Magicae Nigrae

Everybody clear on this so far...?

He uses BLACK Magicks...

He "dabbles".

" Is a dog man's best friend?

 I had a dog. 

The dog was large. 

It ate my garden, all the plants, and much earth. 

The dog ate so much earth it died. 

Its body went back to the earth.

I have a memory of this dog. 

The memory is all that I have left of my dog. 

He was Black — and White. "

How's Annie?

The Substatia Nigra is a brain structure located in the mesencephalon that plays an important role in reward and movement. Substantia nigra is Latin for "black substance", reflecting the fact that parts of the substantia nigra appear darker than neighboring areas due to high levels of neuromelanin in dopaminergic neurons. It was discovered in 1784 by Félix Vicq-d'Azyr, and Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring alluded to this structure in 1791. Parkinson's disease is characterized by the death of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta.

LATIN Substantia nigra

GRAY'S p.802

PART OF Midbrain, Basal ganglia

NEURONAME Shier-527

MESH [/www.nlm.nih.gov/cgi/mesh/2007/MB_cgi?mode=&term=Substantia+Nigra Substantia+Nigra]

I saved your life - it now belongs to ME..!

" Is life like a game of chess? 

Are our present moves important for future success? 

I think so. 

We paint our future with every present brush stroke. 

Painting. 
Colors. 
Shapes. 
Textures. 
Composition. 
Repetition of shapes. 
Contrast. 

Let nature guide us. 

Nature is the great teacher. 

Who is the principal? 

Sometimes jokes are welcome. 

Like the one about the kid who said: 

"I enjoyed school. 

It was just the principal of the thing."





Cooper, you may be fearless in this world. But there are other worlds. Worlds beyond life and death. Worlds beyond scientific reality.

Cooper: 
Tell me more.

Hawk: 
My people believe that the White Lodge is a place where the spirits that rule man and nature reside. There is also a legend of a place called the Black Lodge. The shadow self of the White Lodge. Legend says that every spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection. 

There, you will meet your own shadow self. 
My people call it The Dweller on the Threshold.

Cooper: 
Dweller on the Threshold.

Hawk: 

But it is said that if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul.

In this lecture, Professor Wrightson discusses witchcraft and magic. He begins with the context of magic beliefs in this period, introducing the "cunning folk" who had reputations as healers and were often consulted. 

He then considers the specific problem of witchcraft, the use of magic to do harm, and its identification by the late medieval church as a form of anti-Christian cult. He examines the distinctive nature of both witchcraft beliefs and the history of witchcraft prosecution in England (as compared with both Scotland and continental Europe), outlining the typical circumstances of a witchcraft accusation and what these might suggest about the rise and fall of concern with witchcraft. 

Finally he considers a number of unresolved problems in the history of witchcraft in England: the nature of the links between gender and witchcraft; the reasons behind the passage of the statutes defining witchcraft as a crime; and the exceptionally large number of trials conducted in the county of Essex.

Professor Keith Wrightson: Okay. Well, in 1921 a group of workmen working on the highway near the village of St. Osyth, which is here in Essex, in East Anglia, discovered a skeleton. And at first they thought they'd uncovered a modern crime, but it was soon established that it was very old. And subsequently, on the basis of both documentary evidence and forensic evidence, they identified it as being probably the remains of a woman named Ursula Kemp who had been executed at St. Osyth and buried in the highway, rather than in consecrated ground, in the year 1582. And Ursula Kemp's crime was the alleged causing of death by witchcraft. Now today, obviously, I'm going to talk about witchcraft and perhaps explain how it was that people like Ursula Kemp came to such an end.

First of all we need to start with a little context by discussing the larger place of not simply witchcraft, a specific crime, but magic within the popular culture of early modern England. We could perhaps define that world of magic as being essentially a body of beliefs, a large body of beliefs, and practices regarding supernatural power which stood outside the world of formal religion and yet were widely known and helped people to cope with their anxieties and their insecurities. It helped them to cope above all because it involved various ritual means of manipulating supernatural powers so as to ward off misfortune or else to alleviate it.

This world of magic, then, was essentially a world of trying to propitiate or to manipulate unidentified supernatural powers, largely for the purposes of protection and relief. 

It wasn't — and it's important to stress this — it wasn't an alternative religion. 

It was a whole mess of supplementary beliefs and practices, being described by one historian as "the debris of many different systems of thought."1 It was regarded with some suspicion by the church, but it was not regarded as a threat as such, at least not initially. One historian writing about popular beliefs has put it splendidly. I'm quoting from him. The name's James Obelkevich. "It was a large, loose, pluralistic affair without any clear unifying principle. It encompassed superhuman beings and forces, witches and wise men and a mass of low-grade magical and superstitious practices. The whole was less than the sum of its parts" — the whole was less than the sum of its parts — "for it was not a cosmos to be contemplated or worshipped but a treasury of separate and specific resources to be used or applied in concrete situations." That puts it extremely well.2

These means of tapping into supernatural power were very widely known. You could say they were part of the lore which was acquired by every child as part of their education for life, like learning to cross the road as it were. But the world of magic also had its specialists and they were those who were known as the 'cunning folk', 'cunning men', or 'wise women'. These individuals were those who were known to have special knowledge over and above the average knowledge of magical practices and who often believed to have a special inherent power, often inherited. It was thought to pass in the blood. The cunning folk who were pretty numerous — one survey of known cunning folk in East Anglia suggests that there was a known cunning man or wise woman within ten miles of any village — these people were appealed to for a variety of specific purposes.

In the first place, they often were appealed to for medical reasons. Very often they had specialist knowledge of herbs which they would administer often accompanied by spells to increase their effectiveness — the psychological effect of the incantation going along with what may well have been the practical effect of the herbs they used. Ursula Kemp for example was such a person. She was known as a healer in her village. She was good at curing arthritis apparently. Again, they were appealed to for the diagnosis of witchcraft. If a person suspected that they might have been bewitched, they might go to the cunning folk for the provision of counter-magic. They might help the victim to identify who might have attacked them in this occult manner and advise on counteraction.

