Book Review: "CHURCHILL: THE POWER OF WORDS" -- EDITED BY MARTIN GILBERT (Bantam Press £25)
Review by Roger Lewis
My guess is that had Winston Churchill been more terse, a year could have been knocked off the Second World War. For what comes across in this anthology of his speeches and writings, chronologically arranged by his authorised biographer Sir Martin Gilbert, is how orotund he was, how fruity and ponderous, like an old fashioned ham actor of the Victorian period who has played King Lear too often.
When I read his famous radio broadcasts, which are as well-known as Shakespeare - ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets … We shall never surrender’ - it is impossible (a) not to hear that rich and much-imitated brandy-soaked bulldog growl and (b) to imagine any modern politician wanting to get away with being so poetical and mannered. Today people expect snappy ‘soundbites’ not lugubrious histrionics.
Perhaps Churchill was always anachronistic? Throughout his life he looked back wistfully to the golden age of the Dukes of Marlborough, even to a misty and romantic time of epics and sagas that never quite existed outside story books.
Visiting Haig and the generals on the Somme during the First World War, Churchill regretted that the heroism of military commanders had vanished.
His ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, had directed a battle ‘in the midst of the scene of carnage, with its drifting smoke clouds, scurrying fugitives, and brightly coloured lines … He sat on his horse often in the hottest fire’.
Haig sat behind a desk miles away, ‘a painstaking, punctual, public official’, poring over maps and replying to telegrams. ‘There is no need for a modern commander to wear boots and breeches.’ Churchill’s tone is regretful and nostalgic.
Churchill had served courageously in India and the Sudan, and in the Boer War. He took part in a cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898. He was captured in South Africa in 1899 and escaped by hiding under coal sacks on a train. Though he witnessed plenty of horrors - ‘so terrible were the sights and smells that the brain failed to realise the suffering and agony they proclaimed’ - he nevertheless always saw war and warfare as glorious and glorifying, as something that paradoxically brought out the best in people.
He loved the danger and excitement, which ‘invest life with keener interests and rarer pleasures’. This schoolboyish enthusiasm, couched as it was in the prose style of the authors he’d devoured as a pupil at Harrow (Macaulay, Gibbon, Kipling - what would he have made of Hemingway or Tolkien?), affected all he wrote and said.
Even if only giving a speech about trades unionism or the recent budget, Churchill’s language and narrative thrust was colourfully bellicose and bombastic, full of apocalyptic Old Testament images of fires, floods, clashing swords, ‘the perils of the storm’ and a determination that ‘the fight will be a fight to the finish’. Whether his adversary was Herr Hitler or a political opponent in Dundee, Churchill always saw ‘fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats’.
President Kennedy said of Churchill, ‘He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’. Churchill was forever choosing to get himself into the thick of it - and it wasn’t only words.
He began the First World War as First Lord of the Admiralty, but resigned from government in order to join the Royal Scots Fusiliers and see action in the trenches. He wanted to share ‘the toils and passions of millions of men. Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain …’
As mentioned above, what modern politician would dare talk about blood bedewing endless plains? And how many modern politicians would willingly put their own lives at such risk? Churchill may have deployed rhetoric - but at bottom it was not empty rhetoric, even if it got him nowhere in the short term. Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, when for the ruling classes it was the era of cocktails and laughter, Churchill alone kept worrying about the Hun. As early as 1924 he noticed that ‘the enormous contingents of German youth growing to military manhood year by year are inspired by the fiercest sentiments’.
British bright young things were fox-trotting to Noel Coward. In Germany there was a new generation wishing ‘to square the black accounts of Teuton and Gaul’, and for whom Hitler was the figurehead. As Churchill pronounced in 1932, there was ‘the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland’.
For gathering evidence of the neglect of Britain’s defences and warning the Commons about the scale of German rearmament, ‘I was depicted a scaremonger’, Churchill lamented. ‘Masses of guns, mountains of shells, clouds of aeroplanes - all must be ready,’ he implored.
They were not. Neville Chamberlain was duly humiliated by Hitler, and in September 1939 Churchill moved into full weather forecaster mode, promising that ‘the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales’.
By May the following year, Churchill, at the age of 65, at last became Prime Minister. ‘I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.’
His style became Biblical, Wagnerian, Homeric. His radio broadcasts were clarion calls ‘to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime’. It was as if he feared the end of the world, and was half relishing it.
The culmination of the measured, thunderous cadences came in the summer of 1940, when 526 pilots were killed in action in the skies above Britain. ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’
Here we see the orator’s tricks. 526 was a heck of a lot to lose. But perhaps Britain really did only have Churchill’s rhetoric to protect it? When the Nazis were poised to invade, we had only 20,000 trained troops, 200 artillery guns and 50 tanks. Realistically, during our ‘darkest hour’ we couldn’t even have defended Eastbourne.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2166085/How-Churchill-fought-speeches-CHURCHILL-THE-POWER-OF-WORDS-EDITED-BY-MARTIN-GILBERT.html
Friday, June 29, 2012
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Two very funny videos
Holding hands and an unusual use for an Ipad -- and you don't need the sound on for either of them
So papa, how do you like the iPad we got you?
So papa, how do you like the iPad we got you?
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Climate change wiped out one of the world's first, great civilisations more than 4,000 years ago
Climate change led to the collapse of the ancient Indus civilization more than 4,000 years ago, archaeologists believe.
The Indus civilization was the largest - but least known - of the first great urban cultures that also included Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The empire stretched over more than a million square kilometers across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, over what is now Pakistan, northwest India and eastern Afghanistan.
Now for the first time scientists believe they have discovered that climate change was a key ingredient in the collapse of the civilisation.
The study also resolves a long-standing debate over the source and fate of the Sarasvati, the sacred river of Hindu mythology, the authors believe.
Dr Liviu Giosan, a geologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and lead author of the study, said: 'We reconstructed the dynamic landscape of the plain where the Indus civilization developed 5200 years ago, built its cities, and slowly disintegrated between 3900 and 3000 years ago.
'Until now, speculations abounded about the links between this mysterious ancient culture and its life-giving mighty rivers.'
Like their contemporaries, the Harappans, who may have made up 10 per cent of the world's population, the group lived next to rivers, owing their livelihoods to the fertility of annually watered lands.
But the remains of their settlements are located in a vast desert region far from any flowing river.
The civilisation was forgotten until the 1920s. But since then, a flurry of research has uncovered a sophisticated urban culture with myriad internal trade routes and well-established sea links with Mesopotamia,
Archaeologists have also discovered building constructions, sanitation systems, arts and crafts, and a yet-to-be deciphered writing system.
Over five years an international team has been combining satellite photos and topographic data to make digital maps of landforms constructed by the Indus and neighboring rivers, which were then probed in the field by drilling, coring, and even manually-dug trenches and samples were tested.
Co-author Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist with University College London, said: 'Once we had this new information on the geological history, we could re-examine what we know about settlements, what crops people were planting and when, and how both agriculture and settlement patterns changed.
'This brought new insights into the process of eastward population shift, the change towards many more small farming communities, and the decline of cities during late Harappan times.'
The study suggests the decline in monsoon rains led to weakened river dynamics, and played a critical role both in the development and the collapse of the Harappan culture, which relied on river floods to fuel their agricultural surpluses.
The research provides a picture of 10,000 years of changing landscapes and the researchers identified a striking mounded plain, 10 to 20 meters high, over 100 kilometers wide, and running almost 1000 kilometers along the Indus, they call the 'Indus mega-ridge,' built by the river as it purged itself of sediment along its lower course.
'The Harappans were an enterprising people taking advantage of a window of opportunity - a kind of 'Goldilocks civilization,' said Dr Giosan.
'As monsoon drying subdued devastating floods, the land nearby the rivers - still fed with water and rich silt - was just right for agriculture. This lasted for almost 2,000 years, but continued aridification closed this favorable window in the end.'
The researchers believe they have uncovered the fate of a mythical river, the Sarasvati, described in The Vedas, ancient Indian scriptures composed in Sanskrit over 3000 years ago, which it is believed was fed by perennial glaciers in the Himalayas.
Today, the Ghaggar, an intermittent river that flows only during strong monsoons and dissipates into the desert along the dried course of Hakra valley, is thought to best approximate the location of the mythic Sarasvati, but its Himalayan origin and whether it was active during Vedic times remain controversial.
By 3900 years ago, their rivers drying, the Harappans had an escape route to the east toward the Ganges basin, where monsoon rains remained reliable.
'We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localised forms of economy: smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams,' said Dr Fuller.
'This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable.
'Cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished. Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified.'
Dr Giosan added: 'An amazing amount of archaeological work has been accumulating over the last decades, but it's never been linked properly to the evolution of the fluvial landscape. We now see landscape dynamics as the crucial link between climate change and people.
'Today the Indus system feeds the largest irrigation scheme in the world, immobilizing the river in channels and behind dams. If the monsoon were to increase in a warming world, as some predict, catastrophic floods such as the humanitarian disaster of 2010, would turn the current irrigation system, designed for a tamer river, obsolete.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2151143/Climate-change-wiped-worlds-great-civilisations-4-000-years-ago.html
The Indus civilization was the largest - but least known - of the first great urban cultures that also included Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The empire stretched over more than a million square kilometers across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, over what is now Pakistan, northwest India and eastern Afghanistan.
Now for the first time scientists believe they have discovered that climate change was a key ingredient in the collapse of the civilisation.
The study also resolves a long-standing debate over the source and fate of the Sarasvati, the sacred river of Hindu mythology, the authors believe.
Dr Liviu Giosan, a geologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and lead author of the study, said: 'We reconstructed the dynamic landscape of the plain where the Indus civilization developed 5200 years ago, built its cities, and slowly disintegrated between 3900 and 3000 years ago.
'Until now, speculations abounded about the links between this mysterious ancient culture and its life-giving mighty rivers.'
Like their contemporaries, the Harappans, who may have made up 10 per cent of the world's population, the group lived next to rivers, owing their livelihoods to the fertility of annually watered lands.
But the remains of their settlements are located in a vast desert region far from any flowing river.
The civilisation was forgotten until the 1920s. But since then, a flurry of research has uncovered a sophisticated urban culture with myriad internal trade routes and well-established sea links with Mesopotamia,
Archaeologists have also discovered building constructions, sanitation systems, arts and crafts, and a yet-to-be deciphered writing system.
Over five years an international team has been combining satellite photos and topographic data to make digital maps of landforms constructed by the Indus and neighboring rivers, which were then probed in the field by drilling, coring, and even manually-dug trenches and samples were tested.
Co-author Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist with University College London, said: 'Once we had this new information on the geological history, we could re-examine what we know about settlements, what crops people were planting and when, and how both agriculture and settlement patterns changed.
'This brought new insights into the process of eastward population shift, the change towards many more small farming communities, and the decline of cities during late Harappan times.'
The study suggests the decline in monsoon rains led to weakened river dynamics, and played a critical role both in the development and the collapse of the Harappan culture, which relied on river floods to fuel their agricultural surpluses.
The research provides a picture of 10,000 years of changing landscapes and the researchers identified a striking mounded plain, 10 to 20 meters high, over 100 kilometers wide, and running almost 1000 kilometers along the Indus, they call the 'Indus mega-ridge,' built by the river as it purged itself of sediment along its lower course.
'The Harappans were an enterprising people taking advantage of a window of opportunity - a kind of 'Goldilocks civilization,' said Dr Giosan.
