986. There would also be the hostage situation involving the Libyan Embassy in London.
The next thing that happened is the bombing of the train station in Bologna, the northern Italian city from where Flight 870 had departed. The bombing killed 85 people, more than had died in the plane crash.
A phone call was made to a newspaper claiming responsibility for the bombing on behalf of NAR, an organization that was a rightward component of the country's "Years of Lead".
In 1980, it took some time to trace a phone call, a brief phone call was usually untraceable. But they did manage to trace the call and found, incredibly, that it had come from an office of the Italian Secret Service. Other than that, there was no claim of responsibility for the bombing. NAR members were convicted of the bombing, but denied having anything to do with it.
The city and timing of the bombing of the Bologna Train Station, following the shooting down of the plane and then the discovery of the wreckage of the Libyan jet which apparently yielded no evidence that it shot down the plane, began speculation that either the government itself had bombed the train station, in an effort to save NATO and the European Union at a critical time by making it look as if it were a bomb that brought the plane down, and not that the jet of one NATO country had shot down the passenger plane of another in a misguided assassination attempt, or that a terrorist organization that wanted to bring down the government had seized the opportunity to bomb the train station in order to make it look as if the government had really bombed the train station.
Following the bombing of the Bologna Train Station, a bomb was placed on a train in Bologna but was set so that it would not explode. It was found to actually have been planted by the Italian Secret Service, and contained the same type of explosive that had been used in the bombing of the train station. Those who planted the non-explosive bomb wanted it to be found and it also contained identifying information on two foreign right-wing extremists.
But this also looks like a definite attempt to make it look as if the plane had been destroyed by a bomb, and not in error by a missile from a NATO ally during a bizarre assassination attempt on a foreign leader. It was made to appear that a right-wing terrorist was on the way to another bombing around Bologna, a city that was known for it's leftward sympathies, and had lost or forgotten his briefcase with the explosives.
Another thing that is questionable is the British expert, Frank Taylor, insisting that the plane was brought down by a bomb that was placed in the lavatory, rather than by a missile. He even detonated a bomb in a retired DC-9 to show how the damage would match that which was pieced together from the recovered pieces of the plane.
But it seemed that he was trying too hard to convince the public that it was not a missile, and thus not a disastrous assassination attempt on Moammar Gaddafi, that had brought down the plane. It was as if the people did not trust the explanation given by their own government so they got a foreign terrorism specialist to agree with them.
There would be another benefit of pinning both the crash of the passenger jet and the Bologna Train Station bombing on political terrorists in that it would discredit them, and help to bring the "Years of Lead" to an end.
Finally there is information online, although I cannot see it in any mainstream information outlets, of something that is truly incredible. Eight years after all of this happened, there would be another tragedy. Two Italian jets collided during an air show at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, killing both pilots and dozens of people on the ground.
What is so incredible, if it is accurate, is that the two Italian pilots that collided at Ramstein are the same two pilots who had been sent out to investigate the missing plane on June 27, 1980.
THE CASE OF ITALO BALBO
Here is something extremely interesting with regard to the crash of Flight 870 in 1980.
Exactly forty years, minus one day, before the crash of Flight 870 there was another incident involving Libya and the fatal crash of an Italian plane. The chief of Benito Mussolini's air force was Italo Balbo. He was among the few top people in Mussolini's government and had a good chance of being next in line to rule.
The trouble was that he had openly opposed the alliance with the Nazis, as well as their anti-Semitic policies, and had expressed the opinion that Italy should side with Britain, as it had in the First World War.
While coming in to land at a base in Libya, his plane was shot down by friendly fire and he was killed. The base had reportedly just been attacked by British aircraft, and Balbo's aircraft was mistaken for one of them.
I won't get into the actual death of Italo Balbo here. He died just before the beginning of the Battle of Britain and it is tempting to think that the Nazis might have been uneasy with their ally's air force being led by a general who had opposed their alliance with them and advocated siding with Britain. But anyway, the issue was resolved when he was "accidentally" killed by "friendly fire".
What is so interesting is, if the crash of Flight 870 at Ustica was an assassination attempt on Moammar Gaddafi gone very wrong, is that it is virtually a reenactment of the "friendly fire" incident that killed Italo Balbo. In 1940, after a combat incident with British planes, Italo Balbo's plane was shot down as well. In 1980, after a combat incident with a Libyan plane, Moammar Gaddafi's plane would be shot down as well.
Italo Balbo was ironically Gaddafi's predecessor as governor of Libya. He constructed an elaborate memorial arch, which Gaddafi demolished upon coming to power.
I think most people would say that all of this is just too much coincidence. The death of Italo Balbo, whether it was an accident or not, looks like it is where the idea came from to assassinate Moammar Gaddafi forty years, minus one day, later, and to have it look like an accident. It was indeed an accident, but not in the way intended, and the target turned out to be a planeload of innocent people.
AERODYNAMICS AT NIAGARA
(Note-There is something to think about at Niagara Falls, which is a site of frequent airshows. A similar crash happened, between two Blue Angels, in 1985. There was a crowd of about 20,000 people. Fortunately, the crash occurred at high altitude and directly over the airfield, so that neither plane landed in the crowd. The collision occurred high enough to parachute and one of the pilots escaped by parachute. The other plane seemed to fall upside-down so that it fell straight down onto the airfield, where it exploded.
In such a crash, it is rare for the plane to fall upside down. If it would have fallen right-side-up, the flow of the air over the wings would have provided lift and the plane would have glided for some distance rather than falling straight down. Instead, the negative lift of the wings in the upside-down plane caused it to fall straight down onto the airfield, where it missed the crowds. But if it would have glided before crashing, it may have landed in the crowd and a lot of people could have been killed.
But this is not why I named my autobiography "Right-Side-Up").
4) QUESTIONS ABOUT D-DAY
It's time to take a closer look at the official version of D-Day, the Allied landing in northern France in 1944.
The landings took place on the coast of Normandy on June 6. Such a massive amphibious landing was not expected to be easy, the Nazis were anticipating the landing but did not know exactly where it would come. The Allies had the advantage of overwhelming air superiority.
The traditional story is that the Allies went to great lengths to deceive the Nazis as to where the landings would come. A fake army was assembled in southern England opposite Calais to make the Nazis think that this is where the invasion would come, at the narrowest width of the English Channel. Radio traffic was arranged to make it look as if the center of Allied operations was opposite Calais. Known enemy agents were not arrested so that they could be fed disinformation that D-Day was to come at Calais.
But the landings were planned for Normandy, about 240 km or 150 miles southwest of Calais. The goal of the Allies was to give the soldiers who had landed at Normandy the maximum amount of time possible to bring in supplies and fortify their positions before the Nazis brought the full weight of their forces in a counterattack. The way to do this was to trick the Nazis into keeping the bulk of their forces around Calais, in anticipation that D-Day would come there.
Even after the landings at Normandy began, the Allies did what they could to deceive the Nazis into thinking that this attack was just a diversion, to get them to pull their forces away from Calais. The real landing was still to come at Calais. By the time the Nazis realized that the landings in Normandy was the real invasion, there would be no landings at Calais, the Allied soldiers had had the maximum amount of time to offload supplies and to fortify their position before the Nazis could counterattack.
The official story is that the invasion had not been planned for June 6, but for some weeks later when the weather became better. The reason that the Allies were so concerned about weather is that their advantage was overwhelming air superiority. But to make use of this advantage required good weather. Poor weather would thus favor the Nazis.
The decision was made to take advantage of a one-day period of good weather that was coming, in the midst of otherwise poor weather. That is why D-Day was on June 6.
With all due respect to the "Greatest Generation" that fought the war, this explanation is not remotely near believable.
Part of the official story is that the Nazi general in charge of opposing the D-Day landings, Erwin Rommel, was confident that the invasion would not be coming any time soon because "The Allies have always before attacked in good weather". The Nazis could relax. Many of the soldiers were on leave and top Nazi officers involved in the defense against D-Day were off at war games. Rommel himself was back home for his wife's birthday, which happened to be on June 6, and that is when the invasion came unexpectedly.
But let's consider Rommel's supposed observation that "the Allies had always before attacked in good weather". D-Day was to be the first large-scale combat in northern Europe since the tide of the war had turned and the Allies had been on the offensive. All of the combat between the two before that had been in north Africa and the Mediterranean, where sunny days are the rule rather than the exception.
It was clear that the Allies were waiting for summer weather to launch D-Day, so why would they let half the summer be gone by waiting for several more weeks. The autumn weather would be even worse for the side that was trying to use it's air superiority. Around June 6 actually was the ideal time to launch it.
The Nazis, of all people, had demonstrated that, in 1941, by feeling it necessary to invade Yugoslavia and Greece before invading the Soviet Union. They realized the importance of good weather, to make maximum use of their air superiority, but didn't get around to invading the Soviet Union until June 22. This did not leave them enough time ti finish the Soviets before the severe winter set in, presuming that they could have done, that the Nazis were not prepared for, and which gave the Soviets a chance to recover.
The weather around the English Channel is simply unpredictable. The prevailing wind is from the west, stratus clouds come in off the ocean, and you get that light drizzly rain. Waiting for an extended period of nice weather while the summer is going by is just plain folly. The weather can quickly change from sunny to rainy and back to sunny again. Just launch the invasion when summer arrives, and deal with the weather as it comes. The reason that the Mediterranean is more sunny is that the prevailing wind is from the east.
Likewise, the story about the Allies waiting for the full moon and the tides to be right before launching the invasion just does not make sense. The side with air superiority, which in this case was the Allies, would be the ones to benefit from a full moon, so that pilots can see what is on the ground below them at night. An amphibious assault, which D-Day would be, is best done at high tide so that the soldiers will have less beach to cross while under enemy fire. But waiting for weeks until the moon is just right is letting the summer weather go by, knowing that the following autumn weather will generally be worse for the side with air superiority.
Also, the Nazis were well aware that Allied fliers would like a full moon, and that would be when they would most anticipate the attack to come. It would be better for the Allies to just launch D-Day before the full moon, to have more of an element of surprise. Besides the Allies who landed at D-Day would require just as much air support in the following days, when the Nazis would certainly counterattack, as they would during D-Day itself.
D-Day is actually a two-part story. The first part is the successful Allied landing. The second part is the so-called "Breakout". The Nazis brought all of the forces that they could spare to counter the Allied landings. For about six weeks after D-Day, there was a stalemate. The Nazi forces could not drive the invaders back into the sea, but they could stop them from advancing any further. Until the Allies managed to breakout of this stalemate, it was by no means certain that D-Day would be a success.
But after the Allies began to really advance into occupied France, the situation changed dramatically. The Nazis had already been fighting two full-scale wars at once, on the Eastern Front and in Italy, and were in retreat in both, now they had a third frontal war.
The next thing that happened, on July 20, was the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. A plan by many of his own officers to kill him with a bomb had already been in the works, but the attempt was not made until it seemed that, more than ever, the war was lost. That way, whoever took over after the assassination would likely have the support of the majority of the German population. If Hitler had been assassinated but the war still seemed winnable, he might have just been replaced by another of the top Nazis.
But the assassination attempt on Hitler did not succeed.
As it turned out, Rommel had been in on the plot to assassinate Hitler. He had been in hospital after being wounded when his staff car had been shot at by a plane. (Brits, Americans and, Canadians each claim that it was one of their planes that got Rommel and the truth has never been satisfactorily resolved).
The trouble was that Rommel was widely popular in Germany and it would certainly be damaging to morale to have him involved in this plot. Rommel was quietly arrested and, after being assured that his family would not in any way be punished, was given the opportunity to commit suicide. It was announced that he had died as a result from the wounds suffered in his staff car, and only after the war did the truth become known.
But let's consider the Nazi strategy at countering D-Day. If they did successfully repel the invasion, what would happen then? By this time, the Soviet advance from the east against the Nazis was unstoppable. If western Europe could not be liberated by the Allies, how long would it before it was conquered by the Soviets?
Since Rommel wanted to kill Hitler, but the attempt was not made until it became clear that the post-D-Day breakout was successful and the war looked less winnable than ever, that means that Rommel actually had quite a bit to gain by the Allies' success. In fact, maybe never before in history has a general had so much to potentially gain by the success of the enemies that he was opposing.
Rommel was in on the plot to assassinate Hitler, but was not a central figure in it. The plotters planned to make peace with the Allies and had it planned who of their number would be the leader of postwar Germany.
Rommel was actually well-respected by the Allies. As a general, he had an almost uncanny ability to predict what his enemies were likely to do next. The war in eastern north Africa, with Rommel and his Italian allies on one side, and the British and Commonwealth forces on the other side, had been a relatively "civilized" war, if any war can be so-described. They killed each other, of course, but the war, in complete contrast with the Eastern Front, was not unnecessarily barbaric. Rommel was considered by his Allied enemies as not really a Nazi, but simply a loyal soldier following orders.
Could it be that, if the assassination attempt on Hitler had succeeded, Rommel, with the support of the western Allies, would have stepped in as the leader of postwar Germany, making peace with the western Allies and joining with them in the Cold War with the Soviets, that many on both sides felt would likely begin as soon as this war ended which, it turns out, it did?
But first it was necessary to bring about the climate in Germany where the war was no longer winnable, and an alternative to the Nazis would be welcomed. For that, D-Day would have to be succeed and Rommel, more than anyone else, was in a position to make that happen.
Could that be why, when D-Day came, many of Rommel's soldiers were on leave, many of his officers were away attending war games, and Rommel himself was back home for his wife's birthday? It was explained as "The Allies have always before attacked in good weather". So that the Allies had the maximum amount of time to offload supplies and to fortify their positions before the Nazis could get their forces together and counterattack.
Could that be why Rommel kept the bulk of his forces around Calais, even after the Allied landings began in Normandy? How could the fabled "Desert Fox" be so outwitted by the Allies? Could it be that he knew the landings were not going to come at Calais but felt that the best thing for his country was not to repel the Allied landings, but to be rid of Hitler and bring peace to his people, with him as their likely postwar leader?
I am not sure if he knew the landings would be at Normandy, the Allies may or may not have been willing to put that much trust in him. But I think it likely that there was communication between Rommel and the Allies, at some level, and he did what he could to let the landings succeed.
Making a deal with an enemy general is not as out of the ordinary as we might think. General Friedrich Von Paulus, the commander of the Nazis' Sixth Army who eventually surrendered at Stalingrad, actually later became a Communist himself. Then there was the mysterious flight, earlier in the war, of Rudolf Hess, the third-ranking Nazi, to Scotland. To this day, no one has been able to offer a satisfactory explanation for this flight. Then, of course, was the story of Ataturk, which we saw in the section "The Real Story Of Gallipoli".
With the war over and Rommel dead, the few top Allied leaders who knew about whatever communication might have gone on between the two would have no reason to publicize it. Eisenhower would end up successfully campaigning to be U.S. president. Churchill would be voted out as prime minister almost as soon as the war had ended, but would make a successful comeback to another term as prime minister in the 1950s.
Both of these Allied heroes supposedly had thoroughly outwitted the fabled "Desert Fox", General Rommel, and that is why D-Day was a success. But what actually happened is that these two, together with Rommel, had outwitted Hitler. The planned replacement of Hitler with Rommel as the leader of a peaceful postwar Germany never came to be because the assassination attempt on Hitler did not succeed and Rommel was arrested by the Gestapo.
5) THE REAL STORY OF GALLIPOLI
There is something about the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War that just does not make sense, and I would like to have a closer look at it.
Gallipoli is the name of a peninsula near Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire entered World War One on the side of the Central Powers, allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The British and French, with Australians and New Zealanders, made an amphibious landing at Gallipoli, in 1915. The ostensible reason was to secure the Dardanelles and the Bosporus Strait so that supplies could be shipped to Russia, which was at war with the Central Powers on their Eastern Front. If the operation went well, of course, it could potentially lead to the Allied capture of the Ottoman capital and force them out of the war.
The operation turned into a stalemate that lasted nearly a year. The Ottomans were unable to dislodge the Allies from their beachhead, but the Ottomans held on to the higher ground and the Allies were unable to capture the entire peninsula. Finally it was decided that it was not possible to secure the area so that ships would be able to safely pass through, and the Allied soldiers were withdrawn. It goes down in history as an Ottoman victory.
One of the most maligned aspects of the First World War against the Ottomans is the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement. During the war diplomats from Britain and France, Sykes and Picot, got together over a map of the Middle East and divided up Ottoman Empire territory between them. The agreement between the two Allied countries was supposed to be kept secret. Some blame it for being the foundation of so much trouble in the region today, although no one seems to have come up with what would have been a better plan.
But here is what is interesting and puzzling. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was drawn up in the closing days of the Gallipoli Campaign, before the Allied soldiers were withdrawn. It was formally signed by the two countries soon after the campaign was over.
So here are the questions that we are dealing with today.
1) Why would the British and French begin drafting an agreement to divide up Ottoman territory after the war at a time when it was becoming more apparent every day that a major military campaign against the Ottomans was not going to achieve it's objective?
2) Why would the British and French governments put their final signatures on an agreement to divide up Ottoman territory between them after they had apparently just suffered a serious defeat at the hands of the Ottomans? Before dividing up their territory, isn't it necessary to win the war first?
But there are also so many other questions about this Gallipoli Campaign.
What about the supposed objective of the campaign, to secure the waterway through Turkey, into the Black Sea, in order to deliver supplies to ally Russia?
This appears to have been absurd, unless Turkey changed sides and joined the Allies. Even if the Dardanelles and Bosporus Strait had been secured, Allied ships passing through would be extremely vulnerable to mines and shots from hidden artillery on shore. The Allied supply ships would have also been vulnerable to warships and submarines that the Central Powers could have deployed in the Black Sea, in order to cut the supply line.
Why would such a supply line through hostile Ottoman territory have even been necessary? The Allies sent supplies to the Soviet Union during the Second World War by three routes, and this was not one of them, even though Turkey was a neutral country by this time. One route was by ship convoys from Britain around the coast of Norway, the second route was a land route to Russia across Iran, the third supply route was by ship from the U.S. to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East.
Any of those routes of supply to Russia could have been used in the First World War, making it difficult to understand why the Gallipoli Campaign was even necessary. Japan could potentially hinder the sea route to Vladivostok, but it was on the Allied side in the First World War.
Another question about the Gallipoli Campaign itself is why, if the landing had turned into a stalemate, not just abandon the beachhead land somewhere else that was not as well defended. At D-Day, in the Second World War, the Allies actually landed at five separate beaches. The landing at Omaha Beach was running into especially difficult opposition, and there was discussion of just abandoning that beach and concentrating U.S. forces on Utah Beach, where there was less opposition.
By the time the First World War began, the Ottoman Empire was over five hundred years old. It had been one of the greatest empires that the world had ever seen, but was now in it's twilight days. Some even referred to the Ottoman Empire as "The sick man of Europe". In the Nineteenth Century, the Ottoman leadership had nearly been overthrown by one of it's own generals, the founder of the Pasha Dynasty in Egypt, but had been saved with Allied assistance.
Also in the Nineteenth Century, there had been a great and successful series of reforms across the empire, known as the Tanzimat. The Ottoman Empire had been relatively liberal and there had been many French-run missionary schools within it.
In 1908, a movement known as the "Young Turks" had deposed the ruling sultan and restored rule by the constitution that he had suspended. In 1913, the year before the war began, there was a coup in which three military leaders rose to power. These would become known to history as the "Three Pashas", and would guide the empire through the war. A primary reason for siding with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the war was that Britain and France had been taking Ottoman territories as the empire declined.
We saw in our visit to "Algiers" how, during an argument, the ruling Ottoman dey had struck the French consul with a flyswatter. The French considered it as an act of war and took over the country.
Being on the losing side in the First World War marked the end of the Ottoman Empire. The leader that emerged, Mustafa Kemal, became known as Ataturk. He successfully undertook one of the most far-reaching national reform programs that the world has ever seen.
Turkey gave up the Ottoman Empire and became a republic. The modern country was secular and progressive. The Islamic religion was left in the mosques. Education was coed and emphasized science and technology. The country adopted western-style laws, and there were several women among the members of parliament. Turks began wearing western clothes. Ataturk himself was sometimes seen in a top hat, and sometimes in a panama hat.
But the two most prominent of Ataturk's reforms was the abolition of the caliphate, which had been based in the Ottoman Empire and was widely accepted as the leader of all Moslems, and the use of the Latin script for Turkish writing, in place of the Arabic script.
The reforms of Ataturk must be considered as so revolutionary as to be even greater in scope than those of the French Revolution, which opened the modern political era in the world. But, unlike much of the French Revolution, the reform program of Ataturk was a success.
While it is true that the Middle East has not really settled into a new equilibrium following the end of the Ottoman Empire, it is also true that the great reforms of Ataturk have had far-reaching effects on other countries. Reza Shah, the founder of Iran's Pahlavi Dynasty and father of the shah that was overthrown in 1979, was a friend of Ataturk and undertook modernizing reforms in his own country. But they ultimately ended in his son being overthrown in the 1979 revolution.
THE REAL STORY OF GALLIPOLI
But what I just could not help wondering about is the connection between Gallipoli and the later rise of Ataturk, and how much the British and French who had lost at Gallipoli had just gained so much from all of this. They partitioned the vast territories of the former Ottoman Empire after Ataturk had come to power in Turkey itself, but had drafted the agreement to divide those territories while apparently losing at Gallipoli.
Could there be more to the Gallipoli Campaign than we have been told?
A British company had found oil in the Middle East, in Iran in 1908. This resulted in the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later took a share in a company that tried to find oil in the Ottoman Empire. The British Government seemed to realize how important oil was going to be and put considerable resources into the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
When the boundaries were drawn after the war, and the end of the Ottoman Empire as first approached in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Turkey itself was left without any significant oil. An observer once commented that "Turkey begins where the oil ends".
Doesn't it look like the British authorities, who seemed to have been the first to realize how important the oil in the Middle East was going to be, wanted the Iranians to see their Turkish neighbors enjoying the great prosperity brought about by Ataturk's reforms, but without any oil, so that they would be more willing to just let the British handle the oil? Turkey would be a model for all countries in the region to become modern and western, but without any oil.
This touchiness about the oil in Iran explains the 1953 coup that the British and the CIA engineered when newly-elected Mossadegh announced nationalization of the oil industry.
What about Ataturk? He ended up as such a shining star amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as one of the most important figures of the century. There are streets and other places across the world named for Ataturk.
Ataturk had been an Ottoman general in the war. In fact, he had been the Ottoman general who had successfully opposed the Allied landing at Gallipoli. It amazed people that he seemed to have anticipated where the Allies would attack.
Before the war, Ataturk had been in favor of reform in the Ottoman Empire. He had been a prominent figure in the "Young Turks" movement of 1908, which deposed the sultan of the empire and restored constitutional rule.
After the "Young Turks" movement, but before the beginning of the First World War, Ataturk had visited France, where he observed the military maneuvers at Picardie. During the war, he visited the German side of the Western Front, and was very open with his opinion that the Germans would lose.
The battle at Gallipoli, unlike the other Allied military campaigns against the Ottomans, was not fought out in the desert. It was close to home where the Turkish people could witness their great hero in action.
After the defeat in the war, Ataturk resigned from the Ottoman Army and began his reforms. He was actually sentenced to death by the remaining Ottomans but he defeated them and brought the empire to an end. The Allies sent occupation forces into Turkey, in particular into the capital of Istanbul. These were forced to leave by Ataturk, but without serious combat.
So, what conclusion does all of this bring us to?
Before the First World War began, the British had discovered oil in Iran. They realized how valuable it was going to be. They were not thinking primarily of private cars, but of what a great improvement it would be to have the ships of it's navy running on oil, rather than coal. They also realized that there was a lot of oil in Ottoman territories, in what is now Iraq. British, French and, German archeologists had long been working in the region and, after this division of the former Ottoman Empire, the ruins of the great ancient city of Ur would be discovered in former Ottoman territory.
The Allies had met Ataturk before the war, when he visited France. They knew that he was a reformer, having had a prominent role with the Young Turks. They knew of his military abilities, having been in an Ottoman war with Italy over Libya. They later likely found out about his openly negative opinion of the German war effort.
Next, Ataturk was at Gallipoli to defend it against an Allied landing.
What if the Allies could give Ataturk a great political boost, to propel him to leadership of the defeated Ottoman Empire after the war? Victory over the Allies at Gallipoli would certainly provide such a boost, leaving him as a national hero. He would get a further boost by driving away the Allied occupation force, this time without any serious combat.
This does not necessarily mean that the Gallipoli campaign started with this intent. It could have emerged as a "Plan B" later on, after some kind of communication with Ataturk.
History is very important in this part of the world. Gallipoli had actually been the site of a hostile landing at the time of the Crusades. The Fourth Crusade, in 1203, had landed at Gallipoli and what is now Istanbul and restored control of the area to the Catholic Church, which lasted for over 50 years. Repelling this landing would evoke Ottoman history as well as that of Byzantium before it, and make Ataturk into a modern version of Saladin, the Moslem leader who had defeated the Crusaders.
After the war Ataturk repelling the Allied occupation force, particularly at Istanbul, would evoke historical memories of the Ottomans conquering Constantinople ( now Istanbul ) in 1453.
Italy had been on the Allied side in the First World War, and inviting an Italian contingent to the temporary occupation of Istanbul after the war would further evoke historical memories of the pope sending Crusaders to conquer Moslem lands, until they were driven out by great heroes like Saladin and Ataturk. There had also been contingents from Venice and Genoa among the defenders of Constantinople, trying to resist the Ottoman conquest in 1453.
Who but Ataturk could possibly be considered to lead Turkey after the end of the war?
In return Ataturk would give up the Ottoman Empire, outside of Turkey itself, and would concentrate on his reforms that would make Turkey a prosperous western nation and one of the Allies. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why the British and French mysteriously began drafting the Sykes-Picot Agreement even though they were losing at Gallipoli, and formally signed it soon after being defeated at Gallipoli, with the Allies deciding to withdraw.
Some have wondered why the Arabian Peninsula was not included in the Sykes-Picot agreement. The answer is simple. Oil had not yet been discovered there. It would not be discovered in Saudi Arabia until 1938. That was why the British colonial authorities at the time didn't care too much about it, except for it's strategic location.
The British discovered and knew that there was a lot of oil in the eastern areas of the Middle East, Iraq and Iran. They gladly let the French have the western areas of the Middle East, where there was no oil. France cared about the glory and prestige of having ancient cities like Damascus and Aleppo in it's empire, and about Ataturk carrying on the banner of the French Revolution by ending the caliphate and making modern Turkey a secular republic. Britain cared about the oil. Italy, another of the Allies in the war, could have Libya, where oil had not yet been discovered, as it's share of former Ottoman territory.
How else can we explain why a British and a French diplomat would get together to divide up Ottoman territories between them toward the end of an important military campaign against the Ottomans that they were apparently losing? The governments of the two countries would then formally sign the agreement just after the campaign had been lost. The lost campaign gives a great political boost to the victorious Ottoman general, who emerges as the post-war leader of the Ottomans, and gives up the empire in a way that is greatly beneficial to his British and French former adversaries. He publicly praises the Allied soldiers who died while opposing him at Gallipoli.
It does not make any sense unless there is more to Gallipoli than we have been told.
6) THE WORLD OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
Conspiracy theories often revolve around secret societies and centers of power. But the most successful of these can be the ones that you do not notice how much influence they really have.
The London School of Economics was founded toward the end of the Nineteenth Century by a socialist organization, known as the Fabian Society. Among it's founders was George Bernard Shaw. If Baby Boomers in the U.S. have any familiarity with the London School of Economics, it may be because Mick Jagger attended there.
The London School of Economics is one of those colleges that does not have a recognizable campus. It mostly took over existing buildings. But it's logo is in many places to be seen in central London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_School_of_Economics#/media/File:London_school_of_economics_logo_with_name.svg
The London School of Economics is neither as old or as well-known as universities like Oxford and Cambridge. But several things stand out about it.
The first thing that stands out about it is it's curriculum. Most universities have a course of study that they specialize in, even if it is far from all that is taught there. Imperial College has an emphasis on technology. At Cambridge it is mathematics, traditionally anyone who goes through Cambridge is a mathematician. At Oxford, it was languages and classic literature.
For such a large school, the London School of Economics has a very narrow focus. As the name implies, it was founded to teach economics and politics. It is not known for athletics. Nor for medicine or literature or music or science or technology. It certainly isn't a "party school". It is not one of the schools with a broad curriculum for those who really do not know what they want to do.
But what the London School of Economics teaches is the things that really count in running the world, which are economics and politics.
The second thing that stands out about the London School of Economics is it's location. It is right in the center of London, right "in the middle of everything". One one side of the college, to the east, is the financial district. This is the area known as "The Square Mile". Near the school is the massive stone building of the Bank of England, affectionately known as "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street".
Just to the west of the London School of Economics is the government area, known as Westminster. This is where the parliament is located, along with the residence of the prime minister at 10 Downing Street, and all of the government ministries at Whitehall. Just beyond that is Buckingham Palace.
Just south of the London School of Economics is the Temple area. This is Britain's legal center. It's highest court and the four "Inns of Court", to one of which all barristers must belong, are located there.
We can only imagine how much it must have cost to purchase the buildings in which the London School of Economics is housed. This is an area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, both now and when the college was founded. There were a thousand other places where it could have been located, why did it have to be located here?
The third thing that stands out about the London School of Economics is the students. It educates a higher proportion of foreign students than just about any other university in the world. At any given time, around half of the students are non-British.
Now, let's add those things up and see what we get.
