TBR News January 8, 2017

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C. January 8, 2017:” “A collection of letters, diaries and other informative documents has surfaced and is being edited for publication. These came from one Lt. Cmdr USN (ret) Frederick Joseph Norris, Jr.

Norris lived in Norfolk, Virginia and at one time had been a member of the Naval Security Group and heavily involved in various black bag work.

He and a Bevin Cass were responsible for the assassination of Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Norris had amassed a file of CIA and NSG papers on the assassination of Salvladore Allende of Chile.

But the most interesting and potentially explosive find are the papers relating to a US Navy experimental laboratory located in Haiti.

It seems the US Navy was trying to develop a germ that could cause a flu-like disease to infect a potential military enemy so that an American military attack could be a success. Unfortunately, one of the group developed a retro-virus which was far more dangerous than the flu.

The problem was that local Haitians who volunteered for testing, all eventually developed a disease that eventually killed them and anyone with whom they had had sexual contact.

When the US Navy discovered the problem, they closed down the facility as quickly as possible, destroyed any of its records and also removed the Haitians who were infected.

This disease was HIV.

And many gay groups used to travel to Haiti on cruise ships and the occupants sought sexual comfort from poor and willing locals.

In this manner, AIDS swept through the American, and foreign, gay communities, killings tens of thousands, in its progress.

Norris kept his papers relating to this ugly matter and eventually, truth pressed to earth will surely rise again.”

Turkey in grip of fear as Erdoğan steps up post-terror attack crackdown

Critics believe president’s intolerant approach to civil society may have fostered conditions in which atrocity was possible

January 7, 2017

by Andrew Finkel

The Guardian

Istanbul-Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, rarely goes on the defensive. Yet in his first public appearance since the New Year’s Eve massacre in an Istanbul nightclub, he felt obliged to publicly reject the notion that his government’s intolerant approach to civil society could possibly have encouraged the attack claimed by Islamic State that left 39 people dead.

Erdoğan was speaking before a regular gathering of elected community leaders, an opportunity he usually uses to glad-hand political support.

However, the shock of the attack has further rent an already divided country. While no one believes that the government is directly responsible, it is accused of creating an atmosphere in which a religious fanatic could get away with murder.

“Nobody should be forced to share the same kind of lifestyle,” said Erdoğan, adding that if anyone had come under pressure to conform to an alien way of life it had been “this brother” – meaning himself.

Erdoğan’s rise from street urchin to inhabiting a palace that architects estimate to have cost more than £1bn has indeed been hardscrabble. In 1998 he was removed from office as mayor of Istanbul and briefly imprisoned for reciting a well-known nationalist poem which the prosecutor deemed “an incitement to violence and religious hatred”.

However, greater obstacles might lie ahead. The difficulties that are already facing Erdoğan’s Turkey hardly need rehearsing. A civil war across the Syrian border has led to an influx of what may be as many as three million refugees. A once booming economy is now ailing. In 2015 – in order to woo the nationalist vote – the government shredded its attempt to secure an agreement with dissident Kurds. On top of this, there is the debilitating drip, drip of terrorist incidents.

On Thursday, a courthouse in the Aegean city of Izmir came under attack, leaving two people dead along with two assailants who were believed to be Kurdish militants. A rocket assault on a police station in the Kurdish south-east of the country, also on New Year’s Eve, was sufficiently commonplace to go unreported.

The killing spree in the Reina nightclub, by contrast, is not something that Turkish society is likely to forget. Whether by chance or by design, the gunman, who is still at large, managed to aggravate the “us and them” faultline in Turkish society. Despite the president’s assurances, many Turks feel that their lifestyle is under siege.

“Are they going to carry on until we are all in little pieces?” asked the owner of one fashionable restaurant who, like many people in the public eye, now prefers to remain anonymous.

Reina is located in the shadow of the first Bosphorus bridge, the pinch point of last July’s failed military coup. Since then, Turkey has been under emergency rule in an attempt to root out what politicians describe as terrorist infiltration into the state. The government blames the followers of Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic preacher living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.

While exact figures are hard to come by, there have been at least 120,000 dismissals of civil servants, and a third of these may now be under some form of detention – including two constitutional court judges.

After the Reina shootings, many are beginning to suspect that the government has been chasing the wrong enemy, or at least wonder whether those in charge of the purges are themselves to be trusted. The point was driven home in December when an off-duty policeman working as a presidential guard shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey in what he said was revenge for the brutal reconquest of Aleppo.

Ordinary people, including many government supporters, took to the streets last summer to persuade those behind the coup to step down. Even government opponents were outraged that some still believed you could take control of a G20 nation and Nato member by occupying a radio station. Within hours of the putsch, Istanbul’s Atatürk airport was open for commercial flights.

But if the country quickly returned to normal, it has been a new normal in which the president is much stronger but the country over which he rules has been weakened in ways that are still being played out. One consequence feared by many is that Erdoğan now relies entirely on his core supporters and has given up all pretence of being a “one nation” leader.

“Turkey no longer thinks in terms of left and right but secularist and Islamicist,” says Ayşe Öncü, professor emeritus of sociology at Istanbul’s Sabanci University.

The head of Turkey’s state-funded Presidency of Religious Affairs took the lead from the pulpit in demonising the celebration of new year and social media buzzed with staged lynchings of Father New Year – the Turkish equivalent of Santa Claus. When one German language school in Istanbul was forced to cancel its festivities, the daily Die Welt responded with a caricature of Erdoğan on its front page as the Grinch who stole Christmas.

Truck rams into soldier crowd in Jerusalem, 4 dead, about 15 injured

January 8, 2017

RT

A truck rammed into a crowd of soldiers in Jerusalem, killing four and injuring about 15. The driver of the truck was shot in response to the attack. PM Netanyahu said the perpetrator may have been a supporter of the terrorist group Islamic State.

“It is a terrorist attack, a ramming attack,” a police spokeswoman said on Israel Radio

Police said three men and one woman, all in their 20s, were killed. It added that the truck driver targeted a group of Israeli soldiers who had just gotten off a tourist bus.

The driver was killed in less than a minute after ploughing through the crowd. Soldiers as well as a civilian tour guide armed with a handgun were responsible for gunning down the attacker.

The ambulance service reportedly took 15 people injured in the incident to the hospital, some of whom were seriously injured.

Health officials called on Jerusalem residents to donate blood to hospitals, which are reportedly experiencing shortages in the wake of the incident.

The incident happened on a popular promenade overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel Radio said.

An eyewitness to the incident told the radio station that the truck ploughed into a group of soldiers, and that they fired on the driver, who reversed direction and ran over them again.

The perpetrator of the attack was reportedly identified as a 28-year-old Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, but the Israeli media have been forbidden by a court to immediately publish details about him while the investigation is underway.

Israeli Police Chief Roni Alsheich told reporters it was possible that the attack was inspired by a similar truck attack in Berlin in December, which killed 12 people.

“It is certainly possible to be influenced by watching TV but it is difficult to get into the head of every individual to determine what prompted him, but there is no doubt that these things do have an effect,” Alsheich said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman visited the scene of the attack in a gesture apparently stressing the high profile nature of the incident.

The prime minister said there may be a connection between the truck attack in Jerusalem and those in Nice, France and Berlin, Germany. The terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) claimed credit for the attacks in the European cities.

“We know the identity of the attacker, according to all the signs he is a supporter of Islamic State. We have sealed off Jabel Mukabar, the neighbourhood from where he came, and we are carrying out other actions which I will not detail,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

A security cabinet meeting is set to determine Israel’s response to the attack.

The militant group Hamas called the incident an act of “heroic resistance to the Israeli occupation,” but would not claim responsibility for it.

Random attacks by Palestinians against Jews have escalated over the past 15 months. Of the 231 Palestinians killed in Israel over that period, 157 were assailants in attacks using primitive weapons like knives. They have killed at least 37 Israelis and two visiting American citizens, according to Reuters.

The Israeli government blames Palestinian leaders for inciting hatred against Jews. The Palestinian Authority blames Israel’s harsh policies against Palestinians, including construction of settlements in the occupied territories and persecution of the families of Palestinian attackers.

Israeli-Palestinian antagonism was highlighted this week after an IDF soldier was convicted of manslaughter for shooting dead an already injured Palestinian attacker last March. The ruling sparked criticism from many Israeli officials, while Netanyahu said Sgt. Elor Azaria should be pardoned.

Israeli diplomat caught on camera plotting to ‘take down’ UK MPs

Shai Masot is recorded discussing how to discredit MPs in comments described by Israeli embassy as ‘unacceptable’

January 7, 2017

by Ian Cobain and Ewen MacAskill

The Guardian

An Israeli embassy official has been caught on camera in an undercover sting plotting to “take down” MPs regarded as hostile, including foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan, an outspoken supporter of a Palestinian state.

In an extraordinary breach of diplomatic protocol, Shai Masot, who describes himself as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces and is serving as a senior political officer at the London embassy, was recorded by an ­undercover reporter from al-Jazeera’s investigative unit speaking about a number of British MPs.

The Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev, apologised to Duncan on Friday. An Israeli spokesman said Regev made clear that “the embassy considered the remarks completely ­unacceptable”.

The Israeli embassy said Masot “will be ending his term of employment with the embassy shortly”. Masot declined to comment or to elaborate on what he meant when he said he wanted to “take down” a number of MPs.

Masot had been speaking to Maria Strizzolo, a civil servant who was formerly an aide to another Conservative minister. Also present was a man they knew as Robin, whom they believed to be working for Labour Friends of Israel, a pressure group. In fact, Robin was an undercover reporter.

Strizzolo, discussing with Masot how to discredit MPs, said: “Well, you know, if you look hard enough, I’m sure that there is something that they’re trying to hide.” Later she added: “A little scandal, maybe.”

During the conversation, in October, Strizzolo boasted that she had helped to secure a promotion for her boss, the Conservative MP Robert Halfon. She had been his chief of staff when he was deputy chair of the Conservative party. Last year Halfon was appointed as an education minister and Strizzolo was appointed as a senior manager at the Skills Funding Agency. She continues to work part-time for Halfon.

In the footage, Masot agreed that Strizzolo had assisted Halfon and then asked whether she could also achieve the opposite effect. “Can I give you some MPs that I would suggest you would take down?” he asked. He went on to say that she knew which MPs he was referring to.

She asked him to remind her. “The deputy foreign minister,” he said. Strizzolo said: “You still want to go for it?” Masot’s reply is ambiguous but he said Duncan was still causing problems. Strizzolo asked: “I thought we had, you know, neutralised him just a little bit, no?” Masot answered: “No.”

Masot did not elaborate on what he meant by “take down”, but it is normally used as meaning to engineer a downfall, possibly through discrediting them in some way.

The conversation then turned to the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. Strizzolo said he was solid on Israel. Masot agreed, adding that Johnson just did not care. “You know he is an idiot …” Masot said.

Strizzolo returned to the subject of Duncan later in the conversation, suggesting he had had a run-in with Halfon in the past and that Halfon had reported Duncan to the whips. So never say never, she added. Masot replied: “Never say never, yeah, but …” Strizzolo said: “A little scandal, maybe.”

Other prominent Conservatives named during the conversation include Crispin Blunt, chair of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, who is also a vocal supporter of the Palestinians.

Blunt said: “Whilst this apparent activity of a diplomat of a foreign state in the politics of the United Kingdom is formally outrageous and deserving of investigation, the real questions should be for the state of Israel itself. Israel’s future peace and security is not being served by ignoring the substantial peace lobby in both Israel and the world wide Jewish community and working to undermine those foreign politicians who share that perspective”

In another conversation, Masot agreed that Blunt was among MPs that were “strongly pro-Arab rather than pro-Israel”. Strizzolo referred to him being on a “hitlist”.

UK ministers are understood to regard such plot talks as a matter of serious concern, crossing the line beyond normal diplomatic activity. Duncan declined to comment.

Although the Israeli embassy insists Masot was a junior embassy official and not a diplomat, his business card describes him as “a senior political officer” and his LinkedIn page lists him as having worked for the embassy since November 2014. He describes his work as being the chief point of contact between the embassy and MPs and liaising with ministers and officials at the Foreign Office.

He also describes himself as having been a major in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) between 2004 and 2011 – serving part of that time on a patrol boat off Gaza – and still employed by the IDF as deputy head of the international organisations sector.

The disclosures comes at a sensitive moment, just over a week after Theresa May put herself at odds with the Obama administration by expressing strong support for Israel in a row over the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The sting operation, which began in June and ran through to November last year, recorded conversations on a number of occasions that include a wide range of pro-Israeli activists as well as British politicians and Israeli embassy staff.

The recordings form the basis of four half-hour documentaries that al-Jazeera is to broadcast from 15 January.

Strizzolo sought to play down what had been discussed. Asked a series of questions by the Guardian, she issued a statement that said: “The implications the Guardian is seeking to draw from a few out-of-context snippets of a conversation, obtained by subterfuge, over a social dinner are absurd.

“The context of the conversation was light, tongue-in-cheek and gossipy. Any suggestion that I, as a civil servant working in education, could ever exert the type of influence you are suggesting is risible. Shai Masot is someone I know purely socially and as a friend. He is not someone with whom I have ever worked or had any political dealings beyond chatting about politics, as millions of people do, in a social context.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “The Israeli ambassador has apologised and is clear these comments do not reflect the views of the embassy or government of Israel. The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.”

Caught on Tape: Israeli Plottings

January 8, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

The American public seems to love conspiracy stories as witness the frenzies over the 9/11 episode, the stories about the ‘Chem-Trails,’ the fatal crash of the private aircraft of Paul Wellstone, the arrival of ‘Planet-X’ and various other entertaining stories about the probably appearance of Jesus Christ on bodega walls or cheese sandwiches. Here is, however, a very real and very deadly, conspiracy that many people are only dimly aware of and not only is it real, is has cost, and will cost, the American people their homes, their pensions and their life savings.  For centuries there have been stories, rumors and hints that various Jewish groups, mostly bankers and financial manipulators, who were involved in massive financial swindles, political manipulations and even the instigation of various wars and revolutions from which they and their relations could reap a profit.

One of the most prolific and well-read of exposés of Jewish manipulations is the notorious ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” From its first appearance in Russia in 1905, this work has sold millions of copies and been translated into twenty two languages. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than a political forgery by the Tsar’s secret police. Taken from a French political satire, it has been branded by Jewish groups as a forgery. It is. It is also based on much earlier writings that most certainly not forgeries. There was a meeting of the top Jewish leaders of Europe, called in 1806 by Napoleon, who produced a large body of theoretical work on Jewish control, all of which can be found in official French archives and from which the Protocols was descended.

Today, we in the grip of a deadly financial, political and military crisis that has been engineered by Jewish groups for their own profit, both political and financial. This is not a matter of silly bloggers and their easily-disproved strange stories but a deadly matter of documented truth. Much of this truth can be found here and there in libraries and on the internet but no one has ever bothered to collect it and make coherent sense out of it.

Since the late 1960’s, a unit of the Pentagon has been monitoring international diplomatic and military communications, to include those of the Israeli government and intelligence agencies. From these intercepts, it is clearly evident that there is a specific plan on the part of some Jews to infiltrate the highest levels of the American political and economic agencies with the sole purpose of giving unconditional support to the state of Israel. I should comment here that during the Roosevelt era, we had a similar movement but these people sent all their intelligence material to Moscow because then it was believed that Josef Stalin loved Jews and protected them. It has later been discovered that Stalin actually hated Jews and late in his life, determined to remove them all from Russia as “internationalists” who owed no loyalty to Russia but to themselves, their people and, later, to Israel.

We have the case of Jonathan Pollard who supplied Israel with “a boxcar” full of the most sensitive intelligence material and many others whose names are not as well known. We had the outrageous Israeli military attack on a U.S. ship, the ‘Liberty’ and we saw Lyndon Johnson refuse to go to its assistance because Tel Aviv asked him not to. We have seen the deadly growth of the so-called Neocons, almost all of whom are Jewish and many of whom are Isreali citizens and some who worked for Israeli intelligence networks before coming to the United States. We have the shadowy but very real presence of the Israeli Mossad working against American interests in America even as I write. The CIA is now filled with Israeli people and all of whom burn up the wires or stuff the mails with information they glean from their jobs.

But even more obnoxious are the activities of a legion of Jewish bankers, financial manipulators and thieves whose activities have directly contributed to the collapse of the American economy. Their manipulations pushed up stock and real estate prices and when they had taken their profits, they withdrew and allowed the markets to collapse. The current posterboy for Israeli theft is Bernie Madoff who stole billions, banked most of it in the total safely of Israeli banks from which it can never be returned to its victims. This is not the first time this has happened as witness the Jewish Oligarchs of Yeltsin’s Russia who, with the assistance of their co-religionists in the World Bank and the IMP looted Russia and, like Madoff, stuck their boodle into Tel Aviv banks. Those who did not flee to England, escaped to Israel who has never deported a Jewish citizen to face criminal charges in another country.

This sort of thing has not gone unnoticed by American intelligence agencies. The FBI has been recording information on AIPAC for years and the U.S. Army has been doing the same thing to the supposedly secret messages to and from Israeli diplomatic centers.

Many of these records of theft, treason and pillage have appeared privately and now, most certainly now, is the time for this entire deliberate scheming to be exposed to its victims, the American public.

That such outrageous, and obvious, thefts as those perpetrated by Bernie Madoff and others, as yet free, have escaped the attention of regulatory agencies like the SEC is nonsense. A Ponzi fraud would be child’s play for the competent auditors at the SEC to detect, yet Bernie passed the test on at least four separate occasions. Why did this happen? Because Bernie is a connected Jew and as such, in the current American political and business climate, untouchable. News reports are that Bernie had to “turn in his passport” so as to avoid escape. Which passport, pray tell? His American one or the Israeli one?  The entertaining part of all this, if indeed entertainment can be found in such damaging, public and outrageous thefts, is that Bernie stole from fellow Jews. But then, of course, the money all ends up in Israel but in different hands.

