shade’s peshar

Before commenting, let me contextualize for those who don’t know: Freezer Burn (who’s obviously easily entertained) is referring to last issue’s Secret Word and its application on some contemporary musicians just reeking of it.  

Indeed, it seems that work is already in progress on a Brain Police-sponsored BilgeFest ’02, (aka Bilgeapalooza) featuring the “best” in bilge bands, such as Backstreet Bilge, Boys II Bilge, Bachman Turner OverBilge, Bilgy Manilow, Limp Bilgekit, N.W.B. (Niggas With Bilge), Linkin Bilge, Mötley Bïlge, , Salt ’n Bilge,  Snoop Bilge, Garth Bilge, SilverBilge, The Mighty Bilge Tones, EverBilge, Depeche Bilge, Bilge Cherry, Bilge ’n Roses, Cypress Bilge, Love and Bilge (aka Bilge Division minus one Bilge), Bilgerella, ChumbawumBilge, The BilGees, New Kids on the Bilge, Dixie Bilge, Wu-Tang Bilge, Nine Inch Bilge, Bilge Collins, and Jane’s Addiction (to Bilge). 

Obviously, if James Hetfield ever gets out of rehab, MetalliBilge will be added to the bilge-err, bill.

potential errata

Last issue mention was made of a Clear Channel Communication’s self-censorship that  bans songs because of potential 9/11-related content.

I have since heard that this may well be a myth.  This is one of those “friend of a friend” anecdotes, but someone I know locally says he mentioned this to a friend of his who was a dj at a Clear Channel country station here in Phoenix.  The dj replied bullshit: they could play anything they wanted, and the story was allegedly started by one of Clear Channel’s competitors in an effort to discredit them.

That does make sense; after all, the list is just short of absurd.  I can see Megadeth’s “Holy Wars” and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” potentially causing problems among sensitive listeners still freaked out over the whole 9/11 thing, but Steve Miller’s “Jet Airliner” or Elvis’s “Devil in Disguise” is pushing it, and the Beatle’s “Obla Di Obla Da” and Pink Floyd’s “Mother” is just plain dumb.

Alternately, this site suggests the list itself is real, but merely a suggestion to djs and programming directors of things they might want to consider not playing, rather than a flat-out ban.  While equally plausible, that smacks me more as spin control misinformation from Clear Channel corporate types embarrassed by the whole thing.

I am still researching this matter.  However, I openly challenge the aforementioned dj: if you can truly play anything you want, let’s here some Zappa country tunes like “Lonesome Cowboy Burt” or “Harder than Yer Husband.”  Only then will I believe there isn’t a conspiracy...

OK Bomb Update

 

In mid-March, survivors and victim relatives of the Oklahoma City Bombing filed a class action suit against the nation of Iraq, alleging Iraqi masterminding behind the incident.

Per the suit, Ramzi Yousef, the terrorist convicted of the ’93 World Trade Center bombing, was an Iraqi Intelligence agent who recruited Terry Nichols into his anti-American cabal while both were in the Philippines.  The original idea was to blow up airplanes bound for America, but this fell through, and the “Plan B” of bombing the Murrah Federal Building was adopted.  The April 19 date was chosen as a smoke screen to make it appear Waco-sympathetic perpetrators pulled the caper, thus diverting attention away from the real Iraqi culprits.

Presumably the plaintiffs have some “proof”of this, so I’ll post details as they emerge.

Quote of the Moment

Context: saint and his main squeeze FireSkunk were recently discussing a sightseeing tour to New Mexico, and she asked him if there was anything he was interested in seeing.  Skipping the obvious like Roswell, he surprisingly suggested, “I wouldn’t mind seeing Los Alamos, where they tested the first Atomic Bomb.”

FireSkunk’s Reply:  

“Is it near anything?”

Commentary: yeah, they’re gonna put a super-top secret project that is detonating an atomic bomb in the middle of a large, populated area full of heavily trafficked tourist attractions...

meanwhile, in more important matters...

Your Tax Dollars at Work — Part 665

By 1943, it was obvious to pretty much everyone except Hitler himself how the War was going to turn out: Germany was inevitably headed for a supreme spanking.  It was merely a matter of time before the paddle landed on the Führer’s fanny.

One person who read the writing on the Reichstag wall and realized it wasn’t in Deutche was General Reinhard Gehlen.

Gehlen was a curious figure in his own right, even before we get to the primary focus of this ‘tax dollars at work’ nastiness.  As early as 1942, he realized that if Germany was to have any chance of winning the war, Hitler would need to be removed (so the real generals could run things right.)  He became compatriots of Claus von Stauffenburg and Henning von Tresckow, the two main perpetrators behind the failed 1944 briefcase bomb attempt on Adolph.  Gehlen was apparently involved in aspects of the tactical planning of the unsuccessful coup, but managed to conceal his ties after the fact and avoid detection. 

Or, perhaps, he was just too damned important to lose to the retribution executions that ensued.

You see, Gehlen was the head of Army Intelligence for the entire Eastern Front.  