'As monsoon drying subdued devastating floods, the land nearby the rivers - still fed with water and rich silt - was just right for agriculture. This lasted for almost 2,000 years, but continued aridification closed this favorable window in the end.'
The researchers believe they have uncovered the fate of a mythical river, the Sarasvati, described in The Vedas, ancient Indian scriptures composed in Sanskrit over 3000 years ago, which it is believed was fed by perennial glaciers in the Himalayas.
Today, the Ghaggar, an intermittent river that flows only during strong monsoons and dissipates into the desert along the dried course of Hakra valley, is thought to best approximate the location of the mythic Sarasvati, but its Himalayan origin and whether it was active during Vedic times remain controversial.
By 3900 years ago, their rivers drying, the Harappans had an escape route to the east toward the Ganges basin, where monsoon rains remained reliable.
'We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localised forms of economy: smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams,' said Dr Fuller.
'This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable.
'Cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished. Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified.'
Dr Giosan added: 'An amazing amount of archaeological work has been accumulating over the last decades, but it's never been linked properly to the evolution of the fluvial landscape. We now see landscape dynamics as the crucial link between climate change and people.
'Today the Indus system feeds the largest irrigation scheme in the world, immobilizing the river in channels and behind dams. If the monsoon were to increase in a warming world, as some predict, catastrophic floods such as the humanitarian disaster of 2010, would turn the current irrigation system, designed for a tamer river, obsolete.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2151143/Climate-change-wiped-worlds-great-civilisations-4-000-years-ago.html
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Did dogs help us conquer the world? Man's best friend may be the reason why we flourished over the Neanderthals
This guy has got it right about the evolutionary importance of dogs to us but is clearly clueless about why. The big and keen doggy nose makes up for our small noses. The big doggy ears make up for our small ears and limited hearing range. The weaponized doggy jaws make up for our weak jaws. What we bring to the deal is an upright stance and better colour vision that allows us to spot prey from afar
For more than 32,000 years, dogs have been our faithful companions, living, eating and breathing with us as we moved from cave-dwellers to city-builders.
Around this time, the planet lost our closest cousins - and, many argue, our competitors: Neanderthal man, who had previously occupied present-day Europe for a staggering 250,000 years.
Now, an anthropologist is suggesting these two facts may be related - and it was our close friendship with our canine associates that tipped the balance in favour of modern man.
Pat Shipman said that the advantages that domesticating a dog brought for us were so fundamental to our own evolution, that it made us 'top dog' out of the competing primate species.
Shipman analysed the results of excavations of fossilised canid bones from Europe, during the time when humans and Neanderthals overlapped.
The research first of all established a framework to our early 'best friend' relationships, with early humans adding dog teeth to jewellery, showing how they were worshipped, and rarely adorning cave art with images of dogs - implying dogs were treated with a reverence not shown to the animals they hunted.
The advantages dogs gave early man were huge - the animals themselves were likely to be larger than our modern day pooches, at least the size of German Shepherds.
Because of this, they could be used as 'beasts of burden', carrying animal carcasses and supplies from place to place, leaving humans to reserve their energies for the hunt.
In return, the animals gained warmth, food and companionship, or, as Shipman puts it, 'a virtuous circle of cooperation'.
They may also have influenced how we communicate. Humans and dogs are the only animals which have large 'whites of the eyes', and will follow the gaze of another person. This has not been found in other species, and it is argued that, as our man-dog relationship evolved, we learned to use these non-verbal cues more often.
As such,dogs became one of the first tools, or technologies, that humanity began to use, and as the relationship developed both ways, it became a lot deeper ingrained into our psyche.
And, in those early days where every advantage was needed to survive, Neanderthal man might simply have been unable to cope with the new species which rapidly moved across Europe.
In short, Shipman said: 'Animals were not incidental to our evolution into Homo sapiens - They were essential to it. They are what made us human.'
SOURCE
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Titanic survivors vindicated at last
A recently discovered cache of letters seen by the Telegraph absolves Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon of bribery and cowardice
Just when it could safely be assumed that every rivet of the Titanic had been examined, every myth exhausted and every survivor story told, chance has thrown up a rich hoard of new material written by two of the most vilified first-class passengers to escape drowning.
The letters of Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his colourful wife, Lucy, are an extraordinary record of the night of April 15 1912, a century ago tomorrow. They describe not just the unfolding terror of the ship’s sinking, but every detail of how they dressed for the emergency, what they took with them, and their experiences in a perilously small boat before they were picked up by the RMS Carpathia.
There is even a complete inventory of all Lady Duff Gordon’s possessions that went to the bottom of the sea, from feather boas, teagowns and long kid gloves to silk corsets, diamonds and pearls. Head of a famous fashion house, Maison Lucile, she took three fur coats, a large fox fur and seven hats on the voyage to New York. The total value is given as £3,208 3s 6d (around £250,000 today).
The documents have been in a cardboard box in a solicitor’s room for the past 100 years and only came to light when two summer vacation students at the London office of Veale Wasbrough Vizards (the firm that merged with Tweedies, who represented the Duff Gordons) were asked to work through old papers that might be returned to the families of their original clients.
The historical significance of the find is that it contains fresh detail that could finally restore the good name of the Duff Gordons, who were accused of urging, or even bribing, the crew of their boat to row away from the sinking ship and not to pick up survivors, even though the boat wasn’t full. Though they were cleared of all blame by the Board of Trade inquiry in May 1912, they were savagely cross-examined and remained tainted by suspicion that they had acted selfishly.
The box marked simply “Titanic”, which has just been returned to a very surprised Sir Andrew Duff Gordon, Cosmo’s great-nephew, is a time capsule of enthralling witness. “I had absolutely no idea of its existence,” says Sir Andrew. “I am elated that these papers have come to light. I never doubted my great-uncle, who was a most upright and self-effacing person, and his account of that night shows beyond doubt that he acted honourably. But mud sticks and he never really recovered from the allegations made against him. He was deeply upset, and quite reclusive for the rest of his life.”
The couple took the Titanic because Lucy Duff Gordon had couture shops in London, Paris and New York and it was the first ship available to get her to New York to sort out an urgent problem with her lease. They boarded at Cherbourg and travelled under an assumed name, ironically to spare Cosmo unwanted publicity.
Susceptible to premonitions, Lucy describes in one of the documents how she had remarked to her secretary during the afternoon: “It is so awfully cold that we might be passing icebergs.” After a “very merry” dinner, she describes going to bed prepared, as usual, for any eventuality – wearing a pink Japanese padded dressing gown and stockings, with her red curls tied up in a blue chiffon scarf. Half an hour after she retired, she heard a terrific rumbling noise.
“It seemed almost like people playing bowls, rolling the great balls along, and the boat stopped. Then the frightful tearing noise of steam escaping, and I heard people running along the deck outside my windows, but laughing and quite gay.” Her husband, sleeping in another cabin, had heard nothing and was annoyed to be woken up by her.
A steward’s remark: “I hear that we have struck an iceberg but there is nothing the matter,” did nothing to reassure Lucy, and while Cosmo went up on the bridge to investigate, she unlocked her security box and took out a pair of diamond earrings, a diamond necklace and turquoises. He came back somewhat shaken and urged her to dress.
“I took off my nightgown which was underneath my padded dressing gown,” she writes, “put on my chemise and my thick silk drawers and my woollen drawers. Then I put on a warm silk vest with long sleeves. I deliberately thought I would not put my corsets on in case that if I got into the water I should not be able to swim, and put back my warm dressing gown and on top of that… my warm purple dressing gown, and then I put on my little warm motor hat.”
That was not all. Her life jacket was next, topped by her moleskin fur coat with Astrakhan muff. She took a last look at her “lovely little cabin” with its lace, cushions and photographs and a large basket of lilies of the valley. “It didn’t seem possible there could be any danger.” Cosmo took with him into the unknown the Edwardian aristocrat’s survival kit: a flask of brandy, a colt automatic pistol and a handful of cigars, which he later handed out to the seamen in his rescue boat.
The Duff Gordons’ separate, dramatic accounts reveal that Lucy and her secretary Laura Francatelli (known as Franks), far from elbowing others aside, turned down places in two departing lifeboats for women and children because they refused to be separated from Sir Cosmo. Lady Duff Gordon threw her arms around her husband’s neck and stood her ground, a determination that he acknowledges gave him “the opportunity of being saved”.
The deck was empty of people when they saw a third, smaller boat, known as the captain’s emergency boat, appear before them with spaces. This wooden cutter was one of the last boats to be launched. Although it was supposed to hold 40 people, it was full of clutter. Cosmo, in his courteous way, touched an officer on the shoulder and asked: “May we get in this boat?” The three were urged to board, along with two American businessmen, and the sailor in charge was ordered to “pull off” from the doomed ship as fast as possible to avoid being sucked under. There were seven seamen and five passengers aboard.
Lucy watched in horror as the ship’s rows of lights gradually disappeared below the waterline. “Each time that I looked up there was one row of lights less.” In an excitable letter to her daughter, Esme, written four days after the sinking, she reveals a somewhat voyeuristic fascination in watching the ship go down and her annoyance at being so seasick that she missed things. Sister of the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, she was almost as emotionally flamboyant. “Well, my beloveds,” she writes to her family. “You know how I always said I longed for experiences and adventures and sensations, well, I’ve had it this time and no mistake.”
Her flimsy airmail letter includes a small drawing of their boat, snagged at a dangerous angle as it was lowered 90 ft down to the water. “The behaviour of all the people on the poor Titanic is beyond praise,” she writes. “Hearing all the thrilling blood-curdling tales of some of the survivors and all the excitement of the last few days has quite worn me out but I’m perfectly well and have never turned a hair.”
After explosions that split the ship in two, Cosmo recalls “the perfect horror of shrieking” that followed its final plunge. “Even at the distance we were, we heard the most awful cries of agony.”
The idea of going back for possible survivors, he discloses, was not mooted. They were too far away from the wreck, in intense darkness, and it would have been a dangerous and futile gesture because no one could have survived the icy sea for more than 15 minutes. “Cosmo was in no position to give orders,” says Sir Andrew. “He was not in charge of the boat.”
On the boat, the crew said they had lost not only all their possessions but their jobs. Cosmo promised to give them £5 towards restitution – an offer that was deliberately misinterpreted by one of the crew later as a bribe not to return for survivors because the Duff Gordons were allegedly afraid their small rowing boat would be swamped. In a stoical and moving account of the tragedy sent from New York to his anxious siblings, Cosmo writes: “Indeed at that moment I would have given anything that I possessed to anybody who wanted it, as my heart was full of thanksgiving that the two women in my charge and myself were where we were.”
“It was complete nonsense to call it a bribe,” says Andrew Duff Gordon. “My great-uncle was incredibly grateful to survive and what these papers show is that, when they got on the Carpathia, he wrote the seven oarsmen a Coutts cheque for £5 each to replace what they had lost.” His wife, Evie, comments: “One wonders if an act of philanthropy has ever had such dire consequences for its benefactor.”
By the time RMS Carpathia docked at New York with Titanic’s 710 rescued passengers, the press were in full cry – both for survivors’ stories and for people to blame for a disaster that took 1,500 lives. In a handwritten letter to his two brothers and two sisters, Cosmo comments bitterly: “There seems to be a feeling of resentment against any English man being saved.”
He adds: “The whole pleasure of having been saved is quite spoilt by the venomous attacks they made at first in the papers. This, I suppose, was because I refused to see any reporter.” One of the more outrageous rumours was that Duff Gordon had cheated his way on to a lifeboat dressed as a woman.