There are two basic issues here and they are that Jewish financial speculators are rampaging all over the American economic scene, stealing, lying and conning everyone, safe in the knowledge that they can hide their money and their worthless persons in Israel and both will be safe from American justice and the second is that Israel has virtually taken control over such agencies as the CIA, the White House and most of the American media.

Complaints, allegations of theft of money and state secrets and other high crimes and misdemeanors all are either ignored or deliberately covered up solely because of the great power of the Israel lobby in the United States today.

Money and political  power these creatures of the night and dark places do have but their victims, en masse, ever find out the truth behind the damaging manipulations, the trees of American forest preserves will bear strange fruit in the morning light.

Here is a copy of a typical transcription segment, one of many that are now becoming available.

 

Transcription of telephone conversation on August 3, 2006

from

Israeli Embassy, Washington D.C. Telephone Number (202) 364-5582.

to

unidentified individual at AIPAC, Washington D.C., Telephone Number (202) 639-5201

Commenced 1821 hrs, concluded 1826 hrs.

Speaker A Reuven Azar – Counselor for Political Affairs, Embassy of Israel

Speaker B Unidentified individual located at AIPAC headquarters

B.Well, things are going as well as expected, better perhaps than expected. There is military progress there (Lebanon) and we have wonderful cooperation here.

A.For sure, but don’t forget the dangers in having too much cooperation. All right for this moment but in the long run, this can certainly backfire on us. You know, we are seen as being too much influential with the Bush people.

B.I wouldn’t worry too much about that. The media is certainly not to worry about and most Americans really do not care about things there (Lebanon) The main point is that by the time the U.S. makes itself felt at the UN, we will have accomplished our goals and established the buffer we need..

A.Absolutely but…there is still the future to think about.

B.Who cares? Once we establish the buffer, the rest is just shit. It will all be hidden soon in the coming press reports of Arab ‘attacks’ on the U.S. This is for the voting in November. You know, ‘many Arab groups will for sure attack American targets.’ They (the U.S. Government) will choose so-called target areas where they need the most support. We don’t need to worry about Miami, Skokie or Beverly Hills after all. (Laughter) and this is a little crude but the public here is terribly stupid and the warning color days worked before, didn’t they?

A.Yes, but there are second thoughts on all of that. If you go to the well too often, there are problems. People lose interest.

B.The British are being such swine about this, aren’t they? They are causing trouble about the bombs these days.

A.Just a few troublemakers. The press here does not cover that and who reads the foreign media? Most Americans can’t read anyway. But there is danger that the U.N. might be motivated to move a peace keeping force into Lebanon and this might negate our purposes. Hesbollah must be utterly wiped out and Syria must be made to realize…with force if necessary…that it cannot supply the terrorists with more Iranian rockets. Maybe an accidental airstrike on Syrian military units could say to them to mind their own business. We have done this before.

B.It is too bad that we cannot teach Tehran a lesson. The ultimate goal would be to have America attack Iran but I am afraid the American military is dead set against this…

A.They are all Jew-haters up there.

B.For sure but we know that Americans can bomb the shit out of Tehran and hopefully kill off a number of the militants, probably disrupt their atomic program and teach all of the area that the U.S. means business. We support them, they support us. But they cannot send in ground troops and if we did that, our losses would not be borne at home. As it is, there are the usual malcontents bleating about the Lebanon business.

A.They are just afraid they will get a rocket on their house and there are the same ones here. The Lieberman business is not that good, after all. Yes, of course he is a liberal Democrat but his support of us is too obvious. He could be a little critical too. We see the Bush people doing this, just to keep the people quiet. Yes, they say, see, we too are actually critical of Israel….

B.But not too critical, right?

A.No, never that. Too many pictures of dead jerks for example. We need to see more pictures of grieving Israelis, mourning lost sons and children. Can’t we get more of those? Fuck the Arabs.

B.I feel sorry for the American media. Their instincts are to defend dead Arab children…

A.But nits make lice, don’t they? Who mourns dead Israeli children?

B.I’m sure there would be more on this but not enough children are dead.

A.Not yet, anyway. But if they rocket Tel Aviv…

B.Well, then, for sure,

A.We should have pictures all ready if that happens. Do you think it will?

B.Tehran directs that part of the business. We don’t have as much inside gen on them there…

A.The fucking Russians are on their side.

B.We have always had trouble with those Slavic pricks. First weapons…

A.The Chinese assholes also do this, don’t forget.

B.No one around here will forget that, be assured. The time will come when we get them too. Say we cut off their oil from the Gulf? What then? They will dance to our tunes then, not Tehran’s.

A.If we had oil…

B.But we do not. The filthy Putin has the oil. They should get rid of him while they are at it. Our people almost had it but he forced them out.

A.They can always come back. The people here would really support this. We put our people back in after we get rid of Putin and then a guaranteed flow of oil to America.

B.And Russia is off the chessboard too.

A.They all want that badly here, too. Cheney is the strongest supporter of cutting the nuts off of Russia. The military here are against fishing in troubled waters.They can’t be replaced, Bush can’t sack them all.

B.Set an example. Sack a few more of the assholes and the rest will shut up. They always do.So, send me your latest list and I’ll see what I can do here

A .Send someone to pick it up. The mail here is awful. It will take a week if some black doesn’t steal it, throw it away or wipe his ass with it.

B.Tomorrow for sure.

A.OK. And one other matter. We feel very strongly that if the current people get kicked out in November, as it looks like they might, we owe them to help them stay right where they are. It has taken a long time and much money to get all the ducks lined up and we don’t want to have to start in again. We can generally rely on sympathy from the Democrats but they will not support any more military ventures over there. That’s for sure.

B,Then what do you suggest?

A.The terrorism card works wonders. We were going to release a statement that Arabs were going to attack an El Al plane on takeoff, with rockets….

A.Probably leftovers from the CIA businesses in Afghanistan.

A.Let’s not get into that now. But this scare would only affect flights to Israel and we don’t think it would have any impact on the election.

B.Well then, why not have these attacks aimed at American aircraft? Where would they attack from?

A.Say at the perimeter fence lines at airports. Or better still, why not a plan cooked up to smuggle explosives on board transatlantic flights to or from America? Something clever that will catch the public imagination….

B.That stupid bomb in the shoe routine?

A.Don’t knock it. It worked, didn’t it? We can always find some suckers with a bent to this we can fill up with real enthusiasm and then turn them in, complete with plans. They actually believe they are going to paradise and fuck virgins and we have another propaganda coup. Let’s give this some effort. You know, a terrified public will not want to change horses in mid stream. So far, the Rove people have a good line: If you’re against the Republicans, you’re encouraging the evil terrorists sthick.

B.Well, they did that with the alert warnings and it worked…more or less.

A.Face it, they aren’t too bright here. They ran it into the ground, had to fire Ridge and Ashcroft, one of our very best friends ever, and put those things on ice. They need to discover a huge plot but in America. You know, as you said, infiltrate a group of crazies, plant things on them, call the FBI…

B.Oh, they do that themselves. That business in Florida was pathetic…

A.But it worked, didn’t it?

B.For about ten minutes at six o’clock for about three days.

A.Well, think about it and get back to me.

B.Right.

A.What’s the situation with your two people? Are they going to be tried or not?

B.Probably not, as far as the Bush people are concerned. But it is up to the courts and we are very careful not to fuck with them.  They are expected to have the charges thrown out soon…

A.Well, I’ll pray for them. I have to go now so I’ll get back to you later. Don’t forget to send someone for the list

1. OK.

(Conversation terminated)

Beijing pollution: Police force to combat toxic smog

January 7, 2017

BBC News

A new team of environmental police will try to reduce hazardous levels of toxic smog engulfing Beijing, the city’s acting mayor has said.

The police will look for local sources of air pollution, including open-air barbeques and dusty roads, Cai Qi says, according to Xinhua state news agency.

The mayor has also promised to reduce coal consumption by 30% this year.

Many residents have been forced to stay in their homes for days at a time to avoid breathing the poisonous air.

The public has been calling on the government to do more to address major sources of smog, including reducing China’s reliance on coal-fired power plants, the primary source of electricity in the country.

Officials say unfavourable weather conditions in the capital have prevented pollutants from dispersing.”Open-air barbecues, garbage incineration, biomass burning, dust from roads – these acts of non-compliance with regulations are actually the result of lax supervision and weak law enforcement,” Mr Cai was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

The city’s only coal-fired power plant will be closed after the winter, when consumption increases for heating, Mr Cai added.

Another 300,000 high-polluting old vehicles will be phased out, Xinhua says. Polluting factories will be closed and some 2,000 others will be upgraded to meet higher pollution treatment standards.

Beijing authorities had earlier announced that they would begin installing air purifiers in some of the city’s schools and kindergartens. They were already ordered to stop all outdoor activities.

Inside a Killer Drug Epidemic: A Look at America’s Opioid Crisis

The opioid epidemic killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. What follows are stories of a national affliction that has swept the country,from cities on the West Coast to bedroom communities in the Northeast.