The reason for the narrow focus on economics and politics is that this is what counts in actually running the world. I have never heard of such a large university anywhere else that has such a narrow focus. The name of the school tells what it is about. It is not medicine or literature, or anything else like that, which actually runs the world. It is economics and politics, and as many people as possible who run the world would learn their economics and politics here.
This explains it's location, "right in the middle of everything in London". Students would not only learn how to run the world from the university, they would be within walking distance of Britain's economic center, it's legal center and, it's government center.
The Fabian Society promoted the ideals of socialism, the slant of economics that was halfway between pure communism on one side and raw capitalism on the other. It sought to bring about peaceful change, through effective democratic government, in the world, rather than violent revolution.
The way that socialism would be taught to the world was by presenting economics as a broad spectrum, with moderate socialism as the happy median. The late Nineteenth Century was a time of robber baron capitalism on one side, and proto-communist movements like the Paris Commune on the other, and the hope was for the best of both with the worst of neither.
Having gone to school "right next door" to Westminster and the financial district for several years, graduates of the London School of Economics would be the natural choices to move into to the finance, law and, government of Britain, and run the country the way that they had been taught.
Then when new students came to the university, they would not just study in textbooks how the world is run, they would actually see it being done all around them. This would not be possible if the London School of Economics was built somewhere else in the city, where real estate might have been much less expensive, certainly not in remote locations like Oxford and Cambridge.
Now we see why there is such an emphasis on foreign students. The idea was for those who would be running the world to come to Britain to learn how to do it, and then return home. This idea was a logical continuation of mission schools in many countries and also the use of the British Museum Reading Room by many students and exiles from around the world, who would someday return home and run their countries.
The influence that the London School of Economics has had on how the world is run is phenomenal. There is a Wikipedia article, "List of People Associated With The London School Of Economics".
Did you know, just for a few examples, that Lee Kuan Yew, the famed founder and prime minister of Singapore, Pierre Trudeau, the popular liberal Canadian prime minister and father of the present prime minister, the president of Colombia and, the president of Taiwan were all educated at the London School of Economics?
So many British politicians learned how to run the country there that it is impossible to count. British prime ministers tend to graduate from higher-profile schools, particularly Oxford, but below that level far more have learned here. The school educates a large proportion of the world's economists, as it is by far the most prominent school in the world with "economics" in it's name. These economists are not highly-visible politicians, but manage the "nuts and bolts" of the global economy.
Do Americans know that both Janet Yellen and Paul Volcker, past and present Chairs of the Federal Reserve Bank which sets interest rates and has far more control over the U.S. economy than any other institution, learned at the London School of Economics? Among many other influential people, several of the Kennedy family were educated there.
David Rockefeller, who made Chase Bank (now J.P. Morgan Chase) into the largest bank in the world that it is today, was educated at the London School of Economics. It has educated more billionaires than any other school in Europe, and a significant proportion of the top financial people in the world.
Just look over the Wikipedia article, "List of People Associated With The London School of Economics", if you wish. The influence that this school has on how the world is actually run is incredible, and that was what the school was planned for.
Many people around the world who learn economics and politics are what we could call "second-generation" graduates of the school, not having attended themselves but taught or influenced by those who did attend there. As one example, the current prime minister of Canada did not study at this university, but his father and predecessor did, and how much of his concepts of running the country might he have learned from his father?
Since world Communism began with the October Revolution of 1917, both left and right have moved, on the average, toward the center. This is what the Fabian Society, the founders of the London School of Economics, wanted. How much of this is the result of the influence of graduates of the school?
The main business of London has turned out to be finance. More money flows through London's financial district than anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of Hong Kong. This could not have been seen when the school was founded near the end of the Nineteenth Century. How much of this is due to the influence of the school "right next door"?
Going by the Wikipedia list of prominent people that have attended the London School of Economics, it is clear that the countries that send students are more likely to be democracies. It is true that countries are more likely to send students there if they are democracies, but the reverse is also true. These countries are more likely to be democracies if they have had students at the school. It is very clear that the countries without many graduates of the school tend to have "non-western" economic systems. It is largely this school that has defined modern economics.
What about the legal influence of the Fabian Society and the school that it founded? The great difference between a country that is a democracy and one that is not is in the laws of that country. Democracies tend to have laws that are clear and well-defined. Laws that can be subjective and "open to interpretation" invite dictatorship. For example, a country with a vague law against "threatening the social order" will almost certainly become a dictatorship because the subjective law can essentially be used by the ruling powers to throw anyone in jail who opposes their authority. This was a primary goal of the Fabian Society, progress by democracy and not by violent revolution.
Being next to London's Temple area let's students see firsthand how Britain's legal system works.
The Fabian Society was also what we could call "imperialistic". It's members believed that what the world really needed was the British way of doing things. As the end of the Nineteenth Century neared, visionaries could certainly see that the imperial era would some day come to a close. Even if all British people wanted their country to rule a vast empire, which was far from the case, the empire would someday grow beyond Britain's control.
But the Fabian Society had an idea. It was not a secret society that controlled things from behind the scenes. The course of action that they took was done very openly, even if it wasn't announced. Put simply, if Britain couldn't actually rule the world it would do the next best thing. It would educate the people who were running the world. The vehicle through which that would be accomplished was the London School of Economics.
The world, in the minds of the school's founders, would be largely British without Britain having the burden of actually ruling it. The school couldn't be all foreign students because British students of Economics and politics had to learn the correct way to run the world as well, and the foreign students had to have British classmates to interact with. Support and money to do all of this must have come from beyond the limited membership of the Fabian Society.
But the thing that is so striking about all of this is that one of the world's great universities, which has had such a great influence on how the world is run, keeps such a low profile.
It seems that part of it's plan to shape the world is not to draw attention to the influence that it has. The London School of Economics has educated no less than 52 heads of state, such as presidents and prime ministers in little more than a hundred years, but does not have a readily visible campus. Unlike a university that "looks like a university", most of what can be seen of it in central London is limited to it's logo.
I do not know of any well-known societies or movements in it's name, such as the Oxford Movement or the Yale Society, that other great universities seem to have in abundance.
Students of other prominent universities are usually proud to be wearing the school's colors around town. The "U of T", for one example, is to be seen everywhere in Toronto. Maybe there are students wearing the colors or logo of the London School of Economics, but I cannot recall seeing any. Nor is there a great arena or sports stadium in it's name.
Doesn't it look like the London School of Economics, founded by the not-secret but not very well-known Fabian Society, really doesn't want the general public to stop and think about what an influence it has on the way the world is run?
The Fabian Society does not seek to exert control over the world by recruiting prominent people. Rather, it founded a university that would educate those prominent people in it's way of thinking.
It does not seek to actually control at all, but only to guide the world in the right direction. It seeks the good of everyone. If the teachings of the London School of Economics, or the philosophy of it's founders, does not seem different from the way everybody else thinks, that is because it has succeeded so well in getting the world to see things it's way.
But it is ironic that the logo of the Fabian Society is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Hopefully, this makes London more interesting.
7) NIAGARA FALLS AND THE MOON LANDINGS
In 1969 the American Falls, which are one of the two main falls at Niagara, were shut off by the construction of a temporary dam. This was possible because actually less than ten percent of the water flows over the American Falls because it's base is higher in elevation than that of the Horseshoe Falls. The purpose was announced as the testing of the rock strata to possibly prevent erosion of the cliff over which the water falls. There had been major rock falls the decade before, leaving a large amount of rock at the base of the falls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Falls#/media/File:American_Falls_Niagara_Falls_USA_from_Skylon_Tower_on_2002-05-28_crop.png
https://nfpl.historicniagara.ca/s/images/item/90264
There are numerous photos and videos of the nearly dry falls online. Just do a search for "Dry Niagara Falls 1969" or "dewatered Niagara Falls 1969" if you want to see more.
Remaining traces of the dam between Goat Island and the mainland, can be seen in the satellite imagery as it disturbs the water rushing over it toward the falls. It took well over a thousand truckloads of rock and soil, dumped into the river, to build the dam.
This put Niagara Falls in the news across the world. It was my first summer in America and the area around the falls were very crowded with people wanting to see the dry riverbed and the falls up close. Many people came from the Toronto area to see it.
The Canadian side usually has the natural advantage in viewing the falls because most of the falls can be seen directly from there. The spectacle of turning off the falls made viewing from the U.S. side more popular, but harmed the tourist season overall because there was not much to be seen from the Canadian side but the bare wall of the gorge.
But why couldn't this have been done in the off-season? There was enough time between the end of the tourist season and the beginning of winter to accomplish whatever had to be done. Why tamper with the falls at all? The erosion of the base of the falls is part of the natural process, and the falls has worked it's way from it's beginning at the Niagara Escarpment at Lewiston-Queenston, at the end of the last ice age, to where it is now, by the natural process of the rushing water eroding the cliff face.
The geologists drilled holes in the riverbed, and tested the permeability of the rock layers with dye. After all of the testing was done, the decision was made that the best thing to do was to just leave the falls alone.
That is because, despite the announced purpose, this was never about the falls to begin with.
This was in no way a local idea, it originated with the U.S. Congress. The plan to shut off Niagara Falls was organized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the dam was built by a local construction company.
The shutting off of Niagara Falls in 1969 was actually an international power play by the new Richard Nixon administration. The falls were just the stage on which this play was acted out. The dam was built in the days leading up to the first attempt to land astronauts on the moon, Apollo 11. The dry riverbed was a terrestrial reflection of the surface of the moon, in this era of Cold War posturing and propaganda, for all of the tourists who came to Niagara to see what America could do.
Shortly after humans had walked on the hitherto inaccessible surface of the moon for the first time, a ladder down to a walkway was constructed so that visitors could walk on the hitherto inaccessible riverbed for the first time. They naturally waited to make sure that the moon mission would be a success first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#/media/File:Apollo_11_first_step.jpg
Just as tourists being able to walk on the dry riverbed of Niagara evoked the astronauts walking on the moon a few days before, the geologists examining the rock of the riverbed evoked the astronauts examining the rocks of the moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#/media/File:Aldrin_with_experiment.jpg
Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969,. In November of that year, astronauts landed on the moon again, in Apollo 12. This mission was also a great success. One surprise about the moon was the variation in it's surface gravity from one place to another. Because of this, Apollo 11 actually missed it's intended landing site by several km.
This was corrected in Apollo 12. More than two years before a robot spacecraft had been landed on the moon, Surveyor 3. In an amazing feat of precision, Apollo 12 landed right next to Surveyor, removed it's camera, and brought it back to earth. The following photo is of one of the astronauts at the Surveyor craft, with their lunar module in the background.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12#/media/File:Surveyor_3-Apollo_12.jpg
This was also reflected at Niagara Falls. Just as humans had their first opportunity to walk on the riverbed of Niagara just after America's astronauts had first walked on the moon, the water of Niagara was turned back on by the removal of the dam immediately after the ensuing Apollo 12 had returned from it's successful mission by splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
The shutting off of the falls lasted from the time of Apollo 11 to the time of Apollo 12. The turning back on of the falls was also a major news event. Not only could we land men on the moon, and get them safely back, we could also turn the falls off and back on again.
Despite the expense of the project, nothing was done to change anything about the falls. That is because it was never about the falls in the first place. I think that this history makes Niagara Falls, NY more interesting.
What actually happened is that Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was incessantly critical of the conduct of America's Vietnam War. He even came to Niagara Falls to personally welcome American draft dodgers to refuge in Canada. The new U.S. administration of Richard Nixon didn't appreciate the criticism.
The announced purpose of turning off the falls was for examination of the underlying rock strata. But it had a devastating effect on the Canadian Niagara tourist season. Instead, it brought tourists to the American side to see the dry falls up close.
This was around the same time that the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Sweden over it's criticism of the Vietnam War.
But Nixon and Trudeau soon patched things up. In 1972, Richard Nixon visited Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa and famously predicted that Trudeau's then-infant son would someday be Canadian Prime Minister.
8) INSIGHT INTO 9/11
There is something about the attacks of 9/11 that I have never seen documented anywhere.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, many Palestinians moved into Jordan. In fact, they came to outnumber the native Jordanians. In September, 1970, a group of these Palestinians in Jordan launched an operation in an effort to secure the release of comrades who were in prison. This operation became known as the Dawson Field Hijackings.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palesting, the PFLP, hijacked four jet airliners, from various airports in Europe and the Middle East. The operation was not deadly, but they wanted to get the world's attention. Three of the airliners landed at an airfield in Jordan, known as Dawson Field. The hijackers invited the media from around the world to watch, and then destroyed the planes with explosives after the passengers and crews had gotten off the aircraft.
The fourth airliner landed at Cairo because it was one of the new Boeing 747s, and could not land at the small airfield in Jordan. That plane was also destroyed with explosives, as soon as the passengers had been released. These hijackers were arrested by the Egyptians.
This must have been the prototype for 9/11. This incident is not remembered well in the west because no one, except one of the hijackers, was killed.
How much of a coincidence can it be that four jet airliners were hijacked and destroyed, and the passengers were released on September 11? The planes were destroyed the next day, after all of the media had arrived to watch. Who could have imagined that, thirty-one years later, there would be a much deadlier attack by crashing the planes into buildings, with the passengers still inside?
9) THE REAL BATMAN
The presidency of Richard Nixon, of 1969-74, has been very much analyzed and discussed ever since. Today, I would like to add my view, and I see it as the one of the most fantastic untold stories in American and world political history.
Nixon had been the vice-president of Dwight Eisenhower, but had narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. That conservative icon, Barry Goldwater, had tried to win back the presidency for the Republicans in the 1964 election, but was soundly defeated by Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who had been Kennedy's vice-president, and then became president after the 1963 assassination of Kennedy.
After the devastating defeat of Goldwater, Republicans began searching for the best candidate to win back the presidency in the 1968 election. Nixon's loss to Kennedy had been due to the new medium of television. In the Nixon-Kennedy debates, those listening on the radio actually thought that Nixon had won. But Nixon looked somewhat worn, and had neglected to shave, and those watching on television thought that the young and telegenic Kennedy had won the debate.
After the defeat of Goldwater, Nixon again emerged as the Republican that was most likely to win back the presidency. But how could he be made more television-friendly? The realization by Republicans of how important television was going to be in the future ultimately led to the presidency of a former movie star named Ronald Reagan.
Television was filled with heroes, such as Superman, who used their super powers to battle villains. In the popular Superman television series of the late 1950s, the hero used his extraordinary powers in the quest for "Truth, Justice and, The American Way".
What if Nixon could get some help from such a superhero to win the presidency in the 1968 election?
In the late 1930s an earlier hero named Batman, with his assistant named Robin, had been popular in comics. Batman was an ordinary human, with no special powers, but hid his identity with a mask that resembled a bat. He accomplished his mission with great ingenuity and knowledge, physical fitness, wisdom and, a large array of special and ingenious tools.
It turns out that Richard Nixon, with his black hair combed backward, bore a resemblance to the cowl worn by Batman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#/media/File:Nixon%27s_the_One!_(Portrait)_1968.png
Batman wore a cape,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(TV_series)#/media/File:1966_Batman_titlecard.JPG
and Nixon had this gesture of spreading his arms wide with peace signs, which evoked Batman's cape, which I cannot see that he used in any earlier campaigns,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1968#/media/File:NIXONcampaigns.jpg
Incredibly, the televised Batman of the late 1960s, the 1966-68 series and the accompanying 1966 movie, was to be a pre-enactment of Nixon's future presidency. The show was made to hold the interest of children, but was really aimed at the parents watching with their children. Batman represented Nixon and the actor chosen to play Batman, Adam West, was of the same height and similar build as Nixon. This is the reason that the Batman of the late 1960s couldn't be too muscular, because then he wouldn't resemble Nixon.
Nixon was a Republican, but was not elected for economics. He was a very moderate Republican. He added to the Great Society programs of his Democrat predecessor, and started the Occupation Safety and Health Administration, to protect workers while on the job, actions that most Americans of today would not expect from a Republican.
What Nixon was elected for is simply law and order. To the generation before the Baby Boomers, the 1960s was an unfamiliar new world. Moral standards were dropping just as fast as crime was rising. Young people were taking drugs and engaging in mass protests against the bizarre war in a jungle on the other side of the world. Black people were rioting, for equal rights, and American cities were in flames. Time Magazine summarized 1967 as "that long, strange year".
Batman was like a throwback to the world that the children's parents knew, or at least thought that they knew. There were scenes on Batman that emphasized the importance of diligently doing one's homework, and eating a balanced diet. There was cool technology on Batman that would get the interest of most children, and encourage them to prepare for the future, particularly the Bat-mobile with it's rocket-like engine and the Bat-computer in the Bat-cave.
Batman's real identity was Bruce Wayne, a very wealthy man who lived in a mansion called Wayne Manor. But, unlike the image that Democrats present of the wealthy of seeking out tax shelters and finding ways to squeeze more money out of the less-fortunate, and finally crashing the economy with their greed, Bruce Wayne uses his wealth to start the Wayne Foundation to try to make it a better world for everyone. More importantly, he uses his wealth to set himself up as Batman, joined by his nephew as Robin, to risk his life on a regular basis to battle the criminals who prey on society.
The thing that I want to point out here is that Batman stood for exactly the same set of principles that Richard Nixon campaigned on.
If voters would just elect Republicans like Nixon to office, there would be generous and benevolent wealthy people like Bruce Wayne, a throwback to the wealthy philanthropists of old, and society would be a much better place once these Democrats, who had let things descend into the mad world of the 1960s, were out of the way.
Without being too forward about it, Batman's costume of black and grey, and sometimes blue, are the same colors as a police uniform. This is to sub-consciously convey that the Republican "establishment", that was so reviled during the 1960s, was really on your side.
The logo on the much-admired Bat-mobile also sub-consciously evokes a police car, and the fins on the vehicle evoke the decade before, the 1950s, the "good old days" before the crazy 1960s, when Nixon was vice-president, and which he would bring back if elected as president. But at the same time, the car had a most definite "cool factor", which would keep children and teenagers watching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batmobile#/media/File:1960s_Batmobile_(FMC).jpg
The bat symbol, which represented everything about Batman, was easily rendered on t-shirts and other items. Everyone could wear or have something with the bat symbol on it. But, at the same time, it was sub-consciously reminiscent of the eagle that was the symbol of America without, once again, being too forward about it in the anti-establishment 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_eagle#/media/File:Seal_of_the_President_of_the_United_States.svg
Also notice how Batman in his cape resembles the symbol of America,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(TV_series)#/media/File:1966_Batman_titlecard.JPG
The whole subliminal message was to ignore what the "liberal media" tells you, "the establishment", the Republicans, are on your side. Get some law and order into this mess by getting them back in charge of the country by voting for Nixon.
Batman's costume, with it's serious gray and dark colors, evoked that of a police uniform. But this was also the era of color television, and Batman had to have some color. This was accomplished by the colorful uniform of Batman's assistant, Robin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman#/media/File:Batman_%26_Robin_(Batman_vol._1_-9_Feb._1942).jpg
Some of the troubling aspects of the late 1960s are conspicuous on Batman by their absence. There are no guns. The modern era of senseless mass shootings began in the same year as the first season of the Batman television series, 1966, with the University of Texas Tower Shootings. But Batman brings parents, watching with their children, back to the "good old days" when such things didn't happen, or at least not in our country.
One thing that also must be said about Batman is that there do not seem to be any black people, even though it was filmed as race riots were taking place across the country. In the final season of the show, Eartha Kitt did come in, but as the villain Cat-woman.
Neither does there seem to be many ethnic names. The real identity of Batman is Bruce Wayne, and Robin is Dick Grayson. The police commissioner is Gordon, all nice, traditional Anglo names.
In the heyday of rock music while the series is being filmed, there appear to be no references to any such music on Batman, at least until the final season. Once again, bringing back the "good old days" to parents watching with their children.
One thing that many people found unusual about this show is that it was a half-hour show, but each episode was shown in two separate parts within one week. Often Batman was in a dire situation, or about to be killed, and readers were implored to tune into the second half, shown a few days later, at the "same bat time, same bat channel".
But if this entire show was a pre-enactment of the Nixon presidency, then the second half would represent Nixon's future second term as president. U.S. presidents serve four-year terms, and are allowed to be reelected to a second term. It also represents Nixon's "coming back from political near-death". A few years earlier, he had resigned from politics stating that "You will not have Nixon to kick around anymore". But that was only the end of the first half of Nixon's show, he was still to come back for the second half.
Batman involved a lot of actors and it is difficult to keep all of them together year after year. In the third season, 1968, many of the cast had moved on to other things and had been replaced. The show was less successful than it had been in the first two seasons, and was cancelled. But the reruns would seemingly last forever. The show just happened to conclude just as Nixon took the presidency.
One great mystery about the Batman television show is why the filming set, which had cost a lot of money to construct, was almost immediately destroyed when the show was cancelled. It could have been preserved as a Bat-museum. ABC owned the rights to the show. Upon learning that it was being cancelled, rival NBC offered to buy and continue it, but withdrew the offer upon learning that the set had already been destroyed. The iconic Batcave had been put to the bulldozers.
But if the show was really a pre-enactment of the Nixon presidency, then this makes sense. The Republican sympathizers who came up with the idea of Batman as Nixon didn't want anyone else taking over, and possibly changing the meaning of the show, in the mind of the public. They might even make Batman into a Democrat. Neither did they want the show to continue if it wasn't going to be as popular. It had already accomplished it's mission.
Batman had four major arch-enemies, as well as several minor ones. These villains represented the social ills in the late 1960s that Richard Nixon was campaigning against.
The Riddler had a maniacal laugh and wore a green suit covered with question marks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddler#/media/File:Detective140.JPG
He was played on Batman, in the first two seasons, by Frank Gorshin,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddler#/media/File:Frank_Gorshin_Riddler_1967.jpg
The Riddler stood for several issues. The first was drugs. Even though illegal drugs were not referenced on the show, the first thought of an adult upon seeing the Riddler would be to question how much LSD it would take to get a person to walk around in a costume like that and to laugh like that. Hippies were questioning the entire social order, and this is what the Riddler's question marks could have represented. Part of the anti-establishment movement of the late 1960s was environmentalism, and this is reflected in the Riddler's green costume.
Another issue was feminism, the disruptive advance of women out of their traditional roles. This was represented on Batman by another villain, Cat-woman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Newmar#/media/File:Julie_Newmar_Catwoman_Batman_1966.JPG
The gaudiness of the late 1960s fashion, tye-dyed t-shirts and striped bell-bottom pants, was represented by the gaudy colors of another villain, The Joker. At left in the following photo was yet another villain, The Penguin. By the 1960s, it was being understood how bad it was for the health to smoke cigarettes. The Penguin, usually seen with a cigarette in a cigarette-holder, thus stood for smoking. The top hat worn by The Penguin could have conveyed that, unlike Bruce Wayne who was a good wealthy man The Penguin, in sharp contrast, was an old-style robber baron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joker_(character)#/media/File:Batman_villains_The_Penguin_The_Riddler_The_Joker_1967.JPG
If everything else on this show was so loaded with political and sociological meaning then what about Robin, Batman's assistant and Bruce Wayne's nephew?
Voters would, at this time, still remember Nixon's loss in the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy. It would be wise to incorporate a sub-conscious representation of Kennedy into this scenario. Assassinated in 1963, he was still very popular, and so could not be a villain. But he could come back, this time as Nixon's (Batman's) junior partner. Kennedy would be sub-consciously represented in the series by Robin.
Look at the way Robin (left) has his hair combed in this photo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(TV_series)#/media/File:Batman_and_Robin_1966.JPG
Compare it to the way Kennedy combed his hair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#/media/File:John_F_Kennedy_2017_Dedication-forever.jpg
You can also see in this image of Robin how he tries to have his hair combed like Kennedy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_(comics)#/media/File:Robin_Earth_2.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#/media/File:John_F._Kennedy,_White_House_photo_portrait,_looking_up.jpg
Robin is clearly Batman's junior partner. Batman is the older and wiser of the two. The two are referred to as "Batman and Robin", never as "Robin and Batman". Robin is also significantly shorter than Batman. This, with Robin representing Kennedy and Batman representing Nixon, is to portray the late Kennedy as living on but this time as Batman's (Nixon's) junior partner.
The famed Batmobile, Batman and Robin's very special car, has a flame exhaust like a rocket. When "taking off" in the Batmobile, Robin would first recite "Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed". As if the two were about to take off in a rocket.
Now, why would a car have to resemble and be handled like a rocket in such a way? Also, if Batman was in command of the two, why would Robin recite the launching checklist rather than Batman?
Because it was Kennedy, during his presidency, who initiated the Apollo Space program of the time by making a speech with the goal of putting a man on the moon, and bringing him safely back, by 1970, a goal which was achieved. This design of the Batmobile, and Robin's recitation of the "takeoff" checklist as if it were a rocket takeoff countdown, reinforces the image of Robin representing Kennedy as Nixon's (Batman's) junior partner, even though Kennedy had defeated Nixon in the 1960 election.
One thing about the Batman television show that didn't seem to make sense was the Batman movie that was released after the first season, in 1966. The movie certainly harmed, rather than helped, the television series. The movie was too long for many children, and much of the content would be beyond their understanding. The movie was less-than-successful, and the show began to fade in popularity.
I saw the movie when I was a young child, but was used to seeing Batman in half-hour intervals. The movie was too long, and I didn't watch all of it. But I did like it when I saw it again, a few years later.
But now I realize that the Batman movie of 1966 was made not so much for children, but for voting parents who were watching it with their children. While the series focused on domestic social issues and crime, the movie brought Batman onto the international stage. The four major villains had joined forces, and the Penguin had a submarine which could fire missiles. Nuclear technology was introduced with the nuclear reactor in Batman's Batcave. Cat-woman, masquerading as a Russian journalist in the movie, brought international politics and espionage into Batman.
But remember that Batman represents Nixon, and the show was a pre-enaction of his future presidency. Nixon was not campaigning only on domestic issues and crime, which was portrayed in the series, but also on international relations, which had to be conveyed by this movie.
Nixon indeed turned out to be a renowned master of foreign policy during his presidency. He visited China, and then Russia, in 1972. His opening of relations with China certainly changed the course of the world. Nixon visited Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa, and predicted that Trudeau's four-month-old son, Justin, would one day be prime minister of Canada.
One of Kennedy's campaign points against Nixon in the 1960 campaign was the so-called "Missile Gap". This was the allegation that the Eisenhower Administration, in which Nixon had been vice-president, had allowed the Soviet Union to close the "missile gap" with the United States, and thus give away America's former lead in nuclear missiles.
Nuclear missiles may be fired from submarines, and this movie showed that the public had nothing to worry about that Batman (Nixon) was very capable of dealing with a world of nuclear missiles and submarines.
Kennedy had handled the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis a few year before. The U.S. Navy had dropped a depth charge, which forced a Soviet submarine to surface. It wasn't a real depth charge, which could crush the hull of a submarine, just one with a small explosive charge that was used for training, but would send powerful sound waves through the water.
In the movie, circling the Penguin's submarine in the Bat-boat, Robin uses a "sonic weapon" that he fires like a bazooka, to force the submarine to surface. This, and the missile that the submarine fires, evokes the Missile Crisis of 1962. This is to sub-consciously convey to the public that Nixon (Batman) could have handled such a crisis also. The fact that Robin, rather than Batman, is the one that handles the sonic weapon further links him as representing Kennedy, who is now resurrected as Batman's junior partner.
So that explains why this apparently unproductive movie was made. Batman was representing Nixon. The series showed him battling domestic social issues and crime, but he had to be shown on the international stage as well, and Nixon indeed turned out to be best-known for his foreign-policy accomplishments.
One mystery about the Nixon presidency is his choice of running mate and vice-president. Spiro Agnew had been governor of Maryland, and was initially popular. But his relationship with Nixon soon began to deteriorate, he resigned the vice-presidency due to tax-evasion charges, after which he and Nixon never spoke again, and was even disbarred from practicing law.
But this scenario here explains it. Ten years before the Batman series and movie, there had been another hero in Superman. The introduction to each episode described Superman as battling for "truth, justice and, the American way". The Superman television series was from the 1950s, when Nixon had been vice-president, and the good times that he would take the voting public back to, if he were elected. Like Batman, Superman had worn a cape and had a logo, while he did battle with a nasty array of villains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#/media/File:Superman_S_symbol.svg
Batman was already rallying the voters in support of Nixon, it would be a very good thing if Superman could be brought in too.
Spiro Agnew, it turns out, bore a striking resemblance to Superman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Agnew#/media/File:Spiro_Agnew.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Reeves#/media/File:Stamp_Day_for_Superman.jpg
How could America go wrong with the team of Batman and Superman running the country?
But the real mystery of the Nixon presidency is Watergate. If you have never heard of Watergate, it was a massive scandal in the United States during the second Nixon presidential term, after he was reelected in 1972. During the 1972 campaign, against Democrat George McGovern, a team of burglars broke into the Watergate Building in Washington. They were looking for incriminating evidence against Democrats, to help to get Nixon re-elected. My understand is that were looking, in particular, for documentation that Democrats had received funding from Communist Cuba.
The burglars had entered the building during the day, while it was open. There were doors that had latches which could be opened from the inside, but not from the outside. They put tape over a latch, so that they could come back at night and enter the building. A security guard in the building noticed the tape and called police. The burglars were caught and the ensuing scandal brought about the resignation of Nixon, the only such time in American history that a president has resigned. Spiro Agnew had been replaced with Gerald Ford when he earlier resigned, due to the tax evasion charges, and Ford took over as president when Nixon resigned.