Though he reassures his family that “all the stories against me have already been contradicted and proved untrue. So I shall sit tight”, his arrival in England was met with another wave of traumatic publicity. Lucy Duff Gordon wrote: “I shall never forget his stricken face when we landed from the RMS Lusitania and caught the boat train for London. All over the station were newspaper placards: 'Duff Gordon scandal’… 'Baronet and wife row away from the drowning’.”
Among the newly discovered papers are Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon’s trenchant “Observations” on evidence given at the inquiry. Point by point, they rebut the “slanders” against them.
“They have both been vilified for far too long,” says Sir Andrew Duff Gordon. “The lovely thing is that it’s now been shown that they behaved very well.”
SOURCE
Just when it could safely be assumed that every rivet of the Titanic had been examined, every myth exhausted and every survivor story told, chance has thrown up a rich hoard of new material written by two of the most vilified first-class passengers to escape drowning.
The letters of Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his colourful wife, Lucy, are an extraordinary record of the night of April 15 1912, a century ago tomorrow. They describe not just the unfolding terror of the ship’s sinking, but every detail of how they dressed for the emergency, what they took with them, and their experiences in a perilously small boat before they were picked up by the RMS Carpathia.
There is even a complete inventory of all Lady Duff Gordon’s possessions that went to the bottom of the sea, from feather boas, teagowns and long kid gloves to silk corsets, diamonds and pearls. Head of a famous fashion house, Maison Lucile, she took three fur coats, a large fox fur and seven hats on the voyage to New York. The total value is given as £3,208 3s 6d (around £250,000 today).
The documents have been in a cardboard box in a solicitor’s room for the past 100 years and only came to light when two summer vacation students at the London office of Veale Wasbrough Vizards (the firm that merged with Tweedies, who represented the Duff Gordons) were asked to work through old papers that might be returned to the families of their original clients.
The historical significance of the find is that it contains fresh detail that could finally restore the good name of the Duff Gordons, who were accused of urging, or even bribing, the crew of their boat to row away from the sinking ship and not to pick up survivors, even though the boat wasn’t full. Though they were cleared of all blame by the Board of Trade inquiry in May 1912, they were savagely cross-examined and remained tainted by suspicion that they had acted selfishly.
The box marked simply “Titanic”, which has just been returned to a very surprised Sir Andrew Duff Gordon, Cosmo’s great-nephew, is a time capsule of enthralling witness. “I had absolutely no idea of its existence,” says Sir Andrew. “I am elated that these papers have come to light. I never doubted my great-uncle, who was a most upright and self-effacing person, and his account of that night shows beyond doubt that he acted honourably. But mud sticks and he never really recovered from the allegations made against him. He was deeply upset, and quite reclusive for the rest of his life.”
The couple took the Titanic because Lucy Duff Gordon had couture shops in London, Paris and New York and it was the first ship available to get her to New York to sort out an urgent problem with her lease. They boarded at Cherbourg and travelled under an assumed name, ironically to spare Cosmo unwanted publicity.
Susceptible to premonitions, Lucy describes in one of the documents how she had remarked to her secretary during the afternoon: “It is so awfully cold that we might be passing icebergs.” After a “very merry” dinner, she describes going to bed prepared, as usual, for any eventuality – wearing a pink Japanese padded dressing gown and stockings, with her red curls tied up in a blue chiffon scarf. Half an hour after she retired, she heard a terrific rumbling noise.
“It seemed almost like people playing bowls, rolling the great balls along, and the boat stopped. Then the frightful tearing noise of steam escaping, and I heard people running along the deck outside my windows, but laughing and quite gay.” Her husband, sleeping in another cabin, had heard nothing and was annoyed to be woken up by her.
A steward’s remark: “I hear that we have struck an iceberg but there is nothing the matter,” did nothing to reassure Lucy, and while Cosmo went up on the bridge to investigate, she unlocked her security box and took out a pair of diamond earrings, a diamond necklace and turquoises. He came back somewhat shaken and urged her to dress.
“I took off my nightgown which was underneath my padded dressing gown,” she writes, “put on my chemise and my thick silk drawers and my woollen drawers. Then I put on a warm silk vest with long sleeves. I deliberately thought I would not put my corsets on in case that if I got into the water I should not be able to swim, and put back my warm dressing gown and on top of that… my warm purple dressing gown, and then I put on my little warm motor hat.”
That was not all. Her life jacket was next, topped by her moleskin fur coat with Astrakhan muff. She took a last look at her “lovely little cabin” with its lace, cushions and photographs and a large basket of lilies of the valley. “It didn’t seem possible there could be any danger.” Cosmo took with him into the unknown the Edwardian aristocrat’s survival kit: a flask of brandy, a colt automatic pistol and a handful of cigars, which he later handed out to the seamen in his rescue boat.
The Duff Gordons’ separate, dramatic accounts reveal that Lucy and her secretary Laura Francatelli (known as Franks), far from elbowing others aside, turned down places in two departing lifeboats for women and children because they refused to be separated from Sir Cosmo. Lady Duff Gordon threw her arms around her husband’s neck and stood her ground, a determination that he acknowledges gave him “the opportunity of being saved”.
The deck was empty of people when they saw a third, smaller boat, known as the captain’s emergency boat, appear before them with spaces. This wooden cutter was one of the last boats to be launched. Although it was supposed to hold 40 people, it was full of clutter. Cosmo, in his courteous way, touched an officer on the shoulder and asked: “May we get in this boat?” The three were urged to board, along with two American businessmen, and the sailor in charge was ordered to “pull off” from the doomed ship as fast as possible to avoid being sucked under. There were seven seamen and five passengers aboard.
Lucy watched in horror as the ship’s rows of lights gradually disappeared below the waterline. “Each time that I looked up there was one row of lights less.” In an excitable letter to her daughter, Esme, written four days after the sinking, she reveals a somewhat voyeuristic fascination in watching the ship go down and her annoyance at being so seasick that she missed things. Sister of the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, she was almost as emotionally flamboyant. “Well, my beloveds,” she writes to her family. “You know how I always said I longed for experiences and adventures and sensations, well, I’ve had it this time and no mistake.”
Her flimsy airmail letter includes a small drawing of their boat, snagged at a dangerous angle as it was lowered 90 ft down to the water. “The behaviour of all the people on the poor Titanic is beyond praise,” she writes. “Hearing all the thrilling blood-curdling tales of some of the survivors and all the excitement of the last few days has quite worn me out but I’m perfectly well and have never turned a hair.”
After explosions that split the ship in two, Cosmo recalls “the perfect horror of shrieking” that followed its final plunge. “Even at the distance we were, we heard the most awful cries of agony.”
The idea of going back for possible survivors, he discloses, was not mooted. They were too far away from the wreck, in intense darkness, and it would have been a dangerous and futile gesture because no one could have survived the icy sea for more than 15 minutes. “Cosmo was in no position to give orders,” says Sir Andrew. “He was not in charge of the boat.”
On the boat, the crew said they had lost not only all their possessions but their jobs. Cosmo promised to give them £5 towards restitution – an offer that was deliberately misinterpreted by one of the crew later as a bribe not to return for survivors because the Duff Gordons were allegedly afraid their small rowing boat would be swamped. In a stoical and moving account of the tragedy sent from New York to his anxious siblings, Cosmo writes: “Indeed at that moment I would have given anything that I possessed to anybody who wanted it, as my heart was full of thanksgiving that the two women in my charge and myself were where we were.”
“It was complete nonsense to call it a bribe,” says Andrew Duff Gordon. “My great-uncle was incredibly grateful to survive and what these papers show is that, when they got on the Carpathia, he wrote the seven oarsmen a Coutts cheque for £5 each to replace what they had lost.” His wife, Evie, comments: “One wonders if an act of philanthropy has ever had such dire consequences for its benefactor.”
By the time RMS Carpathia docked at New York with Titanic’s 710 rescued passengers, the press were in full cry – both for survivors’ stories and for people to blame for a disaster that took 1,500 lives. In a handwritten letter to his two brothers and two sisters, Cosmo comments bitterly: “There seems to be a feeling of resentment against any English man being saved.”
He adds: “The whole pleasure of having been saved is quite spoilt by the venomous attacks they made at first in the papers. This, I suppose, was because I refused to see any reporter.” One of the more outrageous rumours was that Duff Gordon had cheated his way on to a lifeboat dressed as a woman.
Though he reassures his family that “all the stories against me have already been contradicted and proved untrue. So I shall sit tight”, his arrival in England was met with another wave of traumatic publicity. Lucy Duff Gordon wrote: “I shall never forget his stricken face when we landed from the RMS Lusitania and caught the boat train for London. All over the station were newspaper placards: 'Duff Gordon scandal’… 'Baronet and wife row away from the drowning’.”
Among the newly discovered papers are Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon’s trenchant “Observations” on evidence given at the inquiry. Point by point, they rebut the “slanders” against them.
“They have both been vilified for far too long,” says Sir Andrew Duff Gordon. “The lovely thing is that it’s now been shown that they behaved very well.”
SOURCE
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Mother Nature's deadly mirage sank Titanic
THE blame for the sinking of the Titanic lies not with her lookouts or her skipper, but with an iceberg mirage created by Mother Nature.
British historian Tim Maltin has declared "case closed" on the cause of the disaster after discovering evidence that an optical illusion concealed the iceberg that sealed the ship's fate.
After collating sea and air temperatures taken by ships that passed through the area around the time of the sinking, the Titanic expert found atmospheric conditions conducive to a cold water mirage.
The data indicated that at the time of the collision the ship had been in the middle of a high pressure zone, where freezing waters originating in Greenland met the Gulf Stream.
The lookouts would have been searching for large black objects blocking the stars on the horizon, but refraction of light created by the movement of air currents could have made the horizon seem higher than it was, rendering the attempt ineffective.
He believes the same conditions could also have distorted the Titanic's emergency flares and SOS signals, explaining why they weren't picked up by the nearby SS Californian.
"It's almost as if Titanic sank in a killing zone of nature where all these very dangerous elements combined to make it fatal," Maltin said.
The author and filmmaker investigated ships' logs after reading eyewitness testimonies from survivors who reported a sudden drop in temperature before the collision and unusual observations about the ship's lights and the brightness of the stars.
There were also reports about columns of smoke from the ship flattening out like mushrooms, indicating a thermal inversion.
The presence of the mirage, or "false horizon", would have meant the iceberg was effectively invisible until it was right in front of the ship, making it impossible to avoid. Maltin said the findings vindicated the ship's crew and builders, adding his belief that the vessel would have been safer than any ocean liner in existence today.
"Titanic is so amazing because she represented the best that man could achieve and she represents the best of science and technology," he said.
"People believed that technology could triumph over nature, but what the Titanic teaches us is that the universe is always more powerful."
His theory is put forward in Case Closed, one of three National Geographic documentaries screening as part of the Titanic 100 series, produced to mark the anniversary of the ship's sinking.
Case Closed premiered last week on the National Geographic channel.
SOURCE
Saturday, February 11, 2012
How top Nazi used 'ratline' escape route to flee to South America after the war, by daughter of woman he seduced
Nazi ratlines that spirited thousands of war criminals to freedom are revealed in a new book chronicling the murderous reign of a top foreign office official during the Third Reich.
The life of Horst Wagner, a man with the blood of at least 350,000 Jews on his hands, is detailed in Beloved Criminal: A Diplomat In The Service Of The Final Solution.
Wagner was the link-man between the foreign office and the SS In this role, he aided in the round-ups, deportation and extermination of both German and foreign Jews.
