TBR News May 21, 2018

May 21 2018

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. May 21, 2018:”Almost as much paper has been used concerning Hitler’s disappearance in Berlin, 1945 as has been used for the Kennedy assassination and 911. And all three subjects have been the playground of “historical writers” who invent, or repeat, the most concocted fiction since the Gospels were written a hundred years after the event. Now we learn that “French experts” have been checking “Hitler’s teeth” they got from the Russians and have “proven” that he died in 1945 and did not escape to Agentina in a submarine. Truth is far less exciting but fiction writers abhor truth. It doesn’t sell books or media articles.”

 

Table of Contents

  • Fiction
  • Hitler teeth test dispels myths of Nazi leader’s survival
    • Fact
  • 1945 in Berlin
  • The Rommel Honor Dagger
  • TSA creates secret watch list of people who may be unruly
  • From Ritalin to Marilyn: Forget gun laws, what else is being blamed for mass shootings?
  • 40% of US citizens above poverty line struggle to make ends meet – study
  • Important New Source for Secret Intelligence
  • The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)
  • French revolt against Macron’s support for Israel

 Fiction

Hitler teeth test dispels myths of Nazi leader’s survival

Adolf Hitler had extremely bad teeth. What may sound like one of countless bits of minutiae stoking the public’s lurid fascination with the Nazi leader is in fact a piece of evidence in our historical knowledge of Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945.

May 30, 2018J

by Jefferson Chase

DW

A team of French pathologists was recently allowed to inspect a set of teeth kept in Moscow that were recovered in Berlin in early May 1945 — the first time that Russian authorities had allowed anyone to examine the remains in over 70 years. And the researchers’ conclusions, published late last week in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, are unambiguous.

The research team was also allowed to look at fragments of Hitler’s skull to confirm the means by which he committed suicide. The teeth matched descriptions provided by Hitler’s dentist and revealed no trace of meat — consistent with the fact that the Führer was vegetarian.

The new findings should, but probably won’t, put an end to crackpot notions that the Nazi leader somehow escaped the destruction of the final days of World War II.

“We can stop all the conspiracy theories about Hitler,” Charlier said. “He did not flee to Argentina in a submarine; he is not in a hidden base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the moon.”

Instead, Hitler’s story ended the way every respectable historian believes it did: with a joint suicide in the Führerbunker in the ruins of the Nazi capital.

Identifying Hitler’s body

By April 30, 1945, Soviet troops had advanced to within 500 meters (1,650 feet) of Hitler’s underground command center in the heart of Berlin. Surrounded and barely able to communicate with the ragtag remnants of the Wehrmacht, Hitler realized that his dreams of a thousand-year empire, or Reich, were over.

In the early afternoon, Hitler withdrew to his private quarters with his long-term mistress and wife of less than two days, Eva Braun. There they ingested cyanide capsules and shot themselves. Their bodies — together with those of the supposed animal lover Hitler’s two dogs — were discovered at 3:15 p.m.

Mindful that Italians had defiled the corpse of Benito Mussolini, Hitler had left instructions for how his and Braun’s bodies were to be disposed of. They were taken outside the bunker and burnt.

It wouldn’t be until May 5 that Soviet forces discovered a charred body in a bomb crater and identified it as Hitler’s.

“Hitler’s teeth were so bad — and uniquely bad — that his teeth alone made it possible to identify his corpse,” the forensic pathologist Mark Benecke, who was hired by National Geographic television to investigate Hitler’s remains, wrote in an online article. He adds that tooth decay and gum disease were probably the reasons for the Führer’s notoriously bad breath.

The Soviets compared the corpse’s teeth, which contained conspicuous and unusual prostheses and bridgework, with descriptions provided by the dental assistant Kathe Heusermann. Later, Hitler’s personal dentist, Hugo Blaschke, would confirm the information to the Allies.

“His teeth were in such bad shape that his dentist was with him in the bunker,” Liubov Summ, the granddaughter of Heusermann’s Russian interpreter, Elena Rzhevskaya, told the Times of Israel newspaper. “There are photos that are very unpleasant to look at.”

“The teeth are authentic — there is no possible doubt,” lead pathologist Philippe Charlier told the AFP news agency. “Our study proves that Hitler died in 1945.”

An examination of Adolf Hitler’s dental remains has removed any doubt that he did indeed die in 1945. The tale of the Führer’s teeth is a story not only of the top Nazi’s demise, but of Cold War propaganda and cruelty.

‘Boys from Brazil’

Rzhevskaya was entrusted with the set of Hitler’s teeth because, by her account, it was feared that male members of the Red Army would get drunk and misplace them. She brought the remains to Moscow. But, although the Soviets knew for sure that Hitler was dead, Stalin ordered the news suppressed so as to sow uncertainty and allow him to spread rumors that the Western Allies had secretly helped Hitler escape.

“It was a deceitful charade, a weird attempt to disguise the fact that his body had been found,” Rzhevskaya wrote in her memoirs, which appeared in Russian in 1965 but were only published in English this March. “Hitler was no longer an emblem of the war, he became an emblem of the kind of piece that was to follow.”

The Russians called the disinformation campaign “Operation Myth.”

“Stalin’s strategy, quite evidently, was to associate the west with Nazism by pretending that the British or Americans must be hiding him,” the historian Anthony Beevor wrote in his book Berlin — The Downfall: 1945.

When combined with the real fact that prominent Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele had, in fact, fled to South America, Stalin’s deception was the genesis of conspiracy theories that Hitler had somehow survived World War II. Such ideas were popularized by the 1976 film “The Boys from

The sad story of Heusermann

Though the fiction was absurd, the reality was tragic. Rzhevskaya, who later became an author, would have to wait until well after Stalin’s death to tell her story. And Heusermann would suffer a far worse fate.

As part of Stalin’s campaign to suppress the truth, she was taken to the Soviet Union and sentenced to 10 years in a gulag, six of them in solitary confinement, for assisting with Hitler’s bridgework.

“They told her that, by helping to fix Hitler’s teeth, she contributed to the continuation of the war, and that she should have hit him on the head with a bottle,” Summ told The Times of Israel.

It was a bitter irony as, according to Rzhevskaya, Heusermann was anything but a committed Nazi and had hid a Jewish dentist and former employer in her home during the Third Reich. Heusermann died in Düsseldorf in 1995 after having played a minor role in history — and having become one of its countless innocent victims.

Fact

1945 in Berlin

by Christian Jürs

The two basic interpretations of the last days in Berlin come from British and Russian sources. As the first one is the source for all subsequent treatments, it will be considered first.

