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The War on Free Speech: Biden Adds Another Advocate for Censorship to the White House

By Jonathan Turley | July 10, 2024

I have previously written how President Joe Biden is the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. For his part, Biden has continued to double down on his anti-free speech policies with the appointment of figures who have long supported bans and other speech controls. The latest such appointment is Andy Volosky, who was made deputy director of platforms for the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy. Volosky has been outspoken in support of banning former president Donald Trump from social media platforms.

In my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I lay out the chilling comparisons between the Adams and Biden Administrations in the crackdown of free speech. For Adams, that led to defeat in 1800 when Jefferson ran in part on restoring free speech. To my surprise, Trump and his fellow challengers in this election have not made free speech a central issue to force Biden to defend the massive censorship system supported by his Administration.

The public does not support censorship. This is a movement that originated in higher education and has been pushed by the political and media establishment, not the voters.

Volosky will now help direct digital strategies for the White House. He previously praised the banning of Trump, asking “What took them so long?” in a 2021 blog post.

In Volosky’s blog post, titled “A New, and Hopefully Welcome, Standard,” he warned that “Twitter still allows the accounts of various world leaders, governments, and spokespeople, who use Twitter for what one can only describe as propaganda as cover for autocracy, to continue to use their platform.”

He praised how Democrats have “long advocated for regulating the [social media] platforms” and emphasized how active social media users like himself and others can “keep the platforms honest.”

He added that:

“we can play a role in keeping the platforms honest and improving the positive role of social in people’s lives… It’s past time for the platforms to take content moderation and user safety seriously; as social media professionals, we should be ready and eager to make that happen, and we hope that [banning Trump] can be a small step in getting that ball rolling.”

Again, with the White House doubling down on censorship, Trump and others need to force him to defend his overwhelmingly anti-free speech record. The 2024 election can give voters the same choice that they faced in 1800. Democracy is not on the ballot, but free speech is.

July 13, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Glenn Diesen about the benefits of a multipolar, Eurasian world order

Reinvent Money | June 16, 2024

Paul Buitink talks to Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian academic and political scientist. He is a professor at the School of Business of the University of South-Eastern Norway. Glenn explains why the current international liberal unipolar world order is in decline. And why a new multipolar Eurasian order is inevitable and how that would benefit the world. He describes Europe’s role and challenge in this new world order. Also Glenn dives into the Russia and Ukraine conflict and why the incremental approach of the West could lead to a boiling frog situation. At the end he also shares his experiences of being a controversial scientist in Norway.

Find more about Glenn Diesen here, including his latest book The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order: https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen https://www.amazon.com/Ukraine-War-Eu…

Follow Paul on X here:   / paulbuitink  

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

WRITING AND READING

BY PAUL ROBINSON | IRRUSSIANALITY | MAY 22, 2024

In case anybody is interested in the inputs and outputs of my intellectual life, here is a little update on what I have been writing and reading.

Reading

Here are a few things I have read recently that might be of interested to purveyors of this site:

Ian Proud is a former British diplomat who served in the UK’s embassy in Moscow and was also responsible for organizing British sanctions against the Russian Federation. He has since left the Foreign Office, written his memoirs. and started a blog on which he regularly criticizes British policy towards Russia and declares the sanctions he enacted to be a total failure. You can read his blog here.

The memoirs are written in a light, engaging style, but contain a serious message. Proud argues that successive British governments have for a long time been totally uninterested in talking to Russia. He also paints a picture of British diplomats who not only mostly didn’t speak Russian but also weren’t interested in doing so. Dispatches to London, he claims, consisted largely of bits cut and paste out of media articles. One has to wonder about the quality of the intelligence that London was receiving.

Worth a read.

I used to teach a course titled ‘Irrationality and Foreign Policy Decision-Making’, which looked at all the ways that foreign policy decision processes deviated from the kind of rational actor models that public policy students are taught to follow.

It’s interesting, therefore, to come across a book that claims that all the stuff I taught is wrong and foreign policy is for the most part a rational endeavour. I can’t say that I was 100% convinced by this book, which I found a bit repetitive, and perhaps worthy more of an extended article than a full-length book. Still, if I ever teach that course again, I will have to bear what this says in mind and suggest it to my students.

This one got a stinker of a review from Joy Neumeyer in the New Left Review, in which, among other things, Neumeyer accused author Jade McGlynn of plagiarizing her work. You can read that review here.

McGlynn’s basic argument is that the war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war but Russia’s war, as Putin and the war have broad support from the Russian population. I would generally agree, but the problem is that McGlynn then goes beyond this and tries to explain this phenomenon by recourse to a sort of Homo Sovieticus argument, namely that the reason why the Russian masses support Putin and the war is that they are psychologically retrograde.

Personally, I don’t see why it’s even necessary to write a whole book explaining the phenomenon. Populations everywhere tend to rally around the flag. It’s natural. And when they do, we don’t have to resort to explanations of the masses’ psychological failings. Why does Russians’ support for Putin mean that Russians are psychologically twisted in a way that Americans’ support for George W. Bush or Britons’ support for Tony Blair during the war in Iraq doesn’t?

By all means read ‘Russia’s War’ if you want, but I can’t say that I got anything useful from it.

This one I haven’t actually read yet. It’s on my shelf awaiting a moment when I have spare time on my hands. The reason I got it is that the description of the book’s thesis seems fascinating. If I am understanding it right, author Tomila Lankina is claiming that there was an astonishing lack of social mobility in the upper middle classes in Russia in the twentieth century. It was more or less the same families who made up that class in Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and post-Soviet Russia. This existed alongside a newer, ‘inferior, second-class middle-class’ (as Lankina calls it) made up of ex-workers and peasants and their children, who rose up in the Soviet era. The two middle classes remained distinct, however, and it was the former that transmitted liberal values from the late Imperial era into the early post-Soviet one.

If true, this casts enormous doubt on the ability of governments of any hue to promote social mobility. Wealth and privilege, it seems, have a way of surviving even regimes dedicated to destroying them. Is it true? I guess I’ll have to read the book to find out.

The title of this book – also still to be read – says it all. ‘The Stupidity of War’. Amen to that!

Writing

Some good news! I have another book on the way. It’s title has been confirmed as Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West. It will be published by Northern Illinois University Press (now an imprint of Cornell Univesity Press) on 15 April next year. It will be published as a trade book, and thus should be available at an easily affordable price. I will post the cover once it is available.

May 23, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

‘We Get Paid to Vaccinate Your Children’: Pediatrician Reveals Details of Big Pharma Payola Scheme

By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | May 6, 2024

Can pediatricians afford to run their medical practices without the generous kickbacks they receive for vaccinating every child?

Dr. Paul Thomas, a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician, discussed this dilemma during an April 16 interview with Polly Tommey on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax: The People’s Study” bus tour.

“You cannot stay in business if you’re not giving pretty close to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [childhood vaccine] schedule,” said Thomas, who ran a general pediatrics practice with 15,000 patients and 33 staff members.

Thomas also addressed the risks and harms of vaccines — including COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — and the importance of boosting our immune systems naturally.

‘We were losing … over a million dollars’

Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Year,” gave parents in his practice a choice: vaccinate their children on the CDC schedule, vaccinate more slowly by waiting for the child’s immune system to develop or not vaccinate at all.

As more patients refused vaccines, Thomas began to notice the financial impact on his practice.

He and his staff conducted a thorough analysis of their billing records, examining the income generated from vaccine administration fees, markups and quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates.

The results shocked him. “We were losing … over a million dollars in vaccines that were refused.”

He explained that pediatric practices heavily rely on vaccine income to stay afloat, with overhead costs running as high as 80%.

“It is very expensive to run a pediatric office,” he told Tommey. “You need multiple nurses, multiple receptionists, multiple billing people and medical records — it’s a huge operation.”

Three financial incentives for giving vaccines

Pediatricians receive several types of financial incentives for administering vaccines.

The first is the administration fee, which Thomas described as a “Thank you for giving the shot.” He estimated that pediatricians typically receive about $40 for the first antigen and $20 for each subsequent antigen.

“Let’s just say a two-month well-baby visit, there’s a DPT — that’s three shots, three antigens,” he told Tommey, plus “Hib [Haemophilus influenzae type b], Prevnar [pneumococcal], Hep B [hepatitis B], polio, rota [rotavirus] — [that’s] about $240.”

The second way pediatricians profit from vaccines is through a small markup on the cost of the vaccines themselves, though Thomas noted that this is not a significant source of income.

The third and most substantial financial incentive is quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates. Insurance companies offer pediatricians bonus payments for meeting certain benchmarks, typically around 80% of patients being fully vaccinated by age 2.