This first major work on him by Gisela Heidenreich is also an intensely personal one for the author - her own mother Edith met and fell in love with him during the war.
During his years in exile Wagner remained in contact with Edith by post, letters which her daughter uses in her work chronicling the escape routes and mini-Reich that the fugitives built for themselves in Argentina.
Heidenreich, who works as a family therapist, has the blood of the Nazi regime in her. She was born into a Lebensborn home - set up by the S.S. for unmarried mothers to give birth and donate their children to the Nazi state.
Her father was the commander of the SS officer school at Bad Toelz in Bavaria.
Wagner, she said, dreamed of becoming her stepfather after he began his affair with her mother.
After escaping from a Nuremberg jail in 1948, he later explained to Heidenreich's mother how he was aided on his way to South America on the so-called Kloster Line, being given sanctuary in a number of convents and holy orders in Austria before heading to Rome.
There the German bishop Alois Hudal, priest-confessor to the German Catholic community in the city, arranged for him to get a Red Cross passport in 1951.
He sailed out of Genoa to Argentina to join such killers as Adolf Eichmann, the supreme mastermind behind the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, the perverted 'Angel of Death' of Auschwitz, notorious for his grotesque medical experiments.
Hudal also arranged the paperwork for Franz Stangl, the commandent of the extermination camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, to flee to Brazil on a Red Cross passport using Vatican funds.
Stangl, who was eventually extradited back to Germany in the 1960s and died in jail while serving a life sentence of his crimes, oversaw the murder of an estimated 1.4million people at the two camps.
Wagner settled in Bariloche, 1,000miles south of Buenos Aires on the edge of Patagonia, and celebrated weekly in Bavarian-style houses with old S.S. comrades, drinking beer and singing the marching songs of the lost regime.
'The line from Germany to South America lay across Austrian monasteries and an intermediate stop in Slouth Tyrol where the Nazis were to recover from the strains of their journeys,' said Heidenreich.
'Once in Genoa they received the friendly assistance of the Vatican, in particular from Bishop Hudal who furnished them with the International Red Cross passports.'
Using the letters Wagner wrote to her mother, Heidenreich set out to reconstruct the odyssey of the Nazi fanatic and even went to Bariloche to draw a fascinating portrait of how this chilling old boys clique lived so many thousands of miles away from the scenes of their crimes.
'It was a parallel world,' she said, 'developed so far away and with no condemnation in postwar Germany by the public or politicians.'
SOURCE
The life of Horst Wagner, a man with the blood of at least 350,000 Jews on his hands, is detailed in Beloved Criminal: A Diplomat In The Service Of The Final Solution.
Wagner was the link-man between the foreign office and the SS In this role, he aided in the round-ups, deportation and extermination of both German and foreign Jews.
This first major work on him by Gisela Heidenreich is also an intensely personal one for the author - her own mother Edith met and fell in love with him during the war.
During his years in exile Wagner remained in contact with Edith by post, letters which her daughter uses in her work chronicling the escape routes and mini-Reich that the fugitives built for themselves in Argentina.
Heidenreich, who works as a family therapist, has the blood of the Nazi regime in her. She was born into a Lebensborn home - set up by the S.S. for unmarried mothers to give birth and donate their children to the Nazi state.
Her father was the commander of the SS officer school at Bad Toelz in Bavaria.
Wagner, she said, dreamed of becoming her stepfather after he began his affair with her mother.
After escaping from a Nuremberg jail in 1948, he later explained to Heidenreich's mother how he was aided on his way to South America on the so-called Kloster Line, being given sanctuary in a number of convents and holy orders in Austria before heading to Rome.
There the German bishop Alois Hudal, priest-confessor to the German Catholic community in the city, arranged for him to get a Red Cross passport in 1951.
He sailed out of Genoa to Argentina to join such killers as Adolf Eichmann, the supreme mastermind behind the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, the perverted 'Angel of Death' of Auschwitz, notorious for his grotesque medical experiments.
Hudal also arranged the paperwork for Franz Stangl, the commandent of the extermination camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, to flee to Brazil on a Red Cross passport using Vatican funds.
Stangl, who was eventually extradited back to Germany in the 1960s and died in jail while serving a life sentence of his crimes, oversaw the murder of an estimated 1.4million people at the two camps.
Wagner settled in Bariloche, 1,000miles south of Buenos Aires on the edge of Patagonia, and celebrated weekly in Bavarian-style houses with old S.S. comrades, drinking beer and singing the marching songs of the lost regime.
'The line from Germany to South America lay across Austrian monasteries and an intermediate stop in Slouth Tyrol where the Nazis were to recover from the strains of their journeys,' said Heidenreich.
'Once in Genoa they received the friendly assistance of the Vatican, in particular from Bishop Hudal who furnished them with the International Red Cross passports.'
Using the letters Wagner wrote to her mother, Heidenreich set out to reconstruct the odyssey of the Nazi fanatic and even went to Bariloche to draw a fascinating portrait of how this chilling old boys clique lived so many thousands of miles away from the scenes of their crimes.
'It was a parallel world,' she said, 'developed so far away and with no condemnation in postwar Germany by the public or politicians.'
SOURCE
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Bacon butties, roast dinners and a cuppa: The 50 things that Brits love best about Britain show Brits are a nation of food lovers
I'm rather partial to a bacon butty myself
The tasty bacon butty is what we love most about Britain, a survey revealed today. A humble bacon sandwich topped the poll of the 50 things we most adore about the nation, with a traditional roast dinner taking second place.
Nothing washes down a meal better than a lovely cup of tea - which came in at number three in the survey of 60,000 Brits.
Our proud national history came fourth followed by the BBC in fifth, Big Ben in sixth and Buckingham Palace in seventh.
The love for our rolling hills will never dwindle as the beautiful English countryside made eighth spot.
Food continued its domination in the remainder of the top ten, with fish and chips and the Yorkshire Pudding coming in at ninth and tenth respectively.
Incredibly, the poll revealed that cheese is a greater national treasure than our monarch, with cheddar coming in at 13th on the list while the Queen trailed behind in 15th.
For an example of style, class and British engineering, the Aston Martin roared into 17th.
It is clear that Brits love bagging a bargain, which comes in at 30th on the list.
James Bond triumphed over Harry Potter as the nation’s best-loved fictional character.
And proving the quirkiness us Brits are known for is alive and well, that most alternative of British ‘sports’ - cheese rolling - made the last spot.
While perhaps when it comes to love, the debate is over, as Marmite finished narrowly outside the top 50.
‘When it comes to our great loves food is clearly on top and whether it’s a butty, bun or sanger the trusty bacon sandwich is a worthy winner of the top spot,’ said T-Mobile spokesman Spencer McHugh, after the company commissioned the research for a new TV ad.
He added: ‘Whether we’re eating it between bread or rolling it down a hill it’s obvious that we are a nation of food lovers.'
SOURCE
The tasty bacon butty is what we love most about Britain, a survey revealed today. A humble bacon sandwich topped the poll of the 50 things we most adore about the nation, with a traditional roast dinner taking second place.
Nothing washes down a meal better than a lovely cup of tea - which came in at number three in the survey of 60,000 Brits.
Our proud national history came fourth followed by the BBC in fifth, Big Ben in sixth and Buckingham Palace in seventh.
The love for our rolling hills will never dwindle as the beautiful English countryside made eighth spot.
Food continued its domination in the remainder of the top ten, with fish and chips and the Yorkshire Pudding coming in at ninth and tenth respectively.
Incredibly, the poll revealed that cheese is a greater national treasure than our monarch, with cheddar coming in at 13th on the list while the Queen trailed behind in 15th.
For an example of style, class and British engineering, the Aston Martin roared into 17th.
It is clear that Brits love bagging a bargain, which comes in at 30th on the list.
James Bond triumphed over Harry Potter as the nation’s best-loved fictional character.
And proving the quirkiness us Brits are known for is alive and well, that most alternative of British ‘sports’ - cheese rolling - made the last spot.
While perhaps when it comes to love, the debate is over, as Marmite finished narrowly outside the top 50.
‘When it comes to our great loves food is clearly on top and whether it’s a butty, bun or sanger the trusty bacon sandwich is a worthy winner of the top spot,’ said T-Mobile spokesman Spencer McHugh, after the company commissioned the research for a new TV ad.
He added: ‘Whether we’re eating it between bread or rolling it down a hill it’s obvious that we are a nation of food lovers.'
SOURCE
Friday, January 27, 2012
Ireland's shame: "The List"
The hate-filled Eamon de Valera persecuted returned Irish soldiers for daring to help Britain fight Hitler
The young airman was desperate to be back with his family and friends at the end of the war. He had done his bit to see off Hitler and make the world a safer place. His one wish now was to be home with ‘my people’. But, instead of a hero’s welcome, what Irishman Martin Walsh feared was being arrested and locked up.
‘Sir,’ he wrote plaintively from England to the authorities in Dublin in 1946, ‘I wish to return as a free Irish citizen once more, without detention or punishment. I would like to have my freedom in Eire and not be caged up like a bird when I go home.’
He sought a written pass ‘to protect me from the military and the police’. His ‘crime’? Leaving Ireland and crossing the water to join the British forces in the struggle against Nazi Germany. It left him in a cruel limbo that, 65 years later, is still scandalously unresolved.
Walsh and thousands of adventurous youngsters were technically deserters. They had enlisted in the Irish Defence Force but with no enemy to fight because of their country’s decision to stay neutral in World War II, they had chosen to slip away to Britain, join up and fight.
After donning British uniforms, some risked their lives on battlefields from Dunkirk to El Alamein and D-Day to Arnhem. Others faced death daily on bomber missions over Germany or suffered the unspeakable hell of Japanese prison camps.
Some — such as Corporal Edward Browne, who was awarded the Military Medal for storming a German machine gun position in Normandy, Bren gun blazing from his hip — paid for their bravery with their lives and would never see Ireland again. Those who survived had every reason to be proud of their contribution to the liberation of Europe from the Nazi menace. But in their homeland they were now outcasts.
At first, Walsh, who had been in the RAF, was given the reassurance he wanted. He was told in a letter he would not be arrested as he got off the ferry. But what the letter failed to mention was that his name was on a secret blacklist, which had been personally authorised by the prime minister, Eamon de Valera.
He would be banned from a job in any civil service department, town hall or state-run service such as the post office, the health service, bus, rail and shipping companies. There would be no pension or benefits. In Ireland, he was effectively a non-person.
History does not record what happened to Martin Walsh, but there is no reason to think his fate differed from any of the 5,000 other men on the now infamous List.
Pat Reid, who had fought the Japanese in India and Burma, failed to find a steady job for 15 years after his return. His family grew up in abject poverty, depending on handouts and soup kitchens to survive.
Denied access to better-paid jobs, men such as Reid were forced into the back-breaking life of itinerant farm labourers, finding what little work they could for virtually slave wages.
The shocking plight of Ireland’s post-war dispossessed — victims of a vengeful anti-British administration — has recently come to light and a campaign is underway for those few still alive to be pardoned. Indeed, signs indicate that the Irish government is indeed soon to redress what many now see as a stain on the nation’s history.
The Irish government of the day had ‘utterly lost its moral compass,’ said Alan Shatter, Ireland’s Justice Minister, in a landmark speech this week that criticised the ‘shameful’ treatment meted out to Irish soldiers. ‘We should no longer be in denial that, in the context of the Holocaust, Irish neutrality was a principle of moral bankruptcy.’
