Hubbard's "defective seeds" are none other than that "Third School" which "considers chaos an integral part of creativity, freedom, and growth." (quoting J. Orlin Grabbe, from his essay on chaos, a good read indeed). In the chapter on new age religion, you can read more excerpts of Hubbard's writing, with accompanying analysis.

``4. Goal of the Plan - Initiation: All who wish to enter the New Age 'on the physical plane' [alive] must undergo an 'energy activation' or 'rebirth' - usually marked by a subjective trance-induced 'light experience' where one meets either a 'spirit guide' or one's 'higher self' (no difference since 'all is one'). This 'altered state of consciousness' will eventually lead to a 'Luciferic initiation' into the 'new humanity', or a vow of allegiance to Lucifer as god. Those who cannot (no souls) or will not ('not sufficiently developed in their spiritual journey') will be sent on to their next life in a global 'cleansing action'
-Hannah Newman's summary of Alice Bailey's The Rays and the Initiations, pp.754-755

from 20th Century Democide by R.J. Rummel:

Browse this mirror of R.J. Rummel's web site (featuring exhaustive coverage of holocausts and other mass murders) . The master site is http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rummel.

The cover article of the November 9, 1998 issue of the John Birch Society's New American magazine is Lessons From the Holocaust, which describes in some detail the consonance and alignment of the Soviet and Nazi ideologies and methods. A highlight:

Mass murder and other hideous crimes against individual rights do not reflect the "degeneration" or "misuse" of socialism, but rather its essence. As is the case with socialism of the Marxist-Leninist variety, the essential lesson of German National Socialism is that collectivism kills, and that the lawless state - in whatever form - is the real enemy.

For an account of Noam Chomsky's affiliation with the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial movement, consider Werner Cohn's Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers, with this short intro. Both are from David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine

from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2009-Sep-24, by Daniel Schwammenthal:

The Mufti of Berlin
Arab-Nazi collaboration is a taboo topic in the West.

Berlin

One widespread myth about the Mideast conflict is that the Arabs are paying the price for Germany's sins. The notion that the Palestinians are the "second victims" of the Holocaust contains two falsehoods: It suggests that without Auschwitz, there would be no justification for Israel, ignoring 3,000 years of Jewish history in the land. It also suggests Arab innocence in German crimes, ignoring especially the fascist past of Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini, who was not only Grand Mufti of Jerusalem but also Waffen SS recruiter and Nazi propagandist in Berlin. When a German journalist recently tried to shed some light on this history, he encountered the wrath of the Arab collaborators' German apologists.

Karl Rössel's exhibition "The Third World in the Second World War" was supposed to premier on Sept. 1 in the "Werkstatt der Kulturen," a publicly funded multicultural center in Berlin's heavily Turkish and Arab neighborhood of Neukölln. Outraged by the exhibition's small section on Arab complicity in Nazi crimes, Philippa Ebéné, who runs the center, cancelled the event. Among the facts Ms. Ebéné didn't want the visitors of her center to learn is that the Palestinian wartime leader "was one of the worst and fanatical fascists and anti-Semites," as Mr. Rössel put it to me.

The mufti orchestrated the 1920/1921 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and the 1929 Arab pogroms that destroyed the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. An early admirer of Hitler, Husseini received Nazi funding—as did Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood—for his 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, during which his thugs killed hundreds of British soldiers, Jews and also Arabs who rejected his Islamo-Nazi agenda. After participating in a failed fascist coup in Iraq, he fled to Berlin in 1941 as Hitler's personal guest. In the service of the Third Reich, the mufti recruited thousands of Muslims to the Waffen SS. He intervened with the Nazis to prevent the escape to Palestine of thousands of European Jews, who were sent instead to the death camps. He also conspired with the Nazis to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Rommel's defeat in El Alamein spoiled these plans.

Associated Press Hezbollah terrorists practicing a familiar salute in 2008.

After canceling the exhibition, Ms. Ebéné clumsily tried to counter the impression that she had pre-emptively caved to Arab pressure. As a "non-white" person (her father is Cameroonian), she said, she didn't have to fear Arabs, an explanation that indirectly suggested that ordinary, "white," Germans might have reason to feel less safe speaking truth to Arabs.

Berlin's integration commissioner, Günter Piening, initially seemed to defend her. "We need, in a community like Neukölln, a differentiated presentation of the involvement of the Arabic world in the Second World War," Der Tagesspiegel quoted him as saying. He later said he was misquoted and following media criticism allowed a smaller version of the exhibit to be shown.

Corbis Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini inspecting a Muslim SS parade in 1944.

Mr. Rössel says this episode is typical of how German historians, Arabists and Islam scholars deny or downplay Arab-Nazi collaboration. What Mr. Rössel says about Germany applies to most of the Western world, where it is often claimed that the mufti's Hitler alliance later discredited him in the region. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the Mideast, Nazis were not only popular during but also after the war—scores of them found refuge in the Arab world, including Eichman's deputy, Alois Brunner, who escaped to Damascus. The German war criminals became trusted military and security advisers in the region, particularly of Nazi sympathizer Gamal Nasser, then Egypt's president. The mufti himself escaped to Egypt in 1946. Far from being shunned for his Nazi past, he was elected president of the National Palestinian Council. The mufti was at the forefront of pushing the Arabs to reject the 1948 United Nations partition plan and to wage a "war of destruction" against the fledgling Jewish state. His great admirer, Yasser Arafat, would later succeed him as Palestinian leader.

The other line of defense is that Arab collaboration with the Nazis supposedly wasn't ideological but pragmatic, following the old dictum that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." This "excuse" not only fails to consider what would have happened to the Jews and British in the Mideast had the Arabs' German friends won. It also overlooks the mufti's and his followers' virulent anti-Semitism, which continues to poison the minds of many Muslims even today.

The mufti "invented a new form of Jew-hatred by recasting it in an Islamic mold," according to German scholar Matthias Küntzel. The mufti's fusion of European anti-Semtism—particularly the genocidal variety—with Koranic views of Jewish wickedness has become the hallmark of Islamists world-wide, from al Qaeda to Hamas and Hezbollah. During his time in Berlin, the mufti ran the Nazis' Arab-language propaganda radio program, which incited Muslims in the Mideast to "kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion." Among the many listeners was also the man later known as Ayatollah Khomeini, who used to tune in to Radio Berlin every evening, according to Amir Taheri's biography of the Iranian leader. Khomeini's disciple Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still spews the same venom pioneered by the mufti as do Islamic hate preachers around the world.

Muslim Judeophobia is not—as is commonly claimed—a reaction to the Mideast conflict but one of its main "root causes." It has been fueling Arab rejection of a Jewish state long before Israel's creation.

"I am not a Mideast expert," Mr. Rössel told me, but "I wonder why the people who so one-sidedly regard Israel as the region's main problem never consider how the Mideast conflict would have developed had it not been influenced by fascists, anti-Semites and people who had just returned from their Nazi exile."

Mr. Rössel may not be a "Mideast expert" but he raises much more pertinent questions about the conflict than many of those who claim that title.

Mr. Schwammenthal is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Aug-17, by Andrew Klavan:

The Panel
What death by bureaucratic fiat might look like.

It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.
—President Barack Obama in a New York Times interview on how costly medical decisions should be made.

The people behind the long table do not know what they've become. The drug of power has been sugared over in their mouths with a flavoring of righteousness. Someone has to make these decisions, they tell their friends at dinner parties. It's all very difficult for us. But you can see it in their eyes: It isn't really difficult at all. It feels good to them to be the ones who decide.

"Well, we have your doctor's recommendation," says the chairwoman in a friendly tone. She peers over the top of her glasses as she pages through your file.

You have to clear your throat before you can answer. "He says the operation is my only chance."

"But not really very much of a chance, is it?" she says sympathetically. Over time, she's become expert at sounding sympathetic.

"Seventy percent!" you object.

"Seventy percent chance of survival for five years—five years at the outside—and even that only amounts to about 18 months in QALYs: quality-adjusted life years."

"But without this procedure, I'll be dead before Christmas."

You try to keep the anger out of your voice. The last thing you want to do is offend them. But the politicians promised you—they promised everyone—there would never be panels like this. They made fun of anyone who said there would. "What do they think we're going to do? Pull the plug on grandma?" they chuckled. The media ran news stories calling all rumors of such things "false" or "misleading." But of course by then the media had become apologists for the state rather than watchdogs for the people.

In fact, the logic of this moment was inevitable. Once government got its fingers on the health-care system, it was only a matter of time before it took it over completely. Now there's one limited pool of dollars while the costs are endless.

"You have the luxury of thinking only of yourself, but we have to think about everyone," says the professor of ethics. He's a celebrity and waxes eloquent every Tuesday and Thursday on Bill Maher Tonight. "This isn't the free market, after all. We can't just leave fairness to chance. We have to use reason. Is it better for society as a whole that we allocate limited resources for your operation when we might use the same dollars to bring many more high quality years to someone, say, younger?"

"I'm only 62."

He smiles politely.

"Look, it's not just about me," you argue desperately. "My daughter's engaged to get married next year. She'll be heartbroken if I'm not there for it."

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you put on so much weight," says the medical officer. "I mean, you people have been told time and again . . ."

But the chairwoman is uncomfortable with his censorious tone and cuts him off, saying more gently, "Perhaps your daughter could move the wedding up a little."

The member in charge of "stakeholder" exceptions shakes her head sadly as she studies your file. "If only you could have checked off one of the boxes. It would be awful if you were penalized just because of a clerical oversight."

It begins to occur to you that this is how you are going to die: by the fiat of fatuous ideologues—that is to say, by the considered judgment of a government committee. They are going to snuff you out and never lose a minute's sleep over it, because it's only fair, after all.

That logic is implacable too. Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

You know you should keep your mouth shut. Be humble—they like that. But you speak before you can stop yourself.

"What you're doing here is evil," you cry out. "You're trying to take the place of God!"

"Sir, this is a government building!" says the chairwoman, shocked. "There's no God here."

Mr. Klavan is a contributing editor to City Journal. His latest novel is "Empire of Lies" (Harcourt, 2008).

from the Telegraph of London, 2009-Sep-8, by Chris Irvine and Kate Devlin:

Daughter claims father wrongly placed on controversial NHS end of life scheme

The daughter of a stroke victim claims that her father is to be wrongly placed on an NHS scheme for the terminally ill which experts say is causing some patients to die too soon.

Rosemary Munkenbeck says her father Eric Troake, who entered hospital after suffering a stroke, had fluid and drugs withdrawn and she claims doctors wanted to put him on morphine until he passed away under a scheme for dying patients called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).

Mrs Munkenbeck, 56, from Bracknell, said her father, who previously said he wanted to live until he was 100, has now said he wants to die after being deprived of fluids for five days.

Along with her sister Jocelyn Troake, 60, who lived in Bermuda until recently moving to Frimley, Surrey, to care full time for her father and her mother Edna, 93, they are convinced their father is a victim of the system.

Last week The Daily Telegraph reported a warning from experts that some patients with terminal illnesses were being wrongly put on the NHS scheme and allowed to die prematurely if they ticked “the right boxes".

The pathway scheme was developed to improve the care of patients in their dying hours and ensure that they were not being "overmedicalised".

The scheme encourages doctors and other health care staff to consider removing medication, fluids and other treatments that no longer benefit the patient.

It also recommends discussing the situation with relatives, and if possible, with the patient themselves.

Mrs Munkenbeck said that her father was taken off an intravenous drip last week but she argues that he has as much of a right to life as anyone else. Although a spokesman for Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey says Mr Troake is not on the scheme "at the moment", it is likely he will be offered a plan of care for dying patients.

"We believe that he has been forced down this route. By withdrawing fluids he is now very weak and there's no going back from it," she told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.

Previously she had called on him to be given the treatment to "see if he can survive."

"Let his body do his own job with a little bit of help. If it's not possible we don't necessarily expect him to be put on a ventilator," she said.

"We don't know that he will die. He might do, he might not, but we feel that's not the doctor's decision to do that."

Mr Troake, a former accountant and Second World War veteran, was admitted to the hospital in June after suffering a stroke.

Although Mrs Munkenbeck admits her father is "confused", she argues that is because of the drugs the hospital have given him.

When a patient is put on the pathway the medical team looks for signs that they are approaching their final hours, which can include loss of consciousness or difficulty swallowing medication.

But doctors last week warned semi-consciousness and confusion are a side effect of painkillers such as morphine if patients are also dehydrated.

"We've been arguing with them and they don't like it," Mrs Munkenbeck claims. "They say my sister and I are cruel and are trying to hold on to our father. But this man has a right to life.

"I just want him protected. He's looking at us and talking to us. He's not suffering from a terminal illness, he just had a stroke. We just feel they decided from the beginning that he's 95 so they've written him off."

A spokesman for Frimley Park Hospital said: "Sometimes, actively treating a patient who is dying can unnecessarily prolong suffering.

"The decision to withhold treatment which is prolonging suffering is only taken after careful consideration by a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, in consultation with the family and, when possible, the patient. Care of a patient who is dying would include the continued treatment of symptoms which may be causing them pain or distress.

"Looking after a patient who is dying may include care in accordance with the Liverpool Care Pathway.

"The Liverpool Care Pathway allows patients to face dying with as little discomfort and as much dignity as possible while they are given appropriate individualised care."

Palliative care experts including Prof Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London and Dr Peter Hargeaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine, last week warned that the LCP can mask signs that a patient's condition is improving.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,” they wrote. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death "without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."

The LCP has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospitals and 560 care homes in England use the system.

Marie Curie, the charity which drew up the pathway, has defended the scheme insisting that it is not about ticking boxes and that it has improved the end of life experience for thousands of people.

from the Daily Mail of London, 2009-Oct-14, by James Tozer:

My husband had beaten cancer, then doctors WRONGLY told him it had returned and sent him to a hospice who let him die

A grandfather who beat cancer was wrongly told the disease had returned and left to die at a hospice which pioneered a controversial 'death pathway'.

Doctors said there was nothing more they could do for 76-year- old Jack Jones, and his family claim he was denied food, water and medication except painkillers.

He died within two weeks. But tests after his death found that his cancer had not come back and he was in fact suffering from pneumonia brought on by a chest infection.

To his family's horror, they were told he could have recovered if he'd been given the correct treatment.

Yesterday, after being given an £18,000 pay-out over her ordeal, his widow Pat branded his treatment 'barbaric' and accused the doctors of manslaughter.

Mr Jones was being cared for at a hospice which was central to the contentious Liverpool Care Pathway under which dying patients have their life support taken away, although the hospice claims it wasn't officially applied in his case.

The scheme is used by hundreds of hospitals and care homes, and is followed in as many as 20,000 deaths a year.

Supporters say it brings dignity to a patient's final hours, but critics fear that some are placed into it incorrectly. Mr Jones, a retired bricklayer with two daughters, was diagnosed with stomach cancer in May 2005. After undergoing chemotherapy, he had his stomach removed by surgeons at Royal Liverpool Hospital that September.

He was told he was in remission from cancer, but the grandfather of two continued to suffer pain following the operation as well as difficulties in eating, and on January 3, 2006, he went to the city's Marie Curie hospice for respite care.

While there, however, his family were told the cancer had returned by Dr Alison Coackley, a palliative medicine consultant who played a key role in drawing up the Liverpool Care Pathway.

Despite the fact that no tests were carried out to confirm the diagnosis, his family say doctors instructed nurses to stop giving him food and fluids.

The only medication he was permitted were painkillers, and he slipped into semi- consciousness without the chest infection being diagnosed and died on January 14.

But a post-mortem examination found he was free of cancer and had in fact died of pneumonia.

Reports commissioned by Mrs Jones's solicitor concluded that with antibiotics and a rehydrating drip he could have made a full recovery and survived for at least another two years.

The hospice and the doctors who treated Mr Jones continue to deny liability, but his widow has now accepted an £18,000 out-of-court settlement after being told she would otherwise lose her legal aid.

Yesterday she said: 'If they'd only treated his chest infection, my husband could well still be alive today.

'We fought in the hospice to get Jack the right treatment and they blocked us, making us feel we were a nuisance.

'I was worried it was pneumonia, I wanted them to check his chest, but they wouldn't.'

Mrs Jones and the family want to know whether her husband was treated under the Liverpool Care Pathway.

She added: 'Jack was the life and soul of the party. He was a true gentleman. As far as I'm concerned, his death was manslaughter. It's barbaric and I don't want any other family to go through what we've had to.'

The 75-year-old, of Childwall, Liverpool, plans to report Dr Coackley and another doctor to the General Medical Council. Dr Coackley, 45, worked with Professor John Ellershaw at the hospice in Liverpool at a time when he was heading the writing of the LCP policy.

One article they published together last year said: 'Futile treatments should . . . be discontinued at this time and consideration should be given to the discontinuation of antibiotics and blood tests.'

Mrs Jones's solicitor, Michael Danby, said: 'This is a particularly sad case as it was entirely preventable. If they had examinedhis chest, they would have diagnosed the infection, and he could have been treated.'

The hospice's lawyer, Dorothy Flower, said it had settled the case to enable Mrs Jones to grieve for her husband, but did not accept liability. 'Some things are done for economic reasons, and a case like this costs a huge amount of money, which would do nobody any good,' she said.

Marie Curie Cancer Care said it could not comment on Mr Jones's case due to patient confidentiality. However, it insists that the Liverpool Care Pathway requires doctors to monitor patients regularly.

from the Times of London, 2009-Oct-11, by Sarah-Kate Templeton:

Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton's daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.

Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother's body?”

On January 19, Fenton's 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding.

Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home five minutes from where her daughter lives.

Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in palliative medicine, is concerned that other patients who could recover are left to die. He said: “As they are spreading out across the country, the training is getting probably more and more diluted.”

A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Patients' needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible.”

In a separate case, the family of an 87-year-old woman say the plan is being used as a way of giving minimum care to dying patients.

Susan Budden, whose mother, Iris Griffin, from Norwich, died in a nursing home in July 2008 from a brain tumour, said: “When she was started on the [plan] her medication was withdrawn. As a result she became agitated and distressed.

“It would appear that the [plan] is . . . used purely as a protocol which can be ticked off to justify the management of a patient.”

Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the care pathway, said: “If the education and training is not in place, the [plan] should not be used.” She said 3% of patients placed on the plan recovered.

from the Telegraph of London, 2009-Oct-14, by Liz Hunt:

Pathway for the elderly that leads to legal execution

Being "made comfortable" is no longer the reassuring euphemism it once was, says Liz Hunt.

At around 4am on Monday, a friend of mine was woken by a call from the private care home in south-west London where her 98-year-old grandmother is resident.

"Mrs ------- has breathing difficulties," the night manager told her. "She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?"

"What do you mean?" my friend responded. "What's the matter with her?"

"She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?"

Befuddled by sleep, she didn't immediately grasp what was being asked of her. Her grandmother is immobilised by a calcified knee joint, which is why she is in the home. She's a little deaf and frail, but otherwise perky. She reads a newspaper every day (without glasses), and is a fan of the darling of daytime television, David Dickinson. Why wouldn't she get medical treatment if she needed it?

Then, the chilling implication of the phone call filtered through – she was being asked whether her grandmother should be allowed to die.

"Call an ambulance now," my friend demanded.

The person at the other end persisted. "Are you sure that's what you want? For her to go to hospital."

"Yes, absolutely. Get her to hospital."

Three hours later, her grandmother was sitting up in A&E, smiling. She had a mild chest infection, was extremely dehydrated, but was responding to oxygen treatment.

It was a happy ending – of sorts. My friend is reeling from the care home manager's questioning. Had she really been asked to pronounce a possible death sentence on her grandmother, a woman with no underlying ailment other than old age? The issue of a "Do Not Resuscitate" order had never been raised with the family – if it had been, they would have dismissed the idea. And why was her grandmother found to be so dehydrated on her arrival at hospital that she remains on a drip: is this down to negligence, or something more sinister?

Withdrawal of fluids (and drugs) is one of the steps on the controversial palliative care programme known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, which has been adopted by 900 hospitals, hospices and care homes in England. The intention is admirable: to prevent unnecessary invasive treatment and help cancer patients to die comfortably.

But there is growing evidence that patients who don't fit the criteria are being railroaded on to the Pathway, and into premature death.

The Daily Telegraph reported two cases this week. Hazel Fenton, an 80-year-old from Sussex, was admitted to hospital in January with pneumonia and put on the Pathway regimen. Her daughter, Christine Ball, fought to stop her mother from being left to "starve and dehydrate to death". Nine months on, Hazel is doing well and is "happy", Christine says. Jack Jones, a cancer patient from Merseyside, wasn't so lucky. Doctors did not treat the 76-year-old's pneumonia because they claimed his cancer was spreading aggressively. A post-mortem examination found otherwise. His wife has never managed to confirm that Jack was on the Pathway, but she has no doubt he was denied precious time with his family. Readers, I am sure, will have their own, similar experiences. I'd like to hear them.

We've long accepted the practice of easing terminally ill patients towards death, by upping the dose of morphine so that pain and consciousness are blunted until respiration is suppressed completely. Sensible people view it as the most compassionate of acts. But being "made comfortable" is no longer the reassuring euphemism it once was. While we've been preoccupied with the moral pluses and minuses of living wills, assisted suicide and euthanasia, legalised execution of some of society's most vulnerable has become available, most probably at a hospital near you. How did we let this happen?

from the Weekly Standard, 2009-Oct-12, by Wesley J. Smith:

Abandoning the Most Vulnerable
Britain moves closer to legalizing assisted suicide.

On July 4, 1995, Myrna Lebov, age 52, committed suicide in her Manhattan apartment. The case generated national headlines when her husband, George Delury, announced that he had assisted Lebov's suicide at her request because she was suffering the debilitations of progressive multiple sclerosis.

Delury became an instant celebrity. He was acclaimed as a dedicated husband willing to risk jail to help his beloved wife achieve her desired end. The assisted-suicide movement set up a defense fund and renewed calls for legalization. Delury made numerous television appearances and was invited to speak to a convention of the American Psychiatric Association. He signed a deal for a book, later published under the title But What If She Wants to Die? Delury soon copped a plea to attempted manslaughter and served a few months in jail.

Had Delury acted in England or Wales today--rather than in New York in 1995--he almost surely would not have been prosecuted. Even though assisted suicide remains a crime in the U.K., newly published British guidelines have effectively decriminalized some categories of assisted suicide by instructing local prosecutors when bringing charges in such deaths is to be deemed "not in the public interest."

The guidelines were developed in response to a ruling by the U.K.'s highest court. A woman named Debbie Purdy--who like Lebov has progressive multiple sclerosis--plans to kill herself in one of Switzerland's suicide clinics if her suffering becomes too much to bear. Wanting to be accompanied by her husband, but fearful he could be prosecuted, she sued, demanding to be told by law enforcement ahead of time whether he would face charges.

Purdy won the day. Noting that other recent cases of "suicide tourism" (as such trips taken to Switzerland to die are called) had not been prosecuted, Britain's Law Lords ordered the head prosecutor to define the facts and circumstances under which the law would--and would not--be enforced.

The resulting guidelines declared that assisted suicides of people with a "terminal illness," a "severe and incurable disability," or "a severe degenerative physical condition"--whether occurring overseas or at home--should not be prosecuted if the assister was a close friend or relative of the deceased, was motivated by compassion, and the victim "had a clear, settled, and informed wish to commit suicide," among other criteria--exactly the circumstances Delury said motivated him to facilitate Lebov's death.

What do these guidelines teach us about assisted suicide? First, "death with dignity" is not just about terminal illness: It is about fear of disability and debilitation. A husband assisting the suicide of his wife, who wanted to die because their son became a quadriplegic, would be prosecuted under the guidelines, but he wouldn't face charges for assisting the suicide of the son.

Second, the guidelines prove that assisted suicide is not a medical act. Nothing in them requires a physician's review or participation.

Third, the court ruling and guidelines illustrate how the rule of law is crumbling. What matters most today is not principle, but emotion-driven personal narrative.

Perhaps most alarmingly, decriminalizing assisted suicide in these cases sends the insidious societal message that the lives of the dying and disabled are not as worthy of protecting as those of others. In this sense, the guidelines are an abandonment of society's most vulnerable citizens, exposing at least some to the acute danger of being coerced into death by relatives or friends.

For proof, we need only turn again to George Delury. Here, as the late Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story.

Delury made a crucial mistake that changed his favorable public perception. Perhaps because he was planning to write a book, he kept a computer diary of the events leading up to -Lebov's death--and its content shattered any pretense that he was motivated by love or compassion. To the contrary, George Delury put Myrna Lebov out of his misery.

The diary showed that Lebov did not have an unwavering and long-stated desire to die, as Delury had claimed. Rather, as often happens with people struggling with debilitating illnesses, her mood waxed and waned. One day she would be suicidal--but the next day she was engaged in life. Delury, moreover, encouraged his wife to kill herself, or as he put it, "to decide to quit." He researched her antidepressant medication to see if it could kill her, and when she took less than the prescribed amount, which in itself could cause depression, he stashed the surplus until he had enough for a poisonous brew.

That wasn't all. He worked assiduously at destroying Lebov's will to live by making her feel worthless and a burden. On March 28, 1995, Delury wrote in his diary that he planned to tell his wife:

I have work to do, people to see, places to travel. But no one asks about my needs. I have fallen prey to the tyranny of a victim. You are sucking my life out of my [sic] like a vampire and nobody cares. In fact, it would appear that I am about to be cast in the role of villain because I no longer believe in you.

Delury later admitted on the NBC program Dateline that he had shown his wife that very passage.

That Delury wanted Lebov to kill herself is beyond dispute. On May 1 he wrote:

Sheer hell. Myrna is more or less euphoric. She spoke of writing a book today. [Lebov was a published author, having written Not Just a Secretary in 1984.] She's interested in everything, wants everything explained, and believes that every bit of bad news has some way out. .  .  . It's all too much.

On June 10, Delury's diary described an argument with Lebov that started when she left a message to her niece that "things are looking splendid":

I blew up! Shouting into the phone that everything was just the same, it was simply Myrna feeling different. I told Myrna that she had hurt me very badly, not my feelings, but physically and emotionally. "Now what will Beverly [Lebov's sister] think? That I'm lying about how tough things are here." I put it to Myrna bluntly--"If you won't take care of me, I won't take care of you."

On July 3, 1995, the day before Myrna's death, Delury wrote:

Myrna is now questioning the efficacy of solution, a sure sign that she will not take [the overdose] tonight and doesn't want to. So, confusion and hesitation strike again. If she changes her mind tonight and does decide to go ahead, I will be surprised.

Finally, on July 4, Delury got what he wanted: Lebov swallowed the overdose of antidepressant medicine that her husband prepared for her and died.

Once the contents of his diary were publicly revealed, though, Delury's defense of "compassion" became inoperative, which is why he accepted the plea bargain.

That still wasn't the end of the story. In But What If She Wants to Die?--published after double jeopardy prevented another prosecution--Delury wrote that he hadn't just mixed -Lebov's drugs, but also smothered her with a plastic bag because he was worried that the amount she ingested might not be sufficient to kill her. Thus, Myrna Lebov didn't really die by suicide: She was killed by her husband. (Delury died by his own hand in 2007, at the age of 74.)

Thanks to the assisted suicide guidelines, potential Myrna -Lebovs in Britain are now at the mercy of future George Delurys. And those Delurys know full well that, so long as they don't keep inculpating diaries, they will have little trouble convincing prosecutors that their motive was compassion, a claim readily believed in a society so fearful and disdainful of disability. Such are the consequences of the state prosecutor's decision that protecting the dying and infirm from assisted suicide is no longer in the public interest.

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and consults for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide and the Center for Bioethics and Culture.

from the Daily Mail of London, 2009-Sep-9, by Vanessa Allen and Andrew Levy:

'Doctors told me it was against the rules to save my premature baby'

Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.

Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy - almost four months early.

They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.

Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours without any medical support.

She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.

Miss Capewell is now fighting for a review of the medical guidelines.

Medics allegedly told her that they would have tried to save the baby if he had been born two days later, at 22 weeks.

In fact, the medical guidelines for Health Service hospitals state that babies should not be given intensive care if they are born at less than 23 weeks.

The guidance, drawn up by the Nuffield Council, is not compulsory but advises doctors that medical intervention for very premature children is not in the best interests of the baby, and is not 'standard practice'.

James Paget Hospital in Norfolk refused to comment on the case but said it was not responsible for setting the guidelines relating to premature births.

A trust spokesman said: 'Like other acute hospitals, we follow national guidance from the British Association of Perinatal Medicine regarding premature births.'

Miss Capewell, who has had five miscarriages, said the guidelines had robbed her son of a chance of life.

She said: 'When he was born, he put out his arms and legs and pushed himself over.

A midwife said he was breathing and had a strong heartbeat, and described him as a "little fighter".

I kept asking for the doctors but the midwife said, "They won't come and help, sweetie. Make the best of the time you have with him".'

She cuddled her child and took precious photos of him, but he died in her arms less than two hours after his birth.

Miss Capewell, who has a five-year-old daughter Jodie, went into labour in October last year at 21 weeks and four days after suffering problems during her pregnancy.

She said she was told that because she had not reached 22 weeks, she was not allowed injections to try to stop the labour, or a steroid injection to help to strengthen her baby's lungs.

Instead, doctors told her to treat the labour as a miscarriage, not a birth, and to expect her baby to be born with serious deformities or even to be still-born.

She told how she begged one paediatrician, 'You have got to help', only for the man to respond: 'No we don't.'

As her contractions continued, a chaplain arrived at her bedside to discuss bereavement and planning a funeral, she claims.

She said: 'I was sitting there, reading this leaflet about planning a funeral and thinking, this is my baby, he isn't even born yet, let alone dead.'

After his death she even had to argue with hospital officials for her right to receive birth and death certificates, which meant she could give her son a proper funeral.

She was shocked to discover that another child, born in the U.S. at 21 weeks and six days into her mother's pregnancy, had survived.

Amillia Taylor was born in Florida in 2006 and celebrated her second birthday last October. She is the youngest premature baby to survive.

Miss Capewell said: 'I could not believe that one little girl, Amillia Taylor, is perfectly healthy after being born in Florida in 2006 at 21 weeks and six days.

'Thousands of women have experienced this. The doctors say the babies won't survive but how do they know if they are not giving them a chance?'

Miss Capewell has won the support of Labour MP Tony Wright, who has backed her call for a review of the medical guidelines. He said: 'When a woman wants to give the best chance to her baby, they should surely be afforded that opportunity.'

What the medical guidelines say...

Guidance limiting care of the most premature babies provoked outrage when it was published three years ago.

Experts on medical ethics advised doctors not to resuscitate babies born before 23 weeks in the womb, stating that it was not in the child's 'best interests'.

The guidelines said: 'If gestational age is certain and less than 23+0 (i.e at 22 weeks) it would be considered in the best interests of the baby, and standard practice, for resuscitation not to be carried out.'

Medical intervention would be given for a child born between 22 and 23 weeks only if the parents requested it and only after discussion about likely outcomes.

The rules were endorsed by the British Association of Perinatal Medicine and are followed by NHS hospitals.

The association said they were not meant to be a 'set of instructions', but doctors regard them as the best available advice on the treatment of premature babies.

More than 80,000 babies are born prematurely in Britain every year, and of those some 40,000 need to be treated in intensive care.

The NHS spends an estimated £1 billion a year on their care.

But while survival rates for those born after 24 weeks in the womb have risen significantly, the rates for those born earlier have barely changed, despite advances in medicine and technology.

Medical experts say babies born before 23 weeks are simply too under-developed to survive, and that to use aggressive treatment methods would only prolong their suffering, or inflict pain.

The guidelines were drawn up by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics after a two-year inquiry which took evidence from doctors, nurses and religious leaders.

But weeks before they were published in 2006, a child was born in the U.S. which proved a baby could survive at earlier than 22 weeks if it was given medical treatment.

Amillia Taylor was born in Florida on October 24, 2006, after just 21 weeks and six days in the womb. She celebrated her second birthday last year.

Doctors believed she was a week older and so gave her intensive care, but later admitted she would not have received treatment if they had known her true age.

Her birth also coincided with the debate in Britain over whether the abortion limit should be reduced.

Some argued that if a baby could survive at 22 weeks then the time limit on abortions should be reduced.

The argument, which was lost in Parliament, followed a cut to the time limit in 1990 when politicians reduced it from 28 weeks to 24 weeks, in line with scientific evidence that foetuses could survive outside the womb at a younger age.

However, experts say cases like Amillia Taylor's are rare, and can raise false expectations about survival rates.

Studies show that only 1 per cent of babies born before 23 weeks survive, and many suffer serious disabilities.

from BBC News, 2009-Apr-13:

Attenborough warns on population

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.

The Trust, which accuses governments and green groups of observing a taboo on the topic, say they are delighted to have Sir David as a patron.

Fraught area

Sir David, one of the BBC's longest-standing presenters, has been making documentaries on the natural world and conservation for more than half a century.

In a statement issued by the Optimum Population Trust he is quoted as saying: "I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more."

The Trust, which was founded in 1991, campaigns for the UK population to decrease voluntarily by not less than 0.25% a year.

It has launched a "Stop at Two" online pledge to encourage couples to limit their family's size.

Other patrons include Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and Dame Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall institute.

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said population was a fraught area of debate, with libertarians and some religious groups vehemently opposing measures by governments to influence individual fertility.

In turn, the Trust accuses policy makers and environmentalists of conspiring in a "silent lie" that human numbers can grow forever with no ill-effects.

In January 2009, Sir David revealed that he had received hate mail from viewers for not crediting God in his nature programmes.

His most recent documentary focused on how Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution and why it remained important.

[Darwin would take rather a dim view of Attenborough. -AMPP Ed.]

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jul-26, by James Taranto:

'It Didn't Happen'
Democrats go soft on crimes against humanity.

Barack Obama's latest pronouncement on Iraq should have shocked the conscience. In an interview with the Associated Press last week, the freshman Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate opined that even preventing genocide is not a sufficient reason to keep American troops in Iraq.

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now--where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife--which we haven't done," Mr. Obama told the AP. "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea."

Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere--and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Further, he elides the distinction between an act of omission (refraining from intervention in Congo and Darfur) and an act of commission (withdrawing from Iraq). The implication is that although the U.S. has had a military presence in Iraq since 1991, the fate of Iraqis is not America's problem.

Unlike his main rivals for the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama has been consistent in opposing the liberation of Iraq. In a 2002 speech, he declared that "an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world." But Mr. Obama's side lost that argument, and it is no longer 2002. For America to countenance genocide of Arab Muslims hardly seems a promising way to extinguish the Mideast's flames or to encourage the best impulses of the Arab world.

---

One may take the position that genocide would not be the likely result of an American retreat from Iraq. That is the view of Mr. Obama's Massachusetts colleague John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee. Mr. Kerry, who served in Vietnam before turning against that war, voted for the Iraq war before turning against it. He draws on the Vietnam experience in making the case that the outcome of a U.S. pullout from Iraq would not be that bad. "We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn't happen," he said recently.

"It didn't happen"--just as Mr. Kerry predicted it wouldn't. In his June 1971 debate with fellow swift boat veteran John O'Neill on "The Dick Cavett Show," the 27-year-old Mr. Kerry said, "There's absolutely no guarantee that there would be a bloodbath. . . . One has to, obviously, conjecture on this. However, I think the arguments clearly indicate that there probably wouldn't be. . . . There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to massacre the people once people have agreed to withdraw." Mr. Kerry acknowledged that "there would be certain political assassinations," but said they would number only "four or five thousand."

Here is what did happen:

In 1973, the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam, as Mr. Kerry had urged. In December 1974, the Democratic Congress ended military aid to South Vietnam. In April 1975, Saigon fell.

According to a 2001 investigation by the Orange County Register, Hanoi's communist regime imprisoned a million Vietnamese without charge in "re-education" camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished. "Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed," the Register reported.

Laos and Cambodia also fell to communists in 1975. Time magazine reported in 1978 that some 40,000 Laotians had been imprisoned in re-education camps: "The regime's figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, 'No one ever returns.' "

The postwar horrors of Vietnam and Laos paled next to the "killing fields" of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge undertook an especially vicious revolution. During that regime's 3 1/2-year rule, at least a million Cambodians, and perhaps as many as two million, died from starvation, disease, overwork or murder. The Vietnamese invaders who toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were liberators, albeit only by comparison.

In the aftermath of America's withdrawal from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. According to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, between 1975 and 1995 more than 1.4 million Indochinese escaped, nearly 800,000 of them by boat. This does not include "boat people" who died at sea, 10% of the total by some estimates.

---

Mr. Obama's blasé cynicism about the possibility of genocide in Iraq is of a piece with Mr. Kerry's denial of the humanitarian catastrophe that followed America's departure from Vietnam. It also creates an opportunity for the Democratic front-runner.

In 1998, Hillary Clinton's husband traveled to Rwanda, where he apologized for failing to intervene to prevent the 1994 genocide in which Hutus massacred some 800,000 Tutsis. "We cannot change the past," President Clinton said. "But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope." It was in this spirit that Mr. Clinton intervened in Kosovo in 1999, over Republican objections, to prevent ethnic cleansing of Albanian Muslims.

