How Iranians Vote

Christopher Bollyn — via Rebel News May 14, 2013

Iranian elections are transparent and democratice. Here two women display the ink on their fingers and the stamp on their identity cards showing they have voted. Click to enlarge

The Islamic Republic of Iran will have a presidential election on June 14, 2013. As an observer of elections in different countries I find that Iranian election procedures are very similar to those of the most democratic elections held in European nations, such as France. Iranians vote on paper ballots that are counted openly in each polling place in the presence of observers. The tally from each polling station is then verified openly and published by the government after the election. These are the most fundamental and essential elements of a transparent and democratic election, and these are exactly the elements that are sadly missing from elections in the United States.

It may come as a surprise but Iranian elections are much more transparent than elections in the United States. The voting process and the counting of the votes in Iran are transparent processes, while most votes in the United States are cast and counted on electronic voting systems run by private companies. The use of computer voting systems in the United States has actually allowed our elections to be stolen because the citizenry has lost its oversight of the crucial vote-counting process entirely. Today, there is virtually no open counting of the votes in polling stations in the United States because nearly all voting “data” is processed in computerized systems – not counted by citizens.

Continues at the SOURCE…:

Good-bye Dubai? Bombing Iran’s Nuclear Facilities would leave the Entire Gulf States Region virtually Uninhabitable

 

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Every Spring and Summer, during a period of low pressure over the Persian Gulf, powerful winds known as the “shamals and sharqi,” sweep down from the north and north east into Saudi Arabia, whipping up ever more grains of sand as they head south and south west across the Arabian Desert. Frequently, these sandstorms become gargantuan in size – hundreds of meters high and kilometers wide and in length of dense roiling particulate, choking the lungs of those exposed, blocking out the sun completely and, by the time they are over, burying whole towns, sometimes even large cities like Riyadh, in a meter deep or more of sand.

 

 

 

Sandstorm hitting Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2012

The wind speeds range from 30 to 300 kilometers per hour, and they generally take a semi-circular route, heading back out to the southern gulf and the remaining Gulf States ????

 

 

Indeed.

On an annual basis all of the Gulf States combined – UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia even Israel inclusive, suffer through literally hundreds of such sand and dust storms. And most often the winds driving those sandstorms originate from the north and north east (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and sometimes even Turkey).

 

NASA satellite image of typical shamal wind directions

Below is a map showing the location of Iran’s nuclear facilities and uranium mines. Now look again at the previous NASA satellite image and note the primary shamal wind direction.

Think “Fukushima x 10”: Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would leave the entire Gulf State region virtually uninhabitable.

Fukushima is, without question, the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date. In fact, many scientists believe, and with good reason, that the Fukushima incident, which is far from over, is the world’s worst environmental catastrophe.

“While the long-term repercussions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are yet to be fully assessed, they are far more serious than those pertaining to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, which resulted in almost one million deaths New Book Concludes – Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer” Global Research, September 10, 2010. For a full account of Fukushima, see “Global Research Online Interactive Reader Series, Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War, The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation (Michel Chossudovsky, editor).

Now imagine several large nuclear reactors (Iran’s Bushehr reactor output, for example, is 1000 megawatts, compared to Fukushima Daiichi’s largest reactor which had an output of 784 megawatts), along with several uranium enrichment plants, and certainly military storage sites and quite likely even uranium mines, all bombed to dust within a matter of days. Moreover, unlike the Fukushima Daiichi reactors which suffered only partial meltdowns with much of the fuel rods and spent fuel storages remaining mostly intact, “all” of Iran’s nuclear fuel would be exploded into the atmosphere. And let us not forget that the US-Israeli military ordinances employed to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities would certainly be tipped with depleted uranium, and very likely would include some mini-nukes.

Indeed, in regards nuclear disasters and environmental catastrophes, Fukushima would absolutely pale in comparison to that caused by the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. The nuclear fallout from such an event would be extreme, to put it mildly. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians would likely die within the first year of such a strike, while millions more would die within a decade or two of some form of radiation-induced cancer. And since a significant portion of that nuclear fallout would end up either immediately, or over the course of the next weeks and months in the Arabian Desert, where the winds, year after year, would gather it up along with the particles of sand and dust into gigantic roiling irradiated storms (remember, “hundreds” of such sand and dust storms annually), not a person living anywhere in the Gulf State region would be safe from exposure. The Persian Gulf, too, would soon be so irradiated and toxic and lifeless that it might as well be renamed the New Dead Sea.

Some statistics worth recalling: The half-life of cesium-137 is just over 31 years, while that of strontium-90 is approximately 29 years. Plutonium-239, the most dangerous of the above-mentioned radioactive substances, has a half-life of 24,110 years. And uranium, which is the primary target and which will make up the largest percentage of the fallout, has a half-life ranging between 700 million to nearly 4.5 billion years, depending on the type of uranium used—U-235 or U-238. It’s also worth noting that it takes an estimated 20 x the half-life years listed for the radiation from such contamination to dissipate entirely.

Of course, a lot of that radiation would also enter the jet stream, which would then carry it around the globe, depositing it as nuclear fallout everywhere. No nation, no body of water, would be spared. It takes but “one” inhaled or ingested “hot” particle to produce a life-threatening cancer.

Calling for, even so much as contemplating, such a genocidal event is madness; actually carrying it out would be insanity beyond description.

We must conclude, therefore, that the US-NATO-Israeli alliance is bluffing. Shortly before each and every scheduled P5+1 negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program, the corporate/government controlled mainstream media in the West ratchets up the threats, with Israel insisting that they will soon bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if their nuclear program isn’t shut down. We’ve been hearing these same threats for more than a decade now. The very fact that the other Gulf States in the region are in support of the US-NATO-Israeli alliance also suggests that such threats are all smoke-and-mirrors, attempts to scare Iran into accepting whatever demands US-NATO and Israel want.

Surely, the Gulf State monarchs especially are aware enough to realize that, even if Iran is planning to develop a nuclear weapon (for which no evidence whatsoever exists), a nuclear-armed Iran would be far less of a danger to them than a bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, which would positively guarantee their demise. Even Israel, which is only 1100 kilometers away from Iran, and also experiences regular severe sand and dust storms, would likely suffer dire consequences as a result of the radiation fallout from such an attack.

Has such absolute insanity infected the minds of the Western powers to such a degree that they actually would attack Iran, and in so doing destroy the entire Gulf State region, further irradiate the entire planet and themselves, and quite possibly set off World War III? Or is it all just smoke-and-mirrors, scare tactics and rhetoric, and saner minds will in fact prevail?

Let us all hope and pray for the latter.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/good-bye-dubai-bombing-irans-nuclear-facilities-would-leave-the-entire-gulf-states-region-virtually-uninhabitable/5334737

 

The Elite Plan for a New World Social Order ( An Glipse Of Understanding ).

 

By RICHARD K MOORE

—

When the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, in the late 1700s, there was lots of money to be made by investing in factories and mills, by opening up new markets, and by gaining control of sources of raw materials. The folks who had the most money to invest, however, were not so much in Britain but more in Holland. Holland had been the leading Western power in the 1600s, and its bankers were the leading capitalists. In pursuit of profit, Dutch capital flowed to the British stock market, and thus the Dutch funded the rise of Britain, who subsequently eclipsed Holland both economically and geopolitically.

In this way British industrialism came to be dominated by wealthy investors, and capitalism became the dominant economic system. This led to a major social transformation. Britain had been essentially an aristocratic society, dominated by landholding families. As capitalism became dominant economically, capitalists became dominant politically. Tax structures and import-export policies were gradually changed to favour investors over landowners.

It was no longer economically viable to simply maintain an estate in the countryside: one needed to develop it, turn it to more productive use. Victorian dramas are filled with stories of aristocratic families who fall on hard times, and are forced to sell off their properties. For dramatic purposes, this decline is typically attributed to a failure in some character, a weak eldest son perhaps. But in fact the decline of aristocracy was part of a larger social transformation brought on by the rise of capitalism.