It happened because of the de Valera government’s decision in 1939 to stay out of the war. Ireland, its army so under-resourced they barely had a serviceable rifle between them, had little to contribute militarily. The judgment made in Dublin was that to side with the British would jeopardise the country’s fragile sense of independence so soon after its constitutional split from the UK in 1920.
But that left its thousands of newly enlisted soldiers — who had joined up when it seemed their country might have to fight an invader, whether the Germans, or the British taking over Ireland in order to forestall the Germans — kicking their heels. Instead of fighting for their country’s honour, they were dispatched to cut peat, knee-deep in bogs.
Con Murphy was among those ‘browned off’ by finding himself on work which, as a farm boy, he had joined the army to avoid. ‘It wasn’t soldiering at all,’ he said.
He secretly applied to the RAF, then took a train from Dublin to the North. There were 20 men in his carriage, all ‘deserting’ to join the British forces. They went for a variety of reasons. Some were unashamedly looking for adventure. There was a war and they wanted to be in the action.
Others thought strategically. Dublin University student Derek Overend’s view was: ‘It was best to stop the Jerries getting England first before they could get to us in Ireland.’
Others — probably the majority — felt they could not stand aside from the crusade against fascism. It was wrong to hide behind neutrality when the rest of the world was having to decide where it stood. ‘I wanted to get a crack at the Germans for what they were doing in Europe,’ was a commonly expressed reason.
Even firm republicans such as Thomas Walsh, who as a child had been a runner for the IRA, knew the threat to democracy from Hitler was greater than any danger posed by his old enemy. He swallowed hard, put aside his historic antipathy and joined the British Army.
After the war, they would all face accusations that it was the pay rather than principle that drew them — and this was clearly an attraction in a country beset by unemployment and poverty.
But while that charge might stick against the tens of thousands who travelled to Britain to work in munitions factories and on the land — and who were not stigmatised in any way afterwards — it was unfair on fighting men, who risked death for far less than was on offer for civilian work.
The 12s 6d (about 62p) a day that Richard Fellows got as air crew in an RAF bomber might have seemed a king’s ransom in Cork, but it was poor recompense for a 50 per cent chance of being killed.
Despite Dublin’s neutrality, Irish officialdom seemed in two minds about those who decided to go to Britain to fight. Soldier Phil Farrington slipped away to England and enlisted in the Royal Sussex Regiment but then made the mistake of using his first leave to go home to Dublin. He was arrested for desertion and spent months being starved and viciously beaten in a military jail.
But, in other cases, the authorities colluded with absconders. Michael Baggott was issued with a travel permit to go to Liverpool even though he stated on the form that the purpose of his journey was ‘to join the British Army’. He was advised to alter this to ‘business purposes’ and change the photograph from one of him in Irish army uniform to one in civvies. Then he was allowed to leave.
Ireland’s neutrality was never totally enforced and always veered towards the Allies, despite the undisguised pro-German leanings of some hard-line republicans and the generally anti-British sentiment of the bulk of the new nation’s population. There was more co-operation on the quiet than was officially acknowledged. British flyers who crash-landed in Eire, for example, were repatriated whereas German ones were interned.
Once the conflict was over and the danger passed, however, attitudes hardened again, as was shown by de Valera’s contemptible nose-thumbing gesture of publicly offering his condolences to the German government on Hitler’s death in 1945.
Suddenly the men who had fought for Britain became Dublin’s fall guys. In August 1945, an executive order named 4,983 of them and pronounced them guilty of desertion after a farcical court martial. They were officially dismissed from the Irish army, convicted en masse in their absence without being given a chance to defend themselves.
But the greater injustice was to come. Their names comprised the dreaded List. From that point on, their lives were blighted.
Opposition politicians tried to get this order overturned, arguing that its effect would be to condemn every man on it to ‘destitution and starvation’, along with his family. It was ‘brutal, unchristian and inhuman, stimulated by malice, seething with hatred and oozing with venom’ — a description that decades later seems perfectly apt.
But the order stayed, and the blacklist began to do its dirty work — all the nastier because the alleged ‘sins’ of the fathers were visited on their offspring. If a man could not work, his children starved.
‘We were hungry,’ said Paddy Reid’s son. ‘The kind where you felt your belly was stuck to your back. The attitude was one of no mercy for us. It was pure vindictiveness.’
Then again, if, fearing retribution, a man who fought with the British decided not to return to Ireland, he was deemed to have abandoned his children. The law then allowed them to be forced into state care and sent to special schools run by Catholic orders — now infamous for physical cruelty and sexual abuse.
In those brutal homes, their names were marked with the initials ‘SS’ – standing for the Gaelic words ‘saighdiuir Sasanach’ (British soldier), but with chilling Nazi undertones that seem to have gone unnoticed by the Irish authorities. They were subjected to even harsher treatment than the rest.
Even more astonishingly, because the list of deserters did not differentiate between the living and the dead, the orphans of men who had died in action in the war were also singled out and treated in this abominable way.
The wrongs perpetrated in those post-war years still trouble the now elderly men who were blacklisted and vilified. After enduring a jail term in Cork when he first deserted, on his release Phil Farrington fled once more to England and joined up again. He was in the final assault on Germany in 1945 and helped liberate the Belsen concentration camp.
Returning home, he knew to keep a low profile and never wore his campaign medals. He remembers that, because of prejudice against those who had fought with the British, he was warned not to visit certain areas, ‘or they’ll have you’.
Now in his 90s, he still has nightmares that the police will come for him and he will be put back in prison. His dread of the knock on the door has no basis in reality but it is the genuinely felt fear of a frail old man. ‘I see it in his eyes even today,’ says his grandson, Patrick. The pardon campaigners are seeking would put at least this old soldier’s mind at rest.
There are, though, apologists who argued at the time and still claim that men like Farrington deserved their punishment. They were deserters who reneged on their uniform, flouted the law and put Ireland’s neutrality in jeopardy.
The flaw in that argument is that, unlike most deserters in military situations, these men were choosing to run towards the guns rather than away from them, placing themselves in the front line rather than ducking out of danger. Moreover, retribution was exacted after the war, when neutrality was no longer a live issue.
The action taken against them had no practical purpose except to persecute those who had dared to defy de Valera and his intransigent anti-British stance. It was essentially spiteful and small-minded, an act of petty revenge.
As author Robert Widders, who highlighted the fate of the returning soldiers in his recent book, Spitting On A Soldier’s Grave, puts it: ‘The deserters from the Irish army who joined the Allied struggle faced the horrors of the bloodiest war in history. They have earned our respect and gratitude. They deserved better than the List.’
SOURCE
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
How to close your ex-files: Can’t get that old flame out of your mind? The solution could be easier than you think...
By Andrea Blundell, who sounds a very foolish woman
When we were together, I used to joke that Paul was my handbag man, because the only time I’ve ever experienced glances of envy from other women was either when he was on my arm or when I borrowed a friend’s Hermes Birkin bag.
Rugged good looks aside, what really made him my Mr Perfect was that he was the only man who saw I wasn’t as strong as I pretended to be. But the more I opened up to him the more he played it cool until, three months in, I walked away in a fit of frustration.
When I backpedalled and tried to get him back he wouldn’t have any of it. End of story. Right? Not even close. Seven years later, single and now 38 years old, I am no closer to my dream of starting a family.
I not only still mourn what I had with Paul, I compare every man to him and look him up on the internet more than I want to admit — even when that means coming across pictures of him and his new girlfriend, who is a teeth-clenching ten years younger than me.
I know it’s completely illogical to be hung up on a man I dated for such a short time, especially as he probably never thinks of me in return. Trust me, I’ve done my very best to stop acting like a lovesick teenager:
I’ve read books about getting over previous loves, I’ve deleted all his emails and I’ve written long lists of things that are wrong with him to give myself a reality check. If you could have a brain operation to erase someone, I’d be first in line.
But it helps to know I’m far from the only middle-aged woman with an ex obsession. At a party recently, a shocking five out of six women — married or not — confessed they, too, had an ex whose memory they still clung to. Why would so many intelligent women do this? And what’s the price we are paying for not letting go?
Nina Grunfeld, founder of psychology workshops Life Clubs, says holding on to a memory can be a way to feel important. ‘It gives us drama in our lives — and we feel special when we have drama.’
I admit she has a point. I tend to think of Paul when I’m feeling bored and past my prime, and it allows me to feel sorry for myself. But it could be costing me dear, Nina warns: ‘When your past takes up a lot of your time, you can then lose out on the future you really want,’ she says.
I have a sickening realisation that holding on to Paul is partly why I’m nowhere near starting the family I dream of. Men I’ve dated since have seemed so disappointing in comparison that now I can’t even be bothered to look, despite the giant biological clock ticking over my head. However, I know it’s not healthy and that I have to get my ex out of my life, so I go to see psychotherapist Tara Springett, author of a book called The Five-Minute Miracle that claims to ‘lift you out of the anguish of psychological hang-ups and addictions within weeks’.
Tara suggests I come to her for three sessions, confident she can help me get over my obsession. Given that, at £45 a session, it’s a fair bit cheaper than other therapies I’ve considered, I give it a go. When I visit, the pale decor and water feature tinkling in the background of her East Sussex home do little to calm the sudden fit of nerves that cause me to babble about Paul at high speed.
Thankfully, Tara is a remarkably down-to-Earth sort who has an amazing knack for making you feel that talking about your problems is the most practical thing in the world. She soon has me relaxed, telling me to close my eyes and imagine I’m surrounded by a big bubble. It feels strange, but I tell myself it’s no different to using my imagination to think of the next home I’ll buy or what I’ll have for dinner, so why not use it to try to make myself feel better? I have to fill this bubble ‘with a loving feeling,’ she says.
For the life of me, I can’t muster any positive emotions at all. She suggests I just imagine someone I really care about looking at me and use the good feeling that creates. I blank on that, too. In the end I resort to picturing a friend’s dog I recently took care of — it’s a sad reflection of my affection-starved life.
Next, Tara asks me to visualise Paul in another ‘loving bubble’. And after all these years thinking I adore the guy, all I feel is utter fury. The best I can manage is a seriously unimpressive, tiny sphere containing what looks a plastic doll. The bubbles, which she has told me help establish boundaries, now make sense — I can’t reach out and crush his head, as I’m shocked to discover I want to. We discuss my anger and I can’t help the truth spilling out— Paul often stood me up, didn’t give me enough affection, and hid from me that he was on heavy antidepressants.
Having said it, I then protest he was still amazing and we could have overcome such things. ‘You would be the first woman to cure a man by love,’ she says, gently. I am given tasks to do at home for five minutes each day — I’m supposed to imagine myself in my happy bubble and ask myself if I really want to exchange those good feelings for a life with Paul and his problems. As she tells me this, a part of my mind is still stubbornly screaming: ‘Yes, I do. I’ll pack my bags and go to him right now!’
Another part of me cynically thinks this will only work because my rebellious side will be so annoyed at being told I must think about him regularly, I will no longer want to. At first, that’s true. Having to routinely think of him just drives home how much the habit has already robbed me of. But I keep up the exercise, remembering Tara’s advice that I’ll get out of it what I put into it. Gradually, as the days pass, things begin to change. A flood of memories comes to the surface — it’s as if the session with Tara has opened a Pandora’s box of truth.
And this includes recalling all the bad things I did to Paul — a side of our story I’ve never really acknowledged. I constantly criticised him, called him a rubbish lover to his face and eventually kissed one of his friends in a crazed attempt to get more attention from him. After this, I sit on my living room floor, bawling with shame. I feel an urge to tell Paul how sorry I am, but he hasn’t returned an email from me in years so it seems pointless.