January. 6, 2017

The New York Times

Opioid addiction is America’s 50-state epidemic. It courses along Interstate highways in the form of cheap smuggled heroin, and flows out of “pill mill” clinics where pain medicine is handed out like candy. It has ripped through New England towns, where people overdose in the aisles of dollar stores, and it has ravaged coal country, where addicts speed-dial the sole doctor in town licensed to prescribe a medication.

Public health officials have called the current opioid epidemic the worst drug crisis in American history, killing more than 33,000 people in 2015. Overdose deaths were nearly equal to the number of deaths from car crashes. In 2015, for the first time, deaths from heroin alone surpassed gun homicides.

And there’s no sign it’s letting up, a team of New York Times reporters found as they examined the epidemic on the ground in states across the country. From New England to “safe injection” areas in the Pacific Northwest, communities are searching for a way out of a problem that can feel inescapable.

Here are their stories

Marblehead, Mass.

In Suburbia, ‘Tired of Everything’

Katie Harvey walked out of the house where she lived with friends, shoved her duffel bag into her mother’s car and burst into tears.

“I need to go to detox,” she told her mother, Maureen Cavanagh. “I’m just tired of everything.”

Ms. Harvey, 24, had been shooting heroin for three years. She had been in and out of detox — eight times altogether. But it had always been someone else’s idea.

This time, Ms. Harvey made the arrangements herself. She had come to loathe her life. “I haven’t even been doing enough to get really high,” she said. “I’m just maintaining myself so I don’t get sick.”

Before she left for detox, Ms. Harvey curled up on the couch in her mother’s living room in this well-to-do suburb north of Boston and reflected on her life: her low self-esteem despite model-worthy good looks; her many lies to her family; how she had pawned her mother’s jewelry and had sex with strange men for money to pay for drugs.

As she spoke, tears spilled from her eyes. She wiped them with the cuff of her sweater, which covered track marks and a tattoo that said “freedom” — her goal, to be unshackled from the prison of addiction.

Ms. Harvey had been a popular honors student. But she developed anorexia. Alcohol was next. By 21, she was hooked on heroin.

In 2015, she was arrested on charges of prostitution. In an extraordinary act of contrition, she wrote a public apology online to her friends and family.

Still, she plunged in deeper. She estimated that at her worst, she was shooting up a staggering number of times a day, perhaps as many as 15 — heroin, cocaine, fentanyl. She overdosed five times. In Massachusetts, almost five residents die every day from overdoses.

“I don’t know how I’m alive, honestly,” Ms. Harvey said.

That night in October, she went into detox. Four days later, she checked out. She went back to her friends and drugs, developing an abscess on her arm, probably from dirty needles.

Two weeks later, she was back in detox. This time, she stayed, then entered a 30-day treatment program.

The return trips to detox have been an emotional roller coaster for her mother. To cope, Ms. Cavanagh founded a group, Magnolia New Beginnings, to help drug users and their families.

Among her words of advice: Tell your children you love them, because “it might be the last thing you say to them.” KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Marshalltown, Iowa

Help May Be Thin on the Ground

Andrea Steen is one of the fortunate ones. For people in this rural community of 28,000, getting medication to help overcome opioid addiction used to require long drives to treatment centers.

That changed about a year ago when two doctors here were licensed to prescribe Suboxone, a drug that eases withdrawal symptoms and helps keep opioid cravings at bay. Now Ms. Steen is one of their patients, coming once a month to check in and renew her prescription.

This epidemic is different from those of the past in significant ways. One is that it has spawned a growing demand for medications that can help modify addiction’s impact.

One of them is naloxone, known as Narcan, a powerful antidote that has jolted hundreds of overdosed users back to life. Another is buprenorphine, typically sold as Suboxone.

By keeping users from experiencing cravings and withdrawal, Suboxone can make it easier for addicts to stay off heroin and other opioids. The number of doctors certified to prescribe buprenorphine has more than doubled since 2011, to about 36,000 from about 16,000, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Yet the drug remains out of reach for many rural Americans.

Ms. Steen, 46, is among 20 patients who get Suboxone from the two doctors authorized to prescribe it here. Until last summer, she said, she abused Vicodin and morphine relentlessly. She would steal them from her disabled husband, who would try in vain to hide them. But sometimes she couldn’t root out the pills fast enough, and she would experience what every addict dreads most: withdrawal.

She heard about Suboxone from a friend in Tennessee whom she met through Facebook.

“She could tell when I was high,” Ms. Steen said. “Her husband was on Suboxone. She was trying to help me.”

Ms. Steen started on Suboxone in July, initially making weekly visits to Dr. Nicole Gastala and Dr. Timothy Swinton, the family practitioners here who prescribe the drug. Then it was every other week.

Unlike methadone, which also helps treat opioid addiction but must be taken under supervision at special clinics, Suboxone can be taken at home. Some doctors fail to follow Suboxone patients closely, or to test their urine to make sure they are not abusing or selling the medication or using other drugs. But the protocol here is strict.

Besides her doctor visits, Ms. Steen must attend group therapy and have regular urine tests.

She has mostly stopped craving opioids, for now. ABBY GOODNOUGH

Los Angeles

Tough-Love Rehab

They enter through an unmarked turquoise storefront, nestled between fashion boutiques on Melrose Avenue. They gather in a circle, ready for the tough-love approach they have come to expect from Howard C. Samuels, a clinical psychologist who runs the Hills, a drug rehabilitation center whose location is central to its marketing

A spot in the room is hard to come by, as are most drug rehabilitation services, especially for the poor and anyone without the proper insurance. The Hills, which can cost around $50,000, serves a more privileged population, yet its mission is no less daunting.

In 2014, heroin became the most common  reported drug of choice among those seeking treatment in Los Angeles County, surpassing marijuana and methamphetamine.

Dr. Samuels began with what he called a reality check. “How many of you have been to at least five treatment centers?” he asked. Nearly every one of the 19 clients in the room raised a hand.

“How about 10?” Still half of the clients raised their hands.

One of them, Jordan, who agreed to tell his story only if his last name was not disclosed, knows he is one of the lucky ones. This is only his third time in rehab, a relative rookie at 33 years old. This was his 118th day sober.

He had smoked pot, taken ecstasy and occasionally snorted cocaine. But heroin seemed off-limits to him, a college-educated son of two therapists, until a friend offered him some to smoke. Four years later, he blew through a $20,000 inheritance in a month to get what he called the best heroin in the city.

After his first days of detox were over at the Hills, Jordan began what would be months of therapy. He confronted what Dr. Samuels calls “character defects,” and rattles his off easily: lust, anger, lack of discipline.

On this day, he knows he will draw the wrath of Dr. Samuels: Subverting the rules, he recently went out for his seventh tattoo. “My addiction has been replaced with addiction to other things: going to the gym, smoking, girls, getting tattoos.”

“Don’t you owe me an apology?” Dr. Samuels said to him, almost shouting.

Jordan answered quietly: “Yeah, I guess I owe you and some people an apology.”

“I’m glad you’re apologizing to me. That’s good, but what’s bad is, it came so naturally,” Dr. Samuels said.

“All of us have some real impulse control problems,” he continued. “That’s why we’re drug addicts.”

JENNIFER MEDINA

Seattle

‘For the Grace of God, There Go I’

The girl looked to be barely out of her teens, and was teetering on the brink of consciousness.

“She couldn’t even form a sentence,” said Dan Manus, a soft-spoken 61-year-old in a Seattle Seahawks cap. His jaw tightened as he recalled the night in October when he and his partner on the King County Emergency Service Patrol found the girl and, he thinks, saved her life.

A former addict, he knows the terrain too well. He’s been clean for 22 years now, and working for the county for the last nine.

“I can relate to everybody I work with down there, because for the grace of God, there go I,” Mr. Manus said, standing in the patrol parking lot between runs. “So, yeah, I feel like this kind of was my calling.”

The Emergency Service Patrol was established in the 1980s by a private charity (later taken over by King County) to rescue street alcoholics by bringing them to a safe “sobering center” to sleep it off.

In October, though, in an acknowledgment of heroin’s new ravages — treatment admissions for heroin in King County surpassed alcohol for the first time in 2015 — Mr. Manus and other patrol crew members were trained and equipped with naloxone.

Harm reduction” is an approach that was to some degree pioneered here. One of the nation’s first clean-needle exchanges started in nearby Tacoma in 1988.

King County is now considering opening what could be the country’s first safe-injection site. There, addicts could use drugs under supervision by a health worker who may, crucially, also open the door to recovery programs, all under one roof.

For Mr. Manus, the crisis is personal. In 1992, he was saved from death by someone who found him in mid-overdose and called paramedics.

Seattle was a different, harder-edged city back then. Grunge music, and the heroin that swirled like a slipstream through the lives and song lyrics of some of its stars, was spilling out of the clubs.The mix of drugs was changing, too. Heroin’s impact in King County surged in the late 1990s in the number of times it was identified in connection with a drug death, before beginning a near decade-long slide — a period that coincided with an increase in the number of times prescription opioids were found in victims’ bodies, which peaked in 2009. In that same year, heroin’s role began rising again to hit its highest-ever, worst numbers in 2014 with a drop since then, according to county figures.