One of my favorite cunning men came from a town in the north of England, Stokesley, and he was called John Wrightson, and he was known as Old Wrightson the Wise Man of Stokesley, and people went to him for help with their horses. He was a horse leech. He was very good at telling whether your horse had been bewitched and knowing how to take the appropriate countermeasures.

People went to the cunning folk also for the recovery of lost or stolen goods and they went for advice and the telling of fortunes, and to this extent the wise women and the cunning men were the popular equivalent of the astrologers who had a more elite clientele in this period.

So, the cunning folk provided a variety of real services and the best of them may well have been quite skilled therapists in their way. One historian of medical practice in this period says we ought to count them amongst the medical practitioners of the time. They were cheap, they were available and in many ways quite knowledgeable. However, the church was pretty unhappy about this kind of activity. It didn't like popular magic. The official teaching of the church was that if a person suffered any misfortune it must be the result of divine providence. It was either a test of your faith or, on the other hand, it was a judgment on your sin. The only proper response to misfortune was to search one's own heart for the possible causes of such divine intervention: to pray, to repent, to trust in God's providential purposes.

The church rejected magical means of relief. It accepted the possibility, but it rejected the means. God could not be commanded by spells and incantations, therefore, if there was any supernatural response to such practices it must be from evil spirits.

And so, given these beliefs, we find the deeply pious of the period searching their hearts for the sins which had brought misfortune upon them and sometimes finding quite extraordinary answers. You find it in their diaries for example. For example, the diary of the Reverend Ralph Josselin, a minister in the late seventeenth century, who, having lost a dearly loved daughter, searched his heart as to why God should have done this, why he should have taken her away, and came to the conclusion that it was because he had neglected his clerical duties because of his enthusiasm for playing chess. He had played chess too much; God had taken his daughter. That's the conclusion he came to and he gave up playing chess. This is a seventeenth-century God, not a nice, modern, user-friendly, God. [Laughter]

Little wonder then, if these were the official teachings of the church, that the greater part of the population preferred to explain their misfortunes in terms of just bad luck, or their neglect of protective magic, or perhaps the malevolence of evil spirits and malicious neighbors. Well, this world of popular magic had long existed and it was long to endure. You can find much of it still alive and well deep into the nineteenth century. And it endured because in various ways it helped.

Chapter 2. Differences between Witchcraft in England and in Europe [00:08:56]

But the problem of witchcraft is altogether more distinctive. That involved a specific kind of magic: the causing of injury or death by the malevolent and malicious use of supernatural powers against another or their property. And that was the practice which was known as maleficium. That's the Latin legal term which was used for this maleficent magic. And concern with witchcraft in this way had a quite distinct chronology. The possibility of malevolent magic had always been there, of course, but concern with it was undoubtedly at an unusual height in the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. And the key to why that was so is perhaps to be found in what the historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Henry Kamen, has described as a peculiarly horrible conjunction in European history, a conjunction he says between "popular superstition" on the one hand and "ecclesiastical fantasy" on the other, the fantasies of churchmen.

The popular superstitious element doesn't need any further elaboration of course. It had always been the case that some individuals were regarded as having this special access to occult power. The element of ecclesiastical fantasy, however, that was something that was peculiar to western Christendom. We don't find it in the Orthodox tradition and it was peculiar to the early modern period, emerging at the end of the fifteenth century and growing in strength in the sixteenth. Essentially, it involved the belief that all witchcraft in fact involved worship of the devil, and as a result the elaboration of a stereotype of the witch which portrayed witches not merely as dabblers in magic, or perpetrators of malefice against neighbours, but as something much more serious, members of an organized diabolical and malevolent cult: not just village wise women or cunning men but enemies of God.

Throughout continental Europe, and indeed in Scotland also, the result of these beliefs was that the main driving force behind the spasmodic witch hunts which can be found in the period was probably religious zeal, and the great witch hunts which would be found scattered across Europe died back only when the judges came to doubt the reality of that stereotype of the witch and came to doubt the notion that witchcraft was an organized cult threatening to Christian society. 

One of the first legal jurisdictions to make that decision, that the whole thing was just a terrible error, was in fact the Spanish Inquisition. 

One doesn't usually associate the Spanish Inquisition with progressive movements, but in 1610 they were the first to abandon, to refuse to deal with, cases of this kind. 

The French Parlement again did so in 1640 some years later. So it gradually died away. But throughout both Catholic and Protestant Europe for some time there was a unity in the war against witches as enemies of God. 

Well, how far was that pattern true of England?

The usual answer is that it wasn't true of England and that was for several reasons. First of all, the authorities in England never actually embraced the full ecclesiastical stereotype of witchcraft as evidence of membership of a diabolical cult. Continental European ideas about the nature of witchcraft were certainly known in England. Books from Europe were read by the educated and these ideas were disseminated by a number of English writers, usually clergymen, particularly from the 1580s or thereabouts. Gradually, such notions did seep into popular beliefs and you begin to find them at the popular level by the mid- to late seventeenth century. But nevertheless that notion of the nature of witchcraft didn't have much influence on English law.

Witchcraft was never prosecuted as a heresy in England. 

The first act which was passed against it in 1542 made it a felony — any crime that was a felony carried the death penalty — made it a felony to practice witchcraft for unlawful purposes. 

But that act was only on the statute book for five years; then it was repealed. After that there was actually no law against witchcraft for nearly twenty years. 

Then in 1563 there was a new act. It was made a felony to invoke evil spirits and to — if they were invoked to cause the death of another, then execution was the punishment. Otherwise witches were to be imprisoned or put in the pillory and face death only for a second offense. 

Then finally in 1604 came a third act. It elaborated on the 1563 act. It made it a felony to bewitch anyone to either their death or their injury. For lesser forms of sorcery people faced imprisonment and death for a second offense. But some elements of continental European ideas were beginning to creep in at last in to this third act. 

For example, it was made a felony to dig up dead bodies for the purposes of practicing witchcraft. Exactly why they were concerned with that they don't explain, but that was one of the clauses of the act. It was also made a felony to consult with or to feed an evil spirit for any purpose.