Though Tara is pleased with my progress at our next session, I feel very anxious still, so she teaches me a breathing technique to lower stress. It’s so effective that I walk out feeling like I’ve taken a sedative. I don’t know if it’s the calming effect of the breathing exercises, but over the following week I start to find my ‘bubble time’ quite relaxing. We move on to the final step of the process — I’m to wish Paul happiness, then visualise his bubble slowly floating towards the horizon until it vanishes.
After a week of making Paul ‘disappear’ I weaken and look up a photo of him on the internet. I still think he is mind-bogglingly handsome, but the gut-wrenching, forlorn feeling I used to get has turned into an almost, dare I say it, warm feeling. I haven’t achieved Zen-like detachment — I’d still be thrilled if he read this article and begged to have me back. The difference is, I wouldn’t say yes, because I’ve realised I deserve something far more committed and honest than what we had.
You see, the very act of being kind to myself for a few minutes a day has not only stopped me thinking about my ex, it’s shown me how little I’d valued myself before. The price we women pay for not letting go of an ex is even higher than I thought, because by throwing our hearts in to a daydream we have little love left for ourselves.
I can’t help but wonder if intelligent women are hung up on previous loves as a way to keep ourselves under-confident in a world that doesn’t like women to be too sure of themselves. For the first time since I left Paul, I truly believe there might be someone better for me out there after all. And I plan to meet him in 2012.
Source
When we were together, I used to joke that Paul was my handbag man, because the only time I’ve ever experienced glances of envy from other women was either when he was on my arm or when I borrowed a friend’s Hermes Birkin bag.
Rugged good looks aside, what really made him my Mr Perfect was that he was the only man who saw I wasn’t as strong as I pretended to be. But the more I opened up to him the more he played it cool until, three months in, I walked away in a fit of frustration.
When I backpedalled and tried to get him back he wouldn’t have any of it. End of story. Right? Not even close. Seven years later, single and now 38 years old, I am no closer to my dream of starting a family.
I not only still mourn what I had with Paul, I compare every man to him and look him up on the internet more than I want to admit — even when that means coming across pictures of him and his new girlfriend, who is a teeth-clenching ten years younger than me.
I know it’s completely illogical to be hung up on a man I dated for such a short time, especially as he probably never thinks of me in return. Trust me, I’ve done my very best to stop acting like a lovesick teenager:
I’ve read books about getting over previous loves, I’ve deleted all his emails and I’ve written long lists of things that are wrong with him to give myself a reality check. If you could have a brain operation to erase someone, I’d be first in line.
But it helps to know I’m far from the only middle-aged woman with an ex obsession. At a party recently, a shocking five out of six women — married or not — confessed they, too, had an ex whose memory they still clung to. Why would so many intelligent women do this? And what’s the price we are paying for not letting go?
Nina Grunfeld, founder of psychology workshops Life Clubs, says holding on to a memory can be a way to feel important. ‘It gives us drama in our lives — and we feel special when we have drama.’
I admit she has a point. I tend to think of Paul when I’m feeling bored and past my prime, and it allows me to feel sorry for myself. But it could be costing me dear, Nina warns: ‘When your past takes up a lot of your time, you can then lose out on the future you really want,’ she says.
I have a sickening realisation that holding on to Paul is partly why I’m nowhere near starting the family I dream of. Men I’ve dated since have seemed so disappointing in comparison that now I can’t even be bothered to look, despite the giant biological clock ticking over my head. However, I know it’s not healthy and that I have to get my ex out of my life, so I go to see psychotherapist Tara Springett, author of a book called The Five-Minute Miracle that claims to ‘lift you out of the anguish of psychological hang-ups and addictions within weeks’.
Tara suggests I come to her for three sessions, confident she can help me get over my obsession. Given that, at £45 a session, it’s a fair bit cheaper than other therapies I’ve considered, I give it a go. When I visit, the pale decor and water feature tinkling in the background of her East Sussex home do little to calm the sudden fit of nerves that cause me to babble about Paul at high speed.
Thankfully, Tara is a remarkably down-to-Earth sort who has an amazing knack for making you feel that talking about your problems is the most practical thing in the world. She soon has me relaxed, telling me to close my eyes and imagine I’m surrounded by a big bubble. It feels strange, but I tell myself it’s no different to using my imagination to think of the next home I’ll buy or what I’ll have for dinner, so why not use it to try to make myself feel better? I have to fill this bubble ‘with a loving feeling,’ she says.
For the life of me, I can’t muster any positive emotions at all. She suggests I just imagine someone I really care about looking at me and use the good feeling that creates. I blank on that, too. In the end I resort to picturing a friend’s dog I recently took care of — it’s a sad reflection of my affection-starved life.
Next, Tara asks me to visualise Paul in another ‘loving bubble’. And after all these years thinking I adore the guy, all I feel is utter fury. The best I can manage is a seriously unimpressive, tiny sphere containing what looks a plastic doll. The bubbles, which she has told me help establish boundaries, now make sense — I can’t reach out and crush his head, as I’m shocked to discover I want to. We discuss my anger and I can’t help the truth spilling out— Paul often stood me up, didn’t give me enough affection, and hid from me that he was on heavy antidepressants.
Having said it, I then protest he was still amazing and we could have overcome such things. ‘You would be the first woman to cure a man by love,’ she says, gently. I am given tasks to do at home for five minutes each day — I’m supposed to imagine myself in my happy bubble and ask myself if I really want to exchange those good feelings for a life with Paul and his problems. As she tells me this, a part of my mind is still stubbornly screaming: ‘Yes, I do. I’ll pack my bags and go to him right now!’
Another part of me cynically thinks this will only work because my rebellious side will be so annoyed at being told I must think about him regularly, I will no longer want to. At first, that’s true. Having to routinely think of him just drives home how much the habit has already robbed me of. But I keep up the exercise, remembering Tara’s advice that I’ll get out of it what I put into it. Gradually, as the days pass, things begin to change. A flood of memories comes to the surface — it’s as if the session with Tara has opened a Pandora’s box of truth.
And this includes recalling all the bad things I did to Paul — a side of our story I’ve never really acknowledged. I constantly criticised him, called him a rubbish lover to his face and eventually kissed one of his friends in a crazed attempt to get more attention from him. After this, I sit on my living room floor, bawling with shame. I feel an urge to tell Paul how sorry I am, but he hasn’t returned an email from me in years so it seems pointless.
Though Tara is pleased with my progress at our next session, I feel very anxious still, so she teaches me a breathing technique to lower stress. It’s so effective that I walk out feeling like I’ve taken a sedative. I don’t know if it’s the calming effect of the breathing exercises, but over the following week I start to find my ‘bubble time’ quite relaxing. We move on to the final step of the process — I’m to wish Paul happiness, then visualise his bubble slowly floating towards the horizon until it vanishes.
After a week of making Paul ‘disappear’ I weaken and look up a photo of him on the internet. I still think he is mind-bogglingly handsome, but the gut-wrenching, forlorn feeling I used to get has turned into an almost, dare I say it, warm feeling. I haven’t achieved Zen-like detachment — I’d still be thrilled if he read this article and begged to have me back. The difference is, I wouldn’t say yes, because I’ve realised I deserve something far more committed and honest than what we had.
You see, the very act of being kind to myself for a few minutes a day has not only stopped me thinking about my ex, it’s shown me how little I’d valued myself before. The price we women pay for not letting go of an ex is even higher than I thought, because by throwing our hearts in to a daydream we have little love left for ourselves.
I can’t help but wonder if intelligent women are hung up on previous loves as a way to keep ourselves under-confident in a world that doesn’t like women to be too sure of themselves. For the first time since I left Paul, I truly believe there might be someone better for me out there after all. And I plan to meet him in 2012.
Source
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Irish Soldier: 'I Saved Hitler's Life In 1919'
There is an abbreviated version of this story in The Daily Mail. Note that it is not implausible for a Irishman to join the German army in WWI. Relations between Ireland and Britain were at that time -- shall we say: "strained".
The principal interest for me in the story is that Keogh found Hitler "likeable" when he met him during WWI. That is the exact opposite of the received story about Hitler at that time. I have always had severe doubts about the received story. How Hitler could morph from a loner to a charismatic leader of his nation was a great mystery and the loner story seemed to me to be most probably just disinformation dating from Hitler's rise to prominence. Hitler had plenty of enemies in the Germany of the '20s and 30s who would be motivated to discredit him -- and Soviet disinformation at some stage cannot be ruled out either, in my view. Soviet disinformers never had much trouble fooling historians
By Terrence Aym
In one of those odd quirks of history, World War II and the 70 million lives lost could have been averted if, on a fateful day during 1919, a young Irishman had let Adolf Hitler die … Instead he unwittingly saved the life of Germany's future Führer.
This amazing revelation came to light only recently—it lay buried for decades in the obscure memoirs of a remarkable, but little known, Irishman named Michael Keogh.
When the family took possession of Keogh's memoirs—authenticated by historians—they decided to release the important details to the world.
Michael Keogh was an extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life filled with odd twists and turns. Perhaps strangest of all: despite his impact on the modern world he's barely a footnote in history.
It's all the more astounding when considering that in the space of a few brief minutes Keogh forever changed the destiny of millions and the face of the future.
All the stunning events were meticulously written down in his diary—memoirs that are so astounding they read more like fiction than fact. Yet experts confirm every word is true.
Decades followed before a family member was approached by archivists that had retained it. After reading some of the entries, they realized the importance the memoirs would have to the world at large: for Keogh not only met Hitler once, but twice, and the second time saved the future dictator from certain death.
Media knew nothing of Michael Keogh. Born into modest circumstances in Tolow County Carlow, Ireland, Keogh lived an unremarkable life until his 22nd year. It was then, during 1913, that young Keogh joined up with the British army's Royal Irish Regiment.
Records show he was later brought up on charges for sedition. Although branded as a troublemaker by some of his superior officers, Keogh was nevertheless shipped off to France to fight the Germans in Europe's Great War.
When he arrived he was assigned to a regiment near the front and before the end of August 1914—barely a month after arriving there—he was captured by the German army and held as a prisoner of war. The turn of events that followed is what eventually set him on the path towards shaping the destiny of the entire human race.
Restless and unhappy at being held in a prison camp, Keogh talked the German commandant into allowing him to join the German army.
By 1916 they agreed and Keogh was given a uniform, an assignment and orders to join the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Things went well for Keogh. His German comrades liked and respected him, and he received praise for valor shown on the battlefield.
Time passed and the war dragged on until September 1918 when he found himself posted on the front and had a chance meeting in Ligny, France with a young Lance-Corporal named Adolf Hitler. Later, Keogh recalled the young Hitler as being intense and serious, but likeable.
Nothing important happened during that meeting except Keogh knew Hitler existed, who he was, and what he looked like. But their second meeting in 1919—and the circumstances under which it took place—were to change the future face of Europe for generations.
After the war, Germany was torn by political upheavals. The Bolshevik-inspired Marxist revolution took root in Germany and sought to undermine its democratic Weimar Republic.
Keogh, fiercely anti-communist and keenly aware of the subversive threat to the weakened Germany, volunteered for, and was accepted into, the politically active "Freikorps" (Free Corps) as an officer. The para-military organization set as its sworn duty the goal to crush the Marxist movement and drive them out of the Fatherland.
Fate's huge hand moved inexorably and Keogh and Hitler met again under the most dire of circumstances.
"I had fought my way into Munich as a captain in the Freikorps Epp," Keogh recalls in his diary. "A few weeks later, I was the officer of the day in the Turken Strasse barracks when I got an urgent call at about eight in the evening." That call to action set events into motion that literally changed the entire course of history.