Nixon easily won re-election in 1972, it was one of the most one-sided elections in American history. Out of fifty states, McGovern won the vote in only one, the Democrat bastion of Massachusetts. But yet this ridiculous and absurd burglary would destroy that presidency. It was like a sports team that was ahead in score 49-1 cheating to be sure that it would win, and then getting disqualified for cheating. It did not make the slightest bit of sense.
But remember that we are dealing with Batman here. Nixon's was the presidency of Batman, and just couldn't help reenacting Batman. Batman did not have super powers, like the ability to fly, he relied on ingenuity and some special devices. This cleverly putting tape over a door latch sounds like something right out of Batman. Never before or since has anything like this happened in any other presidency. Scotch Tape even sells a line of tape called Bat-Tape, with the logo of Batman on it. It is easy to imagine Batman telling Robin to "Put a piece of Bat-Tape over the door latches so we can get back into the building later".
This tape over the door-latch fits perfectly with the secretiveness of the Bat-Cave. There is a hidden button in Wayne Manor, which slides away a bookcase, revealing the elevator to the Bat-Cave. When the Bat-Mobile enters or leaves the Bat-Cave, a wooden traffic entrance barrier temporarily drops down.
Nixon's notorious tape recordings of conversations are also like something out of Batman, who had a Bat-Tape Reader, and a special Bat-device to analyze sounds on tape recordings.
I think that we can conclude that Batman, in his greatest quest of all, came to the rescue and, with a little bit of help from Superman, saved the presidency for the Republicans.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nixon+batman&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiZ09bZq9LUAhXLbD4KHbI4BxcQsAQIKQ&biw=1012&bih=636#imgrc=l26P_BOsAhEILM:
10) AMERICA'S 75-YEAR MYSTERY
How about a spy story, that might provide the answer to an enduring mystery? Even in these days, when hacking has largely replaced traditional spying, spy stories are still popular.
THE DEADLY DOUBLE
Every anniversary of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, we are reminded of a bizarre mystery that has yet to be solved.
Two weeks before the attack, an ad was placed in a magazine called The New Yorker. The ad was for sales of a game involving dice, made by a company called Monarch Publishing. The game was called "The Deadly Double".
The image in the ad featured a pair of dice, with the numbers 12 and 7 prominently displayed. According to one account that I read, this was unusual because no dice at the time featured the numbers 12 or 7. The ad also had the words for "warning" in three languages, and was about the dice game as something to do in an air raid shelter.
As it turns out the attack on Pearl Harbor soon took place, as an air raid on the 7th day of the 12th month.
There is no Wikipedia article about the "Deadly Double", but there are numerous other articles about it online. You can see an image of the ad by going to Google, searching for "Deadly Double" and bringing up all of the "Images For deadly Double". The ad has "Warning" in three languages at the top, "Achtung", "Warning", "Alerte".
After the attack, the U.S. Government launched an investigation into the ad. It was soon found that neither the game nor Monarch Publishing existed. A man had come to the offices of the magazine, paid for the ad in cash without giving his name, and had the type for the ad all set up. He handed the clerk the set of type, and insisted that it be used to print the ad. The man was not Japanese.
According to another account of the Deadly Double that I read, investigators managed to find the man who placed the ad, but he had recently died in a mysterious accident.
It does not seem possible that the ad was a coded warning to any Japanese agents that the attack was about to take place because there were Japanese diplomats in the U.S. at the time of the attack, who clearly did not know that the attack was going to take place. Adolf Hitler was officially an ally of Japan, but was reportedly just as shocked as anyone at news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The "Deadly Double" remains a much-pondered mystery to this day. Even if the game did exist, why would a company market a game as something to do while in an air raid shelter, when the country wasn't even at war?
RICHARD SORGE
Now, let's go to another spy story. In fact, the story of Richard Sorge has got to be the greatest spy story there ever was.
Richard Sorge's father was German, and his mother Russian. While recuperating from wounds suffered while serving in the German Army during the First World War, he became a devout convert to Communism. By the Second World War, he was a journalist reporting from Tokyo, seeming to be a Nazi, but actually spying for the Soviet Union.
Sorge reportedly found out about the imminent Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and warned his NKVD contacts (the NKVD was the predecessor to the KGB, which is the predecessor to the present FSB, the state security organization), but Josef Stalin apparently didn't believe him.
After Imperial Japan occupied Manchuria, transforming it into a client state called Manchukuo, a dispute arose over the border between that state and the Soviet Union. Several battles were fought, in which the Soviets secured their territory. These are known as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. There was also, of course, the major naval battle in the area between Japan and Russia, in 1905.
After the Nazis, allies of Japan, invaded the Soviet Union in the west, the Soviet leadership was very concerned that Japan would join in by attacking from the east. A large military force was stationed in the Soviet far east, even though it was very much needed to oppose the invasion in the west.
This was where Richard Sorge came into the picture. His job was to pretend to be a Nazi, reporting as a journalist on events in ally Japan, but actually finding out and reporting to the Soviet Union what Japan's military plans were.
The Wikipedia article on Richard Sorge states that he was a master spy who relayed to the Soviets, through secret radio transmissions, that Japan had no intention of joining the war against the Soviet Union any time soon. The reason was that there were other military plans in the works. This must have been a great relief to the Soviets, and the bulk of the large military force in the far east was moved westward, where it reportedly played vital roles in the Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad.
It is not in the Wikipedia article, but I have seen information that Sorge not only managed to relay that there were "other military plans" in the works, but exactly what those plans were. The military of Japan was, of course, planning the attack on Pearl Harbor.
As one example, my father had an old set of books about the Second World War. I recall that a book titled "Barbarossa", by John Keegan, stated that Sorge had actually informed the NKVD that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. Japan was not necessarily seeking a full-scale war with the U.S, but only wanted to cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet so that it could not interfere with Japan's conquests in Asia.
The conclusion was that Stalin was delighted, and did not warn America about the pending attack, not because of anything against the U.S., but because the U.S. would surely respond to such an attack, and this would keep the forces of Japan preoccupied so that they could not invade the Soviet far east. The bulk of the large military force guarding the Soviet far east could then be moved westward to join the battle against the Nazis.
THE SOLUTION TO "THE DEADLY DOUBLE"
Now, let's go back to the mysterious ad for the "Deadly Double", that was placed just before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Even though the U.S. and the Soviet Union were on the same side in the Second World War, it was no secret that there were any number of NKVD spies in the U.S. They knew all about the Manhattan Project, and what they really wanted was the plans for the atomic bomb. They would achieve their goal by getting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to give them those plans.
As soon as I first became aware of this ad for "The Deadly Double", my thought was that this was a technique of communication that Communists around this time might have used.
The Soviets knew that there was an impending attack on the U.S., and that it would likely open up an entirely new dimension to the war. But they may not have known exactly what the coming Japanese military action might entail, whether it would be Pearl Harbor or the U.S. forces in the Philippines that might be attacked. It was actually part of a wider military action that included attacks on Malaya, Hong Kong and, the Philippines. They did not know how the coming attack would play out, how successful it would be, or how the U.S. and other countries would react to it.
By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union had been at war with the Nazis and their allies for nearly six months. They may have been unsure whether the leadership of Germany and Italy knew about the upcoming attack, if they had plans to join in some coordinated action if they did know, and how they might react if they didn't.
The following image is of a Communist pamphlet that was widely circulated in the U.S. during the late 1930s. There was plenty of Communist sympathy in the U.S. at the time, due to the stock market crash and the following Great Depression. Every Communist in the U.S., some of which were active NKVD agents, would likely be familiar with this pamphlet.
Notice how the number 4 and the name of July are prominently displayed, in exactly the same way as the 12 and the 7 in the ad for "The Deadly Double".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Browder#/media/File:37-howard-this4thofjuly.jpg
It was done this way because spies had been instructed to read The New Yorker magazine, to find out how to get further instructions as the Communist leadership watched events unfold after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The 12 and the 7, the day of the attack, were rendered in such a way as to be reminiscent of the above pamphlet, so that they wouldn't miss the ad. In fact, this ad for "The Deadly Double" might have been put together by the same source as the pamphlet.
There was also a double-headed eagle, which looked a lot like the Nazi eagle, as well as XX which is 20 in Roman numerals. This was further intended to catch the attention of agents who had been instructed to read the magazine to find out where to get further instructions. This likely stood for Germany and Italy, the Soviets' two Axis enemies, as did the name of "The Deadly Double".
The 12 and the 7, the date of the attack, are the numbers most prominently displayed on the dice in the ad. But what about the four other numbers? The ad also displays, on the dice, the numbers 0, 5, XX (20) and, 24.
Remember that this is a notice for agents to access further instructions. Without these further instructions, all that the ad would accomplish was to let the agents know when the attack would occur, which they would find out anyway by listening to the news on the radio. There is not much that any secret agent could have done to make the attack any more devastating than it was. There is no sign that any secret agent had anything at all to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The ad would really not accomplish much if all it did was to let a few people know when the attack was going to take place.
The ad was instructions on how to listen to further instructions after the attack had taken place, as the Communist leadership watched unfolding events and decided on any possible new course of action.
Shortwave radio had become popular by this time. The wavelength band used in shortwave radio has the property of bouncing off the ionosphere, which is a layer of the earth's atmosphere that holds charged particles due to the effect of the sun. Short-wavelength radio waves travel in straight lines, and are not reflected by the ionosphere. But the shortwave band can be transmitted literally around the world by "bouncing" between the ionosphere and the earth's surface one or more times.
In more recent times, satellites relay shorter wavelengths of radio and television signals that would not bounce off the ionosphere at all, making propagation by way of the ionosphere unnecessary for these wavelengths.
Several years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the aviator Amelia Earhart had disappeared while attempting a flight around the world. The plane had a shortwave transmitter. Numerous shortwave listeners claimed to have heard her calls for help, claiming that she had crash-landed on an atoll but couldn't describe exactly where she was. I recall reading of a teenage girl in Florida, who listened to her father's shortwave receiver, and received a signal that kept fading in and out with a voice calling for help and claiming to be Amelia Earhart, that kept repeating the words "New York City".
The girl knew that her plane would be over the Pacific, so why would she be saying "New York City"?
It turns out that a British cargo ship named "Norwich City" had run aground on an atoll during a storm. The crew had been rescued, but the ship abandoned. The name of the ship would have been clearly visible to anyone who was on the atoll, and many people believe that this was where Amelia Earhart was calling from and was referring to the name of the beached ship. The plane could later have been pushed back out into the water by a storm, where it would have sank.
Anyway, shortwave radio was a staple means of communication for Communist spies. I remember reading stories of spies in North America, during the Cold War, who were instructed to get set up away from any high-tension power lines that might interfere with radio communications.
In the Wikipedia article on Earl Browder, who was leader of the U.S. Communist Party at the time, in the last paragraph of the section "Leader of the Popular Front", you can see that he arranged for shortwave radio communication in case international conflict made direct communication impossible. We also read in this paragraph that shortwave communication began in 1939 to convey the party's political line on the changing situation after the war began. This communication method would thus be in place in the days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One issue with shortwave radio communication is that conditions change. It requires bouncing signals off the ionosphere, which is very much affected by the sun. You may have noticed that very distant radio stations can be received on an AM radio, called long-wave outside of North America, at night that cannot be received during the day, and that cannot be received on much shorter wavelengths, such as FM, at all. That is because those much shorter wavelengths pass right through the ionosphere, and are not reflected.
There are also several layers to the ionosphere, each of which reflects radio waves under it's own conditions. Reflection of radio waves certainly varies between day and night, but also by the seasons. Put simply, a wavelength used for shortwave communications may be unreliable at any given time, although completely reliable at other times.
The solution is that shortwave stations usually broadcast on several different wavelengths, bringing the likelihood that at least one will be reliable at any given time. Notice on the pair of dice in the mysterious ad that the two low numbers, 0 and 5, are on the black dice, and the two high numbers, 20 (XX) and 24, are on the white dice. That could be an instruction to listen to the low channels at night and the high ones during the day, when the conditions of the ionosphere are different. Notice also how the exclamation point in the ad for "The Deadly Double" is extended, so that it looks a lot like a radio antenna.
The shortwave part of the radio spectrum runs from about 2 MHz (megahertz) to about 26 MHz. Thus, the other numbers, with the exception of the 0, could refer to shortwave frequencies, expressed in MHz.
The 0 could, of course, be a reference to not only the "rising sun" symbol that would be on the warplanes, but also to the name of the legendary carrier-based plane, the Zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A6M3_Zero_N712Z_1.jpg
The ad was not so much to warn that the attack was to take place, but as instructions on what to do to listen for further instructions, after it had taken place. An agent would see that the 12, the 7 and the 0 meant, and would conclude that the other three numbers were shortwave frequencies to be listened to, depending on whether listening was done during the day or at night, by which agents in the U.S. can get further instructions and updates on the official party line concerning the events which would unfold after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Japan was no ally of the Soviet Union, and the United States was not an enemy, but it must have been really good news that Japan was planning an attack on the U.S. because that would keep Japan occupied, unable to invade the Soviet far east, and the large military force that the Soviets kept guarding that region could be moved westward to join the battle against the invading Nazis.
I think this solves the mystery that has perplexed America for 75 years. The reason that it was not solved sooner is that the story of Richard Sorge is not widely known in the U.S., and did not get a lot of attention, but is necessary to solve this mystery.
Most of the ships that were in the attack on Pearl Harbor were at least partially salvaged. The exception is the battleship U.S.S. Arizona. The ship was not hit by torpedoes, but a bomb penetrated into the ship and detonated either the powder magazine, or the fuel tank, there are differing theories. The result was a massive explosion, and about half of the casualties in the attack were on board the Arizona.
One military advantage that the Allies had is that the Axis nations still believed in battleships, the ships with massive guns that were being made irrelevant by aircraft carriers. The attack got some of America's battleships, but took place when the aircraft carriers were away at sea. No aircraft carriers were damaged in the attack. The attack would have been much more devastating, in strategic terms, if it had been scheduled when the aircraft carriers were in port.
One popular topic to write about nowadays is conspiracy theories. Many writers have claimed to uncovered the identity of the supposed "second gunman", who really shot John F. Kennedy. Others have identified the "real" Jack the Ripper, the serial killer in the Whitechapel district of London in the Autumn of 1888. So today, we have dozens of people who "really" shot John F. Kennedy, and a whole gallery of Jack the Rippers. Another popular topic for writers is the supposedly "hidden" meanings of artwork in the Vatican.
I would like to present my theory, involving symbolism and secret societies. Unlike many theories involving secretiveness, hidden meanings, and the Vatican, this theory is not fictional and can be seen in photos. However I intend it only for educational, making history a little bit more interesting, and entertainment purposes.
THE FREEMASONS
Let's begin with the semi-secret society that most readers would probably have some familiarity with, the Freemasons. The Freemasons are not directly involved with my theory here, but I want to use them to illustrate the power of secret societies and the symbolism that they typically use.
A so-called "secret society" actually cannot be completely secret simply because it has to have new members joining. No one will seek to join it if they have never heard of it. My understanding of Freemasonry is that it began in either England or Scotland, in the time before the Reformation. Like many secret societies, it's activity revolves around secret rites and symbolism.
A central legend of Freemasonry is that of Hiram Abiff, believed to be the architect of Solomon's Temple who was murdered for refusing to divulge masonic secrets. Other legend has Freemasonry going back to ancient Egypt, before being taken to countries like England and France.
Freemasonry began, as the name implies, in medieval guilds of stone workers. It's main symbol is the compass and the square, around the "G", which stands for the Grand Architect of the Universe, which is God. Freemasonry is not believed to be primarily a religious organization, but it's members are supposed to express belief in a supreme being. This may not be a requirement of all Masonic Lodges, such as for those in France:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry#/media/File:Square_compasses.svg
One important image associated with the Freemasons is the Eye of Providence, a reminder to Masons that God was watching everything that they did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence#/media/File:MasonicEyeOfProvidence.gif
The Eye of Providence is a very important symbol to the United States, being on the country's Great Seal, and is seen today on the U.S. one-dollar bill, atop a pyramid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence#/media/File:Dollarnote_siegel_hq.jpg
One thing that no one doubts about the Freemasons is their power. We won't go into all of the influential persons known to be Freemasons here, but many of the founders of the United States and every significant figure in the French Revolution are believed to have been Freemasons. Lists of prominent Freemasons read like a who's who of much of the world. Five British kings, as well as Winston Churchill, were supposedly among them, as were many U.S. presidents.
Here is George Washington in his Masonic Lodge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry#/media/File:Washington_Masonic_print.jpg
James Hoban, the designer of the White House, was a Freemason. Frederic Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty, was another Freemason.
One of the most prominent pieces of architecture in Washington D.C. is it's Masonic Lodge, The House of the Temple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Temple#/media/File:House_of_the_Temple.JPG
The reaction against Freemasonry shows the power that it had. The Catholic and Anglican Churches were very concerned about their influence. The Nazis thought that they had to eliminate them. There was once an anti-Masonry political party in the U.S., intending to curb their power.
Batavia, New York, between Buffalo and Rochester, is my one-time sales territory and as nice of a place as there is anywhere. It once gained national attention, with regard to Freemasonry, when a local resident, William Morgan, who claimed to have belonged to other lodges, was denied admission to the Masonic Lodge in Batavia. Morgan then threatened to write a book detailing the secret activity of the Masons. He was soon arrested, on questionable criminal charges. Shortly afterward, he vanished and was presumed murdered. These events around Batavia set off a national backlash against the power of Freemasonry.
Do you want another example of a powerful "secret society" that, in this case, wasn't so secret? Tammany Hall, otherwise known as the Columbian Order, virtually controlled all politics in New York City for 150 years. Regardless of the processes of democracy, little could be done in New York without the approval of the reigning "boss" of Tammany Hall.
This cartoon from 1899 illustrates, in astronomical terms, how the operation of New York City really revolves around the "boss" of Tammany Hall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall#/media/File:New_York%27s_New_Solar_System2.jpg
THE VATICAN
Let's move on to another place where symbolism is very important, the Vatican. It is centers of power that tend to also become centers of conspiracy theories. Much has been written about the supposedly "hidden" meanings of Catholic artwork in the Vatican, but we do not need to get into that here.
The Vatican itself is designed around the shape of a key. In the Gospels, Jesus told St. Peter that he would be given the keys to the kingdom of God, meaning that he would be the leader of the church. St. Peter was a leader of the apostles, and was eventually martyred in Rome.
The Jewish religion was protected under Roman rule, Jews were exempt from both otherwise-mandatory emperor worship and military service. But when the early Christians became distinct from Judaism, the same protection did not apply to them. The Romans were concerned about the religious conflict within the empire between Christians and Jews and, according to another theory, the Emperor Nero set fire to part of the city of Rome himself, because he wanted to rebuild it as something else, and then blamed the fire on the Christians.
The grave of the martyred St. Peter was said to have been marked by a red stone. When the Roman Empire later became Christian, a church was built over St. Peter's Tomb. When that church fell into disrepair, the present St. Peter's Basilica was built on the spot.
St. Peter's Basilica and the adjoining St. Peter's Square are in the form of a key, with St. Peter's Square being the handle of the key:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_(lock)#/media/File:Standard-lock-key.jpg
This is starting in St. Peter's Basilica, and around the Vatican. Remember that the Vatican is actually an independent country, and the buildings in the gardens behind St. Peter's Basilica are the administration buildings:
There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow, ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >. After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9003853,12.4529437,3a,75y,295.55h,92.3t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1s-9nfe69UJ5RM%2FVej4Ct1xD_I%2FAAAAAAAAF10%2FB2Lo3rH-Ld8!2e4!3e11!6s%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-9nfe69UJ5RM%2FVej4Ct1xD_I%2FAAAAAAAAF10%2FB2Lo3rH-Ld8%2Fw203-h101-n-k-no%2F!7i8704!8i4352
One popular theory about the alleged symbolism in the Vatican concerns the interior paintings of the adjoining Sistine Chapel, where new popes are chosen by ballot. The Sistine Chapel was constructed as a copy of the inner chamber of Solomon's Temple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel#/media/File:Sistina-interno.jpg
Beginning in 1508, the artist Michelangelo spent several years painting the interior of the chapel. The popular conspiracy theory is that Michelangelo did not want the job of painting the chapel. He had earlier completed sculptures, like the Pieta, and would rather be doing sculpture than painting. After completing a sculpture like the Pieta, spending several years on scaffolding painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel must have seemed like some kind of punishment.
According to the theory, Michelangelo got revenge on Pope Julius by subtly painting hidden meanings into the scenes in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo supposedly was a practitioner of the Jewish Kabbala, and a close look reveals Kabbalastic symbolism in the paintings. Jewish rabbis on a visit once noted that, while the paintings are of biblical scenes, the shapes formed by various figures and cloaks in the paintings form letters of the Hebrew alphabet, standing for concepts in Kabbala, as well as other symbolic shapes such as the right hemisphere of the human brain.
Michelangelo was from Florence, which he supposedly believed to be culturally superior to Rome. In the Sistine Chapel painting of the Great Flood it has been noted that, on one side of the painting, the head of a donkey or mule is seen against the background of red and golden yellow, which were the colors representing Rome at the time. One the opposite side of the painting, two of the antediluvian sinners have washed ashore, and both are wearing the same red and golden yellow colors of Rome.
ORDERS OF KNIGHTS
In the Middle Ages, orders of knights were formed to protect and assist Catholic pilgrims to the Holy Land. Some of these orders of knights ended up gaining great power and influence and becoming, in effect, the world's first multi-national corporations. Some of these orders remain in existence today. But as with all secret, and semi-secret, societies, the question is about how much of their activity is of a social and charitable and medical nature, and how much is about exerting unseen influence and control?
There is the Knights Templar, also known as the Order of Solomon's Temple. Solomon's Temple is, of course, also very important to Freemasons, with the legendary Hiram Abiff being it's architect. Coincidentally, the Sistine Chapel that we have seen was based on the inner sanctuary of Solomon's Temple. So, we can see that Solomon's Temple is something that tends to be held in common among secret societies. Knights Templar, aside from being an organization, is also the name of an order of Masonry of the York Rite.
The Knights Templar are so named because when they reached Jerusalem, they renamed the Moslem buildings on the Temple Mount, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock which is the former site of Solomon's Temple, as Solomon's Temple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar#/media/File:Temple_mount.JPG
Another order of knights, The Knights Hospitaller now headquartered in Rome, is also known as the Soveriegn Military Order of Malta, and is an international medical organization. They are known as the Order of St. John and as the Knights of Malta. They used to own the island of Malta, and are recognized as a landless sovereign state. So great was their influence that today, across the world, a building in which the sick and injured are cared for is referred to as a hospital.
These are only two of the orders of knights which formed in medieval times primarily to protect and assist pilgrims to the Holy Land. Many of these orders gained tremendous power, money and, influence, and still exist, in some form, today. These orders were Catholic, often formed with the blessings of the pope. Their heyday was the time of the Crusades, in the Thirteenth Century, the attempt to regain the Holy Land from the Moslems.
BRIDGING THE REFORMATION
My theory is that, when the Reformation happened, beginning in 1517, these Catholic societies suffered a great loss of territory and influence as Europe was split into Catholic and Protestant. They were not able to stop the Reformation, but they did what they could to bridge the gulf between the two halves of Europe, and we can see evidence of that in the symbolism of important places today. If they would react to the loss of the Holy Land to the Moslems, wouldn't they also react to the loss of much of Catholic territory to the Protestants?
In the article "Knights Hospitaller", on www.wikipedia.org , it is made clear how the organization was affected by the loss of influence and territory brought on by the Reformation. I find the Freemasons to be significant in this bridge because they were based primarily in the part of Europe that split away and became Protestant.
The de-facto "flag" of the crusaders, and the orders of knights, was the red cross on a white background. I find this to be the symbol of the attempt to bridge the gap brought about by the Reformation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar#/media/File:HPIM3597.JPG
The red and white cross of St. George is named for the widely-revered saint of that name. St. George was believed to be a commander in a Roman legion, who was martyred for his Christian faith. The flag of England (but not of all of Britain) is the George Cross:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_George%27s_Cross#/media/File:Flag_of_England.svg
This red cross on a white background, dating from the days of the Crusades, is to be seen in many places associated with England, such as the Order of the Garter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Garter
Why did the cross of a Catholic saint remain the flag of a country like England, which went overwhelmingly Protestant in the Reformation?
Scotland joined England, along with Wales, to form modern Britain in 1707, mainly because the two countries had ended up on the same side during the Reformation. The fiery sermons of John Knox turned his native Scotland from a bastion of Catholicism into one of the most Protestant of nations. Scotland's Cross of St. Andrew was superimposed onto England's Cross of St. George, in a process that resembles the Scottish tartan method, to create the flag of Britain, known commonly as the Union Jack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan#/media/File:Flag_of_Scotland.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Jack#/media/File:Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Jack#/media/File:Union_Flag_and_St_Georges_Cross.jpg
But have you ever noticed that there is a perfect British flag imposed on the very center of Catholicism, St. Peter's Square? The Basilica of St. Peter is included in the following image. If you press the (-) button, to go up a step in altitude, you can see how the dome and the transepts of the basilica form the shape of a key, with St. Peter's Square being the handle of the key:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9023136,12.4571096,271m/data=!3m1!1e3
Could this British flag in St. Peter's Square represent, at least to the influential secret societies who lost such influence in the Reformation, an attempt to pull the former domain of Catholicism, where they had such great influence, back together? Along with the fact that the symbol of a Catholic saint remained the flag of England, despite the split during the Reformation? This location of the British flag in St. Peter's Square fits perfectly with the symbolism of the surrounding Collonades representing the all-embracing "arms" of the Catholic Church.
Considering how important symbolism is to the Vatican, as well as how vital symbolism is to secret societies, I consider this as very plausible. I cannot see that the lines which form the British flag in St. Peter's Square serve any essential purpose and, seen from the surface of the square, the British flag is not apparent unless viewed from above. The obelisk in the middle of St. Peter's Square acts as a sundial, but the time is indicated by markers on the Collonades, and does not involve the lines which form the British flag.
As a parallel example of this use of a pattern of lines in a prominent square in Italy to signify some kind of alliance, look at the pattern of interlocking squares and rectangles in Piazza San Marco, in Venice. Remember that Marco Polo, who visited China, was from Venice. This pattern is commonly seen in China, and I have seen it at a number of Chinese restaurants.
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4339152,12.3384387,133m/data=!3m1!1e3
Much has been written about how secret societies like to link themselves, not only to Solomon's Temple, but also to ancient Egypt. This Egyptian obelisk, in the center of St. Peter's Square, brings the Vatican into the link also.
There was plenty of effort to stop the split of the Reformation or, failing that, at least to bridge it. Considering their power and what they had to lose by the Reformation, secret societies must have had a hand in this effort. The Catholic Queen Mary I of England tried to bring the country back by force. When her successor, Elizabeth I created the Anglican Church, the pope had the Catholic King Phillip of Spain dispatch his armada. The Anglican Church does happen to be one of the branches of Protestantism that retained much of the Catholic liturgy.
I am surprised that no one has noticed this, but a Google search of "British flag St. Peter's Square Rome" turns up nothing. Remember that there is a place called St. Peter's Square in London also.
Isn't it interesting that the symbol of the Knights Hospitaller is the Maltese Cross?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Hospitaller#/media/File:Cross_of_the_Knights_Hospitaller.svg
While the flag of Malta today has the George Cross, on a red and white background. Remember that Malta was once owned by the Knights Hospitaller and that red and white is the primary colors of the orders of knights which protected and assisted pilgrims to the Holy Land. The George Cross is Britain's highest award for valor, after the Victoria Cross. Malta was a British island in the wartime and it was awarded to it's people for their resistance to relentless air raids and naval blockade. The George Cross is named, of course, after the red and white Cross of St. George which is England's flag:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cross#/media/File:Flag_of_Malta.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cross#/media/File:George_Cross_Malta_P1440218.jpg
As far as red crosses on white backgrounds go, today we have the International Red Cross which undergoes humanitarian missions across the world. This makes it a direct descendant of the medieval orders of knights which provided protection and medical assistance to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. The Red Cross certainly does not engage in any violence, but the principle is the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Red_Cross_and_Red_Crescent_Movement#/media/File:Flag_of_the_Red_Cross.svg
SYMBOLISM AND THE HAGIA SOPHIA
In 1453, the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine Empire city of Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbul. Byzantium had been weakened by the earlier conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, who apparently digressed from their stated mission of liberating the Holy Land from Moslem control.
The very old Hagia Sophia, the House of Holy Wisdom, which had been the largest church in the world for nearly a thousand years, was re-purposed into a mosque and four minarets were built around it. To show that they too were capable of such a building, the Ottomans built the Blue Mosque, facing the Hagia Sophia.
The Ottomans were responsible for a lot of important building that remains today. They built the wall around the Old City of Jerusalem, which has some really attractive gates, particularly the Damascus Gate and the Jaffa Gate. This does not include the retaining walls of the Temple Mount (or Noble Sanctuary to Moslems), which is within the Old City. The Ottomans also built the minaret at the Tower of David, within the Old City of Jerusalem.
But look at the Hagia Sophia. Three of the four minarets are made of white stone, while the other is made of red brick.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#/media/File:Hagia_Sophia_Mars_2013.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia#/media/File:Hagia_Sophia_2017.jpg
Whoever heard of a mosque with four minarets, one at each corner, but where one was a different color than the others, particularly one of the most historic and famous buildings in the world? I can find no satisfactory answer as to why three of the minarets at the Hagia Sophia are white, while the fourth is red. I can see no other examples of important mosques, with four minarets, where one is a different color than the others.
This brings us back to the red and white flags of the Crusaders and the medieval orders of knights. The Ottomans would be considered as a rival, but perhaps there were other factors that brought the red and white symbolism of some kind of alliance.
