Fleshy Bones

2012-02-11T09:36:00.001-08:00

Foote's Fleet

2012-02-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

Fort Donelson in Northern Tennessee is now quiet - betraying none of it's importance to the Civil War in 1862. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Foote's Fleet was a water-way expedition down the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and directly into the Confederate heartland in 1862. Under the command of future president Ulysses Grant with a compliment of 17,000 raw recruits the Union expedition sought to take the initiative in the area of battle at the Kentucky/Tennessee border against two heavily fortified positions on the Tennessee River.

Unbeknownst to General Grant or Flag Officer Foote both crucial forts were manned by a force of less than 3,500 soldiers, made up of conscripts and slaves, who were mostly stragglers cut off from a force of 12,000 based in Arkansas.

The Union, by sailing directly south down the Ohio River, were guaranteed a line of supply that greatly favored their troops while their Confederate counterpart relied on distant Richmond, Virginia for supplies and orders.

Confederate Forts Henry and Donelson were isolated but strategically important outposts. The two forts were located 12 miles apart. Henry on the Tennesee River and Donelson overlooking the Cumberland River. Both were badly under-manned but also massively fortified. Fort Donelson, located south of Fort Henry, had walls that stood 20 feet high and were 20 feet thick in places. This fort was nearly impervious to infantry and hardened against cannon fire.

To attack these kinds of cyclopean positions, the Union expedition massed to enormous numbers. Foote's Fleet consisted of 7 war vessels and troop carriers including the ironclad cannon boat the Essex and a rickety barge dubbed a gunboat named the Cincinnati.

Forts Henry and Donelson as described in a map made circa 1862. Photo courtesy of Wikisource.

At the outset of the battle 17,000 Union soldiers were held at bay by a handful of country-fried Confederate bastards, who heavily mined the river channel and damaged or destroyed 2 boats including the Essex. Fort Henry, whose own fortifications were not complete by the start of the battle suffered from disasterous flooding and submerged artillery placements. It was deserted, moving it's remaining defenders east to Fort Donelson under the orders of Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, who was captured when Fort Henry fell after two days of constant raids.

The Union Fleet disembarked and raised the Union battle flag on February 5th 1862 above Fort Henry. Union General Halleck, not part of the fighting force in Tennessee, received word of the victory and immediately telegraphed Washington reporting: "Fort Henry is ours. The flag is reestablished on the soil of Tennessee. It will never be removed...".

Fort Donelson, with it's legendary walls took in the remaining Donelson compliment and was determined to make a heroic stand under the guidance of former U.S. Secretary of War and Tennessee State Attorney (Attorney General in today's terms) John B. Floyd who, without any previous militia or military experience was made General by the Governor himself.

Strengthened by the Tennessee Cavalry Regiment led by Colonel N. B. Forest the Fort repelled raid after raid for 5 days - from February 11th to the 16th. On the 15th Floyd himslef led a charge into the 17,000 men gathered against him and against all odds (3000 raiders versus 17,000 dug in troops) succeeded in opening an escape route. Yet, due to what is presumed to be an error made out of lack of experience, Floyd returned to Fort Donelson where he was surrounded.

The first USS Cincinnati was a "timberclad" gunboat fortified for naval warfare. She would be sunk in Vicksburg in 1863.

There, surrounded and under increasing pressure, but facing only minor losses of 40 of his 3500 men, General Floyd saw only calamity and annihilation. Floyd resigned his commission as General and transferred his position to Brigadier General Gideon Pillow who immediately transferred this position to, of all people the Commander of the Tennessee Regiment.

This abrupt lack of meaningful leadership from an extremely strong but under-manned position would mean nothing but escape and surrender of Fort Donelson. Colonel Forest ordered a second full charge out of the Fort.

Again, against-all-odds the casualties were minor. God himself, however temporarily, seemed to shield these out-numbered men as they rode out to charge through a sea of Union blue uniforms. Floyd escaped as well reaching Nashville where he sailed for Virginia.

Losing these two Confederate forces in a decisive and relatively quick (two weeks for two forts) opened up Middle Tennessee and Alabama to Union forces and was the first important victory of Ulysses Grant's military career. General Floyd would be stripped of his command by Jefferson Davis himself, without a court of inquiry, on March 11th 1862 and die of a mysterious "ailment" the following year of 1963.

References:
Wikipedia, Battle Of Fort Henry
Wikipedia, Battle Of Fort Donelson
Wikipedia, USS Cincinnati
Civil War.org, The Fall Of Fort Henry
Old Court House, Civil War Era Vicksburg

The Bloody Sunday Massacre

2011-12-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Bloody Sunday March of 1972 in Derry, Ireland prior to the massacre of unarmed civilians.

What can be our reaction to Fascism but horror? This is a common place horror. A horror that is readily found in the history of the world.

Fascism comes along to each culture, cloaked in the guise of a reaction to an "immediate threat", bringing with it the efficient brutality that is very often welcomed as a just answer - as it first was in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, the endless revolutions in Communist China and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Viet Nam, Korea and Afghanistan. Initially Fascism is warmly welcomed by an uninformed and misled population that have been carefully cowed by generations of corrupt leadership. When it turns it's sights on it's own people the result is total self-destruction.

Taking extreme measures against masses of unarmed people is pure madness but is at the heart of Fascism in all it's forms. It is at the very heart of fascism, from the gun toting drug thug on the corner to the storm trooper steam-rolling over empty battlefields, on this we can all agree openly - but this particular kind of fearful madness has never more clear then it was one Sunday in late January of 1972 in Derry, Ireland.

"And the battle's just begun,
There's many lost,
but tell me who has won?"

- U2, Bloody Sunday March 1983

Derry is often known as Londonderry by the native Irish due to the fact that Ireland has been dominated by England from this northern Irish city for centuries. Derry was, and remains today, a town deeply divided by religion and politics between England and Ireland. This international fight has been slowly boiling in the fabric of Irish and English society since the 16th Century and Henry VIII.

Irish political group Sinn Fein, first formed in 1905 as an underground resistance to English rule had re-formed in early 1970. Abandoning it's previous policy of abstentionism from politics Sinn Fein had begun actively organizing at the grass roots level with disaffected, unemployed youth and working professionals that saw Irish Independence or "Home Rule" as an attainable and realistic goal. Sinn Fein's fight was not above employing horrific violence equal to modern day suicide bombings that often claimed many innocent lives.

Their targets and opponents were indigenous Irish and emigrated English business leaders who maintained a strict status quo for their English counterparts. These so-called leaders did so by ensuring discriminatory policies that excluded the bulk of the Irish people from jobs, public housing and social programs - a kind of legally enforced religious segregation that only benefited a handful of collaborators. The collaborators themselves, for all their power over the destitute masses of their kin, were no more than weak puppets for a foreign power in their own home country.

In the middle of the two sides stood Ivan Cooper, a centrist Parliamentary politician and co-founder of the Social Democrat Labor Party (or SDLP). Cooper unflinchingly demanded that these centuries long practices come to an end with full civil rights being established for all Irish people. His solid leadership was founded around non-violent peaceful protest against the long military occupation in Ireland by having Catholic and Protestants work together towards common goals.

However, by 1970, explosive violence became the only politics between the two groups with MP Cooper finding himself more and more in the middle of two sides - each side galvanized by self-righteous anger. In July of 1971, two rioters, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, were shot dead in the Bogside section of Derry by soldiers in disputed circumstances adding to the atmosphere of growing fear and unease on each side. The difference here being that Cooper and the SDLP were not the ones holding crowds at bay with automatic rifles and mortars.

January 30th of 1972 is the day that would be called Bloody Sunday. It would be the second such massacre by the English military forces against it own unarmed civilians - the first occurring in 1887 when three protestors were beat to death in London and dozen more quite nearly killed with them during a political protest to free Irish politicians jailed under dubious charges.

On that winter day, thousands of people attended the Civil Rights March including protestors, observers and reporters. Before the parade would reach it's end, over one hundred rounds were fired directly into the crowds by troops. 27 unarmed people were shot, killing 14, More were injured as they attempted to aid the fallen. Two more were knocked down and run over by armored personnel carriers.

The dead included: John Duddy, 17, shot in the chest in a drive-way. Four witnesses stated Duddy was unarmed and running away from the paratroopers when he was killed.

Patrick Joseph Doherty, 31, shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety.

Bernard McGuigan, 41, shot in the back of the head when he went to help the wounded Patrick Doherty. McGuigan had been waving a white handkerchief at the soldiers to indicate his peaceful intentions when he was shot.

Hugh Pious Gilmour, 17, shot in the chest as he ran from the paratroopers. A photograph taken seconds after Gilmour was hit corroborated witness reports that he was unarmed, and that tests for gunshot residue during his autopsy were negative.

Kevin McElhinney, 17, Shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety. Two witnesses stated McElhinney was unarmed.

Michael Gerald Kelly, 17, shot in the stomach while standing near a rubble barricade in front of Rossville Flats. Also unarmed.

John Pius Young, 17, shot in the head while standing at a rubble barricade. Two witnesses stated Young was unarmed.

William Noel Nash, 19, shot in the chest near the barricade. Witnesses stated Nash was unarmed and going to the aid of another when killed.

Michael M. McDaid, 20, shot in the face at the barricade as he was walking away from the paratroopers. The trajectory of the bullet indicated he could have been killed by soldiers positioned on the Derry Walls as was later testified.

James Joseph Wray, 22, wounded then shot again at close range while lying on the ground. Witnesses stated that Wray was calling out that he could not move his legs before he was shot the second time.

Gerald Donaghy, 17, shot in the stomach while attempting to run to safety. Donaghy was brought to a nearby house by bystanders where he was examined by a doctor. His pockets were searched to identify him. Later police photograph of Donaghy's corpse showed unexploded nail bombs in his previously empty pockets. Neither those who searched his pockets in the house nor the British Army Medical officer (identified only as "Soldier 138") who pronounced him dead shortly afterwards say they saw any bombs before the dubious photo was taken.

According to the official report from the coroner for the City of Derry/Londonderry, retired British Army Major Hubert O'Neill, in a shockingly anti-collusionist bit of stark truth, the cause of death was listed as "sheer unadulterated murder".

The Bloody Sunday Memorial in Derry, Ireland.

This incident was immediately covered up, white-washed and denied for the next 40 years. The denial of readily available evidence by a remarkable number of colluded politicians and remorseful soldiers remains astounding given the seriousness of the crime. A number of kangaroo courts cleared all involved in the massacre. "Official" hearings reached the same irrational conclusions despite an over-whelming amount of evidence to the contrary.

During more testimony about Bloody Sunday in the Irish Parliament, Bernadette Devlin, very much a Joan of Arc figure in the chaos of that era of political strife, punched her colleague Reginald Maudling, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when he stated to Parliament that the events of Bloody Sunday were brought about when British Army fired in self-defense. Devlin was temporarily suspended from Parliament as a result of the incident.

It was not until June of 2010, nearly forty years later, that the Bloody Sunday massacre was only semi-officially acknowledged by the English government in the documents released from The Saville Inquiry. The inquiry heard from over 900 witnesses and received 2500 witness statements. However, according to the report, over 1,000 army photographs and original Army helicopter video footage were never made available. Additionally, guns used on the day by the soldiers that could have been evidence in the inquiry were lost by the English Ministry Of Defense. The Ministry claimed that all the guns involved had been destroyed yet some were subsequently recovered in various distant locations such as Sierra Leone and Beirut despite the obstruction.

References:
Wikipedia, Bloody Sunday
Wikipedia, Sinn_Féin
Wikipedia, Ivan Cooper
Wikipedia, The Pale Partitioning Of Ireland
New World Encyclopedia, Bloody Sunday
Sinn Féin, Statement Of Equality
Irish Civil Rights, Badge Of The Derry Civil Rights Movement

Thanksgiving 1949

2011-11-24T10:14:00.000-08:00

The Bath County Bombing

2011-07-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Bath County Consolidated School in 1927 prior to the bombing. Note the cupola atop the school later to become a memorial.

Ninety-eight miles outside of Detroit, just west of Lansing, near to where the world's first automobiles were manufactured there stands the small Midwest town of Bath, Michigan. This sleepy community in Central Michigan betrays no sign of it's disturbing historical significance.

In 1927, Bath's exuberant and triumphant pre-Depression American spirit shockingly gave way as the town became a horrifying scene of the destructive rage of a single deranged man. This event would set two gruesome historical precedents. One, in 1927, Bath MI. became the birth place of the car bomb. And Two, when the dust settled 45 were dead making Bath the scene of the largest mass murder in American history prior to World War II.

Bath far out-weighs the mass shootings at Virginia Tech or the Fort Hood massacre that have occurred in recent years making it second only to 9/11 and the Oklahoma City Bombing in it's indiscriminate, murderous scope.

It's important to note that although 45 lost their lives in the blink of an eye not a single shot was fired. These victims, of which almost all were school aged children, were killed by a mixture of dynamite and a military grade explosive known as pyrotol, an early precursor to napalm used in World War One. Another 58 would survive only to be brutally maimed.

Bath County Consolidated School after 500 pounds of dynamite and ptrotol exploded in the basement. Another 500 pounds was found miraculously undetonated.

This weapon was unleashed in the pre-suicide frenzy of Mr. Andrew Kehoe, a disgruntled farmer, who shortly before his death became the most prolific mass murderer in U.S. history.

At 9:45 AM on the morning of May 18th 1927 a very carefully wired alarm clock went off inside a sleek new school in a sleepy Central Michigan town. When it did, it signaled the end of an era in American history.

The Hall siblings Wila and George Jr. were killed in a Timothy McVeigh styled terrorist bombing of a central Michigan school in 1927.

The tiny electric pulse reached out from the small battery and ignited 500 pounds of dynamite, the equivalent of localized earthquake, demolishing the north wing of the school and instantly killing dozens of innocent children in the blast. Among those killed in the explosion or from horrific injuries were the Hall siblings Wila and George Jr. (pictured above), the Hart siblings Iola and Percy, the Zimmerman brothers ages 8 and 10, Fifth grade teacher Mrs. Elizabeth Harte who died with her three nieces and nephews in the explosion.

A neighbor of Kehoe, who would later write an account of the Bath County Bombing, Monty Ellsworth reported that after the explosion Kehoe was grinning from ear to ear as he raced towards the disaster scene in the world's first car bomb. What neighbor Ellsworth didn't know at time was that Mr. Kehoe had just bashed Mrs. Kehoe's brain's in then set his own home aflame.

At Bath County Consolidated School, as the stupefying shock of the bomb blast wore away, rescuers poured over the rubble and some noticed smoke in the distance. What many did not notice was a small man with a determined expression on his face as he pulled up to the disaster scene. The middle-aged man motioned over to what we refer to today as "First Responders". A few of them walked over to Kehoe's Model A.

Among these men was a man who no doubt would have recognized the euphoric, grinning man in the vehicle as Andrew Kehoe. This man was one of the primary targets of Kehoe's murderous wrath and also one of the last who would die that day - Bath County School Superintendent Huyck.

The Kehoe car bomb was loaded with enough explosive to vaporize 0ver 75% of his vehicle killing Kehoe and three others.

Witnesses report that the third and final explosion of that day, a car bomb utilizing the same dynamite that demolished the school, killed Superintendent Huyck, Postmaster Glenn O. Smith and Smith's father-in-law Nelson McFarren. All that was left of Kehoe's car was a tire and twisted metal shards.

The inexplicable, all-consuming fury of Kehoe claimed the lives of 45 people. Of that number, 38 were school children in grades 7-12 when Andrew Kehoe, acting as a volunteer and school janitor, secretly loaded the school full of dynamite and an incendiary explosive known as pyrotol.

Pyrotol was a military grade explosive that once ignited worked much like modern day napalm - burning ferociously. In World War One, American soldiers used this incendiary agent to burn enemy regiments out of trenches w/dire results.

Miraculously, another 500 pounds of explosive were found undetonated in the south wing of the school - only a miracle saved the entire site from being a smoking pile of rubble with the broken bodies of children roasting in pyrotol.

Bath Bombing survivor Donald Huff who passed away in March of 2011 at age 93, recalls that as a fourth-grade student student he had been one of the most severely-injured survivors of the bombing yet still managed to live into his 90's. Huffman spoke candidly about being inside one of class rooms in the north wing that day:

The school explosion made front page headlines of national newspapers, sharing the page with news of Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight. Senator James Couzens of Michigan gave generously to the fund, and on August 18th 1928 a new school was built on the same site. The James Couzens Agricultural School stood for 50 years before being torn down in 1975 and another school built on another location.

The cryptic sign that greeted firefighters at Kehoe's burned down farm.

The Bath School Bombing remained the worst bombing in U.S. history until Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on April 19th 1995.

