Arthur Goldberg and the Six Day War

Arthur J. Goldberg, another of the resolution's drafters, concurred that Resolution 242 does not dictate the extent of the withdrawal, and added that this matter should be negotiated between the parties:

"Does Resolution 242 as unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council require the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from all of the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war? 

The answer is NO. 

In the resolution, the words the and all are omitted. Resolution 242 calls for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 conflict, without specifying the extent of the withdrawal. The resolution, therefore, neither commands nor prohibits total withdrawal.

If the resolution is ambiguous, and purposely so, on this crucial issue, how is the withdrawal issue to be settled? 

By direct negotiations between the concerned parties. Resolution 242 calls for agreement between them to achieve a peaceful and accepted settlement. Agreement and acceptance necessarily require negotiations."

He is one of the concerned parties.

Tarpley :

"It is clear that the B'nai B'rith is an abject tool of British intelligence, run and directed to serve the interests of British imperial policy, and not the interests of Jews, nor even of B'nai B'rith members. The one peculiarity of B'nai B'rith in comparison to the other organizations launched by Palmerston and his three stooges, is that B'nai B'rith will be used for a wider variety of tasks in various countries and epochs. Therefore, the B'nai B'rith will be more permanent in its continuous organization than its Mazzinian counterparts, among which it stands out as the most specialized.

At the end of this century, one of the tasks assigned to the B'nai B'rith will be to direct, with the help of other Mazzinian agents, the dismemberment and partition of the Ottoman Empire. This is the state the British will call "the sick man of Europe." Historically, the Ottoman Empire offers surprising tolerance to its ethnic minorities. In order to blow up the empire, that will have to be changed into brutal racial oppression on the Mazzini model."

"An irony that made the circumstance all the more agonising for me personally, was that [Associate Justice] Abe Fortas had never wanted to sit on the Supreme Court in the first place.

The events leading to his appointment began on the afternoon of July 16 1965, when Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife visited me in the Oval Office. During our conversation Galbraith said that he believed Arthur Goldberg, then an Associate Justice on the Court would step down from his position to take a job that woul be more challenging to him. Galbraith speculated that he might accept an appointment either as secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (a position soon to be vacated by Tony Celebrezze) or as Ambassador of the United Nations, to replace Adlai Stevenson, who had died three days earlier. Frankly, I was surprised. I was aware that Goldberg, an activist, became restless on the bench from time to time, and I knew that as Secretary of Labour under President Kennedy he had yearned for more freedom and activity. But I could not imagine him giving up his seat on the Supreme Court.

Three days later, on July 19, Justice Goldberg flew to Illinois with me to attend Ambassador Stevenson's funeral. I mentioned that I had heard reports that he mighty ten down from the Court and therefore might be available for another assignment. He told me that these reports had substance.

I said that I would like to see him in the Cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, because that was a department which required imagination and leadership at the top. He replied that the job sounded fascinating but that he had become increasingly interested in foreign affairs.

That was the extent of our conversation that day. I asked Justice Goldberg to "think about it some more" and said that we would discuss it late. The next day, he called Jack Valenti and told him that the job he would accept was the UN ambassadorship, if I offered it to him. I appointed him to the United Nations and I felt that he was an excellent choice. He was a skilled arbiter and a fair-minded man, and he had experience in both domestic and foreign affairs, qualities that I believed would make him an outstanding representative of our nation in that crucial international organisation.

Subsequently, I nominated Abe Fortas to fill the vacant seat on the Court."

NEW YORK (Jan. 9)

Adlai E. Stevenson, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, has been named to receive the America’s Democratic Legacy award, given annually by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, it was announced today by Henry Edward Schultz, the League’s national chairman.

The ADL award, a silver medallion, has been given each year since 1948 to individuals and institutions for “distinguished contributions to the enrichment of America’s democratic heritage.” 

Previous winners include former Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Herbert Lehman, among others. Last year, the award was presented to Harvard, Notre Dame and Brandeis Universities.

LONDON (Oct. 22)

The triennial convention of the B’nai B’rith here, held in connection with the international observance of the 120th anniversary of the fraternal order, today adopted a resolution expressing the hope that the Soviet Government would extend to Russian Jews equality of treatment and freedom to practice their religion.

Messages from retiring Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Labor Party leader Harold Wilson, Adlai Stevenson, head of the United States delegation to the United Nations and other dignitaries were read at a banquet held here last night to mark the anniversary.

Philip M. Klutznick, former international president of B’nai B’rith and former United States Ambassador to the UN, was the guest of honor at the banquet. He said that “the promised land envisaged by B’nai B’rith is the concept of a meaningful Jewish life perpetuated despite new challenges.”

Jack Morrison, Grand President of the British B’nai B’rith, presented Mr. Klutznick with a check for $1,000 for the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Fund of which the latter is chairman.

NEW YORK (Jan. 14)

President Kennedy today hailed the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League "as a spokesman for equality and justice, and as a guardian of democratic rights" which is "making important contributions" to America’s democratic legacy.

The President made his statement in a message to Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the League, in connection with the presentation of the organization’s annual "America’s Democratic Legacy Award" to Adlai E. Stevenson, chairman of the United States delegation to the United Nations. The award was given today at a luncheon culminating the ADL’s 49th annual meeting, at the Plaza Hotel here.

In accepting the award, Mr. Stevenson stressed that the United States "has already proved beyond any possible doubt, for ourselves and all the world, that there is no barrier of race or worship or culture which the unflinching practice of democratic brotherhood cannot cross." Among the speakers today was Philip M. Klutznick, honorary president of B’nai B’rith, and United States Ambassador to the United Nations, where he represents the delegation headed by Mr. Stevenson on the UN Economic and Social Council.

America's 'Young America' movement:

Slaveholders and the B'nai B'rith

by Anton Chaitkin

Chorus: Ten years from now, in 1860, Lord Palmerston's quest for world empire will enter its most critical phase: the American Civil War, provoked by Young America and other pro-British networks. A French army will be in Mexico, propping up Maximilian. Britain will ready the fleet and send troops to Canada. The only support for Lincoln's beleaguered Union will come from the Russian Empire of Czar Alexander II, with two Russian fleets being sent to American ports in 1863 with orders from the czar to join Lincoln in fighting Britain and France should general war break out. Mazzini, Urquhart, and their assets will pull out all the stops to isolate Russia and blow up eastern Europe.
In the midst of these preparations, we have the emergence of Young Israel—B'nai B'rith—as an ideal British weapon against both the United States and Russia, and also against other nations. Lord Palmerston's interest in Zionism was stimulated during the Middle East crisis of 1840, when France backed a rebellious satrap of the Ottoman sultan. The British found that while the French were the official protectors of the Roman Catholics in the Turkish Empire, and the Russians the patrons of the Orthodox, the British had no group of Anglicans or Puritans to sponsor. The British turned their attention to Armenians and Jews. Palmerston ordered British diplomats to take Jewish communities under their protection, since Britain was "the natural guardian of the Jews." This gave the British a foot in the door in the Middle East, and also in Russia, including Russian Poland, where 50% of world Jewry then resided. At this time, Palmerston's son-in-law, the Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote that "it may be safely asserted that [the Jews] contemplate a restoration to the soil of Palestine." Shaftesbury was talking through his hat: He admitted that many Jews "will prefer a seat in the House of Commons in England to a seat under their vines and fig trees in Palestine." But the British resolve to settle Jews in Palestine was clear.
The founder of Zionism in its modern, British-sponsored form is not Theodor Herzl, but a certain Moses Hess. Hess converted Friedrich Engels to communism, and wrote parts of Marx's German Ideology. In 1861, Hess will write Rome and Jerusalem, which attacks Moses Mendelssohn for the idea that Judaism is a religion and a culture. For Hess, Judaism is a race in Mazzini's blood-and-soil sense, and therefore must have a homeland. Yet another of Palmerston's theme parks will open its doors.