It was the weakening of Byzantium by the attack of the Crusaders which made it possible, or at least easier, for the Ottomans to conquer it.
Maybe the red minaret among the white ones represented some kind of agreement to allow Christian pilgrims to visit the Holy Land, which would come under Ottoman control.
The worst thing that ever happened to the Islamic religion took place around the time of the Crusades. But it wasn't the Crusades, it was the Mongol siege and destruction of Baghdad in 1258. The vast library, containing the records of the knowledge that the Abassid Caliphate had built up, during what is known as the Golden Age of Islam, was destroyed.
During the Golden Age, Moslems made great advances in knowledge. About 70% of the stars in the sky now have Arabic names for this reason. The numbers that we use: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, are referred to as Arabic numerals (although the vital concept of zero is an Indian invention). According to many accounts, Moslems ever since then have been seeking to regain what was lost in the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate capital of Baghdad, and this Golden Age is what IS is seeking to bring back.
The Mongols would slaughter the inhabitants of any city that resisted them, Moslem or Catholic. The Mongols had passed by the time the Ottomans took over, although they had earlier inflicted a nasty defeat on the Ottomans in the Battle of Ankara. But could this red minaret among the white ones represent a "secret society" agreement with the Catholic orders of knights to join together if another threat from the east, such as the Mongols, reappeared? How much of a coincidence is it that the primary symbolism of the all-powerful medieval orders of knights was red on white, and these minarets are three white, and one red?
Once again, this theory is intended for education and entertainment purposes.
12) THE PALACE ALLIANCE
We have seen a theory about secret societies and architectural symbolism in the posting on this blog, "Symbolism Theory of The Vatican And Hagia Sophia". How about another theory about such architectural symbolism? Has anyone ever noticed the following?
In 1904, the agreement called the "Entente Cordiale" was signed between Britain and France, which had previously had a history of rivalry. This very much changed to balance of power in Europe and the world.
What I would like to point out here, that I have never seen documented and that was never publicly announced, is how this agreement was expressed in the form of architecture, particularly that of Buckingham Palace.
To begin, let's go to Place Concorde in Paris. The two identical buildings on the north side of Place Concorde, along with the building at the end of the short street that runs between them, are prominent symbols of the previous French hostility to Britain.
The building on the left is where Ben Franklin first gained diplomatic recognition for the new United States, which had declared independence from Britain. France then helped the U.S. gain independence, in ultimate retaliation for Britain giving support to the Protestant (Huguenot) side in France during the Reformation.
The identical building on the right is the headquarters of the French Navy, which had been primarily occupied with conflict with the British Navy.
The building at the end of the short street between the two, Rue Royale, is La Madeleine. This was built by Napoleon as a temple dedicated to the glory of his army. Napoleon was, of course, one of the greatest rivals of Britain. The temple was later made into a Catholic church, which was the other great point of rivalry between the two countries, following the Reformation, with Britain joining the Protestant side but France remaining Catholic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B4tel_de_Crillon#/media/File:Fontaine-place-de-la-concorde-paris.jpg
But eventually, the Entente Cordiale was signed between the two countries, and they became close allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entente_Cordiale#/media/File:Scouts-entente-cordiale.jpg
The year after that photo was taken, 1913, Buckingham Palace in London was remodeled. At the time of the remodeling, tension was building in Europe and the two countries would soon be on the same side in the First World War. What I have concluded is that the remodeling of the palace was done to reflect the new alliance, relative to the former symbols of hostility in Place Concorde.
The 1913 remodeling of Buckingham Palace was done by Sir Aston Webb, who also designed the French Protestant Church of London. Many French Protestants (Huguenots) sought refuge in Britain when the Catholic side of the Reformation eventually triumphed in France. (See the posting on this blog "Christmas In Paris").
It is absolutely striking how Buckingham Palace resembles the two buildings in Place Concorde, not as the palace appeared originally but how it was remodeled in 1913, after the Entente Cordiale had been signed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Palace#/media/File:Buckingham_Palace_from_side,_London,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg
Here is an old photo of the headquarters of the French Navy, one of the two buildings facing Place Concorde. The resemblance with Buckingham Palace, following the renovation of the palace in 1913, is unmistakable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune#/media/File:Barricades_pres_de_Ministere_de_la_Marine_et_l%27H%C3%B6tel_Crillon.jpg
The difference is that the front of Buckingham Palace has pillars on the central section of the palace, but not on the sections with the windows, as do the two identical buildings in Place Concorde. The pillars in the central section of the front of Buckingham Palace could be interpreted as standing for an accord with La Madeleine, the building at the end of the short street between the two buildings in Place Concorde. La Madeleine was constructed by Napoleon, a great rival of Britain, as a temple dedicated to the glory of his army.
There are pillars all around La Madeleine. All of the buildings discussed, including La Madeleine, have the "ancient temple" form of a peaked triangular section supported by pillars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Madeleine,_Paris#/media/File:Madeleine_Paris.jpg
The fact that Buckingham Palace was remodeled into a form that is virtually identical with the buildings in Place Concorde, except with the pillars along the front window sections missing, could be interpreted as a sign that the previous barrier between the two countries, represented by the pillars, had now been removed.
This alliance began with the buildings in Place Concorde, and when Britain and France developed a supersonic transport plane together, it was named the Concorde. It had originally been named Place Concorde in the name of reconciliation after the French Revolution, and so was an apt beginning and name for the new alliance between France and Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#/media/File:British_Airways_Concorde_G-BOAC_03.jpg
Buckingham Palace also has a very similar design to the easy-facing side of the Louvre, although without the pillars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Palace#/media/File:3888ParigiLouvre.JPG
Also, notice the traffic across the bridge over the Seine River, Pont du Carrousel, goes through a triple arch into the Louvre, in a way very similar to traffic going through the triple-arched Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Palace#/media/File:Palais_du_Louvre_-_Paris.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_Arch#/media/File:Arco_del_Almirantazgo,_Londres,_Inglaterra,_2014-08-11,_DD_186.JPG
At the time the Entente Cordiale was signed, in 1904, Britain had a close alliance with Japan. In fact, it was negotiated by Lord Lansdowne, who had also negotiated the Entente Cordiale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Japanese_Alliance#/media/File:Anglo_Japanese_Alliance_30_January_1902.jpg
It was around this time that Akasaka Palace was built in Tokyo, used today as a royal guest palace. We saw Akasaka Palace during our visit to Tokyo, on this blog. Akasaka Palace is not an identical copy of Buckingham Palace, but bears an absolutely striking resemblance to it.
Here is Akasaka Palace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akasaka_Palace#/media/File:State_Guest_House_Akasaka_Palace_main_entrance.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akasaka_Palace#/media/File:State_Guest-House_Akasaka_Palace.JPG
Here is the front and back of Buckingham Palace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Palace#/media/File:Buckingham_Palace,_London_-_April_2009.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Palace#/media/File:West_facade_of_Buckingham_Palace.JPG
Akasaka Palace was actually built a few years before Buckingham Palace underwent it's 1913 renovation. I see the two palaces as standing for the alliance, which brought Japan into the First World War on the Allied side.
The U.S. was in on this architecturally-symbolized alliance also. An exact copy of the two identical buildings, as they face Place Concorde, was built in Philadelphia's Logan Square.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Circle_(Philadelphia)#/media/File:Logan_Square.JPG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Circle_(Philadelphia)#/media/File:Paris_Place_de_la_Concorde_N_Rue_de_Rivoli_02.jpg
These four countries, France, Britain, Japan and, the U.S., have been the closest of allies ever since. The only major exception is Japan during the Second World War. Although it was never announced, and I cannot see it documented anywhere, this alliance was expressed not only on paper but also in the design of palaces and important buildings. Since we can see that this is clearly so here, it is safe to presume that this "palace alliance" was based on the historical precedent of the symbolism discussed in the posting on this blog "Symbolism Theory Of The Vatican And Hagia Sophia".
I think we can refer to the alliance between the U.S., Britain, France and, Japan as The Palace Alliance.
13) THE VATICAN AND ST. PETER
Vatican conspiracy theories are always popular. Any place that becomes a great center of power will inevitably be surrounded by conspiracy theories.
There is one possible Vatican conspiracy theory that I thought was somewhat obvious, but that I had never seen pointed out. I consider it as the most fundamental Vatican conspiracy theory of all, and it is one that anyone can investigate for themselves. It concerns the very foundation on which the power of the Vatican is based, the statement made by Jesus to St. Peter, declaring him to be "The Rock" upon which the church will be built and giving him the "keys" to Heaven, meaning that whatever Peter binds on earth will be bound in Heaven and whatever he looses on earth will be loosed in Heaven.
My main reason for writing this is to get people reading the Bible, by giving them a Vatican conspiracy theory to investigate so that they can come to their own conclusions.
The Gospel of Matthew is where we find Jesus' well-known declaration about St. Peter, who was one of the twelve apostles. Jesus in effect proclaimed Peter as the leader of the apostles, and the "rock" upon which the church would be built. The name of Peter means "rock". (Matthew 16:13). Jesus told Peter, "I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven".
God had already spoken and proclaimed Jesus as his only begotten son, to whom everyone must listen, and it seemed as if Jesus was now making a similar proclamation about Peter.
Peter indeed was an important apostle. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, the statement "including Peter" was made when referring to all twelve of the apostles (Mark 16:7). In some versions of the Bible there is the statement "The women went to Peter and his friends" (Mark 16:9), thus seeming to indicate Peter's importance among the apostles. Near the close of the Gospel of Luke, Peter is described as being amazed at Jesus' empty tomb (Luke 24:12).
Peter was a good speaker. In other biblical descriptions of his activities, in the Acts of the Apostles after the Ascension of Jesus, we see his speech at Pentecost (Acts 2), and his speech in the Temple after a crippled man was healed (Acts 3:11). Peter later rebukes Simon for thinking that the Holy Spirit can be purchased with money (Acts 8:20). Peter raised Dorcas (or Tabitha) from the dead (Acts 9:39). Chapter 10 of the Acts of the Apostles is all about Peter. Acts 11:5 describes Peter's understanding that Gentiles, as well as Jews, are to receive the Holy Spirit. Finally, Peter is miraculously set free after being imprisoned (Acts 12:16).
It is clear that St. Peter was a prominent apostle. He, along with the apostle St. Paul, are believed to have ultimately been martyred in Rome around the year 64.
The Vatican has claimed to have the skulls of both Peter and Paul, and to have identified St. Peter's bones. The obelisk that now stands in St. Peter's Square, in Rome, is supposedly near where he was crucified. There is a story that Peter is buried directly below the alter in his namesake basilica, adjacent to his namesake square, in the Vatican. The present St. Peter's Basilica, which is the largest church on earth, was built in the Sixteenth Century. The original St. Peter's on the site was begun by the Roman emperor Constantine, in the Fourth Century.
It is true that there is a Roman-era graveyard directly under the Vatican. But, of course, it cannot be proven whether any set of bones actually belonged to St. Peter. The basilica and adjoining square of St. Peter are built in the form of a key, with the square representing the handle of the key, and the dome and transepts of the basilica representing the elements of the key.
This is based on Jesus statement to Peter that he was the "rock" upon which the church would be built, the rock being Peter's grave as well as his name meaning "rock", and on Jesus' words that Peter would be given the keys to Heaven, and whatever he bound on earth would be bound in Heaven, and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in Heaven. This is represented by the Basilica and the adjoining Square of St. Peter being in the form of a key.
This must mean that the Vatican is the center of, and is to have absolute rule over, God's church on earth. There is no other way to interpret it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_(lock)#/media/File:Coat_of_arms_Holy_See.svg
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9022829,12.4555641,282m/data=!3m1!1e3
But have you ever wondered if all of this is just too convenient? This one passage in the Bible, which is not repeated or referred to anywhere else, of St. Peter being the "rock", and the Keys of Heaven being given to him, essentially gives the Vatican authority over the world. Doesn't it look like God's earlier declaration of Jesus as his Son was taken and applied to Peter and, since the Vatican was built over Peter's grave, that would mean that it had God's endorsement of supreme authority?
In the early days of the church, the only ones who read and copied the Bible were the members of the church. Other people did not read or handle the Bible themselves. Copies of the Bible were handwritten, mostly by monks in monasteries. A monk might spend his life making a copy of the Bible. The later Protestant curtailment of monasteries is mostly explained by the invention of the printing press making such handwritten copying no longer necessary.
Many books of the Bible were pieced together from separate writings. The Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, are believed to have been woven together from four sources that are now referred to as the Documentary Hypothesis, rather than being presented separately. The Book of Isaiah, the longest book in the Bible, is believed to actually be three separate books with a short historical section also that was borrowed from elsewhere in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, it is considered unlikely that Jesus' famed "Sermon on the Mount", in Chapters 5,6 and, 7, was given all at once. It is believed to have been written together at a later date.
A Gospel, the word means "good news", is an independent account of the events of Jesus' life. The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and, John, are widely believed today to have been redacted from two original written accounts of the Life of Jesus. This is referred to as the Two-Source Hypothesis. It was long noticed that many passages in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke have nearly identical wording, relating events that are not included in the shorter Gospel of St. Mark.
One of these two original sources is the Gospel of St. Mark. The other is referred to as Q, for the German word for "source". Q is now lost. This does not mean that anything has been lost from the Bible because the content of Q has been woven into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Gospel of Mark is considered to actually be based on the words of St. Peter being written down by St. Mark, because Peter could not read or write.
The Gospel of Mark was the first to be written, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke used Q to include stories that were not in the short Gospel of Mark. The Gospel of Matthew seems to be written more for Jews, while that of Luke is more for Gentiles. These first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark and, Luke, are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels because of their similarity to one another. Several decades later, the fourth Gospel of St. John was written. In a similar way to Matthew and Luke, the Gospel of St. John includes stories that were omitted by the other three, and is more about who Jesus was as opposed to what he does.
What concerns us here is that, unlike the Gospel of Matthew, that of Mark does not include Jesus' declaration of Peter being "The Rock with the keys to Heaven". This mean that it must have been written in Q, but Q has been conveniently "lost".
It is also concerning that the Gospel of Mark does not include this declaration about Peter being "The Rock with the keys to Heaven", because this Gospel is considered to have been the words of Peter, written down by Mark, because Peter was not able to write.
How is it that the many letters to the churches from the apostles were collected from far and wide, to be included in the New Testament, but one of the two original written sources on Jesus' life and teachings, right in the middle of where the Bible story took place, was "lost"? Even though it, like the Gospel of St. Mark which was the other original source in the Two-Source Hypothesis, must have been copied any number of times.
It is true that there may be some other letters written by St. Paul that have been lost, but these were written between remote locations during his missionary travels. Once again, this loss of Q does not mean that anything was actually lost from the Bible because it's content, that was not also included in the Gospel of Mark, has been written into the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
What all of this means is that Jesus' declaration of Peter being "The Rock with the keys to Heaven", which essentially gives the Vatican rule over the world, is told in only one of the four Gospels, is not referred to anywhere else in the Bible, and was copied from an original source that was subsequently "lost".
But if the early church indeed slipped this passage into the Bible to justify it's authority, why would it have to do such a thing?
The Vatican had a long and difficult struggle to exert and consolidate it's authority. The position of the Bishop of Rome emerged around the send of the Second Century. But it's first claim of primacy was rejected by other bishops. Innocent I, beginning in 401, is generally considered as the first pope. His preoccupation was consolidation of authority near the end of the Roman Empire. There were five centers of the new religion of Christianity that emerged, Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch and, Constantinople, over which Rome sought supremacy.
Early in church history, the primacy of any one church was far from certain. There was always division between the eastern and western churches, just as there had been division between the eastern and western Roman Empire. There was plenty of doctrines that were considered as heretical that the young church was trying to suppress. The dispute among Christians over christology, the nature of the interaction between the divine and human natures of Jesus, was far from resolved. The church was also embroiled in continuous power struggles with secular rulers.
It took a long time for Rome to become recognized as having primacy over other churches. It's primacy began with it being the site of a council to resolve theological disputes. During this challenging time, having a passage in the Bible about the body of St. Peter, which Rome did have because he had been martyred there, being "The Rock" upon which the church would be built and having the keys to Heaven, would have been extremely useful.
The doctrine of papal infallibility, which has shaped so much of western history, is based on this one passage about Peter being commissioned by Jesus as "The Rock, upon which the church will be built, with the keys to Heaven". Today, the church has charismatic popes to spread it's influence, but there was no mass media in those days.
There are just so many questions about this one passage of the Bible concerning Peter being "The Rock" upon which the church will be built, and being given the keys to Heaven.
An interesting question is why the Gospel of John, which was written several decades after the others, did not reiterate such an important declaration. That one of the apostles was to be the leader over the others, and be the "The Rock" on which the church was to be built, with the keys to Heaven. Peter does not even have a significant role in this later Gospel. The only place that this is stated is in the Gospel of St. Matthew. I have also wondered why the Gospel of Matthew, containing this declaration, is placed first in the New Testament even though the Gospel of St. Mark, the shortest Gospel, was written first.
St. Peter, if he was to be the leader of the apostles, wrote or dictated or had his name put on only two short books of the New Testament. The apostle St. Paul wrote far more.
In the second of the short Books of Peter, 2 Peter 1:16, the verbal commission that God gave Jesus is referred to. But neither of these books makes any reference at all to Peter's supposed commission by Jesus. One of the books is of disputed authorship, being written by someone else who then put Peter's name on it, but that would be all the more reason to include it if Peter himself had left it out due to modesty.
Many believe St. Paul to have been martyred in Rome also. Although the Acts of the Apostles simply ends with him in a prison cell. But Paul and Jesus never met on earth and it would appear more questionable for Jesus to suddenly appear to someone who was persecuting the church, and tell him that he would be the rock upon which the church would be built. Another reason that Peter, not Paul, was this rock is that Paul may not even have been martyred in Rome, or his bones may have been lost.
Peter was known as the apostle to the Jews, while Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles. Would Peter thus be the logical "rock" upon which the mostly-Gentile church would be built, or was it just convenient that the church had, or was at least believed to have, his bones so that a church could be built over them?
Another question concerns the use of the word "church". The passage in the Gospel of St. Matthew about Peter being the rock with the keys to Heaven is one of only two places in the Gospels that this word is used. A little bit further on in the Gospel of Matthew is the only other place that the word "church" is used. Not even when Jesus, near the close of each of the Gospels, sent his apostles out into the world did he mention the "church". The second mention of the word in the Gospel of Matthew must have originally come from Q which is, of course, "lost". Doesn't it make it seem as if it was written after the fact? After the church had already been established, and was looking to boost it's authority?
Another factor in the supposed choice of Peter over Paul is that Peter, while a good speaker, was illiterate. The message about Jesus was spread mostly by the written word, which we have today as the Bible. Wouldn't the highly-educated Paul, who was also a great speaker as well, have been a better choice as "The Rock" upon which the church would be built?
From the time that St. Peter was martyred, it must have been about three hundred years before any kind of church could have been built on the site. The Lateran Basilica, which is actually the center of the Catholic Church and not the larger St. Peter's Basilica, was built by the Emperor Constantine before the First St. Peter's Basilica. If Jesus had indeed said that Peter was "The Rock" upon which the church was to be built, then why wasn't the Lateran Basilica built over his grave?
How necessary was it anyway to assign one of the apostles as the leader of the others when they were all to go off in different directions after the Ascension of Jesus? Nowhere else, other than this one passage in question, is there mention of one apostle being the leader. Indeed, they are all told that they would be guided by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus was critical of the apostles, although he did sincerely pray for them. Jesus' declaration of Peter as "The Rock" stands in sharp contrast and would be the only time that Jesus ever gave such praise to any of the apostles.
The Catholic Church ruled that priests must be celibate. But it's supposed "rock", St. Peter, was married because Jesus is recorded as having healed his mother-in-law.
As far as keys in the Bible go, the Book of Revelation 3:7 is the message to the church in Philadelphia. It refers to "The key that once belonged to David". "When it opens a door, no one can close it, and when it closes a door, no one can open it". But no reference is made to Peter.
When Peter and Paul had a public disagreement over the necessity of new converts following the Jewish rituals (Galatians 2), in which Paul prevailed over Peter, why didn't Peter just "pull rank" on Paul if Jesus had really said that he was "The Rock", with the keys to Heaven, on which the church was to be built?
If this were indeed an act of deception, that this passage of Jesus' declaration about Peter is something that he never said but was slipped into the Bible at a later date, which would give the church in Rome authority essentially over the world, it wouldn't be the only instance in the early church when something like this had happened. The so-called "Donation of Constantine" was a forged deed of the Roman Emperor Constantine, the first emperor to become a Christian, signing over all authority of the Roman Empire to the pope. There had been legitimate donations to the church, among them the lands that became the Papal States.
An interesting parallel to the issue of the Vatican drawing it's authority from the bones of St. Peter can be seen in the case of Venice and St. Mark. Remember that it was to St. Mark that Peter is believed to have verbally recited the story of Jesus' life, which Mark wrote down as the Gospel that bears his name.
St. Mark was another of the apostles, and was martyred in Alexandria. In the Ninth Century two Venetian merchants, looking for a theological foundation for their newly-powerful city-state, went to Egypt and procured the bones of St. Mark. Few places have ever been as closely linked to their patron saint like the Republic of Venice was to St. Mark.
The symbol of St. Mark in Venice is a winged lion with a book open to the Gospel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Saint_Mark#/media/File:Lion_of_Saint_Mark.svg
I leave it up to you to come to your own conclusions about this passage in the Bible, which would give so much authority to the church. With recent popes like John Paul, Benedict and Francis, the Catholic Church does not need to add anything to the Bible to give it authority. I am not Catholic myself, but have been a great admirer of these popes.
Hopefully, this will get a lot of people reading the Bible.
14) ARYAN IDEOLOGY
With racism and "Aryan" ideology being so much in the news again, and with the Second World War generation rapidly passing on, here is a story of that time that should definitely be told.
Before the Twentieth Century, there arose a European fascination with eastern mysticism. The German author Herman Hesse wrote the widely popular book "Siddharta". The Beatles later visited Goa, and converted to Hinduism. The term "Aryan" came into use. There was the legend of a "pure" Aryan homeland, in the far north of Europe, with names like Thule and Hyperborea.
But "Aryan" originally referred not to race, but to language. There were two branches of Aryans, East and West. The so-called "Indo-European" languages include Hindi, Urdu, Farsi and, Sanskrit. These languages are related to Germanic languages, even though the Germanic (northern European) languages have since adopted the Latin script.
The name of Iran literally means "Land of the Aryans". The Pahlavi Dynasty, the one that was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, changed the name from the historic "Persia", to Iran, in 1935. The name of Eire (Ireland) is believed by some to mean "Aryan".
The swastika that was used by the Nazis as their symbol is a very old symbol that was widely used by early Hindus. The name of the swastika comes from a Sanskrit word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#/media/File:A_Hindu_Swastika_at_Goa_Lawah_Temple_Bali_Indonesia.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#/media/File:Jaipur_03-2016_38_Garh_Ganesh_Temple.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#/media/File:Flag_of_the_German_Reich_(1935%E2%80%931945).svg
This is an Iranian swastika necklace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#/media/File:Swastika_iran.jpg
The eastern Aryans invaded India, bringing with them the Sanskrit language, forcing the original inhabitants, the Dravidians, southward. The dominance of the Aryans over other people in India (see the visit "Where India Began", on this blog) is what brought about the Caste System. (Although it is not recognized in the Indian constitution of today). This is apparently where the term of "Aryan" begins to be associated with racism.
In 1938, an SS officer led a German expedition to Tibet, with the purpose of finding out if the people were distant Aryan relatives. In the days before DNA testing, they actually measured the bodies of the Tibetans to help determine if they were related, with the Germans being the western branch of the Aryans, and the Tibetans part of the eastern Branch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938%E2%80%9339_German_expedition_to_Tibet#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_135-KB-15-089,_Tibetexpediton,_Anthropometrische_Untersuchungen.jpg
Heinrich Himmler, of the Gestapo, was the top Nazi that was most interested in eastern mysticism. He reportedly always carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, part of the Hindu scriptures, and closely followed the progress of the expedition to Tibet. He made a point of visiting occupied Norway, which could have been a part of the Aryan interpretation of Thule or Hyperborea. The conquest of Europe was the Nazis, the western branch of the Aryans, trying to set themselves over conquered people in the same way that the eastern branch had done with the Caste System. The logic was that, if the eastern branch of the Aryans had done it, then the western branch, the Nazis, should do it also.
This is certainly not all that there was to the origin of Nazi ideology. Babylon also seems to have been a part of it. German archeologists had been at the center of the excavation of Babylon. The reassembled Ishtar Gate is today on Museum Island, in the Spree River.
But what did the Babylonians do? They rose up and conquered those, the Assyrians, who had earlier conquered them. The Babylonians regained their former greatness, and became greater than before. They ruled a great empire, and they took the Jews captive. The original Babylon had been that of the famous king Hammurabi, and his law code. The Babylonians who overthrew Assyria, representing the Allies who had defeated Germany in the First World War, were known as the Neo-Babylonians. Just as the Nazis were the "Third Reich", while Charlemagne had been the First Reich.
Was this why the Nazis were so fond of making movies? Just as the archeologists found images of great leaders, like Nebuchadnezzar, in Babylon, and relics were put on display in Germany, so people in the future would look back at these movies of the great founders of the "Thousand-Year Reich".
There is certainly also an element of the French Revolution in the Nazis. The tower of the destroyed Kaiser Wilhelm Church, in Berlin, was left standing in the same way as the tower of the St. Jacques Church, in Paris. Hitler replaced the Weimar Republic in the same way as Napoleon had replaced the Directory. The Nazis replaced Christianity with their "Positive Christianity", in the same way that the French Revolution had replaced it with the "Cult of the Supreme Being".
The overthrowing of the Kaiser (king) in the 1919 socialist revolution, which brought about the Weimar Republic, until power was seized by Hitler, is a mirror image of the overthrowing of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by the French Revolution, which brought about the series of provisional governments, from the Committee of General Defense to the Directory, until power was seized by Napoleon. Hitler recognized this parallel, as he made a special point of visiting Napoleon's tomb, and his field of conquest was almost identical to Napoleon's.
Then there was the Holy Roman Empire, of which Germany had been at the center. The Holy Roman Empire, as we saw in the posting on this blog "The Far-Reaching Legacy Of The Holy Roman Empire", was created by the pope to be a political entity that would be under his control. It backfired, because the leaders of the empire became stronger than the pope had anticipated, but the objective was western unity against the growing differences with the church in the east, which would ultimately break away to become the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Nazis, with Hitler in the role of Charlemagne, were gathering western Europe together, under their command, before going after their ultimate objective which was conquest of the Soviet Union. The difference being that, by this time, Catholicism against Eastern Orthodoxy had been secularized into National Socialism against Communism.
The Franks contributed to Nazi ideology. The Franks, as we saw in the posting on this blog "America And The Modern World Explained By Way Of Paris", are the people for whom France is named. Both France and Germany originated as part of their empire, and the German word for France is still "Frankreich". Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, was a Frank. The Nazis referred to their empire as the "Third Reich", Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire was considered as the First Reich. The Second Reich was considered as the time of the Kaisers, in Germany. When Hitler conquered France, as when Napoleon had earlier conquered what is now Germany, it was a putting of the Franks back together.
There was economics behind the Nazis. The crash of 1929 had devastated Germany. The Nazis very effectively used the simple tricks of absorbing unemployment by drastically expanding the military forces, and getting factories back to full production by making armaments for them. That gets the economy rolling again, as Ronald Reagan would later notice, but it doesn't really make sense unless we can have a war for that army.
But the most important element of Nazi ideology I believe to be this conviction that they were the western branch of the Aryans.
To illustrate how important was this concept that they were the western branch of the Aryans, I would like to cite the example of Subhas Chandra Bose. This was an Indian independence leader that is not well-known in the west. Bose left India, and embarked on a fantastic journey that would lead him around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose#/media/File:Netaji_Subhas_Chandra_Bose.jpg
Bose sought help in freeing India from British rule. He ultimately found himself in Germany, after being assisted by the Nazi intelligence service. Hitler is usually considered as the ultimate name in racism against people with dark skin. But he was delighted to meet Bose, seeming to consider him as his counterpart of the eastern branch of the Aryans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose#/media/File:Subhas_Chandra_Bose_meeting_Adolf_Hitler.jpg
Heinrich Himmler brought Bose to meetings of the top officials of the Gestapo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_101III-Alber-064-04,_Subhas_Chandra_Bose_bei_Heinrich_Himmler.jpg
But even the German who first publicized the relationship between the Indo-European languages, Max Muller, did not think that the relationship went any further than language. The concept has been twisted by racists to make the northern Europeans the western branch of the Aryans, who have the historical right to subjugate others just as the eastern branch of the Aryans did.
15) MADE IN INDIA
In the west, the economy of India is thought of as specializing in intellectual work, such as tech support by phone and IT work. But have you ever wonder why, when shopping in stores, you rarely see anything that has a label of "Made In India"?
Prime Minister Narenda Modi has launched a campaign to drastically increase manufacturing in India. The name of the campaign is simply "Make In India"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_in_India#/media/File:Make_In_India.png
But why is this campaign even necessary? India would seem like the natural place to manufacture anything. The only way to explain why it isn't is that there must be some strong bias against manufacturing.
This bias against manufacturing in India, which the present government is trying to reverse with the "Make In India" campaign is very simple to explain. In fact, it can be explained in one word. That word is Bhopal.
