TBR News November 29, 2019

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. November 29, 2019:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for November 29: ” The French philosopher Blaise Pascal discusses such individuals in his essay on ‘Thoughts’ As I recall the passage, he says that men would be great but know that they are small, would be happy but are miserable, wish to be perfect but know that they are full of imperfections and wish to be honored and loved by others but know that their flaws merit only contempt. I believe the passage goes in that way. And it continues to say that these persons become violently angry against these truths which so clearly expose their faults. This man becomes a Communist or a liberal as they call them in England.
He sees that only in reducing all men to a common state he can feel, if not superior, at least equal. These persons cannot achieve or create but can certainly destroy that which others have achieved or created. You find these creatures in the academic world filled with hatred that they cannot create that which they teach or in trade unions where they curse the man who has built a factory that they could not. And if they come to power, they only ruin what they touch.. They start out by demanding that you accept the idea that all men are equal and every man must be the equal to…but not the superior to his neighbor. In mathematics this is called a common denominator. Now these intellectual unemployed want all men to be equal and they, of course, are the natural leaders of these masses because of their superior, if previously unrecognized, brilliance.. They manipulate the masses to whom they condescend in order to overthrow an existing government and supplant it with… themselves!. And the tyranny of the market place, which is more or less natural, is replaced by the tyranny of the failed intellectual who knows with a certainty that he alone is right and wishes to force everyone not as brilliant as himself to worship him as a small clay God.”

The Table of Contents
• Clear message from Hong Kong voters
• Thousands in Hong Kong praise Trump with ‘Thanksgiving’ rally as more protests loom
• The Rise of Russia and the ‘End of the World’
• Homosexuality and Islam
• The Antichrist and other entertaining fictions
• Christ the Essene. What was an Essene?
• Homosexuality and the Bible
• The Season of Evil

Clear message from Hong Kong voters
Hong Kong voters have sent a clear message to the establishment. District councilors may have very little political power, but it would be wrong to ignore the results and continue as before.
November 28, 2019
by Frank Sieren
DW
Even if the situation has been overshadowed by the terrible news of the abuses of Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, the developments in Hong Kong last weekend are of fundamental significance for China.
Never before have so many people taken part in Hong Kong’s local elections: 71% of the electorate, almost 3 million people, went to the polls on Sunday. The result was a landslide victory for the pro-democracy camp, which now controls 90% of the district councils.
Never before had the Chinese voted so clearly against Beijing in free elections. Many pro-Beijing hard-liners, such as controversial lawmaker Junius Ho, lost their seats. State media had predicted that the elections would be seen as a referendum, but had predicted that the “silent majority” would opt for “security and order” and vote in favor of the pro-Beijing camp. Clearly, they were mistaken.
Pro-democracy voters also want security and order — but even more than that, they want autonomy. They want Beijing to have less influence in their city, they want an independent inquiry into police violence and—most importantly — they want to be able to freely choose their government.
Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who has obstinately refused to make any compromise or introduce reforms, was effectively voted out. But her refusal to step down despite the debacle, and Beijing’s continued support of her leadership, show the limitations of democracy in Hong Kong.
Though Lam immediately pledged after the vote that she would listen “humbly” and reflect “seriously” on the results, in her next public appearance she was adamant that she would not give in to the demands of the pro-democracy protesters. Instead, she announced plans for a committee to evaluate Hong Kong’s deep-rooted social problems, without giving further details. Clearly, her response was lacking.
For many, Lam is once again using typical rhetoric and delay tactics, which will only serve to escalate the situation. She seems to be hoping the election results represent only a symbolic victory for the pro-democracy protesters. In part, she’s right — the newly-elected district councilors have very little room to maneuver. They can’t pass laws or make important decisions; instead, they hold more of an advisory role on everyday issues like recycling or health care.
But this belief is another mistake on Lam’s part. Pro-democracy forces are already working toward their next goal: the parliamentary election next autumn. If the results are similar, they’ll have a good chance of forcing through reforms involving the police, election rules and democracy. But first, they’ll have a lot of work to do to lay the groundwork. Many of the new district councilors are young and lack experience. In 2003, the pro-democracy camp made similar advances after anti-establishment protests, but came to a standstill when faced with the daily political grind.
State media downplay results
China’s state media have glossed over Sunday’s results, and at times ignored them completely. Newspapers China Daily and Global Times concentrated on the candidates’ alleged disabilities and spoke of nebulous infiltration by “foreign forces.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stressed that Hong Kong was a part of China “no matter what happens.” He was sending a clear message: the results would not force Beijing or Carrie Lam into anything, and autonomy ends where Beijing’s interests begin.
However, there is still a path that Lam — or preferably, her successor — can take: she must immediately introduce reforms and respond to the concerns of the people of Hong Kong.
Limitations of autonomy
Although much seems possible, it remains nearly certain that Beijing will not allow a free election of the city’s parliament, even if this would be a very valuable and sensible experiment on a comparatively small territory. It would allow for the “one country, two systems” principle to be expanded, and yet it wouldn’t mean Hong Kong was splitting off from the People’s Republic. This remains a deeply-rooted fear in Beijing, after China’s disintegration in the first half of the 20th century.
Autonomy also has its limitations. This is the case in Western democracies too, as the case of Catalonia shows. Whereas an absolute majority in Catalonia voted for independence in 2017, the Spanish constitutional court ruled that the vote had been anti-constitutional, citing the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation” that is anchored in the constitution.
This would be the case in Germany, though there are no strong independence movements there. Parties that call for Bavarian independence, for example, are considered anti-constitutional. In 2017, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled there was “no room under the constitution for individual states to attempt to secede.”
Time to swallow their pride
Beijing could take the risk of conducting the “one country, two systems” experiment for ever. This would not damage its sovereignty, but actually reinforce it. Unfortunately, for the government to have the courage and the openness to do so remains inconceivable.
Now that the pro-democracy camp has received this boost at the polls, protesters should also swallow their pride and sit down at the negotiating table. An armistice would be an important step for Beijing. Democracy and autonomy are not about putting across interests using endless violence, but about finding compromises in dialogue.
Time is of the essence, and it’s playing against the protesters at the moment. The more painful the economic impact of the protests, the more people will ask themselves whether they are ready to put their lives and children on the line for the pro-democracy movement. For many, the price will be too high.