In other words, he was in charge of all of Germany’s spies in Russia.

A quick context commentary about Germany’s spy network, the Abwehr, to put this in perspective.  The Abwehr was divided into two sections, Eastern and Western Intelligence.  The Western division was run by Admiral Canaris, a former First World War U-boat captain.  As a submariner Canaris was apparently half decent, but as a master spy controller, he was far below par.  Literally all (yes, 100%!) of the spies Canaris had working in England and America were either discovered and executed, or were actually double agents secretly working for the Allies.  Fortunately for Der Fürher, Canaris’s Eastern Front counterpart was much more effective.

By most accounts, Gehlen had about 350 spies throughout the Russia—a pretty impressive number by any standard, but especially commendable given Stalin’s penchant for paranoia and purging.  General Gehlen’s success in the Soviet Union was largely due to his secret alliance with General Andrei Vlassov, a Red Army officer who clandestinely belonged to a pro-Czarist underground that understandably despised Stalin and his Communist cronies.  Vlassov was highly placed in Soviet Intelligence, and gladly cooperated with Gehlen in hopes that a successful German invasion would topple the Commies and restore his faction to power.  Even when things went badly after Stalingrad, Vlassov and his network continued to assist Gehlen’s Abwehr apparatus.

And as we shall see, this assistance extended well beyond World War Two.

Now, as pointed out, even as early as 1943, most people could see the Allied tide was going to overflow the Fatherland, and Gehlen was one of those who predicted the inevitable pattern.  However, Gehlen could see even farther, correctly guessing that the next big brouhaha would be between the Americans and the Soviets.   

So, in the fall of 1944—not coincidentally just after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life—he microfilmed all his spy documents concerning Soviet intelligence and buried them—53 steel drums worth—in the Swiss Alps for safekeeping.  Think of it as an insurance policy Ace of Spades in the hole.

When the inevitable surrender came, Gehlen made sure to be near the American front lines rather than the Russian.  By all accounts, on May 25^th, 1945 he simply walked up, turned himself in specifically to the American Counter-Intelligence Corps, and essentially said, “Boy, have I got a deal for you...”  

His offer: he would hand over his still-intact Soviet spy network in exchange for immunity from war crimes tribunals.  Provided, of course, that he could still personally run his spy ring.

Not surprisingly, the offer was immediately and enthusiastically accepted.

Coincidentally—or not—the American that Gehlen turned himself over to and who brokered this sweet deal was an OSS officer named Allan Dulles, who would within ten years become head of the CIA and, despite hating JFK’s guts, also later serve on the Warren Commission.

Literally within a week, Gehlen was out of his Nazi general’s uniform and in an American General’s uniform, all under the aegis of the infamous Project Paperclip.  Gehlen also negotiated the release from internment camps literally hundreds of Army and SS officers who had been all part of his crew, so they could continue to work for him.

Now in case it’s not obvious, it needs be pointed out that (aside from moral and ethical dilemmas) this sort of thing was extremely illegal.  Despite his semi-active involvement in the failed Hitler hit, Gehlen had been an active Nazi who genuinely bought the Party line.  By most accounts, Gehlen loved Nazi ideology; he just hated Hitler for phuqing things up.  There is almost no question that Gehlen should have been on trial at Nuremberg, yet instead he had a cozy compound in the Spessart Mountains of central Germany from which to run his spy ring.  His staff actually grew to almost 3,000 people, and he had to be relocated to a 25-acre complex in Pullach, just south of Munich, where they operated under the guise of the innocent-sounding “South German Industrial Development Organization.”  Gehlen also set up what was essentially a spy training camp at near-by , run by former a SS General named Burkhardt.

Did I mention that all of this was funded with U.S. tax dollars?   Oh, of course I did: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.  Silly me.

Anyway, almost immediately the Gehlenapparat (as they became known) began turning in reports to their new American superiors from agents in the field.  Never mind that these agents were frequently former German military officers, many of whom also had active Nazi backgrounds.  As Gehlen had predicted, a tense standoff between East and West was quickly developing, and the Americans needed as much information about the Soviets as they could get, without regard for the sources.  As Dulles himself commented, “He’s on our side, and that’s all that matters.”

And so for almost ten years, the Gehlenapparat was virtually the CIA’s only source of spies inside Russia.  That is no exaggeration, either.

As historian Carl Oglesby noted about the Gehlenapparat, since the CIA’s image of the Soviet Union largely came through information from die-hard Czarists by way of a Nazi General, it may not have been the most accurate portrayal of the “real” situation in the Russia...

Oglesby’s observation, made in the late ’80s, was closer to the truth than he knew.  With the fall of Communism and the opening of the Russian archives in the early ’90s, historians studying the situation learned something startling: almost everything Gehlen had reported to his Allied overlords was pure, unabashed bullshit.  This is especially true of his portrayal of Soviet military strengths and intentions during the early days of the Cold War.