In the B'nai B'rith's official, authorized history, it says: "B'nai B'rith's relationship to the Civil War presents something of a mystery." They say that the arrest of the B'nai B'rith's leader in Washington as a Confederate spymaster was unfair. They say that no one can account for why the group was not pro-Union, whereas most Jews were pro-Union, and B'nai B'rith's lodges were almost all located in the North. Indeed, Jewish soldiers in the Union Army were intensely proud, mostly German-speaking immigrant, anti-slavery Republicans.
To solve the mystery, we go back 20 years before the start of the American Civil War.
British Foreign Minister Palmerston launched Zionism in 1840. He wrote that the Jews desired to return to Palestine (Abba Eban points out that the Jews knew nothing about this); and a month later, the British landed troops in Palestine for the first time.
B'nai B'rith was started officially in 1843 by some obscure Freemasons in New York, as a secret society "like Freemasonry" for Jews. B'nai B'rith was to shape and lead a particular political faction, with a particular agenda, within the Jewish community.
The agenda for this project came out in a famous speech given two years later at South Carolina College. The speaker was Edwin DeLeon, from a Jewish family in South Carolina that was already notorious for its involvement in the slave trade and in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. DeLeon was later a leader of the Confederate Secret Service.
DeLeon praised his teacher at the school, Thomas Cooper, an English atheist and Lord Shelburne's adventurer, who had first proposed that the South secede from the Union. DeLeon hailed Cooper as a tender-hearted religious heretic and "an earnest ... disciple of the school of Bentham and Malthus."
DeLeon said, "There is a 'Young Germany,' a 'Young France,' and a 'Young England'—and why not a 'Young America'?" He told the students: Any great civil convulsion comes from a source that is unexpected and obscure. In the French Revolution, the priests and nobles were only the flax with which the flame was kindled. But those who first applied the spark were the filthy, obscure savants of the Englightenment. DeLeon reminded the students that the actors in that drama were only its creatures, not its creators.
He then proposed revolutionary military action as the idea for his Young America, to spread what he called "freedom"—by force.
The "Young America" idea first bore its bitter fruit when U.S. President James Polk ordered American troops to invade Mexico. Young Congressman Abraham Lincoln exposed the President as a fraud; he denounced the Mexican war as a slaveowners' conspiracy that would wreck our country. Lincoln was driven out of politics until 12 years later.
This British project matured in the mid-1850s, and its active focus shifted to the West. There were two important partners out there: Isaac M. Wise, a B'nai B'rith Midwest leader based in Cincinnati; and Killian H. Van Rensselaer, a British military operative and Scottish Rite Mason northern leader, also based in Cincinnati. Between 1854 and 1860, they spread a pro-slavery, secessionist-terrorist group along the route extending down the Mississippi valley to Louisiana and Texas: the Knights of the Golden Circle. Wise's B'nai B'rith organization spread southward along the identical route. Their plan was to spread slavery into Latin America and the U.S. West, and break up the U.S.A. into several small countries.
In Louisiana, U.S. Sen. Judah Benjamin and Scottish Rite Southern Mason leader Albert Pike worked together on this terrorist secession project. There is a bust of Albert Pike in New Orleans, celebrating his work in that pre-war southern base for the Scottish Rite, the Knights, and B'nai B'rith. Judah Benjamin's relative (his uncle's brother Manny) had earlier written the masonic order creating the Northern Scottish Rite organization, in which Wise and Van Rensselaer were now leaders.

A trail of treason

To start the Civil War, this pre-organized anti-Union terrorist force would strike for secession in the South. Those who stayed in the North during the War would be known as "Copperheads," with headquarters in Ohio.
Before the war, Isaac Wise had two B'nai B'rith local leaders in Cleveland: Simon Wolf and Benjamin F. Peixotto. Wolf and Peixotto also worked as political agents for Democratic Party boss August Belmont, the U.S. representative of the Rothschild banks—chief moneybags of the British crown, and British puppets. Banker Belmont paid for the Knights of the Golden Circle and Young America projects, which he helped plan while he was U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands.
Benjamin Peixotto was editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a violently pro-Copperhead paper which furious citizens forced to shut down during the war. Wolf and Peixotto ran a Hebrew amateur acting group, which included their non-Hebrew friend John Wilkes Booth.
The war started in 1861. Simon Wolf went to Washington as the B'nai B'rith representative in the national capital, joining Albert Pike's Southern Scottish Rite and Judah Benjamin's Confederate Secret Service operations. Wolf was almost immediately arrested by U.S. Army Counterintelligence director Lafayette Baker, who worked directly for President Abraham Lincoln and for Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The B'nai B'rith was understood to be a Confederate intelligence front. B'nai B'rith's official history says that the "cruel" and "ruthless" Colonel Baker had Simon Wolf arrested "solely because he was a member of B'nai B'rith." At the time, they say, Wolf was "defending several Southern Jews arrested in Washington and charged with being Confederate spies."
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, Isaac Wise's cohort Julius Ochs got in trouble when his wife, Bertha, was arrested for smuggling drugs to the Confederate Army in her son's baby carriage. Later, Julius and Bertha's son, the white supremacist Adolph Ochs, married Isaac Wise's daughter, and then bought the New York Times. Their daughter married Arthur Sulzberger.
The U.S. Navy won an 1862 Mississippi River battle, and the U.S. Army took Memphis, Tennessee. Isaac Wise's Memphis B'nai B'rith agent, the British-born Abraham E. Frankland, was arrested, and admitted being a Confederate spymaster. Julius Ochs sent him supplies in jail the same day, and Frankland was released on a $20,000 bond. We'll hear more of this degenerate Frankland shortly.
The next year, B'nai B'rith leader Isaac Wise was nominated at an Ohio Convention to run for state senator on the radical anti-Union Copperhead election ticket. Wise's running mate for Ohio governor was Clement Vallandigham, then in exile in Canada, whom President Lincoln had banished from the country as America's leading traitor.
The B'nai B'rith leader's candidacy caused a crisis and a newspaper scandal. The Cincinnati Jewish community was overwhelmingly pro-Union. His own synagogue issued a formal demand for him to withdraw; Wise was forced off the ticket.

The conspiracy to kill Lincoln

At the close of the war, on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln while another man simultaneously attacked Secretary of State William Seward. Lincoln died the next day.
Here are some basic facts of the murder. Some months before he shot Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth deposited funds in the Montreal, Canada bank regularly used by the operatives of Confederate Secret Service head Judah Benjamin. John Surrat, a regular Judah Benjamin agent, confessed to plotting with Booth to abduct Lincoln, and admitted to using that Montreal bank for Benjamin's funds.
In the museum which they keep at the assassination site at Ford's Theatre, the National Parks Service displays a decoding sheet, found by police in John Wilkes Booth's trunk. Displayed alongside it is a matching coding device which was found in the office of Judah Benjamin.
At the time John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, Booth's old acquaintance Benjamin Peixotto was international president of the B'nai B'rith. Only hours before going to Ford's Theatre to shoot the President, Booth met with his old friend B'nai B'rith Washington chief Simon Wolf, for a confidential discussion over some drinks. Simon Wolf later claimed that at this meeting, Booth told him about a woman who had turned down Booth's marriage proposal. That evening, Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln, and Wolf attributed the killing to Booth's anguish over his broken heart. (So, the "lone assassin" story of John Hinckley and Jody Foster is an old story.) Simon Wolf was later a prime founder of the Anti-Defamation League.

Albert Pike's Ku Klux Klan

After the war, the Ku Klux Klan was started up in Tennessee to stop newly freed blacks from voting. With their occult-satanic rituals and costumes, the KKK burned and tortured blacks and pro-U.S.A. whites. The Klan's national headquarters was in Memphis, where KKK leaders Albert Pike and Nathan B. Forrest lived and attended lodge together.
Memphis B'nai B'rith leader Abraham Frankland was an intimate friend of Albert Pike. Frankland had been in the Pike-Benjamin spy apparatus, and wrote a blistering attack on the U.S. attempt to reconstruct the South under equal rights. Frankland now stayed on to aid Pike in his postwar task.
A notebook of Frankland's Kabbalistic Researches is kept in the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati. It is a compendium of espionage ciphers, black magic symbols, masonic ritual, and pagan religion. In his preface, Frankland acknowledges aid to his religious research by Albert Gallatin Mackey, grand secretary of the Scottish Rite, "and the Book Lohar on the Sephiroth, kindly loaned to me by Gen'l Albert Pike."
KKK boss Pike was simultaneously working on his own satanic masterpiece, Morals and Dogma, published in 1871.
On page 38 of Kabbalistic Researches, Frankland lists assorted gods passed down by tradition from ancient times, including "Four of the thirteen great Gods of Assyria," plus the god "Bel." Mackey writes that Frankland's god Bel is a form of Baal, and was worshipped by the Babylonians as their chief deity. This is, of course, the false god which the Old Testament Jewish prophets fought to expunge from Israel. Mackey says that since 1871 the Royal Arch Masonic system has combined Bel with "Jah" for Jehova and "On" for the Egyptian sun god, into "JahBelOn," as an "explanation" of God. The Hebrew menorah blasphemously used in the Royal Arch Masonic ritual is displayed in the Alexandria, Virginia masonic temple.
Other pages of Frankland's notebook contain "Cypher" and "Private Cypher," "Philosophical and Hermetic Alphabet," "Cypher of the Rose Cross," and "Ten Cabalistic Spheres."
In his Morals and Dogma, KKK boss Albert Pike celebrates the collaboration between these two Memphis masonic chiefs, Pike and Frankland, at the height of the bloodiest assassination wave in U.S. history. Pike says, "One is filled with admiration, on penetrating into the Sanctuary of the Kabalah, at seeing a doctrine so logical, so simple, and at the same time so absolute ... a philosophy summed up by counting on one's fingers.... Ten ciphers and twenty-two letters, a triangle, a square, and a circle—these are all the elements of the Kabalah."
So, upon the triumph of their KKK, Albert Pike appointed Abraham Frankland the head of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry for the state of Tennessee, and an emeritus member of the Supreme Council. Simultaneously, Isaac Wise appointed Abraham Frankland the president of the B'nai B'rith district for Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas.
At the beginning of this century, Isaac Wise's grandson Adolph Ochs, the owner of the New York Times, wrote a series of editorials attacking black voting rights in those southern states. This vicious editorial campaign helped swing the North behind the new anti-black Jim Crow laws which were then being written, which finally reversed rights gained by Union blood during the civil war. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, a great power in the B'nai B'rith, has remained in control of the New York Times ever since.