Following the end of the war in Europe, numerous and persistent rumors about Hitler’s disappearance were rife in Allied military intelligence circles and, as a matter of course, leaked to the press. In an effort to head off any independent investigation, British military intelligence rushed one of their young agents into the breach. Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, a historical research student at Oxford in 1939, was seconded to MI 6 and put to work evaluating transcripts of German radio intercepts.

Trevor-Roper was not fluent in the German language, either written or verbal, and his specialty was 17th century English history. Trevor-Roper’s post-war paper was probably more disruptive to historians than anything since the production of the Donation of Constantine at a point somewhat earlier in time. He claimed that he had conducted “numerous” interviews with former members of Hitler’s staff.

But the fact that most of the key personnel such as Otto Günsche, Hitler’s military orderly, Heinz Linge, Hitler’s long-time valet and Hans Baur, Hitler’s chief pilot, were in Soviet custody (where they made documented statements directly opposed to Trevor-Roper’s findings), coupled with Trevor-Roper’s admitted unfamiliarity with the German language, has rendered his book The Last Days of Hitler highly suspect in factual content if not in its well-polished context.

As a result of this work, a self-perpetuating series of myths have become well-established in historical circles and Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper automatically became the original source from which an army of subsequent writers copiously copied. He quickly assumed the mantel of the leading expert on the subject of Adolf Hitler and no self-respecting work on the German leader was complete without a skillfully crafted foreword by Trevor-Roper.

In due time, he was made King’s Professor of History at Oxford, and in 1979, raised to the peerage as Lord Dacre of Glanton.

On April 8, 1983, Lord Dacre, the man who believed he had a “patent on Adolf Hitler” flew to Zurich, Switzerland, at the request of newspaper publisher, Rupert Murdoch, to authenticate the now-notorious “Hitler Diaries.” Although possessed of a keen intellect and sharp wit, Trevor-Roper was also blessed with a monumental ego which overrode the basic fact that he was not fluent in German and certainly could not read a word of the old style German script that Hitler wrote.

Following the Zurich visit, which entailed a very cursory examination of unintelligible script, Trevor-Roper returned to England and solemnly announced that “I am now satisfied that the documents are genuine.”1  A subsequent thorough investigation by experts of the German National Archives quickly disclosed that the documents were not only not genuine but “crude forgeries” by “someone of limited intelligence.”2

It would be a secure assumption, following this debacle, that Trevor-Roper’s “patent on Adolf Hitler” had finally expired.

In the Last Days of Hitler, very heavy emphasis for the suicide/cremation theory is placed on statements and alleged statements from a number of SS personnel, allegedly involved in the last act.

In addition to Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, a member of Hitler’s RSD bodyguard, Hermann Karnau, and another RSD member, Erich Mansfeld, were all alleged to have participated in the removal of Hitler and Eva Braun’s bodies from the bunker and their subsequent cremation in the Chancellery garden. Since Günsche and Linge, along with Hans Baur, the pilot, were in a Soviet prison camp and not available for interview when Trevor-Roper wrote his official report, statements attributed to them should be taken with extraordinary caution, if not skepticism.

Hermann Karnow, stated to be an SS member of the RSD was apparently interviewed by Trevor-Roper and claimed he saw Hitler’s body burning in the garden. Unfortunately, an extensive search by Dr. Marwell, then director of the Berlin Document Center, repository of SS personal records, failed to locate any Hermann Karnow or Erich Mansfeld, or “Skripczy” as Trevor-Roper also calls him. Neither of these men were in either the RSD or the SS.

It would be fair to assume that when the British official report was prepared, the SS personnel files and records were not available and no doubt Trevor-Roper may be excused his gross errors on the grounds that he was unaware that he was interviewing non-existent people.

However, there is no question of the existence of Günsche, Linge and Baur. Since they too are used as direct sources for the Viking funeral theory, let us consider recently disclosed information. In a U.S. CIC document of November 15, 1948 (Throughman report: 0933-034), Günsche stated to the senior Wehrmacht medical officer and commander of all military hospitals in besieged Berlin that “I did not see the dead Führer. Those things were done without us.”

Baur said at the same time that he had not seen the bodies either, and Linge, who is alleged to have assisted in carrying the bodies of Hitler and his wife up the bunker exit stairs said that he “did not see the body of the dead Führer.” The debriefing of these SS members following their return from Soviet imprisonment produced similar but still classified statements.

Insofar as the fate of Hermann Fegelein, whom Trevor-Roper has shot in the Chancellery on Hitler’s orders, a careful inspection of his files now located at Ft. George Meade, Maryland, depicts a somewhat different scenario than the one put forward by Trevor-Roper. According to an official CIC report of September 21, 1945, one Walter Hirschfeld, a Jewish refugee from Vienna and agent for the CIC, was in close contact with Hans Fegelein, Hermann’s father, then resident in Munich. According to the Hirschfeld report, Hermann Fegelein had been in contact with his father after the war and reported that “the Führer and I are safe and well” and that he would try to get in contact with his family if possible.

The Russian version, which appeared over twenty years later, approaches the events from a different perspective.

When Soviet troops occupied the government quarter of Berlin during the first week of May, 1945, an immediate search was made of the Chancellery complex for any traces of Hitler and his top aides.

Much of Speer’s new Chancellery was in ruins; the air raid bunker under the Chancellery garden was partially flooded by the ever-present ground water and the interior showed signs of an attempt to burn the contents by the last SS guards on the scene.

There were numerous bodies strewn about the Chancellery gardens including those of Dr. Goebbels and his wife, both of whom were badly charred. The bodies of General Hans Krebs and the six Goebbels children were found in the bunker itself.

Since the Russians had complete physical control of the Chancellery area and, if Hitler’s body had been discovered, they would have been the sole parties to disclose this. Let us consider the official Soviet pronouncements following their capture of Berlin.

May 3, 1945. Pravda: “Hitler not in Berlin.”

May 13, 1945. Pravda: “Moscow has directed the senior officers of the Red Army in Berlin to discuss nothing about the situation in the Führerbunker.”

May 26, 1945. Josef Stalin to Harry Hopkins in Moscow: “In my opinion Hitler is not dead but is hiding somewhere.”

June 6, 1945, Red Army spokesman from Marshal Zhukov’s staff: “Hitler’s body has been found and identified.”

June 9, 1945. Marshal Zhukov, accompanied by Andre Vishinski, Deputy Foreign Minister and General N. Bezarin, Soviet military commandant of Berlin, held a press conference for Western journalists. Zhukov stated that “Hitler’s fate was doubtful” and that “we did not identify the body of Hitler. I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moments.” (emphasis added)

To this, General Bezarin added that in his personal opinion, “he has disappeared somewhere in Europe. Perhaps he is in Spain with Franco. He had the possibility of taking off and getting away.” (emphasis added)

June 9, 1945. Red Star military publication stated that “Hitler had committed suicide two days before Berlin surrendered.”

