http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:06:48 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/10/07/200648.php Peter LevendaA little blatant self-promotion, and then I'll go away.This Monday, the History Channel series Decoding the Past will air the episode "Nazi Prophecies". A look at the occult influences that swirled around the Third Reich like banshees on speed, this will be the first time many viewers will have the chance to see Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in action, among others. Goodrick-Clarke is the author of The Occult Roots of Nazism, a scholarly and academic work describing the weird philosophers behind the growth of German irrationalism at the end of the first World War. I myself will appear, in my persona as author of Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult. This will mark the second time in the last five years that I have appeared talking about Nazi occultism (the last was the TNT special, Faces of Evil that aired in 2000).The entire subject is one that has been bedeviled by speculation and conspiracy theories. A number of earlier books on the subject, such as Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny and Pauwels and Bergier's Morning of the Magicians, were based on rumors and "propinquity" rather than on primary sources; if the sources were there, they were not identified and researchers had a terrible time tracking down the references to see if any of these theories could be proved: Was Hitler an occultist? Did the Nazis practice occult rituals? Was the SS a Satanic organization... etc etc. As it turns out, much of the speculation actually had a basis in reality. The SS did send scientists and medical men to Tibet in 1938 ... the same men who would come back and authorize horrific experiments in the death camps. Himmler did send an SS officer to search for the Holy Grail. And Hitler did read a lot of occult literature while penniless and starving in Vienna. "Nazi Prophecies" will go some way towards explaining the intellectual atmosphere and social context in which all this occult obfuscation took place. It goes even further, though, with commentators such as Nancy Snow and Marla Stone who speak about the ability of Hitler to control the masses through violence and intimidation, and how societies are often guided onto a path they would not consciously choose if they thought they actually had a choice.And for those of you who need a continuing fix of Nazis and the occult, I will be talking live on Coast-to-Coast AM with George Noory the night of October 13, from 11 pm to 2 am Pacific (that's 2 am to 5 am Eastern...ouch!) on Unholy Alliance and Sinister Forces.Ed/Pub:LisaM Video37583@blogcritics.org Fri, 7 Oct 2005 20:06:48 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/06/083247.php Peter LevendaThe environment is one of those issues that can put to sleep the most troubled insomniac. Full of statistics, scientific jargon, and the kind of flora and fauna one would only expect to find at about 2 a.m. on the Discovery Channel, it's hard for us to get excited about it. We know that we live in the environment, that it provides us with air to breathe, water to drink, and food. We also know that when the environment turns nasty - as it is doing these days in South Florida and the Gulf of Mexico with an unprecedented hurricane season - it can cost us billions of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of lives. Still, we find it hard to get as consumed over environmental issues as we do about, say, Valerie Plame or the Bolton nomination. The threat to us from global warming is not something immediately felt. The danger to the world seems to take place gradually, over many years.Or it did.Now we know that strange things are happening to the world and the culprit seems to be the one enemy the Bush administration does not wish to fight. Pollution has caused an incredible amount of damage, which is now being felt more rapidly than even the scientists have predicted. The bizarre hurricane season is one of these results; the plague of sick and dying fish and other aquatic life-forms is another. But how can anyone make us stand up and take notice? Even more importantly, what can we do about it?Robert F. Kennedy Jr has tackled that subject head on in his deeply moving and compelling Crimes Against Nature. He has shown what has happened to the environment, especially in the last few years under a hostile presidential administration. The facts detailed in his book make for sober reading, especially concerning the wholesale rejection by the Bush White House of all the advances made under the Clinton administration. He shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the Bush administration dropped charges against major polluters - charges brought against them under Clinton - and actually installed some of these indicted individuals as environmental watchdogs, an act of obscenity that is only possible when committed by the coldly cynical. The very name of Kennedy, however, will guarantee that the book will be read and embraced by one element of our population while being studiously ignored by another.It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the next great work about the environment and what can be done by ordinary citizens to stop the carnage would be written by an author with close ties to the Kennedy mystique. In 1992, former TV Guide editor Dick Russell published one of the best books about the President Kennedy assassination, The Man Who Knew Too Much. It was the story of Richard Case Nagell, a man with shadowy intelligence connections going back decades who had himself arrested in September 1963 so he would not be involved in the assassination itself, after warning the CIA and the FBI about the plot surrounding the President. The book is massive, more than 500 pages-long, and once begun is hard to put down. It has been reprinted recently, by Carroll & Graf, and is a must-have for conspiracy aficionados. Russell then turned his attention towards the environment. Striper Wars: An American Fish Story is his latest contribution. We may remember the lines from the Billy Joel song about the New England fishing industry, The Downeaster "Alexa", off his Storm Front album: "Since they told me I can't sell no stripers And there's no luck in swordfishing here"If the unfortunate skipper