The survivors, mostly children during the attack, became extraordinarily long-lived people - some living well into their 90's. Those, like Donald Huffman, survived but were horribly physically scarred by the bombing. As if in compensation from a God who arrived late for the party, Huffman and others grew remarkably stronger spiritually - as if re-telling their tales of encountering a mad man's rage made them love Life that much more in the telling.

The final word about the Bath County Bombing is due to William Cressman, who was a 9-year-old fourth grade student at the time that the dynamite exploded directly below his country classroom:

References:
Wikipedia, Car Bomb
Wikipedia, Bath County School Bombing
Clinton County Coroner, Inquest: May 23rd 1927
Story Corps, American Stories
I.D., Bath County Disaster
Nation Master Encylopedia, Andrew Kehoe
Daggy, Bath County Disaster Victims

Tyrants and Madmen: Lewis Powell's War

2011-07-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Lewis Thornton Powell, also known as Lewis Payne or Lewis Paine, was born April 22^nd 1844 and hung at the age of 21 on July 7^th 1865. Powell was a conspirator in the assassination of President Lincoln and acting in this capacity attempted to murder the sitting Secretary of War William H. Seward while John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shots at Lincoln.

Powell was a former Confederate soldier who enlisted at age 17 in the 2^nd Florida Infantry. Fighting at the Second Battle of Gettysburg in July of 1863 the now 19-year-old Powell was shot through the wrist during skirmishing and captured by Union forces. Powell was sent to a Pennsylvania P.O.W. hospital before being transferred to a facility in Baltimore. During his brief stay Payne managed to escape to Alexandria, Virginia.

In late fall of 1863, Powell met up with Confederate forces and rode out with the 43^rd Battalion, Company B of Virginia. During his time with these Rangers, in 1864, Powell became involved in the Confederate Secret Service or CSS.

On April 9^th 1865 Robert E. Lee, the highest ranking Confederate General, surrendered. This began a wave of crushing defeats and surrenders by the remainder of the Confederate States.

A week later, plots for revenge were being hatched at Confederate sympathizer Mary Surratt's boardinghouse in Washington DC, a murderous vengeance was being planned.

Wilkes wanted to cripple the leadership of the victorious Union. His first plot was to do so by abducting President Lincoln but he had to change his plans when Lincoln deviated from a pre-existing schedule. Ultimately, Wilkes decided upon assassinating the three most powerful men in America for their part in the Confederacy's defeat starting with Lincoln.

War Dept. poster issued for suspects in Lincoln's assassination and the attack on Seward.

The plan was for Booth to murder the President personally, while sending George Atzerodt to simultaneously kill the Vice-President and for 21-year old Lewis Powell to assassinate the Secretary of War. If carried out correctly, the murders would happen just minutes after each other beginning at 10 PM.

The night of April 14^th 1865, the three assassins sought their individual targets. Powell, for his part, visited the Seward home on a pretense then stormed into Seward's bedroom, stabbing the War Secretary repeatedly with a large Bowie knife as he laid in his bed.

Earlier in the same month, Seward had been injured in a carriage accident, and suffered a concussion, a broken jaw and a broken right arm. The crude jaw splint worn by Seward ended up saving his life by deflecting the knife away from his jugular vein. The assassination attempt only succeeded in inflicting deep facial lacerations to Seward - including a stab wound went entirely through the Secretary's right cheek. During the attack, Powell injured two of Seward's children, his nurse, Sergeant George F. Robinson, and messenger Emerick Hansell, who arrived as Powell was fleeing the Powell residence.

George Atzerodt failed to kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson when he lost his nerve and got drunk instead. Booth, himself, infamously succeeded in his own part of the bloody conspiracy but was killed outside a farmhouse in Virginia.

Three days later, on April 17^th 1865, Lewis Powell was captured at Mary Surratt's boardinghouse while insisting he was an innocent ditch-digger. He and nine others were charged with treason and murder.

At his trial, held by military tribunal, thirty-two witnesses were called, including Secretary Seward's son, Augustus, and William Bell, who worked for the Seward household as a servant and doorman, and admitted Powell the night of the assassination attempt. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

Lewis Powell, Mary Surratt, David Herold, and George Atzerodt are executed at Fort Nair, Washington DC July 7^th 1865

Three months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the attack on William Seward, Lewis Powell was brought to Fort Nair, in Washington D.C., to be executed with three of his fellow conspirators: Mary Surratt, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. On July 7^th 1865, the four went to the gallows. Powell was reported to accept his fate calmly and quietly. The hangman, who'd undoubtedly had seen many men lose their composure when walking the gallows steps, told the stone-faced Powell, "I hope you die quick."^[0] Powell simply replied, "You know best, Captain."

When Lewis Powell was pushed from the hastily built wooden gallow's platform he died slowly of strangulation^[1].

Notes:
[0] = Perhaps one of the reasons Lewis Powell expressions were always so bland and frozen was that he was reportedly kicked in the face by the family mule as a child.
[1] = It was reported that at the end of Lewis Powell's descent from the gallows he found his neck was not broken. In mid-air, Powell pulled his body into a sitting position in order to hasten his own end.

References:
Wikipedia, Lewis Payne
Lincoln Center Research by R.J. Milton, Lewis Powell

How To Talk Dirty And Influence People

2011-05-22T07:55:00.001-07:00

An infuriated Lenny Bruce is arrested on an Obscenity charge in the early 1960's.

Leonard Alfred Schneider (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), was better known by the stage name Lenny Bruce. Lenny was a Jewish-American comedian and a sharp social critic of 1960's culture in America.

By his own account in his book How To Talk Dirty And Influence People published in 1962, Bruce served in the U.S. Navy and as a Merchant Marine in WWII. There, his experiences shattered his former comfortable and sheltered hypocrisy of being a kid raised by women, his mother and his aunt, in the Big City.

In the Navy, Bruce did his best to earn a Dishonorable Discharge - which was eventually granted to him in 1945.

As a comedian in the 50's and early 60's, he became legendary in his own short lifetime. His arrest and conviction in an obscenity trial for using vulgar language in his night club act, was later followed by a posthumous pardon, the first in New York state history.

Sadly, Bruce was found dead in August of 1964 in his Hollywood apartment. The official cause of death was "acute morphine poisoning caused by an accidental overdose."

References:
Wikipedia, Lenny Bruce
Wikipedia, How To Talk Dirty And Influence People

The Jiangsu Woman: Ming Era Mummification

2011-03-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

After 700 years beneath the city streets Jiangsu Woman has re-appears in the modern age.

In early March of 2011, while working on a street expansion project, a road crew in Eastern China made a startling discovery. Barely more than four feet below street level, encased in modern layers of cement, the men uncovered a small wooden coffin. The coffin dates back to the Medieval Ming dynasty that lasted from 1368 to 1644 AD making the artifact somewhere between 600 and 700 years old.

Inside the ancient coffin was the most shocking discovery of all. After local archeologists arrived and opened the coffin they came face to face with the incredibly well-preserved body of an ancient Chinese noblewoman of 20: the Jiangsu Woman.

A 700-year-old Ming noblewoman is accidentally discovered in Jiangsu, China.

The entire find is highly unusual due to the quality of the corpse and artifacts found within the coffin. This high level of preservation was due to the fact that the body was covered in a strange brown liquid, wrapped in ceremonial cloth (silk and wax) and then shut in an air tight coffin. The Jiangsu Woman was found with her traditional silk and cotton costume was intact including her shoes.

According to the director of the Museum of Taizhou in Jiangsu, Wang Weiyin, the body was adorned with a silver hairpin and a large jade ring on her right hand. Inside the coffin itself archaeologists found animal bones, ceramics and ancient writings.

Currently, this amazing cultural find is being examined at the Museum of Taizhou where tests will be performed to determine Jiangsu Woman's cause of death, her biological age, racial descent and daily diet.

References:
Wikipedia, Taizhou, Jiangsu
Museum of Taizhou, Medieval Taizhou Exhibit
Daily Mail, 700-year-old Mummy Found In Jiangsu
Topworth, Mummy Found Intact In China
DOGO News, 700-Year-Old Mummy Recovered In China

The Cincinnati Riots: 1884

2011-03-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

Court Street Barricade looking East to the Court House in Cincinnati, March of 1884.

The Cincinnati Riots Of 1884
In March 1884, public faith in Cincinnati law enforcement was shaken by a series of grisly murders and body-snatchings. The people of Cincinnati believed that murderers and other serious offenders were not brought to justice and when they did - they received little punishment.

The incident that sparked the 1884 riots happened on Christmas Eve 1883. Two men, Joe Palmer and William Berner, robbed and murdered their employer, a stable owner named Kirk, by hammering in his skull and strangling him to death. The duo dumped his body near Mill Creek in Northside. One of the men, William Berner, was spared the gallows but the decision would nearly destroy the city.

Weaver Alley Barricade looking South East to Plum Street and the City Jail in Cincinnati, March of 1884.

Beginning on March 28^th, thousands of citizens stormed the county jail and courthouse seeking Berner and any other suspected murderers they could find. A small group of Hamilton County Deputies, led by Sheriff Morton Lytle Hawkins, fought to save the jail from a complete takeover. The mobs fired wild shots into the courthouse and jail then burned and broke all in their path. Eventually, after losing ground, and nearly losing fellow prisoner Joe Palmer and the entire jail, the Deputies succeeded in holding the Jail - protecting the lives of all the inmates.

The courthouse and jail suffered enormous damage and was called a ruin. Coal oil fire bombings, wild gunfire, and lynchings claimed many lives including the life of Captain John Desmond whose statue graces the modern courthouse lobby today. Many rampaging citizens died and valuable records were burned during as the three day series of assaults, stand-offs and fires raged.

Ohio Militia in front of Music Hall at Elm and Grant where rioters had marched to the Courthouse.

The Ohio Militia (forerunner of the National Guard), was called in from Columbus as reinforcements to the Dayton squad already in Cincinnati. The Dayton troops had failed to muster at the courthouse due the violence of the huge crowd. A sympathy among the Dayton militia men for the rioters cause undermined the early action. But when combined with the Columbus force, the Militia finally quelled the crowd of an estimated 10,000 armed men and women by patrols, street skirmishes and use of Gatling guns on the 30^th of March. Very fittingly, a Cincinnati invention was used to solve a Cincinnati problem.

The riots had raged over the course of three days, from March 28^th to 30^th, requiring forces from the Sheriff's Office, city police, and State Militia from Dayton and Columbus to restore order. In the end, according to most records of the period, forty-five people were killed and more than 150 wounded.

The object of the crowd’s rage, William Berner himself, had already been moved prior to the worst of the rioting and briefly escaped from a stopped train. He was quickly re-captured north of Cincinnati, in Loveland, then sent to Columbus to begin his 20-year sentence. Berner was eventually paroled, in 1896, after serving 12 years.

Joe Palmer, his accomplice, was not as lucky. On July 16, 1885, after escaping the 1884 rioters by insisting they had the wrong man, Palmer became the last man to be publicly executed in Hamilton County.

The riots gained national infamy but helped establish a larger police force. After the riots, a young Assistant Prosecutor for Hamilton County named William Howard Taft was named head of a committee to reform local criminal law. Having been angered at the "farcical" administration of justice in Cincinnati Taft began a long career in law before becoming 27^th President of the United States and Chief of the Supreme Court.

References:
New York Times, April 2^nd 1884, Cincinnati Quiet Again
Cincinnati Enquirer, March 9^th 1884, The College of Murder
Heritage Pursuit, A Full Account of the Berner Riot
Record Source, Way Marker
Photo Source, Ohio History Central
NY and OH Reports and Periodicals, Courthouse Fire of 1884

Return To Yugoslavia

2011-02-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

All Spionica photos appear by the courtesy of photographer Andy Spyra.

In the mid-1990's, the world became aware of a Yugoslavian effort to liquidate it's Muslim minority population. This Yugoslav minority were called Bosniaks and were, and are, indigenous muslims. The Bosniaks derived their ethnic name from the Bosna river running through Yugoslavia and were unquestionably native to Yugoslavia with a centuries long history in the region dating back to the medieval Kingdom of Bosnia in the late 13th century.

These people were not invaders or immigrants, they were Yugoslavian citizens yet they were regularly under attack by state sanctioned miltia groups which, without due process of law or regard to human life, rounded them up from the street and their homes, and marched them into concentration camps where, like the Nazi death camps in the 1940's, were never seen or heard from again.

In 2009, German photographer Andy Spyra documented the recovering Bosniak region of Spionica Srednja. Spionica is located in the what was once central Yugoslavia and is now called Srebrenik - part of modern day Bosnia-Herzegovina. Spionica had the dubious distinction of being 10 miles from a Yugoslavian government concentration camp. This camp today in 2011, regularly turns up war crime remains.

Spionica is still struggling with the ghosts of it's past. Unemployment, due to the destruction from NATO's bombing campaigns and the wide spread self-inflicted damage of civil war, is well over 75%.

Andy Spyra is freelance photographer in based in Hagen, Germany.

References:
Wikipedia, Bosniaks
Wikipedia, Srebenik
Andy Spyra, Photography

The Old Man Of The Mountain

2011-02-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

The ruins of the fortress of Alamut in the mountain country of Iran.

The Abbasid And The Order Of The Assassins
In 1258 AD, the largest Mongol horde ever assembled, directed by Genghis Khan's grandson Mangu and personally led by his brother Hulagu, completely destroyed the jewel of the Middle East: Baghdad. In 1258, Baghdad was the seat of the 500 year-old Islamic Abbasid Caliphate (750 AD – 1258 AD) whose rule expanded across North Africa, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon (see map below).

As the Mongol horde tore through modern Iraq and Iran they burned colossal libraries and madrassas (schools) annihilating all who stood in their path. The armies of Inner Asia filled the ancient Mesopotamian irrigation canals with the rotting carcasses of the desert people, scattering the best and brightest of the Golden Age of Islam into the barren sands and effectively ending the Abbasid empire.

Less than 10 years later, in 1265 AD, the last of the most feared warriors in the Middle East would also be destroyed - besieged in their isolated mountain stronghold of Alamut. Today, these men are remembered as the Assassins.

The word "assassin" comes into being to describe the Hashshahsin a secretive military society from the Islamic sect of Shi'a made up of Persians and Syrians. The word hash or hashish also comes from the Order whose induction methodology included drugging prospective members with hashish. Christian Crusaders first reported them in 1080 AD.

The Order of Assassins was founded by the dynamic Shi'a leader Hasan-i Sabbah. Sabbah and the Shi'a imams who followed him used the organization to secure military power within the Abbasid empire. Sabbah himself began life as a wandering Persian missionary of the Ismali tradition learning and teaching mathematics, astronomy and history. When he was in school in Egypt at the age of 17 his teaching brought him to the attention of the highest of the local authorities - who imprisoned him.

The Abbasid Caliphate (750 AD – 1258 AD) stretched from northern Africa past modern Saudi Arabia. (Larger View)

Hasan was eventually deported from Egypt and continued his missionary work in northern Iran where he gathered many Shi'a and Ismali followers in the mountain fortress called Alamut - in Arabic Alamut means "Eagle's Teaching".

It was here at Alamut that Hasan was known as The Old Man Of The Mountain. Named after his reclusive habit of permanent entrenchment in the near impenetrable stronghold at the Alamut in the mountains of modern day Iran. Hassan-i Sabbah lived here from 1094 to 1124 ordering his men to seek out political leaders, sheiks, and English crusaders of his day and executing them.

Using the structural system of Ismali Missionary service that starts at the lowest position of footsoldier (fida'i), followed by rafik or "comrade", and finally the Da'I or "missionary". Sabbah's structure within the order started at the top with himself as Grand Headmaster, then “Greater Propagandists”, followed by "Propagandists", then the Rafiqs ("Companions"), and the Lasiqs ("Adherents"). It was the Lasiqs who were trained to become some of the most feared assassins, or as they were called, "Fida’i". The Fida'i were self-sacrificing agents or suicide bombers of their day - carrying poisoned daggers to court or into madrassas, to assassinate key figures despite any consequences afterward.

The Fida'i were fully indoctrinated, much like today's suicide bombers into a fanatical belief that they would be rewarded with Paradise after their mission as a martyr ended. Sabbah himself set up this indoctrination by drugging initiates in the cult, drugging them with hashish and then allowing them access to his personal gardens and harems which he described to them as Heaven itself. A heaven that would await them after their mission was complete.

Hasan-i Sabbah survived many intrigues in his mountain fortress before Alamut was eventually passed on to new Grand Masters and then Shi'a imams before Hulagu leveled the great castle in 1265 AD.

References:
Wikipedia, Hashshashin
Wikipedia, Hassan-i-Sabbah
National Geographic, Iran's Castle Of The Assassins
Hub Pages, Battle Of Baghdad
Disinfo, Hasan bin Sabbah

The Living Mummies of Japan

2011-01-29T17:55:00.000-08:00

Shinnyokai-Shonin's “living mummy” sits in eternal contemplation at Dainichibo Temple in Japan.

