Mohamed Never Existed – Tom Holland – Islam the Untold Story (BBC) 1:11:00 min)

One Hour of Russian Communist Music – Pre -1917

Audio File One Hour Russian Pre-1917 Communist Music (56:30 min) Audio Mp3

North Korean Night Parade – 14 January 2021

Hell March Music Added

You can watch this video at https://koreanow.com​ North Korea held a military parade to celebrate a party congress for the first time. The parade took place on the evening of January 14 in Kim Il-sung square, two days after the North concluded eighth congress of the ruling Workers’ Party.

One Hour of Soviet Latvian Music (1:01:03 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour of Soviet Latvian Music – Mp3

The Egyptian – 1954 – Tale of Akhenaten (2:13:57 min)

The Egyptian is a 1954 American epic drama film made by 20th Century Fox. Filmed in CinemaScope with color by DeLuxe, it was directed by Michael Curtiz and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. It is based on Mika Waltari‘s 1945 novel of the same name and the screenplay was adapted by Philip Dunne and Casey Robinson. Leading roles were played by Edmund Purdom, Bella Darvi, Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Gene Tierney, Peter Ustinov, and Michael Wilding. Cinematographer Leon Shamroy was nominated for an Oscar in 1955.

Plot

Sinuhe (Edmund Purdom), a struggling physician in 18th dynasty Egypt (14th century BC), is thrown by chance into contact with the pharaoh Akhnaton (Michael Wilding). He rises to and falls from great prosperity, wanders the world, and becomes increasingly drawn towards a new religion spreading throughout Egypt. His companions throughout are his lover, a shy tavern maid named Merit (Jean Simmons); and his corrupt but likable servant, Kaptah (Peter Ustinov).

While out lion hunting with his sturdy friend Horemheb (Victor Mature), Sinuhe discovers Egypt’s newly ascendant pharaoh Akhnaton, who has sought the solitude of the desert in the midst of a religious epiphany. While praying, the ruler is stricken with an epileptic seizure, with which Sinuhe is able to help him. The grateful Akhnaton makes his savior court physician and gives Horemheb a post in the Royal Guard, a career previously denied to him by low birth. His new eminence gives Sinuhe an inside look at Akhnaton’s reign, which is made extraordinary by the ruler’s devotion to a new religion that he feels has been divinely revealed to him. This faith rejects Egypt’s traditional gods in favor of monolatristic worship of the sun, referred to as Aten. Akhnaton intends to promote Atenism throughout Egypt, which earns him the hatred of the country’s corrupt and politically active traditional priesthood.

Life in court does not prove to be good for Sinuhe; it drags him away from his previous ambition of helping the poor while falling obsessively in love with a Babylonian courtesan named Nefer (Bella Darvi). He squanders all of his and his parents’ property in order to buy her gifts, only to have her reject him nonetheless. Returning dejectedly home, Sinuhe learns that his parents have committed suicide over his shameful behavior. He has their bodies embalmed so that they can pass on to the afterlife, and, having no way to pay for the service, works off his debts in the embalming house.

Lacking a tomb in which to put his parents’ mummies, Sinuhe buries them in the sand amid the lavish funerary complexes of the Valley of the Kings. Merit finds him there and warns him that Akhnaton has condemned him to death; one of the pharaoh’s daughters fell ill and died while Sinuhe was working as an embalmer, and the tragedy is being blamed on his desertion of the court. Merit urges Sinuhe to flee Egypt and rebuild his career elsewhere, and the two of them share one night of passion before he takes ship out of the country.Olympic discus thrower Fortune Gordien and Jean Simmons on set.

For the next ten years Sinuhe and Kaptah wander the known world, where Sinuhe’s superior Egyptian medical training gives him an excellent reputation as healer. Sinuhe finally saves enough money from his fees to return home; he buys his way back into the favor of the court with a precious piece of military intelligence he learned abroad, informing Horemheb (now commander of the Egyptian army) that the barbarian Hittites plan to attack the country with superior iron weapons.

Akhnaton is in any case ready to forgive Sinuhe, according to his religion’s doctrine of mercy and pacifism. These qualities have made Aten-worship extremely popular amid the common people, including Merit, with whom Sinuhe is reunited. He finds that she bore him a son named Thoth (Tommy Rettig), a result of their night together many years ago, who shares his father’s interest in medicine.

Meanwhile, the priests of the old gods have been fomenting hate crimes against the Aten’s devotees, and now urge Sinuhe to help them kill Akhnaton and put Horemheb on the throne instead. The physician is privately given extra inducement by the princess Baketamun (Gene Tierney); she reveals that he is actually the son of the previous pharaoh by a concubine, discarded at birth because of the jealousy of the old queen and raised by foster parents. The princess now suggests that Sinuhe could poison both Akhnaton and Horemheb and rule Egypt himself (with her at his side).

Sinuhe is still reluctant to perform this evil deed until the Egyptian army mounts a full attack on worshipers of the Aten. Kaptah manages to smuggle Thoth out the country, but Merit is killed while seeking refuge at the new god’s altar. In his grief Sinuhe blames Akhnaton for the whole mess and administers poison to him at their next meeting. The pharaoh realizes what has been done, but accepts his fate. He still believes his faith is true, but that he has understood it imperfectly; future generations will be able to spread the same faith better than he. Enlightened by Akhnaton’s dying words, Sinuhe warns Horemheb that his wine is also poisoned, thus allowing him to marry the Princess and become Pharaoh.

Later, Sinuhe is brought before his old friend for preaching the same ideals Akhnaton believed in, and is sentenced to be exiled to the shores of the Red Sea, where he spends his remaining days writing down his life story, in the hope that it may be found by Thoth or his descendants. Ultimately it is revealed that “These things happened thirteen centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ“.

…………………….

Cast

• Edmund Purdom as Sinuhe
• Victor Mature as Horemheb
• Jean Simmons as Merit
• Bella Darvi as Nefer
• Gene Tierney as Baketamon
• Michael Wilding as Akhenaten
• Peter Ustinov as Kaptah
• Judith Evelyn as Taia
• Henry Daniell as Mekere
• John Carradine as Grave robber
• Carl Benton Reid as Senmut
• Tommy Rettig as Thoth
• Anitra Stevens as Queen Nefertiti
• Michael Ansara as Hittite Commander
• Peter Reynolds as Sinuhe, age 10

Original novel

The script was based on the Waltari novel of the same name. It is elaborated in the book, but not the film, that Sinuhe was named by his mother from the Story of Sinuhe, which does include references to Aten but was written many centuries before the 18th dynasty. The use of the “Cross of Life” ankh to represent Akhnaton’s “new” religion reflects a popular and esoteric belief in the 1950s that monolatristic Atenism was a sort of proto-Christianity. While the ankh has no known connection to the modern cross,^{[citation needed]} the principal symbol of Aten was not an ankh but a solar disk emitting rays, though the rays usually ended with a hand holding out an ankh to the worshipers. The sun-disk is seen only twice; when we first meet Akhnaton in the desert, he has painted it on a rock, and Sinuhe says “Look! He worships the face of the sun.” It appears again as part of the wall painting above Akhnaton’s throne. With that said, the ankh was used in the original novel. Likewise, Akhnaton’s dying revelation that God is much more than the face of the sun is actually found among Waltari’s best-known writings.^{[citation needed]}

The best selling novel^[5] was also well received critically, with the New York Times describing it as “fine and panoramic”.^[6]

Development

Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox bought the film rights in 1952. He announced the film would be his only personal production in 1953. Marlon Brando was going to play the lead and Casey Robinson would write the script.^[7] Robinson finished his script by March 1953.^[8] In April, Fox announced the film would be shot in its new wide screen technology, CinemaScope.^[9] Zanuck borrowed Michael Curtiz from Paramount to direct.^[10] In November 1953 Victor Mature joined the cast along with Jean Peters and Kirk Douglas.^[11] In January 1954, Fox said the cast would also include Betta St. John, Peter Ustinov, and Bella Darvi.^[12]

It was the film debut of Darvi, who was a protege of Zanuck and his wife Virginia (“Darvi” was a combination of “Darryl” and “Virginia”). She eventually became Darryl Zanuck’s mistress.^[13] By January, Peters was out and replaced by Jean Simmons, so only the right half of publicity materials had to be changed.^[14] In October 1953, Philip Dunne signed a new three-year contract with Fox and joined the film.^[15] Dunne said Robinson had done “a pretty good script” which was ultimately done in by “casting”. Dunne says he worked on the film as an “unofficial producer”.^[16]

There were a number of Egyptian-themed films made around this time, including Valley of the Kings and Land of the Pharaohs.^[17]

Marlon Brando quits

In February 1954, a week before filming was to start, Brando took part in a reading of the script. Dunne says Brando read the part “absolutely beautifully” but then Curtiz said “How can I with all my genius make you play this man who is one minute hero the next moment villain?” Dunne says he went home to write a memo for Curtiz then got a call saying Brando had quit the film.^[18] Brando said he was unable to play his part due to mental strain and had his psychiatrist support him.^[19] As location filming in Egypt had already started, Fox sued Brando for $2 million.^[20][21]

Filming was postponed. Fox tried to borrow Dirk Bogarde from J. Arthur Rank in Britain.^[22] Hedda Hopper suggested John Cassavetes. Cameron Mitchell, then a Fox contract star tested for the role of the Pharaoh.^[23] Farley Granger was the next choice and considered the role, but then decided he was not interested after having just moved to New York.^[24][25] Other contenders for the role had been John Derek and Cameron Mitchell, who were all screen tested. Eventually the role went to Edmund Purdom borrowed from MGM.^[26][27] MGM took $300,000 for Purdom’s services although he was only paid $500 a week.^[28] Cassavetes later credited Hopper’s public push for him as helping kick start his career in Hollywood.^[29]

Philip Dunne later said he tried to get Zanuck to cast Cassavetes as the Pharaoh but Zanuck wanted an English actor to play it. “He thought all kings, emperors and nobility should be played by English actors”, said Dunne.^[30] Michael Wilding played the part. Dunne says he also wanted Dana Wynter to play Nefertiti – he thought the actress just looked like the real queen – but instead “Zanuck let Michael Curtiz cast some lumpish girlfriend who looked about as much like Nefertiti as you or I do.”^[31]

Fox’s lawsuit against Brando was resolved when the actor agreed to make Désirée (1954) for the studio.^[32]

Production

Filming began in May 1954.^[33]

Some of the sets, costumes, and props from this film were bought and re-used by Cecil B. DeMille for The Ten Commandments (1956). As the events in that story take place seventy years after those in The Egyptian, this re-use creates an unintended sense of continuity. The commentary track on the Ten Commandments DVD points out many of these re-uses. Only three actors, Mimi Gibson, Michael Ansara and John Carradine, and a handful of extras, appeared in both pictures. The Prince Aly Khan was a consultant during filming; he was engaged to Gene Tierney.

Dunne recalls during filming “Darryl was so besotten [with Darvi] he decided to go around to our film stills department and see how she looked in her costumes. He’d been running the lot for 25 years, but didn’t know where it was and flew into a rage. It was right next door to his private dining room.”^[34]

Music

The Egyptian soundtrack cover.

Owing to the short time available in post-production, the composing duties on the film score were divided between two of 20th Century-Fox’s best-known composers: Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann.

Newman would later conduct the score in a re-recording for release on Decca Records. Musician John Morgan undertook a “restoration and reconstruction” of the score for a recording conducted by William T. Stromberg in 1998, on Marco Polo Records. The performance of the score recorded for the film was released by Film Score Monthly in 2001.

Home video

The film has been released on DVD^[35] and there are several Blu-rays, including bootlegs from Brazil and Spain. Legitimate HD releases have appeared in America (Twilight Time), France (Sidonis Calysta), Denmark (Soul Media) and Japan (Mermaid Films). The region 0 US disc’s 2010 transfer has a drastically revised color scheme, which afflicted numerous Fox restorations carried out at the same time. The other discs, which are region-locked, have a more accurate 2005 transfer.^[36]

See also

• List of historical drama films
• List of American films of 1954
• List of epic films

References

1. ^ Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Scarecrow Press, 1989 p248
2. ^ Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Scarecrow Press, 1989 p225
3. ^ ‘The Top Box-Office Hits of 1954’, Variety Weekly, January 5, 1955
4. ^ Daily Variety, November 9, 1955 p. 4
5. ^ “TOP BEST SELLERS: IN LOS ANGELES Fiction Leaders”. Los Angeles Times. Sep 18, 1949. p. D9.
6. ^ ORVILLE PRESCOTT (Aug 22, 1949). “Books of the Times”. New York Times. p. 19.
7. ^ THOMAS M. PRYOR (Sep 17, 1952). “METRO AIMS TO SUE LANZA IN FILM ROW: Studio Instructs Its Attorneys to Move Against Tenor for Damages to ‘Student Prince'”. New York Times. p. 34.
8. ^ Schallert, Edwin (Mar 24, 1953). “CinemaScope and 3D Rivalry in Full Swing; Henreid to Direct Play”. Los Angeles Times. p. A7.
9. ^ THOMAS M. PRYOR Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES (Apr 2, 1953). “U.-I. STUDIO SHOWS NEW WIDE SCREEN: System Accommodates Both Standard and 3-D Pictures — Fox Lists Production Plan”. New York Times. p. 34.
10. ^ “SCREEN GUILD ACTS TO BAR COMMUNISTS: Actors’ Union Adopts Bylaw Prohibiting Reds — 3,769 Favor Move, 152 Opposed”. New York Times. July 28, 1953. p. 23.
11. ^ “Drama: Mature Handed Big Role in ‘Egyptian'”. Los Angeles Times. Nov 27, 1953. p. B8.
12. ^ “Fox ‘The Egyptian’ To Have All-Star Cast”. The Washington Post. Jan 10, 1954. p. L5.
13. ^ A. H. WEILER (Jan 31, 1954). “RANDOM OBSERVATIONS ON PICTURES AND PEOPLE”. New York Times. p. X5.
14. ^ “Drama: ‘Long John, Silver’ to Be Shot in Australia”. Los Angeles Times. Jan 18, 1954. p. B8.
15. ^ THOMAS M. PRYOR (Oct 16, 1953). “EISENHOWER ROLE IN FILM APPROVED: President Grants Permission to Columbia to Portray Him in Movie of West Point”. New York Times. p. 33.
16. ^ McGilligan p 164
17. ^ “HOLLY: Get set for a rash of sphinxes, Pharaohs and dancing girls. A new movie cycle is under way”. Los Angeles Times. July 25, 1954. p. K8.
18. ^ =McGilligan p 164-65
19. ^ THOMAS M. PRYORS (Feb 4, 1954). “LEMMON IS SIGNED FOR COMEDY LEAD: Actor, Who Will Co-Star With Judy Holliday in ‘Phffft,’ Is Doing Grable Film”. New York Times. p. 22.
20. ^ Hopper, Hedda (Feb 5, 1954). “Studio to Sue Brando for Film Delay”. Los Angeles Times. p. 18.
21. ^ “FOX SCORES BRANDO IN $2,000,000 CLAIM”. New York Times. Feb 17, 1954. p. 28.
22. ^ THOMAS M. PRYOR (Feb 11, 1954). “ARNALL FOR DROP IN FILM BARRIERS: President of Independents Urges Re-evaluation of Foreign Market Policy”. New York Times. p. 34.
23. ^ Hopper, Hedda (Feb 18, 1954). “Looking at Hollywood: Richard Widmark, Who Acts and Writes, Wants to Produce”. Chicago Daily Tribune. p. c8.
24. ^ “Drama: Merian Cooper Paid Honor in Washington”. Los Angeles Times. Feb 25, 1954. p. A12.
25. ^ Richard Dyer MacCann (May 25, 1954). “Reconstructing Old Egypt: Hollywood Letter”. The Christian Science Monitor. p. 6.
26. ^ Pryor, Thomas M (26 Feb 1954). “NICHOLS HONORED BY WRITERS GUILD: Scenarist Is Awarded Laurel Achievement for His Work in Industry and Union”. New York Times. p. 15.
27. ^ “Putdom Picked for ‘Egyptian'”. Los Angeles Times. Feb 26, 1954. p. B7.
28. ^ Hopper, Hedda (Mar 13, 1954). “Looking at Hollywood: Movie on Vasco da Gama to Be Set in Portugal”. Chicago Daily Tribune. p. 16.
29. ^ “Drama: ZaSu to Play Nurse in ‘Francis’ Picture”. Los Angeles Times. Feb 26, 1954. p. B6.
30. ^ McGilligan p 164
31. ^ Lee Server, Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures, 1987 p 107
32. ^ Bacon, James (Apr 11, 1954). “Screen and Stage: His Conflicting Traits Qualify Brando as Genuine Character”. Los Angeles Times. p. D8.
33. ^ Richard Dyer MacCann (May 25, 1954). “Reconstructing Old Egypt: Hollywood Letter”. The Christian Science Monitor. p. 6.
34. ^ Jim Bawden (Jan 27, 1990). “Philip Dunne looks back at movies’ golden age: [SA2 Edition]”. Toronto Star. p. G8.
35. ^ “The Egyptian (1954) DVD comparison”. DVDCompare.
36. ^ “The Egyptian (1954) Blu-ray comparison”. DVDCompare.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Egyptian (1954 film).

• The Egyptian at IMDb
• The Egyptian at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Egyptian at AllMovie
• The Egyptian at the TCM Movie Database
• The Egyptian at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Listing of recordings of the film score

UK Pop Band – Talk Talk – Live – Montreux, Switzerland – 1986 (6:52 min) Audio Mp3

It’s My Life – Talk Talk – Mp3

New FBI Documents – 68 Pages FOIA – Dem Dissident Seth Rich Assassinated – No Robbery, Nothing Taken In Execution Style Slaying

New FBI Documents Suggest Seth Rich May Have Been Assassinated In A Political Murder

APRIL 26, 2021 • 500 WORDS •

Washington, DC: For years, officials in the US government have held that Democratic National Convention voter expansion data director Seth Rich was killed during a random robbery in July 2016. Nothing was taken and there are currently no suspects in the case.

Julian Assange and others have suggested that Rich was in fact the source for the Wikileak’s dump of DNC emails and that foul play from political actors was involved in his death. Debate on this matter has been suppressed through high powered litigation and dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory.

The ‘stolen’ emails were not stolen at all. They were copied.

Now, lawyers representing the Rich family have been able to obtain 68 pages of heavily redacted FBI documents on the case that reveal Assange and others may have been right after all.

While the FBI has repeatedly asserted over the years that it was not involved in the investigation into Rich’s death, the documents show that they were lying.

New information shows that Rich’s homicide was in fact the subject of a Department of Justice meeting in 2018. In another document, it is speculated that “given [redacted] it is conceivable that an individual or group would want to pay for his death.”

Most pressing is the revelation that an individual, whose name is also redacted, had snatched Rich’s laptop and taken it home. The FBI is currently in possession of the laptop but will not say if anything was altered or deleted from it. The FBI revealed this information earlier this year, but has stated it has not investigated a pertinent piece of evidence in the case.

According to the narrative spun by the Metropolitan Police Department, Rich was killed in a failed robbery after leaving a bar in Washington DC.

Rich was still alive when the police reached him, but was supposedly “too drunk” to describe his attacker before his death. Journalist Joe Hoft reported in 2017 that the police body camera footage from the encounter has mysteriously gone missing.

Countless pages of the FBI’s records on Rich are redacted in their entirety. The FBI’s FOIA office has been battling in court for more time to meet the rest of their Rich FOIA obligations (hundreds of more pages) citing the need to fully censor information in the interest of “privacy.” As others have pointed out, the FBI and DoJ don’t have any problem releasing totally unredacted files on people they dislike.

Ultimately, its clear that the FBI and DoJ agree with skeptics that the Rich murder wasn’t just a mugging gone bad. The explosive story appears to be heavily suppressed by Google search algorithms. Suspicions of Rich being a victim of a US government sponsored or otherwise politically motivated assassination will only rise the more the FBI drags its feet and covers for the suspects.

There is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder.

Art Forgery: Han van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers

Han van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers

Forgers, by nature, prefer anonymity and therefore are rarely remembered. An exception is Han van Meegeren (1889–1947). Van Meegeren’s story is absolutely unique and may be justly considered the most dramatic art scam of the twentieth century.

In 1937, Abraham Bredius, who as one of the most authoritative art historians had dedicated a great part of his life to the study of Vermeer, was approached by a lawyer who claimed to be the trustee of a Dutch family estate in order to have him look at a rather large painting of a Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus (fig. 1). Shortly after having viewed the painting, the 83 year old art historian wrote an article in the Burlington Magazine, the “art bible” of the times, in which he stated, “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio.

And what a picture! Neither the beautiful signature . . . nor the pointillés on the bread which Christ is blessing, is necessary to convince us that we have here—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft . . . quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer. In no other picture by the great master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story—a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of highest art.”fig. 1 The Supper at Emmaus

Han van Meegeren
1936–1937
Old canvas, relined, 115 x 127 cm.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Few doubts were advanced by his colleagues since Bredius’ opinion was taken as gospel in the art world so much that he had been nick-named “the Pope.”

This work that today seems so heavy handed and awkward was in reality a fake by Han van Meegeren, a mediocre Dutch artist who had lived and worked in relative obscurity.

The Trial

fig. 2 Han van Meegeren at his trial

In May 1945, Van Meegeren was arrested, charged with collaborating with the enemy and imprisoned. His name had been traced to the sale made during WW II of what was then believed to be an authentic painting Vermeer to Nazi Field-Marshal Hermann Goering. Shortly after, to general disbelief, Van Meegeren came up with a very original defense against the accusation of collaboration, then punishable by death. He claimed that the painting, The Woman Taken in Adultery, was not a Vermeer but rather a forgery by his own hand. Moreover, since he had traded the false Vermeer for 200 original Dutch paintings seized by Goering in the beginning of he war, Van Meegeren believed that he was a national hero rather than a Nazi collaborator. He also claimed to have painted five other “Vermeers” as well as two “Pieter de Hoochs” all of which had surfaced on the art market since 1937.Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery
Han van Meegeren, after Vermeer
1942

This video on the Van Meegeren affairs by Hans Wessles (produced by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, – English subtitles) is extraordinarily well done. It contains interviews, period news clips and even clips of Van Meegeren during his trial.

The trial of Han van Meegeren (fig. 2) began on 29 October, 1947 in Room 4 of the Regional Court in Amsterdam. In order to demonstrate his case, it was arranged that, under police guard before the court, he would paint another “Vermeer,” Jesus Among the Doctors (fig. 3), using the materials and techniques he had employed for the other forgeries. During the incredible two year trial Van Meegeren confessed that “spurred by the disappointment of receiving no acknowledgements from artists and critics….I determined to prove my worth as a painter by making a perfect seventeenth-century canvas.”

“During the investigation, Van Meegeren revealed that having once fooled the art world with Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, probably his best forgery, he was encouraged to try new forgeries. He painted a head of Christ, sold it through an intermediary and then “found” the Last Supper for which it was a supposed study. The buyer of the Christ painting was only too eager to snap-up the full scale painting.”¹fig. 3 Van Meegeren painting Jesus Among the Doctors in 1945

“Perhaps the greatest problem that faced Van Meegeren was the secrecy in which he had to work. He could hire no models, since they might talk. For The Last Supper he was forced to rely mainly on his imagination and it is a wonder that he dared such a accomplished composition, involving 13 figures in a variety of poses. At one point he stole directly from Vermeer, using the head of the Girl with a Pearl Earring for his head of Saint John (fig. 4).”²fig. 4

Van Meegeren spent four years working out techniques for making a new painting look old. The biggest problem was getting oil paint to harden thoroughly, a process that normally takes 50 years. He solved the dilemma by mixing his pigments with a synthetic resin, Bakelite, instead of oil, and subsequently baking the canvas. Now he was ready to begin. He took an actual seventeenth-century painting and removed most of the picture with pumice and water, being most careful not to obliterate the network of cracks, which had an important role to play.”³ Head of Christ
Han van Meegeren
c. 1939
Oil on old canvas, relined
48 x 30 cm.
Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, Rotterdam

After having tried his hand at a few typical Vermeer interior composition for whom the artist is renowned, Van Meegeren had what might be called his own stroke of genius. Instead of forging variations of the interiors which could be compared to works hanging in museums, Van Meegeren chose to forge an early Vermeer of a religious theme based on a composition of Caravaggio. Scholars had long suspected that Vermeer had been to Italy and Van Meegeren’s lost painting would have confirmed that. The subject and early technique of the painting also helped to mask his own technical and expressive inadequacies.

At the end of the trial, the collaboration charges were changed to forgery and Van Meegeren was condemned to one year in confinement, but it was said he was tickled to get only one year in jail. “Two years,” he told a reporter, “is the maximum punishment for such a thing. I know because I looked it up in our laws twelve years ago, before I started all this. But sir, I’m sure about one thing: if I die in jail they will just forget all about it. My paintings will become original Vermeers once more. I produced them not for money but for art’s sake.”

Epilog

The doubts regarding international art establishment spurred by the Van Meegeren case resulted in years of a much needed self-examination. Art historians, connoisseurs, museum directors and unscrupulous dealers had all been involved. Above all, contemporary methods of evaluating the work master painters required a profound reconsideration. “The dénouement of the Van Meegeren affair brought about a kind of a catharsis. The clearest example of this is found in Arie Bob de Vreis’ Vermeer monograph. The first edition in 1939 sketched a picture of the artist that had been shaped by Hannema’s exhibition.⁴ The second edition was published in 1948.

Not only was the text completely revised, but the catalogue of the works had been reduced from forty-three to the now familiar thirty-five. De Vries explained: ‘It was only after the war that this bewildering forgery business had come to light. It opened my eyes completely. I now feel that I have to remove every doubtful work from the artist’s oeuvre”⁵ “The post-Van Meegeren period saw the publications of monographs by Pieter T. A. Swillens, Sir Lawrence Gowing, Vitale Block, and Ludwig Goldscheider, but it was above all Albert Blankert’s sober study of 1975 that acted as a kind of medicinal purge. In an addition to the critical catalogue, the book contained an important chapter on ‘Vermeer and his public.’ For the first time it drew attention to a group of collectors and connoisseurs of the late seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who had view Vermeer not as a “sphinx” but a first-class painter.”⁶
Girl Playing a Lute Han van Meegeren
1930–1940
Oil on canvas, 58 x 47cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

In the later half of the twentieth century Vermeer’s painting was reexamined in a more objective light. As result, the personal intuition of a trusted “experts” is no longer considered a reliable basis for evaluating the work of such a complex painter as Vermeer. His entire oeuvre is now studied in relation to his contemporary social and artistic milieu and through the understanding of the contemporary iconography which is generally believed to have played a fundamental role in Dutch painting. Laboratory analysis has also become an integral part of understanding Vermeer’s and Dutch seventeenth-century painting as well.A detail of head of Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter compared to a simiar figure in Woman Reading by Vam Meegere, both currently housed in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

VAN MEEGEREN’S DILEMMA

“As he moved from strength to strength as a forger…Van Meegeren grew increasingly disenchanted with the way he was perceived, or misperceived, by his peers. And with some justification. Known in public as the inoffensively traditionalist court painter to the patricians of The Hague, Van Meegeren was, in reality, one of the most successful artists alive in Europe. When Joseph Duveen bought the Lace Maker, in 1927. Not even Picasso could have sold a single canvas for £38,000—or even a quarter of that. Moreover, Van Meegeren had risen to the top in a field of creative endeavor so radical that it went beyond cutting edge to criminal. Yet, only his closest confidantes knew that he had painted The Lace Maker, and The Smiling Girl before it. It was a bitter pill for a man like Van Meegeren, who had craved a public triumph… “

Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing
the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, 2008, p. 86.

Who was Han van Meegeren?

Han van Meegeren (58 years old), two months before his death

Henricus Anthonius van Meegeren was born in Deventer in1889 as the third child of Roman Catholic parents. His father sent him to the Delft Institute of Technology in order to be trained as an architect. However, Van Meegeren soon discovered a love for art and made such significant progress that he quickly became the teaching assistant in the departments of Drawing and History of Art. He won a gold medal for a drawing of a church interior done in the seventeenth-century style already demonstrating his talent for imitation. After having married Anna de Voogt (who later bore him two children – Jacques and Pauline) he began to show his first paintings with some success in an exhibition in Kunstzaal Pictura, Den Haag.

Then his problems began, Van Meegeren began drinking. In 1921 he spent three months traveling in Italy presumable to study the Italian masters and in 1922 he held an exhibition of paintings, which were all sold, of Biblical themes in Kunstzaal Biesing, The Hague. In 1923 he officially divorced from Anna van Voogt.

1927 Van Meegeren’s The Deer was the most valued painting at a lottery of the Haagsche Kunstkring. Shortly after he married the actress Jo Oerlemans, who was formerly married to the art critic C.H. de Boer.

Van Meegeren regularly contributed articles for De Kemphaan, a monthly art magazine founded in 1928 which opposed progressive art movements. He also designed the magazine’s cover. However, the magazine was closed only two years later. When Van Meegeren moved to moved to Roquebrune, in the south of France, he was probably thoroughly convinced that there was no longer any possibility that his talent would ever be recognized by the art establishment. In order to vindicate himself on the art world, Van Meegeren began working in a series forgeries. As a kind of warm-up exercise, he first produced four unsold paintings in seventeenth-century style: A Guitar Player and A Woman Reading Musician Vermeer’s style, A Woman Drinking, in Frans Hals’ style and A Portrait of Man in Ter Borch’s style. Once Van Meegeren had gained sufficient confidence by means of his initial technical and stylistic experiments, he then painted Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, probably the best of all his forgeries. Click here to view a gallery Van Meegeren’s own work.

