I was involved in the organisation of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, while First Secretary at the British Embassy in Warsaw. The 50th did not receive anything like the media coverage given to the 70th, of which more later.
Senior British visitors to Poland invariably included a concentration camp on their itinerary, and from escorting people around I visited camps a great deal more often than I would have wished. I found the experience appalling and desolate. The first I ever saw was Majdanek and I recall that I just had to sit helpless and shivering for some time. One thing the experience left me with – including meeting survivors and both Polish and German eye-witnesses, and seeing the architects’ plans for camps – was a contempt for those who claim the whole thing did not happen, or was an accident, or was small scale.
It in no way diminishes the genocidal attack on the Jews to remember that a vast number of Poles also died in the camps, as well as gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled and disparate political prisoners. I tried sometimes to diminish the horror I felt at involvement with the camps, with attempts at humour. I was present at a meeting listing the guests of honour; the President of Lithuania was included. I whispered that he was coming to represent the camp guards. That was offensive, and I apologise. But there is a real problem that to this day Eastern Europe – including Poland itself – has not come to terms with historical truth about collaboration with anti-Jewish genocide and other attacks on minorities. I recommend this website, which tackles these issues very honestly and is well worth a lengthy browse.
It requires bigotry not to be able to understand why nationalist resistance movements against Russian occupation became allied with Germany during World War II. That would be reprehensible only in the same sense that allied collaboration with Stalin might be reprehensible, but for the added factor of enthusiastic collaboration with genocidal and master race programmes and fascist ideology. That is what makes the glorification of Eastern European nationalist figures from this period generally inappropriate.
I fear however that the real reason that the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz received so much more coverage than the 50th is a media desire to reinforce the narrative of the War on Terror and Western policy in the Middle East by invoking the spectre of massive anti-Semitism. There have been isolated but deplorable, apparently anti-Semitic attacks of a small-scale terrorist nature in France and Belgium in recent years. But to conflate this into stories of a wave of popular anti-Semitism in Europe is a nonsense. Maureen Lipman’s claim that she may have to leave the UK is not just silly but disingenuous. I do not believe she feels in personal danger of attack – there is absolutely no reason why she should – she is rather making a political point.
There are two factors which could exacerbate anti-Semitism at present. One is the appalling behaviour of Israel and its indefensible action in continually seizing Palestinian land and using its military superiority to dominate and occasionally massacre Palestinians. Regrettably, there are a very small minority of people who wrongly blame Jews in general for the actions of Israel.
The second factor is of course the terrible economic hardship wrought across the whole world by irresponsible banking practices, and the fact that the bankers luxury lifestyles were maintained at the cost of everybody else. There are still a tiny minority of people stuck in the medieval mindset associating banking with the Jewish community. There is in fact a very plausible argument that if any “race” has a disproportionate influence on the development and character of international banking since the mid eighteenth century, it is the Scots! But those who see banking as a racial issue are nutters.
You could construct an argument from these factors, and you could identify that anti-Semitic people do exist. They certainly do. They dominate the very small category of people who get banned even from this free speech blog. But are their opinions intellectually respectable, promoted in the mainstream or able to be expressed openly without fear of either social or legal consequences? No, no and no. Anti-semites are fortunately a tiny and strange minority. I might add that in my numerous and frequent social contacts in the British Muslim community, I have never encountered anti-Semitism (unlike, say, Poland and Russia where I encountered casual anti-Semitism quite frequently).
The final point, is of course, the conflation of anti-zionism with anti-Semitism. That seems to me the fundamental design of the media campaign exaggerating the scale of anti-Semitism at the moment. Yes, we must always remember the terrible warnings from history and it is right to remember those who died in the concentration camps, Jewish, Polish, Romany, Gay, Communist or any other category. But we should be aware of those who wish to manipulate the powerful emotions of horror thus evoked, for present objectives of the powerful.
Excellent response from you above, Clark.