Thousands in Hong Kong praise Trump with ‘Thanksgiving’ rally as more protests loom
‘We really appreciate the effort made by Americans,’ says one protester, as city braces for another weekend of protest
November 28, 2019
by Lily Kuo in Beijing
The Guardian
Thousands of protesters in Hong Kong, some draped in American flags, have staged a “Thanksgiving” rally in the heart of the city after the approval by Donald Trump of human rights legislation aimed at protecting them.
“The rationale for us having this rally is to show our gratitude and thank the US Congress and also president Trump for passing the bill,” said 23-year-old Sunny Cheung, a member of the student group that lobbied for the legislation.
“We are really grateful about that and we really appreciate the effort made by Americans who support Hong Kong, who stand with Hong Kong, who do not choose to side with Beijing,” he said, urging other countries to pass similar legislation.
The law requires the state department to certify, at least annually, that Hong Kong is autonomous enough to justify favourable US trading terms that have helped it become a world financial centre. It also threatens sanctions for human rights violations.
Organisers of the rally put together a list of possible officials to sanction, including Hong Kong’s leader, chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng, former police chiefs Andy Tsang and Stephen Lo, the heads of the Chinese liaison office Wang Zhimin and secretary for justice Teresa Cheng who has alleged she was attacked and injured by protesters in London.
Hong Kong has faced almost six months of intense political unrest over the growing influence of Beijing in the former British colony, meant to enjoy a “high degree of autonomy” under the terms of its 1997 handover to China.
The conflict, which reached a peak in the last few weeks during a police siege of a university, has worsened already tense ties between the China and the US, which Beijing claims has had a “black hand” in instigating the anti-government protests.
The Chinese foreign ministry has said the US would shoulder the consequences of China’s countermeasures if it continued to “act arbitrarily” in regards to Hong Kong.
China is considering barring the drafters of the legislation, whose US Senate sponsor is Florida Republican Marco Rubio, from entering mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Macau, Hu Xijin, the editor of China’s Global Times tabloid, said on Twitter.
Chinese vice foreign minister Le Yucheng summoned US ambassador Terry Branstad on Thursday and demanded that Washington immediately stop interfering in China’s domestic affairs. Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed government said the legislation sent the wrong signal to demonstrators and “clearly interfered” with the city’s internal affairs.
“This so-called legislation will only strengthen the resolve of the Chinese people, including the Hong Kong people, and raise awareness of the sinister intentions and hegemonic nature of the US,” the Chinese foreign ministry said. “The US plot is doomed.”
The foreign ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, declined to comment on any countermeasures planned by Beijing. “You better stay tuned, and follow up on this,” he said. “What will come will come.”
Gao Feng, a spokesman for China’s commerce ministry, did not comment directly on whether the law would affect trade talks, saying there were no new details of their progress to disclose.
While protesters were gathering in Hong Kong on Thursday night, Chinese state media addressed recent challenges to Beijing’s authority, including the landslide win for pro-democracy candidates at local elections on Sunday, the passage of the bill in the US, as well as recent leaks of classified documents that contradict China’s defence of its policies in Xinjiang.
“All of this has made mainland Chinese feel unwell but this is the price we have to pay for China’s rise … most of the pressure from the US and other western countries is like spittle to us. Xinjiang and Tibet fit into this category. We must fight back but we must also be very clear that these attacks won’t stop us,” an editorial from the Global Times said.
It added, in response to growing chorus of criticism from other countries in the past week over the mass detention of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang : “As long as Xinjiang has achieved peace and prosperity, what the outside world says is really of second priority.”
Prominent democracy activists Joshua Wong and Denise Ho addressed the rally, thanking frontline protesters for the passage of the bill. Crowds sang the protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong”, waving their phone torches.
Several hundred people also gathered outside the Polytechnic University, which police entered after a nearly two-week siege.
“The situation in Poly U is still a disaster,” said 30-year-old Ng, dressed in black and wearing a surgical mask. “We are out to show we will never forget the Poly U incident.”
Hong Kong police on Friday were preparing to clear the university, where more than 1,000 protesters had been holed up after a day-long clash between demonstrators and police on 17 November. The number of protesters remaining has dwindled and police say that none remain.
Police, who said the police cordon around the campus would soon be lifted, have found almost 4,000 Molotov cocktails, corrosive chemicals including acid, as well as 12 bows and 200 arrows and an air rifle.
More than 5,800 people have been arrested since the protests broke out in June over a proposal to allow extraditions to mainland China, with the numbers growing in October and November as violence escalated.
The city on Friday was bracing for protests, announced by demonstrators on social media, over the weekend and into next week. The Civil Human Rights Front, a group that organised million-strong marches in June, has called for a rally on 8 December, which will be seen as a test of support for the protests as they enter their seventh month.
The protests have hit the Asian financial hub’s economy, especially tourism and business travel to the city. Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific Airways as well as South African Airways and Malaysia’s AirAsia have cut flights to and from Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s Civil Aviation said airlines would still be able to keep their airport slots.

The Rise of Russia and the ‘End of the World’
by Joe Quinn
“What the darkness cannot possess, it seeks to destroy”
You’ve probably read all sorts of theories that seek to explain the causes of the ‘new cold war’ in which we find ourselves. From the embarrassingly simplistic “Putin’s a Hitler” offered by the Western press to the more nuanced idea of an ‘energy war’ between US-Europe-Russia. The truth about why we are where we are right now, as a species, however, is actually fairly simple. But to understand it you’ll have to ditch the idea of a ‘new cold war’ and replace it with ‘the 120-year-old war that never ended’.
Over 100 years ago, in 1904, one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy, Oxford University graduate and co-founder of the London School of Economics, Sir Halford Mackinder, proposed a theory that expanded geopolitical analysis from the local or regional level to a global level. Geopolitics is the study (by people in positions of power) of the effects of geography (human and physical) on international politics and international relations. In layman’s terms, this means the study of how best to control as much of the world – its resources, human and natural – as possible. When you or I think about the world, we think of a big, complicated place with billions of people. When the ‘elite’ think of the world, they think of a globe, or a map, with nation states on it that can, and should, according to them, be shaped and changed en masse.
Mackinder separated the world into just a few regions.
The ‘world Island’, and area roughly comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The offshore islands, including the British Isles and the islands of Japan.
The outlying islands, including the continents of North America, South America, and Australia.
The most important of these, by far, was the ‘world island’ and in particular what he called the ‘heartland’, which basically means Russia. Mackinder said that whoever controls the ‘heartland’ (Russia) controls the ‘world island’ (Eurasia and Africa), and whoever controls that, controls the world. It’s a fairly self-evident analysis of the situation because the great majority of the world’s population and resources are on the Eurasian continent, and holding a vast northern position on that landmass – with your rearguard protected by an impassable frozen ocean – gives you the prime vantage point, or ‘higher ground’ if you will.
Mackinder’s geostrategic map of the world
Mackinder probably arrived at this conclusion as a result of the British experience of Empire. The British had a large empire on which ‘the sun never set’ (and the blood never dried), and while the British elite made a lot of money, and caused a lot of suffering, by expropriating the resources of other peoples, they were never able to truly ‘rule the world’ because the ‘heartland’ (Russia) was not conquered and made a subservient state of Western powers, largely due to its massive size and the fact that Russia had long since been an Empire itself.
In 1904, Mackinder’s ideas (shared by his contemporaries) were already common currency among the anglo-American elite of the day, who sought global domination by way of the prevention of any competitor to the United States. Russia was that natural potential competitor, again due its size, resources and imperial history. So even before the turn of the 20th century, the US elite, in league with their British co-ideologues, were busying themselves with the task of ‘neutralizing’ Russia as a threat to their plans for global hegemony. As Mackinder published his ideas, US and British political, industrialist and banker types had already embarked on the process of ‘regime change’ in Russia by way of one of the ‘offshore islands’, specifically, Japan.
In 1898, Russia had agreed a convention with China that leased the Chinese port of ‘Port Arthur’ to Russia. At the time this was Russia’s only warm water Pacific seaport (and it was as strategically important as Crimea is to Russia today). Both the British and Americans were concerned about the close relationship between Russia and Germany (Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were cousins) and the possibility that France might join them in a triple anti-British alliance. To the British and Americans this was a clear “threat to the international order”.1 To thwart Russian intentions in Asia, in 1902 Great Britain and Japan signed the ‘Anglo-Japanese alliance’ which stipulated that if either Japan or Great Britain were attacked by more than one enemy they would support each other militarily. This was effectively a green light from the British for Japan to go to war with Russia if necessary, safe in the knowledge that neither France nor Germany (Russia’s allies) would intervene and risk war with Britain. From this point on, Japan effectively acted as a protector of British interests in East Asia.
From February 8th 1904 to September 5th 1905 the first ‘great war’ of the 20th century was fought between Japan and Tsarist Russia, largely over access to ‘Port Arthur’. The British government supplied the Japanese navy with war ships and during the war itself passed intelligence to the Japanese. Perhaps the most significant aid to the Japanese government came in the form of loans from British and American banks and financial institutions that totaled $5billion at today’s value, including a $200 million ‘loan’ from prominent Wall St. banker Jacob Schiff.2 During World War I, Schiff and other Wall Street bankers would also extend loans to the Central Powers, despite officially being enemies of their adopted homeland, the USA.
Russia fielded over one million soldiers and sailors against Japan’s 500,000, but Russia still lost the war, largely due to support from the British and the Americans. The decisive battle occurred on 27-28 May 1905 when the Russian and Japanese navies met at the Tsushima strait. Two thirds of the Russian fleet was destroyed. Russia’s defeat was underlined by the Treaty of Portsmouth, which confirmed Japan’s emergence as the pre-eminent power in East Asia and forced Russia to abandon its plans to develop the Siberia-Pacific region and launch Far East trade routes. Japan also became the sixth-most powerful naval force and the war costs dealt a significant blow to the Russian economy.
Even before the war officially ended, it was Russia’s dire financial straits, the defeat at Tsushima, and pressure from the British that led the Tsar to ultimately back away from the 1905 Treaty of Bjorko he had signed with Kaiser Wilhelm (and, by implication, France). As soon as the British government and their network of anglophiles in Russia found out about the secret deal signed on the Kaiser’s yacht in the Baltic sea – a deal that would have threatened ‘world order’ by aligning Russia with Germany – they threatened to cut off funding to Russia and marshaled the Russian press, which they apparently controlled, to launch an anti-German propaganda campaign. The Kaiser wrote to the Tsar: “The whole of your influential press, have since a fortnight become violently anti-German and pro-British. Partly they are bought by the heavy sums of British money, no doubt”.3
With Russia isolated and economically broken, and the threat of Eurasian integration removed, the next logical step was to get rid of the Tsar altogether and transform Russia into a controlled, retarded and ‘captive’ market for Western finance. But to achieve that goal, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany would first have to be decisively dealt with, and that meant war. To prepare the ground for that war, the British signed the Anglo-Russian entente in 1907 and then later added France to the ‘triple entente’, allying the world’s most powerful militaries against Germany.
Between 1903 and 1914, the British public was gradually whipped into an anti-German frenzy and assaulted with countless newspaper articles, books and pamphlets (falsely) warning of Germany’s aggressive rearmament and intentions to invade Britain and take over the world. British newspaper and publishing magnate at the time Alfred Harmsworth, who was intricately linked with the British political and banking elite, exerted enormous influence over the British public through his newspapers. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Matin, Harmsworth said: “The Germans make themselves odious to the whole of Europe. I will not allow my paper to publish anything which might in any way hurt the feelings of the French, but I would not like to print anything which might be agreeable to the Germans”.3
The anti-German hysteria culminated in the passage of the UK’s Official Secrets Act of 1911, which effectively established the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It is fitting that these agencies, tasked today with manufacturing terrorist threats to scare the British – and global – public into supporting war, had their foundation in a manufactured threat from Germany.
The chosen ‘flash point’ for an Anglo-American war to destroy Germany, weaken the European powers and make the whole of Europe subservient to Western banking interests was the Balkans. In November 1912, a telegram from the Russian ambassador in Bulgaria to the Russian foreign minister (Isvolsky) identified a representative of the British newspaper The Times who claimed that “very many people in England are working towards accentuating the complication in the Balkans to bring about the war that would result in the destruction of the German fleet and German trade”.4
This Times journalist was most likely James David Bourchier, a member of the English aristocracy who was deeply involved in the Balkan League, an organisation set up in 1912 by the Russian ambassador in Belgrade, Nicholas Hartwig, to lobby for the independence of Balkan states from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Nicholas Hartwig was an agent of the English monarch, Edward VII, and, thereby, of the British elite5. Independence for the Balkan states was fully in line with the British elite’s aim of dismantling competing empires.
The assassination of arch-duke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 is recorded as the spark that ignited the First World War. But this is a distortion of the facts. As mentioned, British plans for war against Germany were at least a decade old by that point. In any case, assassinations of royalty and nobility were fairly common at that time in Europe, and the death of Ferdinand was not something that would necessarily have provoked a world war. Certainly, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was only interested in quieting the Serbs, and Germany, Austria-Hungary’s ally, was decidedly against the crisis spiraling out of control.
After the assassination, the British government deceptively announced to Austria-Hungary and Germany that they accepted Austria-Hungary’s right to compensation from Serbia. When Austria delivered its July Ultimatum on July 23rd to the Serbs – a series of demands that were intentionally made unacceptable – it expected a local war to result, but Russian foreign minister Sazonov (another British agent)6 responded by mobilizing Russian forces on July 28th against the wishes of the Tsar. The British also quietly mobilized their own troops in anticipation of a German move against Belgium, which occurred on August 4th.
What neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary realised was that the assassination – the casus belli – had been orchestrated by the Serbs with the encouragement of British agents in the Russian government. In the 1917 court case on the assassination, Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević confessed that he hired Ferdinand’s assassins and that the murder was planned with the knowledge and approval of the Russian ambassador in Belgrade – Nicholas Hartwig – and the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, Viktor Artamonov. Both Hartwig and Artamonov were effectively in the pay of the British government. If it had been widely revealed at the time that the Russians were directly involved in the assassination, the British government could not have justified the war to the British public, who held strong anti-Tsarist opinions, thanks to being systematically fed anti-Russian propaganda during the ‘Great Game’ of the 19th century. If anything, they would have called for war against Russia.
Even as the Russian and German armies were marching out of their barracks on July 1st, the Tsar and the Kaiser were exchanging telegrams in a futile attempt to avert disaster. In a note he wrote later that day, the Kaiser finally understood the depth of British perfidy: “I have no doubt about it: England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves to take the Austro-Serbian conflict for an excuse for waging a war of extermination against us… the stupidity and ineptitude of our ally is turned into a snare for us … the net has been suddenly thrown over our head, and England sneeringly reaps the most brilliant success of her persistently prosecuted purely anti-German world policy against which we have proved ourselves helpless. We are brought into a situation which offers England the desired pretext for annihilating us under the hypocritical cloak of justice.” 7 It should come as no surprise that during this ‘great’ war to protect the free world, British and American arms manufacturers, many with links to City of London and Wall Street banks, were arming all sides in the conflict. For just one example, the British-owned Armstrong-Pozzuoli Company, headquartered on the bay of Naples, employed 4,000 men and was the chief naval supplier to Britain’s enemy, Italy, and a high-level English naval officer, Rear Admiral Ottley, was a director!8 During the war, Labour MP Philip Snowden angrily told the House of Commons that “submarines and all the torpedoes used in the Austrian navy are made by the Whitehead Torpedo works in Hungary… they are making torpedoes with British capital in order to destroy British ships.”9 The same torpedoes were being used by German U-boats to sink British, and later American, ships.
Talk about a revolution
The disastrous effects to Russia of the British-inspired Russo-Japanese war provoked the 1905 Russian ‘revolution’ that lasted until 1907. That revolution paved the way for the overthrow of the Tsar and the coming to power of the nihilistic Bolsheviks in the October revolution of 1917. The event would define Russia’s history for the next 70 years. Far from being an impediment, the fact that Tsarist Russia was a British ally in the middle of WW1 appears, at the time, to have been seen by the British and American governments as an opportunity to stab the Tsar in the back when, and from where, he least expected it.
Like the First World War, the plan for the overthrow of the Tsar and revolution in Russia was years in the making. In fact, it seems that the 1905 Russo-Japanese war was used by the aforementioned Jacob Schiff and Co. to sow the seeds of that 1917 revolution 12 years in advance. In her book, ‘Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership’, prolific Jewish-American author Naomi Wiener Cohen states: “The Russo-Japanese war allied Schiff with George Kennan in a venture to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian prisoners of war held by Japan (Kennan had access to these). The operation was a carefully guarded secret and not until the revolution of March 1917 was it publicly disclosed by Kennan. He then told how he had secured Japanese permission to visit the camps and how the prisoners had asked him for something to read. Arranging for the ‘Friends of Russian Freedom’ to ship over a ton of revolutionary material, he secured Schiff’s financial backing. As Kennan told it, fifty thousand officers and men returned to Russia [as] ardent revolutionists. There they became fifty thousand “seeds of liberty” in one hundred regiments that contributed to the overthrow of the Tsar.” While Schiff was a strident opponent of the Russian Tsar for his treatment of Russian Jews, it’s difficult to tell if sympathy for his co-religionists in Russia was the motivation for Schiff, and other Jewish Wall Street bankers and industrialists, to finance the Bolshevik revolution. After all, they all also reaped massive financial rewards as a result.
Russian General Arsene de Goulevitch, who witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand, stated: “The main purveyors of funds for the revolution were neither the crackpot Russian millionaires nor the armed bandits of Lenin. The ‘real’ money primarily came from certain British and American circles which for a long time past had lent their support to the Russian revolutionary cause… I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord [Alfred] Milner in financing the Russian Revolution”.10 Milner was perhaps the preeminent agent of the British Empire at that time. As High Commissioner for Southern Africa, German-born Milner pioneered concentration camps and ethnic cleansing during the Boer War to expand British control of Africa. Milner was also the chief author of the Balfour Declaration, despite it being published in Arthur Balfour’s name. In his book on Milner, Edward Crankshaw summed up Milner’s ‘ideology’: “Some of the passages [in Milner’s books] on industry and society… are passages which any socialist would be proud to have written. But they were not written by a socialist. They were written by “the man who made the Boer War.” Some of the passages on Imperialism and the white man’s burden might have been written by a Tory diehard. They were written by the student of Karl Marx.” 11 Milner’s ideological bi-partisanship – and utter indifference to his German roots – mirrored that of the Wall Street bankers. Speaking to the League for Industrial Democracy in New York on 30th December 1924, Otto H. Kahn, who was Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg’s partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and director of American International Corp., said: “what you radicals, and we who hold opposing views differ about, is not so much the end as the means, not so much what should be brought about, as how it should, and can, be brought about”.
De Goulevitch cites reports from local observers and journalists in Petrograd in 1917 of British and American agents handing out 25-rouble notes to soldiers of the Pavlovski regiment just before they mutinied and joined the revolution.5 De Goulevitch also named Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador to Russia at the time, as one of the main players in financing what was effectively an early ‘color revolution’ in Russia.
As Jennings C. Wise has written, “Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson… made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport.”12
With the Tsar gone and the Western-backed Bolsheviks in power, US and other Western governments and corporations had succeeded not only in destroying Russia’s economy and industry, but breaking off parts of the Russian empire.The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is a testament to the fecklessness of the Bolsheviks in that, in order to withdraw Russia from the war, they were forced cede territory to Germany and Austria-Hungary. The first round of negotiations stalled because the mad-cap revolutionaries believed that Germany and Austria-Hungary were on the brink of revolution themselves. When Lenin and Co. finally came to their senses, they were forced to sign an even more punitive agreement with the Central Powers. While Russia regained much of this lost territory after WWII, it lost it all again in 1991. In fact, Russia’s post-1991 western border bears a marked similarity to that imposed by the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolshevik ‘revolution’ had effectively shut down the Russian economy and its industry, allowing Western bankers to step in to ‘rebuild’. Consider the words of American journalist, labor organizer, and publicist, Albert Rhys Williams, who was both a witness to – and participant in – the October revolution, as he testified at the Senate Overman Committee: Mr. Williams: […] it is probably true that under the Soviet government industrial life will perhaps be much slower in development than under the usual capitalistic system. But why should a great industrial country like America desire the creation and consequent competition of another great industrial rival? Are not the interests of America in this regard in line with the slow tempo of development which Soviet Russia projects for herself?
Senator Wolcott: So you are presenting an argument here which you think might appeal to the American people, your point being this; that if we recognize the Soviet government of Russia as it is constituted, we will be recognizing a government that cannot compete with us in industry for a great many years?
Mr. Williams: That is a fact.
Senator Wolcott: That is an argument that, under the Soviet government, Russia is in no position, for a great many years at least, to approach America industrially?
Mr. Williams: Absolutely. When the Bolsheviks started their first bank, Ruskombank, in 1922, one of its directors was Max May of Guaranty Trust. Guaranty Trust was a J.P. Morgan company. On joining Ruskombank, May stated: “The United States, being a rich country with well developed industries, does not need to import anything from foreign countries, but… it is greatly interested in exporting its products to other countries, and considers Russia the most suitable market for that purpose, taking into consideration the vast requirements of Russia in all lines of its economic life.”13 J.P. Morgan’s Guaranty Trust also raised loans for the German war effort while simultaneously funding the British and French against the Germans, and also the Russians, both under the Tsar against Germany, and then the Bolsheviks against the Tsar and for the “revolution”.14
Two world wars, courtesy of the anglo-American elite.
Via Wall Street bankers, the US government under Woodrow Wilson broke with international convention after WWI and refused to forgive debts from the massive war loans it pumped to its allies, primarily Britain and France.15 Germany was in an even worse position because of the reparations demanded by the extremely harsh Treaty of Versailles. None of these countries were in a position to pay back the money owed, so the ‘Dawes Plan’ was enacted whereby the US government would loan money to Germany so that it could pay reparations to France and Britain, who would then give the money back to the US to pay off their war debt. That’s how ‘funny money’ works. Nevertheless, World War I was a boon for the USA. It went from owing foreigners $4.5 billion in 1914 to being owed $25 billion by foreigners in 1928, including Europe’s war debt. As a result, much of Europe’s gold also ended up in Fort Knox. Professor of economics Michael Hudson claims that the motivation for massive US government financial claims on Europe was political rather than economic.
Germany paid off the final tranche of its debt to the US government in 2010. The UK is still paying. The debt to the US and allies from WWI was the primary cause of the collapse of the German economy in the early 1930s that gave rise to Hitler and the Nazis… who were also financed by the same cabal of Wall Street bankers.16
In 1925, a European theorist of imperialism, Gerhart Von Schulze-Gaevernitz, suggested that history would show that the most important result of World War I was not “the destruction of the royal dynasties that ruled Germany, Russia, Austria and Italy”, but the “shift in the world’s center of gravity from Europe, where it had existed since the days of Marathon, to America”. This new era of ‘superimperialism’, he said, had turned traditional imperialism on its head because now “finance capital mediates political power internationally to acquire monopolistic control and profits from natural resources, raw material and the power of labor, with the tendency towards autarky by controlling all regions, the entire world’s raw materials.”17
During the 1920s Russian industry was effectively rebuilt by US corporations, with several of Lenin’s five-year plans financed by Wall Street banks. The aim was to prepare Russia for WWII, where it effectively won the war for the allies but was largely ruined (again) in the process and, like the other European powers, incurred massive debt to Wall Street and London bankers. As revealed by Antony Sutton, the extent of Western influence and control inside Soviet Russia is exemplified by the fact that, during the Vietnam war, the military vehicles being used by the North Vietnamese military to fight American soldiers were produced in a Soviet factory, the Kama River Truck Plant, owned by the US Ford corporation.
By imposing the Bolshevik Revolution on Russia, Wall Street ensured that it could not compete with the USA. For the next 70 years, the ‘managers of the world’ in the US and Western Europe expanded their global domination through the use of a bogus “Communist threat” (which they created). In the late 1980s, the Western banking elite decided that their global power was sufficient to allow them to pull back the ‘iron curtain’ and, once again, open Russia up, but this time for some ‘free market’, ‘open society’ neo-liberal plunder. All was going to plan for most of the 1990s until Vladimir Putin arrived on the scene and began to spoil the Western elites’ ‘we rule the world’ party.
So what’s the point of this little history lesson? I hope it serves to highlight two things. That over 100 years ago the Western banking/corporate/political elite – the type of people who think, and say, things like… “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annexe the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”
~ Cecil Rhodes …understood clearly that the only way they were going rule the world was to ensure that Russia never emerged as a competitor to their center of operations – London, and then the USA. From a practical perspective, to achieve that goal they were going to have to perpetually marginalize Russia on the Eurasian continent and prevent European nations, in particular Western European nations, from ever forming an alliance with Russia. That task began in earnest in the late 1890s. It continues to this day, but it is failing.
Since coming to power Putin has made moves to do to Russia precisely that which the Western banking elite spent over 100 years trying to prevent: make it a strong independent country, free (to the greatest extent possible) of the Western bankers’ toxic influence. Even worse, Putin’s plan does not seem to be limited merely to freeing Russia, but includes the idea of using Russia’s influence to establish a new ‘new world order’, based not on the hegemony of the few, but on multipolarity, real national sovereignty, mutual respect, and genuinely fair trade among nations. In their 15 short years at the helm in Russia, Putin and his friends have gone a long way towards achieving their goals. The response from the Western elite has been interesting to watch. From NATO’s attempts to encircle Russia in Eastern Europe, to economic sanctions imposed on the basis of trumped-up charges, to sabotaging Russia-EU economic relations, to staging a coup in Ukraine in 2014, to manipulating the price of oil and assassinating ‘opposition figures’ inside and outside Russia; the anglo-American elite are resorting to increasingly desperate and hysterical measures to maintain the global imbalance they worked so hard to achieve. But nothing they do seems to phase Russia or divert it from the path it has chosen.
So what can we expect next from the Western elites? Short of all-out nuclear war with Russia (which is not and never was an option, contrary to Cold War propaganda) what scurrilously duplicitous maneuvers are left to be made? Not many, to be sure. Perhaps the only weapon left in their arsenal is the one that, more than any other, has allowed them to dominate the globe for so long: the almighty US dollar, its position as the world’s reserve currency, and the ‘petrodollar’.
For decades, these two financial ‘instruments’ have forced all other countries to hold large reserves of the American currency, thereby providing the US economy with a ‘free ride’ and securing its position as the world’s largest economy. If the US dollar were, for some reason, to collapse, it would create massive panic in the world economic system, and result, quite possibly, in the collapse of governments around the world. This is likely the reason that both Russia and China are wasting no time in establishing the basis for a new economic order that is not dollar-based. If that initiative progresses far enough, there may come a time in the near future when the dollar can be safely ‘ditched’ and replaced with another reserve currency, or basket of currencies, thereby avoiding or mitigating the systemic threat to the global economy (if not the US economy) of a dollar collapse, and forcing the Western elite, with their base of operations in the USA, to accept a more humble and justified position among the nations.
Fat cat feeding time almost over?
Anyone who has investigated and understood the nature of these “elites” of which I speak, knows that they are not the type of people who simply accept defeat, even when it is staring them in the face. They’re like a highly narcissistic chess player who, seeing that ‘check mate’ is almost upon him, opts to knock all the pieces of the board (and maybe burn it… and the room) rather than suffer the ignominy of defeat. It can then be claimed, ‘see, you didn’t win, we’ll have to start again’. The chess analogy is appropriate given that one of the main exponents of Mackinder’s theories of Eurasian strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of The Grand Chessboard, where he wrote “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
With the US debt currently running at over 104% to GDP (and rising), and the US unable or unwilling to reduce that debt or to increase GDP, the USA is effectively insolvent, a ‘failed state’ in all but name. The only thing preventing its economic collapse is the dependency, for now, of so many other nations on the US not collapsing. Is it possible that, facing the almost certain end to their reign as rulers of the world, the Western psycho-elite will chose the ‘financial nuclear option’ of ‘doing an Enron’ and collapsing the American dollar in a last, insane and futile effort to avert defeat by bringing the whole house of cards down… so they can ‘rebuild’ from scratch?
As my opening quote asserts: “what the darkness cannot possess, it seeks to destroy.”

Notes

1 Chapman, John W. M. Russia, Germany and the Anglo-Japanese Intelligence Collaboration
2 Schiff organised the purchase by US investors of $200 million in Japanese bonds
3 Farrer, England Under Edward VII p. 143
4 Stieve, Isvolsky and the First World War p. 116
5 Durham, Twenty years of Balkan Tangle ch 19 pp 2-3 and Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History: The secret origins of the First World war Ch.18
6 See; Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History: The secret origins of the First World war Ch.16
7 Barnes, Genesis of the World War, pp. 268-9
8 Perris, The War Traders: an Exposure
9 Murray, Krupps and the International Armaments Ring: the scandal of modern civilization p.3
10 De Goulevitch,: Czarism and Revolution, Omni Publications, California, pp. 224, 230
11 Crankshaw, The Forsaken Idea: A Study of Viscount Milner (London: Longmans Green, 1952), p. 269.
12 Wise, Woodrow Wilson: Disciple of Revolution (New York: Paisley Press, 1938), p.45
13 Sutton, A. Wall Street and the Bolsheviks Ch. 4
14 ibid
15 Hudson, M. Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance p. 50
16 Sutton, A. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
17 ibid

Homosexuality and Islam
by Aaron L. Johnson

For centuries, Muslim men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Muslim Afghanistani Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern Afghanistan towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.
The Pashtun are Afghanistan’s most important tribe. For centuries, the nation’s leaders have been Pashtun.
As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior “was rampant” among “soldiers and personnel on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time.”
In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”
A recent (July 2010) Department of State analysis, heavily classified,not only discusses rampant homosexual pedophilia among Muslims, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, Iran and, especially, in Saudi Arabia. The thesis that American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud, aggressive pedophiles, is a subject that has been forbidden of discussion by orders from the White House itself. Fear of “energizing’ the Muslim world and creating more active terrorists is the maini motive for this concern.
Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from interpretation of Islamic law. Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Muslim expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist Muslim imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. That helps explain why women are hidden away – and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. ‘It’s not homosexuality,’ they aver, ‘because they aren’t in love with their boys’.They only sodomize them because they view women as unclean and the Prophet approved of pedophelia .

The Antichrist and other entertaining fictions
The Antichrist is described by Pentecostals as the “son of perdition” and the “beast”!
They claim that this interesting creature will have great charisma & speaking ability, “a mouth speaking great things”.
The Antichrist, they allege, will rise to power on a wave of world euphoria, as he tem-porarily saves the world from its desperate economic, military & political problems with a bril-liant seven year plan for world peace, economic stability and religious freedom.
The prophet Ezekiel names him as the ruler of “Magog”, a name that Biblical scholars agree denotes a country or region of peoples to the north of Israel. Many have interpreted this to mean modern day Russia. It could also be Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, perhaps one of the Baltic States or even the lewd and dissolute Socialist Sweden.
His power base will include the leading nations of Europe, whose leaders, the Bible says, will “give their power & strength unto the beast.”
The Bible even gives some clues about his personal characteristics. The prophet Daniel wrote that the Antichrist “does not regard the desire of women.” This could imply that he is either celibate or a homosexual. Daniel also tells us that he will have a “fierce countenance” or stern look, and will be “more stout than his fellows”–more proud and boastful.
Unfortunately, the so-called Book of Daniel was written during the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, not many decades earlier as its proponents claim, and has been extensively modified by early Christian writers to predict the arrival of their personal Messiah, or Christ, on the Judean scene. The so-called “wonderful” prophetic statements put into the mouth of Daniel are absolutely and wondrously accurate…up to the reign of Nero and then fall as flat as a shaken soufflé afterwards
It is well known that Pentecostals loathe homosexuals, among many other groups not pleasing to them, and would like nothing better than to shove them into a bottomless pit filled with Catholics, rock and roll fans, teenaged mothers, Communists, gun control advocates, Ta-rot card readers, Christian Scientists, abortionists, Wayne Newton fans, Asians, Jews, African-Americans and Latino Surnamed Hispanics.
The seven year peace-pact (or covenant) that is engineered by the Antichrist is spo-ken of a number of times in the Bible, and may even have already been signed in secret. The historic peace agreement signed between Israel and the PLO at the White House on Septem-ber 13, 1993, vividly illustrates how dramatically events in the Middle East are presently mov-ing in this direction eager Pentecostals, awaiting their Celestial Omnibus, will inform anyone who is interested and a greater legion of those who are not.
Under the final terms of the fictional Covenant, Jerusalem will likely be declared an in-ternational city to which Judaism, Islam and Christianity will have equal rights. Scripture indi-cates that the Jews will be permitted to rebuild their Temple on Mt. Moriah, where they revive their ancient rituals of animal sacrifice.
According to modern prophecy the Antichrist will not only be a master of political in-trigue, but also a military genius. Daniel describes several major wars that he fights during his 7-year reign, apparently against the U.S. and Israel, who will oppose him during the sec-ond half of his reign.
For awhile, most of the world is going to think the Antichrist is wonderful, as he will seem to have solved so many of the world’s problems. But, three-and-a-half years into his seven year reign he will break the covenant and invade Israel from the North.
At this time he will make Jerusalem his world capitol and outlaw all religions, except the worship of himself and his image. The Bible, according to the Pentecostals, says that the Antichrist will sit in the Jewish Temple exalting himself as God and demanding to be wor-shipped. If this passage, and many others of its kind, actually appears in the King James Ver-sion of the Bible, no one has ever been able to find it
It is at this time that the Antichrist imposes his infamous “666” one-world credit sys-tem.
It must be said that the Antichrist does, in point of fact exist. He can be seen on a dai-ly basis on the walls of the Cathedral at Orvieto, Italy in the marvelous frescos of Lucca Si-gnorelli. He looks somewhat like a Byzantine depiction of Christ with either a vicious wife or inflamed hemorrhoids
Pentecostals strongly believe that U.S. public schools “departed from the faith” when in 1963 the Bible and prayer were officially banned. Now, Pentecostals believe with horror, thousands of these same schools are teaching credited courses in “the doctrines of devils”–the occult and Satanism.
Even a cursory check of curriculum of a number of American public school districts does not support this claim but then the Pentecostals have stated repeatedly that they repre-sent 45% of all Protestants in America. The actual number, excluding the Baptists, is more like 4%.
What they lack in actual numbers they more than compensate for by their loud and ir-rational views so that at times it sounds like the roar of a great multitude when in truth, it is only a small dwarf wearing stained underwear and armed with a bullhorn, trumpeting in the underbrush
Frantic Pentecostals estimated that according to their private Census for Christ there are over 200,000 practicing witches in the United States and allege there are literally millions of Americans who dabble in some form of the occult, psychic phenomena, spiritualism, de-monology and black magic. Their statistics claim that occult book sales have doubled in the last four years.
What is seen by terrified Pentecostals as The Occult today is no longer the stuff of small underground cults. They believe that many rock videos are an open worship of Satan and hell that comes complete with the symbols, liturgies, and rituals of Satanism, and the Pentecostals firmly and loudly proclaim to anyone interested in listening, that “millions of young people” have been caught in their evil sway.
Popular music is termed “sounds of horror and torment” that Pentecostals firmly be-lieve is literally “driving young people insane and seducing them into a life of drugs, suicide, perversion and hell.” It is forgotten now but the same thing was once said about ragtime and later, jazz. If this had been true, perhaps the real reason behind the First World War, the 1929 market crash, the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the lewd hula hoop can be attributed to Scott Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald.
It is also to be noted that the immensely popular Harry Potter series of children’s books are loudly proclaimed as Satanic books designed to lure unsuspecting children into the clutches of the Evil One. Any sane person who has read these delightful fantasy books will certainly not agree with these hysterical strictures. In point of fact, it would be exceedingly difficult to locate any person possessing even a modicum of sanity who would believe any of the weird fulminations of the Pentecostals.
Outraged Pentecostals now firmly state that in the beginning years of the Twenty First Century, “even the most shameless acts of blasphemy and desecration are socially accepta-ble.”
“Acts of blasphemy and desecration” sound like human sacrifices carried out on nuns at bus stops during the noontime rush hour or lewd acts with crucifixes performed by drug-maddened transvestites on commercial airlines.
In his weird Book of Revelation the lunatic John of Patmos claimed he foresaw that in the last days the world would turn away from God in order to worship and follow Satan.
Such a prophecy would have seemed believable to previous generations, but not so in our more enlightened and secular humanist day. Hard-core Satanism has been called by rab-id Pentecostals noise-makers as: “the fastest-growing subculture among America’s teens”, and the revival of witchcraft and the occult is “one of the World’s fastest growing religions!”
What is Armageddon?
‘Armageddon’ is actually purported to be a battle. According to Pentecostal interpreta-tions, the Bible states that Armageddon will be a battle where God finally comes in and takes over the world and rules it the way it should have been ruled all along. After this vaguely-defined battle of Armageddon, Pentecostals firmly believe that there will follow 1000 years of peace and plenty which, according to their lore and legend, will be the sole lot of their sect and no other religion.
An FBI definition of Armageddon is as follows:
“For over four thousand years, Megiddo, a hill in northern Israel, has been the site of many battles. Ancient cities were established there to serve as a fortress on the plain of Jezreel to guard a mountain pass. As Megiddo was built and rebuilt, one city upon the other, a mound or hill was formed. The Hebrew word “Armaged-don” means “hill of Megiddo.” In English, the word has come to represent battle it-self. The last book in the New Testament of the Bible designates Armageddon as the assembly point in the apocalyptic setting of God’s final and conclusive battle against evil.”
Introduction the FBI’s report, Project Megiddo
The actual scene of the battle is referred to by Pentecostals as being clearly set forth in Revelation 16:14-16. The specific citation reads, in full:
“14. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.
“15. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.
“16. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”
This sparse mention of Armageddon has given rise to the elaborate, but entirely fictional, legend of the Final Battle between the forces of good and evil. There is no mention in Revela-tions 16: 14-15 whatsoever of Parusia or the second coming of Jesus, the apocryphal Anti-Christ, the Rapture or the many other delightful inventions designed to bolster the Pentecos-tal elect and daunt all of their adversaries. These adversaries consist of all other branches of the Christian religion with especial emphasis placed on Jews and Catholics.

Christ the Essene. What was an Essene?
by William H. McAuliffe, DD

The Gospel references to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” use the word “agape.” Whether the authors originally used “eros” and the word was subsequently changed is open to speculation.
Jagannath” interprets the Gospels differently. He argues that Jesus may have been bisexual. He wrote:
“In the Book of John a word is used eight times that means ‘is in love with’ with the implication of sexual intimacy. Five times it is used with reference to Jesus’ relationship with John. Once it is used to define Jesus’ relationship with Lazarus. And it is also used to describe his relationship with Mary and with her sister Martha.”
During the crucifixion, in John 19:26-28, Jesus is described as seeing his mother and an unidentified man: “the disciple standing by, whom he loved.” Again, Jesus probably loved all of his 12 or 70 disciples in a non-sexual manner. But this particular disciple is identified as “the” disciple who Jesus loved. That might indicate a special intimate relationship with one special disciple.
The late Morton Smith, of Columbia University reported in 1958 that he had found a fragment of a manuscript which at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. It contained the full text of Mark, chapter 10. Apparently the version that is in the Christian Scriptures is an edited version of the original. Additional verses allegedly formed part of the full version of Mark, and were inserted after verse 34. It discusses how a young man, naked but for a linen covering, expressed his love for Jesus and stayed with him at his place all night. More details.
“J Richards” suggested that Mark 7:14-16 shows that Jesus approves of homosexual acts. The critical phrase reads: “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him…” Richards suggests that Jesus gave great emphasis to this teaching, directing it to everyone. Richards suggests that the sentence refers to dietary laws and also extends to “blood transfusions, medication, organ transplants, and artificial insemination” and to homosexual acts as well. 8On the other hand, these words have historically been interpreted as overturning the Mosaic law about eating,
Rollan McCleary, was awarded his doctorate from the University of Queensland in Australia during 2003-MAY for his work researching the sexual orientation of Jesus and his disciples. He obtained about $33,000 US in funding from the government to finance his degree. He concluded that Jesus and at least three of his disciples were gay. He based this conclusion on excerpts from the Gospel of John and on Jesus’ astrological chart based on the approximate year, month, day and place where he was born. But not even the year of Jesus’ birth is known. Many theologians have concluded that Jesus was born sometime in the Fall, between 4 and 7 BCE. Also, there is disagreement about where Jesus was born. Different theologians argue Bethlehem in Judea, Nazareth, and Bethlehem in the Galilee. The task of creating an astrological chart appears quite impossible. Dr. McCleary told Australian Broadcasting Commission radio that, in the past, “one or two queer theologians” had attempted to show Jesus was gay. “People haven’t taken them very seriously because they don’t have any evidence and they say things so sensationally that people are not really going to listen or just be very angry. What I’m doing is showing a much more theological and also astrological dimension on all this which will make a lot more sense to people.” 9 He has written a book based on his doctoral thesis which was published in 2004.
An anonymous webmaster wrote about a revelation that he received during her/his daily prayer and meditation:
“Suddenly many aspects of the New Testament made sense. Jesus never married. He preached love, tolerance, and forgiveness of sins. He did not condemn and vilify as his so-called followers do today. He surrounded himself with men whom he loved. The Bible says nothing of Jesus’ sexuality, yet we are taught that he was both divine and fully man. Why did he never marry? Why is the New Testament silent about his sexuality? It became so clear when I had the insight that Jesus was probably gay and that He understood hatred and bigotry first-hand.”

Homosexuality and the Bible
Jesus and His Beloved Disciple

Gays and others in the past who have sensed a homoerotic relationship here. Robert Goss (2007) notes that for nearly two millennia men attracted to other men (and some others) have sensed a homoerotic relationship between Jesus and “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Even Jerome, translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible (c. 400 AD), sensed a sexual connection between Jesus and John (in John 13:23) which he felt he should counter with the added note that “Jesus loved John the most because he was youthful and virginal” (italics added)
Then Raymond-Jean Frontain (2002) notes that the Beloved Disciple references in John’s Gospel inspired an important medieval homoerotic tradition and depictions of John as a young man resting his head tenderly on the chest of a bearded Jesus became popular in medieval art, with such images often adorning the entrances to monasteries.
John Boswell in Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994) includes photographs of some carved pieces of Jesus and John from the High and Late Medieval periods62 (1100-1453, ending with the Fall of Constantinople), in which the two also hold each other’s hand.
One medieval saint who wrote frankly about homosexual love and Jesus and John was Aelred of Rievaulx (1109-1167), an abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in England and adviser to King Henry II.
In his treatise Mirror of Charity [Love] (Speculum Caritatis) Aelred defended occasions when “some are joined to us more intimately and passionately than others in the lovely bond of spiritual friendship” (MC 3.39.110 trans. Boswell 1980, pp. 225-226), pointing back to how “Jesus himself, lowering (Himself) to our [human] condition in every way [cf. Heb 4:15], suffering all things for us and being compassionate toward us, transformed it [same-sex love] by manifesting his love [for John].
To one person, not to all, did he grant a resting-place on his most sacred breast in token of his special love” (MC 3.39.110 trans. Connor, p. 299).
Aelred noted also, “[I]t is no mean consolation in this life to have someone with whom you can be united by an intimate attachment . . . [and] someone you can let into the secret chamber of your mind by the bonds of love, so that . . . you alone may repose with him in the embrace of charity [love], the kiss of unity, with the sweetness of the Holy Spirit flowing between you.
Still more, you may be so united to him and approach him so closely and so mingle your spirit with his, that the two [of you] become one” (MC 3.39.109 Connor, p. 298). Still, in spite of all of the spiritual language here, the unanswered question remains whether a gay man (like Aelred) can continue to deny his passionate physical desire while remaining near his handsome beloved, or whether sometime something more sexual (and secret) happened between them.
In any case, in his Spiritual Friendship (De Spiritali Amicitia) Aelred contrasts John with Peter, emphasizing that “To Peter he [Jesus] gave the keys of his kingdom,” but “John was reserved for love” and to the latter “he revealed the secrets of his heart” (SF 3.117 trans. Laker, p. 125).
Aelred notes that even as a lad in school “the charm of my companions pleased me very much, [and] I gave myself to affection and devoted myself to love amid the ways and vices” of this world.
Nothing seemed as “sweet” to me as “love” (SF Prologue.1 Laker, p. 45), he writes. In fact, he shared a relationship of great intimacy and youthful passion with another male while at the Scottish court, before turning to monastic life and celibacy.
Then later he fell in love with two monks in his order (Simon first and then after his death another youth), who provided him with emotional satisfaction until his death.
Of his first “companion” Aelred says that he demanded nothing except to bestow his affection on him; however, his second partner, a youth named Geoffrey of Dinant whom Aelred brought back to England from Rome in 1142 (F. M. Powicke, 1922), was chosen with reason, as well as affection.
Humble, gentle and reserved, Geoffrey became Aelred’s “most cherished of friends” until the end (SF 3.119-122 Laker, pp. 126-127).
Aelred noted, “Feelings are not ours to command.
We are attracted to some against our will . . .” (MC 3.19.47 Boswell 1980, p. 224). Therefore, he did not discourage physical expressions of affection among his monks, such as holding hands or kissing, even like “a bride and bridegroom,” although such kissing should be reserved for special occasions (SF 2.21-27 Laker, pp. 75-76).
Aelred noted how God himself had said, “It is not good for the man [Adam] to be alone . . .” (Gen 2:18 UNASB; and SF 1.57 Laker, p. 63).
He further believed that such male friendships were meant to continue in “eternal enjoyment” (MC 3.39.108 Connor, p. 297), in a kind of “heavenly marriage” (Boswell).68 “Carnal friendship” is not wrong, wrote Aelred, “if nothing dishonorable enters into it” and with the hope that “abundant grace” will lead it to “a more mature form” (SF 3.87 Laker, pp. 113-114).
Aelred acknowledges his “carnal affection” for Geoffrey, and yet the youth did not want their love to be measured by that standard (SF 3.126 Laker, p. 129).
In the Renaissance period (14th—16th centuries), a man was accused and tried in Venice (c.1550) for heresies, one of which was his claim that John was Christ’s catamite (cinedo di Cristo), an idea that apparently had a certain following in Italy at the time.69 In England, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) authored the famous homoerotic play Edward II (1591).
Then after his death, Richard Baines in a libel case claimed that Marlowe had professed that “St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies in his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodome.”
Another playwright Thomas Kyd said that “He [Marlowe] would report St. John to be our Saviour Christ’s Alexis,” referring to the love which the Greek shepherd Corydon felt for the fair youth Alexis as described in Virgil’s Eclogues 2 and about which Marlowe had written in his poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
James I, king of England and Ireland (1603-1625), shrewdly neutralized charges brought against him in Parliament over his homosexual relationship with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by noting that “Christ had his John and I have my Steenie.” Later, the philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) devoted himself to trying to decriminalize homosexual relations in Britain, where hangings for this had increased. In an only-partially published manuscript titled Not Paul but Jesus, Bentham mentions the special fondness which Jesus had for John, and asked, “Could John have meant to imply that he and Jesus were lovers?”
Then he added, “[G]ood taste and . . . prudence would require us to turn aside” from such a “topic of extreme delicacy,” although at the same time a regard for human happiness, truth and justice still “compel” this author “to go over it.”
In the modern period, the Austrian psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck (1866-1934) believed that homosexuals were a normal part of life.
In his Das Buch vom Es (The Book of the It [the Id], 1923, trans. 1949), he included letters in which he sought to understand himself within the Freudian process; and in Letter 27 he discusses how homosexual feelings are basic to human life.
Then he mentions Jesus and his Beloved Disciple, noting that “We make nothing of it at all. To all this evidence we are blind.
We are not to see what is there to be seen,” because “the Church forbids it [homosexuality].”
Groddeck clearly viewed homoeroticism in John’s account of the Last Supper as being “self-evident” (Jennings).
And finally, Terrence McNally (1939- ) in his play Corpus Christi (1998) transposes the Jesus story onto a group of youths growing up in Corpus Christi, his hometown in Texas, including an unusual and modern mix of characters.
For example, Andrew a masseur “loved Joshua [Jesus’ name here] a lot,” Thaddeus is a hairdresser, and Philip comes to Jesus/Joshua as a male hustler and go-go boy. Judas, who doesn’t like girls, expresses his attraction to Joshua in Pontius Pilate High School by kissing him, although later he will betray Joshua because he did not return his love in the way he wanted.
In fact, Judas is portrayed as the Beloved Disciple, although in place of the latter resting his head on Jesus’ breast in the Last Supper scene in John’s Gospel here Joshua sleeps with his head in Judas’s lap.
Jesus/Joshua is presented as a good-hearted youth, with a certain “feminine touch,” who hears voices from God, and who calls upon everyone just to love everybody else, as he himself does.
At one point he marries James and Bartholomew, who are in love.
When Pilate asks Jesus/Joshua if he is “queer,” he answers, “Thou sayest I am.”
At the end of the play, Joshua is crucified by the Romans, while some of his disciples watch in shock and others mock him.
Thus in this phantasmagorical portrayal, the playwright seeks to remind the audience that Jesus was “a real man with real appetites, especially sexual [homoerotic] ones” and also that how the world treated Jesus two thousand years ago is not too different from how gay people are (mis)treated today, recalling, e.g., the death of Matthew Shepard.
John the Apostle never seems to have married, but belongs to Jesus.
The view that Jesus and John shared a profound and lasting commitment, perhaps similar to the kind Aelred of Rievaulx espoused, may be bolstered by the Acts of John, dated between 150-200 AD, where John, right before his death (chapters 111-115), prays to Jesus, saying: “Thou who hast kept me also till this present hour pure for thyself and untouched by union with a woman; who when I wished to marry in my youth didst appear to me and say to me, ‘John, I need thee’; who didst prepare for me also an infirmity of the body; who on the third occasion when I wished to marry . . . didst say to me upon the sea, ‘John, if thou wast not mine, I should have allowed thee to marry’ . . . [and who then gave me] the repugnance of even looking closely [with desire] at a woman.”
Augustine (354-430) also knew of this tradition of John remaining celibate to the end of his life.
Yet legends grew up around John the Apostle in the second century;87 and Eusebius (c.260-c.340) the church historian labeled the stories in the Acts of John as “forgeries” attributed to the apostles by “heretics” (EH 3.25.6).
Still, it might be derived from this tradition that John lived a celibate life to the end, perhaps with the belief that he was always to belong to Jesus as his special companion. Then, there is the story related by Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215) about how John the Apostle, after appointing a bishop in Smyrna, “saw a young man of strong body, beautiful appearance, and warm heart.”
So after John recommended this youth, the newly-ordained bishop took him into his house and “looked after him, and finally baptized him.”
However, after John the Apostle returned to Ephesus, dissolute youths corrupted the young man and led him into a life of crime.
When John visited Smyrna the next time and found out what had happened, he was so distraught that he went out into the mountains, searching, until he found the youth. Then with much pleading he persuaded the young man to return with him to the city, where he prayed for him and “kneeled and kissed” his hand; and with “continuous fasting” he would not leave the youth until he had restored him to the church.
What is interesting here is the attention given a “beautiful [male] appearance,” a concern for the young man that goes far beyond normal bounds, and then “kissing [his hand]” at the end―details which may well point to John’s homoerotic sensibility.
Modern scholars who believe that Jesus and his Beloved Disciple shared a homosexual relationship.
Modern interpreters who hold that there was a homoerotic relationship here include: Hugh Montefiore (1969),89 Robert Williams (1992), Sjef van Tilborg (1993), John McNeill (1995),92 Rollan McCleary (2003), Robert E. Goss (2006), Michael B. Kelly (online undated),95 Peter Murphy (online undated), and James Neill (2009).
The United Reformed Church of Christ of Great Britain in its document Toward a Christian Understanding of Sexuality (1984) wrote that Jesus “may have . . . been homosexuality inclined.”
Psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman (1988) viewed Jesus and his beloved disciple as having a homosexual marriage.
Rosemary Ruether (1978) and Nancy Wilson (1995) held that Jesus was bisexual. Going further in the other direction, Morton Smith (1973) suggested that as part of a secret baptismal ritual Jesus may have had physical union with more than one of his disciples.―although this view is based on a later ‘heretical’ text.
Theodore Jennings (2003) believes definitely that Jesus and John “were lovers,” although he notes that the Bible tells us nothing more about how Jesus and his Beloved shared their love beyond the physical intimacy described at the Last Supper.
However, John Boswell (1980) held that their homosexual love was not consummated.
Still, James Neill (2009) notes that it is “undeniable” that there was “a close and passionate bond between them [Jesus and John].”
As John McNeill notes, any GLBT person will recognize immediately what kind of love this was which united Jesus and John.
John A. T. Robinson (1973) wrote that while there is no indication in the Biblical text that Jesus responded sexually to Mary Magdalene or to any other woman, he could have attracted women without being attracted to them.
As G. Rattray Taylor (1973) noted, a high regard for women often goes hand-in-hand with a tolerance for homosexuality.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 12
They returned to Santa Cruz by driving down Highway 101 to Santa Clara and cutting across to Highway 17 that went up over the mountains and down to the sea.
A brief lunch in Santa Clara was followed by a leisurely drive through part of the small city. As they were driving through an expensive residential section, a reflex action of Chuck’s who always liked to observe rich neighborhoods, they passed a walled compound with a guardhouse and a wrought-iron gate. A sign announced that ‘Crestmont Gardens’ was now leasing select units.
The guard at the gate looked at them but when Chuck proffered his late cousin’s driver’s license in a hand whose wrist was encircled with a very expensive Rolex watch, the guard became much friendlier and opened the gate. He was trained to notice such things.
“Why are we going in here, Chuck?” Lars asked, staring at the lush gardens and the swimming pools.
“I don’t know. It looks like a good place to hole up for a time. We have so much money now, Lars that I thought it might be better to stay out of sight for a while and just rest a little. Do you have any problems with that concept?”
“No, just as long as I can look at my tapes.”
“Oh, I’m sure we can get a VCR just for you.” he said as they pulled up in front of the rental office.
Mrs. Constance (“Call me Connie, sweetie”) McGiver had just returned to her elegant office after a lengthy sexual romp with a teenage Mexican immigrant whom she had hired to trim her shrubs. For a woman in her early forties, Connie usually reduced her somewhat unwilling partner to stupefied exhaustion. Her biological alarm clock was ticking with increasing loudness and she had endured three tummy tucks, one neck job, one removal of bags under her eyes, one liposuction, breast implants and a nose job.
If she sought to reclaim her lost youth, her train had left it far, far behind her, standing in fading glory at a rapidly receding, distant station.
Miguel, on the other hand, had a chronically sore penis and was developing a series of engaging facial tics as a result of his love-slave status.
“Just keep on going, sweet, or its the INS for you and back to taco land,” Call me Connie would snap at him when he stopped for breath.
No sooner had she sat down at her slate-topped desk when two potential renters emerged from the sunlight. One was tall, slim (the body bag was now in the trunk beneath the spare tire) and blonde with an expensive watch and the other short and dark with a furtive look.
“Yes, dears, what can we do for you?”
She was staring at the short man’s crotch with some interest.
Cyril, known to many as Chuck, appraised her lightly larded charms and rejected them out of hand.
“Well, Ma’m my father is not going to run for Congress again and he wants to find a nice, but not permanent, place to live. It can’t be too far from San Francisco. My grandmother lives there and she isn’t well.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. I buried my own grandmother last year.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Why she was dead, of course, silly. We do have some very elegant units still available…”
The unit finally chosen was one in a block called the Garden Apartments and consisted of three bedrooms, two baths, a large living room, dining room and kitchen.
It was fully furnished with the sort of furniture found in very expensive clubs and one of the bathrooms sported a bidet. Eric, who had never seen one before, was under the impression that it was some kind of new appliance for washing socks.
A lengthy lease was filled out by Chuck, almost entirely fictional in content, and a quick visit to the car trunk produced more than enough cash to keep Connie happy. She was a sentimental woman and this was the model unit she had most often used when engaged in what amounted to child abuse with her panting gardener.
The sheets on the large beds were changed on a daily basis and the new tenants were none the wiser.
On the way back to Santa Cruz, they discussed their new home.
“That’s an awful lot of money, Chuck. Couldn’t we find a cheaper place to stay?”
“Sure we could, but note that it has a VCR in the living room which will enable you to view your educational tapes in peace and quiet. Also, there is a nice pool nearby which means while you are panting over tinies, I can spend some time trying to get a nice tan without being groped by fatties. Ever notice that the more expensive a place is, the better looking the women are?”
Lars looked out the window and admired the tall pine trees that flanked the ascending highway.
“Oh, all those women are much too old. Did you see how that old woman kept looking at my pants, Chuck?”
“I couldn’t help noticing it, Lars. Why don’t you take advantage of the situation and take a flyer with her? I’ll bet you could have a very interesting time and it might cure you of your bad habits.”
“No thank you, Chuck. I’ll bet her breasts hang down to her belly button.”
“So what, Osvald? Just toss them up over her shoulders and hang on for the ride.”
“Disgusting. You are really disgusting some times, Chuck. No, I can look at my tapes all I want.”
“Please, be sure and keep a towel handy, OK? There is a huge cleaning deposit involved and I would like to get at least some of it back.”
“And I asked you please do not call me Osvald. I thought you agreed not to call me that.”
“I’m sorry, Eric and Lars. I forgot how sensitive you are. Anyway, I take it you approve of the new place?”
“Oh sure, it’s the best place I’ve ever been in. It’s a lot better than the place I was living in down in LA. You know there were cockroaches there as big as mice and I used to step on them at night when I went into the kitchen. And then when I got back into bed, there was squished cockroach all over my sheets.”
“Jesus, how appetizing, Eric. Did you ever try to have sex with a nice, underage cockroach? A nice tender one with a training bra?”
“Of course not. They’re much too small anyway.”
“At least you could throw them away afterwards and not have to worry about the cops, eh, Eric?”
“Nasty.”
Just before they got to Santa Cruz, they passed the little town of Scott’s Valley. It was occupied in the main by an infestation of born-again Christians whose only sin was they had been born the first time.
There was a huge billboard on the edge of the otherwise-scenic highway that stated that Jesus Saved. Chuck began to laugh when he saw the sign.
“Do you see that sign, Eric? The one about Jesus?”
“Yes. Is it funny?”
“By itself, it’s only in bad taste. When I was a kid, I stole one, but of course not that big. Do you know what I did with it?”
“How many guesses do I get?”
“Oh shit, just one.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I put it up right in front of the local Bank of America.”
Lars looked at him.
“I don’t get it, Chuck. What did Jesus have to do with a bank?”
“Just never mind, Eric. I’ll bet when you go into a market and see a sign that says ‘Wet Floor,’ you do.”
Although it was early in the afternoon, the approaches to the beach area were jammed solid with traffic and it took them almost as much time to drive the five miles to their beach motel as it had taken them to drive over from Santa Clara.
“We’re paid up through tomorrow, Lars, so let’s make the best of the day. Tomorrow is the Glorious Fourth and I guess there will be some kind of fireworks down here,” he said, staring out the window down at the packed beach. He looked for some time and then turned around, smiling.
“I have a wonderful idea, Eric. I think we can make it a really memorable Fourth for everyone, including the Chamber of Commerce. First, help me get that old suitcase of fake jewelry out from under the bed and we can just see how much fun there is in giving stupid people a lesson in greed.”

(Continued)

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