July 17, 1945, Josef Stalin to President Harry Truman and US Secretary of State James Byrnes at the Potsdam Conference, “I believe Hitler is alive. Careful investigation by Soviet investigators has not found any trace of Hitler’s remains or any other positive evidence of his death.”

Following these often contradictory pronouncements, the Soviets lapsed into silence until 1968 when a small book entitled The Death of Adolf Hitler appeared, authored by Lev Bezymenski, a Soviet journalist and KGB official. According to the thesis of this book, the Soviets did, in fact, find the bodies of Adolf Hitler, his wife, his dogs, the Goebbels family and General Krebs. A number of photographs accompanied the official autopsy reports and among the pictures are views of what are purported to be Hitler’s bridgework and teeth, (removed from the body) as well as Eva Braun’s dental bridge and a photograph of Hitler’s favorite German shepherd bitch “Blondi.”

We shall return to these photographs and the views of the author directly but first, a brief discussion of dental forensics is in order.

In establishing the identity of human remains by dental forensics, a number of factors must be taken into account.

Firstly, photographs and X-rays of the teeth and dentition of the deceased must be prepared. Secondly, these photographs and X-rays must be compared with the actual dental records of the deceased, to include (if possible) X-rays of the deceased’s actual teeth and any dental fittings. If these two sets of data are identical, the identity of the deceased should be established to a strong certainty.

It should also be stated that a specific chain of control must exist for the evidence to be valid. An actual corpse must exist and be in a controlled environment such as a morgue or mortuary. The photography and X-rays must be prepared of the body under controlled conditions and the resulting negatives and prints kept in a secure area. Also, the dental records must be original and must also be secured as evidence.

The reasons for this should be as evident to the layman as they are to the professionals of law enforcement agencies and insurance companies. Without proper control exercised over the two sets of records, the opportunity for manipulation is obvious.

On the evening of April 20, 1945, following the parade of dignitaries who paid their respects to Adolf Hitler on the event of his 56th birthday, Hugo-Hannes Blaschke, a General of the Waffen-SS, Senior Dental Officer of that organization, a member of Himmler’s personal staff and Hitler’s long-time dentist, paid a brief and hurried visit to his Reich Chancellery dental office. Here, he quickly assembled and packed into cases his dental equipment and all of the dental records of his prominent patients including Albert Speer, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler. These files were flown out of Berlin later that night along with SS General Dr. Blaschke and a number of other senior officials. The flight landed near Salzburg early the next morning. Blaschke’s entire file case vanished at that time and none of its contents have ever surfaced.

The Führer dentist was subsequently taken into American custody where he claimed he would make an attempt to “reconstruct Hitler’s dentition from memory.”49 The Soviet investigators probing Hitler’s disappearance tried to locate Blaschke in Berlin so that they might interrogate him under their control. When they were advised that the dentist was in American hands and available for questioning, they abruptly discontinued their search and never made any attempts to contact the dentist.3 Without dental records, identification of missing Third Reich leaders was severely hampered and a great deal depended on Dr. Blaschke’s cooperation with his American captors.

U.S. CIC interrogation files on Blaschke indicate that he appeared to be cooperative in his attempts to reconstruct Hitler’s dental records but that the results were of little value because the Führer dentist “could do very little without his records which have disappeared and cannot be located even after an extensive search.” Blaschke was eventually released from custody and died in 1957 at the age of seventy-seven without having contributed anything at all to verifying the deaths of a number of his patients. His records and X-rays are still missing.

There exist a number of X-rays which purport to have been taken of Hitler’s head. All of these were said to have been made in 1944 and early 1945 by various doctors treating Hitler for various infections of his sinuses and tonsils, following the July 20 attempt on his life. The published records of Dr. Theo Morell, Hitler’s chief doctor indicate that X-rays were taken at the Karlshof military hospital in Rastenberg, the location of Hitler’s headquarters. These films were made at the request of Dr. von Eicken, a specialist called in to treat an infected sinus.

Two X-rays were taken of Hitler’s head on October 21, 1944, but proved to be “too meager” for diagnosis. Several other X-rays were taken, also at Karlshof on November 18, 1944, shortly before Hitler left the Wolfsschanze  for the last time. Other X-rays were produced for Dr. Geising and were said to have been taken in Berlin in early 1945.

The U.S. National Archives has purported copies of these X-rays, none of which have the standard German military medical information on the developed films. At least one X-ray has the date “21. Oct. 44” scratched on it whereas the proper German date would be “21.Okt.44.” The date on the negative is standard U.S. military form. There are no further identifying marks on these films.

The Bezymenski book, which appeared in 1968 as noted, makes no mention of these X-rays but does show photographs of what the author purports to be the original bridgework found in what is claimed to be the badly charred and partially obliterated corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun. The author also includes a photograph of a small card purported to have been prepared on May 11, 1945 by one Kathe Heusermann, Dr. Blaschke’s technical assistant, who assisted in the manufacture of bridgework for the dentist.

To consider the Bezymenski publication as anything but crude Soviet disinformation would be a serious error for an objective historian to accept.

Like Trevor-Roper’s 1945 report, which took him only two weeks to prepare, the Bezymenski dissertation was obviously prepared to fulfill an official point of view. It should be noted that in the 1960s, Soviet writers were not free to express their views on international political matters and, in any case, like Trevor-Roper who was a member of MI 6, Bezymenski was a KGB official.

Trevor-Roper, to be sure, is a far better writer but in the end, the two books were prepared with similar goals. The Bezymenski work is easily demolished because of extraordinarily poor research. The author states that on May 9, 1945, a Soviet investigator interrogated Heusermann. A transcript of the official report disclosed that Heusermann in the company of the official found Hitler’s dental file in Blaschke’s Berlin office and then accompanied the investigators to the ruins of the Chancellery where they discovered all of Hitler’s dental X-rays and some gold crowns alleged to be destined for Hitler’s mouth.4

The author appears to be unaware that all of these records were removed from the Chancellery on the night of April 20 and that Hitler’s dental records were kept in the Chancellery dental facility and not at Blaschke’s private practice.

As has been previously noted, Soviet agents seeking Blaschke in Berlin at once abandoned their search upon learning of his detention by the United States and made no attempt to contact him although invited to do so by American authorities.