The transition from dualism:
“I expect I’d have been first troubled, then perplexed, and eventually delighted by the new physics. They teach physics in much the same order as it was discovered. They taught me all the classical stuff first, and only later started describing the (as you called it) modernist, relativity and quantum stuff. And that’s the emotional sequence I went through; first it disturbs the false security of the classical, objective, reductive approach. Next it perplexes with its paradoxes and seeming contradictions. Eventually it brings delight with its simplicity, elegance, inevitability and its, well, playfulness. It’s a delight to discover that the universe you’re looking at is as alive as you are, that it knows when you’re looking at it and it’s looking right back. And it predicts the electron configurations around a nucleus; that’s a delight, those horrible arbitrary number-counting rules replaced by a set of inevitable exclusive harmonic resonances.”
Yup. You’ve summed that process well.
Well done.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/01/auschwitz/comment-page-4/#comment-506930
Herbie, I’m glad you liked that; I enjoyed the way it presented itself in my mind. Thanks for precipitating it.
Yes, there’s much “scientific” research that doesn’t live up to the name. But there will always be inquiring minds, and I doubt they can be entirely suppressed. Real science obviously hasn’t stopped, though commercial pressures and legal constraints have increased due to irresponsible government.
Regarding false flags, I expect better evidence than parents of slaughtered children caught smiling for a second or two, and blurry pictures off Facebook deliberately modified to look like other pictures to assert that one of the subjects never existed, and lists of inconsistencies in official reports and witness testimony.
Things like destruction or concealment of evidence and gagging orders make a cover-up look likely. Testimony in secret and resignation of the investigative panel ring alarm bells. I’m sure I’ve seen this pattern occasionally.
(No, Scouse Billy, I don’t want to talk to you about it; sadly, your standards of evidence are so low that you can “prove” anything.)
Herbie, the difference between me and Billy is that I love science, while Billy appears to hate it.
Billy seems to actually want vaccination not to work. He seems to want the government to be seeding the skies with poison, just so he can get on his high horse about it. I mean, if we sift through the evidence and find very little or nothing to support chemtrails or a great vaccine murder conspiracy plot, and evidence that vaccines really have slashed disease rates (such as that graph Billy linked to), surely that’s good news, isn’t it? Oh my BCG jab is ticking away; Billy won’t have to put up with me spoiling his fun much longer.
No reply from SB all day? Maybe he’s spent the whole time looking for something that actually passes the laugh test, from the hundreds of dodgy references with which he’s been inundating us.
I’ll leave you to it, stuck in your material scientific dogma house.
No I don’t hate science, you dope Again you make things up.
Funnily enough I was just thinking of Dr Shiv Chopra, whistle blower and Human Rights activist. Looked up his wiki page then his own site – mmm you really don’t get much from wiki again. In fact it’s amazing what they leave out.
You, two mugs could take a look
http://shivchopra.com/
Dr Shiv Chopra, Microbiologist, Vaccination Researcher & Specialist, Former Senior Scientific Advisor on Vaccinations for Health Canada:
“No vaccine, as required by law, has ever been shown to be safe or effective”
“It is just story telling”
He reminded me of you two, “story tellers” – no evidence, whatsoever on your side just “stories” dressed up as “common knowledge”.
Oh, yeah, here’s the reference – darn another SB link 😉
http://www.davejanda.com/guests/dr-shiv-chopra/sunday-january-18-2015
Scouse Billy, I’m listening through Sheldrake’s ten points,and summarising my own positions here:
1) Nature is mechanical, machine-like.
2) Matter is unconscious.
3) The laws of nature are fixed.
4) Mass/energy is conserved.
5) Nature is purposeless.
6) Biological inheritance is material.
7) Memories are stored materially.
8) Each mind is confined to its brain.
9) Psychic phenomena are illusory.
10) Only mechanistic medicine actually works.
There, I bet that surprised you!
Tell me, does Sheldrake claim that vaccination doesn’t work?