The process of Buddhist Masters becoming mummified while still living was a custom that was practiced until late into the 19^th Century with documented cases still occurring in the 20^th century. The custom was to create kind of "living" idol of a buddhavista or incarnation of Buddha who would reside permanently in a Japanese temple.

The revered Shinnyokai-Shonin was one such mummified monk. In 1784, a terrible famine raged in the central Japanese Island of Honshu. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead or dying of starvation, malnutrition and diesase.

Shinnyokai, 96 years old at the time, believed that Buddha needed a sign of great compassion to end the famine. He dug a pit on a hill near Dainichibo Temple and with the help of others, sealed himself in a wooden coffin that was then lowered into the pit and buried. With a thin bamboo breathing tube in place the monk sat in total darkness, awaiting the inevitable. Three years after his death, his body was exhumed in 1786. The people were astonished to find that the monk had been completely mummified.

By end of the famine a 1792 government census reported 4.5% of the total population of Honshu dead - a total of 1,119,159 people.

Shinnyokai's mummification methodology was refined for many years after his death. The first step being for a prospective mummy monk to spend 1,000 days (over 3 years) eating a strict diet of nuts and seeds and engage in rigorous physical training to strip the body of fat.

Step two, involved another 1,000 days of eating only bark and roots in gradually diminishing amounts. Toward the end, they would start drinking tea made from the sap of the urushi tree, a poisonous substance normally used to make Japanese lacquer bowls, which caused further loss of bodily fluid. The tea was brewed with water from a sacred spring at Mt. Yudono, which is now known to contain a high level of arsenic. The concoction created a germ-free environment within the body and helped preserve whatever meat was left on the bone.

Finally, the monks would seal themselves in a small underground chamber connected to the surface by a tiny bamboo air pipe. There, the monks meditate until the point of death - at which point they were sealed in their tomb. After another 1,000 days, they were dug up and cleaned. If the body remained well-preserved after this 10-year process then the monk was deemed a living mummy.

Unfortunately, most who attempted self-mummification were unsuccessful, but the few who succeeded achieved Buddha status and are still enshrined today at temples. As many as two dozen of these living mummies are in the care of temples in northern Honshu.

References:
Wa-pedia, Japanese Living Mummies
Natural Plane, Monster Mummies of Japan
Helium, Yamagata Temple

Ice Mummies: Finding John Franklin's Fate

2011-01-28T07:34:00.000-08:00

Engraving from an 1850's U.S. newspaper describing another failed search-and-rescue attempt setting out.

Franklin's lost expedition was a doomed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Capt. John Franklin. Of his 128 strong expedition, each man was claimed by disease, inexplicable violence, creeping madness only to succumb to the terrible arctic cold in a strange part of the world were temperatures regularly reach -40 degrees below zero.

This doomed expedition sailed from England in 1845 with orders to discover a Northwest Passage to across northern Canada. A Royal Navy officer and experienced explorer, John Franklin had served on three previous Arctic expeditions, the latter two as commanding officer. His fourth and last, undertaken when he was 59, was meant to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage.

After early enduring sea-faring fatalities Franklin's ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, became hopelessly icebound. The boats found themselves frozen in thick ice banks of the Victoria Strait near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. After many attempts to free the vessel or seek help the entire expedition complement, including Franklin and 128 men, began to suspect that they would be lost in the ice and snow.

Skeletons of Franklin's doomed expedition are found on King William's Island in the 19^th century.

In 1857, an expedition led by Sir Francis McClintock, discovered a number of written messages indicating that the Erebus and Terror had become stuck in the ice in September 1846. According to the sailor's own accounts, during the next year and a half, nine officers, including Sir John Franklin, and fifteen sailors died. Finally, in April 1848, the surviving members of the expedition decided to abandon the ships and walk on the ice some 120 miles to a river where they could row to a trading post. The unfinished messages suggested that none had survived, and it is easy to see why: the men used extremely poor judgment. Not only had they tried to drag a 1,200-pound lifeboat across the ice, they had selected an assortment of strange items to fill the boat: silk handkerchiefs, perfumed soap, six books, tea, silverware and chocolate.

In 1859, another international search-and-rescue efforts discovered a typed note written in 6 languages (English, French, Spanish, Finnish, German and Dutch) with the date of May 1847 scrawled in the lower right corner. This message, leaving the latitude and longitude of the ice-bound ships was left on King William Island. This note was completely without any details about the expedition's true fate. More searches continued through much of the 19th century.

In 1981, Owen Beverly Beattie and a modern group of explorers, this one also armed with the latest technology and gadgetry of the age set out to find the lost men of Franklin's doomed voyage in the islands surround Victoria Strait. A handful of the doomed crew of the Erebus and Terror, lost for nearly 150 years in the icy tundra began to be recovered at island grave sites. Due to global warming uncovering vast amounts of permafrost Beattie's team had a better time of it than Sir McClintock - to be sure. And what Beattie's team found found for lack of a better word were ice mummies. These men's bodies were well-preserved, undisturbed for many long decades. In fact, their faces still betrayed the cruel, icy manner of their deaths - forever frozen in time.

Petty Officer John Torrington at his final resting place where he died sometime between 1846-1850.

In 1984 and 1986, Beattie found and exhumed the frozen bodies of Petty Officer John Torrington, Able-bodied Seaman John Hartnell and Royal Marine William Braine, on Beechy Island. Beattie noticed highly elevated levels of lead in the sailor's tissues. He was able to trace the source to the expedition's cheaply tinned food supply.

Lead poisoning is known to cause insanity including delirium, cognitive deficits, tremors, hallucinations, and convulsions. Coupled with the brutal cold and the extreme isolation of being trapped at sea with no hope of rescue: it is highly probably that many of these men went mad. Evidence of cannibalism exists in the form of gnaws and cut marks found on human bones discovered on the islands surrounding the original wrecks of the Erebus and Terror. To date both ships remain lost, entombed somewhere in the thick Canadian Arctic ice.

In the end, Beattie's team discovered ignominious death for these legendary men. Bold men who were set upon by unending ice and blinding snow then slowly driven to utter madness at the edge of the known world. God rest their souls.

References:
Wikipedia, King William's Island
Wikipedia, The Note
Amazon, The Terror by Dan Simmons New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2007.
Amazon, Frozen in time: The fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie & John Geiger, Vancouver : Greystone Books, c1998.
YouTube, Ice Mummies
World News, Franklin Expedition

The Golden Children: Pre-Columbian Mummies In South America

2011-01-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

The "Detmold Child" a 10-month-old pre-Columbian mummy approximately 6,500 years old. Photo by Adam Lau.

The Chinchorro mummies are the mummified remains of individuals from the South American Chinchorro culture. The archaeological evidence of this Pre-Columbian culture is found in the secluded valleys of the Andes Mountain Range in western South America in what is modern northern Chile and southern Peru.

These fossilized remains are the oldest examples of mummified humans. The Chinchorro date back 1,000 years before their more well known cousins the Egyptian mummies and 4,500 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Chinchorro, named after a kind of fishing net, were much as the name suggests: fisherfolk. The Chinchorro fished in the western shores of central America. Little more is known of them. They are considered a lost people with only the recent discovery, beginning in the late 20th Century, of Chinchorro mummies to tell their tale.

Carbon dating suggests that the oldest Chinchorro mummy was a child dating back from 5050 BC. This mummy was found in a site in the Camarones Valley, about 60 miles south of modern Arica. The mummies continued to be made until about 1800 BC when the culture declined.

Bernardo Arriaza, a native Chilean and Anthropology Professor at UNLV, is a noted scholar on the Chinchorros. In an interview with Artlivres concerning the 1983 discovery of a group of 100 Chinchorros Arriaza stated: "- the Chinchorro needed to be treated as artistic pieces and not just as scientific objects."

Two key differences in Egyptian mummies and Andian mummies were class and space. While the Egyptian mummies were typically royalty or military the Andian Chinchorros are theorized to have mummified everyone including fetuses. While the ancient Egyptians, who were wary of thieves and desecration, hid and hoarded their mummies, the Chinchorros were displayed in public spaces or placed for worship on mountain tops.

According to Dr. Arriaza's research there could be thousands of Chinchorros waiting to be discovered in the Andes valleys today from a prehistorical culture that lasted 3,000 years. To date, explorers have found a little under 300.

References:
Wikipedia, The Chinchorro Mummies
Art Lives, Chinchorro Mummies by Bernardo Arriaza
Archaeology, Making the Dead Beautiful: Mummies as Art
Santiago Time, Swiss Return Mummies To Chile

Akhenaten and Monotheism in the Ancient World

2010-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

The pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti circa 1355 BC.

The many cities, deserts and oasises of ancient Egypt were ruled by a pantheon of beast-headed deities who directly empowered kings and priest to do their work on earth. The ancient chimera-gods represented the many facets of life in the diverse Kingdom in a multitude of man made deities.

When a bold and rebellious pharaoh came to power in 1355 BC it would change the face of worship in ancient Egypt forever. One man's short-lived reforms to religious and social institutions would deeply influence Judeo-Christian culture over whom the ancient Egyptians ruled.

Noted art historian, Ken Davis ^[0] has referred to the depiction of Egyptian deities of crocodile, crane, dog or hawk-headed gods as some of the first evidence of the "animal principle". This animal principle was, for many centuries, primitive man's method of connecting and imbuing himself with the savage power of the world around him - as well as becoming more of an animal himself. By carrying on this tradition rulers used that original primal fear of wild predators to rule over civilized populations.

For the ancient Egyptians, and the thousands of priests who observed and enforced the worship the elder gods, the "animal principle" and pantheism was a method to control the varied populace while maintaining power over the many pharaohs and dynasties that dominated ancient Egypt.

Of the many hundreds of kings and pharaohs that governed ancient Egypt there was a single controversial ruler who refused to worship the traditional pantheon of toothy beast deities in favor of one god, the sun god, Aten (pronounced AH-ten).

In 1355 BC, Akhenaten (pronounced AK'hen'NOT'un) and his queen the beautiful Nefertiti came to power. The two established the worship of the Aten, the one and only god of the universe. Akhenaten's reign would infuse ancient sculpture and literature with a radical realism and a unmistakable personal warmth as the result of his rejection of the corrupt politics that ruled his day. This outraged the powerful cleric class in Egypt and upset the balance of power in the Kingdom for decades.

Five years into his rule, Akhenaten, or Amenophis IV as he was first known, moved the centuries old capitol and seat of the empire in Thebes to the middle of the harsh desert where he built a new capitol. The site was located 365 miles south of Cairo and called Akhetaten (AK'hit'AH'ten) or "horizon of Aten". The contruction site of the city is known today as Tell el-Amarna and located on the east side of the life giving Nile River. The site of the Akhenaten's city would not be discovered for nearly 4,000 years in 1824 by adventurers John Gardner Wilkinson and James Burton over the course of many expeditions.

The difficulty unearthing the site began with the location. The word "tell", in Tell el-Amarna, is Egyptian for "mound". Through many generations of visitors and villagers, not a single mound remained in the small village that now occupied the lost city of Aten.

When excavation began, it was discovered that the ancient Egyptians, aided afterward by early Christians, destroyed the mysterious city so thoroughly that it was not easy to find an intact cartouche bearing the name of the king or queen for whom the desert city was built. The desert swallowed the remains of the city over many millenia.

After excavating the site at Tell el-Amarna another challenge presented itself. Although the ability to read hieroglyphics was beginning to spread among the early Egyptologists with the translation of the Rosetta Stone, discovering the nature of Tell el-Amarna site still remained elusive.

Akhenaten as a Sphinx circa 1355 from Kestner Museum Collection Hanover, Germany.

Akhenaten's religious reforms are the earliest known example of monotheistic thought and a indication that this particular period of Egyptian history was a contributing factor in Judeo-Christian philosophy.

There are strong similarities between Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten and the biblical Psalms 104 and 19. Great Hymn to the Aten portrays the sun as the giver of all life, plunging the land into darkness and danger during the night, to reawaken to life, daily work and praise with the dawn.

The opening verses of the Great Hyn to Aten read: "Thou appearest beautifully on the horizon of heaven, Thou living Aten, the beginning of life! When thou art risen on the eastern horizon, Thou hast filled every land with thy beauty. Thou art gracious, great, glistening, and high over every land."

Psalm 104 reads: "Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God. thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty: Who coverst thyself with light as with a garment who stretches out the heavens like a curtain...who makes the clouds his chariot..."

More to the point, and drawing many more comparisons is Psalm 19, which reads like an astonomer's love affair with the stars: "The Heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork."

Clearly there are many thematic and structural similarities to Atenism and later monotheistic religions in the worship of a single all seeing, life-giving god. Further, Akhenaten called himself the only son of the sun god as: “Thine only son that came forth from thy body.”^[1] The comparison to Jesus Christ, messianic culture and the Abrahamic tradition is undeniable. As his divine father’s image on earth Akhenaton, the true son of the one true god, was simultaneously high priest, prophet and king.

Upon Akhenaten's demise, circa 1334 BC, the powerful Priesthood of Amun reversed the pharaoh's radical changes. The priests re-established pantheism as the official state religion by installing the boy king Tutankahmen, who was possibly a son of Akhenaten by a minor wife. The priests returned the Egyptian capitol to Thebes and the city of the Aten was deserted.

The statuary at Akhetaten and in greater Egypt depicting Akhenaton and his family was defaced, destroyed and buried for centuries. This act of damnatio memoriae was an effort to curse and erase the memory of the Akhenaten. The story of Akhenaten, even his his name itself, was officially and efficiently erased from Egyptian history. For the next 4,000 years Akhetaten was referred to as 'the heretic'.

The monotheistic religion that Akhenaten established was overthrown after just twenty years but the comparisons to Judeo-Christian Messianic beliefs and the practical divine right of kings is undeniable. By taking the previous belief structure of the Egpytians and adding to it the Messianic tradition of direct divine intervention Akhenaten defined Monothesism.

Strangely, some of the true-to-life style of sculpture (referred to as the Amarna style), also seen in Greece's Helenistic style and Italy's Mannerism style, remained in the depictions of his successor the young puppet pharaoh, King Tut. More to the point, Akhenaton created and instituted the first recorded instance of monotheism while encompassing, and perhaps defining, the early central tenents of Judeo-Christian culture for millenia to come.

Notes:
[0] = Kenneth Davis PHD, MFA is a recently retired art history professor who spent 40 years teaching classes on the art of the ancient world beginning in 1968.
[1] = From The Monotheism of the Heretic Pharaoh: Precursor of Mosiac monotheism or Egyptian anomaly?", Donald B. Redford, Biblical Archaeology Review, May-June edition 1987.

References:
Wikipedia, Akhenaten
Wikipedia, Atenism
Aldokkan, Akhenaten
Tour Egypt.com, The Aten
Tour Egypt.com, Akhetaten
Library Thang, Moses and Monotheism Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1939.

Jonestown: The Death Tapes

2010-11-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

Reverend Jim Jones personally ordered the deaths of 900 men, women and children in 1978.

On November 18^th 1978, more than 900 members of the bizarre and strangely charismatic Reverend Jim Jones' Peoples' Temple perished in a mass suicide in a ragged settlement named Jonestown.

This was the final destination for all of Jim Jones most fanatical followers. They died all at once, deep in the humid South American jungle. Men, women and children were either shot, injected or otherwise poisoned to death based on the orders of a dying megalomaniac.

The aftermath of the massacre as seen by first responders.

The following 1.5 hour (21mb) audio file was made directly from cassette tapes recovered in the aftermath of the mass suicide at Jonestown.

The Fall of Masada

2010-05-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

The doomed fortress of Masada. Photo by James L. Stanfield for National Geographic.

I. The End
Masada, long destroyed and long forgotten, was an ancient Jewish city that was stormed and taken nearly 2,000 years ago. Sitting at the banks of the Dead Sea and located high atop winding canyon ridge, Masada was the last stronghold of Jewish people in ancient Jerusalem.

Roman and Jewish historians remember the wars ending with a final Roman siege and sack of Jerusalem near 70 AD to 73 AD. A series of strategic victories expelled Jews from the Holy City and many portions of Israel. Israel's remaining military forces were cornered. Among these survivors were the Zealots, a group of fanatical fighters sworn to protect Israel. The Zealots and the remaining military forces and their families retreated to the canyon topped city fortress of Masada.

"Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans...it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom."

- Elazar ben Yair, Josephus, 73 AD.