The business of the capitalist is the management of capital, and this management is generally handled through the mediation of banks and brokerage houses. It should not be surprising that investment bankers came to occupy the top of the hierarchy of capitalist wealth and power. And in fact, there are a handful of banking families, including the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, who have come to dominate economic and political affairs in the Western world.

Unlike aristocrats, capitalists are not tied to a place, or to the maintenance of a place. Capital is disloyal and mobile – it flows to where the most growth can be found, as it flowed from Holland to Britain, then from Britain to the USA, and most recently from everywhere to China. Just as a copper mine might be exploited and then abandoned, so under capitalism a whole nation can be exploited and then abandoned, as we see in the rusting industrial areas of America and Britain.

This detachment from place leads to a different kind of geopolitics under capitalism, as compared to aristocracy. A king goes to war when he sees an advantage to his nation in doing so. Historians can ‘explain’ the wars of pre-capitalist days, in terms of the aggrandisement of monarchs and nations.

A capitalist stirs up a war in order to make profits, and in fact our elite banking families have financed both sides of most military conflicts since at least World War 1. Hence historians have a hard time ‘explaining’ World War 1 in terms of national motivations and objectives.

In pre-capitalist days warfare was like chess, each side trying to win. Under capitalism warfare is more like a casino, where the players battle it out as long as they can get credit for more chips, and the real winner always turns out to be the house – the bankers who finance the war and decide who will be the last man standing. Not only are wars the most profitable of all capitalist ventures, but by choosing the winners, and managing the reconstruction, the elite banking families are able, over time, to tune the geopolitical configuration to suit their own interests.

Nations and populations are but pawns in their games. Millions die in wars, infrastructures are destroyed, and while the world mourns, the bankers are counting their winnings and making plans for their postwar reconstruction investments.

From their position of power, as the financiers of governments, the banking elite have over time perfected their methods of control. Staying always behind the scenes, they pull the strings controlling the media, the political parties, the intelligence agencies, the stock markets, and the offices of government. And perhaps their greatest lever of power is their control over currencies. By means of their central-bank scam, they engineer boom and bust cycles, and they print money from nothing and then loan it at interest to governments. The power of the elite banking gang (the ‘banksters’) is both absolute and subtle…

Some of the biggest men in the United States are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere, so organised, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
– President Woodrow Wilson

The End of Growth – Banksters vs. Capitalism

It was always inevitable, on a finite planet, that there would be a limit to economic growth. Industrialisation has enabled us to rush headlong toward that limit over the past two centuries. Production has become ever more efficient, markets have become ever more global, and finally the paradigm of perpetual growth has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Indeed, that point was actually reached by about 1970. Since then capital has not so much sought growth through increased production, but rather by extracting greater returns from relatively flat production levels. Hence globalisation, which moved production to low-waged areas, providing greater profit margins. Hence privatisation, which transfers revenue streams to investors that formerly went to national treasuries. Hence derivative and currency markets, which create the electronic illusion of economic growth, without actually producing anything in the real world.

For almost forty years, the capitalist system was kept going by these various mechanisms, none of which were productive in any real sense. And then in September 2008 this house of cards collapsed, all of a sudden, bringing the global financial system to its knees.

If one studies the collapse of civilisations, one learns that failure-to-adapt is fatal. Is our civilisation falling into that trap? We had two centuries of real growth, where the growth-dynamic of capitalism was in harmony with the reality of industrial growth. Then we had four decades of artificial growth – capitalism being sustained by a house of cards. And now, after the house of cards has collapsed, every effort is apparently being made to bring about ‘a recovery’ – of growth! It is very easy to get the impression that our civilisation is in the process of collapse, based on the failure-to-adapt principle.

Such an impression would be partly right and partly wrong. In order to understand the real situation we need to make a clear distinction between the capitalist elite and capitalism itself. Capitalism is an economic system driven by growth; the capitalist elite are the folks who have managed to gain control of the Western world while capitalism has operated over the past two centuries. The capitalist system is past its sell-by date, the bankster elite are well aware of that fact – and they are adapting.

Capitalism is a vehicle that helped bring the banksters to absolute power, but they have no more loyalty to that system than they have to place, or to anything or anyone. As mentioned earlier, they think on a global scale, with nations and populations as pawns. They define what money is and they issue it, just like the banker in a game of Monopoly. They can also make up a new game with a new kind of money. They have long outgrown any need to rely on any particular economic system in order to maintain their power. Capitalism was handy in an era of rapid growth. For an era of non-growth, a different game is being prepared.

Thus, capitalism was not allowed to die a natural death. Instead it was brought down by a controlled demolition. First it was put on a life-support system, as mentioned above, with globalisation, privatisation, currency markets, etc. Then it was injected with a euthanasia death-drug, in the form of real-estate bubbles and toxic derivatives. Finally, the Bank of International Settlements in Basel – the central bank of central banks – pulled the plug on the life-support system: they declared the ‘mark-to-market rule’, which made all the risk-holding banks instantly insolvent, although it took a while for this to become apparent. Every step in this process was carefully planned and managed by the central-banking clique.

The End of Sovereignty – Restoring the Ancien Régime

Just as the financial collapse was carefully managed, so was the post-collapse scenario, with its suicidal bailout programs. National budgets were already stretched; they certainly did not have reserves available to salvage the insolvent banks. Thus the bailout commitments amounted to nothing more than the taking on of astronomical new debts by governments. In order to service the bailout commitments, the money would need to be borrowed from the same financial system that was being bailed out!

It’s not that the banks were too big to fail, rather the banksters were too powerful to fail: they made politicians an offer they couldn’t refuse. In the USA, Congress was told that without bailouts there would be martial law the next morning. In Ireland, the Ministers were told there would be financial chaos and rioting in the streets. In fact, as Iceland demonstrated, the sensible way to deal with the insolvent banks was with an orderly process of receivership.

The effect of the coerced bailouts was to transfer insolvency from the banks to the national treasuries. Banking debts were transformed into sovereign debts and budget deficits. Now, quite predictably, it is the nations that are seeking bailouts, and those bailouts come with conditions attached. Instead of the banks going into receivership, the nations are going into receivership.

In his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins explains how the third world has been coerced over the past several decades – through pressure and trickery of various kinds – into perpetual debt bondage. By design, the debts can never be repaid. Instead, the debts must be periodically refinanced, and each round of refinancing buries the nation deeper in debt – and compels the nation to submit to even more drastic IMF diktats. With the orchestrated financial collapse, and the ‘too big to fail’ scam, the banksters have now crossed the Rubicon: the hit-man agenda is now operating here in the first world.

In the EU, the first round of nations to go down will be the so-called PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. The fiction, that the PIGS can deal with the bailouts, is based on the assumption that the era of limitless growth will resume. As the banksters themselves know full well, that just isn’t going to happen. Eventually the PIGS will be forced to default, and then the rest of the EU will go down as well, all part of a controlled-demolition project.

When a nation succumbs to debt bondage, it ceases to be a sovereign nation, governed by some kind of internal political process. Instead it comes under the control of IMF diktats. As we have seen in the third world, and is happening now in Europe, these diktats are all about austerity and privatisation. Government functions are eliminated or privatised, and national assets are sold off. Little by little – again a controlled demolition – the nation state is dismantled. In the end, the primary functions left to government are police suppression of its own population, and the collection of taxes to be handed over to the banksters.

In fact, the dismantling of the nation state began long before the financial collapse of 2008. In the USA and Britain, it began in 1980, with Reagan and Thatcher. In Europe, it began in 1988, with the Maastricht Treaty. Globalisation accelerated the dismantling process, with the exporting of jobs and industry, privatisation programs, ‘free trade’ agreements, and the establishment of the regulation-busting World Trade Organisation (WTO). Events since 2008 have enabled the rapid acceleration of a process that was already well underway.

With the collapse, the bailouts, and the total failure to pursue any kind of effective recovery program, the signals are very clear: the system will be allowed to collapse totally, thus clearing the ground for a pre-architected ‘solution’. As the nation state is being dismantled, a new regime of global governance is being established to replace it. As we can see with the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and the other pieces of the embryonic world government, the new global system will make no pretensions about popular representation or democratic process. Rule will be by means of autocratic global bureaucracies, which will take their orders, directly or indirectly, from the bankster clique.