Scouse Billy, I’m going to block avatars so I don’t have your triumphal fist looming at me constantly.
It’s just like the view I’d have if I was falling backwards after being punched in the face.
Well done, Clark – you don’t really surprise me, I don’t think (time for you to be surprised) you are stupid.
Ref point 4. What about the Big Bang then?
There is then the issue of how one reconciles consciousness with the “physical universe”, I like Tom Campbell’s ideas on this.
As for Sheldrake on vaccines, I’ve never heard him talk about them, certainly as far as I can recall and I think I would have noticed!
He has bought into global warming but I can’t believe he’s looked into the physics of it (I know he’s a molecular biologist) as for example Ben Miller has.
That interview with Shiv Chopra is actually pretty short but I notice he has views on Ebola in another Dave Janda interview so I’m going to hear his thoughts on that.
Oh Clark – to put you out of your misery.
My avatar is Bill Shankly 🙂
Scouse Billy, here’s my guess of how things will proceed. Quantum computing and quantum cryptography will be developed as technologies, and quantum teleportation as experimental science (sorry, words separate inseparable things). Specific breakthroughs will be made that will then be applied to existing science, precipitating a generalised breakthrough in understanding.
But I expect you’re hoping this will replace all scientific thought with some sort of individualistic magic-type effects. It won’t, because the Old One has deemed that we must share the universe.
Then don’t keep calling me stupid and treating me like I’m stupid. OK? And I don’t care who it is that looks like he’s just punched me in the face, thanks.
Specifically, stop treating me and everyone else as audience who need to be convinced by any means necessary – I hope you recognise the phrase in italics; the US use it to mean that secrecy, dishonesty and military force may be used.
He’s punching the air – it is you that imagines he’s just punched you in the face…
As for your last comment – wow, I’ll leave you to it…
Scouse Billy, do you really not see why I dislike your approach to argument? Glenn and I have repeatedly told you what the troubles are, and repeatedly told you how you could improve matters, but you ignore us, which seems contemptuous. You seem to accept every contrarian theory and reject everything mainstream. We’ve asked you to sketch out your boundaries, but you’ve ignored us. Instead, you try to overwhelm with unsorted documents and long videos, and when that doesn’t work you move the goal posts. Would Shankly agree to moveable goal posts?
You show no sign of ever admitting error. At 6:57 you called me a dope, one of two mugs, stuck in a material scientific dogma house, yet at 7:54 pm you said you weren’t surprised at my notes above and that you don’t think I’m stupid – these are contradictions; something here has to be either wrong or dishonest. You linked to a graph that showed that a decrease in disease rates started when mass vaccinations were introduced, but you ignored that and referred only to the earlier section of the graph.
These sorts of incidents are what I mean by “any means necessary”.
In the light of continual ad hominems, projections and utter lies about me, what do you and Glenn expect?
Meanwhile I referenced the CDC’s solitary attempt at debunking the true historical decline in diseases. It showed the decline in measles from 1950. I had already referenced graphs going way further back in time showing the vast majority of the decline preceded vaccination.
But hey, who cares – twisting evidence to suit seems normal to some here.
Dr Shiv Chopra, a WHO fellowship recipient and former scientific adviser to Health Canada on vaccine safety states categorically that he would never get a vaccine nor administer one because none of them work and are inherently unsafe. I think he might know a bit more about it than you, me and particularly Glenn.
But to hell with that, you ignore it – well it’s your choice. I don’t tell anyone what to do – I just supply links to information that might prove of interest or of help.
Are you schizoid or something, btw?
P.S. I’m wondering if I just lit a blue touch paper…
(runs for cover) 😉
Scouse Billy, I’m heavy of heart because constructive discussion seems impossible.
Yeah, I’m schizoid. If you say so. Obviously, that’s not an ad-hominem, because it came from you, so you’ve no need to apologise. I’m just a shit by definition.
Look, here’s that graph again. It declines, nearly levels off, declines again, and then is nearly level for two three decades. Then the introduction of mass immunisation coincides with the start of another fall, this time to zero.