Like Mr. Kerry, Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war, then tilted against it before facing the Democratic primary electorate. Her opponents on the left have made much of her refusal to apologize for her vote. But if she can find the courage to defend a continued American presence in Iraq on humanitarian grounds, it will reduce the likelihood that the next president will have to apologize for something far worse.

Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com.

from the Jerusalem Post, 2009-Apr-16, by Sarah Honig:

Another Tack: Never since the 1930s

Minimal intellectual honesty compels us Jews to admit that we live in dangerous times - so dangerous that they cannot but remind us of the noxious atmosphere that led to the incomparable tragedy we will solemnly commemorate this Tuesday.

Never in its annals was the phoenix-like Jewish state - literally arisen from the ashes of incinerated Jewish multitudes - so defamed, so unaccepted by the so-called family of nations and so tossed in a howling tempest of ill will. Never since the 1930s have we experienced isolation so suffocating and so ubiquitous. Never since the 1930s did our collective pariah-status breed among us a resignation so deep-seated that it appears to border on apathy.

What makes our times so chillingly similar to the era that conceived and tolerated the Holocaust is the broad social respectability accorded Jew-bashing. It matters little if the pretext is the fake ogre the Nazis called "International Judaism," or the state that the Jews established so they would never be defenseless again. What matters is that Jewish self-defense in the framework of the Jewish state is as assiduously demonized as was the nonexistent cabal of the Elders of Zion.

JEWISH SELF-preservation today is as illegitimate as it was then, and assailing it is as bon ton as in those dark days before the great cataclysm.

The vulgar bigotry of thugs - whether brown-shirted and in hobnailed boots or skin-headed or keffiyeh-wrapped - was and is facilitated by the ideologically-honed vitriol of an ostensibly exemplary, honorable sort. They rationalize their abhorrence as decent and de rigueur. They were the ones who once made it possible for the storm troopers to terrorize and who now vindicate jihadist terror. Once more the self-professed spokespersons of enlightenment and free speech horrifyingly shout down and shut up the objects of their scorn.

Reviling the Jewish state is today just as proper and urbane as turning sophisticated noses up at Jews was for the prewar smart-set. Verses like T.S. Eliot's "The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is underneath the lot" were received with knowing winks and smug nods of approval by his literary milieu. Jews were judged as deserving repugnance, and the then-guardians of virtue perceived nothing untoward in the diabolical portraiture.

To be sure, Eliot-style spitefulness is crude by today's slyer standards, but the bottom-line is unchanged. No need to badmouth Jews indelicately when Judeophobic ends can be more effectively achieved via compassion for the Jews' would-be annihilators.

When the latter are painted as oppressed victims, Jews per force emerge as ruthless oppressors. When Jews, moreover, are called Israelis, their maligners can fend off accusations of anti-Semitism. Such accusations are anyhow brandished as proof of manipulative intent to silence all criticism of the Jewish state. Calculated, circuitous reasoning eventually turns Jew-haters into righteous, persecuted underdogs, while Israelis are cast as ferocious hounds.

It's thus possible to seethe with anti-Semitism without admitting it. This in turn enables self-loathing Jews to join the denunciation-fest, present themselves as morally superior to benighted "other" Jews and thereby strive for their own personal exoneration from Jewish guilt.
Hate-mongers need only claim that they just cannot abide the suffering inflicted by Nazi-clone Jews/Israelis on pitiable Palestinians. By equating Jewish/Israeli "crimes" with the Holocaust, the ploy becomes altogether irresistible. It no longer matters that Israel's army is humane to its own detriment, or that the Palestinians are merely the vanguard of the pan-Arab/Muslim drive to ethnically cleanse this region of any negligible Jewish vestige.

It doesn't even matter that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular were avid cheerleaders and collaborators in the original Holocaust. Pop-culture banality nearly casts Jews/Israelis as the bad guys of the Holocaust saga.

In the topsy-turvy reality of shallow pop-conscience, descendents of history's worst mass murderers and most indifferent onlookers now decontaminate their heritage by arrogantly portraying descendents of the most downtrodden as flagrantly evil. Exploiting the Holocaust to condemn the children of Holocaust survivors for seeking to preempt a Holocaust sequel must be the epitome of cynicism. But this cynicism is the basic prerequisite for progressive credentials.

THAT'S WHY The New York Times published Pat Oliphant's cartoon featuring a gigantic, headless, sword-wielding, goose-stepping, uniformed fiend wheeling a razor-fanged Star of David that threatens to run down a tiny, defenseless Gazan woman and baby. Every last demonizing stereotype is there, yet the guise is of an indignant liberal commentary rather than the Der Sturmer calumny it replicates.

The Australian-born Oliphant, moreover, is no gutter-agitator. He's the world's most widely syndicated political cartoonist, the winner of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer, and his works have been exhibited in no less than Washington's National Portrait Gallery. Even more disheartening is the fact that Oliphant's distortive cliche is so commonplace.

In bastions of professed broadmindedness, deploring "Israeli excesses" is the barest minimum expected of upstanding persons of goodwill and forward-thinking inclinations. It's an indispensable accessory for the liberal image. Any young quasi-cultured person one might encounter overseas is likely not to like us. That has nothing to do with malice and everything to do with the trendy indoctrination of the do-gooders in crowd.

Said do-gooders orchestrate sinister demonstrations outside Israeli embassies. They throng at college campuses to heckle and abuse any speaker suspected of pro-Israeli sentiments (or of not being sufficiently anti-Israel). They clamor for boycotts of all Israeli products. In freedom's name they initiate inherently incongruous academic boycotts of Israeli universities (which are renowned for unconstrained nonconformity and pluralism). They disrupt sporting events in which Israelis compete. Some even purport to champion opposition to genocide by abiding chants like "Hamas! Hamas! All Jews to the gas!"

They so detest bloodshed and injustice that they vehemently deprecate any remotely feasible plan to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear warheads. The politically correct thing to do is not impede tyrants who broadcast their bloodcurdling intentions before every available microphone.
World peace will supposedly be secured by restraining Israel. Submissive Jews/Israelis are presumably assured the affections of do-gooder non-anti-Semites. Which brings us right back to the 1930s, when Jews couldn't have been more powerless or compliant. Nonetheless, their helplessness won them no kind consideration.

"In those days before the war," Chaim Weizmann said in recalling international vexation with the Jews, "our protests were regarded as provocations. Our very refusal to subscribe to our own death sentence became a public nuisance."

Words that could be spoken today.

This also goes for Weizmann's warning to Anthony Eden: "The fire from the synagogues may easily spread to Westminster Abbey... If a government is allowed to destroy a whole community which has committed no crime... it means the beginning of anarchy and the destruction of the basis of civilization. The powers which stand looking on, without taking measures to prevent the crime, will one day be themselves visited by severe punishment."

from the Times of London, 2009-Apr-3, by David Brown:

Dignitas founder plans assisted suicide of healthy woman
Ludwig Minelli founder of Zurich based Dignitas

The founder of the Swiss assistedsuicide clinic Dignitas was criticised yesterday after revealing plans to help a healthy woman to die alongside her terminally ill husband.

Ludwig Minelli described suicide as a “marvellous opportunity” that should not be restricted to the terminally ill or people with severe disabilities. Critics said that the plans highlighted the risks of proposals to legalise assisted suicides in Britain for people in the final stages of a terminal illness.

The Dignitas clinic in Zurich claims to have assisted in the deaths of more than 100 Britons. The Zurich University Clinic found that more than a fifth of people who had died at Dignitas did not have a terminal condition.

Mr Minelli said that anyone who has “mental capacity” should be allowed to have an assisted suicide, claiming that it would save money for the NHS.

He expects to go to the Swiss courts to seek a ruling in the case of a Canadian couple who have made a suicide pact to die together. “The husband is ill, his partner is not ill, but she told us here in my living room that, `If my husband goes, I would go at the same time with him',” he said.

Mr Minelli, a human rights lawyer, told the BBC that the British were obsessed with the requirement for a patient to be terminally ill to justify an assisted suicide. “It is not a condition to have a terminal illness,” he said. “Terminal illness is a British obsession. As a human rights lawyer I am opposed to the idea of paternalism. We do not make decisions for other people. We should have a nicer attitude to suicide, saying suicide is a very good possibility to escape.”

Mr Minelli admitted that some of the people who had been helped to die at the clinic had been psychiatric patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Swiss psychiatrists are refusing to co-operate with Dignitas so the clinic allows patients to provide their own medical papers from Britain.

“We have some problems because all the Swiss organisations of psychiatrists have told the public that they will not make such reports,” he said. “If we would have a psychiatrist from the UK giving an extended report, then no problems.”

Mr Minelli said that failed suicide attempts caused problems and extra costs for the NHS. “For 50 attempts you have one suicide and the odds of failing with heavy costs,” he said.

Patricia Hewitt, a former Health Secretary, called last month for a change in the law to protect those who helped terminally ill relatives and friends to travel abroad for an assisted suicide. Yesterday she criticised Dignitas for allowing people with mental illnesses to have an assisted suicide without being seen by a psychiatrist in Switzerland.

“I don't think that would be an adequate safeguard for somebody suffering from a psychiatric illness,” she said. “That's why it would be much better to have a British law on this issue.”

Sarah Wootton, the chief executive of Dignity in Dying, which is campaigning to decriminalise assisted suicide in Britain, expressed concern over Mr Minelli's position. “We believe the law should change in the UK to allow terminally ill, mentally competent, adults to have the choice of an assisted death but we are also very clear that should be within a strict framework of legal safeguards,” she said.

“I am very concerned about Dignitas. Mental competence is an essential precursor to an assisted death and we are absolutely immovable on that. We need to give a clear signal that to assist non-terminally ill adults to die is wrong.”

Peter Byrne, the director of public education at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said that he could not imagine a British psychiatrist writing a report that a patient was mentally capable of agreeing to suicide.

“Although it would be possible to say that someone who is miserable or in pain has the capacity to understand that they want to end their life, that could simply be hiding undiagnosed depression,” he said. “I have seen more than 5,000 people who have attempted suicide and the state of mind is never clear. Hardly any of them after the event still wishes they were dead.”

A spokesman for Care Not Killing, a campaign opposed to any weakening of the law on euthanasia or assisted suicide, said that Mr Minelli's comments showed why any legalisation of assisted dying would open a “Pandora's box of nightmare scenarios”.

“Once the border on assisted suicides is opened it will be impossible to close,” he said. “It would have huge public policy consequences for the plight of people who are terminally ill, very old or suffering from mental illness.”

Although suicide is no longer a crime in England and Wales, aiding and abetting suicide is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. No one has so far been prosecuted for taking a person abroad for an assisted suicide.

Swiss authorities say that they are reviewing their assisted suicide law, which could make it more difficult for people to travel to the country to die. At present Swiss law forbids assisting a suicide only if there is a “selfinterested motivation”.

Who was the Grand Mufti, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini?

Grand Mufti with Hitler

Muhammed Amin al-Husseini [many spelling variations] was born in 1893 (or 1895), the son of the Mufti of Jerusalem and member of an esteemed, aristocratic family. The Husseinis were one of the richest and most powerful of all the rivalling clans in the Ottoman province known as the Judaean part of Palestine.

Amin al-Husseini studied religious law at al-Azhar University, Cairo, and attended the Istanbul School of Administration. In 1913 he went to Mecca on a pilgrimage, earning the honorary title of "Haj". He voluntarily joined the Ottoman Turkish army in World War I but returned to Jerusalem in 1917 and expediently switched sides to aid the victorious British. He acquired the reputation as a violent, fanatical anti-Zionist zealot and was jailed by the British for instigating a 1920 Arab attack against Jews who were praying at the Western Wall.

The first Palestine High Commissioner. Sir Herbert Samuel arrived in Palestine on July 1, 1920. He was a weak administrator who was too ready to compromise and appease the extremist, nationalistic Arab minority led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. When the existing Arab Mufti of Jerusalem (religious leader) died in 1921, Samuels was influenced by anti-Zionist British officials on his staff. He pardoned al-Husseini and, in January 1922, appointed him as the new Mufti, and even invented a new title of Grand Mufti. He was simultaneously made President of a newly created Supreme Muslim Council. Al-Husseini thereby became the religious and political leader of the Arabs.

The appointment of the young al-Husseini as Mufti was a seminal event. Prior to his rise to power, there were active Arab factions supporting cooperative development of Palestine involving Arabs and Jews. But al-Husseini would have none of that; he was devoted to driving Jews out of Palestine, without compromise, even if it set back the Arabs 1000 years.

William Ziff, in his book "The Rape of Palestine," summarizes:

• Implicated in the [1920] disturbances was a political adventurer named Haj Amin al Husseini. Haj Amin, was sentenced by a British court to fifteen years hard labor. Conveniently allowed to escape by the police, he was a fugitive in Syria. Shortly after, the British then allowed him to return to Palestine where, despite the opposition of the muslim High Council who regarded him as a hoodlum, Haj Amin was appointed by the British High Commissioner as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for life. [P. 22]

Al-Husseini represented newly emerging proponents of militant, Palestinian Arab nationalism, a previously unknown concept. Once he was in power, he began a campaign of terror and intimidation against anyone opposed to his rule and policies. He killed Jews at every opportunity, but also eliminated Arabs who did not support his campaign of violence. Husseini was not willing to negotiate or make any kind of compromise for the sake of peace.

As a young man, al-Husseini worked with a native Jew, Abbady, who documented this comment:

• Remember, Abbady, this was and will remain an Arab land. We do not mind you natives of the country, but those alien invaders, the Zionists, will be massacred to the last man. We want no progress, no prosperity. Nothing but the sword will decide the fate of this country.

In 1929, major Arab riots were instigated against the Jews of Palestine. They began when al-Husseini falsely accused Jews of defiling and endangering local mosques, including al-Aqsa. The call went out to the Arab masses: "Izbah Al-Yahud!" — "Slaughter the Jews!" After the killing of Jews in Hebron, the Mufti disseminated photographs of slaughtered Jews with the claim that the dead were Arabs killed by Jews.

In April, 1936 six prominent Arab leaders formed the Arab Higher Committee, with the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini as head of the organization, joining forces to protest British support of Zionist progress in Palestine. In the same month, riots broke out in Jaffa commencing a three-year period of violence and civil strife in Palestine that is known as the Arab Revolt. The Arab Higher Committee led the campaign of terrorism against Jewish and British targets.

Using the turmoil of the Arab Revolt as cover, al-Husseini consolidated his control over the Palestinian Arabs with a campaign of murder against Jews and non-compliant Arabs, the recruitment of armed militias, and the raising of funds from around the Muslim world using anti-Jewish propaganda. In 1937 the Grand Mufti expressed his solidarity with Germany, asking the Nazi Third Reich to oppose establishment of a Jewish state, stop Jewish immigration to Palestine, and provide arms to the Arab population. Following an assassination attempt on the British Inspector-General of the Palestine Police Force and the murder by Arab extremists of Jews and moderate Arabs, the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal by the British. The Grand Mufti lost his office of President of the Supreme muslim Council, his membership on the Waqf committee, and was forced into exile in Syria in 1937. The British deported the Arab mayor of Jerusalem along with other members of the Arab Higher Committee.

According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the Nazi Germany SS helped finance al-Husseini's efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin.

In 1940, al-Husseini requested the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right:

• ... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.

While in Baghdad, Syria al-Husseini aided the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941. He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for infamous SS "mountain divisions" that tried to wipe out Jewish communities throughout the region.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny (subsequently executed as a war criminal) testified:

• The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.

With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. After the war al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but escaped prosecution. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal.

From Egypt al-Husseini was among the sponsors of the 1948 war against the new State of Israel. Spurned by the Jordanian monarch, who gave the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to someone else, Haj Amin al-Husseini arranged King Abdullah's assassination in 1951, while still living in exile in Egypt. King Tallal followed Abdullah as king of Jordan, and he refused to give permission to Amin al-Husseini to come into Jordanian Jerusalem. After one year, King Tallal was declared incompetent; the new King Hussein also refused to give al-Husseini permission to enter Jerusalem. King Hussein recognized that the former Grand Mufti would only stir up trouble and was a danger to peace in the region.

Haj Amin al-Husseini eventually died in exile in 1974. He never returned to Jerusalem after his 1937 departure. His place as leader of the radical, nationalist Palestinian Arabs was taken by his nephew Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini, better known as Yasser Arafat. In August 2002, Arafat gave an interview in which he referred to "our hero al-Husseini" as a symbol of Palestinian Arab resistance.

Sources and additional reading on this topic:

• al-Hajj Amin Husayni and the Arab Higher Committee (Photo)
• Nazi ally, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, is Arafat's 'hero'
• Haj Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974)
• Haj Amin al Husseini
• Summons to a Intifada Against Britain: A "Fatwa" Issued by Haj Amin al-Husseini
• Bosnian Moslems recruited the Nazi SS by Yasser Arafat's 'Uncle'
• Arafat's Hitler-loving Role Model
• The Prisoners of History
• Arafat, the Nazi symphatizer
• The Myth of Yasser Arafat
• Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini
• Haj Amin al-Husseini
• The Mufti and the Fuhrer
• We Didn't Start the Fire
• The rise of Haj Amin
• Jerusalem Divided Between Jordan and Israel 1950-1951
• Put an End to It
• Arafat and the Big Lie
• Their Kampf: Hitler's book in Arab hands
• Plus ca change ... Journalists fail to confront Lies against Israel
• Were Jews and Arabs Destined To Hate Each Other?
• The Peace Encyclopedia: Arafat, Yassir

from the Boston Globe, 2006-Dec-12, by Anne Barnard:

Conference in Iran on Holocaust begins
Attendees mostly deny Nazis killed 6 millions Jews

TEHRAN -- Iran's Foreign Ministry yesterday convened a conference on the Holocaust that it boasted would provide a spirit of scientific inquiry and an airing of diverse views, but appeared to be attended primarily by Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world.

The conference, which was denounced in advance by the State Department as "disgraceful," was sponsored by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has called the Nazis' murder of 6 million Jews a "myth."

Participants from 58 countries, including some who have been prosecuted in their home countries in Europe for denying the Holocaust, showed up for the two-day meeting at a Foreign Ministry conference center in the snowy hills of northern Tehran.

Despite the Iranian pledge of an open inquiry, one Arab author who had hoped to convince Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust occurred said he was denied an Iranian visa at the last minute, barring him from the conference. Khaled Mahameed, an Arab citizen of Israel, said he had looked forward to an intellectual duel with the Iranian leader after sending Ahmadinejad his 300-page book documenting the Holocaust.

Holocaust historians, at a separate conference in Berlin yesterday that was backed by the German government and organized to protest the Iranian event, portrayed the Tehran meeting as an attempt to cloak anti-Semitism in scholarly language.

Raul Hilberg, author of the three-volume "The Destruction of the European Jews," said that historians base accounts of the Holocaust on Nazi records.

"This is not a figment of the imagination. This comes from the Germans themselves, and therefore any denial of these figures is absolutely senseless," Hilberg told the Berlin conference.

Under a banner lettered "International Conference of Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," Iranian officials portrayed the meeting in Tehran as a groundbreaking review of history, but quickly made clear that a main purpose of the conference was to challenge the United States and berate its ally Israel.

The meeting is occurring as US officials are pressuring Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program and when the Baker-Hamilton report on the Iraq war is raising the possibility of talks between Iran and the United States about Iraq.

"We hope this will be a beginning for deeper research into different aspects of contemporary history," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki of Iran said in an opening speech. "We are preparing the ground for deeper fact-finding."

But in a rambling speech, he quickly veered into political confrontation, saying that questioning the Holocaust is one more way that Iran can challenge the United States, in addition to condemning US dominance in the United Nations, criticizing the US performance in Afghanistan and Iraq, and backing anti-American populist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

The conference opened four days before elections for city councils across Iran and for the Assembly of Experts, a body of Muslim clerics who select and, in theory, supervise the country's Supreme Leader.

Saeed Laylaz, an economist close to the reformist wing of Islamist politicians, said the conference was aimed at rallying the extreme right-wing vote for the elections and boosting the president's populist appeal in Arab countries, where many people believe that the founding of Israel on what they considered Arab lands in effect punished Arabs for Europe's persecution of Jews.

Farzana Sayid Saidi, 29, an Iranian journalist covering the conference, said she had posted an entry on her blog the night before the conference asking, "What's important for Iran -- denying the Holocaust, or our economic problems?"

"We have no problems in the country, so we're going to review all the historical mistakes of others one by one," she said sardonically.

Some Iranian conservatives appeared embarrassed by the conference. Asked about the timing, Asadullah Badamchian, a leader of the conservative Islamic Coalition party who is critical of Ahmadinejad's economic policies, gave a tense smile. "Let me not say anything now," he said.

Scheduled for yesterday afternoon was a presentation by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, listed in the program as a professor at Mayp University in Ukraine. Today there is the panel "Holocaust, the Achilles Heel of a Primordial Jewish Trojan," by Taregh Ahmed from the Al-Tajdid Social and Cultural society in Bahrain.

Mahameed, a lawyer and amateur historian who argues that Palestinians and the Arab world must accept the historical reality of the Holocaust if they want the international community to listen to their grievances against Israel, told reporters yesterday that Iranian officials, who initially invited him, denied his visa.

Globe correspondent Sa'id Ghazali contributed to this report from Jerusalem. Material from Reuters also was used.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Dec-16, by Bret Stephens:

The Road to Tehran
Polite society helped pave the way for Iran's Holocaust conference.

"Not acceptable," says Ban Ki Moon, new Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Repulsive," say the editors of Britain's Guardian newspaper. "An insult . . . to the memory of millions of Jews," says Hillary Rodham Clinton. Global polite society is in an uproar over the Holocaust conference organized this week in Tehran under the auspices of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do--what they must do--when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let's be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades.

The Australian Financial Review is not the Journal of Historical Review, the Holocaust-denying "scholarly" vehicle of some of the Tehran conferees. But in 2002 the AFR thought it fit to print the following by Joseph Wakim, at one point the country's multicultural affairs commissioner: "Sharon's war is not a war," he wrote. "Genocide would be a more accurate description." In Ireland Tom McGurk, a columnist in the very mainstream Sunday Business Post, noted that "the scenes at Jenin last week looked uncannily like the attack on the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1944." Jose Saramago, Portugal's Nobel Laureate in Literature, observed after a visit to Ramallah that the Israeli incursion into the city "is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz."

Never mind that the total number of Jews "dealt with" in the Warsaw ghetto, according to Nazi commandant Jürgen Stroop, was 56,065, whereas the number of Palestinians killed in Jenin was no more than 60. Never mind that at the time Mr. Saramago visited Ramallah a total of about 1,500 Palestinians had been killed in the Intifada, whereas Jews were murdered at Auschwitz at a rate of about 2,000 a day. Let's concede that, for the sake of moral truth, strained comparisons may still serve useful rhetorical purposes. (Jews and Israelis also often make inapt Holocaust and Nazi comparisons.) Let's concede, too, that the comments cited above amount to criticisms of Israeli policy, nothing more.

---

Yet once a country's policies are deemed Nazi-like, it necessarily follows that its leaders are Nazi-like and--if it's a popularly elected government--so are at least a plurality of its people. "As the dogma of intolerant, belligerent, self-righteous, God-fearing irridentists . . . [Zionism] is well adapted to its locality," wrote Tony Judt, head of New York University's Remarque Institute, in the New York Review of Books. Ian Buruma of Bard College derided Israel's "right-wing government supported by poor Oriental Jews and hard-nosed Russians." And from British MP Gerald Kaufman, this: "If the United States is keen to invade countries that disrupt international standards of order, should not Israel, for example, be considered as a candidate?"

As it happens, Messrs. Judt, Buruma and Kaufman are all Jewish. So let's also concede that it is not anti-Semitic to oppose Zionism. After all, among the Tehran conferees were rabbis from the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta movement, who, like Mr. Ahmadinejad, actively call for the elimination of the state of Israel.

Yet simply because opposition to Zionism ideologically or Israel politically isn't necessarily anti-Semitic, it doesn't therefore follow that being anti-Zionist or anti-Israel are morally acceptable positions. There are more than six million Israelis who presumably wish to live in a sovereign country called Israel. Are their wishes irrelevant? Are their national rights conditional on their behavior--or rather, perceptions of their behavior--and if so, should such conditionality apply to all countries? It also should be obvious that simply because opposition to Zionism does not automatically make one guilty of anti-Semitism, neither does it automatically acquit one of it.

Such nuances, however, seem to go unnoticed by some of Israel's more elevated critics. Michel Rocard said in 2004 that the creation of the Jewish state was a historic mistake, and that Israel was "an entity that continues to pose a threat to its neighbors until today." Mr. Rocard is the former Prime Minister of France, an "entity" that itself posed a threat to its neighbors for the better part of its history.

Alternatively, Professors Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, whose paper on "The Israel Lobby" is now being turned into a book, have complained that "anyone who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy . . . stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-semite." Maybe. But earlier this week, former Klansman David Duke took the opportunity to tell CNN that he does not hate Jews but merely opposes Israel and Israel's influence in U.S. politics. He even cited Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer in his defense. Would they exonerate him of being an anti-Semite?

---

In fact, anti-Zionism has become for many anti-Semites a cloak of political convenience. But anti-Zionism has also become an ideological vehicle for an anti-Semitism that increasingly feels no need for disguise. In January 2002, the New Statesman magazine had a cover story on "The Kosher Conspiracy." For art, they had a gold Star of David pointed like a blade at the Union Jack. This wasn't anti-Zionism. It was anti-Zionism matured into unflinching anti-Semitism. And it was featured on the cover of Britain's premiere magazine of "progressive" thought.

The scholar Gregory Stanton has observed that genocides happen in eight stages, beginning with classification, symbolization and dehumanization, and ending in extermination and denial. What has happened in Tehran--denial--may seem to have turned that order on its head. It hasn't. The road to Tehran is a well-traveled one, and among those who denounce it now are some who have already walked some part of it.

from Al Jazeera, 2006-Dec-7:

An Editorial Note From Al-Jazeerah: News articles may be reduced in size or slightly changed to conform to the Conflict Terminology guide adopted by Al-Jazeerah. Changes also include correcting Arabic names and editing. So, readers are advised that news articles may not represent their original form in verbatim or size, according to the mentioned original sources. Al-Jazeerah comments are in parentheses.

Former US president, Jimmy Carter, blames Israel and US for the failure of the peace process

Bethlehem - Ma'an - Former US president Jimmy Carter has blamed Israel for the failure of the peace process.

In his recently published book, 'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid', the former president places full responsibly on Israel for the failure of any peace talks. This is especially clear in Chapter 16 ("The Wall as a Prison").

Carter says in this chapter: "Most Arab regimes have accepted the permanent existence of Israel as an indisputable fact and are no longer calling for an end to the State of Israel, having contrived a common statement at an Arab summit in 2002 that offers peace and normal relations with Israel within its acknowledged international borders and in compliance with other U.N. Security Council resolutions." (p. 14)

In his book, Carter said that what was offered to the Palestinians by the US president Bill Clinton could not be accepted by any Palestinian leader, especially in regard to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the size of the territory these settlements would occupy.

Carter added that no Palestinians would accept this offer. He said that anyone who accepted that offer would have to be accountable to his people and to history.

With regard to the Israeli allegations that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" in Taba in 2001 when it is widely believed that the Israelis offered to keep only 5 percent of the Palestinian lands, Carter says in his book: "The fact is that no such offers were ever made. Barak later said, "It was plain to me that there was no chance of reaching a settlement at Taba. Therefore I said there would be no negotiations and there would be no delegation and there would be no official discussions and no documentation. Nor would Americans be present in the room. The only thing that took place at Taba were nonbinding contacts between senior Israelis and senior Palestinians." (p. 152)

With regard to Israel's separation wall and the so-called 'Seam Zone' between the wall and the Green Line, Carter writes: "The area between the segregation barrier and the Israeli border has been designated a closed military region for an indefinite period of time. Israeli directives state that every Palestinian over the age of twelve living in the closed area has to obtain a "permanent resident permit" from the civil administration to enable them to continue to live in their own homes. They are considered to be aliens, without the rights of Israeli citizens.

"To summarize: whatever territory Israel decides to confiscate will be on its side of the wall, but Israelis will still retain control of the Palestinians who will be on the other side of the barrier". (pp. 192-3)

Carter's ends his book with recommendations for Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the international community: "The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honors its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions.

The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories." (p. 216)

from the New York Daily News "With News Wire Services", 2007-Jan-12, by Owen Moritz:

Rabbis throw book at Jimmy
Clergy nix Carter center trip over Israel tome

Outraged by Jimmy Carter's controversial new book, the nation's largest organization of rabbis yesterday pulled out of a planned visit to the former President's human rights center in Atlanta.

The Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing nearly 2,000 Reform rabbis, said it was protesting Carter's latest book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," which many say unfairly criticizes Israel.

The announcement came just hours after 14 members of an advisory board to the Carter Center also quit in protest over the book.

"You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side," the resigning members wrote the 2002 Nobel peace laureate, who negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.

The book, which follows the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, assigns blame to Israel, the Palestinians, the United States and others, but it is most critical of Israeli policy.

The Jewish clergy, who had planned to visit the Carter Center during their convention in Atlanta in March, cited their long friendship with the former President, which included participation in his Habitat for Humanity housing organization.

But all that changed with the publication of Carter's book and especially its title, they said.

"The book contains numerous distortions of history and interpretation and apparently, outright fabrications as well," the organization said.

"Its use of the term 'apartheid' to describe conditions in the West Bank serves only to demonize and de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of the world."

The rabbis went on to say that Carter's apparent praise of radical Arab leaders such as Palestinian Yasser Arafat and the late Syrian President Hafez Assad and "his attempted rehabilitation of such terrorist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas demonstrated either a clear anti-Israel bias, extreme naivete or both."

Angering both the clergy and the Carter Center's advisory board members were the former President's public statements that, they said, implied a "Jewish conspiracy" at work to discourage conversation about the Palestinians' plight.

Rabbi Harry Danziger, the conference president, said in a telephone interview that he was offended by passages he read in excerpts from the book. He said his organization's action was unrelated to the resignations by advisory board members of the Carter Center.

from the New York Times, 2007-Jan-12, by Brenda Goodman:

Carter Center Advisers Quit to Protest Book

ATLANTA, Jan. 11 — Fourteen of the city's business and civic leaders resigned from the Carter Center's advisory board on Thursday to protest former President Jimmy Carter's recent criticisms of Israel and American Jewish political power.

Their joint letter of resignation denounced Mr. Carter's best-selling book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” for its criticisms of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. The letter also took issue with comments Mr. Carter has made suggesting that Israel's supporters in the United States are using their power to stifle debate on the issue.

“It seems you have turned to a world of advocacy, even malicious advocacy,” the letter said. “We can no longer endorse your strident and uncompromising position. This is not the Carter Center or the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support.”

The 14 who resigned were members of the center's board of councilors, a group of more than 200 local leaders who act as ambassadors and fund-raisers for the center but do not determine its policy or direct its operations.

Among the letter signers were Michael Coles, the chief executive of the Caribou Coffee Company; William B. Schwartz Jr., the ambassador to the Bahamas during Mr. Carter's presidency; Liane Levetan, a former chief executive of DeKalb County, Ga.; and S. Stephen Selig III, who served as national finance chairman for the Carter-Mondale Presidential Committee.

“I felt very passionate about this,” Ms. Levetan said. “You can't, when something is not correct, sit back. You have to stand up for what you believe.”

Several members said they had admired Mr. Carter for years and found it difficult to resign, but could not remain associated with his recent statements.

“I was very offended with the views that he espoused in that book,” said Jonathan Golden, a board member for 10 years and chairman of the Arnall Golden Gregory law firm in Atlanta.

In an e-mailed statement responding to the resignations, John Hardman, executive director of the Carter Center, thanked the resigning members for their “years of service and support,” but also played down the significance of their departure. Mr. Hardman pointed out that those who resigned were just a fraction of the overall board and were not “engaged in implementing the work of the center.”

The resignations are the latest in a recent string of public defections from Mr. Carter and the ideas he espouses in his book, which has been on The New York Times best-seller list for the last five weeks.

In December, Kenneth W. Stein, a professor at Emory University who was the first executive director at the Carter Center, resigned his most recent position as a fellow there. Days later, Dennis Ross, a former envoy to the Middle East who is now a news analyst, accused Mr. Carter of using maps that Mr. Ross created without his permission, and mislabeling them in the book.

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith recently placed advertisements criticizing Mr. Carter in several major newspapers, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing Reform Judaism, announced that its members would not visit the Carter Center, as planned, during a coming conference in Atlanta.

Mr. Carter has defended his views, along with his use of the word “apartheid” in the book's title, saying he intended the book to spark discussion.

The letter from resigning board members accuses Mr. Carter of having abandoned his role as a peace broker in the Middle East, and said his statements had proven useful to white supremacists and other anti-Semites.

“In its work in conflict resolution, the Carter Center has always played the useful and constructive role of honest broker and mediator between warring parties,” the letter says. “In your book, which portrays the conflict between Israel and her neighbors as a purely one-sided affair with Israel holding all of the responsibility for resolving the conflict, you have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side.”

from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2007-Jan-11, by Ben Harris:

As Carter controversy grows, Jews resign from center's board

NEW YORK — Fourteen Jewish members of the Carter Center's board of councilors have resigned to protest the former president's new book blaming Israel for the failure of Middle East peace efforts.

In a letter to President Carter obtained by JTA, the group wrote that the former president had abandoned his role as a peace broker in favor of malicious partisan advocacy, portraying the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “purely one-sided affair” which Israel bears full responsibility for resolving.

The letter also cites a “disturbing” passage from Carter's book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” which appears to call for Palestinians to end acts of terrorism only if Israel abides by its obligations under international law and under the “road map,” a peace plan guided by the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia. The passage appears to condone violence against Israelis, the signatories said.

“We can no longer support your strident and uncompromising position,” the letter said. “This is not the Carter Center or the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support.”

The departures had been in the works for weeks as the precise wording of the letter and the exact makeup of the resigning group was hashed out. Among those resigning were a number of prominent members of the Jewish community in Atlanta, where the center is located.

Hours later, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the umbrella organization of Reform rabbis, announced it was canceling a visit to the Carter Center planned to coincide with its March convention in Atlanta.

“We call upon Mr. Carter to better educate himself and his readers as to the true root causes of the Palestinian people's dire plight, and once again to dedicate his efforts to promoting peace, not prejudice, in the Middle East,” the CCAR said in a statement. “As the rabbinic body of Reform Judaism, the largest denomination of religiously affiliated American Jews, our cancellation of the visit to the Carter Center reflects our continuing commitment to Israel, Zionism, and America's role in the establishment of a just and lasting peace between the State of Israel and all her Arab neighbors.”

Steve Berman, an Atlanta real-estate developer who was among the 14 that resigned from the Carter Center's board of councilors, told JTA several weeks ago that the group wanted to bring along some non-Jews from the 200-member board. That effort apparently was unsuccessful.

In an interview Thursday, Berman said that time considerations, as well as a desire not “to be disruptive to the work of the Carter Center,” had limited the group's expansion.

The Carter Center's executive director, John Hardman, appeared to downplay the significance of the resignations. In a statement released Thursday, he thanked the board members for their service to the center while noting their limited role in the center's operations and the relatively small size of the group resigning.

“The Carter Center's board of councilors is an advisory body of community leaders and businesspeople who are briefed quarterly on the center's work and serve as emissaries of the center to the greater community,” Hardman said. “They are not engaged in implementing the work of the center and are not a governing board. There are more than 200 members of the board of councilors. The center's governing board is the board of trustees.”

Hardman did not respond to JTA requests for comment.

Founded in 1982 by the former president and his wife, Rosalynn, the Carter Center promotes conflict resolution, freedom, democracy and global health. The center is situated in a 35-acre Atlanta park that is also home to the Carter Presidential Library and Museum and is two miles from Emory University, with which it has a longstanding partnership.

Funding for the center's $36 million operating budget comes from a mix of corporate and private philanthropic sources. In addition, a number of prominent Arab donors — including Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Abdulaziz, Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, and the governments of Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are listed as having contributed more than $1 million.

The mass resignation adds to the firestorm of criticism that has engulfed the center since the publication of Carter's book. Critics have blasted the book as biased, inaccurate, misleading and missing key historical facts.

Jewish leaders have lashed out at Carter for claiming in recent interviews that powerful American Jews stifle free debate on Israel, a claim they regard as anti-Semitic. Carter met last month with a group of rabbis in Phoenix in an attempt to patch things up, but the rabbis left disappointed.

Many of the recent criticisms were echoed in the resignation letter, which also included refutations of several of Carter's claims. The letter cited research by the Anti-Defamation League showing that Carter's comments, in particular his use of the term “apartheid,” has energized white supremacist groups who long have claimed that Israel's supporters have undue influence over the U.S. government.

The former board members followed the lead of Kenneth Stein, a professor who left his position as a Carter Center fellow in December. Stein, a former executive director of the center who had been associated with Carter for 23 years, wrote in his resignation letter that Carter's book is “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.”

Days later, an Emory anthropology professor, Melvin Konner, withdrew from an earlier commitment to join a group advising Carter on how to handle the controversy swirling around the book.