More people lately seem to be on complex combinations of drugs, Mr. Manus said — like the girl who, at his direction, was treated by paramedics.

“It just seems today that there’s so much more out there, so many more people,” Mr. Manus said quietly. “It feels nonstop.” KIRK JOHNSON

Nogales, Ariz.

Outwitting the Mules

A tipster warned: Look out for a silver Nissan Sentra approaching the busy Dennis DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Ariz., a crucial gateway for cheap heroin made in Mexico.

Early one morning, the Nissan rolled into passport control. A Customs and Border Protection officer caught the telltale signs of a driver who had something to hide: the darting eyes, the tight grip on the steering wheel.

The driver carried a border-crossing card, an entry permission given only to Mexican citizens. He also carried his wife and two small children and a load of heavy drugs: four pounds of methamphetamine in the passenger’s backrest, and seven and a half pounds of heroin between the engine and the dashboard.

Last year, Customs and Border Protection agents seized more than 930 pounds of heroin in Arizona, which is almost one-third of all heroin seized along the entire southern border. Agents acknowledge that they catch only a small fraction of what goes through.

Much of the heroin that enters this country comes hidden in cars, concealed in suitcases, squeezed inside hollowed fire extinguishers, or strapped to the thighs, crotches and chests of Mexicans and Americans who cross between the two countries.

To the special agents assigned to Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, mules are the first link of a knotted chain that may or may not lead to the agents’ ultimate prize: a top drug trafficker.

“It’s about preventing the narcotics from entering the community,” said Jesus Lozania, the agent in charge in Nogales. “It’s taking down the organization from the bottom all the way to the top: the mules, the people who coordinate the logistics, the persons who handle the money after the narcotics are sold in the United States. That cash has to make its way back to Mexico.”

It is about building conspiracy cases bit by bit.

That morning at the border, three special agents noticed the black letters stamped on the bricks of heroin: LEY. “That’s probably from the Chino Leys, probably Sinaloa,” said one of the agents, who declined to provide his name because he works undercover.

The Chino Leys, he said, are one of the drug distribution organizations in the Sinaloa cartel, which controls the routes that slice through Arizona, aimed for the Northeast. Cleveland, New York and New Jersey are main destinations for Sinaloa’s heroin these days.

The driver said he had borrowed his cousin’s car to come to Nogales to buy sweaters. The disbelieving agent pressed on. The driver crossed his arms.

“The guy’s not talking,” the agent said. FERNANDA SANTOS

Huntington, Utah

Staying Clean in the High Desert

As she drives to work each morning, past horse ranches and nodding oil pumps, Marsha World stops to give her son, Kolton, a pale yellow pill to help keep him off heroin for another day.

There are few options for drug treatment in the high desert of central Utah, a remote expanse of struggling coal mines, white-steepled Mormon towns and some of the country’s highest opiate death rates.

The lone doctor licensed to prescribe one addiction-treating drug has a waiting list. The main detox center is the county jail. So mothers like Ms. World occupy the lonely front lines of a heroin crisis that has reached deep into the remotest corners of rural America.

The sun was just skimming over the sagebrush hills when Ms. World climbed out of her car and palmed that day’s naltrexone pill for her 30-year-old son. Unlike other medications Mr. World has taken over 11 years of addiction and rehab, jail and relapse, this one seemed to help.

Mr. World was in a treatment program ordered by the local drug court, and Ms. World had promised the judge she would keep the pills at her house and bring one to him. Every day.

The rate of prescription overdose deaths among the 32,000 people sprinkled across two neighboring counties in this corner of Utah is nearly four times the state average. Addiction has rippled through ranks of miners who relied on pain pills after years of digging coal and working in the power plants.

Karen Dolan, who runs the Four Corners Behavioral Health center in the nearby town of Price, the only substance-abuse facility for miles, said three of her staff members had lost family members to addiction. At the power plant where her husband works, some of his co-workers’ family members have died of overdoses. Heroin accounts for 31 percent of the clinic’s admissions, up from 3 percent in 2010.

“People call every day and say, ‘Do you have an opening?’” Ms. Dolan said. “We don’t have any money to pay for medication-assisted treatment, and we don’t have prescribers to provide treatment.”

After years struggling with heroin addiction in Salt Lake City, Mr. World moved back in 2013, to the community where he had grown up in a loving family that went to Mormon services on weekends. (He is no longer a part of the church.)

But it was no sanctuary. When Mr. World found a stray Chihuahua on the road a few months ago, it turned out the dog’s young owner was in jail because of an opiate addiction. And getting drugs here proved just as easy as in the city: One Facebook message to an acquaintance did it.

But it has been more than 300 days since he last used. His days now are work, therapy, random drug tests at the sheriff’s office and morning visits from Mom.

“Love you,” she said after he took his pill. She hugged her son and his boyfriend goodbye, and drove to her job at the dry cleaner.  JACK HEALY

Milwaukee

In the End, Uncomprehending

Sometimes they call themselves “the last responders.”

They work in the county medical examiner’s office, in a low-slung brick building downtown in the shadow of an old Pabst factory. Here is where they take over after a drug addiction has been more powerful than pleas from family, 12-step programs or even Narcan.

“We’re the end of the line,” said Sara Schreiber, the forensic technical director, walking through the autopsy rooms to talk about the office’s part in the opioid addiction epidemic — a crisis that has hit especially hard here.

Last year, 299 people in Milwaukee County died of drug-related overdoses. One of them was the medical examiner’s own son.

Adam Peterson died in September at the age of 29, found unresponsive in a friend’s apartment. “At this time I am not speaking publicly about Adam’s death, and I appreciate your forbearance as my wife and I work through this issue,” his father, Brian L. Peterson, the medical examiner, wrote in an email.

Dr. Peterson has continued his work despite his grief. He oversees a staff of nearly 30 people — administrators, toxicologists and laboratory employees — who have perhaps never been more overwhelmed. They are confronting a surge of drug-related deaths in Milwaukee County, the most populous county in Wisconsin, with nearly one million people in the city and suburbs.

They have witnessed an alarming rise in drug-related deaths for years now: 251 deaths in 2014, 255 in 2015, and they surpassed those figures in 2016. Dr. Peterson’s son was among those who died last summer in a surge of overdoses that in seven weeks took more than 70 lives.

Ms. Schreiber has witnessed much of the epidemic. The victims have been mostly middle-aged; more male than female; more white than black.

As she walked through the laboratory, she pointed out the epidemic’s effects. Now, the machines that analyze blood to help determine the ever-more-toxic blends of drugs are running far more often. They’re juggling more cases and analyzing more specimens than before.

Ms. Schreiber and her colleagues struggle with questions that they cannot answer. What can they do to stem the epidemic? How can they influence people while they are still alive?

It’s hard to know where to begin, she said. “You can’t outrun it.”

JULIE BOSMAN

‘Mein Kampf’: Murphy translation: Part 5

January 7, 2017

There have been a number of translations of Hitler’s seminal book. Most have been heavily editited so as to promulgate disinformation about Hitler’s views and remove passages that might offend the sensitive.

The Murphy translation is considered to be the most accurate and is being reprinted in toto here. Our next publication of this work will be the unexpurgated German edition. The Germans have released a highly doctored edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ that is selling well in Germany. Perhaps a free copy of the original would do better. ed

VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

CHAPTER V THE WORLD WAR

 

During the boisterous years of my youth nothing used to damp my wild spirits so much as to think that I was born at a time when the world had manifestly decided not to erect any more temples of fame except in honour of business people and State officials. The tempest of historical achievements seemed to have permanently subsided, so much so that the future appeared to be irrevocably delivered over to what was called peaceful competition between the nations. This simply meant a system of mutual exploitation by fraudulent means, the principle of resorting to the use of force in self-defence being formally excluded. Individual countries increasingly assumed the appearance of commercial undertakings, grabbing territory and clients and concessions from each other under any and every kind of pretext. And it was all staged to an accompaniment of loud but innocuous shouting. This trend of affairs seemed destined to develop steadily and permanently. Having the support of public approbation, it seemed bound eventually to transform the world into a mammoth department store. In the vestibule of this emporium there would be rows of monumental busts which would confer immortality on those profiteers who had proved themselves the shrewdest at their trade and those administrative officials who had shown themselves the most innocuous. The salesmen could be represented by the English and the administrative functionaries by the Germans; whereas the Jews would be sacrificed to the unprofitable calling of proprietorship, for they are constantly avowing that they make no profits and are always being called upon to ‘pay out’. Moreover they have the advantage of being versed in the foreign languages.

Why could I not have been born a hundred years ago? I used to ask myself. Somewhere about the time of the Wars of Liberation, when a man was still of some value even though he had no ‘business’.

Thus I used to think it an ill-deserved stroke of bad luck that I had arrived too late on this terrestrial globe, and I felt chagrined at the idea that my life would have to run its course along peaceful and orderly lines. As a boy I was anything but a pacifist and all attempts to make me so turned out futile.