Afterword

Chorus: Sometimes persons who have been used by British intelligence manage to assert their own humanity and rebel. Take the example of Simón Bolívar, the liberator of several countries in Ibero-America. After a lifetime of cooperation with Bentham and his agents, Bolívar realized his mistake and repudiated his former associate. This took the form, first of all, of an 1828 decree banning in Colombia all secret societies and fraternities, described as groups "disrupting public tranquility and the established order."

At about the same time, Bolívar issued another proclamation outlawing the teaching of Bentham in the university. Bolívar attacked Bentham and his school as "opposed to religion, to morality, and to the tranquility of the people," and as a contributing cause in conspiracies and disorders in Bogotá. Bolivar concluded that youth was being "given a deadly poison through those authors, which destroyed their religion and morals."

To replace Bentham, Bolívar mandated study of Latin, morals and natural law, constitutional law, and the foundations of the Roman Catholic faith.

Palmerston launches Young Turks

to permanently control Middle East

by Joseph Brewda

Chorus: It is clear that the B'nai B'rith is an abject tool of British intelligence, run and directed to serve the interests of British imperial policy, and not the interests of Jews, nor even of B'nai B'rith members. The one peculiarity of B'nai B'rith in comparison to the other organizations launched by Palmerston and his three stooges, is that B'nai B'rith will be used for a wider variety of tasks in various countries and epochs. Therefore, the B'nai B'rith will be more permanent in its continuous organization than its Mazzinian counterparts, among which it stands out as the most specialized.

At the end of this century, one of the tasks assigned to the B'nai B'rith will be to direct, with the help of other Mazzinian agents, the dismemberment and partition of the Ottoman Empire. This is the state the British will call "the sick man of Europe." Historically, the Ottoman Empire offers surprising tolerance to its ethnic minorities. In order to blow up the empire, that will have to be changed into brutal racial oppression on the Mazzini model.

In 1862, during the time of the American Civil War, Mazzini will call on all his agents anywhere near Russia to foment revolt as a way of causing trouble for Alexander II. A bit later, with the help of Young Poland, Mazzini will start a Young Ottoman movement out of an Adam Smith translation project in Paris. In 1876, the Young Ottomans will briefly seize power in Constantinople. They will end a debt moratorium, pay off the British, declare free trade, and bring in Anglo-French bankers. They will be quickly overthrown; but the same network will soon make a comeback as the Young Turks, whose rule will finally destroy the Ottoman Empire.

In 1908, the Committee for Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks, carried out a military coup, overthrew the sultan, and took power in the Ottoman Turkish empire. Once in power, they carried out a racist campaign of suppressing all non-Turkish minorities. Within four years, their anti-minority campaigns provoked the Balkan wars of 1912-13, among Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. By 1914, these wars had triggered World War I, with Turkey becoming an ally of Germany.

Within seven years of coming into power, the Young Turks destroyed the Ottoman Empire. British intelligence had manipulated every nationalist group in the Empire, both the Young Turks, and their opponents.

When the Young Turks took power, the Ottoman Empire still included Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula. The empire still included much of the Balkans: half of Greece, half of Bulgaria, half of Serbia, and all of Albania. Its land area was much bigger than present-day Turkey.

Although most of the population of the Ottoman empire were Turks, there were also large numbers of Slavs, Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds. The Ottoman empire was a multi-ethnic empire, as were the nearby Austrian and Russian empires.

The Young Turks came to power waving the banner of democracy, but they soon picked up the banner of pan-Turkism. The idea was to form a state that included all the Turkic peoples of Asia. Since half of these people lived in Russia, this policy meant a collision with Russia.

But pan-Turkism was not created by the Young Turks or even in Turkey. It was first called for in the 1860s by a Hungarian Zionist named Arminius Vambery, who had become an adviser to the sultan, but who secretly worked for Lord Palmerston and the British Foreign Office. Vambery later tried to broker a deal between the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl and the sultan, over the creation of Israel.

The Young Turks also raised the banner of a pan-Islamic state. The idea was to bring all the Muslim peoples of the world into one empire, whether or not they were Turkish. This was another goal that meant conflict with Russia.

This idea was also not created by the Young Turks or in Turkey. It was first called for in the 1870s by an English nobleman named Wilfred Blunt, whose family had created the Bank of England. Blunt was a top British intelligence official who advocated using Islam to destroy Russia. Blunt's family later patronized the British KGB spy "Kim" Philby.

While the Young Turks were pushing the pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic movements, the British were also boosting all the anti-Turkish independence movements within the empire. They were supporting Arab nationalism, led by Lawrence of Arabia. They were supporting Serbian nationalism, led by the British agent Seton-Watson; Albanian nationalism, led by Lady Dunham; and Bulgarian nationalism, led by Noel Buxton. All of these peoples wanted to break free from the Ottoman Empire; but they also claimed the land of their neighbors.

For example, the British supported the idea of carving a "Greater Armenia" out of Turkey, Iran, and Russia. This "Greater Armenia" had no possibility of existing. None of the Great Powers, including Britain, really wanted it. The Kurds, who lived in the same area, didn't want it. But the British told the Armenians they supported their plans.

At the same time, the British were also telling the Kurds they supported the idea of "Greater Kurdistan." As the map shows, the proposed territories of "Greater Kurdistan" and "Greater Armenia" were almost identical.

In 1915, during World War I, the Kurds killed about 1 million Armenians. The Young Turks, who had been put in power by the British, used the Kurds (who thought they had the support of the British) to slaughter the Armenians (who also thought they had the support of the British). The British then used this genocide as a justification for trying to eliminate Turkey.

In fact, the next year, the British and French got together to plan the division of the Ottoman Empire between themselves. According to the plan, which only partially worked, Turkey itself would be reduced to a tiny area on the Black Sea. The rest of the empire would go to Britain and France.

B'nai B'rith and the Young Turks

But who were these "Young Turks," who so efficiently destroyed the empire?

The founder of the Young Turks was an Italian B'nai B'rith official named Emmanuel Carasso. Carasso set up the Young Turk secret society in the 1890s in Salonika, then part of Turkey, and now part of Greece. Carasso was also the grand master of an Italian masonic lodge there, called "Macedonia Resurrected." The lodge was the headquarters of the Young Turks, and all the top Young Turk leadership were members.

The Italian masonic lodges in the Ottoman Empire had been set up by a follower of Giuseppe Mazzini named Emmanuel Veneziano, who was also a leader of B'nai B'rith's European affiliate, the Universal Israelite Alliance.

During the Young Turk regime, Carasso continued to play a leading role. He met with the sultan, to tell him that he was overthrown. He was in charge of putting the sultan under house arrest. He ran the Young Turk intelligence network in the Balkans. And he was in charge of all food supplies in the empire during World War I.

Another important area was the press. While in power, the Young Turks ran several newspapers, including The Young Turk, whose editor was none other than the Russian Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky had been educated as a young man in Italy. He later described Mazzini's ideas as the basis for the Zionist movement.

Jabotinsky arrived in Turkey shortly after the Young Turks seized power, to take over the paper. The paper was owned by a member of the Turkish cabinet, but it was funded by the Russian Zionist federation, and managed by B'nai B'rith. The editorial policy of the paper was overseen by a Dutch Zionist named Jacob Kann, who was the personal banker of the king and queen of the Netherlands.

Jabotinsky later created the most anti-Arab of all the Zionist organizations, the Irgun. His followers in Israel today are the ones most violently opposed to the Peres-Arafat peace accords.