In a letter to Hardman, Konner cites the same passage as Berman's group that seems to imply Carter's acquiescence to Palestinian terrorism unless Israel makes further concessions.

“It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the road map for peace are accepted by Israel,” Carter's book states.

“This sentence, simply put, makes President Carter an apologist for terrorists and places my children, along with all Jews everywhere, in greater danger,” Konner wrote.

He also called on the Carter Center to distance itself from its namesake — a man he describes as “one of his heroes” — if it wanted to continue to thrive. But he conceded that the center was unlikely to do so.

Konner said he had been asked to participate in the advisory group after expressing deep misgivings over Carter's recent statements and seeking clarification from Hardman as to whether the Carter Center endorsed the former president's views. It's unclear what response he received.

Hardman has since denied that any advisory group was in the works.

“I think Carter is going to do extensive damage to the center that bears his name, and to the Democratic Party,” Konner told JTA. “And I'm a lifelong Democrat. I hate to see this happening.”

Also Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Carter had agreed to defend his book at Brandeis University, though he will not debate Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, as originally proposed.

Dershowitz said he would attend anyway and would be among the first to raise his hand to question Carter.

from the Boston Globe, 2006-Dec-21, by Alan Dershowitz:

Why won't Carter debate his book?

YOU CAN ALWAYS tell when a public figure has written an indefensible book: when he refuses to debate it in the court of public opinion. And you can always tell when he's a hypocrite to boot: when he says he wrote a book in order to stimulate a debate, and then he refuses to participate in any such debate. I'm talking about former president Jimmy Carter and his new book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid."

Carter's book has been condemned as "moronic" (Slate), "anti-historical" (The Washington Post), "laughable" (San Francisco Chronicle), and riddled with errors and bias in reviews across the country. Many of the reviews have been written by non-Jewish as well as Jewish critics, and not by "representatives of Jewish organizations" as Carter has claimed. Carter has gone even beyond the errors of his book in interviews, in which he has said that the situation in Israel is worse than the crimes committed in Apartheid South Africa. When asked whether he believed that Israel's "persecution" of Palestinians was "[e]ven worse . . . than a place like Rwanda," Carter answered, "Yes. I think -- yes."

When Larry King referred to my review several times to challenge Carter, Carter first said I hadn't read the book and then blustered, "You know, I think it's a waste of my time and yours to quote professor Dershowitz. He's so obviously biased, Larry, and it's not worth my time to waste it on commenting on him." (He never did answer King's questions.)

The next week Carter wrote a series of op-eds bemoaning the reception his book had received. He wrote that his "most troubling experience" had been "the rejection of [his] offers to speak" at "university campuses with high Jewish enrollment." The fact is that Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz had invited Carter to come to Brandeis to debate me, and Carter refused. The reason Carter gave was this: "There is no need to for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."

As Carter knows, I've been to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, many times -- certainly more times than Carter has been there -- and I've written three books dealing with the subject of Middle Eastern history, politics, and the peace process. The real reason Carter won't debate me is that I would correct his factual errors. It's not that I know too little; it's that I know too much.

Nor is Carter the unbiased observer of the Middle East that he claims to be. He has accepted money and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan , saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred. Zayed's personal foundation, the Zayed Center, claims that it was Zionists, rather than Nazis, who "were the people who killed the Jews in Europe" during the Holocaust. It has held lectures on the blood libel and conspiracy theories about Jews and America perpetrating Sept. 11. Carter's acceptance of money from this biased group casts real doubt on his objectivity and creates an obvious conflict of interest.

Carter's refusal to debate wouldn't be so strange if it weren't for the fact that he claims that he wrote the book precisely so as to start debate over the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process. If that were really true, Carter would be thrilled to have the opportunity to debate. Authors should be accountable for their ideas and their facts. Books shouldn't be like chapel, delivered from on high and believed on faith.

What most rankles is Carter's insistence that he is somehow brave for attacking Israel and highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people. No other conflict in the world -- not even the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan -- evokes more hand-wringing in the media, universities, and human rights organizations than the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Jimmy Carter isn't brave for beating up on Israel. He's a bully. And like all school-yard bullies, underneath the tough talk and bravado, there's a nagging insecurity and a fear that one day he'll have to answer for himself in a fair fight.

When Jimmy Carter's ready to speak at Brandeis, or anywhere else, I'll be there. If he refuses to debate, I will still be there -- ready and willing to answer falsity with truth in the court of public opinion.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at HarvardUniversity. His most recent book is "Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways."

from WorldNetDaily, 2007-Jan-25, by Aaron Klein:

Jimmy Carter: Too many Jews on Holocaust council
Former president also rejected Christian historian because name sounded 'too Jewish'

TEL AVIV – Former President Jimmy Carter once complained there were "too many Jews" on the government's Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council's former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.

Freedman, who served on the council during Carter's term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council's board by Carter's office because the scholar's name "sounded too Jewish."

Freedman, now a professor of law at Hofstra University, was picked by the council's chairman, author Elie Weisel, to serve as executive director in 1980. The council, created by the Carter White House, went on to establish the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Freedman says he was tasked with creating a board for the council and with making recommendations to the White House on how best to memorialize the Holocaust.

He told WND he sent a memo to Carter's office containing recommendations for council board members.

He said his memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, "Too many Jews."

The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter's handwriting and was initialed by Carter.

Freedman said at the time the board he constructed was about 80-perent Jewish, including many Holocaust survivors.

He said at the behest of the White House he composed another board consisting of more non-Jews. But he said he was "stunned" when Carter's office objected to a non-Jew whose name sounded Jewish.

Freedman said he could not provide the historians name to WND because he did not have the man's permission.

"I got a phone call from our liaison at the White House saying this particular historian whose name sounded Jewish would not do. The liaison said he would not even take the time to present Carter with the possibility of including the historian on the board because he knew Carter would think the name sounded too Jewish. I explained the historian is Presbyterian, but the liaison said it wouldn't matter to Carter."

Freedman said he was "outraged by this absurdity."

"If I was memorializing Martin Luther King, I would expect a significant number of board members to be African American. If I was memorializing Native American figures I'd expect a lot of Native Americans to be on the board.

"I do not for a moment consider it inappropriate to build a Holocaust council with a significant majority of the board being Jewish," Freedman stated.

Freedman describes himself as "self-proclaimed liberal." He said he decided to speak out after the release of Carter's latest book, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid," which some have accused of being biased against Israel.

This would not be the first time Carter's messages on right hand corners of letters generated a Holocaust-related scandal.

Last week, in an interview with the Tovia Singer Show on Israel National Radio, a former U.S. Justice Department official said he received a letter advocating "special consideration" for a confessed Nazi SS officer accused of murdering Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.

Neal Sher, who served in the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, said that in 1987 he received a note from Carter petitioning for re-entry into the U.S. for Martin Bartesch, who had been deported by Sher's office to Austria after it was established he served as an SS officer.

Sher said his office had "extraordinary evidence" Bartesch shot Jews.

Bartesch originally immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago. He later admitted to Sher's office and the court he had voluntarily joined the SS as a teenager and served in its Death's Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. Bartesch also confessed to having concealed his SS service at concentration camp from U.S. immigration officials.

Sher said the Justice Department obtained a journal kept by the SS and captured by the U.S. Armed Forces listing Bartesch as having shot to death Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner.

Bartesch's daughters, who still lived in the U.S., attempted in 1987 to appeal to politicians to allow the former Nazi officer to enter the country. They wrote a note in which they claimed it was "un-American" to persecute a man for crimes committed when he was only 17 and 18 years old.

Sher said he was shocked when he received the daughter's letter replete with a handwritten note from Carter on the upper right corner stating the former president wanted "special consideration" for the Bartesch family for humanitarian reasons.

The note, containing Carter's signature, was obtained this week by the NY Sun.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Oct-4, by Mark Bowden:

The Six-Million Person Question
Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust.

"As to the Holocaust, I just raised a few questions. And I didn't receive any answers to my questions."--Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, interviewed in Time magazine in September 2006.

When Mr. Ahmadinejad visited the U.S. last month, he backed off slightly from his earlier position that the Holocaust was a myth. The systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, an atrocious historical fact that is as thoroughly documented as a fact can be, remains a living memory for thousands of survivors. My guess is that someone in Mr. Ahmadinejad's circle has pointed this out to him since he publicly doubted it last December.

The president of Iran is a man for whom facts are mere fodder for political purposes, but there is little political advantage in making a fool of yourself on a world stage. So he has now retreated to the last refuge of all intellectual scoundrels, calling for "more research." And he has adopted a slightly different critical tack, which he repeated in numerous forums during his recent trip to New York. In Time it went like this: "I said that during World War II, around 60 million were killed. All were human beings and had their own dignities. Why only six million?"

---

Here, if I understand it correctly, he is asking: Why, in a war where 60 million were killed, has the West made such a big deal out of the deaths of six million Jews? Were the other deaths not equally terrible? Was the world not equally impoverished by each of these losses?

This seems a fair question, and I can think of a good answer. I'm sure others can think of even better ones than mine. But since Mr. Ahmadinejad has complained about not receiving any, for what it's worth, I'm happy to offer this one:

It is a tricky business, rating the moral depredations of the human species, because just when you have settled on the worst, somebody somewhere achieves a new low. In the 20th century alone, communism and its variants in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia have been responsible for the slow and rapid execution of millions. Millions more perished in the saturation bombing campaigns and the atom bomb blasts of World War II. Conflict and murderously misguided idealism were big players in the atrocity game, and accounted for the deaths of many times more innocents than Adolf Hitler and his Final Solution.

The Holocaust haunts us more than these others for a good reason. The Final Solution was the deliberate act of a government to exterminate a portion of its own people. It employed the resources of the state--its policy makers, planners, intellectuals, legal system, police and military, industry, transportation system and to a large extent its people--to single out a particular group of citizens, systematically demonize and isolate them, and then count them, label them, strip them of everything, round them up, ship them to concentration camps, kill them and incinerate them. It attempted to squeeze some last value out of the most fit among those doomed, by employing them as slave labor or subjecting them to medical experimentation before killing them, and even then looked for ways to make saleable products out of their remains.

This horror began in peacetime, so the nation was not lashing out in self-defense, nor was it being threatened in any concrete way. In the early 1930s, when the state-driven process of isolating and demonizing Jews began, Germany had rebuilt itself after its defeat in World War I, and was the most powerful nation on the European continent. Indeed, it would soon sweep across its borders and conquer every country within its reach. Its science, medical and technological prowess were the envy of the world.

The Holocaust disturbs us so deeply because it demonstrates that none of the things we associate with the advancement of civilization--peace, prosperity, industrialization, education, technological achievement--free us from the dark side of the human soul. Just as there is evil in the heart of every man, there is evil at the heart of even the most "civilized" human society. It is a humbling recognition. Man and society are both capable of the most appallingly depraved behavior. Only in the case of society, it occurs on an industrial scale.

The lives lost in the firebombing of Dresden or the nuclear flash over Hiroshima are no less significant, and the military choices that brought about those deaths remain profoundly disturbing, but they at least took place in the context of war. Whole societies were caught up in a life-or-death struggle.

---

What the Holocaust demonstrates is the danger of a one-party state. It shows what can happen when a group of true believers, convinced of the superiority of their own ideas, have unchecked power. They are then free to rewrite history to suit their political ends, and crush those who disagree or protest . . . or who worship God in a different way.

Like, say, the mullahs in Iran.

Mr. Bowden, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Guests of the Ayatollah" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006).

from Reuters UK, 2006-May-28, by Erik Kirschbaum:

UPDATE 1-Germans should stop feeling Holocaust guilt -Iran

BERLIN - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Germans they should no longer allow themselves to be held prisoner by a sense of guilt over the Holocaust and reiterated doubts that the Holocaust even happened.

In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, Ahmadinejad said he doubted Germans were allowed to write "the truth" about the Holocaust and said he was still considering travelling to Germany for the World Cup soccer tournament.

"I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War Two ... The question is: Why is it that only Jews are at the centre of attention?," he said in the interview published on Sunday.

"How long is this going to go on?" he added. "How long will the German people be held hostage to the Zionists?... Why should you feel obligated to the Zionists? You've paid reparations for 60 years and will have to pay for another 100 years."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders have said his previous remarks questioning whether the Holocaust happened were unacceptable. Denying the Holocaust is a serious crime in Germany punishable with a prison term of up to five years.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in concentration camps.

In the rare interview with Western media, Ahmadinejad said if the Holocaust really happened Jews should be moved from Israel back to Europe.

"We say if the Holocaust happened, then the Europeans must accept the consequences and the price should not be paid by Palestine. If it did not happen, then the Jews must return to where they came from."

WORLD CUP

He said he was still considering going to Germany to support Iran in the World Cup despite protest stirred by a "worldwide network of Zionists".

Iran's first World Cup match is against Mexico in Nuremberg on June 11 two days after the tournament starts and German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says he would be welcome to come because Germany wants to be a good host.

The invitation sparked protests from other political leaders and groups who said his anti-Israeli comments were unacceptable.

"My decision (on whether to go) depends on a lot of different things," said Ahmadinejad, a soccer fan. "Whether I have time, whether I want to and some other things."

He said he could not understand why his possible visit had caused such debate but was not surprised by the row.

"I was not at all surprised because there is a very active worldwide network of Zionists, also in Europe," he said in the rare interview with Western media that was published on Sunday.

Ahmadinejad's latest comments were condemned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder and dean, called on Merkel to keep him out of Germany.

"On a day when the Pope is in Auschwitz to remind the world of the horrors of the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad questions it again," Hier said. "For him to be at the World Cup and sit in a VIP seat would be a desecration of the memory of the Holocaust."

Asked by Der Spiegel, in its cover story entitled "The man the world is afraid of", whether he stood by his earlier view the Holocaust was a myth, Ahmadinejad said: "I only accept something as the truth if I am truly convinced of it.

"In Europe there are two opinions on it. One group of researchers who are by and large politically motivated say the Holocaust happened. There is another group of researchers who have the opposite view and are by and large in prison for that."

from National Review, 1995-Dec-31, by George Watson:

Never Blame the Left

The Left is perceived as kind and caring,
despite its extensive history of promoting genocide.

When it comes to handing out blame, it is widely assumed that the Right is wicked and the Left incompetent. Or rather, you sometimes begin to feel, any given policy must have been Right if it was wicked, Left if it was incompetent.

Mr. Watson, formerly a professor at New York University and now a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, is the author of Politics & Literature in Modern Britain and The Idea of Liberalism He is currently completing a history of socialism.

To give an example: I happened recently in Vienna to pass a restaurant that was advertising Jewish food, with two armed policemen standing outside. They were there, one of them explained to me, to guard against right wing radical extremists. There had been no violence against the restaurant then, and I believe there has been none since. But racism, and especially anti-Semitism, is wicked, so it must be right-wing.

That is fairly astounding, when you think about it. The truth is that in modern Europe, genocide has been exclusively a socialist idea, ever since Engels proclaimed it in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in January-February 1849. Ever since then everyone who has advocated genocide has called himself a socialist, without exception.

The Left has a lot to hide. In the 1890s, for example, French socialists dissociated themselves from the Dreyfus affair, and in January 1898 the French Socialist Party issued a manifesto that called it a power struggle within the ruling classes, and warned the workers against taking sides in the matter. Dreyfus's supporters were Jewish capitalists, they argued, eager to clear themselves of financial scandals. A few years later, in 1902, H. G. Wells in Anticipations repeated the Marxist demand for genocide, but with variations, since the book is a blueprint for a socialist utopia that would be exclusively white.

A generation later Bernard Shaw, another socialist, in a preface to his play On the Rocks (1933), called on scientists to devise a painless way of killing large mulititudes of people, especially the idle and the incurable, which is where Hitler's program began six years later. In a letter to his fellow socialist Beatrice Webb (February 6, 1938) Shaw remarked of Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews that ``we ought to tackle the Jewish question,'' which means admitting ``the right of States to make eugenic experments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable.'' His only proviso was that it should be done humanely.

Ethnic cleansing was an essential part of the socialist program before Hitler had taken any action in the matter. The Left, for a century, was proud of its ruthlessness, and scornful of the delicacy of its opponents. ``You can't make an omelette,'' Beatrice Webb once told a visitor who had seen cattle cars full of starving people in the Soviet Unions, ``without breaking eggs.''

There is abundant evidence, what is more, that the Nazi leaders believed they were socialists and that anti-Nazi socialists often accepted that claim. In Mein Kampf (1926) Hitler accepted that National Socialism was a derivative of Marxism. The point was more bluntly made in private conversations. ``The whole of National Socialism is based on Marx,'' he told Hermann Rauschning. Rauschning later reported the remark in Hitler Speaks (1939), but by that time the world was at war and too busy to pay much attention to it. Goebbels too thought himself a socialist. Five days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he confided in his diary that ``real socialism'' would be established in that country after a Nazi victory, in place of Bolshevism and Czarism.

The evidence that Nazism was part of the socialist tradition continues to accumulate, even if it makes no headlines. In 1978 Otto Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant appeared in its original German. Wagener was a lifelong Nazi who had died in 1971. His recollections of Hitler's conversations had been composed from notes in a British prisoner-of-war camp, and they represent Hitler as an extreme socialist utopian, anti-Jewish because ``the Jew is not a socialist.'' Nor are Communists--``basically they are not socialistic, since they create mere herds, as in the Soviet Union, without individual life.'' The real task, Hitler told Wagener, was to realize the socialist dream that mankind over the centuries had forgotten, to liberate labor, and to displace the role of capital. That sounds like a program for the Left, and many parties called socialist have believed in less.

Hitler's allegiance, even before such sources were known, was acknowledged by socialists outside Germany. Julian Huxley, for example, the pro-Soviet British biologist who later became director-general of UNESCO, accepted Hitler's claim to be a socialist in the early 1930s, though without enthusiasm (indeed, with marked embarrassment).

Hitler's program demanded central economic planning, which was at the heart of the socialist cause; and genocide, in the 1930s, was well known to be an aspect of the socialist tradition and of no other. There was, and is, no conservative or liberal tradition of racial extermination. The Nazis, what is more, could call on socialist practice as well as socialist theory when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and began their exterminatory program. That is documented by Rudolf Hoess in his memoir Kommandant in Auschwitz (1958). Detailed reports of the Soviet camp system were circulated to Nazi camp commandants as a model to emulate and an example to follow.

Soviet exterminations under Lenin and Stalin may have totaled 25 to 30 million, which (if the estimate is accepted) would represent about three times the Nazi total of nine million. That seems to matter very little now. My Austrian policeman was still certain that racism is right-wing. As are a lot of people. After a recent bomb outrage against a synogogue in Lübeck, the German press instantly assumed, before anyone was charged with the crime, that the Right was to blame. The fact that there is no non-socialist tradition of genocide in Europe has not even been noticed.

That is an impressive act of suppression. The Left may have lost the political battle, almost everywhere in the world. But it does not seem to have lost the battle of ideas. In intellectual circles, at least, it is still believed that racism and the Left do not mix.

Why is this? How has the evidence of socialist genocide, how has Hitler's acknowledgement of his debt to Marx, been so efficiently suppressed?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the nature of political commitment. Political knowledge is not like botany or physics, and commitment is not usually made by examining evidence. When socialism was fashionable I used to ask those who believed in it why they thought public ownership would favor the poor. What struck me about their responses was not just that they did not know but that they did not think they were under any obligation to know. But if they had really cared about poverty they would have demanded an answer before they signed up, and would have gone on demanding an answer until they got one. In other words, they were hardly interested in solving poverty. What really interested them was looking and sounding as if they did.

When Marxism was fashionable, similarly, I used to ask Marxists what book by Marx or Engels they had read all the way through, and watch them look shifty and change the subject. Or, for a change, I might ask them what they thought of Engels's 1849 program of racial extermination, and watch them lose their temper. Politics, for lots of people, is not evidence based. It is more like showing off a new dress or a new suit.

There are three motives, broadly speaking, for political commitment, of which the third is admirable. I shall leave it till last.

The first is self-definition. You call yourself Left or Right, that is, as a way of proclaiming to the world and to yourself that you are a certain sort of person--kind and caring if you are Left, competent and realistic if you are Right. The reasons for these associations of ideas are far older than our century and matter now only to historians, and even they would usually prefer not to be asked about them. It might be worrying if anyone did. The line between the efficient and the inefficient, after all, is nothing like as simple as the line between the private and the public, and not all public enterprise is caring: Auschwitz was public enterprise. Never mind. If you want to look caring, you will not ask such questions, and if anybody does it is always possible to change the subject.

The second motive is a sense of community. You choose a political side because the people you know, or would like to know, are already there, and you would like them to be like you. There was a time when, in university life, you would not be accepted unless you were Left, and it took enormous courage in that age to speak out on campus against Soviet or Chinese exterminations. That view is not yet dead. There are still those on both sides of the Atlantic who move, and intend to go on moving, in circles that think anti-Americanism a sufficient substitute for connected thought.

The third motive is instrumental. You can hold a political view with the admirable purpose of achieving something specific like constitutional change or a balanced budget, and support those who support it, whatever their party color. A moment's reflection suggests that this is rare. It is hard work, for one thing. It seldom attracts admiration, for another, though it often should. And it is not always easy to believe that this will work. Much more agreeable, on the whole, to use politics as a way of defining yourself or of making and keeping friends.

The Left got away with its crimes, I suggest, because those who form opinion had their own reasons for looking in another direction. They wanted to see themselves in a certain light and to keep the good opinion of the people whose friendship they valued. They had no wish to look at evidence, and they were adept at pretending, when it was produced, that it did not mean what it said. I remember once, ni a controversy in a British journal, being told that Marx, Wells, and Shaw were being whimsical and nothing more when they committed socialists to mass-murder. Couldn't I take a joke? Evidence is seldom as inconvenient as that in the physical sciences, and scientists do not enjoy such convenient excuses for dismissal as whimsy or irony. Most critical theory, in our times, has been a way of pretending that evidence does not, and perhaps cannot, be taken literally.

The effects of that mood are still visible. The history of socialism, above all, is studiously neglected and even, in some aspects, simply taboo. What we need now is a serious and unblinking study of socialism, of what it said and what it did: one that does not judge the evidence; one that is brave enough to tell it as it was.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Nov-7:

Population Politics
Why Ellen Sauerbrey has become a liberal target.

Samuel Alito isn't the only nominee under attack by liberals for his record on abortion. So is Ellen Sauerbrey, President Bush's choice to be Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

To be precise, Ms. Sauerbrey is under fire for supporting Mr. Bush's priorities at the United Nations, where the former Maryland legislator and gubernatorial candidate has spent four years as U.S. envoy to the Commission on the Status of Women. Among her alleged sins is that she supports the Administration's decision to withhold $34 million from the U.N. Population Fund because some of the agency's contributions go to China's appalling forced-abortion policy.

The Population Fund is one of the principal cheerleaders of China's one-child policy, which has been enforced through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilizations and even, human-rights groups charge, infanticide. Several weeks ago Mr. Bush invoked a 20-year-old policy--known as the Kemp-Kasten Amendment--which prohibits federal funding of "any organization or program which supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization."

One would think that women's organizations would applaud this decision--and the appointment of an American woman who champions it. Mandatory limitations on family size and involuntary sterilizations hardly represent "reproductive freedom" or "a woman's right to choose." Instead, groups such as Planned Parenthood have protested that Mr. Bush is denying women access to reproductive health and family planning services. Planned Parenthood is also attacking Ms. Sauerbrey.

---

China insists that coercion is a thing of the past. But the senior China specialist at the U.S. Census Bureau told Congress in December that, "The evidence is clear that the one-child policy is still basic national policy, that it remains coercive and violative of human rights." Amnesty International continues to document abortions, sterilizations and infanticide inside rural hospitals. China also uses fines and "social compensation" penalties of up to four years of salary to punish one-child violators.

There are an estimated 40 million girls demographically missing in China as a result of its one-child policy. The Population Research Institute reports that the sex ratio of 117 boys to 100 girls is so out of balance that the Chinese government has initiated emergency programs to teach parents about the value of girls.

Representative Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) has introduced legislation to release taxpayer funds for the Population Fund and give recipients a blank check on how to spend it. But it is Ms. Maloney and her allies who should be forced to defend the Population Fund's practices, especially its support for China's birth-control policy. The Fund has publicly praised the one-child policy as "the most successful family planning (sic) policy ever developed," and it once gave the Chinese government an award for the "effectiveness" of its population control.

American elites share the blame for this and other coercive population programs by instructing foreign leaders with the false Malthusian premise that people constrain economic progress. The notion of a "population bomb," so universally accepted in the 1960s and 1970s, has been thoroughly discredited.

The birth rate in developing countries like Mexico and India has plummeted to just over three children per couple today from about six in 1950. The major explanation for smaller family sizes, longer life expectancy, income gains and improved health and nutrition has been economic growth, not condom distribution or lower birth rates. Population stabilization is not a cause, but rather a consequence, of growth and prosperity. The Reagan Administration had it right when it first stopped financing the Population Fund and declared that "capitalism is by far the best contraceptive."

---

As for Ms. Sauerbrey, her opponents' claims that she is a "crony" (for having run Mr. Bush's 2000 election campaign in Maryland) and "unqualified" are a smokescreen for their real gripe about the Bush Administration's decision to withhold money from the Population Fund. California Democrat Barbara Boxer recently managed to get a vote on Ms. Sauerbrey delayed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where pro-choice Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island is being lobbied hard to vote against her.

The principle that is most at stake here is personal freedom. We have seen in China the debasement of human dignity on a grand scale when population control is imposed by an authoritarian regime. Mr. Bush deserves credit for refusing to coerce American taxpayers into paying for it, and Ms. Sauerbrey deserves to be confirmed.

from National Review Online, 2005-Mar-30, by Eric Pfeiffer:

Odd Felos
Michael Schiavo's very strange lawyer.

"I wonder what it would be like to die right now?"

Many of us have asked ourselves this question and Michael Schiavo attorney George Felos is no exception. Unlike most, however, Felos has a story to go along with it.

In his 2002 book Litigation as Spiritual Practice, Felos expresses his belief in the "cosmic law of cause and effect," in which the human mind is not limited by the constraints of reality. More specifically, if one wants a new car, one could make this dream car manifest "out of the ether."

Felos claims to have used his mental powers to cause a plane he was passenger on to nearly crash. By simply asking himself, "I wonder what it would be like to die right now?" the plane's autopilot program mysteriously ceased to function and the plane descended into free fall. Felos then observed, "At that instant a clear, distinctly independent and slightly stern voice said to me, 'Be careful what you think. You are more powerful than you realize.' In quick succession I was startled, humbled and blessed by God's admonishment."

Throughout Litigation as Spiritual Practice, Felos combines tactics on successful litigation with his spiritual adventures. The book's 30 chapters feature a diversity of selections such as: "Bargaining for the Contingency Fee" alongside others entitled, "Rescued on Dream Wings" and "My Death and Resurrection."

On their website, Felos publisher Blue Dolphin describe his book as "the excitement and drama of the courtroom, and the ecstasy and anguish of spiritual evolution in a combative environment. If the seemingly barren and war-strewn field of litigation can be the playground where spirit dances, it can revel anywhere."

Felos believes he used this "conscious evolution" in his first "right-to-die" case concerning Estelle Browning. Felos says when he was alone with Browning they shared a "soul touch" in which their spirits left their respective bodies and spoke to each other. It was in this encounter that Browning "told" Felos she wanted to die:

"As I continued to stay beside Mrs. Browning at her nursing home bed, I felt my mind relax and my weight sink into the ground. I began to feel lightheaded as I became more reposed. Although feeling like I could drift into sleep, I also experienced a sense of heightened awareness."

He writes,

As Mrs. Browning lay motionless before my gaze, I suddenly heard a loud, deep moan and scream and wondered if the nursing home personnel heard it and would respond to the unfortunate resident. In the next moment, as this cry of pain and torment continued, I realized it was Mrs. Browning.

I felt the midsection of my body open and noticed a strange quality to the light in the room. I sensed her soul in agony. As she screamed I heard her say, in confusion, "Why am I still here ... Why am I here?" My soul touched hers and in some way I communicated that she was still locked in her body. I promised I would do everything in my power to gain the release her soul cried for. With that, the screaming immediately stopped. I felt like I was back in my head again, the room resumed its normal appearance, and Mrs. Browning, as she had throughout this experience, lay silent.

In addition to his soul-touch with Estelle Browning, Felos also says he had a pre-conception conversation with his future son, who said, "I'm ready to be born...will you stop this fooling around!"

For the past 25 years, Felos has practiced yoga and meditation as a means to advance his spirituality and career. And while he lectures on "practicing non-attachment," Felos has made a good living along the way attaching sizeable legal fees to his bank account.

Critics of Felos and Michael Schiavo claim a significant portion of funds awarded for the care of Terri Schiavo have actually been absorbed in legal fees paid to Felos. As Wesley Smith, author of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder and frequent NRO contributor, says, "I find it bitterly ironic that the bulk of the money a medical-malpractice jury awarded to Terri for use in making her better instead went into Mr. Felos's pocket to make her dead."

Felos describes his spiritual beliefs as syncretistic religion, mixing elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Native American ceremonial practices. In Litigation as Spiritual Practice's introduction, he declares, "evolution of consciousness is our ultimate salvation."

His apparent lack of concern for Terri Schiavo's plight might be better understood in the context of his belief that "[i]n reality you have never been born and never can die."

This is all not to say that Felos isn't entitled to believe whatever he wants to. He, of course, is. However, this is the same man who has described the Schindler family and their supporters as "fanatics." It's a belief many in the media have reciprocated in their analysis of what drives the Schindler's fight for Terri's survival. But, really, who's three sheets to the moonbeam?

Felos did not respond to NRO's request for a transcendent, cosmic-vibe chat.

from the Fox News Channel, 2005-Mar-21, by John Gibson (transcribed by the AMPP editor):

My Word

Here's my take on the Terry Schiavo deal.

A huge argument has broken out over whether Congress and the President should have stuck their noses into the Schiavo case. Some people said thank God they did, some say it's the end of the republic.

I say we would never be in this position if it weren't for the Florida courts recognizing what is clearly now a sham marriage.

At this point, the point at which Michael Schiavo asserted his right as husband and guardian to insist his wife Terry's feeding tube be removed — at this point, Michael Schiavo is married to Terry Schiavo only for the purpose of removing that tube and ending her life. The reason I say that is he has another "wife", has two kids by her, is leading another life.

If Terry Schiavo were in good enough shape to say whether she wanted to live or die, she might first say she wants a divorce! (Considering the fact her husband has another wife and two kids.) And if she were to do that, would Michael Schiavo still have the standing to claim guardianship to be able to pull her feeding tube? No!

So this whole thing turns on whether Michael and Terry Schiavo are really married. And the fact that the Florida courts continue to recognize a marriage that exists only for the purpose of ending her life — surely the Florida courts can't be that dumb — and if they are, then surely somebody else oughta get involved, perhaps even the Congress and the President.

I don't think this is so hard. If you recognize reality, you will see that as of Friday, when Michael Schiavo ordered the feeding tube removed, they weren't really married. Haven't been since he took the other "wife" and has had two kids. So are the Florida courts saying that an ex-husband gets to decide when an ex-wife dies? If so, there's gonna be a very long line at the court's front door.

That is my word.

from Agence France-Presse, 2005-Mar-21:

Euthanasia around the world: how it works

PARIS - The emotional battle over whether to reattach brain-damaged Florida woman Terri Schiavo to the tubes that have sustained her life for 15 years has galvanized the euthanasia debate in the United States, mobilizing even President George W. Bush and Congress in what could have repercussions on US jurisprudence.

Euthanasia is currently allowed in only one of the 50 US states, Oregan on the northwest coast.

The Bush administration, which pushes a so-called pro-life agenda, is opposed to medically assisted suicide, and the US Supreme Court, at the behest of the US Justice Department, is to review Oregan's euthanasia law at its next session in October.

In Europe, laws on mercy killing vary widely. Some countries tolerate the practice of allowing or enabling a terminally sick or hopelessly disabled person to die painlessly. But the topic remains largely taboo, and many countries have backed off from passing legislation to regulate "active euthanasia" -- direct help in ending a patient's life.

Belgium and the Netherlands are the only countries in the world to have fully legalized the practice of euthanasia.

The following is a rundown on where several other European countries stand:

BELGIUM:

- On September 23, 2002, Belgium passed a law partially legalizing mercy killings under strict conditions. A doctor assisting in such a death will not be deemed to have committed a crime on condition that the adult patient is terminally ill or suffering unbearably with no hope for recovery, of sound mind, has made the decision himself or herself, and certain other legal procedures have been respected.

The law does not apply to minors or to any patient deemed unable to make such a request, such as mentally handicapped patients. In two years, nearly 500 deaths have been registered under the "death with dignity" provision.

BRITAIN

- Under British law euthanasia is considered a crime, liable to up to 14 years in prison, but the debate is wide open again thanks to two controversial test cases.

In May 2002, 43-year-old Diane Pretty, an incurable paralytic, finally died after protracted legal battles in which both British courts and the European Court of Human Rights refused her the right to have her husband help her end her days. Another severe paralytic, "Miss B", obtained legal permission -- at her request -- to have breathing tubes sustaining her removed, and died in April 2002.

DENMARK

- Denmark bans "active euthanasia", which is liable to up to three years in prison. But it allows any patient with an incurable disease to make up his or her mind over when to stop vital treatment. Since October 1, 1992, patients with terminal illnesses or victims of serious accidents can make out a "medical will" which doctors are bound to respect.

FRANCE

- Euthanasia remains technically illegal, though on November 30, 2004, French legislators passed a law allowing the "right to die" for people with incurable diseases.

Under the law, based on an emotional case in which a 24-year-old quadraplegic begged his mother and doctor to help him die, unreasonable measures should not be taken to sustain life, and a terminally ill patient can choose to "limit or stop all treatment" and request pain medication, even if it accelerates death.

GERMANY

- Administering a deadly drug in Germany is the equivalent of murder, liable to six months to five years in prison. German law however tolerates "passive" euthanasia, meaning stopping treatment designed solely to sustain life, only when the pateint has made an express demand to do so.

ITALY

- In Italy, a staunchly Roman Catholic country, euthanasia is banned and the subject is more or less taboo.

Debate is building, however, and even Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia in late 2003 raised the issue of allowing people to establish what is known as a living will stipulating that they oppose extreme means to keep them alive.

In December 2003, however, a young Italian was sentenced to 18 months in prison for helping his mother, suffering from the ultimately fatal Lou Gehrig's disease, to go to Switzerland to die.

NETHERLANDS

- The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia under certain conditions in a law that took effect on April 1, 2002, though the practice has been tolerated since 1997. The law affords legal protection to doctors providing that they adhere to certain "strict criteria."

By 2003, medical officials had registered more than 1,800 people whose lives were ended since the adoption of the law.

NORWAY

- "Active" euthanasia is illegal and liable to the same sentence as for homicide. However "passive" euthanasia is allowed at either the patient's request or that of his family if the patient cannot communicate. Practicing passive euthanasia without prior request by the family or patient, on the other hand, is an offense that can lead to legal action or recovation of the doctor's license.

SPAIN

- A Spanish law of 1995 ruled that euthanasia and assisted suicide should no longer be considered murder. Prison sentences are not applicable if the patient has made specific and repeated requests to be allowed to die, if he or she is suffering from an incurable disease or one entailing severe, permanent and unbearable pain.

SWEDEN

- In Sweden, any act considered linked to euthanasia faces legal scrutiny. "Actively assisting a death" is an offense liable to up to five years in prison. A doctor can, in extreme cases, unplug life support machines.

SWITZERLAND

- Active, direct euthanasia is banned in Switzerland, but "passive" assistance with suicide is legal. A doctor can supply a terminally ill or incurable patient who wants to end his or her life with a lethal dose of drugs, and the patient administers the dose himself or herself, without the doctor's help. Patients can register with Swiss groups that have set up to help them organize their final days.

from the New York Times, 2005-Mar-21, by John Schwartz:

New Openness in Deciding When and How to Die

At a Mother's Day gathering of his family last year, Andrew James Turner Jr. made an announcement: "This is my last meal."

Mr. Turner, a 73-year-old cancer patient in Charlotte, N.C., whose treatments brought him great discomfort and no improvement, had already wasted to 130 pounds from 210. "He couldn't do anything that he enjoyed anymore," said his widow, Pat Turner. Mr. Turner told his family that he was having his feeding tube removed and that he would refuse further treatment and food. "If you have any comments about that, I will listen to them," he told them, "but this is my decision."

Five weeks later, he died peacefully in his own bed.

While Congress grapples with the Terri Schiavo case and a national battle rages over whether laws should allow doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives, a quieter revolution is taking place. With or without such laws, many Americans are taking an active role in their own deaths, some with the help of their doctors and others through actions of their own that blur the definition of suicide.

There are no precise figures for how many Americans enlist their doctors' help each year in ending their lives, and support in polls for the practice varies on how the question is asked. But surveys suggest that more than half of Americans find physician-assisted suicide morally acceptable. In a 2004 Gallup survey, 65 percent agreed that a doctor should be allowed to assist a suicide "when a person has a disease that cannot be cured and is living in pain," up from 52 percent in 1996.

