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.
Taking another look at that graph, Clark – I think I might need glasses.
It appears that the 3 point “plateau” actually corresponds to the years following 1929 after all. In fact, there are 4 points in question from 1925 to 1940. Maybe it really was the crash…
My link at 12.44am shows the US government in 1976 hyping bird flu and using a massive media campaign to scare people into a vaccination programme they knew to be dangerous.
Either someone demonstrates that Western governments have got more trustworthy in the last 40 years, or I have every right to mistrust modern vaccination campaigns.
And the really steep drop is 1940-1945! Well many will attest that the wartime diet was about the healthiest this country has ever known.
Who knows, but it’s an interesting pattern.
Node, sorry to disappoint but that swine flu “pandemic” a few years back takes the biscuit for interest conflicted shysters at the highest level.
Scouse Billy, I absolutely agree.
I added the line . .
“This clip doesn’t prove that vaccines don’t work”
. . . only to forestall anybody else making that irrelevant point. Maybe that was confusing.
Node, sure, I understand perfectly – I have some “experience” to say the least… 🙂
You said you were interested in consciousness and so forth. As a psychology graduate that was my abiding interest yet back then it was almost taboo, along with just about anything prefixed by “para”.
I have mentioned Tom Campbell and I thought you might be interested in his ideas. I think this might be of interest. Please feel free to bookmark it and watch when you are in the mood for some heavy concepts and have a couple of hours to indulge. I hope you will find it as inspiring as I did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CL_bU4O0A4
SB: When you are ready to discuss that PDF on Clark’s site, any page or point on it, let me know. You did claim it to be an exciting point of absolute truth for you, a touching act of faith it appeared, so I hoped you might buckle up and get around to it.
You did sincerely recommend I pay particular attention to it, remember. But when I did, and responded, you went disappointingly quiet.
Also, it would behoove you to summon up the courage to indicate where you think legitimate science starts, and ends. And – more to the point – where you consider medical science to be sound and correct, and at which point it suddenly gets all corrupt and New-World-Order-ly. That’s the point at which we could have some interesting discussion.
By your usual manner of reply, I’d have to make do with another tedious 2-hour YouTube video because you can’t seem to answer for yourself. (The abbreviation of “I would” because there’s the proviso that I’d never bother wasting my time with such a proxy reply.) Let’s see if we can talk directly for a change, not duelling YouTubes.
*
I did suggest that you would do anything to avoid answering the question about where “legitimate” science starts and ends. Nothing since from you has done anything but support that hypothesis. The ball is in your court!
SB
“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.”
You said you were eating loads of Brie. Presumably that’s for the K2?
Did you look at Gouda or Natto, or supplement tabs?
I’d like to hear more about how you approached this. How long did it take to reverse, dosage etc.
This is interesting in the context of this discussion.
I was watching Dawkins take on one of those Creationists recently and expected to have a good laugh, but as their discussion went on I realised that the very nice woman whom he was debating was not interested in the science.
She was simply concerned about the impact she felt science was having on humanity, on human beings.
She was expressing a fear of scientific or technological control.
I’d never quite seen it that way before, and even though I’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein many years before, that emotional element didn’t quite register as well as it should have done.
So thanks to that Creationist woman for that.
It’s Romanticism, of course.
Anyway, this article explores these issues:
“Movement’s doubts about climate change, vaccination, and other matters of science are tied to ideas of morality and belief in limited government”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/05/measles-vaccines-climate-god-conservatives-anti-science
I suspect she may have been carefully chosen, Herbie but I’ll take a look later.
Most important is the subject of K2 and the activation of Matrix GLA protein.
The thing is Herbie I was in terrible physical shape and it had crept up on me over many years. I couldn’t climb gentle slopes without having to stop to catch my breath and for my heart rate to subside from racing.
I bought into the message of the vegan doctors that a plant based diet would clean up the arterial placques – didn’t work. I kept researching and realised their flaw was their belief in the diet-heart and lipid hypotheses.
It was Dr Kate Rheaume-Bleue that first introduced me to K2 and hence lots of brie.
You are correct that natto could have worked just as well – although natto is hard to get hold of and perhaps even harder to stomach.
I am hoping to get some later today from a Chinese supermarket that has promised to order it.
Anyway regarding a protocol. I was really following a ketogenic diet which included large ammounts of K2:
Grass fed butter e.g. President (Kerrygold and Anchor used to be the defaults but I am hearing they may no longer be exclusively grass-fed)
Gold Medal Ghee (I have checked with the maker, exclusivel grass-fed!)
Plenty of Coconut Oil (KTC is fine IMO and much cheaper than the virgin, organic cold-pressed). Btw KTC has a high smoke point.
I totally avoid any seed oils.
Obviously no processed foods – I even make things like horseradish sauce from whole ingredients which are organic where possible.
Plenty of vegetables – mainly green leafy but also orange squashes and sweet potatoes for the vit A which is a co-factor for K2. I cook to break down the cell walls – not a believer in raw
Only meat I will touch is lamb unless I can get wild game – joints on the bone and organ meats are rich in vitamins.
Only grain I use is brown basmati rice – absolutely NO wheat.
Everything well seasoned with both celtic sea salt and himalayan pink rock salt.
Also plenty of herbs and spices – especially turmeric (must be taken with piperine from black pepper), garlic, coriander (detox), ginger.
Raw nuts in moderation especially walnuts for Omega 3 and brazils for selenium but also modest amounts of unsalted peanuts for Co-Q-10.
That’s a flavour of it – of course, regular excercise is also important.
I have found some supplements to be useful such as D3 and K2 (from natto i.e. MK-7) and recently have been trying Lions Mane Mushroom capsules – quite interesting for cognition esp. memory but jury’s still out.
It took a year to make a dramatic change although it has now been steady progress for a couple of years.
Hope that is useful. Let me know if you have any questions.
P.S. Herbie, regular detox is advisable.
I never eat breakfast and can go 8 hours without eating easily and will take zeolite (micronised pills not the liquid) with tablespoon of chlorella powder in a glass of filtered water and perhaps a mouthful of fresh coriander well masticated! then a long walk. Works for me because I have to pee a lot hence my walks take me through parkland with lots of bushes 🙂
Brilliant.
Thanks for that comprehensive reply, SB.
I noticed a vast improvement doing gingko and hawthorn, with cayenne, and cutting out bread, pasta, potatoes etc.
Just meat and side salad, eggs etc. No processed meats for the most part.
I’d like to try the natto food. Should be inexpensive, but it’s chock full of K2. I bought a natto based supplement which was £21, but I suspect it can be had cheaper than that.
Great to hear it worked for you.
Did you get tests to check, or are you going on the basis that things seem to be working better?
And yes, grass fed is so important.
I think myself that the emphasis on cutting out sat fats may have had something to do with the impact of trans fats, which are a poison really.
For those who can’t manage anything else, turmeric, garlic and ginger are a fairly easy beginning. Spiced teas. Hibiscus teas. These are easy additions.
Great stuff. Someone mentioned to me ages ago about K2, but I didn’t really look into it.
Thanks for the reminder.
Ah yes, Maureen Lipman. She’s rare among celebrities. After the 7/7 terror bombings in London, she stopped in her car and offered some punters, some council trash, some chavs, some TV viewers, some ordinary people, who were waiting at a bus stop, a lift to north London. Meanwhile Israeli “consular officials” were going round the hospitals. And reports that Netanyahu had had prior notification near Liverpool Street station, and had changed his itinerary accordingly, were getting sent down the memory hole or denied or subjected to “we didn’t mean it like that”.
Someone like her? Offering ordinary people, waiting at a bus stop, a lift in her car? Odd, eh?
Not if you realise it must have been like when Mordechai Vanunu was being hunted, and thousands of Jews in London were asked to help find him, call their local boarding houses and stuff.
So she got a few bits of morale intelligence in the car. Must have been interesting, the conversation. “Do you think it was Al Qaeda, then?” “People say it’s all to do with the Middle East.”
Oh and when the Zionist lobby were finishing off Ken Livingstone’s career, up pops Maureen saying, oh so jokily, how she had put a contract out on Livingstone’s life.
Think I’m joking? Click here.
Can anyone spell sayan?
Craig – This is the line people are fed, that the victims in German camps were Jews plus other ‘discriminated against’ minorities such as homosexuals and gypsies.
Actually at least half of the victims were non-Jewish Russians or Ukrainians. Many were Germans who weren’t in any of the mentioned groups.
Victims include those who were worked to death, or executed before they got a chance to do any work, or died for any reason as prisoners in concentration camps (the number of deaths from natural causes among prisoners was negligible) as well as those who were murdered in the process of ‘extermination’.
And how many people are actually aware of that fact in western Europe, the fact that at least as many non-Jews were killed in German camps as Jews?
Also factor in that a lot of the people classified by the Nazis and other fascist anti-Semites as ‘Jewish’ were anything but, up until the time they got arrested. Many had one grandparent who’d been Jewish, or maybe both parents, or whatever, but felt that the last thing they wanted was back to the rabbis and the exclusivism and all that Jewish stuff. Although it’s easy to understand that they became more ‘Jewish’ once they’d been arrested for being ‘Jewish’ and were made to live and die and fight with others who’d been subjected to the same plight.
Where have I noticed the greatest and vilest contempt for these people? Among Zionists, that’s where, many of whom routinely refer to these victims as “soap”, with connotations of “pathetic people who just took it”.
On at least one commemoration at Auschwitz, the fucking Israeli airforce did a fly-by. If that’s not shitting on the memory of the victims, what is?
One reason why this is very important is that those who don’t understand about the WW2 killings of prisoners in the area that includes the Ukraine, Poland and southwest Russia haven’t got a hope of understanding much about what’s going in the Ukraine now and the push towards a major war in Europe, also right now.
@Clark
“Mass/energy is conserved.
I agree! I have never encountered any well-established exception to this law, unless quantum fluctuations count as such.”
You should have been there just after the big bang, mate! Nobody would have said energy was being conserved then! 🙂
Which isn’t to say cosmologists have got much of a clue. The thrashing about to back up string theory is just ridiculous.
Herbie,
Here is Dr Kate Rheaume-Bleue giving a lot of detail on K2 – she wrote a book, Vitamin K2 and The Calcium Paradox which I’m a third of the way through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2-qqQCD4xM
There is a dedicated unit at the University of Maastricht, headed by Prof. Caes Vermeer that is investigating vitamin K (both 1 and 2 but K2 is much less researched and promises much IMO). One of his leading researchers, Leon Schurgers recently gave a heads up on where they are and what they are looking at here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OniCE8lJZJ8
The funny thing is he was worried about saturated fat but was politely reassured that that’s been shown to be utter nonsense and now can enjoy his butter without guilt!
N_ (and Scouse Billy earlier), I don’t bother speculating about the energy balance of the big bang. Really, you could not have picked a more distant, theoretical example. The theory of the big bang is based upon the conservation of mass/energy, not vice-versa. This really is the most silly way of reasoning that you’ve presented. You may as well throw your hands in the air, give up on physics and claim that everything that has happened is because Gerry Anderson secured a large enough advance.
So you are happy to simply accept Terence McKenna’s “one free miracle”, Clark?
How many miracles are you prepared to accept?
The big miracle of the universe, or of reality, is that it seems to improve. It evolves and diversifies.
If you want to challenge mass/energy conservation you need to give better examples and/or experimental results. Why should you single out zero as the universe’s initial energy budget? Even if you do, can’t you take the expansion energy and the gravitational potential as opposites that cancel? There are lots of possibilities.
But it would be utterly stupid to abandon a principle that’s confirmed every time we test it just because you don’t know why a postulated big bang happened.
But you’re leading me around by the nose again. You still haven’t answered about where lies your boundary between legitimate science and fraud. Or are you claiming conservation of mass/energy is fraudulent?
Do you not
Fuck it. You’re just fucking winding me up for your own amusement, are you not? That’s why you treat me like a fucking idiot; you’re fucking laughing. Fuck OFF.
You’ve no business on the site of a man who risked all by telling the truth about people’s suffering. Go to hell.
When you’ve entirely demolished all honesty, what are you going to put in its place? Torture?
Clark
Hey you ok. It’s only words in cyberspace…take care.
John
Has Soused Bully summoned up the courage to discuss his own references yet? …. checks back …. Nope! It appears not. Ah well, perhaps the morrow will bring Billy a stiffened backbone.
John Spencer-Davis, thanks, no, I’m not OK. I’m losing all faith in human nature. I’m losing hope. It’s not just words, it’s the constant attempts to dominate, to set the agenda, to control. There is no point in a life among individuals that do nothing but attempt to control each other. There is no hope for such a species. I do not belong among others.
@Clark – Are you in a bad mood or something? I was just saying that according to the theory of the big bang (and I know it’s just a theory), energy wasn’t conserved during the big expansion. That’s not silly reasoning; it’s a true statement about the ideas held by cosmologists. If you start arguing that yeah sure but the biggy bang-bang theory is based on energy conservation, you’re…well, flapping. You said “I have never encountered any well-established exception to this law“, so I told you one – or something on a higher level than an exception. I wasn’t looking for any nastiness. I don’t have faith in either energy conservation or the big bang. You say you don’t speculate on whether, assuming the latter happened, the former held or not, but be aware that if old bangers did happen and energy wasn’t conserved for a while after it, then it’s unlikely to hold now. Do you have a big personal investment in the absolute eternal truth of energy conservation or something?
Beware “you can’t think this, because if you do you might as well think that” lines of thought.
I’ve just read your other posts, Clark. Hey, cheer up a bit, man! You do good stuff here; it’s appreciated.
(sends good vibes)
John Spencer-Davis, it isn’t just words at all. Scouse Billy comes here to encourage as many people as possible to abandon as much truth as possible, to believe as many conspiracy theories as possible, the more outrageous the better.
And when he has, Habbabkuk demolishes them and holds them up for ridicule.
This is about controlling the narrative. It’s about destroying any semblance of conversation here, to prevent any clarity from being achieved.
So you know the truth, eh, Clark – the sheer arrogance of your quasi-religious dogma is stunning.
You wish to “control the narrative” – who do you think you are – God?
I question narratives or “conventional wisdom” – I do not coerce anyone to do or think anything they don’t want to. You would prefer that there is no counter argument…
Words fail me.
Anyone who would like to hear from a doctor who gave up her $300,000 p.a. job to seek truth and serve humanity may be fascinated by her story here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vu9YJ4VHow
Clark, you could follow RoS’s advice and simply ignore.