The sketch of Hitler’s dental work is accompanied by numerous notes, all in Russian, a language that Heuserman was not acquainted with in May of 1945. A further lack of familiarity with his subject emerges rather painfully when Bezymenski discusses the purported corpse of Hitler’s dog “Blondi.” The dog, of whom Hitler was extremely fond, accompanied him everywhere, even on many of his trips. In 1945, she had recently whelped and was still nursing her pups at the end of April. The official Soviet autopsy report indicates that the dog in question had a black coat with white lower extremities, worn teeth which would indicate a dog of about eight years of age and who had not been nursing at the time of death.5

Since an official Spanish police report of April, 1945, mentions a “large brown wolfhound” as part of the manifest of Hitler’s personal transport, it could be assumed that like her master, “Blondi” did not meet her end in Berlin.

In addressing the reliability of the Soviet view one must consider their previous record of producing forged anti-German documentation. Official forgery was not the sole bailiwick of Communist creative writers.

Czarist secret police took a French satire on Napoleon III by Joly, made minor changes in the text and produced the well-known Protocols of the Wise Elders of Zion.

Aside from period rewritings of their own history, the Soviets produced the notorious Heusinger file that attacked a former Wehrmacht General who was slated for inclusion in NATO. Original documents captured from Army Group Center during the war were liberally larded with KGB fakes designed to prove that Heusinger was responsible for the murder of Russian civilians.

The added documents were, like most KGB productions, very bad, and Heusinger obtained his appointment. The Soviet apparat also produced the notorious SS camp pass for John Demjanjuk, the alleged ‘Ivan the Terrible’ and gave it to an informed U.S. agency who then used it to prosecute the former Russian citizen. That document was of such transparent falsity that it is a wonder that it was ever introduced in a civilized court of law. The then-West German criminal investigative agency to whom it was shown immediately branded it a fake although this professional opinion in no way prevented the document from being introduced at Demjanjuk’s various trials.

The notorious Hitler Diaries were concocted by the East German Stasi to raise foreign capital and it now appears that the former KGB is attempting to sell to gullible journalists what they claim are the “personal diaries of Goebbels”. This project is more extensive than the East German tour de force because the KGB has had more time to prepare it.

It is still possible that a sudden “discovery” bolstering the Bezymenski thesis could be forthcoming from hitherto closed KGB files but given the current state of German-Russian relations, somewhat doubtful.

In 1972, Dr. Reidar Sognnaes, a professor of anatomy and dental biology at the University of California, delivered a paper at a seminar on forensic science held in Scotland.6 Dr. Sognnaes strongly believed that he was now able to prove that a  “positive identification of Hitler’s remains” had been made as the result of his own brilliant forensic detective work among the archives. His conclusions stemmed from a comparison of the purported Hitler head X-rays which he claimed had somehow been mislaid in the National Archives, only to be rediscovered by himself in a stunning coup in 1972, with the Bezymenski photographs and drawings in the 1968 book.

He also claimed he had searched the Blaschke CIC interrogation file and had found the dentist’s sketches from memory of the Hitler dentition. This work was also located in the National Archives. Since all of this data appeared to coincide, Sognnaes concluded that there could be absolutely no doubt that the corpse found in the Chancellery garden was that of Hitler. Parenthetically, Sognnaes (and other dental forensic specialists) concluded that the alleged burned corpse of Eva Braun was, to a certainty, not the remains of Hitler’s wife. Among other interesting facets of the Eva Braun matter is that the artificial teeth contained in what the Russians stated was Eva Braun’s bridgework found in the mouth of the very badly charred corpse would under no circumstances have withstood the heat of the cremation and would have been thoroughly melted.

The Sognnaes theory is, from a logical point of view, more badly flawed than the Bezymenski one.

Firstly, the X-rays in the National Archives had never been mislaid, and in fact, had been used in several publications prior to both the Sognnaes production and that of Bezymenski. The latter certainly had reference to these X-rays which were available to any researcher from 1946 onwards.

Secondly, the technical information about the dental records in the Russian’s book very obviously came from the same source that Sognnaes had used, namely the files of the National Archives. The Russians based their creative writing efforts on official files and Sognnaes merely copied their end product. If one takes the previously stated criteria concerning positive identification of a body through dental forensics, it becomes immediately evident that the evidentiary chain does not now, and never did exist. The requirement of an actual body kept in a secure location has certainly not been met.

The Russians have repeatedly stated that they burned the purported corpse of Hitler and scattered the ashes. The official Soviet statement that they had recovered Hitler’s personal X-rays and dental records conflicts with extensive evidence that these records were removed from the Chancellery before the occupation of Berlin. In any case, the Soviets never produced any such material in the furtherance of their claims.

Not one scrap of this material could ever be presented in a responsible court of law to support a claim of identification.

There is a regrettable tendency for many authors, in treating a historical subject, to write to an idea. In doing so, they will accept any theory or any evidence, no matter how illogical or patently false, which will tend to prove their case and reject any material that would tend to disprove it.

They will, in sum, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

 

1 Robert Harris, “Selling Hitler,” New York, 1986, pps. 15-16.

2 Ibid, p. 25

3 US CIC Interrogation Reports, Dr. Hugo Blaschke, June-September 1945.

4 US CIC Report, Blaschke, 5 September 1945.

5 Bezymenski, Op.Cit, p. 54.

6 Ibid. p. 90. The real “Blondi” was four years old and a light tan in color.

7 Toland, John, “Adolf Hitler,” Doubleday, New York, 1976, p. 893; McKale, Donald, “Hitler,” Stein & Day, Briarcliff Manor, NY, 1981, p.190; Luntz, Lester, “Connecticut Magazine,” March, 1983, pps. 81-118.

 

The Rommel Honor Dagger

May 21, 2018

by Christian Jürs

Many collectors seem to be drawn to technical works that are published solely to sell fakes. These gaudy books contain endless “variant” pieces, “prototypes,” “late-war production” items and many other entertaining holy relics that happen to be in the possession of either the author or one of his partners in crime.

It might prove instructive to illustrate a fictional fraud, based entirely on factual procedures.

Let us consider the “Rommel Honor Dagger.”

This would be a special, custom-made item given by Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini to German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel upon the occasion of his capture of the British North African military base at Tobruk.

The merchandiser of this piece is the fictive Lothar Sneed, America’s Biggest Dagger Dealer. Sneed stands at five foot, six inches and weighs in at three hundred and fifty pounds.

He once worked for the CIA, selling encryption machines to one country and the encryption codes to their rivals. He also sold surplus military weapons to groups supported by the private policy aims of that agency and, on the side, smuggled drugs with a reasonable profit going to his employers. After an interesting lifetime of manipulative mendacity, Sneed is now retired and makes a very large amount of money as America’s Biggest Dagger Dealer.

Sneed has a friend, Basil Colon, who publishes books on rare and unusual daggers and swords of the Third Reich period. An artifact that appears in a Colon book is an artifact that can be sold for large sums of money.