Although it is generally accepted today that by the mid ’50s the Gehlenapparat had been widely infiltrated by the KGB, there is still great debate over how much of the inaccuracies of Gehlen’s (mis)information was KGB counterintelligence, and how much was Gehlen’s own deliberate creation.  After all, without the Cold War, he’d be out of a job and in a prison.

In 1968, Reinhard Gehlen “retired” from spy work and withdrew to a chalet in Bavaria.

That chalet was a gift from Allen Dulles.

meanwhile, just when you thought it was safe to go back to bashing the Bible...

This is for those who object to a perception that saint does nothing but call Bullshit on Scripture.

Not true!  saint calls Bullshit on Everything.

So here, in the spirit of “equal time airplay” we passionately present...

Debunking an anti-Christian Deconstruction

Recently, Rev. 451 passed along an email article called “Where Were You Before The Tree of Life?”, posted in part from http://4truthseekers.com/treeoflife.  According to the website, ‘Tree of Life’ is the latest book by author Peter Farley.

Yeah, I’ve never heard of him either.

The website itself describes the book thus:

The article/chapter excerpt sent by the Rev was apparently an excerpt from said book, and had to do with Christianity as expressed in the Bible and thus subsequently interpreted.  And as you can probably guess at this point, it was rather harsh towards orthodoxy.  

Somewhat surprisingly, given the above-professed Von Daniken fixation, it did not alternately offer any of the various ‘Jesus was an alien’ hypothesis floating around.  At least, not in the excerpt sent in by the Rev. 

Instead, it was a seemingly straight-forward deconstruction of Orthodox interpretation with the mindset that it was intentionally done for control of the masses.  

Hey, I’ve been saying that all along...

The Good Rev’s tag for his email was “a little spice for the conspiracy blender.”

The piece was interesting, though hardly new information to saint or myself, who have been studying such things long enough to have seen the majority of such “Biblical debunkings.”  Still, it was an interesting article for a layman’s perspective that did make some good points, especially of things that are outside the armchair academic’s realm of ‘common knowledge.’  We freely admit that much of it was right on the mark.

Unfortunately, it also contained a number of inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and flat-out bullshit — enough that saint and I felt it was worth writing a rebuttal—often line by line—to point out some obvious problems or expand upon things that were only hinted at.  

Perhaps saint said it best in his reply to the Reverend: 

The article is presented below, as received via the email [complete with the mystery  marks] and saint’s commentary on it inserted interlinear in purple.  This was originally the reply to Rev. 451, but saint and I agreed that it had enough educational value that it was worth reprinting in the upcoming Update.

The ‘Stigmata’ comment has to do with a series of questions passed on by The Ignition Missionary regarding the film, mostly having to do with the film’s portrayal of how the Catholic Church translated the Dead Sea Scrolls.  These parts of the film are demonstratably disprovable, though the ‘truth’ of how the Church handled the ’Scrolls is not very flattering, either.  Fodder for another Update, perhaps, or .  A portion of the dialogue between myself and I.M. on the film and the inaccurate portrayal of Crucifixion in art did make it into last issue’s “Ask Evil Matt”.

“The Passover Plot” was written by Hugh Schonfield in 1965; it is still in print and probably worth checking out from a library.  I haven’t read it in 10 years, so I largely just have impressions at this point, though I remember the central ‘thesis’ very well: Jesus deliberately faked the Resurrection using tools then readily available.

As pointed out above, there were instances (albeit rare) of the Sanhedrin doing mercy killings to crucified victims with a sponge dipped in belladonna.  However, too little of it would just give the appearance of death, and there were a couple of times where people “came back to life” from underdoses.  Schonfield suggests Jesus deliberately did this with the help of a couple of his apostles, and since he had over a full day between Holy Friday (when he was crucified) and Easter Sunday (when the empty tomb was discovered) this is ample time for a recovery.

The book was a best seller in its day, and was understandably hated, ridiculed, and even feared by Christians, as it presents a relatively reasonable alternative to what dogma wants us to believe.  Surprisingly, the book took equal heat from Jews, as it gives a detailed account of Judaism at the time and what the Jews were expecting in a messiah, and the book essentially argues Jesus was the Messiah.

When I read the book 10 years ago, I didn’t know as much about the subject as I do now; I should probably reread it and see what I think. The book is self-admittedly speculation, but it is interesting speculation indeed!  Schonfield apparently has a sequel out, about Pentecost.  Maybe I’ll check ’em both out and give a more comprehensive commentary/criticism.  When I have time.

Interesting, related trivia, by the way: in the “Twin Branches” chapter above, mention was made of “the Essene Code”.   As I said, this code had not been deciphered until the ’60s or so.  Hugh Schonfield, author of ‘The Passover Plot’ is the one who cracked the code.  In doing so, he found that the Essene Code was more widespread than commonly thought, and had a much longer use than previously believed.  A good example of this has to do with the Knights Templar.  According to Catholic documents on the “heresy” of the Templars, they worshiped an unknown entity they called “Baphomet.”  Schonfield put “Baphomet” into the Essene Code and found it translated perfectly into “Sophia”, the Greek word for (and personification of) “Wisdom.”

and speaking of “wisdom”...

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