The city sat atop a desert plateau. The canyon walls were soon surrounded but held the Roman legions at bay for a time. In this fortress, facing tens of thousands of Roman soldiers, the remaining Zealots must have known that there would be no escape. The war between the Hebrews and Romans would leave Israel destroyed for nearly 2,000 years (from roughly 73 AD to 1948 AD). The Siege of Masada was the final battle in that war.

Masada, the last stronghold of the Zealots after Jersalem fell, was a secluded canyon top fortress-city of the ancient world. The Roman empire, in seeking to control all aspects of the known world both geographically and religiously, sought to crush this last stronghold of the Zealots in 73 AD.

Masada, the Greek translation taken from the Hebrew word for fort: Metzuda, was the last refuge of the Judaic warriors known as the Sicarii. The Sicarii, whose name bears an uncanny resemblance to Judas Isacriot (interpreted to have distant family connections) but is roughly translated to "he from the townships", unwittingly brought doom to their people due their pursuit of fanatical obedience to forms of Jewish teaching that they interpreted as assassination orders for anyone who believed differently - including the entire Roman empire.

II. Master, Slave and Servant
Historically, in the three centuries of Roman rule over the ancient world prior to 70 AD, the relationship between ancient Hebrews and Romans was continually strained. Roman-Jewish history was full of rebellions and alliances and that were sometimes very contradictory. Ancient Hebrews and Romans sometimes lived close together - as close together as a slave and master can live.

Prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and Masada with it, many Roman rulers or senators and governors regularly employed Jewish scholars, philosophers and priests (rabbis) as lawyers and teachers. An extraordinary account of this strained and convoluted relationship is given in the Jewish New Testament called the Talmud in the book of Hullim.

This story recounts an unusually frank relationship a Rabbi had with the Roman Emperor Hadrian in 101 BC at court. Roman Emperors were known for extreme madness and cruelty - savagely executing centurions or rivals for the most minor of offenses. Challenging traditional the pagan Roman gods was included as a lethal offense.

100 years prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth the Emperor Hadrian asked a respected Hebrew philosopher about the existence of one God in 101 BC:

"'An emperor said to Rabbi Joshua ben Hananya: "I want to see your God.' The Rabbi replied: 'You cannot see Him.' 'Nevertheless,' the emperor said 'I want to see Him!' Rabbi Joshua stood the emperor in the summer sun, and said, 'Look at the sun.'

'I cannot,' answered the emperor. Rabbi Joshua said, 'The sun is but one of the servants who stand in the presence of the Holy One, praised be He, and you cannot look at the sun. Is it not truer still that you cannot see God's Presence?'^[0]

It must have been disconcerting for the Emperor Hadrian who was accustomed to seeing statues of the State Gods of Rome, such as Jupiter and Mars, in his lavishly appointed halls and in the public squares to conceptualize a Jewish God who present in everything.

This discussion took place 174 years before the end of Israel as a independent Jewish state. Israel, Jerusalem and Masada with it, was doomed to fall by 73 AD.

IV. The Final Stand
Gathered in the canyon-city were the Zealots, priests and Sicarii. Among the surviving reports of the final siege of the canyon-top city there is a speech delivered by a rabbi named Elazar ben Yair. He is recorded as saying this:

“Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God Himself, Who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice...We were the very first that revolted, and we are the last to fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom.” - Elazar ben Yai

Masada was under siege for many months until the 900 remaining inhabitants commited mass suicide rather than suffer slavery or execution for defending the cause of Jewish independence. The Masada leaders set the city on fire as the Roman burst into the streets but left grain and food storage buildings standing to show the Romans that the people of Masada were still capable of holding out against the siege.

The Roman historian, Josephus Flavius recorded that only 7 people, two women and a handfull of children, survived the siege of Masada to tell the tale.

Today, Masada is still vividly remembered by Israelis and cranky historians, very much as Americans recall the Alamo, Saigon, Chosin Reservoir or Bunker Hill. In fact, many versions of modern loyalty oaths taken by members of the modern Jewish Army in the 21^st century declare that: "...Masada will not fall again".

Notes:
[0] = This account is taken from the book of Hullim 59-60a of The Talmud and included in Judaism edited by Arthur Hertzberg in 1962.

References:
Wikipedia, Fall of Masada
Wikipedia, Joshua ben Hananiah
Wikipedia, Masada
Jewish Virtual Library, Masada
Street Prophets, Intro To Jewish Texts
Fr. Shawn P. Tunink, Masada: A Voice In the Wilderness
American Sociological Association, Volume 18, No. 1 (Fall 2003), The Masada Fraud by Nachman Ben-Yehuda

2010-02-22T03:38:00.000-08:00

The Malmédy Massacre: Snow and Blood

2010-02-15T04:07:00.000-08:00

January 1945, executed American POW's bodies are uncovered by US Army personnel in Malmédy, Belgium.

The Malmédy Massacre occurred on December 17^th 1944 when Nazi SS Stormtroopers opened fire on unarmed US POW's in Nazi occupied Belgium. When the machine guns fell silent 84 of nearly 150 unarmed American GI's were slaughtered like diseased pigs and their bodies were discarded in the snow and blood.

Winter of 1944-45 was the coldest and most snow-blown in Europe for 20 years. This brutal winter unfolded during the Ardennes Offensive and Battle of the Bulge as US Forces cut deep inroads into Nazi occupied Europe.

In mid-December of 1945, the Combat Group of the 1^st SS Panzer Division, led by SS Major Joachim Peiper, was approaching the "Five Points" crossroads at Baugnes near the town of Malmédy where they encountered a small company of US troops from Battery B of the 285^th Field Artillery Observation Battalion from the US 7^th Armored Division.

After a series of firefights and realizing that the odds were hopeless, the US company's commander, Lieutenant Virgil Lary, ordered a surrender. After being searched and relieved of weapons by the SS, the US prisoners were quickly marched into a field adjacent to the Cafe Bodarwé whose owner had been murdered by the SS when they burned it down. The bulk of SS troops then moved on except for two Mark IV tanks numbered 731 and 732. These were left behind to ostensibly guard the captured GI's.

As he stood among his men, Lt. Lary could not know was how fanatical the SS group commander he had just surrendered to really was. Joachim Peiper turned 18 the same day that Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933 and signed up for service soon after. During his SS officer training, Peiper actually volunteered for classes in torture at Dachau inside the infamous Jewish concentration camp. Peiper acted as leader of the SS "König" Heinrich Himmler's personal adjutant from 1938 to 1941 and was close friends with Nazi elite. This man was in every sense of the word - a true Nazi.

As the Nazis held the US soldiers in a loose formation a couple of GI's tried to flee into the nearest woods. The order was given to fire at them and stop the escape. SS Private Georg Fleps of tank 731 drew his pistol and fired at one of the escapees, Lt. Lary's driver, and this man fell dead in the snow. According to survivor accounts Fleps then took aim at a medic, 1st Lt. Carl R. Genthner of 575^th Ambulance Company and calmly fired three shots into him.

Then, for reasons still unclear, the machine guns of both Panzer tanks opened fire on nearly 150 unarmed prisoners. Many of the GI's immediately took to their heels and headed for the woods. Incredibly, 43 GI's survived, but 84 of their comrades lay dead in the field, being slowly covered with a blanket of snow and blood. Survivor accounts relate how SS soldiers went among the dead and wounded Americans and "finished the job". According to survivor PFC Paul Hardiman who lay wounded under a mass of snow and dead soldiers, 1st Lt. Carl R. Genthner was still alive enough plead for his life to the SS soldiers in German when he was shot at point blank range, killing him instantly.

January 1945, bodies of American POW's are marked and identified by US Army personnel in Malmédy, Belgium.

No attempt was made to recover the bodies until the area was retaken by the 30^th Infantry Division on January 14^th 1945. Men from the 291^st Engineers used metal detectors to locate the bodies buried in two feet of snow.

Following the discovery and reports of the massacre, US troops in the area were issued offical orders that for the next week: No SS prisoners were to be taken.

At the end of the war, Peiper, and 72 other suspects arrested for atrocities committed before and after this last offensive of the Wermacht. When they were brought to trial Peiper and his men were held responsible for the cold-blooded murders of 362 POW's and 111 civilians. Lt. Lary, who survived the bloody massacre testified against Joachim Peiper and his men. When the trials ended on July 16^th 1946, forty three of the defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, twenty two sentenced to life imprisonment, two sentenced to twenty years, one for fifteen years and five others sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

Nuremberg Trials 1946: Joachim Peiper is Number 42 on the far right.

Peiper and Fleps were among those sentenced to death, but after a series of reviews these sentences were reduced to terms in prison.

On December 22^nd 1956, SS Sturmbannführer Peiper was released. Peiper's friends in the Nazi elite were no more. Heinrich Himmler had committed suicide awaiting trial in Nuremberg in 1945. Peiper himself eventually settled alone in the small village of Traves in northern France in 1972 where he earned a living by translating military books from English into German.

Four years later, on the eve of Bastille Day, July 14^th 1976, Peiper was murdered and his house burned down by a French communist group known only as "The Avengers". The 61-year-old's charred body was recovered from the ruins and transferred to the family grave in Schondorf, near Landsberg in Bavaria.

After the original discovery of the massacre at Malmédy, most of the remains of the GI's murdered in Malmédy were shipped back to the US for private burials. Today, twenty-two bodies that were never sent home, including that of 33-year-old Lt. Carl R. Genthner, lie buried in the American Military Cemetery at Henri-Chappelle north of the woods of Malmédy were they fell.

References:
Wikipedia, SS Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper
7^th Armored Division, History of the 7AD
30^th Infantry, The Malmedy Massacre at the Baugnez Crossroads
575^th Ambulance Company, The Bitter End of 1st Lt. Carl R. Genthner
Army Quartermaster Foundation at Fort Lee, Malmédy Massacre
Massacres and Atrocities, Malmédy Massacre
Amazon, Malmedy Massacre

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

2010-02-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

Well sir, this is the genuine coin of the realm.

2010-02-07T23:25:00.000-08:00

The Cardiff Giant

2010-02-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

The Cardiff Giant in his current resting place in upstate New York.

The Cardiff Giant, exhibited in the 19^th century as the fossilized remains of a prehistoric giant, was actually the plaster creation of a New York tobacco farmer named George Hull.

Hull, an atheist, created the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister about the passage in Genesis 6:4 that there were giants, known as Nephilim, who reportedly once roamed a primordial Earth.

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."

- Genesis 6:4

George Hull was clearly perpertrating a hoax upon literalist bible interpretaters. However, the Cardiff Giant eventually became a national sensation in the latter part of the 19^th century in America.

The idea of a petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. In 1858, a newspaper in Alta, California published a bogus letter that claimed that a prospector was petrified when he drank a strange liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers had also published stories of supposedly petrified people.

The Cardiff Giant is "unearthed" in upstate New York in October of 1869.

Hull hired men to carve out a 10-foot (3.0 m) long, 4.5-inch block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a stonecutter to carve it into the likeness of a man and swore him to secrecy. Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weathered, and the giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. Then Hull transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868.

Nearly a year later, Newell hired two men on the pretext of digging a well. On October 16^th 1869, the trio "found" the Giant. One of the men reportedly exclaimed, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

The giant drew such crowds that famous showman P.T. Barnum offered Hull $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When the new owners turned him down, Barnum hired a man to covertly model the giant's shape in wax and create a plaster replica. Barnum put his own giant on display in New York, claiming that his was the real giant and the Cardiff Giant was a fake.

On December 10^th 1869, George Hull confessed to the press that his Giant was a hoax. On February of 1870, both giants were revealed as fakes in court. The presiding judge also ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling Hull's hoax a fake.

Apparently Hull was not disuaded from making fake giants. In 1876, created another creature called the Solid Muldoon made of clay, ground bones, meat, rock dust and plaster. Today, the original Cardiff Giant resides at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, an arcade and museum of oddities in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

References:
Wikipedia, The Cardiff Giant
Cardiff New York, Site Marker

The Piltdown Man

2010-02-01T00:02:00.000-08:00

For over four decades the Piltdown Man was a fossil accepted by the world's scientific community as an authentic artifact of man's evolution from ape. However, the so-called Piltdown Man, originally "discovered" in 1912, was eventually revealed to be an infamous paleontological hoax.

The fossil consisted of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near East Sussex in England. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized remains of a previously unknown form of early man. The fossil, itself, was so radically different from previous and following paleological discoveries that it demanded further analysis.

The significance of the specimen remained a subject of controversy until it was finally exposed by researchers in the British Museum in November of 1953 as a forgery.

Although the upper portion of the skull was 50,000 years old (still within the threshold of a modern or later archiac homo sapien) was so roughly combined with an ape jaw that it was conspicuous and suspicious to an expert's eye. The fossil was actually a combination of the chemically treated lower jawbone and teeth of an orangutan and skull fragments from a the skull of a homo sapien. A skull that was more than likely stolen from the Museum itself.

The hoax's perpertrator, lawyer, amateur geologist and dealer of fake antiquities Charles Dawson had died in 1916. The blame, forty years later, fell on ichthyologist Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum, whose aid no doubt helped Dawson re-construct the fossil in the first place. By 1953, once again, the joke was on the scientific community as Smith had retired from the Museum in 1924 and died in 1944.

References:
Wikipedia, The Piltdown Man
Hoaxapedia, Piltdown Man
Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 13/2, December/January, 1993, Debunking of Three Hoaxes

Andersonville: Death in Cherry Blossom Country

2009-12-15T01:04:00.000-08:00

A bird's eye view of the Andersonville P.O.W. camp as recalled by prisoner John Ransom.

In 1864, just outside the affluent antebellum city of Macon, Georgia rose the Confederate P.O.W. prison called Andersonville. Named for it's proximity to Anderson Station, a nearby railroad depot used by the Confederate army, it was constructed with the intention of holding 10,000 men. During the final years of the Civil War the camp housed nearly 45,000 Union soldiers and civilians packed into 26.5 open air acres.

Of that number, 12,913 Union prisoners would die at Andersonville. A Union prisoner had a 1 in 3 chance of being killed as the direct result of infectious diseases like typhoid fever or dysentery, or of gangrene due to untreated injuries, or due to exposure to the elements in the outdoor prison, or starving to death, or being clubbed to death by fellow prisoners.

Dorence Atwater, a soldier in the 2^nd New York Cavalry, while acting as a clerical trustee at the camp, kept a secret record of the thousands of deaths at the camp. His record, smuggled out in 1865 during a prisoner exchange with the Union, contained the names, regiments and homes of the soldiers buried in the camp's mass graves. Atwater and other survivors' stories were later used as evidence to document the concentration camp conditions of Andersonville.

"As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect were now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin."

- Robert Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 1865.

The overwhelming amount of 50,000 soldiers' waste all gathered in one confined place caused waves of illnesses. When the sewage trenches would overflow during storms or due to sheer over-crowding, the run-off would poison wells and over run barracks and tents.

Survivor Robert Kellogg goes on to describe the rancid conditions of the camp by saying: "In the center of the whole was a swamp...this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then."

As the Confederacy lost ground in the Civil war, Union prisoners felt the desperate rage of their overseers. Systematic starvation of Union prisoners, partially due to dwindling Confederate supplies was a matter of daily life in Andersonville. While Confederate troop rations were loaded on the nearby train depot thousands of men starved to death in the rancid camp.

"Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed: 'Can this be hell?' or 'God protect us!'...all of us thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place."

- Robert Kellogg, Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, 1865.

August 16th 1864: Ration Wagon. Photo by Confederate war photographer A. J. Riddle.

One of the daily threats that Union soldiers faced came not from the guards, disease or meager rations but from within their own ranks. A group of men, abandoning all bonds of brotherhood that soldiers and prisoners share, were known as the Raiders. The Raiders would routinely rob and kill their fellow prisoners, especially the sick or injured, for blankets, money or small scraps of food. Six of the Andersonville Raiders were captured by a band of prisoners who called themselves the Regulators.

The Raiders were tried and condemned to death by a court set up by the camp's commandant, Henry Wirz. The men were hung in middle of the camp and their bodies buried separately so that their remains would not befoul those of their fellow prisoners on whom they'd preyed upon.

Mid-August 1864: Prisoner Burial Crew. Photo by Confederate war photographer A. J. Riddle.

After the war, Henry Wirz, commandant at Andersonville, was court-martialed on charges of conspiracy and murder. Dorence Atwater's list, after being smuggled out of the camp then stolen, confiscated or lost a number of times, was used as evidence in Henry Wirz's trial. On November 10^th 1865, Wirz was hanged. He was the only Confederate official to be tried, convicted and executed for war crimes resulting from the American Civil War.

References:
Wikipedia, Andersonville National Memorial
Civil War Indiana, Andersonville Dead 1864-1865
Census Diggins, Andersonville
Civil War Home, Andersonville Prison
Sinclair University, #5223 Bernard McKnight
Life and Death in Rebel Prisons Robert H. Kellogg, Hartford, CT.: L. Stebbins, 1865

The Devil's Luck

2009-12-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

An 1835 engraving of Richard Lawrence's failed assasination attempt of President Jackson.