Do you agree that this is what the graph shows?
http://www.whale.to/vaccines/dec1.gif
Look, the first flattening on the way down is just one data point. The second is three.
Or are my eyes as faulty as my brain?
I thought you must be referring to the CDC graph, ok, so you meant the one on whale.to
You really think the trend line was affected by the introduction of the vaccines?
There is a plateauing effect around 1900 for which vaccines cannot be invoked as a cause. Although it looks as though there was a steep drop post-diphtheria vax, there is a lessening of the slope post-pertussis vax and we’d practically hit zero by the time the measles vax came in.
There are too many confounding variables (i.e. other factors) at play to say that vaccines had any effect but the overriding message is that “other factors” were clearly at play for most of the decline, if not all of it.
Did you ever see Hans Rosling’s program on BBC4 – it’s a brilliant use of modern graphical techniques to show how prosperity leads to longevity?
clip’s only 5 mins long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
Billy, thanks for admitting to that flattening out; I wish it hadn’t taken so long. Yes, compounding variables. The 1900 blip is shown as a single point, so may not be significant.
The lower flattening is shown as three points; still not many. But what this graph could suggest is that improving conditions had done as much good as they could, showing up as the graph levelling off, and then “mass immunisation” did the last bit.
Of course good conditions reduce disease fatalities. But that graph (which you linked to) is not inconsistent with vaccines reducing disease fatalities, too. That doesn’t mean that they do, of course, but it isn’t inconsistent with that graph.
Yes, I take your point – it is a graphic that shows something was at play over 200 years and vaccines (for 3 of the 4 causes of mortality) came in very late in the day after significant, indeed the majority of the, reduction in mortality had already taken place.
The 3 point plateau is curiously at and just post WW2 so there may be something in that. That there is no corresponding plateau at and following WWI may be confounded by the fact that there was less austerity after that war up until the 1929 crash which in turn could have been mitigated by the advent of antibiotics.
Of course, that is speculation and you’re right, true causes are not definitively identified.
Before some one picks me up on antibiotics I should have said indirectly mitigated – i.e. freeing up hospital beds, better health overall, therefore, less susceptibility to disease etc.
Scouse Billy, thanks. Of course it’s beyond any individual to tease out all causes and effects. This discussion and two others have taken up a lot of my time recently, but I promise I will critically review data that purports to support vaccination.
Thanks also for the statistics video; that’s a really beautiful graphic.
This clip demonstrates that :
(1) some vaccines can do serious harm.
(2) that some large scale vaccination programmes are promoted despite medical advice that they are dangerous to public health.
This clip doesn’t prove that vaccines don’t work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMeU-818-YA
Node, I think corruption in science started an accelerating increase in the 1980s, with Monetarism. I remember Thatcher saying that universities funding should increasingly come directly from industry, and things have got worse since then. But vaccination and immunisation go back hundreds of years, and so far as I know there used to be more independent and publicly funded research.
So I’m going to take a guess here and say that the more recent vaccines are the ones more likely to be backed by dodgy research.
I was particularly upset to see the accusations against Ben Goldacre, as there are many examples on his blog where he reveals selective disclosure of results and scientists coerced by non-disclosure clauses. Probably, no one is either all bad nor perfect, though obviously some will be better than others.
Good night all.
Fair enough, Clark.
I don’t know your thoughts on cholesterol and saturated fats – no, I’m not looking to start another topic.
Just to say that for the last 50 years, we have been told that saturated fat is bad and that cholesterol clogs arteries (I simplify but that’s the gist of it). I, along with many others, seriously question this too.
FWIW my diet is at times 75% or higher in healthy (sic) saturated fats and I am trim, fit and have reversed chronic atherosclerotic ischemia.
As I say, maybe now is not the time but I will be happy to return to this theme and debate it if others are so inclined but I leave it as food for thought and to give people a chance to prepare themselves should they so choose.