Lily Truth - Gorki (66E, 65N)

WNE-Wanderer King: DeadMansLandWalking

2007-12-22T03:30:00.002-08:00

Wild Buffalo CheySun Bulletin
~!~
Pardon Mon-Ami, EaglePkSwan
Parlaz Vouz
'Red Dawn Cattararagus Wings'
~~!~*~!~~

{RedArticWind-DogRoyaleBay}

~ LUCKY HORSE ~ U ~ SHOE ‘J-Nr.’ EWS ~

~~ MY KIEL.LA-DINE DINNER WITH ANDRE ~~

{WAG 3 DOG – ‘WE’ BILLWURTH CAUSE 2 CARE}

With Appreciation from:
~ Lara-Lynn, ConQ’erd, MareMansk ~
To:
~ Trouble – Jaguar Yage – Miguel G-National ~
~ Anderson Cooper - CNN-RT - Planet in Peril ~
~ Prophets ‘Hiroshima’, ‘Nagasaki’ & B.B. Darwin ~

~ Only Accurate Rifles Are Interesting – G.W. Beenis School of Anthropology ~
- Colonel Mike Townsend – Lhaza Tibet Bayonet -

~ Bob put his hand under his jacket and set it on the haft of the .45, because it’s always better to have your gun in your hand than in your pants if it comes to kick-ass time. If he wasn’t shooting or sleeping he was reading Guns & Ammo or Shooting Times or The American Rifleman or Accuracy Shooting or The Shotgun News. ~

~- Colonel William A. Bruce U.S.A (Ret.) -~
President – Chief Operating Officer, Accutech Industries, Inc.
Law Enforcement Technology, Law Enforcement Ammunition
Training Seminars and Firearms Consultation

~ P.R.YDHER - MAYSUN - MI6ZION ~

{Oxford ST-Champ Ruble - God Almonty Stillwell}

{WildcatSnowlyon-RedStarSeal}

THE GHOST OF FREEDOM LOST?
I had a dream the other night I didn't understand. A figure walking through the mist, with flintlock in his hand His clothes were torn and dirty, as he stood there by my bed.

He took off his three-cornered hat, and speaking low he said:

"We fought a revolution to secure our liberty. We wrote the Constitution, as a shield against tyranny. For future generations, the error of the legacy we gave: ‘Democracy’: The Tyranny of Every Ignorant Man and Woman Can Get to Vote, In this, the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

This ‘democratic’ freedom we secured for you, we hoped you'd want to earn to keep. But mindless breeding and ignorant voter tyranny laboured endlessly while you shopped, and your parents were asleep. Your freedom gone-your courage lost-you're no more than a slave; in this, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

You buy permits to travel, and permits to own a gun, Permits to start a business, or to build a place for one. Why is it exactly that no permits are required to breed as many ignorant ‘consumer’ tyrants, as Wall Street’s ‘citizens’ wish? On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent, Although you choose to have no voice in choosing how the money's spent.

Your children attend schools and universities that don't educate. Politicians are required to sell their souls to ignorant and lazy voters, with welfare-state promises, from money ‘we’ imagine grows on liberty trees. As jurors, you wash your hands, as you sit asleep; ignoring jury nullification, while your freedom fighters are slaughtered and crucified, in your name.

You read about the current news in a biased press. You pay a tax you do not owe, to please the I.R.S. Your Money is no longer made of Silver or of Gold, You trade your wealth for paper, so your life can be controlled. You pay for crimes that make our Nation turn from ‘God’ in shame. You've welcomed ‘Satan's’ bar-code number, as you've traded off your name.

You've given government control to those who do you harm, So they can padlock churches, and steal the family farms; And keep our country deep in debt; Harassing your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail.

Your public servants don't uphold a solemn oath they've sworn. Your leaders ship artillery and guns to foreign shores. You ‘citizens’ breed sons and daughters, for cannon-fodder sacrificial slaughter, in wars around the globe, all in your ‘Gods’ name. This burnt-offering sacrificial cannon-fodder slaughter, of the children ‘toys’ bred to assuage patriarchal egos, or as free labour products & old age insurance policies, or perhaps a few as prodigy; but failed to educate and love, we call ‘civilized and humane.’

Can you and I regain the freedom for which our founding father’s fought and died? Or don't you have the courage, or the faith to stand with pride? Are there no more values for which you'll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear and be Wall Street Pharoah’s time-less consumer slaves?

Sons & Daughters of the Republic, arise and take a stand! Defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of our Land. Preserve our Great Republic, learn and teach, each day, Mother Earth’s Prodigal Survival Bill of Rights!

Be a torch of Liberty & Freedom burning bright!"

As I awoke he vanished, in the mist from whence he came. His words ring true, we are not free and have ourselves to blame. For even now as our mindless-breeding tyranny of ignorance tramples each God-Given Right, We sit, watch and tremble...too afraid to stand and fight.

If he stands by your bedside in a dream while you're asleep, And wonders what remains of your Rights he fought to keep. What would be your answer when he called out, Is this still...

THE LAND OF THE FREE & HOME OF THE BRAVE?
~ author anonymous ~
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

~~ Day Before Midnight – A-BlueEye-K -- Point of Impact ~~
Point of Impact
by Stephen Hunter

The Shotgun News
Books & Magazines
ART SCOTT: AMERICAN SHOOTER. The true story of the fabled marksman of the thirties who won the National Thousand Yard Match four times in the thirties and forties and twice more in the fifties with his famous TENTH BLACK KING Model 70 .300 H & H MAGNUM. Complete with pictures drawn from family archives and load data. Postpaid, $49.50, or order from James Thomas Albright, P.O Box 511, Newtsville, N.C. 28777, 704-555-0967; Visa, Mastercard.

If it shot or related to shooting or documented shooting, you could find it in The Shotgun News, the urtext of the subculture.
Dobbler was fascinated. Guns everywhere, of every shape and form and description, for every taste and wallet. They could be so cheap and so expensive, so demure and so awesome, so ridiculous and so sublime.
He wondered about the men who worshiped them with such ardency, whose lives were bounded by their complexities or liberated by their possibilities.
What was there to see in all this?
Well, passion for order for one thing. So much of gun culture was about parts, units, systems, things fitting together. There were whole institutions that existed merely to sell parts of obsolete weapons. So there was a puzzle aspect to it, a sense of bringing order to chaos.
Power? The damned things were so absolute in their meaning that yes, there had to be the lure of power. But beauty also. Some of them, he was stunned to discover, were strangely beautiful. He especially liked one called a Luger and another called a New Frontier single action.
And freedom, or at least the illusion of it, by the narrowest of definitions. To Dobbler, freedom was essentially intellectual, but he supposed that to someone in a more primal world, it was physical – freedom of movement, freedom from harassment, freedom from being messed around with. Outdoor freedom. And a man who holds a gun in his hand must feel it passionately. No government can rule you absolutely. Yours is always the last option.
And masculinity. Nothing soft and feminine about guns: they were too direct, too brutal. The phallic business so provocative to Freudians didn’t seem to him to be very helpful; if these guns were penises, their purchasers were too self-oblivious to know or care.
And then again: data. To him a gun was just a gun, but to some of these people it was obviously an endless font of information – a history, a set of specifications, an involvement with a company, usually a corporate entity, a connection to certain traditions, a whole hierarchy of meanings that yielded yet more meanings and had to be deciphered like some runic code. To shoot wasn’t enough: there was something almost Borgesian about the labyrinths the damned things conjured in the imagination.
The clock ticked away and the pages fled by and after a bit, he ceased looking at the display ads from the gun wholesale places, but instead, fascinated, looked to smaller fry: the columns and columns of classifieds, where more oblique needs were addressed. It was like the New York Review of Books personal ads, only for guns and their affiliated phenomena, not sex.

Remington 25… Pre-64, M70 220 SWIFT… Luger…. Military Rifles of Japan, 1989, Third Edition…. Discount Gun Books: All Shipped Free… Great New Book, Winchester, An American Legend Colt Encyclopedia. Felix Honeycutt, 6731 Pilgrim Way, Palm Frisk Village, FL, 20131
~~*!*~~

“How long has it been?” she said.
Since when? He wondered.
“You don’t even know what it’s called anymore? You know. With a woman. Wo-man. Female.”
“Oh, that? I don’t know.”
“A month? A year? Ten years?”
“Not ten years. More than a year. I’m not sure.”
“You could live without it that easily?”
“I had other things to keep me busy.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He paused, considering it.
“I don’t want the complications. Someone said, ‘Simplify, simplify.’”
“Ann Landers?”
“No,” he said earnestly, “it was some old guy called Thoreau. He went and lived by himself, too, as I understand it. Anyway. I wanted to simplify. No wants, no needs, no hungers. Only rifles. Crazy as hell now that I think of it.”
“So you went off and became Henry Thoreau of Walden, Arkansas?” Julie said.
“I was at my best with a rifle in my hand. I always loved rifles. So I decided to live in such a way that the rifle would be all I needed. And I succeeded.”
“Were you happy up there in your trailer in the mountains without any people?”
“I didn’t know it then. I suppose now that I was. I was raised and then trained not to think a lot about how I feel.”
.!.
“Why is it men like you always have to be so alone? She asked.
“Why do you want to live by yourself and contrive situations under which you can go against everybody to prove how smart and tough and brave you are?”
Bob had no answer.
“You see, you make it so terrible for us,” she said. “For the women. Because normal men want to be like you, they learn about you from movie versions of you, and they try for that same laconic spirit, that Hemingway stoicism. They manufacture themselves in your image but they don’t have the guts or the power to bring it off. So they just exile themselves from us, pretending to be you and to have your power, and we can never reach them. Are you aware that Donny was scared every single day? He was so scared. He was no hero. He was a scared kid, but he believed in you.”
“It doesn’t matter if he was scared. He did his job; that made him a man. That made him as much a man as there is.”
“I’d have a little less man, who is alive now and could sleep with me, and be father to the children I never had…
“It doesn’t make much sense. But I was just taught to hurt no man except the man who hurt me and mine. I have no other star to steer by. That and to do my duty as I understand it. If I followed those two rules, I’d be okay.
It was so quiet you’d have thought it was the last second before a nuclear bomb was to go off, ending life on this earth.
Something came into her eyes and onto her face that he’d never seen before; it was pain.
“And I suppose the joke is, none of us care about that kind of man, the kind that you want to be. What we want is the kind that would stick around and be there the next morning. Mow the grass. Bring home a paycheck. That kind of man. And I see how funny that is now,” she said, her anguish suddenly palpable.
“You come in here, and I care for you, patch you up, and hide your car and get myself so deep into this I can never, ever get out, and never, ever have a normal life… and you don’t care. You have to go off. And be a ‘man’.”
After a time, he said, “I didn’t just come here because I had to. I came because I wanted to. A long time ago in Vietnam when Donny Fenn showed me his young wife’s picture, I had a moment where I hated him for having such a woman waiting for him. A part of me wanted him not to make it, and wanted to have you for me. But that passed when I saw what a damn fine man he was, and how he deserved the very very best. And he had it, I see that now.”
She touched him. A woman hadn’t touched him in years, really TOUCHED him so that he could feel her wanting in it. Maybe no woman had ever touched him like that. It had been many years.
“What do you want from me, Sergeant?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes going back to it hard. Truth is, I never ever stopped thinking about that picture and the fine woman Donny Fenn had waiting for him.”
“That’s why you kept writing?”
“I suppose it is. And you’d just send ‘em back, unopened.”
“I knew if I opened them, I was lost.”
“Are you lost now?”
“No, I don’t suppose so. I know where I’m headed. I can’t stop it. Straight into catastrophe, and I don’t even want to stop it.”
He drew her to him. In the kiss there was an extraordinary sense of release. He felt himself sliding away, down a drain, surrounded by warm, urgent, healing liquids. He thought he’d slide until he died. He was also overwhelmed by smoothness. Everything about her was smooth; she was smooth everywhere, he’d never imagined that a person could be so smooth.
The explosion, so long in coming, seemed to build until it could not be held back, and bucked out of him in a series of emptying spasms. He was falling through floors toward solid earth, each one halting him for just a splinter of a second; and then he fell through to another one, and then another. He fell and fell and fell, stunned at the distance of the fall and how far it took him from himself.
“My God,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
~~*!*~~

In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, or in the mountains or desserts, maybe Arizona or South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” She asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.
“Something from the Marines.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up; maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to. I have to be able to let go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose the edge.”
She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.
“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

{Geronimo Phoenix Green}

ONE River

by Wade Davis

~ Yage is taken often by some, infrequently by others. It is a most violent purge and often acts as a vomitive. Extremely bitter. Some say the after effects are an exhilaration and feeling of ease and well-being; others that it is a day of discomfort and headache. The bark of yage is scrapped off and small pieces are heated in water. The water is drunk. People take it alone or in small groups in houses, often with a sick person who is to be cured.

The curandero takes yage to see the proper herb or herbs the sick man needs. Usually taken alone, but in Puerto limon it is taken sometimes together with the bark of another vine – the chapropanga. It is said to be almost the same leaf, but a harder and stouter vine.

Schultz was not sure what to make of this, but two themes intrigued him. First was the realization that the healer embraced yage as a visionary medium and as a teacher. The plant made the diagnosis. It was a living being, and the Ingano acknowledged its magical resonance, as reflexively as he accepted the axioms of his own science.

Second, at the same time there was evidence here of pure empirical experimentation of a specificity he had never before encountered. If yage alone felt like the slow turning of the sky, the addition of chagropanga caused explosions of passion and dreams that collapsed one into another until finally, in the empty morning, only the birds remained, scarlet and crimson against the rising sun.
Schultz had no interest in measuring the penises, breasts, or skull size of the Kofan. Nor did he want to take their land, profit from their labour, or transform their souls.
He was alone and unarmed. He was a botanist who respected their knowledge of plants and who revered their forest. He described the Kofan leaders as “friendly, helpful, intelligent, trustworthy, and dedicated.”
These leaders are gentlemen, and all that is required to bring out their gentle manliness is reciprocal gentle manliness. Until the unsavoury veneer of western culture surreptitiously introduces the greed, deception and exploitation that so often accompanies the good of ways foreign to these men of the forests, they preserve characteristics that must only be looked upon with envy by modern civilized societies. ~
~~*!*~~

Point of Impact
by Stephen Hunter
~
It was technically the Fourth Battalion (Air-Ranger) of the First Brigade (Air-Ranger) of the elite Acatatl Division – but everybody called it Panther Battalion.
In April of 1991, the unit some 250 men, a tough blooded jungle-warfare-center-trained elite of the Salvadoran Armed Forces, had been pulled from front-line anti-guerilla duty in the mountains for an intensive course in psychological warfare techniques…. Through an elaborate scheme of diverted funds, this RamDyne outfit had gotten the contract. And for a month in an isolated jungle area, RamDyne operatives, veterans of some of the gaudiest special operations in history, had schooled the young Latinos in interrogation techniques, population control, intelligence gathering, ambush and counterambush, sniping and countersniping, a whole crash course in the dirty nitty-gritty of low-intensity warfare.
But there was a weird chemistry loose in that encampment.
“Unconfirmed reports insist,” read the FBI investigation, which was forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee but never put on the record as being too sensitive, “that American trainers exhorted these young soldiers with voodoo rituals, thought-control processes and animal sacrifices that went well beyond the range of normal professional military training.” The honcho appeared to be an ex-Green Beret lieutenant colonel named Raymond Shreck, of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a heavily decorated veteran of Korea…
~~*!*~~

{Miracle-Copper-Buddy~~Rock-Lake-Paw}

..

ONE River
by Wade Davis..
~
The other monolith of note was a six-foot columnar guardian statue, a warrior bearing a club across his chest in one hand and clasping a stone in the other. Above his head loomed a spirit being, protective and domineering. Again in each of the cheeks was a prominent bulge. Though more realistic than the “happy face,” the carving nevertheless shared the essence of the jaguar. The nostrils flared, the eyes glaring.
“It has to be coca,” I said as I ran my hand over the surface of the statue. There was no mistaking the resemblance of the stone cheeks to the face of a modern coquero. We looked around and soon found yet a third monolith with an obvious representation of coca chewing, this time a warrior guardian with a single quid held in the left cheek.
“What you’re looking at is the jungle coming into the mountains,” Tim said,
“the place of fear and the place of healing lifted into the highlands by the imagination of these people.”
“It looks like the whole place is tripping,” I replied foolishly.
“Reichel-Dolmatoff sort of thinks they were,” Tim said, referring to the Colombian anthropologist.
“The jaguar was sent to the world as a test of the will and integrity of the first humans. Like people, it is both good and evil. It can create and it can destroy. The jaguar is the force the shaman must confront. To do that he takes yage. That’s when things get interesting.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“If the shaman can tame the jaguar, the energy may be directed for the good. But if the dark aspect of the wild overcomes, the jaguar is transformed into a devouring monster, the image of our darkest selves. Either way the shaman and the jaguar become one and the same. Reichel-Delmatoff would say that the jaguar spirit must be mastered by everyone if the moral and social order is to be preserved. The wildest of instincts, like the impulses of the natural world, must be curbed if any society is to survive. That may be what these stones are all about.”
“You mean in guarding the dead, the statues reveal what it means to be alive?”
“Right. They also show the consequences of failure.”
We continued to wander over the site and came upon a large trough-shaped sarcophagus carved in stone. Beside it was a short but dramatic statue. The figure held a trophy skull in its hands and had a ferocious expression that suggested it had most definitely enjoyed ripping the head from the torso of its enemy.
“Whoever lived here didn’t have a lot of time or patience for compromise,” Tim said.
“They knew what they believed, and they knew it was true because the plant revealed it to them. That’s the key. And I think that’s what Burroughs came looking for; that’s what he wanted to find. Conviction. But he thought it would somehow be pleasant, like another kick.”
“You mean taking yage.”
“Yeah. Yage is many things, but pleasant isn’t one of them.”
~!~