Experts say support for assisted suicide is likely to increase as baby boomers, long accustomed to making the decisions that shape their lives, demand a say over their deaths, as well.

"Talk about a generation that wants a degree of control," said Dr. Diane E. Meier, a professor of medical ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and director of the school's center to advance palliative care.

Many people remain opposed to doctor-assisted suicide, often on moral or religious grounds. The 2004 Gallup poll found that 41 percent of respondents considered the practice "morally wrong," and the assisted-suicide law in Oregon, the only state that allows it, is being challenged by the Bush administration in the Supreme Court. But even opponents acknowledge that acceptance appears to be rising.

"People are definitely more open about it" than in the past, said Rabbi Leonard A. Sharzer, a doctor and bioethicist at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York who opposes suicide on religious grounds. News coverage of assisted suicide and controversial end-of-life issues, from Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Ms. Schiavo to the fight over Oregon's law, has made patients more comfortable talking about death, he said.

A case like that of Ms. Schiavo, the critically brain-damaged Florida woman at the center of a national battle over ending life, forces people to think about their own wishes at the end of life, Rabbi Sharzer said, adding, "I think when people are talking to their family, whether they are sick or not sick, they say, 'Honey, if that happens to me, this is what I would want you to do.' "

Even in Oregon, where the broadest range of choices is available, few take the option of hastening death through suicide drugs.

Two hundred and eight terminally ill Oregonians have taken suicide drugs in the seven years that the law has been in effect. Thirty-seven did so last year, and 42 in 2003.

Outside of Oregon, studies suggest that 1 in 100 terminally ill patients in the United States ask or seriously consider asking for what advocates call "a good death" - a translation of the Greek word "euthanasia" but in this case comprising a broad range of options for ending life in a dignified way. Interest in advocacy groups like Compassion in Dying, an organization that offers counseling and advocates patient control over the manner of dying, has also increased.

In 2003, the group responded to more than 4,000 inquiries nationwide, it says, up from 2,258 in 2001; it provided full-scale counseling to 490 cases in 2003, up from 350 in 2001. (Late last year, Compassion in Dying merged with End of Life Choices, formerly the Hemlock Society, forming what is now known as Compassion and Choices.)

Opponents say the risk to patients and to society of physician-assisted suicide is great. One of the most prominent, Dr. Kenneth Stevens, chairman of the department of radiation oncology at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, said many patients who initially desired suicide would change their minds with counseling. Greater acceptance of physician-assisted suicide, he said, would let financial considerations drive health care down a slippery slope toward mandatory euthanasia.

"We say we want this because of choice," he said. "My concern is, in the future, will this become the only choice?"

But for many Americans, the politics and heat of debate are beside the point. They are ensuring that they get the death they want, whether by surreptitiously gathering deadly doses of medication for possible later use, by seeking out doctors who they know will honor their requests to help end their lives, or, like Andrew Turner, by declining treatment to hasten death.

Declining therapy is increasingly common and accepted, said Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chairman of the department of clinical bioethics at the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center, part of the National Institutes of Health.

"In the last 10 or 15 years," Dr. Emanuel said, ending treatment has gone "from this being a contentious issue to this being the norm."

Sometimes, said Deborah L. Volker, an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Texas, a "covert dialogue" takes place between doctor and patient that results in an unspoken agreement: "We will give whatever it takes to relieve the suffering, and whether or not it crosses the line into intending to hasten death is something we don't talk about as a rule."

In practice, she said, that means a doctor will tell a nurse, "Start the morphine and go ahead and be generous, if you know what I mean."

Carole van Aelstyn, a nurse who serves on the board of Compassion in Dying of Northern California, said doctors often ease the way to death through what is known as "terminal sedation." Once the patient begins "actively dying," the steep decline at the very end of life, the doctors give sedatives that induce sleep, she said.

Otherwise, Ms. van Aelstyn said, some patients fall prey to fits of terror. She recalled one patient who had seemed completely weakened by illness, but in his final days "thought the house was on fire, and got out of bed and fell." He was too large to lift and too panicked to subdue; ultimately she had to call the fire department to help return him to his bed. "If you can sedate someone and let him sleep until he dies, that's so much more humane," she said.

In other cases, terminally ill patients say they want the option of suicide whether or not their doctors are willing or able to help. Norma, an 85-year-old lung cancer patient in western Washington who spoke on the condition that she not be fully identified, said she was refusing treatment.

In 1987, she said, she survived rectal cancer, carrying on for her husband's sake. He died in 1991. "I would never go through that again for anybody," she said of her first bout.

She said she had reached a tacit agreement with her doctor.

"He told me all along that 'I will not let you have any pain,' " she said.

They have never discussed suicide, she said, but he has written her a prescription for powerful pain medication: a bottle of 90 pills with five refills. "That's 450," she said with a giggle.

Other patients say they expect an explicit conversation.

Helen Deeley, who at 62 is facing her third bout with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma since 1984, said she was looking for a doctor who would provide her with a way to end her life if she chose to. "I need someone who will feel comfortable both with the fact that I would wish this, and in delivering it," she said.

The end stage of her disease can involve grotesque swelling, and "I don't want that," she said.

Ms. Deeley is in no hurry to go. "I've got a lot of fight left in me and a lot of good times ahead," said Ms. Deeley, who is also a hospice nurse. She is not even trying to build a stockpile of sedatives because her cancer has retreated again. "It might get out of date," she said. "That's a nice place to be."

Ms. van Aelstyn, of Compassion in Dying, says the practice of hastening death is so widespread that many doctors disapprove of efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide because it brings unwanted attention to a practice that is already common, if quiet. "You've really messed things up," she recalled one doctor saying. "We were doing just fine doing it under the covers."

But proponents of such laws say the states need to pave the way for broader acceptance. "It's crazy for it to be under the table in this way," said Dr. Howard Grossman, an AIDS specialist and the executive director of the American Academy of H.I.V. Medicine in Washington. "It needs to be in the light of day so people can make a rational decision, not regulated by fear, not based on pain or fear of being a burden."

In the absence of a law, these proponents say, some patients take desperate measures that can leave families devastated. Edward Wellwood, a retired vice president of a title company who lived in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., received a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, in July 2003, and his sister, Paula Connolly, said the prospect of living in an inert body "was a much more fearful choice for him than the thought of dying."

Mr. Wellwood told his wife and sister he feared becoming a "head on a pillow," and was worried that a long illness would wipe out the family savings. Realizing that he was determined to end his life, Mrs. Connolly offered to be with him, but he was afraid she would be arrested as an accomplice to suicide. One day last May, he left a note for his wife - they had no children - and drove to a nearby motel to shoot himself in the heart. The family then had to conduct a frantic search to find his body.

"The hardest part for me," Ms. Connolly said, "was looking for him and not knowing whether he was alive and not knowing whether he was dead - but knowing that he was alone."

Ms. Connolly wishes California had a law like Oregon's, she said, adding, "If he knew he could have a safe, easy out, he could have had another year."

Mr. Turner, the man in Charlotte, studied the various ways of ending his life and settled on starvation, since the very sick often have little interest in food.

At the end, a dose of morphine prescribed by his physician eased the discomfort from the tumor in his bowel. His daughter Lise, who is a nurse, said that after getting the pain medication, he told her, "I think this is pretty much going to be the weekend that I die."

Having seen other patients slip toward death after receiving pain medication, Ms. Turner said she doubted the pain pills themselves caused life to end. "Maybe what we did was provide the pain relief that allowed them to finally be at peace so they could die," she said.

His breathing continued to slow over the next day, and toward the end, Ms. Turner recalled, "We all piled into the bed; we all held on to him and said goodbye."

"I think when you've done it right, whatever 'right' means," she said, "you feel good."

James Estrin contributed reporting for this article.

Because cooperative social arrangements have survival dividends, evolution selects those who are adept at participating in cooperatives. But the selfishness of this adaptation is immediately obvious. An average individual's expectation of his individual survival (and that of other members of the cooperative, who are disproportionately likely to be highly congenetic) is increased if he joins others in a tactical, operational, and strategic cooperative. Adaptation for cooperation is a particularly obvious example of selfish genes: the mind is made to a degree unselfish (other-centered) simply because this increases the expectation of the genes' survival.

The Lampman article [below] describes a movement to distort the foregoing reality to create a pseudoscientific rationale for mass collectivization and for the superiority and truth of collectivist ideologies (particularly, socialism). Darwin's conclusion and Loye's agreement that morality and conscience are by far the most important factor in human evolution is clearly mistaken, unless one's reading is tortured by the historically unlikely premise that, by morality and conscience, Darwin meant Innovist morality and conscience.

Loye's suggestion that Darwin's Descent and his revisitation thereof discover a natural symbiotic link between science and spirituality is particularly repugnant. There is no such symbiosis. "Here is the granddaddy of them all, confirming that what your heart tells you is right is really right", he says, but in so doing he gives ostensible license to the vilest of amygdalar impulses - precisely the actual impetus for the great historical horrors of collectivism (for example, the gulags and famines of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the death camps and casualty mills of Germany's National Socialist regime).

The outrageously evil false premise that unreasoned emotional impulses have a sort of inherent rectitude (a moral and epistemological premise) is a crucial enabling principle of totalitarianism and its concomitant horrors. The amygdala is substantially predetermined and uniform (predictable in its dynamics and hence manipulable) species-wide, and often operates independent of conscious reason. If a people is convinced to refrain from checking amygdalar impulses with conscious and reasoned censorship, then hegemons will drive the actions of those people without constraint, wielding them as a horrible weapon, and those people will die senseless deaths fighting on the battlefields of Hegel.

From the point of view of biological evolution, humanity moved instantaneously from the hunter-gatherer societies of prehistory, to a civilization with quarter mile high office buildings, nuclear ballistic missile submarines, and vivid audiovisual media distributed instantly to whole nations. The amygdala, with its largely inflexible structure and dynamic, has had grossly insufficient opportunity to adjust to this awesome new reality - a reality created by technologists through the conscious rational process seated in the overwhelmingly plastic (not genetically predetermined) corpus striatum and cerebral cortex.

To trust the amygdala now, and reject rational objections, is to eagerly invite the horrors of Hegelian war. Each such war disproportionately selects the unquestioningly cooperative and obedient for extermination on the battlefield (or in the great cities, the capitals of cooperation, when they come under attack). After many such wars, the impulses of those amygdalas still operating will tend, with much increased probability, to be individualistic and independent. As long as the pathologies that enable collectivism recur, the calamities will recur, until susceptibility to those pathologies is precluded by the hereditary endowment of the species.

Ironically, Lampman reports Loye believes the rational selfish method "helped produce the deadliest wars in history", whereas clearly it is precisely the method he promotes - the irrationalist, amygdalar method - which was instrumental to those wars.

Lampman's article concludes by asserting intrinsic associations of rationalism with nihilism, and of irrationalism with hope. This is a rationally undefendable premise; I rigorously argue the inverse in the Innovism primer. Obviously, rational argument is immaterial to people who actively and explicitly promote irrationality, so that I am without practical means to dissuade Loye and his allies from their horrible error.

from the Christian Science Monitor, 2000-Aug-3, by Jane Lampman, staff writer:

The fittest conscience: new take on evolution

Suppose you were on a prime-time quiz show and were asked: "What did Charles Darwin see as the prime motivating force in human evolution? (1) survival of the fittest, (2) natural selection, (3) the 'selfish gene,' (4) the moral sense."

Most likely you wouldn't make it to No. 4 before pushing the button. But alas, your run would end there, because the answer is "the moral sense," according to a rather astonishing and provocative new book by psychologist, system scientist, and evolution theorist David Loye.

In "Darwin's Lost Theory of Love," written after a decade of research into evolutionary theory and scientific foundations for morality, Dr. Loye presents the dramatic story of the pioneer scientist seeking to pull together near the end of his life his ideas on the "second half" or "completion" of his theory of evolution.

Here the concern is human evolution, which Darwin explored in "The Descent of Man," a dense book Loye says has been largely ignored over the past 100 years. His monumental "The Origin of Species" focuses on pre-human evolution, and undergirds all subsequent evolutionary theory.

Delving deeply into "Descent," Loye finds Darwin not only exploring the origins of morality and conscience but reaching the conclusion that in human evolution, they are "by far the most important." Darwin says he "perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or survival of the fittest."

For Loye the discovery is galvanizing because it provides hope for developing a more complete and useful theory of evolution for the 21st century, one that goes beyond the neo-Darwinist focus on selfishness as the driving force of human nature and provides a scientific grounding for moral action. It opens the way, he adds, to drawing a link between science and spirituality. "Here is the granddaddy of them all, confirming that what your heart tells you is right is really right," Loye says in an interview. "Darwin is saying: Yes, we're selfish, but there is also this other motivation system, this other thrust that is oriented to others and to doing good for others."

Biology and morality

From his observations of the animal and human worlds, Darwin sees the "social instincts," rooted in biology, as the foundation of morality. Loye details Darwin's perceptions of the development of sympathy and caring, use of language and reasoning about experience, community influence and the power of habit, the capacity for choice, and the moral qualities leading to what we call the golden rule, which appears in almost all cultures.

Although an agnostic, Loye says, Darwin speaks of "an ennobling belief in God" as important for human evolution. Darwin specifically denies that "the foundation of the most noble part of our nature" lies "in the base principle of selfishness."

This flies in the face of the prevailing evolution paradigm, however, a form of neo-Darwinism in which sociobiologists are vigorously pushing the idea that even altruism must be understood as motivated strictly by selfishness. Loye's book will not win any plaudits from that camp.

"The sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists will probably hate it," says Bruce Weber, professor of biochemistry at California State University at Fullerton, who teaches a course covering the range of views on evolution. But "it will be well received by anyone familiar with systems theory, or trying to look at human action in an interdisciplinary framework."

Loye himself is part of a 15-year-old international scientific endeavor called the General Evolution Research Group (GERG), in which researchers from many disciplines are working toward a general evolution theory that would go beyond biology to find related concepts in many fields (i.e. psychology, politics, economics, technology, brain research).

This broad perspective on new directions in scientific research helped Loye find in Darwin intuitions far ahead of his time, he says. "The reason all this material has been overlooked for so long," Loye says, is first, the dominating influence of those pushing the "prevailing paradigm," and second, that Darwin "was seeing at a level science has only reached in the last part of the 20th century."

Dr. Weber - co-author with D.J. Depew of "Darwinism Evolving" - says it is also probably because Darwin's views weren't as fully formed and clearly presented as those in "Origin," or as they appear in Loye's book. He says historians of biology are likely to be bothered by the book, as he initially was, because Loye has pulled together ideas found scattered in Darwin's volume, and put some quotations into more modern idiom to make the book more readable.

But Weber says he then realized the process was one of "hermeneutic recovery." From the perspective of 20th-century science and a systems-science background, Loye is "putting Darwin's text in a new light, using a new interpretive principle ... pulling things together into a pattern that makes a lot of sense," Weber says.

This happens in religion and in science, he explains. "If you look at a passage in Isaiah within an Old Testament context, you give it one sort of interpretation. But if you look at it in the light of the New Testament, you get a very different interpretation. In the light of later knowledge ... suddenly you see a profound statement where before it seemed ordinary" or obscure.

Weber says that within the Darwinian fold, Stephen Jay Gould [exposed as intellectually bankrupt in the racism chapter -AMPP Ed.] and Niles Eldredge did a similar thing when they came up with "punctuated equilibrium" - the notion that evolution was not a very gradual process, but that the fossil record showed that change didn't occur for long periods and then new forms occurred within a short period. Criticized as un-Darwinian, they found in Darwin allowance for their theory. [Their theory was put forth as a Hegelian dialectic, pure punctuation opposed to pure gradualism. This is hogwash. -AMPP Ed.]

"Right now, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are hot topics," Weber says, "and they are dealing with really important questions about what human nature is and what we are capable of. They have their own process of interpretation using a very particular kind of Darwinism.

"The importance of this book" he adds, is that "Loye is saying we can still have a Darwinian worldview but not be locked into the 'selfish gene' concept of [Richard] Dawkins. It gives a legitimate alternative within the Darwinian framework." [Dawkins put forth his theory as a Hegelian dialectic - genes as absolute selfish arbiters, opposed to phenotype as absolute selfish arbiter. Evidently, the theme of the selfish gene is real, but is far from dominant. -AMPP Ed.]

Correcting history of science

Some of Loye's colleagues in systems-science research say the work is very significant. Ervin Laszlo, founder of GERG and the Club of Budapest, says, "Everyone concerned with our understanding of evolution on this planet owes Loye a deep debt of gratitude." According to mathematician Ralph Abraham, a pioneer in chaos theory, "It corrects an oversight in the history of science which has swerved the modern world off its track." He calls the book "of urgent importance."

Loye, formerly on the faculty at Princeton University and UCLA Medical School, is a prolific and award-winning author. Yet he found editors skittish about publishing his new book, so he took it to the Internet publisher iUniverse. He likes the idea of it being accessible worldwide to break the stranglehold of neo-Darwinism and particularly its "social footprint."

Loye, whose current work focuses on "moral transformation theory," says social Darwinism and its successors pervaded 20th-century culture. Their concept of human nature gave us movies, television, novels, and computer games "full of a brutalizing diet of 'Darwinian' plots and characters." He suspects such concepts helped produce the deadliest wars in history. [How ironic. See my introductory essay, above. -AMPP Ed.]

The idea that life is meaningless, governed by blind chance in a random universe "has a horrible psychological effect on people," he adds. And that it doesn't ring true for millions of people is evident in the continuing battles over the teaching of evolution in American schools. "The creationists are totally wrong to reject the findings of evolution," Loye says, "but they are right in that their heart is saying that there is something wrong with the idea that life is directionless."

The beauty of this Darwin material, he adds, is that it says life does have direction, and that what moves evolution forward is love and education for moral sensitivity. It tells us that morality "is fundamental in all human beings, and we have to get serious about understanding what morality is, about identifying moral codes and living by them."

Loye hopes borderline creationists will find this material helps resolve the difficulty "by finding meaningfulness, not only in a scientific vision of the future, but in a vision that happens to match with what they feel is a legitimate spiritual vision."

from Ideas on Liberty, September 1999 (V49N9), by Antony Flew, from The Foundation for Economic Education:

Book Review

The Lost Literature of Socialism
by George Watson
The Lutterworth Press * 1998 * 144 pages * $50.00 cloth; $30.00 paperback

The literature of socialism is lost only in the sense of not having been read for a very long time. George Watson has been re-reading this literature as a professional literary critic, with strong interests in both political affairs and the history of ideas. Many of his findings are astonishing. Perhaps for readers today the most astonishing of all is that "In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels' article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of the kind." (The term "genocide" in Watson's usage is not confined to the extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces also the liquidation of such other complete human categories as "enemies of the people" and "the Kulaks as a class.")

Although Watson himself unfortunately never defines the key word "socialism," he is apparently following throughout the usage of the old British Labour Party. From its foundation, it proclaimed itself a socialist party and stated its aim in Clause IV of its constitution thereafter printed on every membership card as being "the public ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange." Watson distinguishes three periods in the history of this socialist idea. The first, the Age of Conception, runs from the 1840s to the Bolshevik coup of 1917; the second, the Age of Fulfilment, continues until the Communist seizure of power in China in 1949; the third, the Age of Decline, continues until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

During the Age of Conception, many were attracted to socialism precisely because they already saw it as what Watson calls a "Tory project," a project necessarily involving rule by an irresponsible elite. Some of these elitists, such as the science fiction writer H.G. Wells and the dramatist Bernard Shaw, lived long enough into the Age of Fulfilment to welcome this aspect of the realization in the USSR of the socialist vision. Before World War I, other socialists, such as the novelist Jack London and the psychologist Havelock Ellis, saw socialism as leading both fortunately and necessarily to the triumph of the white races over the black and the brown.

For those of us born before World War II, the most interesting section of the book is that dealing with the intellectual relations between the teachings of Adolf Hitler and those of Marx and his professed followers among Hitler's contemporaries. In his autobiography, and in recorded conversations with intimates among his own followers, Hitler said such things as, "I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit," that "the whole of National Socialism is based on Marx," and that without racist commitments his own political movement "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground."

Hitler was not in these statements saying that he either was or ever had been a Marxist. From his first political activity, he had always been opposed to communism, but that was not because it was socialist, but because it was internationalist. Hitler, although born and raised in Austria, had always been a dedicated German nationalist.

Even those who are aware that Hitler's party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party have doubted the sincerity of its socialist professions. This is in part because Hitler, upon coming to power, refrained for tactical reasons from launching an immediate and extensive program of state takeovers of private industries, and in part because these skeptics have not enjoyed the benefits of Watson's re-readings of the lost literature of socialism.

His chapter on "Marx and the Holocaust" begins by telling us that Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the infamous Auschwitz death camp, recalled in his memoirs that even at the height of the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941-45, his colleagues had respected the socialist example of an exterminatory program based on forced labor. Watson then proceeds to deploy further evidence of Soviet influence on the Nazis and to cite other relevant passages from the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other socialist luminaries, all presenting candidates for or possible methods of genocide. The connection between socialism and genocide could hardly be made any clearer.

From all this, Watson concludes that "it is becoming ever more probable that it was not just the idea of genocide that the Nazis owed to Marx and the Marxists, but its detailed practice too, not excluding camps and gas chambers. The shadow of the socialist idea grows longer and longer."

Antony Flew is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Reading, England.

from The Associated Press, 2005-Mar-27, by Deborah Hastings:

Reservation Life Grinds Down Indian Youths
Suicide, Depression, Poverty, Among Problems That Plague Young American Indians on Reservations

The obituary in the small town paper was heartbreaking: Chase Albert "Beka" Lussier, born Dec. 23, 1989, died March 21 at Red Lake High School. A freshman who played basketball and loved computer games. Six paragraphs down, beside the photograph of a chubby-cheeked, smiling boy, came this sentence: "He spent his time juggling life between his family and his son."

A father at 15. Dead three months later. Shot with eight others by an alienated, despondent upperclassman who, at the end of his 10-minute walk through Red Lake High School, turned one of his guns on himself.

The deaths, conspicuous in their senselessness, highlight the problems that American Indian teenagers have been quietly suffering in greater numbers than most adolescents: suicide, violence, depression and pregnancy.

By themselves, the numbers for the Red Lake Indian Reservation are staggering. A state survey conducted last year of 56 ninth-graders showed that 81 percent of the girls, and 43 percent of the boys, had considered suicide.

Nearly half the girls said they'd actually tried to kill themselves. Twenty percent of boys said the same numbers about triple the rate statewide.

"I don't have an explanation for that," said Brenda Child, who teaches American Indian history at the University of Minnesota and grew up on the reservation. Her cousin, 14-year-old Ryan Auginash, was shot in the chest during 16-year-old Jeff Weise's march through the campus.

She doesn't want to view the shootings through the prism of American Indian troubles. "I see it as a problem of a young man who was deeply depressed," she said. "Sadly, that can happen anywhere."

Here, where the Red Lake band of Chippewa has lived in isolation on more than 830,000 acres in northern Minnesota since 1889, such things are not openly discussed.

It simply is not their way. For much of the week, they slammed the door of their reservation to the prying eyes of television cameras and reporters who wanted to know why Weise shot his grandfather, a tribal policeman everyone knew as "Dash," and the man's girlfriend, then drove to the high school entrance behind the wheel of his grandfather's police car. Weise, wearing his grandfather's gunbelt and toting a shotgun, opened fire at the front door, by the lone metal detector.

Tribal elders have said little, as have residents. Some students have been more open, describing Weise as a depressed, friendless boy who talked of shooting people.

On Web site postings, Weise described himself as "nothing but your average Native-American stoner" and described his life on the reservation as "every man's nightmare. This place never changes and it never will."

Weise had not always lived on the reservation. He arrived after his father committed suicide four years ago. His mother, a heavy drinker, was severely injured in an alcohol-related auto accident. The boy had nowhere else to go.

Some on the reservation say Weise had been seeing a professional and taking medication for his depression, which is evident on Internet postings such as this one, where under a section titled "A Little About Me," he typed "16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black."

On Thursday, outside the hospital in Bemidji, a small town 32 miles south of the reservation, Andrew Auginash was there to visit his wounded brother, Ryan. "I don't want anything bad said about our reservation," he said. "It's like any other place."

The Minnesota survey of Red Lake students said they assaulted other classmates and used more alcohol and drugs than other students across the state.

Nationwide figures show that American Indian teenagers commit suicide at three times the national rate; are involved in alcohol-related arrests at twice the national average, and die in alcohol-related incidents at 17 times the national average.

They are third-highest in teen pregnancies, behind Hispanics and blacks.

"My mother moved us off the reservation when I was very young. And I am very glad she did that," says Bill Lawrence, publisher of the Native American Press-Ojibwe News, a 5,000-circulation weekly newspaper in Bemidji.

"The kids there come from drugs, alcohol, broken families, abuse," he says sadly. "To grow up under these circumstances is a tremendous ordeal. And to consider suicide means you think there is no other way out."

Lawrence is a member of the Red Lake band and has relatives and friends on reservation, he says. "Only the most gifted students can overcome this stuff. A lot of kids don't go to school. About 50 percent don't graduate. How do you go on after that? They're not qualified to get a job or go to college."

Sister Patricia Wallis has lived at the reservation, off and on, since 1951, working at a mission that has a school and convent. To Wallis, the problems here come from grinding, dehumanizing, relentless poverty.

"They're not able to succeed in school. If something happens, or someone dies, or there's been an accident, they don't come regularly. Some stay at home because they have to baby-sit their siblings or they have to help out."

Another problem is housing, she said. There aren't enough places to live on the reservation, so families and cousins and children live crowded together in single homes. This has worsened lately, Wallis said, because many who left to make their way in the outside world are now returning in large numbers after failing to find any kind of work because they have no experience or training.

"When you put a lot of adults and children together in one house, you get bedlam," Wallis said. "The children get no rest, they get no sleep, arguments break out between the adults and they come to school carrying all this."

Wallis has not lost hope, and she is careful in choosing her words to describe life here for young people. "I love these people with all my heart," she says.

Then she tells the story of a sixth-grade boy whose father got a new girlfriend. The woman didn't like the boy. "She said "Either he goes, or I go.' And guess who had to go? Now he's living with his cousins and he's suffering."

The boy grew angry in class at the reservation, she said, and he was pulled out by his relatives and sent to public school.

Children and teenagers here, despite the isolation and the cultural importance of turning inward, have only to sign on to the Internet, or turn on the satellite TV, to see that other people, in places not that far way, have things they don't.

"If you've never really been loved, how can you love yourself?" she asks. "How can you make something out of yourself?"

Associated Press writer Joshua Freed contributed to this report from Bemidji, Minn.

from the New York Daily News, via the Portsmouth Herald, 2004-Feb-22, by Tracy Connor:

Mel Gibson's father describes Holocaust as mostly fiction

Mel Gibson's father went on an explosive rant against Jews days before his son's movie about Jesus Christ hits theaters.

"They're after one world religion and one world government," Hutton Gibson, 85, said in a radio interview that will air Monday night.

Gibson also said Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan should be lynched and called for the government to be overthrown.

The timing of Gibson's comments is certain to fuel the uproar over "The Passion of The Christ," which opens this Wednesday. Some critics say the film blames Jews for Christ's death and will provoke anti-Semitism.

Hutton Gibson spoke Monday to Steve Feuerstein of "Speak Your Piece!" on WSNR-AM, a show syndicated by Talkline, the largest syndicator of Jewish programming. Some of his most outrageous rants focused on the millions of Jews exterminated by Adolf Hitler. He said the Germans did not have enough gas to cremate 6 million people and that concentration camps were just "work camps."

"It's all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is," he said.

from New York Newsday, 2004-Feb-20, by Carol Eisenberg:

Hutton Gibson's Passion
Mel Gibson's dad blasts Jews in radio talk show interview

Even as Mel Gibson has sought to quell charges that his movie "The Passion of the Christ" is anti-Semitic, his 85-year-old father discounted the idea that millions of Jews died in the Holocaust and said Jews were trying to take over the world.

"It's all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is," Hutton Gibson said of the Holocaust in a radio interview that will air Monday night.

Coming only days before the opening of his son's film on Feb. 25, Ash Wednesday, Hutton Gibson's comments inflamed the debate over whether the film will foment anti-Semitic hatred. Critics of "The Passion," including some Catholic scholars, have said it blames Jews for killing Jesus and caricatures them as bloodthirsty.

Mel Gibson denies that and recently agreed to remove the "blood curse," lines from the Gospel of Matthew often interpreted to blame all Jews for all time for Jesus' killing.

A spokesman for ICON, the filmmaker's production company, A. Larry Ross, said that Hutton Gibson had no influence on the making of "The Passion of the Christ" or on the thinking of his son, "who doesn't share those particular views." Ross said Mel Gibson stuck by what he told ABC's Diane Sawyer in an interview aired Monday. "That's my father, OK, I love him," he'd said. "And if they're going to try and drive a wedge in there, it ain't going to happen."

Steven Feuerstein, host of the syndicated radio talk show "Speak Your Piece!," said he interviewed Hutton Gibson three times since Monday. Portions of the interviews will be broadcast locally on WSNR/620 Monday and Wednesday at 10 p.m. "He was totally cognizant of everything he was saying," Feuerstein said. "This man has an agenda. That's the bottom line. "

Hutton Gibson, of Summersville, W.Va., is a self-described leader in the ultratraditionalist Catholic sect that rejects reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), including the church's renunciation of the notion of Jews as culpable for the death of Jesus. According to transcripts of the interview, he also blamed Jews for everything from the Roman persecution of early Christians to fomenting the Russian Revolution to orchestrating an international banking conspiracy. He urges someone to go out and "hang" Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who is Jewish.

Mel Gibson's defenders denounced the interview yesterday as part of "the whole hit-and-run, and search-and-destroy mission by Gibson's enemies" in the words of William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

The president of the company that distributes "Speak Your Piece!" called yesterday for a boycott of all of Gibson's films.

"His actions speak louder than his words," said Zev Brenner, a rabbi who is president and executive producer of the Manhattan-based Talkline Communications Network, America's largest syndicator of Jewish programming. "He could come out and say, 'I love my father, but I disagree with his views.'"

Most Jewish leaders, however, were relatively muted in their reaction.

"On the one hand, he's [Hutton Gibson] a classical anti-Semite who is full of conspiracy theories and hate and perversion," said Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League.

But Foxman said it would be unfair to ascribe Hutton Gibson's views to his son. "There are examples of parents who are bigots and children who are not, and vice versa. So who knows?"

Still, the father's remarks may help explain why Mel Gibson has "not gotten" Jewish concerns, Foxman said.

"I've been saying all along that I don't believe he's an anti-Semite," Foxman said of Mel Gibson. "I think he just doesn't get it. And this gives a partial explanation of why. If he was raised hearing all these things about Jews, it would be difficult for him to comprehend that which hurts us and pains us."

Introduction to the film "America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference", written, produced, and directed by Martin Ostrow, text obtained from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/filmmore/index.html:

Complex social and political factors shaped America's response to the Holocaust, from "Kristallnacht" in 1938 through the liberation of the death camps in 1945. For a short time, the US had an opportunity to open its doors, but instead erected a "paper wall," a bureaucratic maze that prevented all but a few Jewish refugees from entering the country. It was not until 1944, that a small band of Treasury Department employees forced the government to respond.

Program Description

In 1937, a 17-year-old German Jew named Kurt Klein emigrated to the US to escape the growing discrimination against Jews that had become a terrible fact of life following Hitler's rise in 1933. Together with his brother and sister, who had emigrated previously, Klein worked to establish himself so that he could obtain safe passage for his parents out of Germany. America and the Holocaust uses the moving tale of Klein's struggles against a wall of bureaucracy to free his parents to explore the complex social and political factors that led the American government to turn its back on the plight of the Jews. The film is produced by Martin Ostrow. Hal Linden narrates.

In 1938, American society had its own political, social, and economic problems, including a long-standing--and rising--anti-Semitism. Despite stories coming from Europe about a campaign to force Jews out of Germany and about the horrors of Kristallnacht ("the night of broken glass"), the majority of Americans were fearful that an influx of immigrants would only aggravate the serious unemployment problem brought on by the Depression.

More than 100 anti-Semitic organizations blanketed the US with propaganda blaming Jews for all America's ills. Businesses discriminated against Jews, refusing them jobs. Signs at private beaches bore the words "No Jews or Dogs allowed" and certain hotels and housing developments proudly proclaimed themselves "Restricted." Even the government was not immune from anti-Semitic sentiments. While the Kleins were struggling to obtain visas from the American consulate, the State Department ordered its consuls to stall the process.

"Even though we continued our attempts to get our parents out--because we knew that they were in the unoccupied part of France which was still not totally under German control--everything we did for them turned into nothing," recalls Kurt Klein.

"The State Department probably had a greater degree of anti-Semitism than others, particularly in the immigration section," says former Treasury Department employee Edward Bernstein. "Their attitude was, `If we're patient, we find that the problems of the Jews in Germany are not really life-threatening."

But for Kurt Klein and other German-American Jews with relatives overseas, patience was a commodity they couldn't afford. By the end of 1941, the Nazis had murdered half a million Jews. Although trains regularly headed to fully operational killing centers by the spring of 1942, the "final solution" was still a well-guarded secret. That summer the State Department was advised by Gerhart Reigner, the representative of a Jewish organization in Geneva, of Nazi plans to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. Their response was to dismiss the information, calling it "a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears."

"The State Department was actively blocking information about the genocide, " says historian David Wyman. "Roosevelt refused to focus on the issue. The American churches were largely silent...and the press had little to say--and buried that little on the inner pages. So it fell to Jewish activists to bring the information to the American public."

It took protests and petitions from Jewish organizations and finally the Treasury Department, headed by Henry Morgenthau, to uncover the State Department's deliberate obstruction of rescue. "Secretary Morgenthau, who valued above all else his relationship with the president, nevertheless felt he had to put himself on the line and be the spokesman on this issue," recalls John Pehle of the Treasury Department.

At last, on January 16, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt met with Morgenthau in the Oval Office. Six days later, Roosevelt officially reversed the government's policy of obstruction. He signed Executive Order 9417, creating the War Refugee Board, which was instructed to "take all measures to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death."

"In the end, the War Refugee Board played a vital role in saving the lives of 200,000 Jews," says Wyman, "a very valuable contribution, to be sure. But the number is terribly small compared to the total of six million killed. The Board did prove that a few good people--Christians and Jews--could finally break through the walls of indifference. The great shame is that if Roosevelt had created the board a year earlier [it] could have saved tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands more--and in the process, have rescued the conscience of the nation."

Read the full and enhanced transcript of America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference.

from TPDL 2000-Apr-5, from the Asheville Tribune 2000-Mar-3, by John J. McNight of Weaverville, NC, in a letter to the editor:

Gun Control Has Proven Record of Effectiveness

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control From 1929 to 1953, approximately 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1928, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1935, China established gun control. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents were unable to defend themselves and were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1964, Guatemala established gun control. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1970, Uganda established gun control. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1956, Cambodia established gun control. From 1975 to 1977, one million "educated" people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

That places total victims who lost their lives because of gun control at approximately 56 million in the last century. Since we should learn from the mistakes of history, the next time someone talks in favor of gun control, find out which group of citizens they wish to have exterminated.

excerpt from How Many Did Communist Regimes Murder? by R.J. Rummel:

[...]

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

[...]

from TPDL 2000-Mar-25, from the London Times 2000-Mar-24, by Simon Jenkins:

SAVE THE WORLD FROM NAIVE DO-GOODERS

Many years ago I was invited to dinner with the actress Shirley MacLaine. I was a serious fan. I watched mesmerised as she held the company in thrall, eyes flashing, red hair bobbing. She was talking not of her latest show but of her recent visit to China, then reeling in the aftermath of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Slowly my wonder turned to horror. The great star had been taken for the mother of all rides. She said that Mao was a hero of all time. He had fed and clothed his people and led them into the promised land. No, no, she cried against all protest, we should go and see for ourselves.

Mao's corpse count was then surpassing those of wartime Germany and Russia, but Peking offered a well-oiled welcome for sympathetic celebrities. The effect was impressive. The killings and famines went unreported and Mao became a cult in the West. Nor was Mao the first at this game. The same was true, in their day, of Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, and more recently of Nkrumah, Amin, Castro, Mengistu and Pinochet. Through the fog of distance shines the glamour of power. The eye reports what it sees, not what it fails to see - or is not shown.

All political globetrotters should watch Daniel Wolf's BBC2 documentaries, Tourists of The Revolution, being aired at the ludicrous time of 5.50pm on Saturdays. It is no travelogue. It is a testament that travel narrows as well as broadens the mind. We are shown Britons exulting at Mussolini's charisma. We see Lloyd George describing Hitler as "the greatest German of his age". We hear an English journalist telling Hitler: "England's youth loves you, F=FChrer".

George Bernard Shaw visited Russia in 1931 and witnessed "an atmosphere of hope and security as has never before been seen in a civilised country on earth". The veteran Marxist, Christopher Hill, still refuses to believe in Stalin's deliberate Ukrainian famine. Barbara Castle, then a journalist, reported "no atmosphere of repression" in prewar Moscow, only glorious opportunities for women. After the fall of Stalin, the Writers Union lavishly entertained British celebrities. I wonder if the young Melvyn Bragg was aware that he had been "framed" by the KGB for star treatment on his visit.