"A riot had broken out over two political agents in the gymnasium," his memoir continues. "These 'political officers' were allowed to approach the men for votes and support.
"I ordered out a sergeant and six men and, with fixed bayonets, led them off. There were about 200 men in the gymnasium, among them some tough Tyrolean troops."
As he explains, two politicians that were giving speeches were roughly grabbed and thrown to the floor. A crowd surrounded the two viciously beating them.
And then, several furious Tyrolean troopers politically opposed to the politicians, moved in to finish the helpless men off. Bloodlust swirled in the air and the angry mob sought to kill both men. Keogh decided to act as "Bayonets were beginning to flash."
The two politicians—one clean-shaven, the other with a small moustache—were overcome and being stomped and beaten to death. The mob's bayonets were closing in and the men wielding them had every intention of gutting the two helpless politicians.
"I ordered the guard to fire one round over the heads of the rioters. It stopped the commotion," recalled Keogh.
His soldiers carried out the two badly beaten and bloody politicians. According to Keogh, both needed immediate medical attention. That their deaths were imminent was obvious.
It was only the intercession of Michael Keogh and the quick orders he gave his men that stopped the killing of the politicians. He wrote: "The crowd around muttered and growled, boiling for blood."
But Hitler had been saved. Of course, Keogh had instantly recognized the man with the moustache—former Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler whom he'd met a year earlier in Ligny, France.
On the way towards medical treatment, Hitler chatted with his savior. The young, up-and-coming politician thanked Keogh for saving his life, and then he shared some of the details of his new party with the Irishman—the Party would become the salvation of the Fatherland, Hitler said—the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NAZI).
Adolf Hitler survived his injuries. And the two men never directly crossed paths again.
Keogh wrote he next saw Hitler during 1930. The up-and-coming political figure gave a rousing speech to a huge, enthusiastic crowd at an outdoor theater in Nuremberg.
SOURCE
The principal interest for me in the story is that Keogh found Hitler "likeable" when he met him during WWI. That is the exact opposite of the received story about Hitler at that time. I have always had severe doubts about the received story. How Hitler could morph from a loner to a charismatic leader of his nation was a great mystery and the loner story seemed to me to be most probably just disinformation dating from Hitler's rise to prominence. Hitler had plenty of enemies in the Germany of the '20s and 30s who would be motivated to discredit him -- and Soviet disinformation at some stage cannot be ruled out either, in my view. Soviet disinformers never had much trouble fooling historians
By Terrence Aym
In one of those odd quirks of history, World War II and the 70 million lives lost could have been averted if, on a fateful day during 1919, a young Irishman had let Adolf Hitler die … Instead he unwittingly saved the life of Germany's future Führer.
This amazing revelation came to light only recently—it lay buried for decades in the obscure memoirs of a remarkable, but little known, Irishman named Michael Keogh.
When the family took possession of Keogh's memoirs—authenticated by historians—they decided to release the important details to the world.
Michael Keogh was an extraordinary man who lived an extraordinary life filled with odd twists and turns. Perhaps strangest of all: despite his impact on the modern world he's barely a footnote in history.
It's all the more astounding when considering that in the space of a few brief minutes Keogh forever changed the destiny of millions and the face of the future.
All the stunning events were meticulously written down in his diary—memoirs that are so astounding they read more like fiction than fact. Yet experts confirm every word is true.
Decades followed before a family member was approached by archivists that had retained it. After reading some of the entries, they realized the importance the memoirs would have to the world at large: for Keogh not only met Hitler once, but twice, and the second time saved the future dictator from certain death.
Media knew nothing of Michael Keogh. Born into modest circumstances in Tolow County Carlow, Ireland, Keogh lived an unremarkable life until his 22nd year. It was then, during 1913, that young Keogh joined up with the British army's Royal Irish Regiment.
Records show he was later brought up on charges for sedition. Although branded as a troublemaker by some of his superior officers, Keogh was nevertheless shipped off to France to fight the Germans in Europe's Great War.
When he arrived he was assigned to a regiment near the front and before the end of August 1914—barely a month after arriving there—he was captured by the German army and held as a prisoner of war. The turn of events that followed is what eventually set him on the path towards shaping the destiny of the entire human race.
Restless and unhappy at being held in a prison camp, Keogh talked the German commandant into allowing him to join the German army.
By 1916 they agreed and Keogh was given a uniform, an assignment and orders to join the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Things went well for Keogh. His German comrades liked and respected him, and he received praise for valor shown on the battlefield.
Time passed and the war dragged on until September 1918 when he found himself posted on the front and had a chance meeting in Ligny, France with a young Lance-Corporal named Adolf Hitler. Later, Keogh recalled the young Hitler as being intense and serious, but likeable.
Nothing important happened during that meeting except Keogh knew Hitler existed, who he was, and what he looked like. But their second meeting in 1919—and the circumstances under which it took place—were to change the future face of Europe for generations.
After the war, Germany was torn by political upheavals. The Bolshevik-inspired Marxist revolution took root in Germany and sought to undermine its democratic Weimar Republic.
Keogh, fiercely anti-communist and keenly aware of the subversive threat to the weakened Germany, volunteered for, and was accepted into, the politically active "Freikorps" (Free Corps) as an officer. The para-military organization set as its sworn duty the goal to crush the Marxist movement and drive them out of the Fatherland.
Fate's huge hand moved inexorably and Keogh and Hitler met again under the most dire of circumstances.
"I had fought my way into Munich as a captain in the Freikorps Epp," Keogh recalls in his diary. "A few weeks later, I was the officer of the day in the Turken Strasse barracks when I got an urgent call at about eight in the evening." That call to action set events into motion that literally changed the entire course of history.
"A riot had broken out over two political agents in the gymnasium," his memoir continues. "These 'political officers' were allowed to approach the men for votes and support.
"I ordered out a sergeant and six men and, with fixed bayonets, led them off. There were about 200 men in the gymnasium, among them some tough Tyrolean troops."
As he explains, two politicians that were giving speeches were roughly grabbed and thrown to the floor. A crowd surrounded the two viciously beating them.
And then, several furious Tyrolean troopers politically opposed to the politicians, moved in to finish the helpless men off. Bloodlust swirled in the air and the angry mob sought to kill both men. Keogh decided to act as "Bayonets were beginning to flash."
The two politicians—one clean-shaven, the other with a small moustache—were overcome and being stomped and beaten to death. The mob's bayonets were closing in and the men wielding them had every intention of gutting the two helpless politicians.
"I ordered the guard to fire one round over the heads of the rioters. It stopped the commotion," recalled Keogh.
His soldiers carried out the two badly beaten and bloody politicians. According to Keogh, both needed immediate medical attention. That their deaths were imminent was obvious.
It was only the intercession of Michael Keogh and the quick orders he gave his men that stopped the killing of the politicians. He wrote: "The crowd around muttered and growled, boiling for blood."
But Hitler had been saved. Of course, Keogh had instantly recognized the man with the moustache—former Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler whom he'd met a year earlier in Ligny, France.
On the way towards medical treatment, Hitler chatted with his savior. The young, up-and-coming politician thanked Keogh for saving his life, and then he shared some of the details of his new party with the Irishman—the Party would become the salvation of the Fatherland, Hitler said—the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NAZI).
Adolf Hitler survived his injuries. And the two men never directly crossed paths again.
Keogh wrote he next saw Hitler during 1930. The up-and-coming political figure gave a rousing speech to a huge, enthusiastic crowd at an outdoor theater in Nuremberg.
SOURCE
Saturday, October 22, 2011
British mustard gas attack didn't blind Hitler: It was an episode of hysterical illness
The statements below may well all be true but one must allow for the urge to denigrate Hitler on the part of his enemies. That he could rapidly morph from being a derided outsider to a charismatic leader of his nation is implausible on the face of it and most probably is just a remnant of wartime propaganda
That he suffered an episode of hysterical blindness on the frontlines of WWI is however plausible. Psychiatric episodes under the fiendish conditions there were common on both sides and were usually covered up as "shellshock" or the like. To be one of those who cracked may have been embarrassing to Hitler himself but he would not normally be condemned for it these days. Allied troops coming home from Afghanistan to this day often have psychiatric disturbances but it is not regarded as being to their discredit or very limiting to their lives after discharge
Note also that the psychiatric diagnosis relied on below comes to us as hearsay and would not as such be credited in judicial proceedings
My remarks above are not intended as any defence of Hitler. They are merely the proper skepticism essential to a search for truth
He claimed to have been blinded by a British mustard gas attack as a heroic First World War soldier. Now research has exposed Hitler’s account of his own gallantry as a sham and revealed that his temporary loss of sight was actually caused by a mental disorder known as ‘hysterical blindness’.
Hitler described in Mein Kampf how the British had attacked in October 1918 south of Ypres using a ‘yellow gas…unknown to us’. By morning, his eyes ‘were like glowing coals, and all was darkness around me,’ he wrote.
But historian Dr Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, has uncovered a series of unpublished letters between two American neurologists from 1943, which debunk Hitler’s claim.
The correspondence showed that Otfried Foerster, a renowned German neurosurgeon, had inspected Hitler’s medical file. He found that Hitler had been treated for hysterical amblyopia, a psychiatric disorder that can make sufferers lose their sight.
Dr Weber said: ‘There were rumours suggesting that his war blindness may have been psychosomatic, but this is the first time we have had any firm evidence.’ He said discovering the letters was ‘crucial’ because Hitler’s medical file, at the Pasewalk military hospital in Germany, was destroyed.
‘Hitler went to extreme lengths to cover up his First World War medical history,’ Dr Weber said. ‘The two people who had access to his medical files were liquidated as soon as he took power and the other people who knew of it committed suicide in strange circumstances.’
The letters could help to explain Hitler’s radical personality change after the war, Dr Weber said. He added: ‘Hitler left the First World War an awkward loner who had never commanded a single other soldier, but very quickly became a charismatic leader who took over his country.
‘His mental state could explain this dramatic change and his obsessive and extreme behaviour.’ [How?]
He said the evidence also gave a crucial insight into Hitler’s mental state during his leadership. ‘The fact that he would not have been able to deal with the stress and strain of war is significant,’ Dr Weber said.
Details of Hitler’s blindness appear in a new edition of the historian’s book Hitler’s First War.
The study also shows how Hitler’s claims to have been a gallant First World War corporal who frequently risked his life were mostly lies.
Far from being a fearless frontline fighter, he spent so much time in regimental headquarters miles behind the lines that fellow soldiers in the trenches branded him a ‘rear area pig’. In reality he was little more than a ‘teaboy’ who worked as a messenger running errands, the study revealed.
Hitler, who served in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, was twice awarded the Iron Cross, but Dr Weber said this was largely due to the fact he knew officers who made recommendations.
He attended only one meeting of veterans from his regiment, in 1922, when he was ‘cold shouldered’, the historian said.
SOURCE
That he suffered an episode of hysterical blindness on the frontlines of WWI is however plausible. Psychiatric episodes under the fiendish conditions there were common on both sides and were usually covered up as "shellshock" or the like. To be one of those who cracked may have been embarrassing to Hitler himself but he would not normally be condemned for it these days. Allied troops coming home from Afghanistan to this day often have psychiatric disturbances but it is not regarded as being to their discredit or very limiting to their lives after discharge
Note also that the psychiatric diagnosis relied on below comes to us as hearsay and would not as such be credited in judicial proceedings
My remarks above are not intended as any defence of Hitler. They are merely the proper skepticism essential to a search for truth
He claimed to have been blinded by a British mustard gas attack as a heroic First World War soldier. Now research has exposed Hitler’s account of his own gallantry as a sham and revealed that his temporary loss of sight was actually caused by a mental disorder known as ‘hysterical blindness’.