Point of IMpact
by Stephen Hunter
~
In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, or in the mountains or desserts, maybe Arizona or South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” She asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.
“Something from the Marines.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up; maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to. I have to be able to get go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose the edge.”
She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.
“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”

~~~~~~~ *!!* ~~~~~~~

[1]
{Sean ST Cloud}
{PrinceCheyCrater--WolfCrossing}
~
It was November, cold and wet in west Arkansas, a miserable dawn following on a miserable night. Sleet whistled through the pines and collected on the humps of stone that jutted out of the earth; low overhead, angry clouds hurtled by. Now and then the wind would rush through the canyons between the trees and blow the sleet like gunsmoke. It was the day before hunting season.
Bob Lee Swagger had placed himself just off the last climb that led up to Hard Bargain Valley, that flat splurge of tabletop high in the Ouachitas, and he sat in perfect silence and perfect stillness against an old pin, the rifle across his knees. This was Bob’s first gift: the gift of stillness. He acquired it naturally, without instruction, from some inner pool where stress never reached. Back in ‘Nam he was something of a legend for the nearly animallike way he could will his body reactions down, stiller than death.
The cold had fought through his wool leggings and up and under his down vest and begun to climb up his spine, like a sly little mouse. He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to let them chatter. Now and then his hip throbbed from a wound from long ago. He instructed his brain to ignore the phantom ache. He was beyond will. He was in some other place.
He was earning Tim…
You see, he’d tell you, if you were one of the two or three men in the world he talked to – old Sam Vincent, say, the ex-Polk County prosecutor, or maybe Doc LeMieux, the dentist, or Vernon Tell, the sheriff – you can’t just shoot an animal. Shootings the easy part. Any city dick can sit in a stand, drink hot coffee and wait till some doe goes prancing by, close enough to touch, and then put out the muzzle of his Warl-Mart rifle and squeeze-jerk the trigger and blow a quart of her guts out and find her three counties away, bled out, her eyes still somehow beaming dumb pain.
You earned your shot, Bob would tell you, by letting whatever was happening to the animal happen to you and for however long. Fair was fair, after all.
…
Tim was TOUGH, Bob knew, and that was the kindest word he had for anybody, living or dead.
Bob was in his seventeenth hour of sitting. He had sat all night in the cold; and when, about four, sleet had started, he still sat. He was so cold and wet he was hardly alive, and now and again a picture of another time would come up before his eyes but always, he’d shake it out, keeping himself set on what lay ahead 150 yards.
Come on, you old bastard, he was thinking, I’m earning you.
Then he saw something. But it was only a doe and her fawn and in their lazy, confident, stupid animal way they came down the trail from the hill and began to move on down to graze in the lower forest, where some lucky city fool would certainly kill them.
Bob just sat there, next to his tree.
~~*!*~~

[2]
{Shibumy Buddy Cloud}
~
Dr. Dobbler swallowed, trying to read the mystery in Colonel Shreck’s eyes. But as always, Shreck sat there with a fierce scowl masking his blunt features, radiating power and impatience and somehow scaring everybody in the room. Shreck was scary. He was the scariest man Dobbler had ever known, scarier even than Russel Isandhlwana, the dope dealer who had raped Dobbler in the showers of Norfolk State Penitentiary in Massachusetts and made the doctor his punk for a very, very long three months.
The planners of RamDyne Security sat in front of the darkened room; the brutish Jack Payne, the second scariest man in the world, sat across the table; and that was all, such a tiny team for the immense and melancholy task that lay ahead of them.
On a small screen, four faces had been projected, now glowing in the dark. Each represented a hundred other possibilities; these men had been discovered by Research, investigated at length by Plans, watched by the pros from Operations, and then winnowed to this sullen quartet. It was Dobbler’s job to break them down psychologically for Colonel Raymond Shreck’s final decision.
Each of the final four had a flaw, of course. Dr. Dobbler pointed these out. He was, after all, still a psychiatrist, if now uncertified. Flaws were his profession.
“Too narcisstic,” he said of one. “He spends too much on his hair. Never trust a man in a seventy-five dollar haircut. He expects to be treated special. We need somebody who is special but has never been treated special.
As for Number 2, “Too smart. Brilliant, tactically brilliant. But always playing the games. Always thinking ahead. Never at rest.”
Of the third, “Wonderfully stupid. But slow. Exactly what we need so far as certain qualities are required, and experienced in the technical area. Obedient as a dog. But slow. “Too slow, too literal, too eager to please. Too rigid.”
Jack Payne was a dour, nasty-looking little man, tattooed and remote, with blank, tiny eyes in his meaty face. He was enormously strong, with a pain threshold that was off the charts. His specialty was getting things done, no matter what.
“The details are impressive,” Dobbler was saying. “He killed eighty-seven men. That is, eighty-seven men stalked and taken under the most ferocious conditions. I think we’d all have to agree that’s impressive.”
There was a pause.
“I killed eighty-seven men in an afternoon,” Jack said.
Jack had been stuck in a long siege at an A-team camp in the southern highlands, and in the last days the gooks had thrown human wave attacks at them.
Dobbler was trembling, Jack could see. He still trembled when the colonel addressed him directly sometimes. Jack almost laughed. He smelled fear on the psychiatrist. He loved the odour of other men’s fear.
But Dobbler pressed ahead. “This is none other than Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, USMC, retired, of Blue Eye, Arkansas. They called him ‘Bob the Nailer’. He was the United States Marine Corps’s second leading individual killer in Vietnam. Gentlemen, I give you the great American sniper.”

~~*!*~~
[3]
{Dillon ST Kivo}

..
On the screen, the four faces vanished; and then Bob’s young face suddenly appeared.
“He’s twenty-six, on his third tour of Vietnam,” said Dr. Dobbler.

“It’s June tenth, 1972. He’s just officially killed his thirty-ninth and fortieth men, though unofficially the total is far higher.”
The slide showed a raw young face, lean and sullen. The eyes were slits, the skin tight, the mouth a hyphen; there was something somehow Southern in the bone structure. He looked mean, too, and very competent, without a lick of humour, with no patience for outsiders, with a willingness to fight anyone who pushed him too far. A boonie hat was pressed back on his head, revealing a thatch of crewcut. He wore rumpled utilities with globe and anchor inscribed on the pocket, and trapped proudly in the joint of his left arm so that it lay along the length of his forearm and was cupped in his hand at the trigger guard and comb was a black, heavy-barrelled rifle with a long telescopic sight.
Dobbler looked at the boy on the screen: it was the same expressionless face you saw on the white-trash tough guys, the human tattoo museums and born-to-kill bikers and assault-with-intent pros who did their time in the joint as easily as a vacation, whereas he himself had nearly died from it. That was the first shock of a cultured man: that in such savagery, some people not only survived but actually thrived.
“Please note, it’s not Robert Lee Swagger, his father named him Bob Lee – he gets quite angry when people call him Robert. And he likes to be called ‘Bob’, not Bob Lee. He’s very proud of his father, although he must only vaguely remember him. Earl Swagger won the Congressional Medal of Honour on Iwo Jima in World War Two and was an Arkansas state trooper, killed in the line of duty in 1955, when Bob was nine. The boy’s mother returned from Little Rock to the family farm outside Blue Eye, in Polk County, in western Arkansas, where she and her mother and Bob managed a threadbare existence.
“Bob is, in many ways, a child of the embarrassing Second Amendment, and he fits the profile of other great American gun heroes – both Alvin York and Audie Murphy come to mind.
“In 1964, having graduated from high school where he got – this is perhaps not as amazing as it seems – excellent grades, Bob turned down a college scholarship and instead joined the United States Marines, just in time for the Vietnam War.
“He did a tour in 1966 as an infantry lance corporal and was wounded twice; he did one in 1968, during Tet, as a recon patrol leader, doing a lot of dangerous work up near the DMZ. In 1971, at Camp Perry, Ohio, Bob Lee was the national-thousand yard century rifle champion. It got him noticed. He returned to Vietnam in late 1971 to the Scout-Sniper platoon, Headquarters Company, Twenty-Sixth Regiment, First Marine Division, operating outside Da Nang.”
He clicked a button.
The tele-screen displayed a business card with a neat block of print under the silhouette of a telescopic rifle.
It said:
WE DEAL IN LEAD, FRIEND.
~~SCOUT-SNIPER PLATOON ~~
~ HEADQUARTERS COMPANY ~
~ FIRST MARENES ~

“The line was stolen from Steve McQueen in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. It was his platoon’s calling card, part of the First Marine’s Psywar operations in its region, left in prominent places in the area where Bob and his men were operating, usually in the left hand of corpses dropped by a single bullet in the chest. Scout-Sniper of the First was the most proficient unit of professional killers this country had ever sponsored, at least on an individual basis. In the six years it operated, it is said to have killed over one thousand seven hundred fifty enemy soldiers. Itself, it only counted forty-six men in its ranks over those years. A sergeant named Karl Hitchcock, with ninety-three confirmed kills, was highest; Bob, five years later, was second, with his eighty-seven; but there were several other snipers in the sixties and more than a dozen in the fifties.
“As for Bob, I’ll only sketch the high points. He evidently did a few jobs for the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, liquidating hardcore infrastructure people, Vietcong tax collectors and regional chieftans and the like. So he is not unfamiliar with the operations of professional intelligence agencies. But his common targets were rank-and-file North Vietnamese regulars operating in the area. They even had a huge reward out for Bob, over fifty thousand piasters. But most astonishingly, he and his best friend and spotter, a lance corporal named Donny Fenn, once ambushed a North Vietnamese battalion which was rushing toward an isolated Special Forces camp. The weather was bad, and the jungle was triple canopy, so air support or evacuation was impossible. It was out of range of artillery. A thousand men, heading toward twelve on a hilltop. But Bob and his spotter were the only other friendly forces in the area. They tracked the North Vietnamese, and began taking out officers one at a time over a forty-eight-hour stretch in the An Loc Valley. The battalion never reached the Green Berets, and Swagger and his spotter made it out three days later. He killed over thirty men in that two-day adventure.
Even Payne, who tried never to be impressed, had to suck in some air.
“Cocksucker can shoot a little,” he said
~~*!*~~

WNW-Wanderer King: DeadMansLandWalking

2007-12-22T03:30:00.001-08:00

{ClearwaterShadow-BlackSnakeBay}

[4]
{Tiger Lily Serge}

“You could say, I suppose, that Bob Lee Swagger gave everything to his country, and in return, it took everything from him. His heroism was of a sort that makes many Americans uneasy. He wasn’t an inspiring leader, he didn’t save lives, he didn’t rise in the chain of command. He was simply and explicitly an extraordinary killer. Almost certainly for that reason, he never got the medals and acclaim he deserved.
“He lives in a trailer, alone, in the Ouachita Mountains, a few miles outside of Blue Eye, subsisting on his Marine disability pay, and what’s left of the thirty thousand dollars his pal, an old country lawyer named Sam Vincent, won for him in a lawsuit against Mercenary magazine in 1986. Alone, that is, except for his guns, of which he has dozens. And which he shoots everyday, as if they are his only friends.
“You can see, of course, his ready fund of resentment, his sense of isolation. All these things make him vulnerable and malleable,” said the doctor. “He’s the man we’ve been taught to hate. He’s the solitary American gunn’y nut.”
…
“Wait a minute,” said Payne.
Dobbler swallowed. In the dark Payne looked over at him with a pathological glare. Everybody was afraid of Payne except Schreck.
“Colonel, I been around a lot of guys like that in the service, and so have you,” he said to Shreck. “Proud to say, I served with them in my twenty-two years in the Special Forces. Now, when it’s killing time, there ain’t no better boy than your white country Southerner. Those boys can shoot, and they got stones the size of cars. But they got an attitude problem, too. They got this thing about their honour. Cross one of them boys, and they make it their business to even the score, and I ain’t shitting you. I’ve seen it happen in service too fuckin many times to talk about it.”
“Go on, Payne,” said the colonel.
“They’re true men, and when they get something in their heads, they won’t let go of it. I saw enough of it in Vietnam. I’m just telling you, cross this man and I’m guaranfuckinteeing you the worst kind of trouble.”
“I think,” said the doctor in a loud voice, “that Mr. Payne has made an excellent point. It would not do at all to underestimate Bob Lee Swagger. And he is especially right when he notes Bob’s ‘honour.’ But surely you can also see that it’s his honour that makes him so potentially valuable to us. He is in fact quite a bit like the precision rifle with which he earned his nickname – extremely dangerous if used sloppily, yet absolutely perfect if used well. He, after all, knows more about what we are interested in than nearly any man alive. He is simply the best snip’er in the Western world.”
“But there is a problem. Bob the Nailer, as perfect as he seems, does present one terrible, terrible problem. He has a deep flaw.”
“His flaw,” said the doctor, “is that he will not kill anymore. He still hunts. He goes to great lengths and puts himself through extraordinary ordeals to fire at trophy animals. But he hits them with his own extremely light bullets machined of Derlin plastic at a hundred yards’ range. If he hits the creatures right and he always does – he aims for the shoulder above the spine – he can literally stun them off their feet for five or six minutes. There’s a small compartment of red aluminium dust for weight in each bullet, and as the bullet smashes against the flank of the beast, it smears the animal with a red stain, which the rain quickly washes off. Extraordinary. Then he saws their antl’ers off. So that no hunter will shoot them for a trophy. He hates trophy hunting. After all, he’s been a trophy.”
Colonel Shreck spoke.
“All right, then. It’s Swagger. But we’ll have to find a trophy this asshole will hunt,” he said.
…
Bob had no real need or urge to leave his mountain, he hadn’t been down in five years.
“You’d get respect and appreciation.”
Bob made a sour bitter look. He’d believe it when he saw it. But he knew he couldn’t stay up here forever. He looked at the rifle cartridge. He was curious. Goddamned thing looked like it would shoot the tits off a mother flea, but there was only proof in the shooting, not in the looking. But he heard it singing to him in a strange way. Poked. He was poked in the head. Hadn’t been poked in the head since he’d given up the drinking.
.!.
“Then that’s all there is to it,” said Bob. “Now I have to feed my dam’ dog.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[5]
{Sir Cossack Igor}

He was all right, too, until the last night. He knew he had to get up early for the drive to Little Rock and just when he’d thought he had everything checked out and was ready for the sack, it came over him. That’s the way it came: fast, without preparation, without announcement. It just came and there it was.
It was a bad one. He hadn’t had it so bad since the president declared the little war in the desert a victory, and America went on a bender and everybody was happy except himself and maybe another million boys who wondered why nobody put up ribbons for them twenty years ago, when it might have mattered.
Now you got to hold it down, he told himself, aching for the glass of smooth brown whiskey to flatten himself out, knowing that if he had one many more would follow.
But there was no whiskey, nothing to blunt what happened in his mind. The memories hit him hard. He remembered the VC he shot who turned out to be an eight-year-old boy with a hoe – it had looked like an AK through the 9X at eight hundred meters in the bad light of sunset. He remembered the smell of burned villages after the Search and Destroys, and the crying of the women and the way the goddamned kids just looked at you during his first tour. He remembered the bellytime, moving through the high grass, avoiding the crest lines, as the ants crawled over you and the snakes slithered by and you just lay there, waiting, for days sometimes, until someone passed into the kill zone eight hundred meters out and you could put them down. He remembered the way they fell when hit, instant rag doll, the toppling surrender, the small cloud of dust it raised. So many of them. The “confirmed” kills were only the ones with a spotter there, to write it in the log and make a report.
You could never forget stuff like that, not really. But he learned somehow not to let it rag him most of the time; he could ride it out in the mountains or in the solitude.
He could feel what he called his own personal night passing over him. Of course the time of day had nothing to do with it. What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good. In other days, this was what got Bob off on his drinking, and drunk, he turned mean as shit.
But now he didn’t drink, and instead he threw on his coat and went out into the harsh Arkansas night and walked the mile or so downhill. Inside Aurora Baptist, some kind of service was going on. He heard the black people singing something loud and crazy. What are they so goddamned happy for inside that shaky little white clapboard building anyhow?
Out beyond the church was the little graveyard, and there among the Washingtons and the Lincolns and the Delanos of Polk County was a spindly marker for a man named Bo Stark. Bob just looked at it. The wind howled and roared through the trees, the moon was a raggedy-assed streetlamp, the music pumped and blasted, the black people were singing up a storm, beating the devil down.
Bo Stark was his own age, and the only white man in the cemetery because no other cemetery would have him. They’d gone to the same dentist, the same doctor, played in the same football team. But Bo’s people had money; he’d gone on to the university of Fayetteville and from there had joined the Army and spent a year as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, another fool for duty who’d believed in it all. And after that, nothing. Bo Stark had gone a man and come home a no-account. The war got inside him and never let him go. One bad thing turned to another; couldn’t hold down a job, wouldn’t pay back loans, was searching for the death he’d only just missed in the Land of Bad Things. Two weeks after the war in the desert was over, after the mighty victory and the celebration, one Sunday night he’d finally killed a man in a bar with a knife in Little Rock and when the police found him in his daddy’s garage in Blue Eye, he’d blown a .45 through the roof of his mouth.
So Bob stood there as the wind brought cold memories from the cold ground out at him, and looked at the marker: BO STARK, it said, 1946-1991. AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY.
He came here when he was frightened, because in the radiance of the glowing church, standing over the body of the man who could have been and was almost him, he could see it in the stone: BOB LEE SWAGGER, 1946-1992, USMC SEMPER FIDELIS.
Now he looked at it, and realized it was time to do that which could kill him fastest of all possible dangers: to go back. He wondered if he had the Pure-D stones for it.
.!.
“Earth to Planet, Doctor!” It was the horrid Payne.
Oh yes, he was holding forth on Bob’s unique capacity for utter near-death stillness, explaining to Payne’s perplexed listeners why it was that Bob, though in his room from five-thirty p.m. on the previous evening, had simply ceased to exist for their listening devices. He was trying to get them to see how important this was, for it got to the very nature of Swagger’s uniqueness.
“Ah—yes, he has an ability to shut down and let the world go about its business while he’s frozen; and then when he’s become a part of the environment, then and only then, will he strike. But like any skill, it’s a skill that simply has to be practiced. He was practicing nothingness.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

[6]
{Zhivago’s Gale Clover}

“All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”
Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after the other with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his ray-ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.
Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.
He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.
Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at point-blank range.
He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.
“X-RING, Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”
Bob fired four more times into the same hole.
“I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.
…
“You’re paying the bills. Let’s get cloverleaf shooting,” Bob said.
…
It was fine ammo. Only fifty to sixty men in the world could handload ammo that fine, Frank Barnes maybe, a couple of the sublime technicians at speer or Hornady or Sierra, a few wildcatters of a dying breed, old gnarled men who’d lived with guns in machine shops their whole lives. A few world-class benchrest shooters who aged in the 1’s. A few Delta or FBI SWAT armorers. Whoever put this stuff together knew what he was doing. Bob had an image in his head of some old man who’d done it a million times, working the brass down to the finest, smallest perfection. It took more than patience; it took a kind of genius. He felt him. He felt him on the range: the presence of an old shooter who knew what he was doing.
Bob knew then. He’d suspected before but now he knew. They were playing him, guiding him; they weren’t what they said. Then who were they?
Bob smiled… He was damned curious where all this was headed. He knew in a general sense, of course, what it had to be. It had to do about killing.
His reputation had preceded him. People in certain zones knew of him. Occasionally something weird would comes his way – a nibble, a veiled hint, just the slightest indication that some really nice money could be his if he’d only meet so-and-so in St. Louis or Memphis or Texarkana and listen to a certain proposal. These offers came from strange sources, over the years. Some were from organized crime, others intelligence sources – Bob, after all, had done two jobs against civilian targets in the ‘Nam, when ordered to in writing by higher headquarters. Still other approaches were simply well-off men with pathological inclinations who wished to use him, in some way, to solve a business problem, to right a wrong, to avenge an infidelity.
No, Bob always explained. It was against the law.
Go away, please.
Most of them did. Though occasionally, one didn’t; there was one breed of hater it took special effort to drive away – those who knew that the country was entirely theirs, and that all good things would flow if others were removed. Of course what they meant, usually, was the black people. Bob had served with too many fine black NCO’s in the ‘Nam to listen to this kind of shit, and though he had more or less given up on violence, he had broken the nose of a fellow from some outfit calling itself the White Order. The man had said through blood and anger they’d put Bob on The List too, and Bob had grabbed the man and thrust the blunt muzzle of his Colt Government Model down his throat and explained simply, “Mister, if you can’t do your own killing, you don’t scare me worth a drink of spit!” The man had pissed in his pants and disappeared off Bob’s mountain but fast.
But now – these others, this damn Colonel Bruce with his medal and his little bird dog Payne. Rich enough to buy this whole spread, bring him way out here, have someone make up these excellent cartridges. Who were they? Who was worth killing to go to this much trouble?
Agency.
He could smell it all over them. This was how the Agency worked, at odd angles, never quite out in the open, bringing you halfway in so that by the time you figured out what was what it took more effort to get out than to stay.
Agency wants me hunting again.
But who?
Bob thought and thought on it in the little restaurant, his head and hip aching, and got nowhere and only after many hours did he notice the place was about to close, and the waco waitress was making hungry eyes at him. He’d have no part of that, no thank you. No women, no liquor, never again. Only rifles and duty.
But what was duty?
Who was worth hunting?
Bob got in his car and drove back; he slept dreamlessly, still setting course by a single star: nothing is worth killing.
He’d tell them tomorrow after hearing them out. He would not kill again.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

[7]
{Zhen Elefente Keyes}

“I’ll take another shot,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky again.”
“This one is straight up your alley. It’s pure sniper war. This one is based on an incident that took place outside Medellin, in Colombia, in 1988. It’s highly classified to I’ve got to ask you never to disclose specifics to anybody. Fair enough?”
“I’m just here to shoot, not talk.”
“As I explained it to you, I think you’ll understand the need for delicacy in the matter. It involves a DEA agent who took a fourteen-hundred-yard shot at a drug dealer who was responsible for the murder of a DEA team. The guy had fantastic security, bunches of Colombians packing a lot of automatic heat. And the word was out, if anybody tried to take the guy down, the Colombians would just start blasting. So, reluctantly and unofficially, DEA decided to take the guy out with a minimum of fuss. Highly illegal, but it was felt a message had to be sent to certain parties in Colombia.”
“So, it was a straight hit?” Bob asked.
“Yes. Your kind of work. No hostages, nothing. Just a man and a rifle and a hell of a long shot.”
“You’re not making any fourteen-hundred-yarder with a .308 H & H Magnum, with a Sierra 200-grain slug. Here, here’s the rifle. The same one.”
He nodded, and one of the technicians brought a rifle case over and opened it. Bob only saw a rifle.
But what a rifle.
“Goddamn,” he said almost involuntarily, “that’s a honey of a piece. Damn!”
It was a bolt-action Model 70 target, pre-’64, with a fat bull barrel and a Unertl 36X scope running nearly along its entire barrel length. It’s dark gleam blazed out at him in that high sheen that was now a lost art but had reached it’s highest pitch in the great American gunmaking days of the 1920s and ‘30s. It was almost pristine, too, clean and crisp, well tended, much loved and trusted. But it was the wood that really hit him. The wood, in that slightly thicker pre-’64 configuration, was almost black; he’d never seen a walnut with such blackness to it; but it wasn’t like black plastic for it had the warm gleam of the organic to it. Black wood?
That’s a hell of a rifle,” he said. He bent quickly to look at the serial number: my God, it was a one followed by five beautiful goose eggs! 100000. The hundred-thousandth 70! That made it infinitely desirable to a collector and marked it as having been made around 1950.
“From a Winchester plant in 1948. The metal was heat-treated at higher temperatures to give it the strength to stand up to a thousand-yard cartridge.”
“Okay, let’s give it a whirl. You have the ammo?”
Hatcher handed over a box of Accutech Sniper Grade .300 H & H Magnum.
LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY, it said in RED LETTERS.
Bob opened the box, took out one of the long .300 H & H’s: it was like a small Ballistic missile in his hand, close to four inches of shell and powder and bullet, heavy as an ostrich’s egg.
“It’s a thumper. We’re kicking it out off 70 grains of H4831 and our own 200-grain bullet boattail hollowpoint. About three thousand feet per second.”
Bob thought numbers and came up with a 198-inch drop at a thousand yards; figure maybe 355 for fourteen hundred yards.
Bob took the rifle. His first love had been a Model 70, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, and he now owned several, including that recalcitrant .270 that had consumed him before coming up to Maryland, and whose problems he hadn’t quite mastered. So the rifle was like an old friend.
“Where can I take it to zero?”
“Uh, it’s zeroed. One of our technicians has worked it out to the yard. It’ll shoot to point of aim at the proper range.
“Hold on, there, sir. I don’t like to shoot for money with a rifle that I haven’t tested.”
“Ah, I can assure you that –“
“You can’t assure me of a thing if I haven’t done it myself.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~
[8]
{SSD Bayonet Lynn}

The colonel had attitude, that was for certain.
Not a twitch of regret touched his tough face, not a shred of self-doubt. What he got from Bob – furious rectitude, and the concealed threat of violence – he paid back in spades.
“All right, Swagger,” he said. “You’ve seen through us. What do you expect, congratulations? You were supposed to. It’s time to put the cards on the table.”
“They say you don’t trophy-hunt anymore, Swagger. I want to let you know that there are still trophys worth hunting.”
The colonel glared at Bob. “What is your name, sir?” said Bob.
“It isn’t William Bruce,” said the Colonel. “Though there is a Colonel William Bruce and he did win the Congressional and he was supervisor of the Arizona State Police. A fine man. I am not a fine man. I’m a man who gets things done and I usually don’t have the time to be anything except an asshole, and this is one of those times.”
“I don’t like being lied to. You’d best come clean, or I’m on my way out of here.”
“You’ll sit there until I say so,” said the Colonel, fixing those hard, level eyes on him, asserting the weight of rank.
It was a sense of command that he’d seen in some of the best officers, the men who pushed the hardest. It wasn’t inspirational, except by deflection; it was instead a gathering of will, a fury to win or die. It was a gift, too, and without it in battle an army was lost. But Bob had seen its ugliness too – that rigidity that could conceive of no other way but its own, that willingness to spend other men’s lives that came from holding one’s own cheaply but the mission dearly. This guy stunk of duty, and that’s what made him so fucking dangerous.
“We’re after a man,” the colonel said. “He’s a very special man, a very sly man. We think we’re going to get a shot at him. We’re after the Soviet sniper…
..
It was amazing, Dr. Dobbler was thinking. His self-control was astonishing. No gasp, no double take, as if it didn’t matter. Swagger simply took it in, and went on, his concentration unmodified, his glare unblinking. No signs of excitation as were common to the species in moments of conflict. No rapid breathing, no facial coloration, no lip-licking, muscular tension. No excitation! No wonder he had been such an extraordinary soldier in battle.
..
“Here he is, Mr. Swagger,” said the Colonel.
Bob looked at the face that the colonel had brought to the tele-screen with the snap of a remote control. He tried to see some special thing there, something that said shooter, something that said sniper. What he saw was a lean hard face, a face that had no nonsense in it. The eyes were slotted and dark, like gun slits; the cheekbones were streamlined knobs; the hair a tight military sheen. There was a streak of the Orient in him in the slight flare of his cheekbones – he looked like a Mongol.
“Solaratov, T. We think that’s his name. But nobody knows what the T stands for.
Bob just grunted.
“T. Solaratov, as photographed from quite a distance away by an agent code-named Flowerpot, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1988. Our last picture of him, and our best. He’s fifty-four years old, in peak condition. Runs twelve miles a day. He was in Afghanistan advising Spetsnaz units on sniper deployment. He’s an expert on sniper deployment; he’s hunted men all over the world. Whenever the Soviets needed a shot to be taken, he took it for them. How many men have you killed, Sergeant?”
Bob hated this question. It was nobody’s business; it didn’t matter.
“We figure Comrade T. Solaratov has sent over three hundred fifty suckers on to a better world. Head shots, mostly, his trademark. No pussy center-of-body shit for this boy.
Bob grunted. That was serious shooting.
“All right, Swagger, here’s what we’ve been able to turn up on the guy. T. Solatov, according to an Israeli team that went after the fucker and almost nailed him when he was instructing Fatah in sniper techniques in the camps of the Bekka Valley in the mid-seventies – our best source of information on him, I might add, and a damned shame for all of us that as close as they got, they weren’t able, quiet to get their man…. By 1960 – after certain exploits in the Congo – he had obtained a commission and been selected out of the Soviet Naval Marines for an even higher elite, the Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces.
“He was spotted in July. Guess where?”
“I don’t like games, mister.”
“Downtown Baghdad, in the presence of a General Khalil al-Wazir, who is head of Al Mukharabat, the Iraqi secret police…
“Now can you solve the puzzle, Swagger. These photos. Solaratov in Iraq. Do you see it yet, Swagger?”
“Sure,” said Bob. “They’re prepping a shot. Those are buildings and streets. He’ll have handled the range and angle solutions already. It’ll be familiar to him.”
“We should have come to you in the beginning. It took a young man in the Agency, a photo analyst, weeks to come up with the same answer, and those are lost weeks. But he finally had the bright idea of coding the grids of buildings to streets by angle with the help of a computer and having the computer run a check on those same streets and angles. Swagger, it’s the Inner Harbour from the U.S.F&G Building in Baltimore, it’s the back porch of the White House from a roof at Justice Department – the Justice Department! – and it’s Downing and Huguenot streets in North Cincinnati, and finally it’s North Rampart and St. Ann in New Orleans.”
“All right,” said Bob. “So it is.”
“Sergeant, those places have one thing in common. They are the sites of speeches to be given over the next several weeks by the president of the United States.”

~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

[9]
{Pink Peasant’s Wizzard}
Peking & Moscow
by Klaus Mehnert

The result of the June 30, 1953 census, announced the following year, had two conflicting effects on the Chinese Communists. On the one hand, proof that they ruled over by far the largest country in the world (in terms of population) filled them with pride; on the other, they now realized for the first time the full extent of the task confronting them. Their attitude was complicated by the thesis hitherto proclaimed by all Communists, and especially the Russians, that a strong population increase posed a problem only for the decadent West, and none for the Communist countries and that therefore any measures to promote birth control were to be severely condemned. It seems that in Peking opinions differed: side by side with enthusiastic comments on the high population figures were demands for the enlightenment of the population concerning contraceptive methods.
The wave of propaganda started in full force on ‘Women’s Day’ (March 8), 1957. When I arrived in China shortly afterwards it was still at it’s peak. There were sixty birth control clinics in the capital alone. But the new trend was short-lived. In line with the Great Leap announced in May 1958, Liu Shao-ch’I proclaimed: “The more people there are to put wood on the fire, the higher the flames leap.” And in September 1960 Choe En-lai declared in an interview that birth control methods were being taught in China ‘to protect the health of mothers and provide favourable conditions for bringing up children, not because of so-called ‘population pressure.’”
.!.
A distorted picture also emerges from the simple statement that an overpopulated China borders on an unpopulated Siberia. According to the latest census figures, those in 1953, in the NE, N & NW border areas of China, there were an average of 24.3 people per square mile. In the corresponding areas of the Soviet Union (1959), there were 9.6 people per square mile.
.!.
No exact figures are available on the opening up of virgin territory within China since 1949. It did not begin on a large scale until after Krushchev’s virgin land campaign of 1954. The Chinese made extensive use of the slogans heard in the Soviet Union, as, for example, this appeal ‘To youth on it’s march to virgin land!’:
“You will transform deserts into a paradise… Birds and animals live there, why not people too? Difficulties only overwhelm people who are unable to withstand hardship: difficulties are afraid of warriors who can withstand hardship. You are an army of steel making an attack on Nature.”
.!.
However, even if Peking should one day decide that it absolutely must have additional arable land, this does not mean that it would necessarily look toward the Arctic Circle rather than the equator. There are the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra, Australia and New Zealand, where many millions of thrifty settlers could be placed, according to some estimates more than 300 million. This would mean war – but does not this also apply to an expansion to the north? Hence for Peking it would be a political decision, certainly not one determined by the laws of nature, whether, if war is inevitable, China should ‘explode’ into the near-by but hard and inhospitable north in a struggle against the Soviet Union, or whether it would not be more profitable to wage war against the Western powers and seize the distant but immensely fertile southern regions. In any case, China has plenty of time to make up its mind.
No doubt Moscow is concerned over the Chinese population trend: while Peking was computing the results of the 1953 census, Khruschev was preparing a population offensive toward Soviet Asia. In February 1954 he launched his virgin land program.
An appeal was made above all to the patriotism and idealism of the younger generation, and eulogies of heroic young people who settle in Siberia as farm-hands or industrial workers occupy a good deal of space in the officially inspired products of Soviet literature. In Kruschev’s speeches the theme of population policy is particularly audible, for example in phrases such as these: ‘Comrades, I was recently in the Far East [of the Soviet Union]… It is an immensely rich land, but there are too few people there; it must be opened up and appropriated … In the East we must appropriate the empty spaces more quickly and settle in them permanently… We must root the people there firmly… that’s the main thing!
Among the Russian people’ themselves the constant appeal for the settlement of the East is definitely regarded as being connected with neighbouring China. On a train journey through Manchuria I was standing by the window next to a Russian. We both looked at the crowded streets of a little town through which the train was passing. The Russian, who was going home after some years spent as a technical adviser in China, said, half to himself and half to me (whom he probably took for a Soviet colleague): ‘The Chinese are really multiplying like rabbits. It’s not for nothing that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev has said we have to populate Siberia.”
.!.
I was also in Burma at the same time as Khruschev. His reception there was cool, at times unfriendly. The Burmese saw themselves as exposed to Chinese frontier demands, and this had influenced their attitude toward the Communist world as a whole. Khruschev went to Burma – as to India – uninvited. The Burmese extended the minimum hospitality required by courtesy. It must have been the most unenthusiastic reception Khurschev has ever encountered on all his travels: a few hundred Communists and Communist-sympathisers at the airport, a scattering of people along the road to the city, hardly any flags, no one – apart from a few government officials – to see him off at the airport, no farewell speeches, and an icy atmosphere in the press. The Rangoon Guardian wrote that four wicked capitalists were not as bad as one Communist; and it’s competitor, the Nation headed its editorial with the words: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR, and called Khurschev a heavy-drinking politician whose appearance one felt like calling out, as at the approach of invading soldiers, Hide the silver and the girls!
Khurschev himself was also regarded more critically by the Indians than during his first visit; half-amused, half-indignant, they shook their heads when they heard that, after a performance by an interpreter of religious dances who was revered throughout India, Khruschev had asked her how much she was paid.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

[10]
{Cead Mile Failte}

That Others May Live:

Inside the Worlds Most Perfect Storm Rescue Force
by Senior Master Sergeant Jack Brahm and Pete Nelson

THE JOB
Johnny Got His Gun, is a book about this soldier who wakes up in a hospital and realizes he doesn’t have any arms or legs, and he can’t smell or taste or see or hear, and somehow he even realizes he doesn’t have a face, and then he remembers that he was in a battle, and now he’s in a hospital, but he doesn’t know if it’s an American hospital or an enemy hospital. After a full year of mental anguish, he finds a nurse who knows Morse code, so he taps out an SOS message in Morse code with his head, and a nurse responds by tapping in Morse code on his forehead, “What do you want?” at which point, his mind just explodes. Something like that.

CHERRY MISSIONS
There was a PJ stationed out in the Pacific Northwest who got handed the worst nickname. It wasn’t his fault in any way, but for the first seven or eight missions he went on, either they got there too late or the injuries he treated were too severe and the victims died, so guys started calling him “The Bagger.” All he did was put people in body bags. Of course, you learn that you can’t save everybody, that you have to accept the fact that your training and your abilities have limitations, and that death is part of the job. Sometimes you develop a dark sense of humour as a coping mechanism, maybe the way doctors or morticians can have dark senses of humour. Still, you really ache to have a good first mission, partly because you’ve been preparing for it for so long that you blow it out of proportion. You want to get off on the right foot. At any rate, you don’t want people calling you “The Bagger.” In the rescue business, that’s a nickname you hope doesn’t stick.

KRYPTONITE
AR: Air Refueling
BDU: Battle Dress Uniform
CARP: Controlled Aerial Release Point, a parachute tactic usually performed at altitudes at or below 800 feet, a way of putting men on the ground in the shortest amount of time.
CISD: Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, a counselling tool usually used to help emergency relief personnel cope with job-related stress.
COULOIR: A mountain ravine or gorge
DECADRON: A synthetic adrenocortical steroid used to reduce swelling in the case of high altitude cerebral edema.
DIAMOX: A carbonic anydrase inhibitor that promotes diuresis and controls fluid secretions.
DROGUE: The basket on the end of the hose that is extended by a midair refuelling tanker, the female receptacle into which the receiving aircraft’s probe is inserted to on-load fuel.
DUCK BUTT: Slang for a mission in which rescue personnel are assigned to escort another aircraft.
HYPERGOLIC: Refers to volatile gases that mix in open air and can spontaneously explode.
JDAM: Joint Direct Attack Munitions or ‘smart bombs’
JSTARS Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System
KINGBIRD OL-J Operation Location J – the site, at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas where the pararescue indoctrination school is located. Also called Indoc, Ingsoc or Superman School.
PENETRATOR: A forest penetrator, designed to penetrate the canopy in the jungles of Vietnam, a milk can-shaped device that can be lowered via a hoist from a helicopter, used to extract survivors.
SARSAT: Search and Rescue Satellite, a satellite operated jointly by the United States, Canada, and Russia that picks up EPIRBs and ELTs.
SIE aka SEE: Self-Initiated Elimination
STARS The Air Force’s demonstration parachute team, called Special Tactics and Rescue Specialists.
TDY: Temporary Duty, a tour of duty, often abroad, lasting anywhere from a day to six months.
WRW Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a short-circuiting of the hearts electrical system, in which an extra electrical pathway develops between the atria and the ventricles, causing extra contractions that speed the heart rate.
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

[11]
{Flanagan VII “Pro”}

The Feather Men
by Ranulph Fiennes

Over a period of fourteen years, from 1977 until 1990, a group of hired killers known as the Clinic tracked down and killed four former British soldiers, one at a time. Two of the victims were ex-SAS. All four had fought in the Arabian Desert. Throughout those fourteen years the Feather Men hunted the Clinic and were never far behind. Eventually, in the autumn of 1990, the Feather Men achieved a form of justice.

The Feather Men are a part of our society. This, the first revelation of their existence, will not be officially welcomed by the Establishment, although an Establishment figure – named in this book – is at the helm of the organisation.

It may be that in a democracy where the taxpayers do not want an all-powerful invasive police force, there is a need for private groupings like the Feather Men. Some readers will be thankful that the Feather Men exist. Others will not. It is a shocking and intriguing true adventure with, at its heart, a moral conundrum of importance to us all.
~~*!*~~
I am not that feather to shake off
My friend, when he must need me.
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
~~*!*~~
‘Do you realize this thing has been going on for nearly ten years and we’re still none the wiser as to the motives of the opposition.’
Mason stubbed out his cigar, ignoring the glare of the elderly waitress, who instantly removed the evil-smelling ashtray. ‘You say ten years, Darrell, but we don’t know what we were in at the beginning. Milling may not have been their first target. Nor do we have any idea how many people they are after.’
‘Why do you give up valuable time for Spike?’
Mason smiled. ‘I like the man. I believe there is a need for us. We harm nobody but characters who would, without us, continue to harm others. What about you?
“I’m Welsh,’ Hallet mused. ‘I like to see fair play and, in this particular case, the boyo you followed to Muscat once gave me a very stiff neck.’
‘Charles Bronson and his Death Wish films have done us no big favour,’ said Mason. ‘No member of the public would be seen dead condoning vigilantism and that is how our activities, if revealed, might be classified. The silent majority might approve but most would never admit it. Just listen to the shrill squeals directed at the very idea of Guardian Angels on the London Underground. Everyone knows there are not enough Transport Police to protect the passengers yet few approve of the thought of red-bereted patrols.’
‘I can think of nobody,’ Hallet interrupted, ‘who would not support the Angels when saved from yobbos or rapists on a dark and lonely Tube platform.’
‘Too right,’ said Mason, ‘but the fools who denounce our existence do not stop to think of the lives we have saved and the fears we have eased.’
‘Ah well, said Hallett, paying the bill. ‘I am proud to have worked with Spike and you and the others. To hell with the righteous bloody Pharisees. My conscience is clear and that’s what I have to live with.’
‘Are you happy with everything?’ Mason asked, handing Hallett the receiver.
Hallett smiled. ‘If they show their faces, they’ll regret it.’
~~*!*~~
‘But Inspector Milling clearly states that he did not kill my brother Salim. He even tells you that the officer responsible for the ambush openly admitted his role in a book.’
‘That is true,’ de Villiers agreed, ‘but I have experienced such flights of the imagination from condemned men on other occasions. It is not uncommon. If Milling had really known of such a book, he would certainly have known its title and the name of it’s author. He would have revealed both key points then and there. Surely you can see that?’
‘You assume that he had no honour.’ Bakhait gave a small smile.
‘I look at this man Milling’s face and I see a strong personality. A soldier who would not have another man killed to save his own neck.’