“I get dinged maybe 10-15% off of those RVUs — relative value units — that are ascribed,” he said, describing the points system used to calculate physician reimbursements.

With his practice’s vaccination rate a mere 1%, Thomas was at risk of losing up to 15% of his overall revenue.

“Really, it effectively means a pediatric practice cannot survive using insurance without doing most of the vaccines, if not all of them,” he said. “And I think that explains the blinders — [why doctors] just won’t go there and look at the fact that these vaccines are causing a lot of harm.”

Neurodevelopmental issues ‘clearly linked to vaccines’

Tommey asked about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

“When you hear the word syndrome, it means we don’t know what it is … [or] what causes it,” Thomas said. “But we actually have a pretty good clue.”

Thomas said six studies examined the correlation between SIDS cases and vaccines. “In one data set, 97% were in the first 10 days after the vaccine. Only 3% were in the subsequent 10 days,” he said.

Other studies showed similar patterns, with 75-90% of SIDS deaths occurring within the first week after vaccination, he said.

Thomas also highlighted the increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, allergies and autoimmune diseases in vaccinated children.

“We know without a doubt that things like neurodevelopmental concerns, learning disabilities, ADD, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], autism [are] clearly linked to vaccines,” he stated. “The more you vaccinate, the more likely you are to have these problems.”

Vaccinated children are more prone to infections and illness compared to their unvaccinated peers, according to Thomas, who published a study comparing the health outcomes of each group.

“It’s the vaccinated who get more ear infections, more sinus infections, more lung infections,” he said. “Any kind of infection you look at, the vaccinated get more.”

‘Healthy adults just “Boom!” — dropping dead’

The risks associated with vaccines extend beyond childhood. Thomas drew attention to the recent phenomenon of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” (SADS) following the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

“We see it on the news, we see it on the ball fields: healthy adults just ‘Boom!’ — dropping dead,” he said. “And that’s all happened since the COVID jabs.”

Thomas expressed particular concern about the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccine development. He pointed out that despite decades of research, mRNA vaccines have never been proven safe or effective.

He cited previous attempts to develop mRNA vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which consistently failed in animal trials.

“When they got to the animal trials, they would vaccinate the rats,” he said. “When they re-exposed those rats, in one study, 100% of them died.”

The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines’ narrow focus on the spike protein is also problematic because it causes the immune system to become “focused on just one thing,” Thomas said.

“When the [viral] organism mutates, those who are vaccinated can’t recognize this new mutation,” he said, recalling how at a family gathering during the pandemic, it was mostly the vaccinated who contracted COVID-19.

Thomas shared a personal story about his mother’s experience with pulmonary fibrosis after receiving three COVID-19 vaccines.

“After her third COVID shot, she started really running out of energy and then getting short of breath,” he said. “Within a month, her lungs [had a] ground-glass appearance.”

Tommey asked about the risks of vaccine shedding.

“Shedding seems to be happening, and it’s been documented in studies,” he said, explaining that vaccinated individuals can expose others to spike proteins through body fluids and secretions.

‘We can no longer go to our doctors and say, “Fix me”’

Thomas discussed the likelihood of new pandemics being declared in the future, driven by the immense financial gains pharmaceutical companies reaped from the COVID-19 vaccines.

“They made too much money — Pfizer alone made over $100 billion,” he said. “So the power that the public health machinery got to themselves with COVID has to be intoxicating to them.”

In light of this, Thomas stressed the importance of personal health and natural immunity.

“We can no longer go to our doctors and say, ‘Fix me,’ after we’ve trashed our own health,” he said. “So we’ve got to take responsibility for eating right, avoiding stress, getting adequate sleep … [and] boosting our immune system naturally with organic produce.”

Thomas also encouraged people to question public health authorities and make informed decisions about their health.

“I can no longer trust the CDC, the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], the NIH [National Institutes of Health],” he said. “Some good people work in these institutions, but the institutions themselves are captured.”

Thomas said that when it comes to vaccines or a new pandemic illness, “They’re the last people you want to trust.”

‘Vax Facts’ book coming soon

Thomas shared information about his upcoming book, “Vax Facts,” co-authored with his partner DeeDee Hoover. He said the book provides an easy-to-read, comprehensive guide to understanding the vaccine issue, regardless of one’s current stance.

“This is going to … allow you to really understand it in an organized, reasonable way why it makes sense now to pause” taking vaccines, Thomas said.

Tommey reminded viewers of Thomas’ weekly show on CHD.TV, “Pediatric Perspectives,” where he interviews pediatricians and doctors who focus on children’s health.

Thomas encouraged viewers to visit his website, Kids First 4 Ever, to learn more about his work and to access coaching services for childhood vaccines and wellness.

Video link


John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 10, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

U.S. Intelligence Operatives Appear to Have Intentionally Groomed Mass Murderer Charles Manson

Status As a Police Informant Raises Suspicion That He Was an FBI and CIA Asset Out to Discredit the 1960s Counterculture

Source: dagospia.com
By Daniel Borgström – CovertAction Magazine – May 1, 2024

The Sharon Tate murders were as bizarre as they were bloody, and the story behind the story is even stranger.

Journalist Tom O’Neill spent 20 years researching, interviewing and digging in his effort to get to the bottom of it. His book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-authored by Dan Piepenbring, is an account of O’Neill’s personal odyssey as well as a presentation of his findings which unfold, page after page, in tragedy, weirdness and irony.

Charles Manson’s hit-team killed ten people, perhaps more. That was in California, back in the summer of 1969, while the U.S. Armed Forces were busily slaughtering millions of Asians in Vietnam. And in opposition to that war, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched in mass protests—the anti-war movement.

Even GIs and military veterans were speaking out against the war. The counterculture movement was in full bloom, having started for at least since “the summer of love” two years earlier. Woodstock, an historic occasion which drew 400,000 people to a music event in Upstate New York, also took place the year of the Manson murders in that same month of August.

War, anti-war, and counterculture—it was all going on when Charles Manson and his “family” suddenly stole the show and took center stage with that series of infamous killings. First there was the Gary Hinman murder, then the Sharon Tate killings, followed by the LaBianca murders. Two more victims about whom we do not often hear were Donald Shea, a caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, and Filippo Tenerelli, who was found dead in a Bishop, California, motel.

manson_newspaper

Source: cbsnews.com

The FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs were also in play—part of intelligence’s covert war on dissent. Several shadowy characters, apparently CIA operatives, turn up in this story and appear to have crossed paths with Charles Manson. Among them was Dr. Louis Jolyon West of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control project. Another was Reeve Whitson who somehow knew of the Tate killings 90 minutes before anyone else did, and reported it in a phone call to Tate’s photographer. O’Neill devotes a chapter to each of them.

Dr. Louis Jolyon West [Source: jamanetwork.com

Thirty years had passed since the killings when O’Neill began work on his project in 1999. Several of the key players had already died, but Charles Manson was still in prison, and memories of the killings remained painfully alive. The topic was initially assigned to O’Neill as a magazine article, and the editor gave him three months to complete it.

However, as he launched into it, interviewing dozens—eventually hundreds—of cops, DA lawyers, clerks, Hollywood personalities, drug dealers and others, he found there was far more to the story than he had ever imagined.

He missed his deadline, then his next deadline, and the one after that. The project became his obsession, and the digging and research continued on through 20 long years of plowing through troves of documents: court records, old newspaper files, FOIA requests, and interviews. Research can be frustrating, and clearly it was. “Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends,” O’Neill tells us. His book finally came out in 2019.

Tom O’Neill – Source: warwicks.com

Told in the first person, the book is a gripping detective story that I could not put down—actually an audio that I could not turn off. It is well written, and the audio by Kevin Stillwell is well read. My partner wanted to know what I kept listening to all the time. So I took off my headset and played it out into the room. She caught the bug and we listened to it together day after day, smitten by Tom O’Neill’s obsession.

At Charles Manson’s orders, people were murdered. This is a “mystery” where we know the “who-done-it” part of the story, but we are left to wonder and speculate about almost everything else—motives, the roles of intel and law enforcement, facts that were covered up, and who or what else might have been operating behind the scenes.

Crime novels typically end with the pieces all falling into place to form a coherent picture. Not so in most real-life crime mysteries, O’Neill cautions us. Some pieces are missing; others do not seem to belong, but they are there nonetheless, often in some grotesquely misshapen form.

A good many pieces are left over; they may seem important, but we do not know what to make of them. In this book, the author takes us into a world where cops, judges, prosecutors, witnesses and others do not function in ways that seem rational or above board.

Among the strange pieces in this picture puzzle is something O’Neill calls “Charlie Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card.”

After having spent much of his life in various prisons, in 1967 Charles Manson was finally out on “federal parole for grand theft auto.” Being on probation is almost like living on the doorstep of a jailhouse.