Another associate of Carasso was Alexander Helphand, better known as Parvus, the financier of the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions. Shortly after 1905, Parvus moved to Turkey, where he became the economics editor of another Young Turk newspaper called The Turkish Homeland. Parvus became a business partner of Carasso in the grain trade, and an arms supplier to the Turkish army during the Balkan wars. He later returned to Europe, to arrange the secret train that took Lenin back to Russia, in 1917.

Of course, there were also some Turks who helped lead the Young Turk movement. For example, Talaat Pasha. Talaat was the interior minister and dictator of the regime during World War I. He had been a member of Carasso's Italian masonic lodge in Salonika. One year prior to the 1908 coup, Talaat became the grand master of the Scottish Rite Masons in the Ottoman Empire. If you go to the Scottish Rite headquarters in Washington, D.C., you can find that most of the Young Turk leaders were officials in the Scottish Rite.

But who founded the Scottish Rite in Turkey? One of the founders was the grand master of the Scottish Rite in France, Adolph Cremieux, who also happened to be the head of the B'nai B'rith's European affiliate. Cremieux had been a leader of Mazzini's Young France, and helped put the British stooge Napoleon III into power.

The British controller: Aubrey Herbert

You can find the story of the Young Turks in the B'nai B'rith and Scottish Rite archives, but you cannot find it in history books. The best public account is found in the novel Greenmantle, whose hero is a British spy who led the Young Turks. Carasso appears in the novel under the name Carusso. The author, John Buchan, who was a British intelligence official in World War I, later identified the novel's hero as Aubrey Herbert.

In real life, Herbert was from one of the most powerful noble families in England. The family held no fewer than four earldoms. His repeated contact with Carasso and other Young Turk leaders is a matter of public record. Herbert's grandfather had been a patron of Mazzini and died leading revolutionary mobs in Italy in 1848. His father was in charge of British Masonry in the 1880s and 1890s. His uncle was the British ambassador to the United States. During World War I, Herbert was the top British spymaster in the Middle East. Lawrence of Arabia later identified Herbert as having been, at one time, the head of the Young Turks.

The U.S. State Department also played a role in the conspiracy. From 1890 through World War I, there were three U.S. ambassadors to Turkey: Oscar Straus, Abraham Elkin, and Henry Morgenthau. All three were friends of Simon Wolf. And all three were officials of B'nai B'rith.

Why England Slept - by John F. Kennedy

King Edward VII and the American Civil War

Born in 1841, Edward VII had the typical Saxe-Coburg-Gotha mug, like the current heir apparent. Edward VII was a pupil of Lord Palmerston, with whom he discussed a Russian alliance during the mid-1860s. The young Edward was also close to Palmerston’s stooge Napoleon III, and the Empress Eugenie.

In that 1866 war, Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, sympathized with Prussia. But Edward supported Austria, even when Austria was crushed by Prussia at Königgrätz. In 1866, Edward favored what he called an Anglo-French Entente to contain Prussia. This was already the germ of the London-Paris Entente Cordiale of nearly 40 years later. Hostility to Prussia and later to Germany is thus the one fixed point of Edward VII’s career. What is reflected here is classical Venetian geopolitics as applied by the British. For centuries, London’s maxim has been to ally with the second strongest continental power to destroy the strongest continental power. Until 1870, the British perceived Russia to be the strongest land power. In the 1870s that abruptly changed with the emergence of a united Germany. Edward VII was quicker than other elements of the British oligarchy to take note of that momentous shift.

Edward visited Canada and the United States in the fall of 1860, helping to give a final push to secession and civil war. In 1862 he was in Egypt and the Middle East. In 1875-76 Edward visited India, where he helped to prepare the Afghan war of 1878, which was waged against the influence of Russia. One of the members of Edward’s party on this tour was his fellow rake, lifelong friend, and political ally, Lord Carrington.

Edward at Niagara Falls, 1860

I quote The Enemy :

 

In 1860, Edward undertook the first tour of North America by an heir to the British throne. His genial good humour and confident bonhomie made the tour a great success.

 

He inaugurated the Victoria Bridge, Montreal, across the St Lawrence River, and laid the cornerstone of Parliament Hill, Ottawa. He watched Charles Blondin traverse Niagara Falls by highwire, and stayed for three days with President James Buchanan at the White House. Buchanan accompanied the Prince to Mount Vernon, to pay his respects at the tomb of George Washington. Vast crowds greeted him everywhere. He met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Prayers for the royal family were said in Trinity Church, New York, for the first time since 1776.

 

The four-month tour throughout Canada and the United States considerably boosted Edward's confidence and self-esteem, and had many diplomatic benefits for Great Britain.

 

Edward had hoped to pursue a career in the British Army, but his mother vetoed an active military career. His ranks were honorary; he was gazetted a lieutenant-colonel without experience or any examinations in 1858.

 

In September 1861, Edward was sent to Germany, supposedly to watch military manoeuvres, but actually in order to engineer a meeting between him and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, the eldest daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark and his wife Louise. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had already decided that Edward and Alexandra should marry. They met at Speyer on 24 September under the auspices of his elder sister, Victoria, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858.

 

Edward's elder sister, acting upon instructions from their mother, had met Princess Alexandra at Strelitz in June; the young Danish princess made a very favourable impression. Edward and Alexandra were friendly from the start; the meeting went well for both sides, and marriage plans advanced.

 

From this time, Edward gained a reputation as a playboy. Determined to get some army experience, Edward attended manoeuvres in Ireland, during which he spent three nights with an actress, Nellie Clifden, who was hidden in the camp by his fellow officers.

 

Prince Albert, though ill, was appalled and visited Edward at Cambridge to issue a reprimand. Albert died in December 1861 just two weeks after the visit. Queen Victoria was inconsolable, wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life and blamed Edward for his father's death.

 

At first, she regarded her son with distaste as frivolous, indiscreet and irresponsible. She wrote to her eldest daughter, "I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder."

 

 

 

The Fish is Red by Hinckle & Turner

"From 1969 until 1984 two pallets of Farewell America languished in Montréal, in an unheated, bonded, government warehouse. Freezing cold winters and blistering hot summers—all fifteen of them. 

During this time the book became very tough to find and the price began to climb, eventually hitting more then $100.00—if you could find a copy. The scuttlebutt was that the F.B.I. had bought up all remaining copies and had them destroyed. This type of tactic had worked with two of William Turner’s books, The Fish is Red and The Assasssination of Robert F. Kennedy which Random House had stopping shipping to bookstores a few months after it was published, probably at the behest of the F.B.I. Of the 20,000 copies it printed, Random House probably burned three-quarters of them! Not good for the bottom line, but very good for the government relations."

If money talks, then Howard Hughes, from his Desert Inn penthouse, was one of the world's greatest ventriloquists. He once sent Bob Maheu to Lyndon Johnson's ranch to offer $1 million to call off nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, which Hughes felt was scaring off the casino trade and irradiating his drinking water. Maheu, unable to bring himself to proffer such a bribe to the President of the United States, asked if there was anything Hughes, a great admirer, might do. Johnson suggested  donation to the LBJ Library, noting that there was a $25,000 limit.

When Maheu reported back to Hughes, the billionaire scoffed "Hell, I couldn't control the son of a bitch with $25,000."

Reference : James Phelan, Howard Hughes : The Hidden Years (New York Random House, 1976), p75

The bubbling ITT scandal, the Chilean skulduggery, the Castro assassination plots, Howard Hughes - these were some of the suspected genies somewhere in a bottle at Democratic headquarters that had to stay corked.

The story of Watergate is told and retold like Rashamon, and each time the shades of truth change with the seasons. On June 16 Sturgis, Barkwe, Martínez, and Gonzalez flew to Washington for another crack at the DNC offices in the Watergate complex. The first try in early May had been unsuccessful; over The Memorial Day weekend, they managed to get in and photograph documents while McCord installed bug transmitters. But McCord had set the power level so low to avoid detection that the transmissions were only marginally intelligible.

No one had the feeling they were going to the well once too often, and if by some chance they were caught, they had been told not to worry; "fail-safe" arrangements had been made to quietly retrieve them. When they got off the plane at National Airport, Sturgis bumped into Jack Anderson, to whom he had been feeding information for years, but said that he happened to be in town on "private business". When they entered the lobby of the Howard Johnson motel across from the Watergate, Sturgis spotted his movie idol Burt Lancaster and impulsively asked for his autograph.

Reference : Author's interview with Frank Sturgis

William Turner was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1927. At seventeen he enlisted in the United States Navy. During the Second World War he served on board an LST in the Pacific.

After the war Turner enrolled at Canisius College, a Jesuit school, and in 1949 obtained a degree in chemistry. Turner also played semi-professional baseball and ice hockey.