‘With all due respect,’ said de Villiers, ‘I cannot agree with you. We are talking of a European, not a Muslim.’
‘I am not European but, yes, I have over the years noted a different set of priorities between the true followers of Islam and the majority of Western Christians.’
~~*!*~~
The Anglo-Arab stallion was Anne Fontaine’s favourite horse. Four evenings a week she rode around the estate and, in fine weather, further afield through the Tokai pinewoods and the gum groves of Platteklip. These outings were her only pleasure. She rode bareback, the better to savour the power of the horse.
Sometimes, and despite her surroundings, Anne wished that she had never been born. She craved children yet could have none; the doctors did not know why. She yearned for love and there was only jealousy. She craved sexual satisfaction but her natural sensuality was denied outside marriage because of the stern moral code of her formative years. Only once had she known a man with whom her loins could have run wild and Luther be damned.
Within the cold walls of her marriage there had been a great deal of sex, all quick and mechanical. The remaining mystery was how disgust had not driven her permanently frigid.
A crescent moon edges into view about the distant silver grove and Anne murmured to the Anglo-Arab, pressing her thighs inward and gently shortening the rein. She would cool the stallion by walking the last mile of vineyard.
The stallion snorted, nosing the air, and Anne clearly saw the figure of a man on the sandy track to the house.
The man had stopped, statue-like, when he heard her approach, but only when she had thankfully passed him did she hear him call her name. She had heard that voice so many times in her dreams. Was it possible or was this the ghostly robber, come down from his legendary lair in the foothills?
Few words were spoken. Time ceased to exist. They were back in the forest clearing of ten years earlier. The stallion grazed beside the track and the world was far away.
Their bodies moved as one in the moonshadows of a bamboo island. As wild as animals, as gentle as hedonists, as abandoned as their instincts dictated. Each had long nurtured fantasies of this act – the one through many killings, the other through a thousand hot nights of hopelessness.
For three wonderful weeks they met in the evenings: out of sight of prying eyes, for there is no gossip machine, no jungle-drums telegraph system, half so efficient as the Cape grapevine of un-conscious pret’enders
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

{Hawkisle Irish Whisper}

White Sun, Red Star
by Robert Elegant

Here follows a brief explanation of the chief forces in the troubled China during the first half of the twentieth century.
Confucianism then dominated the behaviour and the thinking of almost all Chinese. That conservative political and moral code had been developed from the teachings of the Sage Confucius who lived in the sixth century B.C. It fostered authoritarian control within the home, as well as the nation, and it militated against change.
Warlords were ambitious generals who fought each other for power over China after the Nationalist Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Confucian Manchu Dynasty. Warlord rule was usually rapacious, inefficient, and cruel.
The National People’s Party of Dr. Sun Yat-sen struggled to sweep away the warlords and to create a unified, independent, and powerful Republic of China. Dr Sun’s policies were initially inspired by his Christian faith and his belief in modified socialism, both acquired abroad.
Strong foreign influence throughout China was exerted from treaty ports like Shanghai, where the outsiders governed themselves under their own laws, having exacted the concession of such extra-territorial rights from the Chinese by force. The foreigners were chiefly interested in fat profits and the soft life – for themselves, not necessarily for the Chinese. Some idealists – and some missionaries – supported Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalists, but many foreigners wanted the lucrative disorder to continue.
Foreign ideals like democracy, science, feminism, individual liberty and universal equality, however, inspired the students at China’s new universities and colleges. They exercised political influence wholly disproportionate to their numbers because of inherent Chinese reverence for learning, another legacy of Confucius (The common people treasured even scraps of paper bearing the intricate Chinese characteristics, called ideograms because each expresses one idea.) Therefore the natural leaders of the nation, the young intellectuals played the decisive role in its transformation.

Valour of Ignorance
By Homer Lea

“To free a nation from error is to enlighten the individual, and only to the degree that the individual will be receptive of truth can a nation be free from that vanity which ends with national ruin”
~ Homer Lea ~

It was a melancholy, stifling night, but in the bright dry room, one talked, as every visitor in Manila did in those days, lightly enough of the possibility of a Japanese invasion of the Phillipines.
“If it comes, where will they strike first?” I asked.
Colonel Charles Willoughby drew a deft map of Luzon on the Major’s tablecloth. “The main attacks will probably come here, at Lingayen Gulf,” he said, making an arrow, “and then here – at Polillo Bight. Ye old pincer movement.”
“You’re not giving away military secrets?”
The officers all laughed. Colonel Willoughby pocketed his pencil. “No,” he said. “Just quoting military gospel – according to Homer Lea.”
“Who is Homer Lea?”
“Tell you a funny story,” the Colonel said. “When I first came out here, about a year ago, some nimble wit in Military Intelligence had just hauled in a ‘spy.’ Young college-bred Filipino. Seems he had written a letter to a pal, complete with rough maps, analyzing the Jap plans for invading Luzon.
The pal turned it over to G-2, who had the boy on the mat. His maps, and his analysis corresponded rather too well with the Department’s. The terrified kid swore he’d gotten the whole thing right out of an old book he’d taken out of the library. ‘Son, have you by any chance been reading Homer Lea?’ I asked. When he produced the library card which showed he had, we let him go… You see,” the Colonel said, “thirty-five years ago, a strange young man who called himself ‘General’ Homer Lea, wrote a book about a war to come between America and Japan. In it he described, in minutest details the Jap campaigns against the Phillipines, Hawaii, Alaska and California.”
“A sort of American Nostradamus?”
The Colonel said, “Not at all. Homer Lea was neither a mystic nor a prophet. He was a scientist. He studied the science of war – the fundamental laws of which are as immutable as those of any other science. He also sought to analyze the causes of war and diagnose the symptoms of an approaching conflict. And, having proven, at least to his own satisfaction, that great causes of war existed between the U.S. and Japan, that the symptoms of the approaching conflict were apparent to all but fools or wishful-thinkers, he proceeded to set forth the tactical course that war would take.”
The Major said, “I read him at West Point. Damned convincing militarily – if you accepted his political premise – that our democracy wouldn’t get ready in time to lick the Japs.”
“Is America ready?” the Colonel asked of nobody in particular.
“From which dismal question,” I said, “am I to assume that you, like Homer Lea, doubt for a moment we could lick the Japs, even if they attacked tomorrow?”
The Colonel said, “Don’t jump to conclusions. First, Lea wrote over thirty years ago. Since then, there have been revolutionary changes, not in the science, but in the instruments of warfare. Second, like all scientist, he did not make enough allowance for that forever inexact science: the science of the human soul. There are two things – and only two things – having to do with the defense of these Islands which Lea did not, could not, foresee. One was the courage and genius of a man called MacArthur. The other was a machine called the airplane. If these omissions are decisive factors – Lea’s analysis, that these Islands cannot be held will be proven wrong.”
“Are they decisive factors?”
“Well, I hope to God they are!” the Major said fervently.
“Amen,” said Colonel Willoughby. “But in any case, next month, when you get home – brush up on the General.”
~!~
Writing eight years before the outbreak of World War I, twenty-nine years before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, thirty-three years before the outbreak of World War II, Homer Lea states, as militarily axiomatic, that all these dire events – including the surprise attack on Hawaii – would be in time and space, inevitable. Why? Because:

“No state is ever destroyed except through those avertable conditions that mankind dreads to contemplate. Yet nations prefer to perish rather than to master the single lesson taught by the washing away of those that have gone before them. In their indifference, and in the valour of ignorance, they depart, together with their monuments and their constitutions…”
That single lesson is vigilance, the eternal price of liberty.
…
The Valour of Ignorance is charged with the bitterest apoghems ever penned against Isolationism and Pacifism. It explodes with florid and savage indictments of the smugness and conceit that lead fat rich contented nations to disarm while encouraging tough frugal hungry nations to attack them. Like a battle drum it beats the need of militant patriotism in times of peace – so that times of war may be avoided. Like the blast of a reveille bugle, it seeks to shatter “our mock heroism of dreams,” and our “valour of the rostrum.”
~!~
The Day of the Saxon, the second book by Lea, is equally prophetic – and equally gloomy. Published in 1912, its thesis is also stark and simple: The British Empire (the Kingdom of the Saxon) shows certain specific military defects which leave it vulnerable to German aggression. Lea predicted that if the British Empire continued to rely solely on commercialism and sea power, if it could not, in short, quickly form a lasting military alliance with a great friendly land army power – it was doomed by the ever resurgent armies of Germany. But nowhere on the teeming greedy earth, except in the Western hemisphere, where America alone among all the great powers neither feared Great Britain, nor desired what was hers, could Homer Lea, in 1912, find for the Empire a “great land army” ally. And despairful that the United States would ever see – in time – “that the Brittish Navy” – not the Monroe Doctrine is this Republic’s true protection,” he foretold that “the day of the Saxon” was drawing to a close, and that on a hundred fields of battle – in Belguim, France, Holland, Russia and Egypt, the day of the Teuton was dawning. And, bitterest prophecy of all: Great Britain at long last, exhausted by her perhaps “victorious” Germanic wars, would then lose her Empire to Japan and Russia.
~!~
I sought Who’s Who for 1912, the year his last book was published. He was there:
“Lea, Homer, author, souldier, b. Denver, Nov 17, 1876…”
And with this as a clue, to other clues, in old newspaper files… It is the story of the Valour of Homer Lea.
~!~
In the early days of the Civil War, Alfred Erskine Lea, fourteen year old son of a Tennessee doctor, living in Missouri, had made his way alone, through the bloody border states, in a mule-drawn covered wagon to the West. In Colorado, Alfred Lea mined at Cripple Creek, prospered mildly, married Hersa Coberly who bore him a son, Homer, and two daughters, and finally moved to Los Angeles.
There Homer attended a public high school for two years, where he was a “brilliant though erratic student.”
Homer wanted to be a soldier. And it was so very plain he could never be. He was a hunchback child, and after he was twelve years old and five feet tall, he never grew. As he approached boyhood a curvature of the spine grew more pronounced until it earned him the unhappy nickname of “Little Scrunch-neck,” among his classmates. But “Little Scrunch-neck,” nothing daunted resolutely played soldier. Two childhood friends, the late Harry Carr of the Los Angeles Times and Marco Newmark, recalled that after hours “he drilled the kids with broomsticks and laid out campaigns in his backyard.” His sister once wrote a friend that on Fourths of July Homer wasn’t content just to set off firecrackers like other brothers; he insisted on staging manoeuvres on the lawn, using the firecrackers as artillery to blast h is little sisters out of the “untenable positions” he had entrenched them in behind trees and bushes. Why his sisters and his schoolmates meekly took orders from the frail hunchback, whose manner was always gentle and whose voice was always soft, they could never quiet explain. Years later, a Chinese who had been with him on the field of battle said, “He had eyes that could bury you nine feet under the ground, if you disobeyed him.”
Homer spouted the campaigns of Ceasar, Hannibal, Alexander, Turenne and Napoleon, which he knew far better than they knew their football and baseball scores. To this, he added another idiosyncrasy: a tendency to talk Chinese; which he picked up from the family cook, a pigtailed Chinaman. Carr said that Homer once confided to him that his interest in China was the result of a strange set of dreams, in which at last in a blare of Chinese trumpets, he saw himself revealed as the reincarnation of a great historic Chinese warrior called “The Martial Monk,” marching at the head of his army to defend China. The true dreams of a small sick body, or the “daydreams” of a sensitive boy who felt his physical inferiority keenly, or simply the imaginative reflection of the interest all political-minded Californians had in the “Chinese problem” in those days, the fact remains that by the time Lea entered Leland Stanford in 1895, to study law, his main preoccupations were all things military and all things Chinese.
Although still popular, as cripples are always “popular,” most of his college classmates thought him a full-fledged “nut.”
~!~
The creation of a great strong democratic China – was more important to him than all the British Empire, for with uncanny vision, with a strategic insight that verged on mysticism, Lea knew that his America would need an Asiatic ally in it’s inevitable war against Japan.
At a presidential reception he congratulated the President, and is supposed to have uttered a strange word of warning, in which he paraphrased in his own written words:
“Now China,” he said, “is like a Republic. America, too is a Republic. Your Republic, like ours, can only be preserved in its beauty and freedom by vigilant swords… China’s enemies now are its historic pacifism (apathy) and political corruption… and Japan. We have the same three enemies… I can do nothing for either of our two great countries. I am a dying man. I have warned America in my books. I now warn you, in words… Free China will yet perish unless there rises from your innermost bosom the militant spirit of another Martial Monk. If he does not come, Republic or no, the hour for this ancient kingdom has come…”
~!~
Civilisation has not changed human nature. The nature of man makes war inevitable. Armed strife will not disappear from the earth until after human nature changes.
~!~
High or low, the ambitions of the heterogeneous masses that now riot and revel within the confines of this Republic only regard it in a parasitical sense, as a land to batten on and grow big in, whose resources are not to be developed and conserved for the furtherance of the Republic’s greatness, but only to satisfy the larval greed of those who subsist upon it’s fatness.
If there is any patriotism worth having it belongs alone to the primitive principles of the Republic, to the militant patriotism of those who in simple, persistent valour laid with their swords the foundation of this national edifice and who after seven years of labour cemented with their own blood the thirteen blocks of its foundation. The continuation of this building, and the endless extension of the Republic, the maintenance of its ideals and the consummation, in a world-wide sense, of the aspirations of its founders, constitutes the only pure patriotism to which an American can lay claim or, in defence of, lay down his life.
Warfare, either ancient or modern, has never been nor will ever be mechanical. There is no such possibility as the combat of instruments. It is the soldier that brings about victory or defeat. The knowledge of commanders and the involuntary comprehension and obedience to orders is what determines the issue of battles. An army controlled by more than one mind is as many times useless as are numbered the minds that direct it. But what mankind does not take cognisance of is that, in the alteration of modes of combat by mechanical and scientific inventions, there must be a psychological readjustment of the militant spirit of the combatants. As the instruments of warfare become more intricate, the discipline and esprit de corps must be increased accordingly. Because of this fact volunteer forces become more and more useless as the science of warfare progresses.
~!~
An army possesses a heart and brain as does every other living organism. This heart and brain of an army is made up of the officers composing it, while the soul of it is the spirit that inspires them. The worth of an army must be measured primarily by the character of his soul. In volunteer armies it is little more than embryonic, and in its absence armies are but mobs. It is immaterial how numerous they may be, how vast their armament, or how perfect their utensils of war, these things shall avail them not at all.
The creation of this martial soul necessitates year after year that callouses not alone the hands, but also the weakness inherent in man and wrings sweat from his heart. In the lessons of these years they learn that in warfare a relentless absorption of individuality must supervene, an annihilation of all personality. Only then can they reach that pinnacle of human greatness, to seek glory in death.
~!~
It is through empirical knowledge alone that man is able to ascertain what laws do or do not regulate his activities. Inventors do not invent; they only apply in a new manner laws and forces that have existed from the beginning of time. Chemists do not create; they only make known the presence of elements and conditions existent already in nature. Thus it is that sophists and theorists and all that category have not left to mankind, throughout the ages of the human race, one single substantial legacy, and for no other reason than that they try to invent out of airy nothings that which the laws and forces governing the world deny; or labour to create, out of nebulosity of their own sick brains, elements unknown to nature.
As far as the world is concerned they might as well be a louse on the back of a wild duck as it wings its way through the stormy night.

It is in relationship to these forces that govern the formation, duration, and dissolution of political entities, that International Arbitration and Disarmament are to be considered. Not that they themselves are worth even a passing word, but for the fact of the mischief that their illusive ideas are capable of bringing about, especially in this Republic, where education is so prevalent, while knowledge and capacity to discern between what is true and what is superficial is proportionally absent.

No people are so visionary and none hang more persistently onto the coat-tails of false gods as those who have enough education to read by not enough learning to be able to distinguish between what is false and what is true.
It is on account of the prevalency of this smattering of education that every ism has its followers, every form of religious dementia its sanctuary and apostles, every visionary his devotees; and it matters in no way from what depths of absurdity they may come up, they have their adherents.

Usually these delusions are harmful only to the individual, and as such are not worthy of concern, but when the hallucination is apt to become so widespread as to affect the welfare of the nation, then it is time to point out the mockery of their hopes and the quicksands into which their aspirations have led them.
In this class of visionaries we place International Arbitrationists and Disarmamentists, who are so persistently striving through subservient politicians, through feminism, clericalism, sophism and other such toilers to drag this already much deluded Republic into that Brobdingnagian swamp from whose deadly gases there is no escape.
The idea of International Arbitration as a substitute for natural laws that govern the existence of political entities arises not only from a denial of their fiats and an ignorance of their application, but from a total misconception of war, its causes and its meaning.
The source or origin of war must always be searched for, not in disputes between states, but deep down in the bowels of one or all of them. There alone will be heard those bruised noises, political, industrial or revolutionary, sooner or later to end in that eruption of mankind called – war. Disputes or disagreements between nations, instead of being a source or cause of war, are nothing more nor less than the first manifestations of approaching combat, or are the preliminaries thereto. To remove them by arbitration, or any other means, is at best but procrastination.
Investigation shows that whenever two nations have become engaged in warfare they have been advancing on converging lines of self-interest and aggrandizement. When the contact takes place, the struggle for supremacy, or even survival is at hand. This inevitable hour is approximately fixed and determined by the angles of convergence plus the sum of the relative speed by which the nations are moving along their respective lines. Thus it is that, when the angle of convergence of both or even one of the nations is acute and the speed or progress along one or both of the converging lines correspondingly great, war results in a few years or decades.
~~!*!~~
The morality of any nation whose people have electoral rights is no greater than the morality of its people. No republic can be free from any of the motives, passions, ambitions, hate or delinquencies to which the majority of its people are subject.

Whenever the time comes that nations are not obliged to enforce their own laws with a power superior to that of individuals and communities, then and then only can they hope to substitute International Arbitration for the power of armies. But from whence and when will that devoutly wished-for day come wherein states may discard the use of power in enforcing justice and in exacting obedience to their laws?
When will that Golden Age be ushered in upon this unhappy earth, and arbitration between individuals substituted for law and dynamic force in which it originates and ends? When will laws made by man for the government of man, together with his courts, his penal institutions, be put aside and voluntary arbitration between man and man take their place?
Only when arbitration is able to unravel the tangled skein of crime and hypocrisy among individuals can it be extended to communities and nations. As nations are only man in the aggregate, they are the aggregate of his crimes and deception and depravity, and so long as these constitute the basis of individual impulse, so long will they control the acts of nations.
~!~
The suddenness with which the precipitating causes of war break upon public consciousness almost invariably hides the true reasons – in all probability extant many years prior – that tend to bring on the conflict; hence it happens – as is the case with this Republic – that nations go rushing blindly along acutely converging lines to that point of contact – which is war.

Whenever a nation fails or scorns to differentiate between the sources and causes of war, it enters into the conflict unprepared. But those nations whose affairs of state are carried on by men fully cognisant of the difference between the trivial and the immutable are not only always prepared for battle, but they determine the time and place of the conflict; which, more often than otherwise, is an assurance of success.

~!~ ~!~ ~!~ * ~!~ ~!~ ~!~

{Andre Lugovoi, NKVD, KGB}

The Right Man
An Inside Account of the Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
by David Frum

Chapter 5: Like a Fox

Bush meanwhile had the power to grant Fox the thing Mexicans crave most: respect in the United States. Each time Bush rolled out the red carpet for Fox and treated him like the leader of a great power, every time Bush praised Fox’s democratic reforms and promised the full cooperation of the United States, he strengthened Fox against the machine hacks and hard leftists who still controlled Mexico’s federal Congress and most of it incorrigible bureaucracy. The two presidents covered each other’s backs like two soldiers working their way up a dangerous street.
U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have always selected Canada as the destination of their first foreign trip. Bush broke that custom and travelled instead to Fox’s ranch. Fox and Bush saw each other again in Quebec City in April at the Summit of the Americas. Fox returned to Washington in May, toured the American Midwest in July, and paid a formal state visit with his new wife and much of his cabinet in the first week of September 2001.
Bush never wearied of wooing Hispanic voters with gestures of welcome and friendship: Spanish words in speeches, appointments of Spanish-surnamed officials, support for social services for legal immigrants, and the deployment of his Spanish speaking nephew, George P. Bush. But Bush knew that Cinco de Mayo proclamations are not the stuff of enduring political coalitions. He would take the Republican Party where he knew the Democrats could not follow. He would reinvent the GOP as the party that advocated an ever closer relationship between Mexico and the United States – and that won Mexican American votes by delivering prosperity to people of Mexican ancestry on both sides of the border.
He envisioned a border open to labour, a border open to trade, and a border open to investment – especially investment in energy. Mexico had banned foreign investment in its energy industry in 1938, and ever since, Mexican oil production has been controlled by the creaky, corrupt, and polluting state monopoly, Pemex. As a result, even though Mexico’s oil reserves are already known to be larger than those of the United States, Mexico provided less than 7 percent of America’s 3.3 billion barrels of imports in the year 2000, one-seventh as much as OPEC’s Arab members. If Mexico opened itself to the exploration and development of its oil resources by American entrepreneurs and technology, Mexican oil might possibly displace Arab oil from the U.S. market altogether. The United States would never be self-sufficient in oil again, but North America could be – a message that runs through the Cheney energy plan like a leitmotif through a Wagnerian opera.
For this energy “quid,” Mexico would of course demand some equally valuable “quo” – and in Bush’s mind that “quo” was immigration reform. Bush believed that immigration was valuable to the United States and praised it again and again in his public speeches and his private conversation. But if immigration was valuable to the United States, it was indispensable to Mexico. If all those eager young people who slipped across the border to earn dollars for their families were locked inside Mexico, the country would explode. Even after the economic reforms of the 1990’s, Mexico would be burdened with more workers than it could employ for years to come.
So the Bush administration went to work to design some kind of system for regularizing the Mexican American labour relationship – not an amnesty like that of 1986, which simply invited a whole new generation of illegals to try their luck, but some grander system for enabling Mexicans to work in the United States temporarily and then to go home again. Regularisation would help both economies. It would protect the United States from developing a submerged caste of workers without legal rights. And it would show Mexican American voters that President Bush wanted to help not only them, but also cousin Frederico who still toiled in Guanajuato and dreamed of working for two years in Chicago to earn the $15,000 it would cost to buy the gas station on Avenida Diaz.
As like-minded as Bush and Fox were, they envisioned very different futures for the continent. Bush saw Mexico evolving into a sunnier, spicier Canada – a country that retained its separate and distinct political system, even as it gradually merged seamlessly into the American economic system. Fox, on the other hand, imagined a much more political integration: a North America that looked like the European Union. Visiting Chicago in July, Fox proposed that Mexicans illegally present in the United States be allowed driver’s licenses, access to American colleges and universities, and the right to vote by absentee ballot in Mexican elections. Bush believed that everybody who lived for any length of time in the United States had to become an American like everybody else. Fox dreamed of a future in which millions of people of Mexican ancestry lived in the United States and somehow identified with both Mexico and the United States at once.
These differences were not merely theoretical. They stymied negotiations all through 2001 and embittered Fox’s state visit in September. Fox stepped out of his helicopter on the South Lawn on the morning of September 5, walked to the microphone, and without preliminaries assigned Bush a deadline for meeting his demands. “We must, and we can, reach an agreement on migration before the end of this very year.”
Visitors do not usually talk in such a peremptory way to the president of the United States, especially not when they are standing on his lawn and getting ready to walk into his home. The objectionable tone of Fox’s opening comments foreshadowed the entire disastrous visit. At the staff and cabinet meetings, Mexicans made blunt demands on their American counterparts for concessions on immigration, while refusing even to discuss the opening of their energy market.
I still remember that last week. The weather was hauntingly beautiful, a perfect Washington late summer. Mexican flags were bunched alongside the Stars and Stripes on the lampposts of West Executive and Pennsylvania Avenues. Dazzling boughs of flowers filled the White House. All was lovely – except for the grim-faced aides who stomped up and down the big staircases of the Executive Office Building, muttering about the instransigence of their Mexican counterparts. But in the photographs of the event that lined the halls of the West Wing for a week afterward, I could see Bush and Fox and the two First Ladies toasting one another jovially on the Truman balcony – and it occurred to me that the mutual exasperation of the two delegations was not the only reality of the week. Bush and Fox were of course not friends. They may have become fond of each other, even enjoyed each other’s company, but two men with such large and often contradictory responsibilities can never truly be friends.
~!~
But they were perhaps something more: collaborators in one of the greatest works of imagination ever essayed on this continent. That work might be obscured by events to come, but its day would return. And if Bush sometimes blanked out on the details of Article 114.3(e)ii of the North American Free Trade Agreement, well, something has to be forgiven to the artistic temperament.
~!~
Even Bush’s sternest critics were prepared to concede that he handled the relationship with Fox well. But Mexico, they complained, was too easy a test. The commanding Fox had made Bush look good. Set Bush a tougher challenge, and he was sure to fail. Bush’s June meeting with Vladimir Putin in Slovenia seemed at the time to prove those critics right. The American and Russian leaders met in a baroque castle for two hours of face-to-face conversations, and their press conference afterward was instantly filed alongside the Hiller interview in the “Bush is a dunce” dossier.
“I looked the man in the eye,” Bush said of Putin. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
His soul? Putin was a former KGB man who, according to some in U.S. intelligence, had helped the spy agency hide billions of dollars of assets before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin had pressured Yeltsin into appointing him vice president, most likely by threatening to publicize the graft and corruption of Yeltsin’s family and friends. Yeltsin had then resigned six months before the scheduled election, enabling Putin to run for the Presidency backed by all the sinister advantages of Russian incumbency. Putin had used an extremely peculiar series of bombings in Moscow to justify a war in Chechnya. He had laid flowers on the grave of Yuri Andropov, former KGB chief, former Communist Party general secretary, and the Soviet ambassador who urged the invasion of Hungary in 1956. Since taking office, Putin had stealthily moved to close or take control of every independent media source in Russia. Most ominous of all, Russian companies were selling nuclear technology to Iran – and Putin either could not or would not halt them. Had Bush known any of this when he pronounced Putin “straightforward” and “trustworthy”?
The Washington Post, a newspaper not reflexively hostile to the administration, complained that the president sounded “naïve”. The liberal New Republic complained, “Gush, gush, gush: Bush has mistaken big power summits for daytime television.” The popular television pundit Chris Mathews commented sarcastically in his newspaper column, “Such powers of observation deserve our attention. George Reeves, the first Superman, could see whether a bad guy was hiding a gun under his coat. George W. Bush can see clear into a Russian ex-spymaster’s ‘soul’.” Senator Joseph Lieberman complimented the president with heavy irony on his ability to gain such insights in two hours of conversation.
That hurt. And it did not help that Bush – stung by the criticism – gave an interview to Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal and proceeded to expand at some length on what a fine job he had done in Slovenia. “I think Ronald Reagan would have been proud of how I conducted myself. I went to Europe as a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground.”
For two months after the Slovenia summit, Bush’s most ardent supporters and even his staff tacitly accepted the media’s hostile verdict. Putin the ex-KGB man, the leader of a has-been country with an economy the size of the Netherlands, had been lavished with presidential praise in return for nothing at all that anybody could see. Bush’s inexperience must have finally caught up with him.
Or had it? Bush told Noonan that he and Putin had identified one common supreme security interest: Islamic fundamentalism. And he described how he had given Putin a short introduction to the Bush preference for imagination over memory. Putin had told Bush that he loved to read history. Bush replied: “I do, too, I like history a lot… You know, sometimes when you study history, you get stuck in the past.” I said, “President Putin, you and I have a chance to make history. The reason one should love history is to determine how to make good history. And this meeting could be the beginning of making some fabulous history. We’re young. Why do you want to stay stuck?’”
~!~
Sixty days later, America was at war. And at the head of the queue to help was… Vladimir Putin. Putin ordered up an increase in Russian oil production to help calm world markets. He kept his nuclear force on standby even as America went to the highest standard of alert – an act of trust in the United States that would once have been unthinkable for a Russian leader. Even when U.S. forces entered the territory of the former Soviet Union itself, in Uzbekistan and other newly independent states, Putin uttered not one word of protest. Bush had given Putin words of praise. Putin repaid him with coin more solid than words.
~!~
In Bush’s first six months in office, he had executed the most ambitious reorientation of America’s grand strategy since Nixon’s time – away from China and toward Russia. He might be a little hazy about the details. But more than either of his immediate predecessors, he dared to discard obsolete ideas and habits and adapt himself to new times and new circumstances. And if Charles Darwin is to be believed, isn’t adaptability the highest function and ultimate purpose of human intelligence?
“Bush isn’t very smart – he just gets good advice.” How often did we hear people say that in the first year, as if it were obvious which advice was good and which was not? Presidents are inundated by advice, and the very worst of it often sounds as beguiling and plausible as the very best. A president who consistently recognizes and heeds good advice will make good decisions. And about a president who consistently makes good decisions we can say: He’s smart enough.
Bush was not a lightweight. He was, rather, a very unfamiliar type of heavyweight. Words often failed him, his memory sometimes betrayed him, but his vision was large and clear.

And when he perceived new possibilities, he had the courage to act on them – a much less common virtue in politics than one might suppose.
On a visit to Crawford Elementary School later that summer, one of the students asked him whether he found it hard to make decisions.
His answer described the workings of his mind with more candour – and less false modesty – than he usually allowed himself.
“Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people who are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult. But I find that I know who I am. I know what I believe in, and I know where I want to lead the country. And most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.
“I realize sometimes people don’t like the decisions. That’s okay. I’ve never been one to try to please everybody all the time. I just do what I think is right. The good thing about democracy, if people like the decisions you make, they let you stay. If they don’t, they’ll send me back to Crawford. Isn’t all that bad a deal, by the way.”

~!~!~!~ ** ~!~!~!~

ENW-Wanderer King: DeadMansLandWalking

2007-12-22T03:30:00.000-08:00

{BlackPipeMtnDovePk-KingsCasperCheFt}

{Sun Slamdunk Tzu}

~ Demockery ~
A slick form of oligarchy government by a small group or class

Excuse Me, Mr. President: The Message of the Broken Eagle
by Rick Paul Springer

Chapter 3: The Hundredth Monkey

The Movement… A Joke from Childhood?
The honky guvmint official showed up on the res, claiming that the tribe had to move again. Coal or oil or uranium had been discovered and the Big Father in Washington needed it.
The chief of the tribe, Chief Bowels, listened to the official but was not impressed. Unfortunately the official got confused when Chief Bowels answered simply, “Bowels No Move.”
Uncle Sam’s man ran off to get a doctor thinking he had to solve the Chief’s problem, constipation, before he could convince him to move. The doctor gave him his standard laxative but three days later the Chief still insisted, “Bowels No Move.”
The doctor got more serious and moved from Ex-lax to the industrial strength Milk of Magnesia. The official got worried when that didn’t work and Bowels still wouldn’t move. Finally they administered the hospital brand. The following day they arrived to check on the Chief and asked again. “Well, Chief, will bowels move now.”
The Chief responded, “Bowels gotta move: tipi full of shit.”
~!~ **#** ~!~
I was hitchhiking down the highway back in ’69, the year I graduated high school. I was up in South Dakota, east of those big carved rocks of white men, those famous presidents. They struck me as a bold and cruel statement. Conquer a people, take their land and then carve faces of your own people in their sacred mountains.
Still the native people weren’t destroyed. It’s the home of the Lakota. Several of the states up there, as across the United States, are named after the native people, Minnesota, the Dakota’s, Nebraska. It’s really the Paha Sapa, the Black Hills… Sacred Lands. Some may argue it’s just a name but it’s the difference between calling a place a church or a dump, a lady or a slut, a place you respect or something to rape. Miners rushed Rushmore for more gold but later they came back for the uranium, the yellow cake, not as shiny as gold but in our twisted system of power and capital, worth even more.
My thumb never failed. After a man picked me up in his beat-up Chevy van, he looked over at me and asked what I thought of Nixon and the whole Watergate thing.
I scrunched my nose as if I was about to check my shoes to see what I had stepped in, when I told him. “Man, I’m not really into politics.”
He took his eyes off the road, looking at me with the eyes of age. His words sunk in like water splashed on a sponge. “Really? Well, politics is into you.”
It took a dozen years for those words to ferment. They mixed with the sun of the Mohave, the salt water of Alaska’s bays, the forests of Humboldt, the rocks of Mount Index, seasons of wandering in the desert, mountains and seashores of a continent. They made a bitter wine of that truth… politics is into you! There was no use denying it. I could love the earth all I wanted to, but everywhere, the pock marks and cesspools of industry and capitalism were… how you say… ‘in yo face’.. A cancer cluster here, cyanide in your water there, cesium, strontium, radionuclides in your bones, yet bombers screaming through your Idaho wilderness.
I had seen too much of Earth’s beauty, God in person, face to face, to ignore the demise any longer. I had no choice but to respond. The question was ‘where?’. Where was the kingpin issue that would unlock the human mind, releasing us from that market morality of judging ourselves by our material possessions or bank accounts?
~!~
When I asked in prayer, “Just what do you want from me.” I hadn’t considered the possibility that the answer would be, “Your life.” I know now, there is no other answer.
I knew instinctively it would be a period of great spiritual growth because I felt there was no way it could happen otherwise. I was not enlightened, not a guru. I wallowed in power struggles in my relationships… But my love for this earth was genuine and as strong an emotion as any I hold. It’s the love of a parent for a child, the love of a child for it’s parent, the love of mates, of beauty and song and more, and all these loves wrapped into the autumn leaves that carpet and nourish that circle of life.
I put this vision out there to the Western Shoshone National Council, to American Peace Test, to Nevada Desert Experience. My thought was to create a franchise event that every group would take as their own. I called it the Hundredth Monkey Project after the book. The book promoted a concept of critical mass whereby each person was important and may be that hundredth monkey of consciousness that gives us the understanding to live in harmony.
At the initial Hundredth Monkey proposal to the Shoshone council in Alamo, Nevada one of the council members told me, ‘Well, you kinda look like Jesus.” I began to feel that humanity was duped into believing that nothing great can happen until Jesus returns. Any who make suggestions a Jesus might make are suspect. After all, Jesus was crucified as an imposter himself… The son of God, hah!
~!~
Helen Caldicott, the Australian physician and author known as the Mother of the Nuclear Movement, committed to speak. John Robbins, the heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune and founder of Earth Save, also committed. Casey Kasem, top forty DJ and activist in his own right, joined our effort, recording a Western Union Hotline message for us as well as being an MC for our event.
.!.
“Hi, this is Casey Kasem. Thanks for calling our 1-800-CEACE-92 hotline and sending your message to George Bush requesting the end of nuclear weapons testing.”

The Broken Eagle Incident
Mr. Fritz shook Mr. Raegan’s hand, while the camera panned to a crystal eagle sitting on a Formica pedestal about fifteen feet from the podium. My own eyes panned from the crystal on the stage to the tele-screen where it was bigger than life, all sixteen times, up and down the hall. It appeared on tele-screen after tele-screen, as in a house of mirrors, a gorgeous, crystal eagle with wings spread in flight, probably the most familiar and bastardized symbol of freedom in America. And tomorrow the DOE was gonna shoot down the real eagle with a nuclear bomb test named HUNTER’S TROPHY.
I felt as though I was in a Fellini film, not fully able to grasp the meaning of details, the story somehow distorted, demented. Just what was the message? My own mind’s eye became a camera and ran another movie, meshed and interwoven with the dream before me. I was back in the desert, across from the test site, and there was Corbin Harney, the spiritual leader of the Western Shoshone, singing and praying. I smelled the burning sage in my nostrils. Corbin’s song was real in my ears. “Eh Na na na na nay, Eh na na na nay, eh na na na nay.”

He raised two whole eagle wings over his head as the song came, mournful, yet hopeful, from his barely moving lips. His native tongue made ancient sounds in the here and now. Corbin famed the wisps of rising sage smoke from the abalone shell, using the eagle wings, the sacred symbol. Now a bird on our endangered species list, like the symbol of the buffalo, it’s a commodity sold to us in every months issue of Parade magazine as a collector’s edition china plate or mantelpiece nick-nack. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was too close to silence for me.
In my mind the nuclear test site sat stubbornly across the valley as an eagle flew overhead and screeched. It was so real, it almost terrified me. I felt my soul splitting and being torn into two fragments, two places at the same time. Was Corbin somewhere praying for me now, talking to me? I felt I had just been purified for the Sundance, while at the same time I might fail.
I saw the dead, emaciated, fly-covered body of a child pass before my eyes, one of the 13 million destined to starve to death this year, fifteen hundred per hour, 25 per minute, somewhere on earth… right now! Her mother absently passed her bony hand back and forth, vacantly staring into the needless space of hell. Why did I torment myself so, sleeping like an exhausted babe in the night and having my dreams and nightmares in the day?
~!~
“Broadcasting has transformed our universe. Radio and television waves are a sixth human sense – the extra dimension of the twentieth century. This invisible energy inspires humans to be human – to learn, to laugh, love, hate, go to war, or join together in peace. Instantly.
“Radio and television waves are the Paul Reveres of the universe. They are liberators undeterred by the icy tundra or trackless desert. You tear down Berlin Walls, uproot bamboo curtains and destroy dictators.”
Some of that was true. Radio and television, combined with print media have transformed the world. Brainwashing works! The White House put out 15 to 20 press releases a day, while Bill Moyers, who worked the White House as a news correspondent, emphasized,

“Most of the news on television is, unfortunately, whatever the government says is news.”
Austrian Scholar Karl Kraus summed it up, “How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to the journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print.”
“Reporters are puppets,” said Lyndon Johnson. “They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings.”
Rather than Paul Reveres announcing, “the redcoats are coming,” the media are the redcoats discrediting the modern Reveres as a boy crying wolf.
~!~
“Well, you certainly are an unusual activist,” he told me as he re-entered the room, with a hint of respect in his tone.
“I’m afraid that’s what it takes to get the message out there,” I informed him.
.!.
~ We love to romanticise that which we’ve damn near destroyed. ~
~!~
“They sell us our presidents the same way,
they sell us our clothes and our cars,
They sell us everything from youth to religion,
At the same time they sell us our wars.
I want to know who the men in the shadows are,
I want to hear somebody asking them why?
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die.”
~~ Jackson Browne – Lives in the Balance ~~
~!~ ~!~ ~!~ ~!~

{Man-0-War}

1984
by George Orwell

pseudonym for Eric Blair, born in Bengal and educated at Eton; after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living penning novels and essays.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year-Plan. The TELESCREEN RECEIVED AND TRANSMITTED SIMULTANEOUSLY. ANY SOUND WINSTON MADE, ABOVE THE LEVEL OF A VERY LOW WHISPER, WOULD BE PICKED UP BY IT; MOREOVER, SO LONG AS HE REMAINED IN THE FIELD OF VISION WHICH THE METAL PLAQUE COMMANDED, HE COULD BE SEEN AS WELL AS HEARD. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system the THOUGHT POLICE plugged in on any individual wire was GUESSWORK. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, even in darkness, every movement scrutinized. Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak* -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said three thousand rooms above ground level and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war, the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
April 4, 1984
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be around that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the center of the hall, opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors, He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably – since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner – she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She had a narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times around the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey fields and cold baths and community hikes and general cleanmindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police.