The first attempt to kill a sitting U.S. President occurred on January 30^th 1835. It happened just outside the United States Capitol Building and it's intended victim, Andrew Jackson, emerged miraculously unscathed.

As Jackson was leaving the Capitol, after the funeral of South Carolina Representative Warren Davis, Richard Lawrence, an unemployed housepainter from England, burst from the crowd. Standing three paces away, he aimed a small pistol at President Jackson and pulled the trigger.

Although a loud shot was heard - the derringer misfired. Lawrence, seemingly prepared for this unlikely eventuality, then pulled a second pistol and fired. This gun also misfired. It has been suggested that the moisture from the humid weather of the day contributed to both guns misfiring. Although no bullets were fired from the derringers - the explosions from the blasting caps drew the crowds attention.

Lawrence was quickly restrained, with legend saying that the President attacked Lawrence with his cane. Others present, including Representative David Crockett of Tennessee, disarmed Lawrence.

One of a set of two 1850's era Derringer dueling pistols much like the pair Lawrence used. This gun fires .41 caliber bullets about the size of a nickel.

After the failure of the 1835 assasination attempt, would-be assassin Richard Lawrence gave the police and doctors several reasons for his actions. He had lost his job and somehow blamed Jackson. He claimed that with the President dead, "money would be more plenty" (referencing Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States) and that he "could not rise until the President fell." Finally, Lawrence informed his interrogators that he was a deposed English King (specifically, Richard III, dead since 1485) and that Jackson was merely his clerk. Lawrence was deemed insane and institutionalized. He died in 1861, after spending the remainder of his life in asylums.

Although more assassinations and assassination attempts would occur, including those of Lincoln and Garfield, the U.S. Secret Service would not come into official existance until the 1901 assassination of McKinley.

In the 1930's, due to curiosity concerning the double misfires, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution tested and retested the pistols. Each time the pistols performed perfectly. It was later determined that the odds of both guns misfiring during the assassination attempt were 1 in 125,000.

Notes:
The Cherokee nicknamed Jackson "Jack-Son-Nay", or Jackson-the-Devil, due to his uncanny luck on the battlefield and bitter treatment of Native Americans of the Cherokee settlements in Georgia.

References:
Wikipedia, Andrew Jackson
American Heritage Magazine, The Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson

"...for thou art the death of the world."

2009-11-24T19:22:00.000-08:00

In legend, St. Christopher is remembered as a giant of a man described as being anywhere from 12 to 18 feet tall and sometimes described as having the head of a dog. These are loaded descriptions to impart attributes of Power, Respect, Geography and Loyalty. They also echo many of the Greek and Egyptian pantheons for the legitimizing effect of early Christianity by comparing it's saints with those ancient religions. Many accounts describe Caananites (in modern day Lebanon) as doglike or canine. St. Christopher, himself, was born as Reprobus in Canaan anywhere from 200-225 AD.

Later to be known as the patron saint of travelers, St. Christopher is said to have wandered the ancient world searching for a master. As Reprobus, he first enrolled himself in the court of a fearsome Middle Eastern king. After fighting as a soldier, he left the king's service after he saw his master cross himself at the mention of the Devil's name. Reprobus sought the Devil that this great king feared.

Reprobus came upon a group of bandits whose leader proclaimed himself the Devil. While travelling with the bandits Reprobus watched as the thieves and their leader cowered before a crucifix on the roadside. Reprobus parted company with the Devil determined to find the man who made the Devil cower.

"You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king..."

- from The Golden Legend by William Caxton, 1483

Wandering in the wastes, Reprobus met a hermit named Certes who instructed him in the Christian faith. After being baptised as Christopher by Certes he asked the hermit how he could serve Christ, the man who made kings, thieves and devils tremble.

Certes the hermit suggested fasting and prayer, Christopher replied that he was unable to perform that service. The hermit suggested that because of his size and strength Christopher could serve Christ by assisting people to cross a dangerous river nearby. This is another loaded section of the legend. River-crossing can apply to obstacles both real and metaphorical. Christopher had crossed many rivers within himself as he travelled searching for a master. There were no city departments in the ancient world. No one was building or maintaining bridges and there very few official churches - much help was needed here... so Christopher accepted.

After he had performed this service for some time, a little child asked him to take him across the river. During the crossing, the river rose and the child seemed to grow much heavier. Christopher's strength was tested and he found himself in danger of drowning. When he finally reached the other side of the river, he said to the child: "You've put me in the greatest danger. I do not think the whole world could have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were."

The child replied: "You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work." The child then vanished.

Travelling to the city of Lycia, in the southern coast of Turkey, Christopher spoke with local Christians there who were being martyred by Roman law. He was brought before the local king, called Dagnus, who demanded that Christopher sacrifice animals to the local pagan gods. Not to do so would make him a criminal according to Roman law. Christopher is said to have replied: "...thou art the death of the world, and fellow of the devil, and thy gods be made with the hands of men." No hidden meanings in the story this time. In no uncertain terms, and facing death, Christopher was true to his master.

"...thou art the death of the world, and fellow of the devil, and thy gods be made with the hands of men."

- from The Golden Legend by William Caxton, 1483

King Dagnus, still trying to ally with Christopher, then tried to bribe him with a promise of riches and two beautiful women. Much to Dagnus's dismay, Christopher converted these women to Christianity and refused the bribe. Finally, Dagnus ordered all three of them to be decapitated.

St. Christopher was martyred during the reign of the Roman Emperor Decius about 250 years after Jesus Christ. Decius, himself, would rule the empire for just two years before being killed in battle. During his brief reign, Decius issued edicts demanding the blood of Christians - especially leaders like St. Christopher. According to history, Christopher suffered and died as a martyr in the second year of Decius on the Roman calendar date of July 21^st by Dagnus's order.

References:
Wikipedia, Saint Christopher
Sir Thomas Brownes' Vulgar Errors V.xvi, Of St. Christopher
The Golden Legend, The Life of Saint Christopher

As I See

2009-11-20T16:36:00.000-08:00

Boris Artzybasheff (1899 - 1965) was a prolific illustrator who was born in the city of Kharkov in the former Russian province of Ukraine.

As a young man, Artzybasheff fought as a White Russian soldier for the Czars during the Bolshevik Revolution. The October uprising that initiated the Russian Civil War (1917-1923) would eventually bring the Communist Soviet Union to power. The war would leave it's mark on Artzybasheff's work and his work ethic.

In Russia, during the struggle, the monarchist White Russians fought for the survival of the Russian royal family alongside U.S. Marines but were ultimately overwhelmed. The royalists were eventually crushed. Czar Nicholas Romanov's royal family, whose forebears had known assasinations and intrigue for many generations were executed down to the last man, woman and child.

Remaining royalists were summarily imprisoned or executed by the Communists whose revolt was inspired by the bloody domination of the Czars for centuries. The royal families bodies were burned and then buried in Yekaterinburg in Central Russia. After the Czar's four daughters were killed it was discovered that they each bore an amulet or braclet bearing the picture of disgraced monk Grigori Rasputin and a prayer.

The remainder of the 2.4 million man White Army was scattered throughout Europe, Turkey and America. Some would go on to serve as mercenaries, others found their place in Hitler's Reich. Artzybasheff fled Russia in 1919 seeking political asylum after the royal family was killed and 5 years before all of Russian belonged to the Communists.

When Artzybasheff immigrated to New York City he was penniless and without a working knowledge of English. In time, Artzybasheff eventually found work in an engraving shop and his earliest work appeared in 1922 as illustrations for Verotchka's Tales and The Undertaker's Garland. A number of other book illustrations followed during the 1920's.

His graphic style was always fluid and striking. In commercial work, Artzybasheff explored grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, where toiling machines displayed distinctly human attributes. Conversely, one of his works shows Buckminster Fuller's head in the form of Fuller's geodesic structure.

In his personal work, Artzybasheff explored the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion. Artzybasheff went to on to illustrate 200 covers for TIME magazine and 50 books including his own book entitled As I See (1954). He worked exhaustively in advertising as a graphic designer for Xerox, Shell, Pan Am, and Parke-Davis.

References:
Wikipedia, Boris Artzybasheff
Wikipedia, Russian Religious Sect: Khlystism
ASIFA-Hollywood Archieve, Media: Artzybasheff's Diablerie
BPIB, Boris Artzybasheff
American Art Archives, Boris Artzybasheff

The Rose and the Reich

2009-11-13T19:25:00.000-08:00

Munich 1942, from the left: Hans Scholl, his sister Sophie Scholl, and Christopher Probst.

The White Rose were a group of students, writers and designers from the University of Munich that held weekly discussion groups, painting "Freedom" on brick walls and circulated anti-facist literature in the heart of Nazi Germany during World War II.

From June 1942 until February of 1943, members of the White Rose wrote and distributed newsletters that attacked the brutal policies of Nazi Germany that included the brutal truth about euthanasia of German citizens, genocide of Jews, the practice of concentration camps for opposition leaders, and the draconian punishments for speaking out against the policy of compulsorary military service, beginning as children, in Hitler's armies. The White Rose sent these leaflets across Germany and Europe in an attempt to build a "bridge to the non-Nazi world."^[0]

"- why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you openly and in secret, of your rights until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget...?"

— From Leaflet #2, 1942

The leaders of the White Rose: Hans and Sophie Scholls, Christopher Probst and the others were not Jewish, Communists or violent dissenters. They were German citizens. As children, the Scholls had been leaders in the Nazi Youth Party. Hans had been a flagbearer at a Party Rally in Nuremberg. Additionally, before entering medical school, Hans Scholls had enlisted in the German Army and fought for Germany in WWII.

One day however, as the war raged, Hans Scholls came upon a young Jewish woman, under forced labor, digging a trench. The whole idea of what the Nazi regime was doing struck his heart, he realized but for the grace of God, he could have been the one there, or his sister.

A series of six leaflets signed by the "Students of Munich" were diseminated until the six core members of the group were captured by the Gestapo in 1943.

The leaders of the White Rose, mostly in their twenties, including the Scholls and Christopher Probst, were tried in the notorious People's Courts and executed by decapitation in 1943. Inge Scholl, one of the few members of the group who outlived the Reich, went on to found a school in Ulm and wrote several books about the resistance group.

Notes:
[0] = "G.39, Ein deutsches Flugblatt (A German Leaflet)", Aerial Propaganda Leaflet Database, Twentieth World War, Psywar.org.

References:
Wikipedia, The White Rose of Munich
IMDB, Die weiße Rose (1982)
Spartacus Education, White Rose: Nazi Germany
Shoah Education, The White Rose
Amazon, The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943 by Inge Scholl translated by Arthur R. Schultz, Unknown Binding 1983.

The Coming of Conan: Robert E. Howard

2009-11-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

I. Two-Gun Bob in Cimmeria
Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was different. He was a burly Texan who bore a resemblance to Edward G. Robinson but could write like Edgar Allan Poe on an opium fueled rye whiskey bender. Howard was making a small fortune from his writing as a young man but his parents never acknowledged writing as a serious profession for Howard. Consequentially, he strove well beyond their meager expectations of a what a writer should be by publishing 62 novels and dozens of short stories printed in pulp comics and magazines.

After his death, his characters would live on as new authors took up his heroes - the indestructible Conan the Barbarian, Kull The Conquerer, the vile wizard Thulsa Doom, Red Sonya and the vengeful Solomon Kane.

Where in the brains and talent lottery did Mr. Howard fall? To judge this accurately, look at Howard's contemporaries. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator Tarzan of the Apes (first published in 1912) and John Carter of Mars, undoubtedly influenced the stories of Howard starting at a very early age. H.P. Lovecraft, the acknowledged master of horror, would influence and engage Howard personally in a lengthy correspondence that would last for the rest of his life.

J.R.R. Tolkien, a world away, was nearly simultaneouslly working in elaborate fantasy worlds. Both Howard's and Tolkien's stories were set in unique and lavishly detailed worlds of distant ages past. Later, Frank Frazetta, an artist in his own remarkable class of fantasy illustration, would pick up Howard's theme of the rugged individual set against a ruthless world of blood-thirsty men, angry demons, dark gods and colossal reptiles. In this kind of company, Howard is thought to have been ranked fairly high as far as the brains department went - right there in the heart of dusty, old Texas.

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

— Robert E. Howard, The Phoenix on the Sword.

However, as all men are all the product of the same even hand, Howard was given a large share of hardship and emotional turbulence to balance out the large measure of talent he was alotted. Howard was a lifelong chronic depressive renowned for his gloominess. His mother, Hester Jane, was sick or bedridden most of his life. He was never engaged, married or had any children. In the end , Howard died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound hours before his mother would succumb to cancer.

This sad end to his life was a tragic theft of a great writer. His life was just as fascinating as his writing. But, to try to understand Robert E. Howard you must start at the beginning of his life - not at the end.

II. The kid from the dry Texas waste
Robert E. Howard's youth was spent wandering with his traveling country doctor father Isaac Howard and his tubercular mother Hester Ervin Howard. While Robert was growing up, the family moved through a series of small Texas towns tending wildcat oilmen and new and old frontiersmen.

The Howards lived in a long line of cowtowns and boomtowns including: Dark Valley, Seminole, Bronte, Poteet, Oran, Wichita Falls, Bagwell, Cross Cut, and Burkett before settling in Cross Plains. He was an unusually bright child who spoke to aging Civil War veterans and Texas Rangers, listening to the grisly ghost stories told by his grandmother, meeting ex-slaves, and exploring the ruins of old forts and historical sites. These experiences had a strong influence on his personality. By the time he reached his teens, Howard had soaked in the aftermath of the American West through the first hand tales of the people that were part of that history.

The Howards eventually settled in the 1920's in a small town of approximately two thousand residents called Cross Plains. Like much of the Central West Texas region of the era, Cross Plains went through periodic oil-based booms that brought hundreds or even thousands of temporary inhabitants who set up camps just outside the town limits, jammed the hotels beyond capacity, rented rooms, beds and private homes.

The lease men, riggers, drillers and roughnecks who followed the boom were followed by others who sought to make a quick buck off them: from men who set up hamburger stands to feed them, to gamblers and bar whores, to thugs, thieves and con men who simply preyed on them.

An oil boom could make a sleepy little town into a big city in no time - bringing with it social upheaval. The extra hundreds who swelled the population of Cross Plains managed to make it a wilder and rowdier town than usual. Of the atmosphere in boomtown Cross Plains, Howard later wrote: "I’ll say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that life’s a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of."

Howard was given a wide array of characters to draw from his experience even as a young man. These characters shaped the surreal settings he created with realistically brutal dangers. The only kind of man that could survive them was a intelligent, strong hero - the kind of hero that embodied Howard's central theme of rugged individualism.

III. Weird Tales
Howard spent his late teens working odd jobs in Cross Plains: picking cotton, branding yearlings, hauling garbage, working in grocery stores, doing clerical work, serving at a soda counter, public stenography, packing rods for a surveyor, and writing oil-field news, all while taking courses at Howard Payne College in Brownwood (an adjunct of the college) and trying to break into the pulp markets.

After years of rejection slips and near acceptances, he finally sold a short caveman tale titled "Spear and Fang" which netted him the princely sum of $16 and introduced him to the readers of a struggling pulp called Weird Tales.

Howard would create a string of heroes for pulps ahead of Conan the Barbarian. Solomon Kane, a vengeful puritan who roamed through dark, bloody tales of betrayal. Sailor Steve Costigan, a navy boxer with "a head full of rocks and occasionally a heart of gold" who turned up in rough seaport towns across the ocean. Then came Kull, sometimes King Kull or Kull the Conquerer, a Altantis era warrior who lived in a prehistoric age of swords and sorcery. These first heroes, with exception of Kull, immediately found their mark in pulp publications Fight Tales, Action Tales and Weird Tales starting in 1929.

Reworking the Kull storylines into an even and formulatic character Howard came up with a proto-Celtic barbarian. A lone man who wandered cold wastes that were populated only by tribes of subhumans, feral animals, terrifying monsters and evil women. This first came from a story featuring both Kull and Conan called "People of the Dark". This story was published in December of 1932 as "The Phoenix on the Sword" in Weird Tales.

The barbarian who would be king reflected much of Howard's own values of independence, physical and mental strength, adventurousness and self-reliance. Conan's world, the Hyborean Age, reflected the chaos and danger present in the real world in exagerated angles. Battles, duels, lynchings, dry wastelands, warfare, betrayals, lawless metropolises all composed in prose completed the formula. Conan was such a hit that Howard published 17 more Conan stories in Weird Tales for the next four years.