In his book, The Globalization of Poverty, Michel Chossudovsky explains how globalisation, and the actions of the IMF, created massive poverty throughout the third world over the past several decades. As we can see, with the dramatic emphasis on austerity following the collapse and bailouts, this poverty-creation project has now crossed the Rubicon. In this new world system there will be no prosperous middle class. Indeed, the new regime will very much resemble the old days of royalty and serfdom (the ancien régime). The banksters are the new royal family, with the whole world as their dominion. The technocrats who run the global bureaucracies, and the mandarins who pose as politicians in the residual nations, are the privileged upper class. The rest of us, the overwhelming majority, will find ourselves in the role of impoverished serfs – if we are lucky enough to be one of the survivors of the collapse process.

Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.
– Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderbergers meeting

The End of Liberty – The Global Police State

For the past four decades, since about 1970, we’ve been experiencing a regime-change process, from an old global system to a new global system. In the old system, first world nations were relatively democratic and prosperous, while the third world suffered under police state tyranny, mass poverty, and imperialism (exploitation by external powers). As discussed above, the transition process has been characterised by ‘crossing the Rubicon’ – the introduction of policies and practices into the first world, that were formerly limited, for the most part, to the third world.

Thus debt bondage to the IMF crossed the Rubicon, enabled by the collapse-bailout scam. In turn, mass poverty is crossing that same Rubicon, due to austerity measures imposed by the IMF, with its new bond-holding powers. Imperialism is also crossing the Rubicon, as the first world comes under the exploitative control of banksters and their bureaucracies, a power nexus that is external to all national identities. Unsurprisingly, police state tyranny is also crossing the Rubicon: the imposition of third world poverty levels requires third world methods of repression.

The anti-globalisation movement can be taken as the beginning of popular resistance to the process of regime change. Similarly, the police response to the Seattle anti-globalisation demonstrations, in November 1999, can be taken as the ‘crossing of the Rubicon’ for police state tyranny. The excessive and arbitrary violence of that response – including such things as holding people’s eyes open and spraying pepper into them – was unprecedented against non-violent demonstrators in a first world nation.

Ironically, that police response, particularly as it was so widely publicised, actually strengthened the anti-globalisation movement. As demonstrations grew in size and strength, the police response grew still more violent. A climax of sorts was reached in Genoa, in July 2001, when the levels of violence on both sides began to resemble almost a guerilla war.

In those days the anti-globalisation movement was dominating the international news pages, and opposition to globalisation was reaching massive proportions. The visible movement was only the tip of an anti-systemic iceberg. In a very real sense, general popular sentiment in the first world was beginning to take a radical turn. Movement leaders were now thinking in terms of an anti-capitalist movement. There was a political volatility in the air, a sense that, just maybe possibly, enlightened popular sentiment might succeed in shifting the course of events.

All of that changed on September 11, 2001, the day the towers came down. The anti-globalisation movement, along with globalisation itself, disappeared almost totally from public consciousness on that fateful day. Suddenly it was a whole new global scenario, a whole new media circus – with a new enemy, and a new kind of war, a war without end, a war against phantoms, a war against ‘terrorism’.

Earlier we saw how the orchestrated financial collapse of September 2008 enabled certain ongoing projects to be rapidly accelerated, such as the dismantlement of sovereignty, and the imposition of austerity. Similarly, the events of September 2001 enabled certain ongoing projects to be greatly accelerated, such as the abandonment of civil liberties and international law.

Before the towers had even come down, the ‘Patriot Act’ had already been drafted, proclaiming in no uncertain terms that the police state was here (in the USA) in force and here to stay – the Bill of Rights was null and void. Before long, similar ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation had been adopted throughout the first world. If any anti-systemic movement were to again raise its head in the first world (as it did, for example, recently in Greece), arbitrary police powers could be brought to bear – as much as might be necessary – to put the resistance down. No popular movement would be allowed to derail the banksters’ regime-change designs. The anti-globalisation movement had been shouting, ‘This is what real democracy looks like’. With 9/11, the banksters replied: ‘This is what real oppression looks like’.

The events of 9/11 led directly to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in general helped create a climate where invasions of sovereign nations could be readily justified, with one excuse or another. International law was to be as thoroughly abandoned as was civil liberties. Just as all restraint was removed from domestic police interventions, so was all restraint being removed from geopolitical military interventions. Nothing was to stand in the way of the banksters’ regime-change agenda.

The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society… dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values… this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour… Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the stepping-stones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society… In addition, it may be possible – and tempting – to exploit for strategic political purposes the fruits of research on the brain and on human behaviour.
– Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, 1970

The Post-Capitalist Era – New Myths for a New Culture

2012 might not be the exact year, but it’s difficult to see the endgame lasting much beyond that – and the masters of the universe love symbolism, as with 911 (both in Chile and in Manhattan), KLA 007, and others. 2012 is loaded with symbolism, eg. the Mayan Calendar, and the Internet is buzzing with various 2012-related prophecies, survival strategies, anticipated alien interventions, etc. And then there is the Hollywood film, 2012, which explicitly portrays the demise of most of humanity, and the pre-planned salvation of a select few. One never knows with Hollywood productions, what is escapist fantasy, and what is aimed at preparing the public mind symbolically for what is to come.

Whatever the exact date, all the threads will come together, geopolitically and domestically, and the world will change. It will be a new era, just as capitalism was a new era after aristocracy, and the Dark Ages followed the era of the Roman Empire. Each era has its own structure, its own economics, its own social forms, and its own mythology. These things must relate to one another coherently, and their nature follows from the fundamental power relationships and economic circumstances of the system.

Whenever there is a change of era, the previous era is always demonised in a new mythology. In the Garden of Eden story the serpent is demonised – a revered symbol in paganism, the predecessor to monotheism. With the rise of European nation states, the Catholic Church was demonised, and Protestantism introduced. When republics came along, the demonisation of monarchs was an important part of the process. In the post-2012 world, democracy and national sovereignty will be demonised. This will be very important, in getting people to accept arbitrary totalitarian rule…

In those terrible dark days, before the blessed unification of humanity, anarchy reigned in the world. One nation would attack another, no better than predators in the wild. Nations had no long-term coherence; voters would swing from one party to another, keeping governments always in transition and confusion. How did anyone ever think that masses of semi-educated people could govern themselves, and run a complex society? Democracy was an ill-conceived experiment that led only to corruption and chaotic governance. How lucky we are to be in this well-ordered world, where humanity has finally grown up, and those with the best expertise make the decisions for the whole globe.

Capitalism is about growth, progress, and change. Under capitalism the virtues of ambition, initiative, and competitiveness are praised, because those virtues serve the dynamics of capitalism. People are encouraged to always accumulate more, and never be satisfied with what they have. Under capitalism, people need to have a bit of liberty, and a bit of prosperity, so that the dynamics of capitalism can operate. Without some liberty, ambition cannot be pursued; without some prosperity, how could accumulation be pursued? In the post-capitalist world, the capitalist virtues will be demonised. This will be very important, in getting people to accept poverty and regimentation…

The pursuit of money is the root of all evil, and the capitalist system was inherently corrupt and wasteful. Anarchy reined in the marketplace, as corporations blindly pursued profit, with no concern for human needs or for the Earth. How much more sensible are our production brigades, producing only what is needed, and using only what is sustainable. Capitalism encouraged greed and consumption; people struggled to compete with one another, to ‘get ahead’ in the rat race. How much wiser we are now, to live within our ration quotas, and to accept our assigned duties, whatever they might be, in service to humanity.

In this regime change, ushering in the post-capitalist era, we’re seeing a conscious orchestration of economics, politics, geopolitics, and mythology – as one coordinated project. A whole new reality is being created, a whole new global culture. When it comes down to it, the ability to transform culture is the ultimate form of power. In only a single generation, a new culture becomes ‘the way things are’. And what, we might inquire, might stand in the way of any future manipulations of the cultural regime that the bankster royal family might contemplate?