~!~
The Hate had started. As usual the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago, had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymaster; perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding place in Oceania itself.
Goldstein’s was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard – a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness.
Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party – an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough, to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed – and all this even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.
And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched endless columns of the Eurasian army – row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar.
The sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were – in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be.
There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
~!~
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!
~!~
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels – with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat (proles). There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental love songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a speak kind of psychotronic kaleidoscope known as a versifactor. There was even a whole subsection – Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak – engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.
~!~
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
~!~
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite.
Like so many newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
~!~
In Oldspeak it is called quite frankly, “reality control.” In Newspeak it is called doublethink, although doublethink comprises much else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

Doublethink lies at the heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able – and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years – to arrest the course of history.
~!~
Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war; the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.

These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only be reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted – if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently – then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
~!~
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of the Party, and above all the Inner Party, depends upon doublethink. But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists….
~!~
Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power?
He knew in advance what O’Brien would say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice of mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come.
The terrible thing thought Winston, was that when “O’Brian said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O’Brian knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston, he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified for the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against a lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

“You are ruling us for our own good. You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore…

“That was stupid, Winston, stupid!” he said. “You should know better than to say a thing like that.”
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this.

The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power….
“We are the priests of power,” he said. “God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means…

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{Forest King Breaker}

Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behaviour
By David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

Chapter 19: The Database of Consciousness

Noting the ubiquity of archetypal patterns and symbols, Carl Jung coined the phrase “collective unconscious” – which refers to the bottomless, subsconscious pool of all of the shared experiences of the human race. We may think of it as a vast, hidden database of human awareness, which is characterized by powerful, universal organizing patterns. Such a database, comprised of all of the information ever available to human consciousness, implies stunning inherent capabilities; it’s far more than just a giant storehouse of information awaiting a retrieval process. The great promise of the database is its capacity to “know” virtually anything the moment it’s “asked,” for its able to tap in to all that has ever been experienced anywhere in time.
This database is the origin of all information obtained sub-or supranationally – by intuition or premonition; by divination or dream; or simply by “lucky” guess. It’s the foundation of genius, the well of inspiration, and the source of “uncanny” psychic knowledge, including the “foreknowledge.” It is, of course, the inventory drawn upon by kinesiological testing. Thinkers who are troubled by the notion of “paranormal” or nonrational knowledge usually balk at logical – or illogical – inconsistencies with Newtonian concepts of simultaneity, causality, or time and space. But it’s a bigger universe than that.
These same thinkers will scan the evening sky and find pleasure in identifying favourite constellations… but there aren’t any constellations. That familiar pattern of “stars” is made up of points of light originating from totally unrelated sources – some millions of light-years away; some in different galaxies; some actually separate galaxies themselves; many have, millennia since, burnt out and ceased to “exist”. Those lights have no spatial or temporal relationship; it isn’t only the shape of a dipper, bear or man, but the very pattern – the “constellation” itself – that’s projected on the sky by the eye of the beholder. Yet the zodiac is still “real” because we conceive it; astrology still “exists”, and for many people, it’s quite a useful tool in explaining themselves and their relationships. And why shouldn’t it be? The database of consciousness is, after all, an infinite resource.
~!~
The database behaves like an electrostatic condenser with a field potentiality, rather than a battery with a stored charge. A question can’t be asked unless there’s already the potentiality of the answer. The reason for this is that the question and answer are both created out of the same paradigm and, therefore, are exactly symmetrical – there can be no “up” without an already existent “down.” Causality occurs as simultaneity rather than as sequence; synchronicity is the term used by Jung to explain this phenomenon in human experience. As we understand from our examination of advanced physics, an event “here” in the universe doesn’t “cause” an event to occur “there” – instead, both appear at the same time.
What’s the connection between these events, then, if it isn’t Newtonian linear sequence of cause and effect? Obviously, the two are related or connected to each other in some invisible manner, but not by gravity or magnetism, or even by a cosmic field of such magnitude that it includes both events. The “connection” between any two events occurs only in the observer’s consciousness – he “sees” a connection and describes a “pair” of events, hypothesizing a relationship. This relationship is a concept in the mind of the observer; it isn’t necessary that any corollary external event exist in the universe. Unless there’s an underlying attractor pattern, nothing can be experienced. Thus, the entire manifest universe is its own simultaneous expression and experience of itself.
~!~
Omniscience is omnipotent and omnipresent. There’s no distance between the known and the unknown – the known is manifest from the unknown merely by the asking. For example, the Empire State Building was born in the mind of its architects – human consciousness is the agent that can transform an unseen concept into its manifested experience, which is therefore frozen in time. What “happened” on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1931 is there for all to see, and what “happened” in the consciousness of its creators also stands recorded in the database for all to see to this day – both exist complete, but in different sensory domains. By transferring concept into concrete and steel, the architects simply enabled the rest of us to experience their vision.
~!~
The universe is very cooperative – as much as it isn’t different from consciousness itself, the universe is happy to create whatever we wish to find “out there”. The problem is with the concept of cause itself, which presumes that a time warp, a sequence, or a string of events will make sense. If we step outside of time, there are no causes at all. We could say that the manifest world originates out of the unmanifest, but that again would be inferring a sequential causal series in time, that is, unmanifest -> manifest.
~!~
Time, then, is much like a hologram that already stands complete; it’s a subjective, sensory effect of a progressively moving point of view. There’s no beginning or end to a hologram, it’s already everywhere, complete – in fact, the appearance of being “unfinished” is part of its completeness. Even the phenomenon of “unfoldment” itself reflects a limited point of view: There is no enfolded and unfolded universe, only a becoming universe. Our perception of events happening in time is analogous to a traveller watching the landscape unfold before him. But to say that the landscape unfolds before the traveller is merely a figure of speech – nothing is actually unfolding; nothing is actually becoming manifest. There’s only the progression of awareness.
These paradoxes dissolve in the greater paradigm that includes both opposites, wherein oppositions as such are only related to the locations of the observer. This transcendence of opposition occurs spontaneously at consciousness levels of 600 and above. The notion that there’s a “knower” and a ”known” is in itself dualistic, in that it implies a separation between subject and object (which again, can only be inferred by the artificial adoption of a point of observation). The Maker of all things in heaven and on Earth, of all things visible and invisible, stands beyond both, includes both, and is one with both. Existence, is, therefore, merely a statement that awareness is aware of its awareness and of its expression as consciousness.
Ontology need not be speculative – it is, after all, only the theology of existence; anyone who’s aware that he exists already has access to its highest formulations and beyond. There is only one absolute truth; all the rest are semi-facts spawned from the artefacts of limited perception and positionality. “To be or not to be” isn’t a choice; one may decide to be this or that, but to be is, simply, the only fact there is.
All of the foregoing has been expressed at various times in man’s intellectual history by sages who have moved beyond duality in their awareness. But even then, to claim that the comprehension of the nonduality of existence is superior to its realization as dual is again to fall into illusion. There is, ultimately, neither duality nor nonduality; there’s only awareness. Only awareness itself can state that it’s beyond all concepts such as “is” or “is not”. That must be so, because “is” can be conceived by consciousness itself.
Awareness itself is beyond even consciousness. Therefore, it may be said that the Absolute is unknowable exactly because it’s beyond knowing, or beyond the reach of consciousness itself. Those who have attained such a state of awareness report that it can’t be described and can have no meaning for anyone without the experience of that context. Nonetheless, this is the true state of Reality, universally and eternally – we merely fail to recognize it. Such a recognition is the essence of enlightenment and the final resolution of evolution of consciousness, to the point of self-transendence.
~!~
Like the theoretical physicist, the artist finds order in apparent chaos. For example, where there were only blocks of meaningless marble, Michelangelo saw David and the Pieta, and with his chisel, removed the surrounding stone to liberate those perfected images. And while contemplating the random patterns of a meaningless plaster wall in the Sistene Chapel, he conceived a wondrous ABC through the inspiration of art – and through the tactical technique of military art, he actualized the A -> B -> C known today as The Last Judgement.
Art and love are man’s greatest gifts to himself; and there can be no art without love. Art is always the making of the soul, the craft of a human being’s touch – which can be corporeal or of the mind and spirit.
~!~
Genius is often expressed through a change of perception – a modifying context or paradigm. The mind struggles with an unsolvable problem, poses a question, and is open to receive an answer. The source that this answer comes from has been given many names, varying from culture to culture and time to time, in the arts of western civilisation, its traditionally been identified with the Greek Goddesses of inspiration called the Muses.

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{Tramps Ascalon Treasure - U ST Thunder}

{BlackfootSwan-MoonHawkCrater}

Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy
A Revised and Enlarged Edition of From Death-Camp to Existentialism
by Viktor E. Frankl
Preface by Gordon W. Allport

In Aushwitz I had laid down a rule for myself which proved to be a good one and which most of my comrades later followed. I generally answered all kinds of questions truthfully. But I was silent about anything that was not expressly asked for. If I were asked my age, I gave it. If asked about my profession, I said “doctor,” but did not elaborate. This first morning in Auschwitz an SS officer came to the parade ground. We had to fall into separate groups of prisoners over forty years, under forty years, metal workers, mechanics and so forth. Then we were examined for ruptures and some prisoners had to form a new group. The group that I was in was driven to another hut, where we lined up again. After being sorted out once more and having answered questions as to my age and profession, I was sent to another small group. Once more we were driven to another hut and grouped differently. This continued for some time, and I became quite unhappy, finding myself among strangers who spoke unintelligible foreign languages. Then came the last selection, and I found myself back in the group that had been with me in the first hut! They had barely noticed that I had been sent from hut to hut in the meantime. But I was aware that in those few minutes fate had passed me in many different forms.
When the transport of sick patients for the “rest camp” was organized, my name (that is, my number) was put on the list, since a few doctors were needed. But no one was convinced that the destination was really a rest camp. A few weeks previously the same transport had been prepared. Then, too, everyone had thought that it was destined for the gas ovens. When it was announced that anyone who volunteered for the dreaded night shift would be taken off the transport list, eighty-two prisoners volunteered immediately. A quarter of an hour later the transport was cancelled, but the eighty-two stayed on the list for the night shift. For the majority of them, this meant death within the next fortnight.
Now the transport for the rest camp was arranged for the second time. Again no one knew whether this was a ruse to obtain the last bit of work from the sick – if only for fourteen days – or whether it would go to the gas ovens or to a genuine rest camp. The chief doctor, who had taken a liking to me, told me furtively one evening at a quarter to ten, “I have made it known in the orderly room that you can still have your name crossed off the list; you may do so up till ten o’clock.”
I told him that this was not my way; that I had learned to let fate take it’s course. “I might as well stay with my friends,” I said. There was a look of pity in his eyes, as if he knew… He shook my hand silently, as though it were a farewell, not for life, but from life. Slowly I walked back to my hut. There I found a good friend waiting for me.
“You really want to go with them?” he asked sadly.
“Yes, I am going.”
Tears came to his eyes and I tried to comfort him. Then there was something else to do – to make my will:
“Listen, Otto, if I don’t get back home to my wife, and if you should see her again, then tell her that I talked of her daily, hourly. You remember. Secondly, I have loved her more than anyone. Thirdly, the short time I have been married to her outweighs everything, even all we have gone through here.”
Otto, where are you now? Are you alive? What has happened to you since our last hour together? Did you find your wife again? And do you remember how I made you learn my will by heart – word for word – in spite of your childlike tears?
The next morning I departed with the transport. This time was not a ruse. We were not heading for the gas chambers, and we actually did go to a rest camp. Those who had pitied me remained in a camp where famine was to rage even more fiercely than in our new camp. They tried to save themselves, but they only sealed their own fates. Months later, after liberation, I met a friend from the old camp. He related to me how he, as a camp policeman, had searched for a piece of human flesh that was missing from a pile of corpses. He confiscated it from a pot in which he found it cooking. Cannibalism had broken out. I had left just in time.
~!~
Does this not bring to mind the e-story of Death in Teheran? A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee Teheran, which he could reach the same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death.
~!~

Spiders Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit
by Alan Friedman

On June 8, less than a week after the Brooks committee met, it emerged that back in April, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a top intelligence advisor to President Bush, had written a letter to a judge in Philadelphia trying to win a lighter prison sentence for James Guerin, the arms-maker from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Guerin had already been convicted of $1billion fraud and of illegally transferring military technology to South Africa and Iraq. But Inman, who had been CIA deputy director until 1982 and was now serving as the acting chairman of the presidents foreign intelligence advisory board, called Guerin a patriot and revealed in the letter to the judge that he had worked secretly in the mid-1970’s with intelligence agencies. That was the period when Bush had been CIA director. The fact that an intelligence official as prominent as Inman, albeit one who had once served on Guerin’s proxy board, was willing to engage in special pleading for a convicted fraudster, raised further concern among Iraqgate investigators.
The pressure was building on George Bush himself, especially after Brooks’s Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the White House seeking the testimony of Boyden Gray, Nicholas Rostow, and Frank Lemay, the whistle-blower from the state Department who had tried to warn his superiors of the suspected use of U.S. government loan guarantees in Saddam’s nuclear weapons arsenal in 1989. The General Accounting Office had already told Gonzalez’s Banking Committee that it’s requests for Iraq papers had been delayed and thwarted by the Rostow group. By inviting Gray and Rostow, officials with personal knowledge of how the White House had coordinated its response to congressional investigations, the Judiciary Committee seemed to be sending a message: The same committee that had led the congressional charge in the Watergate affair was now focusing on the possibility that the Bush administration had moved to cover up actions in order to limit political damage.
Iraqgate was beginning to follow the president wherever he went. In Rio de Janeiro on June 13 for the UN earth summit, a reported asked Bush what he though of the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation. “I think it’s purely political,” said Bush, adding that as far as the administration was concerned, “we have had detailed testimony by Larry Eagleburger.” He said he didn’t know whether a special prosecutor would be named, but he offered his first formal defence against the cover-up charges: “We tried to bring Saddam Hussein into the family of nations. That policy was not successful.”
~!~
As in Atlanta, British government prosecutors in the Matrix-Churchill case had initially tried to withhold intelligence reports and other documents relating to Iraq. In the autumn of 1992, four ministers in John Major’s government signed papers to this effect, known as Public Interest Immunity Certificates. These ministers – Kenneth Clarke, the home secretary; Tristan Garel-Jones, a Foreign Office Minister; Michael Heseltine, the secretary of state for trade and industry; and Malcolm Rifkind, the secretary of state for defense – were determined to keep secret the history of Britains dealings with Iraq. The certificates informed the court that it would not be “in the public interest” for secret government documents to be released during the trial. The problem, it seemed, was one of national security. The certificates informed the court that it would not be “in the public interest” for secret government documents to be released during the trial. The problem, it seemed, was one of national security.
When Judge Brian Smedley asked to see the documents himself before pronouncing on their admissibility, they were brought to his room in safes. In addition to dozens of interdepartmental memos and letters, there were intelligence reports from the headquarters of both MI5 and MI6, the British Intelligence services. Such was the secrecy surrounding these agencies and their relations to government that the guard remained outside the judge’s room during an entire weekend as he studied the papers.
~!~
As the Matrix trial progressed, years of secret and cynical decisions by Margaret Thatcher’s government were laid bare in the Old Bailey courtroom. On November 2 an officer from MI5 took the stand, seated behind a paper screen to protect his identity. He confirmed that Mark Gutteridge, a Matrix executive, had reported on Dr. Gerald Bull’s Space Research Corporation. Geoffrey Roberston said Gutteridge first told MI5 about Bull and his supergun in May 1988. Secret documents showed that Matrix was being asked to provide machine tools for the supergun a year later, in October 1989. This was the same time that the Bush administration was approving it’s own export licences that enabled Dr. Bull to send sophisticated U.S. technology to Iraq’s supergun project. Gutteridge, it was later revealed in Paul Henderson’s autobiography, had provided detailed reports on Iraq’s procurement network as early as December 1987. The information provided by Gutteridge had been passed straight to the CIA.
On November 3, Paul Henderson’s controller at MI6, whose secret name was Balsam, took the stand and, like his colleague from MI5, gave evidence anonymously, seated behind the screen. He revealed that Henderson had first worked for British intelligence in the early 1970s, providing information on commercial contracts behind the Iron Curtain. He had been “reactivated” as an agent for MI6 between 1985 and 1986 for the same purpose, spying on Iraq’s military projects later in the 1980s.
“There are very few people who would take such risks and take them in their stride,” said the MI6 officer, as prosecutors shook their heads in the knowledge that their defendant was now being praised by a government official. Henderson, said the MI6 agent, had even handed over blueprints for a projectile capable of being fired twelve hundred kilometres and said Matrix Churchill had been approached by the Iraqis to make machine tools for the project, believed to be Gerald Bull’s supergun. And reports from Henderson’s meetings with MI6 were sent to a “very high ministerial level.”
It was becoming clearer each day to the jury that instead of violating Britain’s arms export rules, the Matrix shipments of militarily useful goods to Iraq had been approved by the government. The real question was becoming a different one: Who in the government had approved such shipments, and how could any intelligence-gathering operation justify sending vital equipment straight into Saddam’s war machine? The secret documents answered at least the first part of this question. They showed that Prime Minister Thatcher was herself kept informed about many of the sensitive exports. According to one memo, marked “Advice to Prime Minister,” government officials discussed the suitability of selling engines for minelaying vessels.”
There were thus some enormous question marks hanging over the trial when a somber-looking Alan Clark finally approached the witness box on November 4, 1992. Although he had been one of Thatcher’s most ardent supporters, Clark was an unlikely politician. He was a man who enjoyed all the trappings of privilege. He lived in a castle in Kent, drove a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost as well as a Porsche, and had private wealth that had brought him, among other things, 27,000 acres in the Scottish Highlands and an inclination to speak his mind, often at the wrong moment and in colourful terms. To Clark, diplomatic turn of phrase did not seem to come easily. Evidence of the Matrix Churchill shipments to Iraq via Chile was first available back in 1987, but government ministers made a decision to let the exports go in order “to protect sources.”
The London court was told that a Matrix executive had worked for MI6 while the company was selling to Iraq. An August 1989 British intelligence telegram released during the trial showed that the executive had reported back both on BNL and on Iraq’s procurement network, which owned Matrix Churchill through a cascading series of front companies. The telegram also illustrated the closeness of the intelligence relationship between London and Washington, at one point suggesting “it would be useful if you could eventually get details from the Americans of other British and European companies involved in procurement.”
On October 26, while Frederick Lacey in Washington was privately telling the Bush administration that he needed to get further with his Iraqgate probe, the jury in the London trial was hearing from a government official that the Matrix Churchill executive who had worked for MI6 was Paul Henderson.

Pack of Thieves: How Hitler and Europe Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History
by Richard Z. Chesnoff

Germany: The Plunder Plot
I would not want to be a Jew in Germany
~ Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring ~

Berlin’s main boulevard was not the best place for a young Jewish boy to be on the morning of November 10, 1938. But to the crowds that quietly packed the Kurfurstendamm the day after Kristallnacht, the thirteen-year old, blond-haired, blue-eyed youth in short pants and knee socks seemed the perfect “Aryan.” Six decades later, Michael Blumenthal still remembers every detail of the Nazi’s infamous orgy of anti-Semitic destruction and looting. “I have never forgotten the sight,” says the Holocaust survivor who went on to become an American Secretary of the Treasury. “Every Jewish store had been wrecked, glass from shop windows littered the sidewalks,… and from the direction of the major synagogue of the Fasanstrasse I could see rising clouds of smoke… No one helped. People just stared. There was a kind of strange silence.”
For Adolf Hitler and his most willing executioners, Jews were a cancer on society, a malignancy that had to be surgically but brutally excised with no anesthesia: The Jews of the world, declared Hitler, are “vermin.”
But for the Fuhrer and the clique of officers and technicians who helped him mastermind the mechanics of the Holocaust, Jews – particularly Europe’s Jews – represented much more: They were also a golden cow to be milked dry and eventually melted down for the greater glory and profit not only of the Reich but of those who fanatically supported it.
This state plunder was part and parcel of a coalescent ideology of exclusions, expropriation, and finally extermination. And in that wicked process of exclude and annihilate, the Reich managed to amass many of the multimillions needed to finance the brutal war it launched in 1939 and fought to defeat in May of 1945.
Germany’s program of economic exclusion of the Jews, and individual Nazi profiting from that exclusion, developed in overlapping stages. In early 1933, during the first days of the Hitler regime, it was Germany’s communists – not necessarily its Jews – who became prime targets of Hitler’s goon squad. In the aftermath of the February 27 Reichstagg Fire, almost 10,000 German Communist Party members were rounded up and shipped to the newly opened concentration camps. Only after the Nazis had consolidated their power did they launch the first steps in what was to be their systematic dehumanization and isolation of the country’s half million Jews.
The process was called Arisierung – Aryanization – the elimination of Jews from all aspects of German life. Though cloaked in racist ideology, its fulcrum was pragmatic: the systematic transfer of Jewish-owned businesses, factories, shops, and any other economic enterprise from the hands of the Jews who had built them to Aryan-German ownership. Marked by extortion and outright plunder, it would be a hallmark of Nazi rule in Germany and in the nations they Reich occupied during the six dark years it held sway over Europe.
“It was a way to dehumanize, to isolate and destroy,” says Nobel Prize-winning scholar and author Elie Wiesel. “It appealed to one of man’s basest desires: greed.”
Indeed, by early March 1933, swastika-armbanded squads of storm troopers had already begun a series of organized attacks mailing on East European Jews living in Germany. By March 13, they had begun forcibly closing Jewish shops – promoting first boycotts, then looting. Though initially limited to smaller provincial communities, the violence soon spread to cities. In the eastern town of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), Jewish lawyers and even judges were attacked in the local courthouse and brutally beaten. In Munich, bands of S.A. (Sturmabteilung – Storm Troopers) men tore the beards of the faces of Orthodox Jews.
Larry Orbach of New Jersey, then five years old and called Lothar, recalls how, as the Nazis rose to power, his father was forced to sell their general store in the tiny Pomeranian village of Falkenberg.
.!.
Few voices were raised in protest. With a handful of notable exceptions, Germany’s church leaders, Catholic and Protestant, said or did nothing. Some even preached support for the economic and cultural ethnic cleansing. These laws, wrote the official Catholic Klerusblatt, are “indisputable safeguards for the qualitative make-up of the German people.” The measures against the Jews, declared Bishop Otto Dibelius, general superintendent of the Evangelical Church, “were perfectly justified.” And in a proclamation issued by the Evangelical Church, thanked “the Lord God” for having given the German people “a pious and trusty overlord.”
Amazingly, Nazi anti-Semitism provoked little panic among German Jews. In 1933, fewer than 38,000 of Germany’s 525,000 Jews chose to read the writing on the wall and leave Germany voluntarily. In the four years that followed, fewer than 100,000 more chose exile – tragic testimony to an overwhelmingly delusional German-Jewish conviction that Hitler and Nazism were merely a “passing madness.”
“Those were my fathers precise words,” recalls eighty-year-old Maria Bamberger, now a New Yorker but then a young Berlin Zionist. “My sister Eva and I tried to convince him that we should all leave for Palistein.” But Dr. Walter Weinberg, who would later flee to London, insisted, “Girls, this is passing madness; the German people will never put up with it.”
“They could not grasp it,” explains Saul Friedlander. “Most expected to weather the storm.”
~!~
~ With Criminal Intent: The Changing Face of Crime in South Africa ~
by Rob Marsh

The Nigerian Connection
~ Page 106 ~

Although no drugs are produced in Nigeria, the country’s drug-smuggling syndicates have established themselves as brokers and distributors, having built up a reputation in the early 1980s for smuggling southwest Asian heroin into Europe and the United States.
Africa has a history of cannabis production going back hundreds of years, but until recently has had no role to play in either the production or use of opium, heroin or cocaine. This situation began to change in the [early 1980s], when a group of Nigerian naval officers who were undergoing training in India realised the opportunity to make money by organising shipments of heroin from south-west Asia to Europe and the United States. It was not until the Nigerian economy collapsed in the [mid-1980s], however, that their efforts came to the attention of the authorities, by which time the smuggling rings were well established and fully operational.
The Nigerians tend to concentrate on using couriers who secrete the drugs on or in their bodies
[Raw-‘Roxy?-‘in any related ‘criminal’?: M.G.Inc.[gee@netactive.co.za?? hmm???]
[Ref: Monday, September 17, 2007 2:30 PM’]
They reputedly make a detailed study of the customs operations in the country of destination and frequently change the ‘profiles’ of the couriers they use. In recent years, for example, they have tended to use young white women, whom they feel are less likely to attract suspicion than West African people.
According to Robert Gelbard, the significance of the Nigerian connection is highlighted by the fact that, ‘… some 30% of heroin seized at US ports-of-entry in 1994 was taken from Nigerian-controlled couriers. As of December 1995, some 700 Nigerian traffickers were imprisoned in Thailand. From 1993 to 1995, Brazilian authorities arrested 42 Nigerians in possession of a total of 266 kilograms of cocaine. Brazil [hmm?] is the primary staging area for Nigerian for Nigerian cocaine shipments because of its close historical ties to Africa and its large ethnic African population. Nigerian-controlled traffickers have also been arrested in Colombia, Paraguay and several West African locations. Nigerian organisations are largely responsible for creating a significant market for cocaine in Europe and for spreading illegal drugs through West Africa.’
Attempts by law enforcement bodies in Africa to thwart the Nigerian connection have been disappointing because of corruption and a lack of motivation to address the problem. There is growing evidence that the Nigerians are now targeting southern Africa as a market for their products. In 1993, for example, more than half the cocaine seized in South Africa was taken from Nigerians, and Nigerian heroin ‘cells’ have already been established in the country to facilitate heroin and cocaine transhipment to other parts of the world.

~ The Endangered Species Protection Unit ~
~ Page 121 (?) ~

The Endangered Species Protection Unit (ESPU), led by Senior Superintendent Pieter Lategan, was set up in 1989 at the insistence of then minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok. This followed a request to the Minister for the establishment of a police unit specialising in this area of investigation during a Rhino protection conference held at Skukuza in the Kruger National Park.
ESPU, which began life as a one-man operation, now consists of 45 officers. Plans to increase this number to 80 are currently on hold due to ‘financial constraints’.
ESPU’s field of operation has broadened considerably over the years. From its original brief, which was to investigate the illegal trade in rhino horn and ivory, the unit now investigates the illegal trade in flora, including endangered plant species, mostly cyads and succulents; fauna – common and endangered animal species – including spiders, iguanas, tortoises and snakes; and, at the request of the Interpol sub-group on environmental crime, the illegal dumping of radioactive and toxic waste. On occasion, ESPU conducts investigations on behalf of the departments of Water and Environmental Affairs and the Council for Nuclear Safety.
Apart from its normal policing duties, ESPU has, out of ‘necessity’, to carry out under-cover operations. One of it’s most notable successes was the highly publicised ‘Operation Cobra’ in which an ESPU officer successfully infiltrated and smashed an international syndicate smuggling reptiles.
Operation Cobra evolved out of a report from the Interpol sub-group on the Illegal Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora. The report, which was based on an Interpol analysis named ‘Project Noah’, indicated that South Africa was a major supplier of reptiles to a ‘pet’ reptile market that was growing at an alarming rate [~in a tiny house, in some backyard, drooling and eating her own poop. Sad~]
An entire industry, complete with reptile gimmicks and specialist publications had sprung up in both Europe and the United States, and it was known that millions of Rands worth of animals were leaving the country illegally. It was also known that most reptile (indeed!?) traders were connected in one way or another and that many deals were being done over the telephone.
To counter this trade, Superintendent Pierre Erasmus, an experienced undercover officer, moved to George and, in the guise of a property developer [~in a tiny house, in some backyard, drooling and eating her own poop. Sad~] made contact with a suspect named Kurt Kennell. This was the beginning of a…

~ Murder by Request ~
~ Page 151 ~
The relevance of terminal ballistics became apparent during the sensational Baron Dieter von Schauroth murder case in Capetown in 1961.
Von Schauroth was shot to death by his ‘friend’ and bodyguard, Marthinus Rossouw, on the old Malmesbury Road outside Capetown on the night of 24 March 1961. At his subsequent trial, Rossouw claimed that Von Schauroth had begged to be killed. This was the first defence of its kind and was to lead to a new classification of murder: murder by request. Evidence led by a ‘forensic expert’, however, cast doubt on Rossouw’s version of events at the site of the killing and contributed to ‘his’ conviction.
About a year before his murder, Von Schauroth (36) had been forced through lack of money to abandon his sheep farm in Karasburg, South West Africa (now Namibia), and move to Capetown with his young wife, Colleen (19). Unfortunately, however, his financial circumstances did not improve.
Not long after his arrival in Capetown, Von Schauroth struck up an acquaintance with Rossouw, a 23-year-old railway fitter who acted as his bodyguard cum chauffeur.
On the morning of Saturday, 25 March, Von Schauroth’s body was found at the roadside, about 24 km outside Capetown. There were a number of uncut diamonds scattered around the corpse and two shell casings on the ground: one near the head and one near the feet. The victim had been shot twice in the neck, just above the collar.
Three days later, the police arrested Rossouw and charged him with the murder of his former employer. In his defence, Rossouw claimed that Von Schauroth was a desperately unhappy man. To add to his financial woes, there had been talk that his wife was being unfaithful. According to Rossouw, the baron wanted to commit suicide, but could not do so, since this would negate his funeral insurance policies.
On the night in question, Von Schauroth and Rossouw went to a hotel in Milnerton, then drove along the old Malmesbury Road.
Rossouw said: I thought he was trying to frighten me. He then turned around and said: “Marthiens, I want you to shoot me.”
I said, “No, it’s too dangerous.” He pleaded with me and said there were no witnesses and that it would look like a diamond transaction. He said he could not commit suicide or his wife would not be able to collect the insurance money. He again turned his back on me and said, “Please, Marthiens, shoot me.” I replied, “No, Dieter, I cannot.”
“He pleaded with me for five or ten minutes. He said he wanted to go to a place where there were no women. He then turned around and we shook hands…

The Hunt for Red October
by Tom Clancy

~ The Second Day: Saturday, 04 December ~
~ The Red October ~
~ Seve7romorsk, USSR ~

Page 24
~ As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work... ~

~ Now sailors acted like czarist princes and write tons of letters back and forth and called it work ~

“And the privileges! Every word they committed to paper was priority mail. Whimpering letters to their sweethearts, most of it, and here he was sorting through it all on a Saturday to see that it got to their womenfolk – even though they couldn’t possibly have a reply for two weeks. The letter would be placed aboard the train a day late. The sorter didn’t care. There was a hockey game that night, the biggest game of the young season, Central Army against Wings. He had a litre of vodka bet on Red Wings.”

~ Fighting Sailor, Ph.D [Poehpol Doctor?] (?) ~
Morrow, England

‘Halsey’s greatest popular success was his greatest error. In establishing himself as a popular hero with legendary aggressiveness, the admiral would blind later generations to his impressive intellectual abilities and shrewd gambler’s instincts to ~~ “

~!~!~!~ ** ~!~!~!~

{SageRedRussian-RedArticBell}

{Wild ~ Lavinder ~ Wolf}

Yuri Ivanovich Drozdov, formerly Resident in New York, was a devoted fan of the writer Frederick Forsyth. He told Gordievsky that his novel The Fourth Protocol was 'essential reading'. The book described what Drozdov regarded as the ultimate fantasy of a KGB special operations expert: the explosion by Soviet agents of a small nuclear device near a US airbase in Brittain just before a general election, with the aim of bringing to power a left-wing neutralist government.

Legend About a Legend

{RainbowSealCove-JacksonsWhiteArmSwan}

In October 1989, Kryuchkov announced the abolition of the Fifth Directorate which had hitherto monitored dissident intellectuals, and the creation of a new Directorate for the Defense of the Soviet Constitutional System to coordinate the struggle against 'the orgy of terrorism which has swept the world since the early 1970s.' He revealed that during the 1970s the KGB had identified in the Soviet Union 'more than 1,500 individuals with terrorist designs.'

Simultaneously, Kryuchkov despated two recently retired senior KGB officers, Lieutenant-General Fyodor Scherback, former deputy head of the second Chief Directorate, and Major-General Valentin Zvezdenkov, a former counter-terrorist expert from the same directorate, to take part with former senior CIA officers in a private conference in California to discuss methods of combatting terrorism.

Kryuchkov set clear limits to the unprecedented peace-time intelligence collaboration he was proposing:

Intelligence is a game without rules. There are certain specific features, which I regret to say, prevent us from reaching agreement with anyone on how and according to which rules we should conduct intelligence operations against one another. But I think we should always have decency, even in our business.

One of the consequences of the limited collaboration proposed by Kruchkov was some decline in the traditional demonisation of Western intelligence services. As recently as the final years of the Brezhneve era, the Soviet press, when denouncing the CIA, commongly excoriated, 'the repulsive bared teeth of the monster fed on the money of unsuspecting taxpayers, a monster which trampled underfoot all norms of morality and insulted the dignity of an entire nation.'

In 1991, Mikhael Lyubmimov published LEGEND ABOUT A LEGEND, a farce lampooning the enormously expensive secret war between the KGB and the CIA. Moscow News suggested that it would make a 'good musical comedy.'

Active Wet Affairs Measures

Under Serov, Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for 'wet affairs' had suffered several public embarrassments. After the failure to liquidate the emigre National Labour Alliance (NTS) leader, Georgi Okolovich, in Frankfurt and the defection of the KGB assassin, Nikolai Khokhlov, in 1954, a German contract killer, Wolfgang Wildprett, was hired by Department 13 to assassinate the NTS President Vladimir Poremsky, in 1955.

Like Khokholov, however, Wildprett had second thoughts and told the West German police.

In September 1957 a department 13 attempt to poison Khokhlov with radioactive thallium (chosen in the belief that it would leave no trace at autopsy) also failed. These failures, however, were followed by the successful assassination of two leading Ukrainian emigres in West Germany: the main NTS ideologist, Lev Rebet, in October 1957, and the head of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Stepan Bandera, in October 1959.

These liquidations persuaded Khruschev, who personally authorised both of them, and Shelepin that selective assassination remained a necessary part of KGB foreign operations.

The Department 13 assassin in each case, only twenty-five years of age when he killed Rebet, was Bogdan Stashinsky, who operated out of the KGB compound in Karlshorst. His murder weapon, devised by the KGB weapons laboratory at Khozyaistvo Zheleznovo, was a spray gun which fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule, inducing cardiac arrest in the victim.

Department 13 calculated, correctly, that an unsuspecting pathologist was likely to diagnose the cause of death as heart failure. Stashinsky killed both Rebet and Bandera by lying in wait for them in darkened stairways.

At a ceremony in the Centre, Shelepin presented him with the Order of the Red Banner and read aloud a citation praising him 'for carrying out an extremely important government assignment.' Stashinsky was told that he would be sent on a course to perfect his German and learn English, following which he would spend three to five years in the West carrying out further 'assignments' of the kind which had won him the Red Banner. What was expected of him, said Shelepin, was 'difficult, but honourable.'

Like Khokhlov and Wildprett, however Stashinsky had second thoughts about assassination, encouraged by his anti-Communist East German girlfriend, Inge Pohl, whom he married in 1960. In August 1961, one day before the Berlin Wall sealed off the escape route from the East, the couple defected to the West. Stashinsky confessed to the assassination of Rebet and Bandera, was put on trial at Karlsruhe in October 1962 and sentenced to eight years imprisonment as accomplice to murder. The judge declared that the main culprit was the Soviet government which had institutionalised political murder. Heads were quick to roll within the KGB. According to Anatoli Golisyn, who defected four months after Stashinsky, at least seventeen KGB officers were sacked or demoted. More importantly, the Khokhlov and Stashinsky defections led both the Politburo and the KGB leadership to reassess the risks of 'wet affairs'. After the worldwide publicity generated by Stashinsky's trial, the Politburo abandoned assassination by the KGB as a normal instrument of policy outside the Soviet bloc, resorting to it only on rare occassions such as the liquidation of President Hafizullah Amin in Afghanistan in December 1979.

~!~

At Golubevs request, the KBG main residency in Washington purchased several umbrellas and sent them to the Centre. Directorate OTU adapted the tip to enable it to inject the victim with a tiny metal pellet containing ricin, a highly toxic poison made from castor-oil seeds. Golubev then took the umbrellas to Sofia to instruct a DS assassin in their use. The first victim was Georgi Markov, then working for the Bulgarian section of the BBC World Service. Before he died in hospital, Markov was able to tell doctors that he had been bumped into by a stranger on Westminster Bridge who apologised for accidentally prodding him with his umbrella.

A second assassination attempt a week later in Paris against another Bulgarian emigre, Vladimir Kostov....

~!~!~!~ ** ~!~!~!~

Copper Timing-Ode' 2 Violet Valiant Platoon - ClearwaterMoscow

2007-12-20T16:10:00.000-08:00

~ Blue Skies - Comfor (Bishop-T-Maniega) Letters - No Fences ~

{ClearwaterMoscow-GoldCanal}

~ Felix ~Alpha-"T"-Romeo~ Oscar ~

~ In Timme VV Trouble's Name ~

A wonderful example of the complexity of the Italian mind:
~ "We are not seeking a scandal" ~
.!.
"At high-noon on March 2nd 1981 the Vatican Press Office released a document that puzzled many. Issued without explanation, it reminded all Catholics of the Canon Laws covering Freemasons and stressed the fact that the present code 'forbids Catholics under pain of excommunication from joining Masonic or similar secret-society associations.' No one could understand the timing."
.!.
"The list of P2 members was a veritable Who's Who of Italy. The armed forces were heavily represented with over fifty generals and admirals. The Government of the day was there with two Cabinet Ministers, as were industrialists, journalists, 36 parliamentarians, pop stars, pundits, and police officers. It was a State within a State. Many have said that Prince Gelli was planning to take over Italy. They are wrong. He HAD taken over Italy."
.!.
"I am only answerable to Shakespeare, God and Rome"

~ Constitutional Soul-diers Honour ~
.!.
"If you think it might be useful for something favourable to your Presidential candidate to be published in Italy, send me some material and I'll get it published in one of the papers here."
.!.
"Investing in the future is fine, but investing to ensure that your own kith and kin have no future is another matter."
~~~~~ **!** ~~~~~