Turner joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1951. He worked for the FBI for ten years but grew increasingly concerned with the way J. Edgar Hoover ran the organization. Turner became convinced that Hoover was placing too much emphasis on the dangers of the American Communist Party. Instead, he felt he should be using more resources to tackle organized crime. In 1961 Turner was dismissed from the FBI. He hired Edward Bennett Williams and sued the FBI but lost. However he did manage to get anti-Hoover testimony by other agents into the record.

Turner became a journalist. In 1963 he investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and concluded that he was the victim of a conspiracy. Later he worked with Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans. Turner and Garrison argued that a group of right-wing activists, including Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Carlos Bringuier and Clay Shaw were involved in a conspiracy with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill Kennedy. Turner and Garrison claimed this was in retaliation for his attempts to obtain a peace settlement in both Cuba and Vietnam.

Turner argued that the Kennedy assassination was a paramilitary operation, with riflemen firing from at least three angles. Stephen Rivele agreed with this viewpoint and in the television documentary, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, named Lucien Sarti as being the gunman on the grassy knoll.

Turner later became senior editor of the magazine Ramparts. Under the editorship of Warren Hinckle, the magazine became the voice of the American New Left. It was also highly critical of the Warren Commission. In a series of articles he revealed abuses perpetrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency. He also explored the assassinations of John F. Kennedy , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Books by Turner include Hoover's FBI: The Men and the Myth (1970), Power on the Right (1973), The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1978), The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (1981), Deadly Secrets (1992) (with Warren Hinckle), his autobiography, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails (2001). In his book he published details of wiretapping and bugging abuses by the FBI, its secret campaign against left-wing groups such as Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers Union and the stealth war against Cuba.

Turner also argues that John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he was planning to withdraw American forces from Vietnam. He also argued that Robert Kennedy was murdered because if he had been elected president he would have ordered a full investigation into his brother's death.

In 2004 Turner published Mission Not Accomplished: How Bush Lost the War on Terrorism (2004). 

Wagner

"Chuck managed to get the entire 18 hours of Richard Wagner's 'Ring of Nibaloone--Nibalane--Nibalu--Nibalung' ... squashed ... down to just seven minutes"

Hitler told everyone close to him 
"One cannot understand National Socialism if one does not understand Wagner".

In that case, I have had a deep, scientific understanding of National Socialism since I was roughly four.

National Socialism is the tragic doomed love saga of a bald midget (with his spear & magic helmet) who falls in love with a transvestite rabbit from somewhere near Hoboken, New Jersey.

From Shirer :

"There are many weird twists of fate in the strange life of Adolf Hitler, but none more odd than this one which took place thirteen years before his birth.

Had the eighty-four-year-old wandering miller not made his unexpected reappearance to recognize the paternity of his thirty-nine-year-old son nearly thirty years after the death of the mother, Adolf Hitler would have been born Adolf Schicklgruber.

There may not be much or anything in a name, but I have heard Germans speculate whether Hitler could have become the master of Germany had he been known to the world as Schicklgruber.

It has a slightly comic sound as it rolls off the tongue of a South German.

Can one imagine the frenzied German masses acclaiming a Schicklgruber with their thunderous ”Heils”? ”Heil Schicklgruber!”?

"O mighty warrior of great fighting stock / might I enquire to ask, 'Nyah, what's up, Doc...?' "

Not only was ”Heil Hitler!” used as a Wagnerian, paganlike chant by the multitude in the mystic pageantry of the massive Nazi rallies, but it became the obligatory form of greeting between Germans during the Third Reich, even on the telephone, where it replaced the conventional ”Hello.”

”Heil Schicklgruber!”? It is a little difficult to imagine. *

The Sam Kelly Abbreviatiated Variant

∗ Hitler himself seems to have recognized this. In his youth he confided to the only boyhoodfriend he had that nothing had ever pleased him as much as his father’s change of names. He told August Kubizek that the name Schicklgruber ”seemed to him so uncouth, so boorish,apart from being so clumsy and unpractical. He found ’Hiedler’ ... too soft; but ’Hitler sounded nice and was easy to remember.” (August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, p.40.)

What apparently made those last years of approaching manhood so happy for Hitler was the freedom from having to work, which gave him the freedom to brood, to dream, to spend his days roaming the city streets or the countryside declaiming to his companion what was wrong with the world and how to right it, and his evenings curled up with a book or standing in the rear of the opera house in Linz or Vienna listening enraptured to the mystic, pagan works of Richard Wagner.

A boyhood friend later remembered him as a pale, sickly, lanky youth who, though usually shy and reticent, was capable of sudden bursts of hysterical anger against those who disagreed with him. For four years he fancied himself deeply in love with a handsome blond maiden named Stefanie, and though he often gazed at her longingly as she strolled up and down the Landstrasse in Linz with her mother he never made the slightest effort to meet her, preferring to keep her, like so many other objects, in the shadowy world of his soaring fantasies.

TRIAL FOR TREASON

[ NOTE : How can be on trial for Treason against Germany? He's an Austrian, and not a German Citizen ]

As things turned out, that career was merely interrupted, and not for long. Hitler was shrewd enough to see that his trial, far from finishing him, would provide a new platform from which he could not only discredit the compromised authorities who had arrested him but – and this was more important – for the first time make his name known far beyond the confines of Bavaria and indeed of Germany itself. He was well aware that correspondents of the world press as well as of the leading German newspapers were flocking to Munich to cover the trial, which began on February 26, 1924, before a special court sitting in the old Infantry School in the Blutenburgstrasse. By the time it had ended twenty-four days later Hitler had transformed defeat into triumph, made Kahr, Lossow and Seisser share his guilt in the public mind to their ruin, impressed the German people with his eloquence and the fervor of his nationalism, and emblazoned his name on the front pages of the world.

Although Ludendorff was easily the most famous of the ten prisoners in the dock, Hitler at once grabbed the limelight for himself. From beginning to end he dominated the courtroom. Franz Guertner, the Bavarian Minister of Justice and an old friend and protector of the Nazi leader, had seen to it that the judiciary would be complacent and lenient. Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length – his opening statement consumed four hours, but it was only the first of many long harangues.

He did not intend to make the mistake of those who, when tried for complicity in the Kapp putsch, had pleaded, as he later said, that 

”they knew nothing, had intended nothing, wished nothing. That was what destroyed the bourgeois world – that they had not the courage to stand by their act ... to step before the judge and say, ’Yes, that was what we wanted to do; we wanted to destroy the State.’ ”

Now before the judges and the representatives of the world press in Munich, Hitler proclaimed proudly, ”I alone bear the responsibility. But I am not a criminal because of that. If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the revolution. There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.”

If there were, then the three men who headed the government, the Army and the police in Bavaria and who had conspired with him against the national government were equally guilty and should be in the dock beside him instead of in the witness stand as his chief accusers. Shrewdly he turned the tables on the uneasy, guilt-ridden triumvirs:

One thing was certain, Lossow, Kahr and Seisser had the same goal that we had – to get rid of the Reich government... If our enterprise was actually high treason, then during the whole period Lossow, Kahr and Seisser must have been committing high treason along with us, for during all these weeks we talked of nothing but the aims of which we now stand accused. 

The three men could scarcely deny this, for it was true. Kahr and Seisser were no match for Hitler’s barbs. Only General von Lossow defended himself defiantly. ”I was no unemployed komitadji” he reminded the court. ”I occupied a high position in the State.” And the General poured all the scorn of an old Army officer on his former corporal, this unemployed upstart, whose overpow- ering ambition had led him to try to dictate to the Army and the State. How far this unscrupulous demagogue had come, he exclaimed, from the days, not so far distant, when he had been willing to be merely ”the drummer” in a patriotic movement!

A drummer merely? Hitler knew how to answer that:

"How petty are the thoughts of small men! Believe me, I do not regard the acquisition of a minister’s portfolio as a thing worth striving for. I do not hold it worthy of a great man to endeavor to go down in history just by becoming a minister. One might be in danger of being buried beside other ministers. My aim from the first was a thousand times higher than becoming a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task, and if I do, the title of Minister will be an absurdity so far as I am concerned. "

He invoked the example of Wagner.

"When I stood for the first time at the grave of Richard Wagner my heart overflowed with pride in a man who had forbidden any such inscription as ”Here lies Privy Councilor, Music Director, His Excellency Baron Richard von Wagner.” I was proud that this man and so many others in German history were content to give their names to history without titles. It was not from modesty that I wanted to be a drummer in those days. That was the highest aspiration – the rest is nothing."

He had been accused of wanting to jump from drummer to dictator. He would not deny it. Fate had decreed it.

"The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say, ”If you want me or summon me, I will co-operate.” No! It is his duty to step forward. "

Things Aristotle Was Completely Wrong About : Socrates

Socrates - Just Like Obama, John Coffey, OJ and Bill Cosby,

As Usual, the World Fears a Powerful, Front-walking Black Man.

“I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.”

- Aristotle runs away.

"We had an agent—a well-known American journalist—with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia ... he said he would never again take any money from us".

Major General Oleg Kalugin

KGB,

1992

I. F. Stone Interviewed aboout the Trial of Socrates

By I.F. Stone 

Last year, on his 70^th birthday, in an interview with himself for this Magazine, retired journalist I.S. Stone spoke of his new-found joy in Greek studies and his hope of finding in them "one last scoop" that would help clear up some of the mystery which still surrounds the trial of Socrates, that cause célèbre which has tantalized scholars and historians for centuries. Now, he believes he has found new evidence that sheds light not only on the trial itself but on the complex politics of fifth-century Athens. Here – again in a self-interview – Mr. Stone sets forth his discovery and, at the same time, takes us on an adventure in learning and an armchair tour of the ancient world. 

---

Isn’t it a little late in the day to be re-examining the trial of Socrates? I thought that was 25 centuries ago?

It was held, to be exact, in 399 B.C.

And now, in A.D. 1979, you have discovered something newsworthy – excuse the expression – about a trial that the wire services covered 2378 years ago?

This obsession with the trial of Socrates is not mine alone. Scholars and historians have been puzzled by it for centuries, and still are.

What’s the puzzle?

The Athens of Socrates’s time has gone down in history as the very place where democracy and freedom of speech were born. Yet that city put Socrates, its most famous philosopher, to death. Presumably this was because it citizens did not like what he was teaching. Yet he had been teaching there all his life, unmolested. Why did they wait until he was 70, and had only a few years to live, before executing him?

Why should this fascinate an old Washington muckraker like you?

Because it’s a black eye for all I believe in, for democracy and free speech. Anyone who starts out to study the problem of free speech in depth – as I did after ill health forced me to give up my Weekly – is irresistibly drawn back to ancient Athens, where it all began.

Isn’t that pretty far from home base, from current concerns and difficulties?

Not really. All our basic problems are there in miniature. I fell in love with the Athenians and the participatory democracy they developed. Free discussion was the rule everywhere – in the Assembly, the law courts, the theatre, and the gymnasiums where they spent much of their leisure. Free speech – what the Greeks called parrhasia – was as much taken for granted as breathing. 

But then I was stopped, or stumped, by this contradictory and traumatic spectacle of what they did to Socrates. These people and this city, to which I look back for inspiration – how could they have condemned this philosopher to death? How could so blatant a violation of free speech occur in a city that prided itself on freedom of inquiry and expression?

But why should we care at this late date?

Because Plato turned the trial of his master, Socrates, into a trial of Athens and of democracy. He used it to demonstrate that the common people were too ignorant, benighted and fickle to entrust with political power. In Plato’s "Apology," the contrast drawn between the nobility of Socrates and the grim verdict of his juror-judges indicted democracy in the eyes of posterity. And thanks to his genius, no other trial except that of Jesus has so captured the imagination of Western man.

Plato made Socrates the secular martyred saint of the struggle against democracy. He stigmatized it as "mobocracy." Yet this was the very same "mob" which applauded the anti-war plays of Aristophanes when Athens was fighting for its life against Sparta. (No such antiwar plays were allowed, by either side, during our last two World Wars). This was the same "mob" whose eagerness for new ideas, and its readiness to hear them, drew philosophers from all over the ancient world. It made Athens – in the proud words of Pericles – "the school of Hellas," the university of the Greek world. It is the high repute of Athens that makes the trial of Socrates so puzzling.

And now you think you can throw a little fresh light upon it?

I’ve been happily bogged down in ancient Athens for several years, trying to explore all of Greek thought and civilization, in order to reach a better understanding of the trial. In my researches amid the ancient documents I recently stumbled on a crucial bit of evidence, hitherto overlooked, which makes the trial and its outcome a little less inexplicable.

I hope your life-insurance policies are fully paid up. The classical scholars will be lying in wait for you, with knives sharpened. No trial in history has been more intimately studied, pored over and speculated upon. And you, an interloper and – most horrid of academic epithets – a "journalist," believe you have found something they all overlooked! Have you seen any unidentified flying objects lately.?

Sneer if you will, but I’ve been encouraged by a remark of Jakob Burckhardt, the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance and of Greek culture: To emphasize the importance of restudying the classics in every generation, Burckhardt once said that, in a hundred years, someone would reread Thucydides and find something in his history "we had all overlooked."

How can a newspaperman find something new to report about a trial that took place so long ago?

You re-examine all the source material for yourself. You go back to the texts in the original language, so that you can evaluate every nuance. You search out internal contradictions and curious evasions. It’s no so different from digging the real truth out of a Pentagon or State Department document.

Could you fill me in on the sources for the trial – and do it, please, in less than three volumes?

I can do it in one sentence: The sources are scanty and one-sided. The only contemporary accounts are by two disciples of Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, both anxious to put their beloved master in as good a light as possible. But they do not give us a transcript of the actual trial. They give us their own conception of what Socrates said, or perhaps their own conception of what he should have said in his own defense. Plato’s exquisite, polished version, like his Socratic dialogues, can more reasonably be read as fictionalized biography. In Xenophon, we are told that Socrates’s "inner voice" forbade him to prepare a defense. There is even one ancient tradition that tells us he was silent before his judges.

What of the prosecution’s side?

We have no record of it. We know it only by indirection from the two "Apologies," one by Plato, the other by Xenophon – the word "apology" in Greek means defense -- and from the "memorabilia," or memoirs, of Socrates by Xenophon. It’s like trying to cover a trial when one is barred from the courtroom except to hear the defendant’s summation to the jury.

Do we know the actual charges against Socrates?

There were two charges: first, that Socrates violated the law by "refusing to do reverence to the gods recognized by the city, and introducing other new divinities," and second, by "corrupting the youth." But we do not have the text of the laws on which these charges were based, nor the specific allegations.

So we do not know just what Socrates is supposed to have said or done that made him seem disrespectful of the city gods. Nor do we know what was meant by the charge of corrupting the youth. Under Athenian legal procedure such specifics were required in a preliminary complaint and hearing before a magistrate, who then decided whether the allegations and the evidence were sufficient to warrant a trial. But we have no account of this preliminary procedure, the equivalent of our grand jury.

Didn’t Plato’s dialogue the "Euthyphro" cover the preliminary examination?

That’s a common impression, but it’s wrong. The "Euthyphro" pictures Socrates arriving for the preliminary hearing. But he gets no farther than the portico of the examining magistrate. There he engages in a long and inconclusive conversation with Euthyphro, the defendant in another case. The subject they discuss is the proper definition of piety or holiness. It’s charming, but tells us nothing of what happened when Socrates went in for his own arraignment.

Why do you think Plato chose to be so uninformative?

A lawyer might surmise that he blocked out as much as he could of the specific charges because they were too damaging and too hard to disprove.

Do you see the same defensive strategy in Plato’s "Apology"?

I do. Socrates evades the charge that he did not respect the city’s gods, and proves instead that he is not an atheist. But he was not charged with atheism. We never learn what was meant by corrupting the young. The reader of Plato’s "Apology" comes away with  the impression that this wonderful old philosopher was condemned simply because he had spent his life exhorting his fellow citizens to be virtuous. 

How do you account for his condemnation?

I believe the case against Socrates was political and that the charge of corrupting the youth was based on a belief – and considerable evidence – that he was undermining their faith in Athenian democracy.

If so, why wasn’t the charge brought earlier? He had been teaching for a long time. A quarter century before the trial, Socrates had already been attacked in Aristophanes’s play "The Clouds" for running a "think tank" whose smart-alecky graduates beat their fathers. If they thought him the source of such subversive teaching, why did the Athenians wait until 399 B.C., when he was already an old man, before putting him on trial?

Because in 411 B.C. and again in 404 B.C. antidemocrats had staged bloody revolutions and established short-lived dictatorships. The Athenians were afraid this might happened again.

I haven’t found that in Plato.

Plato didn’t intend that you should. Those are the realities his "Apology" was calculated to hide. Plato was a genius, a dazzling prestidigitator, with all the gifts of a poet, a dramatist and a philosopher. His "Apology" is a masterpiece of world literature, a model of courtroom pleading; and the greatest single piece of Greek prose that has come down to us. It rises to a climax which never fails to touch one deeply, no matter how often it is reread. I read the "Apology" in the original for the first time last year, slowly and painfully, line by line. When I came to the noble farewell of Socrates to his judges, it gave me chest pains, it was so moving; I gladly offer up my angina in tribute to its mastery. "I go to die," Socrates says, "and you to live, but which of us goes to the better lot is known to none but God.’ Even Shakespeare never surpassed that! But these very qualities also make Plato’s "Apology" a masterpiece of evasion.

Is there any way to check Plato’s picture of the trial against the views of the average Athenian?

We do have one piece of evidence which shows that even 50 years after the event, when there had been ample time for reflection and remorse the Athenians still regarded the trial as political, and the verdict as justified.

Where did you find that?

In a speech by the famous orator Aeschines, the great rival of Demosthenes, in the year 345 B.C., just 54 years after the trial of Socrates. This bit is well known to scholars but its significance has never been fully appreciated. With the clue Aeschines provides, we may begin to reconstruct the Athenian political realities. Aeschines cited the case of Socrates as a praiseworthy precedent. "Men of Athens," he said to the jury court, "you executed Socrates, the sophist, because he was clearly responsible for the education of Critias, one of the thirty anti-democratic leaders." 

Who was Critias?

He was the bloodiest dictator Athens had ever known, a pupil of Socrates at one time, and a cousin of Plato’s. Aeschines was saying in effect that the antidemocratic teachings of Socrates helped to make a dictator of Critias, who terrorized Athens in 404 B.C. during the regime of the Thirty Tyrants and just five years before the trial of Socrates. Critias seemed to have been the most powerful member of the Thirty.

But why do you give so much weight to one sentence in one man’s speech to an Athenian jury court 50 years after the trial?

Aeschines could not have swayed the jury by that reference unless he was saying something about the relations between Socrates and Critias which was generally accepted as true by the Athenian public opinion of the time. Thought 50 years had passed, the dictatorship of Critias and the Thirty Tyrants must still have been a hateful memory. Justly or unjustly, Socrates’s reputation still suffered from his association with Critias. The reference to Critias and Socrates proved effective demagogy. Aeschines won his case.

How do you account for the deep and enduring prejudice against Socrates in his native city?

To understand this, one must touch on a damaging fact few historians have explained, or even mentioned, so great is the reverence for Socrates: Socrates remained in the city all through the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants.

Why do you put that in italics?

Because that single fact must have accounted more than any other for the prejudice against Socrates when the democracy was restored. The thirty Tyrants ruled only about eight months, but it was a time of terror. In that period they executed 1,500 Athenians and banished 5,000, one-tenth or more of the total population of men, women, children and slaves.

When the Thirty Tyrants took power, they murdered or drove out of the city all who were of the democratic party. A few months later, the moderates who had originally supported the Thirty Tyrants began to flee, especially after Critias murdered their leader, Theramenes. He, who had been one of the original Thirty Tyrants, was executed without a trial when he began to criticize the Thirty Tyrants for their brutality.

Socrates was neither exiled with the democrats nor forced to flee with the moderate oppositionists. He did not suffer at the hands of the thirty Tyrants unlike his chief accuser, Anytus, who lost much of his property when he fled and joined the fight to free the city. Socrates, in Plato’s "Apology," calls himself "the gadfly" of Athens, but it seems his sting was not much in evidence when Athens needed it most.

How does Plato handle this in the "Apology"?

He never mentions Critias, or his past as a pupil of Socrates, nor does he dwell on the fact that Socrates stayed in the city all through the dictatorship. Instead Plato has Socrates represent himself as a man above the battle of politics.

How does Plato do that?

He has Socrates tell of two incidents in which he defied unjust orders, once under the democracy, and again under the Thirty Tyrants. Under the democracy, he was presiding officer in the Assembly during the famous trial of ten generals accused of misconduct for failing to succor survivors and recover the bodies of the slain after a naval victory. Socrates said he blocked the attempt to condemn them in one proceeding, because the law called for a separate trial for each man. He added that he did so "although the orators were ready to impeach and arrest me."

Under the Thirty Tyrants, Socrates said, he had also resisted an unjust order. Socrates and four others had been ordered to arrest a wealthy resident alien whom the dictatorship wanted to kill so they could seize his property. Such executions for revenue purposes were common under Critias.

Instead of obeying the order, Socrates says, "I simply went home, and perhaps I should have been put to death for it, if the Government had not quickly been put down." But he himself neither helped put it down, nor tried to warn the victim, nor made a protest. Though he was always preaching virtue, he did not, like the Hebrew prophets, call such unvirtuous rulers publicly to account.

But few modern readers know enough to resist Plato’s beguiling narrative, and it serves to distract attention from the fact that nowhere in the ancient texts do we find Socrates resisting or deploring the overthrow of the democracy, nor welcoming its restoration. With the jury, this silence must have outweighed his eloquence. The dictatorship of the thirty Tyrants was the dictatorship of the wealthy landed aristocracy to which Plato and Critias belonged. This was the social circle from which most of Socrates’s followers were drawn. Athens understood this, though the modern reader often doesn’t.

Does Xenophon – our other "witness" on the trial – confront these compromising political circumstances?

Xenophon does so in is "Memorabilia" by quoting an unnamed "accuser." This accuser has been variously identified as one of the accusers at the trial or as a contemporary prodemocratic orator named Polycrates whose "pamphlet" on the trial of Socrates has since disappeared. In any case, Xenophon’s quotations from this accuser and his answer to these accusations provide us with some of the prosecution’s case against Socrates. In so doing, Xenophon discloses much that Plato hides.

Where do you find the political issue in Xenophon?

In his "memorabilia," Xenophon reports that "the accuser" said Socrates "taught his pupils to look down upon the established laws’ by deriding the egalitarian method of filling many minor offices in Athens by lot, and by teaching them that government should be left to experts instead of being determined by popular debate and vote in the assembly. 

The "accuser" said Socrates thus led the young "to despise the established constitution and made them violent." It is significant, but not often noticed, that Xenophon denies only the last part of this indictment. He could hardly deny the first two counts, since elsewhere in his memoirs of Socrates he frequently quotes the old philosopher’s contempt for the assembly and for election by lot. Xenophon passes over these accusations in silence. But he does deny that Socrates taught his pupils to use violence against established institutions. Xenophon insists he taught them it was wiser to proceed by persuasion.

But Critias in power was hardly a model of persuasion.

Xenophon does not deny it. After all, our main source of knowledge about the misdeeds of Critias is Xenophon’s own history of his time, the "Hellenica." Xenophon quotes the accuser as declaring that "none wrought so many evils" to the city of Athens as Critias and Alcibiades, the two most famous pupils of Socrates. The accuser said that in the terrible days of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias "bore the palm for greed and violence,’ while Alcibiades ‘exceeded all in licentiousness and insolence" under the democracy.

What defense did Xenophon offer?

"I have no intention," Xenophon replies in the "memorabilia," of excusing the wrong these two men wrought the state." But he claims they sought out Socrates as their teacher "only to attain the utmost proficiency in speech and action." And "as soon as they thought themselves superior to their fellow disciples, they sprang away from Socrates and took to politics." With that answer most Socratic scholars have been satisfied. 

But you are not?

No. The question left open is what kind of politics Socrates taught them. Clearly from everything we learn elsewhere in Plato and Xenophon, it was an antidemocratic politics. Xenophon’s silence on the point admits what he cannot deny.

Does the "accuser" in Xenophon link the Socratic teachings with aristocratic attempts at tyranny, as in 411 and 404 B.C.?

Yes, but in a curious, indirect way. He alleged "that Socrates, selecting the worst passages of the most celebrated poets, and using them as arguments, taught those who kept him company [i.e. his pupils], to be unprincipled and tyrannical." 

Just what exactly did those terms mean?

A tyrant was someone who used violent and lawless methods to seize and maintain power. The term "unprincipled" is one translation of the adjectival form of the Greek word kakourgos, which means, literally, an evil-doer. An Athenian would of course apply both terms to such men as Critias and the Thirty Tyrants. 

Does Xenophon deny that Socrates used quotations from the poets that might encourage such behavior?

He doesn’t enter an explicit denial. Instead Xenophon, who is ordinarily such a clear writer, gets fuzzy. This provoked my curiosity. In trying to find out why, I stumbled on some fresh material. I found that Xenophon made some striking omissions in discussing this accusation, and the omissions obscured its significance.

What were the omissions?

First of all, in giving us examples from the poets to show what the accuser meant, Xenophon limits himself to two poets. We know from another source, the "Apology" of Libanius, a fourth-century A.D. orator, that the "accuser" of Socrates cited four poets, not two, in this accusation. The two Xenophon omits are Theognis and Pindar. Both were aristocratic poets, notorious for their contempt, not only of the common people but of the new middle class of merchants and traders who had begun to rival the old landed aristocracy. Pindar wrote his lovely odes to celebrate some of the outstanding tyrants of his time. By omitting Theognis and Pindar, Xenophon was omitting the most obvious examples of what the accuser meant.

Who are the two poets Xenophon does quote?

Homer and Hesiod. But the quotations he gives seem to bear little, if any relationship to the charge.

What do the quotations say?

The one from Hesiod says, "Work is no disgrace, but idleness is a disgrace." Hesiod was a farmer poet, and this is from his "Works and Days," a kind of farmer’s almanac. That line is his expression of the work ethic. I will not bore you with my fruitless efforts to find any sense in which this trite but wholesome homily could possibly be interpreted as teaching tyrannical conduct. Hesiod was no aristocrat but a hard-working Boetian peasant who hated tyranny. I think the Hesiod quote has been screwed up for evasive purposes.

What of the quotation from Homer?

Here we come to pay dirt. At first, the quotation from Homer, as given by Xenophon in the "memorabilia," also seems to bear little relationship to the accusation. It long puzzled me. I went to the commentators on the "Memorabilia" without finding any enlightenment. Then I did what none of the commentators I read had done: I went back to Homer and took a look at the context of the quotation. There I found Xenophon had made two omissions, and suddenly I saw what the accuser was driving at. Here I believe I have found fresh insight.

Is this a "scoop" – if I may use so unscholarly a word?

I believe so. But to appreciate it, one must understand what Homer meant to the Greeks. He was their Bible. And with them as with us, the devil could quote Scripture to his purpose. A quotation from Homer was effective as Holy Writ, and the two omissions Xenophon makes are of two passages which would have infuriated an Athenian democrat, but would have delighted an anti-democratic aristocrat – because they would seem fully to justify violent methods in putting down the democracy.

Can you tell us what was the Homeric episode referred to by the "accuser" in Xenophon?

It is in the second book of the "Iliad." The siege of Troy has been going on for nine years. The homesick and weary troops, just recently devastated by a plague, make a mutinous rush for the ships, determined to set sail for home. Odysseus, the man of many wiles, intervenes to stem the panic. 

How does Xenophon handle the episode?

He makes his quotations so minimal and selective as to blur the point of the accusation, and make it easier for Socrates to evade it. Xenophon quotes lines 188 to 191, and then skips to lines 198 to 202 from Book II of the "Iliad."

In lines 188 to 191, Homer describes how Odysseus spoke "with gentle words" to the chieftains and aristocrats, while he tells us in lines 198 to 202 how differently he dealt with the common soldiers. When the angry hero encountered "a man of the people," Odysseus "struck him with his staff," calling him "a worthless fellow" and ordering him to turn back from the ships.

How would an Athenian react to this scene?

Very negatively. He was not used to being treated as an inferior either in peace or war. Xenophon’s account in the "Anabasis" of how he led his 10,000 mercenary Greek troops across Persia has been justly called a picture of "a democracy on the march."

Was anything important omitted in quoting these lines?

Yes. Xenophon omitted the last four lines of the speech made by Odysseus as he struck and reviled the common soldiers. In those four omitted lines Odysseus attacked the idea of democracy altogether. Homer in these lines sets forth for the first time in Western literature the doctrine of the divine right of kinds. Here are the lines, in literal translation. Odysseus tells the common soldiers:

We Achaeans can’t all be kings here 
It is not good for the many to rule. 
Let one man rule, one man be king, 
To whom the son [Zeus] of wily Cronos 
Has given the sceptre and the judgments 
That he may take counsel for you.

That’s the doctrine of one man rule, and that’s just what Critias tried to impose on Athens. Xenophon could have denied that Socrates used these lines, or approved them. Instead Xenophon omitted them. The omission is a confession. These famous lines on kingship were too obviously anti-democratic teaching.

What was the third of the significant omissions to which you referred?

Xenophon omitted any mention of the assembly called by King Agamemnon to deal with the near mutiny. Assemblies are frequent in the "Iliad." This one turned out to be unique. It was the only assembly in all of Homer where a common soldier spoke up in the debate. His name was Thersites, or The Brash One. To an Athenian, as to us, he thus represents the first stirrings of democracy in the Homeric assemblies. 

What happened to Thersites?

Odysseus beat the bold commoner until he bled, humiliated him in front of the army and threatened to kill him if he ever spoke up again.

How does Homer treat this scene?

With approval. Homer sang his great lays in the halls of the rich and powerful, and clearly shows whose side he is on. Homer does not make Thersites a hero, but a shrill and vulgar upstart. Few peoples have been as sensitive to beauty in form and in speech as the ancient Greeks. Homer paints Thersites as bandy-legged, lame, hunchbacked and bald. One wonders how such a cripple ever got into the army at all. The words Thersites uses are made as repulsive as his appearance. Homer calls them akosma. This is the negative of kosmos, whence our words "cosmetics" and "cosmos" derive. The word implies disorder and lack of grace. 

So what do you make of these omissions?

The accuser had charged that Socrates used certain passages from Homer to teach his young aristocratic followers to be violent and tyrannical. In dealing with this mutinous episode, Xenophon omitted what the Athenian democrats would have regarded as the most subversive part of it: the four lines on the divine right of kings, and Odysseus’s use of violence to suppress free speech in the assembly.

Homer was saying that the common people had no right to be heard. There could be no more sensitive point with the Athenian democrats. The right to speak freely in the assembly was the foundation stone of Athenian democracy. Until the reforms of Solon, two centuries before the trial of Socrates, the common people of Athens could neither speak nor vote in the assembly. And again, just five years before the trial of Socrates, they had been forcibly deprived of this precious right by the dictatorship of Critias. In their eyes, this episode in Homer would seem to justify the violent tyranny they had so recently overthrown. I think that is why Xenophon omitted it from his defense of Socrates. They were too damaging a part of the prosecution’s case.

So you think Socrates was condemned because the Athenians believed his teachings had helped to produce such tyrants as Critias?

No, not exactly. The case is more complicated. Socrates was protected from such a prosecution by the amnesty instituted by those who overthrew and killed Critias. The dictatorship was crushed by a coalition of the democrats with moderate oligarchs who had been driven into opposition by the lawless extremism of the thirty. They took an oath to forget past offenses. The amnesty covered everybody but the remaining Thirty and their leading officials. To prosecute Socrates as the teacher of Critias would have been a violation of that solemn oath.

How do you know the oath was always honored?

All the surviving sources attest to it, and nowhere do Plato or Xenophon charge, as they otherwise would, that the prosecution of Socrates was a violation of the amnesty. The most striking testimonial to this is in Aristotle’s treatise on the Constitution of Athens where he says that the Athenians, after restoring their democracy, "blotted out recriminations with regard to the past" and behaved both "privately and publicly toward those past disasters" in ‘the most completely honorable and statesmanlike manner of any people in history." That was written a generation after the trial of Socrates.

So what conclusion do you draw?

When Xenophon discusses the charge that Socrates used certain passage from Homer and other poets to teach his pupils to be lawbreakers and tyrannical, he had to be referring to teachings which continued after the restoration of the democracy. Athens felt that Socrates was still inculcating disrespect for its democratic institutions, and feared an attempt to overthrow the democracy again. 

Do you think this justified the condemnation of Socrates?

No. the 510-man jury itself was deeply troubled and reached its verdict of guilty only by a narrow margin. But these fresh insights give us a glimpse of the political realities and extenuating circumstances which Plato, who hated democracy, did his best to hide – and which his "Apology" has so successfully obscured for 2,500 years.   

---

Aeschines Against Timarchus 173 (Loeb Classical Library)

Did you put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty who put down the democracy, and after that, shall Demosthenes succeed in snatching companions of his own out of your hands, Demosthenes, who takes such vengeance on private citizens and friends of the people for their freedom of speech? 

---

Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.9 (from Perseus Project)

But, said his accuser, he taught his companions to despise the established laws by insisting on the folly of appointing public officials by lot, when none would choose a pilot or builder or flautist by lot, nor any other craftsman for work in which mistakes are far less disastrous than mistakes in statecraft. Such sayings, he argued, led the young to despise the established constitution and made them violent. 

---

Xenophon, Mem.1.2.13.Now I have no intention of excusing the wrong these two men wrought the state; but I will explain how they came to be with Socrates. 

---

Xen., Mem, 1.2.56. Again, his accuser alleged that he selected from the most famous poets the most immoral passages, and used them as evidence in teaching his companions to be tyrants and malefactors: 

---