In September 1937, Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus was identified by Bredius as a masterpiece by Vermeer of Delft. It was Bredius’ contention that Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting and Van Meegeren’s forgery was especially welcomed as it supported this theory; exactly what van Meegeren had hoped for. At first Van Meegeren wanted to reveal the fraud—especially because he despised in particular Bredius—but when he sold the fake Vermeer for the equivalent of what would now be several million dollars, he unsurprisingly had second thoughts.

He had proven to his own satisfaction that the Dutch art establishment was ignorant, and that would have to do as long as he could make good money. Scarcely one year later the painting was officially delivered to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, purchased with financial donations of the Stichting Rembrandt, the Rotterdam ship-owner W. van der Vorm, Bredius and a few Rotterdam private collectors. Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus soon became the museum’s top attraction.https://www.youtube.com/embed/-0FU8z_1Arc

fig. 5 Han van Meegeren’s Mansion Primavera in Roquebrune Cap Martin. It was here, in 1936, that Van Meegeren painted his forgery Christand the Disciples at Emmaus, which later sold for about $300,000.

In the summer of 1938 Van Meegeren, spurred by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception of his work, moved to Nice and painted The Card Players and The The Drinking Party in the style of Pieter de Hooch. In 1939 this last painting is sold to D.G. van Beuningen.

Over a seventeenth-century painting of Govert Flinck, Van Meegeren painted The Last Supper in the style of Vermeer but due to the threat of war he returned to Holland leaving the painting behind in Nice. From 1941 to 1943, the year in which he divorced his second wife, Van Meegeren continued to produce a number of Vermeer forgeries. In 1943 he sold the Christ and the Adulteress sold to Field-Marshal Hermann Goering in exchange for two hundred Dutch paintings which the Nazis had plundered early in the war. One of Van Meegeren’s forgeries was sold in 1942 for the 1.6 million Dutch guilders, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

In 1945, May Captain Harry Anderson discovered Christ and The Adulteress in Goering’s personal art collection and soon traced to painting to Van Meegeren.

Van Meegeren was arrested and charged with collaboration for having sold a “Vermeer” to Goering. After two weeks of imprisonment Van Meegeren on June 12 revealed that he could not accused as a collaborator since he had himself painted the painting in question. After being detained in prison for six week, he was placed in a house rented by the Dutch government, and there he began to paint, for the benefit of the court authorities, his last “Vermeer,” Jesus amongst the Doctors.

In November of 1947 Van Meegeren was convicted to one year in prison. One month later, at the age of 58, he fell ill due to years of drug and alcohol abuse and died of a heart attack in prison. In 1950 household effects were auctioned in his house at 321 Keizersgracht in Amsterdam (fig. 6) .

In all he made more that seven million guilders, about $2 million then and roughly about twenty times that amount today. In his last years Van Meegeren lived the high life and had purchased a number of houses (fig. 5) until he was caught.fig. 6 321 Keizersgracht, Amsterdam

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Essential Bibliography

• Abraham Bredius, “A New Vermeer,” Burlington Magazine 71 (November 1937), 210–211.
• Abraham Bredius,, “An Unpublished Vermeer,” Burlington Magazine 61 (October 1932), 145.
• P.B. Coremans, Van Meegeren’s Faked Vermeers and de Hooghs, trans. A Hardy and C. Hutt, London: Cassel, 1949).
• Edward Dolnick, The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
• John Godley, Van Meegeren, Master Forger, New York: Scribner, 1967.
• Mark Jones, Mark, Fake? The Art of Detection, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
• E. Lammertse, Van Meegeren’s Vermeers – The Connoisseurs Eye And The Forger’s Art, Rotterdam: Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2011.
• Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, 2008.
• Jehane Ragai, The Scientist and the Forger: Insights into the Acientific Detection of Forgery in Paintings, London: Imperial College Press, 2015.
• Hans Tietze, Genuine and False, London: Max Parrish & Co, 1948.
• Hope B. Werness, “Han van Meegeren fecit,” in Denis Dutton, ed., The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
• Frank Wynn, I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century’s Greatest Forger, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2006, 2007

List of known forgeries by Han van Meegeren

• A counterpart to Laughing Cavalier after Frans Hals (1923) once the subject of a scandal in The Hague in 1923, its present whereabouts is unknown.
• The Happy Smoker after Frans Hals (1923) hangs in the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands
• Man and Woman at a Spinet 1932 (sold to Amsterdam banker, Dr. Fritz Mannheimer)
• Lady reading a letter[71] 1935–1936 (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum.)
• Lady playing a lute and looking out the window] 1935–1936 (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum.)
• Portrait of a Man[73] 1935–1936 in the style of Gerard ter Borch (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum.)
• Woman Drinking (version of Malle Babbe) 1935–1936 (unsold, on display at the Rijksmuseum.)
• The Supper at Emmaus, 1936–1937 (sold to the Boymans for 520,000–550,000 guldens, about $300,000 or $4 Million today)
• Interior with Drinkers 1937–1938 (sold to D G. van Beuningen for 219,000– 220,000 guldens about $120,000 or $1.6 million today)
• The Last Supper I, 1938–1939
• Interior with Cardplayers 1938 – 1939 (sold to W. van der Vorm for 219,000–220,000 guldens $120,000 or $1.6 million today)
• The Head of Christ, 1940–1941 (sold to D G. van Beuningen for 400,000 – 475,000 guldens about $225,000 or $3.25 million today)
• The Last Supper II, 1940–1942 (sold to D G. van Beuningen for 1,600,000 guldens about $600,000 or $7 million today)
• The Blessing of Jacob 1941–1942 (sold to W. van der Vorm for 1,270,000 guldens about $500,000 or $5.75 million today)
• Christ with the Adulteress 1941–1942 (sold to Hermann Göring for 1,650,000 guldens about $624,000 or $6.75 million today, now in the public collection of Museum de Fundatie)
• The Washing of the Feet 1941–1943 (sold to the Netherlands state for 1,250,000 – 1,300,000 guldens about $500,000 or $5.3 million today, on display at the Rijksmuseum.)
• Jesus among the Doctors September 1945 (sold at auction for 3,000 guldens, about $800 or $7,000 today)
• The Procuress given to the Courtauld Institute as a fake in 1960 and confirmed as such by chemical analysis in 2011.

Banned Again – Tristan Finn Becomes An ‘Unperson’ On Reddit

I was thinking of Alcibiades in the morning. He lived in Ancient Greece and was popular in Athens until he wasn’t. He was voted out of town via a popular vote held yearly to expel people from the body politic.

I was happily posting a video of someone playing with dolls that is very popular on Youtube and I watched with a little one. I wanted to post the short video on r/TelevisionKidShows subreddit that I had set up to vent my opinions of some of the shows I had watched while around children. I’d love to share happy views about ‘Sara and Duck’ or ‘Pepa Pig’ or, irritation at some other shows I had to sit through.

But, when I went to post the video the subreddit was locked, or restricted, or something. I typed in the user name I had for a separate account I used with my laptop in my bedroom while my main account was on a desktop in my kitchen. Near the coffee and food.

But, Tristan Finn did not exist. What? I went into the bedroom and logged into the laptop and Reddit. A fairly popular r/HarpiesBizarre with news and views about women was still in existence, and getting more popular. But, about four other subreddits where gone. One about model trains, how had that offended: one about r/AnythinggoePictures, perhaps I put a photo on, but… I don’t think so.

Maybe the r/HarpiesBizarre survived because I started to use an ‘auto-moderator’ function. When Tristan Finn was banned the auto-mod took over. Replaced by a robot.

I did get a notice that I was banned from some subreddit I could hardly remember posting to. Maybe the moderator of that obscure subreddit visited there abandoned thread and didn’t like a post I made. They might have complained to the administrators of Reddit, or a computer algorithmic complaint form that just banned me. I hadn’t posted using that account or the laptop for about a month or two.

Liberals are on the warpath against ‘wrongthink’ and thought crimes, or word crimes from me – with pictures.

I started paying more for this WordPress blog so I could post more pictures and text and long videos. I don’t worry about censorship. Yet.

Since I have put leaflets for leftist meetings on telephone poles and bulletin boards and stood at the subway station with socialist newspapers I know that there are many telephone poles, and lots of subway stations, and that ideas can be put on paper and spread hand to hand. There are many outlets.

I can also come up with many personalities. I have read lots of books and heard many stories with heroes and villains and freedom lovers and the enemies of freedom.

So, on to the next telephone pole… or virtual telephone pole and high definition subway station.

Like connecting electricity…

https://videopress.com/v/eAWI7FKv?preloadContent=metadata

The Case For Naturalism – Sean Carroll

https://videopress.com/v/t3f9Hjby?preloadContent=metadata

US Postal Service Spies Monitor Online Dissidents – Photo Every Piece of Mail Front and Back – Support Your Postal Police State?

The law enforcement arm of the United States Postal Service (USPS) has been monitoring the social media activity of the US public and sharing its findings with local, state and federal police agencies and private security firms connected to the state.

The covert surveillance program—known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP)—involves USPS analysts combing through the social media pages and events looking for “inflammatory” posts, according to a March 16, 2021 “Situational Awareness Bulletin” obtained and published by Yahoo News on Wednesday.

The iCOP program has been operating under the direction of the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and specifically “monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” according to the bulletin, which is marked “law enforcement sensitive.” The document was circulated through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fusion centers, which serve as a “primary conduit” of federal law enforcement information to states and major urban areas as well as “private sector partners” across the US.

United States Postal Service delivery truck in San Francisco residential area. Location: San Francisco, CA. (Image Credit Alexander Marks aomarks / Wikipedia/Public Domain)

The significance of March 20 is that this is the date that two national and international political demonstrations were being planned. One was a far-right anti-vaccine “Worldwide Rally for Freedom” promoted by QAnon groups. The other was a global campaign called “Stop 5G” promoted by radical anti-science groups decrying the alleged harmful effects of radio waves used by the latest generation of wireless networks.

The bulletin included details about both events as they were promoted on social media, including the date that the events were first published on Facebook and the hashtags used on Twitter to promote them. The iCOP report also provides the number of Facebook followers for each as of March 16. It states, “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms.”

The document provides screenshots of both Facebook event pages and says, “Online inflammatory material has been identified, which suggests potential violence may occur; however, there is currently no intelligence to suggest specific threats.” The report says that a “prominent Proud Boys North Carolina based member [name redacted] known as NobleBeard made a comment regarding the event stating it would take place at ‘Every state capital on March 20th.” This information was found on the right-wing platform Parler.

While most of the detailed information in the iCOP bulletin pertains to “inflammatory or violent messages” from participants in the extreme right-wing demonstration who discussed plans to “confront BLM” and “do some serious damage,” the document also states that the “Global Action to Stop 5G” rallies were being held in California, Denver, Virginia and Vermont.

When asked about the iCOP program by Yahoo News, the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service responded with boilerplate language saying, “The Internet Covert Operations Program is a function within the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which assesses threats to Postal Service employees and its infrastructure by monitoring publicly available open source information.” The statement went on, “In order to preserve operational effectiveness, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service does not discuss its protocols, investigative methods, or tools.”

Screen capture of the March 16 Situational Awareness Bulletin from the US Postal Inspection Service [Image Credit: Yahoo News]

Yahoo News also spoke with Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program. She questioned the legal authority of the USPS to monitor social media activity, saying, “If they’re simply engaging in lawfully protected speech, even if it’s odious or objectionable, then monitoring them on that basis raises serious constitutional concerns.”

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, one of President Barack Obama’s advisers involved in reviewing the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks said, “It’s a mystery. I don’t understand why the government would go to the Postal Service for examining the internet for security issues.”

Going back to 2001, with the creation of the Mail Isolation and Control Tracking System (MICT), the USPS can “retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement.” Since that time the USPS has been scanning every piece of mail that is delivered to each mailbox. With the integration of digital technologies into the process, the USPS has been capturing exterior images of letter-size mail and storing these images in a database.

Among the information being captured are names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, and this information is very similar to the email and phone call metadata that was previously being captured and stored as part of the NSA mass surveillance program. The existence of the MICT system was inadvertently revealed on June 7, 2013 when the FBI was discussing an investigation into the ricin-laced letters sent to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The program was confirmed by Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in an Associated Press interview nine weeks later.

In 2014, the USPS began marketing the MICT system to the public as “Informed Delivery,” a service that enables individuals to view the exterior of the mail arriving in their mailbox before it arrives or before they have a chance to check their mailbox. By 2017 this program had been rolled out to the majority of ZIP codes in the US. Concerns raised by privacy advocates about the surveillance were dismissed with the explanation that the information is only kept for 30 days and the integrity of the data is guaranteed by the USPIS, the very same postal department agency in charge of iCOP.

Given that millions of people have been using end-to-end encryption technologies on their smartphones and computers following the Snowden revelations, the surveillance apparatus has been working on alternative methods of gathering information in violation of basic democratic rights such as AI-based facial recognition cameras and systems located in public and private spaces across the country. The scanning and monitoring of the USPS mail being delivered to homes and businesses is another way to continue such surveillance.

Posturing as upholders of democratic rights, 30 House Republicans are calling for a briefing from the USPS about its social media monitoring. Among the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee demanding a hearing by April 28 are Representatives Jim Jordan (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Mo Brooks (Alabama).

Lenin – Black Lives Matter Banner

“What is to be done?”

The Covidian Cult (Part II) – by C. J. Hopkins –

 APRIL 21, 2021 • 1,900 WORDS •

Photo: Cheri Scudder-Thomas/Twitter

Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult, in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.

A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary), millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled, demanding that everyone submit to being injected with dangerous experimental “vaccines,” and just generally acting delusional and psychotic.

How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”

To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale. There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned Robert J. Lifton in my earlier essay), but, to keep things simple, I’ll just use Margaret Singer’s “Six Conditions of Mind Control” from her 1995 book, Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through. (The italics are Singer. The commentary is mine.)

Six Conditions of Mind Control

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.

Looking back, it is easy to see how people were conditioned, step by step, to accept the “New Normal” ideology. They were bombarded with terrifying propaganda, locked down, stripped of their civil rights, forced to wear medical-looking masks in public, to act out absurd “social-distancing” rituals, submit to constant “testing,” and all the rest of it. Anyone not complying with this behavioral-change program or challenging the veracity and rationality of the new ideology was demonized as a “conspiracy theorist,” a “Covid denier,” an “anti-vaxxer,” in essence, an enemy of the cult, like a “suppresive person” in the Church of Scientology.

2. Control the person’s social and/or physical environment; especially control the person’s time.

For over a year now, the “New Normal” authorities have controlled the social/physical environment, and how New Normals spend their time, with lockdowns, social-distancing rituals, closure of “non-essential” businesses, omnipresent propaganda, isolation of the elderly, travel restrictions, mandatory mask-rules, protest bans, and now the segregation of the “Unvaccinated.” Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape. You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields. What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.

3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.

What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague? The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated. Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.

4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person’s former social identity.

The point here is the transformation of the formerly basically rational person into an entirely different cult-approved person, in our case, an obedient “New Normal” person. Singer gets into this in greater detail, but her discussion applies mostly to subcultural cults, not to large-scale totalitarian movements. For our purposes, we can fold this into Condition 5.

5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group’s beliefs, and compliance are rewarded, while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, they are made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.

OK, I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s a story about a personal experience, which I’m pretty sure you’ve also experienced. It’s a story about a certain New Normal who has been harassing me for several months. I’ll call him Brian Parks, because, well, that’s his name, and I no longer feel any compunction about sharing it.

Brian is a former friend/colleague from the theater world who has gone full “New Normal” and is absolutely furious that I have not. So outraged is Brian that I have not joined the cult that he has been going around on the Internet referring to me as a “conspiracy theorist” and suggesting that I’ve had some kind of nervous breakdown and require immediate psychiatric treatment because I do not believe the official “New Normal” narrative. Now, this would not be a very big deal, except that Brian is impugning my character and attempting to damage my reputation on the Facebook pages of other theater colleagues, which Brian feels entitled to do, given that I am a “Covid denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” and an “anti-vaxxer,” or whatever, and given the fact that he has the power of the state, the media, etc., on his side.

This is how it works in cults, and in larger totalitarian societies. It isn’t usually the Gestapo that comes for you. It’s usually your friends and colleagues. What Brian is doing is working that system of rewards and punishments to enforce his ideology, because he knows that most of my other colleagues in the theater world have also gone full “New Normal,” or at least are looking the other way and staying silent while it is being implemented.

This tactic, obviously, has backfired on Brian, primarily because I do not give a fuck what any New Normals think of me, whether they work in the theater world or anywhere else, but I am in a rather privileged position, because I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in the theater, and would rather stick my hand in a blender than submit my novels to corporate publishers for review by “sensitivity readers,” so there isn’t much to threaten me with. That, and I have no children to support, or administrations to answer to (unlike, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, who is currently being persecuted by the “New Normal” administration at NYU).

The point is, this kind of ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among friends, even among families. The pressure to conform is intense, because nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs, confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their “reality” isn’t reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.

The key difference between how this works in cults and totalitarian ideological movements is that, usually, a cult is a subcultural group, and thus non-cult-members have the power of the ideology of the dominant society to draw on when resisting the mind-control tactics of the cult, and attempting to deprogram its members … whereas, in our case, this balance of power is inverted. Totalitarian ideological movements have the power of governments, the media, the police, the culture industry, academia, and the compliant masses on their side. And, thus, they do not need to persuade anyone. They have the power to dictate “reality.” Only cults operating in total isolation, like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, enjoy this level of control over their members.

This pressure to conform, this ideological conditioning, must be fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences, both publicly and in our private lives, or the “New Normal” will certainly become our “reality.” Despite the fact that we “Covid deniers” are currently outnumbered by the Covidian cultists, we need to behave as if we are not, and hold to reality, facts, and real science, and treat the New Normals as exactly what they are, members of a new totalitarian movement, delusional cultists run amok. If we do not, we will get to Singer’s Condition 6 …

6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.

We’re not there yet, but that is where we’re headed … global pathologized totalitarianism. So, please, speak up. Call things what they are. Confront the Brians in your life. Despite the fact that they tell themselves that they’re trying to help you “come to your senses” or “see the truth,” or “trust the Science,” they are not. They are cultists, desperately trying to get you to conform to their paranoid beliefs, pressuring you, manipulating you, bullying you, threatening you. Do not engage them on their terms, or let them goad you into accepting their premises. (Once they’ve sucked you into their narrative, they’ve won.) Expose them, confront them with their tactics and their motives. You will probably not change their minds in the least, but your example might help other New Normals whose faith is slipping to begin to recognize what has been done to their minds and break with the cult.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

Ten Influential Writers Whose Last Days Were Shrouded In Mystery – by Tristan Shaw

When a great writer who has revolutionized literature and language dies, it tends to be under plain, ordinary circumstances, maybe from a common illness or old age. Their deaths are widely reported in the media and accompanied by outbursts of respect and grief by their many devoted fans. However, every now and then, some notable poet or novelist disappears or dies under circumstances so strange and mysterious that nobody can say with certainty what exactly happened.

10 Weldon Kees

Although far less-known than contemporaries like John Berryman and Robert Lowell, the poet Weldon Kees is considered to have been one of the best of his generation, with a cult following and admiration. One of his admirers, the poet Donald Justice, remarked that “Kees is original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice which we have never heard before.” In addition to poetry, Kees had a wide number of other interests, also working as a painter, jazz pianist, filmmaker, critic, and short story writer.

Welton Kees

In the early 1950s, his wife Amy began to become a paranoid alcoholic. Kees got her to check into a psychiatric ward, but she left after three weeks, and the couple then separated and divorced. He moved into a small apartment by himself and took to living the life of a bachelor again, but this seemed not to have made him feel any better. On July 19, 1955, police found his car with the keys in the ignition on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. A search of his apartment yielded no clues, aside from the discovery that his wallet, watch, and sleeping bag were also gone. The day before, his friend Janet Richards reported that he had contemplated going to Mexico. Kees, at any rate, has not officially been seen since, although there have been reports of him in New Orleans and Mexico.

9 Pablo Neruda

Photo via Wikipedia

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, born Ricardo Eliecer Netyali Reyes Basoalto, skyrocketed to stardom with his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published when he was only 19 years old. In 1927, Neruda became a diplomat, moving and working all across the world. He was working in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, which left a deep impression on him; he was especially devastated by the death of his friend, Federico Garcia Lorca. In 1945, after years of openly praising Joseph Stalin and communism, he joined Chile’s Communist Party. He continued to write prolifically over the next three decades and further devoted himself to the left-wing causes of the day, such as opposing the Vietnam War and supporting and serving the socialist Salvador Allende’s government during his 1970–73 presidency.

Allende’s government was overthrown by a right-wing coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, while Neruda was suffering from prostate cancer. Twelve days after the coup, Neruda died in a hospital, his death being attributed to the cancer. There were allegations that he was poisoned, especially after it became known that he called a friend before he died, saying that he felt sick after being given an injection by a tall, blond, blue-eyed doctor called Dr. Price.

Dr. Price has never been traced, although a CIA double agent named Michael Townley, who was working for dictator Pinochet’s regime, has been strongly suspected. Harmutt Hopp, a German doctor with Nazi ties, has also been accused, along with a Pinochet collaborator named Manfred Jurgensen. Neruda’s body was exhumed in 2013. No trace of poison was found, but a new investigation announced by the Chilean government in 2015 will again examine Neruda’s remains for anything unnatural.

8 Arthur Cravan

Arthur Cravan was a flamboyant, larger-than-life Swiss poet admired by the Dadaists and Surrealists. He worked hard to cultivate a public image of a shocking, unconventional libertine by being routinely drunk, pulling his pants down in public, fighting a world champion boxer, and infuriating fellow artists and poets with his critical magazine Maintenant! The poet Guillaume Apollinaire once challenged him to a duel after Cravan criticized a self-portrait by his lover, Marie Laurencin.

Cravan’s life is a bit hard to document; he used many different names, forged passports, and once claimed himself a “citizen of 20 countries.” What can be certain is that he was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in Lausanne, Switzerland, on May 22, 1887, the son of Otto Holland Lloyd, the brother-in-law of Oscar Wilde. From 1903–17, he traveled across the world, living in Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona before he fled to New York to avoid being drafted into World War I. Arriving penniless, he spent his first few months drinking and sleeping in a public park, until he gained notoriety for giving a drunken speech at the Premier Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, which ended in the police being called after Cravan undressed and swore at the audience.8.4KThe Last Days On Mars

It wasn’t long before Cravan moved on to Mexico City, where he founded a boxing school and married the English poet Mina Loy in 1918. From the Mexican coast, the couple planned to make a trip to Buenos Aires but could only afford a boat ticket for one of them. Loy took the ticket, and Cravan decided to make the journey by himself on a small fishing boat.

Loy waited and waited for her husband in Argentina, but he never arrived. Because a storm broke out over the days he was assumed to be sailing, it’s possible that he capsized and drowned. Others theorize, since his body was never found, that Cravan had grown bored of married life and faked his death. He was supposedly spotted in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam during the 1920s, living under the names of Dorian Hope and Sebastian Hope, publishing plagiarized poetry and forged Oscar Wilde manuscripts.

7 Sandor Petofi

Photo via Wikipedia

Idolized as Hungary’s greatest poet, Sandor Petofi was a nationalist and revolutionary instrumental in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, a failed revolt that tried to break Hungary free from its Austrian rulers of the time. His poems were typically about nature, love, family, everyday life, and especially patriotism.

Petofi started writing poetry at an early age, and when he was 15, he won first prize in a poetry contest. His youth, however, was a troubled one, with his family experiencing financial difficulties and Petofi doing very poorly in school. When he was 16, Petofi left his eighth school and spent the next few years working a number of different jobs, including as a soldier and actor. In 1844, he met Mihaly Vorosmarty, then Hungary’s best-known poet. With Vorosmarty’s help, he published his first volume of poetry, which brought him instant fame and success.

Over the next four years, Petofi became increasingly political, running unsuccessfully for a seat on the Diet, denouncing the abuses of the Austrian monarchy, and taking up the cause of Hungarian independence. The widespread dissemination of his poem “National Day” and 12-Points declaration (a list of demands of the young Hungarian revolutionaries) moved the Hungarians to action, and Petofi joined the army involved in the Hungarian Revolution from the outset in 1848. On July 31, 1849, during the Battle of Segesvar, Petofi disappeared. It’s believed that he died in the fighting, but his body was never recovered. While he likely might have been buried in a mass grave, others insist that he was captured by Austria’s Russian allies and died as a prisoner in Siberia.

6 Sergei Yesenin

Photo credit: Ekaterina Grub

Sergei Yesenin was a rowdy, drunken Russian poet as well-known for his wild behavior as his verse. The son of peasants, he left his village and moved to Moscow when he was 17. Inspired by Russian folklore and peasant culture, his first collection of poems, Ritual for the Dead, was published in 1916. Initially, he supported the Bolshevik Revolution but soon became disillusioned. In 1921, he published Confessions of a Hooligan, which marked a change to a more cynical, decadent style. The next year, he married for the first time to an American dancer named Isadora Duncan. Yesenin followed her on a European tour, with the international press taking much note of the couple’s constant bickering and Yesenin’s drunken furies, which inspired him to trash many of the expensive hotel rooms they stayed in.

After they separated, Yesenin became more depressed, especially after returning to his village to see his old friends and neighbors wrapped up in the ideals of the revolution. Feeling as though he had betrayed the ordinary people, Yesenin tried making amends by writing poems in praise of the new government and a socialist reorganization of society, but this didn’t make him feel any better. In December 1925, after being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, he went on a two-day drinking spree and then checked into a Leningrad hotel. He slashed his wrists there, using the blood to write his final poem, and then hanged himself.

Yesenin’s death inspired several copycat suicides. He was extraordinarily popular during his lifetime, and even after the government banned his work following his death, his work remained popular. Because the communist authorities disliked him so much for his individualism and wild antics, some theorize that the secret police assassinated him. A subsequent novel, Yesenin, and a TV adaptation have further popularized this conspiracy theory.

5 Vladimir Mayakovsky

Photo via Wikipedia

Vladimir Mayakovsky, like his contemporary Sergey Esenin, considered himself a poet of the people. He wrote his passionate, powerful poems in a simple, colloquial style intended for a mass audience. He was also initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, even working for the Soviet government from 1919–21 as a painter of cartoons and posters. When Esenin committed suicide, Mayakovsky was shocked. He regarded it as a betrayal of communism. In response to Esenin’s final lines, he wrote:

It’s not difficult to die.
To make life
is more difficult by far.

Despite this harsh rebuke, Mayakovsky committed suicide five years later, also under mysterious circumstances. The freedom of the early days under Lenin and Trotsky had been replaced by the Stalinist crackdown.

On April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky’s girlfriend, Veronika Polonskaya, had just stepped out of his apartment after a big argument with him. She heard a gunshot and then ran back inside to find him lying on the ground with blood all over his shirt. He had shot himself in the heart. An ambulance was called for, but he died before it arrived. He was 37 years old.

By the time of his suicide, Mayakosvky was deeply depressed and felt unbearably alienated after devoting his life to a cause he no longer belonged in. His last plays, two satirical pieces, were critical of the government and panned by loyal critics. A few days before his suicide, during a lecture at the University of Moscow, he was booed and attacked. To add to his misery, his girlfriend, a married woman, refused to leave her husband. According to the official account, this was the last straw for Mayakovsky.

However, there is a persistent rumor that Mayakovsky was killed by the Stalinist secret police. Because of his public criticism and the repressive mood of the time, this might not be very far-fetched. His friends, Lilya Brik (pictured above with Vladimir) and Osip Mandelstam were allegedly spying on him for the authorities. Most suspiciously, the officer who was investigating the poet’s death was shot and killed 10 days later. Whatever the truth of the matter is, Mayakovsky grew only more popular after his death, with Josef Stalin declaring him the “best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”

4 Shams Tabrizi

Photo credit: Elmju

The mystic poet Shams Tabrizi, while obscure to those unfamiliar with Persian literature, was the teacher of Rumi, one of the best-selling poets in the world. On November 15, 1244, Shams was walking through the city of Konya (in modern-day Turkey) when he stopped and noticed Rumi in the middle of a marketplace.

Immediately, Shams asked him, “Who is greater, the prophet Muhammad or the great teacher Betsami?” Rumi, of course, answered that Muhammad was greater. In an Islamic dictatorship the ‘Prophet Mohamed’ is considered to be the ‘perfect human being.’ To claim to be better than Mohamed would be to ask for a death sentence. The question is a trick one.

Shams then asked another question: “Betsami said ‘I am great because Allah is within me,’ whereas Muhammad said, ‘God is great in His infinite mercy.’ How would you explain this?”

Rumi was so startled by this question that he fell to his knees. Although a great religious scholar, he had never really considered the properties and vastness of Allah. Rumi was captivated by Shams, and for the next three years, the pair were inseparable.

Rumi’s students, however, became jealous of Shams; they were worried about the influence he was exerting on their teacher. In December 1247, Shams suddenly vanished. Varying accounts exist of what happened to him. Some say he was murdered by Rumi’s son and students. The scholar Aflaki writes that he was killed by his enemies, either thrown into a well or ambushed by a group of seven unknown men, who stabbed him to death.

Rumi was devastated by Sham’s disappearance. Hearing rumors that Shams had fled to Damascus, he traveled there and found no trace of him. In his intense grief and love, Rumi composed a collection of 40,000 verses called The Works of Shams Tabrizi, considered one of the greatest masterpieces of Persian literature.