So, some elements of the notion of diabolical pacts and the like were beginning to creep in but not all of the kind of stereotype of witchcraft which was well known north of the border in Scotland, or in continental Europe. Witchcraft remained seen as not specifically diabolical but rather, as Keith Thomas puts it, an "antisocial crime," a very unusual one but an antisocial crime rather than a form of heresy. And that characteristic, that it's treated as a specific kind of crime, comes out in the trial evidence.

For example, in English witchcraft trials it's very rare to find any reference to making pacts with the devil. You get the odd one in the seventeenth century but they are few; so no diabolical pacts really. 

No witches' sabbats at which witches met and feasted and danced with the devil and so forth. Very little sex with devils in English witchcraft trials, though that was a prominent feature in continental trials. English witches didn't fly. [Laughter] They didn't have much fun at all really. [Laughter] English witches did, however, have pets. They had imps and "familiars" as they were known, usually small animals, and they seem to have been part of popular beliefs in England, that a witch would have a familiar which could act on her behalf. Ursula Kemp, for example, was alleged to have had four familiars: two cats, a toad which was called Pygin, and a lamb which was called Tyffin.

What the English trials focused on first and foremost was simple maleficent acts. Other elements usually entered only in a handful of notorious causes celebres. Witches were always condemned for maleficium and they were hanged rather than burned; it was a crime, not a heresy. 

Secondly, particular witchcraft prosecutions were rarely instigated from above in England. That's another important difference. There's no evidence that the authorities actually wanted a witch hunt.

One outstanding exception to this generalization was the activities in 1645 to '47 of a witch finder called Matthew Hopkins who operated in East Anglia and to all intents and purposes hired himself out as a consultant for the discovery of witches.

That was an organized witch hunt from which Matthew Hopkins personally profited, but it's the only really outstanding example of such an outbreak in the history of witchcraft in England. It was the subject of a wonderful Vincent Price movie thirty [correction: forty] years or so ago, "Witchfinder General," which I do recommend. It's got nothing to do with the history, but it's a great movie. Okay. So witchcraft prosecutions in England tended not to come in these witch hunts that would bring hundreds of cases. They didn't come in great waves with the major exception of Matthew Hopkins' activities. They were sporadic. They were occasional. They came up one or two at a time and so forth.

In addition, in English law torture was not used except in state — certain state trials when it was specially authorized by the privy council. In day-to-day trials torture was not used whereas it was routinely used in many jurisdictions in continental Europe and indeed in Scotland. As a result, people were not tortured into confessing. As a result, large numbers of people were not implicated by people under torture who named names. What you get in the witchcraft statistics from the English courts is really a lot of individual prosecutions brought from below by the alleged victims of witchcraft seeking redress in the courts just like any other crime.

Chapter 3. Trials in England [00:19:26]

So there are some important differences in the way all of this was handled in the law. Nevertheless, England did share in the general European preoccupation with witchcraft even though to a lesser extent. Just how far it shared is not fully known. That's because the relevant legal records don't survive for every area of the country. They survive pretty fully for the whole of the southeast and for the county of Cheshire but for other parts of the country they tend to survive only from the seventeenth century point, which is relatively late in the history of this crime. But where we do have the evidence, one of the striking features is that the trials appear to have been relatively rare except for the home circuit, the counties around London. If you look at the handout, if you look at the two graphs, graph A gives you the trials which took place in different assize circuits and the line at the top showing the real spike is the home circuit. You can see how there are vastly more cases being heard in the whole home circuit than in any other jurisdiction for which we have the records. The second spike is Matthew Hopkins operating in 1645, but the first spike, as you'll see, was in the later years of Elizabeth.

And even within the home circuit, this area, the cases came predominantly from one part of it, the county of Essex to the east of London. If you look at the second graph, graph B, there you have the different counties of the home circuit broken down and it's clear enough that Essex is absolutely outstanding in terms of the numbers of cases which came from that county. To give you some actual figures, in the whole of the reign of Elizabeth the county of Hertfordshire, which is just to the north of London, quite a populous county, produced only twenty-four witchcraft cases. The county of Sussex, a large county to the south of London, produced only fourteen. The county of Essex produced 172. In fact, between 1560 and 1680, 270 individuals were prosecuted for witchcraft in Essex, whereas in comparison, taking a county of similar size and similar population, in the period between 1580 and 1709 only thirty-four were prosecuted in the county of Cheshire for which we have good evidence. So Cheshire, thirty-four: Essex, 270.

In general, most of the trials for which we have evidence took place in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. In the home circuit and in Essex in particular, they were at their peak between the 1570s and the early 1590s. Looking at the country as a whole, trials become very rare everywhere after about 1620. The numbers are falling away after about 1620 with again the notable exception of the activities of Matthew Hopkins in the mid- to late 1640s, which caused a new peak of concern within a downward trend.

Well, that downward trend, the decline of witchcraft cases, after around 1620 is something which historians have found relatively easy to explain. The decline can be explained in a number of ways. First of all, from at least the 1580s some of the justices of the peace and the assize judges who had to handle these cases were very worried about the difficulties of proving witchcraft. They weren't necessarily skeptical. They frequently believed that witchcraft was possible, but how could you prove in law that a particular individual was actually responsible unless they confessed? How could you prove that something was caused by witchcraft rather than by natural causes, if for example someone died of a lingering illness? And even if it was witchcraft, who did it? So they were worried about the problem of proof and they talked about it. In witchcraft cases normal rules of evidence could not apply and this bothered them. Increasingly in the seventeenth century, lawyers who were worried about all of this became very unwilling to entertain cases. They tried to talk people into not prosecuting, or they were — or they insisted upon additional evidence if a case was to go forward.

In addition, from the early seventeenth century onwards there seems to have been an actual decline amongst educated people in belief in the very possibility of witchcraft. The conviction grew that it was a fantasy which had been projected onto wretched people by hysterical neighbors. The conviction grew that the accused did not have the occult powers that were claimed, even if they thought they did so; they were frauds. And in the later seventeenth century there was the growth of awareness of the mechanical philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton, who regarded the universe as having been created by God and subjected to laws which were immutable; you could not tamper with God's natural laws through using spells and the like.