..
~~ Miracle-Paul ~ ST-Winter ~ Copper-Ivan ~~

KGB: The Inside Story of it's Foreign Operations

From Lenin to Gorbachev

By Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky

[1]

{Clover ST Sean}

The last head of the Okhrana, A. T. explained in his memoirs that the ‘core of the evil axis’ was ‘the unfortunate inaptitude of the Jews for healthy productive work’:

“The government would never have had the slightest reason to adopt measures directed against the Jews had not these been rendered imperative by the necessity for protecting the Russian population, and especially the peasants… There was a certain kind of oppression of the Jews in Russia, but, unfortunately, this was far from being as effective as it ought to have been. The Government did seek to protect the peasants from the ruthless exploitation of the Jews; but its action bore only too little fruit…”

**!**

[2]
{Shibumy Buddy Cloud}

At almost the same moment as the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, Meredith Gardner successfully decrypted an NKGB message of 1944 which provided the first clue to the identity of the most important of the atom spies, Klaus Fuchs, by then deputy scientific Lieutenant at Hartwell. Fuchs confessed in January 1950 and was sentenced in April 1951 to fourteen years imprisonment. He described his work for the Russians in words which aptly described the state of mind of some other Soviet agents in the West:

“I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments: one compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relations… I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point… It appeared to me at the time that I had become a ‘free man’ because I had succeeded in the other compartment in establishing myself completely independent of the surrounding forces of society. Looking back on it now the best way of expressing it seems to be to call it controlled schizophrenia."