These "tourists of the revolution" may have given only scant satisfaction to the regimes that hosted them. Some, such as Nigel Nicolson, are now gracious in contrition. Like others who admired German fascism, he recalls the impact that a disciplined nation with a clear sense of mission made on a radical young mind, when Britain seemed reactionary and lost in depression. Michael Burn was so ashamed of saluting Hitler that he subsequently fought in the Second World War, was imprisoned in Colditz and became a communist.

Tyrants have always evoked idolatry, especially in those far from home. Less explicable are the cheerleaders for post-colonial Africa, depicted in tomorrow's programme. For them the habits of empire died hard and the inclination to meddle was irresistible. The role of white advisers in bringing socialist planning to sub-Saharan Africa has long been ridiculed. Wolf's description of these adventurers as "tourists of the revolution" seems apt. Reg Green, aide to Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, appears single-handedly to have wrecked an entire economy. No disaster inflicted on Africa by imperialism seems to have been worse than that inflicted by its successor ideologies, socialism and "overseas aid". Ghana's Volta River project made the colonial groundnuts fiasco seem a mere peccadillo.

The definitive Western intervention was in the Ethiopian civil war of the mid-Eighties. Whether Bob Geldof and the aid agencies saw themselves as tourists may be moot. In retrospect their good intentions seem awesomely misplaced. We see Geldof screaming on television, "Send the money, just send the money". A billion dollars of aid was duly sent, 90 per cent of it to prop up the disgusting regime of the dictator, Mengistu. The World Bank and United Nations lavished money on him. They paid for the depopulation (now termed ethnic cleansing) of highland areas. Food aid and vehicles followed his troops but were denied to rebels, who had to wait until 1991 to topple the United Nation's prot=E9g=E9. The UN chief in Addis Ababa remarked on Mengistu's "intelligence, dignity and courtesy" and asserted that the forced resettlements were "voluntary". This was not 1885, but 1985.

Desperate not to stanch the flow of Western cash, aid agencies colluded never to mention the civil war. Throughout the Ethiopian crisis, the impression conveyed to the West was that the country was suffering a natural disaster, a famine, not the deliberate suppression of rebellion by starvation. When the French agency, M=E9decins Sans Fronti=E8res (MSF), could stomach it no more and protested to the regime, it was duly expelled. Its boss at the time, Rony Brauman, remarked that colluding with Mengistu meant "saving a thousand lives to condemn a hundred thousand". The fight between Brauman and Michael Priestley, the UN chief in Ethiopia under Mengistu, was a classic of the new imperialism. Priestley accused MSF of "grandstanding to get publicity". The charity accused him of being a "Mengistu pawn" and an "accomplice of massive oppression". The spectacle of Westerners playing professional games with a war-torn African country is not edifying. Those who felt obliged to eulogise Mengistu were in a line of descent from those who admired Mussolini for "at least making the trains run on time". They claim that they did more good than harm. I would say, they badly need to prove it.

One sceptic of Western intervention in Africa, Alex de Waal, asks: "How could so much good intention go so tragically wrong?" The answer must be the same as drove Dickens to create Mrs Jellaby in Bleak House: his outrage that his London friends would give readily to overseas causes but not to domestic ones. Starving Londoners were regarded as "naughty". Starving Africans were noble, and far less likely to land on your doorstep.

The thousands of aid workers, volunteers and journalists who poured into Africa's periodic trouble spots undoubtedly saw themselves as well-intentioned. They still do today, as does the soldier in a UN beret. But then so did the visitors to Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, and the advisers who tried to socialise Africa's economies. Just as aid is never impartial, so any traveller to a problem land carries political baggage. He soon becomes a missionary, in search not of evidence but allegiance. As Hannah Arendt said: "The Third World is not a reality, it is an ideology."

The instinct to charity is natural. But these films make me aware how horribly close is the path of charity to the abyss of hypocrisy. Dickens was right. Abroad is so much simpler and more glamorous than at home. The British find it hard to secure peace in Northern Ireland or build a hospital system that works. They hate being lectured by outsiders. But they claim to know, beyond all contradiction, precisely what is going wrong in Iraq and Serbia and Chechnya and Indonesia. If the resulting intervention screws up, if bombs land awry or dams go bankrupt or dictators refuse to be toppled, nobody really cares. Foreign crises are to hand when we need them, and far away when we do not. Like servants, they know their place. The imperialism of the mind is no more attractive than that of the sword or the dollar. We can witness, but not live, the lives of others. I find it ironic that the West has become ever more disciplined towards the world's natural environment, fighting to preserve its autonomy and diversity. Yet we relentlessly abuse its political ecology. We refuse to believe that we might not know what is best for distant polities and peoples. This week British troops are still dropping bombs on Iraq, believe it or not, and overseeing the forced removal of Serbs from Kosovo. Most Britons have probably forgotten the reason. Meddling feels good.

The last word lies with that most sensitive student of Africa, Basil Davidson. Surveying the deeds of Europeans in that continent over the past century, he flatly denies that they have known what is best for Africans. Please believe me, he cries, "Dear friends, you don't know best, only worst."

So caveat viator. The tourist should stick to his sunbed, and Shirley should stick to her song.

from Science News 2000-Aug-5, by B. Bower:

Inside Violent Worlds
Political conflict and terror look different up close and local

On the porch of a small house in war-ravaged Sri Lanka, a weary-looking woman known as Saktirani listens to a man's anguished plea. His son has not been heard from for the nearly 3 years, since he and 158 other people were arrested by government soldiers at a nearby Tamil refugee camp. Tamil families in this part of Sri Lanka are caught in the cross-fire of a brutal struggle between Tamil rebels fighting to establish a separate state and government forces representing the Sinhalese majority population.

The fate of the man's son remains unknown, like that of other so-called disappeared persons in the war zone. The distressed father asked the government for answers but received a letter from the Ministry of Defense saying there was no record of his son's arrest or imprisonment.

That's when the father did what increasing numbers of his countrymen have been doing to cope with their pain—he turned to Saktirani, an oracle. She wields immense spiritual power by virtue of her widely accepted status as a flesh-and-blood conduit to the locally revered Hindu goddess Kali. Will Saktirani tell this man what happened to his son?

Not at first. For 15 minutes, she vividly enacts what may have been the son's experience of torture and saturates herself in the pain that he may have endured. Saktirani writhes on the ground, calls out incoherently, sometimes says the word burning, and vomits. She gets up, abruptly bends over as if absorbing the blows of a blunt instrument, and vomits again. She complains of pain throughout her body and crawls into her shrine room.

A few moments later, Saktirani returns to the porch where she tells the man—much to his surprise—that his son survived imprisonment and was released. She says the boy now lives in southern Sri Lanka and has changed his identity by becoming a Muslim. Tears streaming down his face, the father wonders aloud, "How am I going to find him there?"

In 4 years of fieldwork in eastern Sri Lanka during the 1990s, anthropologist Patricia Lawrence of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been studying the growing tendency of local folk caught in the war zone to seek out oracles such as Saktirani. Amid the constant terror wreaked by rebels and government soldiers alike, oracles represent a rare source of benevolent power. They express searing emotions that often go unspoken and encourage family and community healing in a region stripped of medical care, public transportation, and other basic amenities.

"It has become [the oracles'] work to address agonizing doubts about lost family connections, memory which cannot be erased, and wounds which cannot heal," Lawrence says.

It has become the work of researchers such as Lawrence—a small corps of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and others—to explore how deadly conflicts play out at the level of states, local communities, and individuals. Since the end of the Cold War, their work has assumed greater urgency because violence has spread in many parts of the world.

"Studies of violence and its consequences must go beyond the analysis of specific psychiatric symptoms to account for a range of social and political forces," says Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and anthropologist at Harvard University. "The time has come to develop a new international mental health research agenda."

Kleinman acknowledges there's no groundswell of scientific interest in formulating that agenda. Psychiatrists and other behavioral researchers mainly study the emotional carnage wrought by war on individuals. For instance, they've documented elevated rates of posttraumatic stress disorder and major depression among war survivors and refugees. Brain processes associated with violent crime also draw researchers' scrutiny and media focus.

That might be valuable information, but community- and society-wide violence transcends psychiatric diagnoses and miswired brains, the Harvard researcher asserts. In the past decade, more than 100 violent conflicts have occurred, from the Balkans to Indonesia, Rwanda, and Colombia. These wars killed at least 5 million people and created tens of millions of refugees and orphans.

A devoted cadre of ethnographers has garnered what Kleinman considers unique insights into social violence and its psychological aftermath. Ethnography is the anthropological practice of living in and simultaneously studying a local world, such as a village, neighborhood, or hospital. Some anthropologists regard this approach as unscientific and prey to the personal biases of ethnographer. However, ethnographic research challenges conventional wisdom about the causes of social violence and raises new possibilities for prevention and healing, Kleinman asserts.

Much of this work appears in a trio of books he has coedited with anthropologist Veena Das of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and several others: Social Suffering (1997, Univ. of Calif. Press), Violence and Subjectivity (2000, Univ. of Calif. Press), and Remaking the World, slated for publication next year.

An underlying theme of these volumes is that violent conflicts don't spontaneously ignite out of the dry tinder of ancient ethnic or national hatreds. Instead, wars and riots often arise out of the policy failures of modern political and economic institutions. Moreover, everyday forms of violence that vary from one locality to another also influence outbreaks of fighting and bloodshed.

In affluent Western areas, a subtler kind of violence acts like a "soft knife," whittling away at well-being, Kleinman holds. Constant time pressures, too little sleep, feelings of anxiety and stress, and estrangement from family and community result from the burden of making a living and striving to get ahead in the modern world.

Everyday violence cuts deeper among the estimated 20 percent of the world's population that lives in extreme poverty. Inadequate shelter, diet, and security hack away both at the physical and emotional health of these people.

Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley watched close up as dire poverty unraveled family ties in a Brazilian slum. In her book Death without Weeping (1992, Univ. of Calif. Press), she described the dangers of living in a place where hope for escape or a better life vanished long ago.

For instance, the scarcity of food in this blighted urban neighborhood forced many mothers—who typically raised families on their own—to designate certain of their newborns as weak and unlikely to survive. Although they experienced much emotional conflict about such decisions, the women starved and otherwise neglected these infants, thus hastening their deaths.

In many countries, the poor also face bodily threats created by modern technology and medical advances, Scheper-Hughes suggests. She and a team of ethnographers have uncovered preliminary evidence of a flourishing illegal trade in transplantable human organs in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Rumors about organ stealing that have spread through poor communities in many nations reflect widespread fear about thefts of body parts, the Berkeley researcher says.

Aside from wading into the violent undercurrents of everyday life, ethnographic research challenges common assumptions about civil conflicts, according to Kleinman. Explanations for why neighbors end up killing neighbors in ethnic and religious disputes often cite an irrational tendency of crowds to become murderous and a sudden expression of violent instincts in people groomed to hate all members of certain ethnic groups.

Such assertions certainly have been applied to the bloody conflicts within the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s. However, Croatian ethnographers such as Maja Povrzanovic and Renata Jambresic Kirin of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb have found that intense ethnic hatreds in their country represent a consequence of regional wars not their cause. Nationalist and ethnic sympathies blossomed among Croatians as they witnessed the violent destruction of their local communities by Serbian forces, assert the researchers.

The war in Croatia also flourished in the many disorganized communities trying to recover shared values and a sense of trust after the demise of communism, Povrzanovic says in the April Current Anthropology. Experiences of the war vary greatly in Croatia, and many people grimly survive without harboring hatred for all Serbs, she adds.

Political scientist Susan L. Woodward of the University of London makes similar points in a historical analysis of the Balkans conflict. Woodward traces the outbreak of violence in the former Yugoslav republics to the crumbling of the communist state. At that time, the different groups "in a land of minorities" clamored for power and scarce resources, she says. Foreign nations and institutions imposed economic austerity measures on the region's tottering federal government that gravely weakened it. Violent extremist groups rushed in to fill the power vacuum and solidified their claims on contested national borders, Woodward argues.

"There is no need for any history of ethnic animosity or civil war to [cause] growing uncertainty, social chaos, and potential violence under such circumstances," she says.

When violence erupts, it only looks spontaneous and undisciplined from a safe distance, maintains Das. Local feuds and networks of friendships exert much influence over who is attacked and who escapes unscathed.

For example, Das concluded that Hindu thugs supported by certain politicians had gone into selected Sikh neighborhoods in Delhi, India, and provoked the violence after Indira Gandhi's 1984 assassination. Sikhs who had managed to befriend Hindu neighbors often avoided assaults on themselves and their property, whereas Sikhs who had long-running feuds with nearby Hindus incurred severe casualties. Das based her conclusions on her interviews with residents of about 500 houses in Delhi.

A similar pattern characterized rioting from December 1992 to January 1993 between Hindus and Muslims inhabiting a huge Bombay slum. Apart from the larger religious conflict, violent acts were strongly influenced by neighborhood gang rivalries, family feuds, and other social coalitions and rivalries, contend Deepak Mehta and Roma Chatterji, both sociologists at the University of Delhi. In 1994 and 1995, they conducted fieldwork in four parts of the slum, which houses about 600,000 people.

Such findings underscore the need for research on the mental health needs of people who survive political violence and repressive political regimes, asserts Kleinman. The dearth of such work "is a major failure of the social and behavioral sciences," he argues. Investigators need to focus on local and cultural concerns rather than simply diagnosing mental disorders and importing Western types of drug treatment and psychotherapy, he adds.

In postapartheid South Africa, for one, broken families and disjointed communities have created a crisis of manhood for many African boys, according to physician and anthropologist Mamphela Ramphele of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. These boys no longer participate in traditional rituals marking the entry into adulthood, Ramphele says. In another break from tradition, they also go without advice and support from male mentors who have long set the tone for responsible adult behavior, Ramphele says.

The result has been increased amounts of violence. The apartheid government cordoned black South Africans into ghettos, where white police encouraged power struggles among black male warlords. Young African boys then formed opposition groups that fought against the authority of warlords and their older male followers. The boys also tried to punish and publicly shame men who abused or neglected their families. Many of these boys spent long stretches in prison and never knew or lived with their own fathers.

Ramphele, who has conducted fieldwork in a black township in Cape Town, says that residents of these areas must develop new initiation rituals into manhood and recruit older males as "apprentice masters" for boys in desperate need of direction.

In contrast, emotional recovery for terrorized survivors of Sri Lanka's turmoil hinges primarily on local religious beliefs and rituals, says anthropologist Sasanka Perera of the World Bank in Colombo. In his fieldwork, Perera has noted that stories of spirit possession and avenging ghosts have spread throughout Sri Lanka communities as a means of remembering and coping with wartime horrors.

In one Sinhalese Buddhist village, for example, residents began to complain of nightly screams and supernatural activity emanating from a government-owned building that rebel soldiers had commandeered as a place to torture and kill people. Soon, no one wanted to enter the abandoned structure. At that point, the villagers held a purification ceremony for the haunted building. Afterward, they resumed community activities there.

"Such traditional methods of coping and compensation may be the only hope in a society where the secular legal system is unlikely to deliver justice, where the state has failed to protect its citizens, and where the normal methods of mourning have been subverted," Perera says.

Victims in such situations often experience a prolonged type of anguish and bitterness, he notes. Once blatant hostilities end, they must live among many of their former tormenters, who return to their daily lives as if nothing had happened.

Saktirani, the oracle who tends to the emotional and spiritual needs of Tamil families, sees the toll exacted by such experiences. Although oracles have a long history in eastern Sri Lanka, the war's destruction of civil society has exposed them to unprecedented demands. Tamil families believe that oracles can use divine authority to protect homes from military attacks, to compel children who have fled to other countries to write letters home, to choose the best way to handle extortion attempts by soldiers, and to pressure authorities to release imprisoned relatives.

Even the most respected and resourceful oracles, however, at times fail to deliver accurate predictions or useful advice. Gossip quickly circulates about both the successes and failures of particular oracles. In Saktirani's case, positive word-of-mouth has attracted a steady stream of supplicants to her door.

"The violence has gotten worse in eastern Sri Lanka over the past few months," says Lawrence. "I wonder how Saktirani is doing."

References:

Das, V., A. Kleinman, M. Lock, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds, eds. 2000. Remaking A World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Das, V, A. Kleinman, R. Mamphela, and P. Reynolds, eds. Violence and Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California. In press.

Kleinman, A., V. Das, and M. Lock, eds. 1996. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Povrzanovic, M. 2000. The imposed and the imagined as encountered by Croatian war ethnographers. Current Anthropology 41(April):151.

Scheper-Hughes, N. 2000. The global traffic in human organs. Current Anthropology 41(April):191.

______. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Further Readings:

1999. Social violence. Archives of General Psychiatry 56(November):978.

Sources:

Veena Das
Department of Anthropology
404 Macaulay Hall
Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

Arthur Kleinman
Harvard Medical School
641 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115

Maja Povrzanovic
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Kralja Zvonimira 17
P.O. Box 287
10000 Zagreb
Croatia

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720

from TPDL 2001-Oct-11, from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2000-Oct-10, by Tanya K. Metaksa:

Protect the People of Afghanistan

UNTIL SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 a very small fraction of Americans had ever known much about Afghanistan and less were aware of the Taliban. We were a nation consumed with life’s pleasures; events outside our own self-absorption were irrelevant.

No one cared that the U.S. news media paid little heed to a boatload of refugees sinking in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia. The boat was full of Afghan refugees trying to land on Christmas Island, Australia fleeing the oppressive Taliban regime. A Norwegian freighter rescued the refugees from their sinking boat, but Australia denied them safe harbor. Reading that story in late August brought to mind another ship with similar cargo.

In 1939 the treatment of Jews in Germany by the Nazis was becoming more intolerable by the day. Many German Jews, who believed they were Germans first and Jews second, failed to comprehend Hitler’s solution to "The Jewish question," but others sought to escape.

That May some 907 Jews, in a desperate effort to flee Hitler clutched their German passports and, wearing only the clothes on their backs, boarded the ocean liner, St. Louis, bound for the Western Hemisphere. When the ship arrived in Cuba, all 907 were denied entry. They, like the Afghan refugees, threatened suicide, rather than be repatriated to Germany.

After trying to enter other South American countries, only to be denied, the St. Louis steamed north to the country whose Statute of Liberty proclaims, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free." President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the United States Coast Guard to "keep the St. Louis far from shore." After unsuccessfully trying to land in Canada, the St. Louis steamed back to Germany dooming all passengers to the Nazi gas chambers.

Refugees are an embarrassment to the world. In 1939 those German Jews reminded the world of a cancerous German government that everyone appeased, resulting in 907 innocent people being sentenced to death.

Fortunately those Afghan refugees have found safe haven in camps on Naruu and New Zealand despite the denial from the Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard.

Until September 11 no one cared that these people were trying to escape the Taliban in the same way the Jews tried to escape Nazi Germany. No one knew or was troubled that the Taliban are staging their own version of a holocaust in an effort to develop a "pure Islamic" state, and people are escaping by any method possible.

The Taliban are thugs operating like countless governments that have been responsible for genocide by the millions. Unlike the Communists and the Nazis of the twentieth century they are hiding behind a religious veil.

Where have all those liberals who proclaim their dedication to equal rights been during the last five years of Taliban atrocities? Where were the liberal women’s groups as religious zealots barbarically treated women in Afghanistan? If you believe a story by Julia Malone in the October 3, 2001 issue of the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) Eleanor Smeal, former head of the National Organization for Women (NOW), has been trying desperately to elicit support for Afghani women. That argument sounds bogus, as women’s advocacy groups for decades have never had trouble being heard by the major liberal media outlets.

Since September 11 we have learned the tragic story of the Afghani people: 25 percent of Afghan children die by age five, while Afghan women are not allowed to work or to go outside the house without a male escort. CNN’s "Behind the Veil" showed pictures of religious Afghans cheering the execution of women in the soccer stadium.

Taking a page from Hitler’s playbook the Taliban now require the Hindu minority to wear yellow badges to "protect" them from the religious police. Humanitarian aid workers who went to Afghanistan to try and help have been charged with "spreading Christianity" and are now facing the death penalty. Yet, until now, groups that espouse freedom, religious or otherwise, have been very silent.

The world has a horrible track record of helping victims of brutal regimes. We looked the other way when Hitler took over Germany and went after not only the Jews, but the Gypsies, the Masons, and the mentally and physically disabled. We did nothing when Pol Pot murdered two million Cambodians. Everyone was remarkably silent when 600,000 Ethiopians died during forced relocation.

Now the Afghani nightmare has been brought to our shores, by disciples of that fanatic religious cult. As the world shrinks, we have discovered that ignoring governments that foster inhumane policies does not protect us from those policies. We must not only eradicate the Taliban, but must also make it clear that any government that promotes genocide is not with us, but with the Taliban.

From the Guardian of London by way of the Drudge Report, 1999-Sep-19, by Ed Vulliamy in New York and Antony Barnett:

US trained butchers of Timor

Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has spent £1m helping Indonesian army

Indonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United States under a covert programme sponsored by the Clinton Administration which continued until last year.

The Observer can also disclose that the Government has spent about £1 million in training more than 50 members of the Indonesian military in Britain since it came to power. Human rights campaigners claim a number of these are likely to have links with those complicit in the attrocities.

The US programme, codenamed 'Iron Balance', was hidden from legislators and the public when Congress curbed the official schooling of Indonesia's army after a massacre in 1991. Principal among the units that continued to be trained was the Kopassus - an elite force with a bloody history - which was more rigorously trained by the US than any other Indonesian unit, according to Pentagon documents passed to The Observer last week. Kopassus was built up with American expertise despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about 200,000 people in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975, and in a string of massacres and disappearances since the bloodbath. Amnesty International describes Kopassus as 'responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia's history'.

The Pentagon documents - obtained by the US-based East Timor Action Network and Illinois congressman Lane Evans - detail every exercise in the covert training programme, conducted under a Pentagon project called JCET (Joint Combined Education and Training). They show the training was in military expertise that could only be used internally against civilians, such as urban guerrilla warfare, surveillance, counter-intelligence, sniper marksmanship and 'psychological operations'.

Specific commanders trained under the US programme have been tied to the current violence and to some of the worst massacres of the past 20 years, including the slaughter at Kraras in 1983 and at Santa Cruz in 1991. The US-trained commanders include the son-in-law of the late dictator General Suharto, Prabowo Subianto, and his mentor, General Kiki Syahnakri - the man appointed last week by the so-called 'reform' government as commissioner for martial law in East Timor.

The secret programme unveiled in the document became the focus for military training when above-board aid was curtailed by Congress after the Santa Cruz massacre. Congress had stepped in after up to 270 peaceful protesters - many of them schoolchildren - were murdered by Kopassus shock troops as they paraded through Dili.

American sponsorship of the Indonesian regime began as a matter of Cold War ideology, in the wake of defeat in Vietnam. The left-wing movement in East Timor was feared by Jakarta and seen by the US as an echo of those in southern Africa and of Salvador Allende's government in Chile. Jakarta's harassment of the Timor government and the invasion of 1975 were duly encouraged by the United States.

The training of Indonesia's officer corps peaked during the mid-Eighties. In 1990 a former official at the US Embassy in Jakarta cabled the State Department to say US sponsorship had been 'a big help to the (Indonesian) army. They probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands'.

But the horror of Santa Cruz in 1991, when trucks were seen dumping bodies in the sea, was too much. The US decided that the training, while still available, should be paid for by the recipient nation - in other words, it would no longer be military aid. The covert programme then became the main means of training Indonesia's military - still at the American taxpayers' expense.

In an undated prospectus, the Pentagon says the prime mission was to 'to develop, organise, equip, train, advise and direct indigenous militaries'. The scale was small, to offer concentrated 'significant special training' which would create 'self-sufficient small units'. In 1996, for instance, 10 exercises involved 376 US personnel and 838 Indonesians or 'loyal' Timorese.

Britain also made a significant contribution to Indonesia's military training. The Observer has established that, since May 1997, 24 senior members of Indonesia's forces have been trained in UK military colleges. This included training in running military units efficiently and how to used technical equipment like guided missiles. In addition, 29 Indonesian officers have studied at non-military establishments.

Revelations of the extent to which Labour has used taxpayers' money to aid the Indonesian military has angered many MPs, who claim it makes a mockery of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's 'ethical foreign policy'. In the last four years of the Tory Government, only one Indonesian soldier was trained in the UK.

Ann Clwyd, the Labour chair of the all-party group on human rights, has previously shown that Indonesian military trained here have subsequently committed atrocities. She said: 'It is simply not acceptable that we have been training these people. We know the police, the army, the militia are all interlinked. How many of those trained by this Government are now involved in the East Timor operation?'

Last week both America and Australia suspended military co-operation with Indonesia. Funding for the military training would have been made available by the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence through the Defence Military Assistance Fund. Earlier this year Defence Minister Doug Henderson admitted that training one Indonesian navy officer at the Joint Service Command and Staff College and another on the International Principal Warfare Course at HMS Dryad cost the Government £170,000.

Many of the Indonesian officers were trained at the Royal Military College at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, as part of a ' private and commercial initiative' by Cranfield University. As well as courses on managing army units, the training includes map-making and electronics. In the past two years the Foreign Office has also given £200,000 to eight Indonesian high-flyers through its Chevening scholarship programme. This included two policemen, two from the army and two from the navy. On Friday, the Indonesian authorities stopped three servicemen taking up their scholarships.

Both the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office defend the training given as 'constructive engagement' . A spokesman for the MoD said: 'It is a way of ensuring professionalism in foreign armies. It encourages higher standards, good governance and greater respect for human rights.'

The Foreign Office points out that many of the Indonesian officers on non-military courses are studying subjects such as international law and human rights.

Last summer seven members of Kopassus finished a post-graduate course in defence studies at Hull University. The Ministry of Defence arranged the deal after liaising with General Prabowo. Although the course was initiated before the general election, it started after Labour's victory. George Robertson, then Defence Secretary, was happy for it to continue. Despite Prabowo's links to atrocities in East Timor, Robertson once described him as 'enlightened'.

The Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, meanwhile, says in today's Observer that 'there is a mopping-up operation to be done in Britain on the myths that have mushroomed among commentators who have only discovered the plight of East Timor in the last fortnight'. He denies that Britain has 'armed Indonesia to the teeth', or provided weapons to the militias, and says that Britain has not given fresh subsidies to buy Hawk trainers.

Amnesty International's East Timor country specialist, Deborah Sklar, traces the regime's 'over-reliance on thuggish military operations' as being due to the demands of the foreign investment community and even from the World Bank.

She cites a blueprint called The East Asian Miracle, written by US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, in which he urges governments to 'insulate' themselves from 'pluralist pressures' and to suppress trade unions. This, she says, became a primary Kopassus role during the years of training by the United States.

'If the US,' says Sklar, 'has supplied to the Indonesians equipment that has been concerned in the perpetration of human rights abuses, then that is an outrage.'

from TPDL 1998-Nov-4, from IsraelWire:

Israel Has 'Ethnic Bullet' - Bio-Weapon Could Target Arabs

(IsraelWire-11/1-14:15 - IST) According to a Jerusalem Post report quoting the London-based Foreign Report, Israel has successfully developed what is being called an "ethnic-bullet", which will target only Arabs.

The report quotes an "unconfirmed report" which originated in South Africa, which details how Israeli scientists have made a biological weapon tailor made to attack targets with the Arab genetic system. Long-term studies of Iraqi Jews was credited with providing the genetic code needed to target Arabs.

According to the report, the ethnic-bullet program was originally developed for use in Apartheid South Africa for use against blacks. Scientist in both countries worked together towards the development of the Israeli program.

Israeli officials declined to confirm the existence of the "ethnic bullet," but one told the newsletter: "We have a basket full of strategic surprises which we will not hesitate to use if we feel that the State of Israel is under serious threat."

Apparently, when Jews say "never again," their government says "again, but not to us."

from TPDL 2000-Mar-23, from the Los Angeles Times Syndicate via Houston Chronicle, by Cal Thomas:

Israel's apocalypse near

Which is the greater threat: George W. Bush meeting with Bob Jones IV, or President Bill Clinton meeting with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad in Geneva to further grease the slope leading to Israel's ultimate demise?

State Department spokesman James Rubin betrayed the indefensibly flawed and fatal (for Israelis) philosophy behind resumption of the "permanent status negotiations" between Israeli and Palestinian delegates when he said on March 17, "The Palestinian issue represents the core of the conflict."

No, it doesn't -- and it never has. The core of the conflict is the rejectionist policies of Israel's enemies to the very existence of the Jewish state, which preceded even the 1948 reconstitution of Israel. A largely ignored article in U.N. Resolution 242 requires of the Arabs "termination of all claims and states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

There has been no such termination. The Jerusalem Post, on Feb. 11, ran a picture of a small Palestinian child dressed as a suicide bomber taking part in a rally in Nablus observing the 12th anniversary of the terrorist group Hamas. The Post reported theatrical shows that included blowing up cardboard Israeli buses and setting mock Jewish settlements on fire. Do people who desire peace behave like this?

Is Assad a peacemaker? According to the Ariel Center for Policy Research, which published an ad in the Feb. 8 issue of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Assad provides safe haven to international terrorists and to Nazi war criminals, including Alois Brunner, one of the Adolf Eichmann's senior henchmen. Assad is also a leading Holocaust denier. On Jan. 31, the editor of Assad's official newspaper, Tishrin, wrote: "... Israel invented the legend of the Holocaust so as to blackmail the world and wield terror among intellectuals and politicians." This is a strategy of peace?

There's plenty of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle East, but Assad's brand is particularly venomous. On Nov. 27, 1999, the Syrian weekly al-Osbua al-Arabi ran this: " ... the Passover Matza is soaked with the blood of Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians ... the Talmud is drenched with hatred ... the hostility toward humanity is imprinted on the Jewish soul ... the Jewish Shylock spreads throughout the world and acts under American sponsorship."

Since seizing power 30 years ago, Assad has maintained his position by treating his opponents to execution, torture, imprisonment without trial and kidnapping. Assad has used various means to deter the Sunni majority, including poison gas, which he employed to murder 20,000 residents of the city of Hama. One out of 240 Syrians is employed in "security" organizations, their main purpose to keep Assad in power.

Syria is still defined by the United States as a terrorist state and is the axis around which much of the world's terrorism revolves. Iran, Sudan, North Korea and Cuba are among those that maintain terrorist ties to Syria. Assad has not been a peacemaker with his own Muslim neighbors. He supports and harbors anti-Turkish PKK Kurdish terrorism, claiming Syrian sovereignty over southeastern Turkey. He continues the 13-centuries-old conflict with Iraq. He occupies Lebanon, which he has turned into the world's largest terrorist camp, and is now ready to inflict even more death and destruction on Israel as it withdraws soldiers from the "buffer zone" between the two nations.

Syria is also one of the most active proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, especially the chemical and biological variety.

Nothing that Israel or the United States may do will deter Syria or Israel's other implacable enemies from their appointed and, they believe, divinely mandated objective to eliminate from the region Israel as a nation and all Jews as a people. How can differences be bridged if terrorists and terrorist states hold steadfastly to this objective? There is no evidence that they are prepared to change. There is plenty of evidence they will use the leftist government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the strong-arm tactics of the Clinton administration to hasten Israel's apocalypse and realize Hitler's dream.

opening passage of East Timor: Acceptable Slaughters, by Joe Nunes:

U.S. arms were used in all that and continue to be used today. There is a degree of complicity here by the U.S. that I really find to be quite disturbing.
-- Rep. Donald Fraser, March, 1977

In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and began one of the largest slaughters in recent history. As of 1979, an estimated 200,000 out of a pre-invasion population of 700,000 had been killed [TAPOL91]. Relief officials reporting in 1979 described the situation in East Timor as comparable to that of Cambodia [Chomsky8e].

According to the Canadian Catholic Church:

The invasion, which could have served as the model for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait a decade-and-a-half later, has claimed the lives of 250,000 Timorese -- more than a third of the population -- through war, famine, and an aggressive forced birth control programme said to include forced abortions, involuntary sterilization of women, and murder by injection of newborns in hospitals [Webster90].

The U.S. shares a great deal of responsibility for this tragedy. It supported the Indonesian invasion, provided military assistance through the massacre and blocked all United Nation efforts to stop the Indonesian aggression.

1 --- Background

Until 1974, East Timor was a Portuguese colony while the western part of the island of Timor was under Indonesian control. In April, 1974, the Portuguese announced that independence would be granted to East Timor. Consequently, three parties were formed to contest leadership of the new nation: UDT, FRETILIN, APODETI. According to the _Australian_ magazine (February 26, 1975), the UDT had the support of 10% of the population, FRETILIN had 60% support and APODETI (which was pro-Indonesian) had 5% support. In January 1975, the UDT and FRETILIN formed a coalition. The UDT withdrew on May 2 and staged a coup in August which ended a few weeks later in a complete FRETILIN victory. According to the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (AFCOA), which visited East Timor in October, between 2,000 and 3,000 died during the bloody civil war [ChomskyHerman79]. On November 28, 1975, the Democratic Republic of East Timor was proclaimed in Dili [TAPOL91].

2 --- American Support for Indonesia's Invasion

On December 7, 1975, a few hours after President Ford and Henry Kissinger had departed from a visit to Jakarta, Indonesia invaded East Timor.

[...]

from Wayne Mann's 1998-May-25 TPDP, an editorial from the New York Times:

AT HOME ABROAD / By ANTHONY LEWIS

Their Suharto and Ours

In December, 1975, President Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, visited President Suharto in Indonesia. They reacted with a nod and a wink to his plans to seize East Timor. The day after they left, Indonesian forces invaded the distant island, using American arms. In the invasion and ensuing occupation, a third of East Timor's 600,000 people died.

When it was pointed out that using American arms aid for aggression violated U.S. law, Mr. Kissinger reportedly told his staff: "Can't we construe [stopping] a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?" (East Timor was in fact remote from Indonesia, and its mostly Roman Catholic people wanted independence, not Communism.)

[...]

(The rest of this editorial can be read in the Bilderberg chapter.)

from the Houston Chronicle, 1999-Mar-11, by John C. Henry:

Clinton says U.S. WRONG for role in Guatemalan war

GUATEMALA CITY -- President Clinton expressed regret Wednesday that the United States supported government military forces responsible for killing an estimated 200,000 civilians during Guatemala's 36-year civil war.

Speaking at Guatemala City's anthropology museum, the president embraced the findings of the Historical Clarification Commission, formed to investigate human rights abuses during that period, which reported U.S. involvement with government security forces implicated in "acts of genocide" against civilians, mostly Mayans, during the brutal civil war that ended in 1996.

The U.S. "support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violence or widespread repression described in the report was wrong," Clinton said. "The United States must not repeat that mistake."

The president's statement, which aides declined to amplify or characterize as an apology, came during the third day of a Central American tour to reassure nations crippled by Hurricane Mitch of U.S. plans to help with rebuilding.

As at earlier stops, Clinton promised "justice and fairness" for Central Americans seeking to migrate to the United States, but he stood firm against illegal immigration, saying it "undermines the control of our borders."

When he reached Guatemala, participants in a roundtable discussion on peace in the region called on him to address the findings of the commission, also known as the "truth commission."

The commission report, issued Feb. 25, contradicts years of official U.S. denials that it trained and financed the Guatemalan military.

Although U.S. support for Guatemala's right-wing government and military have been alleged for years, the nine-volume report confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency aided Guatemalan forces and "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation."

Rather than seek an apology -- Clinton apologized last year in Rwanda for U.S. negligence in stopping genocide there -- Guatemalan Foreign Minister Eduardo Stein Barillas urged the president to offer Guatemalans "an uplifting message."

Clinton said the work of the commission, which was set up as part of the 1996 peace accord, "shows how far Guatemala has traveled in overcoming that painful period."

He went on to promise U.S. support for redevelopment programs in communities hardest hit, in some cases destroyed, by the Washington-backed Guatemalan military.

"We must, and we will ... continue to support the peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala," Clinton said.

The civil war broke out in 1960 between the rightist military-controlled government and left-wing insurgents, who were largely concentrated in regions populated mostly by Mayans. Assuming that Mayans were sympathizing with guerillas, military security forces burned villages and slaughtered inhabitants to cut off supplies and deny shelter to the guerrillas.

Newly declassified U.S. intelligence documents surfaced in Washington on Wednesday that indicate the United States was intimately involved in the equipping of those security forces and that the CIA retained close ties to the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. The documents, obtained by the Washington Post, showed that U.S. officials were aware of the killings at the time.

The United States provided $1.5 million for the truth commission, which was set up as part of the peace agreement supervised by the United Nations. In addition, the United States provided commission researchers access to more than 4,000 documents.

Before flying to Guatemala, where he will participate in a summit of Central American leaders today, Clinton addressed the Legislative Assembly in San Salvador.

Juan Duch Martinez, president of the unicameral assembly, urged Clinton to impress upon Congress that joblessness and the ravages of Hurricane Mitch four months ago have forced many Salvadorans to seek work in the United States.