Sneed has an arrangement with a dagger manufacturer in Milan, Italy. This enterprising gentleman inherited a factory from his grandfather and the inventory contained parts and the dies to make Fascist dress daggers.

Colon did a series on rare Italian Fascist Daggers, thereby creating an interest in the collecting fraternity. Signor Stronzo has been cranking out his “official” daggers for three years and has sold almost every one of these new creation  to Lothar Sneed. Helped by the Colon books, Sneed has developed a reputation as the sole source for these daggers. Once the standard Fascist dagger has saturated the market, Sneed and Colon have decided to produce interesting, and salable, “variants” and “presentation” models.

One day, while visiting Signor Stronzo’s shop, Sneed sees a gaudy dagger in a case. It turns out to be a fancy piece manufactured to the specifications of a well-known Italian typewriter manufacturer. Unfortunately for Signor Stronzo, the manufacturer died of an infarction while servicing his sixteen year old mistress and the dagger has been unclaimed.

Colon buys it and back in the United States, he shows it to a friend of his, Wally Smegma. Wally is an expert in creating new and interesting rare pieces for the trade.

The finial of the typewriter dagger depicts a melon-breasted woman and has to go. The plotters have decided to create the “Rommel Honor Dagger” for both fun and profit.

The finial is replaced with a silver one depicting the Italian Fasces on one side and the German swastika on the other. The blade is engraved with a bad Italian inscription from Mussolini to Rommel and with a facsimile of the Duce’s signature.

Four hours in a lapidary rock-polishing drum with a handful of sawdust and some buck shot added a marvelous patina to the dagger.

The finished piece is then photographed from many angles in black and white and the next stage of the operation is launched.

The physical dagger exists but no one would buy it without a provenance.

In the elegant world of fine art, this provenance is most often achieved by inserting a fake into a commissioned coffee table book on an artist or period. This is called Salting the Mine.

Firstly, a series of original photographs of Mussolini and Rommel are purchased from Photo Luce in Italy. The black and white pictures are culled and finally, an original picture of Rommel  is carefully applied to a selected photograph of Mussolini, with another addition of the new dagger,  rephotographed and then screened.

An original German wartime newspaper is located, the front page photographed front and back and the picture of the two men and most especially the new dagger, set into the page. The whole is rephotographed and run off on newsprint at a local print shop.

The finished page, printed front and back, is placed between two sheets of glass and stuck in an attic window of the Sneed estate to age gracefully in the sun. After about a month, when the paper has turned a lovely shade of ochre, it is removed, excess portions removed and the whole glued into a photo album.

Sneed has a postman with the right appearance and he dresses him in a U.S. Army uniform of the wartime period, takes him into his back yard and poses the costumed man holding up a swastika flag in one hand and the Rommel Honor Dagger in the other. The finished photograph is soaked in tea until it attains a lovely patina of age and it too is glued into the album beside the original newspaper.

Sneed bought the album, which is genuine, at a military collector’s show. It is full of pictures of shattered German buildings and other ruins and came from the estate of a deceased warrior. The few extra blank pages in the rear now sport the picture of the bogus GI with the equally bogus dagger and authenticating newspaper clipping.

In return for his standard fee of 30%, Colon agrees to include the newly-discovered treasure in his next book. “Daggers and Edged Weapons of the Third Reich, Volume 11.” For an additional fifteen Italian Fascist High Leader’s Daggers plus three Gestapo General’s Belt Buckle guns (invented by Sneed five years ago and a standard item in his catalog of incredibly rare relics) Colon agrees to place a full color depiction of the Rommel Honor Dagger on the cover of the forthcoming book.

This absolutely guarantees instant and frantic interest on the part of the more advanced of the dagger and sword collectors and Sneed views this as a reasonable operating expense.

To actually own a piece depicted on the cover of a Colon book is a consummation devoutly to be wished by an advanced collector and this piece is no exception. The Rommel Honor Dagger is such a gaudy and generally aesthetically tasteless piece as to inflame the passions of any advanced collector and Sneed now begins his final operation.

Sneed and the dagger will appear at a prestigious military collector’s show given by himself and Colon. The dagger, now ensconced in an expensive rosewood case (which Sneed has used before and will use again), is put on display along with the doctored photo album, open to the page with the recent but aged additions.

Awed attendees to the show stand in line in front of the Sneed display tables and slowly file past the newest treasure. They are allowed no more than thirty seconds of viewing time and then must move on to let others experience the historical treasure.

The piece is not necessarily for sale, Sneed tells the gawping multitude. He might present it to a German museum as his token of respect for that now-free and democratic American-controlled republic. On the other hand, he might be persuaded to consider offers if, and only if, they are serious offers.

This is a piece, as Sneed says later during a speech to the attendees, that belongs in a really advanced collection. It rightfully belongs to someone who understands history and has the capability of truly appreciating a genuine piece of world history.

Later that evening, as Sneed held court at the local Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, an offer is made to him that he cannot refuse.

Carl Mudd, a born-again Christian latex marital-aid manufacturer from Sweetwater, Florida declares his determination to possess what Sneed refers to as “an investment in history for a discriminating collector.” His wife, Winifred, was tragically and accidentally compacted while rummaging deep inside in a dumpster behind the local Piggly Wiggly Food Mart, seeking food bargains.

The insurance company had recently settled with Mudd and he offers Sneed one hundred thousand dollars in cash and his late wife’s collection of Barbie dolls for the Rommel Honor Dagger. Sneed will accept the money with dignified mien and the dolls will end up in another dumpster.

The Rommel Honor Dagger will still appear in several books but this time, a quivering Mudd is told, the line “From the Carl Mudd Collection” can be seen beneath the pictures of his latest treasure.

And that is how the world turns.

And for ‘Rommel Honor Dagger’ one could just as easily say ‘Monet,’ ‘Rodin,’ ‘Remington’, ‘Dali,” or ‘Athenian decadrachma.’

There is, of course, truth in this jest.

The Colon books exist in fact and certainly in spirit. These types of “reference works” are popular in the world of expensive artifacts, be it Nazi daggers or fine art, because they are very well illustrated, if nothing more than catalogs of available and expensive fakes.

The pictures are important because it is to be regretted that large numbers of the American population, in addition to being grossly overweight, are nearly incapable of reading English, let alone a foreign language, so no doubt we can expect the future to contain an increasingly large number of picture books

 

TSA creates secret watch list of people who may be unruly

May 17, 2018

by Brett Samuels

The Hill

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has compiled a list of people who act suspiciously or confrontationally around airport checkpoints, a TSA official confirmed on Thursday.