Then the Boer War came, like a glow of lightning on the far horizon. Day after day I used to gaze intently at the newspapers and I almost ‘devoured’ the telegrams and COMMUNIQUES, overjoyed to think that I could witness that heroic struggle, even though from so great a distance.

When the Russo-Japanese War came I was older and better able to judge for myself. For national reasons I then took the side of the Japanese in our discussions. I looked upon the defeat of the Russians as a blow to Austrian Slavism.

Many years had passed between that time and my arrival in Munich. I now realized that what I formerly believed to be a morbid decadence was only the lull before the storm. During my Vienna days the Balkans were already in the grip of that sultry pause which presages the violent storm. Here and there a flash of lightning could be occasionally seen; but it rapidly disappeared in sinister gloom. Then the Balkan War broke out; and therewith the first gusts of the forthcoming tornado swept across a highly-strung Europe. In the supervening calm men felt the atmosphere oppressive and foreboding, so much so that the sense of an impending catastrophe became transformed into a feeling of impatient expectance. They wished that Heaven would give free rein to the fate which could now no longer be curbed. Then the first great bolt of lightning struck the earth. The storm broke and the thunder of the heavens intermingled with the roar of the cannons in the World War.

When the news came to Munich that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been murdered, I had been at home all day and did not get the particulars of how it happened. At first I feared that the shots may have been fired by some German-Austrian students who had been aroused to a state of furious indignation by the persistent pro-Slav activities of the Heir to the Habsburg Throne and therefore wished to liberate the German population from this internal enemy. It was quite easy to imagine what the result of such a mistake would have been. It would have brought on a new wave of persecution, the motives of which would have been ‘justified’ before the whole world. But soon afterwards I heard the names of the presumed assassins and also that they were known to be Serbs. I felt somewhat dumbfounded in face of the inexorable vengeance which Destiny had wrought. The greatest friend of the Slavs had fallen a victim to the bullets of Slav patriots.

It is unjust to the Vienna government of that time to blame it now for the form and tenor of the ultimatum which was then presented. In a similar position and under similar circumstances, no other Power in the world would have acted otherwise. On her southern frontiers Austria had a relentless mortal foe who indulged in acts of provocation against the Dual Monarchy at intervals which were becoming more and more frequent.

This persistent line of conduct would not have been relaxed until the arrival of the opportune moment for the destruction of the Empire. In Austria there was good reason to fear that, at the latest, this moment would come with the death of the old Emperor. Once that had taken place, it was quite possible that the Monarchy would not be able to offer any serious resistance. For some years past the State had been so completely identified with the personality of Francis Joseph that, in the eyes of the great mass of the people, the death of this venerable personification of the Empire would be tantamount to the death of the Empire itself. Indeed it was one of the clever artifices of Slav policy to foster the impression that the Austrian State owed its very existence exclusively to the prodigies and rare talents of that monarch. This kind of flattery was particularly welcomed at the Hofburg, all the more because it had no relation whatsoever to the services actually rendered by the Emperor. No effort whatsoever was made to locate the carefully prepared sting which lay hidden in this glorifying praise. One fact which was entirely overlooked, perhaps intentionally, was that the more the Empire remained dependent on the so-called administrative talents of ‘the wisest Monarch of all times’, the more catastrophic would be the situation when Fate came to knock at the door and demand its tribute.

Was it possible even to imagine the Austrian Empire without its venerable ruler? Would not the tragedy which befell Maria Theresa be repeated at once?

It is really unjust to the Vienna governmental circles to reproach them with having instigated a war which might have been prevented. The war was bound to come. Perhaps it might have been postponed for a year or two at the most. But it had always been the misfortune of German, as well as Austrian, diplomats that they endeavoured to put off the inevitable day of reckoning, with the result that they were finally compelled to deliver their blow at a most inopportune moment.

No. Those who did not wish this war ought to have had the courage to take the consequences of the refusal upon themselves. Those consequences must necessarily have meant the sacrifice of Austria. And even then war would have come, not as a war in which all the nations would have been banded against us but in the form of a dismemberment of the Habsburg Monarchy. In that case we should have had to decide whether we should come to the assistance of the Habsburg or stand aside as spectators, with our arms folded, and thus allow Fate to run its course.

Just those who are loudest in their imprecations to-day and make a great parade of wisdom in judging the causes of the war are the very same people whose collaboration was the most fatal factor in steering towards the war.

For several decades previously the German Social-Democrats had been agitating in an underhand and knavish way for war against Russia; whereas the German Centre Party, with religious ends in view, had worked to make the Austrian State the chief centre and turning-point of German policy. The consequences of this folly had now to be borne. What came was bound to come and under no circumstances could it have been avoided.

The fault of the German Government lay in the fact that, merely for the sake of preserving peace at all costs, it continued to miss the occasions that were favourable for action, got entangled in an alliance for the purpose of preserving the peace of the world, and thus finally became the victim of a world coalition which opposed the German effort for the maintenance of peace and was determined to bring about the world war.Had the Vienna Government of that time formulated its ultimatum in less drastic terms, that would not have altered the situation at all: but such a course might have aroused public indignation. For, in the eyes of the great masses, the ultimatum was too moderate and certainly not excessive or brutal. Those who would deny this to-day are either simpletons with feeble memories or else deliberate falsehood-mongers.

The War of 1914 was certainly not forced on the masses; it was even desired by the whole people.

There was a desire to bring the general feeling of uncertainty to an end once and for all. And it is only in the light of this fact that we can understand how more than two million German men and youths voluntarily joined the colours, ready to shed the last drop of their blood for the cause.

For me these hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth. I am not ashamed to acknowledge to-day that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment and that I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in such a time.

The fight for freedom had broken out on an unparalleled scale in the history of the world. From the moment that Fate took the helm in hand the conviction grew among the mass of the people that now it was not a question of deciding the destinies of Austria or Serbia but that the very existence of the German nation itself was at stake.

At last, after many years of blindness, the people saw clearly into the future. Therefore, almost immediately after the gigantic struggle had begun, an excessive enthusiasm was replaced by a more earnest and more fitting undertone, because the exaltation of the popular spirit was not a mere passing frenzy. It was only too necessary that the gravity of the situation should be recognized. At that time there was, generally speaking, not the slightest presentiment or conception of how long the war might last. People dreamed of the soldiers being home by Christmas and that then they would resume their daily work in peace.

Whatever mankind desires, that it will hope for and believe in. The overwhelming majority of the people had long since grown weary of the perpetual insecurity in the general condition of public affairs. Hence it was only natural that no one believed that the Austro-Serbian conflict could be shelved. Therefore they looked forward to a radical settlement of accounts. I also belonged to the millions that desired this.

The moment the news of the Sarajevo outrage reached Munich two ideas came into my mind: First,that war was absolutely inevitable and, second, that the Habsburg State would now be forced to honour its signature to the alliance. For what I had feared most was that one day Germany herself, perhaps as a result of the Alliance, would become involved in a conflict the first direct cause of which did not affect Austria. In such a contingency, I feared that the Austrian State, for domestic political reasons, would find itself unable to decide in favour of its ally. But now this danger was removed. The old State was compelled to fight, whether it wished to do so or not.

My own attitude towards the conflict was equally simple and clear.  I believed that it was not a case of Austria fighting to get satisfaction from Serbia but rather a case of Germany fighting for her own existence–the German nation for its own to-be-or-not-to-be, for its freedom and for its future. The work of Bismarck must now be carried on.

Young Germany must show itself worthy of the blood shed by our fathers on so many heroic fields of battle, from Weissenburg to Sedan and Paris.

And if this struggle should bring us victory our people will again rank foremost among the great nations. Only then could the German Empire assert itself as the mighty champion of peace, without the necessity of restricting the daily bread of its children for the sake of maintaining the peace.

As a boy and as a young man, I often longed for the occasion to prove that my national enthusiasm was not mere vapouring. Hurrahing sometimes seemed to me to be a kind of sinful indulgence, though I could not give any justification for that feeling; for, after all, who has the right to shout that triumphant word if he has not won the right to it there where there is no play-acting and where the hand of the Goddess of Destiny puts the truth and sincerity of nations and men through her inexorable test? Just as millions of others, I felt a proud joy in being permitted to go through this test. I had so often sung DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES and so often roared ‘HEIL’ that I now thought it was as a kind of retro-active grace that I was granted the right of appearing before the Court of Eternal Justice to testify to the truth of those sentiments.

One thing was clear to me from the very beginning, namely, that in the event of war, which now seemed inevitable, my books would have to be thrown aside forthwith. I also realized that my place would have to be there where the inner voice of conscience called me.

I had left Austria principally for political reasons. What therefore could be more rational than that I should put into practice the logical consequences of my political opinions, now that the war had begun. I had no desire to fight for the Habsburg cause, but I was prepared to die at any time for my own kinsfolk and the Empire to which they really belonged.

On August 3rd, 1914, I presented an urgent petition to His Majesty, King Ludwig III, requesting to be allowed to serve in a Bavarian regiment. In those days the Chancellery had its hands quite full and therefore I was all the more pleased when I received the answer a day later,that my request had been granted. I opened the document with trembling hands; and no words of mine could now describe the satisfaction I felt on reading that I was instructed to report to a Bavarian regiment. Within a few days I was wearing that uniform which I was not to put oft again for nearly six years.