Ever since public education was introduced, the state and the family have competed to control childhood conditioning – and it is in childhood that culture is transmitted to the next generation. In the micromanaged post-capitalist future, we’ll most likely see the ‘final solution’ of social control, which is for the state to monopolise child raising. This would eliminate from society the parent-child bond, and hence family-related bonds in general. No longer is there a concept of relatives, just fellow members of the hive. The family must be demonised. Already, here in Ireland, there are daily TV spots dramatising the plight of children who are being abused or neglected by their parents…

How scary were the old days, when unlicensed, untrained couples had total control over vulnerable children, behind closed doors, with whatever neuroses, addictions, or perversions the parents happened to possess. How did this vestige of patriarchal slavery, this safe-house den of child abuse, continue so long to exist, and not be recognised for what it was? How much better off we are now, with children being raised scientifically, by trained staff, where they are taught discipline and healthy values.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

RICHARD K MOORE, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, retired and moved to Ireland in 1994 to begin his ‘real work’ – trying to understand how the world works, and how we can make it better. Many years of researching and writing culminated in his widely acclaimed book Escaping the Matrix: How We the People Can Change the World (The Cyberjournal Project, 2005). His cyberjournal email list has been going since 1994 (cyberjournal.org). The book’s website is http://escapingthematrix.org, while his website http://quaylargo.com/rkm/ contains an extensive biography plus list of his articles. Richard can be contacted via email at rkm@quaylargo.com.

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Further Recommended Reading/s:

 

Understanding the Ruling Elite

 

 

How to instantly tell who’s evil vs. good: the philosophy of ‘control’ vs. ‘empowerment’.

(NaturalNews)

I get this question all the time from readers: How can we know whom to believe? Who’s really telling the truth? Which person should I support for political office at the next election?What if I told you there is an incredibly simple way to tell not only who’s good and who’s bad, but also how to tell who is pushing absolute evil onto our world?This method is remarkably accurate, and you can use it right now to assess almost anyone.It all starts with understanding the spectrum of control vs. empowerment.Imagine a 10-foot string stretched out on the ground. On the far left side of the string, there is a point we’ll call “Control.” On the far right side of the string, another point is called “Empowerment.”Let’s start with the “Empowerment” side first. This point represents people who primarily seek to empower you with knowledge, skills, wisdom and tools. “Empowerment” represents GOOD because it allows wisdom, skills and abundance to multiply from one person to the next. It recognizes the value of the individual and honors consciousness and free will.On the far left side of the string — which also represents the political left in America today — we have “Control.” This point represents people who primarily seek to control you: to extract money from you (rob you), to limit your freedoms, to demand your obedience and to use the threat of force to command your compliance. This philosophy dishonors the individual and downplays free will and individual liberty. “Control” is inherently evil because it seeks to diminish the power of a large number of people in order to accumulate power into the hands of a few people.(The context of this discussion is, of course, entirely in the realm of dealing with adults. Obviously children should be subjected to certain controls for their own development and safety. That’s called good parenting. But to treat adults like children and attempt to control them like a parent controlling a child is unjustified and inherently destructive.)

Examples of “control” vs “empowerment”

A person who seeks to teach others how to garden and thereby grow their own food is practicing empowerment and is therefore GOOD. But a person who seeks to place other people on government food stamps and thereby make them dependent on government for their food is practicing control and is inherently EVIL.

A school that teaches students to think for themselves and engage in critical, skeptical thinking about the world around them is practicing empowerment and is therefore GOOD. But a school that teaches students blind obedience to institutional authority while denying them the liberty to think for themselves is practicing control and is therefore EVIL.

A person who seeks to help others create their own successful businesses and generate abundant profits for themselves and their employees is practicing empowerment and is therefore GOOD. But a person who seeks to destroy entrepreneurship, suppress innovation, punish small businesses and burden private sector job creation with onerous taxes and regulation is practicing control and is therefore EVIL.

A person who seeks to teach others how to protect themselves against violent crime through the intelligent, ethical use of weapons for self defense is practicing empowerment and is therefore GOOD. But a person who seeks to strip away from everyone else their right to self defense, placing them in the position of defenseless victimization, is practicing control and is therefore EVIL.

A city mayor who seeks to teach his constituents the principles of nutrition and food choice so that they might make better decisions about their diet and health is practicing empowerment and is therefore GOOD. But a city mayor who demands blind obedience to his selective agenda of banning large sodas or other junk food items is practicing control and is therefore EVIL. (Bloomberg, anyone?)So, getting back to the title of this article, the way to instantly tell whether a person is “good” or “evil” is to examine their actions on the control vs. empowerment spectrum. If they predominantly seek to control others, they are mostly evil. If they predominantly seek to empower others, they are mostly good.Be careful to examine peoples’ actions, not merely their words. Anyone can talk a good game of “empowerment,” but very few actually seek to educate and uplift others around them.

The politics of control vs. empowerment

The political left is deeply invested in a philosophy of control. The left believes in centralized control over the economy, societal control of parenting and children, government control over education, centralized bankster control over money, and government control over health care.The political right is invested in a philosophy of non-interventionism. They classically believe the government should keeps its hands off education, the economy, businesses operations and private lives. (Of course, today’s political right is actually just as much pro-big government as the political left.)Libertarianism, by the way, is a philosophy of allowing — allowing people to make their own fortunes, or mistakes, or personal decisions as long as their behaviors do not harm others. Classic libertarianism means people are free to do what they wish, including marrying someone of the same sex if that’s their choice, as long as their actions do not cause direct harm to others around them. Many people mistakenly think they are libertarians but they are actually closet control freaks because they want everyone else to conform to their own ideas of marriage, religion, recreational drug use, prostitution and so on. A true libertarian must tolerate the free will actions of others even if those actions are obviously self-destructive to the individual.In terms of ethics, “controlism” is inherently destructive because it denies an individual his or her humanity. “Empowerment” is inherently good (or even blessed) because it invests in the individual the power of determining her or her own life outcomes.

The universe is written in the code of conscious empowerment

From a spiritual perspective, the Creator granted humans free will precisely because free will puts control into the hands of the individual, not a centralized power figure. If we were not meant to be free, we would never have been created with free will.

In this way, “controlism” stands in contradiction to the laws of the universe and the existence of free will and consciousness. Thus, the underlying philosophy of the political left is anti-consciousness, anti-free will and a contradiction of the fundamental laws of the universe.

This is why collectivist mandates feel so alien to a free-thinking human being… because control freakism is a violation of self-evident, universal truth. This is also why the leftist / collectivist political philosophy is doomed to fail: It exists in gross violation of the laws of the universe. No human being inherently wants to live without freedom, functioning merely as an obedient peon under a system of centralized control. It feels wrong because it is universally and spiritually wrong.

That is why it will fail. And that is why all those who defend individual liberty, free will and individual empowerment quite literally have God and the universe on their side.

In summary, then, if you want to determine whether a person is “good” or “evil” — in effect, whether they are living in congruency with the laws of the universe — simply place them on the spectrum of “control” versus “empowerment” and your question all but answers itself.

Learn more:

http://www.naturalnews.com/040122_control_empowerment_philosophy.html#ixzz2S2ADAj7T

Ten civilization-shaping trends for 2013 that are driving us into social and spiritual crisis.

(NaturalNews)

 

 

Most people feel that a time of great change is upon us. But what kind of change is unfolding, exactly?

To answer that question, we must examine current trends and attempt to understand where they are headed.

Here’s my look at ten of the most sociologically-charged trends that I believe are leading us into a spiritual crisis (followed by a spiritual awakening, as you’ll see below).

#1) The rise of human engineered genetics

Abandoning the seeds of nature, human scientists continue to play God with plants, animals and even humans. In doing so, they challenge the laws of nature and have already given rise to “superbugs” and “superweeds.”Superbugs are resistant to all known chemicals and drugs, and superweeds are resistant to all known chemical herbicides. Genetic pollution is rampant. No one knows where this takes us, but many understand that such reckless science puts the future of life at risk across our entire planet.