Individuals on the list will go through a regular checkpoint screening process, according to the official, who added that their inclusion will provide advance notice to TSA staff that an individual is scheduled to fly out of a particular airport.

The New York Times first obtained a directive from the TSA that outlines behaviors that could land an individual on the list. Those include loitering near airport checkpoints, acting aggressively or posing physical danger to security staff.

Lisa Farbstein, a spokesperson for TSA, told The Hill that there were more than 34 assaults on TSA officers last fiscal year.

“TSA is committed to its people and wants to ensure there are safeguards in place to protect TSA officers and others from any individual who has previously exhibited disruptive or assaultive behavior at a screening checkpoint and is scheduled to fly,” she said.

Race, religion or gender can not be used as a reason to place someone on the list, according to the Times, which added that the list cannot be used to keep passengers off of flights or to prompt additional screening.

An agency official told the Times that there are fewer than 50 people on the list thus far.

The initiative is expected to be discussed during a Thursday hearing before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation and Protective Security.

 

From Ritalin to Marilyn: Forget gun laws, what else is being blamed for mass shootings?

May 21, 2018

RT

The blame for mass school shootings in America has fallen on some unlikely shoulders amid the ongoing gun control impasse. From Ritalin to Marilyn Manson, here are some of the most memorable factors blamed for school attacks.

Eight students and two teachers were shot dead at Santa Fe High School in Galveston, Texas on Friday; 17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis has been arrested over the mass shooting. Speaking about the attack, the National Rifle Association’s incoming president Oliver North condemned what he called America’s “culture of violence” and blamed Ritalin, the drug used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for making children violent.

“The disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence,” he told ‘Fox News Sunday.’ “They’ve been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male.”

As Ritalin makes the list of products and people blamed by gun activists for another US mass shooting, here are some of the other recent – and perhaps unlikely – reasons for attacks on schools.

Too many doors….

Meanwhile, addressing the Santa Fe tragedy, Texas Lieutenant-governor Dan Patrick proposed that there are simply too many entrances and exits in schools, making it nigh on impossible to guard against gun-wielding attackers.

“Had there been one single entrance possibly for every student, maybe he would have been stopped,” Patrick said. His comments were lambasted on social media as users pointed out that being able to exit a building quickly is acutely important for fire safety.

It’s video games…

After shooting his mother dead with her own gun on December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire on students and staff. During his shooting spree, Lanza killed 20 children between six and seven years old as well as six adult staff members. He later committed suicide by turning the gun on himself.

As people struggled to comprehend Lanza’s motives for the crime, Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, pointed the finger squarely at video games, in particular an online flash game called ‘Kindergarten Killer.’ In the game, players have to first kill the teacher before then shooting small children, who are armed, and the kindergarten principal.

While the game had been on the internet since 2002, there was no evidence that the Sandy Hook shooter ever played it. A final report into the shooting also stated that while Lanza played both violent and non-violent video games, it was said he spent the majority of his time playing benign arcade classics like ‘Super Mario Brothers’ and ‘Dance Dance Revolution.’

It’s music…

After 18-year-old Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, 17, murdered 12 of their fellow students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, debate over gun control laws were countered with cultural quandaries on bullying and the impact of violent music and movies on teenagers.

One of the targets was heavy metal artist Marilyn Manson. In the aftermath of the massacre, students reported that both Harris and Klebold were fans of Manson and modeled their gothic look of white makeup, dark hair and trench coats on the singer. Manson later said his links to the massacre – which were eventually proven false as neither shooter was actually a fan of the singer – almost ended his career.

In an interview with filmmaker Michael Moore, Manson said he believed he had become a political scapegoat. “The two byproducts of that whole tragedy were violence and entertainment and gun control, and how perfect that they were the two things we were going to talk about in the upcoming election,” he said.

It’s a gun shortage…

In the aftermath of mass shootings, the idea is often pushed that a school without guns is a soft target for those with bad intentions as it potentially offers vulnerable victims in a confined setting without attackers worrying about being taken down themselves. Essentially, the argument is that there aren’t enough guns in the right hands.

After the fatal shooting of 14 students and three staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, talk turned to the possibility of arming teachers. “If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly,” said US President Donald Trump during a listening session in the Oval Office with the victims of the shooting.

The suggestion provoked massive amounts of debate. The idea has now been entered into proposed legislation in Florida. Under the School Marshall Program, teachers would undergo training with the local sheriff’s department with the ultimate aim of having 10 armed teachers in every school. The proposal means there would be an extra 37,000 more guns statewide, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

It’s the media…

The idea that the media’s coverage of school shootings is to blame is also pervasive. In February, the NRA released a video via its social media channels in which gun rights activist Colin Noir declares, “The media loves mass shootings”, adding, “No-one on this planet benefits more from mass shootings and motivates more people to become mass shooters than our mainstream media.”

Research suggests there is some truth to Noir’s point. In July 2015, a study from Arizona State researcher Sherry Towers found that mass killings are more likely to happen in clusters and within short periods of time. The study suggests that shootings spread like a contagion, when one person sees a media report they then concoct their own plan – although whether that person should have easy access to guns is a separate issue entirely.

 

40% of US citizens above poverty line struggle to make ends meet – study

May 21, 2018

RT

A new study reveals that more than 40 percent of American citizens who live above the official poverty line are still unable to afford middle-class basics including cell phones and transport.

The study, conducted by United Way ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Project and exclusively obtained by Axios, found that an overwhelmingly large group of US households were virtually struggling to make ends meet.

According to the study, two-thirds of US citizens were earning less than $20 an hour in 2016. As a result, a large band of US households sit uncomfortably just above the poverty line – but still struggle to pay for everyday expenses. The list of the basics found to be out of reach included rent, transportation, childcare and cellphones.

Based on 2016 data, the study, which will be released in full on Thursday, claims that up to 34.7 million households fall into the category of those unable to afford middle-class basics. Meanwhile, a further 16.1 million were said to dwell in a state of actual poverty. The figures indicate that the overall number of those “in need” would hit 51 million, the study suggests.

Despite shockingly high nationwide numbers, poverty was not evenly spread in all states. While North Dakota was revealed to have the lowest proportion of households in need (at 32 percent), California, Hawaii and New Mexico appeared to be tied for the highest, at almost half of all those states’ households (49 percent).

Regardless of the state-by-state disparity of the proportion living in poverty, the reality of social divisions is “shocking,” ALICE project director Stephanie Hoopes said of the findings. “It’s a magnitude of financial hardship that we haven’t been able to capture until now.”

Axios suggests that the project highlights the sheer scale of a so-called ‘economically forgotten’ class who essentially perceive themselves as victims of capitalism, and for whom this is a major political influence.