Martinez asked Clinton to push for "a special migratory status" for Central Americans who have moved to the United States seeking jobs "so they can continue to support their families and our economies."

Clinton was unmoved by the plea, saying that U.S. immigration laws would be enforced. Illegal immigration, he said, "punishes hard-working people who play by the rules and who wait their turn to come to the United States."

At the same time, the president said he would ask Congress to amend Cold War-era immigration laws so Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants have equal chances of legally moving to the United States.

The administration is considering a proposal to revise a 1997 law that granted outright amnesty to as many as 150,000 Nicaraguans, but requires Salvadorans and Guatemalans to prove their hardship claims on a case-by-case basis.

"We must enforce our laws, but we must do so with justice and fairness," Clinton said. "Our treatment of the people of Central America should be based on their suffering, not who caused the suffering. This is wrong, and we must change it."

Architects of the 1997 law, called the Nicaraguan Protection and Central American Relief Act, considered Nicaraguans largely as refugees from the left-wing Sandinista regime, while Salvadorans and Guatemalans fled right-wing governments that were allied with Washington.

Speaking to the democratically elected assembly in its main chamber, or Blue Room, Clinton applauded Salvadorans for the nation's political and economic transformation since a 1992 peace agreement.

Clinton noted that U.S. exports to El Salvador and other Central American countries have tripled since their civil wars of the 1980s ended.

"Years ago, we learned that if Central America suffers, we suffer, too," Clinton said. "In the last 10 years, we have learned how very much we benefit when Central America prospers in peace."

from PDL 1999-Mar-13, from Scripps Howard News Service via Nando Media, by Jay Ambrose:

An apology without context for Guatemala

(March 13, 1999 4:00 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - When a truth commission was organized to look into atrocities in Guatemala, the United States did not run and hide. Instead, it has been noted, it turned over thousands of documents to the investigators and contributed $1.5 million for the work.

And when the commission said the United States had funded an army that slaughtered the innocent, this country neither denounced nor denied most findings.

All of that is commendable, for the United States should be willing to live with the truth. But President Clinton's subsequent apology for the U.S. role in the Guatemalan civil war would have been equally laudable, and less a political and ideological slap at his predecessors, only if he had made a greater effort to put events in context.

There's no question that the Guatemalan government did horrible things in the war that began in 1960 and ended in 1996. As one example reported in the press, its forces destroyed some 400 Indian villages, killing men, women and children, not because the Indians were participating in the war, but because government forces thought they might. And yet, it seems, the United States continued to support the government, despite being aware of brutal acts.

The commission itself has said, however, that the United States bore no direct responsibility for mass slayings that occurred. As the U.S. ambassador has pointed out to the press, this was a case of Guatemalans abusing Guatemalans. Americans killed no one.

In fact, the United States tied its Guatemalan aid to greater respect for human rights, and, in 1977, the Guatemalan government turned down funds rather than change its ways.

It should be remembered, too, that the decisions Clinton now says were wrong were made during the Cold War, when it seemed a real possibility to many that Central American countries would land in the hands of the communists and become client states of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, some find that concern laughable, but American lassitude at certain critical junctures could have made the strategic significance of Central America ultimately vivid to one and all.

Not as an excuse but by way of presenting the whole picture, Clinton also might have mentioned that the leftists who initiated the civil war were determined in a cause that would have denied Guatemala the democracy it now enjoys and that many American policy-makers avidly desired.

If Clinton did not want to get into such a discussion, that would have been fine - if he would also have let the commission report speak for itself.

from TPDL 2000-Aug-29, from Arianna Online 2000-Aug-28, by Arianna Huffington:

Bush And Gore On Colombia: Ask Us No Questions, We'll Tell You No Lies

There is something unsettling about the press coverage of the presidential race. Last week, President Bill Clinton signed a waiver of the human-rights provisions imposed by Congress on the $1.3 billion drug-war package to Colombia, and not a single reporter bothered to ask the candidates -- one of whom, after all, will have to deal with the consequences -- what they thought of it. Do George W. Bush and Al Gore support our becoming embroiled in a three-way civil war? We know where they stand on ``family'' (they're for it), but not whether they are in favor of more than a billion dollars being spent to fight the drug war abroad while 3.5 million addicts at home can't get the treatment they need. Or whether they endorse the cavalier abandonment of the congressionally mandated human-rights benchmarks.

We'd like to know. But since no one in the media is asking, maybe each of the candidates should, on a daily basis, hold a press conference to tell the people they're asking to vote for them how they would deal with the key events of the day. So on Wednesday, when the president, with his drug czar in tow, is in Colombia for a five-hour visit to symbolically hand a gigantic check to President Andres Pastrana, it would be really useful for Gore and Bush to tell us how their drug-war policy would differ from this administration's. How much of his own man is Gore really? And how much will Bush be influenced by Enron, his tenth biggest backer, which has major oil interests in Colombia? It's time for the candidates to be pulled back from pontificating on ``military preparedness'' in general and forced to address specifically their own preparedness to engage our military in the Colombian army's counterinsurgency campaign.

Sandy Berger, the president's history-impaired national security advisor, dismissed the parallels being drawn between Colombia and Vietnam -- which also began with the deployment of a few military advisors and more than a few million dollars in military aid. ``I think you can get paralyzed by the foreign policy of analogy,'' he said. Berger, who seemsparalyzed by the prospect of any ratiocination, would do well to keep in mind that, as Santayana put it, ``Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.''

Nor is Vietnam the only part of our past that should be remembered. As recently as March 1999, Clinton apologized to the people of Guatemala for America's involvement in that country's civil war: ``Support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression was wrong .... The United States must not repeat that mistake.'' He now proceeds to repeat that mistake. The evidence amassed by human-rights groups overwhelmingly shows that the Colombian military continues to allow its paramilitary allies to massacre hundreds of unarmed civilians each year. And only two weeks ago, the army itself was responsible for an attack that killed six elementary school children on a hiking trip.

``I don't know if President Clinton enjoyed apologizing to the people of Guatemala,'' Carlos M. Salinas of Amnesty International USA told me, ``but he's all but guaranteeing that some future U.S. president will have to apologize to the Colombian people for the dirty little war we're about to escalate.''

Just as that apology will sound familiar, so does the policy that will lead to it. Of course, administration officials continue to deny it. ``There is no plan, and there is no proposal, and there is no idea of committing American forces in Colombia to do anything but ... provide training,'' said Thomas Pickering, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. There may be no ``plan,'' but there are already five -- albeit very underpublicized -- American casualties.

Last July, U.S. Army pilot Jennifer Odom, co-pilot Capt. Jose Santiago and crew members Thomas G. Moore, T. Bruce Cluff and Ray Krueger were killed when their plane crashed -- or, as Odom's family believes, was shot down -- while on a top-secret reconnaissance mission in southern Colombia. If you haven't heard about these military casualties of our drug war in Colombia, that was the intention. The flag-draped coffins arrived in the dead of night, in a ceremony that was closed to the press and unattended by any senior White House officials. Ironically, around the same time the administration was trumpeting the lack of body bags from Kosovo, five were quietly arriving from Colombia.

But if we can't get a true picture of what the future holds from our own leaders, we can at least look to the leader of the Colombian armed forces, Gen. Fernando Tapias. ``There will be peace,'' he said in a recent interview, ``but first there will be war. With or without Plan Colombia, things are going to get worse.'' And with more than $1 billion worth of gasoline poured on the fire, does anyone doubt that they are going to get a whole lot worse?

I, for one, would like to know if our next president has given it a thought.

from Agence France-Press, 1998-Dec-9:

The CIA Wrote Death Lists for Pinochet

LONDON, Dec 9, 1998 (AFP) - Former US president Richard Nixon approved a September 1973 coup d'Etat that brought Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to power, a former US ambassador to Chile said here Monday.

Speaking on British television, Edward Korry, who was the US ambassador in Santiago from 1967 to 1971, said the overthrow of Socialist president Salvador Allende was clearly the Nixon administration's objective.

Asked if Nixon sanctioned the coup, Korry said "yes, absolutely" ... "there's no question." Potential consequences did not deter the approval, Korry added.

He described a meeting with Nixon at the White House after Allende's 1970 democratic election.

"The president greeted me at the door, sat down and launched into a violent, 10 minute, disquisition on Chili and how he was going to crush that bastard, Allende," Korry said. Ralph McGehee, a former CIA officer who also spoke on the program, went even farther in describing US involvement with the Chilean dictator.

Asked if Pinochet was a creation of the US spy agency, McGehee said, "Yes, very much so." He also charged that the CIA furnished lists of opposition figures to Pinochet's junta after it took power.

"The Agency was gathering names of leftists, union leaders, media people, anyone who they considered would be a threat to the regime," McGehee said. "And the lists were passed to the military when Allende was killed and many on the list were arrested and killed," he continued.

The testimony supports investigations by the US Congress on CIA operations that show Washington contributed to Pinochet's rise to power.

Many US officials felt that Allende would help establish a regional communist presence in the middle of the Cold War.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged Thursday in Atlanta that "serious mistakes were made" in US Latin America policy.

from http://www.ahriman.com/1dedijer.htm:

Ahriman Series: Unwelcome Books on Fascism No. 1

Vladimir Dedijer

Jasenovac - The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican

Jasenovac - das jugoslawische Auschwitz und der Vatican

4th enlarged ed., 1993, 382 p., 107 Ill., 24 facsimile copies,
German
DM 26.00/US$ 16.00
ISBN 3-922774-06-7

The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican

New York 1992, Prometheus Books
446 p., 108 Ill., 20 facsimile copies, English
DM 49.00/US$ 33.00
ISBN 0-87975-752-3

Vladimir Dedijer, the Yugoslav historian and eyewitness, Tito biographer and President of the International Russell Tribunal, has documented for the first time and comprehensively one of the bloodiest and most unknown chapters of the Second World War: the bestial murder of three-quarters of a million Orthodox Serbs in Ustasha-Croatia, the "Kingdom of God", by henchmen of the Catholic Church between 1941 and 1943. Particularly since the beginning of the civil war in Yugoslavia, whose roots and background are illuminated in great depth by this historical documentation, this work has increased its circulation considerably: the fourth revised German edition has recently been published.

From the editor's preface:
"...in Catholic Croatia, the 'Kingdom of God', everyone who did not belong to the Catholic faith - for the most part Orthodox Serbs - was compelled to convert to Catholicism. Those who refused - as well as many who had already converted - were murdered, usually after prolonged torture in which the order of the day was the cutting off of noses, ears, or other body parts, or poking out eyes. Children were cut out of the bodies of pregnant women and subsequently beheaded; people were chopped to pieces before the eyes of loved ones, who were even forced to catch the spurting blood in a bowl, etc., to list only a few horrors as examples. These atrocities assumed such an extent that even German Nazis, who were not exactly sensitive in such matters, protested. If this historical fact is little known where we are, another fact completely escapes our knowledge: the decisive involvement of the Vatican in these massacres. ."

The way the Croatian side is "burying the ghosts of the past" is tailor-made to thrill the hearts of the Catholic and the Green faction: the leader of the Croation regime, Tudjman, has meanwhile had Jasenovac levelled to the ground, destroyed all documents and declared it a "bird sanctuary".

from http://livelinks.com/sumeria/politics/eugenics.html:

Population Control,
Nazis, and the U.N!

by Anton Chaitkin

ROCKFELLER AND MASS MURDER

The Rockefeller Foundation is the prime sponsor of public relations for the United Nations' drastic depopulation program, which the world is invited to accept at the UN's scheduled September conference in Cairo, Egypt.

Evidence in the possession of a growing number of researchers in America, England, and Germany demonstrates that the Foundation and its corporate, medical, and political associates organized the racial mass murder program of Nazi Germany.

These globalists, who function as a conduit for British Empire geopolitics, were not stopped after World War II. The United Nations alliance of the old Nazi rightwing with the New Age leftwing poses an even graver danger to the world today than the same grouping did in 1941.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family's controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later called "Exxon") to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation's money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry" and the "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity." The Rockefellers' chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led "Eugenics" movement designated the Rockefellers' Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.

The Racial Laws

A few months later, Hitler took over Germany and the Rockefeller-Rudin apparatus became a section of the Nazi state. The regime appointed Rudin head of the Racial Hygiene Society. Rudin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the sterilization law. Described as an American Model law, it was adopted in July 1933 and proudly printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News (USA) with Hitler's signature. The Rockefeller group drew up other race laws, also based on existing Virginia statutes. Otmar Verschuer and his assistant Josef Mengele together wrote reports for special courts which enforced Rudin's racial purity law against cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans.

The "T4" unit of the Hitler Chancery, based on psychiatrists led by Rudin and his staff, cooperated in creating propaganda films to sell mercy killing (euthanasia) to German citizens. The public reacted antagonistically: Hitler had to withdraw a tear-jerker right-to-die film from the movie theaters. The proper groundwork had not yet been laid.

Editor interjection, from the Associated Press:

'Dr. Death' Tries To Force Legal Showdown
Controversial Tape Showing Assisted Suicide Airs On '60 Minutes'

DETROIT, Posted 3:10 p.m. November 22, 1998 -- The newsmagazine 60 Minutes aired a controversial video tonight, showing Dr. Jack Kevorkian ending the life of a patient.

The man known as "Dr. Death" gave the tape to CBS. Kevorkian says the patient had Lou Gehrig's disease, and asked him to end his suffering with a lethal injection of drugs."

See also the involuntary euthanasia laws in the Netherlands.

End interjection.

Under the Nazis, the German chemical company I.G. Farben and Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey were effectively a single firm, merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. I.G. Farben was led up until 1937 by the Warburg family, Rockefeller's partner in banking and in the design of Nazi German eugenics.

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Standard Oil pledged to keep the merger with I.G. Farben going even if the U.S. entered the war. This was exposed in 1942 by Sen. Harry Truman's investigating committee, and President Roosevelt took hundreds of legal measures during the war to stop the Standard-I.G. Farben cartel from supplying the enemy war machine.

In 1940-41, I.G. Farben built a gigantic factory at Auschwitz in Poland, to utilize the Standard Oil/I.G. Farben patents with concentration camp slave labor to make gasoline from coal. The SS was assigned to guard the Jewish and other inmates and select for killing those who were unfit for I.G. Farben slave labor. Standard-Germany president Emil Helfferich testified after the war that Standard Oil funds helped pay for SS guards at Auschwitz.

In 1940, six months after the notorious Standard-I.G. meeting, European Rockefeller Foundation official Daniel O'Brian wrote to the Foundation's chief medical officer Alan Gregg that "it would be unfortunate if it was chosen to stop research which has no relation to war issues" so the Foundation continued financing Nazi "psychiatric research" during the war.

In 1936, Rockefeller's Dr. Franz Kallmann interrupted his study of hereditary degeneracy and emigrated to America because he was half-Jewish. Kallmann went to New York and established the Medical Genetics Department of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry published Kallman's study of over 1,000 cases of schizophrenia, which tried to prove its hereditary basis. In the book, Kallmann thanked his long-time boss and mentor Rudin.

Kallmann's book, published in 1938 in the USA and Nazi Germany, was used by the T4 unit as a rationalization to begin in 1939 the murder of mental patients and various "defective" people, perhaps most of them children. Gas and lethal injections were used to kill 250,000 under this program, in which the staffs for a broader murder program were desensitized and trained.

Dr. Mengele...

In 1943, Otmar Verschuer's assistant Josef Mengele was made medical commandant of Auschwitz. As wartime director of Rockefeller's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity in Berlin, Verschuer secured funds for Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz from the German Research Council. Verschuer wrote a progress report to the Council: "My co-researcher in this research is my assistant the anthropologist and physician Mengele. He is serving as Hauptstuermfuehrer and camp doctor in the concentration camp Auschwitz.... With the permission of the Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler, anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation."

Mengele prowled the railroad lines leading into Auschwitz, looking for twins -- a favorite subject of psychiatric geneticists. On arrival at Mengele's experimental station, twins filled out "a detailed questionnaire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute." There were daily drawings of blood for Verschuer's "specific protein" research. Needles were injected into eyes for work on eye color. There were experimental blood transfusions and infections. Organs and limbs were removed, sometimes without anesthetics. Sex changes were attempted. Females were sterilized, males were castrated. Thousands were murdered and their organs, eyeballs, heads, and limbs were sent to Verschuer and the Rockefeller group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

In 1946, Verschuer wrote to the Bureau of Human Heredity in London, asking for help in continuing his "scientific research."

Facelift

In 1947, the Bureau of Human Heredity moved from London to Copenhagen. The new Danish building for this was built with Rockefeller money. The first International Congress in Human Genetics following World War II was held at this Danish institute in 1956. By that time, Verschuer was a member of the American Eugenics Society, then indistingishable from Rockefeller's Population Council.

Dr. Kallmann helped save Verschuer by testifying in his denazification proceedings. Dr. Kallmann created the American Society of Human Genetics, which organized the "Human Genome Project" -- a current $3 billion physical multiculturalism effort. Kallmann was a director of the American Eugenics Society in 1952 and from 1954 to 1965.

In the 1950s, the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and abortion groups. The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, its current name.

The Rockefeller Foundation had long financed the eugenics movement in England, apparently repaying Britain for the fact that British capital and an Englishman-partner had started old John D. Rockefeller out in his Oil Trust. In the 1960s, the Eugenics Society of England adopted what they called Crypto-eugenics, stating in their official reports that they would do eugenics through means and instruments not labeled as eugenics.

With support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England) set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics Society.

This, then, is the private, international apparatus which has set the world up for a global holocaust, under the UN flag.

from johnz@aa.net via Usenet, on kinship of Nazis and communists:

Lenin was not Jewish. Stalin - who ran everything - was definitely not a Jew. In fact, he conducted purges against Jews and Jewish organizations all throughout his lifetime. When one of Stalin's sons was captured by the Nazis during WWII, the Gestapo interrogated him and asked about Jewish control of the USSR. Stalin's son (I do not remember the name) was shocked and vehemently assured the Gestapo interrogators that his father and the top Communists hated Jews just as much as the Nazis did. After WWII, the Communist conducted a massive anti-Semitic purge first in Eastern Europe with the infamous "Slansky Trials" in Czechoslovakia and then the so-called "Doctors Plot", which was to have ended in the deportation and death of all of the surviving Jews in the USSR. The Soviet Union was nearly always rabidly anti-Israel.

To all the Nazis; Can you explain why your beloved "Reich" allied itself with the Communists to destroy Poland? Can you explain why you hate capitalism just as much as the Communists do? Can you explain why so many German Communists switched sides to become German Nazis, and why after the war so many Nazis found it so easy to work for the Communists? Can you explain why French Communists helped the Nazis by sabotaging French aircraft factories when France was at war with Germany? Can you explain why the Nazis sponsored a Communist radio station - "Radio Humanite", run by German Communists, against France during the war? Can you explain why the old-fashioned Communists and the anti-Semitic Russian fascists are now allies in the former Soviet Union? Isn't it the Nazis and the Communists who are brothers together under the uniforms, common enemies of God and mankind?

Victor Olevich <vjost1@pitt.edu> via Usenet:

[...]

The policies of IMF have been judged genocidal in nature by an Arbitrary Court of Madrid in a recent ruling. The economic conditions set by IMF were specifically designed to destroy the country's industrial potential, limit economic growth, and, consequantly reduce population. It is from this ruling in Madrid that the current effort by Viktor Ilyuxin and Lev Roxlin(headed by Aleksandr Morozov) to bring Yeltsin and others who have made deals with the IMF before the International Court in The Hague on charges of genocide. The Russian population(as well as Ukrainian) is declining not because of post-industrial alienation(Russia is not in a post-industrial stage), but because a miner, a teacher, a doctor doesnt get his salary for the last year, doesnt have enough money to sustain himself or his immediate family. (Berezovskii, who doesnt have these problems, just had his 5th child born in Europe).

from the Manchester Union Leader, article by Richard Lessner "IMF Follies -- Here's an Idea: Let's Stop Subsidizing Socialism"

The Clinton administration wants the taxpayers to pony up another $18 billion to bail out the International Monetary Fund. The IMF itself, of course, specializes in bailouts.

The IMF was set up after the Bretton Woods conference as the lender of last resort for cash-strapped countries ravaged by World War II. Today, it is run by a gang of European socialists and basically serves to rescue big-time international investors and bankers who have made bad loans. The IMF also underwrites the corrupt socialist economies of Third World kleptocracies -- when it's not careening off into such unrelated fevers as global warming and rain forest preservation.

The IMF has an investment fund of $190 billion, $35 billion of which already was put up by the U.S. taxpayers. Why the American taxpayers should be tapped for another $18 billion is a perfect mystery, although the hysterical Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin warns of global economic catastrophe if Congress says "No" to further European and Third World looting of America.

Meanwhile, fresh off his recent safari, the President says he wants to expand free trade to Africa. His "NAFTA for Africa" lunacy would make it easier for impoverished Africans to sell cheap textiles and clothing to the U.S. That this would destroy what remains of our textile industry and drive thousands of Americans, many of them black Southern garment workers out of their jobs -- well, this is the price to be paid for Mr. Clinton's philanthropy.

Here's a radical idea: Let's stop forcing Americans to subsidize socialism.

from http://sunsite.unc.edu/expo/soviet.exhibit:

[...]

The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industrialization had a disastrous effect on agricultural productivity. Nevertheless, in 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas by forty-four percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants, since Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the members of the farm until the government's quota was met. Stalin's decision and the methods used to implement it condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation. Party officials, with the aid of regular troops and secret police units, waged a merciless war of attrition against peasants who refused to give up their grain. Even indispensible seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported. Thosewho did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain. Peasants were prevented from leaving their villages by the NKVD and a system of internal passports.

The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay."

[...]

What did Barbara Marx Hubbard really mean in the quote that opened this chapter? From her book The Revelation, comments on 1 Cor. 15:45, p. 162 (authored by her) she attributes to the book's Christ character:

"You are to prepare the way for the alternative to Armageddon, which is the Planetary Pentecost, the great Instant of Communication which can transform enough, en masse, to avoid the necessity of the seventh seal being broken. It is now the time of the silence in Heaven.

This is the cosmic instant immediately preceding the onslaught of the intensified selection process, or tribulations.

What the angels are waiting for, dearly beloved, is you of my New Order of the Future. You represent the possibility of the avoidance of the painful process of selection, which means the destruction of the self-centered who cannot inherit the powers of co-creation"

Hubbard is advocating the genocide of those humans who do not subordinate themselves to Christian doctrine. She is advocating the total extermination of individualists. This is total evil. On the next page, she rants:

"I, Jesus, am the Lamb. I have been given the Book of Life. It has seven seals.

The first four seals are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, ready to ride, but not yet riding. They wait, holding in abeyance for one more instant the dreadful process of selection:

The White Horse and the conqueror of creature/human nature; the Red Horse and the power to kill; the Black Horse and the power to destroy those who are in deficiency; the Pale Horse upon whom sits the rider called Death, posed to kill those who choose to remain self-centered, with sword, with hunger, with death and with the beasts of the Earth.

All are at the gate, ready to let loose the mighty force" (The Christs' comments on 1 Cor. 15:45)

a few pages later, she rants about those who are self-centered:

"The power of the self-centered human has become a universal aberration, a dragon that can destroy the natural Christ and prevent the birth of the future human.

Intellect and individuality, cultivated during the period of self-consciousness, are meant to marry the Mind of God, rejoining the Creator in alignment with the evolutionary design for greater consciousness, freedom and union with God.

Eve-consciousness must marry Christ-consciousness; intellect must marry direct knowledge of God, and individuality must marry love-of-the-whole, in order for the natural Christ, the future human, to be born.

The dragon is the misuse of the powers of the intellect and individuality at the conclusion of the phase of self-centeredness from which we are soon to emerge. The dragon is the instrument of evil - Satan - God's selection process, which will weed out the self-centered from the God-centered.

It is up to us how long the dragon of selfish power is permitted to prevail. In the end it will surely be defeated, for God's will shall be done on Earth as it is in Heaven" (Hubbard comments on Rev. 12:3-4, p. 174)

Hubbard has not even begun to estimate the power of the self-centered human. For the diametric opposite to Hubbard's moral system, c.f. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. But let's be fair. When Hubbard espouses marriage of individuality to "love-of-the-whole," she is not espousing something necessarily evil. The evil lies in her espousal of God-centeredness: God does not exist, the self does exist and is the most important part of the universe for any healthy conscious entity.

books by Barbara Marx Hubbard, according to http://www.concentric.net/~Edmc/bmhe.html

• The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium
• Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential
• The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth (The Book of Co-Creation)
• Hunger of Eve: One Woman's Odyssey Toward the Future
• Evolutionary Journey
• Complete Guide to Channeling
• The Manual for Co-Creators

Many more samples of Hubbard's writings are at http://www.ncinter.net/~ejt/download.htm (search the page for the phrase "Section Eight")

Why does it matter what this slobbering lunatic says? Two specific reasons: she is saying it to the policy-making governing elite, and it is that brand of drooling watery-eyed rabidity which unfortunately appeals to the minds of men in their foggier moments. In these moments, men perceive Hubbard as offering a shortcut to power and a moral justification for the horrors they want to unleash on those who frighten them.

from http://www.infidels.org/org/ffrf/fttoday/back/hakeem/:

Freethought Today, October 1992

---

Holocaust

Part 1: Christianity's Propensity For Ferocity

By Michael Hakeem, Ph.D.

"The fool says in his heart 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none that does good."--Psalm 14:1

Christianity casts a deep and pervasive shadow over the Holocaust. "If . . . then" is an intriguing game some historians like to play. It is tempting to posit this hypothesis: If there were no Christianity, then would there have been the Holocaust? It is not meant to say that if there is a connection it is actually and necessarily a direct implementation of an explicitly formulated Christian doctrine that orders the killing of the Jews. It is rather meant to affirm that "ideas have consequences." Hitler's "final solution" was the culmination of a Christian idea that nourished the soil and planted the seed of anti-Semitism over a period of two thousand years.

The Nazi Holocaust is a specific event in time. But Christianity, a movement with a dreadfully bloody history--and a bloodier one to come when its end-time judgment of destruction is pronounced on all who do not join it--has had much experience with fathering holocausts on earth, as will be documented in due course. The Holocaust alone--leave aside the other holocausts and the additional horrors of the faith--should have shamed the clergy into silence and put a stop to their penchant for self-righteously pointing the finger of blame and scorn at nonbelievers as the fountain of all that, according to their lights, ails the world. There is something obscene about members of a movement whose central premise is that those who do not join it deserve to be tortured and destroyed having the gall to make judgments about the morality of others. The clergy's irrepressible persistence in spreading intolerance, subtly and not so subtly, toward atheists has been documented here on a number of occasions.

It is not possible to exaggerate the extent of the antipathy and the strength of the anathema directed at atheists the clergy give voice to. Professor Paul Edwards knows that. He says, in the article on "Atheism" he wrote for the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy of which he is Editor in Chief: "One could fill many volumes with the abuse and calumny contained in the writings of Christian apologists, learned no less than popular. The tenor of these writings is not simply that atheism is mistaken but also that only a depraved person could adopt so hideous a position and that the spread of atheism would be a horrifying catastrophe for the human race." He gives some choice examples.

Freethinkers must be fully aware of how often atheism is identified with communism. The Reverend Robert A. Morey is one among many clergy who seek to warn people of the horrendous dangers posed by atheists: "What the atheists have done in Russia, Cuba, China, etc. provides a graphic lesson in what happens when the infidel is in control." Spelling it out, he teaches that "anti-theists in the West call for the same suppression of religion which the Communists use in their lands."

Pat Robertson, important because he possesses vast resources and is an indefatigable advocate and activist in the cause of making Christians a potent voice in the political realm, flatly and unhesitatingly equates atheism with communism. He contends that the signers of the Humanist Manifesto "were not avowed communists as such, but they believed everything the communists believed." Soviet communism, he claims, was "the model for the humanistic world view." He has held explicitly that atheists are not fit to be in public office. He has ruled that "there is absolutely no way the government can operate successfully unless led by godly men and women operating under the laws of the God of Jacob." He warns that the atheists' aim is to silence all who believe in God.

Pastor X, who will soon make his first appearance in the ". . . And Intellectually Fraudulent" series, can represent any number of clergy who point to the horrors of communist Russia as the inevitable product that atheism leads to. Pastor X liked to reel off the evils that allegedly stemmed from Russia's following the path of atheism rather than the Way of God: the rulers' killing of their own people; waging war; tyrannical rule over the citizenry; not allowing freedom of religion; withholding civil rights; keeping people in poverty; allowing special privileges for the elites; censorship of news and literature; spying on people and interfering with their private affairs; and so on.

Thinking persons know that they are required to subject their own assumptions to critical analysis, to look for defects and deficiencies in the logic of their conclusions, to examine alternative explanations, and to present evidence to support their claims. None of the irresponsibly wild and reckless indictments sampled, or any of the other known ones, are credible, and they are made because the clergy making them do not exercise the skills requisite for reasoned deliberation.

The reasons why government regimes, communist or any others, do the things they do, including the killing of their own people, are very complex. To say, as so many of the clergy do, that the only reason that the Russian communists did the beastly things they did is their lack of belief in God is naive and confused in the extreme. It is true that Russian communism subscribed to atheism, and it is true that it opposed and suppressed religion, and it is true that the Russian regime persecuted the clergy and harassed the churches, and it is true that Stalin had millions killed. But surely most of these killings were for political reasons and had nothing at all to do with religion or atheism. In the earlier years of the communist takeover, which was probably the period of most intense persecution of the clergy, leading to the imprisonment and killing of some of them, the hostility of the revolutionary regime was instigated by some of the clergy's active resistance to it and their support of the imperial state. Indeed, if the textbooks on the history of Russia are correct, the post-World War II period saw a relaxation by Stalin of the suppression of religion because of the patriotic behavior of the clergy and their support of the war. In short, political considerations must be taken into account in the communists' treatment of the matter of religion, and it is a matter far more complicated than the simple-minded contention that it is all explainable by the lack of belief in God.

The Russian communist state lasted a mere seventy years. For just a little short of two thousand years, the history of the Western world tells a story of a catalogue of nations that were not only dominated by Christianity but had many countries in which the Church and the ecclesiastical leaders were closely allied with the civil authorities, and It is sometimes difficult in their history to distinguish between state and church or to determine which was exercising more power. Yet these nations have chalked up an appalling record of slaughtering of people, a proclivity to engage in war, tyrannical rule, virtual enslavement of massive populations, deprivation of human rights, oppressive living conditions, absence of religious freedom, excessive privileges for the ruling elites, and control over the private lives of people. These duplicate the very things the critical clergy bemoan as occurring in Communist Russia and which they attribute to its "atheist philosophy." But there they are where Christianity reigned supreme and where atheism was hardly significant.

There is still another alternative way to look at the origins of communist Russia. By the clergy's own endlessly repeated pressing forth of one of their Christian doctrines, it is fair to conclude that God rather than the atheists should be held responsible for bringing the despised atheist Russian communism into being. Who has not heard the clergy proudly proclaim that all that happens is the work of God? Pat Robertson wrote a whole book, The Plan, to spread the idea. God has a plan for the world and a plan worked out for each individual. Robertson teaches that God's "plan for you begins in the womb." Does it not follow that God's plan for Stalin was for him to become communist and rule a communist Russia? No less an authority than the Reverend Richard C. Halverson, Chaplain of the United States Senate, affirms the doctrine. He says Reform theology, the theology he deems to be correct, declares: "The decrees of God are that God foreordains whatever comes to pass. Predestination is not a humanly contrived dogma; it is derived from the word of God."

In a number of extensive analyses of the playing out of the end-times scenario deduced from the Bible, professors in the seminaries, particularly those who are specialists on biblical prophecy like Pentecost and Walvoord, have described the crucial role that communist Russia is scheduled to play. The theologians see its role as the attacker of Israel in Armageddon. They read it all in the prophecies of the Old Testament. They identify communist Russia there, though not under that name. Surely it is blasphemous to assert that the atheists inscribed it in the Bible rather than it being God's revelation. The inescapable conclusion is that God created communist Russia for his own purposes.

The rejoinder will be that God would not have created "the evil empire." Those who say that are not arguing with, but just ignoring, the theologians who claim that he did. "God creates only good things," goes the constant refrain of the objectors. They are ignoring God who himself admits to being the author of evil, and he should know himself: "I form light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things" Again, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" The evil deeds of God that abound in the Bible are so monstrous that his putting Stalin in charge of communist Russia and letting him commit the abominations he did is a peccadillo by comparison. God once destroyed the whole human race except for one family; Stalin never did that.

It has been found necessary to follow a long and circuitous route before arriving at the demonstration of Christianity's implication in the Holocaust. Part 2 will consider a number of genocidal ventures of the Christians. It will also show that during the 1500 years, more or less, of Russia's existence before the communist takeover, the Christianity that was a powerful dominating force in the lives of the people, and the ecclesiastical establishment that exercised considerable influence in and out of the government did not keep the masses of people from living a most miserable existence, and all the conditions that the clergy deplore in communist Russia and blame on atheism were present in the same or greater degree in Christian Russia. A choice to live under Stalin or under the czars who preceded him is a choice between a rock and a hard place.

Part 2: Holocaust (Pogroms) In Christian Russia

To summarize for newcomers, response is being made to the contention often heard from the clergy that most if not all the social ills that beset the world can be traced to the malignant presence of "secular humanists" (atheists). As the ultimate example of the misery, tyranny, terror, immorality, and inhumanity that can result when atheism dominates a society the clergy point to Communist Russia. The accusers can't present any evidence to tie these abominations to atheism. Except for what were, as will be shown later, on-again, off-again attempts of the regime to stamp out religion, the horrors it committed (including all except a relatively small fraction of killings), had nothing whatever to do with its atheistic stand. In fact, as will be shown in due course, the Russian Orthodox Church, during long stretches of time, supported the political policies of the Soviet dictatorship without reservation.

The clergy insist that the prevention or cure of degeneracy in the individual and decay in the society depend on the presence of Christianity. Innumerable assertions of this claim can be reproduced. Three will give their flavor.

The Reverend Don Beltzer, in a widely distributed booklet, "America at the Brink," published by the General Council of Assemblies of God and Revivaltime Media Ministries, reports that he personally directed the ultimate question about the destiny of the nation to none other than Dr. Billy Graham: "Dr. Graham, you know this nation of ours well. You have been a friend of our presidents for decades. You have preached in our great cities. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America's future? His face was 2 feet away, his eyes penetrating into mine [how much closer to oracular power and genius can you get?], and a mask of sadness briefly captured his famous countenance. He replied ever so softly, 'Unless there is a miracle of God's grace here, America is going to hell.' "

The Reverend John Stott, one of the most prominent British clerics, now Rector Emeritus of All Souls Church in London, gave a sermon, "Christians: Salt and Light." Proclaiming that "Christians are fundamentally different from non-Christians," he joins Jesus in reminding them that they are "the salt of the earth" and "the light of the world." He teaches that, as "salt," Christians are appointed to "permeate non-Christian society," and thus prevent its rotting, and, as "light," to dispel "the darkness of evil and sorrow." Being "salt" and "light," the Christians are qualified to battle "the growing dishonesty, corruption, immorality, violence, pornography, the diminishing respect for human life, and the increase in abortion."

Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, a very aggressive and quite successful nationwide organization to get Christians, as Christians, more politically involved, is intended precisely to apply the Christian therapy to the ailing society through political power. He promises Christians: "We can turn our country back from its headlong plunge into chaos and moral decay. But only if we wake-up Christian America. That's the entire purpose of CHRISTIAN COALITION."

It is easy to show that both propositions so dear to the clergy--that where atheism dominates, there can be only disaster and that in Christianity lies the remedy--are without substance. If it is easy, then why do the clergy not cease and desist from so doggedly putting them forth? Because they are committed to an ideology that is at war with proper reasoning, and they lack the skills required to critically analyze the faults that lurk in their loose, irresponsible talk.

Consider the Soviet Union whose dictatorial political and social systems should be found repugnant by any secular humanist. The clergy insist that these systems are in fact due precisely to the atheism that allegedly infected the populace and reigned supreme in the land. The clergy are in error even regarding the elementary facts that are needed to support their premise.

Atheism did not reign supreme in Communist Russia. More religious worship occurred there than the clergy here suppose. How can any regime, no matter how oppressive, wipe out religion privately indulged in? The Soviet government in time became more concerned with restricting institutionalized religion than with trying to eradicate every last vestige of worship, something they came to realize early on was not a feasible goal, leading them to make compromises. Though the rulers made efforts, sometimes very strenuous and even murderous efforts, to promote atheism and eliminate religion, they were far from successful. How unsuccessful they were should be obvious from the massive resurfacing of religion after the demise of the Communist regime.

The clergy, out of ignorance, wrongly assume that there was a straight-line, unvarying, and unrelenting suppression of religion in Communist Russia. In fact the picture is strikingly different. There were alternating periods, sometimes lasting for decades, of relaxing and of strengthening antireligious policies. The history in a nutshell:

After the initial period of hostility to the Bolsheviks, the Church settled into a posture of neutrality (not opposition, but neutrality). Then there came periods when the Church pledged to give the regime its complete support in all political matters. One such period was in 1927 when the Church abandoned its policy of neutrality and committed itself to support the regime unconditionally in all political matters. In subsequent years, there were intervals of pressure against the Church interspersed with intervals of permissiveness. In 1943, the Church ratified a concordat which defined state/church relations for the next fifteen years. The Church was granted concessions in return for which it again committed itself to unequivocally support the state in political affairs.