On December 2, 1984, at a Union Carbide insecticide plant in the city of Bhopal, a large amount of water was poured into a tank that contained a chemical used in making insecticide. The water caused a chemical reaction that burst the tank and released a deadly cloud of very poisonous fumes. About eight thousand people died in Bhopal, with possibly many thousands more dying as a result afterward. It remains the worst industrial accident that the world has ever seen.
This disaster changed the economy of the world. India, quite understandably, developed a severe bias against manufacturing. No one wants a factory down the street after something like this has happened. Products that might have been manufactured in India were instead made elsewhere, and India's economy went on the course that it has.
I remember when this happened. I lived near a Union Carbide factory also, and remember when a cloud of fumes once escaped from it. The fumes got into the ventilation system of a department store some distance away (K-Mart), and sickened a number of people, but it was nothing deadly.
I read a book about the Bhopal Disaster that was in print the year after it happened. My agreement was with the Government of India that Union Carbide had been negligent in safety at the factory, and then had tried to blame the disaster on sabotage by an employee in order to evade responsibility.
But later I happened across some more information about it and, living around factories at the time and having worked in several myself, as well as living close to where the Love Canal (the most misnamed place in the world) disaster had taken place, decided to read some more about it.
My opinion shifted very much to the point of view that the Bhopal Disaster had been the result of sabotage. Water could not have gotten into that tank in error. Someone in the factory knew exactly what would happen if a large amount of water mixed with the chemical in that tank. A meter that was supposed to be attached to the tank was later found to have been removed. There was some industrial washing going on nearby but, going by what information I could find, it does not seem possible that this could have gotten water into the tank.
My reason for writing this is that it would now be a lot better for India to acknowledge that this was sabotage, rather than an accident, because that could begin the elimination of the bias against industry that is hindering the "Make In India" campaign from achieving it's maximum potential.
Remember that India, before this disaster, did not have a significant history of major industrial accidents. There was the explosion of a munitions ship at Bombay, similar to what happened in Halifax during the First World War, but that was during wartime.
The next question is why anyone would commit such an act of sabotage.
Consider the following sequence of events.
In June, 1984, the Indian Army raided the holy place of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The purpose was to capture a militant Sikh religious leader and his followers, who were seeking an independent nation for Sikhs.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had ordered the raid, had two Sikh soldiers among her bodyguards. At the end of October, they assassinated her with their guns in revenge for the attack on their religious sanctuary.
Crowds of Hindus, particularly supporters of Indira Gandhi's Congress party, attack Sikhs across India, killing maybe 8,000 people.
The next thing that happens, barely a month after Indira Gandhi had been killed, is this disastrous release of chemical fumes in Bhopal that also kill maybe 8,000 people, almost all Hindus as there are few Sikhs in that city.
The company insists that this could not have happened, aside from sabotage by an employee of the factory who knew just what would happen. The team of investigators that the company sent said that the Indian Government did not even want to hear anything about sabotage, insisting that it must be an accident caused by the negligence of the company in implementing safety standards.
The following year saw the bombing of Air India flight 182, in retaliation for the operation against the Sikh holy place and the subsequent killing of Sikhs.
But if it had been announced that the Bhopal Disaster had been the result of sabotage, with the intent of killing Hindus to avenge the killing of Sikhs, it would almost certainly have brought India to civil war and meant the killing of thousands more people. It looks very much like the Indian Government was doing it's best to avoid civil war. This is much more realistic than suspecting that an employee sabotaged the plant because he felt underpaid.
Decades later, India has moved far past the climate that brought about this disaster. But now it is faced with the necessity of overcoming the bias against industry that it created.
The best thing now would be to acknowledge that this was the result of terrorism. If this had been an accident, people in India would naturally be strongly biased against having industry around them, in case it might happen again. But this would not be the case if it was sabotage.
Consider that the attacks of 9-11 brought about no lasting bias against aircraft because it was known that it happened as a result of terrorism. But supposed instead that four aircraft had malfunctioned, and had killed thousands of people. Then it would definitely have created a strong bias against the airline industry.
Consider also that the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in contrast with 9-11, did bring about a bias against nuclear energy because it was the result of an accident, meaning that it could very likely happen again.
At the time it was better that the disaster at Bhopal be the result of an accident, in the interest of avoiding civil war. But today, with that era long past, it is better that it be the result of sabotage, so that the "Make In India" campaign can reach it's full potential by eliminating the bias against industry that this disaster brought about, and without which the "Make In India" campaign would not have been necessary in the first place.
16) THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF THE CINEMA REX
One more thing about the Iranian Revolution, in fact the most horrific thing of all.
I remember the first that I heard about the budding revolution. I had arrived back in my native England after completing high school in the U.S., and was getting to know my native country again. One pleasant summer day, there was some mind-boggling news.
A team of arsonists in Iran had blocked the doors and torched a crowded theater, killing over four hundred people. The presumed reason was that the theater showed foreign moves that they didn't like and which offended their religious sensibilities.
I remember this so well because it got me thinking about how different I was from the world as a whole. There were a lot of people around from other cultures that might think completely differently than me. Compared with the world as a whole, I was very individualistic, with a "to each his own" attitude and whatever movies other people watched was none of my business. The idea of killing four hundred people because someone didn't like the movie that they were watching was totally over my head.
This event wouldn't define the Iranian Revolution, because it wasn't established who was behind it. The Shah's government and the Islamic revolutionaries blamed each other for it. After the revolution, one man would be convicted and executed for it, insisting that he acted alone, but it seems certain that there was a team, who blocked the doors and ignited gasoline. They certainly wanted a high death toll.
But why?
Uprisings had begun earlier in 1978, and would ultimately be successful in overthrowing the Shah, but there was nothing else like this done by either side during the revolution.
The Islamic revolutionaries generally claimed that the forces of the Shah, alarmed by the protests and uprisings, had started the fire in order to make the revolutionaries look like a bunch of murderous fanatics who had started the fire.
We have to remember that the revolution against the Shah started out as multi-faceted. It became an Islamic Revolution when that factor predominated over the others. But it seems that it was "Black Friday", September 8, 1978 three weeks after the Cinema Rex Fire, when the Shah's soldiers opened fire on religious demonstrators that began it's definition as an "Islamic Revolution". Black Friday turned out to be the "tipping point" of the revolution, after which no concordance between the two sides was possible. The Revolution would either succeed or it would fail. It succeeded.
No one who wanted the support of the people would do anything like this. No one claimed responsibility for it. One thing that seems certain is that one of the factions lit the fire to make it look as if someone else had done it.
There were two obvious precedents for this. The first is the Reichstag Fire. The difference between the Communist Russian Revolution and the parallel German Revolution is that the Germans had a parliament, which met in the Reichstag. This could be interpreted that the Weimar Republic was socialist, but not Communist like the Soviets.
Communists, for which there was a lot of sympathy after the 1929 economic crash, might try to bring Germany into line by torching the Reichstag. A new party, the Nazis, took the Reichstag Fire as an attack on their country which left them no choice but to take control in order to ensure security.
In fact, the Nazis gained so much from the Reichstag Fire that it is widely believed that they were behind it.
The second precedent is the so-called "Great Fire of Smyrna", in 1922. Smyrna is now the Turkish city of Izmir. The Greek and Armenian sections of the city were set ablaze, apparently by uniformed Turkish soldiers. It was claimed that they had lit the fire themselves, to make the world have sympathy for them and to file claims for it, and the truth has never been satisfactorily established.
One thing that is interesting is that the fire occurred on the 25th anniversary of the coup that put the Shah in power. Mohammad Mossadegh was Iran's democratically-elected prime minister but he had strong leftward sympathies, raising taxes and planning to nationalize the country's oil industry. He was deposed, with the help of the CIA and British Intelligence.
The fire also took place in Khuzestan province, where there was a significant Arab population that at least wanted some autonomy from the ruling Persians. But I cannot see what they would gain by a fire in a crowded theater in which many of their own people would certainly be among the victims.
The fire was in the city of Abadan, which is on the border with Iraq. The theater was within walking distance of the river that serves as the Iraqi border. Abadan is the largest city on the Iranian side of the border.
Ayatollah Khomeini, who would end up as leader of the Iranian Revolution, was still in exile in Iraq at the time of the fire, living in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. In a bizarre twist, Iranian spies in Iraq discovered a Communist plot against effective leader Saddam Hussein and informed him. As a return favor to the Shah's government, Saddam expelled Khomeini from Iraq, from where he was stirring up dissent back in Iran. Khomeini went to Kuwait but was turned away at the border. He ended up in exile in a suburb of Paris.
Khomeini arrived in Paris on October 8, a month after Black Friday. It was a grave mistake for the Shah. From Paris, Khomeini would meet with the western press and run the budding revolution in Iran by telephone. He made cassette tapes of his sermons which sold in Iran as if he were a rock star. The Shah would blame the BBC for giving Khomeini legitimacy.
Could the fire have been lit in Abadan to make it look as if Khomeini had sent a team of assassins from Iraq, just across the border, to light the fire against unislamic foreign movies?
But the movie that was playing at the time of the fire was an Iranian movie, "The Deer". As far as I know, it was not what would be considered as unislamic. It was actually about poorer Iranians, among the many who had been left behind by the Shah's economic reforms and lavish expenditures. In 1967, the Shah had himself crowned as Shahinshah, "King of Kings", in an extravagant ceremony. In 1971, the Shah had thrown perhaps the greatest party the world had ever seen to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the Peacock Throne.
If anyone was cast in a bad light by the movie that was playing at the time of the fire, it was the Shah. The theater was in a working-class neighborhood.
If the forces of the Shah did light the fire, it very badly backfired. This is what really gave impetus to the revolution, even though there was never any proof or claim of who started it. It was only a few protests before this. A modern religious revolution wasn't really in the world's vocabulary in 1978. Revolution meant either Communism or the overthrow of Communism.
Why would the Islamic revolutionaries target a theater that was showing an Iranian movie that, if anything, was against the Shah? Islamic terrorists are very rarely known to attack a target without claiming responsibility.
The movie was about those left behind economically by the Shah's reforms and the theater was in a working class neighborhood. If a Communist uprising was going to start, the neighborhood of the fire would be one of the logical places. But if the Shah's forces lit the fire here, what point could there possibly be? It would only inflame the protests.
The government of the Shah and the revolutionaries insisted that the other was to blame.
Maybe that was the point of the fire.
Of course, I do not have a certain answer as to who lit the fire. But remember that there was a third major party involved in revolutionary Iran. There was the Shah and the Islamic revolutionaries, who vociferously blamed each other for the fire. And then there were the Communists, with a strong party in Iran which appealed to the many who were left behind by the Shah's business-friendly economic reforms.
The revolution would soon be about the Islamic revolutionaries against the Shah. The Communists would fall into third place. But that was not true at the time of the fire. It would really be "Black Friday", three weeks later, that, in the opinion of many, would turn it into an Islamic Revolution when the Shah's soldiers fired on a religious demonstration.
At the time of the fire, Communist sympathizers had a definite chance to gain control of the country if only they could somehow turn the other two factions against each other. Khomeini, in exile in neighboring Iraq, might have sent a team to start the fire so that it looked as if the forces of the Shah had set the fire to make them look like murderous terrorists. Or the forces of the Shah might have lit the fire to make it look as if that was what Khomeini had done.
But both the movie that was playing at the time and the economics of the neighborhood that it was in are more about the Communists against the Shah's government than the Islamic revolutionaries. The dead were some of the most likely people in the country to sympathize with Communism. The Shah was concerned about Communism too but, given that it is usually some kind of atrocity committed by the establishment side that turns ordinary protests into a full-fledged revolution, he would have had everything to lose and nothing to gain by lighting this fire.
Why would the Shah have the fire lit on the 25th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power by deposing the democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who thoroughly alarmed the western powers by promising to nationalize Iran's oil industry?
In this process of eliminating parties who would gain by lighting this fire, there is thus one party that is left out. That party is the Communists. They were the "third party" of the budding revolution and this fire caused the other two parties to vociferously blame each other.
17) AMERICA'S WAR IN VIETNAM
This was originally posted as "Understanding The Direction Of Postwar America".
There is a series on television here about America's Vietnam War. I would like to give my own version of it, and it includes all of what we could call postwar America, and much about the Cold War.
To understand the generation of America that followed the end of the Second World War, there is one thing that we always have to keep in mind. The leaders of this generation all came of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s. We cannot understand their actions without understanding that.
The era after the end of the First World War was a great time in America. The industrial process that had supplied the war effort was transformed into the production of consumer goods. The assembly line manufacturing process had been perfected and all manner of goods, from cars to radios to appliances, rolled out of the factories. The possibilities seemed endless, ordinary people could soon live at a standard at which only the very wealthy had lived not long before.
The times were referred to as "The Roaring Twenties".
But there was trouble on the horizon. Companies were naturally trying to maximize their profits by paying their workers as little as possible. These workers, the majority of the population, were thus unable to afford much of the many goods that were being produced. Most of the manufactured goods were just piling up in warehouses, because people were not earning enough money to buy them. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating economic crash. it didn't make sense to produce anything, because few people would have enough money to buy it.
The following decade, the 1930s, were a terrible time, known as the Great Depression. Millions of people were out of work, standing in long lines at soup kitchens for a meal. Businesses could not get started because no one had enough money to buy what they were selling, and people had no money to buy anything because businesses could not get started that would employ them.
The U.S. Government stepped in, implementing various "make work" projects, to start the economy rolling again by giving people paychecks that they would spend. Much of the work undertaken by these projects, under the Works Projects Administration (WPA). Well-known dams, such as Hoover (Boulder) Dam and those of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were built during this time.
In Europe, Germany was afflicted even worse by the Great Depression. It would mean the end of the Weimar Republic, the government that had emerged from the socialist revolution that had ended the rule of the kaisers after the First World War. Government efforts to get the economy rolling again in Germany included the building of the Autobahn, the national system of highways.
But what happened there is that a party, known as the Nazis emerged. They had the apparently logical idea of absorbing unemployment by drastically increasing the size of the armed forces, and getting factories back to full production by making armaments for them. The popularity of the Nazis can be explained very simply, after the terrible time of the 1930s, at least they got everybody working and earning money again.
The Great Depression did not truly end until the Second World War. One thing that must be said about war is that at least it gets everyone working. The attitude in a deep economic depression is that "We have got to get people working again, no matter what it takes. If it has to mean a war, then so be it".
With that brief background, we begin our understanding of postwar America in 1945, at the end of the Second World War.
Millions of soldiers would soon be returning home. These former soldiers would need jobs, but the production of massive volumes of war equipment was no longer needed. What would they do to earn a living? Now that the war was over, the specter of millions of unemployed must have been foremost in the minds of the leaders of time, who had vivid memories of the Great Depression. It had been the war that had really ended the Great Depression, and now that the war was over it could very easily return.
Part of the solution was the G.I. Bill. This was a wide-ranging program, the main intent of which was to pay for returning veterans to attend college or receive technical training. This would delay those veterans from seeking employment, so that there would not be so many millions of former soldiers looking for jobs all at once. Some considered the G.I. Bill as "too socialistic", but it proved to be highly successful in bringing about the next generation of technological advancements.
There was a simple and obvious solution as to what to do with the now-closed armaments industries, particularly those around Detroit. We would build new housing developments, where the returning veterans would live and start families. But those housing developments, and the postwar suburbs that grew up around them, would be based on cars, rather than being easily walkable.
Every family would have a car. That would keep the wartime armaments industries going, now producing civilian cars, and would provide many millions of jobs. While this strategy would ultimately lead to global warming, and wars to keep the supply of oil flowing, as well as all of the other maladies of a society based on cars, it also may have kept the Great Depression from returning, and that was what was on the minds of the leaders who remembered that time only too well.
The Nazis had earlier tried to alleviate the economic depression with the production of cars for everyone. The result was the Volkswagen (the "People's Car"), with which to drive on the Autobahn.
What about the industries that had produced aircraft for the war? How can we keep those operating? Let's get people flying. The airline industry that we know today would soon emerge. Planes would take passengers on visits and vacations. That would bring about a nationwide tourism industry, which would provide millions of more jobs.
The Korean War (1950-53) came along at just the right time. Conscription of those who had not been old enough for the Second World War eased the employment concerns of the leadership but, most importantly, was the production of war equipment. Nothing gets an economy rolling like the combination of easing unemployment by conscription, and then getting factories making military equipment for them.
Many nations joined in on each side of the Korean War, both in the combat and then the rebuilding afterward. Remember that the Communist countries also had millions of people that they had to keep employed. We thus can see that the Cold War, despite it's hostile rhetoric and proxy wars, was at least a partly symbiotic relationship. When the economy needs a boost, just provoke the other side a little bit and then use the threat of war as a reason to both build up the military forces and the industries that produce for them and also research new technology, which will provide future jobs, in order to avoid "falling behind" the potential enemy.
After the end of the Korean War, the U.S. began the massive national project of building highways, known as the Eisenhower Interstate System. This was a sensible step, considering that the concept of building the postwar society around cars was succeeding, and would, most importantly, keep millions of people working. No matter what, we must never have millions of people unemployed again, like in the Great Depression.
Toward the end of the 1950s, the leaders who remembered the Great Depression so well saw trouble up ahead. When soldiers return from war, they tend to start families. The millions upon millions of soldiers returning from the war led to what is referred to as the "Baby Boom". If the first of the Baby Boom generation was born in 1946, that meant that they would be finishing high school, and looking for a job, beginning in 1964.
If there were not enough jobs for them, this could be catastrophic. What were we to do?
First, the leaders' old friends, the Communists (in the guise of enemies, of course) came to the rescue. The rocket communities of countries like the U.S. and Britain didn't really think that the 1957 launch of Sputnik into orbit was a big deal. Prior to Sputnik, the U.S. had actually weighed a high-flying rocket down with sand, so that it wouldn't go into orbit.
But the leadership whose real concern was, as always, the potential of a return to the Great Depression with millions of unemployed, seized on the launch of Sputnik to issue dire warnings that America was "falling behind" it's potential enemies. We have to increase education in subjects like mathematics and science, because that is what our potential rivals are doing.
As we know, it is mathematics and science, the STEM classes, as it is now called for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, which really create jobs. I wrote in "The Sputnik Vector", on the world and economics blog, www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com , that there has been a price to pay for the shift to emphasis on science and mathematics in that it takes away from the geography, history and, foreign languages that are required to understand the world that we have to deal with. But, in our scenario here, it is the science and technology which creates more jobs, and that is what will prevent the Great Depression from returning.
An important postwar event in America was the 1964 World's Fair, held in New York City. The purpose of the fair was to promote futuristic technology. In the late 1960s, and into the 1970s, there was a feeling of confidence in technology and the bright future that it could bring. But what we really needed was not so much the technology, but the jobs in the entire new industries that it would bring about. The greatest dread of leaders who had come of age in the 1930s is millions of unemployed looking for jobs, and the bulge in the population of the Baby Boom led them to spend their careers scrambling for solutions.
If it requires six people to do a job, and a way is developed to do it with only three people, that is considered as making progress. But the great conundrum of a modern economy is the question of what the other three people are then supposed to do. If they are not earning money then they cannot buy whatever it is the three employed workers are producing. It will then not make any sense to keep producing it, and the economy will crash.
How many times have you heard a conservative politician say something like "Elect me and I will run the country like a business"? But a country is not a business. A business can hire and let people go, as need be, while a country can't. A country has to make sure that all of it's people have a way to get the necessities of life. Too much efficiency means fewer people are needed, and that means more unemployed. It was supreme efficiency in manufacturing that brought about the Economic Crash of 1929, which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, which led to the rise of the Nazis and the Second World War, and the emergence of Communism as a major world system.
What a country has to do is first to get people working, even if it is on "make work" projects, or jobs that are not really essential, and then worry about efficiency from there. To keep the three workers working who were let go, in the above example, requires the creation of new industries. That is what a modern economy is, a never-ending race to keep finding something for workers to do, and hopefully bringing about benefits from what they do, but getting them doing something, to earn and keep spending, comes first.
The crisis point, 1964, arrived. This is when the first of the Baby Boomers finished high school, and began looking for jobs. America had more high school graduates in one year than it ever had before. How much of a coincidence do you think it is that this was also the year in which America's involvement in the Vietnam War began?
The U.S. Government certainly did not want to sent it's teenagers off to war but, remembering the 1930s, they knew that this could be a disaster. It was not the war itself that they wanted, it was the factory production that was sought, there is nothing like a war to keep millions of people working. I live near where a lot of the U.S. Army's iconic "Huey" helicopters were made, and I realize now that factories like these were where the "real" Vietnam war was being fought.
In Vietnam, the U.S. was confronting Communism. But the confrontation on the battlefield was secondary. What America was really confronting Communism with was a booming economy, the booming economy that was brought about by war production. The actual bombs and bullets of the war were a sideshow.
The U.S. never advanced into North Vietnam, like it did into North Korea during the Korean War. The usual explanation was that it did not want to widen the war. The Allied advance into North Korea during the Korean War brought China into the war.
But, in Vietnam, the situation was different. While China had been an ally of North Korea, it was not an ally of North Vietnam. After the end of the Vietnam War, China and Vietnam actually fought their own brief war, because Vietnam had invaded China's ally, the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam was long ruled by China, it successfully resisted the Mongols, and didn't want Chinese soldiers there any more than it wanted American soldiers.
Could it be that the war was allowed to drag on because the U.S. economy still needed the war, to make sure that millions of unemployed Baby Boomers would not bring back the Great Depression, which would be much worse than having the Vietnam War?
The U.S. Government eventually negotiated a truce, and withdrew from the war, early in 1973. But what about the Communist Tet Offensive, five years before? In early 1968, the Communists suddenly attacked targets all across South Vietnam. While it startled and alarmed the American public, the truth is that the Tet Offensive was a military failure. The Communists suffered heavy losses, with the VC (South Vietnamese Communists or Viet Cong) being virtually destroyed.
The U.S. Government was in a position of strength after the Tet Offensive, so why didn't it take that opportunity to negotiate an end to the war, which was so unpopular at home? Could it be that the economy still needed the war, to avoid that dreaded specter of millions of unemployed Baby Boomers bringing back the Great Depression? It did not exit the war until it was sure that the economy was safe because enough new industry had been created to employ the Baby Boom generation.
What about the Apollo Space Program, which was going on at the same time as the Vietnam War? It began almost exactly when the war began, and ended almost exactly when it ended. It wasn't just about exploring space, which we are still doing, it was about putting people on the moon, and then bringing them back safely.
Part of it was certainly Cold War propaganda, showing what our society is capable of, just as the Soviets had detonated a fantastic hydrogen bomb in the Arctic, the Tsar Bomba, for the world to see, in 1961. But why, so many questioned, was it necessary to put humans in space? The Apollo missions, while a great success, really did not add much to our knowledge of the moon, that wasn't already known.
But, as with the Vietnam War, that was not the real objective. The Apollo program brought about a vast number of spin-off developments that were necessary to the program, from super-tough glass to powdered orange juice. The new industries which would provide new industries that would, as always, provide jobs was what the U.S. Government was really after. The program itself provided a lot of jobs and made use of the knowledge that the veterans returning from the Second World War, and going to college by way of the G.I. Bill, had gained.
The process worked so well that Ronald Reagan repeated it in the 1980s. The Iran Hostage Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were used to justify a drastic increase in military spending. Instead of the Apollo Space Program, the Reagan era had a high-tech missile defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative, STI popularly known as "Star Wars", to bring about spin-off industries.
Finally the development of new industries, that would provide millions of jobs, paid off. The development of the personal computer industry, with widespread use of the internet, along with the mobile phone and then smartphone industries seem to have created enough jobs to have alleviated the need for creation of jobs by way of military spending. Demographics have also helped, there is no bulge in the population which brought millions of Baby Boomers suddenly into the job market.
Remember that a modern economy is a never-ending race to develop new industries to find something for workers to do, who have otherwise been made redundant by the never-ending progress that has drastically reduced the number of workers that are needed, first in agriculture and then in industry.
Factory workers in the postwar period were much better-paid than before. In fact they were being paid more than their labor, according to the economic laws of supply and demand, was really worth. This led to inflation, which was a word that was very often heard in the postwar period. How much of a coincidence can it be that inflation peaked in the U.S. in 1979, and the number of people working in industry also peaked in 1979?
But remember, once again, that the Economic Crash of 1929, which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, was brought about by workers not being paid enough. They could not afford to buy the fantastic number of goods that the factories were producing, and those goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into the devastating crash.
Postwar America somewhat over-compensated, by paying factory workers too much, which led to inflation. But that was preferable to the millions of unemployed in the 1930s.
Why do you suppose that Americans, unlike every other western country, do not have automatic health care coverage? The country spends about twice as much per person on health care than countries like Canada, but ends up with a lower life expectancy. Surely the health care industry could be made more efficient.
But, in economics, efficiency is not always a good thing. It is efficiency, and the people that it put out of work, that brought about the Economic Crash of 1929. Heath care is big business, and if it was suddenly too "efficient" it might mean millions of people out of work.
To understand postwar America, as well as it's controversial war in Vietnam, we have to understand the long shadow of the Great Depression.
18) THE REAL STORY OF HUE
In early 1968 the Communist side in the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese regular Army and the Viet Cong, a guerrilla force in South Vietnam, launched a major military offensive against targets across U.S. ally South Vietnam. It was called the Tet Offensive because it coincided with the Vietnamese holiday of that name.
Militarily, the Tet Offensive was not a success. The Communists suffered heavy losses and the combat only continued for long in one place. The greatest effect of the offensive was that it turned the American public more against the war.
The one place that extended combat took place in during the Tet Offensive was also the largest single land battle of the war for the U.S. It was the city of Hue, pronounced like "Hway", in the middle latitudes of the country. The Communists were eventually dislodged, and the city recaptured, but the combat destroyed most of the Imperial City of Hue, in which the Communists had set up fortified positions. The Imperial City was intensely bombed and shelled by the U.S. forces. That is what I want to write about here because we should take a closer look at this.
Why would the Communist offensive, which struck all across South Vietnam, focus so particularly on Hue? The most important U.S. base was at Da Nang, south of Hue. The major base near the border between North and South Vietnam was at Khe Sanh. The population center of South Vietnam was Saigon. These were attacked as well, the objective was to bring about an uprising in South Vietnam against the government and their U.S. allies.
It just does not seem to make sense that Hue would be such an important target, even though it was fairly close to the border between North and South Vietnam. It did not have the military presence, political importance or population of the above targets. Yet it was clearly the focus of the Tet Offensive.
I can see the answer but we have to delve into the history of Vietnam. The Imperial City at Hue, which was devastated by the combat, had been the capital of Vietnam. Hanoi was the capital of Communist North Vietnam and had been the capital of Vietnam for most of the time since it's founding a millennium ago, except during the time that the Nguyen Dynasty ( The very common Vietnamese name "Nguyen" is pronounced like "Na-wen") had it's capital at Hue.
The Nguyen Dynasty started as the Nguyen Lords, ruling only southern Vietnam. Northern Vietnam was ruled by the rival Trinh Lords. There was a long Seventeenth-Century civil war between the two, of which the Twentieth-Century war between North and South Vietnam can be considered as a reenactment. But the Nguyen Dynasty eventually ruled all of Vietnam, including the north, from their Imperial City at Hue. They ruled from 1802-1945.
The president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem who had been assassinated in 1963 after an unsuccessful coup attempt against him the year before, had been of the Nguyen Dynasty. Emperor Bao Dai, who had been deposed by Ngo Dinh Diem, then his appointed prime minister, was also from Nguyen Dynasty, to which the Communists were opposed, and which had ruled from the Imperial City at Hue.
So what this means is that, while the Imperial City was important to Vietnamese history, it was more important to the south of the country than to the north. It was from where the Nguyen Lords of the south had managed to extend their rule over the north as well, ruling as the Nguyen Dynasty. Vietnam was divided again and the Communists now ruled the north. The southern elite with which they were now at war had their roots in the Nguyen Dynasty, which had ruled from the Imperial City at Hue.
The Communists knew that the Imperial City was important to the people of the south, but to them it represented being ruled by a southern dynasty and having their capital of Hanoi being displaced as capital of the country by this Imperial City.
So if the Communists wanted to inspire an uprising against the Government of South Vietnam and their American allies, what might they do? The Communists were an effective guerrilla and combat force, but the U.S. had the advantage in large-scale firepower such as artillery and the Communists were effectively without an air force. But maybe there was a way for the Communists to use their enemies' advantages against them.
They came up with a plan. What if they could lure U.S. forces into bombing the Imperial City of Hue into ruins?
They didn't really care about it themselves but they knew that the people of South Vietnam did. That would show the people of South Vietnam how little their government, which was already beyond legendary for it's corruption, really cared about the country and it's history. Wouldn't all of Vietnam be much better off being ruled by the Communists, who would never think of bombing such a historical site as this?
Why else would the city of Hue, and it's historic Imperial City, be the focal point of the Tet Offensive? The Communists sent a strong force to hold the Imperial City so that U.S. forces decided to devastate it with bombs and naval guns, and that was exactly what the Communists wanted them to do.
It was a tactic intended to turn the South Vietnamese people against their government and it's American ally. The Imperial City wasn't strategically or tactically important at all, but it was historically very important. Then, after victory, the Communists could rebuild something dedicated to their triumph on the site, just as they had razed Diem's damaged former palace in Saigon and built the Reunification Palace after the end of the war.
19) THE VIENNA CAFE SCENE
Vienna is known for it's cafes. These are not just the cafes where one can stop for lunch that are found everywhere. The cafes of Vienna have a history of being hubs of conversation that brings about changes in the world.