A parolee can get thrown back in prison for the slightest mis-step. However, Charles Manson went around committing one offense after another—stealing cars, credit cards and firearms, sex with underage women, drugs, etc. Whatever a parolee was not allowed to do, Charles Manson did. He even flouted it. He was caught repeatedly, but none of his numerous violations landed him in jail for more than a few days at a time.

“We were told not to bother those people,” former Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Preston Guillory told O’Neill. It was a policy handed down from on high, Guillory said: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”

Cops who had clues, evidence or solid proof of Manson’s violations were pulled back from their investigations. On the occasions when Manson was arrested, judges would let him go. His probation officer, Roger Smith, wrote glowing letters about Manson’s supposedly wonderful progress.

Normally, a probation officer would supervise 20 to 100 parolees; but Roger Smith was supervising only one person—Charles Manson. It was with the encouragement of Probation Officer Roger Smith that Manson spent a year in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at the time a Mecca of the hippie counterculture.

There Charlie acquired his “family” of followers, and morphed into the Charles Manson known to history and legend—the charismatic guru and apocalyptic cult leader, acid-dropping mystic, guitarist and songwriter, con artist, car thief and general predator, manipulator and abuser, and evangelist who expatiated on the Book of Revelation.

the-Manson-Family

Members of the Manson family. Source: reprobatepress.com

Manson was well-connected with Hollywood celebrities and music personalities: Doris Day’s son, music producer Terry Melcher, the Beach Boys, and many more, though most did not wish to have it known that they had been associated with him. Even after 30 years had passed, many refused to be interviewed by Tom O’Neill. The refusers’ list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood stardom. Cops and prosecutors were more inclined to talk, and some of them opened the author’s way to troves of documents and records.

Reading the accounts of these interactions, I sense that O’Neill must be something of a Will Rogers-type person who rarely met a person he did not like. And people in turn seemed to like him. Even officials who worked hard to cover things up seemed to warm up to him. Several, of course, including legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, eventually screamed at him and threatened to sue for millions of dollars.

Bugliosi was the attorney who had prosecuted Manson and afterwards wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter. In the courtroom and later in his book, Bugliosi presented Manson’s murder rampage as a scheme to blame the Black Panthers and thus spark a race war between blacks and whites. That became the official narrative, though it was doubted by people who had researched the case. Tom O’Neill devoted a chapter to reviewing “Holes in Helter Skelter”; he exposes Bugliosi’s handling of the case and does the coup de grâce on that theory.

A group of people talking into microphones Description automatically generated

Vince Bugliosi surrounded by reporters when he was prosecuting the Manson case in 1971. Source: nytimes.com

However, by the time O’Neill’s book came out, Bugliosi had passed on, and thus far his ghost has not risen up to carry out the threatened lawsuit. Another person who had threatened to sue O’Neill was music producer Terry Melcher, also dead by the time the book came out. There can be upsides to being a slow writer, taking a long time to do research.

Terry Melcher Source: alchetron.com

“I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence,” O’Neill tells us.

So he kept going, finding more pieces of the picture. And it reads like the script of a film noir.

Throughout the drama, Charles Manson was being closely monitored by law enforcement agencies and intel. And yet, even while they were watching him, he sent his acolytes out on those brutal killing sprees of August 1969. Incredibly enough, despite the surveillance, it took law enforcement four long months to eventually arrest him and his hit team. During those extra months of free rein, Manson killed Shea and Tenerelli and perhaps more.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives had almost immediately found clues leading to Charles Manson; many Hollywood people also suspected him. So why did it take law enforcement so long to catch him? It appears that the “hands off Manson policy” was still in effect.

Actually, Manson was not the only person in this story who seemed to be immune to prosecution; similar immunity appears to have been granted to two or three Hollywood drug dealers who turn up in the story. That seems to be a fairly common practice in law enforcement.

“A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, ‘We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets,’” former Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Guillory told O’Neill. “My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason.”

Former head deputy DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnick, gave a similar opinion. “Sometimes this is explained by just pure incompetence,” he said. “But this is not that. It dovetails right in. Manson was an informant.” Of course, that was just his guess, Watnick conceded, but it was an educated one, based on his 30 years of experience. “They’d been watching this guy for something large.”

Looking at the tolerance that authorities had for Manson’s lawbreaking, his relationship with probation officer Roger Smith, and more, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that somebody up there had a major investment in Mr. Charles Manson. They must have wanted him to do something. But what?

Along with his findings, O’Neill shares his uncertainties. “My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of ‘those people’: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist… I don’t consider myself credulous, but I’d discovered things I thought impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixties.” Further on, he tells us, “I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement… It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was.”

Something darker than Charles Manson? Our leaders, and the establishment they work for, have a lot of closely guarded secrets—secrets that occasionally make their way out by way of researchers, whistleblowers, hackers, and even congressional hearings.

For background on the political environment of the late 1960s, O’Neill reviews the establishment’s war against the anti-war movement. That includes cases of people who were murdered as a result of FBI and CIA activities and manipulations here in the U.S. He ties this brutality to U.S. actions overseas.

Anthony Herbert – Source: ronsherman.com

O’Neill looks at the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a kill-capture campaign, which resulted in the death of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. He quotes from a Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, about his time in the Phoenix Program: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”

A mission shared by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS was to disrupt and discredit the anti-war movement, and that, O’Neill points out, was one effect of the Manson murders. Of course, Charles Manson was not an anti-war activist; it is doubtful that he ever attended an anti-war rally. He was a product of the prison system who somehow found his way into the fringes of the counterculture movement, and there was a lot of overlap between the anti-war and counterculture movements. Many hippies were anti-war, and many activists smoked grass and grew their hair long.

Woman Holding Flower

Scene from the 1967 Summer of Love that Manson and the CIA/FBI were out to destroy. Source: allthatsinteresting.com

The corporate media, then as now, was the voice of the establishment elite, and dutifully presented the murderous Manson and his “family” to the world as poster children of the “hippie movement.” A lot of people bought that framing. Even people who self-identified as countercultural were saying, “Manson ended the Summer of Love!”—a message the corporate media pushed.

Although the killings were billed as the “crime of the century” and have received massive newspaper coverage ever since, few articles went beyond the sensational aspects and asked truly penetrating questions. When (in 1971) whistleblower LA Sheriff’s Detective Guillory went public with what he knew about Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card, the media showed little interest. Nor did many journalists work out a related source and connection between these killings and a society waging a brutal and unjust war.

We assume that our leaders in Washington care about the lives of ordinary people. Our experience with them shows otherwise.

We remember Vietnam. There have been several murderous wars since then, and now Gaza. As I write this, our president and our Congress are in the sixth month of funding, arming and giving diplomatic support to apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

Our leaders are not averse to promoting mass murder. We have the immortal words of former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: When asked in 1996 about U.S. sanctions causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

The powers that be are a bloodthirsty lot when it serves their interests, every bit as murderous as Charles Manson himself. But who might have been the local- or regional-level functionaries authorizing immunity for such criminals?

O’Neill tells us about several high-placed California officials. One was Evelle Younger, then Los Angeles DA. Younger was a former FBI agent who, during World War II, was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and also oversaw the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan; he went on to be California Attorney General from 1971 to 1979.

Evelle J. Younger Source: wikiwand.com

Another was California Governor Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the “Task Force on Riots and Disorders,” William W. Herrmann. Herrmann was a veteran of the CIA’s Phoenix Program; he had also been a lieutenant with the LAPD. However, O’Neill was not able to establish a definite connection between them and the on-the-ground operatives. We do get an idea of who they seem to have been.

In this book of strange dark characters, one of the stranger ones was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, known to his friends as “Jolly” West. He was a pioneering scientist of the CIA’s mind-control project—MK-ULTRA. In 1966 he came to San Francisco, shortly before Manson arrived, and his project was to study and manipulate hippies.

So there they were, the two of them, in the Haight-Ashbury. Tom O’Neill, with meticulous documentation, suggests that Manson became a product of Jolly West’s experiments.

Another dark character who seems to have worked for the CIA was Reeve Whitson, a friend of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. He somehow knew of the killings before anyone else did, and telephoned the awful news to Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami. That was 90 minutes before the bodies were discovered by Polanski’s maid.

Both Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Reeve Whitson are dead and gone, West in 1999 and Whitson in 1994, and are, thus, not available for interviews or comment.

In this book Tom O’Neill shows us convincing evidence that Charles Manson was some sort of operative, maybe unwittingly. It looks like the purpose of his handlers—presumably from the CIA’s CHAOS or the FBI’s COINTELPRO—was to set him up to create a bloody scene such as the one on August 9, 1969.