Eager to explore more characters and settings and due to his interest in history and exotic or esoteric subjects Howard published more of his stories featuring his heroes in Oriental Tales, Argosy, Jack Dempsey's Fight Magazine, Marvel Tales, Thrilling Adventures, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Top-Notch, Cowboy Stories, Strange Detective Stories and Super-Detective Stories.

IV. "All fled, all done..."
The growing success in his writing career did not offset the bleak darkness in his personal life. In 1934, Howard met a local school teacher named Novalyne Price. Although Novalyne was a smart and unusual woman, she would leave Howard repeatedly before finally deserting him completely to move to Louisiana and attend LSU. Howard also acted as a caregiver to his mother, who struggled with TB and cancer. Howard watched as his mother's health continued to decline.

These factors plus Howard's manic-depression and bipolar tendencies made the real world seem more unbearable. It containing none of the epic themes, the heroic victories or the predestined love that seemed to live only in his work.

At a Brownwood hospital on the morning of June 11^th 1936, after being told by a nurse that his mother would never again regain consciousness, Robert E. Howard walked out to his car in the driveway where he took a borrowed .38 automatic from the glove box and shot himself in the head. His father and another doctor rushed out but the wound was too grievous for anything to be done. Howard lived for another eight hours, dying at 4 p.m. His mother died the following day. They were both buried on June 14^th 1936 in a double funeral in Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood, Texas.

References:
Wikipedia, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Wikipedia, Robert E. Howard
Wikisource, Works of Robert E Howard
Robert E. Howard United Press Association, Biography
Robert Weinberg, My Trip to Cross Plains
The Cimmerian, Thulsa Doom

The Varian Disaster: Massacre In Teutoburg Forest

2009-11-07T18:53:00.000-08:00

I. Ransomed To Ancient Rome
In the year of 9 AD the Roman Empire, long the most feared military power of the ancient world, was dealt a crushing blow by a man who began his life as property of the Roman empire. This one man would single-handedly forge an unsteady alliance of barbarian tribes and lead them to an astounding victory in the darkest depths of Teutoburg Forest.

The Battle of Teutoburg Forest and the seven years of war that followed under the Roman General Germanicus would define the Rhine as the border of the Roman empire for the next four hundred years. His leadership gave the loose confederation of subjugated barbarian tribes a fearsome name seventy years after Julius Caesar conquered them.

The man who fought the Romans was known as Gaius Julius Arminius. He was born in 18 BC as Erminaz to the Cheruscan war chief Segimer in the northern Rhine valley. The Cherusci were a Teutonic people which meant they were a society of free men who practiced democracy and held criminal and civil court. But, against this notion of freedom, they were also the local allies to Rome and were used to make war on the neighboring barbarian tribes in the name of the Roman empire. The Cherusi acted as a kind of auxillary military force to subjugate the wild tribes in the frontier and to bolster Roman troops in campaigns abroad.

As a boy, Arminius was taken to Rome. Because of his tribe's status, was held as a hostage to ensure his people's continued obedience. This was a common tactic of the day employed by the Romans. Arminius demonstrated intelligence and strength as a young man and was trained as a Roman military commander. He attained Roman citizenship and the prized rank of Equestrian. The Eques were an order of petty nobles that arose from the Roman calvary as cavalrymen and were installed in military posts within the empire. By the time of Augustus, from 30 BC - 14 AD, the Equestrians were second in social status only to Roman Senators. Yet to the foreign rulers of Germainia and Gaul, who descended from generations of city-dwelling oligarchies, people of the tribes like Arminius were no more than savages.

II. The Teutonic Alliance

An ancient Roman map of Germania. Note the positions of Teutono-vari and Cherusi to the northwest.

At the age of 25, Arminius no longer wanted his people to be pawns of a cold and calculating Roman bureaucracy. Arminius advocated breaking his countrymens' allegiance to Rome and declaring their own independence. His father-in-law Segestes, a respected war chief, disagreed and wanted the tribes to remain loyal vassals.

After seeking allies within the northern tribes and within the empire itself Arminius gained the upper hand among his tribesmen and began to plan for rebellion. Segestes repeatedly warned Publius Quinctilius Varus, the governor of Gaul in modern day France, that a tribal rebellion was coming. Governor Varus, unaware of the scope of the turmoil, declined to act until the rebellion had encompassed many northern provinces.

Governor Varus, himself, was a cruel administrator of the conquered governorships that he oversaw. After the death of Herod the Great, in 4 BC, and acting as Governor of Syria, Varus ordered the crucifixition of 2000 Jewish rebels in the streets of Jerusalem. Varus was a man who had reached his lofty position through the prestige of his family connections including Emperor Augustus. His power was maintained by massacring the peoples of his wards. Varus was accustomed to brutally subjugating an already subjugated people. He was not an experienced campaigner or a soldier in any sense of the word - he was simply a despicable dictator.

In September of 9 AD, Varus gathered an immense horde of soldiers^[0] to annihilate the tribal rebellion. On the 9^th of September, Varus was confident in his imminent victory. He personally led three legions^[1] of infantry, three compliments of cavalry^[2] and six battle groups of cohorts^[3] to find and destroy the rebellious tribal alliance.

Never suspecting the leader of the rebellion was among his most trusted advisors - Varus ordered Arminius and his Chersucan warriors to lead him into the stronghold of the anti-Roman alliance.

Arminius, once securing the Governor's permission for him and his men to act as the massive army's chief scouts, gladly agreed.

III. The Battle
Using his ruse as a guide, Arminius employed a multi-pronged attack strategy. Arminius, unknown to the Romans, led the long, winding column of Roman legions deeper and deeper into a series of thick forests, swamps, traps, dead-ends and hidden fortifications.

Gathered in the dark reaches of the sprawling ancient woods was the collective might of the tribes Arminius had united: the Cherusci, the Bructeri, the Marsi, the Sicambri, the Chauci and Chatti. These barbarian forces awaited the massive Roman force along each leg of their doomed expedition into the dense Teutoburg forest.

As the massive force trekked through the dense forest it was clear that morale was low among the Roman legionaires. Most of the soldiers were Italian conscripts or former slaves many miles from home. They were forcibly pressed into army service for a period of 16 years. After their term ended, they were promised freedom as Roman citizens. It was a freedom that many would not live to reach.

When the Senate announced that the conscripts’ terms would be extended another 4 years (to 20 years) a series of mutinies began to plague the Roman armies in Germania and elsewhere. This new policy resulted in desertions, low fighting spirit and lack of combat initiative – not what an army needs to survive an ambush in unfamiliar territory.

As Arminus led these Romans towards his waiting rebel forces their number and their will slowly diminished. The sections of the column were suprised, broken and surrounded before the Romans could respond. Section after section gradually fell to the forest dwelling barbarians. It was like Arminius's forces were patiently quartering a long serpent.

Arminius knew Roman battle tactics very well. After deserting Varus, he personally directed his hoard to counter the Roman phalanx and column strategies quite effectively. His warriors attacked without warning tearing through more clustered formations of the spread-out Roman legions.

The Roman horsemen, usually a valuable asset, were useless in the the muddy bogs and narrow trails that were choked with disheartened soldiers. Often, the Romans would find stone walls at the ends of blind corners where spear-throwing tribesmen cast their weapons by the hundred with deadly accuracy. The Roman archers, a traditional answer to battle fortifications, like the cavalry, were at a severe terrain disadvantage. The archers were, most likely, securely located behind the initial lines of skirmishers. They had little time or space to deploy to get close to the barbarian fortifications. When they did, the barbarians would simply melt deeper into the forests.

The massive numbers of the Roman column worked against Varus. Movement was highly restrictive in the dense forest trails. Varus, unused to giving split-second orders and without a battlefield instinct at all must have been enraged as he watched the terror of the ancient world's greatest strength being used directly against it.

In three days time, the alliance of tribes annihilated all three Roman legions and auxillaries commanded by Governor Varus. The historical casualities of the battle soared to 15,000 to 20,000 men. According to recent archeological digs, nearly all of those killed were Romans. Varus, the brutal despot, fell on his own sword rather than surrender to the barbarians. He was the last victim of his own cruelty.

It was a victory unparalleled in all of recorded history whether ancient or modern.

IV. Aftermath
The peace won by Arminius would not last. Roman retribution quickly followed. The father of the monsterous Emperor Caligua, Germanicus, sought a bloody vengeance for the horrific losses the Roman incurred.

General Germanicus was named in honor of Julius Caesar who had given Germania it’s name during his own war campaigns in 58 B.C. - 70 years prior to Germanicus's offensive. Germanicus, no stranger to warfare like Varus, meant to live up to Julius Caesar’s image to the fullest.

Germanicus fought a series of merciless campaigns that ultimately defeated Arminius’s forces and cleanly split the tribal lands into two countries defined by the Rhine River: Roman controlled Germania Superior and Germania Inferior the realm of the remainder of the wild tribes of the Cheruscan leader, Arminius.

Despite his heroic efforts in uniting the people of the northwestern lands and his unqualified victory against Varus, Arminius was killed by his own people - falling under the treacherous blade of an assassin in the year of 21 AD.

Notes:
[0] = A conservative total of Varus's column is 13,900 soldiers minus camp followers who were non-combatants. They were like tailors, blacksmiths, prostitutes, slaves, and cooks. This exact number is unknown but could equal another 400 to 800 people - making the total number of the Roman force led into Teutoberg Forest very close to 15,000.
[1] = An early Roman Empire legion, of 30 BC-284 AD, typically contained 3000 trained infantry typically armed with short swords. Varus had three legions under his command during the battle - an estimated total of nearly 9,000 foot soldiers alone.
[2] = A Roman Cohort is a Roman military unit made up of six groups each containing 60 to 100 individual men that operate under a centurion. A cohort can equal 360 to 600 men each. Varus had 6 cohorts of these men totaling up to 3600 additional skirmishers.
[3] = Roman Calvary were made up of 300 equites each. Varus had three of these groups totaling 900 mounted horsemen. For more information abouted mounted calvary please see: Comitatus.net

References:
Wikipedia, Gaius Julius Arminius
Wikipedia, Germanicus Julius Caesar
Ancient Web, The Ancient Teutonic World
Livius, Germania Inferior
Comitatus.net, Adventures in Roman Calvary
The New American, The Battle That Saved The West

"...the pale, thin man in the last row, quiet with burning eyes."

2009-10-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

Franz Kafka photographed in 1906 at the age of 23.

I. Early Life in Europe
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is recognized today as a major fiction author of the 20^th century. However, during his lifetime in Eastern Europe he was an alienated failure as a writer. He found himself as physically and intellectually repulsive as he found much of the world around him. However, history would record Kafka's life much differently: as a struggle for reason and love from a world dedicated to smothering anything resembling humanity.

Educated as a lawyer, Kafka lived and worked in Prague, Berlin and Vienna. Kafka sought escape from the weight of being the oldest child of a overbearing middle-class butcher with no other surviving sons. He lived with his family in Prague, Austria-Hungary in the modern Czech Republic with his three sisters until he was old enough to go to college at Charles-Ferdinand University. After graduation, he worked as an intern in criminal courts the following year.

Kafka suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, migraines, insomnia, constipation, and boils all usually brought on by excessive stress. Kafka added to his long list of ailments by developing tuberculosis in 1917 at age 34. Complications from tuberculosis would kill him at 40 when his throat swelled shut and he was unable to eat. Intravenous drips and parenteral nutrition had not yet been invented - he essentially starved to death in a sanitarium in Vienna, alone.

II. Existentialism, the Individual and Dystopian Philosophy
Against Kafka's lifetime of inner struggles he also fought an outer battle against the world in which he lived in which the only weapon he could wield against hypocrisy was a pen and a typewriter. He wrote his own brand of dystopian philosophy in an effort to combat the hypocrisy in his own personal and professional life as well as the hypocrisy of his country as the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary threw itself into World War One only to be bitterly crushed.

Dystopian philosophy is the grim and dire school of thought that says all of life is a doomed farce. It is all pervasive in the last few hundred years of literature and music. It's the collective dark wolf of society creeping towards it's inevitable death - dreaming of a final meal of snow white girlflesh before the wolf itself dies with an exhausted whimper at the shuffling heels of fools and liars.

The living breathing reality of modern urban culture, where the underbelly is the whole world, is where Kafka lived and died in. Surrounded by crushing poverty, disease, overbearing fathers, impossible bosses, gullible courts, foolish bureacracy, short-sighted publishers, and emotionally abusive women he wrote manuscript after manuscript about this world - many of which would be unfinished or unpublished until after his death.

These characters were the people that populated Kafka's work. He wrote about them as an unending procession of power-crazed fools. These fools were at the controls of a massive vehicle that they neither could understand nor control - rolling gleefully over the backs of better men and women. The suffering of the individual at the hands of unidentifiable masses, such as justice systems or cruel family, is key in Kafka's work.

Kafka's writing, as in The Trial, unintentionally prophesized the rise of the Third Reich that came to power nearly 10 years after his death. His sisters Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1941), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942), and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1891–1943) died in the ovens and ghettoes of Nazi Germany. In fact, many of Kafka's letters to girlfriend Dora Diamant were later confiscated by the Gestapo secret police in 1933 and still remain missing today.

Yet, in his life, Kakfa was hopeful. For what was he hopeful?! He was ridiculed as a fool, a pretender or a criminal his entire life. Only a handful of his friends like Max Brod or Dora Diamant and former fiancees Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenská knew for what he was hopefull for. If he had survived TB he surely would have been killed by the Nazis.

III. Major Works
Kafka, whose remaining writing comes to the modern age incomplete and in fragments is chiefly remembered for two works:

In The Trial a man is snatched from his city apartment and put on trial for a nameless crime. He is tried by a rabidly paranoid court where an accusation is enough for a conviction. He is sentenced to death.

In The Metamorphosis a man wakes one morning to find he has been physically transformed into a giant cockroach. As he shrinks, he is sealed inside a filthy room, ostrasized and wounded by his family, and then finally dies of a combination of infection and starvation.

In closing, as modern cities and urban centers continue to eclipse the earth, Kafka, like Poe, are continually rediscovered by new generations that question the wisdom of a fundamental lack of morality, decency, human warmth, and rationale. This absence of humanity dominates historical and modern urban culture. While the mentality of exploitation and brutality become doctrines there will be men like Kafka exposing those who embrace bloodthirsty cruelty for what they are: dying, desperate wolves.

Notes:
The title of this post comes from an excerpt from an interview with Josef Tal the son of Franz Kafka's language professor, Rabbi Julius Grünthal, with critic Hans Keller. Josef Tal remembers: "...the exceedingly pale man with those piercing eyes... obtrusively quiet, while his striking girl friend, whom he had brought along, was all vivacity." Please see Kafka's Wikipedia Bio for more.

References:
Wikipedia, Franz Kafka
Wikipedia, Exisitentialism
Levity.com, Franz Kafka

"He was a friend of mine"

2009-09-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

Re-printed from the original notice at Dead Punk Stars

James Dennis "Jim" Carroll was born August 1^st 1949 and died September 11^th 2009 in New York City of a heart attack.

Best known as the author of the Basketball Diaries, a memoir of his experiences as a heroin addict during his teens in the 60's, Jim Carroll was also a prominent poet and punk musician.

In 1978, after much encouragement from friend Patti Smith, Carroll formed Amsterdam, later re-named the Jim Carroll Band, releasing their debut LP, "Catholic Boy" in 1980. He published several books that highlighted his life in the underbelly of America.

Carroll suffered a fatal heart attack on September 11^th, 2009, while working at his desk. He was 60 years old.

References:
Wordpress, A Person Who Died
Dead Punk Stars, Jim Carroll
Rolling Stone, On-line Obit

The Martyrs' Mountain

2009-09-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

The Saint Denis statuary at Notre Dame Cathedral.

St. Denis, known as the first bishop of Paris and the patron saint of France, is credited as the first martyr of Christendom. Sent by the early outlaw Christian church of ancient Rome in 250 A.D. his mission was to convert the Romans who had settled in central Gaul, in present day France.

Denis through his energy and sincerity, managed to convert a significant number of inhabitants of Lutece, in present day Paris, a phenomenon that shocked the local authorities and pagan priests.

Roman Governor of Gaul Sisinnius Fesceninus, acting under Emporer Valerius' edict to kill Christians, arrested Denis and his friends Eleutherius and Rusticus ordering them to submit to Roman authority and bow before the state religion.

The trio refused and were promptly imprisoned and tortured. The governor ordered their execution at the temple of Mercury atop the highest hill in Paris as a warning to the Christians that St. Denis had inspired.

The legend of St. Denis becomes very interesting at this point in the story. According to a medival compilation of religious figures, told in the Golden Legend, Roman legionnaires marched to the temple with the condemned men but decided to kill Denis halfway up the hillside by chopping off his head - the common method of execution of the time.