For me, as for every German, the most memorable period of my life now began. Face to face with that mighty struggle, all the past fell away into oblivion. With a wistful pride I look back on those days, especially because we are now approaching the tenth anniversary of that memorable happening. I recall those early weeks of war when kind fortune permitted me to take my place in that heroic struggle among the nations.

As the scene unfolds itself before my mind, it seems only like yesterday. I see myself among my young comrades on our first parade drill, and so on until at last the day came on which we were to leave for the front.

In common with the others, I had one worry during those days. This was a fear that we might arrive too late for the fighting at the front. Time and again that thought disturbed me and every announcement of a victorious engagement left a bitter taste, which increased as the news of further victories arrived.

At long last the day came when we left Munich on war service. For the first time in my life I saw the Rhine, as we journeyed westwards to stand guard before that historic German river against its traditional and grasping enemy. As the first soft rays of the morning sun broke through the light mist and disclosed to us the Niederwald Statue, with one accord the whole troop train broke into the strains of DIE WACHT AM RHEIN. I then felt as if my heart could not contain its spirit.

And then followed a damp, cold night in Flanders. We marched in silence throughout the night and as the morning sun came through the mist an iron greeting suddenly burst above our heads. Shrapnel exploded in our midst and spluttered in the damp ground. But before the smoke of the explosion disappeared a wild ‘Hurrah’ was shouted from two hundred throats, in response to this first greeting of Death. Then began the whistling of bullets and the booming of cannons, the shouting and singing of the combatants. With eyes straining feverishly, we pressed forward, quicker and quicker, until we finally came to close-quarter fighting, there beyond the beet-fields and the meadows. Soon the strains of a song reached us from afar. Nearer and nearer, from company to company, it came. And while Death began to make havoc in our ranks we passed the song on to those beside us: DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES, ÜBER ALLES IN DER WELT.

After four days in the trenches we came back. Even our step was no longer what it had been. Boys of seventeen looked now like grown men. The rank and file of the List Regiment (Note 11) had not been properly trained in the art of warfare, but they knew how to die like old soldiers.

[Note 11. The Second Infantry Bavarian Regiment, in which Hitler served as a volunteer.]

That was the beginning. And thus we carried on from year to year. A feeling of horror replaced the romantic fighting spirit. Enthusiasm cooled down gradually and exuberant spirits were quelled by the fear of the ever-present Death. A time came when there arose within each one of us a conflict between the urge to self-preservation and the call of duty. And I had to go through that conflict too. As Death sought its prey everywhere and unrelentingly a nameless Something rebelled within the weak body and tried to introduce itself under the name of Common Sense; but in reality it was Fear, which had taken on this cloak in order to impose itself on the individual. But the more the voice which advised prudence increased its efforts and the more clear and persuasive became its appeal, resistance became all the stronger; until finally the internal strife was over and the call of duty was triumphant. Already in the winter of 1915-16 I had come through that inner struggle. The will had asserted its incontestable mastery. Whereas in the early days I went into the fight with a cheer and a laugh, I was now habitually calm and resolute. And that frame of mind endured. Fate might now put me through the final test without my nerves or reason giving way. The young volunteer had become an old soldier.

This same transformation took place throughout the whole army. Constant fighting had aged and toughened it and hardened it, so that it stood firm and dauntless against every assault.

Only now was it possible to judge that army. After two and three years of continuous fighting, having been thrown into one battle after another, standing up stoutly against superior numbers and superior armament, suffering hunger and privation, the time had come when one could assess the value of that singular fighting force.

For a thousand years to come nobody will dare to speak of heroism without recalling the German Army of the World War. And then from the dim past will emerge the immortal vision of those solid ranks of steel helmets that never flinched and never faltered. And as long as Germans live they will be proud to remember that these men were the sons of their forefathers.

I was then a soldier and did not wish to meddle in politics, all the more so because the time was inopportune. I still believe that the most modest stable-boy of those days served his country better than the best of, let us say, the ‘parliamentary deputies’. My hatred for those footlers was never greater than in those days when all decent men who had anything to say said it point-blank in the enemy’s face; or, failing this, kept their mouths shut and did their duty elsewhere. I despised those political fellows and if I had had my way I would have formed them into a Labour Battalion and given them the opportunity of babbling amongst themselves to their hearts’ content, without offence or harm to decent people.

In those days I cared nothing for politics; but I could not help forming an opinion on certain manifestations which affected not only the whole nation but also us soldiers in particular. There were two things which caused me the greatest anxiety at that time and which I had come to regard as detrimental to our interests.

Shortly after our first series of victories a certain section of the Press already began to throw cold water, drip by drip, on the enthusiasm of the public. At first this was not obvious to many people. It was done under the mask of good intentions and a spirit of anxious care. The public was told that big celebrations of victories were somewhat out of place and were not worthy expressions of the spirit of a great nation.

The fortitude and valour of German soldiers were accepted facts which did not necessarily call for outbursts of celebration. Furthermore, it was asked, what would foreign opinion have to say about these manifestations? Would not foreign opinion react more favourably to a quiet and sober form of celebration rather than to all this wild jubilation? Surely the time had come–so the Press declared–for us Germans to remember that this war was not our work and that hence there need be no feeling of shame in declaring our willingness to do our share towards effecting an understanding among the nations. For this reason it would not be wise to sully the radiant deeds of our army with unbecoming jubilation; for the rest of the world would never understand this.

Furthermore, nothing is more appreciated than the modesty with which a true hero quietly and unassumingly carries on and forgets. Such was the gist of their warning.

Instead of catching these fellows by their long ears and dragging them to some ditch and looping a cord around their necks, so that the victorious enthusiasm of the nation should no longer offend the aesthetic sensibilities of these knights of the pen, a general Press campaign was now allowed to go on against what was called ‘unbecoming’ and ‘undignified’ forms of victorious celebration.

No one seemed to have the faintest idea that when public enthusiasm is once damped, nothing can enkindle it again, when the necessity arises.

This enthusiasm is an intoxication and must be kept up in that form.

Without the support of this enthusiastic spirit how would it be possible to endure in a struggle which, according to human standards, made such immense demands on the spiritual stamina of the nation?

I was only too well acquainted with the psychology of the broad masses not to know that in such cases a magnaminous ‘aestheticism’ cannot fan the fire which is needed to keep the iron hot. In my eyes it was even a mistake not to have tried to raise the pitch of public enthusiasm still higher. Therefore I could not at all understand why the contrary policy was adopted, that is to say, the policy of damping the public spirit.

Another thing which irritated me was the manner in which Marxism was regarded and accepted. I thought that all this proved how little they knew about the Marxist plague. It was believed in all seriousness that the abolition of party distinctions during the War had made Marxism a mild and moderate thing.

But here there was no question of party. There was question of a doctrine which was being expounded for the express purpose of leading humanity to its destruction. The purport of this doctrine was not understood because nothing was said about that side of the question in our Jew-ridden universities and because our supercilious bureaucratic officials did not think it worth while to read up a subject which had not been prescribed in their university course. This mighty revolutionary trend was going on beside them; but those ‘intellectuals’ would not deign to give it their attention. That is why State enterprise nearly always lags behind private enterprise. Of these gentry once can truly say that their maxim is: What we don’t know won’t bother us. In the August of 1914 the German worker was looked upon as an adherent of Marxist socialism. That was a gross error. When those fateful hours dawned the German worker shook off the poisonous clutches of that plague; otherwise he would not have been so willing and ready to fight.

And people were stupid enough to imagine that Marxism had now become ‘national’, another apt illustration of the fact that those in authority had never taken the trouble to study the real tenor of the Marxist teaching. If they had done so, such foolish errors would not have been committed.

Marxism, whose final objective was and is and will continue to be the destruction of all non-Jewish national States, had to witness in those days of July 1914 how the German working classes, which it had been inveigling, were aroused by the national spirit and rapidly ranged themselves on the side of the Fatherland. Within a few days the deceptive smoke-screen of that infamous national betrayal had vanished into thin air and the Jewish bosses suddenly found themselves alone and deserted. It was as if not a vestige had been left of that folly and madness with which the masses of the German people had been inoculated for sixty years. That was indeed an evil day for the betrayers of German Labour. The moment, however, that the leaders realized the danger which threatened them they pulled the magic cap of deceit over their ears and, without being identified, played the part of mimes in the national reawakening.

The time seemed to have arrived for proceeding against the whole Jewish gang of public pests. Then it was that action should have been taken regardless of any consequent whining or protestation. At one stroke, in the August of 1914, all the empty nonsense about international solidarity was knocked out of the heads of the German working classes. A few weeks later, instead of this stupid talk sounding in their ears, they heard the noise of American-manufactured shrapnel bursting above the heads of the marching columns, as a symbol of international comradeship. Now that the German worker had rediscovered the road to nationhood, it ought to have been the duty of any Government which had the care of the people in its keeping, to take this opportunity of mercilessly rooting out everything that was opposed to the national spirit.