Well, all of this probably had its influence in the course of the decline of witchcraft prosecutions. Though initially it's most likely that it was the legal concern, the unwillingness of some lawyers and judges to handle these cases, which was the main cause of the falling off noticeable by the early seventeenth century. So in these various ways one can perhaps satisfactorily explain the decline of concern with witchcraft, but we still have to explain the sixteenth-century rise of concern and that turns out to be much more difficult. Much more difficult because this seems to have been a genuine popular concern, with cases coming up from below. One can't simply explain it in terms of the activities of a number of bishops or judges.

The dominant explanation was put forward some years ago by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane in two of the pioneering works on this subject, and they explained the rise of witchcraft prosecutions in terms of a detailed examination of the circumstances of surviving cases. Witches were usually women and they were frequently elderly women. Witches were usually accused of bewitching neighbors within their own village; not strangers, always neighbors, people they knew. Witches were often poorer than their alleged victims. This suggested that the accusations were therefore arising from tensions between relatively marginal women in the village community and better-off neighbors, who might be men or women.

Then they looked at the known circumstances of cases, and the classic circumstances were more or less as follows: a quarrel would occur between neighbors, ending in one of them, the supposed witch, going away cursing or muttering. The victim would then suffer some form of personal misfortune. The victim would then begin to entertain suspicion that they'd been bewitched. They would talk to other neighbors some of whom might have similar suspicions about the person they suspected. A person would then be identified as a possible witch, as a malevolent person in the eyes of the village. It's possible that some of those who were so accused did practice magic and did believe themselves to have the power to harm, and to some extent they may even have used it as a form of begging with menace. The quarrels between neighbors which initiated cases very often began when someone was turned away having been begging or asking for a favor of some kind. It's possible that some of these marginal women responded to being gradually identified as witches by playing the part, by scaring their neighbors, as it were, into meeting their needs. That could go on for years and often did, but eventually some incident serious enough to trigger off an actual court prosecution would occur; perhaps a death, something of unusual seriousness. When that happened someone would bring an accusation; other neighbors would chime in. There were lots of such accusations. Alan Macfarlane found that in Essex there was an average of four accusers for each accused witch, so other people would chime in with their suspicions. Supplementary proofs might be looked for, for example the witch's mark — the existence on the witch's body of a wart or mole or other mark which seemed to be insensitive to pain and which was thought to be the place at which the witch's familiar would feed on her blood. If they found such a thing it was considered additional proof and the witch might be found guilty.

Fine. Well, those do indeed seem to have been what one can think of as the classic circumstances though they were by no means unusual [correction: universal]. Witchcraft accusations could arise in other contexts. They could arise for example as a result of personal rivalries in local politics. An accusation of witchcraft was something which was easy to throw at another person in order to discredit them, so there are other circumstances. Not all witches were women, some were men, though most were women and so on. But these do appear to have been the classic circumstances.

Why then should the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have seen a peak of such accusations because surely one could find such circumstances earlier and one could find them later? Why was that the peak period of anxiety? Thomas and Macfarlane suggest, first of all, it was partly because of the loss of the protective magic which had been supplied by the medieval church. The Church of England allowed the belief in witchcraft to continue, but it wouldn't offer ecclesiastical means of counter-magic and it forbade people to resort to them. If that was the case, then bringing a legal accusation, a trial, and eventually seeking an execution would be the only way out of the impasse.

A second part of their explanation is that the reason for so many late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century trials was that because that period was one of unusual tensions within village society, within neighborhoods. It was a period, as we know, of economic distress, one which saw a declining position for the poor, especially perhaps the elderly and marginal poor, the widowed and so forth. The Poor Laws had not yet been fully put into effect to provide for such people. Neighbors who themselves were feeling the pinch might be less willing to show charity, less willing to help. They might feel uncomfortable about that. They might feel rather guilty about that. That might prey on their minds and make them sensitive to misfortunes which they saw as the revenge of people to whom they had refused charity, people who had perhaps cursed them. Accusing such a person of witchcraft was a way of severing their responsibility, assuaging their feeling of guilt, transferring it to the accused witch.

Well, all of this is an ingenious explanation, which may well hold a great deal of truth and it's indeed widely accepted as an account of the sociology and psychology of accusations. Recently, that explanation of Thomas and Macfarlane has been elaborated by more focus upon the fact that most of those accused of witchcraft were of course women. The tensions within neighborhoods seemed to have come to focus upon punitive action against women above all. Why was that?

Thomas and Macfarlane suggest that it was simply a product of the fact that most of the economically marginal and most of the aged in particular were indeed poor women. Some feminist writers see it as more sinister, as constituting an attack upon women who, by their social situation, or perhaps their aggressive personalities, stood outside the normal controls of the patriarchal household. It's an important issue, but one has to pause, I think, before jumping to the conclusion that witch hunting was in effect a form of repression of women. Certainly, it was the case that the association of witchcraft with women specifically, which was universal, derived in large part from fundamentally misogynistic attitudes. Women were seen as being morally weaker, as more prone to temptation, as more likely to use occult means to revenge themselves upon their neighbors; spells were the weapons of the weak. However, witchcraft prosecutions were not simply a patriarchal drive against marginal, aggressive, or troublesome women.

The magistrates who heard the cases were men but the accusers themselves were very often other women. The work of James Sharpe reveals how many of the suspicions that led to accusations actually arose in the female spheres of village life; they were often initiated by other women. Women themselves felt threatened by witchcraft and were deeply involved in identifying and accusing witches. And on the other hand many of the juries, universally male, who heard these cases, failed to believe them. Many accused witches were acquitted by male juries. The gender element then is clearly there, but it's complex; it's paradoxical. These issues remain far from resolved, but they add further complexity to any discussion of the sociology of witchcraft accusation.

Chapter 4. Witchcraft Statutes in Essex [00:35:05]

There were a number of other problems also to which I need to draw your attention, problems relating not so much to the sociology of specific witchcraft accusations, but to the history of witchcraft as a crime, and two questions in particular arise in the English case. First of all, why were the witchcraft statutes passed in the first place? And, secondly, once they were passed why did such an utterly disproportionate number of the cases arise in the county of Essex? Essex seems to be wholly unusual so far as one can tell. If there were neighborhood tensions which were acute in the county of Essex leading to such accusations, why were there not such neighborhood tensions in the counties of Kent or Sussex or Hertfordshire, all of which were places which had a great deal in common with Essex in terms of social structure or local economy and so forth. Why Essex?