Denis, having no intention of cutting the trip short, after being decapitated, picked up his fallen head and continued up the hill preaching a sermon.

On the north side of the descending slope, Denis finally fell to his knees before a recently converted woman named Catulla and died. She buried him there in a Christian ceremony. Sprigs of wheat were said to immediately spring from his grave site.

The martyrdom of St. Denis, as well as the practice of slaughtering of Christians in the area, resulted in renaming this hill the Montmartre or "The Martyrs' Mountain".

The lesson of St. Denis is the inspiration of all men and martyrs: that men can kill men, but no man can kill an idea.

References:
Wikipedia, Saint Denis

"No prison can hold me."

2009-08-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

A 25 year old Harry Houdini in a publicity shot photographed in 1899.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926) rose from humble beginnings as a boy in Budapest and a poor Jewish teenager in New York to become the most famous escape artist in 20^th century America. His work not only broke through the boundries of what human beings were thought capable of doing but also broke through the even thicker walls of bigotry and prejudice. Harry Houdini is remembered today as a legendary showman and magician whose life and death is still shrouded in mystery.

I. Eric of the Air
Ehrich "Harry Houdini" Weisz was born into family of four boys to a Rabbi and a country girl in Budapest, Hungary. At four, Ehrich's family migrated to America first settling in Appleton, Wisconsin as the Weiss family. His father was named the leader of the local Jewish Orthodox Church. Over the next few years two more children were born.

When Samuel Weiss lost his congregation, due to his strict adherence to orthodox views, he and eight year old Ehrich moved from Wisconsin to New York City to search for work. During this time, they lived in a crowded boarding house on East 79th Street. Young Ehrich worked several jobs, including as a "newsie" and shoe shine boy or "bootblack".

In New York, Ehrich discovered the adventures of 19^th century French magician, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, whom he would later take the stage name Houdini from. It's not hard to imagine the young Ehrich working a series of menial jobs day in and day out and dreaming of being a mysterious magician while in reality he and his father were desperately poor and living in one the most crowded and dangerous cities in the world.

When Samuel Weiss brought the rest of the family to New York, a few years later, Ehrich began performing in the streets with his older brother Theodore. They performed in city parks and at Coney Island where Enrich undertook a variety of unsuccessful routines such as a daredevil trapeze artist "Eric of the Air", simple hucksterism, and enacting sleight of hand routines as the "King of Cards". This was all well before Ehrich began performing in minor escape acts with Theodore in the "The Brothers Houdini".

Before and after work, when the brothers couldn't find audiences to give them money they would beg for coins. In Ruth Brandon's biography The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini she retells how a young Houdini would give coins he had begged for to his mother by making them mysteriously emerge from her hair in silver fountains. If that failed in causing a smile, he would hide them in his pockets and tell her, "Shake me, I'm magic!" and proceed to sprout puddles of pennies and nickels.

Rabbi Weiss died in 1892 leaving a family of five boys and one girl. At this time, all of the family worked in New York's garment district sweatshops to survive. Ehrich himself worked sewing together men's ties in the sweatshops.

In 1893, at 19, met his future wife Wilhelmina "Bess" Rahner, a struggling singer and dancer, while performing at Coney Island. She eventually replaced Theodore as Houdini's assistant. They performed together for the next six years and in 1899 Houdini was discovered by a vaudeville agent while the act was traveling in Illinois. There, Houdini was offered a contract to tour Europe which he gladly accepted.

II. King of Handcuffs

Harry Houdini in Cleveland, Ohio circa 1915.

In 1890, Ehrich threw himself into European public relations the likes of which have never been seen. As part of his over the top advertising, he would stop in the jail of every village or city that he toured to challenge the local police to keep him locked inside a cell for one night. As part of the routine, he would be strip searched, shackled and then led into a cell only to escape by morning. He succeeded each time, even freeing himself from a Siberian prison train, leading skeptics to charge him with cheating by bribing jail guards.

Not one to allow slander, a trait he must have inherited from his proud father, Houdini sued a police officer in Cologne, Germany for making one such false allegation. He won by a demonstration in opening a hefty safe from the inside. The safe, itself, belonged to the judge in the case. The amazing escape cleared Houdini of any wrong doing - winning the law suit and prestige for Houdini.

In London, Houdini spent nearly an hour freeing himself from a set of specially designed handcuffs before a crowd of 400 people and 100 journalists. Never before had Houdini had such a difficult time in an escape - requiring nearly an hour of sustained effort. Only after Bess surreptitiously passed him a special key did he manage to free himself before the thunderous applause of the crowd.

These tactics of showmanship, publicity stunts and spending nearly ten years traveling exhaustively in Europe and Russia, made Ehrich widely known as "The Handcuff King" in Europe. For several years he was the highest paid vaudeville entertainer in the world. His unusual talents provided Houdini with a new found wealth that he had struggled to find since he was a boy a in America.

After returning to the US in 1907, one of the first things Houdini did was buy a brownstone home in the German part of Harlem for $25,000 for his mother and siblings in New York. He published a book called Handcuff Secrets in 1909 and determined to be more than a simple conjurer began devising a series of ever larger illusions that would place his life in danger.

III. The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls
Starting in 1912, his stunts evolved into elaborate escapes from watery graves or being held in mid-air and set aflame. Right before the audience's unbelieving eyes, and no longer behind the safety of a curtain, he was locked in chains, hand-cuffed, crammed into straitjackets, bound with thick ropes and then given a few minutes to escape.

Harry Houdini slipping out of a straitjacket while hanging upside down over 46th and Broadway in Manhattan circa 1915.

With only the air in his lungs to survive, he performed his definitive Chinese Water Torture act. In this performance, Houdini was regularly required to hold his breath for three minutes as he unlocked a series of chains and restraints to free himself from a 5' x 3.5' re-inforced glass chamber. The original cell was built in England, where Houdini first performed the escape for an audience of one person as part of a one-act play he called "Houdini Upside Down". This was so he could copyright the effect and have grounds to sue imitators - which he often did.

The Overboard Box routine evolved from the Milk Can Escape that he performed on stage in vaudeville. In his unique role as a performer that could go anywhere and do anything Houdini would escape from a chest that was chained and nailed shut while he was held in heavy shackles. To further complicate the act, the chest would be thrown into the East River in front a large audience. Houdini escaped from the chest as quickly as 57 seconds leaving only a pair of empty manacles in the wooden box.

Buried Alive, one of Houdini's acts that has been repeated many times, involved Houdini literally being buried alive strapped in a straitjacket and then to emerge - clawing his way to the surface - unharmed. In 1917 in Santa Ana, during his first public performance of the act the heavy weight of the earth pressed down on Houdini nearly killing him. Afterwards, he would use a specially built bronze casket to avoid being crushed or suffocated.

Houdini, ever resourceful and wary of competition, also patented a small specialized "diving suit" that he used in some of his escapes. The innovation was granted as U.S. Patent Number 1,370,316 on March 1, 1921.

IV. Spiritualism and the Houdini Picture Corporation

Houdini, in a publicity shot, in his fifties.

In the 1920s, spiritualism became a great interest in America. His competitors, like the Davenport Brothers, ascribed much of their own illusions to supernatural powers. Something of the hard-working religious character in Ehrich must have taken great offense in this tactic. Altough he had used the aura of "ghost worlds" in some of his early routines he always attributed his escapes to his own natural skills. Where his "powers" were purely physical or intellectual and advertised as simply mysterious the various charlatans of his day were using superstitious beliefs to bilk large and small audiences out of fortunes.

After his mother's death in 1913, and researching spiritualism himself, Houdini became convinced that the practitioners were frauds, and he spent much of his time debunking the fakes. In his vaudeville shows he advertised a "Three Shows in One: Magic, Escapes, and Fraud Mediums Exposed." Where he would explain how mediums would research their victims or how they used common parlor tricks to fool them into believing they were contacting dead relatives. He was even more merciless to magicians that claimed spiritual powers.

Houdini challenged one of these "mystical" performers, the Egyptian Conjurer Rahman Bey, in August of 1925 to better the mystic's record of spending an hour underwater in a small, sealed container. Houdini remaining at the bottom of a New York Public pool for an hour and a half, in a casket, using none of the special powers that Rahman Bey claimed to allow him to survive. Houdini would later say that all he did was control his breathing.

He was also a early Special Effects artist in the new medium of motion pictures and acted as a consultant on early films made by Pathe Films (inventors of the newsreel) in France. Building on his many appearances in newsreels, in 1919, The Master of Mystery series was made. It was a 15 part serial in which Harry performed his trademark escapes on film. The series was released to early matinee audiences as a success. Houdini formed the Houdini Picture Corporation with it's own film lab going into business with his brother Theodore. They made two features, The Man From Beyond (1921) and Haldane of the Secret Service (1923). But, in late 1923, citing lack of profits, Houdini abandoned motion pictures.

V. The Final Challenger
In the end, Houdini's reknowned hubris would eventually be his undoing. For all of his death defying feats, he died as a result of long standing personal challenge to his audience in late October of 1926. Nine days prior to his death (and with a broken ankle on the mend from the previous night's show) his challenge was accepted in Montreal by a McGill University college student and amateur boxer named J. Gordon Whitehead.

Among his many challenges to his audience, Houdini had long laid claim that he could painlessly absorb any blow to the gut. But, before being prepared for the strike, Whitehead struck him three times - doubling Houdini over where he lay. Apparently Houdini was already suffering from appendicitis at this point and Whitehead's punches ruptured the organ. Houdini did not seek medical attention and continued to perform for a few days afterward. He finally had the appendix removed on the 29^th of October before dying of peritonitis and sepsis due two days later at the age of 52. Ehrich Weisz died on Halloween in a Detroit hospital saying, "I guess this thing is going to get me..."

Houdini's death was a great shock to the country. Theodore eventually took up the Houdini act and would perform his brother's escape routines, as Hardeen, until 1945. According to his will, the Houdini book collection, valued at $30,000 at the time, was left to the Library of Congress where it remains today as part of a larger collection on Houdini.

Ironically, after Ehrich's death, his wife Bess held yearly seances on Halloween attempting to use spiritualism to unsuccessfully contact her departed husband's soul. After ten years, Bess ended the practice saying "Ten years is long enough to wait for any man." Bess died in 1943 well provided for by Houdini's legacy.

Harry Houdini remains an enigmatic performer who was celebrated during his time as "the young Hungarian magician with the pleasant smile and easy confidence." Today, he is remembered as a titan of his craft and an inspiration to many modern magician's such as David Copperfield and David Blaine.

References:
Wikipedia, Theodore Hardeen
Wikipedia, Harry Houdini
HoudiniTribute.com, Legendary Escapes!
Find-A-Grave, Harry Houdini
Humbugs of the World, P.T. Barnum, New York: G.W. Carelton, 1865
Magician Among the Spirits, Harry Houdini, New York: Harper, 1924.
The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, Ruth Brandon, London: Secker & Warburg, 1993.
Appleton Public Library, Harry Houdini, Adam Woog Wisconsin: Lucent Books, 1994

The Torpedo Riders

2009-08-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

The Decima, or "Unit Ten", were a deadly elite Naval Assault Group developed by the Italian government.

I. The Torpedo Riders
The Decima, or in English "Unit Ten", were an elite Naval Assault Group developed by the Italian government and used in World War II. They were officially known as the Tenth Light Flotilla of Assault Vehicles and became a forerunner of what would later be known in the US Navy as S.E.A.L. teams. They carried out combat and covert sabotage missions by working in small groups of six to ten men. The Decima used newly developed technology such as early SCUBA gear called re-breathers, underwater demolitions and manned torpedos¹ to strike their targets.

On these missions, the Nuotatori ("swimmers") were often mobilized from Torpedo Boats called MAS's or MTM's² to deploy mines and guide specially designed manned torpedoes complete with instrumentation panels and steering wheels (see diagram below) into Allied targets. The manned torpedoes were known as Maiales ("pigs")¹. They were a secret weapon of the Italian Navy that delivered mixed results during the Decima's combat operations.

A diagram of the Maiales, or Pigs, used as guided torpedos.

Due the Pig's build and bulk the slow nautical speed, (compared to unmanned torpedoes) swimmers were often spotted or could easily lose control of the weapon. Later versions, copied by the British were known as code name "Chariot". The Japanese used their version, the Kaiten, at least 100 times as a suicide weapon - using it to sink the USS Underhill on July 24, 1945 near the end of World War II.

II. Souda Bay and The Battle of Matapan

A Torpedo Armed Motorboat on combat patrol in World War II.

The Decima were called into service in Mussolini's facist Italy in June of 1940. At the beginning of the World War II, they were used to covertly sabotage Allied freighters and attack ahead of large scale invasion forces.

In one of their most successful operations as a unit, the Decima were part of a series of attempts to attack Greece. The Italian Royal Navy's (IRN) actions to invade Greece took place in October of 1940 and in March of 1941. Except for the actions of the Decima in sinking freighters and the HMS York - the entirety of the Italian invasion attempts were total catastrophes.

In early March of 1941, ahead of a second doomed invasion attempt, Italian Decima frogmen were deployed to destroy Allied freighters to sink munitions and troops. They deployed mines and manned torpedos in Souda Bay an inland bay and shipping port that lies to the south of Greece in the north of the island of Crete. The Decima were acting ahead of the main IRN strike force that was sailing from Italy.

During it's part of the operation, the Decima severely crippled the HMS York, a heavy cruiser with a compliment of 630 men, by using two quick attack craft called MTM's². They managed to rip open the aft compartments (located at the rear of the ship) with explosives killing two British sailors and dropping the York's keel to the bottom of the shallow Souda Bay.

Within hours of the arrival of the Italian strike force, they were decisively driven out of Greek waters in the Battle of Matapan. In some of the closest range firing between battle ships during World War II, three Italian cruisers, starting with the IRN Pola, IRN Fiume and IRN Zara and two destroyers, IRN Vittorio Alfieri and IRN Giosué Carducci were annihilated in a rout by Allied forces at sea.

Some 2,300 Italian sailors were killed. It should be noted that many Italian sailors would be rescued by Merchant Marines notified by a victorious Allied force. This was not a policy practiced by Axis naval forces who made it an unofficial policy to kill or abandon overboard Allied sailors at sea.

The only recorded damage to the Allied forces came when a single torpedo plane was shot down, killing it's crew of three, downed by the wounded Italian flagship, the IRN Vittorio Veneto.

The strategic and technical disadvantages, including no radar, no sonar and choosing to re-engage a superior force at night, played a large role in the utter defeat of the IRN at British and Greek hands.

However, one month after the humiliating loss for the Italian Royal Navy in it's attempt to invade Greece Nazi forces would take the country, in just 24 days, in April of the same year. In doing so, the way was opened for Hitler to invade Africa which he saw as a stepping stone for what became his own failed attempt to surround Europe.

III. Genius of Gibraltar

The Auxilary Ship Olterra appeared as decrepit hulk to all inspections during WWII.

Sabotage and small covert strikes were a method of slowing down naval shipments of troops and munitions travelling from Allied bases in Europe in World War II. To that end, many missions required a great cost of time, men and equipment to deliver a handfull of divers into Allied ports. However, one of the major strengths of the Decima was in it's ability to find ways around these costly and risky deliveries by establishing a covert base of operations to work from.

One example of this strategy involved a secret operation aboard the ship Olterra in the well-guarded Allied seaport of Gibraltar. The Italian tanker was docked in the critical shipping port and appeared as a salvaged hulk that was being retrofitted.

From a hidden series of chambers aboard this vessel, the Decima launched a campaign of mysterious torpedo attacks under the cover of darkness. The Decima secretly transformed the ship into a floating base of operations, adding diving chambers and munitions storage, while sinking Allied freighters using manned Mailales torpedoes and limpet mines from September of 1942 to August 1943 during the war.

The operation aboard the Olterra sunk 6 merchant ships totalling 40,000 tons (or 80,000 pounds) of war materials with a surprisingly low casualty rate on both sides. Only 3 divers and 3 sailors were killed due to surgical precision of the strikes and the timing of the attacks which were conducted at night when most of the freighter crews were ashore.

Another factor that allowed the operation to succeed so well is that when Decima teams were apprehended they never admitted to the base's existence. Instead, they insisted they were deployed from a submarine in the harbor. The universal penalty for sabotage during wartme is death yet under military interrogation Decima agents never gave up the Olterra operation. Members of the Italian secret service were rumoured to have scattered diving gear on the docks after attacks to further confuse authorities as to the origin of the sabotage.

The "Trojan Horse" ship ingeniously sunk freighters docked in Gibraltar.

After Mussolini's grip on power was first broken, in July of 1943, the Decima continued attacking freighters in Gibraltar. The Decima's role aboard the Olterra in the sinking Allied freighters was not discovered until after the war ended.