While the flower of the nation’s manhood was dying at the front, there was time enough at home at least to exterminate this vermin. But, instead of doing so, His Majesty the Kaiser held out his hand to these hoary criminals, thus assuring them his protection and allowing them to regain their mental composure.

And so the viper could begin his work again. This time, however, more carefully than before, but still more destructively. While honest people dreamt of reconciliation these perjured criminals were making preparations for a revolution.

Naturally I was distressed at the half-measures which were adopted at that time; but I never thought it possible that the final consequencescould have been so disastrous?

But what should have been done then? Throw the ringleaders into gaol, prosecute them and rid the nation of them? Uncompromising military measures should have been adopted to root out the evil. Parties should have been abolished and the Reichstag brought to its senses at the point of the bayonet, if necessary. It would have been still better if the Reichstag had been dissolved immediately. Just as the Republic to-day dissolves the parties when it wants to, so in those days there was even more justification for applying that measure, seeing that the very existence of the nation was at stake. Of course this suggestion would give rise to the question: Is it possible to eradicate ideas by force of arms? Could a WELTANSCHAUUNG be attacked by means of physical force?

At that time I turned these questions over and over again in my mind. By studying analogous cases, exemplified in history, particularly those which had arisen from religious circumstances, I came to the following fundamental conclusion:

Ideas and philosophical systems as well as movements grounded on a definite spiritual foundation, whether true or not, can never be broken by the use of force after a certain stage, except on one condition: namely, that this use of force is in the service of a new idea or WELTANSCHAUUNG which burns with a new flame.

The application of force alone, without moral support based on a spiritual concept, can never bring about the destruction of an idea or arrest the propagation of it, unless one is ready and able ruthlessly to exterminate the last upholders of that idea even to a man, and also wipe out any tradition which it may tend to leave behind. Now in the majority of cases the result of such a course has been to exclude such a State, either temporarily or for ever, from the comity of States that are of political significance; but experience has also shown that such a sanguinary method of extirpation arouses the better section of the population under the persecuting power. As a matter of fact, every persecution which has no spiritual motives to support it is morally unjust and raises opposition among the best elements of the population; so much so that these are driven more and more to champion the ideas that are unjustly persecuted. With many individuals this arises from the sheer spirit of opposition to every attempt at suppressing spiritual things by brute force.

In this way the number of convinced adherents of the persecuted doctrine increases as the persecution progresses. Hence the total destruction of a new doctrine can be accomplished only by a vast plan of extermination; but this, in the final analysis, means the loss of some of the best blood in a nation or State. And that blood is then avenged, because such an internal and total clean-up brings about the collapse of the nation’s strength. And such a procedure is always condemned to futility from the very start if the attacked doctrine should happen to have spread beyond a small circle.

That is why in this case, as with all other growths, the doctrine can be exterminated in its earliest stages. As time goes on its powers of resistance increase, until at the approach of age it gives way to younger elements, but under another form and from other motives.

The fact remains that nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine, without having some spiritual basis of attack against it, and also to wipe out all the organizations it has created, have led in many cases to the very opposite being achieved; and that for the following reasons:

When sheer force is used to combat the spread of a doctrine, then that force must be employed systematically and persistently. This means that the chances of success in the suppression of a doctrine lie only in the persistent and uniform application of the methods chosen. The moment hesitation is shown, and periods of tolerance alternate with the application of force, the doctrine against which these measures are directed will not only recover strength but every successive persecution will bring to its support new adherents who have been shocked by the oppressive methods employed. The old adherents will become more embittered and their allegiance will thereby be strengthened. Therefore when force is employed success is dependent on the consistent manner in which it is used. This persistence, however, is nothing less than the product of definite spiritual convictions. Every form of force that is not supported by a spiritual backing will be always indecisive and uncertain. Such a force lacks the stability that can be found only in a WELTANSCHAUUNG which has devoted champions. Such a force is the expression of the individual energies; therefore it is from time to time dependent on the change of persons in whose hands it is employed and also on their characters and capacities.

But there is something else to be said: Every WELTANSCHAUUNG, whether religious or political–and it is sometimes difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins–fights not so much for the negative destruction of the opposing world of ideas as for the positive realization of its own ideas. Thus its struggle lies in attack rather than in defence. It has the advantage of knowing where its objective lies, as this objective represents the realization of its own ideas.

Inversely, it is difficult to say when the negative aim for the destruction of a hostile doctrine is reached and secured. For this reason alone a WELTANSCHAUUNG which is of an aggressive character is more definite in plan and more powerful and decisive in action than a WELTANSCHAUUNG which takes up a merely defensive attitude. If force be used to combat a spiritual power, that force remains a defensive measure only so long as the wielders of it are not the standard-bearers and apostles of a new spiritual doctrine.

To sum up, the following must be borne in mind: That every attempt to combat a WELTANSCHAUUNG by means of force will turn out futile in the end if the struggle fails to take the form of an offensive for the establishment of an entirely new spiritual order of’ things. It is only in the struggle between two Weltan-schauungen that physical force, consistently and ruthlessly applied, will eventually turn the scales in

its own favour. It was here that the fight against Marxism had hitherto failed.

This was also the reason why Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation failed and was bound to fail in the long run, despite everything. It lacked the basis of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG for whose development and extension the struggle might have been taken up. To say that the serving up of drivel about a so-called ‘State-Authority’ or ‘Law-and-Order’ was an adequate foundation for the spiritual driving force in a

life-or-death struggle is only what one would expect to hear from the wiseacres in high official positions.

It was because there were no adequate spiritual motives back of this offensive that Bismarck was compelled to hand over the administration of his socialist legislative measures to the judgment and approval of those circles which were themselves the product of the Marxist teaching. Thus a very ludicrous state of affairs prevailed when the Iron Chancellor surrendered the fate of his struggle against Marxism to the goodwill of the bourgeois democracy. He left the goat to take care of the garden.

But this was only the necessary result of the failure to find a fundamentally new WELTANSCHAUUNG which would attract devoted champions to its cause and could be established on the ground from which Marxism had been driven out. And thus the result of the Bismarckian campaign was deplorable.

During the World War, or at the beginning of it, were the conditions any different? Unfortunately, they were not.

The more I then pondered over the necessity for a change in the attitude of the executive government towards Social-Democracy, as the incorporation of contemporary Marxism, the more I realized the want of a practical substitute for this doctrine. Supposing Social-Democracy were overthrown, what had one to offer the masses in its stead? Not a single movement existed which promised any success in attracting vast numbers of workers who would be now more or less without leaders, and holding these workers in its train. It is nonsensical to imagine that the international fanatic who has just severed his connection with a class party would forthwith join a bourgeois party, or, in other words, another class organization. For however unsatisfactory these various organizations may appear to be, it cannot be denied that bourgeois look on the distinction between classes as a very important factor in social life, provided it does not turn out politically disadvantageous to them. If they deny this fact they show themselves notonly impudent but also mendacious.Generally speaking, one should guard against considering the broad masses more stupid than they really are. In political matters itfrequently happens that feeling judges more correctly than intellect.

But the opinion that this feeling on the part of the masses is sufficient proof of their stupid international attitude can be immediately and definitely refuted by the simple fact that pacifist democracy is no less fatuous, though it draws its supporters almost exclusively from bourgeois circles. As long as millions of citizens daily gulp down what the social-democratic Press tells them, it ill becomes the ‘Masters’ to joke at the expense of the ‘Comrades’; for in the long run they all swallow the same hash, even though it be dished up with different spices. In both cases the cook is one and the same—the Jew.

One should be careful about contradicting established facts. It is an undeniable fact that the class question has nothing to do with questions concerning ideals, though that dope is administered at election time.

Class arrogance among a large section of our people, as well as a prevailing tendency to look down on the manual labourer, are obvious facts and not the fancies of some day-dreamer. Nevertheless it only illustrates the mentality of our so-called intellectual circles, that they have not yet grasped the fact that circumstances which are incapable of preventing the growth of such a plague as Marxism are certainly not capable of restoring what has been lost.

The bourgeois’ parties–a name coined by themselves–will never again be able to win over and hold the proletarian masses in their train. That is because two worlds stand opposed to one another here, in part naturally and in part artificially divided. These two camps have one leading thought, and that is that they must fight one another. But in such a fight the younger will come off victorious; and that is Marxism.

In 1914 a fight against Social-Democracy was indeed quite conceivable. But the lack of any practical substitute made it doubtful how long the fight could be kept up. In this respect there was a gaping void.

Long before the War I was of the same opinion and that was the reason why I could not decide to join any of the parties then existing. During the course of the World War my conviction was still further confirmed by the manifest impossibility of fighting Social-Democracy in anything like a thorough way: because for that purpose there should have been a movement that was something more than a mere ‘parliamentary’ party, and there was none such.

I frequently discussed that want with my intimate comrades. And it was then that I first conceived the idea of taking up political work later on. As I have often assured my friends, it was just this that induced me to become active on the public hustings after the War, in addition to my professional work. And I am sure that this decision was arrived at after much earnest thought.