of the Alexa couldn't sell any stripers, it was due to guys like Dick Russell who, in the 1970s, fell in love with the fish and with catching them all up and down the Atlantic coast. Russell de-objectifies the striped bass in such a way that we can begin to understand why it elicits such intense emotion in all who fish for bass. Even more importantly, Russell - in digging deep into the history of the striped bass, a fish "as American as the bald eagle" - shows us that the first Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock were taught how to go after the stripers by the Native Americans and how catching the luxuriously sweet and meaty bass probably contributed to the survival of the Pilgrims their first few winters in America. In fact, as Russell points out, the very first conservation law passed in the Colonies was designed to protect the striper from being over-fished, its flesh and bones having been used as a popular fertilizer by the colonists.The Striper Wars began in the 1970s over alarm at the sudden decline of the fish from Maryland to Massachusetts. Russell was appalled at the dwindling supply, and cast about looking for ways to call a halt to the vast over-fishing of the striper's waters by commercial fishing concerns. His attempts were not met with unadulterated warmth by state legislatures. In fact, he faced an uphill battle for years. Striper Wars is the story of that battle, told in a moving and at times self-effacing way. Russell is careful to give credit where it is due ... and blame where it hurts most:Leave it to the old Kennedy assassination researcher to come up with a good one. As we read about the decimation of the striper's principal food supply - a small, boney fish called the menhaden - by commercial fishing operations intent on exploiting it for use in Omega-3 fish oil, we find ourselves back at "the Bay of Pigs thing", as Nixon put it. For who is America's largest purveyor of Omega-3 fish oil and the major destroyer of the menhaden supply but ... Zapata Oil! Oh, yes, dear reader. The same Zapata Oil that was run by George H.W. Bush until he sold it in the mid-1960s, believed to have been a CIA front for the Bay of Pigs invasion. We will never know all the details because, as Russell reminds us, potentially revealing financial documents were "accidentally" destroyed at the SEC when Bush became vice-president under Reagan. The company is now known as Omega Protein, and it is owned by the same man who bought the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Manchester United: Malcolm Glazer.So what does all this tell us? Nothing we don't already know: big money and Washington politics, hand-in-hand, protecting corporate profits and destroying the environment in easy stages. What Russell's book does reveal, however, is how a handful of determined people were able to force the issue and save the striped bass from extinction. They were successful, Russell and his colleagues, but the fight is far from over. The environment is constantly in flux and needs careful husbanding by its people, the prime benefactors: ordinary people with a passion for the beauty and majesty of nature, committed to acting on behalf of a client that cannot speak in its own defense. Those of you who consider all environmentalists to be nothing but tree-huggers and starry-eyed New Agers should well consider one incontrovertible fact: maybe the environment cannot plead its case in the media or the courts, but it can exact a terrible vengeance. Predictions of the effects of global warming have recently been moved up. We will start seeing more serious results not in our children's lifetime but in our own. Striper Wars is a case study on how to take charge of the situation now, before it gets totally out of hand. That old saw, "think globally, act locally", never sounded so insistent as it does now. Pub:NB Books33735@blogcritics.org Sat, 6 Aug 2005 08:32:47 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/07/13/090000.php Peter LevendaWhen the news trickled in from Argentina and then Chile that a fugitive from justice, Paul Schaeffer (no, not the Letterman guy) was finally apprehended and extradited from the land of Peron to the land of Pinochet, I was quite frankly relieved. And then the revelations about a horde of documents and weapons, and my relief turned to anxiety.I visited Paul Schaeffer in June, 1979. It was a cool winter's day in Chile, and I was wearing a tan trench coat so that I would be a very recognizable figure should anything go wrong. I was not an invited guest, or an expected one, that Sunday morning. I had read about Schaeffer's notorious German estate in the Andes Mountains in a much-maligned book by Ladislas Farago, Aftermath. Farago's focus was on the ratlines that enabled Nazi war criminals to escape European justice by providing transport, false documents, and visas to countries in South America, the Middle East, and Asia. Some of the more famous alumni of the ratlines include Dr Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, who wound up in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil; Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, who wound up running the secret police in Bolivia; and Alois Brunner, a sadistic Nazi mass murderer who is believed to be living in Syria today. Almost as an aside, Farago mentioned the bizarre German outpost and safe house close to the town of Parral, in Chile. Run by an ex-Luftwaffe medic, Paul Schaeffer -- an accused pedophile and Baptist minister on the run from the German courts -- it covered thousands of acres in the Andes near the border of Chile and Argentina. It was populated almost entirely by German nationals, and ran a clinic that was free to the local townspeople two days a week when I was there. (A free German clinic, run by a former Luftwaffe medic? Is it safe?)According to Farago, the "Colony of Righteousness" or Colonia Dignidad was a weird combination of voodoo and fascism in the middle of the Andean forests. There was something forbidding about the place, and as I searched further for information on the estate, I was informed that it did exist, was run by German doctors, and that it staunchly supported the Pinochet regime. Indeed, it was claimed that Schaeffer and Pinochet were friends, and that Colonia Dignidad was a favorite hangout of Nazi-loving Chilean military officers and members of DINA, the secret police.I was 28 years old that year, and I could not pass this up. Nazis, voodoo, secret police. I was working on a book that would eventually become Unholy Alliance and which would attract the attention of writers and journalists such as Norman Mailer, Jim Hougan, Dick Russell, Jim Marrs, and Whitley Strieber. (Norman Mailer would eventually write the foreword to the second edition, published by Continuum in 2002.) It was a study of twentieth century Germany's fascination with the occult, and how this fascination fueled the formation of the Nazi Party and especially of Himmler's SS. Based on primary sources located at the National Archives, the Berlin Documentation Center, and the Library of Congress' Rehse Collection, Unholy Alliance attempted to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that occult ideas and concepts were central to the Nazi weltanschauung and to lift the discussion out of the realm of speculation and mystification.So, I girded my loins and made the flight down to Santiago, catching a bus for the town of Parral about 250 miles to the south of Chile's capital.That story is told in detail in Unholy Alliance, but suffice it to say that my stay at the Colony was brief, albeit unpleasant. I was detained there for several hours, my passport was taken, the film was removed from my camera, and I was interrogated. I was allowed to leave (for reasons I did not know at the time, but which became clear a few days later) and was virtually escorted out of the country. The Colony had radio contact with the military, and I had soldiers ensuring that I was indeed on the bus back to Santiago and on the next plane to the United States.The rest of the story forms the backbone of Unholy Alliance. I tried, without success, to interest members of the mainstream media in the Colony and in my experiences at the hands of the blue-coated doctor who did most of the interrogating on behalf of Schaeffer, who did not speak English. Major magazines and newspapers were simply not interested, didn't believe my story, or didn't think that Colonia Dignidad was anything more than a bunch of unpleasant Germans living in seclusion. Then Boris Weisfeiler disappeared.That was in 1982, three years after my visit. The Russian-born American academic had been hiking in the Andes near the Colony. Picked up by a Chilean military patrol, he was taken to the Colony and left there. He has never been seen or heard from again. There was still no interest in this tale by anyone in the States. After all, there was a great deal of resistance on the part of the Nixon White House to deal with the disappearance in Chile of Charles Horman, the young artist whose story was memorialized in the Costa-Gavras film, Missing. Horman had been arrested by the Chilean security forces during the Pinochet coup, and was murdered at the National Stadium. Witnesses to the event said that an American official was present at the time. The American relationship to Chile has always been a trifle problematic. Nixon made it our business to do what we could to unseat a democratically elected president, the socialist Salvador Allende, and to replace him by a more definite anti-Communist strongman, General Augusto Pinochet. As more and more news came out of Chile, it became clear that Colonia Dignidad had a special role in the military coup and in the subsequent interrogation, torture and murder of political prisoners. As it was honeycombed with underground tunnels and chambers, people could and did disappear within the Colony at an alarming rate. This would eventually include the Colony's founder, Paul Schaeffer himself, who used the tunnels to flee justice during a raid on the estate ordered by the newly elected president of Chile after Pinochet's demise, Patricio Alwyn.Then, a few months ago came the capture and extradition of Schaeffer to Chile, where he will stand trial for human rights abuse and child abuse. During an excavation at the Colony a few weeks ago, a hoard of guns and ammunition, some dating from the Second World War, was discovered and revealed to the world's press. Along with that came the discovery of hundreds of documents, many of them dossiers on people the Colony considered suspect. I have contacted the Chilean Consulate to discover if, by any chance, one of those dossiers is mine. (In 1979, when I was held there by a lot of strong Germans with side arms, my passport was confiscated. It was returned to me perhaps 20-30 minutes later. I had the distinct impression it had been photocopied.)When I returned to the States a few days later, Jack Anderson ran a column on Colonia Dignidad, reporting its use as an interrogation center by DINA and the fact that a CIA report existed on the place. This was news to me at the time, and anyway I was suddenly afraid for my life. I had nothing to do with the story, but would the men of the Colony know that? A few days after the column appeared, I was accosted by four large Germans in a taxi in Brooklyn who screamed epithets at me, using various anti-Semitic slurs, threatening me bodily harm. A few days after that, a strange man in a white suit and a red carnation in his lapel stopped me on a street in Astoria, Queens, and told me, "Don't worry. You're among friends here." I am not making this up.Now, documents have been found and I can't help but wonder if one of them holds a piece of my story. More importantly, do these documents help survivors understand what has happened to their loved ones, los desaperecidos, people who disappeared during the Pinochet regime? Will they hold answers as to the fate of Boris Weisfeiler? And will anyone care? Stories about the Colony do not make the nightly news (in spite of its tabloid appeal along the lines of "mysterious religious cult abuses children, Nazi medics torture, murder dissidents in remote South American outpost.") Reports barely make it into the Spanish-language media, which I monitor regularly. No one seems to want to know. Approaches to the mainstream media have, again, resulted in a deafening silence. And men like Pinochet, Schaeffer, Mengele, Brunner and all the others eventually die peacefully in their beds as the bodies of the people they murdered lie buried in unmarked graves.News at eleven? Not a chance.Edited: LI Politics32448@blogcritics.org Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:00:00 EDT