It needs to be recognized that Charles Manson and his followers served the establishment well. Nevertheless, they went to prison where they remained for the rest of their lives. Only one, Leslie Van Houten, was finally released last year on parole.

May 5, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Lyndon Johnson’s Role in the JFK Assassination

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 29, 2024

Ever since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a question has naturally arisen: What role, if any, did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson play in the assassination?

With the publication of Douglas P. Horne’s massive 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the national-security establishment’s role in the assassination has now been established beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s because Horne meticulously detailed the fraud in the autopsy that the U.S. military carried out on Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination. Horne served on the staff of the ARRB in the 1990s.

Examples of autopsy fraud set forth by Horne (which are summarized in my book The Kennedy Autopsy) include (1) sneaking JFK’s body into the Bethesda Naval morgue before the official start of the autopsy in order to perform pre-autopsy surgery designed to hide evidence of shots having been fired from Kennedy’s front and (2) two separate brain examinations, the second of which involved someone else’s brain rather than Kennedy’s. Horne’s findings have now been reinforced and built upon in a new book, The Final Analysis by David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D. and Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily means criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in the assassination itself. There is no way around that. That’s how we can definitively conclude that the JFK assassination was one of the national-security establishment’s patented regime-change operations based on what have become the two most important words in the American political lexicon — “national security.” See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.”

But what about Johnson? Was he just an innocent beneficiary of the assassination? Actually not. The circumstantial evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Johnson himself was up to his neck in the assassination. Johnson had three primary roles in the assassination.

The first role was to get JFK’s body out of Dallas and deliver it into the hands of the military. Keep in mind that JFK’s murder was a state criminal offense. At that time, it was not a federal crime to assassinate a president. Therefore, no federal agency had any jurisdiction over the crime. That includes the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI.

Under Texas law, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, was required to perform an autopsy on JFK’s body. Immediately after JFK was declared dead, Rose announced that he was going to perform the autopsy. A team of Secret Service agents immediately declared that no such autopsy would be permitted. Headed by a Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, who was brandishing a Thompson sub-machine gun, the Secret Service team began screaming, yelling, and cussing as they began forcing their way out of Parkland Hospital  with the president’s body, which had been placed in a heavy casket. Rose refused to give ground, insisting, correctly so, that Texas law required him to perform the autopsy before the body could be released. One Secret Service agent physically picked up Rose, carried him to a nearby wall, and wagged his finger in his face. The others pulled back their suit coats to brandish their guns, thereby threatening to use deadly force against anyone who got in their way.

Kellerman declared that he and his team were simply following orders. There is only one person who could have issued such an extraordinary order to Kellerman — Lyndon Johnson, either directly to Kellerman or indirectly through one of Kellerman’s superiors. Who else would have dared to issue an order that violated state criminal law?

In fact, Johnson’s own actions confirm that he was the person who issued the order. Once JFK was declared dead, Johnson headed to Love Field, where he ordered seats to be removed from the back of Air Force One to make room for the big casket in which JFK’s body had been placed. Johnson had absolutely no intention of waiting at Love Field for the 2-3 hours that would have been needed to complete the autopsy. He was removing those seats in the full expectation that the casket and the body would be arriving shortly. How would he know that? Because he had to have been the one who issued the order to Kellerman to get the body out of Parkland at all costs and deliver it to Johnson at Love Field.

The second role that Johnson had was to conjure up the prospect of World War III by suggesting that the assassination might be the first step in a nuclear attack on the United States by the Soviet Union. He first raised this possibility while he was waiting at Parkland Hospital for Kennedy to be declared dead. He raised it again on the way to Love Field.

Yet, when Johnson arrived at Love Field, his actions belied any such concern. Rather than get up in the air immediately in order to direct America’s defenses and counterattacks to a possible Soviet nuclear attack, he instead lollygagged at Love Field, waiting, first, for a federal judge to arrive and swear him in as president and, second, for JFK’s body to be delivered to him. In fact, JFK was declared dead at 1 p.m. and LBJ waited until 2:47 to take off. That was the action of a person who knew for certain that the assassination could not possibly have been the first stage of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. The only way that Johnson could have been so certain is that he knew that it was not the Soviets who committed the assassination.

Once Johnson arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he dutifully delivered JFK’s body into the hands of the military, notwithstanding the fact that the military had absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct such an autopsy.

It was not the last time that LBJ conjured up the possibility that the Soviets or the Cubans had assassinated JFK, however. When he began inducing people to join what became known as the Warren Commission, he once again conjured up the possibility that the assassination had been committed by the Soviet Union or Cuba. Why would he do that? Because that was the way that the plotters were able to get the investigation into the assassination shut down immediately — in order to ostensibly avoid World War III and all-out nuclear war that would come with it.

How did this ingenious strategy play out? As I detail in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the plot called for shots being fired from the front and the back. That would establish a conspiracy with the supposed communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. intelligence agent who the national-security establishment was setting up to take the fall. The only people with whom Oswald would have been supposedly conspiring were the Soviet Union and Cuba. That was the purpose of setting up Oswald in New Orleans and Mexico City as a supposed communist agent.

Keep in mind that JFK and his brother RFK had initiated Operation Mongoose, whose aim was to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. Keep in mind also that the CIA had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro. Thus, Johnson’s second role was to assert that the communists had gotten to JFK first and that if the United States responded to their assassination of JFK, World War III would occur. Therefore, the only way to obviate going to war based on what the Kennedy brothers had started was to immediately shut down the investigation and hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front.

The third role that LBJ had was to ensure that there would never be an official investigation that could lead to the national-security establishment, including, of course, with respect to the military’s fraudulent autopsy. That was the purpose of appointing former CIA Director Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. Dulles, who Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster and who loathed Kennedy, ensured that the commission stayed on track with the official lone-nut narrative.

Finally, it should be noted that if JFK had not been assassinated, it was a virtual certainty that LBJ would have been removed from office, indicted, and convicted for political corruption. In fact, it is also a virtual certainty that Johnson knew that Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, who loathed Johnson, was furnishing evidence of Johnson’s corruption to LIFE magazine. Thus, LBJ, who had a lifelong obsession to become president, had a choice: Go to jail or participate in the assassination of JFK and become president. He chose the latter course of action and, after being elected president in the 1964 election, gave the U.S. national-security establishment what Kennedy had refused to do–its war in Vietnam.

April 30, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Queen of Climate Crackpottery

By Tony Thomas | Quadrant | April 15, 2024

Trigger warning: if your household companions include a cat, dog, canary, goldfish or turtle, this article is not a safe space. I’m writing about Harvard’s distinguished agnatologist Professor Naomi Oreskes (above) and her 2014 warning that global warming would kill your pets in 2023. The warning is in her acclaimed but glum book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Given margins of error in climate science, the pet die-off might be this year instead. Oreskes wrote,

The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal . … A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment (p9).

Smarter climate alarmists don’t make short-term predictions. They choose a date like 2050 for when the oceans will boil. They’ll be senile or dead by then and can’t be humiliated if the oceans stay chilly.

Top environmentalist Paul Ehrlich forecast in 1971 that by 2000 the UK “will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”[1] His 1968 book, Population Bomb, predicted starvation would shrink the US population to 23 million by 1999. Strangely, Oreskes in her book hails Ehrlich as a vindicated futurist. (p3-4 and 56).

The only good news from Naomi is that the IPCC becomes [more] discredited and is disbanded. She replaces it with such alphabet soups as the UNCCEP’s ICCEP which launches IAICEP, which she says is pronounced “ay-yi-yi-sep” (p27).The mission of ay-yi-yi-sep is to sprinkle enough fairy dust aka sulphates in the air to make an anti-sun umbrella and save the planet by 2079.

In September 2014 she was interviewed on the ABC’s Science Show by Dr (honoris causa) Robyn Williams, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, about the pet-deaths. One reader, she explained,

… started crying when the pets die, so I didn’t mean to upset people too much … I was just trying to come up with something that I thought people wouldn’t forget about, and I thought, ‘Well, Americans spend billions of dollars every year taking care of their pets’, and I thought if people’s dogs started dying, maybe then they would sit up and take notice.

Interviewer Dr Williams[2] was delighted with Oreskes’ pet-panic strategy. He chimed in,

Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things…And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, then it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it.

Oreskes: Well, exactly. It was about bringing it literally home, literally into your home, your family, your pet, the dog or cat that you love who is your faithful and trusted companion.

As I type this, I look down fondly at Natasha, our doomed spaniel, although she is neither faithful nor trustworthy.

Oreskes began her Science Show appearance by reading from her book in sepulchrul tones:

Then, in the northern hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heatwaves scorched the planet [and] led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never seen before.