#2) Reality escapism via gaming, social networks and computer-human interface devices such as Google Glass, VR helmets

Turning to techno-immersion devices, more and more people are escaping reality and “living” in virtual worlds, or living in “augmented” versions of the real world. Though such devices and social networks promise connection, they actually deliver isolation, social detachment and depression.As these devices become more capable of sensory immersion, the problems they foment will only become more extreme, leading to extreme isolationism, escapism and truly delusional life experiences. People will live and die in “the Matrix,” so to speak.On the up side, immersion devices have tremendous therapeutic value and training value. They could theoretically be used to teach the fundamentals of liberty, consciousness, economics and philosophy, but history has shown they will most likely be exploited by corporate interests and abused by users to escape reality rather than enhance it. (Just look at where television ended up taking us…)

#3) The demonization of normalcy

Any idea that used to be considered “normal” is being increasingly demonized. For example, understanding mathematics and the laws of economics now makes you a “fringe whacko” in any discussion about the national debt or budget deficits.Expressing the existence of human consciousness will earn you a sharp rebuke from conformists who insist there is no such thing as consciousness. This group already includes many the world’s top physicists such as Stephen Hawking.Ideas like “we should be responsible for our own actions” are becoming increasingly alien across society. Even a heterosexual lifestyle is now being thought of as “abnormal” by the new metro-sexual trendies. Everything normal and natural is being marginalized and replaced with radical, anti-consciousness ideas such as “it’s okay to murder babies right after they are born, just call it a post-birth abortion.”Normalcy is the new “closet.” If you are normal, hide it away, lest you be incessantly berated by your peers for not conforming to their “new wave” of freakish ideas.

#4) The rise of “omission journalism”

Journalism is increasingly becoming more about what is omitted from the news rather than what’s in it. As mainstream media institutions pursue agendas of social shaping rather than reporting factual news, they use the power of omission to make sure the people aren’t aware of the most socially-relevant stories.For example, in our modern time there are two huge stories the media isn’t reporting because it’s practicing “omission journalism.” Those stories are the abortion murder trials and DHS bullet stockpiling.When watching the news, an informed observer must now ask himself, “What are they NOT showing me?” Therein lie the real stories that will never be reported.

#5) The “Idiocracy” effect of self-selected procreation that multiplies the number of people least qualified to advance humanity

I call this the “Idiocracy” effect, named after the movie of the same name (by Mike Judge). It simply means that humans who are least qualified to advance humanity are the most likely to have the most offspring.Put simply, smart people have fewer babies, but the idiots procreate in massive numbers. This ultimately skews the demographic profile into a society filled with people of very low cognitive function who nevertheless represent the voting majority. From there, the downfall of society and the rise of the idiocracy is only a matter of time.In a hundred years, this article you are reading right now will be incomprehensible to even high-level scholars of the future because it uses big words like “demographic” and “cognitive.” Anyone who can do basic algebra will be considered a genius.

#6) The censorship and criminalization of knowledge

Today, publishing truthful knowledge about nutritional supplements, colloidal silver or natural medicine is considered a criminal activity. Any coherent physics analysis of WTC building 7 is also met with sheer derision.One of the trademarks of the insane society into which we have already entered is the censorship and criminalization of knowledge. Any who speak the truth, who attempt to preserve knowledge, or who counter lies with truth are immediately branded whackos, conspiracy theorists or terrorists.The purpose of this ploy is to eliminate all knowledge from society’s memory so that reality can be instantly reshaped at will by the governing tyrants. A population which has no connection with actual history, knowledge of natural medicine or even awareness of their natural rights is far easier to control than a well-educated population with a sense of factual context.

#7) Selective dehumanization: The abandonment of any value for the life of a newborn child or any adult who disagrees with you

Dehumanization is a key trend to watch. You see it right now with the idea that sufficiently young children have no “life” and no value and can be terminated as a “choice.” You also see it with the increasingly radical rhetoric in the mainstream media, where guests on CNN and other broadcasts call for the violent shooting of anyone who disagrees with them.These are signs of dehumanization, and they will be extended and multiplied until all those who disagree with the governing status quo are labeled “animals” and dealt with accordingly.I’ve even reflected this very trend right here on Natural News when describing the great “zombie masses” that threaten our society. To refer to people as “zombies” is to dehumanize them. We must be extremely careful when invoking this term if it is not clear that the context is satire or comedy.

#8) The “theaterization” of narratives for political gain (false flags)

Government is becoming less a body that governs and more an institution that can only be called a “theater production entity.”Violent, public theater productions are increasingly carried out under the pretense that they are actual events which demand increased government power to prevent. Because terror has the most emotional and viral impact across society, terror events are chosen as the most economical forms of government theater to achieve a desired social or political goal.The use of false flags and government theater will increase to the point where nearly everything announced by government is a complete falsehood. This use of theater instead of governance serves to further detach people from reality while making them more malleable to the whims of government obedience.

#9) The end of privacy: Government tracking and cross-referencing of every uttered word, email, web page visit, photos and electronic communications

The rise of total government surveillance — as is already under construction in the United States – promises to record, profile and cross-index every uttered word, email, web activity, phone text and electronic transmission.This capability will very quickly be abused by political forces to track and destroy political enemies while suppressing freedom of thought across society. Certain words will become illegal to utter… even to type into a word processing application that stores data in “the cloud.”The surveillance state is what makes the police state fatal, because it transforms a police state from a group of bumbling idiots into an informed domestic police force with specific reachable targets. A police state without surveillance is just a bunch of guys standing around with guns. A police state with surveillance is a totalitarianistic nightmare.

#10) Rewriting of history

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, and the growing power of the state does not want private citizens to have any knowledge of actual history.Already, the revisionists are hard at work. In recent memory, for example, we’ve seen gun control pushers on the left argue that Hitler never enacted gun control laws before rounding up disarmed Jews and murdering them in gas chambers.We’ve also seen new efforts in popular media to demonize America’s Founding Fathers and paint them as discredited terrorists. Other efforts are under way to disparage the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These are all efforts to eradicate history and force citizens to forget where they came from and what it took to establish freedom in the first place.Much of the rewriting of history is accomplished through popular media: TV shows, movies and social media.

The Suffering

These trends will ultimately lead us to an era that I call “The Suffering.”This era will be characterized by mass starvation, pandemics, financial catastrophe, extreme social unrest, global infertility, biological freakism, mental insanity and intense suffering.This suffering will be born out of detachment from self, from nature, from consciousness and from the Creator. Detachment is the common theme that will haunt society during the suffering.The Suffering may last a decade or even a generation. But once the suffering has been sufficient, out of it will come en era of spiritual renaissance — a cry for help from those who realize their detachment has caused unnecessary suffering and that healing can be initiated by returning to reality. They will once again seek connection rather than detachment. They will once again value life, seeds and consciousness rather than abnormalcy, death and mindlessness.

The Consciousness movement

I predict this will see the rise of a powerful “consciousness movement” that will grow from humble beginning as a minor social movement to an unstoppable political movement. Its basis will be philosophical: that humans are conscious, free-will beings with a soul that exists beyond the physical.

This simple truth will become the basis for a movement that inherently combines compassion with personal responsibility, espousing both conscious connection with all living things while simultaneously recognizing the individual responsibility to make something of yourself. It will revolutionize both science and spirituality while finding common ground in both.

The Consciousness movement will spur the next stage of societal evolution on our world, and it will simultaneously mark the end of the era of biological determinism and scientific reductionism. Holism will finally be recognized as the key fundamental philosophy that underlies health, science, religion and even consciousness.

I will discuss these concepts in more detail in a future article here on Natural News.

In the mean time, make sure you are prepared to survive “The Suffering” so that you will still be around to enjoy the rise of the Consciousness movement. All this may take many years — or even decades — to unfold. Hunker down for the long haul, in other words, and never lose track of the ultimate destination in all this: the global recognition of consciousness and the non-physical soul.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/040137_spiritual_crisis_trends_consciousness.html#ixzz2S26Q9mb5

The Bad Samaritan: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups about the Man Believed to be God

By davidjones

By LYNN PICKNETT & CLIVE PRINCE

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It is remarkable what happens when you abandon your preconceptions about Christianity – hard though that might be, if, like us, you were brought up as a churchgoer – and approach the subject as objectively as possible.