**!**

[3]
{Dillon ST Kivo}

Anarchist assassinations of President Carnot of France (1894); Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the Spanish Prime Minister (1897); Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary(1898); King Umberto of Italy (1900); President McKingley of the U.S. (1901); and a succession of prominent Russians, including Grand Duck Sergei Aleksandrovick, Education Governor-General of Moscow Interior (1911): In 1898 an international conference of security agencies in Rome approved a resolution that, “The Central Authorities responsible in each country for the surveillance of anarchists establish direct contact with one another and exchange all relevant information.”

**!**

[4]
{Tiger Lilly's Serge}

In Tzarist Russia, the development of sigint was undisturbed by parliamentary protests. The Okhrana had black chambers working for it in the post offices of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Kiev and Tomsk. The last head of the Okhrana, A.T. Vasilyev, virtuously insisted that their work was directed only against subversives and criminals: “The right-minded citizen certainly never had any reason to fear the censorship, for private business was, on principle, completely ignored." In reality, as under the ancien regime, letter opening was a source of gossip as well as of intelligence. The coded correspondence of the Archb{U}shop of Irkutsk disclosed, when decrypted, that he was having an affair with an abbbess.The Okhrana’s chief cryptanalyst, Ivan Zybin, was a codebreaker of genius. According to the Okhrana chief in Moscow, P. Zavarzin, ‘He was a fanatic, not to say a maniac, for his work. Simple ciphers he cleared up at a glance, but complicated ciphers placed him in a state almost of trance from which he did not emerge until the problem was resolved.’ The original priority of the Okhrana’s cryptanalysts was the coded correspondence of revolutionaries inside and outside Russia, but the Okhrana extended its operations to include the diplomatic telegrams sent and received by St. Petersburg embassies. Intercepted diplomatic despatches had been an irregular source of foreign intelligence ever since the 1740s. In 1800 the Foreign Minister, N.P. Panin, wrote to his Ambassador in Berlin:

“We possess the ciphers of the correspondence of the King [of Prussia] with the charge d’affaires here: should you suspect Haugwitz’s [the Prussian Charge d’affaires] of bad faith, it is only necessary to find some pretext to get him to write here on the subject in question. As soon as his or his King’s despatch is deciphered, I will not fail to apprise you of its [PR=political intelligence] content.”

~*!*~

[5]
{Sir Cossack Igor}

Entry into the KGB was racially selective. No Jews were allowed in the KGB… The sole KGB officer in Malta during the 1970s was an Armenian named Mkrtchyan, working under cover as a Tass correspondent… Internal KGB statistics showed that Georgians, Azerbajaijanis, Uzbeks and other Central Asian nationalities were more reliable than Russians and Ukrainians.

The Andropov Institute also discriminated on the grounds of sex and religion. Religious practice was forbidden. In 1990 the FCD made its first ever public statement about the qualities it looked for in the graduate entry to the Andropov Institute:

“What is, of course, desirable is robust health and an ability to learn Ivan’gelical angletaire… However, the main requirement for all future intelligence-gathering operatives, without exception, is to be absolutely reliable and devoted to the cause.”

It was also announced in 1990 that applicants to the FCD are expected to make parachute jumps from ~TAT~Towers and C-47 aircraft:

“Those who are too afraid are not suitable candidates.”

~*!*~

[6]
{Zhivago's Gale Clover}

In France diplomatic traffic was decrypted in cabinets noir at both the Foreign Ministry and the Surete. The Okhrana became the first modern intelligence service to make one of its major priorities the theft of embassy codes and ciphers, as well as plain-text versions of diplomatic telegrams which could be compared with the coded originals. In so doing, it set an important precedent for the KGB.…

According to French Surete records, the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, was located in the Russian Embassy in Paris. By 1884 it was fully operational under the direction of the formidable Pyotr Rachkovsky. Formerly a minor civil servant, he was arrested by the Third Section and given the option of exile in Siberia or a career in the political police. Rachkovsky chose the latter and went on to become the most influential foreign intelligence officer in the history of Tsarist Russia.

Unlike later KGB residents in Paris, he was also a prominent figure in Parisian high society, accumulating a fortune by speculation on the Boche, entertaining lavishly in his villa at St. Cloud, and numbering directors of the Surete, ministers and presidents among his intimates. Rachkovsky specialized in forgery as well as the use of agents provocateurs.

There is a strong probability that he was responsible for the fabrication of the famous anti-Semitic forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which purported to describe a Jewish plot for world domination.

The ‘Protocols’ had limited influence before the First World War. Between the wars, however, the ‘Protocols’ re-emerged as one of the central texts in Nazi and fascist anti-Semitism, becoming perhaps the most influential forgery of the twentieth century.

“He has one rather noticeable weakness – that he is passionately fond of our little Parisien’gelicals – but he is the most skilful operator to be found in the ten capitals of Europe.” [Echo de Paris, 1901]

~*!*~

[7]
{Zhen Elefente Keyes}
The Cheka, the ancestors of todays KGB, was founded on 20 December 1917. When the KGB was established in 1954, it adopted the Cheka emblems of the shield and the sword: the shield to defend the Revolution, the sword to smite its foes. Today’s KGB officers still style themselves as ‘Chekisty’ and receive their salaries on the twentieth of each month (Chekists’ Day) in honour of Cheka’s birthday.

~*!*~

The problem of opposition, both at home and abroad, to the new Bolshevik government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), proved vastly greater than Lenin had anticipated. He quickly concluded that ‘a special apparatus’ to deal with it was necessary, after all. Convinced of the monopoly of Marxist wisdom, the Bolshevik leaders tended from the outset to classify all opposition, whatever its social origin, as counter-revolution.

On 4 December the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had carried out the October Revolution, created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (ChekU), under Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Addressing Sovnarkom on 20 December, he proclaimed:

“Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not now in need of justice. It is war now – face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death! I propose, I demand an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries.”

~*!*~

During his first year as head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky worked, ate and slept in his office in the Lubyanka.

His powers of endurance and Spartan lifestyle earned him the nickname “Iron Feliks”. The ‘Old Checkist’ Fyodor Timofeevvich Foamin later eulogised Dzerzhinsky’s determination to refuse any privilege denied to other Chekists.

Compromise of any kind was alien to Dzerzhinsky’s personality:

“I am not able to hate in half measures, or to love in half measures, I am not able to give up half my soul. I have either to give up my whole soul or give up nothing.”

~*!*~

According to Viktor Chebrikov, Chairman of the KGB from 1982 to 1988:

Feliks Edmundovich wholeheartedly sought to eliminate injustice and crimes from the world and dreamed of the times when wars and national enmity would vanish forever from our life. His whole life was in keeping with the motto which he expressed in these words:

‘I would like to embrace all mankind with my love, to warm it and to cleanse it of the dirt of modern life.’

St. Feliks would have been unlikely to appreciate Chebrikov’s mildly comic eulogy, for his gifts did not include a sense of humour. Since, by the 1980’s, ‘lofty humanists’ such as Dzerzhinsky were supposed to have a sense of humour, however, Chebrikov made a humourless attempt to defend him against the charge of being humourless.

~*!*~

[8]
{SSD Bayonet Lynn}

The Cheka proudly claimed, and the KGB still believes, that it played a crucial part in defending the young Soviet state against a gigantic conspiracy by Western capital and its secret services. In 1921 Lenin paid tribute to the Cheka as ‘our devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us’:

“Gentleman capitalists of Russia and abroad! We know that it is not possible for you to love this establishment. Indeed, it is not! It has been able to counter your intrigues and your machinations like no-one else when you were smothering us, when you had surrounded us with invaders, and when you were organising internal conspiracies and would stop at no crime in order to wreck our peaceful work.”

Dissmissive though Moscow was about Gerald Ford's ability, it was anxious for him to win the 1976 presidential election. The Kremlin's innate conservatism made it prefer a known lightweight like Ford to the unpredictable Democrat candidate Jimmy Carter. Under Ford, it was believed, the 'back channel' between Dobrynin and Kissinger would continue.

Though one of the best educated Presidents since the Second World War, Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 as both an outsider in Washington and a novice in diplomacy.

After the carnage of Vietnam and the corruption of Watergate, Carter set out to rebuild American foreign policy on the high ground of moral principle and human rights. Sooner after his inauguration, Academician Andrei Sakharov, the dissident winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote to Carter asking him to persevere in his campaign for human rights in the Soviet Union. To the outrage of the Kremlin and the KGB, Carter publicly acknowledged and replied to his letter.

Shortly afterwards he received another Soviet dissenter, Vladimir Bukovsky, in the White House. Both Yakushkin and the Center mistakenly interpreted Carter's human rights campaign chiefly as a bargaining ploy designed to strengthen the US bargaining position for the next round of strategic arms talks after SALT1 expired in October 1977.

Service A (Active Measures) attached extreme importance to countering Carter's human rights campaign by attacking the United States own record. In 1977, it composed a number of letters to the President's wife, Rosalynn Carter, protesting against 'the infringement of human rights' in the United States. While Gordievsky was stationed in Copenhagen, the residency succeeded in persuading a well-known liberal politician to send one of these letters to Mrs. Carter. The residency was so excited that it immediately sent a PR line officer to her home town to obtain a copy of the letter and satisfy himself that it corresponded to the KGB draft. The two texts matched exactly, and a triumphant report was sent back to the Center.

Washington was the chief center for political intelligence. Dmitry Ivanovich Yakushkin, Main Resident from 1975 to 1982, was proud of his descent from one of the Decembrist conspirators of 1825. He also probably enjoyed the Washington Post's assessment of him in 1982 as 'the most powerful KGB officer outside the Soviet Union.' (When roused, he bellowed down the telephone at a higher rate of decibels than anyone else in Yasenevo).

His period in Washington, however, was marred by one major embarrassment. A passer-by threw a packet into the grounds of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, not far from the White House. When opened, it contained what appeared to be classified documents, the sender's name and address, and the offer of more intelligence. Yakushkin dismissed the whole affair as a provocation and ordered the packet to be handed to the police. The documents, however, turned out to be genuine, and the sender was arrested.

On becoming head of the FCD, Kryuchkov rapidly introduced a series of organisational changes designed to take advantage of the new opportunities created by detente for work against the 'Main Adversary'.

A new Group North was set up within the First Department to coordinate intelligence operations against American targets in other parts of the world. It's first head was Vadim Kirpichenko, the former Resident in Cairo who had recruited Nasser's intelligence chief, Sami O. Shariff.

Residencies in most parts of the west and the Third World were instructed to set up "Main Adversary Groups' to organize operations against United States targets. Such groups usually contained one or two officers from lines PR (political intelligence) and KR (counter-intelligence), and one from line X (scientific and technological intelligence) under a line PR Chairman.

Officers from Group North occassionally visited residencies to inspect the work of 'Main Adversary Groups'. Gordievsky's impression was that, because of bureaucratic rivalries, these attempts at coordination achieved at best only partial success. The rapid expansion of contacts with the West at the height of detente initialy persuaded Kryuchkov that new methods of intelligence collection should be employed against the 'Main Adversary'. The heamorrhage of American official secrets as the Watergate scandal developed, and the sensational revelations of investigative journalists, convinced him that the traditional tradecraft of agent recruitment was becoming outmoded. Many secrets seemed to be there for the taking.

On taking charge of the FCD in 1974, to the horror of Center veterans, he instructed residents to concentrate on building up large numbers of overt contacts willing to talk openly about official secrets, rather than engage in the much slower and more labour-intensive methods of cultivating and recruiting secret agents.

A few disastrous experiences in Western restaurants with KGB officers under diplomatic cover abandoning their traditional tradecraft and trying to imitate Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post quickly persuaded Kryuchkov to abandon the experiment.

He subsequently laid even greater emphasis on the need to recruit a new generation of penetration agents in the West than many of his department heads.

Mikhail Petravich Lyubimov, whom Gordievsky considered on of his most talented and likeable FCD officers of his generation, with a deep knowledge of both English literature and Scottish single malts, author of the thesis (based upon his two year 'debriefing' of Kim Philby, among others) entitled, 'Special Traits of the Brittish National Character and Their Use in Operational Work'. The thesis was presented with great success at the FCD's Andropov Institute in 1974, and used as the basis of the FCD's main classified textbook on the United Kingdom, which was still in use in the mid-1980's.

~*!*~

[9]
{Pink Peasant's Wizzard}

The KGB still regards as one of its great past triumphs the Cheka’s unmasking, in the summer of 1918, of the so-called “Lockhart Plot” involving French, Brittish, and American diplomats and secret agents.

Robert Bruce Lockhart, former acting British Consul-General in pre-revolutionary Moscow, was an able but erratic member of the consular service whose career had twice been interrupted by his complicated love affairs. The Secret Intelligence Service, then known as MIic, added further to the confusion caused by Lockhart. Lockhart formed ‘a very poor opinion’ of their work. ‘However brave and however gifted as ...linguists,’ they were in his opinion, ‘frequently incapable of forming a reliable political judgement.’

Though Lockhart had a low opinion of MIic operations in Russia, the sheer audacity of its most extrovert agent, Sydney McReilly, took his breath away. Reilly had been born Sigmund Rosenblum, in Russian Poland, in 1874. In London, he became a confident, intrepid, international adventurer, fluent in several languages, expert in sexual seduction, who wove around his cosmopolitan career a web of fantasy which sometimes deceived O’Reilly himself and has since ensnared most of those who have written about him. Though a fantasist, O’Really possessed a flair for intelligence tradecraft that combined with an indifference to danger which won the admiration of both Sir Mansfield Cumming, the first head of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Winston Churchill. Lockhart described McReilly’s flamboyant personality as a mixture of ‘the artistic temperament of the Jew with the devil-may-care daring of the Irishman.’

Reilly, claims one best-selling history of the British Secret Service, ‘wielded more power, authority and influence than any other spy’, was an expert assassin ‘by poisoning, stabbing, shooting and throttling’, and possessed ‘eleven passports and a wife to go with each.’

Reilly was born in Odessa of an ‘Irish captain’ and a Russian mother. Reilly’s career has a particular fascination for the present Chairman of the KBG, General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov, who summoned all the books on Reilly from the FCD library. ‘And,’ said one of the librarians, ‘he seems to be reading them.’

~*!*~

[10]
{Cead Mile Failte}

The Silent Conspiracy:

Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990’s

By Stephen Dorril

~ MI5 – Operation ‘God-diers’ Flavius - AS8U ~

British Empire, Gibraltar: Two leading Provisional IRA members, thirty-one year-old Mairead Farrell and thirty-year-old Daniel ‘Butch’ McCann, were walking past a Shell service station when a soldier, who was following directly behind them on the footpath, shouted a warning. Immediately, an SAS colleague fired from the road, hitting Farrell in the face. More bullets ricocheted off the petrol pumps. McCann, moving quickly to assist Farrell, was shot twice, once in the face and then in the top of the head. The other SAS man moved forward and, from a distance of three feet, fired three shots into Farrell’s back. The bullets exited from the front, her heart shot to pieces. He then moved across and fired two more bullets into McCann as he lay face down on the ground. A third IRA terrorist, twenty-three-year-old bomb-maker Sean Savage, ran towards the town, pursued by a man running awkwardly with a gun in his left hand. Suddenly and without warning, the pursuer opened fire…. As Savage lay ‘corkscrewed to the ground’ his killer, an SAS soldier, standing at his feet, fired the fatal bullets, the coup de grace. He fired two shots from his Browning pistol into Savage’s head, the cartridges ejecting four feet to the right. Three more shots caused ‘extensive brain damage’ and ‘multiple fractures to the skull-bone’.“Only a shot in the brain guarantees immobility” ~ Sol-dier D

~~~~~ ***** ~~~~~

[11]
{Flanagan VII "Pro" }

~ Kings Language ~

“There has been a rumour going around the service that the person who had the DG’s job had a name beginning with W,’ said a former MI5 officer. ‘But nobody thought of Walker.’ Walker was soft-spoken with an easy smile. He was alleged to be a skilled interrogator, a man with a good memory who listened carefully to questions, paused to consider and answered deliberately, in the manners of the media’s favourite spook, George Smiley. Unlike Smiley, he reportedly had ‘a short fuse’ and on occasion a fierce temper. The image portrayed was that of the New Spy who had little to do with the ‘buggers and burglars’ of the Wright era. It was, inevitably, highly misleading.

On his appointment the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee had warned newspapers against publishing Walkers name. In March 1986, the Committee had issued Soldier-D Notice No. 6 requesting that ‘nothing should be published’ on the security and intelligence services without reference to the secretary of the Committee. Typically, the majority of newspapers acquiesced to this form of self-censorship (As part of its policy of encouraging more openness, in October 1992, the government announced a ‘thorough review’ of the D-Notice system which is to be completed by the spring of 1993.) It was reported that moves to greater openness were supported by high-flyers within MI5 and by veterans of the service. Former MI5 officer John Day, whose autobiography remains unpublished, said that ‘What concerned me is that while some of the criticicisms of MI5 was undoubtedly deserved, often it was ill-informed. Informed criticism is healthy. If MI5 is moving towards more openness, two cheers.”

~*!*~

..
[12]
{HawkIsle Irish Whisper}

Miss RTR Moneypenny

She was a tall, big-boned woman with a surprisingly quiet voice and a slight, almost undefined lisp that sum men found very appealing. In the tough and masculine world in which she had competed and won, she had sacrificed femininity for function… She had an outstanding brain, fast and analytical.

~~ James Adams, The Final Terror ~~

~*!*~

MI5’s Reform Protocol: a dinosaur filled with yesterday’s men beavering away at nothing very much… Everything seemed to smell of failure… Great ability rubbed shoulders with breathtaking incompetence and when you were knew you never knew which to expect. How they get anyone at all to join up now is a mystery to me… The job requires ‘unusual persistence and attention to detail and the ability to mix well with men and women of all kinds and backgrounds… Immaturity or tendency to emotional instability are key disqualifying factors. Those employed by the security services are classed by psychologists as loners of the ‘stable introvert’ type. “Two sorts of women who joined the service, ‘chorus girls and nuns’: ‘the former flitted around the edge, never really becoming involved at all, while the latter dedicated their lives to it a way few men would do.’
“Institutional loyalty of the kind they cling to really precludes the absolute love that, particularly in middle age, they begin to look for. Success in love – I don’t think the British believe in that at all, really. Certainly not the administrative classes.”

“I want all my girls to be well bred and have good legs.”

– Director General VK007

“It’s a bloody awful job, people hate it. It is like working in funeral insurance. The work is desperately dull… It’s bloody boring wading through people’s phone taps. People talk about how the dog is getting on or they bought some potatoes today.”

~*!*~
MI5’s Reform Club, is akin to a secret society whose officers are united by one purpose, which is secrecy itself: belief, methods and membership. Sissela Bok in her book Secrets, has suggested that for those individuals who ‘live with secrecy day in and day out’ and are ‘trained to give up ordinary moral restraints in dealing with enemies’, working in an intelligence-gathering organisation is ‘an experience that isolates and transforms the participants’. It gives ‘insiders a stark sense of separation from outsiders.’ According to those who have been through the process: ‘New recruits are given no cover story to help them keep the nature of their work secret. They are told simply to say that they work for the Ministry of Defence and, if pressed, to say that the work is secret. It is made clear that it will be frowned upon if they slip up and let someone know what they do. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, while recognising that a degree of secrecy is essential for mental health, believed that the ‘maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison, which alienates their possessor from the community.’ Officers find themselves at one removed from their fellow citizens. They grow accustomed to being guarded in their relationships, and eventually discover that the only people they trust are their colleagues. Gradually they are moulded into shape. Individual expression within the service is discouraged and dissent is stifled.

~*!*~

[13]
{Tramps Ascalon Treasure - U ST Thunder}
~ FatwaClub – Stasi Wall -- Spy Boss ~

My Enemy, My Self

By Yoram Binur

[a]
Yoram Binur studied Arabic at the Hebrew University, and has lived in England and Italy. He served in the Israeli Defence Force as Lieutenant in the elite Parachutists’ Unit, and instructed soldiers in sabotage, and anti-terrorist combat methods. He has been writing for the Jerusalem weekly Kol Hai’r since 1983, and is recognised as one of the leading experTs on Arab affairs. He is thirty-four years old and lives in JerUshalom.

~*!*~

[b]
My posing project was originally intended to be carried out among Israelis, whose reactions and attitudes toward the PalesTinians working in their midst were my main concern. After my experience at the Coliseum Halls, however, I became interested in investigating the background of the day laborers who perform all the dirty and unpleasant jobs in Israel’s cities. They come mostly from the lower classes or from refugee camps, whose residents are the poorest among all those living in the occupied territories. I decided that Jabalaya was where I’d make my first attempt at posing as an Arab in Arab surroundings, precisely because it is an extreme example of living conditions under Israeli miliTary rule.

Jebalaya is one of the largest refugee camps in the area which Israel occupied in June 1967. It was hastily erected by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on a site located to the southwest of the city of Gaza, in order to provide temporary shelter for the tens of thousands of refugees who fled to the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the War of 1948. (In Israel this war is known as the War of Independence; the Arabs term it the CatasTrophe of 1948.) They came from Arab towns and villages in the southern part of the new Jewish state, such as Majdal (Ashkelon), Sdud (Ashdod), and Yibneh (Yavneh). As time went by, Gaza grew in size and the refugee camp developed alongside it – a shantytown on the outskirts of the city where seventy-five thousand inhabitants still live in cramped and squalid conditions. This “temporary” camp has been standing for forty years. It was here, on December 8, 1987, that the first riots started, which quickly spread all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, forming the beginning of the current full-scale uprising, known as the InTafada.

~*!*~

..
[c]
As I followed the conversation, I found out the meaning of the strange signs I had seen painted on electricity poles on almost every street corner in the camp. The signs were sprayed in red or black paint and depicted various geometrical forms, usually triangles, with numbers inside them.

“Since Abu Tomar arrived the patrols have been painting more signs for agents in the camp to come and meet their contacts,” said Munir.

“How exactly does it work here with these signs?” I asked him.

“When the muhabarat [the Shin Bet] want to meet a particular agent they instruct the soldiers who are on patrol to paint an agreed-upon sign. The number within the sign stands for the serial number of that person or it may mean a special instruction such as ‘Come and meet me this evening at the central administration.’

The painting is out in the open and everyone can see it but doesn’t mean anything to them.

Only the particular agent understands the coded message.”

~*!*~

..
[14]
{Alex II Kugan}
{G5-U-HW}

Munir continued telling us about his experience working among the Jews. “Once I was picking fruit on some farm near Ashkelon. We worked like donkeys from morning to evening and slept in a stinking run-down shed in the orchard. After a week, payday came around and the boss brought in some thugs at night armed with guns who beat us and chased us, yelling, “You’re all terrorists!” We had to get out of there and a whole week of hard work went to hell. We didn’t get a shekel.” The anti-Israeli sentiment was very strong and I was forced to concur with every word that was being said.

Abd Al Karim erupted for a second time.

“Those Zionists are getting money from America all the time. Like a flock of sheep, they just stand with mouths open and ask for more. And they’re always talking about what Hitler did to them in Europe. I don’t believe that Hitler killed the Jews, they just killed each other.”

This wicked assertion made my blood boil.

The young Palestinians in whose company I found myself were intellectuals. Abd Al Karim, my host, had completed his studies at the university of Gaza. The others were educated as well and knew – or should have known – the truth about the Holocaust. The problem was that, considering all the pent-up anger and frustration that resulted from growing up in a miserable ref{U}gee camp, it would have been hard for me to protest against the hatred they felt toward anything that even faintly smacked of Zionism.

…

Food seemed to be Abd AlG Karim’s lowest priority, if it was a priority at all.

As a university graduate who was forced to earn his living as a day labourer, Lubad suffered a high level of frustration. He expressed himself by painting motifs depicting the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation and their life before the great evacuation of 1948.

He loved to paint at night. On days when he didn’t find work, he’d come home early, sleep a few hours, and then set up his canvas.

More than once I saw him take the tubes of cheap oil paints from the refrigerator and draw Palestinian figures against peaceful rural backgrounds.A few years earlier Lubad had graduated from the Islamic university in Gaza with a major in geography and with a grade average of jayid jidan (excellent). He then joined the twelve thousand university graduates from the occupied territories who cannot find employment in their chosen fields; the Israeli job market absorbs them only in the capacity as manual labourers.

Abd Al Karim nurtured a venomous hatred for the Israeli occupation.

“If one day there are a lot of speeches in the Israeli Knesset about peace, then you can be sure it’s a sign they’re going to attack another Arab state,” he declared, expounding the principles of his attitude toward Israel.

“The Arab states talk about war all the time and when there is a war they’re not worth anything, but when the Israelis last spoke about peace they invaded Lebanon and murdered the Palestinians there. Victory will only come by means of the gun. All the rest is idle Wyoming pillow-talk.”

“But in order to win we need leaders,” I ventured.

Lubad replied, “The leaders can only be those who have fought and sat in the Zionist prisons and not people who don’t have anything to do with the PalesTinian cause.”

~*!*~
..

[15]
{Sun Slamdunk Tzu}

“I told her, the judge, that Jewish cunt,” and here he switched to Hebrew:

“Your exalted and honourable and noble honor, you are indeed the judge here upon earth, but there is another judge” – here he pointed dramatically above at the dust-ridden flouroescent lamp that was flickering on the ceiling—“the judge above us, whom we will all have to face, and if you give me a penalty that’s too severe, your honor, and I’m just a poor worker who works here to earn his daily-bread, how will you face Her on Judgement Day?’

And so” – Abu Al Az shook with barely controlled mirth – “she only gave me a four-hundred-shekel fine. Everyone gets at least a thousand.”

~*!*~

..
[16]
{Man-O-War}
~ Cactus Flower – Shwe Dragon – Sparrow Timor ~

Hidden Agendas

By John Pilger

“I use very big money. I use guns, too. The bums who insist on double-crossing me know what they are up against. City Hall understands what I am saying. At least I hope they do.”

Al Capone, American Mafia gangster

..
“You just give me the word and I’ll turn that fucking little island into a parking lot.”

Al Haig, American Secretary of State

Henry Kissingers realpolic rule. The ‘statecraft’ that Kissinger personified in the 1970s is widely appreciated in circles of ‘post-modern’ expertise. Presidents and governments consult him. Douglas Hurd, when Foreign Secretary, arranged an honorary knighthood for him. The BBC pays him $8,000 for less than a minute’s wisdom. That he secretly and illegally bombed a neutral country, Cambodia, causing tens of thousands of deaths is immaterial. That he worked to overthrow the elected government in Chile is irrelevant. That he defied Congress and clandestinely supplied the Indonesian dictators with weapons with which they pursued the genocide in East Timor is of no consequence. That he encouraged the Kurds to fight for nationhood, then betrayed them, is by the way.

Illusion is all-important. Leaving aside its declared ‘mistakes’, Western colonialism is benevolent, the Cold War was rational. Countries are ‘protected’ from or ‘defended’ against ‘inSirGents’ whom the former US Secretary of State George Schultz described as ‘the depraved opponents of civilisation itself.’

The West itself is never terrorist.

That it has invaded, stolen land and resources, subverted local culture and abused and enslaved indigenous populations is beyond comparison with terrorism: that was divine work.

The distrust and fear of colonialism felt by societies all over the world is easily explained. According to the Foreign Office, it is ‘often strictly psychopathic’ as colonised peoples ‘have practically no social consciousness.’

~*!*~

[17]
{Forest King Breaker}

Mandelay, Burma’s second city, is described as ‘the Golden Land’s Tourist Paradise City.’ The view from Mandelay Hill offers an instructive panorama. On one side is the Novotel Champignon Hotel, a white concrete box whose brochure boasts of ‘a computer socket, multi-channel in-house music and TV, a fitness center and an 18-hole golf course.’ Facing it across a landscape of pagodas is another white concrete box, this one a maximum security prison in which there are people serving ten years for writing poetry and singing songs about freedom.

I explained this to an Australian tourist enjoying the golden sunset, and he told his wife, who took a photograph of him smiling with the prison in the background. They asked if I knew of other ‘off-beat sights’.

The principle British tour operator in Burma is the Oriental Express Group, which operates ‘The Road to Mandelay’, a ‘champagne-style cruise’ on the Irrawaddy River between Mandalay and Pagan in a converted Rhine cruiser. The company is owned by Sea Containers, a London based company with worldwide shipping and transport interests, whose American Ranger chairman, James B. Sherwood, ‘really gets a buzz out of going into those countries where others fear to tread’, his public relations manager told me. ‘He’s also pretty outspoken, I can tell you,’ she said. Sherwood demonstrated this on the day he was announced as a successful bidder for a chunk of Britains newly privatised railway, the East-Coast Main-Line. ‘We have to try and break’, he declared, ‘the communest approach to running a railway.’

The Burmese waiters and cabin attendants on The Cruise for Mandalay are graduates in physics and history. ‘The beauty of this place’, said Captain Brian Hills, ‘is that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for an educated bloke; they’ll do anything for a job.’

Captain Hills said the company had ‘tried to think of everything and be sensitive.’ The Victorian etchings in the Kipling Bar are ‘discreet'. That is to say, ‘they don’t show the British lording it over the natives’.

In the ‘staterooms’ the television rises at the foot of the bed and, hey presto, there is Rupert Murdoch’s satellite TV and a BBC cookery programme beemed straight to the Irrawaddy.

‘Just let the aroma of this coffee waft through the house you’re trying to sell,’ oozed the rush presenter, ‘and you’ll have no trouble at all. The buyers will close there and then.’

In one of the side tours on offer, the passengers of the Road to Mandaly are taken to picturesque Buffalo Point, where they watch floating logs dragged ashore by yoked buffalo, urged by whooping children. The people here are among the most wretched on earth. They traditionally rented a patch of mud on the riverbank, where they cut and weave bamboo for thirty pence a day. Since tourism got under way, their children earn ten times that by begging from the foreigners. Ten-year-olds paint themselves with lipshtick and sing ‘Frere Jacques’ with the result that the few who went to school now refuse to go.

Enfants have become the breadwinners, locking their families into a cycle of dependency seldom understood by tourists.

~*!*~

[18]
{Oxford ST-Champ Ruble - God Almonty Stillwell}

We Shall Have Our Country Time

.!.

On March 2, 1962, the hope of independent Burma ended when the army seized power, inaugurating more than three decades of military dictatorship.

The new leader was General Ne Win, who proclaimed another version of totalitarianism, called ‘the Burmese Way to Socialism’.

A Stalin-like figure, Ne Win concentrated power in himself and his A-court.

Although he was an absolute ruler, he never created a personality cult around himself like Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-sheck or Kim Il-Sung. Yet he established at his luxurious Ady Road residence on a peninsula in Enya Lake in Rangoon an almost absurd replica of the old Burmese monarchy. One of the few men he trusted was his old Indian cook, Raju, who had served him since his 4th Burma Rifle days. Fearful of being poisoned, he entrusted only Raju with the task of preparing his food. But even RAju had to taste it first, in Ne Win’s presence.

For one who married seven times, Ne Win’s public diktats were puritanical in the extreme. A devoted gambler, he banned horse racing ‘to uplift public morals’ – reportedly after a bookie cheated him at Montezuma-Ascot. Following a row with his brother-in-law Georgie, who had taken American citizenship, he decreed that no Burmese with a foreign passport was to be allowed back in the country. Thus he never saw Georgie again.

Martin Morland, who was British Ambassador to Burma during the 1980’s, describes him as ‘a King Sun addict control maniac.’ Like Stalin, Ne Win displaced whole populations, built camps and filled the prisons with his enemies, real and imagined. His wars against the ethnic people’s were unrelenting and vengeful; and along the way he made himself extremely rich.

Ne Win gave himself the sobriquet ‘Brilliant as the Sun’. The Burmese, who often likened him to Ferdinand Marcos, preferred to call his reign ‘the madhouse dynasty.’

In 1984, he produced his coup de grace. Without warning, he withdrew most of the country’s banknotes, replacing them with new denominations that included or added up to the number nine. According to his chief astrologer, nine was his lucky number. The people of Burma did not share his luck. As most of them kept their savings in cash, they were ruined. It was this impoverishment that lit the touchpaper. Penniless farmers rebelled; followed by the students.

The moment of uprising came precisely at eight minutes past eight on the eighth morning of the eighth month of 1988. This was the auspicious time the dockworkers, the ‘first wave’ chose to strike. Others followed, and in the days and weeks that followed it seemed, almost everyone showed a defiance and courage comparable with those who stormed the Berlin Wall the following year.

‘It was unforgettable and moving,’ said Martin Moreland, who was Ambassador at the time. ‘All you could see were people and all you could hear was Do-a-ye Do-a-ye…

‘Our country is our business.’

~*!*~

[19]
{Geronimo Phoenix Green}

~ Social Yewgenics Contract ~

Amazing Steven Holland, the ‘super fish’, broke three world records in the Olympic trials of 1976; and Dawn Fraser and Lorraine Crapp, whose style and courage made them our heroines.

Coached by friends and fathers, training at sunrise and at night, none of them made money out of swimming. That such a small population (fewer than ten million then) could produce so many fine swimmers was affirmation of the way we Australians liked to think we were. It had something to do with our origins: the strong sense of being a nation of down-underdogs, which is still there and is probably related, by blood and myth, to the historical fact that a number of our great-grandparents, like my own, had arrived in leg-irons.

Unlike the United States, our first white inhabitants were not on a mission from God but were Godforsaken. We clung to the foreshores of an ancient continent whose mysteries and harshness made us, so we thought, innocent bystanders in our own country. We liked to think that we were the poor who had got away: ‘an entire continent peopled by the lower orders’, as Mark Twain once observed of Australia.

He was not that far out; and the proof is there still in the unpatronising celebration of working-class culture. Bondi people were the Irish who ran the politics, and Jewish refugees – known as reffos – and others known as Eyeties, Chinks, Balts and Boongs.

There were numerous Little Belfasts and Little Cypruses and Little Lebanons; and there was no blood on the streets.

It did not matter that people got on by default; most agreed there was nowhere better a battler could go. We did not know it and could not imagine it, but this was the prototype of what was to become the most culturally diverse society on earth (after Israel).

That Bondi belonged to a people excluded from this melting pot was never mentioned. Their secrets remained beneath the concrete and asphalt on the ocean promenade, in the workshops and armouries where they made the weapons and tools with which they had endeavoured to defend their homeland against the white-skinned invaders. All but a few of the original people of Bondi died in the invasion: from diseases brought by the English, or they were shot or poisoned.

Something similar happened over at Lavender Bay, on the site of the Olympic Pool. This side of Sydney belonged to the Waddermedegal and Cammeraygal people’s until they, too, were exterminated. This happened all over the continent. It was our secret life; and that has not changed.…

While I swam in my wonder pool, Aboriginal children were barred from entering public swimming pools all over Australia. In 1966, Charlie Perkins, an Aborigine, chained himself to the turnstyle of the municipal pool at Moree, in western New South Wales, and after enduring threats and violence, he and his fellow ‘freedom riders’ saw the black kids in.

Three years later, Charlie and I smashed down the gate of the Aboriginal reserve at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory by driving a Ford Falcon at it. The other way was to get permission and fill out forms with the certainty of refusal. Heddy, Charlie’s mother and a queen of the Anaconda people, was in the back seat wearing her best black hat. ‘Do it’ she said.

Times have changed, though not altogether. Nearly thirty years later, I was travelling in northern Queensland and happened on ‘Strange Wild World’, a tourist attraction. Twice a day, between ‘wombat feeds’ and a ‘toad and snakes show’, Aborigines performed a ‘cultural show’. That is, three young men blew didgeridoos and cavorted unconvincingly while a Japanese tour guide stood in front of them, interpreting for her non-plussed package tour. Tourism, not sheep, is now Australia’s biggest export earner.

What used to be regarded by establishment voices as conveniently contentious is now stated as fact.

‘Much of the poverty and disease in Aboriginal communities’, said the President of the Australian Medical Association, Dr. Keith Woollard, ‘is a result of the dispossession of their lands.’

This was also the view of expert witnesses giving evidence to a Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in late 1984. The Commission heard that Aborigines were sixty times more likely to be arrested than Whites in Western Australia. There was evidence of beatings and, by any definition torture, as standard police procedure. The Royal Commission recommended the blindingly obvious: that Aborigines should be imprisoned as a last resort. Since then, Aborigines have been sent to prison at a higher rate than ever before and the number dying behind bars has doubled. The former chief psychiatrist at Bargwanath Hospital in Sowetho wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald to point out that the rate of black deaths in custody in Australia was thirteen times higher than in South Africa.

There is no mystery why.

In 1996, newspapers published a series of photographs of New South Wales policemen at a party with blackened faces and mock nooses around their necks, meant to depict Aborigines who had died in police custody. No disciplinary action was taken against them.

Like Pauline Hanson, Geoffrey Blainey warned of a conspiracy with race as the subtext, between an ‘alliance of academics and ethnics’ who met in a ‘secret sun room’ in the Department of Immigration.

He referred to ‘front –line’ suburbs in the cities and said he was speaking up for those Australians whose dissent was confined to ‘graffiti on the café lavatory’. He quoted complaints about spitting foreigners and their stinking cooking, the sort of people who ‘dry noodles on the clothes line in the backyard’ and ‘fly around in flash cars while I walk all the time.’ He calls this the ‘black armband’ view of history.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, released a damning and painful report, entitled Bringing Them Home: that of the ‘stolen generations.’ Police were used to find and steal children. The policy stemmed from the eugenics movement, which promoted fears that white women were not breeding fast enough and the ‘white’ race would be ‘swamped’.

Whenever word of the horror leaked out there was, at first, disbelief, then extreme discomfort and censirship. It took film-maker Alex Morgan two years to convince the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to show his searing documentary, Lousy Little Sixpence, telling the full story of the stolen children.

In the Canberra Times of May 11, 1996, ‘Freedom Fighters Farewell’, Jan Mayman wrote:

The sad, troubled spirit of Robert Riley will be healed at last next week when he is buried with his people in the Noongar Aboriginal Heartland of Western Australia.

He was a brilliant and charismatic indigenous leader who died at 41, burned out by a lifelong struggle with racism, injustice and dirtypolitics.

On May Day, with his nation still stunned by the Tasmanian Massacre, he ended his life in a lonely hotel room…

His high public profile enraged the redneck tribes. They sent him frequent death threats.

His downward spiral began when he decided to speak out publicly about a secret that had haunted his life – his pack rape, at the age of eight, in a Perth orphanage, Sister Kate’s.

[At the motel] he paid in advance, in cash, and left a carefully written note, in blood-red ink. There were farewells, apologies – and a final, passionate appeal to white Australia to act on the findings of the Stolen Children enquiry, so no one would ever have to suffer as he had…

As advice to a friend he wrote,

‘Remember two important things: you can’t be wrongif you’re right, and you don’t stop fighting for justice simply because those around you don’t like it. You keep on fighting.’

The pioneering works like The Chant of Timmy Blacksmith have informed and helped to change attitudes.

Kevin Gilbert was the first Aboriginal author and playwright to be acknowledged by white Australia at a time when they were counting sheep and not him.

He had the courage to address his own people unsparingly. In his book, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It, he described the degradation of Aboriginal Man:

‘He bowed to the fact of his women having to prostitute themselves for the food that would allow the children to survive, or for the alcohol that would yield the oblivion that was so much more desirable than the daily reality.”

Kevin was born in 1933 on the banks of the great Lachlan River at Condobolin in New South Wales. His mother was a Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi woman, his father Irish. He was stolen at the age of seven and sent as an ‘orphan’ to a ‘reserve’ like the one at Jay Creek.

He was meant to grow up with Christianity; like so many, he grew up with violence and alcoholism.

IN a drunken craze he murdered his wife, for which he was imprisoned for fourteen years, at Bathurst gaol, where he was often beaten senseless. Yet he came back from the abyss; taught himself to paint, read and write; and his appetite for books was voracious. His poem Digger Memorials:

Our history is carved

In the heart of the country

Our milestone memorials

Named Slaughter House creek

The Coniston Massacre, Death

Gully and Durranurraijah

The place on the clifftops called

Massacre Leap

Where the mouth of the valley

Filled up with

Our murdered dead bodies

The place where our blood flowed

The river ran red

All the way to the see…

~*!*~

[20]
{Miracle-Copper-Buddy~~Rock-Lake-Paw}

~ WaterGateLincolnBarn ~ Elsewhere ~ PeacePrincePSDUltimatum ~

Psychic Warrior:

The True Story of the CIA’s Paranormal Espionage Programme

By David Morehouse

Inside STARGATE…

How do we know the truth is out there?

Because, one man defied the CIA and the US Army to bring his story back.

His name?

David Morehouse.

His occupation?

PSYCHIC WARRIOR: ARMY RANGER

{i}

Major David A. Morehouse, PhD, has had a noteable military career. He holds a Regular Army commission in the infantry and is a Distinguished Military Graduate. During his tours of duty, Major Morehouse served in a myriad of staff and command positions ranging from airborne rifle platoon leader to commander of an elite Airborne Ranger company. He was the Aide de Campe to two army generals, a battalion executive officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and Chief of Training for the 82nd.

From 1987 to 1991 he was assigned to several highly classified special access programmes in the US Army’s Intelligence Security Command and Defense Intelligence Agency. An army ranger, master parachutist, pathfinder, scuba diver and special operations soldier, his unique military skills place him in a select group of army officers. He holds a Master of Military Art and Science Degree, is a Master of Administration, and a Doctorate in Philosophy. The recipient of numerous military awards and decorations, his last assignment was to have been with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s elite ‘Study Group’ as the non-lethal weapons expert.

~*!*~

{ii}

My next mission was posted on the assignment board, with a huge red “T” beside my name. I’d been in the unit for eight months now, and I’d graduated from coordinate remote viewing a few weeks ago. That meant I was no longer required to sit in a viewing chair, or take the coordinates sitting up, or produce an ideogram. For extended remote viewing, ERV, all I did was lie on a specially designed platform bed, count down, and make the separation into the ether. I was still hooked up, and still monitored by Kathleen in the room as well as by the audio and video monitor.

ERV technique was to place the tasking sheet on the small table next to the platform. I would look at the tasking sheet, focus on the encrypted coordinates, and then lie back, adjust the lighting, and go… I looked at my tasking coordinates a final time: “Coordinates seven eight five six four, nine three four five two; describe the target and any significant events.” Within minutes I was in the ether and on my way to the target. Paul Posner monitored the changes in my physical body which indicated to him that the separation was complete.

…

“I want you to move ahead through the stone wall and describe what you see.”

“I’m moving now.” The wall pressed against my phantom form with the sound of Velcro tearing open; in the center of the wall it was dark. It was at times like this that I learned that everything indeed has a spirit.

The wall had it’s own history, and it seemed to weep as I passed through it. I left the darkness feeling as though I’d left a painful, clutching memory behind.

After this training, I never doubted that all things are inanimate. To hear or feel an object speak had been unfathomable only a few short months ago; now, it was a not so uncommon event. Every viewer experienced it at times; we learned to listen and trust what we heard. Levy had taught me that. A target’s surroundings recorded the history of the place without prejudice and stood ready to bear witness to all who had the ears to hear.

…

{iii}

I sighed, pulled open the envelope, and extracted the first of five black and white photographs. A Nazi death camp.

“Dachau,” I whispered.

“This is a difficult target; nobody waltzes in and waltzes back out. Everytime you go to a place like this you leave something behind. Every time you go here you will experience something more evil, more lost, more godforsaken. You were right when you said the place was stained with evil.”

“Why the hell did you send me there anyway? What could possibly come from it, besides another nightmare for me?

“Everyone gets sent there; it’s part of the training program. Every person in this office has been there, and everyone has been affected just like you.”

“Why is it important for us to go there?”

“You have to experience the extreme out there in the ether, in order to be able to understand the nuances of some more obscure targets: double agents, test pilots, politicians. In the near future you will learn how to reach the minds of these men and women and tell us what they are thinking and feeling. If you can’t train yourself to grasp the extreme, overwhelming evil of Dachau. How can you expect to grasp the more subtle nuances of a pilot test-flying the latest Soviet fighter? Learning the extremes is the first step in the process of getting your eyes. You want them, don’t you?”

…

{iv}

“Hey, I’m sorry if I came across an ass,” I apologized. “I guess I’m looking for answers out there, and all I ever run into are more questions.”

“I know how you feel, and I apologize for loosing my cool. I have an agenda in mind for you, and it’s frustrating when you don’t realize the significance of what you’re doing. Going to the surface of Mars and back in a matter of minutes is significant stuff; you can’t just blow it off because it doesn’t answer all your questions.

One big question it should have answered for you was whether you can journey off-planet and survive. Another thing: we are not alone in this universe.

That’s the kind of lesson I want you to learn here. Everything else will come in time. Okay?

I smiled at her. “You know, if you’d been my freshman math teacher in high school, I most certainly wouldn’t be so bad at math now. Thanks for your patience. I know I’m a terrible student pilot.”

“You’re an infantryman; I don’t expect anything more. What’s that saying? Arguing with an infantryman is like wrestling with a pig: Everybody gets dirty, but the pig loves it.”

…

{v}

In Mel’s hand was a flat, perfectly round stone, in a supple, tightly sewn hide case. The case was adorned with an intricate pattern of beads and finished with a long strap that allowed it to be hung around the owner’s neck. It was beautiful.

“What does this pattern mean?”

“It’s your rock medicine – like mine, see?” He pulled his from inside his shirt to show me briefly. “You wear it next to your heart, always. I made yours to indicate that you are a member of the Bear Clan, a warrior class. The symbols on the front represent the bear in his cave. These colors and patterns here represent the piercing bullets of his enemies heading toward him, and the wavy lines here show how his spirit and power have made the bullets waver and fall. See, he’s protected by his power, and his power comes from his bravery, and his bravery from his spirit.”

“That’s really… I don’t know what to say. Nobody’s ever given me anything like this. Thank you, Mel.”

“You’re welcome, brother, but there’s more. Turn it over. The symbols on this side represent balance in all things, sort of an Indian yin and yang. The stone is balanced, as are the colors and symbols on this side of the medicine. The red represents adversity, turmoil, and challenge, while the blue speaks of depth and promise and goodness. The central yellow symbolizes the east-to-west journey of the sun separating the two powers and thus creating balance.”

“I think you need some balance in your life. If you wear this all the time, and believe in it, the medicine will provide what you need according to your faith.”

His gaze seemed to reach into my soul briefly, “Now, what do you say we get some fucking coffee?”

“Yeah, I could use some. And, Mel, thanks for this. I will never let it out of my sight.”

“You know, I picked up that rock about twenty years ago, just before I came into the army. I’ve carried it all this time waiting for the right way to use it. You better take care of it, it’s a Vietnam veteran.”

I wanted to say something important but all I could do was fight the lump in my throat…

…

{vi}

“I’m following this large group; they seem to be turning off… yeah, we’re entering a large room, where everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder. It’s like an amphitheatre, very narrow at the bottom and wider at the top. Still made of the black crystal.”

“What’s going on in this place?”

“There’s someone sitting in a big elevated chair at the bottom of the room. Everyone here is paying very close attention to whatever this thing says.”“Why are you calling this being a ‘thing’?”

“Uh, that’s a good question. I think because he or she or it is larger than the others, and dressed differently. They’re all in white; this things in black. It has a large open hood over it’s head, with long flowing sleeves that mostly cover its hands. If I had to call it, I’d say this one is very evil.”

“Evil?”

“Okay, not evil. He’s some kind of lawgiver or something. He directs people to do things, and they do them without question. It’s not really clear; he points to people, motions to them, and they leave, apparently to carry out some task.”

“Can you speak to this lawgiver?”

“No! And I don’t even want to try. I can tell he knows I’m here, but he couldn’t care less, and I get the impression he’ll be pissed if I try to flaunt the fact that I’m here.”

“Break it off and come back.”

I thought Mel might be disappointed by my timidity. It seemed he wanted me to really assert myself and let the beings know I was there, but I simply didn’t feel comfortable doing that. I felt a certain fascination in visiting another world, but I also understood the need to treat it respectfully. I was an invader, not a guest. I saw them look at me; I knew they were aware of my presence, yet they chose not to speak. So it was clear to me that I was being tolerated, not accepted. And I vowed I would never interfere in other worlds. It was their prerogative to acknowledge me, but I would never force myself on them.

“So did you learn anything?”

“I guess I learned that there are other worlds and other civilisations, and that each one has its own agenda in the universe. It’ puts things into perspective for me. I used to think of the human race as God’s chosen people, but I’m obviously wrong.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, who’s to say where God’s reign starts and stops? I mean, He could be the overseer of that place I visited only hours ago, what makes us any better than those beings?”

“You’re catching on my friend. We’re nothing but a little blue spot in a solar system, in a galaxy with a hundred million solar systems, in a universe with a hundred million galaxies. And the truth is we don’t know where it ends, or if it does. And we aren’t even talking about dimensions yet. Gives you a headache, doesn’t it?”

I laughed. “It does, at that. Let’s go get that bear.”

…

{vii}

It’s a custom in our church for members to speak periodically to the congregation on some topic set by the bishop. The topics are generally simple, in keeping with traditional belief, and members’ talks are supposed to be testimonial, informative, and uplifting. Debbie and I were asked to speak.

Debbie gave a wonderful presentation. I, on the other hand, concluded that the congregation had been fed religious pabulum for too long. I ignored the assigned topic and substituted one of my own: “Temples – Beyond Ritual.”

My talk dealt with issues of dimensionality, astronomy, other worlds and beings, who God really was, and what motivated his dealings with us. I challenged the congregation to expand their minds, to reach beyond the books and spoon-fed teachings of the church, to be more than they’d ever imagined.

I think they thought I was insane.

When I gave the concluding ‘Amen,’ maybe five people in a congregation of two hundred said it with me. At the time, I was furious. I thought the reaction was a perfect example of organized religion: don’t challenge yourself, don’t ask questions, just sit in the pews and breathe; God will reward you for it.

I thought of Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii: “Some must watch, while some must sleep; So runs the world away.” Run away, little sheep, and be saved in your little world; I haven’t time for you any longer. I did not return.

…

{viii}

For some time, the random, unpredictable shifts between the ether and reality had been making me sick. I couldn’t fall asleep without the radio or TV blaring away to keep the noise in my head from driving me completely insane. Why I didn’t put a gun to my mouth, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was the angel’s message. Perhaps it was God having the decency and mercy to keep me from making that leap into the ether forever. My mind and body craved the euphoria of the altered state, the rush of bilocating, the uniqueness of what I was in Stargate’s Sun Streak. At Team Five I was just another professional liar, sucking pay from the taxpayers and trying to bullshit my way through. Every time someone asked me what I did for a living I cringed. I felt like dung telling the lies our bosses expected us to spout. It was like pimping on Saturday night and getting up early on Sunday to preach to the congregation about morality.

…

{ix}

It was Sunday, April 7, 1991. I was sketching and taking in the sun by the bay. I set my notebook aside to watch white sails on the horizon, and let my mind drift to another place and time.

“David!” the familiar voice of the honest angel called softly.

“David!”

I turned to see him standing in the sun to my left. I’d seen him so many times over the years that although his visits never seemed ordinary, I was comfortable with him, not frightened and overwhelmed as I had been at first.

I guess nothing good ever dies, and I’m thankful for that.

The evil in my life and in the ether changed faces often, but the angel was an old and welcome friend.

“I’m here, just like I always am when you want me.”

“I’ve come with a warning again.”

“A warning? Why? Please don’t, I beg you, please don’t. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve worked hard to be what you want me to be. You want me to give something up; but I can’t give up any more, I haven’t got it to give.”

“And so love is fleeting, dyeing, withdrawing from you.”

He smiled.

The beauty of this entity, I’d found, was his ability to look straight to the heart of my apprehensions. He invariably saw things the way they were supposed to be seen.

“You tremble at my warnings, but I offer you a chance for a new life.”

“No, you don’t! You offer me nothing but a chance to continue fighting. I’ve been fighting for over four years now. All I’ve done is exist in the borderland, somewhere between this world and others. What life is that?

“Your life has been part adventure and part miracle, has it not?”

“Those are your words, not mine. This existence has been a struggle for power between good and evil, and I’ve been caught up in that. And what power have I had? All I’ve done –“

The angel interrupted me.

“All you have done is learn to be responsible for your life, and that is the only way to change the world in which you live. The acceptance of that responsibility will guide you through the next phase of your learning.”

He gazed intently at me.

“This phase will test you beyond your limits. You will have to fight for your life before it is over.”

“I’m tired of fighting. I’ve been fighting for my life, and I’m tired.”

“A man is not what he says, but what he fights for; you will be fighting for much more than yourself. You will be fighting for your children, and your children’s children. For generations to come. You are but one link in a millennia-long chain of warriors, but you are called, and much depends on you. Your fight rests on the fight you bear within yourself. The gift is the power – not you, the gift. The test of your strength will be in your ability to bring the gift to others. Remember, the gift is the power! Give the power to others when the time is right. You’ll know when it is right.

…

{x}

“David, what did you learn here?”

“I learned that there is darkness and light and neutrality in the world.”

“There is no neutrality. Everything is a choice; you cannot stand in the world without a choice.”

Then I learned that there is darkness and light, and that each represents some aspect of the world.”

“You knew that already. Search deeper – what did you learn?”

“I learned that perceptions can mask the truth”

”Very well. Then how do you know the truth of your world?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do! How do you know the truth of your world? When you know the truth of something, where does it touch you? Where do you feel it?”

“Here!” I touched my chest.

“Inside me.”

“You feel it and know it in your heart.”

“Yes, that’s where I feel it! Why is that lesson important to me now? I haven’t any problem feeling love.”

“It is truth you seek, not love; it is truth that evades you now. All that you believed, all that you wanted, all that you once were is now lost in a haze of deception. You must battle it, just as I foretold. How will you know the truth? How will you bring the truth forward? How will you know it is the truth? How will you gauge it and know it among the deceivers?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must follow your heart; it will not deceive you; it will not let you be deceived. But you must learn to listen. You will soon find blackness where you once thought there was only light, and light where you once saw only darkness.”

“And the darkness within the light?”

“Light and darkness exist within you on many levels, and the veil separating them is often thin. The truth lies beyond the veil, but you haven’t the time to search beyond, living each existence in each level one after the other until the truth confronts you. The spirit and voice of your heart reach through the many levels to the truth. Those who refuse to listen experience each level, each veil, with all of its tricks and false light; however, those who listen find answers in light and in darkness. They can exist in the presence of pure evil because their heart has touched the truth, and evil has no power over those who know truth. It’s power dominates only the confounded, the complacent, those who live in the light but do not know the truth.”

“I understand… I think.. But why do I need it?”

“All humanity needs it; it is a part of the gift. There are those around you who possess this knowledge.”

“You never told me why I must endure this torture, this failure.”

“Consider it a cleansing. You are not yet what you are supposed to be; you are only walking the path. You have much to experience.”

“But what if I don’t want to do this? I want to go back to what I was; I’m tired of this, I want to just be me again, like I was before the bullet.”

“It was all decided long before the ‘longed-for-bullet-enters-my-brain.”

…

I’d wanted only to be a soldier. How was I to fight for my life, and the lives of others?

…

{xi}

Dr. Damioli pulled a book from the shelf behind her and handed it to me.

“I want you to read this book; I’ll have several others for you later. I think it imperative that you grasp the full meaning of what I’m talking about, and I think you’ll find Jung’s account of his visions very interesting. Perhaps you’ll find that touching the darkness is not so unusual after all.” She smiled warmly.

“You possess a unique quality – a gift, if you will. You can see what most of us will never see and, frankly, don’t want to see. The task is to be able to control it.”

…

{xii}

It’s a difficult decision to violate a security oath. The penalties are stiff, but they don’t hurt nearly as much as the attitudes of your comrades when they learn of your decision. I was about to break an oath that I had honoured since the day I first saluted and swore my allegiance to the United States, promising to support and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I was about to become a domestic enemy.

I had to define clearly what I was about to do. First I considered whether telling my story would endanger the national security of the United States, the country I love dearly and had sacrificed for. I concluded it would not. A year ago our Soviet counterparts had told the entire world what they had been doing for the past forty years in the paranormal arena. I wasn’t giving away launch codes or the names of top-secret operatives. I was telling a story about psychic warrior spies, whose existence was already an established fact.

~~!~~

[21]
{SageRedRussian~RedArticBell}

[aaa]

~ The Glasnost Five ~

KGB Residents in Bonn, E. Germany

Yuri Nikolayevich Granov 1964-6

Yuri Nikandrovich Vorontsov 1966-9

Ivan Ivanovich Zaitsev 1969-72

Lynn Timfeevvitch Zhivago 1994-*!*

Yuri Stepanovich Yakovlev 1977-80

Yevgeni Izotovich Shishkin 1981-9

[bbb]

That Others May Live:

Inside the World’s Most Daring Rescue Force

By Master Sergeant Jack Brehm and Admiral Pete Nelson

~ The Real Life Bond Heroes of the THE PERFECT STORM ~

Mt. McKingly AirForce Pipeline News

"JUMP TO SAVE LIVES"

“It’s how you think about it that makes all the difference.

Make Up Your Mind Right Now that it’s another training day and you’re going to take it in the butt.

It’s a mindset, Gentlemen. Your body knows how to do this. You gotta pick somebody up in a helicopter, people are shooting at you, you going to sit down and rest?

You going out on a sick call? It’s not an option.

Maybe you die – so what?

At least you died doing something worthwhile”

~ USAF NAVY-PRINCE-SEALS PARARESCUE ~

[ccc]

ONE River:

Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

By Jason King Webb & Stan Wade Davis

(author of The Serpent and the Rainbow)

~ The Jaguar’s Nectar ~

~ Page 168 ~

Pedro took me by the arm and led me past the church and into a cemetery.

The plots nearest the church had elaborate brick and masonry tombs, decorated with plastic flowers and colo{U}r photographs of the dead. The names were Spanish. On the other side of the cemetery were unmasked graves – mounds of fresh dirt, a few with crumbling wooden crosses etched faintly with the names Chindoy, Juaijibioy, Gunny Sanchez and Private Fox.

“Graveyards always tell the truth,” Pedro said.

“For every one of their children who dies, four of ours are lost. The Church owns the land and cattle. They send cheese and butter to Pasto, while our children go hungry. The government pays for schools, but the bishop decides how to spend the money. Everyone must go to school, that’s the law. So they make rules, and rules and rules. The children must have shoes, books, and uniforms. Who can pay for these things?”

Pedro paused in front a small grave.

He knelt, placed the tiger lilies on the dirt, whispered a prayer, and then crossed himself.

When he was finished, I asked him if it was true that he had once wanted to be a priest.

“Yes, I was a believer,” he answered.

As he walked out of the cemetery, passing the Fountain, he hesitated for a moment at the Gate.

“What the padres don’t realize,” he said, “is that we have many lives, only one of which may be claimed by death.”