Naomi’s actually playing down her future horrors, she omits to tell him about the arrival of the Black Death:

Dislocation contributed to the Second Black Death, as a new strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis emerged in Europe and spread to Asia and North America. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed as much as half the population of some parts of Europe; this second Black Death had similar effects. (p30).

Australians will wonder: does Medicare charge extra premiums to cover bubonic plague?

Williams, instead of asking Oreskes what she’s smoking, merely observed that all of the above is “fairly shocking”. He further wondered why it is only Western civilization that collapses, leaving the Chinese in charge. One reason, says Oreskes, is that Chinese civilisation is more durable, and two, that authoritarian regimes are better able to deal with hypothesised climate apocalypses.

Looking back from the future, Oreskes viewed China in the early 2000s as a beacon of carbon enlightenment. China, she said,

… took steps to control its population and convert its economy to non – carbon – based energy sources. These efforts were little noticed and less emulated in the West, in part because Westerners viewed Chinese population control efforts as immoral, and in part because the country’s exceptionally fast economic expansion led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, masking the impact of renewable energy. By 2050 , this impact became clear as China’s emissions began to fall rapidly. Had other nations followed China’s lead, the [grim future] history recounted here might have been very different. (p6).[3]

Another interviewer — a friendly one, actually — played the devil’s advocate:

Interviewer: Just how much do you hate the American way of life? What gives you the intellectual chutzpah to make these kinds of projections?

Oreskes: Our story is a call to protect the American way of life before it’s too late.

I identify with Oreskes, who grew up in New York, because as a lass she was a geologist working on Western Mining Corp’s Olympic project in central Australia. I phoned WMC’s retired boss Hugh Morgan but he couldn’t give me any piquant anecdotes about young Naomi.

Her sojourn Down Under must have been unhappy because she’s forecast that the climate emergency will kill off every Australian man woman and child (all 26 million of us). “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.” (p33). As a resident of Australia’s pagan state of Victoria, I don’t believe in the afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. (Witticism courtesy Woody Allen).

Oreskes dropped geology to co-write that Merchants of Doubt book, painting “climate deniers” as the evil twins of those denying that smoking causes cancer. The book in 2021 was set to music by composer Yvette Jackson, who sees climate doubt as having the

… low, somber insistence of the bass clarinet, skittering flute that cranks up anxiety, sonorous cello to hold things together, and the deep, doubting rumble of double bass.

Listen to that anxious, sonorous cello and more here (fourth video down).

At 65, Naomi’s job title is Harvard Professor of the History of Science — but don’t call, she’s on leave. She co-wrote her civilisational-collapse book with fellow alarmist Erik Conway. Her other collaborators include Pope Francis: she did the intro for his Laudato si’ encyclical in 2015.

Wikipedia lists only 30 of her honours, including the Stephen H. Schneider Award in 2016 for communicating “extraordinary scientific contributions” to a broad public in a clear and compelling fashion. Schneider (1945-2010) was a top IPCC climate scientist. He urged colleagues there to strike a balance between scaring the pants off the public and being honest about how weak the CO2 evidence really is. Oreskes also scored the 2019 Mary Rabbit Award from the US Geological Society. Her lifetime of bashing denialists is surely worth a million-dollar Nobel.

The Collapse book is about Western civilisation’s ruin while China saves the planet with its enlightened anti-CO2 measures. She is writing from the future in 2393 when she will be aged 435. Oreskes (as at 2393) is cross because we have refused to build enough windmills to stop at 11degC warming (p32) and eight-metre sea rises (p30). We should not have eaten so many fillet steaks[4] and, personally, I should not have tooled around in my reasonably priced, petrol-powered Hyundai i30 when Teslas were available at $80,000.

Oreskes was talking about Collapse at a Sydney Writers’ Festival when someone in the audience piped up, “Will you write fiction next?” She doesn’t of course view Collapse as fiction: “Speculative? Of course, but the book is extremely fact-based” (p79). And she elaborated to the ABC’s Dr Williams, “Well, it’s all based on solid science. Everything in this book is based on the scientific projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All we did was to add to the social and human aspects to it and to ask the question; what does this really mean in terms of what its potential impacts would be on people and its potential impacts on our institutions of governance?”

Her “science based” technical projection involved an angry summer in 2023 continuing year-round, “taking 500,000 lives worldwide and costing nearly $ 500 billion in losses due to fires , crop failure , and the deaths of livestock and companion animals” (p8) In 2014, how was Naomi (no-one’s perfect) to know that current agricultural output and yields continue smashing records?

The book’s “fact-based” projections have drought and desert ravaging the US in the 2050s:

The US government declared martial law to prevent food riots and looting [similar to 2020s’ mostly-peaceful burning and robbing]. A few years later, the United States announced plans with Canada for the two nations to begin negotiations … to develop an orderly plan for resource-sharing and northward population relocation (p26). 

The talks led to the combined United States of North America. I imagine Texans started adding “eh” to their sentences, as in Why do Canadians say “eh?”? It’s so silly right? Because we want to, eh.

Even at the age of 435 in 2393, Oreskes remains really sore about the Climategate email scandal of 2009 (IPCC climate scientists conspiring to fudge data). She blames Climategate on a “massive campaign” that was “funded primarily by fossil fuel corporations” (p8) — this alleged largesse must have by-passed sceptic bloggers, who still rely on their tip jars. Oreskes remains vigilant to smite deniers:

It will also be crucial not to allow new forms of denial to take hold. We are already seeing examples, such as the false claim that off-shore wind kills whales and that restrictions on gas stoves are the latest excuse by liberals to control our lives and deny our freedom. Scientists will have to work with climate activists to block the spread of such misleading narratives.

She finished her interview with the ABC’s Dr Williams by claiming, improbably, that some readers of  Collapse wished her 80-page book to be longer. She explained,

We didn’t want it to be too depressing, we didn’t want to go on and on and on, like 300 pages of misery, that really wouldn’t be any fun. So we are sort of hoping that the book, despite the fact that it’s a depressing topic, it’s actually we think kind of a fun read.

Apart from our dead kittens, that is.

[1] Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971. Link broken.

[2] The ABC Ombudsman told me it’s fine for people with honorary doctorates to be called “Dr” in any context.

“The ABC style guide does not form part of the editorial standards and we consider there is nothing materially inaccurate in referring to Ms O’Donoghue as Dr O’Donoghue.” Email from James, Investigations Officer, ABC Ombudsman’s Office, Feb 14, 2024. (The late Ms Donoghue’s Doctorates are honorary).

[3] On the ABC iview’s posting of the Oreskes/Williams interview, the ABC claimed the planet was warming at the top of the IPCC models’ forecasting. I wrote to my friend Kirsten McLiesh, who runs Audience & Consumer Affairs (i.e. the complaints department) pointing out that actual warming was at the bottom of the IPCC models’ range. In those days (2014) the ABC had some integrity and Kirsten wrote back,

“Having been alerted to your complaint, the program acknowledges that the sentence read on the website as an incontrovertible fact and have undertaken to remove it. An Editor’s Note has been added to the page.”

[4] Oreskes, Twitter May 4, 2023: “I’m often asked “What can I do to stop climate change.” That’s a hard question because so much of the change we need is structural, but this new study proves one thing: EAT LESS BEEF. (And now, drum roll, here come the beef industry trolls.)”

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

April 17, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Childhood Innocence

On The Marxist Queering

Lies are Unbekoming | April 16, 2024

It can’t be overstated that Queer Theory thinks all children are sexual. The Queer Cult thinks society has constructed a myth of the “innocent child” to repress children’s sexuality so they can’t explore and experience it until they are already conditioned to be heterosexual or, at the very least, conditioned to fit into and stabilize a heterosexual society. – The Queering of the American Child

Innocence is in their way.

It’s the wall that must be breached.

It has gotten as far as it has because people do not say “No” anymore.

It has crept forward, millimeter by millimeter because, people wanted to “keep the peace.”

It has hollowed out all that was sacred because people didn’t want “to hurt it’s feelings.”

Well, it is here now, and it wants your child’s innocence.

What are you going to do about it?

CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE

From The Queering of the American Child

Beneath all of this, and as a final impediment to Queer Theory, is developmental psychology, particularly childhood developmental psychology. This field has long recognized that growing up is a developmental process containing certain milestones that takes place within boundaries usually defined as “age-appropriate.” Sex, sexuality, and even romantic or many emotionally involved relationships are not developmentally appropriate for children and can do lasting psychological damage if introduced irresponsibly. Learning to categorize the world at first concretely—man, woman, boy, girl —before moving to more complicated and nuanced understandings of ambiguities and differences is developmentally crucial to developing brains. All of this stands firmly in the way of Queer Theory and its ambitions to queer the child.