When we began our latest book, The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Man Believed to be God, we thought we had already reached certain conclusions in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (which Dan Brown acknowledges as a major inspiration for The Da Vinci Code). But as our research progressed we became enthralled – perhaps even a little shocked – by what we were faced with, but which only served to reinforce and clarify our previous conclusions.

We begin with a great mystery.

The Great Debate

Of the many puzzles surrounding Jesus, perhaps the most fundamental is the clash between the Jewish and pagan elements in his mission.

Certain New Testament passages are unequivocally hardcore Jewish nationalist, such as Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, a role which (despite Christians’ later redefinition) only makes sense in Jewish terms. The Messiah – ‘Anointed’, in Greek ‘Christos’ – was to be the great deliverer, who would reassemble and lead the twelve tribes of Israel in kicking out the Romans, before finally fulfilling God’s promise to extend their rule to all other nations.

Of course, Jesus conspicuously failed to fulfil that role. From the Jews’ perspective he achieved the exact opposite, spawning a religion that, in his name, subjected them to centuries of subjugation. That is why his besotted early followers changed the whole emphasis of ‘Messiah’, with Paul initiating the new spin with the notion that has underpinned Christianity ever since: instead of being a hard-nosed Jewish military leader, the new Messiah was a god-man whose redeeming death and resurrection offered eternal life to all who accepted him, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Yet the gospel writers still ensured Jesus was associated with the old prophecies of the Messiah, such as entering Jerusalem on a donkey, which was an unequivocal declaration of Messiahship.

Even though by the time of the gospels the Christian movement had adopted Paul’s doctrine that the message was for all mankind, clearly the internal evidence shows that Jesus himself intended to confine the ‘Good News’ to the people of Israel. We see this in the tale of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, where at first he refuses to heal her possessed daughter because she is not one of the chosen people – even calling her ‘dog’, the racist term used by Jews of Gentiles – only changing his mind when she implicitly acknowledges his God’s superiority. As several scholars admit, since this contradicts the gospel writer’s own position, it must be authentic.

Jesus the Pagan

On the other hand, some Biblical passages are hard to equate with Judaism, especially those about Jesus’ more private rituals, most obviously the Eucharist, the symbolic eating of his ‘body’ as bread and drinking of his ‘blood’ as wine that he supposedly established at the Last Supper. Such a rite, even symbolically, was unthinkable for a Jew, for whom ingesting human blood was an abomination. In fact, it resonates much more neatly with the mystery cults of the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, where gods were symbolically devoured to forge a spiritual communion between the cult member and the deity. Importing such practices into Judaism would have been regarded by the mainstream as blasphemous.

Evidence has also accumulated over the last few decades that Jesus modelled his cures and exorcisms on pagan magicians’, primarily from Egypt, echoing – or perhaps confirming – early Jewish claims that he had been schooled in sorcery in Egypt. And if the suppressed ‘Gnostic Gospels’ are accepted as genuinely representing certain sides of Jesus’ beliefs and teaching – as we do – then they, too, show a thinking not obviously associated with the Judaism of his day, especially where the spirituality of the feminine is concerned, as exemplified in his relationship with Mary Magdalene.

The majority of New Testament scholars simply reject the non-Jewish parts of the gospels as inauthentic, arguing that the Eucharist was invented by the apostles of the new religion – Paul again! – to make it more Gentile-friendly, something familiar from the sects that celebrated dying-and-rising saviour gods who incarnated as a mortal man. The academics assume that this was borrowed from one of many such cults, perhaps that of Mithras or Dionysus, and was applied to the meal that Jesus’ first followers held purely in memory of him (with no mystical connotations).

But in fact, there is no reason to reject these passages except the impossibility of fitting them into a Jewish context. The logic is that, since we know that Jesus was Jewish, and no Jew could possible have entertained such practices, then he couldn’t have done so, and therefore they must be later inventions.

However, the evidence simply isn’t there. It is hard to imagine later followers inventing Jesus using pagan magic in such detail – even down to specific phrases found in earlier Greco-Egyptian magical papyri. And the internal evidence of the New Testament itself points to the Eucharist being one of the earliest Christian practices, going back to Jesus himself. It is the one element that appears virtually identically in all four gospels and Paul’s Letters. (It is generally agreed that Paul’s Letters predate the gospels, although we would argue that Mark’s Gospel might be contemporary with some of Paul’s writings.)

Even odder, as Paul clearly struggled to fit the Eucharist into his ‘revealed’ version of Jesus’ mission, evidently he would even have been happier to ignore the rite entirely, but it was already too well established. His solution was to transmute the rite into a memorial, specifically to dodge the ‘communion’ aspect. So ironically the evidence points to the exact reverse of the conventional position – instead of Paul adding the ‘mystical communion’ element, he tried to get rid of it!

Part of the Christian process of redefining the meaning of the ritual meal was linking it to the Last Supper the night before his crucifixion. However, the evidence of John’s Gospel is that Jesus actually instituted the rite earlier, when he was preaching in Galilee – which led to a mass desertion of disciples appalled by his injunction that they must drink his blood.

It must be stressed that such practices are not merely difficult to reconcile with Judaism – as a would-be Messiah had to be – but impossible. They are totally incompatible.

So, as some scholars are now beginning to argue, could the Jewish parts be the invention? But that solution doesn’t work either, since it means rejecting passages that are strongly evidential – such as the episode of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the entry into Jerusalem.

So we hit an impasse. According to accepted thinking, Jesus could never have been both a Jewish leader and a proponent of mystery school rites. Is there any possible solution?

Enter the Magus

One potential way forward, we realised – with some astonishment – lay in exploring the parallel between Jesus and that flamboyant scriptural bad boy to end bad boys, Jesus’ hugely unconventional contemporary, Simon Magus, whose very name underlines his apparently pagan credentials, ‘Magus’ meaning ‘occultist’ or ‘magician’.

The earliest reference to Simon Magus (or Simon of Gitta, after the town of his birth in Samaria) comes in the Acts of the Apostles, the continuation of Luke’s Gospel that takes the story on after Jesus’ crucifixion. After the first persecution of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem that began with the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, some of Jesus’ disciples, led by Philip, fled to Samaria. This was within, at most, ten years of the crucifixion – probably less. Here they find that many Samaritans follow Simon Magus, regarded as the ‘Great Power’ sent by God. Philip not only successfully converts Simon’s followers to Christianity, but also the Magus himself. Some time later Peter and the disciple John go to Samaria to take the Holy Spirit to the community established by Philip, and Simon Magus reveals his true colours by offering them money for the secret of the Holy Spirit, earning a stern condemnation from Peter.

Clearly, as the Simonites found it so easy to switch their allegiance there must have been a marked similarity between the messages of Jesus and the Magus. And Simon himself was, albeit briefly, once a member of the Christian community in Samaria. Although Acts attributes his success there to sorcery, as we now know Jesus himself indulged in pagan magic, so this points up a similarity between them.

Although Acts’ story ends with Simon asking forgiveness, other early Christian sources show he went on to challenge the fledgling Jesus movement, appearing in the writings of the Church Fathers as the ‘first heretic’ who attempted to lead the early Christians astray. Again, the term suggests a basic similarity between Simon and Jesus – heresy being a variation of a religion.

A major source is the related texts known as the Clementina or the Pseudo-Clementine Literature. Written around 150 CE but drawing on earlier material, it describes the struggle between Peter and Simon Magus for the hearts, minds and souls of the Samaritans.

It is crystal clear that the Church Fathers’ big problem was that Simon Magus was far, far too similar to Jesus, performing miracles and healings – even being regarded as an incarnate god. The early Christians were anxious to point out to their flock that, although Simon appeared to be cut from the same cloth as Jesus, this was a ploy by the Devil to sow confusion. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote that Simon “worked under the cloak of Christ” and even hinted that he claimed to be Jesus resurrected. Hyppolytus of Rome said bluntly: “He was not the Christ.” But do they protest too much?