Well, some brief suggestions. First of all, as regards the laws, I think it's worth considering that these laws were passed when they were, perhaps because of a convergence of two things. First of all, both of the major witchcraft statutes in England were passed at the beginning of new regimes, one in Elizabeth's second Parliament, one in the first Parliament of King James VI and I. It makes one wonder whether there was an element in this legislation of symbolism; that acts on this subject were passed perhaps as part of the propaganda of a new regime, that passing statutes of this nature in a sense conferred legitimacy on new regimes by showing their firm stance against a particularly symbolically charged form of deviance. To be opposed to witchcraft was in a sense a declaration of legitimacy. The acts may have had then a certain symbolic function when they were passed through Parliament, without opposition so far as we can tell.

Secondly, another element of the timing of the acts is the fact that there may have been an element of political contingency, specifically in the form of suspected threats to the person of the monarch. In 1561, two years before the 1563 act was brought forward, a plot had been discovered in which sorcery was allegedly being used against Elizabeth. William Cecil was horrified to find, when the plot was uncovered, that there was actually nothing on the statute book forbidding it. This may have been a contingent political reason for moving ahead with a witchcraft statute. It may have persuaded him to go along with one or two of the bishops who were themselves interested in having legislation on this issue. That's an interpretation, then, which might be particularly relevant to the passage of the 1563 act though the full details of its passage through Parliament remain unknown; the documentation is too poor.

The act of 1604 is a lot clearer. Following the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England, he was a man with a profound interest in witchcraft, he'd written a book about it on the subject in — he'd written a book about the subject in Scotland — following his accession and the union of crowns, the witchcraft statutes of both England and Scotland were overhauled and revised by a committee of judges and bishops. This again may have been a symbolic act. They decided to do it then. Why then? It's a new regime and a new act was passed in Scotland at the same time. It may have been helped along again by the fact that in 1604 there was a particularly notorious witchcraft case in London itself, which may have drawn attention to the problem once again.

So what I'm suggesting is that these acts of Parliament were essentially introduced as legitimizing symbols: good and godly laws introduced by good and godly regimes. Yet there's no evidence that the authorities that put them on the statute book actually wanted a witch hunt. If they'd wanted one, they could have had one. But they didn't. What they did was to make witchcraft prosecutions possible in the royal courts — and to that extent the political and ecclesiastical elite had a bigger role in making possible the prosecutions which took place than is often recognized.

So one can perhaps explain why the acts were put on the statute book in that kind of way, but that still leaves the problem of Essex. Why Essex? Is it possible that Essex as a local society was peculiarly conscious of the threat of witchcraft? But why should that be so? It's quite clear that people might feel threatened by maleficium in any part of England. Why should they act against it so much more in the county of Essex? And the only suggestion I can make on that issue is that the use of the criminal law against witches had had terrible publicity in Essex. Essex was unusual in the sense that it saw three causes celebres, three group trials. They took place in 1566, only three years after the passage of Elizabeth's statute; in 1582; and in 1589. In each of these cases an initial accusation was vigorously pursued by local justices of the peace who happened to have a particular personal concern about witchcraft. That meant that instead of just one person going on trial small groups of women went on trial and these trials were well publicized in pamphlets which were written about them and which survive to this day. You can read them on Early English Books Online.

All of this, then, may have given peculiar publicity to witchcraft as a threat and what could be done about it. One wonders, then, whether a number of particularly scandalous local cases occurring in this county had the effect of heightening anxiety about witchcraft within Essex, enhancing the sense of threat which people felt, making it more intense than elsewhere, and of course providing an object lesson in how to deal with it. So are we dealing then with a moral panic breaking out within a particular local society, which subsequently died down in the seventeenth century until it was artificially revived again by the activities of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, in 1645? Ursula Kemp incidentally was one of the women tried in one of those group trials, the one of 1582.

So to conclude: the whole issue of the history of witchcraft, why people were so concerned with it at a particular point in time, is clearly enormously complex. But what I'm suggesting is that first, the case of England was different to a degree from what was going on elsewhere in Europe at the time. There were no mass witch hunts to marry popular superstition and ecclesiastical fantasy in the way one found in various parts of Europe and in Scotland, Matthew Hopkins excepted. Secondly, in England witchcraft prosecutions did come up spontaneously from below and they probably usually arose in pretty much the way Thomas and Macfarlane and James Sharpe have suggested, as far as individual cases were concerned, though it was an accusation which could also be used for malicious prosecution and was so used.

But thirdly, these cases could only arise because of the existence of laws which were perhaps essentially symbolic and contingent in their origins. And that once those laws existed, fourthly, the cases arose only sporadically. The sense we have of a definite chronological pattern in witchcraft prosecutions is very heavily influenced as you've seen by the case of Essex alone. Essex does seem to have been unique for very special reasons which we may never be able to do more than to guess at. Elsewhere in the country cases arose sporadically, occasionally, no clear pattern beyond the fact that they were more common in the late sixteenth century than later.

And finally, there was no English witch hunt because at the end of the day the authorities in both church and state didn't want one. They never felt sufficiently threatened to instigate one against those they deemed their enemies. The potential for a witch hunt was there and it long continued. Village tensions hadn't faded. The difference of the seventeenth century from the later sixteenth century was above all that the judicial authorities not only failed to seek a witch hunt, but actually became active in suppressing the accusations which were brought before them. So then, I suspect that overall both the rise and the fall of witchcraft prosecution is best explained by the way in which the law first of all gave people, and then later took away from them, the opportunity to settle a particular kind of personal conflict through the use of the law and the prosecution of people to their deaths.

The beliefs behind all of that were very ancient and they long continued, but the history of witchcraft is very much to do with the use of the criminal law in the way I've described. The crucial issue was perhaps that for a short while, for two generations, there was indeed a conjunction of long-standing patterns of popular belief with a shorter-term enhancement of the anxieties and the credulousness of the elite. It was they who passed the laws that made witchcraft trials possible. They later repented of their folly. They avoided the enforcement of those laws and eventually, in 1736, they repealed them. But that, of course, was about 150 years too late for Ursula Kemp.

[end of transcript]

—

References

1. Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).

2. J. Obelkevich in Religion and Rural Society. South Lindsey 1825-1875 (1976). As the title indicates, he was describing the persisting magical beliefs of the rural poor in the early nineteenth century.

Top

George Soros - The 60 Minutes Interview

When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, George Soros' father was a successful lawyer. He lived on an island in the Danube and liked to commute to work in a rowboat. But knowing there were problems ahead for the Jews, he decided to split his family up. He bought them forged papers and he bribed a government official to take 14-year-old George Soros in and swear that he was his Christian godson. But survival carried a heavy price tag. While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.

(Vintage footage of Jews walking in line; man dragging little boy in line)

KROFT: (Voiceover) These are pictures from 1944 of what happened to George Soros' friends and neighbors.

(Vintage footage of women and men with bags over their shoulders walking; crowd by a train)

KROFT: (Voiceover) You're a Hungarian Jew…

Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.

KROFT: (Voiceover) …who escaped the Holocaust…

(Vintage footage of women walking by train)

Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.

(Vintage footage of people getting on train)

KROFT: (Voiceover) …by–by posing as a Christian.

Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Right.

(Vintage footage of women helping each other get on train; train door closing with people in boxcar)

KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.

Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made.

KROFT: In what way?

Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and–and anticipate events and when–when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a–a very personal experience of evil.

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that's–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

Mr. SOROS: Not–not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't–you don't see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

Mr. SOROS: No.

KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?

Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c–I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets–that if I weren't there–of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would–would–would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the–whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the–I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.

The Bitter Clingers Ball

TRUMP RALLY from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

And now as we stand here from this moment in history, 29 years past the first echoes of the Giant Sucking Sound - what still remains here, Left Behind - 

Living in America.

We went to a Trump Rally and filmed with our cell phones. Enjoy!

Edited by

Kathy Gatto

Kathygatto.com

Produced by

Cass Greener

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

- Barack H. Obama

HyperNormalisation

Adam Curtis - The Pope of Team-B at the BBC

"Now, the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalised."

- Leonid Brezhnev, 1968

You have now found urself trapped in The Incomprehensible Maze - 

Where's UR Head?

"Our World is strange and often fake and corrupt. 
But we think it’s normal because we can’t see anything else."

HyperNormalisation - The Story of How We Got Here.

Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates.
The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,
But in our Selves, that we are underlings.

—Cassius to Brutus,

from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

It’s a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages.

The first one [is] Demoralisation. 

It takes from 15-20 years to Demoralise a nation. 

Why that many years? 

Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. 

In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. 

Most of the people who graduated in the sixties (drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals) are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. 

You are stuck with them. 

You cannot get rid of them. 

They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. 

You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behaviour. 

In other words, these people... the process of Demoralisation is complete and irreversible. 

To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favour and in the interests of United States society.

Griffin: And yet these people who have been ‘programmed,’ and as you say [are] in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept... these are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country?

Bezmenov: Most of them, yes. Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in [the] future what the beautiful society of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ means in practice, obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people, and the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people. Obviously they will join the leagues of dissenters (dissidents).

Unlike in [the] present United States there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy-rich like Jane Fonda for being ‘dissident,’ for criticizing your Pentagon. 

In [the] future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. 

Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. 

This they don't understand and it will be [the] greatest shock for them, of course.

The Demoralisation process in [the] United States is basically completed already. 

For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because Demoralisation now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralised is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of Demoralisation.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

The next stage is Destabilisation.

This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.

The next stage, of course, is Crisis. 

It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of Crisis. You can see it in Central America now.

And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of Normalisation.

It may last indefinitely. 

Normalisation is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said,

‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalised.’

VLADIMIR PUTIN: We know how these decisions were taken and who was applying the pressure. But let me stress that Russia is not going to get all worked up, get offended or come begging at anyone’s door. Russia is a self-sufficient country. We will work within the foreign economic environment that has taken shape, develop domestic production and technology and act more decisively to carry out transformation. Pressure from outside, as has been the case on past occasions, will only consolidate our society, keep us alert and make us concentrate on our main development goals.

Of course the sanctions are a hindrance. They are trying to hurt us through these sanctions, block our development and push us into political, economic and cultural isolation, force us into backwardness in other words. But let me say yet again that the world is a very different place today. We have no intention of shutting ourselves off from anyone and choosing some kind of closed development road, trying to live in autarky. We are always open to dialogue, including on normalising our economic and political relations. We are counting here on the pragmatic approach and position of business communities in the leading countries.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: First of all, regarding my view of Ukraine’s sovereignty: I have never disputed that Ukraine is a modern, full-fledged, sovereign, European country.

But it is another matter that the historical process that saw Ukraine take shape in its present borders was quite a complex one. Perhaps you are not aware that in 1922, part of the land that you just named, land that historically always bore the name of Novorossiya… Why this name? This was because there was essentially a single region with its centre at Novorossiisk, and that was how it came to be called Novorossiya. This land included Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Nikolayev, Kherson and Odessa Region. In 1921-22, when the Soviet Union was formed, this territory was transferred from Russia to Ukraine. The communists had a simple logic: their goal was to increase the share of proletariat in Ukraine so as to ensure they had more support in various political processes, because in the communists’ view, the peasantry was a petty bourgeois group that was hostile to their aims, and so they needed to create a bigger proletariat. That is my first point.

Second, what also happened I think is that during the Civil War, nationalist groups in Ukraine tried to seize these regions but didn’t succeed, and the Bolsheviks told their supporters in Ukraine: Look what you can show the Ukrainian people. The nationalists didn’t manage to get hold of this territory, but you have succeeded. But it was all one country at the time and so this was not considered any great loss for Russia when it was all part of the same country anyway.

