Beauty will save the world. ~ Dostoyevski, The Idiot "Tulip with Butterfly and Cockchafer."
Barbara Regina Dietzsch, German (1706-1783).
*
A PARADISE OF FLOWERS
(rudolf hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, to his sister)
My dear little sister, In answer to your question:
Gypsies are my favorite prisoners.
When I visit their family camp, they run out
and play their fiddles. this very afternoon
a barefoot little girl danced the czardas for me,
then held out her hand to beg for bread.
That tiny hand: first shyly curled,
then opening, then curling back . . .
You know Gypsies, they are optimists.
The Jews are fatalists and capitalists.
The camp’s black market is in Jewish hands.
Jehovah’s Witnesses — our “Bible Worms” —
think it is right that the Jews should suffer
since they are “stiff-necked” and will not convert,
delaying the Second Coming.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are our best workers.
The Russians sing; the Slovaks curse. Most
trouble are the Poles; they want to die with honor.
I promised Lotte I’d build a little park;
I’m always trying to improve the camp.
How many times have I warned my superiors
about the chimney cracks from furnace overload
in certain special installations here —
Still, we’re advanced compared to Treblinka —
we are the most advanced of all the camps.
Hygiene and order, under my command . . .
Not to mention we have a soccer field.
Our concert hall stands ready for its first
Beethoven performance. Alas, my subordinates
are mostly inartistic; Palitzsch, with his whip
and greasy face, again reported late —
the swine must have gotten drunk again.
The dog handlers play with their dogs
or chat with prisoners, against regulations.
The commander in charge of the dogs —
two hundred fifty thoroughbreds —
threatens to resign if the leaking roofs
in the kennels are not repaired immediately.
We’ve lost another careless guard
who brushed against the electric wire.
You ask if I like my work. Dear sister,
one does not ask that of an officer. I serve.
I sacrifice for the Fatherland, or else the Jews
will be a threat to Germany forever.
The children are very fond of our house inmates.
They pester me for cigarettes to give to them —
even little Evi, who waves to her “uncles”
as she splashes in the wading pool.
The Polish name of the charming little town,
centuries old, means “a holy place.”
We boat on the river, pick mushrooms,
walk in the birch woods full of deer.
Imagine, from the camp on a clear day,
we can see the Carpathians hanging in the sky.
The inmates stare as at a vision — but then
each blade of grass, a dandelion even,
is religion to them. Which brings me
to your question, “What about God in Auschwitz?”
We have clergy here; some nights I have heard
communal prayers, more fervent, I dare say,
than in any church. Sundays I take the children
to visit the kennels and the stables.
Lotte says she could live here all her life.
Our garden is a paradise of flowers.
Heil Hitler! Your loving brother, Rudi
A PARADISE OF FLOWERS
(rudolf hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, to his sister)
My dear little sister, In answer to your question:
Gypsies are my favorite prisoners.
When I visit their family camp, they run out
and play their fiddles. this very afternoon
a barefoot little girl danced the czardas for me,
then held out her hand to beg for bread.
That tiny hand: first shyly curled,
then opening, then curling back . . .
You know Gypsies, they are optimists.
The Jews are fatalists and capitalists.
The camp’s black market is in Jewish hands.
Jehovah’s Witnesses — our “Bible Worms” —
think it is right that the Jews should suffer
since they are “stiff-necked” and will not convert,
delaying the Second Coming.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are our best workers.
The Russians sing; the Slovaks curse. Most
trouble are the Poles; they want to die with honor.
I promised Lotte I’d build a little park;
I’m always trying to improve the camp.
How many times have I warned my superiors
about the chimney cracks from furnace overload
in certain special installations here —
Still, we’re advanced compared to Treblinka —
we are the most advanced of all the camps.
Hygiene and order, under my command . . .
Not to mention we have a soccer field.
Our concert hall stands ready for its first
Beethoven performance. Alas, my subordinates
are mostly inartistic; Palitzsch, with his whip
and greasy face, again reported late —
the swine must have gotten drunk again.
The dog handlers play with their dogs
or chat with prisoners, against regulations.
The commander in charge of the dogs —
two hundred fifty thoroughbreds —
threatens to resign if the leaking roofs
in the kennels are not repaired immediately.
We’ve lost another careless guard
who brushed against the electric wire.
You ask if I like my work. Dear sister,
one does not ask that of an officer. I serve.
I sacrifice for the Fatherland, or else the Jews
will be a threat to Germany forever.
The children are very fond of our house inmates.
They pester me for cigarettes to give to them —
even little Evi, who waves to her “uncles”
as she splashes in the wading pool.
The Polish name of the charming little town,
centuries old, means “a holy place.”
We boat on the river, pick mushrooms,
walk in the birch woods full of deer.
Imagine, from the camp on a clear day,
we can see the Carpathians hanging in the sky.
The inmates stare as at a vision — but then
each blade of grass, a dandelion even,
is religion to them. Which brings me
to your question, “What about God in Auschwitz?”
We have clergy here; some nights I have heard
communal prayers, more fervent, I dare say,
than in any church. Sundays I take the children
to visit the kennels and the stables.
Lotte says she could live here all her life.
Our garden is a paradise of flowers.
Heil Hitler! Your loving brother, Rudi
~ Oriana
*
THE LETTERS OF SEAMUS HEANEY
. . . In “The Impact of Translation” (included in The Government of the Tongue), Heaney recalls Stephen Dedalus’s quip, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, that “the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead” (implying that only from abroad could Ireland really be understood), and adds that perhaps “the shortest way to Whitby”—for whose abbey Caedmon worked—“is via Warsaw and Prague.”
Miłosz and Holub were crucially important to him poetically, although he did not translate either. His letters to Miłosz have, as Reid says, an “almost filial” affection; writing in 2002 to Fr. John Breslin, a Jesuit English teacher, Heaney comments, “I suppose I read him [Miłosz] as a kind of spiritual director, really.” His Eastern European translations are from lesser-known poets: Ana Blandiana and Marin Sorescu are Romanian, Ozev Kalda from Wallachia (now the Czech Republic). Heaney’s choices suggest a wish to show solidarity with artists who had suffered under political censorship and persecution.
The letters provide evidence of Heaney’s feelings about his own work, complementing the interviews in Stepping Stones. His early pseudonym, “Incertus” [Latin for "uncertain"], for poems published in a student magazine, points to a diffidence that never quite left him; even after winning the Nobel Prize, he was always extravagantly grateful for any praise from fellow poets and other friends. He writes to Karl Miller that Field Work (1979) is not “as tight and obsessive” as North, but “I like to think there’s more of my personality relaxing in it.” He admits to Helen Vendler that “there was something doughy and dutiful” about the sequence “Station Island” in the book of the same name (1984). (Vendler, who became a friend, published a monograph on him in 1998.)
In 2012, responding to inquiries from David-Antoine Williams about his linguistic and etymological interests, Heaney identified Wintering Out (1972) as “the collection where language and its historical/political charge come into focus,” adding that since Field Work “the language . . . was wanting to be more like clear glass than stained glass.”
He was commendably determined not to stand still artistically, even if the element of experimentation didn’t always come off. In 1989, Craig Raine admitted to reservations about the relaxed manner of the sequence of forty-eight poems called “Squarings,” in a draft version of Seeing Things (1991), but added that he had eventually been won over. In his reply, Heaney expressed relief at this, acknowledging “vague intimations of a book more generously loosened out, with more draperies of meditative, discursive things—and a more spacious patchwork of the bits.” Both Vendler and Foster read “Squarings” in a positive light, as a visionary meditation on the process of creativity itself. Such an undertaking risks losing touch with the concrete, drifting too far into abstraction, a fault Heaney doesn’t always avoid.
*
Heaney’s later years were clouded by anxieties. In 2006, he had a minor stroke; in 2007 his wife, Marie, was treated (successfully) for breast cancer; in 2009 he turned seventy and had to endure “the passage of the media juggernaut” in celebrations that made him feel “plundered”; in 2010 and 2011 he suffered severe depression, which he overcame with the help of medication, but in the latter year he again had a small stroke. Inevitably, his thoughts turned to mortality. Two months after the first stroke, he wrote to Jane Miller that, although he had abandoned Catholicism, its “structured reading [of] the mortal condition” had never quite left him and emerged in the many poems he wrote about ghosts and the underworld (“I’ve always had a weakness for the elegiac”).
This is evident not only in his original work—preeminently “Station Island” but also the late “Route 110” from his last collection, The Human Chain (2010)—but in his translations of Book VI of the Aeneid, the first three cantos of Dante’s Inferno, and the poem “Testimony: What Passed at Colonus,” from Sophocles. To Michael Alexander he reflected that, at seventy-two, he must be about the age Beowulf was when he fought the dragon.
The final pages of Reid’s collection have a wistful, tender note, and in view of the anecdote with which I began this review I am glad to be able to record that in December 2012 Heaney took the trouble to write to a seventeen-year-old schoolboy fan, Dean Browne, thanking him for his letter of appreciation. Browne is now a published poet in his own right.
On August 30, 2013, Heaney sent a text message to Marie from the hospital on his way to an operation for a ruptured artery. It read Noli timere, “Don’t be afraid.” He died before the surgery could be performed. Two weeks earlier he had written his last poem, “In Time,” dedicated to his granddaughter Síofra.
Foster tells us that, at the All-Ireland Gaelic football semifinal held shortly after Heaney’s death, “eighty thousand people stood and applauded for two minutes in homage.” One cannot imagine a comparable event occurring at Wembley Stadium after the death of an English poet. Whatever Heaney believed, or did not believe, about life after death, through his work he has assuredly had, and will continue to have, an unassailable afterlife.
*
“In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a lot better.” — Woody Allen
*
THE PENAL COLONY WHERE NAVALNY DIED
Alexei Navalny's penal colony is the strictest penal colony you can get. Only those accused of the very worst crimes are sent to IK-3.
Nicknamed Polar Wolf, it is located in Yamalo-Nenets region, well above the Arctic Circle. Conditions, needless to say, are very harsh.
It is known for a culture of collective punishment and winter temperatures there can go as low as -20C.
Inmates have described being punished for the infringements of others by being made to stand outside in the winter without coats. Those who fail to stand still face being doused with cold water.
Snow covers the ground for months at a time — only to be replaced by muddy slush when temperatures rise above freezing, around May.
In the summer, prisoners are forced to strip to their waists in swarms of mosquitoes.
With summer comes long days with no nights. It all takes a heavy physical toll.
Navalny's day-to-day life will have been a lonely one, since December in IK-3 and before that at the IK-6 facility in Melekhovo, east of Moscow.
Since 2022, he had spent nearly 300 days in in solitary confinement and lately he was allowed one daily stroll in a nearby cell where the floor was covered in snow.
All he could see outside his window was a tall fence, and no light. In winter in the Arctic Circle, it's only ever dusk at best.
With years of jail ahead of him, Navalny had to find ways of remaining relevant.
He filed complaints about prison conditions that would allow him to appear in court and deliver statements on camera on a regular basis. He tried to create a trade union for prisoners to campaign for better seats in the jail's sewing factory.
He made a noise so he wouldn't be forgotten.
Navalny was known for his acerbic wit. He always tried to make light of his situation, no matter how hard the conditions were.
Through social media posts, written and posted by his lawyers, he talked about the conditions he was held in — often with more humor than many thought possible.
He described New Year's Day in the punishment cell, saying: "It goes like any other day: wake-up is at 05:00, bedtime at 21:00. So for the first time since I was six years old, I just slept the entire New Year's Eve. Overall I'm pleased. People pay money to celebrate the New Year in an unusual way, but I did it for free.”
But his day-to-day life must have been truly testing.
In January 2023, he wrote about being assigned a new cellmate with severe mental health problems.
"There are many videos online about people who believe that they are possessed by demons and devils," he said.
His cellmate was "very similar" — emitting "a growling, guttural scream that periodically turns on and doesn't turn off for hours. He yells for 14 hours during the day and three hours at night.”
On another occasion, he was made to share a cell with a person who had "serious problems" with hygiene.
"If you live in a cell, and some person lives at arm's length from you 24/7, and you are both one or two meters from the toilet 24/7, and the toilet is a hole in the floor, maintaining hygiene is of fundamental importance. And a prisoner who is problematic in this sense will instantly make your life unbearable.”
Navalny was sure that neither of his cellmates arrived by accident. He believed they were just another way for the Russian prison system to make life hell for an inmate if they wanted to.
At 47 Navalny wasn't old, but being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok and spending three weeks in a coma took its toll. Living a life of constant deprivation in jail only added to that.
In December, he said his request to see a dentist had been denied for 18 months.
He had also developed serious back problems, and recently had difficulties walking and standing. One of his legs was going numb, possibly indicating a herniated disk.
Despite his smiles and relaxed air in court, with each appearance he became more gaunt.
In 2023, more than 500 Russian doctors signed an open letter demanding to have him seen by a civilian doctor after he said he had been suffering from a cough and a fever and had to share a cell with an inmate with tuberculosis.
Russian prisons have a long history of torture, both physical and psychological. Inmates are often abused by prisoners friendly to the administration, and rules that are impossible to follow add to the mental anguish.
The federal prison system itself estimates there have been an annual 1,400-2,000 prison deaths over the last five years. The number one cause is invariably put down to cardiac problems.
Lawyers treat this explanation with suspicion. "They can cover up anything as a cardiac arrest — even a suicide or a killing by other inmates or guards," says lawyer Irina Birykova.
In her experience, it's nearly impossible to overcome the hurdles created by the prison system if authorities don't want the cause of death to be independently verified.
Navalny's death has dealt an enormous blow to Russians who saw him as an emblem of resistance.
It was clear he could no longer lead Russia's opposition, but there was an underlying hope that one day the political situation would change and Navalny would be able to come back.
If Vladimir Putin ever needed to negotiate his own freedom or safety, Navalny might have been part of the bargain.
Most Russians now agree there is little hope now in protest. People will try to mark his death in their own way, laying flowers in locations where Navalny stood.
Some brave souls will even come out on to the streets, and they will be punished.
If shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine failed to bring masses of people on to the streets, Navalny's death won't either.
But privately, a lot of Russians are grieving. For them, this will just be another very dark day and a loss of hope. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68322113
*
THE DAY BEFORE HE DIED, Navalny appeared in court, where he mocked the poor salaries he accused corrupt Russian officials of supplementing with bribes.
"Your Honor, I will send you my personal account number so that you can use your huge salary as a federal judge to 'warm up' my personal account, because I am running out of money," he told the judge presiding over the case.
It was to be his last public appearance.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68320250
*
”Listen, I've got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.” ~ Alexei Navalny
*
PUTIN LOOKS VERY HAPPY
*
MISHA IOSSEL ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NAVALNY
Someday, the Day of Alexei Navalny will be established in Russia. Streets, settlements, steamboats will be named after him. And the name of Putin, this fish-eyed killer, will forever be covered in shame.
Navalny martyred himself for the nation which, in its majority, at this point in its history, did not deserve or indeed need that heroic selfless sacrifice from him — or anyone.
*
TUCKER CARLSON ON LEADERSHIP
*
Tucker Carlson trying to grasp Putin's wit and wisdom*
RUSSIAN ADORATION OF LENIN AND STALIN
~ Lenin and Stalin are to Russians what Washington and Lincoln are to Americans. They also served similar roles in both countries, though the gap between Washington and Lincoln was much wider and they obviously didn’t fight together in the revolution. Washington upended the political order and replaced it with a new one, and Lincoln resolved the problems that Washington and his peers failed to address.
But the way Lincoln resolved it was controversial, and not everyone is happy with the outcome.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that there are Americans who want slavery to come back. They’re unhappy that Lincoln cemented a loose, theoretically voluntary coalition of equal sovereign states into a centralized dictatorship. The dictatorship established by Lincoln only got more authoritarian since then. This needed to be done, but it is important to understand why not all Americans are happy about it, even now.
The controversy surrounding Lenin and Stalin is roughly equivalent. When a Russian complains about something Stalin did, he’s not suggesting that Nazi Germany should have won, or in any way implying that Stalin and Hitler were equivalent. It is true that Stalin is controversial, and it’s not all NATO propaganda. There was a huge moral shift and it wasn’t just in Russia, but global. The exact reasons why this moral shift happened can be debated, but it is most likely because World War II was the single biggest man-made disaster in history, both East and West.
In 1945 all of the world’s major cultures concluded that genocide is bad. Up until that point, war and genocide came hand in hand, and were practically the same thing. Basically every wartime leader had committed something that could be construed as genocide, and no one saw anything wrong with this. When you win a war you convert the population to your way of thinking, or at least something compatible to your way of thinking. If there’s a group of people who are too obstinate, you physically remove them one way or another, and throughout human history everybody has done this.
Realizing that genocide is bad was a great moment for human cultural evolution, but it didn’t happen smoothly or flawlessly. This realization that genocide is bad also didn’t end genocide, just like realizing murder is bad didn’t end murder. Or perhaps a better example, realizing slavery is bad didn’t end slavery.
Throughout most of human history, slavery was fine and nobody even thought it was bad. More importantly, people were fine with being slaves. It was just the way of things, some people were owners, and some people were slaves. But after the widespread realization that slavery is bad, the genie couldn’t be put back into the bottle. No one wants to be a slave and will actively resist slavery, or at the very least passively resist by not working hard, making the system impractical.
Furthermore, any country that openly practices institutional slavery instantly becomes a pariah. According to the Global Slavery Index, the number of slaves around the world as of 2023 was roughly 50 million, which is a microscopic portion of the human population. Also, the GSI is extremely political, and their criteria for who counts as a slave make little sense. Slavery, in the practical sense of what slavery actually meant historically, has been all but eliminated.
Now for genocide. We already had the idea of “trinitarian warfare,” a conflict that recognizes a society as three somewhat distinct parts civilians, government, and military. Up to and during World War II, if an army was struggling to win against the opposing government and military pillars, the solution was to just destroy the civilians, knowing resistance would eventually collapse if you caused enough destruction. But after the collective disdain for genocide, this solution became increasingly difficult, and no longer had a near-100% success rate like in previous eras. Modern armies are obligated to make at least moderate effort to only target the enemy military and spare civilians. Even targeting government infrastructure is frowned upon.
There are American commentators who insist that NATO interventions would go better if we just “took the gloves off” and started exterminating people indiscriminately. But these people are hopelessly divorced from reality. American occupations in the Middle East are tolerated for the exact reason that there are limits to American violence. The average modern American citizen is not capable of calculated genocide. And even if he was, the US military is not nearly big enough to do it. The passive local population would no longer be passive if they were being indiscriminately killed, and international forces would no longer be passive either if the US attempted a classic genocide.
What’s happening now in Ukraine is interesting, and perhaps the logical conclusion of these threads. It is without a doubt the cleanest large-scale peer-on-peer war in history. Now I know the NATO trolls reading this are already smashing their keyboards in pure rage, but it’s true. The civilian fatalities (inflicted by both sides, mind you) are a fraction of even the most conservative estimates of Russian military losses. Can you think of even one modern military that showed such restraint?
Denazification, as elaborated on by Putin in his Tucker Carlson interview, is the dismantling of of the Ukraine’s pro-nazi political institutions. Denazification is not killing Ukrainian civilian who sympathize with nazism. Trinitarian warfare indeed.
With all this in mind, let’s circle back to Stalin. He put people in camps, and he forcibly relocated people. Both of these acts meet the modern criteria for genocide, it is true. And so what? He was a man of his time who faced a cataclysmic, civilization-ending crisis, and preserved the country the best he could. He was far from the only one with dirty hands among the allies. Churchill deliberately starved millions of Indians to death [Oriana: his policies contributed to the 1943 Bengal Famine] — which was worse than anything the Soviets did, as this was intentional starvation to break the Indians’ will to resist (that genocide thing I mentioned earlier), and FDR wholesale locked up ethnic Japanese citizens in concentration camps.
Painting Stalin, and Stalin specifically, as the same as Hitler was useful to post-WWII NATO propaganda, and it was pretty easy to do. NATO propaganda was, ironically, just an extension of Hitler’s propaganda — Germany was simply defending itself from “unprovoked Russian aggression.” By agreeing that Hitler was telling the truth, Stalin and Russians became the big baddies of WWII. But… this propaganda came at a cost, which I’ll explain.
American political discourse is just variations of this:
—Bush is literally as bad as Hitler! —No, Obama is literally as bad as Hitler! —But Trump is literally as bad as Hitler too!
And so on. Needless to say, that’s not normal or healthy. What exactly went wrong? I think it started with the “Stalin was just as bad as Hitler” narrative. This required, in part, exaggerating the scale Stalin’s misdeeds, but just as importantly, required downplaying Hitler’s. See, concentration camps were very common throughout history, but actual extermination camps like Auschwitz were rare. By equating all camps as like Hitler’s, we’re diminishing the scale of Hitler’s atrocities.
There’s yet another problem with this logic. The western allies sided with Stalin and the Soviet Union against Hitler and Nazi Germany. If we declare that the Soviets were no better than Nazis, then this means that allies of the Soviets were also no better than Nazis. You cannot accept one of these statements without accepting the other. Shitting on the Soviet victory over Nazism is shitting on the American and British victories too, because they were a joint effort.
Declaring that Stalin and Hitler were one and the same took us down a pretty bad rabbit hole. If a world leader who commits an act that could be construed as a genocide on any scale is the same as Hitler, then that just means that practically all world leaders throughout history were like Hitler. Is this a useful lesson? Is it an actionable lesson? Most importantly, is it even a true statement? Was every world leader who fought a war just as evil and depraved as Hitler? No, I don’t think that’s true at all, and more than a little insulting. ~ Ian Kummer (who describes himself as “American Tourist in Russia”), Quora
Oriana:
This is a biased account, much too easy on the two mass-murderers, especially Stalin.
Still, we have to remember that they weren't only mass-murderers, period. They were true believers in an ideology they tried to apply to a multi-million population, with the ultimate goal of encompassing the whole world (no small task, to put it mildly).
Putin and Stalin are definitely not in the same rank, but there is some similarity, which gives rise to cartoons like the one below. We could all agree that Putin needs a beauty make-over.
Sam Payne:
Actually it was the British that popularized the use of concentration camps during the Boer War in the early 20th century South Africa in which Winston Churchill played a part as a young army officer. The British put Afrikaner women and children in camps to break the will of the resistance. Tens of thousands of women and children died of starvation in these camps.
*
RUSSIA: GOOD OR EVIL? (Elena Gold)
To understand whether a country is morally “good” or “bad,” I suggest looking at photos of court hearings of people who are prosecuted for non-violent crimes.
You won’t see cages in Western European or US courts in similar trials.
The people in these countries are treated as human beings.
They are treated with dignity, no matter what they have done, until a just and independent court decides that the person is guilty.
But in Russia, a person whose destiny judges decide is worth less than the dirt under their nails. The accused are in advance treated like criminals.
Once they have been arrested, they are already seen as guilty. The court only announces how many years of Gulag this person deserves.
In essence, anyone could be guilty of breaking one of the many laws that Duma makes every week.
The state can pick and choose to make anyone an example and a lesson for all others, who are still not behind the official Gulag walls, but think that they are free within the open air prison that Russia has become.
Priest Ioann Kurmoyarov was sentenced to 3 years in prison under the article on “fakes about the Russian army”. He was arrested for a video on his YouTube channel, titled “Who will be in hell and who will be in heaven?” In the video, the priest criticized Russia's invasion of Ukraine from the point of view of Christian doctrine.
Out of 18 ”crimes” of Stalin’s Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code on “enemies of the people”— the one used for mass repressions — 14 “crimes” have already become part of the amended Russia’s criminal code.
This 23-year-old woman has never been convicted of any crimes before, she has not attacked anyone with a knife, she is no danger to the society. But she was put behind the bars in the courtroom.
Russia has no civil society. It’s a mafia state, ruled by criminals top to bottom. Being a law-abiding, decent citizen gives no guarantee that you won’t be thrown in jail and locked behind bars for a long time.
This young woman pretended to “tickle” the “Motherland” monument in a video she posted online (which some Z-patriots considered offensive, stating that the monument was sacred). That’s her crime. She didn’t even touch the actual statue.
She has been sent to a pre-trial detention center until March 10, but she may get 5 years in prison for “rehabilitation of Nazism.”
This is how you can quickly determine the degree to which the country is screwed up.
2024 Russia is anything but a morally good country. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Franz Peter:
The repression of the Stalin years is alive and as strong under the repression of Putin, tragically. Spasiba for confirming that for the doubters. Elena. Let’s start with T. Carlson, Putin’s America backstabbing useful idiot.
David Chris Hawke:
And now certain American Christians are installing portraits of Putin next to the pictures of tRump and Jesus in their so-called churches. Surreal.
Gilbert Watts:
It’s like Al Capone running Chicago writ large. But compared the criminal state of Russia, he actually did something for the people, like running soup kitchens during the Depression.
Oriana:
“Innocent until proven guilty” actually blew my adolescent mind. “You have the right to remain silent” — this was absolutely revolutionary. Because I grew up in Poland, where the husband of one of my aunts was actually tortured in prison (where he spent 8 years, not guilty of anything except great courage during the war), “no cruel or unusual punishment” also impressed me.
No country has an ideal judicial system, but when it comes to human rights, some countries are ahead of others.
More from Elena Gold: TERRORIST DYSTOPIA
The Russian state has the absolute liberty to throw any citizen in jail and take away everything they own — and everything their families own (yes, they are allowed to confiscate the property of the associates as well).
When I say “any citizen”, it’s not a figure of speech. All the enforcers need is a complaint from a concerned citizen (someone saying you were saying things in support of Ukraine), and that’s enough to search your home (destroying it — breaking furniture and pulling the wallpaper off the walls, etc.) and open a criminal case.
Obviously, the need for such laws can only be a testament of how strongly Putin’s war in Russia is supported and how unanimously all the Russian citizens believe that Russia is doing very well.
It’s this — or jail and confiscation.
Oh, well. Most Russians have supported Putin’s war from the start — or chose not to protest — they’d have to live with the results.
The most corrupt and sycophant individuals became the leaders everywhere from public schools to regional legislature.
There are no journalists left, only propagandists. Labor productivity fell as bosses are not held accountable. They don’t care to make employees work hard as they are paid pennies and can’t be promoted because all the top spots are taken by the inner circle appointees leaving them unmotivated.
Every evening I watch a stampede of Russian Railways office plankton at 6pm from the glass office building running across the road on red light risking their lives to put the distance faster between the hated job and the metro station.
The number of the employees of this state corporation has tripled since the collapse of the Soviet Union and revenues come from ticket sales that cost as much as flight tickets and transportation of natural resources overseas using the old Soviet rail tracks. No new lines have been built.
Putin decided to follow in the footsteps of Nazi Germany and when the society started to get torn apart and internal terror couldn’t cope with it, he relieved tensions through external expansion.
Putin ordered to create organization of the patriotic competition for mentors “To be, not to seem!”
The phrase “To be, not to seem!” (Mehr sein als scheinen) was the slogan of political schools in Nazi Germany, where they trained leadership for the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and the SS — the party's paramilitary units. When World War II began, many school graduates joined the SS and Wehrmacht.
Putin is witlessly creating Nazism in Russia under the guise of anti-Nazi fight.
Russia is world’s largest country and second least densely populated and yet Putin sacrifices the remaining workforce and economy to enlarge it through a war of conquest.
Repairing a broken pipe with a shovel in Lipetsk.
As a KGB agent, Putin knows only one social mechanism available to him — terror.
The phrase “To be, not to seem!” (Mehr sein als scheinen) was the slogan of political schools in Nazi Germany, where they trained leadership for the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and the SS — the party's paramilitary units. When World War II began, many school graduates joined the SS and Wehrmacht.
Putin is witlessly creating Nazism in Russia under the guise of anti-Nazi fight.
Russia is world’s largest country and second least densely populated and yet Putin sacrifices the remaining workforce and economy to enlarge it through a war of conquest.
Repairing a broken pipe with a shovel in Lipetsk.As a KGB agent, Putin knows only one social mechanism available to him — terror.
His utopian promises about great achievements that will be done in some distant future is a relic of the Bolshevik pseudo-religious doctrine that sold future to the uneducated peasants because they lagged far behind the Western civilization in the present.
Putin does not have a plan for post-war Russia. Even if he were to occupy all of Ukraine and defeat American hegemony, his country lacks workforce, technologies and a clear vision of the future to take the global lead.
As such, Russia’s future is to be China’s vassal for many decades if not centuries to come. This is Putin’s real legacy. Not economy or Ukraine. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
and this too is from Elena:
All these hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers whom Putin sent to their deaths… and Putin looking for excuses in 13th century history.
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MEANWHILE IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST
Is the fact that China now declared the Russian city of Vladivostok its internal port the first signs that Russia is losing control over its Eastern regions?
The Russian provinces near China are already full of Chinese laborers doing all the work. They outnumber the resident Russian population by around 10–1. These regions are rich farmlands. As Russia fractures many of these areas are highly likely to seek protection and assistance from China and seek to join the nation peacefully. This could include Vladivostok. ~ Sunlo, Quora
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CHINESE NEW YEAR IN RUSSIA
Putin’s new fad is China and right on cue for the first time ever Russians are celebrating Chinese New Year. Will they celebrate North Korean New Year in 2025?
A walking street in Moscow was festooned with red lanterns. Food stalls sold Chinese dishes with names doubled in Mandarin.
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NEPALI FIGHTER’S TALES OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE
Ramchandra Khadka stood in front of a temple in the middle of Kathmandu, Nepal, praying for his fellow countrymen who are fighting for Russia in Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
As the ceremonial bells rang and the sweet smell of incense filled the air, he lit candles and offered flowers to a deity. All he wants is for his Nepali friends to survive the brutal war.
The 37-year-old recently returned to Nepal after suffering injuries on the front lines in Ukraine. He told CNN he witnessed horrific scenes and regrets his decision to join the Kremlin’s army as a foreign mercenary.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not the first battle Khadka has fought. He was among Nepal’s Maoist rebels, who fought a bloody war with the country’s forces for 10 years from the mid-1990s. He then went to Afghanistan after being hired by a private military contractor to assist NATO forces in the country. He thought he had experienced it all in his lifetime – bloodshed, death and pain. But, some 17 years after the Maoist war ended, with no hope of a job in Nepal, he decided to fly to Russia to join the country’s military for money.
“I didn’t join the Russian military for pleasure. I didn’t have any job opportunities in Nepal. But in hindsight, it wasn’t the right decision. We didn’t realize we would be sent to the frontlines that quickly and how horrible the situation would be,” Khadka said.
He arrived in Moscow in September last year. After only two weeks of training, he said, he was sent to the front lines in Bakhmut – a town in eastern Ukraine that saw some of the heaviest fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces – with a gun and a basic kit.
“There isn’t an inch of land in Bakhmut that’s not affected by bombs. All the trees, shrubs, and greenery… they are all gone. Most of the houses have been destroyed. The situation there is so gruesome that it makes you want to cry,” he recalled.
Khadka was deployed to Bakhmut twice and spent a total of one month there. During his second deployment, he was struck by a bullet in his hip. After he was rescued and taken a few hundred meters back from the front line, he was hit by shrapnel from a cluster bomb.
“I still get a headache when I think about the terrible scenes I saw in the war zone,” he said.
He is one of as many as 15,000 Nepali men to have joined the Russian military, multiple sources have told CNN, after the Russian government last year announced a lucrative package for foreign fighters to join the country’s military.
The package included at least $2,000 salary a month and a fast-tracked process to obtain a Russian passport. Nepal’s passport is ranked one of the worst in the world for global mobility, below North Korea, according to an index created by global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners, and the Himalayan nation is among the world’s poorest, with a per capita GDP of $1,336 for 2022, according to World Bank data.
Ramchandra Khadka in Bakhmut
The Nepali government says about 200 of its citizens are fighting for the Russian army and that at least 13 Nepalis have been killed in the war zone. But lawmakers and rights’ campaigners in Nepal say those official estimates vastly underestimate the real numbers.
A prominent opposition Nepali lawmaker and former foreign minister, Bimala Rai Paudyal, told the upper house of the county’s parliament on Thursday that between 14,000 and 15,000 Nepalis are fighting on the front lines, citing testimony from men returning from the war zone, and called on the Russian authorities to provide the figures.
“The Russian government must have the data of how many foreign fighters have joined the Russian army and how many Nepalis are fighting for Russia,” she said.
Four Nepali fighters are currently being held as prisoners of war (POWs) by Ukraine, according to Nepal’s foreign ministry.
The Russian foreign ministry has not responded to CNN’s questions about the number of Nepalis recruited by the Russian army and how many of them have died so far.
Kritu Bhandari, a Kathmandu-based politician and social campaigner, has become the leader of a group of family members of Nepali men fighting in Russia. She says around 2,000 families have approached her in recent weeks asking for help either to get in touch with their missing loved ones or to bring those who are still in contact home to the small South Asian nation.
Hundreds of families say their relatives in Russia haven’t been in contact for many weeks or months, according to Bhandari.
‘I TRY NOT TO THIINK OF THE WORST’
Januka Sunar’s husband went to Russia three months ago to join the military. He hasn’t been in touch with his family in Nepal for two-and-a-half months.
The last time Sunar spoke to her husband, she told CNN, he said that the Russian military was moving him to a different location and that they would not allow him to take his mobile phone with him. He didn’t tell her where he was being relocated to.
“I’m very worried. I don’t know what happened to him. He may be injured… and I wonder if they will return his phone eventually. I’m scared. I try not to think of the worst,” she said.
Sunar said her husband, the sole breadwinner in the house, who used to work making silver jewelry and utensils, had joined the Russian army solely for money – to build a better life for the family. She has two children who live with her in a town on the outskirts of Kathmandu.
CNN met her along with other family members of those in Russia, who had gathered at the headquarters of the ruling Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Center) in the Nepali capital to try to put pressure on the country’s top politicians to repatriate their loved ones.
“If the worst has happened to him, it’ll be worse than going to hell for us. We don’t have a future for the rest of our lives,” she said.
Sunar burst into tears as she shared how she was unable to explain to her children where their father is.
“They say: ‘Where is our dad, mummy? All of our friend’s dads who went abroad for work have returned… when is our dad coming back? We want to talk to our dad just for once.’”
Sunar is desperate for help from the authorities. “We just want information – from our government or the Russian government. Just tell us about his condition. Please see if you can rescue him. If they want to keep him there… .at least we want to know how he is… and speak to him,” she said.
Buddhi Maya Tamang, who was also at the gathering, received a call at the end of January from a Russian number after midnight. She thought her husband, Shukra Tamang – a retired Nepali army soldier fighting for Russia – was the person calling.
It was someone else. A Nepali commander who was leading a unit on the front lines told her that her husband had been killed during the fighting.
“I was then speechless and senseless… I was hoping it was a prank call,” she said.
She hasn’t received confirmation of his death from either the Nepali or the Russian government.
“I just need an official proof of his condition – regardless of whether it’s good news or bad news.”
RECRUITS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
After analyzing the TikTok profiles of 10 Nepali men who traveled to Russia to join the army, CNN used satellite imagery to geolocate them to the Avangard training center, a military academy outside of Moscow.
The academy was designed as a youth military academy and describes itself as a “patriotic education” center. It has been re-outfitted into a training academy for foreign mercenaries entering the ranks of the Russian army. This was where Khadka received his brief training.
“Over here they teach you how to assemble and fire guns,” explained Shishir Bishwokarma, a Nepali soldier who has documented his journey to Russia and life at the training camp on YouTube.
The geolocated social media video shows an indoor wrestling gym converted into a training area for familiarization with small arms such as AK-47s, while the gym’s old Moscow Oblast flag appears to have been switched out for the colors of the Russian defense ministry.
A Nepali soldier in Russia, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told CNN he had trained on rocket launchers, bombs, machine guns, drones, and tanks while staying at Avangard.
The soldier described his fellow academy cadets as coming from across the global south. He cited Afghan, Indian, Congolese and Egyptian classmates, among others. Class photos from Avangard posted on social media show dozens of what appear to be South Asian soldiers with native Russian instructors.
Following their basic training at Avangard, CNN traced at least two soldiers to a nearby secondary base known as the Alabino Polygon.
At this mechanized infantry training compound, which was geolocated with the help of the Bellingcat Discord community, a handful of South Asian soldiers in full combat gear appear to be familiarizing themselves with operating alongside armored vehicles and heavy weaponry, as well as packing gear bags and organizing into larger units among Russian soldiers.
One of Bishwokarma’s videos shows drones flying over the center of the Avangard academy complex, while he narrates “now guys, we have come to a drone class.”
“We don’t understand Russian, but they have turned on Russian movies in our waiting room so that we can watch,” he explains.
Multiple Nepalis enlisting in the Russian army have stated that they don’t speak Russian but explain that instructors at Avangard seek to accommodate this by training the men in English.
That language barrier has played a large part in the deaths of many Nepalis on the front lines, said Khadka, the former fighter.
“Sometimes you can’t even understand where you’re supposed to be going or how to get there,” he said.
Khadka said he used to communicate with Russian officers by using a voice-translating app – and many times, just hand signals.
Shukra Tamang, a retired Nepali army soldier, training in Russia. His fate is unclear.
Several returned Nepali fighters who spoke with CNN blamed Russia for using them as cannon fodder in the war.
“It’s the Nepalis and other foreign fighters that are actually fighting in the front of war zones. The Russians position themselves a few hundred meters back as support,” said Suman Tamang, who returned from Russia last week.
“Some of my friends were mistreated by the Russian commander when they tried to voice their concerns,” Tamang recalled.
The 39-year-old also said that the Ukrainians were attacking their position with drones, something his unit didn’t have. He blamed the lack of modern fighting machinery for their losses.
CNN has reached out to the Russian defense and foreign ministries about Tamang’s claims.
Some fighters claim that while they signed up for the money, they do not support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s not right to invade another country. Everyone has the right to live. All countries should respect the sovereignty of another country. It’s not right for people of any country to be killed in such a hideous way. It’s not right for tens of thousands of people to die for the interest of a few,” Khadka said.
Each year, around 400,000 people are estimated to enter the Nepali job market with limited skills and opportunities. A staggering 19.2% youth unemployment rate among individuals aged 15 to 29 underscores the hurdle the younger demographic faces in the pursuit of employment.
BONUSES PAID
Nepali men who want to join the Russian army first travel to Russia on a tourist visa. Most of the people CNN spoke with said they went via the United Arab Emirates or India. After landing in Moscow, they go to a recruitment center, where a physical checkup is done, they said.
“The recruiters get very happy when Nepalis show up,” a former fighter said.
A one-year contract is signed and the men get a Russian bank account, where at least $2,000 monthly salary is deposited. Many fighters say bonuses were also given – and the longer they stay on the front lines, the more bonuses they receive. Some say they made up to $4,000 a month.
Several of the Nepalis who fought for Russia said they had received only brief training before being sent into combat.
Such a short training period before sending Nepali soldiers to fight “shows the desperation of the Russian government and their need for human resources on the frontline,” said Binoj Basnyat, a retired major general from the Nepali army, who now works as a strategic analyst.
CNN spoke with one Nepali man who recently left Russia after spending three months there. CNN is referring to him by the pseudonym Ram Sharma for his security.
Like many Nepalis who fled Russia without being discharged from their contracts, Sharma has no idea how to withdraw the money he still has in a Russian bank account.
“After I escaped from the military camp, it took me three days to get to Moscow. I was worried that by going to a bank to withdraw the money, I would risk getting caught,” he said. “I can access my bank account on my phone, but I don’t know if it’s possible to transfer that money overseas.”
Sharma, a retired Nepali police officer, was working as a security guard in a Dubai hotel when a Nepali agent in Kathmandu contacted him about the terms Russia was offering for foreigners to join its military. Sharma was making around $450 a month in Dubai and was immediately lured by the offer.
“After seeing gruesome images on the frontlines, seeing your friends die next to you, realizing chances of survival is very slim…. you then realize the money is not worth it. That’s why I escaped,” he said.
Agents in Nepal charge between $5,000 and $7,000 to arrange a tourist visa for an individual through a third country, according to the police.
‘I’M DONE FIGHTING WARS’
The Nepali government has now banned its citizens from traveling to Russia for work and has implemented stricter requirements for people trying to go to countries such as the UAE on a visit visa.
Nepal’s foreign ministry in December urged Russia to stop recruiting Nepali citizens and send home the remains of those killed in the war.
“We are very much concerned that Russia has recruited our citizens and sent them to war zones in vulnerable situations,” Nepali Foreign Minister N. P. Saud told CNN in an interview in his office in Kathmandu.
The minister said that Russia’s deputy foreign minister had last month assured him that “they will sort it out” with regard to Nepal’s concerns but acknowledged that Moscow hasn’t taken any steps so far.
“We don’t have any information that Russia is doing anything,” he said, stressing that Moscow should “respect Nepal’s point of view.”
“We have a traditional treaty with a few countries for the recruitment of our citizens in the military of those countries,” he explained. “But we don’t have such treaty with Russia for such type of military or security recruitment.”
The minister said he had asked to travel to Moscow to discuss the issue but was waiting for an invitation from the Russian government.
Saud also said Nepal was talking to Ukrainian officials about releasing the four Nepali POWs taken by Ukraine from the front lines. He said Ukraine had some “reservations” and “legal questions” which the Nepali government was working to address.
It’s unclear if there will be any legal consequences against individuals who either defy the Nepali government’s ban to travel to Russia for work or who take part in combat operations against Ukraine.
A protest is held near the Russian embassy in Kathmandu by a human rights group.
Kathmandu police said they broke up a racket last month, leading to the arrest of 18 people allegedly involved in sending Nepali men to join the Russian army.
They raided several hotels where those arrested were staying and confiscated dozens of passports and several hundred thousand Nepali rupees, the police said.
But Nepalis haven’t stopped flying to Russia.
Sharma, the man who recently returned, said he had met a few Nepalis in Moscow who had just arrived and were looking to get into the army.
Kathmandu police chief Bhupendra Bahadur Khatri said the number of Nepalis going to a third country on a visit visa to eventually fly to Russia had slowed but hadn’t completely stopped.
“It’s not right to invade another country. Everyone has the right to live. All countries should respect the sovereignty of another country. It’s not right for people of any country to be killed in such a hideous way. It’s not right for tens of thousands of people to die for the interest of a few,” Khadka said.
Each year, around 400,000 people are estimated to enter the Nepali job market with limited skills and opportunities. A staggering 19.2% youth unemployment rate among individuals aged 15 to 29 underscores the hurdle the younger demographic faces in the pursuit of employment.
BONUSES PAID
Nepali men who want to join the Russian army first travel to Russia on a tourist visa. Most of the people CNN spoke with said they went via the United Arab Emirates or India. After landing in Moscow, they go to a recruitment center, where a physical checkup is done, they said.
“The recruiters get very happy when Nepalis show up,” a former fighter said.
A one-year contract is signed and the men get a Russian bank account, where at least $2,000 monthly salary is deposited. Many fighters say bonuses were also given – and the longer they stay on the front lines, the more bonuses they receive. Some say they made up to $4,000 a month.
Several of the Nepalis who fought for Russia said they had received only brief training before being sent into combat.
Such a short training period before sending Nepali soldiers to fight “shows the desperation of the Russian government and their need for human resources on the frontline,” said Binoj Basnyat, a retired major general from the Nepali army, who now works as a strategic analyst.
CNN spoke with one Nepali man who recently left Russia after spending three months there. CNN is referring to him by the pseudonym Ram Sharma for his security.
Like many Nepalis who fled Russia without being discharged from their contracts, Sharma has no idea how to withdraw the money he still has in a Russian bank account.
“After I escaped from the military camp, it took me three days to get to Moscow. I was worried that by going to a bank to withdraw the money, I would risk getting caught,” he said. “I can access my bank account on my phone, but I don’t know if it’s possible to transfer that money overseas.”
Sharma, a retired Nepali police officer, was working as a security guard in a Dubai hotel when a Nepali agent in Kathmandu contacted him about the terms Russia was offering for foreigners to join its military. Sharma was making around $450 a month in Dubai and was immediately lured by the offer.
“After seeing gruesome images on the frontlines, seeing your friends die next to you, realizing chances of survival is very slim…. you then realize the money is not worth it. That’s why I escaped,” he said.
Agents in Nepal charge between $5,000 and $7,000 to arrange a tourist visa for an individual through a third country, according to the police.
‘I’M DONE FIGHTING WARS’
The Nepali government has now banned its citizens from traveling to Russia for work and has implemented stricter requirements for people trying to go to countries such as the UAE on a visit visa.
Nepal’s foreign ministry in December urged Russia to stop recruiting Nepali citizens and send home the remains of those killed in the war.
“We are very much concerned that Russia has recruited our citizens and sent them to war zones in vulnerable situations,” Nepali Foreign Minister N. P. Saud told CNN in an interview in his office in Kathmandu.
The minister said that Russia’s deputy foreign minister had last month assured him that “they will sort it out” with regard to Nepal’s concerns but acknowledged that Moscow hasn’t taken any steps so far.
“We don’t have any information that Russia is doing anything,” he said, stressing that Moscow should “respect Nepal’s point of view.”
“We have a traditional treaty with a few countries for the recruitment of our citizens in the military of those countries,” he explained. “But we don’t have such treaty with Russia for such type of military or security recruitment.”
The minister said he had asked to travel to Moscow to discuss the issue but was waiting for an invitation from the Russian government.
Saud also said Nepal was talking to Ukrainian officials about releasing the four Nepali POWs taken by Ukraine from the front lines. He said Ukraine had some “reservations” and “legal questions” which the Nepali government was working to address.
It’s unclear if there will be any legal consequences against individuals who either defy the Nepali government’s ban to travel to Russia for work or who take part in combat operations against Ukraine.
A protest is held near the Russian embassy in Kathmandu by a human rights group.Kathmandu police said they broke up a racket last month, leading to the arrest of 18 people allegedly involved in sending Nepali men to join the Russian army.
They raided several hotels where those arrested were staying and confiscated dozens of passports and several hundred thousand Nepali rupees, the police said.
But Nepalis haven’t stopped flying to Russia.
Sharma, the man who recently returned, said he had met a few Nepalis in Moscow who had just arrived and were looking to get into the army.
Kathmandu police chief Bhupendra Bahadur Khatri said the number of Nepalis going to a third country on a visit visa to eventually fly to Russia had slowed but hadn’t completely stopped.
“We are getting some intelligence that some of these agents are still active in recruiting Nepal men. We have gathered some undercurrent of their activities, and our investigation continues,” Khatri said.
Basnyat, the analyst, blames political instability and rising unemployment in Nepal as a major factor driving Nepalis to seek out dangerous employment in Russia.
More than 15% of its people live below the poverty line. The estimated unemployment rate in 2022 was 11.1%, according to the World Bank, compared with 10.6% in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. Tens of thousands of Nepalis travel to Gulf countries for work every year, with international remittances amounting to nearly 23% of the country’s GDP. An overwhelming 70% of the country’s workforce is employed in the informal sector, exposing them to heightened job insecurity and limited protections.
Khadka is also planning to go to the Middle East as a migrant worker once he recovers from his conflict injuries.
“I want to do commercial farming in Nepal but it’s proving next to impossible for me to take a loan. I’m looking to go to one of the Gulf countries. I’m done with fighting wars,” he said. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/asia/nepal-fighters-russia-ukraine-families-intl-cmd/index.html
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Mt. Everest seen from Nepal
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WHY THE GERMAN TROOPS WERE ABLE TO ADVANCE DEEP INTO THE SOVIET TERRITORY
Because of this man: Grigori Kulik
He had no skills and no special military achievements, but he was appointed to a very high position after the Russian civil war because he was a close friend of Stalin, supposedly specializing in artillery, which he attributed to the two cannons he fired in the battle of Tsaritsyn.
Before the German invasion, a huge defense line was planned, it was called the Stalin Line, a massive area was to be defended with mines, artificial swamps, barbed wire and various reserve units. Theoretically, attacking such a line would be no different from suicide, even if the German army attacked with all its might, it would be impossible to break through the line without hundreds of thousands of casualties.
So why did this line fail?
First of all, Grigori Kulik refused to mine a huge area, saying that mines are the work of cowards, so the German panzers had the chance to move freely into Soviet territory, he refused to improve the weapons of the t-34 and kv1 tanks that the Soviets had; on top of that, while the infantry repeatedly demanded armor-piercing shells, Kulik did not provide them and because he did not provide most units with the necessary degree of equipment and ammunition, most Soviet soldiers had to fight in primitive methods.
Also the Germans had machine guns such as the mp40. Kulik refused to equip the Red Army troops with automatic weapons, calling them inaccurate and inefficient so many soviet units forced the use outdated bolt action guns.
Another factor was that because there were no radios in Soviet tanks, they could not coordinate even when they were superior. So many Soviet soldiers were trapped and destroyed because of reasons such as Kulik's insistence on not using mines and not giving enough equipment.
I want to tell you the following story to make you realize how stupid Kulik was.
ppd40 was one of the best weapons of the second world war, very simple to manufacture and use, but why did the Red Army get these weapons late?
WHY THE GERMAN TROOPS WERE ABLE TO ADVANCE DEEP INTO THE SOVIET TERRITORY
Because of this man: Grigori Kulik
He had no skills and no special military achievements, but he was appointed to a very high position after the Russian civil war because he was a close friend of Stalin, supposedly specializing in artillery, which he attributed to the two cannons he fired in the battle of Tsaritsyn.
Before the German invasion, a huge defense line was planned, it was called the Stalin Line, a massive area was to be defended with mines, artificial swamps, barbed wire and various reserve units. Theoretically, attacking such a line would be no different from suicide, even if the German army attacked with all its might, it would be impossible to break through the line without hundreds of thousands of casualties.
So why did this line fail?
First of all, Grigori Kulik refused to mine a huge area, saying that mines are the work of cowards, so the German panzers had the chance to move freely into Soviet territory, he refused to improve the weapons of the t-34 and kv1 tanks that the Soviets had; on top of that, while the infantry repeatedly demanded armor-piercing shells, Kulik did not provide them and because he did not provide most units with the necessary degree of equipment and ammunition, most Soviet soldiers had to fight in primitive methods.
Also the Germans had machine guns such as the mp40. Kulik refused to equip the Red Army troops with automatic weapons, calling them inaccurate and inefficient so many soviet units forced the use outdated bolt action guns.
Another factor was that because there were no radios in Soviet tanks, they could not coordinate even when they were superior. So many Soviet soldiers were trapped and destroyed because of reasons such as Kulik's insistence on not using mines and not giving enough equipment.
I want to tell you the following story to make you realize how stupid Kulik was.
ppd40 was one of the best weapons of the second world war, very simple to manufacture and use, but why did the Red Army get these weapons late?
Because Kulik is said so. According to him these weapons were ideal only for policemen, whereas the German army, which used the mp40, literally annihilated Soviet infantry .
Another system that incurred the wrath of Kulik was the Katyusha rocket system, which has left its mark on war doctrine. It was constantly postponed until Operation Barbarossa; his words "What the hell do we need rocket artillery for?
Years after his appointment as Chief of Artillery (and his poor performance in two separate wars), Khruschev questioned his competence, causing Stalin to rebuke him angrily: "You don't even know Kulik! I know him from the civil war when he commanded the artillery in Tsaritsyn. He knows artillery!
Of course, after Operation Barbarossa, Kulik was demoted by Stalin and in the following years he was executed for treason, but his adventures caused millions of Soviet deaths and almost the collapse of the Soviet state. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Tip Iesan:
It was because the Red Army was prepared for an offensive, to strike first the West. No mines by the borders, airbases and fuel depots pushed forward, BT-A tanks, paratroopers etc.
Joey the Icepick:
The Red Army was not prepared for anything at all, because Stalin never imagined that Hitler would do something as reckless as launch the biggest invasion in human history against his own petroleum supply, while also being engaged in the air war against Britain.
Alexei Sinitsa:
The team that designed Katyusha was executed, including the leader, Langemak. Because their former patron was ‘traitor' Tukhachevsky.
Razvan Pacuraru:
The irony was that Kulik was mumbling during a telephone conversation that “the politicians get all the credit for victory.” Arrested in 1947 and executed in 1950. For mumbling things.
Nan Vile:
Short answer: Stalin had no choice. He was helplessly outclassed in every way. Giving ground and suffering ridiculous casualties was all the Russians could do. Fortunately for them, Winter finally intervened before they ran out of ground and men. It gave them a reprieve in which Stalin could finally get organized, and begin to bring Russia’s immense resources to bear.
Robert Hauldcroft:
A few other things contributed to the Soviets stopping the Nazi advance just outside Moscow.
1. The transfer of the Siberian Regiments to reinforce the defense — these were crack troops trained and equipped to fight in extreme cold. Stalin had intel that Japan was not going to invade so he decided he could use them.
2. The arrival of lend lease convoys which included tanks and aircraft (including an entire Squadron of Spitfires along with pilots and ground crew) from the US and Uk — you can’t underestimate how much this equipment helped — for example a third of heavy tanks used in the Battle of Moscow were British.
Nikita:
Also, Kulik was one of the main reasons Tukhachevsky, who was arguably one of the most brilliant and innovative military commanders of Soviet Union, was executed before the war.
Kulik, who was of Ukranian descent, perversely was one of the reasons Ukraine had suffered so much in WW2.
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THE HISTORY BEHIND “THE ZONE OF INTEREST”
For one German family, life in central Europe was seemingly idyllic, even as World War II raged around them. “Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted to them,” wrote family patriarch Rudolf Höss in his autobiography. “My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers.” Rudolf’s five children played with tortoises, cats and lizards at their villa near the Polish city of Krakow; in the summer, the siblings frolicked in a pool in their yard or swam in a nearby river.
These peaceful domestic scenes masked a dark reality: Rudolf was the Nazi officer in charge of Auschwitz, the concentration and extermination camp where the Nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people — most of them European Jews. Rudolf was directly responsible for these killings, which he oversaw as the camp’s longest-serving commandant. And the peaceful villa with its floral garden? It stood just beyond the high walls surrounding the Höss home.
The Zone of Interest, a new film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, envisions the Hösses’ everyday lives, rarely venturing beyond the villa’s borders to acknowledge the atrocities unfolding next door. By emphasizing the mundane, the acclaimed British filmmaker hoped to expose Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), as undeniably human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural,” Glazer tells the New York Times. “You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”
Unlike Schindler’s List, The Pianist and other staples of Holocaust cinema, The Zone of Interest never explicitly depicts the horrors of life and death inflicted by the Nazis. Instead, the film relies on the power of suggestion, alluding to mass murder through brief glimpses of crematoria chimneys and an ambient soundtrack punctuated by gunshots and screams. The story is less about the Nazis than the broader question of human nature, “the thing in us that drives it all, the capacity for violence that we all have,” Glazer tells the Guardian.
“For me, this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.” (As many critics have pointed out, the film underscores “the banality of evil,” a phenomenon described by philosopher Hannah Arendt during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust.)
The film deviates heavily from its source material, a 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. In the book, a Nazi officer falls in love with the wife of Auschwitz’s commandant, who is loosely based on Rudolf but doesn’t share his name. For his take on the story, Glazer excised the love triangle and made the characters’ connections to the real-life figures explicit. To immerse viewers in the family’s routines and create an environment akin to a surveillance state, the director filmed interior scenes on hidden cameras—a setup he likens to “‘Big Brother’ in a Nazi house.”
A central conflict in the film is Hedwig’s objection to her husband’s pending promotion, which will take him to Berlin and her away from her beloved home outside the camp. (According to the Times, this argument is based on testimony recently found in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which consulted on The Zone of Interest and makes an appearance in its closing moments.) At his wife’s request, Rudolf convinces his superiors to let the rest of the family stay behind while he relocates. The Hösses are only reunited when Rudolf is put in charge of an enormous undertaking: the deportation and murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, all in the span of less than two months in 1944.
The question of what the Höss family knows—and to what extent they can be held responsible—looms over The Zone of Interest. Hedwig and her children aren’t directly involved in Auschwitz’s administration. But the movie suggests complicity in one way or another. At one point, Hedwig tries on a luxurious fur coat stolen from a murdered woman. In another scene, the couple’s oldest son, Klaus, uses a flashlight to examine false teeth pried from the mouths of Jews killed in the gas chambers. When Rudolf and his children go swimming in a river, the commandant stumbles onto a human jawbone—a macabre find that prompts him to hurry home for a bath.
As Polygon notes in its review of the film: “We don’t see the camp, but the sounds of it are all-encompassing, blaring just beneath the everyday sounds in the rest of the movie. They’re like a thick fog that permeates the family’s weightless domestic concerns, making the evil they’re complicit in inescapable. Death and its noises are ever-present but never acknowledged, shrouding the nearly meaningless events on the screen.”
WHO WAS RUDOLF HÖSS?
Born to Catholic parents in Germany in 1900, Rudolf fought in World War I before joining a nationalist paramilitary group. He first heard Adolf Hitler speak in 1922, and he joined the Nazi Party shortly thereafter. The following year, Rudolf and several accomplices murdered a schoolteacher who’d betrayed a fellow paramilitary soldier to the French. Sentenced to ten years in prison, Rudolf was released in 1928 under a general amnesty. He spent the next few years farming and starting a family but eventually abandoned the agrarian lifestyle in favor of the SS, the Nazis’ elite paramilitary division.
Between 1934 and 1940, Rudolf worked at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, which at the time housed mainly political prisoners. He impressed his superiors so much that they appointed him commandant of the newly created Auschwitz. In this role, he transformed the camp into the Nazis’ chief killing center, settling on Zyklon B as the most efficient method of gassing. As he later said, gassing was preferable to shooting because the latter “would have placed too heavy a burden on the SS men who had to carry it out, especially because of the women and children among the victims.”
Rudolf approached the prospect of mass murder with systematic, detached precision. As historian Laurence Rees wrote for History Extra in 2020, “Höss was no mere robot, blindly following orders, but an innovator in the way he organized the killing.” At the camp’s peak, Auschwitz’s gas chambers were capable of murdering 2,000 people an hour.
Rudolf’s family lived in a villa in Auschwitz’s zone of interest, an SS-administered area surrounding the camp. During the war, the SS expelled some 9,000 locals from this 16-square-mile zone, preventing outsiders from witnessing the atrocities and isolating the prisoners from the rest of the world. The commandant took care to hide the crematoria chimney from his children, erecting a garden wall and planting trees that obstructed their view from the house.
In his autobiography, Rudolf maintained that Hedwig had no knowledge of the killings taking place at Auschwitz. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The Hösses lived a life of luxury, employing camp inmates as forced laborers and seizing items confiscated from the dead, including expensive furs, cooking supplies like sugar and flour, jewelry, and leather goods.
The commandant “made his household so magnificent and so well-equipped that his wife declared, ‘Here I want to live and die,’” recalled Stanislaw Dubiel, a Pole who worked as the family’s gardener, in testimony provided after the war. “They had everything in their household, and there was no way they would lack anything with the enormous supplies of all kinds of goods accumulated in the camp.”
Both Hedwig and Rudolf were deeply antisemitic. According to Dubiel, “She believed that [Jews] all must disappear from the surface of the earth, and that some day the time would come even for English Jews.” Rudolf, for his part, “had joined the SS because he believed wholeheartedly in the overall Nazi vision,” Rees wrote.
The film deviates heavily from its source material, a 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. In the book, a Nazi officer falls in love with the wife of Auschwitz’s commandant, who is loosely based on Rudolf but doesn’t share his name. For his take on the story, Glazer excised the love triangle and made the characters’ connections to the real-life figures explicit. To immerse viewers in the family’s routines and create an environment akin to a surveillance state, the director filmed interior scenes on hidden cameras—a setup he likens to “‘Big Brother’ in a Nazi house.”
A central conflict in the film is Hedwig’s objection to her husband’s pending promotion, which will take him to Berlin and her away from her beloved home outside the camp. (According to the Times, this argument is based on testimony recently found in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which consulted on The Zone of Interest and makes an appearance in its closing moments.) At his wife’s request, Rudolf convinces his superiors to let the rest of the family stay behind while he relocates. The Hösses are only reunited when Rudolf is put in charge of an enormous undertaking: the deportation and murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, all in the span of less than two months in 1944.
The question of what the Höss family knows—and to what extent they can be held responsible—looms over The Zone of Interest. Hedwig and her children aren’t directly involved in Auschwitz’s administration. But the movie suggests complicity in one way or another. At one point, Hedwig tries on a luxurious fur coat stolen from a murdered woman. In another scene, the couple’s oldest son, Klaus, uses a flashlight to examine false teeth pried from the mouths of Jews killed in the gas chambers. When Rudolf and his children go swimming in a river, the commandant stumbles onto a human jawbone—a macabre find that prompts him to hurry home for a bath.
As Polygon notes in its review of the film: “We don’t see the camp, but the sounds of it are all-encompassing, blaring just beneath the everyday sounds in the rest of the movie. They’re like a thick fog that permeates the family’s weightless domestic concerns, making the evil they’re complicit in inescapable. Death and its noises are ever-present but never acknowledged, shrouding the nearly meaningless events on the screen.”
WHO WAS RUDOLF HÖSS?
Born to Catholic parents in Germany in 1900, Rudolf fought in World War I before joining a nationalist paramilitary group. He first heard Adolf Hitler speak in 1922, and he joined the Nazi Party shortly thereafter. The following year, Rudolf and several accomplices murdered a schoolteacher who’d betrayed a fellow paramilitary soldier to the French. Sentenced to ten years in prison, Rudolf was released in 1928 under a general amnesty. He spent the next few years farming and starting a family but eventually abandoned the agrarian lifestyle in favor of the SS, the Nazis’ elite paramilitary division.
Between 1934 and 1940, Rudolf worked at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, which at the time housed mainly political prisoners. He impressed his superiors so much that they appointed him commandant of the newly created Auschwitz. In this role, he transformed the camp into the Nazis’ chief killing center, settling on Zyklon B as the most efficient method of gassing. As he later said, gassing was preferable to shooting because the latter “would have placed too heavy a burden on the SS men who had to carry it out, especially because of the women and children among the victims.”
Rudolf approached the prospect of mass murder with systematic, detached precision. As historian Laurence Rees wrote for History Extra in 2020, “Höss was no mere robot, blindly following orders, but an innovator in the way he organized the killing.” At the camp’s peak, Auschwitz’s gas chambers were capable of murdering 2,000 people an hour.
Rudolf’s family lived in a villa in Auschwitz’s zone of interest, an SS-administered area surrounding the camp. During the war, the SS expelled some 9,000 locals from this 16-square-mile zone, preventing outsiders from witnessing the atrocities and isolating the prisoners from the rest of the world. The commandant took care to hide the crematoria chimney from his children, erecting a garden wall and planting trees that obstructed their view from the house.
In his autobiography, Rudolf maintained that Hedwig had no knowledge of the killings taking place at Auschwitz. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The Hösses lived a life of luxury, employing camp inmates as forced laborers and seizing items confiscated from the dead, including expensive furs, cooking supplies like sugar and flour, jewelry, and leather goods.
The commandant “made his household so magnificent and so well-equipped that his wife declared, ‘Here I want to live and die,’” recalled Stanislaw Dubiel, a Pole who worked as the family’s gardener, in testimony provided after the war. “They had everything in their household, and there was no way they would lack anything with the enormous supplies of all kinds of goods accumulated in the camp.”
Both Hedwig and Rudolf were deeply antisemitic. According to Dubiel, “She believed that [Jews] all must disappear from the surface of the earth, and that some day the time would come even for English Jews.” Rudolf, for his part, “had joined the SS because he believed wholeheartedly in the overall Nazi vision,” Rees wrote.
As in the movie, Rudolf was reassigned to Berlin in late 1943, tasked with overseeing operations at all of the Nazis’ concentration and extermination camps. The SS was pleased with his progress, describing him as “a true pioneer in this area because of his new ideas and educational methods.” His family remained at Auschwitz during his stint in the German capital, but their separation was relatively brief.
In May 1944, Rudolf returned to the camp to oversee the eponymous Operation Höss, which brought 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in just 56 days. The Auschwitz Album, a collection of photographs housed at Yad Vashem in Israel, records these individuals’ arrival at the camp, where the majority were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The images stand in stark contrast to snapshots captured by SS officer Karl Höcker around this same time. In the photos, Rudolf, Josef Mengele and other SS men stationed at Auschwitz participate in a sing-along and relax at a retreat, as well as attend official camp ceremonies. Juxtaposed with the final moments of the newly arrived Jews, the officers’ blithe enjoyment of everyday life appears both callous and eerily relatable, reminding viewers—much like The Zone of Interest does—of the Nazis’ humanity.
In May 1944, Rudolf returned to the camp to oversee the eponymous Operation Höss, which brought 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in just 56 days. The Auschwitz Album, a collection of photographs housed at Yad Vashem in Israel, records these individuals’ arrival at the camp, where the majority were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The images stand in stark contrast to snapshots captured by SS officer Karl Höcker around this same time. In the photos, Rudolf, Josef Mengele and other SS men stationed at Auschwitz participate in a sing-along and relax at a retreat, as well as attend official camp ceremonies. Juxtaposed with the final moments of the newly arrived Jews, the officers’ blithe enjoyment of everyday life appears both callous and eerily relatable, reminding viewers—much like The Zone of Interest does—of the Nazis’ humanity.
“Though Höcker's album does not depict any criminal or immoral actions, one is struck by [its] amorality,” notes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on its website.Eliding the brutality of Auschwitz, the photos instead show “SS officers going about their business, socializing, enjoying the beautiful weather and mourning fallen comrades, se emingly oblivious to the magnitude of the crimes which they are either perpetrating or enabling.”
Toward the end of the war, the Höss family went into hiding in northern Germany, hoping to bide their time until they could escape to South America, where many Nazis sought refuge after the conflict. Hedwig and the children settled above an old sugar factory in the coastal village of St. Michaelisdonn, while Rudolf moved to Flensburg and worked at a farm under the alias Franz Lang.
It took a year for authorities to catch up with the former commandant. In March 1946, British soldiers showed up at Hedwig’s home. “My older brother Klaus was taken with my mother,” Rudolf’s daughter Brigitte later recalled. “He was beaten badly by the British. My mother heard him scream in pain from the room next door. Just like any mother, she wanted to protect her son, so she told them where my father was.”
The man in charge of the search was Hans Alexander, a German Jew who’d fled Berlin in the 1930s and ended up in Britain. When Alexander turned up at Rudolf’s door one night, the Nazi denied that he was the former commandant. But his wedding ring proved otherwise, bearing the inscribed names “Rudolf” and “Hedwig.”
Following his capture, Rudolf testified at the Nuremberg trials, providing detailed accounts of the Nazi killing machine and his own role in the murders at Auschwitz. He was the first senior Nazi to confess to such crimes, taking responsibility for his actions while many of his peers refused to admit any wrongdoing. Transferred to Poland, he was tried for murder and sentenced to death by hanging. While awaiting execution, he wrote his autobiography, painting himself as “a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich.” On April 16, 1947, Rudolf was hanged at Auschwitz, the site of his crimes, in front of a crowd that included former camp inmates.
After Rudolf’s execution, his family struggled to make ends meet in a country eager to forget its Nazi past. As the widow of a convicted war criminal, Hedwig didn’t receive a pension or other government funding. But she never held a job either, leading her grandson Rainer Höss to speculate that she survived on money “from the old Nazi network that flocked around her.” The commandant’s oldest son, Klaus, eventually relocated to Australia, while his daughter Brigitte moved first to Spain and then to the United States. The rest of the children stayed in Germany, as did their mother. The family rarely talked about Rudolf, preferring to hide their connection to the infamous Nazi and downplay his crimes.
Alexander’s great-nephew, a journalist named Thomas Harding, interviewed Brigitte while working on a book about his uncle’s search for Rudolf. "She told me that he was the nicest father in the world, that he would read stories and take them on boat rides,” Harding told the Globe and Mail in 2013. “His family loved him. There were two sides to him—the father and the commandant.” Harding added, “What I found is that a single person can be both [a man and a monster], and that’s frightening. It could happen again, and that’s why we need to be vigilant.”
Toward the end of the war, the Höss family went into hiding in northern Germany, hoping to bide their time until they could escape to South America, where many Nazis sought refuge after the conflict. Hedwig and the children settled above an old sugar factory in the coastal village of St. Michaelisdonn, while Rudolf moved to Flensburg and worked at a farm under the alias Franz Lang.
It took a year for authorities to catch up with the former commandant. In March 1946, British soldiers showed up at Hedwig’s home. “My older brother Klaus was taken with my mother,” Rudolf’s daughter Brigitte later recalled. “He was beaten badly by the British. My mother heard him scream in pain from the room next door. Just like any mother, she wanted to protect her son, so she told them where my father was.”
The man in charge of the search was Hans Alexander, a German Jew who’d fled Berlin in the 1930s and ended up in Britain. When Alexander turned up at Rudolf’s door one night, the Nazi denied that he was the former commandant. But his wedding ring proved otherwise, bearing the inscribed names “Rudolf” and “Hedwig.”
Following his capture, Rudolf testified at the Nuremberg trials, providing detailed accounts of the Nazi killing machine and his own role in the murders at Auschwitz. He was the first senior Nazi to confess to such crimes, taking responsibility for his actions while many of his peers refused to admit any wrongdoing. Transferred to Poland, he was tried for murder and sentenced to death by hanging. While awaiting execution, he wrote his autobiography, painting himself as “a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich.” On April 16, 1947, Rudolf was hanged at Auschwitz, the site of his crimes, in front of a crowd that included former camp inmates.
After Rudolf’s execution, his family struggled to make ends meet in a country eager to forget its Nazi past. As the widow of a convicted war criminal, Hedwig didn’t receive a pension or other government funding. But she never held a job either, leading her grandson Rainer Höss to speculate that she survived on money “from the old Nazi network that flocked around her.” The commandant’s oldest son, Klaus, eventually relocated to Australia, while his daughter Brigitte moved first to Spain and then to the United States. The rest of the children stayed in Germany, as did their mother. The family rarely talked about Rudolf, preferring to hide their connection to the infamous Nazi and downplay his crimes.
Alexander’s great-nephew, a journalist named Thomas Harding, interviewed Brigitte while working on a book about his uncle’s search for Rudolf. "She told me that he was the nicest father in the world, that he would read stories and take them on boat rides,” Harding told the Globe and Mail in 2013. “His family loved him. There were two sides to him—the father and the commandant.” Harding added, “What I found is that a single person can be both [a man and a monster], and that’s frightening. It could happen again, and that’s why we need to be vigilant.”
Mengele (L) and Hoess
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-history-behind-the-zone-of-interest-and-rudolf-hoss-180983531/
*
THE ZONE OF INTEREST: A DIFFERENT KIND OF HOLOCAUST MOVIE
Though it’s been seven months, I remain haunted by “The Zone of Interest.” When I first watched writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s radical take on the Holocaust back in May, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what was so startling about it. There have been many films on this horrific chapter in history—from “Night and Fog” to “Schindler's List” to “The Pianist,” and as recently as “Occupied City”—all asking the viewer to bear witness to unfathomable suffering under a genocidal regime’s brutality. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’ same-titled novel as him asking viewers to simply witness. It’s a disturbing work, guided by a discomforting sense of immaculateness that chills the viewer. It is the sanitation the film performs, which speaks to the now, in a way few Holocaust films have done before.
You could, of course, accuse Glazer’s film of merely being a formal exercise. He challenges himself to not only work purely through atmosphere, but also takes the risk of telling this story from a German perspective. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. When he first appears on-screen, he is with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children, relaxing at the riverside, in a verdant field surrounded by lush mountains.
Soon we are introduced to their dream house, a tall concrete structure surrounded by a lavish yard and seemingly even taller walls. On the other side of these barriers is the camp itself. Outside of a single shot—a low angle of Rudolf, framed by black smoke billowing in the background—we never really see inside the camp. Instead, viewers are asked to aurally visualize. Much has been explained by Glazer about the two movies occurring within “The Zone of Interest” (the one perceived through sight and the other through sound). That tension is obvious, yet no less powerful.
Much has also been made of the banality of evil. The Höss family live next door to ongoing genocide yet never comment on the horrific screams or the smell of death nearby. Thus, there is an expected coldness which seeps into the film’s lack of sentimentality. They raise their children under a pretense of normalcy—Rudolf tells them late-night bedtime stories, takes them horseback riding, and participates in other pastoral pursuits. Because of the emotional blankness, a burden falls on Friedel and Hüller to chart a tricky course: How human can you make someone who is clearly inhuman? Friedel gives nothing away, relying on a cold stoicism that translates to his frigid posture. Hüller is a tad slipperier, a vicious rattlesnake with a blade for a tail. If not for their performances, you could see how Glazer’s framing could easily go left.
But that feeling isn’t anything new for Glazer: “Birth” was widely criticized for its ending and the on-screen relationship between Nicole Kidman and Cameron Bright. “Under the Skin,” though better received critically, walks a fine feminist line. Those films, along with his debut “Sexy Beast,” witnessed Glazer pushing his audio-visual storytelling toward leaner, angular compositions and a dynamic sense of sound capable of unnerving the viewer. In “The Zone of Interest,” with cinematographer Lukasz Zal, he furthers those two desires, often linking domestic spaces causally to exterior sound: When a train rumbles by, bringing more Jewish people, a package comes to the house with stockings presumably taken from the murdered occupants of the previous train. On Rudolf’s side of the wall, the family celebrates life (birthdays and social gatherings) while death occurs on the other side.
The close correlation speaks to the repulsively intimate relationship Rudolf and his family have with destruction. They profit off an entire people’s death in unspeakable ways: In one scene, one of Rudolf’s sons has a flashlight in bed. But he’s not rifling at a comic book in the dark; he’s rummaging through his collection of gold teeth. In another scene, Hedwig receives a fur coat. She tries on the fine pelt, twisting her body to catch her every angle in the mirror. In one of the pockets, she discovers the previous owner's lipstick; in the next scene she tries the lipstick on. Their easeful proximity to murder is thrown in stark relief when Hedwig’s mother arrives. At first, her mother is impressed by their “scenic” home. “You really have landed on your feet, my child,” she says to a proud Hedwig. But when the emanating sounds and smells become apparent to Hedwig’s mother, she reacts in a way that shocks Hedwig.
In a film predicated on dissonance, the Höss’ persistent tidying up looms large. Whenever Rudolf takes off his boots, there is a Jewish prisoner there to clean them. When soot from the camp touches the river, Rudolf’s kids are scrubbed down with scalding hot water. When Rudolf has affairs, he washes his privates in a slop sink before returning to his wife’s bedroom. Weeds are pulled and human ashes are used to replenish. Every misdeed by the Höss family functions on this cycle of obfuscation.
Much has also been made of the banality of evil. The Höss family live next door to ongoing genocide yet never comment on the horrific screams or the smell of death nearby. Thus, there is an expected coldness which seeps into the film’s lack of sentimentality. They raise their children under a pretense of normalcy—Rudolf tells them late-night bedtime stories, takes them horseback riding, and participates in other pastoral pursuits. Because of the emotional blankness, a burden falls on Friedel and Hüller to chart a tricky course: How human can you make someone who is clearly inhuman? Friedel gives nothing away, relying on a cold stoicism that translates to his frigid posture. Hüller is a tad slipperier, a vicious rattlesnake with a blade for a tail. If not for their performances, you could see how Glazer’s framing could easily go left.
But that feeling isn’t anything new for Glazer: “Birth” was widely criticized for its ending and the on-screen relationship between Nicole Kidman and Cameron Bright. “Under the Skin,” though better received critically, walks a fine feminist line. Those films, along with his debut “Sexy Beast,” witnessed Glazer pushing his audio-visual storytelling toward leaner, angular compositions and a dynamic sense of sound capable of unnerving the viewer. In “The Zone of Interest,” with cinematographer Lukasz Zal, he furthers those two desires, often linking domestic spaces causally to exterior sound: When a train rumbles by, bringing more Jewish people, a package comes to the house with stockings presumably taken from the murdered occupants of the previous train. On Rudolf’s side of the wall, the family celebrates life (birthdays and social gatherings) while death occurs on the other side.
The close correlation speaks to the repulsively intimate relationship Rudolf and his family have with destruction. They profit off an entire people’s death in unspeakable ways: In one scene, one of Rudolf’s sons has a flashlight in bed. But he’s not rifling at a comic book in the dark; he’s rummaging through his collection of gold teeth. In another scene, Hedwig receives a fur coat. She tries on the fine pelt, twisting her body to catch her every angle in the mirror. In one of the pockets, she discovers the previous owner's lipstick; in the next scene she tries the lipstick on. Their easeful proximity to murder is thrown in stark relief when Hedwig’s mother arrives. At first, her mother is impressed by their “scenic” home. “You really have landed on your feet, my child,” she says to a proud Hedwig. But when the emanating sounds and smells become apparent to Hedwig’s mother, she reacts in a way that shocks Hedwig.
In a film predicated on dissonance, the Höss’ persistent tidying up looms large. Whenever Rudolf takes off his boots, there is a Jewish prisoner there to clean them. When soot from the camp touches the river, Rudolf’s kids are scrubbed down with scalding hot water. When Rudolf has affairs, he washes his privates in a slop sink before returning to his wife’s bedroom. Weeds are pulled and human ashes are used to replenish. Every misdeed by the Höss family functions on this cycle of obfuscation.
Composer Mica Levi’s foreboding score, which can be guttural and dirty in infrared scenes, wherein a girl picks up food from the mud, participates in the dichotomy of polishing and revealing. The use of the color white—new sheets, sleek suits, and sterile office walls—depends upon this blurring. Even the language, the way everyone speaks about death in mechanical terms and technicalities, works to wash over the truth. If you’re always talking in circles about your crimes, isn’t it easier to continue performing them in a straight line?
As much as Glazer’s film is about a specific moment in time, it’s equally concerned with how history records tragedy. Consider when Rudolf is transferred from Auschwitz to Oranienburg; Hedwig wants to stay in the dream house, in the reality she’s crafted for herself. Rudolf on the other hand, for the first time, openly speaks on the phone to his wife about murder without softening the language. Her reaction is grim; his words barely register. “It’s in the middle of the night and I need to be in bed,” she disturbingly replies. He hangs up on her, leaves the office and descends the stairs. While walking down the steps, he vomits several times until he comes to a barely lit hallway.
Editor Paul Watts makes a narrative-breaking cut to present-day Auschwitz. It’s being cleaned—swept, mopped, and vacuumed—for visitors to witness the artifacts (shoes and luggage) now without owners.
This juxtaposition allows for the two results of sanitization to be at play. For much of the film, viewers see how sanitization can be used to erase. Here, Glazer gives us a glimpse of how it can also be used to maintain. Because how we remember history, how we make note of current events—through propaganda, photography, video, and the internet—is a constant interplay between the truth as it exists and as it has been edited. The fact that "The Zone of Interest" arrives now, as world powers manipulate the narrative to sanitize their crimes, makes Glazer's images all the more chilling. Glazer’s intermingling of the now and the then, appearance versus truth, life and annihilation are rendered into unignorable magnitude.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-zone-of-interest-film-review-2023
Oriana:
I’m glad I saw the movie, but I’d never want to see it again. Just the guttural roars that punctuate the score are simply hideous. This is of course deliberate: the movie is not about Hedwig’s love of flowers. Its message is not that Höss was a loving father.
My favorite scene was Höss talking to his horse. Again, the scene showed that the mass murderer was capable of love — he wasn’t a psychopath.
And Hedwig? She loves flowers. She creates a “paradise of flowers” next door to hell.
But let’s not forget that the movie also presents an angel: the astonishingly brave young girl who hid apples for prisoners to find. She was indeed a real person.
To say that the movie is about the “banality of evil” is to dismiss it too quickly. It resists being dismissed. This movie is meant to linger in our psyche, to haunt us and disturb us.
It’s definitely not just another Holocaust movie. In some ways, it’s more disturbing by far than, say, “Schindler’s List.” That’s not to say that it’s better — just different in a haunting way, presenting again the puzzle of why human beings are capable of such immense evil.
*
DID JESUS REALLY EXIST?
Most New Testament scholars agree that some 2,000 years ago a peripatetic Jewish preacher from Galilee was executed by the Romans, after a year or more of telling his followers about this world and the world to come. Most scholars – though not all.
But let’s stick with the mainstream for now: the Bible historians who harbor no doubt that the sandals of Yeshua ben Yosef really did leave imprints between Nazareth and Jerusalem early in the common era. They divide loosely into three groups, the largest of which includes Christian theologians who conflate the Jesus of faith with the historical figure, which usually means they accept the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection; although a few, such as Simon Gathercole, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a conservative evangelical, grapple seriously with the historical evidence.
Next are the liberal Christians who separate faith from history, and are prepared to go wherever the evidence leads, even if it contradicts traditional belief. Their most vocal representative is John Barton, an Anglican clergyman and Oxford scholar, who accepts that most Bible books were written by multiple authors, often over centuries, and that they diverge from history.
A third group, with views not far from Barton’s, are secular scholars who dismiss the miracle-rich parts of the New Testament while accepting that Jesus was, nonetheless, a figure rooted in history: the gospels, they contend, offer evidence of the main thrusts of his preaching life. A number of this group, including their most prolific member, Bart Ehrman, a Biblical historian at the University of North Carolina, are atheists who emerged from evangelical Christianity.
As much as Glazer’s film is about a specific moment in time, it’s equally concerned with how history records tragedy. Consider when Rudolf is transferred from Auschwitz to Oranienburg; Hedwig wants to stay in the dream house, in the reality she’s crafted for herself. Rudolf on the other hand, for the first time, openly speaks on the phone to his wife about murder without softening the language. Her reaction is grim; his words barely register. “It’s in the middle of the night and I need to be in bed,” she disturbingly replies. He hangs up on her, leaves the office and descends the stairs. While walking down the steps, he vomits several times until he comes to a barely lit hallway.
Editor Paul Watts makes a narrative-breaking cut to present-day Auschwitz. It’s being cleaned—swept, mopped, and vacuumed—for visitors to witness the artifacts (shoes and luggage) now without owners.
This juxtaposition allows for the two results of sanitization to be at play. For much of the film, viewers see how sanitization can be used to erase. Here, Glazer gives us a glimpse of how it can also be used to maintain. Because how we remember history, how we make note of current events—through propaganda, photography, video, and the internet—is a constant interplay between the truth as it exists and as it has been edited. The fact that "The Zone of Interest" arrives now, as world powers manipulate the narrative to sanitize their crimes, makes Glazer's images all the more chilling. Glazer’s intermingling of the now and the then, appearance versus truth, life and annihilation are rendered into unignorable magnitude.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-zone-of-interest-film-review-2023
Oriana:
I’m glad I saw the movie, but I’d never want to see it again. Just the guttural roars that punctuate the score are simply hideous. This is of course deliberate: the movie is not about Hedwig’s love of flowers. Its message is not that Höss was a loving father.
My favorite scene was Höss talking to his horse. Again, the scene showed that the mass murderer was capable of love — he wasn’t a psychopath.
And Hedwig? She loves flowers. She creates a “paradise of flowers” next door to hell.
But let’s not forget that the movie also presents an angel: the astonishingly brave young girl who hid apples for prisoners to find. She was indeed a real person.
To say that the movie is about the “banality of evil” is to dismiss it too quickly. It resists being dismissed. This movie is meant to linger in our psyche, to haunt us and disturb us.
It’s definitely not just another Holocaust movie. In some ways, it’s more disturbing by far than, say, “Schindler’s List.” That’s not to say that it’s better — just different in a haunting way, presenting again the puzzle of why human beings are capable of such immense evil.
*
DID JESUS REALLY EXIST?
Most New Testament scholars agree that some 2,000 years ago a peripatetic Jewish preacher from Galilee was executed by the Romans, after a year or more of telling his followers about this world and the world to come. Most scholars – though not all.
But let’s stick with the mainstream for now: the Bible historians who harbor no doubt that the sandals of Yeshua ben Yosef really did leave imprints between Nazareth and Jerusalem early in the common era. They divide loosely into three groups, the largest of which includes Christian theologians who conflate the Jesus of faith with the historical figure, which usually means they accept the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection; although a few, such as Simon Gathercole, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a conservative evangelical, grapple seriously with the historical evidence.
Next are the liberal Christians who separate faith from history, and are prepared to go wherever the evidence leads, even if it contradicts traditional belief. Their most vocal representative is John Barton, an Anglican clergyman and Oxford scholar, who accepts that most Bible books were written by multiple authors, often over centuries, and that they diverge from history.
A third group, with views not far from Barton’s, are secular scholars who dismiss the miracle-rich parts of the New Testament while accepting that Jesus was, nonetheless, a figure rooted in history: the gospels, they contend, offer evidence of the main thrusts of his preaching life. A number of this group, including their most prolific member, Bart Ehrman, a Biblical historian at the University of North Carolina, are atheists who emerged from evangelical Christianity.
In the spirit of full declaration, I should add that my own vantage point is similar to Ehrman’s: I was raised in an evangelical Christian family, the son of a ‘born-again’, tongues-talking, Jewish-born Anglican bishop; but, from the age of 17, I came to doubt all that I once believed. Though I remained fascinated by the Abrahamic religions, my interest in them was not enough to prevent my drifting, via agnosticism, into atheism.
There is also a smaller, fourth group who threaten the largely peaceable disagreements between atheists, deists and more orthodox Christians by insisting that evidence for a historical Jesus is so flimsy as to cast doubt on his earthly existence altogether. This group – which includes its share of lapsed Christians – suggests that Jesus may have been a mythological figure who, like Romulus, of Roman legend, was later historicized.
But what is the evidence for Jesus’ existence? And how robust is it by the standards historians might deploy – which is to say: how much of the gospel story can be relied upon as truth? The answers have enormous implications, not just for the Catholic Church and for faith-obsessed countries like the United States, but for billions of individuals who grew up with the comforting picture of a loving Jesus in their hearts.
There is also a smaller, fourth group who threaten the largely peaceable disagreements between atheists, deists and more orthodox Christians by insisting that evidence for a historical Jesus is so flimsy as to cast doubt on his earthly existence altogether. This group – which includes its share of lapsed Christians – suggests that Jesus may have been a mythological figure who, like Romulus, of Roman legend, was later historicized.
But what is the evidence for Jesus’ existence? And how robust is it by the standards historians might deploy – which is to say: how much of the gospel story can be relied upon as truth? The answers have enormous implications, not just for the Catholic Church and for faith-obsessed countries like the United States, but for billions of individuals who grew up with the comforting picture of a loving Jesus in their hearts.
Even for people like me, who dispensed with the God-soul-heaven-hell bits, the idea that this figure of childhood devotion might not have existed or, if he did, that we might know very little indeed about him, takes some swallowing. It involves a traumatic loss – which perhaps explains why the debate is so fraught, even among secular scholars.
Secondo Pia’s photograph of the Shroud of Turin (May 1898), digital print from the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne.
When I’ve discussed this essay with people raised as atheists or in other faiths, the question invariably asked goes something like this: why is it so important for Christians that Jesus lived on earth? What is at stake here is the unique aspect of their faith – the thing that sets it apart. For more than 1,900 years, Christianity has maintained the conviction that God sent his son to earth to suffer a hideous crucifixion to save us from our sins and give us everlasting life.
Jesus’ earthbound birth, life and particularly his death, which ushered in redemption, are the very foundation of their faith. These views are so deeply entrenched that, even for those who have loosened the grip of belief, the idea that he might not have been ‘real’ is hard to stomach.
You’d think that a cult leader who drew crowds, inspired devoted followers and was executed on the order of a Roman governor would leave some indentation in contemporary records. The emperors Vespasian and Titus and the historians Seneca the Elder and the Younger wrote a good deal about 1st-century Judea without ever mentioning Jesus. That could mean simply that he was less significant an actor than the Bible would have us think.
But, despite the volume of records that survive from that time, there is also no death reference (as there was, say, for the 6,000 slaves loyal to Spartacus who were crucified along the Appian Way in 71 BCE), and no mention in any surviving official report, private letter, poetry or play.
Compare this with Socrates, for example. Though none of the thoughts attributed to him survive in written form, still we know that he lived (470-399 BCE) because several of his pupils and contemporary critics wrote books and plays about him. But with Jesus there is silence from those who might have seen him in the flesh – which is awkward for historicists like Ehrman; ‘odd as it may seem,’ he wrote in 1999, ‘[i]n none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus’ name ever so much as mentioned.’ In fact, there are just three sources of putative proof of life – all of them posthumous: the gospels, the letters of Paul, and historical evidence from beyond the Bible.
Christian historians base their claims for a historical Jesus on the thinnest mentions of early Christians by the Roman politicians Pliny the Younger and Tacitus (who write of Christians they interviewed early in the 2nd century – in Pliny’s case, a tortured female deacon – all followers of ‘The Way’ who talked about Jesus) and by Flavius Josephus, a Romanized Jewish historian.
Josephus’s 20-volume Antiquities of the Jews, written around 94 CE, during the reign of Domitian, contains two references to Jesus, including one claiming that he was the Messiah crucified by Pontius Pilate. This would carry some weight if Josephus actually wrote it; but the experts, including evangelicals like Gathercole, agree this reference was likely forged by the 4th-century Christian polemicist Eusebius. The other reference is to ‘the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James’. Some scholars say the ‘called Christ’ bit was a later addition, but it hardly matters when Josephus was drawing from stories told by Christians more than six decades after Jesus’ assumed crucifixion.
When I’ve discussed this essay with people raised as atheists or in other faiths, the question invariably asked goes something like this: why is it so important for Christians that Jesus lived on earth? What is at stake here is the unique aspect of their faith – the thing that sets it apart. For more than 1,900 years, Christianity has maintained the conviction that God sent his son to earth to suffer a hideous crucifixion to save us from our sins and give us everlasting life.
Jesus’ earthbound birth, life and particularly his death, which ushered in redemption, are the very foundation of their faith. These views are so deeply entrenched that, even for those who have loosened the grip of belief, the idea that he might not have been ‘real’ is hard to stomach.
You’d think that a cult leader who drew crowds, inspired devoted followers and was executed on the order of a Roman governor would leave some indentation in contemporary records. The emperors Vespasian and Titus and the historians Seneca the Elder and the Younger wrote a good deal about 1st-century Judea without ever mentioning Jesus. That could mean simply that he was less significant an actor than the Bible would have us think.
But, despite the volume of records that survive from that time, there is also no death reference (as there was, say, for the 6,000 slaves loyal to Spartacus who were crucified along the Appian Way in 71 BCE), and no mention in any surviving official report, private letter, poetry or play.
Compare this with Socrates, for example. Though none of the thoughts attributed to him survive in written form, still we know that he lived (470-399 BCE) because several of his pupils and contemporary critics wrote books and plays about him. But with Jesus there is silence from those who might have seen him in the flesh – which is awkward for historicists like Ehrman; ‘odd as it may seem,’ he wrote in 1999, ‘[i]n none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus’ name ever so much as mentioned.’ In fact, there are just three sources of putative proof of life – all of them posthumous: the gospels, the letters of Paul, and historical evidence from beyond the Bible.
Christian historians base their claims for a historical Jesus on the thinnest mentions of early Christians by the Roman politicians Pliny the Younger and Tacitus (who write of Christians they interviewed early in the 2nd century – in Pliny’s case, a tortured female deacon – all followers of ‘The Way’ who talked about Jesus) and by Flavius Josephus, a Romanized Jewish historian.
Josephus’s 20-volume Antiquities of the Jews, written around 94 CE, during the reign of Domitian, contains two references to Jesus, including one claiming that he was the Messiah crucified by Pontius Pilate. This would carry some weight if Josephus actually wrote it; but the experts, including evangelicals like Gathercole, agree this reference was likely forged by the 4th-century Christian polemicist Eusebius. The other reference is to ‘the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James’. Some scholars say the ‘called Christ’ bit was a later addition, but it hardly matters when Josephus was drawing from stories told by Christians more than six decades after Jesus’ assumed crucifixion.
The problem with Paul for proof-seekers is how little he says about Jesus. If Jesus lived and died in Paul’s lifetime, you might expect he’d refer to Jesus’ ministry on earth – to his parables, sermons and prayers – and that his readers would want this crucial life story. But Paul offers nothing on the living Jesus, such as the stories or sayings that later appear in the gospels, and he provides no information from human sources, referring only to visionary communication with Jesus and to messianic Old Testament quotes.
Which brings us to the gospels, written later, and not by those whose names they bear (these were added in the 2nd and 3rd centuries). The gospel of Mark, which borrows from Paul, came first and set the template for the gospels that followed (Matthew draws from 600 of Mark’s 661 verses, while 65 per cent of Luke is drawn from Mark and Matthew.) The first version of Mark is dated between 53 and 70 BCE, when the Second Temple was destroyed, an event it mentions. The last gospel, John, which has a different theology and stories that contradict those of the three ‘synoptic’ gospels, is dated at around 100 CE.
Which brings us to the gospels, written later, and not by those whose names they bear (these were added in the 2nd and 3rd centuries). The gospel of Mark, which borrows from Paul, came first and set the template for the gospels that followed (Matthew draws from 600 of Mark’s 661 verses, while 65 per cent of Luke is drawn from Mark and Matthew.) The first version of Mark is dated between 53 and 70 BCE, when the Second Temple was destroyed, an event it mentions. The last gospel, John, which has a different theology and stories that contradict those of the three ‘synoptic’ gospels, is dated at around 100 CE.
All four gospels include sections written in the 2nd century (among them, two different virgin birth narratives in Matthew and Luke), and some scholars place the final 12 verses of Mark in the 3rd century. Several historians assume that Matthew and Luke had an earlier source they call Q. However, Q has never been found and there are no references to it elsewhere. Barton suggests that a belief in Q may serve a ‘conservative religious agenda’ because to say these gospels drew from an earlier source ‘is an implicit denial that they made any of it up themselves’.
Taken together, what can the gospels tell us about the historical Jesus? Secular scholars agree that much of their content is fictional, and note, as Ehrman puts it, that ‘these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues’. And yet Ehrman is convinced that Jesus existed; he contends that the gospel writers heard reports about Jesus and ‘decided to write their own versions’.
Taken together, what can the gospels tell us about the historical Jesus? Secular scholars agree that much of their content is fictional, and note, as Ehrman puts it, that ‘these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues’. And yet Ehrman is convinced that Jesus existed; he contends that the gospel writers heard reports about Jesus and ‘decided to write their own versions’.
A few basic facts, like the dates of Jesus’ birth and death (gleaned from their mention of various rulers), are widely accepted, and several of Jesus’ sayings are said to be close to his real words. To separate the factual wheat from the fictional chaff, they employ ‘criteria of authenticity’ – stories and words that ring true. The three main criteria are: embarrassment (are those details out of step with 1st-century Judaism and, if so, why would the gospel writers invent things that would cause problems?); multiple attestation (the more sources, the better); and coherence (are details consistent with what we know?)
However, there is good reason to interrogate this approach. With regard to the criteria of multiple attestation and coherence, we know the gospel writers borrowed from each other, so we’d expect them to include the same stuff. The gospel of Luke, for instance, borrowed Matthew’s ‘consider the lilies of the field’ speech, but if Matthew’s tale is fabricated, Luke’s repetition hardly adds credibility. In addition, the ‘embarrassment criterion’ relies on our knowing what went against the grain.
However, there is good reason to interrogate this approach. With regard to the criteria of multiple attestation and coherence, we know the gospel writers borrowed from each other, so we’d expect them to include the same stuff. The gospel of Luke, for instance, borrowed Matthew’s ‘consider the lilies of the field’ speech, but if Matthew’s tale is fabricated, Luke’s repetition hardly adds credibility. In addition, the ‘embarrassment criterion’ relies on our knowing what went against the grain.
But the Church was diverse when the gospels were written and we can’t be sure what might have embarrassed their authors. It’s often argued, for example, that the gospel writers went to such great lengths to show that the crucifixion was predicted in the Hebrew scriptures in order to make it palatable to an audience convinced that no true messiah could be thus humiliated. But this argument can be turned on its head if we accept that the crucifixion tale was included because the gospel writers – pace Paul – believed it was required to fulfill prophesy. If the crucifixion was prophesied, then how can it have been embarrassing?
On the subject of the crucifixion, it’s worth noting that, while the four accepted gospels have Jesus sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, in the non-canonical gospel of Peter it is Herod Antipas who does the deed. The gospel of Thomas, meanwhile, makes no mention of Jesus’ death, resurrection or divinity at all. According to the 4th-century theologian Epiphanius, the Torah-observant Nazorean Christians (thought to have descended from the first group of believers), held that Jesus lived and died during the reign of King Alexander Jannaeus (10-76 BCE) – a century before Pontius Pilate. And the Babylonian Talmud agrees, claiming that Jesus was executed by stoning and ‘hanging’ in the town of Lydda (not Jerusalem) for ‘immorality, sorcery and worshipping idols’. So, even when the ‘criteria of authenticity’ are met, historical consensus is hard to establish.
The most concerted effort to separate fact from fiction started in 1985 when a group of mainly secular scholars were drawn together by the lapsed Catholic theologian Bob Funk. Funk’s ‘Jesus Seminar’ met twice a year for 20 years to ‘search for the historical Jesus’. At its launch, Funk said the group would enquire ‘simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said.’ These scholars (eventually numbering more than 200) used the ‘criteria of authenticity’ to assess the deeds and words of Jesus as reported in the gospels.
On the subject of the crucifixion, it’s worth noting that, while the four accepted gospels have Jesus sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, in the non-canonical gospel of Peter it is Herod Antipas who does the deed. The gospel of Thomas, meanwhile, makes no mention of Jesus’ death, resurrection or divinity at all. According to the 4th-century theologian Epiphanius, the Torah-observant Nazorean Christians (thought to have descended from the first group of believers), held that Jesus lived and died during the reign of King Alexander Jannaeus (10-76 BCE) – a century before Pontius Pilate. And the Babylonian Talmud agrees, claiming that Jesus was executed by stoning and ‘hanging’ in the town of Lydda (not Jerusalem) for ‘immorality, sorcery and worshipping idols’. So, even when the ‘criteria of authenticity’ are met, historical consensus is hard to establish.
The most concerted effort to separate fact from fiction started in 1985 when a group of mainly secular scholars were drawn together by the lapsed Catholic theologian Bob Funk. Funk’s ‘Jesus Seminar’ met twice a year for 20 years to ‘search for the historical Jesus’. At its launch, Funk said the group would enquire ‘simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said.’ These scholars (eventually numbering more than 200) used the ‘criteria of authenticity’ to assess the deeds and words of Jesus as reported in the gospels.
Many seminars later, following much debate, they concluded that Jesus was an iconoclastic Hellenistic Jewish preacher who told stories in parables and spoke out against injustice; that he had two earthly parents; and that he did not perform miracles, die for people’s sins or rise from the dead. The veracity of his sayings and deeds was decided by a group vote. Scholars were invited to place plastic beads in a box: red (three points) if Jesus said it; pink (two points) if he probably said it; grey (one point) if he didn’t, but it reflected his ideas; black (zero) if invented. When tallied, there were black or grey beads for 82 per cent of Jesus’ Biblical sayings, and 84 per cent of his deeds.
Such methods are regarded as quaint, at best, by scholars researching non-Biblical historical figures. One of those I canvassed was Catharine Edwards, professor of classics and ancient history at Birkbeck, University of London, who said that some historians of the ancient world tend towards scepticism – ‘for example, we can’t really know anything about the earliest stage of Roman history beyond what is gleaned from archaeological evidence’ – while others tend towards ‘extreme credibility’. But, even among those, ‘criteria of authenticity’ are not a familiar tool. She added that the colored-beads approach ‘sounds naive and on the credulous end of the spectrum where scholars make assumptions about the character of a particular ancient individual and on that basis decide what they think he (invariably) may or may not have said.’
Hugh Bowden, professor of ancient history at King’s College London, said that there was more evidence for the existence of Socrates and Pericles than for Jesus, but ‘much less hangs on it’. The focus on the historicity of Jesus has ‘no real equivalent in other fields, because it is rooted in confessional preconceptions (early Christianity matters because modern Christianity matters) even when scholars claim to be unaffected by personal religious views. Historians in other fields would not find the question very important.’
If we remove those preconceptions, it seems commonsensical to apply caution to the historicity of the gospels and let doubt lead our interrogations. The first gospel, Mark, was begun nearly half a century after Jesus’ ministry (and its final verses much later). Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers were probably illiterate, and there were no reporters taking notes. The likelihood of Jesus’ words being accurately reproduced by writers who’d never met him, and were elaborating on increasingly fanciful tales passed down through the decades, seems remote.
One scholar who was part of the Jesus Seminar and yet harbored such doubts, is Robert Price, a respected New Testament professor with a PhD in ‘Systematic Theology’, and a former Baptist pastor turned atheist. Price came to query the methodology used to establish historicity, prompting him to doubt whether Jesus ever lived. ‘If there ever was a historical Jesus there isn’t one anymore,’ he said, later writing: ‘There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.’
Price became the heavyweight figure for a fringe group of ‘Christ myth’ skeptics – historians who propose that early Christians, including Paul, believed in a celestial messiah and that he was placed in history by the gospel writers in the next generation. So, while most of the 200 believe Jesus was a historical figure mythologized by the gospel writers, the skeptics believe the opposite: he was a mythical figure who was subsequently historicized.
Such ideas have been around for centuries. Thomas Paine was an early adopter but it was the 19th-century German philosopher Bruno Bauer who advanced the theory most assiduously. Bauer, an atheist, recognized the gospel themes as literary rather than historical, arguing that Christianity had pagan roots and that Jesus was a mythical creation.
In recent decades, it has become widely accepted by secular scholars that the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is more myth than history. In particular, the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and his American colleague Neil Asher Silberman have written in The Bible Unearthed (2002) that none of the patriarchs, from Moses and Joshua backwards, existed as historical figures; that there was no record of Jews having been enslaved in Egypt (instead, they descended from the Canaanites); that David and Solomon were warlords rather than kings; and that the first temple was built three centuries after Solomon.
Such methods are regarded as quaint, at best, by scholars researching non-Biblical historical figures. One of those I canvassed was Catharine Edwards, professor of classics and ancient history at Birkbeck, University of London, who said that some historians of the ancient world tend towards scepticism – ‘for example, we can’t really know anything about the earliest stage of Roman history beyond what is gleaned from archaeological evidence’ – while others tend towards ‘extreme credibility’. But, even among those, ‘criteria of authenticity’ are not a familiar tool. She added that the colored-beads approach ‘sounds naive and on the credulous end of the spectrum where scholars make assumptions about the character of a particular ancient individual and on that basis decide what they think he (invariably) may or may not have said.’
Hugh Bowden, professor of ancient history at King’s College London, said that there was more evidence for the existence of Socrates and Pericles than for Jesus, but ‘much less hangs on it’. The focus on the historicity of Jesus has ‘no real equivalent in other fields, because it is rooted in confessional preconceptions (early Christianity matters because modern Christianity matters) even when scholars claim to be unaffected by personal religious views. Historians in other fields would not find the question very important.’
If we remove those preconceptions, it seems commonsensical to apply caution to the historicity of the gospels and let doubt lead our interrogations. The first gospel, Mark, was begun nearly half a century after Jesus’ ministry (and its final verses much later). Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers were probably illiterate, and there were no reporters taking notes. The likelihood of Jesus’ words being accurately reproduced by writers who’d never met him, and were elaborating on increasingly fanciful tales passed down through the decades, seems remote.
One scholar who was part of the Jesus Seminar and yet harbored such doubts, is Robert Price, a respected New Testament professor with a PhD in ‘Systematic Theology’, and a former Baptist pastor turned atheist. Price came to query the methodology used to establish historicity, prompting him to doubt whether Jesus ever lived. ‘If there ever was a historical Jesus there isn’t one anymore,’ he said, later writing: ‘There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.’
Price became the heavyweight figure for a fringe group of ‘Christ myth’ skeptics – historians who propose that early Christians, including Paul, believed in a celestial messiah and that he was placed in history by the gospel writers in the next generation. So, while most of the 200 believe Jesus was a historical figure mythologized by the gospel writers, the skeptics believe the opposite: he was a mythical figure who was subsequently historicized.
Such ideas have been around for centuries. Thomas Paine was an early adopter but it was the 19th-century German philosopher Bruno Bauer who advanced the theory most assiduously. Bauer, an atheist, recognized the gospel themes as literary rather than historical, arguing that Christianity had pagan roots and that Jesus was a mythical creation.
In recent decades, it has become widely accepted by secular scholars that the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is more myth than history. In particular, the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and his American colleague Neil Asher Silberman have written in The Bible Unearthed (2002) that none of the patriarchs, from Moses and Joshua backwards, existed as historical figures; that there was no record of Jews having been enslaved in Egypt (instead, they descended from the Canaanites); that David and Solomon were warlords rather than kings; and that the first temple was built three centuries after Solomon.
But the view that the Christian Bible is similarly lacking in veracity has, until recently, been drowned out by those arguing for a flesh-and-blood Jesus. One reason for the consensual chorus may relate to the fact that tenured positions in departments dealing with Bible history tend not to be offered to those who doubt that Jesus was real. So the revival of the ‘doubters’ camp’ owes much to the internet, as well as to the missionary zeal of its key proponents.
Momentum began to gather in the 1990s with a series of books by Earl Doherty, a Canadian writer who became interested in scripture while studying ancient history and classical languages. Doherty claimed that Paul and other early Christian writers did not believe in Jesus as an earthly figure, but instead as a celestial being crucified by demons in the lower realms of heaven and then resurrected by God. His views (ironically, on the face of it, the most ostensibly religious, in being so thoroughly spiritualized) were rejected by historical Jesus scholars who claimed that Doherty lacked the academic nous to understand ancient texts. But the next wave, which included Price, was more firmly rooted in academia.
Price believes that early Christianity was influenced by Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising deities that survived into the Greek and Roman periods. One was a Sumerian legend, ‘The Descent of Inanna’, which tells of the queen of heaven who attends an underworld funeral only to get killed by demons and hung from a hook like a piece of meat. Three days later, however, she’s rescued, rises from the dead, and returns to the land of the living.
Another is the Egyptian myth of the murdered god-king Osiris. His wife, Isis, finds his body, restores it to life and, via a flash of lightning in one version, conceives his son, Horus, who succeeds him. Osiris goes on to rule over the dead. In Plutarch’s Greek version, Osiris is tricked to lie in a coffin, which floats out to sea before washing up at the city of Byblos. There, Isis removes Osiris’ body from a tree and brings it back to life.
Several Jewish texts in circulation at the time reinforced the messianic aspects of these narratives. For instance, 1 Enoch (a book written mainly in the 2nd century BCE, and particularly revered within the Essene community, thought to be responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls) refers to the ‘Son of Man’ (a phrase used for Jesus in the gospels) whose name and identity will be kept secret to prevent evildoers from knowing of him until the appointed time.
Momentum began to gather in the 1990s with a series of books by Earl Doherty, a Canadian writer who became interested in scripture while studying ancient history and classical languages. Doherty claimed that Paul and other early Christian writers did not believe in Jesus as an earthly figure, but instead as a celestial being crucified by demons in the lower realms of heaven and then resurrected by God. His views (ironically, on the face of it, the most ostensibly religious, in being so thoroughly spiritualized) were rejected by historical Jesus scholars who claimed that Doherty lacked the academic nous to understand ancient texts. But the next wave, which included Price, was more firmly rooted in academia.
Price believes that early Christianity was influenced by Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising deities that survived into the Greek and Roman periods. One was a Sumerian legend, ‘The Descent of Inanna’, which tells of the queen of heaven who attends an underworld funeral only to get killed by demons and hung from a hook like a piece of meat. Three days later, however, she’s rescued, rises from the dead, and returns to the land of the living.
Another is the Egyptian myth of the murdered god-king Osiris. His wife, Isis, finds his body, restores it to life and, via a flash of lightning in one version, conceives his son, Horus, who succeeds him. Osiris goes on to rule over the dead. In Plutarch’s Greek version, Osiris is tricked to lie in a coffin, which floats out to sea before washing up at the city of Byblos. There, Isis removes Osiris’ body from a tree and brings it back to life.
Several Jewish texts in circulation at the time reinforced the messianic aspects of these narratives. For instance, 1 Enoch (a book written mainly in the 2nd century BCE, and particularly revered within the Essene community, thought to be responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls) refers to the ‘Son of Man’ (a phrase used for Jesus in the gospels) whose name and identity will be kept secret to prevent evildoers from knowing of him until the appointed time.
The favorite ‘Christ myth’ source is the Ascension of Isaiah, written in bits and pieces in the 1st and 2nd centuries. It includes a section dealing with a journey through the seven heavens by a non-human Jesus who is crucified in a lower heaven by Satan and his demonic ‘archons’ who are the rulers of that realm and yet do not know who he is. Again, the story ends with Jesus rising from the dead.
‘Christ myth’ scholars believe that ancient tales of death and resurrection influenced the gospel writers, who also borrowed from Homer, Euripides and the Hebrew Bible. For them, the Jesus story fits the outlines of the mythic hero archetype of the time – a spiritual savior killed by ‘archons’ before rising triumphant. They contend that later Christians rewrote Jesus as a historical figure who suffered at the hands of earthly rulers.
The rock star of skepticism is Richard Carrier, a Bible scholar with a very modern aptitude for using social media (some of his lengthy YouTube videos have attracted more than a million viewers). He enters into fervent debates with rivals, lectures, and writes acerbic, clinical and fact-laden books. With his PhD in ancient history from the University of Columbia and his record of publishing in academic journals, his credentials are less easily dismissed than Doherty’s. Ehrman, for instance, acknowledges Carrier and Price are serious New Testament scholars.
At one time, Carrier accepted the historicity of Jesus but he became contemptuous of the mainstream position because of what he saw as the parlous state of scholarship supporting it. He and the Australian Bible historian Raphael Lataster use Bayes’ theorem, which considers historical probabilities based on reasonable expectations (weighing up the evidence and attaching mathematical odds to it), to conclude that it is ‘probable’ that Jesus never existed as a historical person, although it is ‘plausible’ that he did.
The ‘Jesus myth’ advocates get plenty of airplay, but the fringe label has stuck, and not just because religious studies departments freeze them out. Their own methodology has been criticized, not least their use of Bayesian methods. Bizarrely, Carrier offered odds to his readers, concluding that the likelihood of a real-life Jesus was no better than 33 per cent (and perhaps as low as 0.0008 per cent) depending on the estimates used for the computation, which illustrates the wooliness of this use of Bayes’ theorem.
Carrier and his comrades do a fine job poking holes in the methods of historicists but what they offer in exchange seems flimsy. In particular, they have found no clear evidence from the decades before the gospels to show that anyone believed Jesus was not human. Each reference in the epistles can be explained away as referring to a celestial savior, but it all feels like a bit of a stretch. Paul frequently refers to the crucifixion and says Jesus was ‘born of a woman’ and ‘made from the sperm of David, according to the flesh’. He also refers to James, ‘the brother of Christ’. Using these examples, Ehrman says there’s ‘good evidence that Paul understood Jesus to be a historical figure’. Which was certainly the view of the writer/s of Mark, a gospel begun less than two decades after Paul’s letters were written.
If we accept this conclusion, but also accept that the gospels are unreliable biographies, then what we are left with is a dimly discernible historical husk. If Jesus did live at the time generally accepted (from 7-3 BCE to 26-30 CE) rather than a century earlier as some of the earliest Christians seemed to believe, then we might assume that he started life in Galilee, attracted a following as a preacher and was executed. Everything else is invention or uncertain. In other words, if Jesus did exist, we know next to nothing about him.
Christ as Gardener; Titian, 1553
One way of looking at it is to think of a pearl, which starts as a grain of sand around which calcium carbonate layers form as an immune response to the irritant until the pearl no longer resembles the speck that started it. Many legends have developed in this way, from the tale of the blind bard Homer onwards.
The outlaw and thief Robert Hod was fined for failing to appear in court in York in 1225 and a year later he reappeared in the court record, still at large. This could be the grain of sand that begat Robin Hood, whom many people assumed to have been a historical figure whose legend grew over the centuries. Robin started as a forest yeoman but morphed into a nobleman. He was later inserted into 12th-century history with King Richard the Lionheart and Prince John (earlier versions had Edward I), along with his ever-expanding band of outlaws. By the 16th century, he and his Merry Men had mutated from lovable rascals to rebels with a cause who ‘tooke from rich to give the poor’.
The Jesus story likewise developed fresh layers over time. At the start of the common era, there may well have been several iconoclastic Jewish preachers, and one of them got up the noses of the Romans, who killed him. Soon his legend grew. New attributes and views were ascribed to him until, eventually, he became the heroic figure of the Messiah and son of God with his band of 12 not-so-merry men. The original grain of sand is less significant than most assume. The interesting bit is how it grew. ~
One way of looking at it is to think of a pearl, which starts as a grain of sand around which calcium carbonate layers form as an immune response to the irritant until the pearl no longer resembles the speck that started it. Many legends have developed in this way, from the tale of the blind bard Homer onwards.
The outlaw and thief Robert Hod was fined for failing to appear in court in York in 1225 and a year later he reappeared in the court record, still at large. This could be the grain of sand that begat Robin Hood, whom many people assumed to have been a historical figure whose legend grew over the centuries. Robin started as a forest yeoman but morphed into a nobleman. He was later inserted into 12th-century history with King Richard the Lionheart and Prince John (earlier versions had Edward I), along with his ever-expanding band of outlaws. By the 16th century, he and his Merry Men had mutated from lovable rascals to rebels with a cause who ‘tooke from rich to give the poor’.
The Jesus story likewise developed fresh layers over time. At the start of the common era, there may well have been several iconoclastic Jewish preachers, and one of them got up the noses of the Romans, who killed him. Soon his legend grew. New attributes and views were ascribed to him until, eventually, he became the heroic figure of the Messiah and son of God with his band of 12 not-so-merry men. The original grain of sand is less significant than most assume. The interesting bit is how it grew. ~
Christ blessing the little children, 17th century, Adam van Noort
https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-son-of-god-story-is-built-on-mythology-not-history?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6143fea6a7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_02_16_02_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-6143fea6a7-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Michael Cabrogal:
The accounts in the Gospels are all over the shop, contradicting each other in places and sometimes going to hilarious lengths to try to make Jesus comply with Messianic prophecies such as detailing two different lineages linking Joseph to David, despite Joseph supposedly not being his father, and Jesus apparently simultaneously riding an ass and a colt into Jerusalem, which seems to be a product of the Matthew author’s unfamiliarity with earlier Hebrew rhetorical styles.
I’d also agree that Jesus was probably little known during and immediately after those events allegedly took place. Miracle-workers and necromancers were probably a dime a dozen, as were Jewish Messiahs whose followers attributed prophecy fulfilling qualities to them and there’s nothing in the Jesus story that would have made him stand out from the crowd of Divine Brians jostling each other in the messiah markets of occupied Judea.
But I think many of those weaknesses are arguments for rather than against a historical Jesus — albeit one who would probably be unrecognizable to modern Christians.
In completely rejecting the historicity of Jesus we’d need to postulate how it came about that within 300 years so many different communities were so committed to their own versions of his story. Why would a myth made of whole cloth be so heavily contested if you could just make up another one to suit your own needs? How did the cult gain so much influence in the face of far more interesting Roman ones (at least in Julian’s opinion)? Why were relatively sophisticated people with no discernible stake in the comparatively primitive and unoriginal beliefs of an occupied people in the Levant so committed to it?
I think the parsimonious explanation is that there really was a Jesus who, largely due to historical chance, gave a strong initial impetus to his small band of followers that enabled them to spread steadily mutating versions of their enthusiasm around the Mediterranean. But Christianity would probably have died out within a few centuries were it not for its suitability as a centralizing state religion intended to hold the fragmenting Roman Empire together.
Gavin Evans:
Another point, on how Christianity spread in the way you described: This had a great deal to do with Paul and his group. Their decision to preach to the gentiles and not to require them to keep to Jewish law (particularly circumcision), helped it to spread (often via trade routes — Paul himself seemed to have spread the word while pursuing his trade as a leather worker).
The next generation of Christians included the gospel writers, and in time the many rival gospels fell by the wayside or were repressed, meaning that the self-declared orthodox version of Christianity won out against rival versions (the Essenes, Docetism, Arianism, Marcionism, Gnosticism, the Nazarenes) withered or were stamped out, and the version that became Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity survived.
Jan Sand:
The doubts about Jesus are as frightening as those about Santa Clause which could destroy the entire toy industry. That might benefit the Christmas tree but even raise doubts in the possible aerodynamics of reindeer.
James Ross:
Humans are the only animals with a foreknowledge of death. Along with the cohesion and mutual trust religion provides a group in competition with others, it generates a ‘just-so’ story to help mitigate this terrible reality, ” "a necessary illusion”, as Freud said. Because of certain unique political and social factors of the time, Christianity was able to spread, while remaining pliable enough to meet the evolving needs of ongoing, contemporary societies. We only have to look at the Christianity of today’s mega-churches to see the mutability for adaptation.
Mary McDonald:
For myself, I have for a long time (decades) believed that all religious texts are works of fiction.
Jan Sand:
The doubts about Jesus are as frightening as those about Santa Clause which could destroy the entire toy industry. That might benefit the Christmas tree but even raise doubts in the possible aerodynamics of reindeer.
James Ross:
Humans are the only animals with a foreknowledge of death. Along with the cohesion and mutual trust religion provides a group in competition with others, it generates a ‘just-so’ story to help mitigate this terrible reality, ” "a necessary illusion”, as Freud said. Because of certain unique political and social factors of the time, Christianity was able to spread, while remaining pliable enough to meet the evolving needs of ongoing, contemporary societies. We only have to look at the Christianity of today’s mega-churches to see the mutability for adaptation.
Mary McDonald:
For myself, I have for a long time (decades) believed that all religious texts are works of fiction.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca 4 BC – 65 AD
W Z:
There has been more than enough doubt cast on everything Jesus – the world is saturated if only one cares to notice. And if one does notice, will one in fact be moved by that doubt? Lourdes encapsulates the whole drama: “Lourdes, the Grotto, the cures, the miracles, are, indeed, the creation of that need of the Lie [of a higher Power],” commented Zola, “that necessity for credulity, which is characteristic of human nature.”
The author of the article closes with these lines: “The original grain of sand is less significant than most assume. The interesting bit is how it grew.”
Here, in a way, he echoes Zola:” At first, when little Bernadette came with her strange story of what she had witnessed, everybody was against her. The Prefect of the Department, the Bishop, the clergy, objected to her story. But Lourdes grew up in spite of all opposition, just as the Christian religion did, because suffering humanity in its despair must cling to something, must have some hope: and, on the other hand, because humanity thirsts after illusions. In a word, it is the story of the foundation of all religions.”
Mike Baldwin:
I tend to agree that most of the Jesus story is fictional and was taken over and embellished by later Christians. What is not addressed by this article and others I have read is where the teachings of Jesus, which went counter to the mores and general beliefs of that era among the Jews and others, came from. The ideas of love, befriending strangers, the significance of the poor rather than the rich, etc. If a human Jesus existed and preached these ideas, they form the legitimate basis for a major philosophy unlike anything that went before. The miracles weren’t necessary, they were just added to speed the process of acceptance among the credulous to create a religion. It was mainly the recycled idea of resurrection that turned it into a religion rather than just a philosophy. So my question is: where did Jesus’ philosophical ideas spring from so suddenly at that time in history?
Gavin Evans (author):
I don’t think they emerged suddenly. The different, often contradictory ideas expressed in the gospels, were all in the ether of the communities where and when they were written. We don’t know enough about those communities to assume they went counter to the mores and general beliefs there and then.
*
NO, ALIENS HAVE NOT VISITED THE EARTH
There has never been a worse time to be a UFO skeptic. Last month, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon office responsible for investigating unexplained aerial events, stepped down. He said he was tired of being harassed and accused of hiding evidence, and he lamented an erosion in “our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking.”
He may have been pushed over the edge by a pair of events from the past summer. In June of last year, Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard, announced that he had found some tiny blobs of metal by dragging a magnetic sled over the bottom of the Pacific near Papua New Guinea. He claimed that these blobs were metallic droplets that had melted off an interstellar object that might have been “a technological gadget with artificial intelligence” — the product of beings from another star system.
In July, David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, stepped out of the shadows to announce that the U.S. military Establishment currently possesses a small fleet of nonhuman pre-owned flying saucers. He didn’t call them saucers; he called them UAPs, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” which used to be called UFOs. But basically, we’re talking saucers.
Grusch’s story first reached the public via a journalist named Leslie Kean (pronounced Kane), who had co-written a hugely influential article about UFOs that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2017. She and Helene Cooper, a Pentagon correspondent for the paper, along with a writer named Ralph Blumenthal, revealed that Senator Harry Reid had gotten the Pentagon to create a secret, “mysterious” $22 million program to study UFOs. A few years later, Kean was the subject of a long profile in The New Yorker by staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus with the web title “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.”
Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, non-crankish people at Harvard, at The New Yorker, at the New York Times, and at the Pentagon seemed to be drifting ever closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth. Everyone was being appallingly open-minded. Yet even after more than 70 years of claimed sightings, there was simply no good evidence. In an age of ubiquitous cameras and fancy scopes, there was no footage that wasn’t blurry and jumpy and taken from far away. There was just this guy Grusch telling the world that the government had a “crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program” for flying saucers that was totally supersecret and that only people in the program knew about the program.
Grusch said he had learned about it while serving on a UAP task force at the Pentagon. He interviewed more than 40 people, and they told him wild things. He said he couldn’t reveal the names of the people he interviewed. He shared no firsthand information and showed no photos. He said the program went back decades, back to the saucer crash that happened in Roswell, New Mexico.
Grusch seems sincere and polite and cheerful. In interviews, he has said he’s on the autism spectrum, which helps him focus. He uses military buzzwords sometimes, like near-peer adversaries and asymmetric national-defense advantages, but not in an off-putting way. He says when he came to learn about the existence of the secret saucers, he was troubled and felt it was highly unethical for their existence to be kept from the public. He also says he has at times wondered whether he was being deceived: “Was this some kind of ruse against me? Am I being used in any kind of way?” No, he decided.
In March 2023, Grusch was introduced to Kean. “It was always sort of established that I was going to — me and my colleague Ralph were going to — break his story because of the track record that we had,” Kean told me. “I wanted it that way, but David wanted it that way, too, because he thought we had a lot of credibility.” Grusch showed Kean his security clearances and performance evaluations, and they talked for many hours online and in person. What he told her resembled what other sources had already described, though they couldn’t go on the record because the information was classified. “People I had known for a long time,” she said, “I could call them and up say, ‘Is it credible that he’s saying that these crash objects exist, or whatever?’ And they would say, ‘Yes, we support what he says.’ ”
Kean and Blumenthal’s piece about Grusch ended up at a UFO-friendly website called The Debrief, which reports on “knowledge on the periphery of human understanding.” They quoted Grusch as saying that the government keepers of the spaceships know the machines are from nonhuman intelligent beings because of “vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.”
Next came a packed hearing in Congress, which happened at the end of July before the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. The topic was unidentified anomalous phenomena and “what threats they may pose.” Representative Andy Ogles asked Grusch whether these UAPs represented “an existential threat to the national security of the United States.”
“Potentially,” Grusch answered.
Representative Nancy Mace asked Grusch whether there were bodies in the crashed craft.
“Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” he said, nodding.
Mace then asked, with possibly the tiniest hint of a smile, “Were they, I guess, human or nonhuman biologics?” “Nonhuman,” Grusch replied, his forehead furrowing as if he’d taken a bite of a huge sandwich. “And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.”
Representative Tim Burchett thanked Grusch and the other witnesses for their bravery: “They took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and daggum it, they are doing it and we owe them a debt of gratitude.” Sustained applause followed.
After the hearing, Kean gave an interview on a news show called Rising. She reported that she had heard no disparaging or ridiculing remarks from the audience. The mood was “sort of joyful.” People were “very excited.” When members of Congress are seriously engaging with the idea of UFOs, “the stigma starts to fade away,” she said.
“What do you make of that claim there by Grusch of the nonhuman biologics?” the Rising announcer asked.
“That is probably the most explosive statement that was made in the whole hearing in terms of trying to wrap your mind around something that hard to imagine,” said Kean. “That there’s actually biological material, if not bodies, of nonhuman beings in possession of the U.S. government.” She said she had no way of knowing whether it was true but added, “I have talked to others who have told me that it is true.”
*
Who is Leslie Kean, and why is she making such an effort to put a respectable face on what are, let’s just say it, quite wiggy-sounding assertions? In 2010, Kean published a book about UFO sightings that talked about the “terrible stigma” of being UFO-curious and about how when she first got interested in the subject, she felt shame, as if she were taking an illegal drug, and didn’t tell anyone. But then, after a while, she was okay with it and gained confidence.
The book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, was a best seller. She then began work on a book about the afterlife, called Surviving Death, in which she recounted how she went to a psychic who described her to herself with amazing accuracy, though maybe it was because she had given the psychic her phone number and the psychic used a reverse phone search and found some things out, but she, Kean, thought that was unlikely.
The psychic told her she could feel the energy and presence of Kean’s departed partner, whose name began with a B — and yes, it was a B, it was her departed partner, Budd, the famous Budd Hopkins, who had died a few years earlier and who before that was a very successful UFO writer and speaker, though he never got his byline on the front page of the New York Times, unlike Kean.
Hopkins used to put people into hypnotic states and interview them in order to tease out from their tranced minds all the unpleasant things space aliens had done when they’d drawn them into the saucers. He toured the country giving talks on alien abduction at UFO conferences, and he appeared on a very good Nova episode on PBS in 1997, “Kidnapped by UFOs?,” in which one of his informants said space aliens had harvested his sperm and a woman said she had been probed in her ears and her nose and another place, too — and then something came out of her and she looked down and it was an alien baby.
Over the years, Hopkins showed his dubious methods of hypnotic suggestion to others, including David M. Jacobs, a history professor who wrote The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda, and John E. Mack, who wrote Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, and they thanked him in their books — “To Budd Hopkins, who led the way,” said Mack; “Budd Hopkins, my friend and ‘partner in crime,’ ” said Jacobs — and they produced a shelf full of fat books about creepy, naughty things that aliens had done, and that’s why the New York Times called Hopkins “the father of the alien-abduction movement.” Hopkins coached children into believing they had met aliens; Jacobs suggested to “Emma Woods,” one of his alleged alien abductees, that she buy and wear a chastity belt to block space creatures intent on breeding hybrid babies. “They can’t take it off,” Jacobs told Woods. “It’s got a little lock and a key, and right where the vaginal opening is, it’s got a couple of nails sticking across. It’s a dead stopper, no doubt about it.”
And then one day, somewhere around 2004, Hopkins was giving a talk about aliens at a UFO conference when — as he tells it in his autobiography — a “trim, attractive, petite woman with a mass of short, curly, dark-blonde hair and beautiful, steady blue eyes” came up to him and said she was interested in one of his abduction stories, the one in which a woman named Linda floated out a window in New York City and was pulled into a bright-red UFO. The attractive, petite woman was Leslie Kean. They struck up a friendship, became partners, and there you go.
Meanwhile, Hopkins divorced his third wife, who had by then begun to doubt his methods (she wrote a devastating article about him in a UFO magazine called Paratopia), and he dedicated his memoir “to Leslie Kean, a sun whose rays have warmed my life and renewed my hopes.” Kean, in her UFO book, said, “A special thanks goes to my close friend Budd Hopkins for providing daily, steady support as I dealt with the myriad personal and professional challenges inherent in producing this book.”
After Surviving Death, Kean continued her UFO advocacy work with the assistance of Christopher Mellon, a wealthy defense and intelligence insider. Mellon set up a meeting for Kean with Hal Puthoff, a mage of remote viewing and other outré telepathic experimentation, and a goateed counterintelligence officer, Luis Elizondo, who’d just quit his Pentagon job and was now part of an entertainment company Puthoff had set up with pop-punk singer-songwriter Tom DeLonge. (DeLonge is famous for the catchy, guitar-heavy songs he recorded with Blink-182, like “Aliens Exist,” in which he sings, “I got an injection / Of fear from the abduction.”) Sitting in the lobby bar of a hotel near the Pentagon, Puthoff opened a laptop and played Kean some Navy UFO videos in which blips of light cavort on a cockpit screen. “I was completely floored,” she told me. Seeing actual military videos of UFOs “changed everything.”
Kean’s 2017 Times article included two of the clips she watched at the meeting, and everyone who read it clicked on them and went, “Holy crackers!” Especially over the video called “Gimbal,” in which a black shape that resembles a flying saucer turns this way and that. Suddenly, everyone was saying to themselves, “That thing is very eerie and otherworldly, look at that glowing aura, maybe we are being visited by flying saucers — the Navy pilots sure think so.” 60 Minutes did a piece on the videos and interviewed the pilots.
Some viewers were not convinced. Mick West, who runs a website called Metabunk, explained on YouTube that the “Gimbal” video shows the heat image of a jet from behind and the aura is an artifact of image sharpening. The antics of the saucer-shaped craft, he demonstrated, which seemed effortless, porpoiselike, are the result of the laggy way the external camera mount adjusted itself when tracking an object. It was clear that this really wasn’t a film of a flying saucer at all — and that Mick West should get some kind of Edward R. Murrow award for even-toned analysis.
“If Mick were really interested in this stuff,” Kean told The New Yorker, “he wouldn’t debunk every single video.” She and Blumenthal wrote more UFO pieces for the Times, republishing the “Gimbal” video as if it still meant something when it almost certainly means nothing at all.
After Surviving Death, Kean continued her UFO advocacy work with the assistance of Christopher Mellon, a wealthy defense and intelligence insider. Mellon set up a meeting for Kean with Hal Puthoff, a mage of remote viewing and other outré telepathic experimentation, and a goateed counterintelligence officer, Luis Elizondo, who’d just quit his Pentagon job and was now part of an entertainment company Puthoff had set up with pop-punk singer-songwriter Tom DeLonge. (DeLonge is famous for the catchy, guitar-heavy songs he recorded with Blink-182, like “Aliens Exist,” in which he sings, “I got an injection / Of fear from the abduction.”) Sitting in the lobby bar of a hotel near the Pentagon, Puthoff opened a laptop and played Kean some Navy UFO videos in which blips of light cavort on a cockpit screen. “I was completely floored,” she told me. Seeing actual military videos of UFOs “changed everything.”
Kean’s 2017 Times article included two of the clips she watched at the meeting, and everyone who read it clicked on them and went, “Holy crackers!” Especially over the video called “Gimbal,” in which a black shape that resembles a flying saucer turns this way and that. Suddenly, everyone was saying to themselves, “That thing is very eerie and otherworldly, look at that glowing aura, maybe we are being visited by flying saucers — the Navy pilots sure think so.” 60 Minutes did a piece on the videos and interviewed the pilots.
Some viewers were not convinced. Mick West, who runs a website called Metabunk, explained on YouTube that the “Gimbal” video shows the heat image of a jet from behind and the aura is an artifact of image sharpening. The antics of the saucer-shaped craft, he demonstrated, which seemed effortless, porpoiselike, are the result of the laggy way the external camera mount adjusted itself when tracking an object. It was clear that this really wasn’t a film of a flying saucer at all — and that Mick West should get some kind of Edward R. Murrow award for even-toned analysis.
“If Mick were really interested in this stuff,” Kean told The New Yorker, “he wouldn’t debunk every single video.” She and Blumenthal wrote more UFO pieces for the Times, republishing the “Gimbal” video as if it still meant something when it almost certainly means nothing at all.
*
This has all happened before: It’s the latest instance of what Marina Koren, a science writer for The Atlantic, calls the “UFO-mania cycle.” Before Grusch, there were military men like Robert Salas, who published a book a decade ago in which he said that one night in the 1960s a space alien floated him out of his bedroom window and inserted a needle into his groin. And before Salas, there was Colonel Philip J. Corso, a retired Pentagon insider, who in 1997 published a memoir, The Day After Roswell, in which he claimed that in July 1947 he had opened a small shipping crate in a veterinary building in Fort Riley, Kansas, and found a dead space alien inside, submerged in a viscous blue liquid. “It was a four-foot human-shaped figure,” Corso wrote, “with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands — I didn’t see a thumb — thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin.”
In the 1950s, Corso was an intelligence operative and counterpropagandist in Washington, and later he began working for President Eisenhower’s National Security Council. The United States was fighting a two-front war, Corso wrote — against Communists on the one hand and space creatures on the other. Earth, he said, was “under some form of probing attack by one or more alien cultures who were testing both our ability and resolve to defend ourselves.”
The flights of Eisenhower’s U-2 spy plane over Soviet Russia had an undisclosed secondary purpose, Corso believed. Not only did they identify missile sites and bombing targets; they also carried on the search for extraterrestrial crash sites behind enemy lines: “We also wanted to see whether the Soviets were harvesting any of the alien aircraft technology for themselves.”
In 1961, Corso was put in charge of the foreign-technology desk at the Pentagon, where (so he said) he was asked to “exploit” the secret Roswell files and alien remains, including autopsy reports and crash debris. Corso said his team farmed out various reverse-engineered extraterrestrial innovations to American industry, including tech for lasers, integrated circuits, fiber optics, stealth planes, and night-vision goggles — also Kevlar, which was, according to Corso, inspired by the “cross-stitched supertenacity fibers” on the surface of the downed saucer. “The seeds for the development of all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell,” he wrote.
Corso’s book became a New York Times best seller. Reviews were mixed. The Baltimore Sun called it “disturbing.” The Financial Post’s review was titled “Book Reads Like Unidentified Lying Object.”
“We absolutely stand by the book,” said the director of publicity at Pocket Books. “It’s a memoir.”
This has all happened before: It’s the latest instance of what Marina Koren, a science writer for The Atlantic, calls the “UFO-mania cycle.” Before Grusch, there were military men like Robert Salas, who published a book a decade ago in which he said that one night in the 1960s a space alien floated him out of his bedroom window and inserted a needle into his groin. And before Salas, there was Colonel Philip J. Corso, a retired Pentagon insider, who in 1997 published a memoir, The Day After Roswell, in which he claimed that in July 1947 he had opened a small shipping crate in a veterinary building in Fort Riley, Kansas, and found a dead space alien inside, submerged in a viscous blue liquid. “It was a four-foot human-shaped figure,” Corso wrote, “with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands — I didn’t see a thumb — thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin.”
In the 1950s, Corso was an intelligence operative and counterpropagandist in Washington, and later he began working for President Eisenhower’s National Security Council. The United States was fighting a two-front war, Corso wrote — against Communists on the one hand and space creatures on the other. Earth, he said, was “under some form of probing attack by one or more alien cultures who were testing both our ability and resolve to defend ourselves.”
The flights of Eisenhower’s U-2 spy plane over Soviet Russia had an undisclosed secondary purpose, Corso believed. Not only did they identify missile sites and bombing targets; they also carried on the search for extraterrestrial crash sites behind enemy lines: “We also wanted to see whether the Soviets were harvesting any of the alien aircraft technology for themselves.”
In 1961, Corso was put in charge of the foreign-technology desk at the Pentagon, where (so he said) he was asked to “exploit” the secret Roswell files and alien remains, including autopsy reports and crash debris. Corso said his team farmed out various reverse-engineered extraterrestrial innovations to American industry, including tech for lasers, integrated circuits, fiber optics, stealth planes, and night-vision goggles — also Kevlar, which was, according to Corso, inspired by the “cross-stitched supertenacity fibers” on the surface of the downed saucer. “The seeds for the development of all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell,” he wrote.
Corso’s book became a New York Times best seller. Reviews were mixed. The Baltimore Sun called it “disturbing.” The Financial Post’s review was titled “Book Reads Like Unidentified Lying Object.”
“We absolutely stand by the book,” said the director of publicity at Pocket Books. “It’s a memoir.”
*
On the same day Arnold saw saucers, a prospector in the Cascades, Fred Johnson, looked up to see five or six discs about a thousand feet above him. He estimated they were 30 feet in diameter. They were silent, and they made his compass needle wiggle wildly, he said.
Another same-day report came in from Richland, Washington, 125 miles east of Mount Rainier and very close to the enormous Hanford plant, which was at that time going full blast turning uranium into plutonium to make atomic bombs. A Richland resident named Leo Bernier said he’d seen several discs or saucers heading west very fast, probably just before Arnold saw them. “I believe it may be a visitor from another planet, more developed than ours,” Bernier said.
Then came the “July 4 deluge” reported by the Los Angeles Times: “Two hundred persons in one group and 60 in another saw them in Idaho; hundreds saw them in Oregon, Washington, and other states throughout the West.” A group of policemen in Portland, Oregon, noticed several discs that they said looked like “chromium hubcaps”; they “wobbled, disappeared, and reappeared.” A United Airlines pilot and co-pilot, on their way from Boise to Seattle, had a surprise. “Brother, you could have knocked me over with a feather when about eight minutes after takeoff, at exactly 7,100 feet over Emmett, Idaho, we saw not one but nine of them,” said pilot Emil Smith. They were “evenly spaced in a line.”
Smith had been a commercial pilot for years. The story he and his co-pilot told, said the Associated Press, “is the first confirmation by experienced, highly trained airmen of flying discs which have been reported over the northwest for the past two weeks.”
“Lots of people are worried to heck about the things,” said a military PR man in Sacramento. “But there’s nothing to get excited about. If there were anything to them, the Army would have notified us.”
Something unusual was going on, that’s clear. And the reports had elements in common: roundish wobbly objects, shiny, grouped together, connected, tethered.
BALLOONS
What were these people looking at?
I’m going to have to say it, and I’m sorry because I know UFO people roll their eyes at the word balloons. But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, “rockoons” that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons — are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange.
It began after the Second World War, when Soviet scientists dropped hints that they were on the verge of world-changing discoveries in the stratosphere that had to do with the untapped power of cosmic rays. A team led by Artem Alikhanian had been working at a new high-altitude research laboratory near Mount Aragats in Soviet Armenia, and they’d been sending up research balloons to fish for new cosmic particles, one of which, the “varitron,” was heavier than all others.
I’m going to have to say it, and I’m sorry because I know UFO people roll their eyes at the word balloons. But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, “rockoons” that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons — are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange.
It began after the Second World War, when Soviet scientists dropped hints that they were on the verge of world-changing discoveries in the stratosphere that had to do with the untapped power of cosmic rays. A team led by Artem Alikhanian had been working at a new high-altitude research laboratory near Mount Aragats in Soviet Armenia, and they’d been sending up research balloons to fish for new cosmic particles, one of which, the “varitron,” was heavier than all others.
In May 1946, Piotr Kapitsa, physicist and founder of the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow, told startled reporters that bombs that harnessed the power of the new particles “could cause devastation several times greater than that of the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima, Japan.” Gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote about the threat in September 1946: “Reason Russians so cocky lately is they allegedly have Cosmic Ray Bomb.”
The U.S. government quickly stepped up funding for cosmic-ray research, hoping to learn more about whatever the Russians might have found. (The varitron was eventually determined not to exist.) At New York University, there was a physicist and balloon wrangler named Serge Korff who went all over the country helping scientists rig up enormous balloon trains — free-floating chains of weather balloons hundreds of feet long — in order to carry heavier payloads higher. These were composed of ten, 15, 20, even 30 large neoprene weather balloons.
The problem was that sometimes the balloon trains, longer than football fields when airborne, went missing, and they were disturbing looking. Out of scale, silent and spectral — especially after dark when they glowed, still sunlit, in the stratospheric sky — these apparitions distressed countless people. “New Jersey residents who saw 28 ‘flying saucers’ linked together in a block-long aerial snake dance today were reassured by Princeton scientists that it was merely a cosmic ray experiment,” said the Camden Courier-Post in July 1947. “The scientists said they hoped someone would see the balloon chain descend so they could recover their cosmic ray equipment.”
On top of the surge of cosmic-ray research, the Air Force, early in 1947, funded a related program at NYU, the Constant Altitude Balloon Project, code-named Mogul, which aimed to listen for a nuclear explosion in the USSR so that American strategists would know right away when the Soviets had the atomic bomb. A young engineer, Charles B. Moore, launched a number of Mogul flights using a train of neoprene balloons to lift a low-frequency microphone high into the upper atmosphere. After some preliminary experiments on the East Coast, he and his team soon relocated to Holloman Air Force Base at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
To the northeast, not far from Roswell, something crashed on a sheep ranch in June 1947. W. W. “Mac” Brazel, who found the wreckage, didn’t know what it was. “He described his find as consisting of large numbers of pieces of paper covered with a foil-like substance and pieced together with small sticks,” reported the Associated Press. “Scattered with the materials over an area about 200 yards across were pieces of gray rubber.” For his part, Brazel recalled, “At first I thought it was a kite, but we couldn’t put it together like any kite I ever saw.”
What Brazel didn’t know, because it was a secret, was that he’d found one of Moore’s Project Mogul balloon trains. The pieces of gray rubber were fragments of neoprene balloons that had darkened and hardened in the sun. The item that looked like a kite was a foil-covered radar reflector of a somewhat unusual type; it was faceted so it would work in all directions, and it looked shiny and a bit starlike. It allowed the balloon launchers to track their experiment, to a degree. It was made of balsa wood.
After Brazel gathered up some of the sunbaked neoprene scraps and the balsa sticks and the foil-and-paper covering, he went into town to see the sheriff, who got in touch with someone at the Roswell air base. Three intelligence officers visited the crash site, and one of them, Jesse Marcel, told a reporter the debris was from a flying saucer. In the ’70s, Marcel became a UFO celebrity. The records of Project Mogul weren’t made public until the ’90s, so there was plenty of time for a lush Roswellian mythology to germinate and ripen.
Toward the end of 1947, Moore and a rival balloon engineer, Otto Winzen, left neoprene behind. They began making enormous research balloons out of newer materials — first Pliofilm, used to make shower curtains, then sheets of ultralight polyethylene plastic, used to bag carrots at the grocery store — sewn together on long tables at a factory run by General Mills, the cereal company, in Minneapolis. In October, a General Mills Pliofilm balloon, 70 feet wide and 100 feet high, caused a mass flying-saucer panic.
“City residents flooded telephone switchboards at the Minneapolis Tribune, weather bureau, police department, and radio stations with inquiries about a strange light moving slowly across the sky,” said the newspaper. “Police reported the calls reached a frantic state when the sun went below the horizon.” As darkness grew, the orb turned red, then purple. The Air Force scrambled up a plane to investigate, but the glowing thing, whatever it was, was too high to reach. Eventually, Winzen explained that it was one of his General Mills balloons: “Its great visibility was due to the reflective powers of its Pliofilm shell, which expanded to many times its ground size as it reached its great height.”
Winzen soon left General Mills and formed his own balloon company, Winzen Research, which manufactured plastic balloons as tall as 20-story buildings. Sometime around 1950, Moore took Winzen’s place as head of aeronautical research and development at the cereal company. “I’m very proud we began pushing them for polyethylene balloons,” Moore said. As these “Skyhook” balloons got bigger, they floated everywhere, sometimes thousands of miles away, sometimes across oceans, and wherever they went, people saw flying saucers.
So successful were the new balloons that by the mid-1950s, General Mills, flooded with military- and CIA-funded contracts, built a balloon factory in St. Paul twice as big as the old one. Nearly 400 people worked there, making 6,000 gigantic balloons and half a million smaller ones per year. During his tenure at General Mills, Moore worked on Project Ultimate, which launched flocks of pillow balloons filled with anti-Communist propaganda flyers from West Germany into Czechoslovakia, treating the people below to “a siege of flying-saucer heebie-jeebies,” according to columnist Drew Pearson. Moore also worked on the CIA’s Project Gopher, a plan to loft heavy unmanned cameras over the Soviet Union; they were first tested over the U.S. using the cover story that they were part of something called Project Moby Dick, which ostensibly studied wind currents and weather patterns at high altitudes.
And Moore consulted on an insane plan to destroy the Soviet wheat crop, called Operation Flying Cloud. The idea was to fill 80-pound gondolas with a mixture of turkey feathers and spores of wheat stem rust — a fast-spreading fungal disease — and then stealthily float this agent over enemy lands when the wind was right.
This biological weapon, known as the E-77 balloon bomb, had as its primary target the wheat fields of Ukraine. “The anti-crop program is aimed at the bread basket of the Soviet Union,” said an Air Force memo dated December 15, 1951. By March 1953, the CIA, using Project Moby Dick as cover, had set up three balloon-testing and training outposts on the West Coast — two in California and one in Oregon — plus a site in Missouri and one at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. According to another declassified Air Force memo (I found it in the National Archives), 2,400 test-balloon flights crisscrossed the U.S. in the early ’50s in preparation for the massive biological-warfare attacks planned by the Pentagon for World War III. “On the surface, it appears that the balloon delivery system is feasible,” the memo read.
The Associated Press issued a news bulletin in August 1953 that was published on the front pages of some newspapers: Project Moby Dick’s “whale like bags,” the article said, “have often been mistaken for flying saucers.” Because it was hard to judge the speed of shiny objects at high altitudes, “the balloons sometimes seem to be racing at tremendous rates, whereas they actually are moving at 60 miles per hour or less.”
The crop-disease balloon bomb was never used — or was it? “Hungary, once the granary of Central Europe, reports a wheat crop 40 percent below expectations,” the Associated Press reported in July 1953. Refugees reportedly claimed “thousands of families in Hungary recently were without substantial food for days.” In 1956, half of Ukraine’s wheat crop failed, according to the Associated Press, “a failure which the Russians have been concealing from the world.” Perhaps it was just bad weather.
The effect on the U.S. of all this Cold War balloonery is pretty obvious. The Air Force, the Navy, and the CIA seeded the sky with helium ghosts and made us crazy. The country was, and is, suffering from a paranormalization of the plastic bag.
And then, in 1955, just as some of the military balloon programs were being scaled back, another secret source of confusion appeared in the sky: the CIA’s Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Saucer sightings, especially from pilots, soared again. “High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects,” according to a paper written by two CIA historians.
CHIMPS IN BALLOONS
Were experiments performed, I was curious to know, on monkeys or chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico?
Turns out the answer is yes, there were. There was a whole colony of experimental chimps at Holloman. Monkeys went up in balloons and in V-2 rockets. Many of them died. Chimpanzees were strapped into a rocket sled and abruptly decelerated; they were spun, tumbled, ejected from their seats, subjected to wind blasts, and slingshotted in the “bopper.” They died, they were autopsied, or they lived but suffered injuries and were “sacrificed” and autopsied.
In August 1958, the Air Force announced that a chimpanzee had survived a wind-blast test at a speed of 1,400 miles an hour. It was the fourth chimp it had used in this extreme set of tests. “The other three died afterward because the suits they wore blew apart,” wrote the project’s lead researcher. This one, however, survived because it wore a “suit of Dacron sailcloth.” (The AP article said the chimp was anesthetized.) Is Dacron sailcloth the super-advanced tight-fitting mesh that some witnesses claimed the aliens wore?
Late in November, I reached Loeb, Harvard’s avid alien spotter, and asked him what he thought about Grusch’s testimony. He wasn’t impressed. “My issue is that he did not witness the materials he was talking about,” Loeb said. “To me, that doesn’t count as evidence. It’s just hearing people tell him about something he didn’t see himself.” Loeb also doubts that there are any alien bodies in government custody or any alien “biologics,” whatever they are. “Biology cannot survive the journey across interstellar distances,” he said. “I would be very skeptical about biology.”
Loeb does, however, agree with Grusch and other military folk that some reports of UFOs are probably real, and he has volunteered to help the Pentagon identify possible threats. He and his students have begun scanning the skies of Massachusetts around the clock with a network of advanced “multispectral” imaging systems to try to get good footage of any anomalies that may appear, using artificial intelligence to weed out the drones and the birds and the satellites — and the balloons.
The U.S. government quickly stepped up funding for cosmic-ray research, hoping to learn more about whatever the Russians might have found. (The varitron was eventually determined not to exist.) At New York University, there was a physicist and balloon wrangler named Serge Korff who went all over the country helping scientists rig up enormous balloon trains — free-floating chains of weather balloons hundreds of feet long — in order to carry heavier payloads higher. These were composed of ten, 15, 20, even 30 large neoprene weather balloons.
The problem was that sometimes the balloon trains, longer than football fields when airborne, went missing, and they were disturbing looking. Out of scale, silent and spectral — especially after dark when they glowed, still sunlit, in the stratospheric sky — these apparitions distressed countless people. “New Jersey residents who saw 28 ‘flying saucers’ linked together in a block-long aerial snake dance today were reassured by Princeton scientists that it was merely a cosmic ray experiment,” said the Camden Courier-Post in July 1947. “The scientists said they hoped someone would see the balloon chain descend so they could recover their cosmic ray equipment.”
On top of the surge of cosmic-ray research, the Air Force, early in 1947, funded a related program at NYU, the Constant Altitude Balloon Project, code-named Mogul, which aimed to listen for a nuclear explosion in the USSR so that American strategists would know right away when the Soviets had the atomic bomb. A young engineer, Charles B. Moore, launched a number of Mogul flights using a train of neoprene balloons to lift a low-frequency microphone high into the upper atmosphere. After some preliminary experiments on the East Coast, he and his team soon relocated to Holloman Air Force Base at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
To the northeast, not far from Roswell, something crashed on a sheep ranch in June 1947. W. W. “Mac” Brazel, who found the wreckage, didn’t know what it was. “He described his find as consisting of large numbers of pieces of paper covered with a foil-like substance and pieced together with small sticks,” reported the Associated Press. “Scattered with the materials over an area about 200 yards across were pieces of gray rubber.” For his part, Brazel recalled, “At first I thought it was a kite, but we couldn’t put it together like any kite I ever saw.”
What Brazel didn’t know, because it was a secret, was that he’d found one of Moore’s Project Mogul balloon trains. The pieces of gray rubber were fragments of neoprene balloons that had darkened and hardened in the sun. The item that looked like a kite was a foil-covered radar reflector of a somewhat unusual type; it was faceted so it would work in all directions, and it looked shiny and a bit starlike. It allowed the balloon launchers to track their experiment, to a degree. It was made of balsa wood.
After Brazel gathered up some of the sunbaked neoprene scraps and the balsa sticks and the foil-and-paper covering, he went into town to see the sheriff, who got in touch with someone at the Roswell air base. Three intelligence officers visited the crash site, and one of them, Jesse Marcel, told a reporter the debris was from a flying saucer. In the ’70s, Marcel became a UFO celebrity. The records of Project Mogul weren’t made public until the ’90s, so there was plenty of time for a lush Roswellian mythology to germinate and ripen.
Toward the end of 1947, Moore and a rival balloon engineer, Otto Winzen, left neoprene behind. They began making enormous research balloons out of newer materials — first Pliofilm, used to make shower curtains, then sheets of ultralight polyethylene plastic, used to bag carrots at the grocery store — sewn together on long tables at a factory run by General Mills, the cereal company, in Minneapolis. In October, a General Mills Pliofilm balloon, 70 feet wide and 100 feet high, caused a mass flying-saucer panic.
“City residents flooded telephone switchboards at the Minneapolis Tribune, weather bureau, police department, and radio stations with inquiries about a strange light moving slowly across the sky,” said the newspaper. “Police reported the calls reached a frantic state when the sun went below the horizon.” As darkness grew, the orb turned red, then purple. The Air Force scrambled up a plane to investigate, but the glowing thing, whatever it was, was too high to reach. Eventually, Winzen explained that it was one of his General Mills balloons: “Its great visibility was due to the reflective powers of its Pliofilm shell, which expanded to many times its ground size as it reached its great height.”
Winzen soon left General Mills and formed his own balloon company, Winzen Research, which manufactured plastic balloons as tall as 20-story buildings. Sometime around 1950, Moore took Winzen’s place as head of aeronautical research and development at the cereal company. “I’m very proud we began pushing them for polyethylene balloons,” Moore said. As these “Skyhook” balloons got bigger, they floated everywhere, sometimes thousands of miles away, sometimes across oceans, and wherever they went, people saw flying saucers.
So successful were the new balloons that by the mid-1950s, General Mills, flooded with military- and CIA-funded contracts, built a balloon factory in St. Paul twice as big as the old one. Nearly 400 people worked there, making 6,000 gigantic balloons and half a million smaller ones per year. During his tenure at General Mills, Moore worked on Project Ultimate, which launched flocks of pillow balloons filled with anti-Communist propaganda flyers from West Germany into Czechoslovakia, treating the people below to “a siege of flying-saucer heebie-jeebies,” according to columnist Drew Pearson. Moore also worked on the CIA’s Project Gopher, a plan to loft heavy unmanned cameras over the Soviet Union; they were first tested over the U.S. using the cover story that they were part of something called Project Moby Dick, which ostensibly studied wind currents and weather patterns at high altitudes.
And Moore consulted on an insane plan to destroy the Soviet wheat crop, called Operation Flying Cloud. The idea was to fill 80-pound gondolas with a mixture of turkey feathers and spores of wheat stem rust — a fast-spreading fungal disease — and then stealthily float this agent over enemy lands when the wind was right.
This biological weapon, known as the E-77 balloon bomb, had as its primary target the wheat fields of Ukraine. “The anti-crop program is aimed at the bread basket of the Soviet Union,” said an Air Force memo dated December 15, 1951. By March 1953, the CIA, using Project Moby Dick as cover, had set up three balloon-testing and training outposts on the West Coast — two in California and one in Oregon — plus a site in Missouri and one at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. According to another declassified Air Force memo (I found it in the National Archives), 2,400 test-balloon flights crisscrossed the U.S. in the early ’50s in preparation for the massive biological-warfare attacks planned by the Pentagon for World War III. “On the surface, it appears that the balloon delivery system is feasible,” the memo read.
The Associated Press issued a news bulletin in August 1953 that was published on the front pages of some newspapers: Project Moby Dick’s “whale like bags,” the article said, “have often been mistaken for flying saucers.” Because it was hard to judge the speed of shiny objects at high altitudes, “the balloons sometimes seem to be racing at tremendous rates, whereas they actually are moving at 60 miles per hour or less.”
The crop-disease balloon bomb was never used — or was it? “Hungary, once the granary of Central Europe, reports a wheat crop 40 percent below expectations,” the Associated Press reported in July 1953. Refugees reportedly claimed “thousands of families in Hungary recently were without substantial food for days.” In 1956, half of Ukraine’s wheat crop failed, according to the Associated Press, “a failure which the Russians have been concealing from the world.” Perhaps it was just bad weather.
The effect on the U.S. of all this Cold War balloonery is pretty obvious. The Air Force, the Navy, and the CIA seeded the sky with helium ghosts and made us crazy. The country was, and is, suffering from a paranormalization of the plastic bag.
And then, in 1955, just as some of the military balloon programs were being scaled back, another secret source of confusion appeared in the sky: the CIA’s Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Saucer sightings, especially from pilots, soared again. “High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects,” according to a paper written by two CIA historians.
CHIMPS IN BALLOONS
Were experiments performed, I was curious to know, on monkeys or chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico?
Turns out the answer is yes, there were. There was a whole colony of experimental chimps at Holloman. Monkeys went up in balloons and in V-2 rockets. Many of them died. Chimpanzees were strapped into a rocket sled and abruptly decelerated; they were spun, tumbled, ejected from their seats, subjected to wind blasts, and slingshotted in the “bopper.” They died, they were autopsied, or they lived but suffered injuries and were “sacrificed” and autopsied.
In August 1958, the Air Force announced that a chimpanzee had survived a wind-blast test at a speed of 1,400 miles an hour. It was the fourth chimp it had used in this extreme set of tests. “The other three died afterward because the suits they wore blew apart,” wrote the project’s lead researcher. This one, however, survived because it wore a “suit of Dacron sailcloth.” (The AP article said the chimp was anesthetized.) Is Dacron sailcloth the super-advanced tight-fitting mesh that some witnesses claimed the aliens wore?
Late in November, I reached Loeb, Harvard’s avid alien spotter, and asked him what he thought about Grusch’s testimony. He wasn’t impressed. “My issue is that he did not witness the materials he was talking about,” Loeb said. “To me, that doesn’t count as evidence. It’s just hearing people tell him about something he didn’t see himself.” Loeb also doubts that there are any alien bodies in government custody or any alien “biologics,” whatever they are. “Biology cannot survive the journey across interstellar distances,” he said. “I would be very skeptical about biology.”
Loeb does, however, agree with Grusch and other military folk that some reports of UFOs are probably real, and he has volunteered to help the Pentagon identify possible threats. He and his students have begun scanning the skies of Massachusetts around the clock with a network of advanced “multispectral” imaging systems to try to get good footage of any anomalies that may appear, using artificial intelligence to weed out the drones and the birds and the satellites — and the balloons.
And he continues to hold on to the possibility that he and his collaborators might already have discovered evidence of a nonhuman space-voyaging vehicle that came our way from outside the solar system only to burn up in our atmosphere. In a preprint released in August 2023, he writes that five of the 57 tiny oceanic spherules that he collected and analyzed, with their unique pattern of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”
*
Other scientists, specialists in the geology of meteors and related matters, disagree. Christian Koeberl, an impact expert and cosmochemist at the University of Vienna, wrote me that Loeb’s spherule research is “very superficial.” There is no evidence, Koeberl said, that the spherules Loeb found came from the 2014 meteoric fireball: “It is pure speculation.” Patricio A. Gallardo, a cosmological physicist at the University of Chicago, has published a paper proposing that Loeb’s allegedly “weird” spherules are not weird at all — that they are, in fact, common products of coal-fired power plants.
*
Other scientists, specialists in the geology of meteors and related matters, disagree. Christian Koeberl, an impact expert and cosmochemist at the University of Vienna, wrote me that Loeb’s spherule research is “very superficial.” There is no evidence, Koeberl said, that the spherules Loeb found came from the 2014 meteoric fireball: “It is pure speculation.” Patricio A. Gallardo, a cosmological physicist at the University of Chicago, has published a paper proposing that Loeb’s allegedly “weird” spherules are not weird at all — that they are, in fact, common products of coal-fired power plants.
“Nickel, beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium concentrations are found to be consistent with expectations from coal ash from a coal chemical composition database,” he wrote. “The meteoritic origin is disfavored.” Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University who has written a point-by-point critique of Loeb’s paper, told me, “Loeb has a habit of asking interesting questions. He just already believes he has the answers to the questions he’s asking.”
Loeb strongly disputes the coal-ash explanation. The composition of these “beautiful metallic marbles,” he says, one of which holds nested spheres within it like a Matryoshka doll, shows a “pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before.” He told me that some of his critics “behave like terrorists.” Loeb’s “Westward ho!” hope, expressed in his book Interstellar, is that in the future, having reverse-engineered nonhuman technology, humanity will build “spacearks” capable of “spreading terrestrial life throughout the universe.” Sometimes, in his eagerness to come up with new theories of intergalactic visitation, he seems to be willfully self-destructing. It’s as if he’s a meteoric fireball sprinkling spherules of misplaced credulity over the seafloor.
Still, I find myself touched by the intensity of Loeb’s yearning for evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations. It’s fun to think about intelligent life evolving over billions of years on some of the millions of far-flung planets. Are space aliens really an “existential threat” to the U.S.? Should the Pentagon and paranoid politicians be involved? Is there a hidden fleet of crashed spacecraft and jars of nonhuman remains? Probably not. But we’ve got the Crab Nebula, which is intimate and crowded and empty and gorgeous all at the same time. We don’t need flying saucers to feel awe.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/leslie-kean-ufo-sightings-aliens.html?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
williamskevin090:
Then why are there so many references to beings from the sky and many pieces of ancient art work that depicts objects in the sky that people on the ground saw? The idea that some imaginary dude is watching over 8 billion people is ridiculous: show me the proof of your belief exists. This is why people are moving away from religion in droves, because it's BS plain and simple. If there is this person, he is doing a really lousy job at protecting anyone let alone children. Some book says there is a person, really a book that's been rewritten how many times? Religious beliefs are just that beliefs, no proof ever. You apparently don't know much about any of this otherwise you could look in your religious texts and see how many ancients claim knowledge and information came from the sky, many references in many cultures for thousands of years have made these claims and painted portraits showing what they saw. Your BS religion-based thought is just that, BS.
patrickr:
The question of whether we've been visited by intelligent life of extraterrestrial origin has become almost a theological dispute. There are the 'absolutely nots', like the author of this piece, and there are the 'of course we have, how can you deny it?' And as in theological disputes, there is plentiful scorn and ridicule to heap on the other side. Perhaps an agnostic position would be the most honest: There is arguably some evidence for visitation, it's often ambiguous and disputed and perhaps suppressed, there is no consensus about the truth, and there is much we don't know. I'm personally much more comfortable with mystery and admitted ignorance than I am with absolute declarations of 'truth' that are more a matter of faith than of indisputable proof.
Loeb strongly disputes the coal-ash explanation. The composition of these “beautiful metallic marbles,” he says, one of which holds nested spheres within it like a Matryoshka doll, shows a “pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before.” He told me that some of his critics “behave like terrorists.” Loeb’s “Westward ho!” hope, expressed in his book Interstellar, is that in the future, having reverse-engineered nonhuman technology, humanity will build “spacearks” capable of “spreading terrestrial life throughout the universe.” Sometimes, in his eagerness to come up with new theories of intergalactic visitation, he seems to be willfully self-destructing. It’s as if he’s a meteoric fireball sprinkling spherules of misplaced credulity over the seafloor.
Still, I find myself touched by the intensity of Loeb’s yearning for evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations. It’s fun to think about intelligent life evolving over billions of years on some of the millions of far-flung planets. Are space aliens really an “existential threat” to the U.S.? Should the Pentagon and paranoid politicians be involved? Is there a hidden fleet of crashed spacecraft and jars of nonhuman remains? Probably not. But we’ve got the Crab Nebula, which is intimate and crowded and empty and gorgeous all at the same time. We don’t need flying saucers to feel awe.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/leslie-kean-ufo-sightings-aliens.html?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
williamskevin090:
Then why are there so many references to beings from the sky and many pieces of ancient art work that depicts objects in the sky that people on the ground saw? The idea that some imaginary dude is watching over 8 billion people is ridiculous: show me the proof of your belief exists. This is why people are moving away from religion in droves, because it's BS plain and simple. If there is this person, he is doing a really lousy job at protecting anyone let alone children. Some book says there is a person, really a book that's been rewritten how many times? Religious beliefs are just that beliefs, no proof ever. You apparently don't know much about any of this otherwise you could look in your religious texts and see how many ancients claim knowledge and information came from the sky, many references in many cultures for thousands of years have made these claims and painted portraits showing what they saw. Your BS religion-based thought is just that, BS.
patrickr:
The question of whether we've been visited by intelligent life of extraterrestrial origin has become almost a theological dispute. There are the 'absolutely nots', like the author of this piece, and there are the 'of course we have, how can you deny it?' And as in theological disputes, there is plentiful scorn and ridicule to heap on the other side. Perhaps an agnostic position would be the most honest: There is arguably some evidence for visitation, it's often ambiguous and disputed and perhaps suppressed, there is no consensus about the truth, and there is much we don't know. I'm personally much more comfortable with mystery and admitted ignorance than I am with absolute declarations of 'truth' that are more a matter of faith than of indisputable proof.
Oriana:
I find the explanation based on balloons (weather balloons or military balloons) to be quite convincing. However, this is my guess about the real aliens (who make us serve them):
A SYNTHETIC ANTIBIOTIC FOUND HIGHLY EFFECTIVE AGAINST DRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA
A new antibiotic created by Harvard researchers overcomes antimicrobial resistance mechanisms that have rendered many modern drugs ineffective and are driving a global public health crisis.
A team led by Andrew Myers, Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, reports in Science that their synthetic compound, cresomycin, kills many strains of drug-resistant bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
“While we don’t yet know whether cresomycin and drugs like it are safe and effective in humans, our results show significantly improved inhibitory activity against a long list of pathogenic bacterial strains that kill more than a million people every year, compared with clinically approved antibiotics,” Myers said.
The new molecule demonstrates an improved ability to bind to bacterial ribosomes, which are biomolecular machines that control protein synthesis. Disrupting ribosomal function is a hallmark of many existing antibiotics, but some bacteria have evolved shielding mechanisms that prevent legacy drugs from working.
Cresomycin is one of several promising compounds that Myers’ team has developed, with the goal of helping win the war against superbugs. They’ll continue advancing these compounds through preclinical profiling studies, supported by a $1.2 million grant from Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X). A Boston University-based global nonprofit partnership, CARB-X is dedicated to supporting early-stage antibacterial research and development.
The Harvard team’s new molecule draws inspiration from the chemical structures of lincosamides, a class of antibiotics that includes the commonly prescribed clindamycin. Like many antibiotics, clindamycin is made via semisynthesis, in which complex products isolated from nature are modified directly for drug applications. The new Harvard compound, however, is fully synthetic and features chemical modifications that cannot be accessed through existing means.
“The bacterial ribosome is nature’s preferred target for antibacterial agents, and these agents are the source of inspiration for our program,” said co-author Ben Tresco, a Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student. “By leveraging the power of organic synthesis, we are limited almost only by our imagination when designing new antibiotics.”
Bacteria can develop resistance to ribosome-targeting antibiotic drugs by expressing genes that produce enzymes called ribosomal RNA methyltransferases. These enzymes box out the drug components that are designed to latch onto and disrupt the ribosome, ultimately blocking the drug’s activity.
To get around this problem, Myers and team engineered their compound into a rigidified shape that closely resembles its binding target, giving it a stronger grip on the ribosome. The researchers call their drug “pre-organized” for ribosomal binding because it doesn’t need to expend as much energy conforming to its target as existing drugs must do.
The researchers arrived at cresomycin using what they call component-based synthesis, a method pioneered by the Myers lab that involves building large molecular components of equal complexity and bringing them together at late stages – like pre-building sections of a complicated LEGO set before assembling them. This modular, completely synthetic system allows them to make and test not just one, but hundreds of target molecules, greatly speeding up the drug discovery process.
The stakes are clear. “Antibiotics form the foundation on which modern medicine is built,” said co-author and graduate student Kelvin Wu. “Without antibiotics, many cutting-edge medical procedures like surgeries, cancer treatments, and organ transplants, cannot be done.”
Myers’ component-based synthesis research received early support from Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, part of the Office of Technology Development, which awarded funding to Myers’ lab in 2013 to enable testing of drug compounds. The Office of Technology Development protected the Myers Research Group’s innovations and, along with the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, will support the research team for the duration of the CARB-X agreement. The newly awarded CARB-X funding allows the researchers to continue profiling and optimizing drug leads.
“Funding and other support from groups like the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and CARB-X are essential for the discovery and development of new antibiotics,” said Curtis Keith, the Harvard accelerator’s chief scientific officer. “These innovations from the Myers Research Group have the potential to yield new drugs that will one day meet a global health need.”
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VIRAL INFECTIONS FOUND TO INCREASE ALZHEIMER’S RISK
~ With rates of Alzheimer's disease expected to rise, and still no cure for this type of dementia, finding new ways to treat this disease has been at the forefront of research over the past few years.
Adding to this research is a new study from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The findings recently published in the journal Neuron, found that immune cells in the blood of people with Alzheimer’s disease are epigenetically altered.
This alteration, the researchers say, is potentially caused by a previous viral infection, environmental pollutants, or other lifestyle factors.
The research revealed several genes that may be therapeutic targets for manipulating the body’s peripheral immune system.
WHAT IS THE PERIPHERAL IMMUNE SYSTEM?
The body’s immune system can be considered as comprising two parts — the central immune system and the peripheral immune system, a term used to describe immune responses that happen outside the brain.
The peripheral immune system includes circulating white blood cells that detect antigens, such as bacteria or viruses, when they enter the body. This part of the immune system acts as the first wave of attack against any foreign substance.
According to Dr. David Gate, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and senior and corresponding author on this study, there is mounting evidence that the peripheral immune system plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease.
“In recent years, we have shown that immune cells of the cerebrospinal fluid — a fluid that flows in and around the brain — are clonally expanded and activated,” Dr. Gate told Medical News Today. “This means that they have previously responded to some type of immune stimulus.”
Previous research has connected the peripheral immune system to neurodegenerative diseases, and studies have shown an association between types of peripheral immune cells and cognition, brain structure, and Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
As epigenetics only provides a snapshot into the past, Dr. Gate said we can only speculate on what might have caused these discovered epigenetic changes.
“However, in the past decade, we have grown to appreciate the fact that viral infections are a risk factor for the development of dementias like Alzheimer’s disease,” he continued.
“While our data do not provide evidence that epigenetic changes in Alzheimer’s disease patients’ immune systems were caused by viral infections, this is certainly a tantalizing possibility. In this scenario, viral infections promote inflammatory responses over the course of one’s life that promote Alzheimer’s disease risk via mechanisms that we do not yet understand,” suggested Dr. Gate.
“Our ultimate goal is to design immune cell therapies for Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Gate added. “Using information from this study, we can potentially target the genes that harbor epigenetic changes.”
For this study, Dr. Gate said the team wanted to find out whether there might be epigenetic changes within the immune system of Alzheimer’s disease patients that might promote the trafficking of these changes to the cerebrospinal fluid and the brain.
“Epigenetics essentially reflects changes to our DNA that have occurred in the past,” he explained. “There are many influences on epigenetics, such as the environment, pollutants, viral infections, lifestyle factors, and behaviors. It is possible that these influences work in concert, or in isolation, to promote inflammation that puts one at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.”
Dr. Gate and his team examined immune cells from peripheral blood samples taken from people with Alzheimer’s disease. When compared to healthy controls, researchers found that every immune cell type in the participants with Alzheimer’s disease had epigenetic changes indicated by open chromatin.
Additionally, scientists looked for which genes were more open in the immune cells and found more exposure in the protein CXCR3 on T cells.
Epigenetic changes alter the way our genes are translated into proteins,” Dr. Gate explained. “In this study, we observed an epigenetic change in a gene that encodes the protein CXCR3. CXCR3 is a signal receptor on the surface of immune cells called T cells. This receptor essentially serves as an antenna that we believe allows them to traffic signals put out by the Alzheimer’s brain.”
Researchers also found epigenetic changes in a type of white blood cell called monocytes.
“Monocytes are very important to immune defense. They secrete inflammatory proteins that protect your body in the case of infection. In this study, we found that there are epigenetic changes to genes that encode these inflammatory proteins. This is significant because it could signal that Alzheimer’s disease patients have a more pronounced pro-inflammatory immune system,” Dr. Gate stated.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-viral-infections-over-a-lifetime-influence-alzheimers-risk#Implications-in-prevention-and-treatment-of-Alzheimers
ending on a childhood memory:
MY GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGHTER
One day in the street my grandmother
stops before another grandmother.
Both stammer: “It’s you —
you — in Auschwitz — ”
Turning to me: “She and I shared
the same blanket. Every night
she said, ‘You’ve got more than I’
and pulled, and I pulled back –
and so we’d tug across the bunk — ”
and the two grandmothers laugh.
In the middle of the sidewalk,
in old women’s dusk,
widows’ browns and grays,
they are laughing like two schoolgirls.
Tears rain down the cracked
winter of their cheeks.
On Piotrkowska Avenue,
in the busiest street,
they are tugging that thin blanket.
They are pulling back.
~ Oriana
(P.S. this is a modern photo of Piotrkowska Street. It used to be crowded, full of pedestrians as well as vehicular traffic)
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