The most famous cafe in the world today is probably the Cafe Riche, in Cairo. In many countries, discussions in cafes are where political movements get started. Governments try to monitor the conversation in such cafes, wary that the topic of discussion will turn to overthrowing the government.
Vienna doesn't seem to have a single cafe as well-known as the Cafe Riche. But it's cafes have long been known as a place where one can go to either read, many periodicals being available in the cafes, or to get in a discussion. Vienna is also a place where people in exile from their home countries seemed to gravitate to.
In the years before the First World War, which began in 1914, it is known that the following characters all lived in close proximity to one another, in central Vienna, and were regulars at discussions in the cafes.
Vladimir Lenin, initiator of the October Revolution of 1917 which began Communism in the Soviet Union.
Josef Stalin, ally of and successor of Lenin who would consolidate Communism in the Soviet Union and lead it during the Second World War.
Leon Trotsky, along with Lenin and Stalin one of the three founders of Communism in the Soviet Union after the Romanov Dynasty was overthrown.
Josef Broz Tito, a young autoworker who would lead the Communist Party in the new nation of Yugoslavia which would be founded from territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the end of the First World War.
Adolf Hitler, a young painter and native of Austria who was trying unsuccessfully to be admitted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis who, unlike the others listed here, was already known at the time.
Theodor Herzl, the Jewish founder of modern Zionism which was the movement that ultimately got the nation of Israel reestablished in Palestine.
Ironically, within walking distance lived the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, the long-reigning Franz Joseph and his nephew and heir-apparent, Franz Ferdinand. It would be the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand that would bring about the First World War. This, or the even worse war that resulted from and followed it, would be what brought all of the above, with the exception of Freud, to their ultimate destinies.
The big question about this era in the cafes of Vienna is what meetings and acquaintances might have taken place between these not-yet-famous characters who all, at least for some period of time, lived within walking distances of one another?
The only meeting to have taken place between any of the above, that is known with certainty, is between Trotsky and Stalin, who actually came to Vienna to see Trotsky.
Vienna was not where the meeting to determine the course of Communism took place between Lenin, Stalin and, Trotsky. That took place in a church in London in 1907, as we saw in the posting on this blog "Happy St. George's Day". There is was decided that the course of coming to power had to be violent revolution, not a peaceful process. Ten years after this meeting came the October Revolution of 1917.
An intriguing possibility involves chess. One Vienna cafe, then known as the Cafe Central, was also a haven for chess players. There is a persistent story that Hitler and Lenin played chess in 1909. A lot of information online states that both were avid chess players. One source claims that Lenin and Hitler were among the best players in Europe.
Lenin was 19 years older than Hitler and would never see who Hitler was. Lenin died before Hitler became known. Hitler, leader of the Nazis which promised security against Communism, would have no reason to make it known that he had played chess with Lenin years before.
What is interesting here is not the potential alliances that might have formed between the above cast of characters, but the rivalries. With the exception of Freud, who was not primarily a political figure, all of the above were more or less rivals of one another.
Stalin came to Vienna to see Trotsky. But, after the death of Lenin, the two would become intense rivals over the course of Communism. Trotsky would go into exile, ultimately to Mexico City, where he was found dead with an ice pick buried in his skull.
Also after the death of Lenin, Stalin would eliminate most of Lenin's "Old Bolshevik" allies. The Bolsheviks were the faction that won the 1907 debate in London about implementing violent revolution. The "Old Bolsheviks" are the ones who were Communists before the October Revolution of 1917.
Josef Broz Tito would lead the partisans of Yugoslavia against Hitler's occupation in the Second World War. Ruling Yugoslavia after the war, Tito was a Communist but not the kind of Communist that Stalin would like him to be. Tito was very independently-minded and did not submit his country to being a client state of Stalin. It was no secret that Stalin put quite a bit of effort into spying on the Yugoslav Government, and relations were chilly for quite some time.
The Zionism, the reestablishment of Israel, of Theodor Herzl would ultimately be brought about by the Holocaust inflicted by his former Vienna neighbor, Adolf Hitler.
As for Stalin and Hitler, who very likely saw each other or even met in Vienna, they would engage in the greatest conflict that the world has ever seen, the Eastern Front of the Second World War. But yet Hitler wrote letters to Stalin, assuring him that he had no intention whatsoever of going to war with the Soviet Union.
Then there was the great mystery of Stalin's state of denial before Hitler's invasion of his country in 1941. Even when Stalin was repeatedly given intelligence warnings like "There are three million soldiers, with hundreds of tanks and aircraft, assembling against your western border", he didn't want to believe it. When, shortly before the invasion, Nazi reconnaissance aircraft began openly flying over Soviet territory, Stalin gave orders not to shoot at them.
It seemed very much as if Stalin remembered meeting Hitler and couldn't believe that he would do any such thing.
20) THE UNIVERSITY RECRUITING DRIVE THAT REALLY CHANGED THE WORLD
A world-changing event in history really requires some analysis. It is the U.S. naval mission to Japan in 1852. It was intended to force Japan open to trade with the U.S. But there are just so many questions about it.
First, unlike European nations, the United States was not a colonial power. It opposed colonialism. The Philippines would become a quasi-colony of the U.S., after it was inherited following the Spanish-American War, but that was nearly fifty years later.
Second, Japan was an isolated and feudal country, or at least that was the way it was usually perceived, and it wanted to keep it that way. What would Japan have to trade, in 1852, that would interest the U.S.so much? It didn't have significant manufacturing of goods to export, and it wasn't known for resources that could be traded for imports. Neither was it known for spices or any specialized agricultural products, such as tea or cacao, that could be exported.
Third, as far as the situation in the U.S., this did not take place during the "Gilded Age" when there were wealthy industrialists seeking either markets, resources or, labor. That era was decades away. In 1852, the Civil War was still ahead and it was not even certain that the union would hold together. It becomes difficult to understand what sense this adventure to the other side of the world could make.
Fourth, The U.S. had just gained, by way of the Mexican War, the vast territories of the west. With all of that to be explored and settled, and all of the resources that it contained, why would the U.S. need to send this expensive mission to the other side of the world to force a feudal country open to trade? It could not be a need for laborers from Asia because there were settlers from China, which was much more populous than Japan. In 1882 a law was actually passed actually banning immigration from China.
Japan was closed because, with all of the foreign ships seen passing by, it considered outsiders as barbarians and was wary of being made into a colony. It had the historical memories of two attempted invasions by the Mongols. But it didn't want to be completely isolated. There was one thing that it had a voracious appetite for from the outside world. That one thing was knowledge.
The leaders of Japan knew that the outside world was making progress. They realized that cutting Japan off from that progress would only make it more vulnerable. There had been a policy of acquiring knowledge for quite some time, known as Rangaku. The only westerners that were allowed to land by ship were the Dutch, and they were only allowed one trip per year. Actually, there was a law that no foreign ships could land in Japan at all but an artificial island, called Dejima, was created at Nagasaki for them to land on.
The Japanese sought all the knowledge that they could get from their Dutch visitors. They had many Dutch books about science, technology and, world geography translated. The Dutch brought all manner of technical devices to Japan, from machines and clocks, to telescopes and microscopes.
As a result of this naval mission, Japan did open up and set about modernization but it would bring very wide-reaching and unexpected changes to the world.
In Japan the change would bring the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore the emperor to full power. This is known as the Meiji Restoration. Kyoto had been the capital of Japan for a thousand years but, in the sign of the new era the emperor chose to move the capital to Tokyo, where the shogunate which held the real power had been based although the emperor ruled from Kyoto, and that is why Tokyo is the great city that it is today.
Russia had the potential to be a great naval power but was hindered in that it lacked a port that was free of ice all year. Before the development of modern China, in the final years of the Qing Dynasty, Russia leased a naval base from China. But nearby Japan felt threatened by the arrangement and a naval battle ended up being fought over this location that changed the course of the world. The naval battle in 1905 between Japan and Russia, as well as a great battle on land, would bring major changes to the world.
It led to the rise of Japan as a world power. But this would put it technologically ahead of it's Asian neighbors. The Second World War in the Pacific, as well as the far-reaching changes that followed the war, would not have happened. There would have been no attack on Pearl Harbor and no dropping of atomic bombs. This battle can also be considered as the beginning of modern naval warfare.
It weakened the Romanov Dynasty in Russia, opening the way for the October Revolution to succeed twelve years later. The immediate result of this lost battle was the 1905 Revolution. It didn't topple the Romanov Dynasty but two years after that, Lenin, Stalin and, Trotsky met in London to plan the coming revolution.
Without this battle, the October Revolution likely would not have succeeded even if it had happened. This would probably have meant no Communism and the very different course of the Twentieth Century that would have brought about.
We can scarcely imagine what the world might be like today had there not been this 1905 battle that is really not well-known, and wouldn't have happened without Japan being forced open by this U.S. naval mission, after which it set about modernization. Without Germany and Austria-Hungary taking this battle as a sign of the weakness of the Romanov position, the First World War might never have happened.
Since the Second World War sprang from the First, that wouldn't have happened either. Since the development of nuclear weapons was spurred by the Second World War we might not have those, or nuclear power at all. Since it was the changes brought about by the world wars that ended the colonial era, there seems to be no reason why it wouldn't have continued until today.
The relationship between the races would be different. The white race had largely convinced the world, as well as itself, that it was the superior race. But the hideous slaughter of World War One, which almost exclusively involved the white race, began to cast doubt on that. All races have shown themselves to be capable of barbarity but this was unlike anything the world had seen before.
But that brings us back to why the forcing of Japan open in the first place was necessary or how it could really be beneficial to the U.S. The mission had been ordered by a little-known U.S. president named Millard Fillmore. He had been vice-president and became president upon the death of Zachary Taylor. He did not even get the nomination of his party for the following election. Millard Fillmore is remembered today primarily around Buffalo, where a hospital and a main avenue are named for him.
The Buffalo connection can be seen in that Commodore Matthew Perry was chosen to lead the naval mission to Japan. He was the younger brother of Oliver Hazard Perry, who was a hero of the War of 1812 in the Buffalo area and today has a housing development named for him.
The opening of Japan would likely have eventually happened in time anyway but Millard Fillmore completely changed the world by sending this mission, if only it was clearer why.
But maybe a look at what Millard Fillmore did before he became president might provide an answer. We know that while it might have been difficult to see a basis for trade with Japan that would justify the naval mission that was sent, what Japan had long sought from the outside world was knowledge. Just as soon as it was opened up by force it began sending students abroad to study, although not to America as it was by then preoccupied with it's Civil War.
Before becoming president, Millard Fillmore had founded a university. He had been the chancellor of the university, and a teacher there. The only conclusion that I can come to is that filling his university with eager Japanese students is at least a major part of the reason for this mission to Japan in 1852. That makes more sense than any other reason. It was the university recruiting drive that really changed the world.
This is Millard Fillmore's university today, the University of Buffalo known in local parlance simply as UB. There are actually two separate campuses. This is the older South Campus. There is also the larger North Campus, in Amherst NY.
There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow, ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >, After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.
21) THE WAY TO SAN JOSE
They've got a lot of space. There'll be a place where I can stay
I was born and raised in San Jose
I'm going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose"
It can pull you far away from home
With a dream in your heart you're never alone
Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away"
Do you know the way to San Jose?"
22) THE EXONERATION OF AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON
I believe there is a good chance that the kidnapping originated from with the Angelus Temple itself. The following year, 1927, Aimee Semple McPherson's own mother held a "vote of no-confidence" against her, in an attempt to try to take control of the ministry for herself. At a later date, another female minister associated with the ministry tried to remove Aimee Semple McPherson in order to take control for herself. In fact, Aimee's own daughter also conspired against her.
Being successful and popular is, unfortunately, a sure way to make enemies, often among the people that are closest.
The kidnapping certainly appears to have been timed to coincide with the former employee, Ken Ormiston, renting a cabin to spend time with his girlfriend. So it would have to have been planned by someone who would have known all about that and also that Aimee would be going swimming.
23) THE COLOSSEUM AND THE VATICAN
24) THE HOUSE OF THE REVOLUTION
25) MAYBE O.J. SIMPSON REALLY DIDN'T DO IT
26) THE NORWAY PLAN
27) THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT
41) U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THE APOCALYPSE
42) THE REAL STORY OF AUNG SAN SUU KYI
During my youth, postponing or changing plans because of car breakdowns was a regular occurrence. It was much more common to see cars broken down by the side of the road than it is now.
But then cars suddenly seemed to get much more reliable. Breakdowns now are much less common. Cars today are not so much "better", just last longer and are more reliable.
How can this possibly be?
Automakers want people to buy new cars. Buyers want their cars to last as long as possible. The trouble is that if automakers make cars that last a long time then people will buy fewer new cars.
If automakers made cars that lasted forever, they would be putting themselves out of business. The idea that they purposely make cars that will not last forever is not new. It is called "planned obsolescence".
But then came the rise of the Japanese auto industry. Japanese cars were lasting considerably longer, and breaking down less, than domestic models.
Could it be that "planned obsolescence" didn't translate into Japanese and domestic automakers had to drop that policy to stay in business?
How else could cars suddenly get so much more reliable?
That can only mean that, not only were automakers purposely not making cars as reliable as they could be but also, at some level, there must have been collusion among automakers that were supposed to be competing with each other to bring about better cars.
44) THE MCDONALD'S CLUSTER
No, The McDonald's Cluster is not a new item on the menu.
McDonald's is known for it's supreme sense of location. A McDonald's restaurant might be in place for nearly a century. So, having the resources of one of the few largest corporations in the world, it makes sense to spare no expense to get absolutely the best available location for each restaurant.
In the area where I live, there is a pattern that just jumps out at me. McDonald's and Burger Kings exist in pairs, always with roughly a kilometer between them. There are several such pairs.
This could not be a coincidence. It seems to me that Burger King is letting McDonald's, which came first, "do it's homework" for it, as far as choosing a location, and then locating about a kilometer away.
The next pattern that becomes apparent involves Tim Horton's. It is certainly no coincidence how often a Tim Horton's, a newcomer compared with McDonald's and Burger King, is located close to a McDonald's.
While Burger King's strategy seems to be, aside from competing with McDonald's on quality, to locate about a kilometer away so that half of McDonald's customers might choose Burger King simply because it is closer, Tim Horton's seems to be trying to locate as close as possible to McDonald's, and then top it on quality and nutrition.
Wendy's may have one strategy based on quality, locating near McDonald's and Burger Kings and then topping them on quality, and another based on location, locating away from McDonald's and Burger Kings especially near highway exits.
McDonald's has defined fast food. Many people, for several generations, had their first job at a McDonald's. Doesn't it make sense that it should also define business districts?
In a way, the gold standard of a business district is the famed "golden arches" of McDonald's. But I thought it should have a name. This also includes independent businesses and smaller chains that are influenced in their decision on location by a McDonald's.
45) THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT ZIA
A recent visit on this blog was to Pakistan. It reminds me of something that will not go away. It is a thought about the assassination of former president Zia.
Pakistani President Muhammad Zia ul Haq boarded a C-130 after witnessing a demonstration of a tank that his army was thinking of buying. The date was August 17, 1988. Shortly after takeoff contact was lost with the plane. It was seen flying erratically until it crashed into the ground, killing all on board. There was no sign of an explosion before the plane crashed.
Zia was Pakistan's president. The country has since switched to the parliamentary system and is led by a prime minister.
The C-130 was in service with the Pakistani Air Force but had been made in the U.S. The U.S. conclusion was that the crash had been caused by mechanical issues. This explanation is not widely believed because the plane was seen flying erratically for a period of time before crashing and this does not explain why radio contact was also lost.
Since there was no sign of a bomb or explosion, nor disintegration of the aircraft before striking the ground, the most widely-believed explanation for the crash is that a chemical agent disabled the crew. They could neither pilot the plane nor call for help.
Endless speculation has been written about who was behind the assassination. Pakistan was, at the time, a U.S. ally during the Soviet war in neighboring Afghanistan. But attacking aircraft in this manner was not a usual tactic in the Afghan war and assassinating Zia would not end Pakistani support of the Mujahedin in the war.
There is the story of a Pakistani general, who happened to become the next Chief of Staff, that was supposed to fly back to Islamabad on the same plane as Zia, but changed his plans at the last minute and flew on another plane.
The trouble with that, aside from being too obvious, is that top members of Pakistan's military had been killed on the plane as well. Sabotaging the plane would make plenty of enemies in the military for whoever was behind it.
Zia had been promoted to Army Chief of Staff by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He then overthrew Bhutto and took his place as president. Bhutto was later executed. Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, would later lead the country herself until she was assassinated following a return from exile.
Supposing that Bhutto supporters were behind Zia's assassination is problematic because first, many top military personnel of the country were also killed. Second, Bhutto had been a U.S. ally and the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan was also killed. Third, while Pakistan does have somewhat of a tumultuous political history, attacks on aircraft like this were not part of that history.
Two things are very clear. Whoever was behind this was very skilled in attacking aircraft, and they were fine with killing Americans. Pakistan's intelligence agency concluded that a "foreign power" was involved, but didn't give any names.
Here is what I would like to add. I do not have any kind of proof. I just want to add a direction to the assassination that I have never seen written about.
Pakistani military forces have been stationed in the Middle East, although have never been in combat with Israel. In the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Pakistani special forces were engaged in the recapture of the mosque.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, during which Israel captured the West Bank and the original city of Jerusalem, many Palestinians moved eastward into Jordan. The Palestinians outnumbered the native Jordanians.
The Palestinians launched attacks against Israel without consulting with the Jordanian Government. In 1970 this led to what is known as the Dawson Field Hijackings. Four planes were hijacked and brought to Jordan. The passengers were released and the global press invited. Then, with the attention of the world's press, the four planes were destroyed by explosives.
We saw the Dawson Field Hijackings in the section of this posting, 8) INSIGHT INTO 9 / 11.
Following this the Government of Jordan, led by the well-known King Hussein, felt that it had no choice but to take back control of the country. This was especially because some of the Palestinians were openly calling for the overthrown of King Hussein.
The Jordanian Royal Family was recently in the news due to internal turmoil. We visited it in the visit on this blog, "Jordan And The Hashemites" January 2021.
This September 1970 conflict is referred to as the Jordanian Civil War or as "Black September". As it turns out Muhammad Zia ul-Haq was a general in Pakistan's Army who was stationed in Jordan at the time. Zia was instrumental in helping King Hussein to defeat the Palestinians, and take back control of the country.
After the conflict the organisation called "Black September" was formed to get revenge on the Jordanian Government. It assassinated the Prime Minister of Jordan. There had been earlier assassination attempts on King Hussein.
Black September also turned to attacking Israel and is best-known for the hostage-taking of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
So my reasoning is that if an organization like Black September was formed to strike back at members of the Jordanian Government in retaliation for the war that it launched against them, and if the military leadership of Zia was so important to the conduct of that war, then isn't it logical to presume that Zia would be a target as well?
Attacking aircraft was a hallmark of organizations like Black September. There was the Dawson Field Hijackings, and any number of other attacks on aircraft. Yet I have never seen this avenue explored in the assassination.
46) AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS
Has anyone noticed what a fantastic success America's "War on Drugs" has been? Although it has not succeeded in eliminating drugs it has been very successful in another way.
The "War on Drugs" is generally credited to Republican president Richard Nixon, who announced it in 1971. It proscribed long prison terms for possession or use of even small amounts of illegal drugs.
In New York State this was followed by the passing of the notorious "Rockefeller Drug Laws", named for Republican former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. These laws had penalties that were even harsher than the national laws, very long prison terms. I can remember from childhood the announcements on television that the harsh new laws are soon to take effect and drug users should seek help immediately.
In the U.S. convicted prisoners are not allowed to vote.
What I find so interesting is that virtually all of the many people who have been given long prison terms under these drug laws are from the population demographic that almost always votes Democrat. The Democrats are the political rivals of the Republicans who made the harsh drug laws.
In other words, America's Republicans have succeeded in taking millions of people who would vote against them and locked them away in prison where they can't vote. This is absolutely brilliant. We can definitely be sure that the "War on Drugs", while not succeeding at actually eliminating drugs, has meant many more Republicans in office, and more political power to Republicans, than there would have been otherwise. In this regard it has been a brilliant success, as the Republicans' war against people who would vote against them.
On another issue, what about guns? A central tenet of Republicans is the right to gun ownership, even though so many Americans are killed or wounded by gun violence every year.
But what is significant is that the vast majority of American victims of gun violence are of the population demographic that would vote Democrat. People who have been injured by being wounded will be less likely to get out and vote.
Republicans tend to favor having the death penalty, capital punishment. But once again virtually everyone who is put to death is of the population demographic that would vote against the Republicans.
I am not claiming that the Jehovah's Witnesses are a creation of Republicans. But the group is one of the best things that have ever happened to Republicans and conservatives. Jehovah's Witnesses do not get involved in politics, neither voting nor running for public office.
What this amounts to is taking people of the population demographic that would ordinarily vote Democrat, of which almost all Jehovah's Witnesses are, and telling them not to vote. Republicans and conservatives should absolutely adore the Jehovah's Witnesses.
America's Republicans are absolutely brilliant at gaining and holding on to office.
47) RONALD REAGAN AND THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS
Here is something that is just a little bit spooky.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian demonstrators seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. After some of the staff were released, 52 hostages were held. The demand was that the former Shah, who had recently entered the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran to face trial.
The hostage crisis would go on for 444 days. The event that triggered their ultimate release was the beginning of war between Iran and neighboring Iraq. With Iran actually being invaded the hostages were no longer needed as a rallying point for the revolution and those guarding the hostages were needed at the battlefront.
The Iran Hostage Crisis is almost universally believed to be what ruined the chances of reelection for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He was defeated in the 1980 election by Ronald Reagan.
But if the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War was the catalyst for the release of the hostages, the mystery is why it took another four months for them to be released. The war began on September 22, 1980 and the hostages were released on January 20, 1981. The hostages were no longer needed as a rallying point and their guards were needed at the battlefront.
As it turns out the hostages were released right on America's Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981,. Almost as soon as new president Ronald Reagan had finished his inauguration speech came the announcement from Iran that the hostages were being released. Algeria had been mediating the crisis and the hostages were flown from Tehran on Algerian planes.
This aroused the suspicion of many people. The Iran-Iraq War began on September 22. America's election day, November 7, was well over a month away. But if the hostages were released before election day it would likely have saved the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The suspicion was that Ronald Reagan's people had somehow made a deal with those holding the hostages to hold them, not only until after election day but until after Reagan's Inauguration, to be sure that Jimmy Carter's Democrats didn't get any credit for getting them released.
The U.S. Congress conducted an investigation but didn't find anything to substantiate the suspicions.
But then the next thing we know the Reagan Administration was found to be secretly selling weapons to Iran, for use in it's long war with Iraq, and using the profits to assist the Contras in Nicaragua.
Doesn't it look like Reagan's people made a deal with the Iranians holding the hostages to keep them until after Reagan's Inauguration, and then Reagan would sell urgently-needed weapons to Iran for it's war with Iraq? During the time of the Shah America had supplied weapons to Iran and, now that diplomatic relations had been broken by the Hostage Crisis, Iran was short of weapons when the unexpected war with Iraq began.
Some might think that maybe the Iranians were mad at Jimmy Carter's Democrats, for allowing the exiled Shah into the country, but not Reagan's Republicans, and that is why the hostages were held until Reagan actually took office on Inauguration Day.
But that doesn't make sense because it was in the news that Jimmy Carter actually didn't want to admit the Shah to the U.S. for cancer treatment, thinking correctly that it would mean trouble. It was the Republicans who insisted that America must not abandon an "old friend", and got the Shah admitted. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized soon afterward.
If there was a secret alliance between the Reagan Administration and Iran it didn't last. In 1987 there were naval clashes between the two in the Persian Gulf.
But the scenario we have discussed here is just a little bit spooky, and still seems so after more than forty years.
For more about this general time and series of events remember the posting on this blog, "When The Last Forty Years Began". Here is a link to it:
https://www.markmeeksideas.blogspot.com/2018/09/when-last-forty-years-began.html?m=0
48) THE REAL STORY OF AMERICA'S ELECTRIC CHAIR
This is a story that is connected to the area where this blog is being written.
Countries that execute people have come up with some novel ways of getting it done. America's contribution to execution is the electric chair. The condemned person is strapped in a wooden chair, electrodes are attached to them, and they are killed by a high-voltage alternating current.
They are killed by an alternating current, rather than a direct current, and that is the part that is interesting.
A direct electric current is, as the name implies, a current that continuously flows from a negative to a positive terminal. Electricity is the flow of electrons, and always moves from a negative to a positive terminal, but in some circuits each of the two terminals alternates between being negative and positive.
This means that the current flows first in one direction, and then the other. This is known as alternating current. Whether alternating or direct current is produced depends on how a generator is wired. Magnetism is related to electricity and a current is generated by spinning a magnet or electromagnet inside a coil of wire. A generator that produces alternating current is known as an alternator. A battery always produces direct current.
Alternating current is abbreviated as AC, direct current as DC.
(Note-Have you ever wondered what the difference is between "electric" and "electronic"? I could find no satisfactory answer. My conclusion is that if the direction of the current doesn't make a difference, as in a light bulb, the device is electric. If the direction of current does make a difference, as in a transistor, the device is electronic).
Alternating current has one great advantage over direct current. A transformer will work effectively with alternating current, but not with direct current.
An electrical transformer is a soft iron core with two coils of electric wire wrapped around it. When an alternating electric current is passed through one of the coils a current of equal power is generated in the second coil.
(Note-The designation of electric charges is entirely arbitrary. We could just as easily define electrons as having a positive charge. The trouble is that the + and - signs also mean add and subtract. An atom that loses an electron thus now has a positive charge and one that gains an electron has a negative charge. It sounds like it doesn't make sense. Why don't we call the charge on an electron a positive charge)?
There is a possible disadvantage to alternating current. An alternating current must have a certain number of cycles per second, or hertz. If different countries generate current with different numbers of cycles per second then electrical equipment manufactured in one country may not work on the electricity of another country. As far as I can see all countries today use either 50 or 60 hertz.
Electrical power consists of a combination of the number of electrons moving in the current and the pressure pushing those electrons. The moving electrons is known as the current, and is measured in amperes. The pressure behind those electrons is the voltage, and is measured in volts. The total power of the current is defined as amperes x volts, and is measured in watts. One watt is one volt pushing one ampere.
It is a little bit more complex to express the power in an alternating current circuit because the value of the voltage is not consistent, unlike direct current. The voltage in alternating current starts at zero, reaches a peak in the positive direction, drops back to zero, reaches a peak in the negative direction, and again drops back to zero. This is one cycle, a hertz is a cycle per second. The overall power is .707 of the peak value, this number is the square root of 1 / 2.
The reason that the voltage pressure is necessary to move electrons is that any circuit offers some innate resistance to the flow of electricity. This resistance is measured in ohms. These basic electrical units are all related. If one volt is applied to a circuit and it pushes one ampere through the circuit then we know that the resistance of the circuit must be one ohm.
E = IR is the simple algebraic equation regarding electricity. E is voltage, I is current and, R is resistance. The formula can be rearranged to give any of the three elements, I = E / R and R = E / I.
A coulomb is a certain quantity of an electrons and an ampere is defined as the flow of one coulomb per second. But the term "coulomb" is rarely used.
(Note-Just a thought. Here is something that I just don't understand. A coulomb is a quantity of electrons, specifically 6.241 x 10 (18) of them. A mole is also a quantity, 6.02 x 10 (23), usually this quantity of atoms. A mole is a very useful quantity if we measure mass in grams because a mole of any atoms or molecules will have a mass of the atomic or molecular mass in grams. An ampere is defined as the flow of one coulomb per second. Both are extremely large numbers but there is an order of magnitude of less than ten thousand between them. Since a flow of electrons comes from atoms why on earth didn't electrical scientists and chemists get together and coordination the two units? This would have been so useful. I will get back to this later).
Now here is the great advantage of alternating current. When electricity is sent through wires, there is some loss of power due to the resistance of the wires, but the loss is much less with high voltage and low current than it is with low voltage and high current, even though the power of both is the same because power (in watts) is always equal to the voltage multiplied by the current.
As we saw above an electrical transformer is a soft iron core with two coils of wire wrapped around it. A current sent through one of the coils will generate a current of equal power in the second coil. But the number of turns of wire in each coil has an effect.
If the number of turns in the primary and secondary coils are the same then the voltage and the current in the secondary circuit will be the same as in the primary circuit. If there are twice as many turns of wire in the primary coil as in the secondary, then voltage will be halved but current doubled in the secondary circuit. If there is one-third as many turns of wire in the primary coil as in the secondary, the voltage in the secondary coil will be multiplied by three but the current divided by three.
This means that, by use of such an electrical transformer, we can either "step up" or "step down" the voltage in alternating current. This makes it possible to transmit electricity a long distance over wires, since the resistance losses are much less when the voltage is high and the current is low. The current is "stepped up" to high voltage, and then stepped back down at the destination.
Direct current cannot be transformed in the same way. If we pass direct current through a coil around and iron core we will get an electromagnet. One end of the core will be the magnetic north pole and the other the south pole. The same rule applies as with the eastward rotation of the earth. If we look down at the earth's north pole, the earth is rotating counter-clockwise. In the same way if we are looking at a pole of an electromagnet and the current is flowing counter-clockwise, we are looking at the magnetic north pole.
This means that direct current cannot effectively be transmitted long distances and must be used within about 2 km of where it is generated. Direct current came first and this is what made Niagara Falls. Industries that were dependent on inexpensive electricity rushed to build factories in Niagara Falls, where the kinetic energy of falling water could be used to generate electricity.