The Magus, too, promoted a seemingly peculiar blend of Jewish and pagan ideas. The Clementina makes the apparently extraordinary statement that, while he taught that there were “many gods,” he was citing the books of Moses (i.e. the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament). This seemed so weird that the Clementina was dismissed as nonsense – but in 1842 a work of Hippolytus was discovered in which he had included (in order to point out the errors) large extracts from Simon’s own treatise, the ‘Great Revelation’, whose one-time existence was known but which was believed to have been lost.

The ‘Great Revelation’ reveals an elevation of the sacred feminine and an emphasis on sexual mysticism that fit awkwardly with the patriarchal character of Judaism, and which caused much outrage among the Church Fathers, to whom Simon’s rituals were obscene and disgusting. Notoriously, he is said to have travelled with one Helen, a former prostitute from Tyre – described as a black woman who danced in chains, and who he claimed was the incarnation of God’s ‘First Thought’, the female power through whom God had created the material world. (Of course there are intriguing parallels between the relationships of Simon and Helen, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene as portrayed in the Gnostic Gospels.)

An even more extraordinary link between Simon and Jesus is that, again according to the Clementina, the two men shared the same teacher: John the Baptist. Indeed, it states that it was Simon Magus, not Jesus, who John chose as his successor.

But what does all this have to tell us about the historical Jesus?

The big clue comes from the fact that Simon Magus was a Samaritan, one of those who, despite an ethnic kinship with the Jews, were detested by them – a feeling that was decidedly mutual.

On the subject of Jesus and Samaria, the gospel writers appear to differ awkwardly. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is depicted as shunning the land and its people (with some exceptions, notably the parable of the Good Samaritan). On the other hand, John’s Gospel has him extending his mission into Samaria.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that the enigmatic Gospel of John was originally written for an early Samaritan Christian community, which would explain its positive view of the Samaritans. For example, it describes the first person to whom Jesus chooses to reveal his Messiahship as the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well in the heart of Samaria, and the first to recognise him as the Messiah are Samaritans. We suggest it was written for Samaritan converts from Simon Magus’ following – after all, some of the gospel’s unique stories, particularly those with an unexpected sexual subtext, seem to have been specifically included (or contrived) to subvert Simon’s teaching.

The key figure of John the Baptist was also active in Samaria. According to John’s Gospel, one of his centres was Aenon (modern Ainûn), in Samaria.

So, Jesus and John the Baptist both took their missions into Samaria – another parallel with Simon Magus. But what is it about that land that explains the Jewish/pagan paradox of both Jesus’ and Simon’s teachings?

The key lies in the reason for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, which had its roots in the earliest days of Israel. The Samaritans were descended from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manesseh, and still inhabited their lands, between Judea and Galilee. Originally, Ephraim was predominant: Moses’ successor and the conqueror of the Promised Land, Joshua, was from Ephraim and the tribe was given the honour of being custodians of the Ark of the Covenant in its sanctuary at Shiloh. Some historians and archaeologists believe that Ephraim and Manesseh were two of only three tribes (the other being Benjamin) that came out of Egypt, the others being native Canaanites who were converted to the religion of Moses. And intriguingly, legend linked them with the Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, since their progenitors, Ephraim and Manesseh, were sons of Joseph and Asenath, the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis.

After the creation of the kingdom of Israel a power struggle developed between the tribes of Ephraim and Judah. King David usurped Ephraim’s status by taking the Ark to Jerusalem, the new religious centre in Judah’s territory. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two, Ephraim heading the ten tribes of the larger Kingdom of Israel in the north, with the smaller Kingdom of Judah (which gave its name to the Jewish people and religion) in the south. A new sanctuary and temple, a rival to Jerusalem, was built in Ephraim’s land on Mount Gerizim.

Although larger and more powerful, the northern kingdom collapsed when it was invaded by the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. The Jews later claimed that the Assyrian influence corrupted the religion of the north, a taunt that was returned when Judah underwent its own trauma of invasion and mass deportation in the Babylonian Captivity two centuries later. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem after their seventy-year exile, they set about codifying and reforming their religion, incorporating concepts from that of Babylon. So both the Jews and the Samaritans believed that only they practised the ‘pure’ religion of Moses, and that the other’s version was heretical. Victors’ history decided that the Jews won, but the Samaritans could have been right…

The rivalry reached a climax when, about two centuries before Jesus, the Jews conquered Samaria and destroyed their temple – yet another reason for Samaritan resentment. It was only with the advent of Roman rule that Samaria was freed from Jewish subjugation.

Not unnaturally, by Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans detested each other. The hostility even affected their respective end times speculations: all the prophecies foresaw a re-gathering of the twelve tribes – one of the functions of the Messiah – and a reconciliation of Judah and Ephraim, but opinions differed over which tribe would come out on top. Naturally, the Jews thought it would be them. Moreover, their deeply-ingrained prejudice made the idea of bringing the Samaritans back into the fold deeply distasteful. Meanwhile, the Samaritans believed in a coming saviour, the Taheb (‘Restorer’ or ‘Returner’), who would reassemble the tribes under the authority of Ephraim, restoring the situation that had existed at the very beginning of Israelite history. And part of the Taheb’s function was to overthrow Judah. (The Samaritan woman would therefore have recognised Jesus as the Taheb.)

Many scholars and archaeologists have shown that the Israelites’ original religion was far from the monotheistic and patriarchal institution it was to become, and that it owed much to either, or both, the native, pagan religions of Canaan and Egypt. The classic study is Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (1967, revised 1990), which argued that, before the split after Solomon’s reign, the Israelites had worshipped a goddess, Asherah, alongside Yahweh, revealing both polytheism and an awareness of the sacred feminine. (Images of cherubim excavated from ninth-century Israel are almost identical to Egyptian depictions of the winged Isis.) Patai also showed that early Israelite tradition incorporated a female figure which manifested God’s power of creation.

And as we know, all of these are characteristics of the teaching of the Samaritan Simon Magus – which makes sense if, as the Samaritans claimed, they really did preserve the original form of the Israelite religion.

But we believe it would also resolve the basic contradiction about how Jesus’ career could incorporate ‘Jewish’ and pagan elements. If, instead of ‘Jewish’ we think in terms of the ‘people of Israel’ – i.e. the original religion and tribes – then much about his mission falls into place.

The Samaritan connection also offers an explanation of the origin of the Eucharist. One of the texts that might include a possible Jewish precursor to the Christian Eucharist is the late BCE or early CE ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’. Normally described as a product of the Jewish community in Egypt, it includes a ritual involving the eating of bread and the drinking of wine – the nearest ceremony to the Eucharist in any Jewish source, and, although the key element of equating the bread and wine with body and blood is absent, some have suggested that it may have influenced either Jesus’ rite or the practices of the first Christians, who added the communion element.

However, as ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’ describes the Biblical tale of the union of the patriarch Joseph and the daughter of the Egyptian high priest of Heliopolis, it was clearly written by or for a community to which their marriage was particularly important. As the sons of Joseph and Asenath were Ephraim and Manesseh, the legendary ancestors of the Samaritans – and there was a large Samaritan community in Egypt – it seems the text is Samaritan and not Jewish.

So in the Samaritan connection we find clues to the apparent discrepancy between the Jewishness and paganism found in Jesus’ teachings. And it was against the background of age-old simmering tribal hatred that the extraordinary character of Simon Magus – the ‘bad’ Samaritan – arose, challenging the cult of Jesus with his miracles and claims of divinity.

It is all too easy to accept the rather garbled version of his later life as given by the early Church fathers, in which he is tamed by the apostles and dies in a magical battle with Saint Peter. Yet this is the man who it seems John the Baptist nominated as his official successor – and not Jesus… But that, as they say, is another story…

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

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Despite often bitter opposition from many vested interests, LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE have fearlessly exposed cover-ups and conspiracies, from the faking of the Shroud of Turin (Turin Shroud), the Rudolf Hess mission (Double Standards), the battle among the Second World War Allies (Friendly Fire), the British royal family (War of the Windsors), the New Age movement and the hijacking of ancient Egypt (The Stargate Conspiracy), the Priory of Sion (The Sion Revelation) – and the origins and history of Christianity (The Templar Revelation) as well as their latest book The Masks of Christ. Their website is www.picknettprince.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin & the Eurasian Empire of the End Times.

By davidjones

By PHILIP COPPENS—

 

Russia has always perceived of itself as a Eurasian country.
– President V.V. Putin, November 2000

 

…an epochal, grandiose revolutionary admission, which, in general, changes everything. The prophecy of [French conspiratologist] Jean Parvulesco has come to pass… There will be a Eurasian millennium.
– Alexandre Dugin, Russian thinker and author

 

The French visionary writer Jean Parvulesco’s main agent – if not hope – for world change rests with Vladimir Putin. Parvulesco argues that – whether we are aware of it or not – we find ourselves at the crossroads of “great history,” where a totally new era is about to be born.

 

For such a new period to begin, the old needs to die first. For Parvulesco, this is the old “democratic system” of political correctness, which he feels has now reached its limits and is no longer supportable. It has become “a permanent and total nightmare.” Many will wonder how the “new world” is to come about. The best example of what appeared to be a sudden, almost instantaneous collapse is seen in the fall of the Soviet Union, two decades ago. It illustrates that powerful empires can, from one day to the next, completely disappear, requiring a new society and structure to be built from the ground upwards.

 

When news of the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared on television screens, the system had already imploded. It was just the public revelation of its death; the disintegration of the communist system had already occurred. According to Parvulesco, the collapse of “democratic Europe” has already taken place too, and we are now in the years between its collapse and the public acceptance of its demise – and the start of a new Europe.

 

For Parvulesco, the evidence of the collapse of this system is apparent in the recent political history of Italy and Germany, and to some extent that of France and Great Britain. But in each case he feels the same dire situation has transpired: an “immense empty desert,” the wasteland of “social democracy.” A local version of what he sees as a “worldwide conspiracy,” but one that has failed and will soon be sent back to the “black hole” from where it came.

 

Parvulesco knows what to write on the death certificate; but he also feels he knows what the New Europe will be: the “Eurasian Empire of the End Times.” He labels our timeframe an interregnum where what happened to Russia is actually evidence that dramatic political change is possible. The Soviet Union was the first domino to fall, with the others in Europe soon to follow.

 

Could he be right? In 1976, Parvulesco published “La ligne géopolitique de l’URSS et le ‘projet océanique fondamental’ de l’Amiral G.S. Gorchkov” (The geopolitical line of the USSR and the ‘fundamental oceanographic project’ of Admiral G.S. Gorchkov), which he labelled “political-revolutionary research.” In it he wrote that the Soviet Union would end up changing the course of history. And changing the course of history is, for Parvulesco, the only true goal politics should have.

 

Parvulesco therefore provides an interesting type of prophecy. Whereas most prophets predict the end of the world at a given time, his type of prophecy brings more detail about the type of change and how. As to its timeframe, it is very much like “when the time is right.”

 

So, what is meant to happen? Parvulesco argues that across Europe there are geopolitical groups at work – often clandestinely – laying the groundwork for the Eurasian agenda. Like the Project for a New American Century, there are other think tanks hard at work – and judging from the amount of newspaper headlines they don’t get, much more secretly – to bring about a new Eurasia. Despite their secrecy, Parvulesco was able to lay his hands on one article titled “The Imperial Eurasian Pact.” Similar to the idea put into action by the Neocons after 9/11 (an agenda that claimed to want to bring peace to the world by using the power of America’s military might), this group states that, “It is the confrontation of our imperial and catholic [universal] doctrines with the current political-historical reality […] which will see the final emergence of the catholic Great Empire which constitutes our ultimate objective, the Imperium Ultimum, the Regnum Sanctum, which should comport, in principle, three operational stages […].”

 

The first stage is the creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, that is considered to be the axis along which this major change will occur. This axis will tie together the destiny of three nations (France, Germany and Russia).

 

The second stage is the integration of what was traditionally known as West and East Europe, together with Russia, Siberia, India and Japan.

 

The final stage involves what is termed the destruction of the “global democratic conspiracy,” led by the United States, including a revolutionary liberation of its people, after which America as a whole (North and South) will become one entity. We can only wonder whether the present drive by the US to expand NAFTA and create a North American Union are steps in this direction.

 

The end of the planetary superpower that is the United States is forecast to be an act of self-destruction, a continental civil war very much on par with the first Civil War. The extreme dissatisfaction within the United States, the extreme disparity between the archconservative religious community and the more liberal, means that being elected as president on a genuine agenda (rather than one of total style but no substance) is almost impossible. For Parvulesco, it will be primarily America’s Catholic, ex-European community that will lead America towards its new destiny – and cause the demise of the current “global conspiracy.” There will be a new Europe, but also a new America.

 

In the end change is a social process, but it often needs a symbol. Hitler became the face of World War II, Lenin – more than Marx – that of communism, etc. So who is the new face of Europe, and who is the creator of this new Eurasian Empire? For Parvulesco, that “messiah” is already here: Vladimir Putin. Even though Putin is no longer president, his influence as Russian prime minister remains virtually omnipresent.

 

Vladimir Putin remains the face of the New Russia, a country with a vast territory and natural resources that is able to hold Europe to ransom, energy-wise, should it ever want to.

 

Who is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? This is a question that many in a non-Parvulesco universe have also asked. Seen as a pawn of the KGB’s successor, in Parvulesco’s world, Putin is the direct emanation of the secret revolutionary groups of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. These, he believes, are trying to make their decades-long secret battle open and public, moving from a type of synarchic, behind the scenes government, into a more open type of rule.

 

Whereas some conspiracy theorists claim the CIA and various secret societies like Skull & Bones are the real puppet masters of American politics, Parvulesco says the situation in the Soviet Union was not much different. Ruled for a long time by secret powerbrokers whose agents are now stepping out into the open taking the course of Russian politics into the direction they have been trying to steer it from behind the veil for a number of decades.

 

Unlike in the US where the “conspiracy” is often faceless, Parvulesco lists two people as Russia’s master conspirators. One was the chief of the Soviet security service (GRU) and one time Commander in Chief of the former Warsaw Pact, General S.M. Stemenko (died 1976), the other was Marshall N.V. Ogarkov, a former head of the Soviet military. Marshall Ogarkov, who died in 1994, is rumoured to have been behind a failed coup attempt which in turn led to a kind of counter-conspiracy that brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power.

 

Parvulesco is convinced that if this counter-conspiracy had not succeeded, the end of the Soviet Union would have occurred several years earlier, with a transition from the Soviet Union to the New Russia that would have been much harsher. Indeed, it underlines that years before the actual demise of the Soviet Union, the regime was comatose, ready for the taking, just like – in Parvulesco’s eyes – Western Europe (and the United States of America) is now.

 

Parvulesco is not alone in his assessment of these two men. French intelligence expert Pierre de Villemarest who wrote the history of the GRU, labelled “the Soviet’s most secret service,” says Gen. Sergei Matveevich Stemenko was “one of the first geopoliticians of the Soviet Union, perhaps even the first.” Though de Villemarest calls Stemenko a Soviet, he considered himself to be truly a “Great Russian.” “For this caste,“ writes de Villemarest, “the Soviet Union was an Empire that was called to dominate the Eurasian continent, not only from the Ural to Brest, but also from the Ural to Mongolia, from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.”

 

The “dream” of Russia à la Stemenko may be seen as merely returning back to the days when Russia was a true empire, before the days of the Bolshevic Revolution. But for Parvulesco, that in itself is part of a larger, and most intriguing puzzle – a mission.

 

The above is connected to this article in the same issue of New Dawn: Men of Mystery: Raymond Abellio & Jean Parvulesco – Their Vision of a New Europe

 

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PHILIP COPPENS was an author and investigative journalist, ranging from the world of politics to ancient history and mystery. He was editor-in-chief of the Dutch magazine Frontier and a frequent contributor to various magazines. Website www.philipcoppens.com.

 

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

 

Vladimir Putin was the subject of an article in the Sept-Oct 2001 issue of New Dawn that prophetically discussed the symbolic significance of his ascension to power and the important role he was destined to play in the future of not only Russia, but the world.

 

 

 

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