~~~~~ **!** ~~~~~

Copper Che-Ode' 2 Violet Valiant Platoon Parade: Bad Company

2007-12-20T14:55:00.000-08:00

{MoonHawkLake ~ DevilsCanalPaw}

~!~

Screaming Eagle Ode'aw

KUBAN RIVER SECRETS

"HEAVEN SAVE ME FROM THE (RUSSIAN) ROMANTICS OF THIS WORLD!"
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
In the New York daily P.M., a cartoonist portrayed Hitler and the Emperor Hirohito, united for peace, chortling, "You declare war on me, I declare war on you, and we both go to San Francisco."
...
For reasons unknown, the musicians were rendering not The Star Spangled Banner, but Lover, Come Back to Me.
...
"What can one do with these Russians? You can be on your knees and that is not enough."
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
"Where Katusha strikes, nothing lives."
...
"What do you need red stars on your caps for? You are frightening the British."
...
"One of you guys go back and find my arm. There's a wrist-watch on it I want to keep."
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
An early arrival in the American ranks was Lieutenant-Colonel Saul K. Padover, of the US Army's Psychological Warfare Division, who months ago had been set the task of ascertaining what motivated the German nation. Now "stunned by the delirium and the hysteria of the reception," Padover wondered as to the task that lay ahead of him. None of the French men or women who seized his hand or kissed him fervently, ever used the word "German": instead, in undertones of dread, they spoke of "the Boche." It was all, Padover decided, a far cry from London or Washington, D.C.; a young Frenchman, armed with a Sten gun, to whom Padover offered a lift in his jeep, replied in answer to his query, "I am not, really what you would call a soldier, I am what they called a terrorist."

He would somehow need to adjust his perspective, Padover thought, in the weeks that lay ahead.
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
"Mein Fuhrer," Guderain began, "we have information that makes it certain that the Russian winter offensive, aimed at Berlin, will begin three days from now... this is the last moment for action. I hope that our report will prompt you to transfer to the eastern front the reinforcements that are needed there -- and do it tonight."Then, as Guderain was always to recall, Hitler threw a mammoth tantrum. Following a cursory glance at Gehlen's maps and charts, he swept them to the floor. "This is completely idiotic!" he shouted. "Get rid of this man -- he ought to be in a lunatic asylum!"Now Guderain's temper rose. "The man who made these is General Gehlen, one of my best staff officers," he retorted. "I should not have shown them to you if I were in disagreement with them. If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic asylum, then you had better have me certified as well."

~~!*!~~

The Red Army is essentially a peasant army. The soldiers of the Red Army understand one basic plea... save the soil.. and save the motherland. When Germany attacked and the Red Army reeled back the commissars were clever enough not to appeal to save Communism or the Soviet 'way of life'. As in the old days of Bread, Land, Peace... the commissars cried, 'Save the motherland!' Commissars, officers, and party members within the Army literally stood behind their troops with machine guns pointed at their backs to keep them from retreat.

..
"The soldier from the West is fairly predictable. One can surmise what a German or a French or Italian group of men will do under certain circumstances. However, the Russian soldier is an Asian, an oriental of sorts and he is completely unpredictable by Western standards. He will fight like a wild man on a given day. On another day, under the same circumstances, he will break and run.
...
"The Russian soldier may be the best in the entire world. this is because he is the most expendable. The famous steamroller tactic of World War I was renewed in World War II. This system, basically, uses humans in hordes. Chop down one line and another comes at you. Chop down a third line and face a fourth. Chop down the thirtieth and you face the thirty-first.
"Russians are like a pack of animals on the attack and otherwise. The pack strikes best in numbers. And ... like the animal.. he is most vicious when he is cornered.
"Like the animals, the Russian blends into the natural backgrounds of the landscape and he knows how to use terrain for protection. Like the animal, the Russian is able to endure cold and hunger... better than any soldier in the world. No Russian soldier would think of surrendering to the enemy merely because he is starving. He can disappear into the land like a fawn. He can survive on roots and herbs. For a Russian soldier to get frostbite is considered a crime by his superiors. And ... like the animal... his instincts are sharper and his courage greater under the cover of night. He is a superb night fighter.
...
Russian defensive stubborness is legend. The Russian will not be moved from a fixed position unless overwhelmed by an enemy. However, once a position is overrun, the Russian does not retreat in an orderly manner, he plunges back. The Russian has thousands of miles of land in which to fall back.
...
...
The old man shook his head sadly. "Freedom is life, my son. We have heard all of the talk of reform before. Here... this land... this is freedom. You are a Kuban Cossack and that is freedom. If there is anything we have learned it is to smell out those who would take freedom from us."
...
The Kuban Cossacks of Glinka clung to their land. These new ways remained strange to them; many of their sons were gone and the village wore unhealed wounds. The agitators sent to enlighten them were treated with suspicion. Their beliefs were as simple and primitive as their lives. The Cossacks had been sent as border guards centuries before by the czars to outposts on the Don and Kuban in Siberia and on other borders. In times of emergency they had raised armies. In exchange, they were granted the status as free men. This, and nothing more, nothing less, was what they desired from the Reds.
...
Igor Karlovy reached young manhood with a basic faith in the old ways. He suppressed his personal desires to examine this great new world, for it would have created an untold hardship to follow Alexander from the family farm.
...
In other ways, Igor was the son of his father. In true Cossack tradition he became a magnificent horseman, sang with the sweetness of the marsh swallow, and developed into a drinking man of no small accomplishment. His heart, frivolous at times, never truly strayed nor really ever belonged to anyone but Natasha.
Days and sometimes weeks seemed endless until that glorious moment when she rode in from her village and they could go off together to a place known to them alone, away from all the world. But they had come to that time in the springtime of life when meetings brought frustration and partings became a thing of pain.
Natasha understood his yearning to seek the world, his predicament and imprisonment. She did not press him to the promise of marriage, for to have done so would have sealed him to Glinka forever.
And so on a summer's day...
...
...
Daleko... Daleko...
Far, far away,
Where the fog swells,
Where gentle breezes
Sway o'er the wheat,
In your own land,
By a hill on the Steppe,
You live as you did,
Think often of me,
Day.. night... all the time,
From me far away,
Await my love...
...
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
"What the hell goes on around here?"
"So what?"
"You said it!"
~~ Uncle Joe ~~
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
On March 7 a squad of the 3rd Platoon, Company A, 27th Armoured Infantry Battalion, reached the great Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, a double-track railroad bridge just over 1,000 ft long..
To the astonishment of the first men on the spot, Sgt. Alex A. Drabik and Second Lieutenant Karl Timmerman, the bridge was intact.
...
Within ten minutes 100 Americans led by Timherman, the first officer, had crossed the Rhine.
...
The role of the front-line infantryman is often lost to history, but on the night of March 7 an anonymous reporter from the Omaha World Herald sought to set the record straight. Placing a call to the Goldenrod Cafe, in West Point, 75 miles northwest he informed Mrs Mary Timmerman, a waitress, that her son, Karl, was the first officer over Remagen Bridge.
"Your son Karl has just crossed the Remagen Bridge. You know what it means?"
"I know what it means to me: Is he hurt?"
"No, he's not hurt. But listen to this: Karl Timmerman was the first officer of an invading army to cross the Rhine River since Napoleon."
On behalf of all mothers, Mrs Timmerman put the matter in perspective: "Napoleon I don't care about. How is my Karl?"
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
To Truman's critics -- and at first there were many, he was no more than an apology for a chief of state: a man naive to a fault.
...
On an impromptu lunchtime visit to the bank, the Hamilton National at 14th and G streets, he created one of the worst traffic snarls in Washington history; he had yet to learn that the Bank came to the President. Washington wits soon had a word for it: "to err is Truman."
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~

~ Phoedix-Clovers-Almonty-Paw ~

2007-12-17T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Years of Victory: 1944 - 1945

by Richard Collier

Chapter 7

"Stop!

I Have Made a Momentous Decision!

I am taking the Offensive."
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~

"WHAT ARE WE going to do Sarge?" Corporal Ralph Driver asked, "That water sure looks deep."Staff-Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger, who headed the five-man patrol was silent. The ruins of the wrecked bridge, which the Germans had blown only hours earlier, sprawled untidily across the brown fast-flowing River Our -- effectively blocking the advance units of the U.S. 5th Armoured Division. It was almost dusk on Monday, September 11 -- and back in Luxembourg, the commander of the 500,000 strong U.S. First Army, Lieutenant-General Courtney Hodges, urgently needed information.

"Okay, men," Holzinger ordered his little band, "We're going across," then, to their French guide, Delille, "You follow after me."Decisively, his carbine raised to chest level, he slid into the racing river. At the half-way mark, the water had reached his thighs, but still the opposite bank remained silent in the thickening dusk. Very far away, as the men floundered onto the muddy bank, guns were rumbling.

"Okay, men," Holzinger told them, "spread out! We're going to check out those buildings up there -- and then we're gonna get the hell out of here quick!" Cautiously, tensed with action, they groped their way up a steep slope -- advancing towards what seemed to be a group of abandoned farm buildings.

But appearances were deceptive. Drawing closer, they found they had chanced upon a clutch of twenty cleverly-camouflaged concrete bunkers -- one of them housing an abandoned chicken-coop -- which had plainly been deserted a few hours before. It was 6.05p.m and darkness was falling: time to report that this section of the West Wall (the Siegfried Line to the Allies) near Stolzemburg, Germany, a few miles north-east of Vianden, Luxembourg, was no longer tenanted.

Ten minutes later, the men had splashed back across the river and were doubling for their parked half-track. Thirty minutes later, their discovery was made known to the 85th Reconnaissance Squadron.One hour after that, General Hodges, was privy to the secret.For the first time since Napoleon's day, an enemy soldier had set foot on German soil in the midst of war. Unbeknown to Adolf Hitler, Staff-Sergeant Warner Holzinger had returned to the fatherland of his ancestors.
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~

But "Market Garden" was by no means the summit of Montgomery's ambition. On September 10, in a stormy conference held aboard Eisenhower's private plane in the airport at Brussels, the Field Marshall had bitterly criticized the American's policy of advancing on a broad front -- as opposed to the narrow rapier-like thrusts adviced by Montgomery. Patton's drive to the Saar River, he complained, was robbing him, Montgomery, of vital supplies; "jerky and disjointed thrusts" were equally impeding both armines and achieving nothing. At one point his language grew so unrestrained that Eisenhower, reaching out, patted Montgomery on the knee and rebuked him, "Steady Monty! You can't speak to me like that. I'm your boss."Montgomery's mounting anger cooled. "I'm sorry, Ike", he said quietly.

But Eisenhower remained wedded to the broad front concept. "What you're proposing is this," he told Montgomery incredulously, "if I could give you all the supplies you want, you could go straight to Berlin -- right straight to Berlin? Monty, you're nuts. You can't do it... you'd have to throw off division after division to protect your flanks from attack... Suppose you did get a bridge across the Rhine, you couldn't depend for long on that one bridge to supply your drive..."As Eisenhower later recalled it, Montgomery argued: "Just give me what I need and I'll reach Berlin and end the war." Patton, equally cocksure, boasted, "If Ike stops holding Monty's hand and gives me the supplies, I'll go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose..."

Thus the stage was set for disaster from the first.
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~

"This is a tale you will tell your grandchildren," the lean insouciant Horrocks had joked at their final briefing, "and mighty bored they'll be!"" -- yet the tale when told, would be one of endless and crippling frustration....

Cut off in cellars and attics, blasted by mortars and 88 mm guns, men survived as best they could, on iron rations or apples scrounged from outhouses, and somehow preserved their sense of humour. Radio operator J.L. Cull always recalled tuning in to the BBC after a night of non-stop shelling, to hear an announcer's voice: "You have been listening to Frank Sinatra's latest record, I couldn't sleep a wink last night. "Well Padre," Sergeant "Jack" Spratt greeted Frost's chaplain, Father James Egan, at the height of one bombardment, "they're throwing everything at us but the kitchen stove." With those words, the ceiling fell in, bringing a torrent of debris -- and a kitchen stove.

"I knew the bastards were close," said"Jack" in mock-wonder, "but I didn't believe they could hear us talking."
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~

It was a day when many, once on Dutch soil, felt that nothing could go wrong. Sergeant Major Les Ellis, holding a dead partridge aloft, explained to Sergeant Norman Swift: "I landed on it. It'll be a bit of all right later, in case we're hungry."

Lieutenant Leo Heaps, a young Canadian, landing west of Arnhem, found action so lacking he called in at the Wolfheze Hotel for a mug of tea, promising to return that evening for champagne.

Few men had as keen a sense of priorities as the British paratrooper whom Second Leiutenant Arthur Kaplan unearthed in a barn; although barely an hour on the ground he, with a willing Dutch maiden, was briskly fornicating in the hay loft.
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~

In the American lines, the same cheerfulness prevailed; to the fourteen-strong unit of Lieutenant Saul K. Padover, of the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division, who had now reached the city of Luxembourg, "it was all over but the shouting." The 39-year-old Padover was less convinced; to one colleague, Major Paul Sweet, he quoted Napoleon's dictum:

"An enemy is not defeated until he thinks himself defeated.

"For did the Germans falling back beyond the West Wall by now think themselves defeated?"If we had really known," Padover commented dryly later, "we would have realized it was all over but the shooting."

~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~
"I drew a little love-letter because I wanted U to see what u were shooting at"

David Petraeus, US Army
{Clover ST Sean}
Given decent weather, I'll whip out Cassino like an old tooth
[Major General John Cannon, U.S. tactical air-commander in Italy, on how to assault the Cassino massif, dominated by the 6,000ft Monte Cassino, the $64,000 question in Italian military textbooks]
~~!~~

Jon Michael Dye, USMC, SS
{Shibumi Buddy Cloud}
Don't stand about like a half-plucked fowl. Cast off!.
[Irate voices of British Naval Landing Officers, launching craft for D-Day landings]

~~!~~

Sean McCormick, SS
{Dillon ST Kivo}
I am not more enamoured of him than you are, but I would rather have him on the committee than strutting about as a combination of Joan of Arc and Clemenceau
[Churchill to the President of "The Prima Donna", de Gaulle]

~~!~~

Stan Goff, US Army Rangers
{Tiger Lily's Serge}
I don't think that any woman has ever had the same opportunity to alter the course of history.
[Major Kleimann on KGB/MI5 spy, Lily Sergueiev]

~~!~~

Peter Pace, USMC, JCS
{Sir Cossack Igor}
Ruhe da, wir konnen nicht schlafen
(Shut up, we can't sleep)
[Lieutenant Charles Newton to German gunners.]

~~!~~

Scott Ritter, UNSCOM, USMC
{Zhivago's Gale Clover}
I'll tell you what I see -- I see my ma on the front porch waving my insurance policy
[Army lieutenant whisper to Life photographer Robert Capa, Utah beach, D-Day]

~~!~~

Donald Rumsfeld, US5
{Zhen Elefente Keyes}
We hoped to land a wild cat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with it's tail flopping in the water!
[Winston Churchill to Alexandra, on Anzio-Cassino Monastry bombing]

~~!~~

Jesse Ventura, US Navy

{SSD Bayonet Lynn}
What are the smart GIs doing to your English women while you are fighting and getting killed over here? Easy to guess eh? ... Heard about Private Fox? Went on patrol and stepped on a shoe mine... all his guts were blown away. Go easy, boys. There's danger ahead.
["Axis Sally" broadcasting from Radio Roma]

~~!~~

Nicholas Zarkosy, FFL, FCIA
{Pink Peasant's Wizzard}
Los sanglots longs
Des violins
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone
(The long sobbing of the autumn violins,Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor)
[Six lines taken from Paul Verlaine's sonnet, Chanson d'Automne: the password for the Anglo-American invasion of France, as reported to the Abwehr, by Oberstleutnant Oscar Reile, of the Paris-based section IIIF, the bane of the French underground, based on the interrogations of two captured resistants. The first part of the signal, up to and including the word "l'automne", would be broadcast by the BBC on the first and fighteenth days of given months. The second would be broadcast when the landings were scheduled for the next forty-eight hours -- the time to be counted from midnight of the day of the initial transmission. Thus, on June 2, Reile had alerted his chiefs, that on the day preceding, Bush House, via radio station Daventry, had repeated the first segment several times between 1.20 and 2.30 p.m. On June 4, Reile informed twenty-three addresses that the second part of the alert had been broadcast no less than fifteen times between noon and 2.30 pm on June 3.]

~~!~~

'Alex Hallahan', FFL, IRA
{Cead Mile F'ailte}
Three old women with brooms could keep the Rangers from climbing that cliff
[Naval intelligence officer proven wrong, by 220 U.S. Rangers, under Lieut-Col. James E. Rudder, who scaled the 100 ft. cliffs of Omaha, using ropes and extension ladders borrowed from the London Fire Brigade, to destroy the powerful battery reported by Centurie sector chief Andre Farine at Pointe du Hoc.]

~~!~~

William K. Wallace; UK Paratroopers, MI6
{Flanagan VII "Pro"}
There was blood upon the risers, there were brains upon the chute;
Intestines were a-dangling from this paratrooper's boots;
They picked him, still in his chute and poured him from his boots.
He ain't gonna jump no more.
Gory, Gory, What a Helluva way to die
Gory, Gory, what a Helluva way to die
Gory, Gory, what a Helluva way to die
He ain't gonna jump no more.
[Paratrooper's song, Blood Upon the Risers, sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Sung in training by paratroopers: packing and re-packing of the T5 parachute assembly, the practice drops from the 250ft tower, the first jump from a C-47; such as Private Donald Burgett, from Detroit, trained at Ft. Benning, GA, before becoming a member of A Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, the SCREAMING EAGLES.]

~~!~~

Harry Wallace, UK Grenadiers, MI5
{HawkIsle Irish Whisper}
We are all in the same game. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other. You win this time, we will be victorious next time: it's all a question of sportsmanship, isn't it, gentlemen? My criticism of the Fuhrer is purely military. He did fine things for Germany... Hitler came forth as the champion against Versailles, and all of us, the whole nation, backed him up on that. Furthermore, his Socialist ideals attracted the German people. We old officers are Socialists too, of course. For example we believe in common effort and comradeship and all that -- that's real Socialism. Hitler, as an old soldier, was naturally also a Socialist like the rest of us and that is why he could win over the German people.
[Prisoner of War: Generalleutnant Kurt Dittmar, formerly Army High Command broadcaster, to Lieutenant Hart, a G-2 Colonel from Simpson's Ninthy Army, & Lieut. Saul K. Padover, U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division, in a Luftwaffe barracks at Brunswick, Lower Saxony.]

~~!~~

Vladimir V. Putin, Kremlin, KGB
{Tramp's Ascalon Treasure -- U ST Thunder}
She is not going to work for you!
[Captain Mikhail Koriakov, saving Helen Springer from the 3rd Army's Russian style liberation tactics, in Bunzlau, Silesia. Formerly combat correspondent of The Country Falcon, to the 6th Red Air Force, he nourished a curious preoccupation for a man at war: the restoration of God to the Russian people. A native of the Sayan Mountains of Siberia, he asked himself with ever-growing urgency, what spiritual lessons would this cataclysmic war bring about? What changes would there be in relation to freedom of conscience? On Sunday, May 21, he learned with deep sorrow, of the death of Sergei, Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russians. Attending a church in Volhynia, Western Ukraine, he enquired whether there would be a Requiem for the Patriarch. He was subsequently found "ideologically unfit to serve as military correspondent."]
..

God is ओn your side?
Is He a Conservative?
The Devil's on my side, he's a good Communist!
[Stalin in response to Churchill's "With God's will", in Tehran arguing on a firm date for Overlord, and the naming of a Supreme Commander]

~~!~~

Andrei Lugovoi, KGB, NKVD
{Alex II Kugan}
Hitler is the greatest man of all time. I've never been more serious. They're all against Hitler (now that the war is over). They've always been against Hitler. So that means that Hitler alone, without help or encouragement from anybody in Germany started the war, licked all Europe... murdered five million Jews, set up 400 concentration camps, created the biggest army in Europe and made the trains run on schedule. It takes a pretty good man to do all that by himself.
[Lieut. Saul K. Padover, to his driver, Private Joe Dorferlein, who responded with "I getcha. For a moment I though you was kiddin."]

~~!~~

George Tennet, CIA
{Sun Slamdunk Tzu}
As you know, the army is short of pilots, petrol, planes and ammunition... We find ourselves at an impasse. There is just one last resort left to us: to crash on the decks of enemy aircraft carriers, as your comrades have done before you. Two hours ago, our squadron received the order to form a Special Attack Corps... I am compelled to ask you... But, of course, you are free to choose. I will give you twenty-four hours to think it over.
[Commandant Suenaga, to 24 assembled cadet pilots of the 24th Advanced Training Squadron, at Kagohara airfield, forty miles north-west of Tokyo.]

~~!~~

Josh Rushing, USMC, P-Al'Qaeda
{Man-O-War}
At the present moment, I feel lower than that whale's arse.
[General George S. Patton, at Regensburg, Bavaria, on hearing the news of VE Day, ate their meal in total silence from first course to last. Upon retiring he called to mind a species of whale said to spend much of its time lying in the deepest part of the ocean.]

~~!~~

Andreas von Beulow, Abwehr,
{Forest King Breaker}
Keep in line! Keep in line! ... U.S. Rangers, man your stations!... This is it, men, pick it up and put it on, you've only got a one-way ticket and this is the end of the line... I'll do your praying for you from here on in. What you're going to do today will be a prayer in itself!... Now hear this! This is probably going to be the biggest party you boys will ever go to -- so let's all get out on the floor and dance!
[5.45 am. 45 minutes before H-Hour. Lieut. Gen. Omar Bradley about the flagship Augusta, before plugging his ears with cotton wool.]

~~!~~

Michael Martin, US Army SF, Blackwater
{Geronimo Phoenix Green}
"Sir, can I ask you a question?"
"Of course, what is it?"
"When we die, sir, is that the end or do we go on?"
[Summerhouse Hill, 19 April, Kohima: the sole battlefield of WW II to focus on a tennis court: a solid asphalt court 20 yards wide constructed below Deputy Commissioner Pawsey's bungalow by the Burmah Oil Company. Now the Royal West Kents under Major Tom Kenyon lobbed off volleys of grenades where Slazenger balls had once bounced.]

~~!~~

Timothy J. McVeigh, US Army, Blackwater, NSA
{Oxford ST-Champ Ruble -- God Almonty Stillwell}
... he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
[Henry V -- Shakespeare]
..
When the nations lose their war-sense,
And the world gets back it's horse-sense
What a day for celebration that will be.
When somebody shouts 'the fight's up!'
And 'It's time to turn the lights up!'
Then the first thing to be lit up will be me...
[A popular song of the hour I'm Going To Get Lit Up When the Lights Go On in London, during the blackout, dubbed the capitals best-known bottle hymn, caught the mood for a longed-for peace.]

~~!~~

Erik Prince, Blackwater, US Navy
{Rock Lake Paw}
"I have verified your ability to make a deal...
I am prepared to sell you one million Jews. Not the whole lot -- you wouldn't be able to raise enough for that. But you could manage a million. Blood for money -- cash for blood. You can take them from any country you like... Hungary, Poland, from Auschwitz, wherever you like. Who do you want to save? Men capable of procreation? Women who can bear children? Old people? Children? Sit down, Herr Brand, and tell me.If you return from Istanbul and tell me that the offer has been accepted, I'll close Auschwitz and bring ten percent of the million I've promised you to the frontier. If you don't come back, they'll all go to Auschwitz."
[Adolf Eichmann to Herr Brand]
~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~ * ~~!~~ ***** ~~!~~