But there were some who believed that the future of electric generation belonged to alternating current, because it could be transformed and thus transmitted long distances. Among them was a Serbian inventor named Nikola Tesla. An engineer named George Westinghouse was also a believer in the future of alternating current.
In Niagara Falls, NY, not far from where this is being written the first large-scale alternating current generating plant went online, the Adams Power Station. It successfully transmitted alternating current over a distance to Buffalo for the 1901 Pan Am Exhibition, which really popularized electricity. This exhibition is also remembered for the assassination of U.S President William McKinley.
There was quite a public battle between the proponents of alternating current, and those of direct current, over which system would predominate. It was known as the "War of the Currents".
That is where the electric chair comes in. The electric chair had earlier been invented in Buffalo. The first person to be executed by it was a Buffalo man who had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend.
Electrocution must necessarily use alternating current, since it requires high voltage and electricity from a distance. The electric chair is, honestly, a bizarre and sometimes messy way to execute people. It became so widespread because it became a focal point in the "War of the Currents".
Some in the direct current camp, led by the famed electrical inventor Thomas Edison, had an interest in people being executed in the electric chair, which had to use alternating current. They did their best to portray alternating current as barbaric and evil. That is the real story behind the electric chair, and what led it to become a common method of execution.
49) THE BUFFALO NY CONNECTION TO WATERGATE
Here is something that I have never seen written about either the city of Buffalo, NY or the Watergate scandal. It is the connection between the two.
Watergate is the seismic scandal named for the building, in Washington D.C., where it began. It was 1972 and there would be a presidential election in a few months. The incumbent president, Republican Richard Nixon, would be running against the Democrat candidate, George McGovern.
On June 17, burglars from the Committee to Reelect President Nixon entered the Democrat National Committee headquarters, in the Watergate Office Building, and got caught. My understanding is that they were looking for evidence that the Democrats were receiving help or funding from Communist Cuba.
What was so significant is not so much this failed burglary but the Republican efforts to cover up knowing about it or having ordered it. The investigation would lead all the way up to President Nixon, who had easily won reelection. Watergate utterly dominated U.S. news for two years until, finally, Nixon made his shocking resignation speech live on national television.
I, having just entered my teens, was watching Nixon's surprise resignation speech. There was national upheaval and confusion. A president had never resigned before and no one was sure what to expect.
Nixon had appointed Gerald Ford as vice-president only a short time before, after Spiro Agnew had resigned over a tax-evasion investigation against him. Most Americans, not to mention those in other countries, knew little about the new president and how he would handle the job.
Watergate was, in a way, the fulfillment of the anti-establishment counterculture of the 1960s. Those who claimed that the establishment couldn't be trusted had been proven right.
The thing that was so utterly ridiculous about the Watergate burglary is that Nixon won reelection in 1972 in an easy landslide, without any help from anything that might have been found in the burglary. The only U.S. state that McGovern won was the Democrat bastion of Massachusetts. It was like a sports team being ahead 49-1, cheating just to make absolutely sure that they would win, and then getting disqualified for cheating.
The Cold War was going on and Watergate certainly shook the world order. Nixon had achieved peace in Vietnam, although it was only a truce that many didn't expect to last. The Communists, seeing America distracted by Watergate and gambling that it wouldn't get reinvolved in the war, launched the final offensive that would bring an end to U.S. ally South Vietnam.
Although the convulsion raised doubts about America's reliability as an ally and a democracy, Watergate also had it's positive side. It showed that in America no one is above the law, not even the president. The U.S. President has to follow the same laws as everyone else. It was impressive how quickly America moved past Watergate, pretty soon it was old news and few people were talking about it. Convulsions like this are common in the world, but usually include explosions, bullets and, blood. America got through this with no bloodshed.
Nixon wasn't entirely bad. He was moderate for a Republican, continuing the social programs of 1960s, and did the right thing by taking America off the gold standard. He visited China and the Soviet Union, opening diplomatic relations with China. After the Communist victory in Vietnam Kim Il Sung reportedly wanted to restart the Korean War. But this time, after getting to know Nixon, neither China nor the Soviet Union was supportive.
But where did the idea for the Watergate burglary come from? My conclusion is that it can be traced to Buffalo, NY. This is something that I have never seen before.
In August 1971 Vietnam War opponents in Buffalo entered the main post office, while it was open, and hid upstairs in an empty room. They had the necessary tools taped to their bodies (credit-USA Today November 24, 2016). In the days before the internet became widespread this is where the records were stored of young men who were eligible to be drafted and sent to the war. They were going to steal those records so that no more men from Buffalo would be drafted.
Five of the burglars were caught and went on trial the following year. They became known as "The Buffalo Five", or simply "The Buffalo". The case got national attention and they were found guilty.
The judge in the case was the notable federal judge, John T. Curtin, who was known for his liberal views. Instead of sending them to prison Judge Curtin suspended their sentences and gave them a year of probation. This was national news and it thrilled some people while enraging others.
This was in the national news on May 20, 1972. Judge John Curtin would later affirm me in as a U.S. citizen. I still have the booklet that he gave me.
Exactly four weeks after the verdict was in the national news a strikingly similar burglary took place, in Washington D.C. It was the Watergate burglary.
Just as with the Buffalo Five it was five burglars who entered the Watergate Building. Just as in Buffalo they entered the building when it was open so that they could do what they had to do when it was closed. Just as in Buffalo the operation involved tape. The Buffalo Five taped the necessary tools to their bodies. The Watergate burglars used tape over the door latches that could be opened from the inside, but not the outside.
It was this taping of door latches that got the Watergate burglars caught. A security guard notice tape over a door latch and removed it. But when he passed the door again on his rounds, someone had put the tape back. The guard called police and the burglars were caught.
I find it impossible to believe that the Watergate burglary was not inspired by events in Buffalo.
The main Buffalo Post Office where this took place when a new central postal facility was built on William Street. The building where it took place is now the City Campus of Erie Community College. Has anyone who attended ECC ever thought about how historic the City Campus building is? Events there inspired other events that had a monumental effect on the world.
50) THE UNDERLYING STORY OF NEW YORK STATE'S GREAT PRISON ESCAPE
There is a side to New York State's great prison escape that I did not see anywhere in the news.
In the late 1970s efforts were being made to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and testing. U.S. President Jimmy Carter promoted a treaty signed by many nations limiting nuclear testing. A system of satellites was put in orbit that could detect nuclear tests. The primary reason behind nuclear tests is not to verify that the weapons work but to miniaturize and improve them.
On September 22, 1979, a brilliant flash was detected in the southern ocean, about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica, that was consistent with a nuclear test. No nation had announced that it would be testing in that area and no one claimed responsibility for a test. The U.S. investigated but found a lack of the radioactivity that can usually be detected after a nuclear test.
There was actually a window of opportunity to conduct a test in this location when none of the VELA satellites would be able to detect it, and it seems clear that whichever power conducted the test knew this. But as it turned out there was an officially retired satellite that was still collecting data, and that was the one that detected the flash. (Source-Wikipedia)
It was a minor nuclear explosion, only a few kilotons. Most nuclear tests, by nations other than the superpowers, are done openly so that the world knows that this nation has the bomb. It soon became the presumption that this had been a joint nuclear test between South Africa and Israel, which were close allies at the time.
It is true that Israel has nowhere to safety conduct a nuclear test in it's own neighborhood, and keeping a nuclear detonation a secret there would be absolutely impossible. But Israel is widely believed to have possessed nuclear technology since the 1950s, why did it suddenly decide to conduct a test in 1979, and why was it so important to keep it a secret when non-superpower nuclear powers inevitably want everyone to know that they have the bomb?
1979 was, of course, when the Iranian Revolution happened. Israel had been in the 1967 Six-Day War with neighboring countries. Six years later, in 1973, there was the Yom Kippur War. In 1979 it was six years after that and it might have seemed about time for another war.
We read a lot about the hostility between Iran and Israel today, but that was not true at the time of this nuclear test. The Iranian Revolution was far from complete. That Ayatollah Khomeini would consolidate his power over Iran was by no means certain. There was other facets to the revolution such as the Communists. It was not even certain at the time that the exiled Shah wouldn't be able to return to power someday.
At the time of this nuclear test the world had a "wait-and-see" attitude toward the Iranian Revolution. No one knew exactly how it would turn out and the test took place six weeks before revolutionaries seized the staff of the U.S. Embassy as hostages. Israel had been in plenty of danger before without, as is known for certain, testing a nuclear bomb.
There has been a Jewish community in Iran ever since the Persian Empire conquered Babylon and freed the Jews that the Babylonians had taken captive. Ayatollah Khomeini actually met with members of the Jewish community and praised Moses. Israel clandestinely supported Iran in it's war with Iraq during the 1980s. Iranian hostility against Jews and Israel would come later, but that would be well after the time of this nuclear test.
If Israel conducted such a test today we might presume that it was in preparation for a conflict with Hezbollah, which is an Iranian ally that has engaged in a lot of conflict with Israel. But this was years before Hezbollah was formed.
It thus makes no sense that the Iranian Revolution was the reason for this nuclear test.
Another major event occurred in 1979, although it got a lot less attention than the Iranian Revolution. It took place closer to Israel. What happened is that Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq. Although he had already been the real power in the country for several years he officially took power on July 16.
Iraq had been in three wars with Israel, in 1948, 1967 and, 1973. It had a minor role in the 1967 war but a much larger role in 1973.
Upon taking uncontested power in Iraq Saddam Hussein immediately showed how radical he was. Saddam presided over a purge of his own political party, in which dozens were executed. Iraq maintained a large army with many Soviet-made tanks.
There was a Syrian and an Iraqi branch of Saddam's Baath Party. The purge was against those who favored a union between the two countries, as Saddam split from the Syrian branch. The father of the present embattled president of Syria, Bashar Assad, was an arch-rival of Saddam Hussein, and supported Iran in it's war with Iraq. This alliance continued thirty years later when Hezbollah, Iran's ally in Lebanon, helped Bashar Assad during Syria's civil war.
This purge took place in July of 1979, the nuclear test came on September 22.
Due to the apparent low yield of the nuclear test, and the lack of radioactivity detected afterward, it has been suggested that it was a test of a neutron bomb. A neutron bomb was a tactical, rather than a strategic, nuclear weapon that was designed for use on the battlefield, rather than against a city.
As the name implies a neutron bomb strikes by unleashing a deadly burst of neutrons, rather than by the force of an explosion. This was believed to be especially useful against tanks, since neutrons can penetrate thick armor.
Just as neutrons hold the nucleus of an atom together, against the mutual repulsion of the positively-charged protons, so a neutron must also be held together by being part of a nucleus. A neutron by itself will break down into a proton and an electron, in an average of about fifteen minutes. But neutrons, propelled at high speed, last long enough to do their damage in neutron bombs, or to bring about nuclear fission.
Saddam Hussein would turn his aggressive designs to the east, against neighbor Iran. Seeing Iraq's traditional rival cut off from it's major ally, the U.S., and certainly worried that Iran's revolution would incite his own majority Shiite population, Saddam launched a military offensive against Iran, after months of sporadic border clashes and apparently hoping that Iran's oil-rich and Arab-majority Khuzestan province would rise up and join him.
Consider the tank force that Saddam Hussein sent against Iran in 1980. This is what the Israeli defense establishment was thinking about having to confront, after Saddam officially became president of Iraq, and the reason for the neutron bomb test because neutron bombs were developed for use against tanks.
In 1981, while Iraq and Iran were at war, Israel surprised the world by launching an air raid that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. In 1990, during the First Gulf War, Iraq rained Scud missiles on Israel, hoping to provoke Israel to enter the conflict.
(Note-We have seen this Israeli air raid on Osirak in the compound posting, "Investigations" December 2018, in section 2) THE REAL STORY OF OSIRAK. My belief is that the raid was also a warning to Iran, although Israel certainly considered Iraq as the greater threat. Iran had earlier bombed this Iraqi reactor but had not succeeded in seriously damaging it. Iran had pulled off one of the most brilliant aerial operations in history, ironically using American planes, in an attack on airfields far on the other side of Iraq, known as H3, but that showed Iran to certainly be capable of striking Israel).
Look how closely similar the reaction times are. It was 64 days from when Iran conducted the aerial mission against H3 to when Israel conducted their aerial mission against Osirak. It had been 68 days from when Saddam Hussein officially took power in Iraq to this nuclear test in the southern ocean.
Ironically Saddam's tank offensive that was the beginning of full-scale war between Iraq and Iran began on September 22, 1980, exactly one year after the nuclear test.
Has anyone ever thought about how ironic the timing of the Iran Hostage Crisis was? The hostages were taken on November 4, 1979, which was exactly one year before the next U.S. presidential election. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, which is the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated after winning that election. The hostages were released shortly after the inauguration ceremony.
One good thing to emerge from the satellite program to detect nuclear testing is that it discovered the Gamma Ray Bursts that were taking place in space. Gamma Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosions known, far more powerful than a supernova. An average of about one Gamma Ray Burst per day seems to take place somewhere in the universe. My cosmology theory explains Gamma Ray Bursts but I won't get into it here.
Kennedy was being driven through Dallas in an open convertible, waving to the crowds who had lined the streets to see the popular president. The motorcade had just passed the building where school textbooks were stored and was proceeding down a slope when three rifle shots were fired from the sixth floor of the building. One shot missed, one hit both the governor of Texas and Kennedy, and then the fatal shot struck Kennedy in the head. At that point there was grass on both sides of the road, known as the "grassy knoll".
Oswald, an employee of the school textbook building, almost escaped but the owner of a shoe store, having heard about the assassination on the radio, noticed a suspicious man duck into his store as a police car went past, and then go into a nearby theater. After assassinating Kennedy, Oswald had shot and killed a police officer who attempted to question him.
I am certain that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone with regard to the actual shooting. Those stories about a "second gunman", whether on the "grassy knoll" or in the school textbook building from where Oswald fired the shots, have been thoroughly debunked. The supposed sound of gunshots in the background on an audio recording has also been explained.
Communist countries inevitably come into play in virtually any Kennedy assassination theory. Oswald had earlier defected to the Soviet Union before changing his mind and returning to the U.S., bringing his Soviet wife with him. Before the assassination Oswald had visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City. There was a very anti-Communist, particularly anti-Cuba, mentality at the time in the U.S.
When I landed in the U.S. people were still talking about this assassination. Some other children at school told me "Everybody knows that the Mafia did it".
There is a theory that the Italian Mafia was behind the Kennedy Assassination but it was because his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had started an extensive campaign against organized crime, and not because of any foreign connections. In this theory Oswald's earlier defection to the Soviet Union would make it appear that Communists were behind it.
There were two groups of people for whom Fidel Castro's 1958 overthrow of the Cuban Government had been catastrophic. These were the anti-Castro Cuban exiles and the Italian Mafia.
Cuba, before Castro's revolution, had been a playground for the Mafia. The leader of the country, Fulgencio Batista, had been a close associate of theirs. If ever the Mafia had their own country it wasn't Italy or the United States, it was Cuba in the 1940s and 50s. In 1946 a great meeting of Mafia leaders was held in Havana. The location was absolutely ideal, close to America but beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. The Mafia had a vast amount of money invested in all kinds of resorts and casinos. Frank Sinatra was a regular performer.
But it all came to an end with the 1958 Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro.
Not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis Lee Harvey Oswald had started an organization called the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee". He is widely believed to have been planning to move to Cuba, leaving his wife behind, and killed Kennedy so that he would be a hero in Cuba.
Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-U.S. government of Fulgencio Batista in 1958, driving many Cubans to leave for the U.S. These anti-Castro Cubans attempted to invade and liberate the country. The attempted invasion, known as the Bay of Pigs, was supported by the U.S. but ended in disaster.
Fidel Castro had visited the U.S. after coming to power in Cuba and had been very popular. But then Kennedy had demonized him, and had backed the Cuban exiles in their attempt to invade the island.
But why would Kennedy demonize Castro after he had been so popular?
Kennedy is known to have had friends in the Mafia. Before becoming president he visited Cuba and Mafia friends reportedly set up the married future president with prostitutes. ( Source- Smithsonian Magazine, "When The Mob Owned Cuba"). It was known that Kennedy was less than saintly in his private life but his indiscretions were with high-class women, the likes of Marilyn Monroe. These encounters, while married, with common prostitutes could be very damaging.
Is this why the Mafia set him up with prostitutes? Knowing his lustful ways and that he might be president someday, this gave the Mafia something to hold over Kennedy. At least to some extent he would have to do their bidding.
In 1963 the Cuban exiles in the U.S. and the Mafia must have been very disappointed. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro was firmly entrenched in power. The U.S. had supported the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, but not with it's own ground military force.
It became clear that the only way to remove the Castro government, so that the exiles and the Mafia could get their country back, was for the U.S. to actually invade Cuba. Kennedy had demonized Castro and supported the Bay of Pigs at their obvious request but, with Soviet nuclear missiles removed from the island, Cuba was no threat to the U.S. and Kennedy wasn't about to invade it, risking a world war.
But what if the exiles and the Mafia could find a pressing reason for the U.S. to invade Cuba? There was one thing that was within their power to do. What if they could have the U.S. President assassinated and make it appear that the Castro government was behind it? Kennedy had threatened to attack Cuba if the nuclear missiles were not removed.
That is where a character like Lee Harvey Oswald comes in, he described himself as a "pasty" after being arrested. He had earlier learned to speak Russian before defecting to the Soviet Union. But I cannot see that he spoke Spanish or had ever been interested in Cuba.
So why did Oswald suddenly shift his attention to Cuba? Neither his founding of the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" nor his visits to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City apparently accomplished much.
Could he have undertaken those actions to make it appear that he was getting instructions from the Castro government? Could members of the Dallas Mafia, knowing of his earlier defection to the Soviet Union, have sold him on Cuba? They could have told him how hated Kennedy was in Cuba, since many members of the Mafia had been to Cuba, and that he would be a national hero there if he killed Kennedy.
Could one or more Cuban exiles have pretended to be Communists and instructed Oswald to start the committee and go to Mexico City, making no secret of the fact that he was visiting the Cuban Embassy, so that it would later look like he had been following instructions from Cuba?
The exiles must have known that, given Oswald's erratic nature and his earlier re-defection from the Soviet Union, he would likely be denied permission to move to Cuba. When Oswald returned to Dallas they would tell him that there was one sure way that Oswald could not only get into Cuba, but also be a national hero there. It was to assassinate the U.S. President, who had demonized Fidel Castro, supported the Bay of Pigs invasion, and then confronted Cuba in the missile crisis the year before.
In April 1963, seven months before the assassination of Kennedy, a shot was fired at retired General Edwin Walker, who lived in Dallas. He was sitting at his desk by a window and the single shot hit the window frame. Oswald is widely believed to have fired the shot, although not until after the Kennedy assassination. The general was known for his outspoken right-wing views, and had in fact been relieved of his command over it.
But I find this to be a little bit strange. Oswald was clearly a very good shot with a rifle. If he could hit Kennedy's head at long range then how could he miss this shot, at much shorter range? He fired two shots at Kennedy, before the fatal third, why didn't he fire again at Walker? But the bullet fired at General Walker was the same type as Oswald's rifle would use.
Maybe Oswald didn't fire this shot, even though he told his wife that he did, or did fire it but purposely didn't hit Walker. It could have been done to build Oswald's legend as a genuine anti-fascist for his future life in Cuba after the assassination of Kennedy.
The fact that an Italian-made rifle was used in the assassination is interesting. It could be a false clue to divert attention away from the Italian Mafia. It made it look like someone, probably the Cuban exiles or someone other than the Mafia who had a grudge against Kennedy, was trying to make it look like the Mafia was behind it. If the Mafia really was behind it, but trying to keep it a secret, then why would they have Oswald use an Italian rifle?
Oswald's Soviet-born wife, Marina, was well-known in the Russian community around Dallas. Cuban exiles would have heard about Oswald's earlier defection to the Soviet Union and that he liked guns. Having been in the U.S. Marines he would be a good shot with a rifle at a distance. The following year, 1964, was an election year and Kennedy was sure to campaign in Dallas. Oswald just happened to get a job in the school textbook building that Kennedy's motorcade would pass, and from where the fatal shots would be fired.
Given Oswald's pro- Castro activities and then his escape to Cuba after the assassination would make it clear that Cuban Communists were behind the killing. The U.S. would use that as a reason to invade Cuba and depose the Castro Government, the same as it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. The Cuban exiles and the Mafia would have their country back.
Fidel Castro, according to the Wikipedia article about him, thought that Kennedy had been assassinated by a right-wing conspiracy and was concerned that Cuba would be blamed for it.
But why would the Mafia choose Oswald and what exactly were they thinking? To understand that we have to go back thirty years before the assassination and when we do it all fits together perfectly. This is the clue that investigators were supposed to notice but I cant see anywhere that they did.
In 1933 Giuseppe Zangara tried to assassinate president-elect Franklin Roosevelt. That means it was after Roosevelt had been elected but before he actually took office. Zangara was a bricklayer and had immigrated from Calabria, in southern Italy. It was this assassination attempt that the Mafia was thinking of when it set Oswald up to assassinate Kennedy with an Italian-made rifle to make it look as if Castro was behind it, but set it up to look as if the Mafia was behind it, who really were behind it.
There are so many similarities between Zangara's assassination attempt on Roosevelt and Oswald's assassination of Kennedy that it could not possibly be a coincidence. Like Oswald Zangara gained marksmanship skills in the military, having served with the Italian Army in the First World War. Like Oswald Zangara was working close to the site of the assassination attempt. Like Kennedy Roosevelt had been in an open car, with another politician, when the assassination attempt took place. Kennedy had been with Texas governor John Connolly, who was wounded. Roosevelt had been with Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was killed. Oswald fired from a sixth floor window, Zangara fired standing on a chair. Like Oswald Zangara was politically leftward. His final words, before execution, was to excoriate Capitalism and express solidarity with poor people.
All of these similarities could not be a coincidence. The attempted assassination of Roosevelt took place in Miami, which has always been America's Cuban center. Since an Italian leftist had tried to assassinate FDR in Miami, it would look to those investigating the Kennedy assassination like Cuban agents had set Oswald up with an Italian rifle, and so many similarities, to assassinate Kennedy but make it look like the Mafia had been behind it. Also considering that Kennedy's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was organizing a crackdown on organized crime.
Meanwhile the Mafia would be one step ahead of everyone else. It really would be the Mafia that was behind the assassination of Kennedy. But it would look to U.S. investigators like Cuban agents were behind it, but setting it up to look like the Mafia was behind it. The U.S. would take the assassination of it's president by a foreign government as an act of war. U.S. forces would then invade Cuba, and depose the Castro government, and the Mafia would have Cuba back.
This scenario explains Jack Ruby. The most intriguing thing about the Kennedy Assassination is that Oswald was himself shot to death two days after killing Kennedy. It was announced that Oswald was being moved from one police station to another. News reporters were waiting in the parking garage of the police station. As Oswald was escorted past them, a man among the reporters pulled out a pistol and shot Oswald to death.
The shooter was Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with a criminal background who was heavily in debt and dying of cancer. He would die in prison for the shooting. His stated reason for killing Oswald was so that Kennedy's widow, Jackie, wouldn't have to go through his trial.
Jack Ruby is known to have been acquainted with members of the Dallas Mafia, as well as with off-duty police officers, through his nightclub. He was as strange of a character as Oswald, if not more so. Maybe he thought he would be a hero for killing the man who killed Kennedy. Maybe he thought his friendships with police officers would help him after he had killed Oswald. According to one account that I once read while being restrained and arrested after shooting Oswald Ruby shouted to the police, "Hey guys it's me, Jack". There is information online that Ruby visited Mafia friends in Cuba, in 1959.
The assassination was successful but the exiles' plan was for Oswald to escape, and later be traced to Cuba or trying to enter Cuba. Convertibles were popular during the 1960s and Kennedy would be waving to the crowds that would certainly come to see the popular president from the open car. Oswald wouldn't be in the crowd but in the school textbook building. It would take some time to determine where the shots came from, initially focusing on the crowd, and this would give Oswald the chance to escape, which he almost did.
Many people have speculated that Jack Ruby, already dying of cancer, had the job of silencing Oswald after he had fired the fatal shots because Oswald, as an ex-Marine, was a good shot with a rifle. In the same way, during the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul, the would-be assassin didn't know that there was another gunman standing near him who would shoot him after he had shot the pope, purportedly to save the pope's life but really to silence the assassin from revealing who was behind the assassination attempt.
But if Jack Ruby was to similarly silence Oswald then why wasn't it done immediately? Jack Ruby was nowhere around when the assassination took place and Oswald had already been in police custody two days when Jack Ruby managed to silence him, by pretending to be a reporter in the police station parking garage. Ruby had made a great show of grief after Kennedy had been killed, closing his nightclub, but that could have been part of the "Plan B", silencing Oswald, after he had failed to escape to Cuba and had been arrested.
The plan was for Oswald to escape and later be traced to Cuba. Oswald's home and belonging would be searched and He left behind the "backyard photos" of himself holding the rifle that would kill Kennedy, obviously so that people in Cuba would know that he was the assassin. He almost did escape but when he was caught they had to find a way to silence him before he could reveal who was really behind the assassination.
What I want to do here is to add the concept that the real reason Kennedy was assassinated was to bring about a U.S. military invasion of Cuba that would depose the Castro Government by making it appear that it was behind the assassination. Many people with influence, the Mafia and the anti-Castro Cubans, had lost so much that they could regain by bringing this about.
Has anyone ever noticed that George W. Bush, a native of Texas, would follow exactly this same pattern, except that the Kennedy Assassination would be replaced by 9/11 and Fidel Castro would be replaced by Saddam Hussein. Maybe George Bush instinctively knew what the Kennedy Assassination was really about. Fidel Castro remained in power but what might have happened was played out against Saddam Hussein instead. His country was invaded and he was deposed on the basis of his involvement in 9/11. The theories about Oswald not acting alone were reflected in Saddam's supposed "weapons of mass destruction".
One thing that I have never seen written about the Kennedy Assassination is that not far from the site of the assassination in Dallas lived an eight-year-old boy, named John Hinckley Jr. He would one day attempt a presidential assassination of his own. His assassination attempt would resemble not Oswald's sniper shots at Kennedy but Jack Ruby's waiting for Oswald, and then opening fire.
Kennedy had won the 1960 presidential election by defeating Richard Nixon, who would later be president himself. Ironically Nixon, while not assassinated, would also be brought down by the obsession with Cuba. Cuban exiles were prominent among the Watergate burglars, who were allegedly looking for evidence that the Democrats were receiving funding from Cuba.
This Mafia dynasty in Cuba, during the 1940s and 50s, doesn't get a lot of historical attention. But it was the primary reason for the Castro revolution that overthrew the Batista government, and brought the world to the edge of nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It led to the assassination of Kennedy, which inaugurated the modern era of mass shootings. Charles Whitman's sniper shootings, from the University of Texas Tower, very much resembled Oswald's firing at Kennedy which took place elsewhere in Texas. This is generally considered as the first modern mass shooting. Finally, it resulted in America being really shaken by Watergate.
The purported reason for the coup, by hard-line Communists who were opposed to Gorbachev's reforms, was to stop him from signing the New Union Treaty, which would decentralize the Soviet Union by replacing it's original founding treaty.
Gorbachev was placed under house arrest while on vacation. He got news of what was going on by listening to the BBC on a transistor radio. The country was to be administered by an "Emergency Committee", known as GkChP (which would make a good password because it contains a mix of caps and lower case), or sometimes as the "Gang of Eight".
Action during the coup was mostly limited to Moscow and was nearly bloodless. Three civilians were killed and three true believers in Communism died of suicide when the coup failed. The coup is almost universally considered to have been very disorganized and poorly planned. Yanayev came across as an uninspiring speaker. Some got the impression that the coup leaders were intoxicated during a press conference.
The leaders of the coup gave up after three days.
The coup did not accomplish it's objective of restoring traditional Communism and halting Gorbachev's reforms. But it destabilized the country and hastened it's breakup. The following December the Belovezha Accords were signed in Minsk, which ended the Soviet Union.
The big winner of the coup attempt was Boris Yeltsin. The best-known news image of the coup is Yeltsin standing on a tank in Moscow. Yeltsin proceeded to the Russian White House and appeared very much in control, in contrast with Gorbachev who was under house arrest far away. The west supported Yeltsin during the coup.
The coup was attempted by hard-line Communists who were opposed to Gorbachev's far-reaching reforms. Yeltsin had earlier been an ally of Gorbachev but the two split because Yeltsin wanted to go even further with reform. He had publicly destroyed his Communist Party membership card and resigned from the Politboro. Yeltsin was willing to let the Soviet Union break up altogether, whereas Gorbachev was only trying to reform it.
So many questions arise from this unsuccessful coup.
The KGB was a very capable organization. How did it manage to facilitate something that not only failed so miserably but actually brought about what it was supposedly trying to prevent?
It is very interesting that the leaders of the coup were pardoned and having tried to overthrow the government of their country didn't seem to hurt their future careers.
Boris Yeltsin ended up as the star of the show who defeated the coup, which sent Gorbachev into an irrevocable political decline. Troops involved in the coup had Boris Yeltsin surrounded, before he proceeded to the Russian White House. They could have easily arrested him, but they didn't.
Not arresting Yeltsin is likely what caused the coup to fail. It was also somewhat of a shock how the leaders of the coup suddenly gave up.
Boris Yeltsin served two terms as President of Russia. He resigned at the end of the last millennium. According to some reports he was the first leader of Russia or the Soviet Union who left voluntarily.