William C. Fletcher, Professor and Director of Soviet and East European Studies and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, who is one of the closest students of the subject and has published numerous researches on the matter, has many interesting things to say about it. He makes reference, in the Journal of State and Church, to "the spectacular revival of religion during the latter fifties" in the Soviet Union. More than this, Fletcher says that if one can assume the correctness of the figures that went into his calculations, "the number of religious believers in the Soviet Union has not been reduced but has actually grown from some eighty to ninety million people in 1937 to perhaps one hundred fifteen million today [1980]." He tracked spans of time when the Orthodox Church and its officials were allied with the Communist government.

The Church hierarchy helped the regime to establish control over the peoples (western Ukraine and the Baltic countries) brought into the Soviet orbit after World War II. Its influence was brought to bear even on nonOrthodox countries of Eastern Europe that came under Soviet domination, the Church urging nonOrthodox bodies (such as the national Catholic Churches) to accept the political situation. The Orthodox Church cooperated enthusiastically with the Soviet's "peace offensive" of the forties and fifties, a peace campaign that has been exposed as little more than a ploy to throw the West off guard.

During World War II, to cite the findings of another authority, the Church was rehabilitated, it received many concessions, and, in fact, it hailed Stalin as "the divinely appointed leader of the nation." According to still another academic researcher, whose studies pertain to more recent years, in the seventies the Communist government revised its state/church regulations to favor the Orthodox and Baptist leadership. He surmises that this was a reward for their subservience: "These leaders have consistently supported the Kremlin's domestic and international policies."

So, it seems, after all, that Christianity was present in the very belly of "Godless Communism," and its heart beat fairly rhythmically. Yet, it was no antidote to the vile ways of an "evil empire." In fact, the Orthodox Church must bear part of the responsibility for doing much to help it on its way and support and perpetuate its tyrannical grip on people. The Baptists also helped. This is not the first or last time Christians are found willing to sell their souls.

Let us use imperial Russia as a testing ground for the clergy's promise that where Christianity permeates society life is much more likely to be pleasing, since Christianity spells love, peace, joy, serene contentment, caring, sharing, humaneness, equal worth of everyone, bounteous good gifts, and everything else that's nice.

Pre-Communist Russia was certainly thoroughly permeated by Christianity. It reigned in Russia for at least a thousand years before communism came on the scene. The religion played a vital role in the lives of the people, and the Orthodox Church was a dominant influence in many spheres. One historian, but not the only one, comments: "Peasants in particular embraced their religion wholeheartedly." Besides preparing "loyal subjects for the Tsar," the officially stated aim of education was preparing "loyal sons for the Orthodox Church." From 1700 to 1917 the central administration of the Church was made a department of the government and went under the name, "Holy Governing Synod." The Church officials and the priests received salaries and subsidies from the state.

Numerous professors of Russian history can be brought forth to testify that the Church not only supported the autocratic government which ruled imperial Russia from beginning to end but provided a religious rationale for it also. Not to obey the czar was made a sin. Here is Professor Richard Pipes who writes that "students of the Orthodox faith in all primary and secondary schools were required to take courses in religion, usually taught by clergymen." He notes, in connection with this that the Church "condemned disobedience to [the czar] as a sin."

Another historian: "The Church repaid her protectors by exercising all her great influence to support and sanction the Russian monarchy as the representative of God on earth." Another takes note of "the solicitude of the church hierarchy for the strengthening of absolutism." Still another points out that "the teaching of the Orthodox Church was inherently favorable to autocracy."

Czar Alexander III, upon succeeding to the throne, heard, as did other czars, "the voice of God" ordering autocratic rule. Czars were elevated to quasi-divine status. According to the Orthodox Church, Russian rulers were "viceroys of God on earth." Under Nicholas I, the catechism used in schools and churches taught that God commands subjects "to obey from the inmost recess of the heart every authority, and particularly the Emperor." Question: "What example confirms this doctrine?" Response: "The example of Jesus Christ himself, who lived and died in allegiance to the Emperor of Rome, and especially submitted to the judgment which condemned him to death."

There was no religious freedom in imperial Russia, and persecution of nonOrthodox faiths was common. At times profession of nonOrthodox dogma was looked upon as treason. One religious body was even prohibited from holding prayer meetings and the leaders of another were incarcerated and their followers subjected to cruel indignities and hounded by punitive expeditions. Under the law, only the Orthodox Church was allowed to proselytize. Conversion of an Orthodox to a dissenting faith was punishable by imprisonment or exile to Siberia. Dissenting religions were not allowed to build new houses of worship or to issue religious propaganda. The monarchy established an espionage system within the Church to ensure obedience, in addition to the secret agents which it deployed everywhere, just as Stalin did. Christian imperial Russia was one of the most bellicose nations in history. In its modern history, during the reign of only one czar, who was on the throne a relatively short time, was the country not involved in a major war.

Anti-Semitism was rife in imperial Russia, and its victims were subjected to flagrant abuse and discrimination. Jews were assessed special taxes not demanded from others. Attempts were made to forcefully convert them. Jewish children were baptized against their parents wishes. Yehuda Bauer, who holds a professorship in Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, reports that under Czar Nicholas I Jewish "children younger than twelve were forcibly taken [kidnapped] from their homes and sent to strict schools, where most of those who survived--many did not--were forced to abandon their Jewishness." Quotas permitted only an insignificant proportion to attend educational institutions at all levels. They were confined to certain areas. Their occupational choices were restricted. They could not employ Christians except with the permission of the police. They were kept out of the professions. They were not allowed to acquire real estate except in the Pale of Settlement (Jewish quarters). They could not own agrarian land or live in rural areas.

When Czarist Russia is mentioned, "pogroms" is triggered in the mind. One historian describes what they are: "A pogrom consisted of mobs thronging into Jewish parts of town breaking into houses and shops, looting, beating, raping, burning and killing inhabitants." After Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, waves of some of the worst pogroms occurred over a period of several years, spreading to two hundred cities, though the assassin was not Jewish. In the early 1900's there were outbreaks of barbaric pogroms. The New Encyclopedia Britannica is authority for the claim that "the Church and the tsarist authorities went so far as to condone and even encourage some pogroms against the Jews."

How did the devout Christian masses fare in this thoroughly Christian society and one lacking any visible atheism? Life couldn't be worse. Ninety per cent of the people were peasants, most of them serfs, a status little better than slavery. "By the beginning of the nineteenth century the structure of serfdom was complete," one historian writes, "and its profounder results were active until 1917."

A small book can be filled with summary statements by historians of Russia depicting the condition of the masses. Professor Graham Stephenson: "The peasantry was Russia. They paid nearly all the taxes, they provided all the food, they were the hordes of domestic servants, they died in the wars, they starved frequently and suffered always."

Professor I. Michael Aronson: "For the most part . . . the so-called masses . . . lived impoverished, primitive, and brutalized lives."

Professor John Stipp: "At least from the mid-1400's on the masses of Russia lived in circumstances that were unbelievable . . . The masses were so lacking the refinements of human qualities that they were often referred to in nineteenth century Russian literature as 'dead souls.' "

"The nobles had complete power over the serfs," is a truism that can be found in many histories of imperial Russia. They could extract any kind of labor from the serfs; hire them out to work for others; send them away from the land without their families; order them to marry or not marry; transform them into household servants; compel them to provide any kind of personal service; lash them for misdeeds; get them, if incorrigible, drafted into the army for twenty-five years or sent to Siberia by the authorities; impose on them any dues in money or labor; throw out of the village the aged and the sick; seize their movable goods at will. The murder of one's serfs was prohibited by law, but, by law, serfs were not allowed to complain to the officials about their lords. Murders of serfs frequently occurred and went unpunished.

Would anyone be uninformed or foolish enough to say or imply that life was better where Christianity reigned supreme in pre-Communist Russia than it was in "Atheist (?) Russia"? Richard C. Halverson, Chaplain of the United States Senate, is. In a vacuous attack on atheists, he said, as reported in these pages recently, that "Atheism has no room for human rights" (the context was his reference to Communist Russia). By implication, he has to be indicating that human rights will prevail where theism does.

Why did he not know that in imperial Russia, where Christianity played a central role in people's lives and the Church had great influence, human rights were virtually unknown? Why did he not research the subject in the Library of Congress to which he has ready access before recklessly uttering his insulting and inflammatory nonsense? Because the skills of intellectual and critical inquiry required for the task are not within his ken.

It was reported in a previous column that dealt with him, that he said, "The most important thing I do is pray. It would be accurate to say I'm preoccupied with it." He would be doing a more socially useful thing if he would stop praying and devote the time saved to reading about the horrors that can be laid at the door of the faith he is nevertheless willing to support. Ponder the enormity of the intellectual bankruptcy it takes for Halverson, who supports an ideology one of the basic tenets of which is that those who do not subscribe to it ought to be horribly punished and finally destroyed, pointing an accusing finger at secular humanists--among the strongest supporters of human rights--as being in disfavor of them.

Part 3: Its Foundation In Christian AntiSemitism

The clergy's claim that atheism accounts for the evils of Communist Russia has been shown to be insupportable. Are the clergy ready to argue that the Nazi horrors could occur only because Germany was permeated with atheism? In fact, pre-Nazi Germany was permeated with Christianity. It is no exaggeration to say it was one of the most Christian nations in the world, if judged by the usual indexes. Just a couple of decades before Hitler started his ascent to power, 90 to 95 per cent of Germans were members of Christian churches; the Protestant church press was flourishing, publishing some 600 independent church papers with a circulation of 17,000,000; theology students numbered 5,500; and the presence of some internationally famous theologians kept interest in religious concerns prominent.

Nazism arose in the bosom of a pervasively Christian society. More than this, the Holocaust was a product of certain Christian doctrines. If the American clergy don't know that there is an intimate relationship between the Holocaust and the Christian faith, some Nazi officials and military leaders did. A German general replied, when asked at the Nuremberg Trials, how such a thing could happen: "I am of the opinion when for years, for decades the doctrine is preached that Jews are not even human, such an outcome is inevitable." He, of course, underestimated the duration of such preachment, which, as will be seen, started with Jesus. Julian Streicher, chief Nazi ideologist of anti-Semitism and founder of Der Sturmer, the most notoriously vile anti-Semitic publication, recommended "the extermination of the people whose father is the Devil," recalling Jesus' attribution of such parentage to Jews.

Hitler, whose virulent hatred of the Jews he frequently voiced with frenzy, saw the killing of the Jews as a sacred mission: "Today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord [italics in the original]." In response to two bishops who questioned the Nazi race policy, Hitler said that he was only putting into effect what Christianity had preached for 2,000 years.

Hitler is wrong. Christianity does not preach that all Jews should be exterminated here on earth. What Christianity did was to invent religious anti-Semitism which sometimes spills over into massive slaughter of Jews. In addition, what Christianity preaches is that Jews, and all others who do not believe in it, should, after death, be punished by horrible torture and ultimate destruction, whereas believers could qualify for a life of everlasting bliss. Christianity provided a system of thought, a climate of opinion, that made possible the dehumanization of whole categories of people, particularly the Jews. The Nazis referred to the Jews as devil, bacilli, vermin, worms, rats with human faces, filth, insects that lived in the darkness, and worse. Before Nazism, German literature contained vicious degradation of the Jews.

That is the bedrock Hitler could exploit with impunity. A historian, Victoria Barnett, writes: "The very fact that the persecution of the Jewish people could reach genocidal proportions, without massive outcry from their fellow citizens and with participation of the thousands of Germans who worked in the camps, reveals how deeply anti-Semitism was embedded in the hearts and minds of ordinary Germans." It was so deeply embedded in the German psyche that it was possible to hear anti-Jewish diatribes from Christian pulpits, the court preacher in Berlin in the Weimar period was a rabid anti-Semite, there existed pre-Nazi anti-Semitic political parties, and a League was formed to promote hatred of Jews. Professor George L. Mosse, a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin and one of the most expert, probing, and prolific students of Nazism, says: "German anti-Semitism is a part of German intellectual history. It does not stand outside it." Mosse quotes Nietzsche: "I have never yet met a German who was favorably inclined to the Jews."

A combination of Christian anti-Semitism, racist theories, and Germanic super-nationalistic ethnocentrism reached its zenith in the Nazi era, forming a mixture of lethal volatility that exploded in the flames of the Holocaust. Its foundation was Christian anti-Semitism, in the view of some scholars, Professor Yehuda Bauer's being representative: "Without Christian, or traditional anti-Judaism, modern nationalistic and racial antisemitism would have been impossible."

Basic to an understanding of it all is the inherent intolerance of Christianity, a truth noted by the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Christianity from its beginning, tended toward intolerance that was rooted in its religious self-consciousness." It is possible to cite many authorities who confirm that intolerance of Jews is part and parcel of Christianity. Professor Rosemary Radford Ruether can represent them all: "Is it possible to purge Christianity of anti-Judaism without at the same time pulling up Christian faith? Is it possible to say 'Jesus is Messiah' without, implicitly or explicitly, saying at the same time 'and the Jew is damned' "?

Many students of the subject see the Holocaust and Christian ideology as twins. As one researcher notes: "Almost without exception, general histories of National Socialism and especially of the Nazi policies concerning the 'Jewish question' begin with the story of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. Conversely, most works on anti-Semitism in pre-Nazi Germany see in it a prelude to the Holocaust." Barnett provides a specific example: "The Holocaust . . . posed a direct challenge to Christians throughout the world. They were confronted with the consequences of the anti-Semitism that had been supported by Christian churches for centuries, and which made the Holocaust possible."

It all began with Jesus. Bishop John Shelby Spong indicts him: "Jesus is . . . depicted, especially in the Book of John, as being guilty of what we today would surely call antisemitism. Indeed, the hatred of the Jews that has been the dark underside of Christianity for two thousand years is fed by the pejorative attitudes found in the Christian Scriptures and even in the supposed words of Jesus. It has led to pogroms, ghettos, segregated housing and clubs, defaced synagogues, Krystallnacht, and Dachau."

Through the ages, the Gospels have furnished abundant ammunition to the anti-Semites. Professor Alan Davies, writing in Eliade's sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, comments: "Today, even Christian scholars generally concede that the Gospels and other sections of the New Testament are colored in some measure by hostility toward the Jewish antagonists of the apostolic church in the troubled milieu of the first and second centuries." He goes on to give details of the material in each of the Gospels that has gone into the structure of anti-Semitism. He points to the Gospel of John as an extreme example of Jew-baiting: "So negative and intense is the Johannine image that John has sometimes been regarded as the 'father of anti-Semitism.'" But that infamy is pinned on the Apostle Paul by Professor Hyam Maccoby: "If Paul was the creator of the Christian myth, he was also the creator of anti-Semitism which has been inseparable from that myth."

The Church Fathers--Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ephrem, Augustine, for example--topmost Christians all, fashioned an image of the Jews concocted of superhuman malevolence, hopeless totality of spiritual blindness, and every nameable evil. Look at this tiny sample of Chrysostom's thunder, taken from eight sermons devoted to the same theme: The Jews "are inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil . . . debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of pigs and lusty goats. They know only one thing, to satisfy their gullets, get drunk, to kill and maim one another. They murder their offspring and immolate them to the devil . . . .The Jewish disease must be guarded against. The Christian's duty is to hate the Jews."

This image of the Jews spun by these Christ-possessed notables of the early Church has been transmitted throughout the Western world through theological works, sermons, the mystery and Passion plays, folklore, and the arts.

The Middle Ages, spanning several hundred years, was a very bad time for Jews. The Popes were ruthless in their condemnation of them, treated them with extraordinary contempt, stimulated hatred toward them, and were instrumental in getting them slaughtered. Professor Raul Hilberg, in his encyclopedic research, The Destruction of the European Jews, presents two parallel columns, one setting down indignities, disadvantages, deprivations, prohibitions, restrictions, special penalties, and stigmatizing garb and insignia imposed on the Jews by the Catholic Church in Medieval times and the other listing their counterparts enacted by the Nazi regime.

What did the Christians have against the Jews? Professor Friedrich Heer reports that blame for everything deemed evil, from aborted human or animal birth to the plague, was laid at the door of the Jews in the Middle Ages. But above all, Christians charge the Jews with being "Christ-killers." Did the Jews kill Christ? Ignorance leads to an unhesitating affirmative response. Yet the Gospels themselves are confused and contradictory about the crucifixion, Mark and Matthew pinning it on the Romans, Luke and John on the Jews. Historians say crucifixion was never a Jewish method of execution but a Roman one. Many scholars make the case for the Romans' execution of Jesus as a political rebel.

Howard Teeple, after a painstakingly detailed analysis in his recent, impressive volume, How Did Christianity Really Begin?, concludes: "Who was responsible for Jesus' death, Jews or Romans? Neither Jews as a whole nor Romans as a whole, but the Sadducean priests, the Sanhedrin, Judas, and Pilate." Then there are those scholars who insist that there existed no historical Jesus to be executed.

Think of the millions of Jews put to death by Christians unable to reason logicalloy about their beliefs. If they could reason correctly, they would have nothing but boundless gratitude for the Jews, had they indeed crucified Jesus. Isn't it at the core of Christian doctrine that it was foreordained that Christ was to be put to death? To talk like Christians do, didn't God send his son here, for that express purpose? If salvation was to come into being, wouldn't someone have had to crucify Jesus?

Part 4: Catholic Reaction To The Nazi Holocaust

The specter of Martin Luther was a haunting presence in Nazism and was in attendance at the Holocaust. Numerous scholars have taken note of that fact.

For example, Professor Robert J. Wistrich, one of the profoundest students of worldwide anti-Semitism, writes: "The seed of hatred sown by Luther would reach its horrible climax in the Third Reich when German Protestants showed themselves to be particularly receptive to Nazi antisemitism."

The Lutheran editor of the American translation of Luther's works comments: "It is impossible to publish Luther's treatise today . . . without noting how similar to his proposals were the actions of the National Socialist regime in Germany in the 1930's and 1940's." The Nazis would now and then pay tribute to their mentor by staging an event on a date or at a place associated with him. They declared, for example, that their first large-scale pogrom against the Jews in November, 1938 was a pious operation performed in honor of the anniversary of Luther's birthday.

To cite but one more example, the installation of Ludwig Müller as Reich Bishop was conducted with great fanfare in the church at Wittenberg where Luther had preached. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, names Luther as one of the great heroes of the German people. The historian, Professor Friedrich Heer, is authority for the knowledge that Hitler "was prepared to concede that Luther had prepared the way for his own work." He quotes Hitler as saying, as early as 1918: "He saw the Jew as we are only now beginning to see him today." (Ominous.)

What was it that Luther offered that made him so attractive to the Nazis? It was a book-length treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he gave expression to his unbridled, not to say utterly maniacal, detestation of Jews, and which contained more than a hint of genocidal intentions toward them. Luther's vehement attacks on the Jews were frequently recalled and widely disseminated by the Nazis. The original edition of Luther's loathsome volume was exhibited in a special glass case at party rallies in Nuremberg.

In page after page of Hitler's ranting against the Jews in Mein Kampf, one soon comes to realize that echoes of Martin Luther are being heard. Julius Streicher, the chief party ideologist of anti-Semitism, argued in his defense at the Nuremberg trials that he had never said anything about the Jews that Martin Luther had not said four hundred years earlier.

No paraphrase or brief excerpts can give the full flavor of the seething hatred with which Luther assailed the Jews. It has to be read to be believed. He can hardly find words vile enough to describe what he apparently believes are creatures endowed with very little of human qualities. There is no malevolence, crime, immorality, and depravity he does not attribute to them. He even resorts to gross obscenities.

Luther is not satisfied merely to mouth all this vitriol. He calls on the civil authorities to implement some hideously cruel measures against the Jews. He recommends that their synagogues be burned. Their houses should be destroyed and they should be forced to live like Gypsies under one roof or in a stable. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be taken away from them. Their rabbis should be forbidden to teach, and they should be killed if they violate the prohibition. They should not be permitted to travel. They should be deprived of all their cash, silver, and gold. The young and strong, both men and women, should be forced to do hard, menial labor. If, after all this, the Christians still feel threatened, the Jews should be expelled from the land.

At times, Luther seems as if he is all but calling for a holocaust: "We are at fault in not slaying them."

In their reaction to the Holocaust, the churches, the clergy, the theologians, and Christians at large had an opportunity to show if there is substance to their claim that only a Christian presence can yield peace, justice, regard for the preciousness of every human creature, and universal love. Christians were put to the test by Nazism and the Holocaust and failed miserably. They predominantly allied themselves with the Nazis, and they remained essentially silent about the major moral issue that confronted them--the staggering abuse, torture, enslavement, and slaughter of many millions of men, women, and children for no other reason than that they were Jews. An insignificant number, mighty or humble, spoke out against it.

One embarks on treacherous waters when seeking the truth on this Germanic nightmare. Unless one has a thorough knowledge of the vast and ever-increasing relevant research and scholarship one can be fed much disinformation. Christian apologists are fond of citing this or that instance of resistance to Nazism or of some rescue of Jews as representative of common practice. Indeed, there were such isolated instances but they were just that.

Most important is the larger picture. What did the churches do officially? Were Christians massively opposed to what the Nazis were doing? Did important church leaders, aroused by Christian reflex, unhesitatingly and unceasingly publicly condemn the slaughter of the Jews?

Consider the Catholic Church. Only a few months after Hitler came to power, the Vatican joined him in a Concordat whereby it agreed to recognize the legitimacy of his regime and to abolish all Catholic political and social organizations in Germany in return for some concessions to the Church which Hitler proceeded very soon to disregard.

The Concordat had stifling effects on any possibility of protest, and it served to confirm the propriety of support of the regime by millions of Catholics. The eagerness with which the Vatican came to terms with the Hitler regime could be expected from the history of its penchant for "forging diplomatic links with conservative or even fascist regimes [because] it found most aspects of right-wing regimes congenial," to convey the point in the words of Professor of History Michael R. Marrus.

Professor Friedrich Heer, in his magnificently researched God's First Love, backs him up, as do many other historians. Heer gives a lengthy and vivid account of the political leanings (anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, anti-enlightenment) of Catholicism and the Church's leaders. It is this that led them swiftly into the Nazi fold and, once in, kept them from opposing even the extermination of the Jews. Supporting his conclusions with copious excerpts from Catholic publications, Heer shows the extraordinary support the Church gave the Nazi regime as well as its wars, which most historians regard as flagrantly aggressive and monumentally unjust. He observes: "Catholic theologians rightly discovered many affinities between Nazi ideology and Catholicism. . . . Many church papers . . . became virtually propaganda organs of National Socialism." Heer finds that "the [Catholic] press worked smoothly in the service of the war propaganda machine."

If Christianity is the only dependable bulwark against human cruelty and depravity, tyranny and unmitigated slaughter, as its advocates claim, it requires that Christians at least say something against such abhorrences, doesn't it? And certainly Christians should refrain from participating in them, shouldn't they? As has been said, only a few German Catholics, high or low, spoke out against the Nazi treatment of the Jews, and large numbers of them participated in the work of rounding up, transporting, working to death, running the concentration camps, waging the wars, and executing innocents. Millions of Catholic soldiers, vigorously prodded by their bishops and priests, proudly fought in Hitler's unjust and rapacious wars. In fact, evidence has been uncovered that some churches checked their birth records at the request of the government in order to sort out Jews for it.

What about the Pope (Pius XII reigned during most of the era), topmost Roman Catholic, exemplar of Christian truth and virtue, Vicar of Christ, moral teacher of his flock and of the world, defender of the right, promoter of unrestricted brotherhood and universal love, and infallible interpreter of every wish and instruction of God? In statements the likes of which occur in a multitude of objective histories by other scholars, Professor Nora Levin concludes that the Pope "did not condemn the exterminations or exterminators as such. The Vatican . . . remained silent through the Holocaust . . . . Appeals were made to the Vatican by Jews in the midst of the Holocaust and those distant from it. But the hoped-for protest never came."

Appeals to the Pope that he speak out specifically against the genocide of the Jews came from many quarters, Jewish and non-Jewish. The Pope was immovable. On several occasions, President Roosevelt's personal representative to the Vatican outrightly requested the Pope to condemn the "incredible horrors" perpetrated by the Nazis. Immovable. In one try, the President's representative forwarded to the Papal Secretary of State a memorandum from the Jewish Agency reporting mass executions of Jews in Poland and occupied Russia and deportations from several nations to the death camps and asked for suggestions as to how world opinion can be brought to bear so the barbarities would cease. The Secretary replied that it had not been possible to verify that such measures were being taken against the Jews. Immovable.

Actually there is rather conclusive documentation that the Vatican knew about it very early. After the Allies had denounced the extermination in December 1942, the United States representative again asked the Papal Secretary to issue a similar denunciation. The Secretary replied that the Vatican, pursuing a policy of neutrality, could not protest specific atrocities and could only condemn immoral actions in general. (The highest representative of Christ on earth was strictly forbidden from speaking out specifically about the slaughter of millions of innocent human beings.)

There are two bits of evidence that lead to the hypothesis that the reasons given by the Vatican for refusing to object to the extermination of the Jews were nothing but rationalizations. One is the fact that it had intervened on behalf of Catholics of Jewish descent. The other is the Vatican's joining in the widespread protest against the euthanasia program that disposed of Gypsies and other "unfit," a protest that had at least some positive effects.

Millions of human beings throughout history have learned that sometimes it is dangerous to live in Christian countries, not to mention countries where other religions prevail, especially lethal when religion and government are allied.

Part 5: The Protestant Reaction To The Nazi Holocaust

Going by what the Christian clergy teach about the virtues that the faith inspires, Nazism, Hitler's wars, and the Holocaust should not have been possible. Not only did they occur, but with insignificant and wavering exceptions, neither theologians, clergy, nor ordinary Christians as individuals, nor churches as corporate bodies, objected. In fact they overwhelmingly supported them. Look at three of the most distinguished German Protestant theologians--Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanual Hirsch. These men were highly respected, extremely erudite, uncommonly productive, and internationally known professors, each at a different, first-class university.

Professor Robert P. Erickson did an unusually comprehensive investigation of the three theologians' writings, utterances, and activities as they pertain to Nazism and the Jewish Question. He reports his findings in a book, Theologians Under Hitler. If anyone should know whether submission or opposition is demanded of the followers of the living Christ when confronted with a regime as totally reprehensible as that of the Nazis, surely it would be these theologians.

What conclusions did Erickson reach as to the stance of the three men who would be expected to exemplify the ultimate in the embodiment of those noble values that millions of Sunday school children are taught attach to Christian folk? They are grim:

"They each supported Hitler openly, enthusiastically, and with little restraint." In fact, they deemed it the Christian thing to do. They "saw themselves and were seen by others as genuine Christians acting upon genuine Christian impulses." Furthermore, all three tended "to see God's hand in the elevation of Hitler to power." Hirsch was a member of the Nazi party and of the SS. The Nazi state, he said, should be accepted and supported by Christians as a tool of God's grace. To Althaus, Hitler's coming to power was "a gift and miracle of God." He taught that "we Christians know ourselves bound by God's will to the promotion of National Socialism."

Kittel and a group of twelve leading theologians and pastors issued a proclamation that Nazism is "a call of God," and they thanked God for Adolf Hitler. Kittel was a party member and he himself proudly claimed that he was a good Nazi. He explains that he did not join it as a result of pressure or for pragmatic reasons but because he concluded that the Nazi phenomenon was "a völkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foundation." He accorded Christianity a place of honor in Nazi Germany precisely because of its position on the Jewish Question. He said he was speaking for other theologians too when he maintained that agreement with state and Führer was obedience to the law of God.

These theologians were drenched in anti-Semitism. For example, throughout the whole of the Nazi era, Kittel's writings, Erickson has determined, "correspond to and support Nazi politics, including all of the policies on the Jewish question, with the possible exception of genocide," but one is led to wonder. He never spoke out against extermination. Indeed, he actually propounded what was purported to be a theologically solid Christian justification for the oppression of the Jews, whom he referred to as "refuse."

Kittel discusses what he deems to be the only four options for dealing with the Jews. He rejects extermination but not at all because of humanitarian motivation but because he thinks it does not work. In fact, he warns against "so-called" Christian sensitivity, saying the faith is not weak sentimentality but a strong, principled anti-Jewish force. His solution is to strip Jews of German citizenship and make them "guests." He would deprive them of civil rights, debar them from the professions, keep them from marrying Germans, prohibit them from teaching Germans, and impose on them other disadvantages and hardships.

All this still gives only a meager sample of the abominations these men spawned. Erickson concludes that they "were not isolated or eccentric individuals . . . . Their assumptions, their concerns, and their conclusions represent a position that must have been common to many professors, theologians and pastors in Germany. They were not extremists." The largest middle group in the churches, Erickson observes, "probably held views resembling those of Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch."

From one fact alone, noted by Richard Grunberger, and confirmed by numerous historians, it is possible to learn that the Protestant churches remained shrouded in silence while the Nazis were massively tormenting, torturing, imprisoning, deporting, enslaving and killing the Jews: "The Confessional Church of Prussia was the only Christian body in the twelve-year history of the Third Reich to protest publicly against the unspeakable outrages inflicted upon the Jews."

The other extreme has been noted by the historians Rubenstein and Roth: "Of all the churches of Europe during the period 1933-45, none was as silent or as indifferent to the known fate of the Jews, when it did not actively support National Socialist antisemitic politics, as was the German Lutheran Church."

One hears much about the "Church Struggle" in Nazi Germany. The very term suggests, and some unscrupulous, pious pretenders seek to persuade the world, that there was a mighty battle by the churches fought against the evils of Nazism and that some courageous Protestant leaders opposed the Hitlerian plan to annihilate all the Jews. That was not the Church Struggle. It was rather, as one writer put it, "the struggle of the church against the church for the church." The apologists misleadingly portray a handful of "heroes" and "martyrs" of this struggle as fearless fighters against the regime. In fact, the Church Struggle was fought out within the churches and was not in opposition to the Nazi regime as such and certainly not to its anti-Jewish policies.

The struggle was waged between a union of a number of regional Protestant churches, known as "German Christians" (it called itself the SA of Jesus) which was unreservedly committed to the support of the Nazi government and its anti-Jewish policies, and the "Confessing Church," a body within the larger Evangelical Church (Lutheran and Reformed), which was established particularly to oppose the "Aryan Paragraph." This was a law by which the state sought to prohibit the baptism of non-Aryans (almost entirely Jews, of course) and to prohibit non-Aryans from being pastors or holding other positions in the churches. The German Christians wholeheartedly adopted the Aryan Paragraph as church law. The Confessing Church was opposed to it.

That was at the core of the Church Struggle. The Confessing Church opposed the restriction against Christianized Jews because it went against scriptural doctrine, and it objected to the state's interference with the churches' self-regulation. Courageous as they were for what they did, the three leaders of the Confessing Church--Pastor Martin Niemöller and theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth--still merit no more than one cheer because of the narrowness of their concern and particularly, as will be seen, because of their irrepressible anti-Semitism. In founding the Confessing Church, pains were taken to emphasize that it was as politically loyal to the state as were the German Christians and that it was not criticizing the measures taken by the Nazi state which it acknowledged must "bear the sword."

The Barmen Declaration of Faith, which is a statement of principles of the Confessing Church, composed mainly by Karl Barth, says nothing about the Jewish Question. It was Jews who had become Christians that the Church was concerned about. In the words of Professor John S. Conway: "The Confessing Church did not seek to espouse the cause of the Jews as a whole, nor to criticize the secular legislation directed against the German Jews and the Nazi racial philosophy." Further confirmation is provided by the latest, most comprehensive research on the matter, Victoria Barnett's For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, published in 1992: "For the mainstream Protestant church and even within most of the Confessing Church, the question of church advocacy on behalf of non-Christians Jews did not even arise."

So it was not Jews the Confessing Church was interested in but Christians. It insisted that baptized Jews were no longer Jews; the state and the German Christians insisted that once a Jew always a Jew, even after baptism.

The "heroes" of the Confessing Church had strong antipathy toward Jews who refused to become Christian. Pastor Niemüller's opposition to the Aryan Paragraph reflected more a concern for the church's independence from the government than humane consideration for those affected by the policy. He said, in effect, that defending the Christian Jews was a bitter pill that people had to swallow despite what they had to put up with from the Jews. He referred to their "dark and sinister history of this people which can neither live nor die because it is under a curse which forbids it to do either." The curse was imposed because they "brought the Christ of God to the cross."

Bonhoeffer saw in the Nazi atrocities proof of God's curse on the Jews. "The church of Christ," he said, "has never lost sight of the thought that the 'chosen people,' who nailed the redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering." Bonhoeffer, in his lectures of 1934, recommended that the Jews should never be expelled from Europe. They should remain there so they can serve as exemplification of divine wrath.

Barth was a rarity. From the beginning, he had no illusions about the nature of National Socialism, and he saw that it was not possible to compromise with it. He was outspoken, and unlike the overwhelming majority of his theological colleagues, he condemned the persecution of the Jews. In 1935 he emigrated to Switzerland. Barth would have received more than one cheer here for his courage had he been able to disavow his Christian anti-Semitism, but he could not. In 1942 he taunted the Jews for not subscribing to his religion: "There is no doubt that Israel hears; now less than ever can it shelter behind the pretext of ignorance and inability to understand. But Israel hears--but does not believe." In 1949 he continued to insist that the fate of the Jews' under Hitler was "a result of their unfaithfulness."

The clergy will contend that the Holocaust happened because the Germans and the Nazis were "not real Christians." But renowned theologians in Germany believed that Nazism and its pogroms and programs were the will of God. The unreasoning clergy don't seem to realize what a devastating blow it is to the coherence of Christianity to admit that there is no agreement on what is and what is not Christian.

---

Michael Hakeem, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison.

from http://marauder.millersv.edu/~holo-con/epstein.html (The Annual Holocaust Conference at Millersville University):

THE LEGAL PATH TO JUDEOCIDE

by
Eric Epstein

"The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more, and tolerated by all." Tacitus, Roman historian.

The destruction of European Jewry was a gradual, well-organized legal process. The Nazi party and the Reichstag codified a racist legal system to exclude, disenfranchise and murder Jews. The system was upheld and enforced by the German judiciary. This pattern was followed to varying degrees in occupied territories and by sympathetic regimes in Italy, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary, Rumania, Greece and Poland. This is, indeed, ironic since Western government rests on the precept that civil authority is necessary to protect us against evil.

The environment that made the Holocaust possible was aided by prewar European apathy as well as a concerted effort by the Allies to restrict Jewish immigration below legal quota limits. The ultimate Catch-22 for German Jews is that they were not considered German citizens by the Nazis (Nuremberg Laws, 1935), yet the Americans still classified them as citizens of the Reich and maintained their annual immigration quota at 25,000.

Adolf Hitler invented nothing new. He successfully tapped into centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe. Martin Luther's ninety-page tract written in 1543, "On the Jews and Their Lies," assured a continuity between Catholic and Protestant anti-Semitism. The Jew as the perennial "outsider" was created and perpetrated by binding religious edicts, anti-Jewish liturgy and governmental mandates.

A new variant of anti-Semitism developed in the late nineteenth century with the advent of eugenics and social Darwinism. Solving Germany's Jewish problem by genocide was first proposed by Eugene During of Berlin University in "The Value of Life." The term anti-Semitism followed soon after, coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 and based on racial hatred of Jews. The Nazis viewed the Jew as a dangerous, foreign bacteria that was infecting the superior Aryan race. The Nazis were engaged in a Volkerchaos for the survival of German blood purity and believed that there was a sacred covenant between "blood and soil." Conversion, to avoid persecution, was not an option. On October 4, 1936, the Reich Ministry decided conversion had no relevance concerning racial matters.

Hitler came to power in January 1933 and, by April, the gradual, legal separation of Jews from German society began. On April 1, 1933, a boycott of Jewish businesses was initiated; a week later the forced "retirement" of all civil servants "who were not of Aryan descent" was mandated. In March, Dachau, the model concentration camp, was opened. By 1935 there were seven concentration camps operating within Germany. In October, all hospitals were declared "free" of Jewish doctors. That same year Thuringa became the first province to eliminate Jews from official and professional posts. For example, on March 2, 1933, the local government declared that it "will only consider Christians for public contracts." Also, in 1933, the Nazis banned the activities of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The first Nazi challenge to the clergy was the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. The boycott was announced by Joseph Goebbels and enforced by Julius Streicher in response to the anti-German boycott rally organized by the American Jewish Congress on March 27, 1933 in New York City. The Catholic and Protestant churches were silent. The Bishops of Munich, Berlin and Bresalau were mute for two reasons: 1) They believed Jews could take care of themselves; and, 2) They didn't want to provoke the Nazi regime. On July 23, 1933 the Vatican and the Nazis signed a Concordant disbanding the Catholic Centrist Party. The Vatican succumbed to the Nazi representation that Germany would recognize the sacredness of the church and its property.