Soon afterwards, Spanish officials, eager to minimize any complicity in the Decima operation, tried to destroy the evidence. However, before they could intervene, three full Maiale model torpedoes were recovered aboard the Olterra after Italy surrendered in late 1943.

IV. The Italian Gestapo and Aftermath

A suspected "Ferruccio Nazionale" member is hung in the streets during World War II.

As Italy's role in the Axis began to take a defensive role against the Allies, the Decima were given another mission: acting as an Italian Gestapo of spies and infiltrators into Anti-Facist organizations within Italy. It's important to remember the Decima were the enemy of democracy and fought for facism. They freely voiced Hitler's anti-semitic views and Mussolini's lust for power in their unit and in the unit's publication "L'orizzonte" or "The Horizon"⁵.

They were notorious hunters of Partisan agents including communists and resistance fighters. In hunting for resistance members and Allied collaborators the Decima publicly shot and hung freedom fighters in the streets including a massacre of 68 suspected Partisans in Forno east of Turin in central Italy, during the war.

In all, the Decima were to be feared for their ingenuity. They employed a combination of skills using new technology and old stratagems on the battlefield. As facism began crashing in Italy they were re-purposed as secret police. Many of their members were sentenced to long prison terms during the Nuremberg trials after WW II only to be re-purposed yet again as secret agents for the forerunner of the American CIA the OSS (Over Seas Service) as spies⁶. The Decima's tools and tactics are used by military forces and scientific research communities, almost 70 years after their original implementation, in nearly every modern country today.

Notes:
[1] = Manned Torpedoes were called Maiales meaning "pig" in Itailan and were guided by two-man teams. They were originally used in 1918 by the Italian Royal Navy against Austria to great effect.
[2] = The acronym for Motoscafo Armato Silurante (literally, Motorboat Armed with Torpedoes) or Motoscafo Anti Sommergibile (Motorboat Against Submarine) both mean "Motorized Torpedo Boat" in English and were also referred to as MTM's or MAS's.
[3] = A photo of a restored Maiales torpedo can be seen at Wikipedia Commons by following this link.
[4] = The Italian Duke of Spoleto is credited as the first to concieve of manned torpedoes. Major Elios Toschi and Major Teseo Tesei (Tesei was KIA at Malta in 1942 on a Decima combat mission) of the Italian Royal Navy later worked with the Italian goverment to develop the concept as a weapon of war.
[5] = This publication, with an article by Decima Commandant Junio Valerio Borghese about the "Occult Power of The Jew" has been re-published, in it's original format and in Italian, here.
[6] = OSS officer, and future CIA senior chief, John Angleton personally took "custody" of several former Decima officers, including Commandant Junio Valerio Borghese, to use as agents in America's Cold War against the USSR. The sentences of these Decima officers were never served.

References:
Wikipedia, The Decima Flotilla
Italy at War, Decima MAS

Raise the Hunley!

2009-08-04T02:22:00.000-07:00

The CSS H.L. Hunley is salvaged from the bottom of Charleston Harbor in 2001.

When the American Civil War erupted in 1861 it's first battle happened off the coast of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina at Fort Sumter. During the war, from 1861 to 1865, one of the major military goals of the Army of the Union, located in the northern half of the United States, was to blockade and capture the major Confederate seaports, like Charleston, located in the eastern and southern parts of the United States.

The Union used its blockade tactics to shell seaport cities with warships moored in the relative safety of the harbors. The ships inflicted massive damage to sea towns and successfully stopped shipments of British arms from coming into the Confederate territories as well as the shipments of cotton, tobacco and wheat that were used as payment for these munitions. This also isolated large troop movements of the Southern armies.

In the important seaport city of Charleston, the Confederacy was desperate to break the Union blockade that had begun in 1863. Destruction to the city was devastating. The Confederate military leadership was willing to try anything to attack the blockade including using a secret weapon - an early version of an armored submarine.

Ruined buildings in Charleston, South Carolina photographed in April of 1865.

February 17th, 1864 the Confederate States Ship the CSS H.L. Hunley, became the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in modern warfare. The confederate boat did so against the Union blockade in Charleston Harbor by targeting the USS Housatonic. The Hunley successfully deployed and secretly approached under cover of darkness. As it was sighted by the Housatonic, right off it's bow, the Hunley used it's unique electrically triggered "spar torpedo".

The Union ship Housatonic burned quickly at sea and sank - claiming the lives of five of it's sailors. Shortly after signaling the Charleston shoreline of it's victory the Hunley submerged. The sub sank to the bottom Charleston harbor killing it’s entire eight man crew and disappearing from history for 137 years.

Schematics showing the interior of the Confederate submarine the CSS HL Huntley.

This single combat mission came at a great cost of brave men and hard years in practical development. The Hunley itself was essentially a 40-foot long cast iron coffin. It carried no stored other oxygen than its hand pumped ballasts it used to rise or dive. This was in contrast with Union boats that were being developed using compressed air. The Hunley was powered by a crew of eight men who hand-cranked a long shaft attached to a small screw at the end of the iron coffin that propelled this early submarine.

The prototype boat sunk a total of three times killing 28 of its crewmen during its commission. This was due to both crew negligence and severe design flaws. It was reported by a survivor of the Hunley's first crew that the commander, Lt. John Payne, had accidentally stepped on a diving lever when the hatches were open causing the compartments to flood and killing four men. Payne survived this accident but no mention of a court martial remains today.

The second crew was made up of eight more men, culled form the original test crews in Mobile, plus the boat’s inventor Horace Hunley. The entire second crew died when the Hunley sank in a battle drill on October of 1863.

In 1864, after being salvaged by Confederate divers, the Hunley set out on it's first combat mission in Charleston. Almost immediately after sinking the Housatonic, the third crew of the Hunley, this time captained by the legendary Lt. George Dixon, signaled to shore news of the victory and then, perhaps due to collateral damage done by the spar torpedo, sank to the bottom of Charleston Harbor where it remained lost in the murk and mire for over one hundred years.

After being sieged by Union forces for four years, and with no way to break the blockade, the Confederate city of Charleston was surrendered on February 18^th, 1865.

In the 1970's two groups of adventurous historians suspected they located the wreck a mile offshore of the Charleston coast. They offically charted it's position as just a few dozen feet from the ship it had historically sunk - the Housatonic. In August of 2000, a group of scientists and researchers began the colossal effort of raising the iron coffin from the murky harbor where it had rested since the worst of the American Civil War.

The effort, documented by National Geographic, located and ingeniously excavated the H.L. Hunley along with the watery remains of it’s final crew. The Hunley was moved to a laboratory at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center.

The remains of the third and final crew made up of Lt. George Dixon, Frank Collins, Joseph F. Ridgaway, James A. Wicks, Arnold Becker, Corporal J. F. Carlsen, C. Lumpkin, and Miller, whose first name is still uncertain, were found at their stations. This suggested that they died, perhaps as a result of a sudden ordnance misfire, and not trying to escape from the boat. They were interred with full military honors on January 21^st 2004 in Magnolia Cemetery.

References:
New World Encyclopedia, History of Submarines
Wikipedia, The Historic Mission
Hunley.org, The Recovery of the H.L. Hunley
Shipwrecks.com, Dr. E. Lee Spence's discovery of the H.L. Hunley

The Black List

2009-06-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

Legendary actors Humphrey Bogart and John Huston prepare their testimony for the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

HUAC and the Hollywood Witchhunt
Re-printed from an except by Jeanine Basinger, American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Film-making, courtesy of Modern Times

The content of Hollywood films has always been regulated in one form or another, however between 1947 and 1954 the House Un–American Activities Committee (HUAC) became indirectly involved in this kind of regulation. After the Second World War the America’s alliance with the Soviet Union ended, the Cold War began, and the “Red Scare” moved into full force. The HUAC members considered it their duty to purge the country of any Communist influences. While numerous industries were investigated by HUAC, because of Hollywoods high profile, it became the best known target of this infamous committee.

In 1947, the committee’s purpose was threefold. First, it intended to prove that the Screen Writer’s guild had Communist members with an insurrectionist agenda. Second, it hoped to show that these writers were able to insert subversive propaganda into Hollywood films. Third, J. Parnell Thomas, head of the committee, argued that President Roosevelt had encouraged pro–Soviet films during the war. Although none of these claims were ever substantiated, the committee’s tactics worked to force many talented and creative people to leave Hollywood.

HUAC was a political witchhunt that fired solely within the paranoid imagination of a few members of post-war American government. The committee members were looking for a new enemy for America to focus it's rage upon. Although there were Soviet spys active in America, they were not the black-listed writers and actors, including Dalton Trumbull, that faced Washington's irrational firestorm.

Trumbull, who spent a year in federal prison on Contempt charges for refusing to take the witch hunt seriously, previouslly wrote Hollywood blockbuster 30 Seconds Over Toyko (1943) and underground classic Gun Crazy (1949). After being blacklisted, Trumbull continued to write screenplays under a vareity of pseudonyms and fronts. As "Robert Rich" he won an Oscar for writing The Brave One (1956) and didn't officially recieve it for 10 more years. His screenplay for the classic film Spartacus (1960) was credited to "Sam Jackson". Spartacus won four of the six Academy Awards it was nominated for in 1961. This one Trumbull eventually accepted.

Over three decades after HUAC, Trumbull adapted his 1939 book "Johnny Get Your Gun" into film in 1971 starring Jason Robards. He, and men like him, were forced into decades of obscurity for no reason other than the evil ambition of unscrupulous politicians. The careers of Ronald Reagan, who became a six time Screen Actors Guild President with crooked political ambition, and a young Richard Nixon were made by assisting the notorious Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) in ruining the lives of many of Hollywood's of best and brightest.

References:
Wikipedia, HUAC
Wikipedia, Dalton Trumbo
PBS.org, American Masters: Trumbo
Dan Moldea, The Corruption of Dutch Reagan

2009-05-12T00:54:00.000-07:00

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2009-02-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Doomed Patrol

2009-02-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

A rendering of the aftermath of the devastating U-boat attack.

September, 22^nd 1914
The Royal Naval Secretary of the Admiralty communicated the following statement:

"HM Ships Aboukir (Captain John E Drummond), Hogue (Captain Wilmot S Nicholson) and Cressy (Captain Robert W Johnson) have been sunk by submarines in the North Sea. The Aboukir was torpedoed, and whilst the Hogue and the Cressy had closed and were standing by to save the crew, they were also torpedoed.

A considerable number were saved by HMS Lowestoft (Captain Theobald W B Kennedy), and by a division of destroyers, trawlers and boats. Lists of casualties will be published as soon as they are known..."

The HMS Cressy, one of three armored cruisers sunk by German submarine U9.

By the time the deadly attack became a matter of public knowledge, neither the Admiralty nor the British public knew that the carnage at sea was the work of a single submarine. Thousands of sailors were killed as three great ships of the Royal Navy, on a routine patrol, were sank in the English Channel.

At the end of WWI, it was learned that the horrific attack was conducted by a single German submarine, U-Boat U-9. U-9 sunk a total of three ships that day manned by nearly 3,000 English sailors. During it’s commission in The Great War, the sub sunk a total of 14 ships and 3 warships until it was finally surrendered and scuttled in 1918. Part of it's success was due to the fact that U-9 was the first submarine to reload its torpedoes while submerged and manned by one of the most disciplined naval crews in all of naval combat history.

German sub U-9 leaving dock to patrol for Allied ships.

In U-9's brief encounter with the Cressy, Aboukir and Hogue, lasting less than one hour in duration, it single-handedly cost the Royal Navy the lives of 1600 men and 60 officers - most of whom where cadets and raw recruits assigned to protect the eastern coast of England in this doomed patrol.

References:
Wikipedia, WWI Naval War
World War One, WWI Naval Combat
Uboat.net, U-9 on Uboats.net

2009-02-16T07:55:00.000-08:00

2009-02-09T12:05:00.000-08:00

2009-02-05T13:25:00.001-08:00

The End of Civilization: James Nachtwey

2009-02-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

Bosnia, 1993 - Ethnic cleansing in Mostar. Croat fires on his Moslem neighbors.

Chechnya, 1996 - Chechen rebel fighting against the Russian army.

Bosnia, 1993 - Mourning a soldier killed and buried in a football field.

James Nachtwey is a veteran photojournalist who has photographed the human cost of war in Africa, former Yugoslavia, Israel, and Chechnya. Nachtwey is a contemporary photographer who is very actively working today that consistently brings to mind the stark reality of Lewis Hine and Dorthea Lange with every powerfully evocative frame.

He works and lives among the war, famine, misery and death he documents. It gets so deep inside of him that it becomes an integral part of his lives. This type of dedication means men like Nacjtwey carry a heavy responsibility to tell the stories of those who lived and died better.

2009-01-26T13:15:00.000-08:00

2009-01-09T12:03:00.001-08:00

Balance Of Powers

2009-01-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

From a photo Series by Narcis Virgiliu

2008-12-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

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2008-11-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

Saint Matthew and the Angel

2008-11-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

Caravaggio's Saint Matthew and the Angel painted for the Contarelli Chapel in 1602.

Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571–1610) was the most intense and gifted painter of the very late Italian Renaissance known as the Baroque period. Often conflicted, he never ran from the brutally religious nature of his paintings. Caravaggio was confined, rewarded, exiled, and even become a Knight and official painter of the Order of Malta - a small Mediterranean island south of Sicily.

Thematically, his radical approach combined contemporary culture of 17^th century Italy with the heroes, prophets and saints of the Bible. In his paintings, deep spiritual truths were clearly visible around man - whether he is looking for them or not. To many, this was sacrilege.

Although he was never without popular and critical acclaim (or patronage) his entire lifetime - his radical themes and personality caused Caravaggio decades of hardship.In 1610, Caravaggio, armed with his last three paintings, died on his way to a Papal pardon for murder (during duels), of a "fever" at the age of 38.

Today, after being long forgotten, he is best remembered for three paintings: Judith Beheading Holonofernes , The Incredulity of Thomas (Doubting Thomas) and The Calling of St. Matthew and the fact he was the mentor of of one of the very few women painters recognized from the Baroque era, the amazing Artemisia Gentileschi.

Reference:
The Official: Caravaggio.com
Wikipedia, Caravaggio

2008-11-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

2008-11-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

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2008-10-16T06:30:00.000-07:00

The Gold Rush, Alaskan Yukon, 1899

2008-10-15T10:45:00.001-07:00

The 83 oz. nugget, pictured directly above, is worth $69,471 American today.

Read More on the Yukon and Klondike areas of Alaska:
The Klondike Goldrush at Wikipedia
Rare Photos at the University of Washington Libraries

Showtime

2008-10-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Deep Sleep Operatives

2008-10-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

2008-09-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

From the BBC Image Library: "Blind listener, Mr. Oransby, listening to his Crystal Radio Set with headphones, December 1929"

Five Points

2008-09-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

Unusual Suspects

2008-09-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

Nunsploitation: 5 Reasons to Chortle

2008-09-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

Tricky Dick vs. Jack's Burning Integrity

2008-09-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

Click the image above for a clip from the famous debate 1960 Presidential debate. See Nixon's remarks at 09:20 (on clip 2) for an unguarded insight into the thought process behind Watergate scandal which occured 12 years later in 1972.

References
Rolling Stone, "He Was A Crook" Hunter Thompson (Rolling Stone, July 1994)

"To draw you must close your eyes and sing."

2008-09-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

Bad Luck Chuck

2008-09-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

Private Priestess

2008-09-08T10:15:00.001-07:00

The beautiful author and explorer Jane Dollinger.

Ken Krippene and Jane Dolinger traveled the world including Ecuador and Central America together artifact hunting for 20 years, until his death in 1980. Krippene was a former soldier, lawyer, Hollywood screenwriter, and an explorer. He was a fascinating writer whose credits included books like Life Along the Amazon (Nelson Doubleday) Jan 1, 1957, and periodical credits in Argosy and Sir! magazine with his stories "I Took Part In The Secret Passion Rites Of Voodoo Island", "The Adventures of a Sex Photographer in Swinging London by Rex Stewart, as told to Ken Krippene" and "I Keel Gorgeous George". Jane wrote several books including Inca Gold (1955) and The Jungle is a Woman (1967).

A good friend to Ken and Jane, Gail Howard, maintains a travelogue of pictures from the mid-1960's when they traveled in South America together. There's also word that a new book is in production about Jane's life from Miami to Equador to be released in 2010.

References:
Wikipedia, Ken Krippene
Gail Howard.com, Equador Travel Adventures
Jane Dolinger.org

I am Jack's Cochlear Implant

2008-09-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

"... to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there bein' perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waiting for us to stop all our frettin' and foolin'." - Jack Kerouac from Dharma Bums (1958)

2008-08-20T14:15:00.000-07:00