3 Federico Garcia Lorca

Photo credit: Pere Joan Barcelo

Federico Garcia Lorca was a Spanish poet and playwright known for his surreal, folk-inspired style. He was born on June 5, 1898, near Granada in the small town of Fuente Vaqueros. In 1919, he moved to Madrid, where he made a number of popular friends, including Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

He dropped out of university to focus on his art, staging his first play in 1920 and publishing his first collection of poems the following year. His breakthrough came in 1928 with Gypsy Ballads, a massively popular set of poems, which went through seven printings over the next decade. He then spent about a year in New York City, returning to Spain after the country re-established itself as a republic. Working for a government-funded traveling theater troupe called La Barraca, Garcia Lorca wrote and performed the three great tragedies of his Trilogy of Blood plays: Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936).

In August 1936, a month after the Spanish Civil War began, Garcia Lorca was arrested by Francisco Franco’s right wing Nationalists. What exactly happened next is unclear, but Garcia Lorca was eventually executed after his arrest, possibly on August 19. During his lifetime, General Franco denied having anything to do with the poet’s death, claiming, “The writer died while mixing with the rebels, these are natural accidents of war.” General Franco was backed by fascist Italy, and Nazis Germany.

However, in April 2015, Franco-era documents were released that admitted to the government’s involvement. Previously, Garcia Lorca was thought to have been killed by a firing squad with three other men, but the leaked documents instead claim that he was immediately executed and buried in a shallow grave after a confession. What was said in his ‘confession’ elicited under fascistic torture is not known; his crimes might have been being gay and a socialist leftist. Where exactly his body lies is still unknown. All attempts to find his remains have resulted in nothing.

2 Maxim Gorky

Photo via Wikipedia

A highly productive playwright, writer, and political activist throughout his life, Maxim (or Maksim) Gorky has often been hailed as “the greatest ‘proletarian’ in Russian literature.” Best-known for his 1902 play The Lower Depths, Gorky is famous throughout the world for his touching portraits of outcasts, the poor, and other members of the bottom strata of society.

Gorky, whose name meant “bitter,” was born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, on March 28, 1868. Peshkov’s father died when he was five years old, and after his mother remarried, he was sent off to live with his maternal grandparents. Although his grandmother was very loving, his grandfather was a cruel and abusive man whom the young Peshkov greatly feared. When his grandfather’s dye shop began to fail, he had to quit school at age eight and go to work. He ran away from home when he was 12, spending his teenage years wandering around Russia and performing small jobs. After a suicide attempt in 1889, he turned to writing under his pseudonym and attracted national attention over the next decade for his powerful, realistic short stories.

Gorky was an ardent revolutionary and Marxist and frequently came under the eye of the czar’s government. After being briefly jailed for his role in the Russian Revolution of 1905, Gorky left the country for seven years, not being allowed back until 1913. Four years later, after Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky led the Bolsheviks to overthrow the capitalist government, he became vocally disillusioned with the Bolsheviks and was again forced into exile from 1918–28. Afterward, he paid the Soviet Union several visits until he returned permanently in 1932 to great acclaim.

Despite his criticism of Stalin during his period abroad, Gorky spent the next few years politically quiet, being banned from foreign travel in 1933 and becoming the leader of the Union of Soviet Writers the next year. In 1936, at the age of 68, he suddenly died while undergoing medical treatment. Rumors spread that Stalin ordered his death, and a 1936 trial for the revolutionary Nikolay Bukharin claimed that he had been poisoned by a “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites.” One of the defendants, a police chief named Genrikh Yagoda, later confessed to having been ordered by Stalin to kill the great writer.

1 Solomon Northup

Photo via Wikipedia

Solomon Northup was an African-American farmer and musician who wrote the 1853 memoir 12 Years a Slave, the source material of the highly acclaimed Steve McQueen movie of the same name. Born in 1808 in Minerva, New York, to a free man, Northup spent his youth working on his father’s farm, reading books, and playing the violin. He married Anne Hampton in 1829 and had three children with her. The family got along pretty well financially, with Anne working at one of the community’s biggest hotels and Northup working as a popular musician.

In 1841, two white men claiming to be part of a circus offered Northup money to play for several of their performances and managed to convince him to head south to Washington, DC, with them. Once in Washington, the men drugged Northup and sold him into slavery. Northup suffered 12 brutal years on a plantation in Louisiana until a lawyer was able to prove that he was a free man. Once released, Northup published his famous memoir the same year, and became active in the abolitionist movement.

Around 1863, however, Northup vanishes from the historical record. No death certificate has ever turned up, and cemeteries all over New York have been checked to no avail. Historians simply have no idea what happened to him. After Northup disappeared, a relative of his said in a letter that, “We believe that he was kidnapped or killed, or both.” The idea that he was kidnapped again has largely been dismissed, since he would have been too old to have been very profitable. The possibility that he was murdered by his old kidnappers is doubtful, too. Northup might instead have just dropped out of public sight, going off to live with one of his daughters or sinking into poverty and obscurity. Still, others like author David Fiske suggest that he reinvented his identity and moved to California.

…………………….

Tristan Shaw is a lover of mysteries and literature who really does wonder what happened to his favorite American writer, Ambrose Bierce?

Ten Skillful Forgers Who Totally Conned The Art World – by Ward Hazell

Art is a strange thing, but the business of art is stranger. If a painting has been authenticated as a masterpiece, it can command huge prices in galleries and auction houses. The dealer gets a fee, the auction house gets a fee, and the buyer gets a masterpiece that will appreciate in value. They have no interest in finding out later that it is worthless. And so, even questionable paintings go by unquestioned.

Police have estimated that up to half of the art sold on the international market may be forged. Major museums are estimated to hold collections that are about 20-percent fake. In April 2018, one museum in France discovered that 82 of their 140 Etienne Terrus paintings were counterfeit. The forgeries were only spotted when an eagle-eyed visitor noticed that some of the buildings featured in the paintings were built after the artist’s death. Oops.^[1]

Artists often receive only a small fraction of the hammer prices for valuable artworks. Sometimes, those artists decide to fight back.

10 Han Van Meegeren

Photo credit: Koos Raucamp

In 1932, Han van Meegeren, stung by criticisms that his work was “unoriginal,” decided that he would create a new and original work by the great master Johannes Vermeer. He told himself that once the painting was accepted by leading scholars, he would denounce it as a hoax.

He created his painting, called Supper at Emmaus. He used genuine 17th-century canvas and only pigments that would have been available at the time. He added Bakelite to the paints, which made them dry rock-hard, giving the impression of great age.^[2]

Supper at Emmaus

Van Meegeren At Trial 1945

It was proclaimed a masterpiece and purchased by a Dutch gallery, becoming the highlight of their exhibition. The moment for Van Meegeren to announce his fake came. And went. He decided, instead, to work on another one. And another. And another.

In 1945, Van Meegeren made the mistake of selling one of his Vermeers to the Nazi leader Hermann Goering. When the war ended, he was charged with treason for selling a work of national importance to a member of the Nazi party. Van Meegeren was forced to admit, in his defense, that the work was a forgery. He became famous overnight, not only as the world’s best art forger but also as “the man who swindled Goering.”

Without this reluctant confession, Van Meegeren might have continued to fool the art world forever.

9 Michelangelo

NextStayPhoto credit: Jacopino del Conte

Michelangelo started his career as an art forger. He created a number of statues, including one called the Sleeping Cupid (or simply Cupid ), when he was working for Lorenzo di Pierfranseco. Di Pierfranseco asked Michelangelo to “fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried.” Di Pierfranseco intended to sell the sculpture as an ancient work, not knowing that an authentic work by Michelangelo would one day command a much higher price.

The piece was sold to Cardinal Raffaello Riario, who, on discovering that the piece had been artificially aged, demanded his money back from di Pierfranseco. He was, however, sufficiently impressed by Michelangelo’s skill that he did not press charges for fraud. He allowed Michelangelo to keep his fee and invited him to come to Rome to do a spot of work at the Vatican, which turned out rather well for both of them.

Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid was later purchased by King Charles I of England, where it is thought to have been destroyed in a palace fire in 1698.^[3]

8 Reinhold Vasters

Photo credit: Walters Art Museum

Reinhold Vasters was an accomplished German goldsmith in his own right. He was also a very accomplished forger in, well, not his own right. Many of his pieces have turned up in private collections and museums, and it is certain that there are more waiting to be discovered.

Vasters had won prizes for his own work, including at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. He specialized in creating religious pieces in gold and silver. It is believed that he began to create his forgeries in order to support his family after the death of his wife.^[4] He seems to have been especially prolific in faking Renaissance jewelry, with several pieces turning up in the Rothschild collection.

As of 1984, the Met Museum had uncovered 45 fakes in their own collection which were created by Vasters, including the Rospigliosi Cup, which was previously attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. But the Met is not alone. The Walters Museum purchased Vessel In The Form of a Sea Monster (pictured above), which they believed to have been carved by Alessandro Miseroni and mounted in gold by Hans Vermeyen in the early 17th century. But it turned out to be another Vaster piece.

The forgeries were not discovered until 60 years after Vaster’s death, so there is no way to tell how many he created, which must be a little nerve-wracking for collectors.

7 Elmyr De Hory

Photo credit: Crime Library

Elmyr de Hory was a faker in every possible way. He moved to the US after World War II, portraying himself as a dispossessed Hungarian aristocrat who had survived a concentration camp and was now forced to sell off his family heirlooms to survive, none of which is provable or likely. It is claimed that he sold over 1,000 forgeries during his career, many of which have not yet been uncovered.^[5]

After failing in his career as an artist, de Hory sold a pen and ink drawing to a woman who “mistook it” for a Picasso, and a new career was born. He began to sell more Picassos, claiming that they were part of his family collection. He forged works not only from Picasso but added in Matisse, Modigliani, and Renoir, among others.

However, suspicions were raised when he sold a “Matisse” to the Fogg Art Museum and followed it up by offering them a “Modigliani” and a “Renoir,” which all appeared suspiciously similar in style. In 1955, de Hory was charged with mail fraud after selling a piece of art via the post. However, he continued his career, moving from city to city selling off his “family heirlooms.”

De Hory’s career came to an end after partnering with Fernand Legros. As de Hory was now known in the art world, he “retired” abroad, and Legros sold his paintings and took a (very) generous cut. Legros was not a careful man, however. He sold 56 forgeries to a single Texan oil magnate, who did not take the discovery well. The affair created worldwide interest in de Hory, and he became a celebrity. Unfortunately, the game was up when he was ordered to be extradited, and he committed suicide in 1976 rather than face jail.

Ironically, the work of Elmyr de Hory himself is now sought after, and “fake forgeries” have begun to appear in auctions around the world, with other artists pretending to be de Hory pretending to be someone else

6 Robert Driessen

Robert Driessen began his art career selling tourist art pieces in Holland and then moved on to painting “in the style of” other artists. It wasn’t long before he was painting and sculpting outright forgeries. Driessen is particularly known for his copies of the work of Alberto Giacometti, whose art can sell for millions of dollars.

The profession of forger can be a very lucrative one, and for a time, Driessen became extremely rich. It is believed that he earned millions of dollars from his artworks.^[6]

Robert Driessen moved to Thailand in 2005 after a warrant was issued for his arrest in Germany. He claims that he was paid to skip the country by art dealers who had made millions selling his work and didn’t want to be involved in the scandal. It is estimated that there are still over 1,000 Driessen forgeries in circulation, most of which have not yet been discovered.

5 Tom Keating

Photo credit: The Vibe

Tom Keating has been described as the most important forger of the 20th century. He specialized in producing watercolors by Samuel Palmer and oil paintings by old masters. Having failed to achieve fame as an artist in his own right, Keating turned his back on the art gallery system, which he regarded as “utterly rotten.” He believed that galleries and dealers were taking advantage of artists and making millions from their efforts, while paying the artists a pittance. His forgeries were a means of redressing the balance.^[7]

Keating planted “time bombs” in all his pictures, writing rude comments on the canvas in white lead before he began the painting. When the painting was X-rayed, the messages would show up. He also included obvious mistakes in the pictures and used materials not in keeping with the period. He even painted one picture backwards! Anyone, except a greedy art dealer with an eye to making a fast buck, should have been able to spot the forgeries.

But they clearly didn’t, and Keating is estimated to have created over 2,000 pieces “in the style of” 100 different artists. Keating and his partner, Jane Kelly, were finally arrested in 1977, when 13 very similar Samuel Palmer watercolors aroused suspicion. Kelly pleaded guilty. However, Keating’s trial was halted due to his ill health. He went on to make a number of TV appearances and write a book about his forgery career before passing away in 1984.

4 Yves Chaudron

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Yves Chaudron was a French forger who is believed to have made six copies of the Mona Lisa as part of a conspiracy to steal the original. The plan was to steal the da Vinci masterpiece from the wall of the Louvre and then sell the six copies to prospective buyers, who would each believe that they had bought the stolen original. And, of course, the thieves would get to keep the finest painting in the world for themselves.

The plan was brilliant because even if the forgeries were detected, the buyers would be unable to report it to the police. The original was stolen in 1911 and was missing for two years before it was discovered in the bottom of a trunk. At this time, La Gioconda, as the painting is officially called, was merely famous, rather than world-famous. The thief simply took it off the wall, and the theft was not discovered until the next day.

Rumors persist that the painting that was returned to the Louvre was one of the six forgeries. No one has ever admitted to buying any of the fake Mona Lisas, and the story of the greatest art swindle has never been proven.^[8] (Some even claimed that Yves Chaudron never existed!)

3 Ely Sakhai

Photo credit: Alchetron

Ely Sakhai was not himself an artist, but he employed a number of artists to create forgeries for him. He owned a high-end art gallery in New York, and it is alleged that he created forgeries for over 20 years before he was caught.^[9]

Sakhai purchased authentic artworks by such well-known painters as Renoir and Gaugin perfectly legitimately, at respectable auction houses. He then employed artists to make copies of the paintings before selling them with the original certificates of authenticity. It was only when Christie’s and Sotheby’s both offered the same painting by Gaugin at the same time that the scheme fell apart.

One of the paintings being sold was owned by Sakhai, the other by a private seller who, ten years previously, had bought the picture from, wait for it, Ely Sakhai. Oops. It was just Sakhai’s bad luck that the other owner decided to sell at the same time that he was offloading his.

Further investigations showed a whole lot more fakes sold from Sakhai’s gallery, and he was charged with eight counts of wire fraud. He is thought to have made over $3.5 million from his crimes. In 2005, Sakhai pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and given a $12.5 million fine. He was also ordered to forfeit the 11 authentic artworks in his possession, from which his copies had been made.

Hardly seems worth it.

2 John Myatt

Photo credit: Fabio De Paola

John Myatt began his career selling “genuine fakes” for £150 each. However, when one of his clients came back to him and said he had sold the painting for £25,000 and suggested that they go into business together, a new career was born.

Myatt is said to have created more that 200 forgeries of famous 19th- and 20th-century painters. Myatt and his partner were convicted of conspiracy to defraud in 1999, and Myatt was sentenced to one year in prison, although he only served four months, during which time he swapped his pencil drawings for phone cards. When he left prison, he decided that his art career was over, until he was commissioned by his arresting officer to paint a family portrait, followed by requests from the prosecuting barristers. Another career as a celebrity art faker beckoned.^[10]

There are still an estimated 120 undiscovered Myatt fakes in circulation, but the artist refuses to disclose where they are. “I can’t see who gains,” he says. If he spoke up, the $100,000 paintings on the buyers’ walls would suddenly be worth nothing, so everyone involved appears to have agreed to live in blissful ignorance.

John Myatt continues to create paintings “in the style of” Monet, van Gogh, and Vermeer, among others, and his paintings are regularly offered for sale through a gallery, though they are now clearly labeled as his own work.

1 Wolfgang Beltracchi

Photo credit: BBC Arts

Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the most famous art forgers ever. He was certainly one of the richest. Beltracchi forged paintings by some of the world’s most famous artists, and his work was, and probably still is, in some of the most famous galleries in the world. One of his paintings even graced the cover of Christie’s catalogue, though Christie’s didn’t know it at the time.

A gifted painter, he spent years studying the work and styles of the painters who he copied. He never copied an existing painting, instead choosing to paint a picture that the artist might have painted and allowing a new work to be attributed to the master. While he painted the pictures, his wife acted as a seller, auctioning off “family pieces” and faking provenances.

The couple were living in luxury, with several homes, fast cars, and even a yacht. However, the party was over when he created a Campendonk painting using titanium white paint. When the painting was analyzed, it was clear that such a pigment would not have been available at the time the painting should have been made. He and his wife were both arrested and sent to prison. Since his release, Beltracchi has resumed painting, this time signing his work with his own name.^[11]

When asked if he would change anything about his life, he has said, “I would never, never use titanium white.”

Ward Hazell is a writer who travels, and an occasional travel writer.

10 Final Paintings By Artists Who Committed Suicide – by Josh Fox

 JULY 18, 2015

Many artists have passed away and left a final masterpiece tantalizingly unfinished. Even more interesting, albeit in a slightly morbid fashion, are the last works of artists who took their own lives. Some such works seem to hint at the dark thoughts consuming their creator, while others seem ironically serene and peaceful in relation to the artist’s inner suffering.

10Zebra And Parachute
Christopher Wood

Photo via tate.org

Zebra And Parachute was one of two paintings that Christopher Wood produced in Paris in the summer of 1930, the other being Tiger And Arc De Triomphe. Both paintings depict a surreal image of an exotic animal against the backdrop of a manmade structure, although Zebra And Parachute is unique in that it adds a parachuting figure in the sky. It may be darkly significant that the parachutist is limp and appears to be either dead or seriously injured.

After leaving Paris for England in August 1930, Wood met his mother in Salisbury to show her his newest works, including Zebra And Parachute. Tragically, Wood was suffering from the effects of opium withdrawal, which caused paranoia and the belief that he was being followed by a mysterious entity. In a desperate attempt to escape his imagined pursuer, Woods jumped in front of a train that very same day. To avoid upsetting his mother, the death often referred to as accidental by the contemporary press.

9Nu Sur La Plage
John William Godward

Photo via wikimedia.org

Over the course of his 40-year career, John Godward rarely deviated from painting beautiful women in robes. This style made him famous and he was often praised for depicting the rippling movement of classical clothing with incredible accuracy. But his paintings weren’t universal critical hits, with many dismissing his idealized and historically inaccurate portraits as “Victorians in togas.” His own family despised his choice of career and disowned him after he moved to Italy in 1912, destroying all photographs that reminded them of his existence

In his old age, Godward produced fewer and fewer paintings as his health deteriorated. His last known paintings are Contemplation and Nu Sur La Plage (“Nude On The Beach”), both of which were completed in the months before his death. Nu Sur La Plage is especially significant, because it marks a deviation from Godward’s usual style of classical scenes featuring fine clothes and marble surfaces. By then, Godward’s classical style was considered extremely unfashionable, but he apparently felt unable to change. In December 1922, he took his own life, writing in his suicide note that the world was not big enough for him and Picasso.

8Le Concert
Nicolas De Stael

2.9M684Amazon Pledges $2 Billion Investment in Clean EnergyPhoto via francois-murez.com

Nicolas de Stael was a prolific French abstract artist, producing thousands of paintings and drawings over the course of a relatively short career. In the last five months of his life alone, he produced 147 paintings, the last of which was most likely Blue Nude Lying, which was completed in 1955. In March of that year, he committed suicide by jumping from a tall building in Antibes, leaving his final work, Le Concert, unfinished. He was 41 years old.

Le Concert was de Stael’s largest and most ambitious painting, measuring six meters (20 ft) by 3.5 meters (11.5 ft). It features a grand piano and a double bass on a floor littered with sheets of music, referencing the fact that these two instruments are traditionally not removed from the stage after a concert is over. De Stael was inspired by a concert he had attended the night before, racing home and working on the painting all the next day, until the bad light made it impossible to continue. He then burned all his sketches and jumped to his death. Shortly before he died, he wrote, “I have not the strength to complete my paintings.”

7The Death Of James Dean
John Minton

Photo via tate.org

The final work of painter and illustrator John Minton was still incomplete when he committed suicide in January 1957. The unfinished painting depicts a gravely injured man surrounded by distraught onlookers. On the day before Minton’s death, the painter Ruskin Spear visited him at his studio and was told that he identified the dying figure with Hollywood actor James Dean, who had died two years previously in a car accident at the age of just 24.

Spear believed that James Dean represented the suffering of the younger generation, which Minton strongly related to. However, the true identity of the dying figure is debatable. It has been suggested that a more direct inspiration for the painting was a similar car accident which Minton witnessed in Barcelona and later came to identify with Dean. Minton’s suicide was provoked by his depression and a loss of confidence after the rise of abstract art caused the popularity of his work to decline. Although the painting is clearly unfinished, there are indications that Minton didn’t intend to do any further work on it, telling a friend that he was worried about turning it “into another Johnny Minton painting.”https://6b4eaabbf4a7bd328655793373487c58.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

6Untitled (Black On Gray)
Mark Rothko

Photo via tate.org

Mark Rothko’s reputation as an abstract artist largely rests on his famous paintings of vibrantly colored rectangles. These works were widely praised for their use of color to provoke emotional responses. But Rothko despised such praise and apparently wished to be taken more seriously as an artist and not just as a colorist. He insisted that he only cared about depicting emotion and was “not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else.”

Toward the end of his life, his paintings became more bland and desolate, most likely in an attempt to challenge his public reputation. His final series of works were “the Black Paintings,” most of which consisted of a black and grey canvas with a horizontal divide and a thin white border. By Rothko’s own admission, the paintings are about death. Shortly after separating from his wife, and suffering from severe depression, Rothko committed suicide by slicing his wrists in his New York studio in 1970.https://6b4eaabbf4a7bd328655793373487c58.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

5Une Famille Dans La Desolation
Constance Mayer

Photo via yale.edu

Although Constance Mayer killed herself while working on Une Famille Dans La Desolation (“A Miserable Family“) it isn’t unfinished. It was completed by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Mayer’s partner in one of the most famous doomed affairs in art history.

Meeting in 1803, when Prud’hon was one of the most famous painters in France and Mayer was a rising young artist, they soon became close collaborators, to the point where it’s said to be difficult to tell where her work ends and his begins. Since Prud’hon preferred drawing to painting, he would often sketch the design for a painting and Mayer would finish it in oils. Since Prud’hon was better-known (and a man) these were often sold as his work alone, with owners even replacing her name with his to get a better price. Still, Mayer was successful in her own right and maintained a studio in the Sorbonne.

It would have been a perfect match, but Prud’hon already had a miserable family of his own. He and his wife actually had six children, although the marriage was so unhappy that she had a breakdown and eventually died in a mental hospital. In one version of the story, Prud’hon’s promised his wife on her deathbed that he would never remarry, devastating Constance. Others suggest that the government requisitioning her Sorbonne studio pushed her over the edge. Either way, on May 26, 1821, Mayer cut her own throat with Prud’hon’s shaving razor. Devastated, Prud’hon would pass away two years later, but not before completing their final collaboration, a portrait of a grieving family.https://6b4eaabbf4a7bd328655793373487c58.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

4Riding With Death
Jean-Michel Basquiat

Photo via wikiart.org

Jean-Michel Basquiat began his artistic career while in his teenage years, as a graffiti artist in Manhattan, before transitioning to painting later in life. His work quickly attracted widespread acclaim for its depth and composition and Basquiat was soon the toast of the art world. Unfortunately, the artist was also struggling with a heroin addiction and died of a “speedball” overdose (essentially a mix of heroin and cocaine) when he was only 27.

Basquiat was prolific and it isn’t clear exactly which is his final finished painting. But one of the likely candidates seems to be Riding with Death, which was completed in the months before his suicide in 1988. The work features a skeletal creature being straddled by a human figure. Although much of Basquiat’s late work has been criticized as lazy and overly commercial, Riding With Death remains a firm critical favorite, with some critics linking it to the concept of spiritual possession (“being ridden”) in Haitian voodoo. Other contenders for the title of Basquiat’s last painting are Eroica II, The Dingoes That Park Their Brains With Their Gum, and The Mechanics That Always Have A Gear Left Over.https://6b4eaabbf4a7bd328655793373487c58.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

3Nude Self-Portrait With Palette
Richard Gerstl

Photo via wikimedia.org

Richard Gerstl produced arguably his best work while engaged in a scandalous secret affair affair with Mathilde, the wife of famous composer Arnold Schoenberg. During the affair, Gerstl painted multiple nudes of both himself and Mathilde. After being discovered together in “a compromising position,” the pair fled from Mathilde’s husband and continued their relationship. Unfortunately for Gerstl, Mathilde eventually left him and returned to Schoenberg “for the sake of the children.”

Distraught by this, Gerstl would take his own life in November 1908, at the tender age of 25. To do the deed, he first stabbed himself in the torso. When this failed, he hung himself in front of a mirror in his new studio, surrounded by his paintings. His last known painting was Nude Self-Portrait With Palette, completed in September 1908, which shows a sickly pale and thin Gerstl on a vivid blue background. The long, jagged brushstrokes apparently indicate that the painting was created quickly, reflecting the artist’s agitated state at the time.https://6b4eaabbf4a7bd328655793373487c58.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

2Agony
Arshile Gorky

Photo via usc.edu

Arshile Gorky was an abstract expressionist painter who predominantly worked using simple shapes and colors to express meaning. In the years leading up to his death, Gorky endured many unfortunate and tragic events. In 1946, a fire broke out at his studio and many of his finest paintings were burnt to ash. In the weeks following this, his health deteriorated and he was diagnosed with cancer. Shortly after that, he discovered that his wife Agnes had been cheating on him with another artist. The couple separated, and Agnes moved away with their two daughters.

In 1947, Gorky produced numerous paintings, including Agony, The Plough And The Song, and The Limit And The Beginning, any of which might be said to have been his last work. Agony is perhaps the most interesting, since it can only be understood in relation to Gorky’s immense suffering shortly before his death. The blazing red colour, which Gorky seldom used prior to Agony, is most likely a reference to the fire that destroyed his studio. In 1948, Gorky’s tragic run of bad luck came to a devastating climax when he broke his neck in a car accident, paralyzing his painting arm. Unable to work, he committed suicide in his studio a month later.https://6b4eaabbf4a7bd328655793373487c58.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

1Daubigny’s Garden
Vincent Van Gogh

Photo via wikimedia.org

The ominous and haunting Wheatfield With Crows is often mistakenly said to be Vincent van Gogh’s final painting. Although it was certainly one of his final paintings, scholarly analysis of the artist’s letters indicates that Wheatfield With Crows was completed around two weeks before his suicide in July 1890. That means that van Gogh’s actual last painting was probably Daubigny’s Garden, one of three works depicting the large garden of Charles-François Daubigny, a painter who van Gogh deeply admired. The idyllic garden scene is a sharp contrast to the darker Wheatfield With Crows, offering no apparent hint of van Gogh’s mental torment.

On the morning of July 27, 1890, van Gogh went outdoors to paint, apparently bringing a loaded gun with him. He then attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest, although the bullet failed to kill him. He died two days later in the presence of his brother, at the age of 37. Van Gogh never achieved any real success or fame before his untimely death and, as a result, his mother tragically disposed of a large amount of his work.

Josh Fox student from the UK who is back writing lists again after a three-year break.

Down With the Lockdowns! – The Working Class Must Defend Itself (Workers Vanguard) – 19 April 2021

Break with the Labor Traitors—Reforge the Fourth International!

Miserable health care, decrepit housing, production for profit, imperialist domination: the very nature of capitalist class rule fuels the economic and health crisis that has ravaged the world since the outbreak of Covid-­19. The parasitic bourgeoisies have responded to the pandemic with the means that best serve their interests, forcibly locking up their entire populations at home, pending vaccination.

The bourgeoisies’ lockdowns are a reactionary public health measure. Workers must oppose them! Lockdowns may well temporarily slow the spread of infections, but they weaken the fighting ability of the working class. By shutting down whole branches of industry and services, they have caused an economic crisis and thrown masses of people into unemployment. Closures of schools and childcare facilities have increased the oppressive burden of the family. State repression has been severely increased as democratic and working-­class rights have been gutted. Gatherings, protests, travel, strikes, union organizing: all have been restricted or banned. Lockdowns aim to prevent working-­class struggle, the only way workers can genuinely protect their health and combat the social causes of the crisis.

Invoking “shared sacrifice,” the capitalists have launched a blitzkrieg against the working class. Union-­busting, massive layoffs, wage cuts and speedups are the “new normal.” Faced with the combined threats of a deadly virus and the capitalist onslaught, the working class stands disarmed. Around the world, the pro-­capitalist leaders of both trade unions and workers parties have loyally collaborated with the ruling class in its offensive. In the name of national unity and fighting the virus, they are betraying the working class.

From the British and Australian Labor parties to the German Social Democratic Party and Die Linke, the French Socialist and Communist parties and the South African Communist Party, the labor misleaders play a key role in enforcing the lockdowns, locally and nationally, and shoving them down the throats of workers and the oppressed. From the American AFL-­CIO to the Mexican and Italian trade unions to the Japanese Rengo, Zenroren and Zenrokyo federations, union leaders urge their members to support the bourgeoisies’ measures: stay home and get screwed!

The urgent need to defend the health and livelihoods of the working class directly poses the task of forging a new leadership of the workers movement. Unions need to fight against the capitalist state shutting down industries and for safe working conditions. The decrepit health care and housing infrastructure needs to be rebuilt and expanded now. The expropriation of the capitalists’ best real estate combined with massive public works programs is necessary to provide decent living conditions for working people.

At every step, the basic interests of the workers and oppressed run up against the pillars of capitalist class rule. The current crisis sharply poses the need for women’s emancipation from the shackles of the family, for ending racial oppression and for liberation from imperialist exploitation. The only way forward for humanity is through workers revolutions and the establishment of an international socialist planned economy.

Faced with the utter bankruptcy of the established leaders of the workers movement and their pseudo-­Marxist lackeys, the vital question posed for the class-­conscious proletarians is the need for a leadership based on the revolutionary program of Trotskyism—authentic Marxism-­Leninism. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) strives to build an international Leninist vanguard party, the essential instrument for bringing revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat and achieving workers power. Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!

Down With Class Collaboration and National Unity!

For the last year, the position of the ICL was to accept the lockdowns as necessary. We repudiate this position. It was a capitulation to the “national unity” rallying cry that all classes should support the lockdowns because they save lives.

For this supposedly universal cause, the labor tops have willingly sacrificed the proletariat’s interests. Like public health in general, fighting the pandemic does not stand above class antagonisms. Behind the capitalists’ concern for “saving lives,” they in fact pursue their class interests. The bourgeoisie’s interest in public health is to maintain a workforce fit enough for exploitation at the cheapest possible cost while protecting its own health. Contrary to this reactionary aim, the proletariat has an interest in securing the best living conditions and health care for all. These clearly counterposed class interests cannot be reconciled, pandemic or not. It is only through its independent mobilization against the bourgeoisie that the working class can defend its health and safety.

The bourgeoisie blackmails workers with the idea that fighting for their interests spreads disease—that union meetings and protests threaten public health; that health care workers kill people by fighting for better working conditions; that schools and day care centers must be closed to protect children. This is a big lie! Fighting against the lockdowns is the necessary starting point to address the social causes of the current disaster. Union meetings are essential to workers’ self-­defense. Struggle by health care workers is the road to better health care. Fighting against school and day-­care closures is the precondition for better schools and childcare—and furthers the struggle for women’s emancipation.

In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938), Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky insisted:

“In a society based upon exploitation, the highest morality is that of the social revolution. All methods are good which raise the class-­consciousness of the workers, their trust in their own forces, their readiness for self-­sacrifice in the struggle. The impermissible methods are those which implant fear and submissiveness in the oppressed in the face of their oppressors.”

The bourgeoisie always uses supreme moral imperatives such as “saving lives” to justify its crimes. The German and French imperialists use the European Union to plunder the proletariat across Europe in the name of “peace” and “social progress.” The American imperialists and their NATO allies have devastated Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and many more countries in the name of “democracy” and “freedom.” They invaded Somalia in 1992 to “feed the starving.” When the bourgeoisie urgently cries about “saving lives,” this is always used to instill submission to the ruling class and rally national unity behind its interests.

For Union Control of Safety!

The capitalist state—constituted at its core by the police, prisons, army and courts—is an apparatus of organized violence to maintain the rule and profits of the exploiting class. While Marxists support certain state-­enforced public health measures beneficial to the working class, such as mandatory vaccinations, it is suicidal to rely on the state to protect health and safety.

The Stalinists of the Communist Party of Greece are experts in distorting such ABCs of Marxism. One of the main demands they raise in the unions is:

“Organized sanitary control to prevent spread of the virus, under the responsibility of state agencies, at the port of Piraeus, at Cosco [shipping company], on the ships, in the shipbuilding and repair zone, in factories and industrial units employing thousands of workers.”

—Rizospastis (1 April)

This means tying the working class to the capitalist state and spreading illusions in the benevolence of its health agencies. Workers have to fight for union control of safety. The unions, not the capitalist state, should determine what conditions are safe to work under.

Unions are the elementary defense organizations of the working class. Their purpose is to defend workers on the job, not fight for the workers to stay home. Contrary to this, in many countries the leaders of the teachers unions have fought for governments to keep schools shut in order to “protect” teachers and students. This is a craven refusal to fight for safe schools. Against the “stay home and wait” politics of the union bureaucrats, a class-­struggle leadership must be built based on mobilizing the union ranks and the whole labor movement against closures, for better schools and safe workplaces.

Union organizing drives are urgently needed to unite and strengthen the proletariat. Temporary and subcontracted workers need to be brought into the unions with full union wages and benefits. Unionizing employees with little social power—in retail, restaurants, bars, delivery services, etc.—will bring them under the protection of the organized working class.

Reopen the Economy! Fight Unemployment!

Tailing the labor traitors, the pretenders to Trotskyism have been prostrating themselves before the bourgeoisie. Lutte Ouvrière, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), the World Socialist Web Site, the Internationalist Group, the Trotskyist Fraction—Fourth International & Co.: all have embraced the lockdowns, betraying the proletariat.

The IMT, for example, demanded: “All non-­essential production should be immediately brought to a halt. Workers should be sent home with full pay for as long as it is necessary” (marxist.com, 20 March 2020). This is an utterly reactionary call that could only lead to more layoffs! The IMT wants to throw whole layers of the working class out of work and onto welfare.

The working class derives its social power from its role in production. The labor movement needs to oppose layoffs and furloughs by fighting for union-­run hiring and training, and for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay in order to spread work among all hands. The current crisis cries out for increased production and services: more and better medical care; mass construction of public housing; spacious and well-­ventilated buildings for schools and day care; better public transport. Reopening and expanding the economy is necessary to meet the needs of working people and to combat unemployment and pauperization.

For Quality Health Care, Free at the Point of Service!

The system of production for profit cannot provide adequate health care. Expropriate without compensation the private and religious hospitals and pharmaceutical companies! For mass, union-­run training and hiring of medical and hospital workers! Abolish patents, so vaccines and medicines can be mass-­produced throughout the world!

Facing the crumbling ruins of the health care systems, reformists of all stripes have raised calls to nationalize health care. For one, Left Voice, U.S. section of the Trotskyist Fraction, calls to “nationalize all health-­related industries under workers’ control” (Left Voice, 13 April 2020). Don’t be fooled by the left-­sounding rhetoric of these social democrats. Left Voice advocates stricter lockdowns, which would further inhibit any kind of mass action by the proletariat, rendering the fight for better health care impossible.

Here is Left Voice’s model for workers control: “In Argentina, workers are showing us how this can be done. Worker-­controlled factories without bosses across the country are beginning to produce for need instead of greed.” What Left Voice is talking about is the takeover of a few bankrupt and peripheral factories in capitalist Argentina. This is not a model for what is needed. Left Voice’s perspective is for workers management of a nationalized health care system in the framework of capitalism, i.e., institutionalized class collaboration. Freeing health care from the profiteers can only be achieved through sweeping away the bourgeois state, replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat and expropriating the capitalist class.

The Working Class Must Defend All the Oppressed!

The lowest layers of the middle class are being devastated. The criminal support of labor leaders and all the reformist left to the lockdowns has ceded the ground to the far right, allowing sinister reactionaries and outright fascists to posture as defenders of democratic rights and champions of the ruined petty bourgeoisie. A revolutionary party would mobilize the working class to defend all of the oppressed and rally them to the workers’ side in the fight against the bourgeoisie.

In Asia, Latin America and Africa, millions of poor peasants are bled dry by landlords and banks while street traders are being starved by the lockdowns. Everywhere, small shops, bars and restaurants as well as students are choked by debt. Cancel all their debt!

Millions of white-­collar workers have been forced to work from home. “Remote” work fuels layoffs and unpaid overtime, atomizes the workforce and makes anti-­union attacks easier and union organizing virtually impossible. Strikes are not won on Zoom but on picket lines. Any union worthy of its name needs to oppose “remote” work schemes.

Immigrants form a crucial component of the working class and are disproportionately employed in the hard-­hit service industries with miserable pay. To unite its ranks, the working class needs to fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

Socialize the Functions of the Family!

The bourgeoisie is trying with all its might to turn back the wheel of history. The lockdowns are dumping childcare, education and care for the elderly entirely onto the family, mainly on women’s shoulders. Women are forced back into the home, losing jobs in greater numbers than men, and are victims of a sharp increase in domestic violence. Children and teens are imprisoned with their parents. Elderly people are left to die alone in lousy care homes.

If the lockdowns have shown one thing, it is that the feminist program of redistributing household tasks inside the family is a dead end. What is needed is to take household chores out of the family: free 24-­hour day care, collective kitchens and laundries, quality retirement centers.

The lockdowns have reinforced capitalism’s pillar institutions—the state, the church as well as the family. The emancipation of women can only be achieved as part of a worldwide socialist transformation that will include replacing the family with socialized childcare and housework. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

Down With Imperialism!

The world imperialist system, where a few great powers compete over the division of the world, exploiting billions, is the very source of the current global crisis. The pandemic cries out for a coordinated international response. But in a system based on interimperialist rivalries and competing nation-­states, this is impossible. Imperialism has crushed and stalled the economic, social and cultural development of the world in the interests of the stock exchanges of Wall Street, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and Paris. The imperialists are using this crisis to tighten the stranglehold of international finance capital on the dependent countries. Cancel the imperialist-­imposed debt! Down with the UN, IMF, NATO, NAFTA 2.0 and the European Union!

Defend China! The imperialists are redoubling their efforts for capitalist counterrevolution to overturn the 1949 Revolution and open the Chinese deformed workers state for their depredation. For workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy!

For New October Revolutions!

South Korea, Sweden, Australia? The bourgeois press is filled with never-­ending debate about which country has better balanced mass death and mass repression. We Marxists have an entirely different model: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. By breaking the shackles of capitalist exploitation, the working class under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks made a giant stride for human progress. The Soviet workers state’s public health system was one of its great achievements, despite being forged in the crucible of civil war and imperialist invasion in a landscape already laid waste by world war. The man who led its creation, Nikolai Semashko, wrote in 1919:

“To move the urban poor from musty dungeons to spacious rooms in well-­built houses, to really struggle with social disease, to create normal conditions of work for the worker—all this is unattainable if we are to regard private property as something holy and inviolable. The old health system hesitated before it as before an insurmountable barrier; Soviet power—Communist power—has broken this barrier.”

— “The Tasks of Public Health in Soviet Russia,” published in William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990)

—International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
19 April 2021

NY Times – Fan Fiction Account Of Islamic Militant in NYC – (Archived)

He Was Convicted of a Bombing Plot. Was It a Setup? – The New York Times (archive.is)

A ‘novelized’ very sympathetic narrative about a seemingly illiterate mentally challenged Islamic immigrant who works at an Islamic bookstore. Never a word of discouragement in this essay that has the feel of an O’Henry story about an innocent boob led astray by bad companions and half baked ideas. Across the planet over the last twenty years there have been hundreds of thousands of Islamic commando attacks on civilians. An Islamic militant who dies fighting to advance Islam is promised to dine with Allah in Paradise the night they are martyred. But the NYT has a case to make, and this piece reads like a lawyers plea to have the conviction overturned, or to have the convicted man released or pardoned. Not a word of doubt or opposition appears in this very long piece.

……………….

Here is the paywall free archived copy. Best listened to with sad violin music playing in the background.

“Shahawar Matin Siraj first met the older man late in the summer of 2003. He would see him at the mosque in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sobbing loudly during prayers and hovering near the imam. But when the man entered the bookstore nearby, where Siraj worked, he was warm and easygoing. He said his name was Osama Eldawoody, and the two men struck up an unlikely friendship.Siraj, at 21, had a hulking build and a tendency to ramble when he spoke. He usually lingered around the store with friends from the neighborhood, talking about Islam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He had difficulty grasping new ideas and would need them explained multiple times, but in front of his friends, he pretended to know more than he did. Eldawoody was the son of an Egyptian religious scholar and said he studied nuclear engineering. He was knowledgeable about the world and had a flair about him, gesticulating excitedly as he spoke. To Siraj’s delight, Eldawoody took an interest in him, encouraging him to pursue his interest in computers. Never before had someone this sophisticated, an adult more than twice his age, taken him so seriously.Siraj’s family fled Pakistan several years earlier, seeking to escape the violence against their Shiite minority sect.

He was a teenager when they arrived in the United States, but he did not attend high school and was still struggling to earn his equivalency diploma. His world consisted of a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Queens that he shared with his parents and sister, and the equally cramped emporium filled with Islamic books and phone cards that was a 90-minute subway ride away in Bay Ridge.Siraj was quietly pleased when Eldawoody started offering him rides after work. The young man listened as his friend counseled him on personal responsibility and the Prophet’s sayings.

Over the months, Siraj found himself pouring his heart out to Eldawoody, about his financial woes and about Mano, the woman in Pakistan he had met online; he hoped to marry her soon. He was distraught when Eldawoody confided that he was suffering from a liver disease and worried that it was potentially fatal. Siraj promised to care for Eldawoody’s daughter if anything happened to him and began telling him, in his broken English, “I am like your son.”Slowly, their conversations took on a darker edge.”

He Was Convicted of a Bombing Plot. Was It a Setup? – The New York Times (archive.is)

50 of the funniest, most searing movie reviews ever written – by Stephanie Marcus – 2018

We rounded up some of the funniest film reviews of all time. 

For many viewers, a movie can simply exist as something to fill a void of upwards of 90 minutes. Film critics, who spend their lives scribbling notes in dark theaters, ask for a little more.

“I have a colleague who describes his job as ‘covering the national dream beat,’ because if you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear in their deepest secrets,” the late Roger Ebert wrote in 1992. “At least, the good ones will. That’s why we go, hoping to be touched in those secret places. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may seem.”

Sometimes the best thing to come out of a movie is a blistering review. INSIDER rounded up 50 of the funniest, most searing movie reviews ever written.

(Archived – https://archive.ph/Y1U8r )

https://archive.ph/Y1U8r

Recovering The Truth About The Comfort Women – by John Mark Ramseyer (Japan Forward)

Recovering the Truth about the Comfort Women

As academics, we are used to dealing with exaggerations. We are not used to finding that the story is pure fiction. But that is the nature of the comfort-women-sex-slave story.

on January 12, 2021

By Mark Ramseyer

It’s been a bizarrely unending story.

Elderly Korean women claim to have been forced at Japanese bayonet-point to work as sex slaves. The Japanese government replies that the Korean government waived claims like this by treaty in 1965. But it expresses sympathy anyway, and offers more money. Koreans still complain. The Japanese government apologizes again, offers more money, and the Korean government promises never to raise the question again. Then a new political party takes power, declares the Japanese apology insincere, and starts the process all over again.

Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine. Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine.

But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue. The Japanese army did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels. It did not use Korean women as sex slaves. The claims to the contrary are simply ー factually ー false.

The Contracts 

During the 1930s, the Japanese military decided it needed brothels that would agree to keep the risk of venereal disease in check. It was not short of prostitutes. Prostitutes follow armies everywhere, and they followed the Japanese army in Asia.

But many of the prostitutes that followed its army had venereal disease. For an army, disease can be debilitating. To maintain an effective military force, the army needed brothels that required condom usage, that required prostitutes and clients to use disinfectant after every encounter, and that required their prostitutes to undergo weekly health examinations.

Hence, the army proposed a system: if a brothel agreed to these terms, it would designate it a “comfort station,” and prohibit its soldiers from patronizing any competing installations.

To hire Korean prostitutes, the brothels used variations on the contracts that the licensed prostitutes used within Japan. Prostitution is obviously dangerous and unpleasant. Even women otherwise interested in the job take it only if the pay is high enough to compensate for those dangers and difficulties and for the reputational hit they will incur. A brothel owner can promise a woman that she will earn high pay, but he has an incentive to lie, and she knows he has an incentive to lie. He can offer her a fixed wage, but then she will have an incentive to shirk. After all, she works in an unmonitored setting. If she is sufficiently unpleasant that no one asks for her at the front desk, so much the better.

The brothels and prostitutes solved these problems by coupling a high up-front payment with a maximum service term that the prostitute could reduce by working hard. More specifically, Tokyo brothels paid new prostitutes an upfront fee that typically ranged from 1000 to 1200 yen. In addition, it paid her room, board, and a fraction of the revenues she generated.

She agreed to work for a maximum of (usually) six years, and the brothel agreed to let her quit early if she generated enough revenue to repay the advance before that. The stereotype that brothels manipulated accounts to keep the women locked in “debt-slavery” is simply not true. Most Tokyo prostitutes paid back their advances early and quit in about three years.

Licensed prostitutes in pre-war Korea used similar contracts. Typically, they served under three-year-maximum contracts rather than the six in Japan. As in Japan, most left the industry by their mid-20s. 

Other Korean women worked as unlicensed prostitutes. And even before the Japanese military began its comfort-station network, Korean women fanned out on their own across Asia to work as prostitutes.

Working at a comfort station in war-torn China or Southeast Asia was a more dangerous job than working in Seoul. There was the risk of war. There was a much higher risk of disease. And should the brothel prove abusive, a prostitute would find it harder to leave the brothel and fade into the comfortable anonymity of a Korean city. To take these jobs, the Korean women demanded and received very high pay. They worked shorter terms ー typically two years. Until the last months of the war, they repaid the advances and went home.

The ‘Asahi Shimbun’ Debacle

The claim that the Japanese army coerced Korean women into working in comfort stations dates to the 1980s. In 1982, a writer named Seiji Yoshida began talking about “comfort women hunts” he had led. He gave lectures, and soon incorporated the stories into what he styled a memoir. “My War Crimes,” he called it. He had worked from 1942 in a labor office in Yamaguchi. There, he had supervised the work of mobilizing Korean workers. In May of 1943, he wrote, his office received an order to recruit 2000 Korean workers. More pointedly, it received an order to acquire 200 Koreans to work as “comfort women.”

With nine soldiers, Yoshida continued, he went to the island of Jeju. There, he led “comfort women hunts.” In a typical account, he recalled finding a compound where 20-30 women worked. He and his team went in with guns. When the women started screaming, nearby Korean men came running. He and his team grabbed the women by their arms, however, and dragged them off. The mob soon grew to over 100, but Yoshida’s soldiers drew their bayonets and held them at bay. They loaded the women into the truck, drove 5 or 6 km, and then stopped for a half hour to rape them. The military transported the women to the harbor and loaded them onto its ships ー hands tied, and each woman bound to the next.

In fact, Yoshida had invented the story. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper gave it flamboyant coverage, but several historians questioned it from the start. 

Ikuhiko Hata was among the first to doubt the account, and traveled to Jeju to investigate. He found the village where Yoshida claimed to have conducted one of the larger hunts, but no one remembered anything about a raid. This is a small place, one elderly man told him. If the Japanese military had abducted women to serve as prostitutes, no one would forget it.

Other historians and reporters ー both Japanese and Korean ー followed. Yoshida initially insisted that the events had occurred. He started avoiding reporters and scholars, however, and eventually admitted to having fabricated the book. By the mid-1990s, scholars had dismissed Yoshida’s account as fiction. Eventually, even the Asahi Shimbun retracted its stories.

The Chong Dae Hyup 

One organization lies at the heart of the current dispute, and it is an organization that manipulates the dispute in relentless opposition to reconciliation with Japan. The organization is the Chong Dae Hyup (CDH), the “Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery.” The CDH organizes weekly protests in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. It began the installation of comfort women statues around the world. It pressured the former comfort women to reject the compensation offered by Japan. And it brutally attacks Korean scholars who would question the “sex-slave” narrative.

CDH controls most of the public testimony by the comfort women. It maintains its ability to do this by collaborating in the operation of a nursing home ー the House of Nanum ー for the women who tell the stories it wants reported. Only a small subset of the comfort women recount the autobiographies on which the conventional Western account depends, and these are the women that the CDH promotes.

Several of these women have changed their stories in dramatic ways. When they first identified themselves as comfort women, they told of having taken the jobs on their own, or of having been sold into prostitution by their parents. As the movement began to extract money from the Japanese government, they changed their stories. Now they told of being forced into the job by the military, and that is the story that the CDH has promoted.

By sabotaging any reconciliation between South Korea and Japan, the CDH directly promotes a key North Korean political goal ー and that seems to be the point. Initially organized by Korean communists, the group was at one time designated by the South Korean government as a North Korean affiliate.

As academics, we are used to dealing with exaggerations. If someone recounts a story that sounds bizarre, we assume the truth must be more modest. It usually is. We are not used to finding that the story is pure fiction. But that is the nature of the comfort-women-sex-slave story.

Within Korea, the story fairly obviously struck a nationalistic chord. Within Japan, it fed a long-standing opposition among professors to the Liberal Democratic Party and its plans for the Self-Defense Force. And within the western academy, it fit the triple “narratives” of racism, imperialism, and sexism currently so fashionable in some departments.

Yet pure fiction it is.

Author: J. Mark Ramseyer

Find other articles by the author on JAPAN Forward, at this link.

Other Articles related to this debate:

• Some Uncomfortable Truths About Comfort Women for the International Mob
• Rabble-Rousers Go on Witch Hunt vs Harvard Professor Who Challenges ‘Sex Slaves’ Theory
• What Miki Dezaki and I Have in Common: Speaking Up for Mark Ramseyer
• Bad History on the Comfort Women
• [Bookmark] Controversy over Harvard Thesis on Comfort Women Foretells the Decline of ‘Anti-Japanese Tribalism’ 
• [Bookmark] Harvard Professor’s Paper on Comfort Women Will Become Academia’s Pandora’s Box

Prominent Pro-Japanese Harvard Prof Pilloried For Sloppy Bizarre Article Claiming Sex Slaves ‘Signed Contracts’ – 75% Death Rate For WW2 Sex Slaves – by Nevin Thompson

Prominent Harvard professor pilloried for peddling revisionist history about wartime ‘comfort women’

‘There are three big Japanese right-wing talking points and Ramseyer has parroted them all.’

Written by Nevin Thompson

Posted 20 February 202116:00 GMT 

Read this post in русский, Italiano, Français, Español, Ελληνικά, bahasa Indonesia

Image caption: “Comfort women (comfort girls) captured by U.S. Army, August 14 1944, Myitkyina.” Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

A noted American professor at Harvard Law School has been denounced both at home and internationally after publishing an academic paper arguing that claims about Korean women enslaved by Japanese military forces as “comfort women” during the second world war are historically untrue.

Critics of the professor, J. Mark Ramseyer, who is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, argue the paper ignores standard research methods, existing scholarship, and primary sources, and is full of inaccuracies and intentional misrepresentations.

Ramseyer’s paper, which is titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” will be published in the March 2021 print issue of the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE), but is already available online to academic audiences.

In the paper, Ramseyer characterizes the organized, methodical sexual slavery of approximately 200,000 women — so-called “comfort women” or ianfu (慰安婦) — by Japanese Imperial forces during the Second World War as a legitimate, contractual, economic exchange between willing participants.

Ramseyer’s paper repeats common tropes typically employed by historical revisionists who seek to minimize or erase sexual slavery practiced by Japan during the war. His conclusions contradict rigorous, established scholarship, including a comprehensive 1996 United Nations report on the issue.

Ramseyer summarized the key points of the paper in a column published in late January in Japan Forward, an English-language opinion site for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners run by Sankei Shimbun, a hard-right Japanese daily.

In his Japan Forward opinion column, Ramseyer states:

…the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue. The Japanese army did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels. It did not use Korean women as sex slaves. The claims to the contrary are simply ー factually ー false.

In the Japan Forward opinion piece, Ramseyer also argues that Korean women (in fact, women from more than ten occupied countries in Asia were forcibly conscripted) entered into a mutually agreeable contractual agreement with brothel operators that protected the rights of both parties.

Following the publication of Ramseyer’s Japan Forward column in late January, attention turned to the online version of his IRLE journal article, which was released in December 2020. Besides generating headlines in Korean media, the article sparked condemnation by students and faculty at Harvard University, where Ramseyer works.

The Korean Association of Harvard Law School, a student group, issued a statement in response to Ramseyer’s article, stating:

Without any convincing evidence, Professor Ramseyer argues that no government “forced women into prostitution,” a contention he also makes in his editorial. Decades’ worth of Korean scholarship, primary sources, and third-party reports challenge this characterization. None are mentioned, cited, or considered in his arguments.

Ramseyer was also publicly criticized by colleagues. In a Twitter thread, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a legal scholar and the first Asian woman and first Korean professor to teach at Harvard Law School, said: Tweet

In other public comments, Gersen called into question Ramseyer’s interpretation of contract law, stating, “No legal system would recognize or justly enforce contract of this nature,” where people forced into sex in the context of Japanese military occupation in wartime were not free agents exercising agency.

In the IRLE paper, for instance, Ramseyer argues a ten-year-old girl entered into a contract with full knowledge of what sex work entailed:

When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age 10, she knew what the job entailed.

The critique of Ramseyer’s interpretation of contract law is notable, since Ramseyer, as Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, is widely regarded as an expert on Japanese law and economics. In spite of his long connection to Japan, however, Ramseyer’s curriculum vitae indicates no apparent expertise on the topic of wartime sexual slavery or East Asia.

The child of Christian missionaries, Ramseyer attended elementary school in rural Japan before returning to the United States to attend college. While he would eventually attend and teach at top-ranked Japanese universities after completing a master’s thesis on the merchants of early-modern Japan, his scholastic focus has always been law, and never Japanese or Korean wartime history.

Indeed, in a February interview, Ramseyer also admitted that he neither speaks nor reads Korean, indicating he cannot, for example, evaluate or even understand testimony by Korean victims of sexual slavery:

Asked why he did not cite any Korean sources in the paper, Ramseyer said he is “very upfront” about the fact that he does not read Korean.

Historians familiar with wartime sexual slavery perpetrated by Japanese armed forces also point out that Ramseyer has long championed historical inaccuracies and revisionism. Nick Kapur, a historian of modern Japan and East Asia notes multiple instances in the past where Ramseyer has promoted racist or questionable narratives: Tweet

A transnational team of five professional historians of Japan and its empire published an open letter that focuses on the academic integrity of Ramseyer’s recent IRLE article.

The five historians who reviewed Ramseyer’s IRLE journal article, interviewed on Korean televison. Screencap from MBC website.

Their letter, at 33 pages, is four times as long as Ramseyer’s eight-page IRLE article, and carefully examines every aspect of Ramseyer’s article, with particular focus on his sources.

Asserting that Ramseyer mischaracterized, distorted and misrepresented sources, the historians questioned the fundamental academic integrity of the journal article, and called on IRLE to retract it:

Its inaccuracies are more than superficial errors; they completely undermine the article’s claims. […] We believe that an article containing this level of academic misconduct should not have passed peer review, or have been published in an academic journal.

Miki Dezaki, a documentary filmmaker who explored the competing historical narratives about the “comfort women” issue in his film “Shusenjo,” notes that Ramseyer did receive a letter of support signed so far by six individuals, all of who are affiliated with a far-right nationalist group in Japan: Tweet

In an interview with Global Voices, Dezaki also notes that in another academic paper discrediting the claims of “comfort women,” Ramseyer cites an individual named “Texas Daddy,” an American retiree with his own YouTube channel who is considered a mouthpiece for Japanese nationalists.

Dezaki says that like Texas Daddy and other foreign peddlers of historical revisionism, Ramseyer repeats common talking points:

There are three big Japanese right-wing talking points and Ramseyer has parroted them all. He claims the women were just well paid prostitutes, he claims that Asahi Shimbun’s retraction of a false testimony proves that the comfort women issue is a lie, and he claims, most despicably, that the victims’ testimonies are inconsistent, which suggests that they are lying.

Regarding what motivates Ramseyer and others, Dezaki suggests that:

It really boils down to fame, money and staying relevant. That isn’t to say that these people don’t believe in what they are writing or saying, but doing so in the public arena gets them praise, speaking engagements and book deals in Japan.

An editor for the academic publisher behind IRLE has been quoted as saying that the article is “considered final,” though IRLE has appended an expression of concern to the online version of the piece to inform readers that concerns have been raised regarding the article’s historical evidence.

The March 2021 print issue in which the paper is to appear is also being temporarily held so that comments on the paper can be published in the same issue.

……………….

https://archive.ph/OkSKZ

Prominent Harvard professor pilloried for peddling revisionist history about wartime ‘comfort women’ · Global Voices

Harvard Prof Defends Japanese Sex Slavery – The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History – by Richard Carrier

BY RICHARD CARRIER ON MARCH 14, 2021

21 Feb 2021 Protest Opposes Harvard University Japanese Apologist Prof – Seoul South Korea

It’s not common that major, respected academic journals exhibit a catastrophic failure in their peer review process. But it happens. Everything from creationist dribble to just about anything in any field has “slipped past” peer review protocols in legitimate journals—usually leading to retractions when caught (since the epistemic reliability of a journal literally hinges on what they will or won’t retract). Which means you need to know how to detect when this happens, so you can continue to rely on the otherwise reliable source-vetting that peer review standards are intended to create (see my Vital Primer on Media Literacy and On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus). Most often you’ll benefit from the expert community already catching this and thus exposing it. But that can take time. And in humanities fields it is very common for no one to notice, and thus for a bogus paper to survive undetected.

The example I use today is not such. Since it pushed an extremely alarming position in a controversial subject many people had constant eyes on, it was caught and exposed as fraudulent almost immediately upon the annunciation of its acceptance for publication. But the question of how such a paper survived peer review at a serious journal (rather than a fake journal whose peer review is a joke, a problem plaguing all sciences and humanities) remains. And explaining that gives us lessons in what peer review is supposed to do in the field of history, and thus what constitutes an actual failure of it; how we as mere citizens can sleuth such failures on our own when we need to; and why (this may come as a surprise here) feminism is necessary to the epistemic reliability of every field of knowledge. Yes. I will elucidate all three propositions, proving even the third.

The Set-Up

Recently a research paper by J. Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard professor of Japanese law, passed peer review and was accepted for publication by the International Review of Law and Economics (and released online before going to print; likely to be retracted, it probably will not appear in the print issue). The paper is titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” and argues that the widely-confirmed Japanese mass-rape atrocity, in which literally tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of women (especially Koreans; Korea then being an occupied Japanese colony) were forced into brutal sex slavery by the Japanese military in WWII, is a “fiction” that never happened and that all those women consented to and signed lucrative prostitution contracts they could depart from at any time, and that this can be proved with “Game Theory” (he also repeated these assertions in an editorial published in the Japanese nationalist far-right web forum Japan Forward, which may indicate something of his own political leanings).

Several experts, including Nobel laureates, have compared his argument to Holocaust denial, and that comparison is spot on, morally and epistemically. Indeed Ramseyer’s paper was so grossly in violation of even basic epistemic standards as to be fairly described as fraudulent (it fakes evidence and deliberately misquotes sources, as well as consciously omits contrary evidence that is in fact overwhelming). In my opinion, Ramseyer should lose his position at Harvard and be blacklisted from any future position at any respectable university; and not because he “dared” to challenge the factual reality of a mass atrocity against women, but because no scholar who engages in this kind of epistemic dishonesty should ever again be trusted as a scholar, or allowed to teach. This paper demonstrates he is literally a fraud. That should end your career.

To catch up on all the ins and outs of this controversy there is a good article by The Associated Press (reproduced at NBCNews.com) and another by Anne Branigin at The Lilly (a publication of The Washington Post) and a solid Op Ed at Harvard’s campus periodical The Crimson, as well as some crucial gotcha-style sleuthing reported on by Cho Ki-weon & Kim So-youn for the South-Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh. Most importantly, there is a letter of demonstration of Ramseyer’s fraud signed by over a thousand experts in relevant fields worldwide: “Letter by Concerned Economists Regarding ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’ in the International Review of Law and Economics,” which I’ll refer to as the Economists Letter. Likewise a Statement by Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert, Harvard professors who did their own fact-check of Ramseyer’s paper and found alarming evidence of malfeasance. Everything to follow comes from these sources or directly from Ramseyer’s writings or my own personal and professional knowledge.

The Standards

The Economists Letter correctly concludes “this article” by Ramseyer constitutes academic malpractice, and indeed “goes well beyond mere academic failure or malpractice in its breach of academic standards, integrity, and ethics.” And it makes clear “our chief concern is” that it “attempts to use the language of economics to make historical claims that have no basis in evidence,” and also does so in aid of immoral and unconscionable ends, “using economics—more specifically game theory and law and economics—as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.” They make clear the difference between opposing such immoral fraud and opposing academic freedom. “Academics should not shy away from analyzing controversial and disturbing topics” nor be intimidated or punished for doing so. But that is not the issue here. Here the issue is epistemic malpractice. That it was deployed in furtherance of misogynistic nationalist propaganda only makes it worse.

Actual evidence (and it is vast, extending from recovered state and military documents from Japan to a huge database of eyewitness testimony) demonstrates quite conclusively that “most” of the tens or hundreds of thousands of women pressed into “comfort service” were “between eleven and twenty” years old (yes, you read that right), they were transported into hundreds of brothels by “Japanese military vessels, under the supervision of military police,” “recruitment methods included abduction, deception, threats, and violence,” and the victims of this process endured widespread “rape, forced abortions, physical torture, and sexually transmitted diseases” and most (informed estimates come out around 75%) “died from this experience” (many were mowed down en masse by the Japanese during military retreats, to conceal evidence of their war crimes). Though long denied by the Japanese government, overwhelming evidence uncovered in subsequent lawsuits decades ago forced the Japanese state to admit to it all. Several independent legal investigations of Japanese war crimes have reached the same conclusion. The overwhelming consensus of experts in Japanese and Korean history concurs.

If you are going to challenge a historical consensus built on such a vast and multiply-corroborated network of evidence, you had better damn well have the goods. And peer reviewers are responsible for ensuring that. I’ve discussed how peer review works in the field of history before. Their principal role is to “pre-vet” a paper or book, saving the rest of us the laborious time of doing so. Passing peer review thus signals a work is worth our time reading, considering, and engaging with, because it meets the minimal standards for that. Passing peer review thus does not indicate the conclusion a paper or book argues is “true”; peer reviewers are not tasked with nixing anything they disagree with. They are only tasked with answering basic questions like “are there any obvious errors of reasoning or method,” “is enough evidence presented to establish the conclusions reached,” “are there any obvious omissions or misrepresentations of fact,” “is this author familiar with and engaging with established knowledge and positions in the subject,” and “does this thesis comport with well-known background facts.” For examples of general peer review standards see the PLOS Guide and the Wiley Guide. Everything they say applies to history manuscripts as much as any in science.

Peer review is often blind (single or double), meaning the author is usually not told who the peer reviewers are, and often the peer reviewers are not told who the author is (that information will be stripped from the headline, for example). Blinding peer review is not necessary, but it does allow reviewers to be more honest without community or professional backlash, and it can forestall some biased outcomes (resulting from professional grudges for example). A serious journal, one whose peer review process is considered of high quality, will only use reviewers who have relevant PhDs and publication histories (meaning, they have gotten their own work in the same or closely related topics published through peer review). And it is standard to have at least two, operating independently of each other, as such duplication significantly reduces the risk and impact of bias and error.

And finally, it is very common for an academic work to be rejected (often for trivial reasons, like word length or a belief the work is redundant or not subject-suited to the journal or publisher), then revised and resubmitted to the same or other journals or publishers, going through multiple venues until accepted. However, this will not operate merely as forum shopping. With every peer review (resulting in a rejection or acceptance), there will be a peer reviewer’s report (in fact, more than one), and if it contains any critique of the work (reasons for rejection, or conditions for acceptance, or even just recommendations that fall short of requirements), this will be provided to the author. Who can then use that information to improve the work (or even have to). Which is one of the principal benefits of peer review as a process: anything that passes peer review (at any respectable journal or publisher), you know has gone through this process, and therefore will be of higher quality—it has already faced and been revised in light of expert criticism. This makes peer reviewed work substantially more reliable than “just anything published on the internet,” or through a non-academic publisher, or one of dubious credentials (like the many fraudulent and shoddy academic journals there are out there: on which, see “How Do You Know a Paper Is Legit?”, “How Do You Know a Journal Is Legitimate?”, and “Scholarly Articles: How Can I Tell?”).

This does not mean work that isn’t peer reviewed is unreliable; just that it requires more critical vetting from the reader themselves, which means it is safe to dismiss it if you don’t have or want to burn time on doing that before trusting it, or lack the needed skills and professional knowledge to do it (and no one who does has already done this and made available their critical report or assessment). Peer review is like a check mark that says “that preliminary vetting by real experts has been done and it passed.” Which helps you allocate your time more efficiently, zeroing in on stuff highly likely to be worth taking seriously. Peer review is thus one example of the core advantage of civilization generally: utilization of specialized expertise and the division of labor.

Which is all great, until it fails. How did the Ramseyer article even pass peer review? Literally hundreds of serious experts are actually asking this question now. It is a shocking failure of process. The International Review of Law and Economics professes it is now conducting an investigation to find out how this happened. Indeed, their reputation has been seriously tarnished by this, and it might not recover—they will need to earn back academic trust by showing what mistakes occurred and how they plan to ensure they won’t be repeated. But until such a report comes out, we can explore what at minimum had to have happened, and thus what reforms the Review will certainly have to implement, regardless of what it finds. It cannot likely be that the peer reviewers only pretended to read the paper, giving it a rubber stamp not even really knowing what’s in it, and by coincidence this paper just happened to be assigned simultaneously to two reviewers engaging in such malpractice, because professional peer review reports make this impossible: the editor must receive reports from each reviewer describing the contents of the work and answering some assigned questions about it (see, again, the PLOS and Wiley guides for example). So even the editor would have to be engaging in this malpractice, and that’s remarkably unlikely. So how could two independent peer reviewers have written reports giving Ramseyer a pass?

Dutch Women Prisoners of Japanese Military In Indonesia

The Failures

Here’s a short-list of the frauds in the Ramseyer piece:

• Ramseyer’s article repeatedly talks about “contracts” between private procurers and the women and girls involved and states as fact their existence and even content, and the entire thesis of his paper is built on these “facts” as essential premises. But as the Economists Letter puts it, “despite the centrality of this assumption,” that such contracts existed and had that content, “to [his explanatory] model, the article presents no evidence to justify this.” There are no contracts. Ramseyer made that up. When confronted about this after the paper was accepted for publication, he admitted “I don’t have any Korean contracts…I haven’t been able to find” any.
• Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an emeritus professor of Japanese history, puts it succinctly: in his paper “Ramseyer provides no reference to a single contract actually signed between a ‘comfort woman’ and her employers, and cites no oral testimony from any former ‘comfort woman’ who recalls signing a contract of the type he describes, nor from any third party who witnessed the signing of such a contract.” In other words, the paper did not even include a fake citation of evidence. It literally cited no evidence.
• Ramseyer wrote that a 10-year-old Japanese girl named Osaki had voluntarily agreed (sic) to become a prostitute. In his words: “When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age ten, she knew what the job entailed.” But when experts checked the source he cited, “they found that Osaki and other young girls complained to the recruiter that he hadn’t told them they would be doing that kind of work.” Confronted with this, Ramseyer claimed “I don’t know how this happened, but I did in fact make a mistake here.” Such a “mistake” is essentially impossible though; I think only deliberate fraud can explain this.
• Ramseyer claims as a representative example a one Mun Okchu was so financially successful as one of these “voluntary” prostitutes that she lived “most flamboyantly” in result. His own sources don’t say anything of the kind, but in fact report that Mun was actually “prevented from retrieving her money during the war and afterward, even in 1993” when she attempted to claim the money she was never paid in a lawsuit. Other victims who led successful lawsuits were awarded the equivalent of a mere few thousand dollars, so little were they even falsely promised to be paid by their enslavers (and usually, in fact, for other work—countless witnesses attest they were lied to about what jobs they were being shipped off to do). As one victim reports, “We only received clothes two times per year and not enough food, only rice cakes and water. I was never paid for my ‘services.’” No source cited in Ramseyer’s article evinces any other outcome.
• Ramseyer claims that “some Korean comfort women in Burma worked on contracts as short as six months to a year,” but the source for this he cites contains no such information; rather, it only reproduces “a sample contract,” not a signed contract, “written in Japanese,” not Korean, and “in 1937,” which was “years before the Japanese military was fighting in Burma.” Worse, this “is a sample for contracting with Japanese prostitutes,” not Korean subjects, and “specifies a two-year term,” not “six months to a year.” It would appear Ramseyer wholly fabricated this claim and cited a bogus source for it, hoping no one would check.
• Ramseyer claims “regularly, comfort women from [one Burma] brothel completed their terms and returned to their homes,” but the source material he cites only documents one, and maybe two, women (of numerous hundreds) were let go (their fate is not recorded; nor why they were released). This is not “regularly.” Nor does it constitute completing a contract. That an occasional prisoner of war is released cannot evince even they were imprisoned voluntarily (!), much less that all (!) war prisoners were. That these few victims’ families bought them back, by bribing Japanese officials, is a far more plausible explanation of the data.
• Ramseyer’s paper never discusses the well known fact that victims of similar sex-trafficking are often tricked or forced to sign “contracts” which often they cannot even read and are lied to regarding the contents of, and are forced by threats of ominous violence or harm to agree to anyway. Therefore, even if he had such contracts, that would not alone suffice to evince a consensual practice. To not acknowledge or answer this, but instead pretend no such possibility has to be ruled out with evidence, is a bizarrely egregious failure of historical reasoning.
• As pointed out in the Economists Letter FAQ, Ramseyer’s paper “does not meet current disciplinary standards for being a contribution to economic theory or game theory … because it does not make its arguments in a way which is now considered standard and complete,” e.g. it presents no mathematical or logical model—it never proves anything by any method accepted in the field—but argues solely by assertion and hunchwork—which is the approach of an amateur, not a professional. It also presents no thesis that is “novel, interesting, or rises above common sense,” apart from its claim that there were voluntary contracts, which claim is established by no accepted method in any professional field.
• As the Economists Letter points out, Ramseyer’s “article implies that economics, in particular, game theory, justifies his conclusion” that the contracts were consensual, but “invoking game theory does not establish the absence of violent exploitation or predation,” and game theory “does not allow one to conclude that such interactions were consensual.” In other words, Ramseyer’s inference model rises to the level of professional incompetence: a completely irrational (and frankly, sub-amateur) deployment of the theories and terminology of the field.

Any one of these findings would nix a paper in the peer review process of any even half-respectable history journal. I struggle to think of any explanation for how multiple peer reviewers did not notice that no evidence was ever cited for these alleged contracts or their contents. One of the fundamental questions peer reviewers are asked to make of a work is precisely whether evidence is cited for its essential claims. They are not expected to fact-check that cited evidence (there is some trust that scholars will not perpetuate a fraud; a trust that has gotten even leading science journals in trouble), but they are expected to fact-check a representative sample of citations for the most surprising or controversial or unexpected claims.

Peer reviewers, being experts, can often already tell at-sight when claims are true, because they already know the evidence-base well enough, so they might not check a source citation for an unsurprising claim. But they definitely will check something that shocks or surprises them, to confirm an author is citing a real source and representing its contents fairly, and most especially when a claim is both surprising and essential to the thesis being argued (and of course, once you catch one incident of fraudulent citation, you will then start checking far more citations than otherwise you might, looking for more). Which means Ramseyer’s peer reviewers were for some inexplicable reason not shocked or surprised by any of his claims, and thus never moved to check them and thus discover what other experts subsequently did (such as for the Osaki or Mun or Burma claims).

Another of the fundamental questions peer reviewers are asked to make of a work is whether the conclusions follow from the premises by any recognizable logic. Which means Ramseyer’s peer reviewers did not think to ask why his inference model never addresses in any evidence-based way the obvious counter-hypothesis that the contracts he’s talking about were coerced. This is a glaring hole in the paper’s logic. They also did not “notice” that Ramseyer’s misapplication of game theory as an explanatory device was bogus; it did not meet even minimal standards in the field regarding how that would actually work. This is quite strange, as any real expert reading a paper that misused a basic term or theorem would notice that right away—it’s one of the most common red flags for an amateur poser, so it garners the most ready attention and suspicion. It would be like a paper in Jesus studies assuming, without explanation, that Q was usually employed to explain the content of the Gospel of John. Any expert would flag that as indicating the author does not know what they are talking about, which would trigger an even more thorough audit of the paper’s sources, claims, and arguments. It would also evoke a correction demand; the claim would never make it into print.

Why We Need Feminism

That’s all true, and profoundly mysterious. The failure of the International Review of Law and Economics peer review process is disturbingly extensive here, which is why the expert community is so alarmed by it. But there is one other point I sort of swept right past, which is not about the academic and epistemic standards peer reviewers are supposed to police, but which falls squarely in the province of social morality: why did none (!) of Ramseyer’s peer reviewers catch that his paper actually rests on the argument that a ten year old girl can consent even to sex—much less to be sex-trafficked? This isn’t just epistemically inexplicable; it’s morally terrifying. This means not only Ramseyer thinks children can be consensual sex partners, and even consent to being shipped off to undertake that as a regular profession (the moral core of even ordinary child labor laws be damned), but also multiple expert peer reviewers thought so, and the editor of the journal thought so (as the paper had to be edited and formatted for publication; so the editor definitely had to have read it). Think about that.

And let’s be clear. We mean actual children here; not teenagers. Osaki was 10, and no aberration; the evidence establishes preteen victims of this wartime industry were quite numerous. And yet even Japanese law at the time held that women below the age of twenty could not consent to a sexual relationship or even sign a contract (and even with parental approval, girls still had to be at least sixteen). Which means even if these contracts were “consensual” (in whatever sense Ramseyer, his peer reviewers, and the journal’s editor were imagining), they were illegal—even by the perpetrators’ own laws! It is also of course academic malfeasance to neither know nor mention this in the article itself; but what I am calling attention to here is that no one flagged this argument as constituting an immorally delusional worldview, and to such an extent as in fact to undermine the paper’s entire thesis. At the very least, after being really creeped out and hoping they never meet this author, a reviewer should have insisted Ramseyer qualify this part of his paper with an acknowledgement that the scenario he is describing cannot evince consent—morally or legally, even under the applicable law—and thus actually is evidence against his paper’s thesis, not “for” his thesis, as he presents it: any institution that is contracting ten-year-olds for this service should be suspected of not running a consensual operation of mutual benefit for anyone.

Feminism gets a bad rap, largely because of delusional, misogyny-cult Protocols-of-Zion-style fantasies about Cultural Marxism (which doesn’t exist, and has nothing to do with actual feminism as an idea or movement), and partly because human brains are shitty at grasping reality (on which general point see my Vital Primer on Media Literacy). Human beings tend to be fools, loons, or idiots prone to Dunning-Kruger their way through life; and feminists are human beings, and therefore suffer the same proportion of such clowns as non-feminists do, and—ironically—one of the things seeing the world through a sexist lens causes you to do is only “see” the bad examples confirming your biases, while you ignore all the far more numerous good examples as “irrelevant data,” as they don’t confirm your thesis. That same lens can also distort what you see to conform to what you expect to see (your caricatures and mythologies), rather than what’s really there; most anti-feminists cannot correctly describe a feminist argument made to them five minutes prior, much less the evidence that was presented them. Thus, when someone hears “feminism” what they might “see” in their head is a gallery of fools, loons, or idiots Dunning-Krugering their way through any conversation about feminism (whether real or imagined), and not an actual collection of reasonable, professional, or well-informed feminist activists and intellectuals. So, I do not here mean that delusional, selection-biased version of feminism—the straw man—but the actual, expert version—the steel man (or woman or other; scarecrows and ferrous entities have no real gender). On that see my articles A Primer on Fourth Wave Feminism and Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Baseline feminism—mainstream feminism—is simply the conjunction of a five core beliefs:

• That women are people, in the sense of autonomous actors with agency, intelligence, competencies, individualities, opinions, feelings, and rights;
• That women are not so different from nor inferior to men, and deserve to be understood and treated on a basis of factual realities about them rather than myths and tropes and group biases;
• That despite what any laws say or can do, and regardless whether by conscious or unconscious motives, women aren’t consistently treated that way in society (in some places the disparity is greater than others, but it’s hard to find any population-group lacking any noticeable disparity);
• That nevertheless women ought to be consistently treated that way everywhere in society;
• And that we ought to do something about that.

That much all feminists agree on; and as such, that is the definition of feminism qua feminism. After that can ensue all manner of disagreements, leading to various different kinds of feminists and different positions within feminism and among feminists. Disagreements about “what ought to be done,” “what disparities, and where and when,” “what realities,” and even who counts as a “woman” in this equation, are all to be found, and as such no single position on any of these subjects can be definitive of feminism. See my article Why Atheism Needs Feminism; which also goes more into the detail of my next point:

Feminism is an essential component of any successful epistemic enterprise. Not only because it’s an epistemic canary. If your epistemology does not lead you to even baseline feminism (as just now defined), it has failed a basic epistemic test and is therefore exposed as broken; which is a serious social and academic problem: see What’s the Harm for the epistemic point; though there applied to religion, it applies as well to rejecting feminism. The canary role here operates the same way as depicted in my old flow chart on systemic racism (on which topic see Actually, Fryer Proved Systemic Racism in American Policing), which I have reproduced here:

But a more direct way feminism is essential to any epistemic enterprise is that once you grasp the facts and ideas inherent in feminism, you cannot fail to understand concepts of autonomy and consent, and how coercion and bias operate in a social system in overt and subtle ways. And this will make you more epistemically competent to assess presentations like Ramseyer’s. A feminist would immediately flag the ten-year-old-girls-can-consent thing; a feminist would immediately notice Ramseyer’s argument omits any effective response to the ubiquitous reality of coerced contracts in sex-trafficking, and identify that omission as a fatal methodological flaw; and a feminist would be pervasively skeptical of Ramseyer’s thesis and claims and thus strongly motivated to check the validity (or indeed even presence!) of his sources, instead of “not noticing” he didn’t have any, or employed them fraudulently. For example, a feminist would be “shocked and surprised” by the claim that he had the evidence he claimed (such as regarding Mun and Burma), and thus been motivated to fact-check his sources.

And not simply because of some sort of feminist bias. A competent feminist peer reviewer (as most actual feminist peer reviewers will be), who did all that and still found all Ramseyer’s sources and evidence-claims checked out, would still approve the paper on a proviso of conditional revisions, such as that he address the logical problems of ten-year-old-consent and how to ascertain the absence of coerced contracts. In other words, any competent feminist would not block publication of such a shocking and controversial article if it met the epistemic, logical, and professional requirements of the field and claim. It just didn’t. And feminism is what would have ensured that was detected—probably at every point of the peer review process, but certainly at least at one point in that process, thereby ensuring this fraud was not endorsed by publication; or that its author fixed all the epistemic, logical, and professional problems before attempting to publish it again.

I doubt the International Review of Law and Economics will realize or admit this in particular. But I await with bated breath the results of their “investigation” into how all of this incompetence, fraud, and pedophilic ideology made it through several layers of supposedly professional vetting. I also await Harvard’s excuses for why it does not fire this disturbing, mendacious hack, but continues to allow him to represent their school and teach its students. But as they say, reactions against feminism typically justify feminism.

‘Nice game!’ The Girl On A Bike Said Riding By –

I was bouncing a ball in the sun.

I drew a series of parallel lines on the street with yellow sidewalk chalk.

I was thinking about human’s implicit understanding that leaving a graphic mark on a wall, or on the ground could be seen by some other human later who would have some understanding of the graphic.

Does that come from human’s ability to look at snow and see animal tracks and understand that they could follow the imprints in the snow and find the animal at the end of the trail. Can any other animal do that? I wondered as I bounced the ball.

I stood over the lines and remembered how a little child had explained the rules of ‘hop-scotch’ a while back. I thought of adapting the rules to the series of lines I had drawn.

I straddled the lines with my shadow on the ground heading north and the sun at my back. I bounced the ball and thought of a game.

“Nice game!” a young woman on a bicycle said riding by. I looked up and saw curly brown hair coming out from under a helmet.

“Yes,” I responded.

She went to the corner and right down the hill disappearing from my sight.

She had read my graphic; she read my mind. On the streets of Boston on a sunny day in April.

……………………..

‘Nice game!’ The Girl On A Bike Said Riding By

Saint Bernie Madoff Remembered For “A Letter From A Capitalist In Jail”

“No Capitalist can truly enjoy their wealth as long as a single Capitalist is denied their profits”

US: Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue – by Elizabeth Condra

Audio of Article – Mp3

A 2020 Pew Research study reveals that over half of white, liberal women have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point. Does this mean there’s a correlation between progressive ideas and mental health?

It’s a common tactic of the politically charged on either side (and normally perceived as a cheap one at that) to take the particular adherents of an ideology and equate that diehard worship to mental illness.

Conservatives label younger liberal generations as snowflakes or as having Trump derangement syndrome if they didn’t like the past president; liberals and progressives label right-leaning individuals or conservatives as racists, bigots, misogynists, etc. Resorting to this type of lowbrow behavior might once have been seen as an excuse not to address the actual issues or beliefs at hand, but now ad hominem attacks are more common than not. 

But what if what was once a cheap shot or a personal insult has actually been found to bear scientific correlation between the individuals who hold progressive ideologies and an increased risk of mental illness? That’s exactly what Pew Research has found — and all politics aside, the shocking diagnosis of over 50% of liberal women with some form of mental health medical diagnosis is a public health concern that no one seems to be discussing, let alone taking seriously. 

Women and Mental Illness

For whatever reason, we’re not talking about the risk of mental illness women in general face, especially compared to men.

Women are 40% more likely to develop depression than men. Due to lower levels of serotonin, we’re also more likely to have anxiety and depression because of that deficiency. There are also certain life experiences, like childbirth for example, which can lead to these diagnoses. 1 in 7 women will be diagnosed with postpartum depression in the year following childbirth. Postpartum depression in particular is a condition that leaves its victims feeling powerless and without confidence or assurance in their own abilities as a mom or caregiver — many women with postpartum depression describe feeling like failures. 

Women are 40% more likely to develop depression than men. 

Conditions like depression and anxiety thrive in silence, but there also seems to be a lack of confidence in women when it comes to knowing our own bodies, and instead our mental problems are written off as being too overly “emotional.” (Think about how many times someone has described you or another woman as emotional.) While hormones do obviously play a role in the development of mental health, for better or for worse, it’s possible to minimize or downplay the risks our mental health is facing if they’re written off as a “hormonal” issue, whether it’s our medical professionals or even ourselves engaging in that mindset. 

But biology and hormones aside, what about the choices we actively engage in? The behaviors we indulge, the beliefs and convictions we hold as more important than all the others? The people we spend our time with, the actions we devote our energy to, and the news we consume? Is that negatively impacting our mental health, or even more importantly, leading to medical diagnoses?

Here’s What the Study Found

The study in question — which, by the way, isn’t from a news source or media outlet but Pew Research for heaven’s sake — is, when all’s said and done, pretty damning. 

Interestingly enough, the study, which is titled Pew American Trends Panel: Wave 64, was dated March 2020 — over a year ago. Yet it took a Ph.D. candidate in political science posting about the study on Twitter for it to garner even a smidge of attention.

The study, which examined white liberals, moderates, and conservatives, both male and female, found that conservatives were far less likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues than those who identified as either liberal or even “very liberal.” What’s more, white women suffered the worst of all. White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives.

Zach Goldberg, the doctoral candidate in question, consolidated the study’s info in a set of visuals and posted them to a thread on Twitter. But it’s important to note that he clarified the following: “I didn’t write this thread to mock white liberals or their apparently disproportionate rates of mental illness (and you shouldn’t either). Rather, this is a question that’s underexplored and which may shed light on attitudinal differences towards various social policies.” He’s right.

Dr. Lyle Rossiter, a board-certified psychiatrist who’s treated mental disorders for over 30 years, agrees and adds that white liberalism thrives on supposedly championing “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed,” who they continuously see as “wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited, and victimized” with little to no agency of their own (A view that often mutates into the infantilizing and patronizing of certain groups within a narrative). 

When those raised to think reality is subjective bump up against objective reality, there can be mental health consequences.

The people responsible for these crimes? As Rossiter tells it: “poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization, and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: ‘Big Business,’ ‘Big Corporations,’ ‘greedy capitalists,’ ‘U.S. Imperialists,’ ‘the oppressors,’ ‘the rich,’ ‘the wealthy,’ ‘the powerful,’ and ‘the selfish’.”

That’s pretty much an exhaustive list of every grievance and every perpetrator that progressives see as responsible for these injustices which plague our disenfranchised communities while moderates and conservatives seemingly sit idly by unconcerned with anything but their own privilege.

But as the study exemplifies, the champions of these causes (white women in particular) aren’t exactly living the liberated utopia they believe we all should be living. 

Taking It Seriously

It’s truly unfortunate that so many women are facing these kinds of issues, and that this prevalence of mental illness among progressive women might be being weaponized for political purposes. If there’s one thing this topic deserves, it’s delicacy and empathy. We should feel compassion for these women, especially if we’ve struggled with mental health ourselves.

But at the heart of the matter is this: Progressivism is an ideology that supposedly demands equality for all, and one that keeps score to an exhausting degree. The privilege between social classes, between races, between men and women, between religious and non-religious, and more, all have to be constantly monitored, and “inequality” has to be exposed for the purposes of “accountability.” That kind of behavior isn’t just unrealistic, it’s unsustainable. In all honesty, it’s understandable that anxiety and depression thrive in these kinds of environments when we’re focusing on every minute, problematic issue in our world and not able to take comprehensive, productive action to solve all these problems.

Progressivism demands equality for all and keeps score to an exhausting, unsustainable degree.

There’s also the unrelenting focus on oppression, verbal violence, and micro-aggressions. We know that building resiliency against hardship is the best weapon against depression and anxiety, yet progressive ideology forces its followers to wallow in feelings of helplessness and victimhood. Instead of empowering women and minorities with self-knowledge, strength of character, and resilience to hardship, progressivism encourages victims to stay in a place of fear and helplessness.

Closing Thoughts

It’s not just significant that the women suffering from mental health issues are white (though we’ll get to that) but especially that they’re so young. The age range of those most affected was 18-29. These women are students, employees, moms, daughters, wives, and friends. They have goals and ambitions, yet who knows how hampered their day-to-day lives are by the conditions they’ve been diagnosed with. 

But it’s also key that white individuals are usually at the forefront of these movements, whether or not they’re the group being adversely affected. As most of us know by now, white guilt and savior narratives are pretty much as bad as any genuinely racist agenda because it robs the very group they’re trying to help of their own voice. 

We should be having the difficult conversations this topic requires. But if you take a quick look at the state of our political discourse nowadays, we might not be ready for it.

One Hour of Soviet Armenian Music

https://videopress.com/v/HgoCU0jP?posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fxenagoguevicene.files.wordpress.com%2F2021%2F04%2Farmenian-ssr.gif&preloadContent=metadata

China Documents – Since 1945 US Imperialism Started Hundreds of ‘Humanitarian’ Wars – by Tom Foudy – 13 April 2021

China’s right. The long, grim death toll from America’s 201 military conflicts since 1945 reveals the world’s real bad guy

A Chinese organization has published a report slamming the United States as responsible for a “History of Humanitarian Disasters” citing what it described as “American aggression” and highlighting the destructive consequences of US-led wars, most often under the guise of “humanitarian interventions” or “human rights.”

The document by the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS) states that US conflicts have often caused total destruction of countries and claimed millions of civilian lives. It states that among 248 armed conflicts from 1945 to the present day, America had initiated 201 of them (81%) and branded its behaviour as “hegemonic.”

The report said that US action had “not only cost the belligerent parties a large number of military lives but also caused extremely serious civilian casualties and property damage, leading to horrific humanitarian disasters.”

Sailors fire M9 service pistols during small weapons training aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Nitze DDG 94, Gulf Of Aden, 2012.

The criticism is the latest salvo in an escalating geopolitical competition between China and the United States, which has seen Washington scold Beijing harshly in the language of human rights focusing most particularly on the Xinjiang autonomous region. China has responded to this by forcefully denouncing US foreign policy, highlighting American hypocrisy and the reality of what it does around the world. At the same time, Beijing aims to pitch its own version of “human rights,” based on more of an economic angle, as opposed to classical liberty.

In the modern world, the United States utilizes the rhetoric of human rights as a tool to achieving its foreign policy goals, which builds into its self-depiction of exceptionalism and seeks to frame its national interests and military activity as a ‘good vs. evil’ binary struggle. 

It is also the product of an international system after World War II, where offensive warfare on explicit ‘self interest’ grounds violates national norms and therefore requires a moral justification to be waged. This has instrumentalized the concept of human rights as a “propaganda weapon” in order to legitimate what would otherwise be aggressive foreign policies, and to frame the US as constantly “under threat” by various enemies. 

As a result, America selectively weaponizes human rights in order to discredit opponents and to exploit the consciousness of individuals so as to transform war from what is explicitly destructive and tragic, into something which otherwise appears just, necessary and heroic. 

Once the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and the international system became ‘unipolar’, dominated completely by Washington, the politics of ‘humanitarian interventions’ became mainstream, whereby righteous Western countries ‘intervene’ in other nations to topple another government on behalf of the ‘human rights’ of their own population. There are a few notable examples of this, including Afghanistan, Iraq (multiple times), Libya, and Syria. 

This is what China’s report strikes at. Although the US has intervened in many countries claiming to promote human rights, the outcome has often been the wholesale destruction or destabilization of these countries. The above Middle East examples stand out most prominently, because US or Western intervention in each case has in fact made the situation worse. The Taliban are still prominent in Afghanistan. The toppling of Saddam Hussein unleashed political instability through the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, which killed many. The removal of Muammar Gaddafi produced a catastrophic civil war in Libya. And the people of Syria have faced prolonged conflict and sanctions in the bid to topple Bashar Assad.

It doesn’t end there. The US has actively supported Saudi Arabia and its allies in an indiscriminate carpet bombing of Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians and spread disease and starvation. As the world has become more multipolar recently and outright interventions become more difficult, America has upped the use of crippling economic sanctions to try to besiege hostile countries into submission, including Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, all in the name of so called “human rights” or other geopolitical grievances. 

It is no surprise that, given this extensive history, China sees the US complaints over Xinjiang as little more than opportunism, rather than a sincere concern for human rights – a bid to isolate the country, put others off engaging with Beijing, and of course build legitimacy for tough politics. How many westerners now want action against China because they believe there is a “genocide” going on? There has been a concerted campaign to push this by Washington and allies like Britain, but, as ever, the human rights that are emphasized are always selective.

As a result, China is increasingly shining a light on what it sees as catastrophic human rights violations by America, particularly abroad, and ironically in the name of human rights itself. The United States calls China an aggressor for defending its periphery from US militarization, so Beijing aptly points out that America is, by any measure, the most war-driven and belligerent country in history. 

Its actions have habitually killed and induced suffering on millions, yet it does not seem to register with people fed a constant diet of propaganda by their governments and their complicit mainstream media. This new study “turns the world as we know it” on its head and looks at the facts. China’s the bad guy? The long and grim toll of the dead from America’s 201 military interventions since 1945 exposes the real culprit.

…………….

Tom Fowdy

is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.13 Apr, 2021 13:47

One Hour of Yugoslav Communist Music – Kosovo

One Hour Of Yugoslav Communist Music – Macedonia

https://videopress.com/v/7sqGxcKL?preloadContent=metadata

One Hour of South Yemeni Communist Music

https://videopress.com/v/VTt56Bxx?preloadContent=metadata

One Hour of Iranian Communist Music

One Hour of Iranian Communist Music – Audio Mp3 (1:00:13 min)

One Hour of Thai Communist Music

One Hour of Portuguese Communist Music

https://videopress.com/v/WaTxUXJ3?preloadContent=metadata

One Hour of Angolan Communist Music – Audio Mp3

One Hour of Angolan Communist Music

One Hour of German Communist Music – Audio Mp3

One Hour of German Communist Music – Audio Mp3 (1:13:35 min)

18 Reasons I Won’t Be Getting a Covid Vaccine – by Christian Elliot

Friends have asked my thoughts on the covid inoculations – time to write an article on the topic.

Knowing how contentious this issue is, part of me would rather just write about something else.

I promise to do my best to be level-headed and non-hysterical.

I’m not here to pick a fight with anyone, just to walk you through some of what I’ve read, my lingering questions, and explain why I can’t make sense of these covid vaccines.

#1: VACCINE MAKERS ARE IMMUNE FROM LIABILITY

The only industry in the world that bears no liability for injuries or deaths resulting from their products, are vaccine makers.

First established in 1986 with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and reinforced by the PREP Act, vaccine makers cannot be sued, even if they are shown to be negligent.

The covid-vaccine makers are allowed to create a one-size-fits-all product, with no testing on sub-populations (i.e. people with specific health conditions), and yet they are unwilling to accept any responsibility for any adverse events or deaths their products cause.

If a company is not willing to stand behind their product as safe, especially one they rushed to market and skipped animal trials on, I am not willing to take a chance on their product.

No liability. No trust.

Here’s why…

#2: THE CHECKERED PAST OF THE VACCINE COMPANIES

The four major companies who are making these covid vaccines are/have either:

1. Never brought a vaccine to market before covid (Moderna and Johnson & Johnson).
2. Are serial felons (Pfizer, and Astra Zeneca).
3. Are both (Johnson & Johnson).

Moderna had been trying to “Modernize our RNA” (thus the company name)–for years, but had never successfully brought ANY product to market–how nice for them to get a major cash infusion from the government to keep trying.

In fact, all major vaccine makers (save Moderna) have paid out tens of billions of dollars in damages for other products they brought to market when they knew those products would cause injuries and death–see Vioxx, Bextra, Celebrex, Thalidomide, and Opioids as a few examples.

If drug companies willfully choose to put harmful products in the market, when they can be sued, why would we trust any product where they have NO liability?

In case it hasn’t sunk in, let me reiterate…3 of the 4 covid vaccine makers have been sued for products they brought to market even though they knew injuries and deaths would result.

• Johnson & Johnson has lost major lawsuits in 1995, 1996, 2001, 2010, 2011, 2016, 2019 (For what it’s worth, J&J’s vaccine also contains tissues from aborted fetal cells, perhaps a topic for another discussion)
• Pfizer has the distinction of the biggest criminal payout in history. They have lost so many lawsuits it’s hard to count. You can check out their rap sheet here. Maybe that’s why they are demanding that countries where they don’t have liability protection put up collateral to cover vaccine-injury lawsuits.
• Astra Zeneca has similarly lost so many lawsuits it’s hard to count. Here’s one. Here’s another…you get the point. And in case you missed it, the company had their covid vaccine suspended in at least 18 countries over concerns of blood clots, and they completely botched their meeting with the FDA with numbers from their study that didn’t match.
• Oh, and apparently J&J (whose vaccine is approved for “Emergency Use” in the US) and Astrazenca (whose vaccine is not approved for “Emergency Use” in the US), had a little mix up in their ingredients…in 15 million doses. Oops.

Let me reiterate this point:

Given the free pass from liability, and the checkered past of these companies, why would we assume that all their vaccines are safe and made completely above board?

Where else in life would we trust someone with that kind of reputation?

No. I don’t trust them.

No liability. No trust.

Here’s another reason why I don’t trust them.

 A vial of the Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine is seen at Northwell Health’s South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore, New York, U.S., March 3, 2021.

#3: THE UGLY HISTORY OF ATTEMPTS TO MAKE CORONAVIRUS VACCINES

There have been many attempts to make viral vaccines in the past that ended in utter failure, which is why we did not have a coronavirus vaccine in 2020.

In the 1960’s, scientists attempted to make an RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) vaccine for infants.

In that study, they skipped animal trials because they weren’t necessary back then.

In the end, the vaccinated infants got much sicker than the unvaccinated infants when exposed to the virus in nature, with 80% of the vaccinated infants requiring hospitalization, and two of them died.

After 2000, scientists made many attempts to create coronavirus vaccines.

For the past 20 years, all ended in failure because the animals in the clinical trials got very sick and many died, just like the children in the 1960’s.

You can read a summary of this history/science here.

Or if you want to read the individual studies you can check out these links:

• In 2004 attempted vaccine produced hepatitis in ferrets
• In 2005 mice and civets became sick and more susceptible to coronaviruses after being vaccinated
• In 2012 the ferrets became sick and died. And in this study mice and ferrets developed lung disease.
• In 2016 this study also produce lung disease in mice.

The typical pattern in the studies mentioned above is that the children and the animals produced beautiful antibody responses after being vaccinated.

The manufacturers thought they hit the jackpot.

The problem came when the children and animals were exposed to the wild version of the virus.

When that happened, an unexplained phenomenon called Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) also known as Vaccine Enhanced Disease (VED) occurred where the immune system produced a “cytokine storm” (i.e. overwhelmingly attacked the body), and the children/animals died.

Here’s the lingering issue…

The vaccine makers have no data to suggest their rushed vaccines have overcome that problem.

In other words, never before has any attempt to make a coronavirus vaccine been successful, nor has the gene-therapy technology that is mRNA “vaccines” been safely brought to market, but hey, since they had billions of dollars in government funding, I’m sure they figured that out.

Except they don’t know if they have…

#4: THE “DATA GAPS” SUBMITTED TO THE FDA BY THE VACCINE MAKERS

When vaccine makers submitted their papers to the FDA for the Emergency Use Authorization (Note: An EUA is not the same as a full FDA approval), among the many “Data Gaps” they reported was that they have nothing in their trials to suggest they overcame that pesky problem of Vaccine Enhanced Disease.

They simply don’t know–i.e. they have no idea if the vaccines they’ve made will also produce the same cytokine storm (and deaths) as previous attempts at such products.

As Joseph Mercola points out…

“Previous attempts to develop an mRNA-based drug using lipid nanoparticles failed and had to be abandoned because when the dose was too low, the drug had no effect, and when dosed too high, the drug became too toxic. An obvious question is: What has changed that now makes this technology safe enough for mass use?”

If that’s not alarming enough, here are other gaps in the data–i.e. there is no data to suggest safety or efficacy regarding:

• Anyone younger than age 18 or older than age 55
• Pregnant or lactating mothers
• Auto-immune conditions
• Immunocompromised individuals
• No data on transmission of covid
• No data on preventing mortality from covid
• No data on duration of protection from covid

Hard to believe right?

In case you think I’m making this up, or want to see the actual documents sent to the FDA by Pfizer and Moderna for their Emergency Use Authorization, you can check out this, or this respectively. The data gaps can be found starting with page 46 and 48 respectively.

For now let’s turn our eyes to the raw data the vaccine makers used to submit for emergency use authorization.

#5: NO ACCESS TO THE RAW DATA FROM THE TRIALS

Would you like to see the raw data that produced the “90% and 95% effective” claims touted in the news?

Me too…

But they won’t let us see that data.

As pointed out in the BMJ, something about the Pfizer and Moderna efficacy claims smells really funny.

There were “3,410 total cases of suspected, but unconfirmed covid-19 in the overall study population, 1,594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1,816 in the placebo group.”

Wait…what?

Did they fail to do science in their scientific study by not verifying a major variable?

Could they not test those “suspected but unconfirmed” cases to find out if they had covid?

Apparently not.

Why not test all 3,410 participants for the sake of accuracy?

Can we only guess they didn’t test because it would mess up their “90-95% effective” claims?

Where’s the FDA?

Would it not be prudent for the FDA, to expect (demand) that the vaccine makers test people who have “covid-like symptoms,” and release their raw data so outside, third-parties could examine how the manufacturers justified the numbers?

I mean it’s only every citizen of the world we’re trying to get to take these experimental products…

Why did the FDA not require that? Isn’t that the entire purpose of the FDA anyway?

Good question.

Foxes guarding the hen house?

Seems like it.

No liability. No trust.

#6: NO LONG-TERM SAFETY TESTING

Obviously, with products that have only been on the market a few months, we have no long-term safety data.

In other words, we have no idea what this product will do in the body months or years from now–for ANY population.

Given all the risks above (risks that ALL pharmaceutical products have), would it not be prudent to wait to see if the worst-case scenarios have indeed been avoided?

Would it not make sense to want to fill those pesky “data gaps” before we try to give this to every man, woman, and child on the planet?

Well…that would make sense, but to have that data, they need to test it on people, which leads me to my next point…

#7: NO INFORMED CONSENT

What most who are taking the vaccine don’t know is that because these products are still in clinical trials, anyone who gets the shot is now part of the clinical trial.

They are part of the experiment.

Those (like me) who do not take it, are part of the control group.

Time will tell how this experiment works out.

But, you may be asking, if the vaccines are causing harm, wouldn’t we be seeing that all over the news?

Surely the FDA would step in and pause the distribution?

Well, if the adverse events reporting system was working, maybe things would be different.

#8: UNDER-REPORTING OF ADVERSE REACTIONS AND DEATH

According to a study done by Harvard (at the commission of our own government), less than 1% of all adverse reactions to vaccines are actually submitted to the National Vaccine Adverse Events Reports System (VAERS) – read page 6 at the link above.

While the problems with VAERS have not been fixed (as you can read about in this letter to the CDC), at the time of this writing VAERS reports over 2,200 deaths from the current covid vaccines, as well as close to 60,000 adverse reactions.

“VAERS data released today showed 50,861 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 2,249 deaths and 7,726 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and March 26, 2021.”

And those numbers don’t include (what is currently) 578 cases of Bell’s Palsy.

If those numbers are still only 1% of the total adverse reactions (or .8 to 2% of what this study published recently in the JAMA found), you can do the math, but that equates to somewhere around 110,00 to 220,000 deaths from the vaccines to date, and a ridiculous number of adverse reactions.

Bet you didn’t see that on the news.

That death number would currently still be lower than the 424,000 deaths from medical errors that happen every year (which you probably also don’t hear about), but we are not even six months into the rollout of these vaccines yet.

If you want a deeper dive into the problems with the VAERS reporting system, you can check this out, or check this out.

But then there’s my next point, which could be argued makes these covid vaccines seem pointless…

#9: THE VACCINES DO NOT STOP TRANSMISSION OR INFECTION

Wait, what?

Aren’t these vaccines supposed to be what we’ve been waiting for to “go back to normal”?

Nope.

Why do you think we’re getting all these conflicting messages about needing to practice social distancing and wear masks AFTER we get a vaccine?

The reason is because these vaccines were never designed to stop transmission OR infection.

If you don’t believe me, I refer you again to the papers submitted to the FDA I linked to above.

The primary endpoint (what the vaccines are meant to accomplish) is to lower your symptoms.

Sounds like just about every other drug on the market right?

That’s it…lowering your symptoms is the big payoff we’ve been waiting for.

Does that seem completely pointless to anyone but me?

1. It can’t stop us from spreading the virus.
2. It can’t stop the virus from infecting us once we have it.
3. To get the vaccine is to accept all the risk of these experimental products and the best it might do is lower symptoms?

Heck, there are plenty of other things I can do to lower my symptoms that don’t involve taking what appears to be a really risky product.

Now for the next logical question:

If we’re worried about asymptomatic spreaders, would the vaccine not make it more likely that we are creating asymptomatic spread?

If it indeed reduces symptoms, anyone who gets it might not even know they are sick and thus they are more likely to spread the virus, right?

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard many people say the side effects of the vaccine (especially the second dose) are worse than catching covid.

I can’t make sense of that either.

Take the risk.

Get no protection.

Suffer through the vaccine side-effects.

Keep wearing your mask and social distancing…

And continue to be able to spread the virus.

What?

It gets worse.

#10: PEOPLE ARE CATCHING COVID AFTER BEING FULLY VACCINATED

Talk about a bummer.

You get vaccinated and you still catch covid.

• It’s happening in Washington State
• It’s happening in New York
• It’s happening in Michigan
• It’s happening in Hawaii
• It’s happening in several other states too.
• It happened to 80% of 35 nuns who got the vaccine in Kentucky. Two of them died by the way.

In reality, this phenomenon is probably happening everywhere, but those are the ones making the news now.

Given the reasons above (and what’s below), maybe this doesn’t surprise you, but bummer if you thought the vaccine was a shield to keep you safe.

It’s not.

That was never the point.

If 66% of healthcare workers in L.A. are going to delay or skip the vaccine…maybe they aren’t wowed by the rushed science either.

Maybe they are watching the shady way deaths and cases are being reported…

#11: THE OVERALL DEATH RATE FROM COVID

According to the CDC’s own numbers, covid has a 99.74% survival rate.

Why would I take a risk on a product, that doesn’t stop infection or transmission, to help me overcome a cold that has a .26% chance of killing me–actually in my age range is has about a .1% chance of killing me (and .01% chance of killing my kids), but let’s not split hairs here.

With a bar (death rate) that low, we will be in lockdown every year…i.e. forever.

But wait, what about the 500,000 plus deaths, that’s alarming right?

I’m glad you asked.

#12: THE BLOATED COVID DEATH NUMBERS

Something smells really funny about this one.

Never before in the history of death certificates has our own government changed how deaths are reported.

Why now, are we reporting everyone who dies with covid in their body, as having died of covid, rather than the co-morbidities that actually took their life?

Until covid, all coronaviruses (common colds) were never listed as the primary cause of death when someone died of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, auto-immune conditions, or any other major co-morbidity.

The disease was listed as the cause of death, and a confounding factor like flu or pneumonia was listed on a separate line.

To bloat the number even more, both the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. changed their guidelines such that those who are suspected or probable (but were never confirmed) of having died of covid, are also included in the death numbers.

Seriously?

If we are going to do that then should we not go back and change the numbers of all past cold and flu seasons so we can compare apples to apples when it comes to death rates?

According to the CDCs own numbers, (scroll down to the section “Comorbidities and other conditions”) only 6% of the deaths being attributed to covid are instances where covid seems to be the only issue at hand.

In other words, reduce the death numbers you see on the news by 94% and you have what is likely the real numbers of deaths from just covid.

Even if the former CDC director is correct and covid-19 was a lab-enhanced virus (see Reason #14 below), a .26% death rate is still in line with the viral death rate that circles the planet ever year.

Then there’s this Fauci guy.

I’d really love to trust him, but besides the fact that he hasn’t treated one covid patient…you should probably know…

#13: FAUCI AND SIX OTHERS AT NIAID OWN PATENTS IN THE MODERNA VACCINE

Thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act, government workers are allowed to file patents on any research they do using tax payer funding.

Tony Fauci owns over 1,000 patents (see this video for more details), including patents being used on the Moderna vaccine…which he approved government funding for.

In fact, the NIH (which NIAID is part of) claims joint ownership of Moderna’s vaccine.

Does anyone else see this as a MAJOR conflict of interest, or criminal even?

I say criminal because there’s also this pesky problem that makes me even more distrustful of Fauci, NIAD, and the NIH in general.

#14: FAUCI IS ON THE HOT SEAT FOR ILLEGAL GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH

What is “Gain-of-Function” research?

It’s where scientists attempt to make viruses gain functions–i.e. make them more transmissible and deadlier.

Sounds at least a touch unethical, right?

How could that possibly be helpful?

Our government agreed, and banned the practice.

So what did the Fauci-led NIAID do?

They pivoted and outsourced the gain-of-function research (in coronaviruses no less) to China–to the tune of a $600K grant.

You can see more details, including the important timeline of these events in this fantastically well-researched documentary.

Mr. Fauci, you have some explaining to do…and I hope the cameras are recording when you have to defend your actions.

For now, let’s turn our attention back to the virus…

#15: THE VIRUS CONTINUES TO MUTATE

Not only does the virus (like all viruses) continue to mutate, but according to world-renowned vaccine developer Geert Vanden Bossche (who you’ll meet below if you don’t know him) it’s mutating about every 10 hours.

How in the world are we going to keep creating vaccines to keep up with that level of mutation?

We’re not.

Might that also explain why fully vaccinated people are continuing to catch covid?

Why, given that natural immunity has never ultimately failed humanity, do we suddenly not trust it?

Why, if I ask questions like the above, or post links like what you find above, will my thoughts be deleted from all major social media platforms?

That brings me to the next troubling problem I have with these vaccines.

#16: CENSORSHIP…AND THE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DEBATE

I can’t help but get snarky here, so humor me.

How did you enjoy all those nationally and globally-televised, robust debates put on by public health officials, and broadcast simultaneously on every major news station?

Wasn’t it great hearing from the best minds in medicine, virology, epidemiology, economics, and vaccinology from all over the world as they vigorously and respectfully debated things like:

• Lockdowns
• Mask wearing
• Social-distancing
• Vaccine efficacy and safety trials
• How to screen for susceptibility to vaccine injury
• Therapeutics, (i.e. non-vaccine treatment options)

Wasn’t it great seeing public health officials (who never treated anyone with covid) have their “science” questioned.

Wasn’t it great seeing the FDA panel publicly grill the vaccine makers in prime time as they stood in the hot-seat of tough questions about products of which they have no liability?

Oh, wait…you didn’t see those debates?

No, you didn’t…because they never happened.

What happened instead was heavy-handed censorship of all but one narrative.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg can question vaccine safety, but I can’t?

Hypocrite?

When did the first amendment become a suggestion?

It’s the FIRST amendment Mark–the one our founders thought was most important.

With so much at stake, why are we fed only one narrative…shouldn’t many perspectives be heard and professionally debated?

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO SCIENCE?

What has happened to the scientific method of always challenging our assumptions?

What happened to lively debate in this country, or at least in Western society?

Why did anyone who disagrees with the WHO, or the CDC get censored so heavily?

Is the science of public health a religion now, or is science supposed to be about debate?

If someone says “the science is settled” that’s how I know I’m dealing with someone who is closed minded.

By definition science (especially biological science) is never settled.

If it was, it would be dogma, not science.

OK, before I get too worked up, let me say this…

I WANT TO BE A GOOD CITIZEN

I really do.

If lockdowns work, I want to do my part and stay home.

If masks work, I want to wear them.

If social distancing is effective, I want to comply.

But, if there is evidence they don’t (masks for example), I want to hear that evidence too.

If highly-credentialed scientists have different opinions, I want to know what they think.

I want a chance to hear their arguments and make up my own mind.

I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the world, but I think I can think.

Maybe I’m weird, but if someone is censored, then I REALLY want to hear what they think.

Don’t you?

To all my friends who don’t have a problem with censorship, will you have the same opinion when what you think is censored?

What if a man who spent his entire life developing vaccines was willing to put his entire reputation on the line and call on all global leaders to immediately stop the covid vaccines because of problems with the science?

What if he pleaded for an open-scientific debate on a global stage?

Would you want to hear what he has to say?

Would you want to see the debate he’s asking for?

#17: THE WORLD’S LEADING VACCINOLOGIST IS SOUNDING THE ALARM…

Here is what may be the biggest reason this covid vaccine doesn’t make sense to me.

When someone who is very pro-vaccine, who has spent his entire professional career overseeing the development of vaccines, is shouting from the mountaintops that we have a major problem, I think the man should be heard.

In case you missed it, and in case you care to watch it, here is Geert Vanden Bossche, explaining:

1. Why the covid vaccine may be putting so much pressure on the virus that we are accelerating it’s ability to mutate and become more deadly.
2. Why the covid vaccines may be creating vaccine-resistant viruses (similar to anti-biotic resistant bacteria).
3. Why, because of previous problems with Antibody Dependent Enhancement, we may be looking at a mass casualty event in the next few months/years.

If you want to see/read about a second, and longer, interview with Vanden Bossche, where he was asked some tough questions, you can check this out.

If half of what he says comes true, these vaccines could be the worst invention of all time.

If you don’t like his science, take it up with him.

I’m just the messenger.

But I can also speak to covid personally.

#18: I ALREADY HAD COVID

I didn’t enjoy it.

It was a nasty cold for two days:

• Unrelenting butt/low-back aches
• Very low energy.
• Low-grade fever.

It was weird not being able to smell anything for a couple days.

A week later, coffee still tasted a little “off.”

But I survived.

Now it appears (as it always has) that I have beautiful, natural, life-long immunity…

…not something likely to wear off in a few months if I get the vaccine.

In my body, and my household, covid is over.

In fact, now that I’ve had it, there is evidence the covid vaccine might actually be more dangerous for me.

That is not a risk I’m willing to take.

IN SUMMARY

The above are just my reasons for not wanting the vaccine.

Maybe my reasons make sense to you, maybe they don’t.

Whatever does makes sense to you, hopefully we can still be friends.

I for one think there’s a lot more that we have in common than what separates us.

• We all want to live in a world of freedom.
• We all want to do our part to help others and to live well.
• We all want the right to express our opinions without fearing we’ll be censored or viciously attacked.
• We all deserve to have the access to the facts so we can make informed decisions.

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Huck Hemingwaystein

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NYC: Museum of Modern Art – Matisse Work Hung Upside Down – 1961

MoMA Hung Matisse Gouache Upside Down for 47 Days

Oops! On October 18^th, 1961, an exhibit “The Last Works of Henri Matisse” opened at the New York Museum of Modern Art. It consisted of large cut gouaches – including Matisse Le Bateau (The Boat). Le Bateau is an image of a boat and its reflection executed in very simple lines and shapes. For 47 days Le Bateau hung upside down in the gallery until a stockbroker by the name of Genevieve Habert came to visit. Up until this point, none of the torrent of visitors, critics, the curators nor the art dealing son of Matisse, Pierre, had noticed the mistake. Habert claimed that it didn’t make sense to her that Matisse would make the reflection of the boat more complex than the boat itself. After returning to the gallery a few more times, she confirmed her suspicions by buying the exhibit catalogue and doing a side by side comparison. Indeed the Henri Matisse painting was oriented different in the catalogue. Pleased with her discovery, she told the nearest guard that the painting was upside down. He responded, “You don’t know what’s up and you don’t know what’s down and neither do we.” Slightly annoyed by the lack of response, she approached another guard who directed her towards the information desk. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday and the desk was closed. Habert, who felt she had to do something, contacted the New York Times who ran the story on December 5^th, 1961.

The error had been corrected the day before, within two hours of the direction of exhibitions, Monroe Wheeler, being notified. He was rightfully embarrassed and called the incident “just carelessness.” Alicia Legg, an assistant curator, blamed the confusion on a label on the verso posted the wrong way, as well as screw holes which implied it had been hung upside down before. Upon closer inspection, there were also screw holes on the correct side of the frame.

References

Cascone, Sarah. “This Day in History: The Museum of Modern Art Hung a Matisse Upside Down and No One Noticed,” Artnet. October 18^th, 2016. Accessed October 19, 2016. https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/moma-hangs-matisse-upside-down-683900

“MOMA Hangs Matisse Painting Upside-Down,” History Channel. October 18^th, 2016. Accessed October 19, 2016. http://www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/moma-hangs-matisse-painting-upside-down/

Robertson, Nan. “Modern Museum is Started by Matisse Picture,” New York Times. December 5^th, 1961.

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Hemingway Makes a Great Comic Book Subject – by Robert K. Elder – Dec 2020

Why Ernest Hemingway Makes a Great Subject for
Comic Book Artists

Robert K. Elder on the Protean Appearances of the
Great American Writer

By Robert K. Elder

---

December 14, 2020

Comic book creators and Hemingway share a natural kinship. The comic book page demands an economy of words, and—for multi-panel stories—a lot of the action takes place between the panels. It’s an interactive reading experience, much like Hemingway’s work. It demands that you interpret and bring yourself to the text, like Hemingway’s less-is-more “iceberg theory,” in graphic form.

In Death in the Afternoon(1932), Hemingway expounded on his theory that what is left out of a story gives it power, that the act of omission strengthens a story. Hemingway contends that in the hands of a talented writer, a reader “will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Comic book artists and writers similarly make choices that require both surface and thematic readings, with narrative information being absorbed through a spare, meticulous pairing of text and artwork. Done well, comics are visual experiences that plumb emotional depths.

Hemingway’s influence continues to permeate pop culture, and comics are no exception.

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While researching my book Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park, I started collecting Hemingway references in pop culture, including more than 40 appearances in comic books. That research turned into several articles for the Comics Journal and the online Hemingway Review. To date, I’ve cataloged more than 120 Hemingway appearances, references, jokes, adaptations, homages, and doppelgängers from across the globe—and the list keeps growing. Even as I write this introduction, a colleague has just sent me a new story starring Hemingway from a comic book artist in Croatia.

Celebrity appearances aren’t new to comic books. Both Stephen Colbert and President Barack Obama got guest shots with Spider-Man, and Eminem got a two-issue series with the Punisher. Orson Welles helped Superman foil a Martian invasion, and President John F. Kennedy helped the Man of Steel keep his secret identity. Even David Letterman got a studio visit from the Avengers. But, using the crowd-sourced Comic Book Database and my own research, I’ve discovered that Hemingway by far exceeds other authors in number of appearances (Shakespeare: 22, Mark Twain: 13). As historical figures go, only Abraham Lincoln comes close to touching him, with roughly 122 appearances in comics (and counting). Hemingway casts a long shadow in literature, one that extends into comic books. In my first wave of research, I found him battling Fascists alongside Wolverine, playing poker with Harlan Ellison, and leading a revolution in Purgatory in The Life After. He has also appeared alongside Mickey Mouse, Captain Marvel, Cerebus, Lobo—even a Jazz Age Creeper.

In comics, the Nobel Prize winner is often treated with equal parts reverence, curiosity, and parody. In 2001, on the fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway’s death, Reed Johnson wrote about how the author’s image had been treated in pop culture. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Johnson reflected on the “Hemingway caricature handed down to posterity: a hard-drinking, womanizing, big game trophy-hunting, fame-craving blowhard who pushed his obsession about writing in a lean, mean prose style to the point of self-parody.”The comic book page demands an economy of words, and—for multi-panel stories—a lot of the action takes place between the panels.

Five decades after Hemingway’s death, Johnson observes, “There’s another, more serious and respectable Hemingway still duking it out with this comic imposter in the ring of public perception.”

That fight continues and is unlikely to be won anytime soon, because as author Tim O’Brien has pointed out, there is more than one Ernest Hemingway. In the many appearances I found, Hemingway is often the hypermasculine legend of Papa: bearded, boozed up, and ready to throw a punch. Just as often, comic book creators see past the bravado, to the sensitive artist looking for validation. This book endeavors to explore these Hemingway appearances, from the divine to the ridiculous.

When I first presented my research at the 2016 International Hemingway Conference in Oak Park, Illinois, I joked that this project was a pop culture rabbit hole that I couldn’t climb out of. The statement grew truer as I was invited to give talks at universities and to host gallery showings. What I found was a curiosity among fans and scholars about Hemingway and how his legend gets recorded, distorted, parodied, and boiled down to its essential parts.

Hemingway has turned out to be the perfect avatar for comic book artists wanting to tell history-rich stories. He passed through the most beautiful places during the most chaotic times: Paris in the 1920s, Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Cuba on the brink of revolution, France in World War I and in World War II just after the Allies landed in Normandy. He is a fixed point and iconic touchstone that comic book creators love to invent stories around. Even when he’s not the center of the book, a cameo appearance injects the story with energy and pathos.

Although Hemingway was an avid reader of newspapers, he seemed not to linger in the comics section—or, at least, he never wrote about it. His former secretary (and later daughter-in-law) Valerie Hemingway said that while he consumed multiple newspapers, he seemed to skip the comics.

He certainly knew that he was caricatured in his high school yearbook and mentioned in a few single-panel New Yorker cartoons before his death. He was also a consummate doodler; his mother kept some of his cartoonish sketches for his family scrapbooks. He was fond of drawing wine glasses and beer steins in letters, and notably, the teenage Hemingway drew a caricature of himself in a letter to family in 1918 after being wounded in World War I while working for the American Red Cross in Italy. He even includes a word balloon, “gimme a drink,” and points to the 227 pieces of shrapnel taken out of his legs.

The only comic strip to which he was compared in his lifetime, however, was Blondie. After a 1952 visit to Hemingway’s home in Cuba, Howard Berk wrote in National Geographic that Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, “seemed to be measuring each other. I had the distinct feeling that she was displeased and that he was trying to figure out what he had done. For some odd reason, the image that came to mind was Blondie and Dagwood, although neither resembled either.”Comic book artists and writers similarly make choices that require both surface and thematic readings, with narrative information being absorbed through a spare, meticulous pairing of text and artwork.

This was a standard trope in the Blondie newspaper strip: the clueless husband trying to figure out why his wife was mad at him. For the unfamiliar, Chic Young’s Blondie follows the courtship—and later marital conflicts of—bookkeeper Dagwood Bumstead and former flapper Blondie. Young’s iconic couple translated their loving but friction-filled marriage from newspapers into radio, TV, movies, and their own monthly comic books published by Harvey Comics.

There’s plenty of Hemingway the adventurer in the comics discussed in the following pages; there’s also Hemingway the husband, the lover, the writer, the hunter, and a man alone, battling his demons.

A note about organization: I’ve largely kept to a chronological presentation, so it’s easy to track Hemingway’s evolution in comics. I have not differentiated between daily comic strips, like Peanuts and Doonesbury, single-panel New Yorker–style cartoons, and traditional comic books, like Superman. I’ve included comics and illustrations from big publishers (such as Marvel and DC), independents (such as Dark Horse Comics and Fantagraphics), and foreign publishers (Le Lombard, Manga Bungo, Panini), as well as underground, internet, and other self-published comics. In an effort to be more inclusive and expand the scholarship, I’ve also included web comics and the odd subgenre of Hemingway as a portfolio model. While I was searching for images, I kept running into portraits of Hemingway and scenes from his work that weren’t attached to either a book or a web comic. Rather, these commercial or portfolio images were created by aspiring comic book and graphic artists.

This work also includes a few breakout chapters, in which my collaborators offer examinations of Hemingway comics and adaptations. In a couple places I’ve grouped similar sections together, such as Italian Disney comics and the work of Norwegian cartoonist Jason.

Almost all of the interviews in this volume are original, appearing for the first time. In some places, I’ve removed my own questions and let the creators speak for themselves.

It’s worth noting that this is not a complete encyclopedia of Hemingway in comics. That would be an impossible task, as a new work is always being created or found. To paraphrase Paul Simon, Hemingway has not ended up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard. I see this not as the definitive work on the subject, but the first step.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Hemingway in Comics by Robert K. Elder.

Hemingway Makes a Great Comic Book Subject – by Robert K. Elder – Dec 2020 | xenagoguevicene (archive.ph)

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Hemingway Told Me Things – by Lillian Ross – May 1999

Hemingway Told Me Things

Notes on a decade’s correspondence.

By Lillian Ross

May 16, 1999

I first met Ernest Hemingway on Christmas Eve, 1947, in Ketchum, Idaho. He liked vacationing there, away from his home, in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, and eventually built his own house there. I had gone to talk to Hemingway about Sidney Franklin, the bullfighter from Brooklyn, whom I was writing about. Hemingway was extraordinarily patient and generous in giving me marvellous material on Franklin and bullfighting. Then he and his wife, Mary, invited me to join them and his three sons for an elaborate Christmas dinner cooked by Mary in the tourist cabin where they were staying. After that, we kept in touch, and a couple of years later, when the Hemingways came to New York, I was able to spend enough time with him to write a long Profile of him for this magazine. He was, as he liked to put it, “half a century old” at the time. Throughout the succeeding eleven years, until his death, he wrote scores of letters to me. Mary also wrote from time to time. Our correspondence established an unshakable friendship. I last heard from Hemingway in 1961, when he was in St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where he had gone to seek medical help. It was about five months before he killed himself, in Ketchum.

Hemingway had some succinct advice for me as a writer: “Just call them the way you see them and the hell with it.”Illustration by Edward Sorel

In his letters to me, Hemingway often used the joke “Indian” talk he had invented, dropping his articles and being intentionally ungrammatical. He kidded around in other ways, too. For example, while writing a letter he would switch from typewriter to handwriting: “Had to quit typing due to my self pity + cramps. There are a lot of compensations in life. Anyhow, I don’t have to re-marry Dorothy Parker. Please write. Huck Hemingstein.” Or: “Wrote you a funny letter last night when yours came. But had to tear it up because it was too rough. I shouldn’t have said that about the sin house, etc. anyway. But I got used to telling the truth to you and it’s a hell of a habit to stop. Probably am just as much of a jerk as those bastards that rush to their analysts. My analyst’s name is Royal Portable (noiseless) the 3rd.” He also liked to refer to his typewriter as the Royal Deportable Machine.

Hemingway signed a few of his letters “Papa,” but mostly he signed them “Ernest” or “Honest Ernie” or “Huck von Hemingstein” or “Ernest Buck Hemingstein” or “Mountain Boy Huck” or “Huckmanship von Hemingstein” or “Love and good luck, Ernest.” Or, after signing, he would draw three mountain peaks, which I assumed was his own idea of an Indian sign.

Occasionally, he would apologize for his “sloppy writing.” And he would ask, “But you don’t want me to write all the time with a hard, gem-like flame do you?” Then he would throw in a Hemingway sentence as only Hemingway could write it. In talking about the “haunted, nocturnal life” he led in Cuba, he once wrote that he had been up since “0230” and it was now “0530”: “It is getting light now before the sun rises and the hills are grey from the dew of last night.”

From Cuba, he often wrote once or twice a week. When he went to Spain or to Africa, the letters would come less frequently. Each time I opened one of them, on onionskin stationery with “finca vigia, san francisco de paula, cuba” printed across the top, I felt the thrill of knowing that it was from Hemingway. Every letter contained electric echoes of the writer I had discovered at the age of eleven, when I found “The Sun Also Rises,” a forbidden book, under my brother Simeon’s pillow. We planned a couple of times to meet in Paris, but we didn’t connect, so we met during the Hemingways’ few visits to New York. Despite many invitations from Hemingway and his wife to come and stay with them in Cuba, I never visited them there. I’ve never felt comfortable “visiting” most people. Besides, I didn’t want to spoil our particular equation.

In my Profile, I wanted to give a picture of this special man as he was, how he looked and sounded, with his vitality, his unique and fun-loaded conversation, and his enormous spirit of truthfulness intact. He had the nerve to be like nobody else on earth, stripping himself—like his writing—of all camouflage and ornament. To my surprise, the piece was extremely controversial. Some readers objected strongly to Hemingway’s personality, and admired the piece for the wrong reasons. The Profile was called “devastating” by some reviewers. But Hemingway wrote to me afterward, “Actually good old profile made me about as many enemies as we have in North Korea. But who gives a shit? A man should be known by the enemies he keeps.” Several years later, he told me that people continued to talk to him about it: “All are very astonished because I don’t hold anything against you who made an effort to destroy me and nearly did, they say. I always tell them how can I be destroyed by a woman when she is a friend of mine and we have never even been to bed and no money has changed hands?”

He had some succinct advice for me as a writer: “Just call them the way you see them and the hell with it.” In his letters to me, he ridiculed people he didn’t respect; he gossiped about people he knew; he sympathized with people who were in trouble. He told of his impatience with the wife of one of his friends. “There was always, with her, a lot of stuff about being Jewish and not being Jewish,” he said. “This always bores the hell out of me because I would just as soon observe Yom Kippur as Easter, and I am really an Indian I guess anyway, and we probably were as badly bitched as the Jews. I like Jews very much, but I always get bored with people making a career of their race, religion, or their noble families. Why can’t we take the whole damned thing for granted?”

In another letter he said, “I usually introduce myself as Hemingstein when meeting known anti-Semites and their friends. But actually the name is Hemingway, and there is nothing I can do about it.”

Hemingway liked to make lists, and when he listed the people he loved he usually started with the names of his sons: John (nicknamed Bumby), Patrick (nicknamed Mousie), and Gregory (nicknamed Gigi). Next, he would affectionately list all his wives: Hadley, Pauline, Martha, and Mary. (He described Pauline as a fine woman after she had visited Mary and him at Finca Vigia.) When John became a captain of infantry in Germany, Hemingway proudly told me, “He is a nice boy and I love him very much and he loves me. Since have never been on a couch don’t know whether there is anything wrong with that.”

In addition to being marvellously eclectic, the letters were full of facts. Hemingway told me things. I found skiing difficult, for example, and the proliferation of broken legs among skiers scared me. “Nobody has any real strength in their legs any more, because they don’t climb,” he said. “Skiing is all on a ski-lift basis. . . . They don’t know the mountains.”

He didn’t feel that he had to conceal his romantic notions about the military life. He would tell me, “I wish we could go to war (shoot-shoot war) sometime with Buck Lanham and Chink Dorman-Smith.” Lanham, his best friend, was commander of the Twenty-second Infantry Regiment. “You’d have fun. It is supposed to be a terrible sin to have fun in war. But we commit it and the three of us are very light-hearted people when the chips are down.”

I didn’t go fishing or shooting or hunting or camping or trekking on safaris to Africa—much less to war. I had no interest in doing any of that. But I enjoyed hearing Hemingway talk about all those things, because he said everything with originality, with zest, with energy, and with humor. During one fishing trip, he reported to me that they had caught five marlin, five tuna, five kingfish, about a dozen barracuda, a very big grouper, and a big female dolphin, “the kind that change from gold to silver when they die.” He liked to instruct me in the ways of the porpoise and the whale. The porpoise, he said, is your best friend at sea; he will stay with you and play for miles and come around the boat and blow at night like a whale but without a whale’s terrible stink. The sperm whale, I learned, when he’s been eating squid, has the worst halitosis. Some of the fishing talk would keep me from eating seafood for months at a time.

Sometimes he described how he felt about the Finca. On returning there from a trip, he would say that it was even better than he remembered. It was wonderful, he said, “to have lots of room to work and plenty of big waste baskets.” No one else told me things like that.

In our letters, we also discussed some of my enthusiasms. For example, he tutored me on the poker fundamentals. Never call; either raise or throw down. Play your good cards for keeps when you hold them and ride out your bad ones. Also, don’t come in on every pot. As for tennis, he told me that he used to play a lot of singles with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. “You had to let her almost win for her to be happy,” he said. “If you let her win, she became insufferable.”

When we discussed writing or writers, it wasn’t in a strictly intellectual idiom. In connection with the fish, we once got on to the subject of “Moby Dick.” I remember that I told him I liked reading the book. He said, “It is all wonderful except the rhetoric, which is shit. Also it is a lot of words about a whale. But in it there is something wonderful.” Then, in his metaphorical habit of comparing writers to baseball pitchers, he said that Melville is like a “truly good left-hand pitcher with no control but who has played with every club and knows everything.”

Hemingway could be very funny about other writers. “What is Faulkner’s book like?” he once asked me. “Did you read it? I mustn’t comment on it until I have read it or failed to be able to read it, but one thing I know is that writing would sure be easy if you went up in a barn with a quart of whiskey and wrote five thousand words on a good day without syntax.” Once he asked me what I thought of Faulkner’s “ranking of American writers.” He considered this an appalling practice. “They are all ranking each other now,” he said. “Like in J. Arthur Ranking Service.”

From time to time, I would ask Hemingway what he thought of this or that piece of writing. When Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker, in 1948, I admired it, and I asked Hemingway to read it. He replied, “That story was a stinker.” He called the ending “faked and phony,” adding, “You have to write so people believe it.” He said it was “the worst story I ever read in The New Yorker.”

I liked Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” and sent it to Hemingway. He thought that Mailer was very skillful and said he was “all for him.” He went on, “I wish him luck and that he keeps on writing. He has lots of stuff.” Another time he wrote of Mailer, “He has a fine imagination and if he disciplines it and controls it and invents truly from what he really knows, he can be a hell of a writer. Don’t tell him this as kids resent even an opinion.” He thought Irwin Shaw was “a jerk and a good short-story writer. But if I’d say he was a bad playwright (which he is) he would say I was anti-Semitic.” He called Dawn Powell a wonderful writer who “has everything that Dotty Parker is supposed to have and is not tear-stained.” He told me that Thurber was a better writer than Benchley. Once I took my great colleague Joe Mitchell (that other fish enthusiast) to meet him, and thereafter Hemingway always said how much he liked Mitchell’s “The Bottom of the Harbor.” But he criticized The New Yorker for “not being stapled well,” and complained that the magazine fell to pieces in his hands.

When Hemingway liked or admired a bullfighter or a boxer or a writer or a cook, he was always generous about sharing the object of his enthusiasm with someone. He was a good friend of Bernard Berenson (“the most intelligent man I know”), and told me, in a letter, “Old Mr. B is 86 plus seven months. He always wants me to be impressed by how old he is and how he might die and I never want to tell him that I don’t impress by being old; only by being intelligent.”

In 1954, after Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize, he said that he and Mary didn’t see anybody coming down to Cuba but “bloody bores, ex-rummies and people who want to shake the hand of the man who shook down Alfred Nobel’s legatees.” He would tell me about people who came up to him and said, “I just wanted to tell you, Mr. Hemingway, that I think you are our greatest writer. You and Louis Bromfield.” (That one made me laugh out loud.)

The same year, Hemingway shyly reported to me that another unusual visitor had turned up at the Finca—Ava Gardner. “Only for three days,” he said. “She is no strain, and I like to look at beautiful women and will go out in the boat tomorrow with her and Mary and Mayito Menocal. She was pretty good to come down with neither reporters nor cameramen and using the name of Ann Clark.”

He seemed to enjoy having visitors, but he often wished they would go away and let him work. At the end of one letter, marked “0215” at the top, he wrote, “I am awake for the night after haveing”—it was his habit to keep the “e” in participles—“sent everybody to bed. But if you want to know how lonely a man can be when his damn book comes out you could bring down your lonely detector and make some accurate readings.”

When Hemingway was feeling bleak, he invariably apologized. “I’m sorry daughter,” he wrote, “when I’m not a better example. Nobody ever fielded 1000 if they tried for the hard ones. Nor if they didn’t.” And he added, “Anyway thanks very much for letter and try and have one here for when we get back. It is nice to come back and have a letter. But don’t write if you are working too hard.”

He often wrote about the terrible heat, and once said, “Sorry this is such a lousy letter. Did you ever read any of those stories about India and the summer heat when the Monsoon has failed and people go heat nutty and take a rifle out of the racks and shoot somebody in barracks? It has been that hot day and night. Only you can’t take any rifle out of the rack and shoot the sergeant. You get up instead and re-write for six hours; copying and re-writing and writing new in long hand until the paper gets so wet it won’t take a pencil. Then you stand up and sign checks and business letters and necessary family letters on the typewriter hopeing to get to the pool before the last patch of shade where the water is cool will be gone. That’s why you don’t write Lillian. . . . Better stop before I bore you some more.”

Hemingway always cheered me on in my writing projects, and he confided in me about his own battles. In 1951, when he was finishing “The Old Man and the Sea,” he wrote, “By the time I get it all right and as good as I can do they will probably be dropping atomic bombs around like goat shit. But we can make a trip to some comparatively unbombed area and you can read it in Mss if they have stopped publishing books.”

When he was depressed or discouraged, he sometimes resorted to his baseball or boxing metaphors, saying he was “pitching double headers to empty stands,” or “fighting twenty round fights with Stanley Ketchel without a paying customer in the house.” Then he added, “Well, Dr., when you are half a hundred years old and know your trade what the hell is the difference under what conditions you practice it?”

There were times when Hemingway thought nobody “wished him well.” But he quickly corrected himself and said that was wrong, that a lot of people wished him well but just didn’t, he guessed, tell him about it. Then he might become sadly philosophical and say, “Your legend grows like the barnacles on the bottom of a ship and is about as useful—less useful.”

There has been a great deal of speculation in the past thirty-eight years about the nature of Hemingway’s death. Mary Hemingway said it was an accident, and I believe her. Hemingway was impatient with suicide. He would say, “Don’t die. That is the only thing I know is really worthless.” He loved and believed in life. When Thomas Heggen, the “Mr. Roberts” playwright, committed suicide, Hemingway said to me, “Now, a guy makes a little money with a play like ‘Mr. Roberts.’ Nothing occurs to him better than to kill himself. You’d think he’d buy himself all the women in the world or go to China or take a good room at the Ritz in Paris and be the Proust of the people. No, he kills himself.”

On the same theme, he said, “How people cling to their useless lives I do not understand. Some Africans when they decide to die, just die. I think I understand how they do it, but have always been playing on the other team and engaged in deciding to live when it is actually impossible. Sometimes that is a little rough.”

All writers yearn to be considered the best. Some conceal the yearning; others deny it. Hemingway, more than any other writer I’ve known, was forthright about this wish, and as touching as a child. He told me once that he wanted to be Champion of the World. “But I have that son of a bitch Tolstoi blocking me and when I get by him I run into Shakespeare,” he said. “It would be an out to say S. never wrote them. But whoever wrote them is the best writer. The main trouble is that he was in there first and wrote all the things I would have liked to have written and never can ever because he did.” He would ask, “What the hell do you do when they wrote it first?”

In rereading Hemingway’s letters, written more than four decades ago, I am struck by their modernity. For me, his presence is as alive as his fiction, and I feel blessed to have had his trust and his friendship. My respect for him may be somewhat deeper today, but I feel now, as I felt when I first got to know him, that he represents the very soul of what we call a writer. And I still believe that he may well be the greatest novelist and short-story writer of our day.

“The only thing for me to do is write good books,” Hemingway once said to me after reading a mean piece about his novel “Across the River and Into the Trees,” in Time. “I may be a no good son of a bitch and lead a highly criticizable life. But I am a good and conscientious writer, and they ought to give you that.” Once he speculated about why he had been criticized so often. “I joke all the time at myself and everybody else and at everything and most literary critics are very solemn and without humor and they resent that,” he said.

“When I’m going good, don’t give a damn about anything nor anybody,” he wrote. “People who don’t know work is your truest love, feel the thing come between you, and always get jealous and pick fights. Well, I love my work more than I love any woman or anything else.”

♦https://001751ef76a380f14b7ce25176942c1c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.htmlhttps://001751ef76a380f14b7ce25176942c1c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.htmlPublished in the print edition of the May 24, 1999, issue.

Hemingway – PBS Ken Burnes Series – US writer who sought “the truest sentence that you know”

Hemingway, a documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, premiered on PBS April 5. Its three parts, each approximately two hours, are now available online. It is eminently worth watching.

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was one of the most important American novelists and short-story writers of the 20th century, and a literary figure with an immense global influence and following.

He is best known for his three most significant novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), as well as innumerable and often scintillating short stories and nonfiction works. Hemingway wrote about the two world wars and the Spanish Civil War. He also wrote about love affairs, personal betrayal and suicide, as well as bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing.

Hemingway family portrait. From left to right–Ursula, Clarence, Ernest, Grace, and Marcelline Hemingway. October 1903

In the wake of the slaughter of the First World War, which he briefly but nearly fatally experienced first-hand, Hemingway developed a terse, compact and direct writing style. He hoped to eliminate what was ornamental and inessential, and thus false, from his language. The effort had a both moral and political dimension to it, bound up as it undoubtedly was with revulsion against the old order responsible for the savage conflict and with the wave of revolutions that overturned empires and in Russia, in October 1917, the capitalist system itself.

There are enormously attractive and enduring features of Hemingway’s body of work (he wrote some of the most beautiful prose in the English language), as well as less attractive and less enduring features. It is not accidental that the first two hours of the Burns-Novick series are its most compelling and intriguing. A persuasive case can be made that the writer did his most authentic and purposeful work in the first decade of his career, in his Michigan and European short stories and his first two novels.

As the series itself suggests, Hemingway was damaged by his arrival as a “celebrity” in the 1930s, by the solidifying and fixing at the same time of the two-fisted, brawny “Hemingway personality,” a man rushing—for unclear reasons—from one near-death encounter to the next. The writer, a deeply sensitive and shy man, initially built that public personality in part, it would seem, out of the need to protect himself from the world and how it was suffering and how it hurt him. Unfortunately, if one takes on such a posture long enough, one tends to become it. When Hemingway later turned to “political” matters in the late 1930s, his “tough-guy” personality became anchored, at least temporarily, in quasi-Stalinist realpolitik, a location “from whose bourn no traveller” easily or fully returns.

If Hemingway ultimately falls below Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald in one’s estimation, it has something to do with a less critical attitude toward American society, although he was undoubtedly critical of it, and a less critical attitude toward his own situation and trajectory, although he could be honest about that at times too.

His famed style played a role as well. Form is not a passive container for content. To a certain extent, Hemingway trapped himself in a corner with his short, declarative sentences and his nearly relentless stoicism (whereas the real man wallowed in grudges, complaints and even self-pity). When it came time to expand, to open up his approach and let in more of the world, including its great, historic tragedies, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, for instance, the results were not entirely happy. And that was his last major social-aesthetic experiment.

Hemingway asserted in his memoir, A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964), that writing “the truest sentence that you know” and going “from there” solved any paralyzing dilemmas he faced in the early days of his writing career. Of course, a particular sentence is only true to the extent that it belongs to or reflects the truth of a larger, preconceived artistic and social idea. Whether a given author is fully conscious of it or not, he or she is subordinating the selection of words and sentences to that idea—although those words and sentences may, in turn, act upon the overriding conception and alter it. In his later, postwar books, Hemingway continued at times to turn out individually true sentences, but they added up to false or often trivial works because the underlying notions no longer corresponded meaningfully to the character of the epoch.

The moral-artistic crusade that Hemingway launched in the early 1920s, rooted in a belief that personal courage and strength lay at the heart of accomplishing anything in the world, ultimately ran up against the objectively thorny political problems of the 1930s and 1940s, and inevitably proved inadequate. Nonetheless, at his bravest and most realistic, Hemingway cut through mystification and euphemism in a pioneering fashion and contributed toward humanity seeing itself as it really was.

The Burns-Novick series is divided into three episodes, “A Writer (1899–1929),” “The Avatar (1929–1944)” and “The Blank Page (1944–1961).” The miniseries, narrated by actor Peter Coyote, systematically works through the course of Hemingway’s life and career, making use of photographs and film clips, interspersed with comments from numerous academics, biographers and writers, including short story writer and novelist Tobias Wolff, Irish novelist and memoirist Edna O’Brien and Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa. Unfortunately, comments by the late Sen. John McCain also make their inappropriate way into the series.

The observations of the more than 15 interviewees in Hemingway range from the acute to the banal, but one has to commend Burns and Novick in general for their refusal to kowtow to the prevailing obsession with gender and race, and malicious, subjective gossip. Whether one subscribes to all their judgments or not, the co-directors, first and foremost, seriously treat Hemingway’s contributions as an artist, as someone who importantly responded to life and society, and do not become overly ensnared by his personal dramas and failings—although those are not ignored. One hopes, indeed, that Hemingway will encourage viewers to turn to the author’s works.

Ernest Hemingway in World War I

Jeff Daniels voices Hemingway, with Keri Russell (Hadley Richardson), Patricia Clarkson (Pauline Pfeiffer), Meryl Streep (Martha Gellhorn) and Mary Louise Parker (Mary Welsh) as his four wives.

The creators conscientiously attempt to examine Hemingway’s art and personality in their contradictoriness. In regard to the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s, one might say that the Burns-Novick series encounters some of the same difficulties as Hemingway did. No doubt the writer-directors have their own limitations and blind spots, but much of the PBS film’s predicament in trying to depict the period has broader, more generalized sources: the complexity of the events and the degree to which they are still poorly understood 70, 80 and 90 years later.

One especially salient fact certainly does come across in Hemingway, that the writer was intensely attuned to social and political life and “the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivalled,” in critic Edmund Wilson’s eloquent phrase. This is the case apart from the question as to whether he responded valuably or in a principled manner to every pressure of that atmosphere.

Indeed, that Hemingway failed to grasp the essence of a number of strategic experiences, and made serious blunders, tended to heighten and not lessen the degree to which he ultimately felt or even absorbed physically, as it were, a portion of the immense violence and suffering bound up with the events of the mid-20th century. It seems reasonable to suggest, on the basis of the six-hour film alone, that the accumulating blows and defeats, only very partially comprehended, contributed to his early, tragic death, by suicide, in July 1961.

The first episode grapples with Hemingway’s childhood, adolescence, his experiences in World War I and the first phase of his writing career in the 1920s, predominantly in Europe.

Hemingway was born in the upright Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. His mother was a cultured woman and aspiring vocalist, to whom her eldest son was strongly drawn and by whom he also felt oppressed, as the PBS series indicates. Their relationship was a contentious one, and no doubt had longer-term psychic consequences. His father, a doctor, suffered from depression and would eventually kill himself in 1928.

At 18, during the First World War, Hemingway signed on to be a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy. Soon after he arrived, he was seriously wounded by an Austrian mortar shell, hit by 220 shards of shrapnel. Hemingway lay in a Milan hospital bed, uncertain whether he would lose one or both legs. Having spent six months in hospital and “deeply affected by the war,” as one of the interviewees observes, he returned to the US in 1919.

Three years later, now married and having arranged a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway and his new wife, Hadley Richardson, moved to Paris, the intellectual and artistic capital of the decade. He quickly fell in with artistic circles there, encountering Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. As part of his work for the Star, Hemingway traveled widely in Europe, covering wars and international conferences, interviewing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923. It contains what was a controversial piece at the time, “Up in Michigan.” The eight-page story, set in northern Michigan, where the Hemingway family had a cottage and spent every summer, describes a sexual encounter between a coarse blacksmith and a girl who works as a waitress.

Hemingway, his wife Hadley (center) and friends in Spain in 1925

Edna O’Brien makes the point that the story refutes Hemingway’s “detractors” who claim that he “didn’t understand women and women’s emotions.” In general, Daniels’ reading of passages from Hemingway’s works,” especially in the first episode (including also “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River”), is intensely moving and evocative.

Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, concerns a group of expatriate Americans and Britons, residing in Paris, who travel to Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls and the bullfighting. The various men and women belong to what had become known as the Lost Generation, those scarred and disoriented by the world war. As the title suggests, however, all is not lost, humanity is resilient, although the characters are battered and disillusioned.

The beautifully composed novel, as a commentator points out in the Burns-Novick series, concludes on a disturbing, questioning note:

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Episode 1 of Hemingway also deals with the end of the writer’s first marriage, his second one to Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy American woman from Arkansas, his initial commercial and critical successes and the writing of remarkable stories such as “Hills Like White Elephants.” In that brief work, mostly dialogue, an American man pressures his female companion while they wait at a small Spanish train station to have an “operation,” presumably an abortion. At one point, she simply says to him, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, saw him return to the subject of World War I. Set in northern Italy, the story centers on an American ambulance driver, who falls in love with a British nurse. Eventually, after many disasters related to the war, including his serious wounding, the lovers escape to Switzerland. Tragically, the woman dies in childbirth, along with her baby. Without ever offering a didactic statement, the novel presents the cruelty and madness of the world war, whose horrors fall almost entirely on the heads of ordinary soldiers, civilians, refugees. Those in charge are stupid and brutal. The book was a great critical and popular success.

In a number of ways, the second and third episodes, covering Hemingway’s writing and activity during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, along with his physical and mental decline in the 1950s, are more problematic and more painful to watch, and even at times tedious, for some of the reasons mentioned above.

Various commentators in Hemingway point to the increasing weight of the writer’s fame in the 1930s, to the emergence of the “legendary Hemingway,” which threatened to consume him.

Now based in Key West, Florida, flush with money, Hemingway is watching the bullfights again or off to Africa to hunt game. He writes about such things in unsatisfying works like Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). Meanwhile, the Great Depression grinds down the population and Stalinist critics such as Granville Hicks deplore his apparent lack of commitment.

In fact, the burst of slightly hysterical outdoor activity may well have been Hemingway’s initial, overwhelmed response to the economic hardships and the political tragedies in Europe. Edmund Wilson observed that while in the previous decade, the writer had tried to express his disquiet, and had been “undruggable,” now what had set in was “a deliberate self-drugging.”

By 1937, however, “the blast of the social issue” rushed into the vacuum. Hemingway produced a not very good “proletarian novel,” To Have and Have Not, about an individualistic fisherman-smuggler who ends up dying in a heroic manner. (The novel did form the basis of two very good films, Howard Hawks’ 1944 film with the same title and Michael Curtiz’ The Breaking Point in 1950).

Hemingway in Spain, 1937

Moreover, in the face of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Hemingway declared, “I have to go to Spain.” He went there as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In Madrid, he met fellow correspondent Martha Gellhorn, with whom he carried on an affair and to whom he was later married, for a third time.

The Burns-Novick series points to the role of Stalin and the GPU in Spain, rounding up and murdering anarchists, socialists and “Trotskyites,” although it fails to place the vicious repression in the context of the Stalinists’ counter-revolutionary functioning during the civil war as a whole, as a force for bourgeois law and order suppressing every attempt by the Spanish workers to carry out a revolution.

The series notes Hemingway’s “opportunist” decision to conceal the Stalinists’ execution of leftist José Robles, a friend and translator for American novelist John Dos Passos, who was working at the time with Hemingway on the film The Spanish Earth (directed by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens). Hemingway claimed that such killings were “necessary in time of war,” and Dos Passos rightly denounced him, although it became the departure point for the latter’s own shift to the extreme right. Hemingway screened the Ivens film for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, as part of a vain effort to drum up official American support for the Spanish Republican cause.

As we noted ten years ago, at the time of the 50th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, the writer’s politics, generally speaking, “were of a certain American left variety, an amorphous mix of socialism, liberalism and individualism. … During the Spanish Civil War he submitted to the politics and discipline of the Spanish Communist Party and Soviet Stalinists, not the only American ‘free spirit’ to do so, although he writes mistrustfully about them.”

For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, and it is “mistrustful” of the Loyalist-Stalinist leadership. It relates the events over several days in the life of a young American volunteer, Robert Jordan, serving in the International Brigades and attached to a guerrilla band, as he prepares to blow up a bridge. The explosion is vital to an offensive planned by the Loyalist army, with its Soviet and French advisers. The offensive is doomed, however, and Jordan tries unsuccessfully to have it called off.

The book begins and ends with the young American on the floor of a pine forest, an image, we commented in our 2011 article, that “brings back some of Hemingway’s earliest concerns and emotions,” associated with summers spent in northern Michigan, “but now the images are charged with world-historical and tragic dimension. The ‘boy from the American Middle West’ was now in the midst of vast events, with equally vast consequences. As Jordan prepares for death in an apparently hopeless cause, he can feel ‘his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.’”

Wilson wrote, with some exaggeration, that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway had “largely sloughed off his Stalinism” and that “the artist is with us again, and it is like having an old friend back.” Wilson observed that “The whole picture of the Russians and their followers in Spain … looks absolutely authentic,” and indeed Hemingway was denounced by the Stalinist press in the US.

The new series makes much of Martha Gellhorn’s goading Hemingway into covering the Second World War as though it were some sort of virtue on her part. One has the sense that Hemingway rightly viewed the new mass carnage with a considerable degree of horror. Gellhorn appears to have been more gung-ho. When Hemingway did eventually make his way to Europe, he ended up observing and perhaps even participating in the bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest in late 1944, the longest single battle the US army has ever fought. The sights he saw, the series suggest, “would haunt him” for the rest of his days. As Hemingway once remarked, “never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.”

By the end of the world war, Hemingway was involved with journalist Mary Welsh, who would become his fourth and final wife. By all accounts, she endured a great deal over the next 15 years, as the writer experienced a sharp deterioration in his physical and moral condition. However triumphant official America and the Stalinist left may have been about the outcome of the war, Hemingway emerged from it an even more shattered human being. The onset of the Cold War troubled and demoralized him further. How else can one make sense of his comment, not cited by Burns and Novick, in a letter to fellow writer William Faulkner in 1947, following the victory of the US and its allies in “the good war,” the supposed war for democracy against fascism, that “Things [have] never been worse than now.”

Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway in 1941

The success of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which helped win Hemingway the Nobel Prize, and the Prize itself, tended to mask the overall decline and loss of purposefulness. The book, about an aging fisherman and his heroic but ultimately defeated effort to bring in a great fish, as we argued in 2011, “is well carried out, but its slightly condescending and sentimental tone is grating. And it almost celebrates resignation and defeatism.”

Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden and True at First Light, all published posthumously, are negligible works or worse. His memoir, A Moveable Feast, based on newly recovered notebooks and writings from his early days in Paris, was his last valuable and insightful work.

Hemingway, as the series documents, suffered serious injuries in two successive plane crashes in Africa in 1954. Erroneously, obituaries appeared in the international press. Hemingway had the unusual privilege of being able to read various premature attempts to sum up his life and work.

Afflicted with alcoholism and a host of physical wounds and ailments, unable to write satisfactorily, Hemingway inadvertently endured another blow when the Cuban revolution, which he generally supported, and US imperialism’s hostile response, combined to prevent him from returning to his beloved home outside Havana. He and Mary now resided in an isolated house in Ketchum, Idaho.

The series makes reference to Hemingway’s “paranoia” in regard to the FBI following and observing him. There may have been individual episodes of paranoia, but, in fact, documents subsequently made public revealed that J. Edgar Hoover and his ferociously anti-communist agency had been keeping an eye on the novelist since the 1940s.

In the early hours of July 2, 1961, the deeply, hopelessly depressed Hemingway shot himself at his Ketchum residence.

Hemingway’s life-story is an important one, for the light it sheds on art and politics in the last century.

The Burns-Novick series and the various interviewees refer, legitimately enough, on numerous occasions to Hemingway’s obsession with violence and death, and the brutality of life. But the responsibility for this “obsession” did not lie with Hemingway but with modern capitalist society. Born into an America created by the mass violence of the Civil War (in which both of Hemingway’s grandfathers fought) and the ensuing industrial-labor conflicts and imperialist interventions, Hemingway did not have to look far to find “darkness” and “butchery.” “How we are,” he pointedly observed in a letter in 1950, “is how the world has been.”

Hemingway in later life

Again, Hemingway, in our view, does not get everything right and does not probe deeply and critically enough into some of the American establishment’s own mythology, but it has its priorities essentially correct.

And that has been enough to bring down on the series and on PBS the wrath of the race-and-gender set. How dare anyone pay attention to anyone but these people? An open letter from “Beyond Inclusion” March 29 to PBS President Paula Kerger “from viewers like us” questioned “the network’s over-reliance on one white male filmmaker,” i.e., Burns. Beyond Inclusion describes itself as “a BIPOC [black, Indigenous and people of color]-led collective of non-fiction makers, executives, and field builders.”

The letter complained about Burns’s “211 hours of programming on PBS spanning 40 years,” reflected “in 38 cumulative films, mini series and television series titles.”

Rather than congratulating Burns on his sustained, diligent efforts over four decades, the open letter primarily suggests envy and petty back-biting. It would never occur to the authors, for example, to make a case for the infusion of tens of billions of dollars into PBS and the setting up of public film and arts programs on a mass scale that would enable young people of every background, including the most oppressed, to participate in cultural life. Rather, this unsavory pressure campaign by Beyond Inclusion is about divvying up more advantageously for its members and supporters the existing, meager resources.

The claim that the letter writers represent “viewers like us,” in other words, that only “BIPOC” filmmakers can speak to the concerns of black and other audiences, while entirely predictable, is false and disgusting. In fact, frankly, in so far as the letter expresses affluent petty bourgeois selfishness and self-regard, it does not speak to any wide layer of the population.

The questions examined or touched upon in Hemingway —including the rise of modern American society, the relationship between artists and social struggles, the nature of fascism and Stalinism, the character of the two imperialist world wars—are or ought to be of the greatest concern to every section of the working class and to the serious-minded intelligentsia, if such a thing can be said to exist at present. They are of far greater concern, in any case, than any issue raised so far, or likely to be, by those fixated on their ethnic or gender identities.

…………………………..

A Number of Hemingway’s Works Are in the Public Domain in Canada

Available on the site fadedpage.com – The works can be downloaded, or simply read online, at no cost.

A Farewell to Arms (fadedpage.com)

Across the River and Into the Trees (fadedpage.com)

The Old Man and the Sea (fadedpage.com)

Winner Take Nothing (fadedpage.com)

Men without Women (fadedpage.com)

A Moveable Feast (fadedpage.com)

Death in the Afternoon (fadedpage.com)

Hellas One Hour of Greek Communist Music

One Hour of Greek Communist Music – Mp3

One Hour of Ethiopian Communist Music

One Hour of Ethiopian Communist Music (1:00:17 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour of Yugoslav Communist Music

One Hour of French Communist Music

One Hour of French Communist Music (1:00:05 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour of Communist Netherlands Music

One Hour of Communist Netherlands Music (1:01:02 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour Of Albanian Communist Music

One Hour Of Albanian Communist Music – Audio Mp3 (1:00:19 min)

One Hour Of Afghan Communist Music

One Hour Of Afghan Communist Music (1:02:18 min) Audio Mp3

One Hour of Canadian Communist Music

Godzilla vs Kong – Male Hate Fest Against Women’s Rights – A Slugathon As A Misogynistic Dog Whistle To White Male Supremacists

Audio of Article – Mp3

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Directed by Adam Wingard

Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller PG-13 1h 53m

Godzilla Vs. Kong roared into theaters this past weekend as the long-awaited match-up between the two legendary male beasts. The film had lizard-punching action and jaw-dropping spectacle to spare, but it left me wondering: is this the movie we women and allies need right now? How does this movie advance or hinder women’s rights?

I sat in the theater, my mask and face shield firmly attached to my face. Someone coughed three rows up — but the scariest thing in this place wasn’t the threat of dying from COVID. It was the lack of progressive feminist intersectional agenda on screen as we watched a male monkey and a male lizard punch each other. Where do these creatures come from? Do they have mothers? Do they seek mates? Don’t most males of any species fight with other males of the same species. Not in this ‘dog whistle’ movie. Neither His Majesty King Kong or Godzilla San appear to have genitalia. People in the Gay Bi Trans Lesbian Non-Binary community have been claiming that Godzilla is gay for years if one adds up all the clues in the numerous works from the stars oeuvre.

But, sadly, anyone who is looking for blatant intersectionality, or even nuanced feminist allyship, this ain’t it.

That was the thought running through my head for the duration of the latest 160 million-dollar missed opportunity to stand up for trans people and fight for oppressed BIPOC bodies in America​​.​​​​​

With so much potential for in-your-face social messaging on progressive issues, Godzilla vs. Kong utterly failed to explore Godzilla’s thoughts on the greater social injustices of our day. Sure, we know Godzilla’s stance when it comes to fighting for the fate of Earth, but why haven’t we explored his take on the pandemic, gender identity, the racist UK break from the EU, and climate change? Isn’t the tale of Godzilla the story of a metaphorical Mother Nature being disturbed and bringing back ancient monsters from the time of the dinosaurs? But that message is so subtle that it goes over most of the audience’s head.

Are we just supposed to sit there and watch two males in a boxing match in Hong Kong? Can’t we go to news websites and see real clashes on the streets of Hong Kong between male and female protesters and police and pro-China civilians. Real fist fights.

Sure, the director threw in a little girl for people in the audience to identify with and a mother figure for the kid to always win a verbal interchange with the white guy who gets things wrong to punish all white men in the audience for their white privilege. Okay, so far, but it just a throw away to counter the main male v male fight. Haven’t we all seen this movie before?

It was bad enough when Kong failed to observe the proper social distancing guidelines as he tackled Godzilla, but that’s not what completely pulled me out of the film. After escaping the clutches of the humans, my jaw dropped as I watched Kong’s director refuse to use his script as platform to speak out on gun control. Again and again the monsters face withering assault weapons fire and no consequences are shown. The monster treat the bullets as irritating pin pricks. What does this teach the children in the audience. That guns are fun toys. This normalizes mass murder. Exactly what males want, especially murderous white males. Is this spelled out in the movie? No. Often female soldiers and authorities are shown attacking the giant creatures.

All immersion was lost for me as it was simply unbelievable that someone in the directors position would choose to remain silent instead of speaking truth to power. Just another Hollywood millionaire who refuses to take on the male dominated capitalist system of globalist imperialism.

And then, of course, there’s always been the nagging unanswered question of Godzilla’s sexuality. Certainly, it’s been hinted at here and there, teeming under the surface with cryptic, but obvious signs to those who are paying attention, (he’s gay, by the way) but never a definitive answer. It’s beyond frustrating. With the audience left wondering, I was forced to loudly shout “GODZILLA IS GAY!” in the theater during a quiet moment when I thought the drama was lacking. While Freud is certainly out of date one might speculate why both Godzilla and His Majesty King Kong where both in Hong Kong’s notorious rainbow light gay district. Was that more subliminal messaging to the audience in the gay friendly community that Godzilla is a ‘queen?’ What other answer could their be?

And in a 2-hour action spectacle, isn’t there any room for a 20-minute scene in which the characters discuss white supremacy and unconscious bias? Throughout the entire film, never once does Kong step up and answer for his privilege of having his own island. Consequently, it’s unfathomable to him that others might not have had it so easy, which clearly manifests itself in his treatment towards Godzilla. I couldn’t help but think of the rise of anti-Asian hate as I watched Kong punch the famous Japanese lizard.

As far as action goes, it’s all done competently. The lizard breathes fire, while the monkey punches stuff. But while the two destroy the city, I noticed a complete lack of BIPOC representation among those crushed under these monsters’ feet. Must we continue whitewashing an already stark white industry?

The problematic nature of the film even extends to the main casting choices: Godzilla and Kong’s voices are both digitally generated to be obviously male and heterosexual. Why were they not voiced by actual giant monsters? Godzilla is Asian. Couldn’t they find a gay Asian monster on some Indonesian island with giant lizards? Where they avoiding Indonesia due to Islamizationphobia?

Instead, some overpaid male audio engineer collects a direct deposit while two more perfectly qualified Asian and African animals are out of a job. It’s hard to believe that I’m actually having to talk about this in 2021. I can’t believe that I am forced to write about this painful subject after the stress of watching the movie, once in the theater and three times on HBO Max. I did change the audio to Spanish on HBO Max at home to be intersectional. Strangely the monsters growled and roared the same in either English or Spanish. Really? This is Anglophone cultural imperialism. Godzilla should be roaring in Japanese. His Magesty King Kong … I’m not sure what South Sea language he would speak, Tamil, or Cambodian?

As the movie wrapped up its 5th all-out brawl, I found myself wondering if monsters depicted on-screen tearing each other apart shouldn’t have been us instead. I thought of looking at my wrist watch, but I haven’t had a wrist watch for about fifteen years. I daren’t take out my cell phone because there were two burly ushers patrolling up and down the aisles checking masks and telling people not to take out cell phone to try and video the movie. So I took out my phone at home and made a clip of the movie with my cat; I wanted to fight the capitalist overlords of Hollywood. We defeated the record companies on the music front.

Watching the titans fight mammal vs reptile and hearing the meaty thumps of the punches from Kong I had an epiphany.

I had a profound and original thought: humans are the real monsters. When I choose to see the movie through this lens– as a metaphor for all the shortcomings of peoplekind, the movie becomes somewhat salvageable. It can be viewed as an intersectional feminist fable of anarchistic triumph over authoritarianism.
At the end of the credits I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Fuck Stalinist China!”

The theater empties. I double-check my face shield and get up to leave. There’s a bad aftertaste in my mouth, and it’s not from the popcorn or the enormous box of Good and Plenty that cost five bucks. It’s from what I just witnessed: a movie that didn’t advance the agenda at all. A movie on the wrong side of history. A movie that just had two giant male monsters punch each other to “entertain” and “distract” an audience from the superstructure of white supremacy all around us. Where were the voices of the marginalized communities of color or of gender or of no gender at all? Where were they? Not on the movie screen I sat in front of. I was going to demand my money back. I turned as I got up listening to my feet sticking to the theater floor and got my coat.

I looked behind me to see a group of white men clapping, having enjoyed the film.

Of course, it’s white men, I thought. This movie was made for them.

1/2 out of 5 stars

Review: ‘Godzilla Vs. Kong’ Is Fun — But What Does It Do For Minorities, Immigrants, And The LGBTQ+ Community?

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Directed by Adam Wingard

Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller PG-13 1h 53m

Godzilla Vs. Kong roared into theaters this past weekend as the long-awaited match-up between the two legendary beasts. The film had lizard-punching action and jaw-dropping spectacle to spare, but it left me wondering: is this the movie we need right now?

I sat in the theater, my mask and face shield firmly attached to my face. Someone coughed three rows up — but the scariest thing in this place wasn’t the threat of dying from COVID. It was the lack of progressive agenda on screen as we watched a monkey and a lizard punch each other.

This ain’t it chief.

That was the thought running through my head for the duration of the latest 160 million-dollar missed opportunity to stand up for trans people and fight for oppressed BIPOC bodies in America​​.​​​​​

With so much potential for in-your-face social messaging on progressive issues, Godzilla vs. Kong utterly failed to explore Godzilla’s thoughts on the greater social injustices of our day. Sure, we know Godzilla’s stance when it comes to fighting for the fate of Earth, but why haven’t we explored his take on the pandemic, gender identity, Georgia’s voter law, and ease of access to government-funded abortion?

It was bad enough when Kong failed to observe the proper social distancing guidelines as he tackled Godzilla, but that’s not what completely pulled me out of the film. After escaping the clutches of the humans, my jaw dropped as I watched Kong refuse to use his platform to speak out on gun control. All immersion was lost for me as it was simply unbelievable that someone in his position would choose to remain silent instead of speaking truth to power.

And then, of course, there’s always been the nagging unanswered question of Godzilla’s sexuality. Certainly, it’s been hinted at here and there, teeming under the surface with cryptic, but obvious signs to those who are paying attention, (he’s gay, by the way) but never a definitive answer. It’s beyond frustrating. With the audience left wondering, I was forced to loudly shout “GODZILLA IS GAY!” at the screen.

And in a 2-hour action spectacle, isn’t there any room for a 20-minute scene in which the characters discuss white supremacy and unconscious bias? Throughout the entire film, never once does Kong step up and answer for his privilege of having his own island. Consequently, it’s unfathomable to him that others might not have had it so easy, which clearly manifests itself in his treatment towards Godzilla. I couldn’t help but think of the rise of anti-Asian hate as I watched Kong punch the famous Japanese lizard.

As far as action goes, it’s all done competently. The lizard breathes fire, while the monkey punches stuff. But while the two destroy the city, I noticed a complete lack of BIPOC representation among those crushed under these monsters’ feet. Must we continue whitewashing an already stark white industry?

The problematic nature of the film even extends to the main casting choices: Godzilla and Kong’s voices are both digitally generated. Why were they not voiced by actual giant monsters? Instead, some overpaid audio engineer collects a paycheck while two more perfectly qualified animals are out of a job. It’s hard to believe that I’m actually having to talk about this in 2021.

As the movie wrapped up its 5th all-out brawl, I found myself wondering if monsters depicted on-screen tearing each other apart shouldn’t have been us instead. That’s when I had a profound and original thought: humans are the real monsters. When I choose to see the movie through this lens– as a metaphor for all the shortcomings of peoplekind, the movie becomes somewhat salvageable.

The theater empties. I double-check my face shield and get up to leave. There’s a bad aftertaste in my mouth, and it’s not from the popcorn. It’s from what I just witnessed: a movie that didn’t advance the agenda at all. A movie on the wrong side of history. A movie that just had two giant monsters punch each other to “entertain” and “distract” an audience from the superstructure of white supremacy all around us.

I looked behind me to see a group of white men clapping, having enjoyed the film.

Of course, it’s white men, I thought. This movie was made for them.

1/2 out of 5 stars

Courtroom Artist Jane Rosenberg Has Sketched Some of the Most High-profile Cases of the Century – by Hakim Bishara

With cameras forbidden in federal trials, Jane Rosenberg’s drawings of high-profile trials, including Steven Bannon, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein, offer unique insights.

Jane Rosenberg, a courtroom artist of 40 years who has sketched numerous high-profile trials throughout her career.

The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston marathon bomber, in 2015

(cont. https://archive.ph/kUA64 )

Jesus Ignores Judas Belief In The Value of Silver and Gold – Bitcoin Is The Kingdom Come

Jesus Ignores Judas Belief In The Value of Silver and Gold – Bitcoin Is The Kingdom Come

Democracy is a Pagan Idea – New Testament, Torah Old Testament, Talmud, Koran – Not a word about democracy

Democracy is a Pagan Idea – New Testament, Torah Old Testament, Talmud, Koran – Not a word about democracy or democratic consent of the group

For the Love of Godzilla!

Hong Kong – Stalinist Godzilla versus Capitalist King Kong

Godzilla vs Kong – HBO Max – Looks Like Fun Video Game – CGI Graphics Monsters Don’t Scare Me

I read a review of ‘Godzilla vs Kong’ that claimed that the movie was about the US vs China. Godzilla represented China for some reason and had Asian origins and the problem with nuclear bombing causing global radiation problems with the monster as a metaphor. King Kong was a US 1930’s allegory for the colonialism and capitalist imperialism that enslaved backward peoples living in nature in the rain forest.

The review mentioned King Kong destroying the US Pacific fleet and a battle in Hong Kong that might be taken two ways perhaps pro-democracy protester, or perhaps an illustration of a city being destroyed in a pointless fight.

The review I read had a Youtube video trailer to see the movie; I almost clicked on the video. But, I’d get commercials before the video, et cetera.

I have HBO Max, and I had seen the opening page with ‘Godzilla vs Kong’ featured and the point that the movie was opening in theaters and also streaming online immediately. In the past theater owners had prevented movies from streaming online for weeks or months to force early interested fans to go to a physical theater to see popular content. Covid changed that.

So, I figured I’d take a look at ‘Godzilla vs Kong’ All it would cost me was time since I already pay for HBO Max so I can get Turner Classic Movies.

Besides, I loved Godzilla as a child. The rudimentary black and white movies from Japan that I saw on a small television screen on a Saturday afternoon where the kind of drama I craved when I was about ten years old. Who needs a lot of dialogue? Let’s see some buildings knocked down. How about a dinosaur type creature, or a man in a suit, stepping on cars. People running and screaming as they look back in horror, who can’t understand the drama there?

I have a plastic Godzilla somewhere around my apartment that cats are wary of since it is about cat-sized.

For Godzilla’s Sake!

I find that my attention span seems to be shorter than in days gone by when I could go to a movie theater and sit through two ninety minute feature films. Now, I have two, three desktop computers going, I’m looking out the front and back door, looking out the window, looking at the ten clocks I have in the apartment, or going out the back door or front door to look at the clouds or trees, or people walking by. Sometimes I talk to two people at once outside on the sidewalk. We call that ‘multitasking.’

So, tedious feature blockbusters can seem… tedious. Not an honest line of dialogue in many of them. I watch lots of these movies with the sound off, or I switch to Spanish dialogue. I like having Netflix because I could select French for lots of movies since Netflix seems to have more of an international reach than HBO Max. Thank goodness HBO Max let’s me switch the prosaic prose into Spanish. I do have a limited understanding of Spanish. Most of the Hollywood movies are so simplistic that one can understand them without the dialogue. The works are made for simpletons by simpletons.

King Kong? Where do I begin? When I was a little kid I went to downtown Boston with my mother and sister and aunt and I remember going by a movie marquee on Washington Street that advertised ‘King Kong.’ I begged to see that monster movie.

“You’ll have bad dreams,” my aunt said. I was outraged, and to some extent I still am. I would love to have dreams of a King Kong destroying a city, especially Boston. At one point on Dorchester Avenue Boston’s mass transit system ‘subway’ train is above ground and crosses the street and as a kid I always thought of the scene in the 1930’s King Kong where he attacks a NYC subway train.

We went to see a Disney movie ‘Darby O’Gill and The Little People.’ The green ghost banshee that was in the film was a lot more scary for me than King Kong. I figured that one could avoid Kong by staying away from tropical islands, and the subway, and downtown big buildings. But banshees seemed to come to windows at night, and windows were everywhere and night followed day. Plus, I think I have met more metaphorical banshees in my life than giant apes.

So, sadly, I have been left with a lifelong feeling of regret “Who cares?” my rational self says. But then I remembered that I would have seen the movie on a large screen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen King Kong 1933 in a movie theater or on a large screen. Quelle domage.

I clicked on the button on HBO Max to play the movie and muted the sound. I do not want to listen to bombastic overly dramatic music from a ‘blockbuster’ production that takes itself very seriously. I moved over to the audio button and clicked the ‘espanol’ so I could hear the dialogue in Spanish. I didn’t need the subtitles for the English script. Unfortunately most dubbed movies that have a Spanish audio track and subtitles in Spanish hardly ever have the same text. The tasks of the audio dubber and the text translator are different. I had French cable a while back and they featured nightly movies that had text and dialogue that matched exactly so a language learner could follow along easily.

The graphics for the opening where good. But, there are so many interesting graphics displayed on my screen everyday.

A central character was a charming little girl who looked East Asian and might be a way for young kids to see themselves in the movie.

Kong looked like a CGI nothing. Realistic enough, but after seeing so many video games with animals and fur it all looks the same. I took a look at the CGI ‘Call of the Wild’ and the dog seemed like a lifeless cartoon. If kids loved the dog, I’m happy to hear that. This Kong did not have the appeal of the 1940’s ‘Mighty Joe Young’ who was a claymation creation.

I skipped forward a lot. I skipped over the talk, talk, talk, parts. This is a monster movie, not King Lear. Finally I got to some part where Kong is trying to break out of some kind of virtual prison where he is being held. Then he fights the US Pacific Fleet and shows why aircraft carriers are sitting ducks.

Point taken! Imaginary primitive urges personified in extra-powerful monsters can defeat US Imperialism.

Who knew? Every twelve year old boy.

The actors all looked pleasant enough and did there best to stare at green screens and look amazed, thoughtful, or, a little sadder and wiser after a big monkey teaches the real meaning of monster movies.

The little girl has some kind of mental connection to Kong because she is young and pure of heart, or something. She is apparently deaf and uses sign language. I’m not sure, I had the sound off most of the time.

There is an evil capitalist boss who is using some kind of robot Godzilla to mess things up. But a brave group of low wage nobodies gets into the office of the boss and confronts him and tells him he is a bad man. The Godzilla robot breaks free and kills the capitalist boss as the workers stand back and watch.

Then for some reason the little girl convinces Kong that Godzilla is his friend and the robot is the bad actor. A fistfight takes place and Hong Kong gets trashed. There is no swordfight because the director thought that would look silly in a serious monster movie like this.

The robot gets irreplaceable parts damaged in the ‘no rules’ fistfight and dies. Kong dies, or something, and comes back to life because the little girl loves him. I think. That was over an hour ago and I forget the movie already. It’s like a video game. The work is to be enjoyed and instantly forgotten, or, replayed with a different ending.

Like watching a cat walk among toy trains knocking over toy soldiers. What drama!

………………….

Update: Overcome with guilt I watched the movie from start to finish, in English. I thought about a reviewer from the 1970’s who was famous for not liking every film he ever saw. One parody account of his signature disdain for the popular cinema was his getting an award for not mentioning the name of the movie until page four of his Atlantic magazine high brow review.

Do I want to be ‘that guy?’

Yes, a little. But only sometimes.

So I actually watched ‘Godzilla vs Kong’ in my native tongue, English. I did skip over lots of the boring people talking parts unless the scenes looked unintentionally funny. Strange that the monsters lumber around like elephants with normal earth gravity during the slow scenes, but, when it is time to fight they are like two nimble cats. I watched on a fairly big screen with excellent definition. The battle ships going to their doom look like a video game.

Godzilla vs Kong – HBO Max – Looks Like Fun Video Game – CGI Graphics Monsters Don’t Scare Me | xenagoguevicene (archive.ph)