 

Important New Source for Secret Intelligence

May 21, 2018

by Ben Dova

We have just received a notice from a firm that specializes in digging electronic information out of the woodwork. The firm lists several pages of topics, some of which are unbelievable. They are very expensive but one must assume that their data is correct. We are excerpting some of this list and have included their address for those who have the money to learn the truth as, according to the précis, it has never been available before.

  • Successor to the NSA ‘Harvest” programs that catalog important overseas telephone calls made via communications satellites.
  • In depth information on the DoD’s DISA sytems / VIPER and others
  • USIA/Warrentown files
  • In depth dossiers on members of Congress. These, the list advises us, consists of medical and financial records.
  • A 250 page report on the fake Anthrax scare
  • Firms and individuals in foreign countries known to be friendly sources.
  • Scanned copies of Governor George W. Bush’s personal correspondence and financial records, now hidden in the George H.W.Bush Presidential Library
  • Lists of offshore bank accounts for senior political and military figures
  • The so-called ‘Wilson Blvd.’ technical and scientific records
  • A report on infiltration and surveillance of all Israeli communications with their embassy and other entities in the United States
  • An analysis of a collection of documents relating to homosexual activities on the part of President Trump
  • A copy of an FBI report on Edward Snowden’ employment by Russian Intelligence and a compendium of secret documents he downloaded for them from Booz-Hamilton connections

There are many more fascinating offerings but it should be noted that on the list we were sent, prices are very high indeed but approved credit cards, especially American Express, can be used. We have not availed ourselves of this reported service but as it might prove to be interesting to our many readers, especially those with large amounts of cash, we are including the address for your general information: www.spywarelabs.inc and one must apply for an entrance code.

Good hunting!

 

The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21 Trillion (That’s Not a Typo)

May 14, 2018

by Lee Camp

TruthDig

Twenty-one trillion dollars.

The Pentagon’s own numbers show that it can’t account for $21 trillion. Yes, I mean trillion with a “T.” And this could change everything.

But I’ll get back to that in a moment.

There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize. We’ve all been in stadiums with several thousand people. We have an idea of what that looks like (and how sticky the floor gets).

But when we get into the millions, we lose it. It becomes a fog of nonsense. Visualizing it feels like trying to hug a memory. We may know what $1 million can buy (and we may want that thing), but you probably don’t know how tall a stack of a million $1 bills is. You probably don’t know how long it takes a minimum-wage employee to make $1 million.

That’s why trying to understand—truly understand—that the Pentagon spent 21 trillion unaccounted-for dollars between 1998 and 2015 washes over us like your mother telling you that your third cousin you met twice is getting divorced. It seems vaguely upsetting, but you forget about it 15 seconds later because … what else is there to do?

Twenty-one trillion.

But let’s get back to the beginning. A couple of years ago, Mark Skidmore, an economics professor, heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, say that the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General had found $6.5 trillion worth of unaccounted-for spending in 2015. Skidmore, being an economics professor, thought something like, “She means $6.5 billion. Not trillion. Because trillion would mean the Pentagon couldn’t account for more money than the gross domestic product of the whole United Kingdom. But still, $6.5 billion of unaccounted-for money is a crazy amount.”

So he went and looked at the inspector general’s report, and he found something interesting: It was trillion! It was fucking $6.5 trillion in 2015 of unaccounted-for spending! And I’m sorry for the cursing, but the word “trillion” is legally obligated to be prefaced with “fucking.” It is indeed way more than the U.K.’s GDP.

Skidmore did a little more digging. As Forbes reported in December 2017, “[He] and Catherine Austin Fitts … conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.”

Let’s stop and take a second to conceive how much $21 trillion is (which you can’t because our brains short-circuit, but we’ll try anyway).

  1. The amount of money supposedly in the stock market is $30 trillion.
  2. The GDP of the United States is $18.6 trillion.
  3. Picture a stack of money. Now imagine that that stack of dollars is all $1,000 bills. Each bill says “$1,000” on it. How high do you imagine that stack of dollars would be if it were $1 trillion. It would be 63 miles high.
  4. Imagine you make $40,000 a year. How long would it take you to make $1 trillion? Well, don’t sign up for this task, because it would take you 25 million years (which sounds like a long time, but I hear that the last 10 million really fly by because you already know your way around the office, where the coffee machine is, etc.).

The human brain is not meant to think about a trillion dollars.

And it’s definitely not meant to think about the $21 trillion our Department of Defense can’t account for. These numbers sound bananas. They sound like something Alex Jones found tattooed on his backside by extraterrestrials.

But the 21 trillion number comes from the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General—the OIG. Although, as Forbes pointed out, “after Mark Skidmore began inquiring about OIG-reported unsubstantiated adjustments, the OIG’s webpage, which documented, albeit in a highly incomplete manner, these unsupported “accounting adjustments,” was mysteriously taken down.”

Luckily, people had already grabbed copies of the report, which—for now—you can view here.

Here’s something else important from that Forbes article—which is one of the only mainstream media articles you can find on the largest theft in American history:

“Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.

That’s right. The expenses with no explanation were 54 times the actual budget allotted by Congress. Well, it’s good to see Congress is doing 1/54th of its job of overseeing military spending (that’s actually more than I thought Congress was doing). This would seem to mean that 98 percent of every dollar spent by the Army in 2015 was unconstitutional.

So, pray tell, what did the OIG say caused all this unaccounted-for spending that makes Jeff Bezos’ net worth look like that of a guy jingling a tin can on the street corner?

“[The July 2016 inspector general] report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department’s ‘failure to correct system deficiencies.’ ”

They blame trillions of dollars of mysterious spending on a “failure to correct system deficiencies”? That’s like me saying I had sex with 100,000 wild hairless aardvarks because I wasn’t looking where I was walking.

Twenty-one trillion.

Say it slowly to yourself.

At the end of the day, there are no justifiable explanations for this amount of unaccounted-for, unconstitutional spending. Right now, the Pentagon is being audited for the first time ever, and it’s taking 2,400 auditors to do it. I’m not holding my breath that they’ll actually be allowed to get to the bottom of this.

But if the American people truly understood this number, it would change both the country and the world. It means that the dollar is sprinting down a path toward worthless. If the Pentagon is hiding spending that dwarfs the amount of tax dollars coming in to the federal government, then it’s clear the government is printing however much it wants and thinking there are no consequences. Once these trillions are considered, our fiat currency has even less meaning than it already does, and it’s only a matter of time before inflation runs wild.

It also means that any time our government says it “doesn’t have money” for a project, it’s laughable. It can clearly “create” as much as it wants for bombing and death. This would explain how Donald Trump’s military can drop well over 100 bombs a day that cost well north of $1 million each.

So why can’t our government also “create” endless money for health care, education, the homeless, veterans benefits and the elderly, to make all parking free and to pay the Rolling Stones to play stoop-front shows in my neighborhood? (I’m sure the Rolling Stones are expensive, but surely a trillion dollars could cover a couple of songs.)

Obviously, our government could do those things, but it chooses not to. Earlier this month, Louisiana sent eviction notices to 30,000 elderly people on Medicaid to kick them out of their nursing homes. Yes, a country that can vomit trillions of dollars down a black hole marked “Military” can’t find the money to take care of our poor elderly. It’s a repulsive joke.

Twenty-one trillion.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke about how no one knows where the money is flying in the Pentagon. In a barely reported speech in 2011, he said, “My staff and I learned that it was nearly impossible to get accurate information and answers to questions such as, ‘How much money did you spend?’ and ‘How many people do you have?’ ”

They can’t even find out how many people work for a specific department?

Note for anyone looking for a job: Just show up at the Pentagon and tell them you work there. It doesn’t seem like they’d have much luck proving you don’t.

For more on this story, check out David DeGraw’s excellent reporting at ChangeMaker.media, because the mainstream corporate media are mouthpieces for the weapons industry. They are friends with benefits of the military-industrial complex. I have seen basically nothing from the mainstream corporate media concerning this mysterious $21 trillion. I missed the time when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said that the money we dump into war and death—either the accounted-for money or the secretive trillions—could end world hunger and poverty many times over. There’s no reason anybody needs to be starving or hungry or unsheltered on this planet, but our government seems hellbent on proving that it stands for nothing but profiting off death and misery. And our media desperately want to show they stand for nothing but propping up our morally bankrupt empire.

When the media aren’t actively promoting war, they’re filling the airwaves with shit, so the entire country can’t even hear itself think. Our whole mindscape is filled to the brim with nonsense and vacant celebrity idiocy. Then, while no one is looking, the largest theft humankind has ever seen is going on behind our backs—covered up under the guise of “national security.”

Twenty-one trillion.

Don’t forget.

 

French revolt against Macron’s support for Israel

May 18, 2018

by Ali Abunimah

electroinic intifada

Israel’s massacre of dozens of Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip last Monday is sharpening the divide between the French public and the country’s staunchly pro-Israel leaders.

Even before the latest massacre, one of France’s international giants, film director Jean-Luc Godard, had joined dozens of cultural figures saying they would refuse to take part in French government “cultural” activities designed to promote Israel.

Since Monday, people have demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians all over the country, including thousands in the streets of Paris.

The CGT, a major labor federation, condemned Israel for committing a “crime against humanity,” and urged its members to intensify their solidarity with Palestinians.

Another federation, L’Union syndicale Solidaires, reiterated its support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as did the left-wing anti-capitalist organization NPA.

In an online poll run by Le Journal du Dimanche this week, 66 percent of the 33,500 people who took part agreed that France should recall its ambassador from Tel Aviv.

That position was backed in parliament by La France Insoumise, the left-wing party of former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon who has supported sanctions on Israel.

Speaking in the National Assembly on Wednesday, Eric Coquerel, a lawmaker for the party, said Israel had been allowed to violate international law with impunity for far too long.

“Why has France not already withdrawn its ambassador from Israel?” Coquerel asked Prime Minister Édouard Philippe.

Mélenchon also urged the government to summon the Israeli ambassador, as Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg have done to protest Israel’s actions.

France has refused to take any such steps, but the government is clearly feeling pressure to go beyond the typical bland statements of “concern” and calls for “restraint” that have characterized responses from the European Union and its members since Israel began its weekly massacres of protesters in Gaza on 30 March.

President Emmanuel Macron on Monday finally “condemned the violence of the Israeli armed forces against the demonstrations,” according to his office.

These rhetorical shifts are, however, unlikely to assuage outrage that France is still refusing to take any action to hold Israel accountable.

Macron notably failed even to endorse the calls from other EU states for an investigation into the slaughter in Gaza.

“Tell the truth”

In light of France’s position, many people on social media shared a 2014 article by Dominique de Villepin, a center-right former prime minister and foreign minister who gained international stature when he led France’s opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

He had criticized France’s weak response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza that year.

Writing in Le Figaro, de Villepin stated that it was France’s duty to “raise its voice against the massacre perpetrated in Gaza.”

He condemned France’s mere calls for “restraint” while “children are being killed” as well as one-sided support for Israel.

“Let’s have the courage to tell the truth: there is nothing in international law or in the right to security that implies a right to military occupation, even less a right to carry out massacres,” de Villepin stated.

With bluntness rare for a mainstream French politician, de Villepin said that Israel’s sole reliance on military brutality and its utter disregard for the rights and interests of Palestinians “condemns Israel, bit by bit, to becoming a segregationist, militarist and authoritarian state.”

“This is the spiral of apartheid South Africa before Frederik de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, made up of violent repression, iniquity and humiliating bantustans,” de Villepin added. “It is the spiral of French Algeria.”

This time around, most of the French center right has remained silent, but Israel has predictably found support from the far right.

Louis Aliot, a member of parliament from the historically anti-Semitic Front National, and the partner of its leader Marine le Pen, declared that in committing the massacre in Gaza, “the Israelis were defending their border.”

France-Israel season

Despite the growing outrage, France is pressing ahead with the Saison France-Israël – or France-Israel Season – a propaganda campaign backed by both governments to whitewash Israel on the 70th anniversary of the start of the Nakba – the ongoing expulsion and exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland in order to establish a discriminatory and apartheid “Jewish state.”

On Wednesday, two days after Gaza’s bloodiest day in years, France’s ambassador in Tel Aviv insisted that the France-Israel Season would be launched in two weeks as planned:

Left-wing lawmakers are amplifying calls for the cancellation of the festival.

Earlier this month, 80 French artists, including Jean-Luc Godard, published an open letter explaining why they would refuse to take part in the France-Israel Season.

The artists say that “under the cover of promoting dialogue and exchange,” the France-Israel Season is “really a means put in place by the Israeli government to burnish the image of the state of Israel that is being tarnished each day by its ever harsher policies towards the Palestinians.”

Solidarity across France

At the Cannes Film Festival this week, attendees observed a minute of silence at the Palestine pavilion in solidarity with victims of the Israeli massacre.

Those in attendance included Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir, actor Benicio del Toro and several other film festival jury members.

French-Lebanese actor Manal Issa made headlines around the world by holding up a sign on the Cannes red carpet stating “Stop the attack on Gaza.”

Meanwhile, activists held rallies in solidarity with Palestinians in towns all over France.

 

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