Hitler described in Mein Kampf how the British had attacked in October 1918 south of Ypres using a ‘yellow gas…unknown to us’. By morning, his eyes ‘were like glowing coals, and all was darkness around me,’ he wrote.
But historian Dr Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, has uncovered a series of unpublished letters between two American neurologists from 1943, which debunk Hitler’s claim.
The correspondence showed that Otfried Foerster, a renowned German neurosurgeon, had inspected Hitler’s medical file. He found that Hitler had been treated for hysterical amblyopia, a psychiatric disorder that can make sufferers lose their sight.
Dr Weber said: ‘There were rumours suggesting that his war blindness may have been psychosomatic, but this is the first time we have had any firm evidence.’ He said discovering the letters was ‘crucial’ because Hitler’s medical file, at the Pasewalk military hospital in Germany, was destroyed.
‘Hitler went to extreme lengths to cover up his First World War medical history,’ Dr Weber said. ‘The two people who had access to his medical files were liquidated as soon as he took power and the other people who knew of it committed suicide in strange circumstances.’
The letters could help to explain Hitler’s radical personality change after the war, Dr Weber said. He added: ‘Hitler left the First World War an awkward loner who had never commanded a single other soldier, but very quickly became a charismatic leader who took over his country.
‘His mental state could explain this dramatic change and his obsessive and extreme behaviour.’ [How?]
He said the evidence also gave a crucial insight into Hitler’s mental state during his leadership. ‘The fact that he would not have been able to deal with the stress and strain of war is significant,’ Dr Weber said.
Details of Hitler’s blindness appear in a new edition of the historian’s book Hitler’s First War.
The study also shows how Hitler’s claims to have been a gallant First World War corporal who frequently risked his life were mostly lies.
Far from being a fearless frontline fighter, he spent so much time in regimental headquarters miles behind the lines that fellow soldiers in the trenches branded him a ‘rear area pig’. In reality he was little more than a ‘teaboy’ who worked as a messenger running errands, the study revealed.
Hitler, who served in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, was twice awarded the Iron Cross, but Dr Weber said this was largely due to the fact he knew officers who made recommendations.
He attended only one meeting of veterans from his regiment, in 1922, when he was ‘cold shouldered’, the historian said.
SOURCE
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Know anyone who talks about food and money too much? They could be a psychopath
If someone you know uses the past tense and likes to talk about what he eats, then beware - he or she could be a psychopath.
Researchers have identified the speech patterns which are the tell-tale signs somebody could be the next Hannibal Lecter.
Those who use verbal stumbles like ‘um’ and ‘ah’ should be treated with caution whilst anybody showing a lack of emotion could be trouble too.
Other tics which should be of concern are focusing attention on basic needs like food and money or speaking about crimes in the past tense.
The researchers found that psychopaths use twice as many words for basic needs such as eating and drinking - a reflection of the psychopathic world view that everything is 'theirs' to take.
The researchers claim that whilst we are able to choose which words we use in day-to-day speech, we unconsciously choose functional words like ‘the’ or the tense of the verbs or the vocabulary sets we use.
With careful analysis these cues can show us who is a psychopath and who isn’t.
The study involved interviews with 52 convicted murderers, of whom 14 were classified as psychopaths.
Their responses were analysed in detail by a computer programme which looked for patterns in what they said.
Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University in New York, said that overuse of the past tense demonstrated psychological detachment.
The research found that psychopaths tended to dwell on subjects such as food and money in conversation. Overall, psychopaths tend to use twice as many words relating to such basic needs as food and money
The use of dysfluencies like ‘uh’ and um’ was also a way of ‘putting the mask of sanity on’.
He added: ‘Psychopaths talked a lot about what they ate that day (of the murder). They talked about money more often.’
Overall psychopaths use twice as many words relating to basic needs like eating and drinking as ordinary people.
This fitted in with their world view that everything around them was theirs to take, the authors said in their report.
Psychopaths also used more subordinating conjunctions like ‘because’ which is explained by their interest in cause and effect.
The report says: ‘This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)’.
Just one per cent of the population are to some extent a psychopath but that has not stopped Hollywood from making them into villains hundreds of times.
Arguably the most famous was Hannibal Lecter who famously talked about how he liked to eat his victims’ brains in ‘Silence of the Lambs’.
Source
Researchers have identified the speech patterns which are the tell-tale signs somebody could be the next Hannibal Lecter.
Those who use verbal stumbles like ‘um’ and ‘ah’ should be treated with caution whilst anybody showing a lack of emotion could be trouble too.
Other tics which should be of concern are focusing attention on basic needs like food and money or speaking about crimes in the past tense.
The researchers found that psychopaths use twice as many words for basic needs such as eating and drinking - a reflection of the psychopathic world view that everything is 'theirs' to take.
The researchers claim that whilst we are able to choose which words we use in day-to-day speech, we unconsciously choose functional words like ‘the’ or the tense of the verbs or the vocabulary sets we use.
With careful analysis these cues can show us who is a psychopath and who isn’t.
The study involved interviews with 52 convicted murderers, of whom 14 were classified as psychopaths.
Their responses were analysed in detail by a computer programme which looked for patterns in what they said.
Jeffrey Hancock, the lead researcher and an associate professor in communications at Cornell University in New York, said that overuse of the past tense demonstrated psychological detachment.
The research found that psychopaths tended to dwell on subjects such as food and money in conversation. Overall, psychopaths tend to use twice as many words relating to such basic needs as food and money
The use of dysfluencies like ‘uh’ and um’ was also a way of ‘putting the mask of sanity on’.
He added: ‘Psychopaths talked a lot about what they ate that day (of the murder). They talked about money more often.’
Overall psychopaths use twice as many words relating to basic needs like eating and drinking as ordinary people.
This fitted in with their world view that everything around them was theirs to take, the authors said in their report.
Psychopaths also used more subordinating conjunctions like ‘because’ which is explained by their interest in cause and effect.
The report says: ‘This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)’.
Just one per cent of the population are to some extent a psychopath but that has not stopped Hollywood from making them into villains hundreds of times.
Arguably the most famous was Hannibal Lecter who famously talked about how he liked to eat his victims’ brains in ‘Silence of the Lambs’.
Source
Friday, September 23, 2011
Genes map Aborigines' arrival in Australia
A LOCK of hair taken from an unknown young man near Kalgoorlie in the 1920s has provided solid genetic evidence that Aboriginal Australians are descended from the first modern humans to walk out of Africa nearly 75,000 years ago.
Detailed analysis of the Aborigine's genetic blueprint - his genome - by an international team on several continents supports the theory that humans migrated from Africa into eastern Asia in multiple waves, contrary to the theory of a single out-of-Africa migration wave.
The order, or sequence, of the genes in the young man's genome suggests his ancestors were "the first human explorers", leaving Africa before a second group migrated from Africa into eastern Asia, 25,000-38,000 years ago.
The first Aboriginal genome reinforces archeological evidence that people arrived on the Australian continent at least 50,000 years ago and that they share one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world.
Published today in the journal Science, the research was conducted by a Danish, Australian and British team led by evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen.
"Aboriginal Australians descended from the first human explorers," he said.
"While the ancestors of Europeans and Asians were sitting somewhere in Africa or the Middle East, yet to explore their world further, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians spread rapidly; the first modern humans traversing unknown territory in Asia and finally crossing the sea into Australia.
"It was a truly amazing journey that must have demanded exceptional survival skills and bravery."
The Goldfields Land and Sea Council, which covers the area where the man lived, has endorsed the research, marking a break with past tensions over scientific research. In Kalgoorlie, council chairwoman Dianne Logan said the findings were
"exciting". The project further proved the ancient Aboriginal connection to the land, and Aborigines felt "exonerated in showing the broader community that they are by far the oldest continuous civilisation in the world".
Adelaide-based DNA expert Alan Cooper, head of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, who was not part of the research team, agreed the genome strongly supported the idea Aborigines were an early and separate wave of human expansion out of Africa, before the subsequent wave that established Europeans and Asians.
Along with Mike Bunce, head of the Ancient DNA Research Laboratory at Perth's Murdoch University, who co-ordinated the Australian contribution to the program, Professor Willerslev and geneticists in Britain and Denmark concluded that, after the first wave of migration, a second wave of people left Africa 25,000-38,000 years ago.
The team estimated the timing of the first and second migrations using the known rate at which DNA changes, or mutates, over time. Because they had had quality data on 60 per cent of the Aboriginal genome, they had plenty of data to calibrate the "molecular clock".
Then as both waves of immigrants moved into the Middle East and onwards, they swapped genes with archaic people such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and with one another.
A second report this week in the American Journal of Human Genetics by another team - headed by geneticist Mark Stoneking at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig - details the extent of intermingling by the various groups, and bolsters the Science team's finding of multiple waves of early human movement out of Africa.
Professor Cooper said Professor Stoneking's work showed there was not a single wave of migration out of Africa through to Australia. "There's a whole patchwork of interactions in Asia before the Aboriginal people get to Australia," he said.
The Aboriginal hair sample was collected at a long-gone train station at Golden Ridge, near Kalgoorlie, in 1923, by Cambridge anthropologist and ethnologist Alfred Haddon, who like many anthropologists of the time, believed Aboriginal people were a dying race.
Craig Muller, research manager at the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, said Haddon was in Australia in 1923 to attend a conference in Sydney and Melbourne, but travelled to Western Australia on the Trans-Australia. The train would have stopped for about 40 minutes at Golden Ridge, now just "scrub and gravel". Aboriginal people traded artefacts with passengers along the line, although he "likes to imagine the young man was rather surprised when he was asked to give up some of his hair".
With little provenance other than Haddon's name and the label "Golden Ridge", the sample remained at Cambridge, at the Duckworth Laboratory, devoted to the study of human evolution and variation, until about a year ago when Professor Willerslev learned of its existence.
Initial tests confirmed DNA could be extracted from it. Dr Bunce noted: "That's when Eske got on a plane and came straight over. He's acutely aware that this is a politically charged area."
In particular, the 2005 US Genographic Project aroused much anger among indigenous communities in Australia and the US. The project was denounced as a clone of the Human Genome Diversity Project, which was condemned by the US-based Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism as an "unconscionable attempt" by genetic scientists "to pirate our DNA for their own purposes".
Dubbed the Vampire Project, the Human Genome Diversity Project was condemned in 1993 by the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. "The Vampire scientists are planning to take and to own what belongs to indigenous people," it said.
Dr Bunce said "times have moved on" and scientists and indigenous communities had learned how to work together.
Mr Muller said the project had raised several ethical issues for the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, but he was satisfied the sample was obtained ethically, rather than in a way "we would now find distasteful".
In June, Professor Willerslev spoke to the Land and Sea Council to explain his research and gain Aboriginal endorsement.
The council last night said it was excited by the study, which "establishes Aboriginal Australians as the population with the longest association with the land on which they still live today".
"Aboriginal people, in the Goldfields, as elsewhere, always feel secure in their connection to this country, and the research does not alter this fact."
One of the council's directors, Wongatha elder Cyril Barnes, said the genome project was "just a whitefella story" and he would continue to believe in the Wati Kutjara desert creation story, just as other people in Kalgoorlie were Bible-belt creationists.
Source
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Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope