Lenticular cloud over Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano on Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia*
STALIN’S MUSTACHE
in homage to Osip Mandelstam
In Warsaw near the Tomb
of the Unknown Soldier,
in a treeless square,
there used to scowl a statue
of Feliks Dzierżyński,
founder of the CheKa,
the Bolshevik Secret Police.
His nickname was “Bloody Felek.”
Before the unveiling,
someone managed to paint
the statue’s hands blood-red.
When the string was pulled,
the dignitaries gasped:
the blood of his victims
seemed to drip
from Bloody Felek’s hands.
The speaker on the podium
began to stutter. The military
band struck up, then
stopped; feebly began again.
To the hesitant tuba’s
failure to proclaim
the dawn of workers’ paradise,
the string was pulled back.
Fifty years later, ten thousand
people jammed the square
to watch the demolition
of a monument to a mass murderer.
*
My cousin Ewa tells the tale
of yet another fallen icon:
a giant statue of Stalin,
largest in the world. Taller than
the Statue of Liberty,
the dictator stained the sky
at the joining of two rivers,
the Volga and the Don —
his “sneer of cold command”
staring down the starving
Ukraine. The ten-story
pedestal still stands.
Stalin was toppled into the water —
shallow enough, they say,
that from the cruise boats you can see
his colossal face.
Ewa was on one of those boats:
“From where I stood,
I only caught a glimpse
of Stalin’s mustache.”
She giggles. She must have told
this story countless times.
We sit at the table smiling,
sipping home-made hawthorn wine.
Stalin’s mustache. The empty
pedestal still stands.
~ Oriana
*
ANTON CHEKHOV’S LAST MOMENTS
Daniel Rayfield in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) describes the writer's final, defiant gesture:
“German and Russian medical etiquette dictated that a doctor at a colleague’s death, when all hope was gone, should offer champagne. [Dr.] Schwörer felt Anton’s pulse and ordered a bottle. Anton sat up and loudly proclaimed ‘Ich sterbe’ [I’m dying]. He drank, murmured ‘I haven’t had champagne for a long time,’ lay down on his left side, as he always had with Olga [Knipper, his wife], and died without a murmur, before she could reach the other side of the bed.”
*
VASKA THE SAVIOR CAT DURING THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD
“My grandmother always said that she and my mother, and I, her daughter, survived the severe blockade and hunger only thanks to our cat Vaska. If it were not for this red-headed bully, my daughter and I would have died of hunger like many others.
Every day Vaska went hunting and and my grandmother made stew from what he dragged back.
At the same time, the cat always sat nearby and waited for food, and at night all three of us lay under one blanket and he warmed us.
He felt the bombing much earlier than the air raid was announced, began to spin and meow plaintively, my grandmother managed to collect things, water, mother, cat and run out of the house. When they fled to the shelter, as a family member, they dragged him with them and watched him not to be taken away and eaten.
The hunger was terrible. Vaska was hungry as everyone else and skinny. All winter until spring, my grandmother collected crumbs for the birds, and from spring they went hunting with the cat. Grandmother poured crumbs and sat with Vaska in ambush, his jump was always surprisingly accurate and fast. Vaska was starving with us and he didn't have enough strength to keep the bird. He grabbed a bird, and grandmother ran out of the bushes and helped him.
So from spring to autumn, they also ate birds.
When the blockade was lifted and more food appeared, and even after the war, my grandmother always gave the cat the best piece. She stroked him affectionately, saying - you are our breadwinner.
Vaska died in 1949, my grandmother buried him in the cemetery and, so that the grave would not be trampled, put a cross and wrote Vasily Bugrov. Then my mother put my grandmother next to the cat, and then I buried my mother there too. So all three lie behind the same fence, as they once did in the war under one blanket." Svetlana Shaov.
Story found in the World War 2 Eastern Front group
Also as some noted this Is about the siege of Leningrad,in case any of you reading this want to learn more about that important moment in history aside from the above tagged group here's a fairly detailed documentary episode on it
STALIN’S WAR?
~ Adolf Hitler looms largest in the pantheon of evildoers. As Sean McMeekin notes in his massive and indispensable new book “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II,” “Hitler still haunts our nightmares as an all-purpose bogeyman, with remembrance of the horrors he unleashed uniting us in denunciation of Fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, and the other evils of Nazism.” In the West, Hitler and the Nazis occupy the farthest reaches of human depravity: You’re bad, you’re really bad, and then, finally, you’re Hitler.
As McMeekin points out, the farther East the focus shifts, the more Joseph Stalin and Soviet Russia dominate the picture. McMeekin is absolutely right when he writes that the Allied victory in World War II brought only more pain – in the form of conquest and civil war – in Eastern Europe and northern Asia. In those areas, Stalin’s “postwar wars” netted millions of new forced laborers for Soviet industries from Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary – plus, after 1945, nearly a million Japanese, Mongolians, and Koreans. “Thus began,” McMeekin writes, “a renewed period of Soviet terror, fed by increasing paranoia about Jews and other pro-Western cosmopolitans, that would last until Stalin’s death in 1953.”
By any accounting, the number of innocent people Stalin caused to be murdered, particularly in the decade after the war, dwarfs that of Hitler’s victims, military or civilian. And as so many books have done before it, “Stalin’s War” makes abundantly clear that the dictator was, if anything, even more coldly reptilian than Hitler. Stalin's duplicity and rapacity were exercised on a scale not seen in the world since Genghis Khan, and yet for an entire generation subsisting on Western-produced wartime propaganda, he was stern-but-kindly “Uncle Joe,” sending millions of his people to the fight.
If any vestige of this propaganda still exists, “Stalin’s War” should see it soundly off the stage. There are new books every year that promise “a new history” of such a well-studied subject as World War II, but McMeekin actually delivers on that promise. The war, he asserts, had a protagonist whose armies fought in both Asia and Europe on an epic scale that spanned the whole Eurasian continent, who participated in the conquest of the Axis powers and enormously enlarged his own empire in the process. “In all these ways,” he writes, “it was not Hitler’s, but Stalin’s war.”
The inclusion of the key battlegrounds of Asia lends an added element of heft to McMeekin’s thesis. The author’s extensive use of Soviet archives (the book has 100 pages of often wonderfully discursive endnotes) informs a darkly fascinating look at Stalin’s dealings with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in China, leading to the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance signed in August of 1945 and encompassing the West’s increased awareness of Soviet atrocities in Manchuria. Stalin’s machinations in the Far East – largely hidden from his titular allies U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – lay bare an agenda entirely characterized by tyranny and conquest, an agenda in which fighting Hitler was a means to gain territory and plunder, a wolf fighting a wolf not for a world free of wolves but for unimpeded preying on the sheep.
The anger animating “Stalin’s War” is about Western complicity: Once the Soviet Union seemed to join the Allied cause, there was scarcely anything Stalin could ask of those allies that would be denied him. As McMeekin writes, in the last 14 months of the Pacific war the Soviets received more than 4 million long (metric) tons of war matériel for Stalin’s Far Eastern armies, including 870,000 long tons of petroleum – roughly equal to the entire amount shipped to Russia for help in fighting the Nazis.
And as McMeekin notes, Stalin’s nature was clear all along. “If there were any lingering doubts in London and Washington about Stalin’s intentions for the soon-to-be-conquered peoples of Europe,” McMeekin writes, “these should have been dispelled by his behavior as the Red Army, riding on the trucks and rubber tires of lend-lease, powered into formerly (and soon again) occupied Poland in the second half of 1944.”
At the end of the war, Churchill instructed his chiefs of staff to prepare a plan for attacking Soviet forces in Eastern Europe (his generals called it “Operation Unthinkable”), but of course nothing like it was ever done. Instead, Stalin was allowed almost total victory in a war he had largely engineered for his own benefit. Sean McMeekin has done a fantastic job telling that war’s story.
https://news.yahoo.com/worse-hitler-stalin-orchestrated-world-182158754.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb&tsrc=fb
Here is a negative review from the Irish Times:
DISTORTED HISTORY
~ Sean McMeekin’s contention that the second World War was more Stalin’s war than Hitler’s has a long and dubious pedigree reaching back to the war-revolution conspiracy theory of the interwar years. According to this myth, Stalin plotted to precipitate a new world war in order to foment global revolution.
In truth, there was nothing Stalin feared more than a major war. While the first World War had enabled the Russian Revolution, that was followed by foreign military interventions which came close to strangling Bolshevism at birth. Stalin’s nightmare scenario was the revival of that anti-communist coalition. War did offer opportunities – and Stalin certainly took advantage of them – but war also posed an existential danger to the Soviet state.
So sparse is the evidence for the war-revolution hypothesis that McMeekin resorts to citing a blatant forgery: a document purporting to report on a speech Stalin supposedly made in August 1939 in which he spoke about the Sovietisation of Europe as a result of the war he intended to provoke. The document in question initially appeared in the French press shortly after the outbreak of war and was plainly propaganda designed to discredit Stalin at a time when he was collaborating with Hitler.
A legitimate piece of evidence cited by McMeekin are the private remarks made by Stalin in September 1939: “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries. We see nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other. We can maneuver, pit one side against the other to set them fighting each other as fiercely as possible.”
But McMeekin lets his readers down by not quoting what Stalin also said: “We preferred agreements with the so-called democratic countries and therefore conducted negotiations. But the English and French wanted us for farmhands and at no cost.”
What these remarks actually show is that having failed to form an anti-Hitler coalition with Britain and France, Stalin instead opted for neutrality and the Nazi-Soviet pact, intended to further protect Russia from the consequences of war.
Disastrous miscalculation
According to McMeekin, it was Stalin who goaded the Japanese to invade Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. He says the Soviet campaign for collective security against fascist aggression was a sham, as was Moscow’s support for Republican Spain during its civil war. Then, in 1939, Stalin engineered an Anglo-French-German war over Poland. Allied to Hitler, Stalin overplayed his hand by refusing to deepen his pact with the Nazi dictator. That disastrous miscalculation almost led to the Soviet Union’s defeat in 1941, says McMeekin, but Stalin’s bacon was saved by western military aid, the crucial source of all subsequent Soviet victories over Hitler’s armies.
His most bizarre claim is that in spring 1943 Stalin approached Hitler to offer an armistice. During the war there were numerous fake news stories about peace feelers being extended, many of them generated by intelligence agencies. The Soviets played this game, too, but there is no hard evidence of any serious intent to negotiate a separate peace with Hitler. Why would Stalin do such a thing after the resounding Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943? And why risk alienating his British and American allies when they were supplying him with massive material aid, which McMeekin insists the Soviets were dependent on?
To his credit, McMeekin steers clear of the wilder claims of right-wing historical revisionism. He doesn’t excuse Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union as a preventative war or claim that Stalin was preparing to attack Germany. Nor does he blame the Holocaust on Stalin.
Shorn of its polemics there is some good history in this book. McMeekin writes well and has the language skills to comb through a huge amount of archival material, though in the Russian case not always accurately. There is much interesting detail about allied supplies to Russia, the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, the Soviet plunder of Germany in 1945, and the war with Japan.
McMeekin’s relentless anti-communism keeps him focused on the dark side of the Soviets’ war – the Katyn massacre of Polish POWs, the deportation of ethnic groups accused of collective disloyalty, and Stalin’s maltreatment of the families of Soviet POWs, including that of his son, Yakov, who died in German captivity in 1943. This is fair enough. Arguably, Stalin and the Red Army did save the world from Hitler and the Nazis, but the cost was brutal.
In conclusion McMeekin argues the West should have confronted Stalin during the war and formed “a broad international coalition against totalitarian aggression”, an alliance that could have included “pro-Axis Hungary and Fascist Italy”. As to Hitler, he could have been dealt with by a peace deal that would have saved Western Europe from Nazi occupation and may even have extracted conquered Poland from his clutches.
This book will certainly enhance Prof McMeekin’s reputation as an ideologically-driven conservative historian. His fantastical speculation that standing up to Stalin would have produced a better outcome than standing up to Hitler may appeal to those who share his fervent anti-communism. More impartial readers will recoil from the book’s distortion of the complex and multi-faceted history of the second World War.
The Guardian provides perhaps the best summary here:
~ When you look at the war from the perspective of its end rather than its beginning, it is Stalin who emerges as the main beneficiary. Besides, if the second world war is to be treated seriously as a global conflict and not just a European one, then Stalin, with his troops occupying parts of eastern Europe and fighting the Japanese in Mongolia at the beginning of the war, and his armies marching into central Europe and China’s Manchuria at its end, is a more convincing world figure than Hitler.
Oriana:
Another point to consider is the limited appeal of Nazi racist ideology, which classified most of humanity as subhuman (Untermensch). Stalin, on the other hand, presided over a charismatic ideology that appealed to human idealism regardless of race. The promises of universal justice and liberation from oppression made it a secular religion. In fact, only traditional religion could compete with communism in terms of making attractive promises of a paradise in the afterlife. Even there, communism came close by invoking the "radiant future."
Mary: IT’S MORE COMPLEX THAN “WHOSE WAR”
Thinking of Stalin, Hitler, and really any of those deemed great and important historical figures, I can't see each of them, or any one, as fully driving the events of history. Understanding history is not reducible to any simple formula, certainly not to the desires, ambitions and acts of single individuals.
At the same time, there is no denying that the horrors of the 20th century would not have been the same without Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or its victories without Roosevelt, Churchill, Kennedy. The value of a study like McMeekin's is that it allows us to see things from an alternate perspective, to see how the war became an opportunity for Stalin to extend his reach without check from those who were now his allies (and providers of material he could put to the advantage of his own ends).
I think the more angles we can employ to the study of history the more true and nuanced, and inevitably more complicated, our understanding will be. These leaders, the movers and shakers, were only possible because the time was ripe for them — the dominoes, so to speak, were all in a row. They did not manufacture the great events but were produced by their time, place and history...the way was already made clear for them, their bloody slaughter not their singular evil, but an evil already present for them to magnify, utilize, and even, as the Nazis did, industrialize.
And while multiple perspectives can deepen understanding, every factor must be recognized and given its due. To talk about war and Russia, without taking into account the force of the Russian winter, would only be to repeat Napoleon's great mistake. And we should probably not think one perspective negates another rather than complementing it...that is where the error comes in thinking that to talk of "Stalin's War" makes "Hitler's War" less important. Neither owned it, both used war for their own ends, ends made possible by history itself, by ground prepared through years of other conflicts, other wars, and the development of nations.
I think it is important for instance, to note the class structure, the degree of industrialization, the wealth or poverty, and whether a nation was largely capitalist or remained feudal in organization. What kind of ruling class was there, and what was its power? How much of the population was still made up of peasants?? I have always thought the shape of revolution and its results in both Russia and China had much to do with a large peasant and relatively small proletarian class. Even the mass murders themselves take their character from the societies that birthed the murderers. Unfortunately with all the body count was massive, the costs immeasurable, the consequences long and hard.
I can’t help but think of Tolstoy's Pierre, following the path of war, trying to understand, and the eventual turn away from the sense that history is driven by the 'Great Men”— towering figures that push events, to the realization that history is rather the result of millions of smaller individual events and forces building to a kind of ripeness, where they emerge on the stage and enter into play.
Oriana:
One of the games played in my childhood was trying to answer the question “Would you be rather deaf or blind?” Later, I came upon the question: “Hitler, Stalin, Mao — who was the greatest monster of them all?”
I came upon this question only in the US. In Poland, for my generation and for my parents’ generation, there was no question: Hitler. But at least Hitler got defeated, and the Nazis would never rise again (we thought; we were strangely certain of that). On the other hand, Communism would never end — of that too we were sure. History has a peculiar sense of humor.
Yes, there are a million factors to be considered, but still, is World War Two imaginable without Hitler? Perhaps someone else would step up to fill that role. Perhaps someone else would be insane enough to try to conquer the world. But perhaps not. We will never know.
For now, there is some intellectual satisfaction in thinking that the first part of the war belonged to Hitler, and the second to Stalin — with the aid of America’s industrial potential. And this pale intellectual satisfaction is all we have as a refuge of sorts against being overwhelmed with massive scale of evil and human suffering.
*
ALL IS ORWELL
~ How to account for the enduring interest in Orwell’s life and work? Quite obviously, part of the explanation is that, quite rarely, he has admirers on both the right and left of the political spectrum and that he wrote two of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, containing words and phrases—“Big Brother,” “Newspeak,” “Doublethink,” “Memory hole,” etc.—that have entered the political lexicon, reflecting and shaping the anxieties and fears of his own and subsequent generations. But I do not think this gets to the heart of the matter.
Nor does Orwell’s own estimation of his strengths—which he described as the capacity to write clearly combined with an unusual ability to face up to unpalatable truths—provide a satisfactory explanation. There is no doubting the clarity and vigor of his prose, but when it comes to assessing his capacity to face up to grim truths, there is good reason to doubt Orwell’s claims to his having looked reality unflinchingly in the eye and told it like it was. Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge believed that while Orwell displayed “an almost painful honesty,” his grasp of what was going on in the world was often more than a little tenuous.
It is the contradictions in Orwell’s character that provide the key to understanding the enduring fascination with his thought and work. His personality was too modest and austere to assert, as Walt Whitman did, “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes).” But the contradictions abound, confirming Muggeridge’s view that Orwell was not the unblinkered and straight-thinking observer he believed himself to be. Despite his strong moral sense, these contradictions also imply a degree of moral obtuseness and even confusion, and it is these which in large part explain our fascination with him.
The contradictions have frequently been noted: he was a socialist intellectual whose finest achievements included a mordant critique of the hypocrisy and double standards displayed by the socialist intellectuals of his day; a patriot who held most of his country’s institutions in contempt; a passionate defender of historical truth who chose to write under an assumed name and who occasionally told lies; a self-styled champion of decency who backed causes that, had they prevailed, would have produced outcomes in which decency would have been difficult to discern; an atheist who decreed that his funeral should be conducted by the Church of England and that he should be buried in a rural parish churchyard.
*
The extent to which, to use a contemporary term, Orwell was conflicted is amply illustrated by his participation in the Spanish Civil War, an experience that shaped his political consciousness. Without it, he acknowledged, he would not have come to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. We have it on his own authority that the war defined his political outlook and that everything he wrote subsequently was written with the aim of fighting totalitarianism and of promoting democratic socialism.
Orwell had joined the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), rather than the International Brigades, because the Communists wouldn’t have him. Orwell’s Eton drawl had probably not impressed Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the British Communist Party, who suspected, perfectly correctly, that Orwell was likely to prove “politically unreliable” and that if he were to write about the war, he could not be relied upon to follow the party line. Pollitt therefore declined to provide the documentation that would have gotten Orwell across the Franco-Spanish border and into the International Brigades, abruptly ending their interview.
Instead, Orwell traveled independently to Barcelona with a letter of introduction by the Independent Labour Party, who arranged for him to join the POUM as a militiaman.
At the time, Orwell knew almost nothing of Spanish history, did not speak the language, and was largely ignorant of many aspects of the conflict in which he would come close to losing his life. His earlier experience as a colonial policeman in Burma, about which he felt guilty, had evidently produced a strong desire to be on the side of the oppressed, rather than that of the oppressor; the war offered the opportunity to atone for his sins as “an agent of imperialism,” which is how he had come to regard himself. He went to Spain in the belief that he would be supporting the working man and common decency (a favorite Orwell term) and did not regret having done so or subsequently doubt his reasons for having fought there.
The seven days he spent in the Catalan capital before being sent to fight on the Aragon front strengthened his desire not merely to write about the war, but also to fight in it. “At that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” He added: “when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.” Revolutionary posters were everywhere, private transport had been abolished, shops carried notices informing customers that they had been collectivized, many churches had been attacked or demolished. Waiters and shop assistants looked the customer in the eye: servility had been abolished. Almost Orwell’s first experience in Barcelona was to be told off by his hotel manager for insulting a porter by giving him a tip. Most extraordinarily, the bourgeoisie had almost entirely disappeared. Practically everyone, Orwell observed, wore rough working-class clothes or the uniform of the militia. He found the experience “queer and moving,” adding:
I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared and this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side.
Orwell’s attitude was undoubtedly colored by his obvious liking for Spain and the Spaniards; he recorded that he would “defy anyone” to mix with the Spanish working class and “not be struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity.” He added: “A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is almost embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet on you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit . . .”
On arrival in Spain, he had sympathized with Communist aims in the belief that the party’s soldiers would prosecute war more single-mindedly and ruthlessly than the Trotskyites, anarchists, and syndicalists whose aim was not just military victory against Franco but a full-scale social and political revolution.
When Orwell returned to Barcelona after 118 days on the Aragon front looking like a scarecrow, dirty and unshaven, he found the city vastly changed: private vehicles had returned to the street, the revolutionary posters had largely disappeared, and the shops were no longer focused on the needs of the militias. He observed, rather sadly, that the normal divisions of society, between rich and poor, working class and middle class, were reasserting themselves: “The militia uniform and the blue overalls had almost disappeared; everyone seemed to be wearing the smart summer suits in which Spanish tailors specialize. Fat prosperous men, elegant women, and sleek cars were everywhere.” Orwell now realized that the bourgeoisie had not disappeared or gone over to the other side, as he had naively supposed during his earlier visit; they had merely concealed their wealth and status for reasons of self-preservation. An almost reverse situation was now occurring. As the Spanish Communist Party increased hold over the government, prominent members of the Poum found themselves at risk. Moscow was opposed to a full-scale revolution because it reasoned that this would damage the prospect of success in the war against Franco; it therefore sought to deny weapons to the Poum and its allies and to discredit it by alleging that it was in the pay of the Fascists.
At this stage, Orwell might still have liked to have joined the International Brigades in the battle for Madrid, and a Communist friend offered to help make this possible. But Orwell, appalled by the cynicism of the Communist Party in seeking to preserve a bourgeois government and denouncing the anarchists and revolutionary socialists, decided to remain loyal to the POUM. What galled Orwell most was the falsification of history: “I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories . . .”
His contempt for publications such as the News Chronicle and the New Statesman that uncritically accepted the Communist description of events was even greater than that for newspapers that backed Franco: “It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise.” He believed not merely that the truth about the conflict would never be known, but that objective truth itself had perished.
*
Shortly after his return to the Aragon front he was shot through the throat by a sniper’s bullet. On discharge from the hospital, Orwell, suffering from a temporary loss of speech, returned to Barcelona, where the changes he had observed on his previous visit were even more pronounced. The best way of staying alive was to look like a member of the Catalan middle class. The smart clothes that would have formerly placed you in danger were now the key to survival. There is something comic about the idea of Orwell trying to look like a member of the middle class in order to remain at liberty. The embrace of his wife Eileen as he arrived at the Barcelona hotel where she was staying was accompanied by the words: “Get out!” She explained that her room had been searched and that Orwell was at risk of arrest and imprisonment.
Orwell, recognizing the dangers he now faced, slept on building sites or in churchyards while exploring a part of the city where he was unlikely to be spotted while making arrangements to return to England. Homage to Catalonia was written immediately on his return, while the war was still being fought, and is an attempt to make sense of his experiences.
He had already concluded that talk of it being a “war for democracy” was “eyewash” and believed that the Nationalists would win unless Britain and France chose to provide military aid to the Republican cause, an outcome which he rightly judged to be unlikely. He also concluded that in the event of a Republican victory, the Communists would run the show. This would be represented as a victory for the proletariat but in fact would represent the triumph of state capitalism. Orwell did not speculate on the likely consequences of a victory by the POUM and its allies, but there is little reason to quarrel with Crow’s judgment: “There is no doubt . . . that if the anarcho-syndicalists had come out on top after the war they would have introduced the worst conceivable kind of tyranny.” In those circumstances, believing that one final purifying act of violence was necessary to bring about the end of violence and the transformation of society, the executioners might well have been as high-minded as it is possible for executioners to be—but their murderous zeal would have greatly exceeded that of Franco’s death squads. Orwell, however, showed little interest in the details of anarchist thought (despite his description of himself as a “Tory Anarchist”) and indeed little interest in political and economic theory of any kind.
He took for granted that the outcome would be some kind of socialism. Seven years later, in a review of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in The Observer, which is curiously not mentioned in most of the Orwell biographies, he conceded that the negative part of Hayek’s thesis was correct: “It cannot be said too often—at any rate it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. ” For good measure, he added: “Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”
Well, that would seem to as unambiguous as you could wish for.
But Orwell’s review also dealt with a book by the Soviet sympathizer and left-wing Labour MP Konni Zilliacus, who blamed imperialism and capitalism for the two world wars and much else. Orwell had no difficulty in agreeing with Zilliacus that capitalism led to the creation of monopolies (Orwell did not seem to mind state monopolies), to food lines, and to war. It was a depressing thing: both writers were probably right. Then, equally typically: “There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is is restored to politics.” Yet only a sentence earlier he had endorsed Hayek’s denunciation of central economic planning, which allowed no such possibility. When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man.
Such unresolved contradictions permeate Orwell’s thought and writing: they explain why he retains admirers on different sides of the political spectrum. We go on reading about him in the hope that these can somehow be resolved in a way that would finally put him irrevocably on our side; the fact that this can never be achieved only increases our desire for more. Orwell’s reputation as a moral giant survives, but the interest in him would surely not have survived if his courage in grappling with the moral and political complexities of his age had not been combined with a capacity to grasp the wrong end of the stick and hang on with great tenacity. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/6/all-is-orwell
Orwell's manuscript of "1984" Oriana:
Stilll, there is no denying that “1984” is an astonishing achievement. Whatever Orwell’s contradictions may have been during the Spanish Civil War, 1984 is an absolute denunciation of totalitarianism, and much of it was inspired by the actual practices of the Stalinist Soviet Union. “Animal Farm,” where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” again exposes the hypocrisy of regimes posing as benefactors of the common man.
And it is the Orwell of “1984” (1949) and “Animal Farm” (1945) that ultimately define Orwell as a great writers and a seer. This Orwell is no longer mired in contradictions. He it utterly against any totalitarian regime, be it of the right or left.
Joe: ORWELL INDICTS ALL OLIGARCHICAL SYSTEMS
Orwell’s contradictions give little insight into his continual popularity. Focusing on his inconsistencies dismisses his ability to subtly show the greed and deceit inherent in the leaders of all movements. Gerald Frost’s criticism takes a wrong turn when he uses Orwell’s quirks or weaknesses to criticizing his writing.
Orwell’s intuition enhanced his talent for uncovering the true motivation of political leaders. In the Spanish Civil War, he saw that the dual ambitions of the Communist party. One was selling the party as the representative of the oppressed. The other was establishing itself as the oligarchical power controlling a Russian empire.
It is a mistake to limit his work to only an anti-communist stance. Orwell’s strength was his insight that all oligarchical governments are motivated by greed for power and wealth. He never wavers from this truth. Gerald Frost muddles this message when he uses Orwell’s support for Marxists instead of the Communists to imply confused thinking.
The tension between his pragmatist side and his idealist side did not obscure Orwell’s vision of the Communist party as two-faced. In his two most famous novels, social justice and opportunity is the proverbial carrot held out to the working class. These novels expose the distance between the Marxist model and the Communist implementation of that paradigm.
By alluding to the Communist Party, Orwell also indicts other oligarchical systems such as Fascism, Socialism, and Capitalism. Orwell’s insight of how greed for power and wealth corrupted governments shows the harmful outcomes for people. This Orwellian theme is present in all film noir and explains his popularity.
Oriana:
An interesting reference to film noir here — and indeed “1984“ lends itself perfectly to cinematic treatment. I was very impressed by the first movie adaptation dating back to the nineteen fifties — uncannily realistic.
I think a writer should be judged by his best work. It’s not Homage to Catalonia that made Orwell famous and relevant in a timeless way. That book was only a part of his journey, from which he emerged as the creator of the ultimate anti-utopias, an iron verdict against all totalitarianism.
Two things come to my mind. One is M. Iossel’s remark: “The Soviet Union was never a Communist country. I was always a fascist country.” The second is a story of a former Jihadist fighter whose name I have forgotten. During his time in an Egyptian prison he came upon a copy of Animal Farm. When he finished reading it, he was no longer a Jihadist. He stated that Orwell had opened his eyes to the impossibility of a utopia. All attempts to create a utopian society led to a reign of terror, confirming again and again that all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
Yet another explanation is that idealists have to clue about the nitty-gritty of not just creating a utopia but any kind of government, and psychopaths take over. Thus, idealism taken to an extreme results in extreme evil. We see this in politics, we see this in religion — in any field where abstract ideas are more valued than the well-being of individuals, and noble-sounding doctrine can indeed mask the greed for power and/or wealth. “All power to the people” unfortunately translates as “all power to the leaders.” The rest is catastrophe.
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“I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it. But in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists — the true protagonist is the story itself.” ~ Antonio Tabucchi, Time Ages in a Hurry
Oriana;
Maybe what he means is that history — the public story — is bigger than we are, and we are rarely aware of being active agents. When it comes to the private story of our own life, we desperately search for a meaningful narrative, but that changes with each stage of life.
THE SOUND OF SILENCE: WEST GERMANY AFTER WW2
~ “The Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about ufos, “have not died out. . . . Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land, an intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious belief that swept across Germany in the immediate post-war years, would disagree. Certainly, Black recognizes the fascination that supernatural ideas and practices, from astrology to the occult, held for millions of Germans “across the modern period” as well as the persistence of a long-standing tradition of folk and magical healing.
But that is not inconsistent with her finding that there was “something quite particular about the kinds of mass [allegedly] supernatural events that took place in Germany after World War II, so many of which focused . . . on sin and guilt, healing and redemption.” To Black this was a way of dealing with what could not be said. “While Germans,” she relates, “did talk, obsessively, about their own losses in the war, there were many other things they simply did not discuss, at least not publicly: allegiances to the former regime, participation in antisemitic persecution and looting, genocide, war crimes.”
Bruno Gröning (1906–59), who did indeed have longer, more coiffed hair than was typical for a man at that time (“a womanish lion’s mane,” jeered a reporter for Bild) plays a central role in A Demon-Haunted Land. Within its pages, Black recounts the saga of this faith healer who became one of the most famous figures in the nascent West Germany, attracting an enormous following after seeming to cure a boy who could barely walk (unsurprisingly, it turned out to be no more than a reprieve).
An unexpected passage in which Black supports the idea that American tales about haunted Indian burial grounds are, even today, an expression of sublimated settler fear “that vengeful ghosts will come back and reclaim what’s theirs” suggests that she cannot always resist overinterpretation. Nevertheless, her thesis that Gröning both conjured up the spirits of the past and alleviated a portion of the pain that they had left behind is convincing. She quotes a journalist who watched Gröning speak from a balcony just outside Munich in 1949. Faces in the crowd “furrowed with worry and suffering” were “magnetized” by “this unimposing little man” with “piercing blue eyes.” He wore wrinkled, threadbare trousers and a dark-blue shirt buttoned all the way up, a “kind of uniform,” writes Black, evoking memories reinforced on the occasions when klieg lights illuminated the balcony, adding, one way or another, to the enchantment.
It has, Black notes, been argued (controversially) that drawing some sort of veil over the Hitler years was a necessary precondition if a country that contained Nazis, those who had opposed them, and many who were in between was to pull itself together. In some respects that anticipates Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Soviet past. But the differing outcomes in West Germany and Russia owe much to Germany’s military catastrophe, a continuing occupation by the victors, and the trials of a number of the old regime’s most prominent monsters, none of which Russia has undergone. These all combined to form guard rails that, in the German case, were surely essential. After all, the majority of those responding to a 1948 poll in western Germany and west Berlin saw National Socialism as a good idea that had been poorly executed. Black does not mention that, but she does demonstrate just how far that helpful silence was taken. Her depiction of the Bonn republic’s rush to a general (and appallingly broad) amnesty for crimes committed during the Third Reich indicates that something more than a very chilly pragmatism was involved.
Black effectively and evocatively contrasts the story that this new democracy was telling about itself, a narrative of rebuilding and recovery, with what lay below its increasingly shiny surface. While Gröning was merely one of history’s countless faith healers, his rise at that time and in that place is suggestive, at least, of something. That is also true of other phenomena—including apocalyptic scares, front-parlor exorcisms, and numerous sightings of the Virgin Mary, various saints, and incarnations of Jesus.
The profound chaos generated by the sheer scale of Germany’s defeat can go a long way to explaining why so many—as the bewildered and the traumatized frequently do—looked to the supernatural for comfort. I suspect that the same, paradoxically, could be said of the widespread belief that the country was being punished by God. This is a familiar enough thought at a time of disaster, great and small, but it is difficult, after reading this book, not to think that it was often another evasion of responsibility, rather than an authentic acknowledgment of guilt. Divine wrath can be followed by divine forgiveness, offering the prospect of an escape route that was spiritual rather than rooted in earthly reality. An honest reckoning with the past could be safely postponed until later. And in Germany it was. ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/6/the-sound-of-silence
Oriana:
This is a predictable pattern: the emergence of charismatic charlatans in times of crisis. They know how to make attractive promises. But then, isn't that the main thing that religion does: make attractive promises?
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PLAGUES AND EMPIRES
~ Neo-Malthusians credited environmental feedback loops, not moral failings, for regime collapse. In the 1960s and ’70s, works by Paul Ehrlich and Donella Meadows et al argued that the world’s population was growing so fast it would soon outstrip resource supplies, leading to (among other things) widespread food shortages. More recently, Jared Diamond wrote of the role that environmental depletion and diseases played in the fall of civilisations, and his theory that the collapse of Easter Island resulted from overexploitation of the natural environment has enjoyed particular resonance. For its part, the COVID-19 pandemic revived old theories about the role that diseases played in regime collapse, and we were reminded that plagues had laid low the Roman Empire and destroyed European feudalism.
Except, that wasn’t what happened. At least, not quite the way supposed.
The thesis that environmental stresses cause regime collapse remains a topic of great debate. We can start just with the cases mentioned above. The alarmist warnings in the 1970s about overpopulation soon gave way not to concerns about food shortages, but about the problems caused by global overproduction of food, which was driving down food prices and accelerating the urbanization of the developing world. Regarding Diamond’s book about Easter Island, pretty much from the get-go it faced strong criticism for its questionable evidence. For similar reasons, many historians of the Roman Empire doubt that the plague played a part in its downfall. As for the Black Death, in much of Europe it didn’t end feudalism but actually reinforced it. More generally, measured by the scale of the loss in human life as a proportion of the total population in the affected areas, 19th-century epidemics of cholera, and the flu pandemic of 1918, all took a far greater toll in the Western world than COVID-19. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find hints of regime stress in response to any of them.
Still, the scholars who make a case for the civilizational impact of epidemics might be on to something. For starters, the link between empires and disease is quite strong, with cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis, bubonic plague, smallpox and other diseases all fanning out across the trade routes of empire. Tellingly, when one contrasts the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic of, say, China and Western countries, it seems plausible that this pandemic could hasten the relative decline, if not the fall, of the West. But given that China and the West confronted the same plague, why have the outcomes differed so wildly? Fortunately, history offers some insights.
Let’s return to the Black Death of 14th-century Europe. The thesis that the plague ended feudalism starts with the fact that Europe’s labour supply dropped suddenly and sharply. This then augmented the bargaining power of the labouring classes, altering their relations to the nobility. But as mentioned, in much of Europe, and particularly in the east, the nobility responded by then reinforcing feudal bonds. However, in other places, the legal system permitted the renegotiation of the relationship between lords and producers. For example, in England, the evolution of Common Law had created a framework that made it possible for land tenure to change from feudal to market-based relations. As a result, when the Black Death caused an agrarian crisis, English society produced new forms of tenancy, thereby accelerating the decline of feudalism. In effect, English feudalism had a vulnerability to exogenous shock that was not present in other parts of Europe.
As it happens, the thesis that an exogenous shock must encounter a vulnerability to bring down a regime happens to fit the case of the Roman Empire. Recent historiography attributes that empire’s fall not to plagues but to the Hunnish invasions. Importantly, though, the sudden incursion of the Huns didn’t itself signal the Roman Empire’s collapse. The Huns emerge into the historical record in the 4th century, but it would be another century before they toppled the empire – which is to say, the exogenous shock alone didn’t change anything. Until well into the 5th century, the Romans dealt with the Huns as they had always done with frontier invaders, using a combination of repression and negotiation to neutralize the threat. But in the mid-5th century, at around the time of the empire’s greatest economic output, its reckless expansionism multiplied the conflicts on its borders, such that it could no longer concentrate its firepower on one foe. Thus, the vulnerability did not result from Rome’s internal weakening, as the Gibbon thesis had maintained. It actually came at the point when the empire was at its peak in both economic output and, it would appear, hubris.
That an empire’s strength might actually be its weakness, creating vulnerabilities to exogenous shocks that didn’t exist in earlier stages of its history, bears consideration in light of the comparatively poor performance of Western countries in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Even more importantly, it could help us chart the likely long-term geopolitical impacts of the pandemic. While far more devastating in human lives, the 1918 flu pandemic did little economic harm to Western societies. In contrast, COVID-19 plunged today’s West into an economic slump that will set back growth, in some cases by years, hastening its decline relative to China and much of the erstwhile global periphery. All told, the same exogenous shock, a very different outcome: COVID-19 seems to have found a vulnerability that did not exist in the West in 1918 – and does not exist in much of the Western world’s former periphery. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/empires-pandemics-and-the-economic-future-of-the-west?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3042c33f53-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_14_05_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-3042c33f53-71890240
ICELAND’S FOUR-DAY WORK WEEK
~ After an experimental drop to a four-day work week in Iceland, workers were both more productive and satisfied with their jobs and lives.
The experiment, which included more than 2,500 Icelandic workers from a variety of public-sector industries including healthcare and education, supported the idea that paying people the same amount of money for less work resulted in widespread benefits, the BBC reports, both in the workplace and their private lives.
And now that the experiment is complete, it could help shape the way that time is balanced between work and everything else for the rest of us.
Overwhelming Success
In general, the four-year-long experiment showed that workers with a four-day week felt more satisfied at work, experienced less burnout, and reported being able to do more fulfilling things like spending time with family or on their hobbies, according to the official report. Meanwhile, their productivity stayed exactly the same and in some cases even increased despite working fewer hours.
“This study shows that the world’s largest-ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success,” director of research at Autonomy, a think tank that helped with the experiment, Will Stronge told the BBC. “It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks — and lessons can be learned for other governments.”
Unions in Iceland are already using the report to get members the right to work four-day weeks for their current salaries, according to the BBC, a change that could affect 86 percent of the country’s workers. Meanwhile, other countries including Spain and New Zealand are following suit by conducting trials of their own, suggesting that the four-day week could become a prominent trend around the world.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/icelands-four-day-week-trial-workers-happier-productive?fbclid=IwAR2rlRiaEKZbTebf6ZTqTpV50sI43hwJpB6fxszSNTQiwZNN9odEy2jDxVI
Iceland: Hot springs
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THOMAS RÖMER’S THE INVENTION OF GOD — HOW A SECOND-TIER DESERT GOD BECAME THE NATIONAL GOD AND THEN THE ONLY GOD
~ Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms―Yhwh, God, or Allah―by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.
That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe―the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah―that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism. ~ Amazon introductory review
~ My father was a devout Methodist clergyman in the UK . As a young boy, in about 1946, I read an English translation of Homer's Iliad and asked about all the gods and goddesses in the book. He told me they were inventions of the ancient Greeks of Homer's time. It was not until about 50 years later that I realized that the city of Troy itself was also an invention for the purposes of the poem.
Thomas Romer gives a careful archeological based account of the history of the gods of the people of Judah (Judea) and Israel from around 1000 BC to about 300 BC. Initially, they had several gods and goddesses, gradually narrowing it down to one called Yahweh (Yhwh) or El and a possible companion goddess. During that period of time members of these tribes wrote and rewrote their 'history', inventing, like Homer, the most amazing stories, including all the stories about 'Moses'. They gradually attributed more and more power to their chosen god. If they were defeated in battle, then they said that their god had turned against them. What ever happened to them, they managed to give a construction in which their god continued to be all powerful but they had behaved inappropriately.
Romer demonstrates that many of the incidents or stories in the Old Testament are 'lifted' from historical accounts pertaining to other more powerful peoples of the times, such as the size of the first temple in Jerusalem or the size of Solomon's empire.
He shows that the god that eventually became the Jewish and Christian God was invented by these earlier forbears, and that much of the contents of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible are invented incidents possibly based on accounts or stories from local empires with additional exaggerations which tended to enhance the powers of this selected god. ~ (Amazon customer)
~ Probably better to call this excellent book The Reinvention of God because it chronicles the evolution and recreation of an obscure wind and warrior god of a Middle Eastern nomadic tribe into the only god complete with a sacred book and a monotheistic ideology that still shapes three of the world's major religions. While the book is accessible to dedicated lay readers, it sometimes lapses into academic jargon and technical detail that is off-putting. Some readers may benefit, as I did, from first reading the same author's reader-friendly paperback, DARK GOD: CRUELTY, SEX, AND VIOLENCE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. As a fan of Sigmund Freud, I was disappointed to see that Roemer dismisses Freud's classic work on Moses and Monotheism with a passing remark and a single footnote. Nevertheless, this is a classic piece of historical analysis. (Amazon customer)
~ Using clues from the text and archeology, he reasons that Yahweh was initially a southern god. The evidence he presents is good and it builds a strong hypothesis from the evidence he presents. He has a wonderful chapter about the "face of God" in which he theorizes that the phrase was literally referring to a statue of god that was in the temple. He has a great section where he discusses the various names of god used throughout and how they relate to other gods in the Ancient Near East. The one thing I think this book lacks is any emphasis on Ugaritic gods. YHWH can be found as far back as the 20th century BCE in Ugarit (See legends of Keret and Aqhat). He notes this, but its just a few paragraphs without deeper analysis. Other than that, its a great read for anyone interested in how Israel went from polytheism, to henotheism, to monotheism. ~ (Amazon customer)
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THE FACE OF GOD? ARCHEOLOGIST CLAIMS TO FIND 10TH CENTURY BCE GRAVEN IMAGES OF YAHWEH
~ A leading Israeli archaeology professor claims that a handful of small male figurines associated with horse statues dating to the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, discovered in multiple sites from the ancient Kingdom of Judah, are in fact representations of the biblical Israelite God, Yahweh.
Hebrew University Prof. Yosef Garfinkel published his theory on Friday in an article for the popular archaeology-themed magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, in its Fall 2020 issue.
“Yes, I think that people in ancient times believed these figurines to represent the face of Yahweh,” Garfinkel told The Times of Israel on Friday.
His theory was firmly rejected by all archaeologists who agreed to respond to Garfinkel’s premise. Some would not give it the time of day, while others said it is not coincidental that his article was printed in a mainstream magazine and not an academic journal.
What has led Garfinkel to believe that he holds a statue of Yahweh in his hands is a combination of an anthropomorphic biblical verse from the Book of Habakkuk, the fact that neighboring nations in the biblical era had national gods, and the relative scarceness of male figurines made of clay such as the one his team uncovered at his Khirbet Qeiyafa excavation, some 20 miles or 30 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem.
About a decade ago Garfinkel’s team discovered what he said was a rare male head at his Khirbet Qeiyafa excavation in a layer that he says is securely dated to the 10th century through over 30 radiocarbon dated organic samples.
In the BAR article, Garfinkel writes: “With a flat top, the head has protruding eyes, ears, and a nose. The eyes were made in two stages. They were first attached to the face as rounded blobs of clay and then punctured to create the iris. Because the ears are pierced, the figure may have worn earrings. Around the top of the head is a circle of holes,” which could have been used to hold a crown or other headdress.
While thousands of female fertility figures have been discovered from prehistoric times onwards, the discovery of this sole circa 5-cm (2-inch) clay male statue — there are indications of a beard — made him raise an eyebrow and dig deeper. It is the lone figurine recovered from the 10th-century layer.
Garfinkel acknowledged that the Bible is very clear on the prohibition against physical representations of god. However, he said the distance between theology and what happened on the ground may be worlds apart. The Bible is rife with exhortations of leaders to the people of Israel to stop worshipping household gods and excavation sites are filled with remains of cultic deities.
Garfinkel said that the Canaanite tradition depicts the god “El,” a name also preserved in the Hebrew Bible, as an older god, a Zeus-like figure often sitting and holding a scepter. He believes that his clay figurine depicts a god unlike all others because the god riding a horse is “a totally different iconography, the horseman is something new,” he said.
Saying that since these presumed horsemen god figures were found in the Motza temple complex — and not at a home — ruled out that they were simple household deities. Therefore, the statues must have represented “the religion of the time” and its god, Yahweh.
As for why the depiction of Yahweh would be so rudimentary, Garfinkel said that whereas Egypt and the Mesopotamia were rich kingdoms with court artists, the Kingdom of Judah was poor, small (between 5,000-20,000 people at its peak), and barely eked out an existence on the 30 kilometers or so of arable land it had between Beit Shemesh and Lachish.
“We’re talking about peasant society,” he said, that was never a big political power in the Middle East. Aside from the Bible, which preserved regional history, very little remains from the monarchic periods in the Land of Israel.
“The Kingdom of Judah left a great intellectual contribution,” he said, and influenced morals until today, but left barely a mark in material culture. “There’s nothing you can put in a museum, really.”
DISSENTING ARCHEOLOGISTS: “Although we cannot rule out the possibility that the human heads from Motza and Qeiyafa depicted gods, they have no markings, symbols or attributes (such as horns, crescents, bulls), found on figures and visual representations throughout the ancient Near East, that would identify them as divine figures. Furthermore, when gods were depicted on animals, they did not sit on them (they do not need the transport) – they stood on them!” they wrote.
“His association of the figurine heads with Yahweh is based on the very late depiction of Yahweh as a rider on a horse in Habakkuk 3:8, and his erroneous statement that the heads from Motza are ‘outstanding in their large size in relation to almost all known anthropomorphic figurines’ is meant to differentiate them from other figurines in order to substantiate his claim that they are divine,” they wrote.
Furthermore, they claim that Garfinkel “ignores all the early Iron Age horse and human figurines and figures found throughout the region, some of which provide significantly better parallels for the Motza and Qeiyafa figurines.” ~
https://www.timesofisrael.com/face-of-god-archaeologist-claims-to-find-10th-cent-bce-graven-images-of-yahweh/
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THE RIGHT FAT WILL GIVE YOU A CHANCE! KETOGENIC DIET ACCORDING TO DR. STEVEN GUNDRY (brace yourself: protein too is very restricted)
~ Fat will give you a chance.
Low-carb, high-protein diets are not the answer. The answer is significantly decreasing the two biggest sources of insulin-raising calories — sugar and protein. You’ve got to do this to give your mitochondria a break and allow your insulin level to drop.
The good news is you can actually eat or drink the ketones that plants have already made for you. That’s right, lots of plant fats are composed of ketones.
Which kinds of plant fats can help?
First off, medium-chain triglycerides (found in MCT oil) are 100 percent composed of ketones, which can help your mitochondria produce ATP right away.
Virgin coconut oil contains about 65 percent MCTs so it’s another great source of ketones.
Another source of MCTs is red palm oil – aka palm fruit oil – which consists of approximately 50 percent ketones.
And the ketone in butter, butyrate, is the short-chain fatty acid in butter, goat butter, and ghee (clarified butter). It’s another source of ketones. Just make sure you’re buying grass-fed butter [Oriana: Irish Kerrygold is available even at Walmart] if you’re going for cow’s milk butter at all. (Dr. Gundry suggests French or Italian grass-fed butter, but where to get it? And it would no doubt be very expensive, while the superb Irish butter is affordable)
The Takeaway
There’s a right way and a wrong way to go ketogenic. Remember, protein is as much an enemy in excess as are sugar and carbs. Sadly, most people on the ketogenic diet eat WAY too much protein – it’s the reason many ketogenic dieters will never get into ketosis.
You can swallow ketones all day long, but if you keep chowing down on animal proteins, you’ll keep your insulin levels high. And then you’ll never be able to break your own fat down into ketones.
So stick to Plant Paradox-approved veggies and remember the 80/10/10 ratio –
80% of your daily calories should be good fats (avocado, coconut oil, MCT oil, EVOO)
10% of your daily calories should be protein (no more than 20 grams a day)
10% of your daily calories should be carbohydrates (leaves and tubers)
That’s how you get your body into the right kind of ketogenic state. ~
Oriana:
(First, let me correct a chemical inaccuracy: MCT oil is not composed of ketones. It's composed of medium-chain fatty acids, such as caprylic acid and capric acid. The liver needs to convert those medium-chain fatty acids into ketones, which then can provide more energy than carbs.)
Some of you may be appalled by the mention red palm oil. But the Nutiva brand is sustainably produced in Ecuador.
Protein restriction makes sense, whether you are using this diet to lose weight or to fight cancer. What Atkins didn’t fully understand is how readily protein is converted into glucose — and the body seems to become more efficient at it the longer one restricts carbs without restricting protein.
(I say “seems” because that happened to be my experience with the Atkins diet; it works great at first, but then the weight creeps back on. I do admit that another factor is less severe carb restriction. And Atkins himself suggested “fat only” diet for people who appeared to be “weight-loss resistant.” The message remains: no, you can’t indulge yourself in unlimited quantities of animal protein and expect to lose weight in the long term.)
ending on beauty:
everyone believes the Eternal Master sculpted him
from the dust of the earth with his own hands
and the fish of wisdom in a sea of sorrow hesitates
floating away from us moving its four fins
~ Boris Khersonsky, Wisdom floats in a sea of sorrow like an ancient fish, tr Nina Kossman
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