Queer Theory colonized and captured developmental psychology by attacking the notion of a normal and innocent child. The Queer Theory literature will not let one escape the idea that the ruling class in society (people who own “normalcy” as Bourgeoisie private property) uses the concepts of “normal child” and “childhood innocence” to keep children from exploring their true queer nature. In this view, the normal and innocent child is a justification for pushing all children through a “cisheterosexual” developmental track.

There is perhaps no better paper to turn to than Hannah Dyer’s Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development to summarize Queer Theory’s view of the “normal and innocent child” progressing through a “normal” developmental track. What the weird title of the paper indicates is that believing in and protecting childhood innocence limits the full range of the child’s future life in terms of how queer (recall: politically radical) he might be. That is, growing up normal and safeguarded by developmental appropriateness as outlined in rigorous child developmental psychology is characterized as a kind of injury to the child! In brief, believing in age-appropriate approaches backed through child developmental psychology allegedly injures kids who might otherwise have grown up to be Queer Activists by exposing them to a “normal” childhood that threatens to “straighten” them, against their best interests.

Borrowing from Foucault’s idea that the scientific disciplines serve as a regulatory “regime of truth” that perpetuates the status quo, Queer Activists like Dyer argue that psychologists are deeply “implicated in the harming of gay kids.” 185  Queer Theory takes developmental psychology to task “for their catastrophic support for beliefs that queer childhood was not viable or healthy.” 186  In this view, psychologists have served as a strong arm for the normal society , taking “queer children” and “straighten[ing] out their futures.” 187  Allowing young children to understand the world in terms of simple, unambiguous, concrete, natural, normal, and real categories crucial to their healthy development, categories like man, woman, boy, girl , is, from the demented view of Queer Theory, an act of “straightening” kids and stealing from them the possibility of a queer future, thus oppressing them.

According to Queer Activists, what used to be called “gender identity disorder” harmed “queer” children because “as a diagnostic classification [it] assumed the ability to detect impulses not yet organized as queer identity and realign them with heterosexuality.” 188  That is, “gender identity disorder” was a way to “fix” children rather than allow them to be “who they really are.” And allowing children to be “who they really are” requires ditching old paradigms in favor of “embracing [children’s] queer curiosity and patterns of growth.” 189  Queer developmental psychology must “address the child as always already queer.” 190 

The idea that developmental psychology should abandon traditional theories and practices in favor of queer possibilities rests on the idea that society scripts children’s futures. Queer Theory claims that the soul is the prison of the body , and society convinces children’s souls to materialize certain futures on their bodies. That is, Queer Theory argues that disciplines like psychology serve to discipline kids that are stepping out of line, convincing them to get back on a predetermined developmental track, ultimately growing up and performing as a straight man or a straight woman. In this view, society treats all kids as “proto-heterosexuals” needing continuous developmental conditioning.

Before Queer Theory colonized the discipline, developmental psychologists worked to help children understand that “It Gets Better.” 191  They worked with children to help them constructively navigate their issues. An “it gets better” approach treats a child’s disorders as disorders that can be addressed while stressing that things will improve in time. Queer Theory could not tolerate that message because that message doesn’t address the here and now as defined on the cult’s terms. Queer Activists think that telling kids “it gets better” only stabilizes a definable future within the current sociopolitical order. “It gets better” postpones feelings to the “mythical adulthood,” requiring children to tolerate the intolerably oppressive social fabric they are drowning in.

A queer conception of child development is meant to “rupture conventional schemas of ‘growing-up,’” as it undoes “anticipated congruency” and “the enforcement of strict borders between childhood and adulthood.” Queer Cult Psychology “find[s] pleasure” in tearing down traditional theories of childhood developmental stages and replacing them with queer possibilities. That this is likely to induce crises for the children, as we saw, is considered a queer opportunity. That it will lead to psychological damage and personality disorders is viewed as an oppressive myth used to uphold the “normal” status quo of a cisheteronormative society.

For Queer Activists, the key societal construct that justifies the traditional and alienating [as Marx would use it!] developmental track is “childhood innocence.” The Queer Theory literature is unambiguous in this claim. Queer Activists believe that “childhood innocence” is a political construct that normal people use to keep children from learning about their true queer sexuality and desire. The “innocent child” is nothing more than a myth normal people tell society to control what children are exposed to. “Childhood innocence” keeps children away from forbidden knowledge—away from taking a bite of the apple . Queer Activists believe they must “queer the rhetoric of innocence that constrains all children and help to refuse attempts to calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire.”

The Queer Cult does not believe that children are innocent. Queer Activists believe children are full of queer sexuality and desire, claiming that society just suppresses and restricts those instincts to protect a normal child and their normal future . What they lack is initiation . In this view, all children are capable of reason and consent—capable of true human agency, as someone like Paulo Freire would define it. Queer Activists, like Dyer, claim that making childhood sexuality taboo “hurt[s] children’s curiosity and imagination” in an effort to protect a child’s “assumed proto-heterosexuality.” 192  The Queer Cult isn’t interested in labeling things as too taboo for children. The Queer Cult is invested in fully ramping up the taboo while “understanding the possibility for children and youth to recruit amounts of bodily pleasure.” 193 

Queer theories of childhood are often brave in the ways that they wade into such taboo territory in order to show how what is considered perverse is often a mode of securing heteronormativity. Queer theory can be helped in its desires to prove that children are capable of possessing complexity and sexuality by exploring work done in the fields of early childhood studies and sociological studies of childhood. This is because these fields and their associated methods of inquiry prioritize the child’s possession of knowledge and agentic relation to the world. (Dyer, 2016)

It can’t be overstated that Queer Theory thinks all children are sexual. The Queer Cult thinks society has constructed a myth of the “innocent child” to repress children’s sexuality so they can’t explore and experience it until they are already conditioned to be heterosexual or, at the very least, conditioned to fit into and stabilize a heterosexual society. In this sense, society uses the language of childhood sexual trauma to “foreclose careful consideration of the child’s agentic relationship to perverse and queer sexuality.” 194  Defining children as innocent prevents all children from being exposed to queer forms of sexuality and desire before their future is settled. The “innocent child” has but one path to choose from—cisheterosexuality—as all other queer possibilities are deemed “developmentally inappropriate.”

BULLDOZING THE WALL

Hannah Dyer’s Queer futurity and childhood innocence isn’t an outlier in the Queer Theory literature. Queer Activists consider childhood “an arguable crucible or ground zero of all sexual politics.” 195  They think this way because they believe children are pawns that normal people use to protect their dominant interests. In this view, who gets to decide what “a child,” “childhood,” and “innocence” mean determines the future of society. If normal people get to define these concepts, then the future will be normal. If Queer Activists get to define these concepts, then the future will be queer . “Queer futurity” is a vision of a future that isn’t limited by current societal norms and expectations, particularly those related to sex and sexuality. Hannah Dyer and other Queer Activists make clear that any hope for queer futurity is lost in the concept of “the innocent child,” so “the innocent child” is a barrier they know they must destroy. Or, as Queer Activist Lee Edelman says in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive :

Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis ; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. 196  (Edelman, 2004, p. 29)

Queer Activists queered developmental psychology because the discipline was a significant barrier to Queer Cult initiation. In the past, psychologists considered children innocent and incapable of grasping the concepts of sexuality and desire. This was a huge problem for Queer Activists who believed that children must explore sexuality , gender, and desire before the clock of “normalcy” strikes midnight. Twenty years ago, it would have been considered child abuse to discuss sexuality and desire with little kids. Likewise, “affirming” a child’s mental health disorder would have been considered psychologically abusive. Queer Pedagogy would have been stopped dead in its tracks. Today, all of this is considered developmentally appropriate.

Developmental psychology was the great wall that prevented Queer Activists from presenting, discussing, and encouraging developmentally inappropriate ideas, concepts, and themes with kids. The discipline was bulldozed by Queer Activists who endlessly declared that “childhood innocence” creates an unjust distinction between appropriate and inappropriate discussions and content. Queer Theory dissolves distinctions, melding opposites together and creating a new whole understood on its own terms. In this case, Queer Activists claimed that what is considered appropriate or inappropriate is arbitrarily defined by those in power for their own benefit. So, nothing is appropriate or inappropriate—everything is contextual and subjective. But, because Queer Activists claim to know the truth about how the world works, they think they are the only ones who can determine the correct context of any given situation. Ketanji Brown Jackson felt she couldn’t define the word “woman” during her U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing because Queer Activists have bullied everyone into thinking that question must be deferred to them. Queer Activists think they are the only ones capable of answering questions related to sex, “gender,” and sexuality. Their insight is considered sacred , and they say talking to kids about sex, sexuality, and desire is not only appropriate but necessary.