In 1954, Khrushchev, who liked to bang his shoe at the UN, decided for some reason to transfer Crimea to Ukraine. This violated even the Soviet Union’s own laws. Let me explain what I mean. Under Soviet law at that moment, territory could be transferred from one constituent republic to another only with the approval of the Supreme Soviets in each of the republics concerned. This was not done. Instead, the Presidiums of the Russian and Ukrainian Supreme Soviets rubber-stamped the decision to go ahead, but only the presidiums, not the parliaments themselves. This was a flagrant violation of the laws in force at the time.

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Crimea pressed for and proclaimed autonomy with wide-ranging powers. 

Unfortunately, the authorities in Kiev then started abolishing these autonomous powers and essentially reduced them to zero, centralising all the political, economic and financial processes. The same goes for southeast Ukraine as well.

As for western Ukraine, perhaps you are not aware that Ukraine gained territory following World War II? Some territory was transferred from Poland and some from Hungary, I think. What was Lvov if not a Polish city? Are you not aware of these facts? Why do you ask me this question? Poland was compensated through the territory it gained from Germany when the Germans were driven out of a number of eastern regions. If you ask around, you will see that there are whole associations of these expelled Germans.

I cannot judge here and now whether this was right or wrong, but this is what happened. In this respect it is difficult not to recognise that Ukraine is a complex, multi-component state formation. This is simply the way historical developments went. The people of Crimea feared for their and their children’s future following a coup d’etat carried out with the support of our Western partners and decided to make use of the right to self-determination enshrined in international law. However, this does not in any way mean that we do not respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. We do respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and will continue to do so in the future.

I hope very much for normalisation and development of Russian-Ukrainian relations and I think this is an inevitable process.

RESEARCH DIRECTOR AT THE GERMAN-RUSSIA FORUM ALEXANDER RAHR: Mr President, a question on energy. Will Europe freeze in the winter if Russia does not sign the agreement with Ukraine that is so important for us?

Also, could you please explain to this audience, which I think is probably aware of all the details, what is the catch in these talks? Why hasn’t there been any success in agreeing with Ukraine on the price for two or three months now, when there are constant meetings?

And another question: how will you build the new energy strategy with the European Union, which has suddenly changed the rules and begun to liberalise its market, and will offer to buy gas from Russia at one price? What are your thoughts on this?

VLADIMIR PUTIN: I will start with the latter part of your question. We have long been in discussion with our colleagues in the European Commission about the Third Energy Package, so this was not born yesterday. We feel that this decision is harmful for Europe. At first glance, it seems like liberalisation, the creation of market conditions. In fact, we believe, it’s nothing of the sort, because everything was liberalised long ago in the oil sector; oil is traded on the exchange, and the price is set at the exchange. Of course, you can partially manipulate the prices for a period by sharply increasing the volume being traded, by increasing production, but that is also impossible to maintain forever, because it will be damaging to shale oil producers and to traditional black gold exporters.

In the gas sector, for example, nothing is more sustainable than long-term contracts that are tied to the market price for oil. This is an absolutely fair pricing system. What can be more liberal than the market price for oil, which is traded on the exchange? There are standard parameters that indicate the calorific value of gas which is comparable to the calorific value of oil, and everything can be easily calculated by experts. And an important factor for our European consumers is that they can be certain that this volume will definitely be delivered according to those rules of setting the price. This creates certainty in European energy security. And Russia has never – I want to stress this – has never failed to abide by its commitments, not a single time.

In 2008, a crisis occurred because Ukraine practically blocked transit. But Russia was not responsible for this. Regardless of what anyone says, the experts are all fully aware of this.

What happened in 2008? Ukraine did not want to sign a new contract with Russia, and the old one had expired. And without signing a new contract, they began siphoning certain volumes of gas from the export pipeline in the winter. At first, we tolerated this, simply indicated to them that this was unacceptable. We tolerated it for some time, and then said that every day, we will reduce the amount of gas pumped equal in volume to the amount illegally taken – essentially stolen. They stole one million cubic metres one day, so the next day, we reduced the volume pumped out by a million cubic metres. And we continued this, from day to day. Eventually, we reduced it to zero. But this was not our doing. We cannot deliver free gas. What kind of behaviour is that?

Now over to the existing threats and what is going on there. As you may know, last year, to help Ukraine pay the debt it accrued since 2013 – they stopped paying last July and by November the unpaid debt had added up – to normalise the situation we said, and I have to repeat this: we will lend you $3 billion and we will reduce the price in the first quarter of 2014 to below the lowest limit. However, we will keep this price for the second quarter only if Ukraine uses the loans it receives to pay off its entire debt for 2013 and makes regular payments at the lowest rate - $268.5 for 1,000 cubic metres.

The result is that the debt for the previous year was not paid out and the current payments for the 1st quarter were not made in full. Therefore, in full compliance with its agreements, Gazprom shifted to contractual pricing. As we all remember, the contract was signed in 2009. It has been in effect all this time and was never questioned by our partners in Europe, by us, or by our Ukrainian friends. This contract has been in effect all these years. The Timoshenko government signed it. The current authorities in Kiev, including Energy Minister Prodan attended the signing ceremony and are fully aware of all this. Now it suddenly turns out that this was a bad contract and it needs to be revised. Why? Yet again, they don’t want to pay.

Everybody knows these figures, but I would like to repeat them. Last year we issued a loan for $3 billion. The official debt for this year has already reached $5.6 billion. However, we are willing to revise it with a $100 discount on the gas price. This still adds up to $4.5 billion for last year and this year. Thus, a $3 billion loan plus a $4.5 billion debt adds up to $7.5 billion.

In addition to that, Gazprombank lent its client in Ukraine, a private company, $1.4 billion to buy gas for the chemical industry at the lowest price of $268. The same Gazprombank gave Naftogaz Ukrainy another $1.8 billion to balance current accounts.

Nobody wants to pay off their debts. We undertook a huge responsibility. Now we have agreed on almost everything – the price and the payment procedure. I would like to stress that under the contract and in line with current agreements, Gazprom has switched to advance payment, which means we will only ship as much gas as we are paid for in advance. Under the previous arrangement, we first shipped the gas and they paid a month later. However, since they don’t pay, we cannot carry on in the same way. We said, and this is in strict compliance with the contract, that first they pay and then we ship. Everybody agreed to this as well. Our Ukrainian partners agreed and the members of the European Commission admitted this was fair: they have to repay their debt to us and shift to advance payment.

The IMF and the European Commission have confirmed what our Ukrainian friends are saying. Ukraine now has $3.1 billion to pay its debt. This is not the entire $4.5 billion, only $3.1 billion. Technically, we could assume a tough stance and say we want it all. I had to put some pressure on Gazprom, and I would like to apologise to its shareholders, including foreign shareholders for this, but I asked Gazprom not to insist and to let them pay at least the $3.5 billion and then argue over the balance.

So, they have $3.5 billion, and they say: either we use the entire amount to pay our debt and then we have nothing left to make advance payments, or we prepay future shipments, but then we would not be able to repay the debt. In the latter case, we would ask for an extension of our debt repayment until March or April 2015. What does this mean for us? I can say with a great degree of certainty that if we agree to this, we will get nothing for the last month. This has happened a countless number of times before. Therefore, we said no, we are not doing this anymore.

What did the European Commission suggest – and this was publicly voiced by Mr Ettinger? They suggested that we again lend money to our Ukrainian partners to pay for future transit. Another loan from us, or we can ship without prepayment. This is also a loan – a commodity loan, this time. We told our friends in Ukraine and in the European Commission that we will not do this anymore. Our total loan to Ukraine currently stands at nearly $11 billion. In January, Ukraine is to receive another $3 billion tranche from the IMF. So we told them that we know Ukraine is to get money is January, and we want them to get it, so let us move this payment from January to December. In reply, they said this was impossible due to the complicated decision-making procedure at the IMF. Then I suggested that they provide Ukraine with a bridge loan for a month, since everyone knows that there will be payment in January. The reply was they could not make that decision in the European Union, the European Commission because they have a very complicated lending procedure. All right, we asked for a guarantee from a top class European bank instead. And again, we hear that this is a complicated procedure, they cannot do it right now.

You know, the mentality here in Russia, and in Ukraine is different from Europe. Here if a man invites a woman to a restaurant, he will pay the bill, while you would normally go Dutch, when everybody pays for themselves. However, this is a different situation. The European Union has chosen association with Ukraine and undertook certain commitments. Why don’t you help Ukraine and issue it a bridge loan for a month, only for one month?

We are having a very professional and amicable discussion with our partners both in Ukraine and in the European Commission. We took on a huge responsibility and great risks and we think it would be absolutely fair if we shared these risks with our European or American partners. Why are they humiliating Ukraine with these $40 million handouts? What should them do with them? Give them at least $1.5 billion, and only for a month.

I very much hope that this issue will be resolved shortly, maybe next week. If this is the case, then there is and can be no threat. However, if this does not happen, we will again face the threat of gas siphoning from the export pipeline, which, in turn, could lead to a crisis. We don’t want to see this happen. However, Russia would never cause a crisis. We will comply with all our contractual commitments with great care and ship in a timely manner.

HoloTrump : The Emergency Commander-in-Chief Hologram (ECiCH)

"Please State the Nature of the Fascist Political Emergency"

 

Jim Marrs in The Jeff Rense Show, October 11, 2016. 
Jim Marrs: 
"Let me tell you something. The more they come out trying to break Donald Trump, the more you should understand that he has got the establishment very, very concerned, OK?!"

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

Prez

Arrogant Presumption

KIRK: Dining on ashes?

SPOCK: You were right. It was arrogant presumption on my part that got us into this situation. 

You and the Doctor might have been killed.

KIRK: The night is young. 

You said it yourself. It was logical. 

Peace is worth a few personal risks. 

...You're a great one for logic. I'm a great one for rushing in where angels fear to tread. 

We're both extremists. 

Reality is probably somewhere in between us. 

...I couldn't get past the death of my son.

SPOCK: I was prejudiced by her accomplishments as a Vulcan.

KIRK: Gorkon had to die before I understood how prejudiced I was.

SPOCK: Is it possible 

...that we two, you and I, have grown so old and so inflexible 

...that we have outlived our usefulness? 

...Would that constitute.... a joke..?

KIRK: Don't crucify yourself. It wasn't your fault.

SPOCK: I was responsible.

KIRK: For no actions but your own.

SPOCK: That is not what you said at your trial.

KIRK: That was as Captain of a ship. Human beings...

SPOCK: But Captain, we both know that I am not human.

KIRK: Do you want to know something? 

...Everybody's human.

SPOCK: I find that remark ...insulting.

KIRK: Come on. I need you.

I've Already Gone Places

F26. What does Carl mean by "I've already gone places"?
When Agents Desmond and Stanley are checking out Teresa's trailer, the trailer park manager, Carl, says 

"I've already gone places. 

 I just want to stay around."

Some say this indicates Carl believes the agents see him as a suspect and he doesn't want to go to jail, he's already been there.

Others suggest that perhaps Carl had had an experience like Agent Philip Jeffries (which we learn about later) and what may have happened to Agent Stanley (also later); namely, a trip to what we assume is the Black Lodge.

This is yet another unanswered question. These lines are not in the FWWM shooting script, and none of the other dialogue in this scene talks about anyone going anywhere, so we can only assume that they were a last-minute change by Lynch, or an ad lib by actor Harry Dean Stanton

.

It reminds me of a line from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" the last story I read to my class before... the accident. Ichabod Crane disappears... the line goes: 

"As he was a bachelor, and in nobody's debt, nobody troubled their head about him anymore."

"Is that what you feel?"

It's what I want... what I want.

The Dead Zone

You cowardly bastard! 

You're not the voice of the people, I am the voice of the people! 

The people speak through me, not you!

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, 

still is sitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas 

just above my chamber door, 

and his eyes have all the seeming 

of a demon's that is dreaming, 

and the lamp light o'er him streaming 

throws his shadow on the floor, 

and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, shall be lifted... 

Nevermore. 

Don't be an Alarmist - The Germans 1933-45

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955

By Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. 

In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. 

These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. 

On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. 

You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. 

This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. 

The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

"And the judge?"

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."

I said nothing.

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

"Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. 
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