From 1933 to 1935, the exclusion of non-Aryans and their spouses from the clergy or church offices was instigated through the "Aryan Paragraph." Aryan status was developed under the Civil Service Law of 1933 which stipulated that a German was an Aryan if all four grandparents were Christian. Most churches routinely supplied the baptismal records. This Paragraph became moot with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, but clearly signaled there would be little or no opposition from the Christian hierarchy to Nazi legislative initiatives.

The road to the Final Solution was paved with German Christian blood. On July 14, 1933, the Nazis passed the law for the Prevention of Progeny of Sufferers from Hereditary Diseases. The law was enacted six months later and formed the groundwork for the Euthanasia Program (T-4) which began in force after the invasion of Poland. The T-4 program was responsible for the sterilization of 200,000 - 350,000 "hereditary diseased," "habitual criminals" and "unproductive eaters." The program also let to the murderer of eighty-thousand German citizens in one-and-a-half years before Hitler outwardly appeared to yield to clerical opposition. The Fuehrer suspended Gnadentod ("mercy death") on August 24, 1941. However, Hitler issued a secret directive to continue the program and euthanasia to the East, i.e., concentration and death camps, from December 10, 1941 through 1945. Mercy killing after August 1941 was referred to as "wilde Euthanasia" and afforded physicians more freedom in selecting their victims.

The use of the gas chambers as a means of achieving large scale murder was pioneered through the Euthanasia Program as were two other practices: financing murder by plundering the victims' resources and printing a legal and official death certificate for each victim. Never underestimate the power of paper in German society. The Nazis were scrupulous record keepers and obediently adhered to details. "Bureaucratic organization, for example, can distance most persons from the killing, and routinize the tasks that facilitate genocide, dampening moral awareness." In Germany, as Raul Hilberg points out, most bureaucrats " composed memoranda, drew up blue prints, signed correspondence, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences.' Yet they could sit at their desks and destroy a whole people." (1)

The Night of the Long Knives that began on June 30 and ended on July 2, 1934 emasculated the SA and catapulted the SS to primacy as the foremost police agency in Germany. The federal police were soon integrated into the SS who could now operate with a legal mandate. Obedience to, and the primacy of, the state have been theorized and practiced since Kant and Hegel. These concepts were adroitly manipulated by the Nazis during the implementation of the Final Solution.

Consider the following exchange between the court psychologist at Nuremberg, G. M. Gilbert, and Wilhelm Frick, lawyer and Reich Minister of the Interior, in Frick's cell:

Frick: "Well, what do you expect a man to do when he has orders to carry out?"

Gilbert: "If it is a question of one man's will against the lives of millions of people, I would say that one is morally obligated to kill the dictator rather than carry out such orders, if that is the only way out."

Frick: "A moral obligation to murder? - That is a very peculiar obligation. That is a crime against social convention, you know."

Gilbert: "I see. Killing a murderous dictator is a crime against social convention, but war and extermination were quite legal in Nazi Germany."

Frick: "Oh, that is another matter." (2)

In a separate interview, Gilbert asked Hermann Goering:

"What about killing the man who ordered the mass murder?"

Goering: "Oh, that is easily said, but you cannot do that sort of thing. What kind of a system would that be if anybody could kill the commanding officer if he didn't like his orders? You have got to have obedience in a military system." (3)

Gilbert asked General Alfred Jodl:

"The killing of the escaped prisoners and the assassination plot against Giraud seem to disturb the military men more than the whole murder program that exterminated millions of Jews and other ideological opponents."

Jodl: "Yes, of course - that concerns our honor vitally. We had nothing to do with the other thing. It will be shown conclusively that we had nothing to do with that."(4)

The Nuremberg Laws passed on September 15, 1935 legally separated Jews from the rest of society by denying them German citizenship and preventing intermarriage. The Reich Citizenship Law mandated that only Germans could be citizens of the Reich and Jews, who became state subjects, consequently lost their political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor prohibited intermarriage and Rassenschande (sexual contact) between Aryans and Jews .

The judiciary was composed of conservative, anti-republic judges during the Weimar period. For the Nazis, "In truth, the action of the Fuehrer was pure justice. It is not subject to the law; instead, it was the highest law." (5) The People's Court, under the leadership of Dr. Roland Freisler (1942-1945), enforced racist legislation passed by the Reichstag and turned thousands of German citizens over to the SS for "protective custody." The court sentenced and authorized executions for thousands of Germans accused of "racial defilement," "defeatism" and opposition to Hitler.

The courts reinforced the concept of Ordnung which "meant that law had to be applied in fact and spirit, that every paper for every 'case,' had to be filled out, stamped, signed by all parties, including the damned, and placed in the correct file." (6) In Germany, "The judge is a direct servant of the state." (7) Examples of typical sentences follow:

Kaufman, Julius, born 5/30/1897 in Vienna, full Jew, sentenced on 8/5/1939 to two years and six months penitentiary for dishonor of the race. After serving sentence, released to custody of Gestapo Frankfurt.Neumark, Markus, born 4/9/1884 in Gross-Steinheimnr. Offenbach, full Jew, sentenced (10/39) to 2 years and three months penitentiary for dishonor of the race. After serving sentence, taken into preventive detention. (8)

In 1936, Jewish students were expelled from high school and Jewish professors were prohibited from instructing Aryan students. This was merely an extension of an age-old European tradition of minimizing the number of Jewish students enrolled in universities through numerical quotas affixed to percentages, i.e., Numerus Clausus .

This was also the year that American domestic politics dovetailed with Nazi racial polices. The 1936 Olympics gave a boost to Hitler's international credibility and signified a tacit endorsement of Nazi racial laws. Avery Brundridge of the United States Olympic Committee successfully argued for American participation in Berlin claiming boycott efforts were led by Jewish "special interests."

Legality, as a means of isolating Jews, gained widespread international support in 1938. The Anschluss with Austria, on March 13, 1938 added 185,000 Jews under Nazi jurisdiction. Anti-semitic racial laws quickly followed. On March 31, 1938, the Polish government enacted the Denial of Citizenship Bill revoking citizenship to anyone living outside of its borders for more than five years. This bill clearly was aimed at Jews and had the potential to strand 70,000 Jews in the Reich. The Germans retaliated by rounding up and dumping 18,000 Jews on the Polish border from October 28-29, 1938. The Citizenship Bill was not revoked until November 28, 1941.

Earlier in the year, from July 6-15, 1938, an international conference was convened in Evian, a southern French resort town, to deal with the German Jewish immigration "problem." Out of the 33 nations invited, only Italy refused to participate. The gathering was prompted by the suggestion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Barriers to liberalized immigration policies were not loosened and most nations, including America and Britain, failed to meet their legal immigration quotas during the war. The most generous offer came from the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, who offered a safe have for Jews. Hitler was convinced that he alone would have to solve the "Jewish problem" (Judenfrage). One month later, on August 17, 1938, legislation authored by Dr. Hans Globke forced German Jews to adopt the middle name of either "Israel" or "Sarah" if the bearer did not already have a very distinct Jewish name.

Encouraged by Western apathy and his success in Austria, Hitler demanded, and was awarded, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia) by a binding, legal arrangement negotiated September 29-30, 1938 - the Munich Agreement.

As the screws were tightened in Germany, Jews became more desperate and sought refuge in Switzerland in greater numbers. Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, Chief of the Swiss Police, "suggested" the German government mark Jewish passports with a red "J" so they could be more easily identified. Germany responded by ordering Jews to surrender their passports and have "J" marked on their new IDs. On September 29, 1938, a treaty between Switzerland and Germany was codified and the measure was implemented a week later.

On November 9-10, 1938, Kristallnacht, the first organized pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages took, place. This party-sanctioned pogrom destroyed 7,700 stores, warehouses and homes; 280 Jewish synagogues and communal institutions were razed or demolished; approximately 250 Jews died during the rampage an additional 2,500 would die by spring 1939; and for the first time, Jews (20,000 to 30,000 men) were taken to concentration camps solely on the basis of their religion. The violence and organized looting was paid for by Jews who were assessed a Jewish Atonement Fine of roughly $400 million for instigating the pogrom. Earlier in the year, April 26, 1938, Hermann Goering ordered Jews to declare the value of their domestic and foreign property holdings. The Nazis forced insurers to respect their legal obligation to reimburse Jewish losses, then confiscated the proceeds. In addition, to forestall any financial disruption, bond dealings were suspended for several days as Jews scrambled to pay the fine. Goering commented to Reinhard

Heydrich, "I wish you had killed 200 Jews and not destroyed such valuable property." (9).

Kristallnacht expedited Jewish immigration attempts and facilitated the looting of Jewish resources. Walther Funk, Minister of the Economy, drew up laws in 1938, expelling Jews from German economic life. Jews no longer were allowed to be members of corporations effective December 31, 1938 and by the following day, they were prohibited from being the head of an enterprise "for the organization of national labor." (10) At the Nuremberg trial, Funk, Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank, continued to justify the Aryanization or Nazi expropriation of Jewish property and businesses in occupied Europe. There was little or no compensation for this "legal" theft of Jewish assets, and rarely was Aryanization overturned or rectified after the war.

In late May 1939, the St. Louis, a ship carrying 936 European refugees, of which 900 were Jewish, was denied access to Cuba. The Cuban government asked for a "$500,000 entry fee." The boat lingered off the shores of the United States from June 4-6, 1939. The Coast Guard prevented the passengers from disembarking despite the fact 734 refugees had valid, American quota numbers. Roosevelt was silent. The ship returned to Antwerp on June 17, 1939, and most of the Jews perished in the Holocaust.

The Nazis were still far from their goal of solving the "Jewish Problem." From 1933-1941, 250,000 of the 525,000 Jews living in Germany emigrated or escaped. Yet, after Kristallnacht, Heydrich estimated it would take an additional eight to ten years to rid the Reich of Jews. As Germans conquered territories in the East, millions of Jews were put under their domain. The plan to relocate Jews to Madagascar became impossible to implement by June 1941.

In May 1939, the British promulgated the White Paper to appease Arab interests in the Middle East. This foreign policy position restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine to 15,000 Jews per year for five years. The White Paper was a violation of the British Mandate as charged by the League of Nations. The British committed substantial naval resources to enforce the policy and, in effect, trapped European Jews three months before the outbreak of World War II.

The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 precipitated World War II and fast-forwarded the war against the Jews. Two years to the day, the Yellow Badge was introduced in Germany. This was not a Nazi innovation, but a replication of the badges introduced by Pope Innocent III in 1215 to single out the Jews by their dress. Later in the year, Jews were "forbidden" to leave the "Greater Reich."

The Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, was the Nazi blueprint for the Final Solution. In 90 minutes, Nazi officials agreed to convert several concentration and labor camps into institutions of slave labor and systematic, industrialized mass murder. As a follow up to the conference, Walther Funk cut a deal with Heinrich Himmler to launder the booty from the camps through the Reichsbank. Additionally,

Otto Thierack, former President of the People's Court and Reich Minister of Justice, signed the "Destruction Through Work" Agreement with Himmler on September 18, 1942. This pact was designed especially for inmates in the "Night and Fog" (Nacht und Nebel) program.

The Germans created 400 ghettos from 1939-1942, mostly in Eastern Europe, to restrict and physically isolate Jews. This concept, together with book burning, had its roots in fifteenth and sixteenth century Germany and Italy. By the summer of 1942, two million Jews and 8,000 Roma were trapped in medieval ghettos. (11) Judenraete, composed of Jewish elders, were empowered to pass legislation that would bleed and squeeze their own people. As Adolf Eichmann and Alois Brunner discovered in Vienna, Jews were law abiding and well organized. The Judenraete assisted Nazis in restricting food, stripping Jews of privileges, maintaining police, supplying slave labor and organizing deportations. All actions connected with ghettoization and "resettlement" of Jews was sanctioned by Berlin.

During this period, Breckinridge Long, Undersecretary of State for European Affairs, orchestrated American foreign policy to prevent Jews from immigrating. He felt Jews would become spies and saboteurs and urged foreign consuls to use any means necessary to frustrate Jewish sanctuary. Long circulated a memo to foreign embassies in 1939 asking them to erect barriers to Jewish immigration. That same year a special bill was proposed in Congress asking for sanctuary for 10,000 children outside of the quota system. The bill died in Committee. Six months later, legislation was overwhelmingly approved to allow 15,000 children from war-torn England to emigrate. In 1941, the State Department issued a directive that paperwork associated with immigration had to be filled out in Washington, D.C., rather than European embassies. At the Bermuda Conference, (April 1943) , Long successfully argued against making concessions to Jews. On November 26, 1943, the Undersecretary intentionally misled Congress to abandon legislation that would have set up a special commission to deal with the rescue of Jews. In late 1943 , the Treasury Department documented that the State Department advised the Swiss delegation not to accept data from private organizations about extermination camps. The War Refugee Board, which rescued approximately 200, 000 Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution, was not established until January 22, 1944.

Back in Germany, the Nazis were still cranking out anti-Jewish legislation. As late as 1944, Dr. Hans Globke authored legislation to expropriate property from Jews sent to concentration camps. On January 13, 1945, the Central Office for Reich Security decreed that all "stateless" Jews and those married to Aryans who were capable of work must be transported to Theresienstadt. Two weeks later, the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz.

The Fuehrer, Reichstag and German Judiciary created, perpetrated and sanctioned the legal framework for the mass murder of Jews. However, all segments of German society were involved in the industry of genocide: The Reichsbahn, received payment for transports to camps; gold fillings, watches, bank notes, jewels, even the gold from eyeglasses of gassed victims, was stored in the Reichsbank and Berlin Pawn Shops; IG Farben contracted with the SS to provide Zyklon-B for the gas chambers; human hair was sent to the Alex Zink factory in Nuremberg; and, German corporations exploited Jewish slave labor with the cooperation and authorization of the WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Office.) All of these arrangements were legal transactions. The German political system had no built in fail-safe to check genocidal impulses. Obedience to the law of the state prevailed over modern conventions of human decency.

END NOTES

1 Roger W. Smith, "Holocaust and Genocide Studies," Volume 8 Number 3, Winter 1994, 329.

2 G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary. York, Pa.: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947, 328.

3 Gilbert, 252.

4 Gilbert, 247.

5 Carl Schmidt, Hamburg, 1940.

6 Peter Wyden, Stella. New York: Anchor Books, 1993, 188.

7 Ingo, Mueller, ; trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 73.

8 Mueller, 115.

9 Anthony Read and David Fisher, Kristallnacht: The Nazi Night of Terror. New York: Random House, 1989, 145.

10 Read and Fisher, 147.

11 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

from http://www.hemisfear.com/wcs/victims.htm:

How many people have been killed by Christians since Biblical times?

VICTIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

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"WONDERFUL EVENTS THAT TESTIFY TO GOD'S DIVINE GLORY"

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Listed are only events that solely occurred on command of church authorities or were committed in the name of Christianity. (List incomplete)

Ancient Pagans

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• As soon as Christianity was legal (315), more and more pagan temples were destroyed by Christian mob. Pagan priests were killed.
• Between 315 and 6th century thousands of pagan believers were slain.
• Examples of destroyed Temples: the Sanctuary of Aesculap in Aegaea, the Temple of Aphrodite in Golgatha, Aphaka in Lebanon, the Heliopolis.
• Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa or Cyrill of Heliopolis were famous as "temple destroyer." [DA468]
• Pagan services became punishable by death in 356. [DA468]
• Christian Emperor Theodosius (408-450) even had children executed, because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. [DA469]
  According to Christian chroniclers he "followed meticulously all Christian teachings..."
• In 6th century pagans were declared void of all rights.
• In the early fourth century the philosopher Sopatros was executed on demand of Christian authorities. [DA466]
• The world famous female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was torn to pieces with glass fragments by a hysterical Christian mob led by a Christian minister named Peter, in a church, in 415.
  [DO19-25]

Mission

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• Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) in 782 had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded. [DO30]
• Peasants of Steding (Germany) unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children slain 5/27/1234 near Altenesch/Germany. [WW223]
• Battle of Belgrad 1456: 80,000 Turks slaughtered. [DO235]
• 15th century Poland: 1019 churches and 17987 villages plundered by Knights of the Order. Victims unknown. [DO30]
• 16th and 17th century Ireland. English troops "pacified and civilized" Ireland, where only Gaelic "wild Irish", "unreasonable beasts lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing." One of the more successful soldiers, a certain Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, ordered that "the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies... and should bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie", which effort to civilize the Irish indeed caused "greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolke, and freinds on the grounde".
  Tens of thousands of Gaelic Irish fell victim to the carnage. [SH99, 225]

Crusades (1095-1291)

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• First Crusade: 1095 on command of pope Urban II. [WW11-41]
• Semlin/Hungary 6/24/96 thousands slain. Wieselburg/Hungary 6/12/96 thousands. [WW23]
• 9/9/96-9/26/96 Nikaia, Xerigordon (then turkish), thousands respectively. [WW25-27]
• Until Jan 1098 a total of 40 capital cities and 200 castles conquered (number of slain unknown) [WW30]
• after 6/3/98 Antiochia (then turkish) conquered, between 10,000 and 60,000 slain. 6/28/98 100,000 Turks (incl. women & children) killed. [WW32-35]
  Here the Christians "did no other harm to the women found in [the enemy's] tents - save that they ran their lances through their bellies," according to Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. [EC60]
• Marra (Maraat an-numan) 12/11/98 thousands killed. Because of the subsequent famine "the already stinking corpses of the enemies were eaten by the Christians" said chronicler Albert Aquensis. [WW36]
• Jerusalem conquered 7/15/1099 more than 60,000 victims (jewish, muslim, men, women, children). [WW37-40]
  (In the words of one witness: "there [in front of Solomon's temple] was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes", and after that "happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Saviour's tomb, to honour it and to pay off our debt of gratitude")
• The Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished." [TG79]
• Christian chronicler Eckehard of Aura noted that "even the following summer in all of palestine the air was polluted by the stench of decomposition". One million victims of the first crusade alone. [WW41]
• Battle of Askalon, 8/12/1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". [WW45]
• Fourth crusade: 4/12/1204 Constantinople sacked, number of victims unknown, numerous thousands, many of them Christian. [WW141-148]
• Rest of Crusades in less detail: until the fall of Akkon 1291 probably 20 million victims (in the Holy land and Arab/Turkish areas alone). [WW224]

  _{Note: All figures according to contemporary (Christian) chroniclers.}

Heretics

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• Already in 385 C.E. the first Christians, the Spanish Priscillianus and six followers, were beheaded for heresy in Trier/Germany [DO26]
• Manichaean heresy: a crypto-Christian sect decent enough to practice birth control (and thus not as irresponsible as faithful Catholics) was exterminated in huge campaigns all over the Roman empire between 372 C.E. and 444 C.E. Numerous thousands of victims. [NC]
• Albigensians: the first Crusade intended to slay other Christians. [DO29]
  The Albigensians (cathars = Christians allegedly that have all rarely sucked) viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. [NC]
  Begin of violence: on command of pope Innocent III (greatest single pre-nazi mass murderer) in 1209. Beziérs (today France) 7/22/1209 destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbours and friends) 20,000-70,000. [WW179-181]
• Carcassonne 8/15/1209, thousands slain. Other cities followed. [WW181]
• subsequent 20 years of war until nearly all Cathars (probably half the population of the Languedoc, today southern France) were exterminated. [WW183]
• After the war ended (1229) the Inquisition was founded 1232 to search and destroy surviving/hiding heretics. Last Cathars burned at the stake 1324. [WW183]
• Estimated one million victims (cathar heresy alone), [WW183]
• Other heresies: Waldensians, Paulikians, Runcarians, Josephites, and many others. Most of these sects exterminated, (I believe some Waldensians live today, yet they had to endure 600 years of persecution) I estimate at least hundred thousand victims (including the Spanish inquisition but excluding victims in the New World).
• Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada alone allegedly responsible for 10,220 burnings. [DO28]
• John Huss, a critic of papal infallibility and indulgences, was burned at the stake in 1415. [LI475-522]
• University professor B.Hubmaier burned at the stake 1538 in Vienna. [DO59]
• Giordano Bruno, Dominican monk, after having been incarcerated for seven years, was burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo dei Fiori (Rome) on 2/17/1600.

Witches

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• from the beginning of Christianity to 1484 probably more than several thousand.
• in the era of witch hunting (1484-1750) according to modern scholars several hundred thousand (about 80% female) burned at the stake or hanged. [WV]
• incomplete list of documented cases:
  The Burning of Witches - A Chronicle of the Burning Times

Religious Wars

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• 15th century: Crusades against Hussites, thousands slain. [DO30]
• 1538 pope Paul III declared Crusade against apostate England and all English as slaves of Church (fortunately had not power to go into action). [DO31]
• 1568 Spanish Inquisition Tribunal ordered extermination of 3 million rebels in (then Spanish) Netherlands. Thousands were actually slain. [DO31]
• 1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee. [DO31]
• 17th century: Catholics slay Gaspard de Coligny, a Protestant leader. After murdering him, the Catholic mob mutilated his body, "cutting off his head, his hands, and his genitals... and then dumped him into the river [...but] then, deciding that it was not worthy of being food for the fish, they hauled it out again [... and] dragged what was left ... to the gallows of Montfaulcon, 'to be meat and carrion for maggots and crows'." [SH191]
• 17th century: Catholics sack the city of Magdeburg/Germany: roughly 30,000 Protestants were slain. "In a single church fifty women were found beheaded," reported poet Friedrich Schiller, "and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers." [SH191]
• 17th century 30 years' war (Catholic vs. Protestant): at least 40% of population decimated, mostly in Germany. [DO31-32]

Jews

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• Already in the 4th and 5th centuries synagogues were burned by Christians. Number of Jews slain unknown.
• In the middle of the fourth century the first synagogue was destroyed on command of bishop Innocentius of Dertona in Northern Italy. The first synagogue known to have been burned down was near the river Euphrat, on command of the bishop of Kallinikon in the year 388. [DA450]
• 17. Council of Toledo 694: Jews were enslaved, their property confiscated, and their children forcibly baptized. [DA454]
• The Bishop of Limoges (France) in 1010 had the cities' Jews, who would not convert to Christianity, expelled or killed. [DA453]
• First Crusade: Thousands of Jews slaughtered 1096, maybe 12.000 total. Places: Worms 5/18/1096, Mainz 5/27/1096 (1100 persons), Cologne, Neuss, Altenahr, Wevelinghoven, Xanten, Moers, Dortmund, Kerpen, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, Prag and others (All locations Germany except Metz/France, Prag/Czech) [EJ]
• Second Crusade: 1147. Several hundred Jews were slain in Ham, Sully, Carentan, and Rameru (all locations in France). [WW57]
• Third Crusade: English Jewish communities sacked 1189/90. [DO40]
• Fulda/Germany 1235: 34 Jewish men and women slain. [DO41]
• 1257, 1267: Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Lincoln, Cambridge, and others exterminated. [DO41]
• 1290 in Bohemian (Poland) allegedly 10,000 Jews killed. [DO41]
• 1337 Starting in Deggendorf/Germany a Jew-killing craze reaches 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria, Poland. [DO41]
• 1348 All Jews of Basel/Switzerland and Strasbourg/France (two thousand) burned. [DO41]
• 1349 In more than 350 towns in Germany all Jews murdered, mostly burned alive (in this one year more Jews were killed than Christians in 200 years of ancient Roman persecution of Christians). [DO42]
• 1389 In Prag 3,000 Jews were slaughtered. [DO42]
• 1391 Seville's Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. [DA454] Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored "badges of shame" that all jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear.
• 1492: In the year Columbus set sail to conquer a New World, more than 150,000 Jews were expelled from Spain, many died on their way: 6/30/1492. [MM470-476]
• 1648 Chmielnitzki massacres: In Poland about 200,000 Jews were slain. [DO43]

(I feel sick ...) this goes on and on, century after century, right into the kilns of Auschwitz.

Native Peoples

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• Beginning with Columbus (a former slave trader and would-be Holy Crusader) the conquest of the New World began, as usual understood as a means to propagate Christianity.
• Within hours of landfall on the first inhabited island he encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six native people who, he said, "ought to be good servants ... [and] would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion." [SH200]
  While Columbus described the Indians as "idolators" and "slaves, as many as [the Crown] shall order," his pal Michele de Cuneo, Italian nobleman, referred to the natives as "beasts" because "they eat when they are hungry," and made love "openly whenever they feel like it." [SH204-205]
• On every island he set foot on, Columbus planted a cross, "making the declarations that are required" - the requerimiento - to claim the ownership for his Catholic patrons in Spain. And "nobody objected." If the Indians refused or delayed their acceptance (or understanding), the requerimiento continued:

  "I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter in your country and shall make war against you ... and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church ... and shall do you all mischief that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him." [SH66]

• Likewise in the words of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony: "justifieinge the undertakeres of the intended Plantation in New England ... to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, ... and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of the Ante-Christ." [SH235]
• In average two thirds of the native population were killed by colonist-imported smallpox before violence began. This was a great sign of "the marvelous goodness and providence of God" to the Christians of course, e.g. the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, as "for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess." [SH109,238]
• On Hispaniola alone, on Columbus visits, the native population (Arawak), a rather harmless and happy people living on an island of abundant natural resources, a literal paradise, soon mourned 50,000 dead. [SH204]
• The surviving Indians fell victim to rape, murder, enslavement and spanish raids.
• As one of the culprits wrote: "So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous." [SH69]
• The indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As "they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell." [SH70]
• What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness:
  "The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties ... They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive." [SH72]
  Or, on another occasion:
  "The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts...Vasco [de Balboa] ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs." [SH83]
• The "island's population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out." Eventually all the island's natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were "forced" to import slaves from other caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus "the Caribbean's millions of native people [were] thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century". [SH72-73] "In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated." [SH75]
• "And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlán [Mexico city] was next." [SH75]
• Cortez, Pizarro, De Soto and hundreds of other spanish conquistadors likewise sacked southern and mesoamerican civilizations in the name of Christ (De Soto also sacked Florida).
• "When the 16th century ended, some 200,000 Spaniards had moved to the Americas. By that time probably more than 60,000,000 natives were dead." [SH95]

Of course no different were the founders of what today is the US of Amerikkka.

• Although none of the settlers would have survived winter without native help, they soon set out to expel and exterminate the Indians. Warfare among (north American) Indians was rather harmless, in comparison to European standards, and was meant to avenge insults rather than conquer land. In the words of some of the pilgrim fathers: "Their Warres are farre less bloudy...", so that there usually was "no great slawter of nether side". Indeed, "they might fight seven yeares and not kill seven men." What is more, the Indians usually spared women and children. [SH111]
• In the spring of 1612 some English colonists found life among the (generally friendly and generous) natives attractive enough to leave Jamestown - "being idell ... did runne away unto the Indyans," - to live among them (that probably solved a sex problem).
  "Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed: 'Some he apointed (sic) to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some shott to deathe'." [SH105] Of course these elegant measures were restricted for fellow englishmen: "This was the treatment for those who wished to act like Indians. For those who had no choice in the matter, because they were the native people of Virginia" methods were different: "when an Indian was accused by an Englishman of stealing a cup and failing to return it, the English response was to attack the natives in force, burning the entire community" down. [SH105]
• On the territory that is now Massachusetts the founding fathers of the colonies were committing genocide, in what has become known as the "Peqout War". The killers were New England Puritan Christians, refugees from persecution in their own home country England.
• When however, a dead colonist was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians, the Puritan colonists wanted revenge. Despite the Indian chief's pledge they attacked.
  Somehow they seem to have lost the idea of what they were after, because when they were greeted by Pequot Indians (long-time foes of the Narragansetts) the troops nevertheless made war on the Pequots and burned their villages.
  The puritan commander-in-charge John Mason after one massacre wrote: "And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished ... God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven ... Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies": men, women, children. [SH113-114]
• So "the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their land for an inheritance". [SH111].
• Because of his readers' assumed knowledge of Deuteronomy, there was no need for Mason to quote the words that immediately follow:
  "Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them..." (Deut 20)
• Mason's comrade Underhill recalled how "great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of the young soldiers" yet reassured his readers that "sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents". [SH114]
• Other Indians were killed in successful plots of poisoning. The colonists even had dogs especially trained to kill Indians and to devour children from their mothers breasts, in the colonists' own words: "blood Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seaze them." (This was inspired by spanish methods of the time)
  In this way they continued until the extermination of the Pequots was near. [SH107-119]
• The surviving handful of Indians "were parceled out to live in servitude. John Endicott and his pastor wrote to the governor asking for 'a share' of the captives, specifically 'a young woman or girle and a boy if you thinke good'." [SH115]
• Other tribes were to follow the same path.
• Comment the Christian exterminators: "God's Will, which will at last give us cause to say: How Great is His Goodness! and How Great is his Beauty!"
  "Thus doth the Lord Jesus make them to bow before him, and to lick the Dust!" [TA]
• Like today, lying was OK to Christians then. "Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them: when the Indians 'grow secure uppon (sic) the treatie', advised the Council of State in Virginia, 'we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, & cutt downe theire Corne'." [SH106]
• In 1624 sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenseless Indian men, women and children. [SH107]
• In a single massacre in "King Philip's War" of 1675 and 1676 some "600 Indians were destroyed. A delighted Cotton Mather, revered pastor of the Second Church in Boston, later referred to the slaughter as a 'barbeque'." [SH115]
• To summarize: Before the arrival of the English, the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had numbered 12,000. Less than half a century later about 250 remained alive - a destruction rate of 98%. The Pocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000, fifty years later they were down to 920 - 95% destroyed. The Quiripi-Unquachog people had numbered about 30,000, fifty years later they were down to 1500 - 95% destroyed. The Massachusetts people had numbered at least 44,000, fifty years later barely 6000 were alive - 81% destroyed. [SH118] These are only a few examples of the multitude of tribes living before Christian colonists set their foot on the New World. All this was before the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678 had occurred. And the carnage was not over then.
• All the above was only the beginning of the European colonization, it was before the frontier age actually had begun.
• A total of maybe more than 150 million Indians (of both Americas) were destroyed in the period of 1500 to 1900, as an average two thirds by smallpox and other epidemics, that leaves some 50 million killed directly by violence, bad treatment and slavery.
• In many countries, such as Brazil, and Guatemala, this continues even today.

More Glorious events in US history

• Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of New England's most esteemed religious leaders, in "1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of dogs 'to hunt Indians as they do bears'." [SH241]

• Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 11/29/1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist minister and still elder in the church ("I long to be wading in gore") had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs' waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed.
  From an eye-witness account: "There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed ..." [SH131]
  More gory details.

• By the 1860s, "in Hawai'i the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands' native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to 'the amputation of diseased members of the body'." [SH244]

20th Century Church Atrocities

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• Catholic extermination camps
  Surpisingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveliç, a practising Catholic and regular visitor to the then pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children!
  In these camps - the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar - orthodox-Christian serbians (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis the Catholic Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive (the Nazis were decent enough to have their victims gassed first). But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain or shot to death, the number of them being estimated between 300,000 and 600,000, in a rather tiny country. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The atrocities were appalling enough to induce bystanders of the Nazi "Sicherheitsdient der SS", watching, to complain about them to Hitler (who did not listen). The pope knew about these events and did nothing to prevent them. [MV]

• Catholic terror in Vietnam
  In 1954 Vietnamese freedom fighters - the Viet Minh - had finally defeated the French colonial government in North Vietnam, which by then had been supported by U.S. funds amounting to more than $2 billion. Although the victorious assured religious freedom to all (most non-buddhist Vietnamese were Catholics), due to huge anticommunist propaganda campaigns many Catholics fled to the South. With the help of Catholic lobbies in Washington and Cardinal Spellman, the Vatican's spokesman in U.S. politics, who later on would call the U.S. forces in Vietnam "Soldiers of Christ", a scheme was concocted to prevent democratic elections which could have brought the communist Viet Minh to power in the South as well, and the fanatic Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem was made president of South Vietnam. [MW16ff]
  Diem saw to it that U.S. aid, food, technical and general assistance was given to Catholics alone, Buddhist individuals and villages were ignored or had to pay for the food aids which were given to Catholics for free. The only religious denomination to be supported was Roman Catholicism.
  The Vietnamese McCarthyism turned even more vicious than its American counterpart. By 1956 Diem promulgated a presidential order which read:

  "Individuals considered dangerous to the national defense and common security may be confined by executive order, to a concentration camp."

  Supposedly to fight communism, thousands of buddhist protesters and monks were imprisoned in "detention camps." Out of protest dozens of buddhist teachers - male and female - and monks poured gasoline over themselves and burned themselves. (Note that Buddhists burned themselves: in comparison Christians tend to burn others). Meanwhile some of the prison camps, which in the meantime were filled with Protestant and even Catholic protesters as well, had turned into no-nonsense death camps. It is estimated that during this period of terror (1955-1960) at least 24,000 were wounded - mostly in street riots - 80,000 people were executed, 275,000 had been detained or tortured, and about 500,000 were sent to concentration or detention camps. [MW76-89].
  To support this kind of government in the next decade thousands of American GI's lost their life.

• Christianity kills the cat
  On July 1, 1976, Anneliese Michel, a 23-year-old student of a teachers college in Germany, died: she starved herself to death. For months she had been haunted by demonic visions and apparitions, and for months two Catholic priests - with explicit approval of the Catholic bishop of Würzburg - additionally pestered and tormented the wretched girl with their exorcist rituals. After her death in Klingenberg hospital - her body was littered with wounds - her parents, both of them fanatical Catholics, were sentenced to six months for not having called for medical help. None of the priests was punished: on the contrary, Miss Michel's grave today is a place of pilgrimage and worship for a number of similarly faithful Catholics (in the seventeenth century Würzburg was notorious for it's extensive witch burnings).
  This case is only the tip of an iceberg of such evil superstition and has become known only because of its lethal outcome. [SP80]

• Rwanda Massacres
  In 1994 in the small african country of Rwanda in just a few months several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently a conflict of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.
  For quite some time I heard only rumours about Catholic clergy actively involved in the 1994 Rwanda massacres. Odd denials of involvement were printed in Catholic church journals, before even anybody had openly accused members of the church.
  Then, 10/10/96, in the newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany - a station not at all critical to Christianity - the following was stated:

  "Anglican as well as Catholic priests and nuns are suspect of having actively participated in murders. Especially the conduct of a certain Catholic priest has been occupying the public mind in Rwanda's capital Kigali for months. He was minister of the church of the Holy Family and allegedly murdered Tutsis in the most brutal manner. He is reported to have accompanied marauding Hutu militia with a gun in his cowl. In fact there has been a bloody slaughter of Tutsis seeking shelter in his parish. Even two years after the massacres many Catholics refuse to set foot on the threshold of their church, because to them the participation of a certain part of the clergy in the slaughter is well established. There is almost no church in Rwanda that has not seen refugees - women, children, old - being brutally butchered facing the crucifix.
  According to eyewitnesses clergymen gave away hiding Tutsis and turned them over to the machetes of the Hutu militia.
  In connection with these events again and again two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom have fled into a Belgian monastery in the meantime to avoid prosecution. According to survivors one of them called the Hutu killers and led them to several thousand people who had sought shelter in her monastery. By force the doomed were driven out of the churchyard and were murdered in the presence of the nun right in front of the gate. The other one is also reported to have directly cooperated with the murderers of the Hutu militia. In her case again witnesses report that she watched the slaughtering of people in cold blood and without showing response. She is even accused of having procured some petrol used by the killers to set on fire and burn their victims alive..." [S2]

• As can be seen from these events, to Christianity the Dark Ages never come to an end.

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If today Christians talk to me about morality, this is why they make me sick.

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References:

[DA]

K.Deschner, Abermals krähte der Hahn, Stuttgart 1962.

[DO]

K.Deschner, Opus Diaboli, Reinbek 1987.

[EC]

P.W.Edbury, Crusade and Settlement, Cardiff Univ. Press 1985.

[EJ]

S.Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, Madison 1977.

[LI]

H.C.Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, New York 1961.

[MM]

M.Margolis, A.Marx, A History of the Jewish People.

[MV]

A.Manhattan, The Vatican's Holocaust, Springfield 1986.
See also V.Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Buffalo NY, 1992.

[NC]

J.T.Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Cambridge/Mass., 1992.

[S2]

Newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany, 10/10/96, 12:00.

[SH]

D.Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press 1992.

[SP]

German news magazine Der Spiegel, no.49, 12/2/1996.

[TA]

A True Account of the Most Considerable Occurrences that have Hapned in the Warre Between the English and the Indians in New England, London 1676.

[TG]

F.Turner, Beyond Geography, New York 1980.

[WW]

H.Wollschläger: Die bewaffneten Wallfahrten gen Jerusalem, Zürich 1973.
(This is in german and what is worse, it is out of print. But it is the best I ever read about crusades and includes a full list of original medieval Christian chroniclers' writings).

[WV]

Estimates on the number of executed witches:

• N.Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt, Frogmore 1976, 253.
• R.H.Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York 1959, 180.
• J.B.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca/NY 1972, 39.
• H.Zwetsloot, Friedrich Spee und die Hexenprozesse, Trier 1954, 56.

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This page © 1996 by kelsos. So there.