The Queer Cult uses Queer Pedagogy to coerce children to bite the apple and learn about the secrets of queer sex, sexuality, and desire. Queer Pedagogy exists to take innocent children and initiate them into the revealed knowledge of the Queer Cult. This initiation process intentionally places kids into an identity crisis. Now, a parent can’t take their child to a developmental psychologist to address sex and “gender” confusion because the psychologist serves only to affirm the initiation . The only thing waiting for a child with “gender dysphoria” on the other side of the referral is Queer Cult Psychology.

Queer Activists, following Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s seminal work Epistemology of the Closet, fundamentally believe that innocence/initiation is a binary that must be overcome. Like the binaries of “appropriate” vs. “inappropriate” and “man” vs. “woman,” innocence vs. initiation must be dissolved, revealing a new, higher truth: namely, that innocence is a social construct normal people use to initiate children into cisheterosexuality. In this view, innocence is initiation and initiation is innocence. Queer Activists think the two concepts are the same if one can only view them from the more elevated state of queer consciousness.

“The closet” is where the magic happens—where innocence and initiation become one and the same. Queer Activists use Queer Pedagogy to force kids into the closet where they develop their queer consciousness and transcend their innocence through initiation into the Queer Cult. The closet, where you keep secrets from others like your parents, is where children are initiated, learning that they aren’t so innocent after all—they’re queer .

Some parents are demanding their day in court after learning that the “inclusive” education their children are receiving is queer . When that day arrives, they are met by the expert testimony of a Queer Cult psychologist who is all too thrilled to tell them that their “innocent” child isn’t so innocent after all. “If you scratch a child,” they might say, “you will find a queer.” 197 

April 17, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

A History of H5N1 Lab Accidents

A disturbing report by investigative journalist and author Alison Young

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | April 12, 2024

Exactly one year ago, the investigative journalist and author, Alison Young, published a report in USA Today on an accident that occurred on December 9, 2019 at the University of Wisconsin’s Influenza Research Institute.

The accident involved experiments with an H5N1 influenza virus that had been modified through GoF to make it transmissible among ferrets. The research team leader—a renowned virologist named Yoshihiro Kawaoka—had gained international attention (or notoriety) for his controversial GoF research on H5N1. As Alison Young reported:

… in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.

The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Kawaoka contended it would be “irresponsible not to study” how the virus might evolve in nature. “Some people have argued that the risks of such studies – misuse and accidental release, for example – outweigh the benefits. I counter that H5N1 viruses circulating in nature already pose a threat,” he said at the time.

In Nov. 2013, a needlestick accident happened on Kawaoka’s research team, followed by failure to adhere to the established quarantine rules. Though no human infection resulted from this accident, it was nevertheless alarming. Young’s report continues:

By 2014, there was a growing discomfort at the highest levels of the U.S. government about the risk of an accident with an engineered virus.

Wisconsin’s needlestick incident, which drew questions within NIH but wasn’t publicly known, was soon followed by a series of high-profile accidents at federal labs in 2014 – from safety breaches with anthrax and avian influenza at the CDC to the discovery of forgotten vials of smallpox that had been kept for decades in a storage room on the NIH campus.

In October 2014, citing these federal lab incidents, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a moratorium on new federal funding for certain gain-of-function research while the risks and benefits of the controversial experiments were studied.

The funding pause remained in place for three years until it was finally lifted in December 2017. But it was only in 2019 that some of the halted experiments were quietly allowed to begin again under a revised federal oversight process, which was criticized for keeping secret the details of the new experiments and the basis for the government approvals.

The second accident on Kawaoka’s team occurred less than a year after GoF experiments were allowed to resume. This time, a lab researcher in training was working with ferrets infected with the GoF-modified H5N1 when his respirator hose was discovered to have detached from his hood, allowing him to breathe the possibly contaminated air in the cabinet. Again the quarantine rules were not properly followed, and nor was the incident promptly reported to the NIH.

Though the accident purportedly did not result in a human infection, it nevertheless raises many questions about the prudence of manipulating the H5N1 virus in a lab in order to make it infectious and transmissible among mammals.

Alison Young’s report prompted me to start reading her book, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, published on April 25, 2023. Young has a long history of researching and reporting on Bio-labs and their checkered past. Most lab manipulation of pathogens is purportedly done to develop vaccines against them in the event that their natural iterations should ever evolve to infect humans, but this rationale is highly questionable if not downright mendacious.

Indeed, on December 18, 2013, the Foundation for Vaccine Research wrote a letter to the European Commission, signed by 56 scientists (including Nobel Laureates) in which they sharply criticized the GoF experiments on H5N1 by virologist, Ron Fouchier.

The 56 scientists vehemently express their opinion that naturally-occurring H5N1 does NOT efficiently transmit to humans and therefore poses little risk to humans.

Far more dangerous, they claim, is the possibility of a lab-modified H5N1 virus escaping from a lab. The scientists refer to the resurgence of H1N1 influenza in 1977 after a 20-year hiatus, most likely after escaping from a lab in the former Soviet Union.

April 15, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Late admission: Who is really responsible for the chemical attacks in Syria?

By Bakhtiar Urusov – New Eastern Outlook – 12.04.2024 

On 22 February this year, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued an opinion from the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) that found ISIL responsible for the use of chemical weapons (CW) in the Syrian town of Mari in September 2015.

Despite the fact that it took the OPCW more than 8 years to state a known fact, the conclusion uses cautious language such as “there is reason to believe” that “only ISIL could have had the intent, motive and capability” to use CW at this location.

The conclusion is based on another OPCW document, the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) report on the Mari incident, dated 24 January 2022.

It is noteworthy that the OPCW inspectors conclude that CW has been used by ISIL fighters against other “armed groups”, including the US-controlled terrorist organisation Jabhat al-Nusra. Despite its official recognition by the international community as a terrorist organisation, the report refers to this international terrorist organisation as “armed opposition to ISIL”. It also states separately that there were no Syrian army forces in the Mari area. In reality, this refers to the presence of chemical weapons in the terrorists’ possession, which they used in their struggle for power.

At the same time, there are known facts of the use of chemical weapons by Jebhat al-Nusra itself. For example, in 2015, Turkish parliamentarians presented evidence of supplies of precursors for CW (sarin) and CW missiles by militant groups from Turkey.

Details of British and American intelligence assistance to extremists in the creation of CWs are revealed in the book “The Red Line and the Rat Line” by the well-known American journalist Seymour Hersh.  In it, the author refers to the documents of the US military intelligence, according to which the US not only knew about the creation of CW by pro-Turkish militants with the help of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but also actively contributed to it.

This fact played a key role in President Obama’s declaration of readiness to attack Syrian troops if CW were used. The Americans knew that such a scenario had already been prepared by extremists supported by Washington and its allies – Ankara, Riyadh and Qatar. The “White Helmets” and “Belingcat” organisations, created by Britain’s MI6, were to provide the necessary media image to justify the invasion of Syria.

Damascus’ proposal to destroy Syria’s CW stockpiles, with Moscow’s active mediation, postponed for a while, but did not stop the provocations with its use. Apparently, the initiative took the members of the anti-Assad coalition by surprise and they had no plan B. Against the background of the defeat of the terrorists in Syria, it was too late to create another pretext for a quick invasion of Syria.

The subsequent chemical attacks in Syrian cities were clearly attributed to the Syrian army. Without any investigation, based only on the testimony of the White Helmets and Belingcat, the Americans, British and French launched several massive attacks against the Syrian army in an attempt to prevent the defeat of the terrorists. Just three days after the Syrian Air Force destroyed a militant CW depot in Khan Shaykhun (April 2017), the US Navy struck the Syrian Air Force’s Shayrat airbase with missiles, a base which had played a key role in pushing al-Nusra militants out of northern Idlib province. When the Syrian military forced the militants to retreat from the suburb of Douma in April 2018, the militants staged a chemical attack there, prompting a massive missile attack by US, French and British forces on the advancing Syrian army just six days after the incident. As before, the White Helmets’ testimony about the Syrian army’s use of CW was enough for the West. With the full cooperation of Damascus, OPCW experts inspected the site of the alleged CW use. Subsequently, one of the inspectors appeared at the UN with a refutation of the White Helmets’ conclusion, providing evidence of a staged use of CW. However, his testimony was rejected by the OPCW and he was ostracised and dismissed without any legal basis.

Similar provocations have been carried out in other cities in Syria. All of them have one thing in common – preliminary military successes of the Syrian army against terrorists in a particular area, the absence of any military sense in the use of CW, as well as immediate air strikes by the “friends of Syria” led by the United States, the invasion of foreign troops into the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic.