The next point of interest concerns Yeltsin appointing Vladimir Putin as his successor. Yeltsin had first put Putin in charge of the FSB, the state security service that is the Russian descendant of the Soviet KGB, and then named him as his successor.
What is so interesting here are how completely different Yeltsin and Putin are as leaders. The two could scarcely be more different. Putin could be described as the anti-Yeltsin. Yeltsin was about capitalism and privatization, which allowed the "oligarchs" to take control of quite a bit of the country's wealth, and who now have an arch-enemy in Putin.
Putin has lamented what a "catastrophe" the breakup of the Soviet Union was. But it was his mentor who chose him as his successor, Yeltsin, who brought about the breakup. When a leader chooses his successor it is always one who, more or less, agrees with his views and will continue his policies. How is it possible for a leader and his successor to be so completely different?
With that background here is the question of the day. Was the 1991 Coup staged. Was it all a show, organized by the head of the KGB to discredit the hard-line Communists, as well as Gorbachev, and get Yeltsin into power? Yeltsin would serve until the end of the millennium, at which point he would retire after naming the head of the KGB's successor organization as his successor.
Has anyone ever thought about all of the ovals in Washington D.C.? There are so many ovals built into the city, all around the federal government district. What could these ovals mean? I cannot see anything like this concentration of ovals in any other city.
There are organizations that link themselves to Solomon's Temple, the original Temple in the Bible. One such organization is the Freemasons. But I am just using the Freemasons as an example here, this could also apply to other organizations.
St. Peter's Square, in the Vatican, is another oval that it at a center of power.
The Colosseum, in Rome a few km from St. Peter's Square, is also in the form of an oval. In fact, I have pointed out previously here, in "Investigations" December 2018 section 23), that the Colosseum and St. Peter's Square are of exactly the same shape and dimensions. The Colonnades in St. Peter's Square are placed to make it exactly the same form as the Colosseum, an oval with a ratio of about 1.2 or 6 / 5. This could not possibly be a coincidence and I cannot see that it has been pointed out before.
Not only that, we also saw that a straight line through the long axis of the Colosseum will lead right to the obelisk in the center of St. Peter's Square. You can verify this with the "Measure Distance" feature on Google Street View.
Solomon's Temple was first destroyed by the Babylonians, and it's treasures and the Jewish people brought to Babylon. The Persians later conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return home with the artifacts to rebuild the Temple.
The rebuilt Temple was later destroyed by the Romans, and it was the looted wealth from the Temple that paid to build the Colosseum in Rome. That is how the Colosseum is linked to Solomon's Temple, and the Colosseum is in the form of an oval.
The Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument, is the most visible oval in Washington D.C. An ellipse means an oval.
Here is Lafayette Square, just north of the White House.
Paths around the Washington Monument form three ovals.
Then there is the Second World War Monument.
The main office of the U.S. President, in the White House, is the Oval Office. Why would the office at the center of power in the United States be shaped like an oval? I don't think I have ever heard of any office anywhere else being shaped like an oval.
In fact the ratio of the long axis to the short axis in the Oval Office is just about exactly the same as that in the Colosseum, about 1.2 or 6 / 5. And the Colosseum was built with the wealth looted from the Temple.
I was just using the Freemasons as an example but George Washington, America's first president for whom it's capital city is named, was a high-ranking Freemason. Both of the lead surveyors that Washington had lay out the city, first Charles Pierre L' Enfant and then Andrew Ellicott, were both prominent Freemasons.
For Buffalo, NY area readers Andrew Ellicott's brother, Joseph was also a surveyor and set out the design of Buffalo. That is why the name of "Ellicott" is all over the area. Joseph Ellicott unfortunately suffered from mental illness.
Henry Ford was another prominent Freemason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company#/media/File:Ford_logo_flat.svg
The usual symbol of the Freemasons is the Square and Compass. Connecticut Street NW, near the White House, forms angle of about 115 degrees.
This is the Square and Compass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry#/media/File:Square_compasses.svg
We saw how the Temple is connected to the world through the Colosseum in the posting, " The Temple Is Still With Us" October 2020.
Hopefully this will give some conspiracy writers something to go on.
55) THE REAL STORY OF THE 2022 ALABAMA PRISON ESCAPE
For eleven days the U.S. was transfixed by the escape, from an Alabama jail, of a male prisoner with a female guard. The prisoner was Casey White and the guard was Vicky White. Despite having the same surname the two were not related.
On what was reported to be her final day of work before retirement, Vicky White said that she was transporting Casey White to a mental health evaluation, as he was awaiting trial for murder. It turned out that no such evaluation was ever scheduled. Vicky White had bought a car, a Ford Edge using an alias. She left the car in a shopping center parking lot overnight. She then drove Casey White to the parking lot. They abandoned the police car and drove off in the Ford Edge.
The two were ultimately caught in Evansville, Indiana. They had abandoned the Ford Edge, in Tennessee, and had bought a pickup truck. They then decided to abandon that, in Evansville, after buying a Cadillac. But they made the mistake of abandoning it in the bay of a car wash, where Casey White was caught on security camera with his clearly visible tattoos. Another security camera caught them driving off in the Cadillac.
In the U.S. most prisons are operated by the state, although there are also federal prisons. The local "holding centers", for people who have been arrested but not yet convicted, are operated at the county level, and run by the Sheriff's Department. Short prison terms might also be served at the local holding center, as opposed to being sent away to a prison. It was such a Sheriff's Department that Vicky White worked for, not the prison system. A sheriff's department patrols rural areas and towns that don't have their own police department.
My information about the case is solely based on what I have read in the news. The conclusions here about the case are based on the presumption that what has been reported in the news is correct.
Vicky White was supposedly on her last day at work when she escaped with prisoner Casey White. She had sold her home and had been talking, at work, about moving to "The beach". From northern Alabama "The beach" can only mean moving southward, particularly to Florida. There were no beaches to the north of where she was located.
This was a diversion. The escaping pair drove due northward, ending up in Evansville, Indiana. The talk about "moving to the beach" was set up to lead the search for them in the wrong direction.
Just before the escape Vicky White bought a car, using an alias. The car was a reddish colored Ford Edge, which is a SUV. The car was their getaway vehicle. She left the car in a plaza parking lot overnight. The following day she said she was taking Casey White for a "mental health evaluation". She drove to where the Ford Edge was parked and got into that car, abandoning the patrol car in which they had left the jail.
The reddish Ford Edge was carefully chosen as the escape vehicle, this was the second diversion. With a limited supply of money, and the price of fuel so high, why would she choose a SUV to escape in? When they were caught they were found to have camping equipment. Vicky White lived in a rural area and so would be familiar with the natural environment. The rear seats of a Ford Edge fold down, and the front seats can be moved forward. I believe that Vicky White intended for them to sleep in the car.
A Ford Edge is a smaller SUV. If she had bought a van that might make it obvious that they were planning to sleep in it. Casey White was 6 feet, 9 inches tall (205.75 cm), and who would think of someone that tall sleeping in a vehicle? It would avoid the security cameras and possible scrutiny of staying in hotels.
Surely they weren't planning on camping in the woods, where a bright red vehicle would stand out. That was why Vicky White bought a bright red vehicle, knowing full well that her purchase of the vehicle would be discovered even though she used an alias.
The car was found abandoned in Tennessee. Part of the car had been painted a dark green, the ideal color to hide in the woods. Notice that their final car, the Cadillac that they were caught in, was about the same dark green color that they had started to paint the Ford Edge. Some reports have it that the Ford Edge had developed mechanical troubles. I think it more likely that they had given up on painting the car and were worried that an amateurish partial paint job on the car would draw attention.
Their next vehicle was a pickup truck, which they apparently bought in cash in Tennessee. This was the vehicle that they abandoned in Evansville, at the car wash where they were caught on security camera. But why did they abandon the pickup truck when there was no report that it had mechanical troubles, or that police were looking for them in a pickup truck? The obvious answer is that a pickup truck isn't sleepable.
One of the mysteries of this case is why Vicky White stayed in a hotel the night before the escape. She had sold her home and had been staying with her mother. Interestingly, even though she was close to her mother she reportedly never told her of any plans to retire to "The beach". This might be the last she would ever see of her mother, so why would she spend it in a local hotel?
This was the third diversion. She wanted to make it look like she was making a "dry run" of checking into a hotel, seeing what kind of identification they ask for, where security cameras might be located, and so on. This was to deceive police into looking for them or their car at hotels. But instead of driving a red SUV and staying at hotels while moving southward they would be driving a dark green SUV and camping in the woods while moving northward.
According to some news reports the two had made a "dry run" of their escape from the jail, Vicky White leaving the building in a patrol vehicle with Casey White, but hadn't been gone for long. This was done to make investigators after the escape think that she was in the habit of making a "dry run" before actually doing something. This would make them think that her stay in a hotel, on the last night before the escape, was a "dry run" for the two staying in hotels after the escape, but she was actually planning that they would be sleeping in the car.
CASEY WHITE TAKES OVER
I believe that, as time went on, Casey White, the escaped prisoner, took more control. Vicky White had planned the escape well. Casey White had quite a criminal record but doesn't seem to have been good at avoiding getting caught.
After being caught Casey White told police that they had stopped at a motel in Evansville to "get their bearings" and decide what to do next. This reveals that the initially well-planned escape seems to have gone awry.
To stay at the motel in Evansville they found a homeless man and paid him to rent a room for them for two weeks. They had reportedly already been there one week when they were caught. Finding a homeless man to help them was awkward, time-consuming and, risky but now they only had the pickup truck, not a vehicle that they could sleep in.
While in Evansville they bought a Cadillac, paying for it in cash. The car was like a dark green that wouldn't stand out if they were camping in the woods, about the same color that they had tried to paint the Ford Edge. But now they had to dispose of the pickup truck, and that is what got them caught.
Going to a car wash and leaving the truck in one of the bays was absolutely crazy. Maybe Vicky White was getting tired and wasn't fully alert by this point.
Of course the owner of the car wash would check the security video to see who left the pickup truck. I don't know why criminals often get tattoos but there was the unmistakable image of Casey White, with the prominent tattoo on his forearm clearly visible. Security cameras at the car wash also got the car that Casey White got into, the dark green Cadillac, although not the plate number.
Police looked around Evansville and a car of that make and color was seen in a motel parking lot. The car was watched, to see who got into it and, sure enough, it was them. After a chase of about 2 miles (about 3 km) northward on Highway 41, the car ended up in a ditch.
One of the eeriest things about this escape is that, just before the end of the chase, Vicky White made a call to the 911 (emergency) line. She may have made the call inadvertently, not realizing that she made it, but what went on inside the car, both before and after the crash, was recorded.
The two drove off the highway and through an industrial parking lot. Then, surrounded by police and Marshals' cars, went across a grassy area. Vicky White's southern-accented voice can be heard twice expressing alarm, to Casey White, about the airbags in the car going off, suggesting that they "get out and run" and also a reference to "that (expletive) motel". Her words are not very intelligible but I believe what she was saying to Casey White is "We never should have stayed in that (expletive) motel".
After the crash into the ditch, with Vicky White mortally wounded from a self-inflicted gunshot, the voices of the police officers outside the car can be heard on the phone call, saying that "she has a gun", "she is still breathing" and, "her finger is on the trigger". They disarmed her, and got her out through the sunroof of the car. She died in hospital. Casey White surrendered peacefully.
56) A FURTHER LOOK AT THE KENT STATE SHOOTINGS
In 1970 America was embroiled in the Vietnam War. Since 1965 there had been racial uprisings in American cities. University campuses were the focal points of antiwar protests.
In April of 1970 U.S. President Richard Nixon widened the Vietnam War with an invasion of neighboring Cambodia. The reason was evidence that the Vietnamese Communists were using it as a sanctuary. College campuses across America erupted in protest. Nearby Buffalo State College exploded.
Each U.S. state has National Guard troops. Many fully armed National Guard troops were moved to college campuses. On May 4 what might have been inevitable happened. At Kent State University, in Ohio National Guard troops opened fire, killing four students.
It was probably America's defining event of the year. The world of rock music was quick to react, with the hit song "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and, Young. The refrain of the song was "Four dead in Ohio".
There has been endless conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, more than six years before this, I am surprised at the lack of conspiracy theories about the Kent State shootings.
The worst year for racial uprisings was 1967. Such urban uprisings had been declining since then. What I find interesting is that there were no major racial uprisings after the Kent State shootings.
This shooting incident changed the dynamic of the people against the establishment in America, over the Vietnam War, and the racial conflict. It was no longer black against white. Now the establishment had shot down white university students. There would be no more major racial uprisings in this generation.
Here is the question. Could the Nixon Administration, knowing that this escalation of the war would provoke a massive reaction, had fully armed National Guard troops on college campuses knowing that, if such an incident did happen to take place, it would calm racial tensions?
Now I am not claiming that the National Guard troops were ordered to open fire, or anything like that. Just that with the escalation of the very divisive and controversial war the placing of fully-armed National Guard troops on college campuses would, sooner or later, likely result in something like this happening. When the establishment had gunned down a few white university students it would change the whole racial dynamic across America and, sure enough, after this there would be no more major racial uprisings for a generation.
Considering the endless conspiracy theories about the Kennedy Assassination I am really surprised not to see conspiracy theories about this.
57) THE UNABOMBER AND THE ZODIAC KILER
This is a very important day for this blog because I think we have a major mystery solved. I thought of this when the story of the Unabomber was in the news this week.
The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, died this week in prison. "The Unabomber" wasn't a title that he gave himself. From a remote cabin in the woods of Montana he mailed homemade package bombs often to universities and airlines, and others he associated with allowing nature to be destroyed by modern technology. The name of the FBI file on him was "Unabom" with the "Una" meaning "universities and airlines".
The Unabomber was pretty smart. He received a scholarship to enter Harvard at age 16, after skipping two grades in school. After graduation from Harvard he went on to get a PhD in mathematics. He was hired as a professor at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay area.
But he apparently didn't have the personality to be a teacher, and later resigned. He moved back with his parents in Illinois for a while before choosing to live a very isolated life in the cabin in the woods of Montana. It was while living there that he undertook his long campaign of sending package bombs by mail.
It reportedly resulted in the most expensive manhunt in U.S. history, but it came up completely empty. I remember reading once about someone sending a wooden package bomb, primarily to universities and airlines, on average about once a year. A sketch was made of a man wearing a hood and dark glasses, who was seen placing a package in a parking lot, which exploded when picked up.
The government had no idea who was doing it. The idea did arise that the Unabomber might have some connection to UC at Berkeley, because that was the only place that was targeted more than once. Ironically the first person to arrive to aid the person injured by the second bomb was the one who had been injured by the first bomb.
These mail bombings began in 1978. The Unabomber was finally caught in 1996. He had written a manuscript describing his views of how technology was destroying society. He wrote to newspapers and promised to cease mailing bombs if they published it. The Unabomber would write to his brother describing his ideas and his brother, and his wife, recognized his writing in the manuscript. The brother decided that he had to turn him in to save innocent lives.
After the background of the Unabomber was uncovered, something interesting became apparent. There had been a serial killer in the San Francisco Bay area that got a tremendous amount of media attention but was never caught. It was the Zodiac Killer. I know that the FBI eliminated the Unabomber as a suspect in the case of the Zodiac Killer, but the parallels between the two are just plain eerie.
The Zodiac Killer is confirmed as having killed five people, usually with a handgun and wounding others who survived. There were unconfirmed speculation of other killings and letters from the Zodiac that were determined to be hoaxes. Most of his victims were couples on dates. It seems like classic incel killings. A guy who resents not having a girlfriend kills people who are having fun on dates.
What is unusual about the Zodiac Killer, relative to other serial killers, is that the timeframe of his confirmed killings was short, actually less than a year from December 1968 to October 1969, yet he continued writing to authorities for several years afterward.
This is exactly the same timeframe that the reclusive and unsocial future Unabomber was teaching at nearby UC at Berkeley. He left California some time after resigning his position, moving in with his parents for a while before moving to the remote cabin in Montana.
The Zodiac Killer was known for the cryptograms that he sent to newspapers. Like the Unabomber would later do with his manuscript the Zodiac Killer threatened killings if they weren't published. Some of the cryptograms have not yet been solved, one required a team of mathematicians and programmers to solve. The Zodiac Killer must not only have been pretty smart, but very good with both words and mathematics. The characters in the cryptograms that the killer made up himself look like symbols used in mathematics.
The letters and cryptograms that the Zodiac Killer sent have quite a few misspellings. But how could someone who could come up with these unsolvable cryptograms not know how to spell?
When the future Unabomber was in university he amazed teachers with his ability to solve complex math problems. When he was finally arrested a diary, written in code, was found in his cabin. He was also very good with languages, I know that he could speak at least German and Spanish. Wouldn't he be just the one to come up with the very complex and difficult cryptograms of the Zodiac Killer? Two are still unsolved and one took the team of mathematicians and programmers to solve.
The FBI claimed that the fingerprints of the Unabomber and the Zodiac Killer don't match. But could they be sure that they had the Zodiac Killer's fingerprints? Someone clever enough to create these cryptograms is probably smart enough to wear gloves. A call to a police station by the killer was traced to a photo booth, and prints were found on the phone. But it could have been anyone else's prints. Maybe he waited for someone else to use the phone, so that person's prints would be on it, and then handled the phone carefully with gloves. When he killed his final confirmed victim, a taxi driver, he was seen carefully wiping the car down before leaving.
The Unabomber hunted animals in the woods while living in his remote cabin. Nowhere do I see that the Unabomber was into guns while growing up. His father did show him how to survive in the wilderness and he might have fired a gun, but nowhere in anything written about his life did I see anything about an interest in guns.
But yet he was adept enough with a gun to survive mostly by hunting by the time he moved into the wilderness. It seems that he must have gotten some hunting practice somewhere. Could it have been as the Zodiac Killer in California?
Hunting is usually done with long guns, shotguns and especially rifles, which are more powerful and accurate than pistols. A pistol is intended only for close range. Yet the Zodiac Killer killed with a pistol and, when the Unabomber was arrested he was found to have only a pistol.
Like the Unabomber the Zodiac Killer threatened bombings if what he sent to the news wasn't published. He also made a schematic diagram of a bomb. The Unabomber threatened an airliner just as the Zodiac Killer had threatened a school bus.
One parallel that I find really interesting is in the signatures of the two killers. The Zodiac Killer had his own "crosshairs" symbol, like a plus sign superimposed on a circle. The Unabomber signed his correspondence with F.C., for "Freedom Club". What is so interesting is that they both used their signatures on their correspondence in exactly the same way.
Another convincing link is letter writing. The Zodiac Killer wrote so many letters. The Unabomber was also a prolific letter writer, often to his brother. When the Unabomber was in prison he spent much of his time writing letters, some to answer those that were sent to him.
Following is a copy of the Zodiac Killer's 340 character cryptogram. Part of the "crosshairs" symbol is at bottom. Credit to the Wikipedia article "Zodiac Killer".
The clue as to how to decode it is in the second half of the last line. After that is "ZO". We know that he must be signing his name, Zodiac, but the characters must be moved around, according to some pattern.
Now consider the Unabomber's name. It was unknown why the killer called himself "Zodiac".
Theodore Kaczynski
If we start with reverse alphabetical order and take one letter, the Z, continuing in reverse alphabetical order we take two consecutive letters, the OD. Continuing in reverse alphabetical order we go back to one letter, the I, and then to the two consecutive letters, the AC, it spells "Zodiac".
Starting from the end of the name, the "i", if we take the required letters and skip the four letters between each time we end up with "The Zodiac". So there are groups of 1, 2 and, 3 letters, separated each by four letters, to get "The Zodiac".
But how would we know this? The Zodiac Killer gave us a clue in that he committed four attacks but only the first, second and third were against couples. The fourth attack was completely different in that it was against a taxi driver. Remember that everything about this is a cryptogram. The actual cryptograms don't give any real clues, they just point in this direction.
When a person signs their name to a document they sign at the end of it. Look at the last line and the second half of the second-to-last line. The capital "I" at the end has a minus sign, -, extending from it's left side. Is this a sign to start on his name in reverse order from the final "I", as described above?
This ending of the cryptogram spells his name, "Kaczynski". It has several mathematical symbols. The last line starts with MD, which means doctor. It also contains a rearranged "PhD" and the MD could be a clue that this means doctorate. Some letters are reversed so what looks like a "9" could be a reversed "P". "MI" is the abbreviation for Michigan, where he got his PhD.
It is interesting that the Zodiac Killer put a 9 in the final line because he sent in a map with his logo of a circle divided into four quadrants. The origin point was Mount Diablo, with north defined as 0, east as 3, south as 6, and west as 9. The University at Berkeley is due west of Mount Diablo. Image from Google Earth.
That explains the mystery of why he would call himself "Zodiac" but his correspondence never mentions anything to do with astrology. Being so much into cryptograms it was because the letters of his name could be rearranged to spell "Zodiac".
I believe that the misspelled words in the Zodiac Killer's letters were clues as to which letters are substituted for other letters in the cryptograms.
The Zodiac's letters state that the cryptograms reveal clues to his identity. But the two that have been decoded offer no such clues at all, just descriptions of how much he enjoys killing. Maybe that is because the clues are not within the cryptograms, rather the cryptograms themselves are the clues.
The clue in the cryptograms is that the killer is obviously very accomplished at mathematics. The first place we would think to look for a mathematician is probably a university. All of the three couples that were attacked by the Zodiac Killer were all around college age, this is another clue pointing toward a college or university.
Look at the sites where the three attacks on college age couples took place. The name of all three begin with a "B". Since the killer was a cryptographer surely this must be a clue. Theodore Kaczynski has no "B" in his name, his middle name is John. There is a "B" in the ending of the cryptogram above.
The killings of couples took place at Benicia, at Blue Rock Springs Park, and at Lake Berryessa. Two of the sites begin with "Be" and the other begins with the color blue.
If the Zodiac Killer was so adept at cryptography wouldn't it make sense that the sites of his killings would have some cryptographic significance?
So the victims were around university age and we know that a university would be the place to look for a mathematician who would be adept at such cryptography. There is a university nearby, UC at Berkeley. The name of the school begins with "Be" and it's school color is blue, along with California Gold. The university actually has it's own shade of blue, known as "Berkeley Blue".
The Zodiac Killer's final confirmed victim was a driver for the Yellow Cab Company and the taxi was a golden yellow color just like Berkeley's other color. The shooting took place very near the Golden Gate Bridge, as if to leave no doubt that the color of the cab stands for the gold that is the university's other color, blue and gold.
This means we should be looking for a mathematician at Berkeley University, whose name can be respelled as "The Zodiac".
The Zodiac Killer killed with a gun but there is one known exception. The attack at Lake Berryessa took place with a knife. Why would someone who kills with a gun suddenly decide to use a knife? Killing with a gun is so much easier and safer than with a knife. With cryptography being so important here, and the first two letters "Be" pointing to Berkeley, could it be a clue that the Zodiac Killer also has a "K" and an "N" in his name, Theodore Kaczynski?
The Zodiac Killer boasted of killing 37 people, which is generally considered as a gross exaggeration. But remember that this is all about cryptography that reveals his identity. "University of Berkeley Theodore Kaczynski" has 37 letters.
Crossword puzzles are usually square. But the cryptogram above has 17 spaces across and 20 spaces down, which adds up to the same number of people The Zodiac said that he killed. "Theodore Kaczynski" has 17 letters and University of (or at) Berkeley has 20 letters.
The solved 408 character cryptogram also has 17 spaces across. I am surprised that no one seems to have taken note that both cryptograms are 17 across. The 408 character cryptogram was divided into thirds, and each sent to a different newspaper. Each third has 8 characters down. Why would he do this? Was it because "Berkeley" has 8 letters. Also an 8 resembles a "B" and the three shootings of couples were at places that begin with a 'B".
I think this leaves no doubt that the Zodiac Killer became the Unabomber, and this hasn't been pointed out anywhere else. What I had wondered about is why he called himself "The Zodiac", but his letters never mention anything about astrology or stars, and why he took a taxi for his final known murder if he had a car, and killed the taxi driver instead of a couple. Now we know.
I am sure that there is more than this but a lot of what was sent in was sent by other people. Besides I have had enough of writing about, and thinking about, this psychopath. However it is interesting that in 1978, just before the bombings of the Unabomber began, a letter was received, from supposedly the Zodiac Killer, stating "I am back with you".
58) INOCCULATION AGAINST COMMUNISM
Here is something that I have suspected for years.
The Cold War was a global ideological confrontation between Communism and free enterprise, or Capitalism. Free Enterprise is allowing people to run their own businesses, although vital sectors are operated by the government. Pure Communism is basically having everything run by the government, including stores, farms, factories and, medical services.
The western countries were based on free enterprise but, at the height of the Cold War about a third of the world war under Communist governments and there were significant Communist movements in the western countries. The west increased social spending on it's citizens, including more on unemployment insurance, welfare, minimum wage and work safety laws, retirement benefits and, medical coverage.
In America, during the 1960s, these social reforms were known as "The Great Society". The wealth gap in America, meaning the difference between rich and poor, was at it's least in 1973, at the height of the Cold War. This helped to refute some of the accusations of Communists against free enterprise, that it was really the rich oppressing the poor and the solution was for all the people to own the means of production, through the government, as is done in Communism.
It is true that, in America for example, the end of the Cold War might sound like a victory but since then, without the ideological competition from the Communists, the wealth gap has widened very significantly with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
What I suspect is that there was another plan that the western countries put into place to deter people from falling for Communism. This plan was undocumented and probably mostly unspoken. I am not claiming that any person or people thought of this plan. But yet, at some level, there was a plan, and the plan was for the "Innoculation Against Communism".
Remember the times that you have dealt with government offices. This includes such things as applying for unemployment benefits, dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, applying for social services, trying to get a permit for something, challenging a traffic ticket, and so on.
Most people agree that government offices are hardly a model of efficiency. There is almost always a lot of waiting, often in a long line of people. Waiting for some kind of decision usually seems to require excessive time. Challenging a traffic ticket almost always takes most of the day.
When was the last time someone smiled at you in a government office, and seemed glad to see you and eager to help you? Even if the people working there do their jobs well the process makes people feel like they are just a number, in fact the person might have to actually take a number and be called by the number instead of their name.
Government offices, at least in some places, might be technologically backward. There might be a computer interface that looks like Windows 3.0 or 3.1. There might even be a dot matrix printer like something out of an ancient history museum. If you make any comment about it the usual attitude is "So what do you want me to do? I just work here".
What a contrast with dealing with a private company. When you call a bright and cheerful voice asks "How can I help you today"? When you order something from a company like Amazon you can be sure that, if they tell you that you will get your package by a certain day then you will get it by that day. Have you ever noticed that, if your call goes to a voicemail or you get instructions by phone, a private company almost always has a pleasant and upbeat voice while the government office has an unenthusiastic monotone drone?
While dealing with private companies is not quite perfect most people would agree that, as far as pleasantry goes, it is much preferable to government offices. The question is whether this is being done, at least at some level, on purpose, although this doesn't mean that it was specifically planned or organized.
The purpose of this contrast between dealing with government offices and dealing with private companies is as an inoculation against Communism. In pure Communism there is no private enterprise, as everything is run by the government. After seeing the difference in dealing with government offices and dealing with private companies, who would want to be Communist?
59) THE LONG-TERM PLAN OF CHAIRMAN MAO
I wonder if I am the only person in the west who has thought about this.
Today we see "Made In China" everywhere. It began with U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Until then the U.S. and China didn't even have diplomatic relations. I remember from childhood watching the coverage of Nixon's meeting with Chairman Mao in the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing. No one imagined how it would change the world.
All of the information that I have ever seen about that historic meeting indicates that it was Nixon, known for foreign policy expertise, who took the initiative and reached out to China. We know that it was the President of Pakistan who set up the meeting (Pakistan has since switched to the parliamentary system), but I wonder if Chairman Mao had it planned all along although he wanted Nixon to make the first move.
Richard Nixon became U.S. President at the height of the Cold War. He was elected in 1968 and inaugurated in January 1969. The two major Communist powers were the Soviet Union and China. It was known that the two countries didn't always agree on everything, with a mild split between the two resulting from Nikita Khrushchev surprising the world upon taking office by denouncing his predecessor, Josef Stalin, and beginning the process of "Destalization".
As soon as Nixon took office the expertise in foreign policy that he would become known for became apparent. A short time after Nixon took office something else happened that took the world by surprise. Border clashes began between China and the Soviet Union. It was over some disputed islands in the Ussuri River. The Chinese side is almost universally considered as having been the aggressor.
The clashes didn't lead to a wider war and the dispute was eventually resolved, but it did get the world's attention. One thing that seemed to help resolve the dispute is that Ho Chi Minh, President of Communist North Vietnam, died in September 1969, and the foreign ministers of China and the Soviet Union met while attending his funeral.
In 1972 Richard Nixon visited both China and then the Soviet Union. The meeting in China, which didn't have diplomatic relations with the U.S., took time to set up. The primary anti-Communist strategy was to play the two major Communist powers against each other and this was Nixon's goal, at least to some degree.
It seems obvious to me that Nixon developed the strategy of playing the two major Communist powers against each other due to the border clashes between the two that began not long after he took office. The border clashes were evidence that the two countries were further apart than the west realized.
What I wonder is whether Chairman Mao had this planned all along. The border clashes let the new U.S. administration know that the two major Communist powers were further apart than they might think, and it could be possible to play them against each other. This led to Nixon reaching out to China, and establishing diplomatic relations, which would give China a vast new market as it emerged as the world's great manufacturer of consumer goods, and today "Made In China" is to be seen everywhere.
This is the statue of Chairman Mao in Changsha. Image from Google Street View.
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