If it took more than eight years to recognise ISIL responsibility for the use of CW, it took only a few days for the West to accuse and attack government forces. All the CW provocations in Syria are reminiscent of the infamous test tube of white powder demonstrated by US Secretary of State C. Powell at the UN in 2003. With the passage of time this lie, which became the pretext for the invasion of Iraq, has become obvious to everyone. The use of CWs by terrorists supported by the West, Turkey and KSA is also becoming obvious. But we should not expect Washington, London, Paris or Ankara to acknowledge this fact any time soon. This would mean admitting that they have committed crimes against humanity, violated many international conventions and carried out aggressions against sovereign states.

Collective condemnation of the crimes of these countries in the UN, the OPCW and other international and regional organisations should be a defence against such a policy of the West. International cooperation should be established to repel such hybrid attacks on yet another “overly independent” state that, according to Washington, intends to defend its national interests “to the detriment of the interests of the United States.”

April 12, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review of “Unmasking Anne Frank, Her Famous diary Exposed as a Literary Fraud” by Ikuo Suzuki

By Karl Haemers | Occidental Observer | August 27, 2022

I am going to assume that most readers of The Occidental Observer are familiar with the official story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl (aged 13–15) who kept a diary while hiding in a house from Jew-hunting “Nazis” in the Netherlands during World War II. In searching the TOO site for “Anne Frank,” I found no hits, but the Anne Frank story is almost as prevalent and persistent as the holocaust story itself, and surely TOO readers know the basics.

Publisher Clemens & Blair has just released a new book focused on the fraudulence of The Diary of Anne Frank. A number of other works examining the fraudulent Anne Frank diary have been published over the course of many years, most famously “Is the diary of Anne Frank Genuine?,” an article in English in 1982 by Robert Faurisson. But this new book surpasses the old ones in many ways.

Author of the current work, Ikuo Suzuki, a Japanese researcher, reviews a number of these earlier analyses of the diary in his new book, as does editor Thomas Dalton in his Foreword. As assistant editor, I do the same in my Introduction. (Disclaimer: I have a partial financial interest in this book.)

From there, Mr. Suzuki explores new analyses of the diary, including an illuminating graphic depiction of the many changes among the many various publications of the diary over the span of decades. So numerous and detailed are the diary’s entries over 26 months that logical inconsistencies and physical and logistical impossibilities inevitably occur; Suzuki identifies many new ones. He calls some of this “Anne magic,” and indeed only a magical explanation can reconcile some of the diary’s many internal flaws and self-contradictions.

Suzuki’s book is arranged into five main chapters, each having four to nine sections. As an example of inconsistency among various published versions of the diary, Chapter 1 is titled “Absurdity on the Surface,” and one section is titled “The Translation of ‘Cat’ Into ‘Tarantula’.” This Chapter displays pictures and drawings of the “Annex” in which Anne Frank supposedly hid out with seven other Jews, along with examinations of physical and architectural impossibilities.

Suzuki goes on to explore “Absurdities Lurking in the Depths” in Chapter 2, closing with the section “Was Everything a Figment?.” Here we see pictures of diary pages themselves, and careful comparisons among the bewildering number of different versions of the diary published at different times in different languages. Here we find Suzuki’s unique graphic display of the many changes among the versions. For example, Anne Frank is said to have edited her own diaries at a later point in her time in the “hideout.” Edited is not the proper term when we see that one early entry in her Diary as presented in the English publish version is actually a combination of two entries more than a month apart from the original diaries.

Chapter 3, “Annie Ample: A Soft-Core Porn Romantic Life?,” examines the core drama at the heart of the diary: the love (or lust) affair Anne supposedly had with a Jewish boy from another family also confined in the “hideout.” One of the great revelations that Suzuki presents is just how grotesque and sexually perverse the diary truly is, raising doubts on its own whether a young girl could even think such thoughts, much less write them down.

I’ll say here that, in my Postscript, I present the content of five missing pages of the diary that supposedly were found in 1998, and then two more “uncovered” in 2018. The five pages contain a scathing denunciation of Anne’s mother Edith and an oblique critique of her father Otto, but the two “uncovered” pages contain “perhaps the filthiest pornographic smut of the entire diary.” (I will spare readers the details here, though the book will not.)

Chapter 4 explores Anne’s writing career (or lack of it), the “infamous bookshelf door,” and the story of the beginning and end of the “hideout” (which is the chapter title). More pictures of documents and infrastructure assist the inquiry. This chapter engages in a staple of Diary doubters—handwriting analysis, and clarifies some former confusion.  A letter Anne Frank supposedly sent in 1940—before the “hideout”—to a pen pal in the US was found, and when its handwriting is compared to the handwriting of the Diary, even an amateur analyst can see the two are different. It also debunks the absurd story—or stories—of how the diaries were finally found after the “hideout” inhabitants were hauled away by the Gestapo.

Chapter 5, “The Diary Unmasked,” explores the core issue of The Diary of Anne Frank, one that all revisionists have addressed: who really wrote the diary? Many speculate that Anne’s father Otto Frank was the actual author all along, but Suzuki excludes Otto as lacking the character, ability and motivation to forge the diary. He says: “there was at least one person in Otto’s vicinity who definitely possessed those qualities.” Suzuki’s in-depth profile and examination of this one person—Jewish playwright and journalist Meyer Levin—I found compelling. For instance, Levin’s relationship with Otto Frank included Frank appointing Levin his copyright agent in 1952. Levin’s history involved him working in the “Office of War Information” in the US, producing propaganda movies. Thus Levin had the presence and ability to invent the Diary as on-going war propaganda.

Mr. Suzuki closes with a touching Afterword he calls “Annelies Next to You,” in which the focus of our outrage is inverted from the evil “Nazis” to those who would fabricate lies in Anne’s name. This is a virtue of this book; Suzuki never blames Anne for the fraud, but rather points the finger at other Jews. “Not a single word in (the diary) contains her truth. It is merely a prison for Annelies’ soul, covered by a thick wall of falsehood in the name of a legend.” Our compassion should be for the real Annelies (her full name) Frank who has been so brutally used and misrepresented to promote a Jewish victim/”Nazi” perpetrator agenda.

The book closes with my Postscript, where, as stated, the five “missing” and two “uncovered” pages bring us up to date on diary developments. Unfortunately, Revisionists can also generate myths to their discredit, and one of these is the “ball-point pen” story. Hopefully I put to rest the claim that the diary is a fraud merely because it was written in ball-point pen, which was not invented until 1950. (Only two attached notes were written in pen, but nothing in the diary text itself.) The Postscript is framed as “Re-Rebutting the Anne Frank House,” which is the lavishly funded and well-organized foundation administering the “hideout” building itself as a museum, curating the diaries themselves (though not all are displayed), and issuing the on-going education about the iconic Jewish victim of “Nazi” tyranny, Anne Frank. I believe that just about the only point on which the Anne Frank House is correct regarding the diary is its position on the ball point pen issue. Everything else is tendentious and misleading propaganda, or outright deception.

In the words of main author Suzuki: “All other textual information, even the testimonies of friends and relations, is too biased and too fraudulent to be believed.” As he carefully demonstrates, there is so little truth to the diary itself that one can hardly accept any of it as valid.

This is one of those books that in parts of a couple sections presents such exhaustive detail as to make reading tedious, while at the same time my fascination with the revelations drew me onward. Suzuki could not completely resist the temptation to depart from a strict scholarly tone and lapse into humor—but neither could Dalton or I. I suppose this has to be accepted in such revisionist material, as we see all over certain “free speech” social media platforms. The lapses are rare and brief however, and the depth and scope of scholarship prevail. If I have any final critique of Unmasking Anne Frank, it is that it treated the perpetrators of the hoax too lightly, failing to express the appropriate loathing and contempt and even criminal accusations they deserve. Suzuki’s compassion is for Annelies, who was so cruelly used by these criminal fraudsters, but he expresses not enough outrage at those who exploited her posterity. We are all victims of the fraud as well.

Unmasking Anne Frank by Ikuo Suzuki, including the excellent Foreword by editor Thomas Dalton and Introduction and Postscript by myself, achieves the difficult task of summarizing and updating previous diary revision, while presenting new crucial insights. The end effect is to drive a dagger of certainty into the bleeding heart of Diary pathos. Suzuki’s detailed biographical analysis of the person he concludes actually wrote the diary—Meyer Levin—is  the climax of a book filled with stunning insights. This book has much to consider for those new to Diary doubt, and much more to ponder for those already familiar with Anne Frank revisionism. Unmasking Anne Frank is, without doubt, the best such revisionist text ever produced; it is not only a great contribution to diary revision, it may be a culmination.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment