source:CNN
Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on "formidable evidence" asserting his innocence and "horrendous violations" of his rights, defense attorneys said in federal court papers filed this week.
In a U.S. District Court brief, Sirhan's lawyers also say that an expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan's revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy.
The attorneys further assert that Sirhan was hypno-programmed to be a diversion for the real assassin and allege that Sirhan would be easily blamed for the assassination because he is an Arab. Sirhan, 67, is a Christian Palestinian born in Jerusalem whose parents brought him and his siblings to America in the 1950s.
Sirhan "was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed," court papers said....
Court papers filed by Sirhan's attorneys say the state "refuses to acknowledge that hypno programming/mind control is not fiction but reality and has been used for years by the U.S. military, Central Intelligence Agency and other covert organizations.
"Though the practices of hypno programming/mind control is hardly new, the public has been shielded from the darker side of the practice. The average person is unaware that hypnosis can and is used to induct antisocial conduct in humans," Sirhan's court filings say. more...
Monday, November 28, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Understanding the US Torture State
source:Antiwar.com
by Anthony Gregory, October 28, 2011
When I was a child in Reagan’s America, a common theme in Cold War rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained them without cause, extracted phony confessions through cruel violence, did the unspeakable to detainees who were helpless against the full, heartless weight of the communist state. It was torture as much as any evil that differentiated the bad guys, the commies, from the good guys, the American people and their government. However imperfect the U.S. system was, it had civilized standards rejected by the enemy.
In April 2004, the world was shocked to see photos exposing the torment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prisons, which was taken over and used by the United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Well, most of the world was shocked. Some, mostly conservative commentators, dismissed or defended the barbarity, even comparing it to frat-boy hazing. Others were disgusted but shrugged it off as the work of a few bad apples, not something that should draw judgment down on the whole of U.S. policy and the brave men and women in uniform....We have actually come to the point where the rhetoric of Reagan’s day no longer holds: American exceptionalists and conservatives no longer claim emphatically that the United States does not and never will torture, as they did before (however disingenuously). An AP poll in June 2009 found that 52 percent of Americans thought torture was justified in some situations — up from only 38 percent in 2005. In Obama’s America, torture is now normalized.
But Americans should recoil from torture absolutely, should recognize it is not an anomaly of the Bush war in Iraq but a practice with decades of U.S. precedent, should understand that responsibility for the Bush-era torture went all the way to the top, should know that domestic and international laws were unambiguously violated in the war on terrorism, should understand and oppose torture even when it’s “only” psychological or used against domestic criminal convicts, and should recognize that Obama has not put a stop to the abuse. A single book will offer a crash course in all these elements of the U.S. torture state: The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, a remarkable and multidisciplinary collection of chapters by scholars, lawyers, and journalists, all compiled by Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
by Anthony Gregory, October 28, 2011
When I was a child in Reagan’s America, a common theme in Cold War rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained them without cause, extracted phony confessions through cruel violence, did the unspeakable to detainees who were helpless against the full, heartless weight of the communist state. It was torture as much as any evil that differentiated the bad guys, the commies, from the good guys, the American people and their government. However imperfect the U.S. system was, it had civilized standards rejected by the enemy.
In April 2004, the world was shocked to see photos exposing the torment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prisons, which was taken over and used by the United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Well, most of the world was shocked. Some, mostly conservative commentators, dismissed or defended the barbarity, even comparing it to frat-boy hazing. Others were disgusted but shrugged it off as the work of a few bad apples, not something that should draw judgment down on the whole of U.S. policy and the brave men and women in uniform....We have actually come to the point where the rhetoric of Reagan’s day no longer holds: American exceptionalists and conservatives no longer claim emphatically that the United States does not and never will torture, as they did before (however disingenuously). An AP poll in June 2009 found that 52 percent of Americans thought torture was justified in some situations — up from only 38 percent in 2005. In Obama’s America, torture is now normalized.
But Americans should recoil from torture absolutely, should recognize it is not an anomaly of the Bush war in Iraq but a practice with decades of U.S. precedent, should understand that responsibility for the Bush-era torture went all the way to the top, should know that domestic and international laws were unambiguously violated in the war on terrorism, should understand and oppose torture even when it’s “only” psychological or used against domestic criminal convicts, and should recognize that Obama has not put a stop to the abuse. A single book will offer a crash course in all these elements of the U.S. torture state: The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, a remarkable and multidisciplinary collection of chapters by scholars, lawyers, and journalists, all compiled by Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
Not just Bush
It is crucial to recognize that torture is not a new policy that began with George W. Bush’s war on terrorism. Despite the Cold War rhetoric, the U.S. government has been responsible for torture for decades, particularly in Latin America. The preface to the book is written by Dianna Ortiz, a nun who was raped, burnt, beaten, and otherwise tortured in Guatemala in 1989, all under the auspices of a U.S. commander, she is sure. There is no reason to doubt her. A chapter by Bill Quigley surveys the legacy of the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S. Army installation with origins in Panama in 1946 that was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984 and renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001. “Together these schools have trained more than 60,000 members of the military from 22 Central and South American countries.”
Students were trained in “the systematic use of torture and executions to neutralize dissidents.” In 1996 the Pentagon admitted using torture training manuals in the SOA. The manuals “were based on materials used in the Vietnam War in the 1960s.”
Some of the worst graduates include Bolivian Gen. Hugo Banzer, who seized the country in a violent coup in 1971; the dictator of Guatemala, Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia, who is implicated in “5,000 political murders and up to 25,000 civilian deaths”; Panama’s famed dictator, Manuel Noriega; and “most of the Chilean military who overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.”
El Salvador was probably the scene of most of this U.S.-sponsored barbarity. American support for the death squads is the focus of Terry Lynn Karl’s chapter. The Reagan administration repeatedly defended the regime in El Salvador, despite its outright murder of moderate reformers, Jesuit priests and nuns, and other innocent men, women, and children. “On December 10, 1981, units of the Atlactl Battalion and the Third Infantry Brigade detained between 500 and 900 people in the village of El Mozote and the surrounding area, then executed them in groups, first the men, and then the women and children.” It is telling that “U.S. aid totals in the two years of greatest repression (1980–1981) were far greater than the total for the previous 33 years.” This is one great shame of both the Carter and the Reagan administrations.
Even before George W. Bush took office, what became one of his most scandalous torture programs — the outsourcing of abusive interrogation to foreign thugs, known as “extraordinary renditioning” — was already being developed. Jane Mayer tells of its fledgling beginnings in the Clinton years, when it was also used in the war on al-Qaeda, with most of the renditioned detainees handed over to Egypt, “the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel.” At the hands of Mubarak’s brutal regime, Shawki Salama Attiya claims “that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees.” The abuses only expanded under Bush, who renditioned at least dozens of terror suspects. At least some of them, such as Canadian citizen Maher Arar, tortured in Syria, appear to have been completely innocent of any terrorist-related activities.
Just as U.S.-sponsored torture didn’t begin with Bush, it didn’t end with him. The last chapter, written by Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, points out that the Obama administration has “implied that it would continue the practice of extraordinary rendition” and as of his writing Obama “is not complying with the UN Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, or other obligations under international and domestic law, as reports from the Washington Post and other reputable news organizations indicate that torture continues at various U.S. prisons oversees.” Of course, indefinite detention without charge has also continued and Obama has shielded Bush officials from legal recourse.
Psychological abuse and solitary confinement
One misconception about torture is that it has to leave a physical mark, or be physical at all. Alfred W. McCoy’s chapter, “The CIA’s Pursuit of Psychological Torture,” dispels this myth, detailing the agency’s most disturbing past in attempting to master the art of mind control. Starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s and guided by a report on Nazi experiments, chemist Henry Beecher consulted for the CIA in psychological experiments in postwar Germany. Later, “Beecher won a classified military contract to test heavy LSD doses on unwitting human subjects at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1953-4 — a clear violation of the Nuremberg medical code.” McCoy explains how severe psychological torture techniques can be and traces their propagation “among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America” and their link to the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam.
The importance of psychological torture is not lost on U.S. officials, who have in the war on terrorism cooperated with professional psychologists to hone this diabolical craft. “[Psychologists] helped to define what constitutes ‘torture’ in general terms of detainee breaking points” to help the administration find the threshold of what would “officially constitute illegal torture,” writes Stephen Soldz. The psychologists “were not just monitors of abuse.” They helped design it. U.S. troops are put through abusive conditions to “evaluate how much stress an individual could tolerate. It was these psychologists on whom the government relied, when it ‘reversed engineered’ … techniques to design ‘counterresistance techniques’ to break down detainees.” Soldz is highly critical of the American Psychological Association for what he says is complicity in this shameful collaboration between members of the profession and the torture state.
Just as physical torture is not the only kind of torture, so wartime enemies are not the only victims. Lance Tapley indicts the entire institution of solitary confinement in America’s supermax prisons as a form of torture. But is he exaggerating?
Severe pain and suffering as punishment are plainly the norm in a supermax. Even when mental suffering alone is considered — ignoring, for example, the coordinated beatings and violent subjugation of recalcitrant prisoners known as “cell extractions” — the prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners has increasingly been described by UN agencies and human-rights organizations as cruel, inhuman, degrading, or torturous.
You don’t have to take the UN’s word for it. Tapley describes compellingly a totalitarian hell for domestic prisoners. Nothing like it can be found in the world of criminal justice, especially the so-called civilized world. And what are “cell extractions”? The author describes one prisoner who endures them “up to five times a day”:
Five hollering guards wearing helmets and body armor charge into a cell. The point-man smashes a big shield into the prisoner, knocking him down. The others spray Mace into his face, push him onto the bed, and twist his arms behind his back to handcuff him, connecting the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. Then they haul him into the corridor, cut off all his clothes, and carry him screaming through the cell block while they continue to Mace him. They put him in an observation room, and bind him to a special chair. He remains there for hours, naked and cold, yelling and mumbling.
Estimates of how many American prisoners sit in supermaxes range between 36,000 and 100,000. Not all inmates are violent rapists and murderers. Many are mentally troubled. Their terrible treatment is one reason some of us were not so shocked by the photos at Abu Ghraib.
Legal violations and philosophical dilemmas
Yet there was something particularly evil about the Bush administration’s torture policies. Many thousands were detained without due process and were exposed to particularly disturbing cruelties. Up to a hundred died in detention, many tortured to death.
The chapter by Marc D. Falkoff, a lawyer for a Guantánamo inmate, humanizes such prisoners, many of whom were swept up in the war in Afghanistan, called the “worst of the worst” by American officials, and deprived of due process for years, even as the Supreme Court struck down one administration attempt after another to circumvent habeas corpus. Falkoff’s client, Adnan, appears to be an innocent victim of circumstance, deprived of the right to see the evidence against him, accused of connections with al-Qaeda, an organization he seems not to know anything about. He suffers from chronic headaches and inner ear pain, the results of a 1994 car accident. He is denied suitable food or anywhere near adequate medical attention for his many health problems. The water he is given has bugs in it. Excerpts from the proceedings and interrogations indicate a code of justice reaching Kafkaesque absurdity. After years of torturous confinement, Adnan went on a hunger strike. In response, “twice a day, soldiers force-feed Adnan a liquid nutrient by inserting a tube up his nose and into his stomach. His arms and legs are strapped to a special restraint chair during the feedings.” more...
Friday, October 21, 2011
Real-Life Inception: Army Looks to ‘Counteract Nightmares’ With Digital Dreams (edited)
source: Wired
At this phase digital dreams are promoted as a safe, comforting fantasy land just like the Magic Kingdom, which of course is quite ugly beneath the surface. In a few years the same technology will likely be openly used to torture people without leaving a mark, thereby making prosecution for war crimes much more difficult to achieve while increasing potential damages exponentially. The possibilities are nearly endless: synthetic sexual assault, drowning, suffocation and nearly anything a sick mind can dream up to torture social dissidents. Trigger search algorithms could even be used to mine the target for particularly upsetting scenarios. Of course this will all seem like paranoia unless you're aware of the U.S. military sponsored MK Ultra project and its history of destroying the minds and bodies of U.S. civilians, in no small part via the use of microchips that alter neural impulses responsible for regulating emotional well-being. Happy dreaming!
At this phase digital dreams are promoted as a safe, comforting fantasy land just like the Magic Kingdom, which of course is quite ugly beneath the surface. In a few years the same technology will likely be openly used to torture people without leaving a mark, thereby making prosecution for war crimes much more difficult to achieve while increasing potential damages exponentially. The possibilities are nearly endless: synthetic sexual assault, drowning, suffocation and nearly anything a sick mind can dream up to torture social dissidents. Trigger search algorithms could even be used to mine the target for particularly upsetting scenarios. Of course this will all seem like paranoia unless you're aware of the U.S. military sponsored MK Ultra project and its history of destroying the minds and bodies of U.S. civilians, in no small part via the use of microchips that alter neural impulses responsible for regulating emotional well-being. Happy dreaming!
A soldier tries to sleep. But he is not safe in his dreams. Jolted awake by a nightmare, the combat veteran fumbles in the dark for his 3-D glasses.
He puts them on. Around him are the faces of people whom he trusts. They fight the darkness with him. The soldier’s re-lived this scene in his head and the laboratory over and over again, until it has become reassuringly familiar. The soldier knows that his pixelated friends will take him away from these troubled dreams. When the scene is over, he takes off his goggles and looks around him. The soldier is home.
The U.S. Army wants this dream sequence to become reality. In an Army-backed experiment called “Power Dreaming,” Naval Hospital Bremerton in Washington State will help traumatized troops battle their nightmares — with soothing, digitally-made dreams crafted in virtual worlds. more...
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Update: Opus Dei involved in Roman Catholic child trafficking network*
The recent scandal in Spain involving the theft and subsequent trafficking of hundreds of babies by the Spanish Roman Catholic Church has been revealed to be linked to an adoption agency run by the secret society Opus Dei. Children were typically taken from single mothers who were sometimes threatened with exposure as adulterers if they exposed the crimes of the Church. Here is an excerpt from a news article followed by brief commentary, via El Pais. Skeptical readers can verify the involvement of Opus Dei here as well.
On the trail of Spain's stolen children
In the decade following the end of the Spanish Civil War, an unholy alliance of doctors, priests, and General Francisco Franco's secret police systematically took thousands of children from vulnerable women known to have supported the Republican cause. These women were often in prison, or their husbands had been killed or were also in jail. It was seen at the time as an effective way of inflicting a lasting punishment on those who had backed the wrong side in the war, at the same time as preventing the appearance of a new generation of "reds" by placing the children in the care of families who supported the new regime.
But over recent years, it has emerged that the practice continued beyond the war, which came to an end in 1939, and was widespread throughout the Franco era - even after the dictator died in 1975. A network of Catholic Church-run children's homes and private hospitals would take newborn infants, typically from young, impoverished single mothers, who were told that their baby had died. Estimates put the total number of children who may have been illegally adopted between 1950 and 1980 at around 300,000.
...The link that enabled the practice of taking children from their mothers - now through deception rather than by force - up to and beyond the death of Franco, was made up of a network of priests and nuns, as well as Catholic doctors, judges and notaries, many of them belonging to the highly secretive Opus Dei movement.more...
What is highly interesting here is that it reveals the extent to which Opus Dei has been involved in supporting right wing dictatorships, a history the group has repeatedly attempted to minimize, despite the fact that, in 1958, Josemaria Escriva, Opus Dei's founder, wrote a letter to General Franco announcing his congratulations and support for the regime. Not mentioned in the above article is Opus Dei's practice of recruiting members through highly developed techniques of cult mind control. Here is an excerpt from a personal testimony on the Opus Dei Awareness Network website:
"While many Catholic religious organizations now question whether corporal mortification brings a person closer to God, the lay organization Opus Dei embraces corporal mortification in their program of making modern-day martyrs. The use of the cilice (see photo), a barbed-wire chain worn around the groin for two hours each day and the disciplines (see photo), a flagellation device, is well-documented by former numerary (celibate) members. And Opus Dei’s 1950 Constitutions, whose operational and governing paragraphs are still in effect say:
“They conserve faithfully the pious custom of chastisement of the body to keep it in a state of servitude, by wearing a small cilice for at least two hours a day, taking the discipline and sleeping on the floor once a week, making adequate provision to safeguard the health.”...I found out to what extreme this philosophy is carried out when I began to have doubts about my numerary vocation after living in an Opus Dei center for two years. They assigned me a new spiritual director to get me back on track with my life-long commitment to the organization. She was the same age as me, 24. She took me on pilgrimages, and I explained to her that I wanted to leave because I wanted to get married some day. She laughed and told me that the lives of the supernumeraries were far worse and that “men are jerks in pants.” In addition to spending more time with me than our usual weekly fraternal chat, she assigned me the following spiritual reading:..The secret internal document in which Fr. Alvaro del Portillo describes an incident which happened while he and Escriva were hiding in the Madrid’s Honduran consulate in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. This testimony is recounted in Andrea Tornielli’s book on Escriva and is translated by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, ““Escriva would ask for the use of the bedroom alone when it was time for his spiritual practices. Once, however, his chief aide, Fr. Alvaro del Portillo (who would later succeed Escriva as head of Opus Dei), was sick and could not leave the room. Escriva thus told Portillo to cover his head with his blanket. Portillo described what followed: ‘Soon I began to hear the forceful blows of his discipline. I will never forget the number: there were more than a thousand terrible blows, precisely timed, and always inflicted with the same force and the same rhythm. The floor was covered with blood, but he cleaned it up before the others came in.’” more...
It is also interesting that, when most people discuss covert rule by secret societies, the focus is on the "secular humanism" of the Illuminati, with scant mention of the cult's origins in rituals of the Jesuits, a Catholic secret society whose founder also belonged to a secret society named Alumbrados(Illuminated). The Illuminati's founder, Adam Weishaupt, was himself a Jesuit and he based the rituals of the Illuminati upon those of the Jesuits. Ultimately, both right wing religious ideologies and their supposed left wing counterpart in libertinism are rooted in Gnostic sects of antiquity, and both sides have repeatedly been linked to gross abuses of power, whether through politics, industry, religion or the media. Since geopolitical centralization is by no means partisan in nature, it is vital to dig deeper to understand the philosophical undercurrent which unifies the seeming opposites in dictatorial criminal rule. For now, I will wrap things up by comparing images of the pagan sun cross with the insignia of Opus Dei and the Jesuits, an organization that has repeatedly been linked to assassinations(notice what appears to be the image of a sword in their logo. It's the first one down). The Knights of Malta, yet another Catholic secret society linked to right wing dictatorships, will have to wait for another day.
*Credit is due my East Bay reader for inspiration for this post. ;)
On the trail of Spain's stolen children
In the decade following the end of the Spanish Civil War, an unholy alliance of doctors, priests, and General Francisco Franco's secret police systematically took thousands of children from vulnerable women known to have supported the Republican cause. These women were often in prison, or their husbands had been killed or were also in jail. It was seen at the time as an effective way of inflicting a lasting punishment on those who had backed the wrong side in the war, at the same time as preventing the appearance of a new generation of "reds" by placing the children in the care of families who supported the new regime.
But over recent years, it has emerged that the practice continued beyond the war, which came to an end in 1939, and was widespread throughout the Franco era - even after the dictator died in 1975. A network of Catholic Church-run children's homes and private hospitals would take newborn infants, typically from young, impoverished single mothers, who were told that their baby had died. Estimates put the total number of children who may have been illegally adopted between 1950 and 1980 at around 300,000.
...The link that enabled the practice of taking children from their mothers - now through deception rather than by force - up to and beyond the death of Franco, was made up of a network of priests and nuns, as well as Catholic doctors, judges and notaries, many of them belonging to the highly secretive Opus Dei movement.more...
What is highly interesting here is that it reveals the extent to which Opus Dei has been involved in supporting right wing dictatorships, a history the group has repeatedly attempted to minimize, despite the fact that, in 1958, Josemaria Escriva, Opus Dei's founder, wrote a letter to General Franco announcing his congratulations and support for the regime. Not mentioned in the above article is Opus Dei's practice of recruiting members through highly developed techniques of cult mind control. Here is an excerpt from a personal testimony on the Opus Dei Awareness Network website:
"While many Catholic religious organizations now question whether corporal mortification brings a person closer to God, the lay organization Opus Dei embraces corporal mortification in their program of making modern-day martyrs. The use of the cilice (see photo), a barbed-wire chain worn around the groin for two hours each day and the disciplines (see photo), a flagellation device, is well-documented by former numerary (celibate) members. And Opus Dei’s 1950 Constitutions, whose operational and governing paragraphs are still in effect say:
“They conserve faithfully the pious custom of chastisement of the body to keep it in a state of servitude, by wearing a small cilice for at least two hours a day, taking the discipline and sleeping on the floor once a week, making adequate provision to safeguard the health.”...I found out to what extreme this philosophy is carried out when I began to have doubts about my numerary vocation after living in an Opus Dei center for two years. They assigned me a new spiritual director to get me back on track with my life-long commitment to the organization. She was the same age as me, 24. She took me on pilgrimages, and I explained to her that I wanted to leave because I wanted to get married some day. She laughed and told me that the lives of the supernumeraries were far worse and that “men are jerks in pants.” In addition to spending more time with me than our usual weekly fraternal chat, she assigned me the following spiritual reading:..The secret internal document in which Fr. Alvaro del Portillo describes an incident which happened while he and Escriva were hiding in the Madrid’s Honduran consulate in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. This testimony is recounted in Andrea Tornielli’s book on Escriva and is translated by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, ““Escriva would ask for the use of the bedroom alone when it was time for his spiritual practices. Once, however, his chief aide, Fr. Alvaro del Portillo (who would later succeed Escriva as head of Opus Dei), was sick and could not leave the room. Escriva thus told Portillo to cover his head with his blanket. Portillo described what followed: ‘Soon I began to hear the forceful blows of his discipline. I will never forget the number: there were more than a thousand terrible blows, precisely timed, and always inflicted with the same force and the same rhythm. The floor was covered with blood, but he cleaned it up before the others came in.’” more...
It is also interesting that, when most people discuss covert rule by secret societies, the focus is on the "secular humanism" of the Illuminati, with scant mention of the cult's origins in rituals of the Jesuits, a Catholic secret society whose founder also belonged to a secret society named Alumbrados(Illuminated). The Illuminati's founder, Adam Weishaupt, was himself a Jesuit and he based the rituals of the Illuminati upon those of the Jesuits. Ultimately, both right wing religious ideologies and their supposed left wing counterpart in libertinism are rooted in Gnostic sects of antiquity, and both sides have repeatedly been linked to gross abuses of power, whether through politics, industry, religion or the media. Since geopolitical centralization is by no means partisan in nature, it is vital to dig deeper to understand the philosophical undercurrent which unifies the seeming opposites in dictatorial criminal rule. For now, I will wrap things up by comparing images of the pagan sun cross with the insignia of Opus Dei and the Jesuits, an organization that has repeatedly been linked to assassinations(notice what appears to be the image of a sword in their logo. It's the first one down). The Knights of Malta, yet another Catholic secret society linked to right wing dictatorships, will have to wait for another day.
*Credit is due my East Bay reader for inspiration for this post. ;)
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Spanish Catholic Church sponsored child trafficking network
via:BBC
Let's keep this story firmly in the context of what has recently been occurring between Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals, Church genocide of Mohawk children and Catholic priests openly admitting to their involvement in organizations formed with the specific purpose of legalizing pedophilia. Viewed in this light it should not be too hard to put two and two together. Moreover, Vaticancrimes.us recently published an article about similar child trafficking practices occurring in Viet Nam, and of course many of those children were also taken from their families and sold at an exorbitant rate for the benefit of the Church, as usual. Let's also remember that this incident, Operation Baby Lift, was not the only time a relief agency has been charged with trafficking children, as can be evidenced in the history of Dyncorp, a private military contractor whose employees were charged with kidnapping Eastern European girls and forcing them into prostitution. Similar to child-molesting priests within the Vatican, Dyncorp employees have been given legal immunity from prosecution under international law. But I suppose it would be unreasonable to suggest there's some kind of a pattern here, wouldn't it? (eyeroll)
Spain's Stolen Babies
Spain is reeling from an avalanche of allegations of baby theft and baby trafficking. It is thought that the trade began at the end of the Spanish civil war and continued for 50 years, with hundreds of thousands of babies traded by nuns, priests and doctors up to the 1990s. This World reveals the impact of Spain's stolen baby scandal through the eyes of the children and parents who were separated at birth, and who are now desperate to find their relatives.
Exhumations of the supposed graves of babies and positive DNA tests are proof that baby theft has happened. more:
Let's keep this story firmly in the context of what has recently been occurring between Roman Catholic sex abuse scandals, Church genocide of Mohawk children and Catholic priests openly admitting to their involvement in organizations formed with the specific purpose of legalizing pedophilia. Viewed in this light it should not be too hard to put two and two together. Moreover, Vaticancrimes.us recently published an article about similar child trafficking practices occurring in Viet Nam, and of course many of those children were also taken from their families and sold at an exorbitant rate for the benefit of the Church, as usual. Let's also remember that this incident, Operation Baby Lift, was not the only time a relief agency has been charged with trafficking children, as can be evidenced in the history of Dyncorp, a private military contractor whose employees were charged with kidnapping Eastern European girls and forcing them into prostitution. Similar to child-molesting priests within the Vatican, Dyncorp employees have been given legal immunity from prosecution under international law. But I suppose it would be unreasonable to suggest there's some kind of a pattern here, wouldn't it? (eyeroll)
Spain's Stolen Babies
Spain is reeling from an avalanche of allegations of baby theft and baby trafficking. It is thought that the trade began at the end of the Spanish civil war and continued for 50 years, with hundreds of thousands of babies traded by nuns, priests and doctors up to the 1990s. This World reveals the impact of Spain's stolen baby scandal through the eyes of the children and parents who were separated at birth, and who are now desperate to find their relatives.
Exhumations of the supposed graves of babies and positive DNA tests are proof that baby theft has happened. more:
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Vatican genocide of Mohawk children, continued...
The following video describes how children from the Mohawk Nation were systematically starved, beaten, ritually tortured, sold into pedophile rings run by the Canadian government and deliberately murdered at a missionary school run by the Vatican. Reverend Kevin Annett of the International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and State has worked with a group of Mohawk elders to bring this story to the light despite a widespread media blackout. Please spread this video far and wide to speak out against Native American genocide.
Vatican implicated in ritual torture and genocide of Mohawk children
via:The Examiner:
And everyone has called David Icke crazy for his claim that the British royal family has been involved in the ritual torture of children....
And everyone has called David Icke crazy for his claim that the British royal family has been involved in the ritual torture of children....
Mass genocide of Mohawk children by UK Queen and Vatican uncovered in Canada
BRANTFORD, ON, CANADA - Mass graves of Mohawk children have been uncovered by ground-penetrating radar at the Mohawk Institute, a residential school for Mohawk operated by the Church of England and the Vatican before its closure in 1970.
According to Rev. Kevin Annett, Secretary of the International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and States (www.itccs.org), the Mohawk Institute was “set up by the Anglican Church of England in 1832 to imprison and destroy generations of Mohawk children. This very first Indian [First Nations] residential school in Canada lasted until 1970, and, like in most residential schools, more than half of the children imprisoned there never returned. Many of them are buried all around the school.”
Preliminary scanning by ground penetrating radar adjacent to the now closed main building Mohawk Institute has revealed that “between 15-20 feet of soil” was brought in and put over the mass graves just before the Mohawk Institute closed in 1970 in order to camouflage the mass graves of Mohawk Children and avoid prosecution for genocide and crimes against humanity under the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court, and cooperating national courts.
International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and States (ITCCS.org) is expected to commence judicial proceedings starting in late October 2011 in Brussels, Belgium and Dublin, Ireland for child genocide crimes against humanity against defendants Elizabeth Windsor, head of state of Canada and head of the Church of England and Pope Joseph Ratzinger, both of whom knowingly participated in the planning and coverup of the child genocide, according to forensic evidence.
The Tribunal sessions were originally to have been held in London, U.K. However, The U.K. government has denied entrance to the Secretary and major jurists and staff of the International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and States (ITCCS.org) without cause.
The discovery of the mass graves of Mohawk children, uncovered by ground-penetrating radar at the Mohawk Institute comes on the heels of videotaped evidence by eyewitness William Coombes, who in Oct. 1964 witnessed Elizabeth Windsor, as Head of State of Canada and Head of the Church of England, visit an aboriginal school in Kamloops, British Columbia, choose 10 young aboriginal children, made them kiss her feet, and allegedly took them from the school for a picnic at a lake.
The 10 aboriginal children were never seen again. Mr. Coombes, who was to give evidence at the International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and States (ITCCS.org) of Elizabeth Windsor’s child genocide, was murdered in Feb. 2011. Fortunately, Mr. Coombes’ testimony was videotaped before his death and is available for the Tribunal.
Rev. Kevin Annett states that instruments of torture such as a rack for torturing the Mohawk children in ritual torture have been found at the now closed Mohawk Institute. Eyewitnesses from the Mohawk community have stated they witnessed priests in red robes torturing children in ritual torture.
Rev. Annett made these revelations in an exclusive Oct. 7, 2011 interview with Alfred Lambremont Webre. In the interview, Rev. Annett acknowledges the close parallels between the Oct. 1964 personal child genocide and possible ritual killings of 10 aboriginal children by Elizabeth Windsor, Head of State of Canada and Head of the Church of England, and the child genocides occurring during the same period at the Mohawk Institute.
These parallels suggest that Elizabeth Windsor, as Head of State and Head of the Church of England was personally aware of, ordered, and participated in this systematic program of genocide and ritual torture and killings at Church of England residential schools operated by the Church of England and the Vatican.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Amnesty International calls abuse of tens of thousands in Catholic reformatories an act of torture
via: Catholic News Service
Credit is due the Catholic News Service for exposing this appalling problem. Here the wide gulf in ethical legitimacy between the laity and much of the clergy is made evident. As always, it is necessary to distinguish between Church as an expression of the people and Church as an expression of hierarchy, because the former invariably holds a greater claim to the roots of Christian charity and compassion, and where corrupt, impractical doctrines are maintained, those precepts are largely disregarded, even where lip service is given. This pattern is displayed here most obviously, where Pope Benedict's numerous attempts to keep information about pedophilia in the Church from legal authorities have thankfully been ignored.
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The abuse of children in Irish institutions amounted to torture and represents an enormous human rights failure, Amnesty International Ireland said.
Based on evidence revealed by a number of independent commissions, "children were tortured. They were brutalized, beaten, starved and abused," said Colm O'Gorman, executive director of the Ireland office of the human rights organization..."At every turn, Irish people kept their mouths shut out of deference to state, system, church and community," she said.
She said, "We must create a society in which no-one is afraid to speak. In which no-one is afraid to challenge authority and power, because deference to the powerful is a guaranteed way to help that power corrupt." more:
Credit is due the Catholic News Service for exposing this appalling problem. Here the wide gulf in ethical legitimacy between the laity and much of the clergy is made evident. As always, it is necessary to distinguish between Church as an expression of the people and Church as an expression of hierarchy, because the former invariably holds a greater claim to the roots of Christian charity and compassion, and where corrupt, impractical doctrines are maintained, those precepts are largely disregarded, even where lip service is given. This pattern is displayed here most obviously, where Pope Benedict's numerous attempts to keep information about pedophilia in the Church from legal authorities have thankfully been ignored.
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The abuse of children in Irish institutions amounted to torture and represents an enormous human rights failure, Amnesty International Ireland said.
Based on evidence revealed by a number of independent commissions, "children were tortured. They were brutalized, beaten, starved and abused," said Colm O'Gorman, executive director of the Ireland office of the human rights organization..."At every turn, Irish people kept their mouths shut out of deference to state, system, church and community," she said.
She said, "We must create a society in which no-one is afraid to speak. In which no-one is afraid to challenge authority and power, because deference to the powerful is a guaranteed way to help that power corrupt." more:
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Torture Alleged at Chain of Children's Homes, (edited)
via:Courthouse News Service
Warning: This post is not for the squeamish.
So, what follows below is yet another national chain of children's homes involved in what seems to be a cover for ritual abuse, the likes of which have been uncovered countless times with nearly identical indicators, such as sexual assault, locking children in cages, binding their hands and feet and forcing them to eat vomit/feces. One of the other national chains involved in religious ritual abuse was Kindercare, a company whose logo contains a barely concealed all-seeing eye. More information about Kindercare follows at the end of this post.
Make note of the fact that the following excerpt concerns abuse occurring at a Mormon children's home, because the numerous links between Mormonism and Freemasonry are well established, and regular readers here are already aware of Freemasonry's central role in trauma-based mind control projects. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, was himself a Master Mason who inspired the construction of a Salt Lake City Great Sphinx statue that bears his likeness, in keeping with Freemasonry's fascination with Ancient Mysteries. Other Masonic imagery such as the compass and square can be found in Mormon temple garments. For a comprehensive overview regarding the long history of torture and cult abuse within the Mormon Church, refer to this page on the S.M.A.R.T.(Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today) website, which details personal accounts involving groups of up to 800 individuals. In nearly every single scenario described, Freemasons were present. Please be aware that the descriptions contained within may be difficult to read.
It is also important to know that these well-organized abuses have been allowed to continue on account of legislation passed by former Texas Governor George Bush, who enacted laws that exempted faith-based institutions from governmental oversight. Mother Jones recently published an article, Escape From Missouri, which documents how this deregulation allowed for the proliferation of a network of Christian residential facilities for "troubled teens", where physical and psychological abuse were routine. The homes were typically located in remote rural areas, sometimes surrounded by barbed wire fences. Residents were often severely beaten, kept in isolation rooms with no bathroom access, forced to wear high heels for weeks at a time and cut off from all communication with their families.
When deputies finally raided one of the homes they discovered handguns, rifles, leg irons and handcuffs. Former residents testified that armed staffers would sometimes "go hunting for runaways". In 2007 several deaths at the homes resulted in a House Resolution, the Keeping All Students Safe Act, which would have banned the use of physical and chemical restraints in residential facilities. The bill died in the Senate when GOP members stated "This bill is not needed. The states and the localities can handle this situation. They will look after the children." Many former staffers, including Reclamation Ranch founder Jack Patterson, who was charged with aggravated child abuse, continue to own teen homes across the country. According to Mother Jones, the network of Christian homes is linked by overlapping leadership and connections to religious institutions, particularly Christian universities. It is worth keeping situations like this one in mind when discussing issues like states' rights or "religious freedom", especially since the "troubled teen" industry has been a key fund raiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Because the size of government is not the only aspect defining its intrusion into the lives of the people and, in this scenario, as well as in many others, "smaller government" did nothing to protect vulnerable people from the most severe human rights abuses, since it allowed for the rise of a dangerous strain of religious fundamentalism every bit as destructive as centralized bureaucracy.
Torture Alleged at Chain of Children's Homes
SALT LAKE CITY (CN) - Hundreds of parents claim a group of boarding schools tortured their children: locked them in dog cages, forced them to lie in feces and eat vomit, masturbated them and denied the troubled teens any religion "except for the Mormon faith."
The Utah-based World Wide Association Of Specialty Programs and Schools and its owners - Robert Lichfield, Brent Facer and Ken Kay - went to great lengths to hide the "torture," which began in the mid-1990s and continued for a decade, the 357 plaintiffs claim in Salt Lake County Court.
The plaintiffs say that 59 schools and owners tied to the company "jointly promoted, advertised, and marketed defendants' residential boarding schools as a place where children with problems could get an education while receiving instruction and direction in behavior modification for emotional growth and personal development."...
According to the complaint, students were locked in boxes, cages and basements at the schools, denied medical and dental care, and forced "to carry heavy bags of sand around their necks or logs throughout the day over many days."
They were sexually abused, "which included forced sexual relations and acts of fondling and masturbation performed on them," according to the 119-page complaint.... forced to sleep on cold concrete floors, boxspring, or plywood," and put to forced labor...more...
Here, also, is an excerpt from David Icke's Biggest Secret, about the Kindercare company:
One unfolding story I have featured on my website is that of Zack. He is a little boy who attended a pre-school operated by a company called Kindercare at 100 Endeavor Way, Cary, North Carolina. Kindercare is the biggest pre-school organization in the United States. Zack's experience contains all the elements of the constantly recurring reports of child abuse, both in what he says happened to him and the shocking lack of investigation by the authorities that are supposed to be protecting children.
This story and all the quotes by his parents and grandmother are from direct correspondence and conversations with me.4 Zack said that he was taken from the centre in Cary to a house where he was tied up and made to watch people sacrifice a little boy. He said that he and other children were made to drink the blood and eat the flesh of the dead child. He also said that they took his own blood. He had a small circular puncture on his elbow, which looked like a mole was growing there. He said this is where they put the "needle-knife" into him.
He has also talked of large spiders he saw in movies on these occasions and of seeing "bad movies" all the time. The mother of another boy at the centre, a four year old called Tyler, said her son had asked her if it was all right for people "to eat each other". Zack talked about a "green" party at the school in which the children were given green food and juice. He said the children were given gifts at the party, but he was given 'poop'. When asked if anyone else got poop and he said:
"No, only me -the other kids got cars and things like that."
He said the sandwiches were all green with "yucky mustard" and "there was blood". Suzen, his grandmother, asked him what happened when he wouldn't eat it and he said:
"We all went to sleep." He also said: "They put blood in the oatmeal at the school."
And another from the San Jose Mercury regarding the abuses coordinated by former Army colonel Michael Aquino:
CHILD ABUSE AT THE PRESIDIO
THE PARENTS' AGONY, THE ARMY'S COVERUP, THE PROSECUTION'S FAILURE.
The preschool and hourly care programs were both run by the US. Army at the Presidio of San Francisco, a sprawling compound of turnofthecentury wood and brick buildings, headquarters of the Sixth Army, the place that motorists glimpse through the pines on their way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
On that day that changed her life and the lives of her family, Joyce Tobin arrived at the Presidio day care center at 2:30 p.m. Her son appeared to be napping with several other children, and the teacher, Gary Hambright, was sitting at a table in the room...
That night, while watching television with his older brother, the 3-year-old started playing with his penis, pulling it forward with both hands and letting go. "Mr. Gary do it," he said and kept at it. His brother ran for their mother, who was talking to a neighbor in the front doorway. Trying to keep her voice calm, Joyce asked her son what he was talking about.
The child's reply was terse and grim. "He touched my penis with his hand, and he bit my penis." The boy made a chomping sound with his mouth. Asked if "Mr. Gary" had done anything else, the boy said, "He put a pencil in my hole in my bottom. He do that, he do that to me. He hurt me and I cry and I cry."...
CASARC reviews more than 700 cases of suspected sexual abuse every year. Among other things, the CASARC staff had often heard children describe anal rape as having a pencil put in their bottoms. When Dr. Kevin Coulter examined the Tobins' son, he observed that the child's anus dilated to approximately 20 millimeters in approximately five seconds, a much faster and wider dilation than normal. Coulter had conducted more than 300 examinations of children at CASARC. His conclusion was that such rapid and wide dilation was caused by trauma to the anus and rectum, consistent with penetration. The Tobins' 3-year-old son had been sexually abused, anally raped.
...it took the Army almost a month to notify the parents of other children who had been in "Mr. Gary's' class that the incident had taken place, that their children might be at risk. Nearly a year would pass before more than 59 other victims children between the ages of 3 and 7 had been identified. And allegations would be made by parents that several more children were molested even after the investigation had begun.
...The children had begun to talk. And they kept talking. That was the problem. They kept saying things that no one, especially not the Army, wanted to hear. They kept mentioning other people besides "Mr. Gary," other locations besides the day care center. Among the allegations:
Some of the children said they were taken from the day care center to private homes on the Presidio where they were sexually abused. Two houses were singled out on the Army post and at least one home off-post, in San Francisco.
One girl said she played "poopoo baseball" at the home of one of her female teachers. The girl said the game involved throwing feces at the teacher.
Other children talked about playing the "googoo game" with "Mr. Gary". It involved Hambright having the children urinate and defecate on him. Then he would do the same to them. Sometimes, the children said, they were forced to drink urine and eat feces. Some said they had blood smeared on their bodies.
Some children said they had guns pointed at them. Others said they were told they or their parents would be killed if they told what happened.
One 3-year-old boy said he was sexually abused on his first visit to the center. That day was also his birthday.
A 3-year-old girl said "Mr. Gary" used special pens, black, blue, pink and red -- to doodle on her, starting at her legs and moving up over her genitals. The same child said she saw one of her friends at the center cry when "Mr. Gary's" friend, a woman, pointed a gun at the friend.
There were five confirmed cases of chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, including two of the four daughters of one family.
A preliminary test of one boy for AIDS came back positive. Further tests revealed that a he did not have the disease, but fear of AIDS tormented parents for months. .
...The core group of parents consisted of professional people doctors, a dentist, a nuclear scientist. They spoke out loud and often. They said they spoke for those who could not, the children and the enlisted people who, they said, were too afraid to risk their military career to speak out. The enlisted people needed their jobs and the day care. The core group could afford day care elsewhere.
...NONE OF THE PARENTS WHO WERE PROTESTING the Army's handling of the case knew that signs of trouble had surfaced at the center at least six years earlier. And none of them knew that the Army had been dealing with sex abuse problems at its day care centers for years before the Presidio case broke.
The Army said nothing of prior cases at West Point and Fort Dix. The Army said nothing of an investigation six years before involving John Gunnarson, the Presidio's top day care official and the supervisor of the day care center during the time Hambright allegedly molested the children.
In 1982, Gunnarson was child support services coordinator at the center, responsible for the training of the center staff, when he was arrested on charges of assaulting an employee of the center, Pearl Broadnax. Broadnax had been complaining about conditions at the center and treatment of the children. She say she was branded a troublemaker and often called to task about her job performance. On Feb. 3, 1982, she and Gunnarson argued over the use of scissors by the children. He asked her to go into another room to continue the discussion, but Broadnax said she wanted to remain in the playroom. "At this time," according to an investigative report of the incident, "Gunnarson grabbed Broadnax by the left arm above her wrist and pulled her toward him. She then told Gunnarson, "don't touch me," to which he replied, I'm not touching you." She felt that she was in fear of bodily harm at this point in the incident.
...Now a deputy sheriff in Santa Clara County, Albanoski called after he read one of my stories about the Presidio case. "When I read the paper, I almost fell out of my chair," Albanoski said ""I couldn't believe [Gunnarson] was still working there" While interviewing Broadnax at the day care center after she had called MPs about Gunnarson, Albanoski learned that Broadnax was concerned about more than the alleged threat of harm to herself. She also alleged that employees had touched children's genitals improperly...Broadnax also said she had seen the then director of the center hit a child in the mouth, making him bleed.
...Capt. Robert J. Meyer was appointed to look into the allegations for the commander of the Presidio in a letter summarizing his findings, Meyers said, "at least three of the Child Care Center staff have been threatened with the loss of their jobs if they speak out and tell the truth about how the Child Care Center is being managed and how the minority children are treated." A hearing was held at the Presidio on the allegations in 1981. The director in question was reinstated. more...
Warning: This post is not for the squeamish.
So, what follows below is yet another national chain of children's homes involved in what seems to be a cover for ritual abuse, the likes of which have been uncovered countless times with nearly identical indicators, such as sexual assault, locking children in cages, binding their hands and feet and forcing them to eat vomit/feces. One of the other national chains involved in religious ritual abuse was Kindercare, a company whose logo contains a barely concealed all-seeing eye. More information about Kindercare follows at the end of this post.
Make note of the fact that the following excerpt concerns abuse occurring at a Mormon children's home, because the numerous links between Mormonism and Freemasonry are well established, and regular readers here are already aware of Freemasonry's central role in trauma-based mind control projects. The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, was himself a Master Mason who inspired the construction of a Salt Lake City Great Sphinx statue that bears his likeness, in keeping with Freemasonry's fascination with Ancient Mysteries. Other Masonic imagery such as the compass and square can be found in Mormon temple garments. For a comprehensive overview regarding the long history of torture and cult abuse within the Mormon Church, refer to this page on the S.M.A.R.T.(Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today) website, which details personal accounts involving groups of up to 800 individuals. In nearly every single scenario described, Freemasons were present. Please be aware that the descriptions contained within may be difficult to read.
It is also important to know that these well-organized abuses have been allowed to continue on account of legislation passed by former Texas Governor George Bush, who enacted laws that exempted faith-based institutions from governmental oversight. Mother Jones recently published an article, Escape From Missouri, which documents how this deregulation allowed for the proliferation of a network of Christian residential facilities for "troubled teens", where physical and psychological abuse were routine. The homes were typically located in remote rural areas, sometimes surrounded by barbed wire fences. Residents were often severely beaten, kept in isolation rooms with no bathroom access, forced to wear high heels for weeks at a time and cut off from all communication with their families.
When deputies finally raided one of the homes they discovered handguns, rifles, leg irons and handcuffs. Former residents testified that armed staffers would sometimes "go hunting for runaways". In 2007 several deaths at the homes resulted in a House Resolution, the Keeping All Students Safe Act, which would have banned the use of physical and chemical restraints in residential facilities. The bill died in the Senate when GOP members stated "This bill is not needed. The states and the localities can handle this situation. They will look after the children." Many former staffers, including Reclamation Ranch founder Jack Patterson, who was charged with aggravated child abuse, continue to own teen homes across the country. According to Mother Jones, the network of Christian homes is linked by overlapping leadership and connections to religious institutions, particularly Christian universities. It is worth keeping situations like this one in mind when discussing issues like states' rights or "religious freedom", especially since the "troubled teen" industry has been a key fund raiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Because the size of government is not the only aspect defining its intrusion into the lives of the people and, in this scenario, as well as in many others, "smaller government" did nothing to protect vulnerable people from the most severe human rights abuses, since it allowed for the rise of a dangerous strain of religious fundamentalism every bit as destructive as centralized bureaucracy.
Torture Alleged at Chain of Children's Homes
SALT LAKE CITY (CN) - Hundreds of parents claim a group of boarding schools tortured their children: locked them in dog cages, forced them to lie in feces and eat vomit, masturbated them and denied the troubled teens any religion "except for the Mormon faith."
The Utah-based World Wide Association Of Specialty Programs and Schools and its owners - Robert Lichfield, Brent Facer and Ken Kay - went to great lengths to hide the "torture," which began in the mid-1990s and continued for a decade, the 357 plaintiffs claim in Salt Lake County Court.
The plaintiffs say that 59 schools and owners tied to the company "jointly promoted, advertised, and marketed defendants' residential boarding schools as a place where children with problems could get an education while receiving instruction and direction in behavior modification for emotional growth and personal development."...
According to the complaint, students were locked in boxes, cages and basements at the schools, denied medical and dental care, and forced "to carry heavy bags of sand around their necks or logs throughout the day over many days."
They were sexually abused, "which included forced sexual relations and acts of fondling and masturbation performed on them," according to the 119-page complaint.... forced to sleep on cold concrete floors, boxspring, or plywood," and put to forced labor...more...
Here, also, is an excerpt from David Icke's Biggest Secret, about the Kindercare company:
One unfolding story I have featured on my website is that of Zack. He is a little boy who attended a pre-school operated by a company called Kindercare at 100 Endeavor Way, Cary, North Carolina. Kindercare is the biggest pre-school organization in the United States. Zack's experience contains all the elements of the constantly recurring reports of child abuse, both in what he says happened to him and the shocking lack of investigation by the authorities that are supposed to be protecting children.
This story and all the quotes by his parents and grandmother are from direct correspondence and conversations with me.4 Zack said that he was taken from the centre in Cary to a house where he was tied up and made to watch people sacrifice a little boy. He said that he and other children were made to drink the blood and eat the flesh of the dead child. He also said that they took his own blood. He had a small circular puncture on his elbow, which looked like a mole was growing there. He said this is where they put the "needle-knife" into him.
He has also talked of large spiders he saw in movies on these occasions and of seeing "bad movies" all the time. The mother of another boy at the centre, a four year old called Tyler, said her son had asked her if it was all right for people "to eat each other". Zack talked about a "green" party at the school in which the children were given green food and juice. He said the children were given gifts at the party, but he was given 'poop'. When asked if anyone else got poop and he said:
"No, only me -the other kids got cars and things like that."
He said the sandwiches were all green with "yucky mustard" and "there was blood". Suzen, his grandmother, asked him what happened when he wouldn't eat it and he said:
"We all went to sleep." He also said: "They put blood in the oatmeal at the school."
And another from the San Jose Mercury regarding the abuses coordinated by former Army colonel Michael Aquino:
CHILD ABUSE AT THE PRESIDIO
THE PARENTS' AGONY, THE ARMY'S COVERUP, THE PROSECUTION'S FAILURE.
The preschool and hourly care programs were both run by the US. Army at the Presidio of San Francisco, a sprawling compound of turnofthecentury wood and brick buildings, headquarters of the Sixth Army, the place that motorists glimpse through the pines on their way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
On that day that changed her life and the lives of her family, Joyce Tobin arrived at the Presidio day care center at 2:30 p.m. Her son appeared to be napping with several other children, and the teacher, Gary Hambright, was sitting at a table in the room...
That night, while watching television with his older brother, the 3-year-old started playing with his penis, pulling it forward with both hands and letting go. "Mr. Gary do it," he said and kept at it. His brother ran for their mother, who was talking to a neighbor in the front doorway. Trying to keep her voice calm, Joyce asked her son what he was talking about.
The child's reply was terse and grim. "He touched my penis with his hand, and he bit my penis." The boy made a chomping sound with his mouth. Asked if "Mr. Gary" had done anything else, the boy said, "He put a pencil in my hole in my bottom. He do that, he do that to me. He hurt me and I cry and I cry."...
CASARC reviews more than 700 cases of suspected sexual abuse every year. Among other things, the CASARC staff had often heard children describe anal rape as having a pencil put in their bottoms. When Dr. Kevin Coulter examined the Tobins' son, he observed that the child's anus dilated to approximately 20 millimeters in approximately five seconds, a much faster and wider dilation than normal. Coulter had conducted more than 300 examinations of children at CASARC. His conclusion was that such rapid and wide dilation was caused by trauma to the anus and rectum, consistent with penetration. The Tobins' 3-year-old son had been sexually abused, anally raped.
...it took the Army almost a month to notify the parents of other children who had been in "Mr. Gary's' class that the incident had taken place, that their children might be at risk. Nearly a year would pass before more than 59 other victims children between the ages of 3 and 7 had been identified. And allegations would be made by parents that several more children were molested even after the investigation had begun.
...The children had begun to talk. And they kept talking. That was the problem. They kept saying things that no one, especially not the Army, wanted to hear. They kept mentioning other people besides "Mr. Gary," other locations besides the day care center. Among the allegations:
Some of the children said they were taken from the day care center to private homes on the Presidio where they were sexually abused. Two houses were singled out on the Army post and at least one home off-post, in San Francisco.
One girl said she played "poopoo baseball" at the home of one of her female teachers. The girl said the game involved throwing feces at the teacher.
Other children talked about playing the "googoo game" with "Mr. Gary". It involved Hambright having the children urinate and defecate on him. Then he would do the same to them. Sometimes, the children said, they were forced to drink urine and eat feces. Some said they had blood smeared on their bodies.
Some children said they had guns pointed at them. Others said they were told they or their parents would be killed if they told what happened.
One 3-year-old boy said he was sexually abused on his first visit to the center. That day was also his birthday.
A 3-year-old girl said "Mr. Gary" used special pens, black, blue, pink and red -- to doodle on her, starting at her legs and moving up over her genitals. The same child said she saw one of her friends at the center cry when "Mr. Gary's" friend, a woman, pointed a gun at the friend.
There were five confirmed cases of chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, including two of the four daughters of one family.
A preliminary test of one boy for AIDS came back positive. Further tests revealed that a he did not have the disease, but fear of AIDS tormented parents for months. .
...The core group of parents consisted of professional people doctors, a dentist, a nuclear scientist. They spoke out loud and often. They said they spoke for those who could not, the children and the enlisted people who, they said, were too afraid to risk their military career to speak out. The enlisted people needed their jobs and the day care. The core group could afford day care elsewhere.
...NONE OF THE PARENTS WHO WERE PROTESTING the Army's handling of the case knew that signs of trouble had surfaced at the center at least six years earlier. And none of them knew that the Army had been dealing with sex abuse problems at its day care centers for years before the Presidio case broke.
The Army said nothing of prior cases at West Point and Fort Dix. The Army said nothing of an investigation six years before involving John Gunnarson, the Presidio's top day care official and the supervisor of the day care center during the time Hambright allegedly molested the children.
In 1982, Gunnarson was child support services coordinator at the center, responsible for the training of the center staff, when he was arrested on charges of assaulting an employee of the center, Pearl Broadnax. Broadnax had been complaining about conditions at the center and treatment of the children. She say she was branded a troublemaker and often called to task about her job performance. On Feb. 3, 1982, she and Gunnarson argued over the use of scissors by the children. He asked her to go into another room to continue the discussion, but Broadnax said she wanted to remain in the playroom. "At this time," according to an investigative report of the incident, "Gunnarson grabbed Broadnax by the left arm above her wrist and pulled her toward him. She then told Gunnarson, "don't touch me," to which he replied, I'm not touching you." She felt that she was in fear of bodily harm at this point in the incident.
...Now a deputy sheriff in Santa Clara County, Albanoski called after he read one of my stories about the Presidio case. "When I read the paper, I almost fell out of my chair," Albanoski said ""I couldn't believe [Gunnarson] was still working there" While interviewing Broadnax at the day care center after she had called MPs about Gunnarson, Albanoski learned that Broadnax was concerned about more than the alleged threat of harm to herself. She also alleged that employees had touched children's genitals improperly...Broadnax also said she had seen the then director of the center hit a child in the mouth, making him bleed.
...Capt. Robert J. Meyer was appointed to look into the allegations for the commander of the Presidio in a letter summarizing his findings, Meyers said, "at least three of the Child Care Center staff have been threatened with the loss of their jobs if they speak out and tell the truth about how the Child Care Center is being managed and how the minority children are treated." A hearing was held at the Presidio on the allegations in 1981. The director in question was reinstated. more...
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The CIA Really Wants to Make Hollywood’s Next Blockbuster
Anyone who believes that sending military aid to Israel, or any of the other corrupt regimes presently receiving U.S. support, is a wise idea is urged to look into the following article to get a glimpse into exactly how unbiased our media truly is. While you're at it, read Naomi Klein's unusually balanced article on The Goldstone Report, because it clearly demonstrates how supporting war crimes today means having to account for the imposition of international authorities tomorrow. But honestly, the looming specter of global governance only underscores the more important reality, that bombing schools, hospitals and vital civilian infrastructure is never acceptable under any circumstance, no matter which country is doing it.
via:Gizmodo
Are you an aspiring filmmaker who wants to produce a spy thriller? Well, you're in luck because the CIA has a pile of script ideas lying around.
Ironic, you say, that an organization known for secrecy is doling out helpful hints to Hollywood? The CIA doesn't think so. For them it's all about image control. And they're just the start of it. The Department of Defense and just about every branch of the military has an entertainment industry liaison similar to the CIA's. Read more:
via:Gizmodo
Are you an aspiring filmmaker who wants to produce a spy thriller? Well, you're in luck because the CIA has a pile of script ideas lying around.
Ironic, you say, that an organization known for secrecy is doling out helpful hints to Hollywood? The CIA doesn't think so. For them it's all about image control. And they're just the start of it. The Department of Defense and just about every branch of the military has an entertainment industry liaison similar to the CIA's. Read more:
Friday, September 16, 2011
Conspiracy of Silence
Viewing Conspiracy of Silence, a documentary about a child prostitution ring serving high-level politicians, is absolutely necessary for understanding the material covered here, particularly regarding connections between organized child trafficking and the Roman Catholic Church. Be assured that the crimes described in the film, targeting society's most vulnerable members and supported by highly respected social institutions, continue up to the present day and will not be alleviated until the necessary task of exposure and prosecution takes place. Please help to spread the word and bring justice to those whose stories remain invisible.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Pope accused of crimes against humanity by victims of sex abuse
via:The Guardian
Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have accused the pope, the Vatican secretary of state and two other high-ranking Holy See officials of crimes against humanity, in a formal complaint to the international criminal court (ICC)...It includes individual cases of abuse where letters and documents between Vatican officials and others show a refusal to co-operate with law enforcement agencies seeking to pursue suspects, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a US-based organisation that represents the claimants...Megan Petersen, from Minnesota, is one of two named US victims whose cases have been included in the complaint to the ICC. Petersen was awarded $750,000 (£500,000) last week in a civil claim against Crookston diocese, in which she alleged that a priest, Joseph Jeyapaul, had raped her repeatedly as a child.
Speaking at The Hague, where the complaint was being launched, Petersen said of Jeyapaul: "He was a man of God and I was very devout. I wanted to be a nun. I trusted him.
"Part of why I'm here is to protect kids. My perpetrator is still serving among kids and vulnerable adults, despite there being criminal charges against him. Ratzinger is the head of this organisation and these are his sheep, his flock. I will do everything in my power to make sure this does not happen to another child." more...
Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have accused the pope, the Vatican secretary of state and two other high-ranking Holy See officials of crimes against humanity, in a formal complaint to the international criminal court (ICC)...It includes individual cases of abuse where letters and documents between Vatican officials and others show a refusal to co-operate with law enforcement agencies seeking to pursue suspects, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a US-based organisation that represents the claimants...Megan Petersen, from Minnesota, is one of two named US victims whose cases have been included in the complaint to the ICC. Petersen was awarded $750,000 (£500,000) last week in a civil claim against Crookston diocese, in which she alleged that a priest, Joseph Jeyapaul, had raped her repeatedly as a child.
Speaking at The Hague, where the complaint was being launched, Petersen said of Jeyapaul: "He was a man of God and I was very devout. I wanted to be a nun. I trusted him.
"Part of why I'm here is to protect kids. My perpetrator is still serving among kids and vulnerable adults, despite there being criminal charges against him. Ratzinger is the head of this organisation and these are his sheep, his flock. I will do everything in my power to make sure this does not happen to another child." more...
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The Wheel of Fortune (edited)
I am linking to this article from Whale.to with reservation because of the author's tendency to mix in irrelevant gossip about public figures' sex lives with far more serious charges like the sexual exploitation of boys from care homes. I am suspicious of the motives of anyone who is so cavalier about an action that can easily destroy careers and/or families while inducing brutal public humiliation, all because of trivial, quite possibly fabricated tabloid fodder that is ultimately nobody's concern except the people directly involved. So, those parts have been removed and I would urge anyone to take this article with a grain of salt.
However, by all accounts the sexual exploitation of minors by public figures is a thriving industry and one that is routinely used for blackmail purposes by intelligence agencies. I can certainly appreciate the work that went into the article despite any disagreement with the methods of the author. Of course, I can't vouch for the veracity of individual names listed here but based on what I've seen the overall pattern is correct. It's unfortunate that there is no reliable legal system through which to voice these issues because this absence of judicial oversight means that justice is almost solely the domain of individual citizens, many of whom seem unconcerned about the right to privacy. Bolded sections are my own emphasis. The link to the wikipedia entry on Lindi St. Clair is particularly informative.
Many have wondered how the controversy over former IMF chief Dominique Strauss –Kahn’s escapades ever reached the public? After all the Murdoch press serve the same masters as Strauss-Kahn so they could easily have kept this scandal from public scrutiny.
However, by all accounts the sexual exploitation of minors by public figures is a thriving industry and one that is routinely used for blackmail purposes by intelligence agencies. I can certainly appreciate the work that went into the article despite any disagreement with the methods of the author. Of course, I can't vouch for the veracity of individual names listed here but based on what I've seen the overall pattern is correct. It's unfortunate that there is no reliable legal system through which to voice these issues because this absence of judicial oversight means that justice is almost solely the domain of individual citizens, many of whom seem unconcerned about the right to privacy. Bolded sections are my own emphasis. The link to the wikipedia entry on Lindi St. Clair is particularly informative.
Many have wondered how the controversy over former IMF chief Dominique Strauss –Kahn’s escapades ever reached the public? After all the Murdoch press serve the same masters as Strauss-Kahn so they could easily have kept this scandal from public scrutiny.
As the wheel of fortune turns it turns good fortune and prosperity for one man and desolation and ruin for the next.
What did Strauss-Kahn do whereby he needed to be pushed from favour?
The Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss specialised in honey trapping Hollywood luminaries and political high flyers that were lured into the frame to be blackmailed.
The British brothel madam Lindi St Claire(the Saint Clairs, also known as Sinclairs, were a dynasty that descended from the Merovignians, one of the 13 Bloodlines that occult researcher Fritz Springmeier claims control international politics) the original Miss Whiplash ran a similar service supplying the most extraordinary beautiful women to those in government in the seventies and eighties. Her underground torture chamber was reputedly rigged for secret sound and film, although I hasten to add that I do not know for which intelligence service, if any.
She also would arrange a service called ‘normalising’. This occurred when suspected homosexuals were dining quietly in a cosy romantic restaurant with someone of the opposite sex when press photographers would suddenly burst in on them.
However, Lindi was involved in a very strange car crash, where she was driven off the road and was close to losing her life in similar fashion to Princes Grace of Monaco and Princess Diana.
During renovations the restaurant opposite the House of Commons was found to be riddled with British and Soviet listening equipment professionally wired into the building’s fabric. Thereafter both restaurants and pubs were kept inside Parliament for security purposes.
The DJ Allan ‘Fluff’ Freeman(the Freemans are yet another one of the 13 bloodlines), brought a special blend of quick humour and colour to radio and televised pop music shows. He owned a large corner shop in Lea Bridge Rd. London, and this was the venue for many kinky parties where young boys from several care homes would be brought in by taxis for the night. Jimmy Saville, Jonathan King, Joe Meeks and on occasion Brian Epstein, all Jewish pop mogul homosexuals would party and ply drugs and alcohol to young boys. The local police chief was horrified to find Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe and other top politicians also attended these parties, and a boozy lunchtime in the policemen’s pub the Windmill, made sure the kinky parties quickly came to an end.
Jeremy Thorpe had a taste for young street boys and runaway teenagers were often brought to him, and at his trial for the attempted murder of male prostitute Norman Scott, he threatened to expose the perversions of many members of government.
Thorpe’s threats worked, he was found not guilty and he got off as it was said ‘Scott free’.
One of those who stood most to lose was Sir Edward Heath prime minister from 1970-74, who was known to visit the Jersey care home the Haute Garrene among others to take young boys on boating weekends on his yacht called ‘Morning Cloud’, or as bodyguards referred to it, ‘Morning Sickness’.
Heath was warned on 4 occasions by the head of the Metropolitan police not to loiter in London’s lavatories and not to try to pick up young boys. Nonetheless, he quickly fell prone blackmailers who insisted he dress up in a ridiculous Gestapo uniform in which he was photographed.
Under threat of exposure Heath was forced to enter Britain into the Common Market, now the European Union, under very unfavourable conditions. It is still a bone of contention among scholars how he became PM in front of the immensely popular and scholarly Enoch Powell who to all intents and purposes should have been Prime Minister.
Late one night on the Thames embankment by the House of Commons a British prime minister approached a rent boy, almost all the rent boys there were employed by the KGB or Mossad or occasionally CIA and sometimes they would sell info to all of the aforementioned to fund their drug habits.
The sordid details of the encounter on the Thames embankment quickly ended up on the London KGB station chief’s desk but this very brave man was also working for MI6 and he quickly passed the details onto British intelligence.
That same evening a British Prime Minister got the scolding of his life for such risky behaviour.
Sir Anthony Blunt was a big instigator of these homosexual parties at the highest levels and many young boys who went missing over the years were murdered at his bequest. It was his way of tidying up and making sure potentially dangerous secrets were kept hidden.The full extent of his crimes will probably never be known, but in contrast Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s crime, if he is guilty, look rather petty to me.
But how strange it is that a man can be a top banker one day and a suspected criminal leper the next, the wheel of fortune turns for us all and is never ending.
T Stokes London
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=23810
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Medicis Pharmaceuticals CEO hires small army to ward against bad publicity in death of his girlfriend (edited)
So, the basic gist of the story here is that the six-year-old son of a pharmaceutical CEO, Jonah Shacknai, age 54, was found dead of an apparent accident that occurred when the boy fell off the balcony of his family home. Within a few days, Shacknai's girlfriend, Rebecca Zahau, was found dead, hanging from a second story balcony with a gag in her mouth and her hands and feet bound. Zahau's hands were bound behind her body. Witnesses say they heard loud music coming from the Shacknai residence during the night before the body was found. Inexplicably, the death was almost immediately ruled a suicide. Since then, a leading pathologist has questioned the suicide ruling, citing haemorrhages beneath Zahau's scalp surface that may indicate evidence of blunt force trauma. On the bedroom wall was a message scrawled in black paint: "She saved him, can he save her" (sarcasm?). Within a week of Zahau's death, Shacknai had already hired a PR firm to represent him. Recently released police reports have revealed that Shacknai's second ex-wife went to the police to file a domestic violence report, saying that he had allowed his guard dog to attack her, in addition to other accounts of physical assault. In a written statement, she said "I feel scared of what he is capable of doing to me physically via the dog as well as the lengths he will go to try to destroy me in any way he was able to do so."
Here is the logo for Shacknai's company, Medicis Pharmaceuticals. The Medicis were a banking family and royal house that played a central role in founding an occult fraternity called Rosicrucianism, an organization that continues to exercise enormous influence on international politics up to the present day. The Medicis logo contains an image strikingly similar to the caduceus, a staff carried by the Greek god Hermes which was entwined by two snakes. Within Western occultism, Hermes is considered to be the primary teacher whose writings form the basis of modern esoteric tradition. Rosicrucianism itself is promoted as a Hermetic Order. The caduceus was originally adopted as a symbol of medicine allegedly at the insistence of Captain Frederick P. Reynolds, descendant of a lineage that occult researcher Fritz Springmeier names as one of the 13 Bloodlines of the Illuminati.
What does any of this have to do with the "suicide" at the Shacknai residence? Beyond the obvious, that anyone who belongs to elite networks of power possesses a virtual immunity from being prosecuted for crimes that would have the rest of us behind bars for a lifetime, it's hard to say. I will let the reader draw their own conclusions because anything else I could say at this point would be pure speculation. Here is part of a relevant article from CBS News.
CEO Shacknai Wields Small Army Against Speculation on Death of His Girlfriend
Medicis (MRX) CEO Jonah Shacknai’s threat to sue the lawyer representing the family of his late girlfriend, who was found bound and hanging naked from a balcony at his Coronado, Calif., home on July 13, is an attempt to do the impossible: Dampen speculation about the death.
The Shacknai family has reportedly hired two lawyers, a PR firm and a private detective since the death, which has officially been declared a suicide.
Shacknai hired a PR firm, Sitrick & Co., less than a week after Rebecca Zahau Nalepa’s death. Executives at that agency have had a series of off-the-record conversations with reporters whom the agency believes have made mistakes in their coverage.
Media coverage has changed: A source close to the case told BNET that Rebecca told her family she believed Max, Shacknai’s 6-year-old son, may have been “planking” on a stair rail before he suffered a fatal fall two days before she died. (Planking is a fad in which people photograph themselves lying face down in unusual locations.) USA Today initially published a story that included the planking reference, but that word was removed from later editions, as these images of Google’s cache of two older versions of the story show: more...
Here is the logo for Shacknai's company, Medicis Pharmaceuticals. The Medicis were a banking family and royal house that played a central role in founding an occult fraternity called Rosicrucianism, an organization that continues to exercise enormous influence on international politics up to the present day. The Medicis logo contains an image strikingly similar to the caduceus, a staff carried by the Greek god Hermes which was entwined by two snakes. Within Western occultism, Hermes is considered to be the primary teacher whose writings form the basis of modern esoteric tradition. Rosicrucianism itself is promoted as a Hermetic Order. The caduceus was originally adopted as a symbol of medicine allegedly at the insistence of Captain Frederick P. Reynolds, descendant of a lineage that occult researcher Fritz Springmeier names as one of the 13 Bloodlines of the Illuminati.
What does any of this have to do with the "suicide" at the Shacknai residence? Beyond the obvious, that anyone who belongs to elite networks of power possesses a virtual immunity from being prosecuted for crimes that would have the rest of us behind bars for a lifetime, it's hard to say. I will let the reader draw their own conclusions because anything else I could say at this point would be pure speculation. Here is part of a relevant article from CBS News.
CEO Shacknai Wields Small Army Against Speculation on Death of His Girlfriend
Medicis (MRX) CEO Jonah Shacknai’s threat to sue the lawyer representing the family of his late girlfriend, who was found bound and hanging naked from a balcony at his Coronado, Calif., home on July 13, is an attempt to do the impossible: Dampen speculation about the death.
The Shacknai family has reportedly hired two lawyers, a PR firm and a private detective since the death, which has officially been declared a suicide.
Shacknai hired a PR firm, Sitrick & Co., less than a week after Rebecca Zahau Nalepa’s death. Executives at that agency have had a series of off-the-record conversations with reporters whom the agency believes have made mistakes in their coverage.
Media coverage has changed: A source close to the case told BNET that Rebecca told her family she believed Max, Shacknai’s 6-year-old son, may have been “planking” on a stair rail before he suffered a fatal fall two days before she died. (Planking is a fad in which people photograph themselves lying face down in unusual locations.) USA Today initially published a story that included the planking reference, but that word was removed from later editions, as these images of Google’s cache of two older versions of the story show: more...
Friday, September 2, 2011
Opus Dei member argued for total abortion ban in El Salvador
I recently came across this NYTimes article about abortion in El Salvador, which is a unique country, legally speaking, because not only are total bans on abortion in place, even including when the life of the mother is in jeopardy, the ban is enforced by police and medical spies. Predictably, since the law was passed the maternal death rate has since reached a high of 1 in 350. This is probably a good time, yet again, to post a link about Queen Anne's Lace, an herbal implantation inhibitor that can cause a fertilized egg to leave the body painlessly, typically within 72 hours after conception. Again, this may be a bit of a tangent but I thought it was somewhat relevant
since it highlights the moral bankruptcy of covert organizations like Opus Dei, which was involved in enforcing the ban. Here are some choice quotes from the article.
The pope's appointment of Lacalle 11 years ago brought to the Archdiocese of San Salvador a different kind of religious leader. Lacalle, an outspoken member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, redirected the country's church politics. Lacalle's predecessors were just as firmly opposed to abortion as he was. What he brought to the country's anti-abortion movement was a new determination to turn that opposition into state legislation and a belief that the church should play a public role in the process. In 1997, conservative legislators in the Assembly introduced a bill that would ban abortion in all circumstances. The archbishop campaigned actively for its passage.
There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal.
Julia Regina de Cardenal runs the Yes to Life Foundation in San Salvador, which provides prenatal care and job training to poor pregnant women. She was a key advocate for the passage of the ban. She argued that the existing law's exception for the life of the mother was outdated. As she explained to me, "There does not exist any case in which the life of the mother would be in danger, because technology has advanced so far."...In January 1999, as the issue headed toward the second vote in the Assembly, Pope John Paul II visited Latin America. "The church must proclaim the Gospel of life and speak out with prophetic force against the culture of death," he declared in Mexico City."May the continent of hope also be the continent of life!"..."At the hospital they asked me what I had. I didn't want to say. I said I felt bad. They did tests on my urine, blood and lungs and found I had a severe respiratory infection. They did an ultrasound and found my kidneys, lung and liver were infected. And the ultrasound showed something else. They asked me: "Why do you have a perforated uterus? What have you done?" Then they did a vaginal exam, and it was the most painful thing for me in the world. They put something in me, and I cried out. They had two doctors holding me down. They said they knew I had had an abortion because my uterus was perforated and big and they would have to operate immediately. All I remember was going to the operating room, and then I don't remember anything because for the next six days I was in a coma"...
"Back-alley abortion" is a term that has long been part of the abortion debate. In the United States, in the years since Roe v. Wade, it has come to seem metaphorical, perhaps even hyperbolic, but it happens to conjure precisely D.C.'s experience. And it's easy in El Salvador to find plenty of evidence that D.C.'s story is neither isolated nor the worst case. A report by the Center for Reproductive Rights offers this grim list of tools used in clandestine abortions: "clothes hangers, iron bars, high doses of contraceptives, fertilizers, gastritis remedies, soapy water and caustic agents (such as car battery acid)."...when a woman might face jail time for an abortion, she's less likely to discuss her pregnancy at all. According to a study on attempted suicide and teen pregnancy published last year by academics at the University of El Salvador, some girls who poison their wombs with agricultural pesticide (its efficacy being a Salvadoran urban legend) would rather report the cause of their resulting hospital visit as "attempted suicide," which is not as felonious a crime nor as socially unbearable as abortion. "They don't want to be interviewed about abortion," Irma Elizabeth Asencio, one of the study's authors, explained to me. "They know they have committed a crime."...
Abortion as it exists in El Salvador today tends to operate on three levels. The well-off retain the "right to choose" that comes of simply having money. They can fly to Miami for an abortion, or visit the private office of a discreet and well-compensated doctor. Among the very poor, you can still find the back-alley world described by D.C. and the others who turn up in hospitals with damaged or lacerated wombs..."When we get a call from a hospital reporting an abortion," said Flor Evelyn Tópez, "the first thing we do is make sure the girl gets into custody. So if there is not a police officer there, we call the police and begin to collect evidence." Tópez is a prosecutor in the district of Apopa in San Salvador...Wandee Mira, an obstetrician at a hospital in San Salvador, told me that she had seen "a young girl handcuffed to her hospital bed with a police officer standing outside the door." "Yes, we sometimes call doctors from the Forensic Institute to do a pelvic exam," Tópez said, referring to the nation's main forensic lab, "and we ask them to document lacerations or any evidence such as cuts or a perforated uterus." In other words, if the suspicions of the patient's doctor are not conclusive enough, then in that initial 72-hour period, a forensic doctor can legally conduct a separate search of the crime scene. Tópez said, however, that vaginal searches can take place only with "a judge's permission."...Doctors in El Salvador now understand that it is their legal duty to report any woman suspected of having had an abortion.
A policy that criminalizes all abortions has a flip side. It appears to mandate that the full force of the medical team must tend toward saving the fetus under any circumstances. This notion can lead to some dangerous practices. Consider an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that occurs when a microscopic fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube — which is no bigger around than a pencil — and gets stuck there (or sometimes in the abdomen). Unattended, the stuck fetus grows until the organ containing it ruptures. A simple operation can remove the fetus before the organ bursts. After a rupture, though, the situation can turn into a medical emergency.
According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. "That is our policy," Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. "That is the law," she said. "The D.A.'s office told us that this was the law." Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital's practice. "Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital," she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. "If it's dead, we can operate," she said. "Before that, we can't." If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture....
One doctor, who asked to remain anonymous because of the risk of prosecution, explained that there are creative solutions to the problem of ectopic pregnancies: "Sometimes when an ectopic pregnancy comes in, the attendant will say, 'Send this patient to the best ultrasound doctor.' And I'll say, 'No, send her to the least-experienced ultrasound doctor.' He'll say, 'I can't find a heartbeat here.' Then we can operate."
In the United States, this conundrum is only beginning to emerge, as it did on "Meet the Press" in October 2004, when Tim Russert, the host, asked Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican representative then in the middle of what turned out to be a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, to explain his position in favor of a total ban on all abortion procedures. DeMint was reluctant to answer Russert's repeated question: Would you prosecute a woman who had an abortion? DeMint said he thought Congress should outlaw all abortions first and worry about the fallout later. "We've got to make laws first that protect life," he said.
since it highlights the moral bankruptcy of covert organizations like Opus Dei, which was involved in enforcing the ban. Here are some choice quotes from the article.
The pope's appointment of Lacalle 11 years ago brought to the Archdiocese of San Salvador a different kind of religious leader. Lacalle, an outspoken member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, redirected the country's church politics. Lacalle's predecessors were just as firmly opposed to abortion as he was. What he brought to the country's anti-abortion movement was a new determination to turn that opposition into state legislation and a belief that the church should play a public role in the process. In 1997, conservative legislators in the Assembly introduced a bill that would ban abortion in all circumstances. The archbishop campaigned actively for its passage.
There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal.
Julia Regina de Cardenal runs the Yes to Life Foundation in San Salvador, which provides prenatal care and job training to poor pregnant women. She was a key advocate for the passage of the ban. She argued that the existing law's exception for the life of the mother was outdated. As she explained to me, "There does not exist any case in which the life of the mother would be in danger, because technology has advanced so far."...In January 1999, as the issue headed toward the second vote in the Assembly, Pope John Paul II visited Latin America. "The church must proclaim the Gospel of life and speak out with prophetic force against the culture of death," he declared in Mexico City."May the continent of hope also be the continent of life!"..."At the hospital they asked me what I had. I didn't want to say. I said I felt bad. They did tests on my urine, blood and lungs and found I had a severe respiratory infection. They did an ultrasound and found my kidneys, lung and liver were infected. And the ultrasound showed something else. They asked me: "Why do you have a perforated uterus? What have you done?" Then they did a vaginal exam, and it was the most painful thing for me in the world. They put something in me, and I cried out. They had two doctors holding me down. They said they knew I had had an abortion because my uterus was perforated and big and they would have to operate immediately. All I remember was going to the operating room, and then I don't remember anything because for the next six days I was in a coma"...
"Back-alley abortion" is a term that has long been part of the abortion debate. In the United States, in the years since Roe v. Wade, it has come to seem metaphorical, perhaps even hyperbolic, but it happens to conjure precisely D.C.'s experience. And it's easy in El Salvador to find plenty of evidence that D.C.'s story is neither isolated nor the worst case. A report by the Center for Reproductive Rights offers this grim list of tools used in clandestine abortions: "clothes hangers, iron bars, high doses of contraceptives, fertilizers, gastritis remedies, soapy water and caustic agents (such as car battery acid)."...when a woman might face jail time for an abortion, she's less likely to discuss her pregnancy at all. According to a study on attempted suicide and teen pregnancy published last year by academics at the University of El Salvador, some girls who poison their wombs with agricultural pesticide (its efficacy being a Salvadoran urban legend) would rather report the cause of their resulting hospital visit as "attempted suicide," which is not as felonious a crime nor as socially unbearable as abortion. "They don't want to be interviewed about abortion," Irma Elizabeth Asencio, one of the study's authors, explained to me. "They know they have committed a crime."...
Abortion as it exists in El Salvador today tends to operate on three levels. The well-off retain the "right to choose" that comes of simply having money. They can fly to Miami for an abortion, or visit the private office of a discreet and well-compensated doctor. Among the very poor, you can still find the back-alley world described by D.C. and the others who turn up in hospitals with damaged or lacerated wombs..."When we get a call from a hospital reporting an abortion," said Flor Evelyn Tópez, "the first thing we do is make sure the girl gets into custody. So if there is not a police officer there, we call the police and begin to collect evidence." Tópez is a prosecutor in the district of Apopa in San Salvador...Wandee Mira, an obstetrician at a hospital in San Salvador, told me that she had seen "a young girl handcuffed to her hospital bed with a police officer standing outside the door." "Yes, we sometimes call doctors from the Forensic Institute to do a pelvic exam," Tópez said, referring to the nation's main forensic lab, "and we ask them to document lacerations or any evidence such as cuts or a perforated uterus." In other words, if the suspicions of the patient's doctor are not conclusive enough, then in that initial 72-hour period, a forensic doctor can legally conduct a separate search of the crime scene. Tópez said, however, that vaginal searches can take place only with "a judge's permission."...Doctors in El Salvador now understand that it is their legal duty to report any woman suspected of having had an abortion.
A policy that criminalizes all abortions has a flip side. It appears to mandate that the full force of the medical team must tend toward saving the fetus under any circumstances. This notion can lead to some dangerous practices. Consider an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that occurs when a microscopic fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube — which is no bigger around than a pencil — and gets stuck there (or sometimes in the abdomen). Unattended, the stuck fetus grows until the organ containing it ruptures. A simple operation can remove the fetus before the organ bursts. After a rupture, though, the situation can turn into a medical emergency.
According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. "That is our policy," Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. "That is the law," she said. "The D.A.'s office told us that this was the law." Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital's practice. "Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital," she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. "If it's dead, we can operate," she said. "Before that, we can't." If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture....
One doctor, who asked to remain anonymous because of the risk of prosecution, explained that there are creative solutions to the problem of ectopic pregnancies: "Sometimes when an ectopic pregnancy comes in, the attendant will say, 'Send this patient to the best ultrasound doctor.' And I'll say, 'No, send her to the least-experienced ultrasound doctor.' He'll say, 'I can't find a heartbeat here.' Then we can operate."
In the United States, this conundrum is only beginning to emerge, as it did on "Meet the Press" in October 2004, when Tim Russert, the host, asked Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican representative then in the middle of what turned out to be a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, to explain his position in favor of a total ban on all abortion procedures. DeMint was reluctant to answer Russert's repeated question: Would you prosecute a woman who had an abortion? DeMint said he thought Congress should outlaw all abortions first and worry about the fallout later. "We've got to make laws first that protect life," he said.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Occult Origins of the Counterculture: Part 2, edited
I'm bumping this post back up to the top because new material has been added. References will be included when the article is finally complete. Part 1 can be found here.
The French Revolution, next in the line of major historical events impacted by occult fraternities, is marked by the abolishment of feudalism and a transition away from absolutist monarchies towards constitutionalist states and republics, which have since become the dominant forms of government in the modern world. All of these political accomplishments originated in grass roots peasant uprisings that were then later attributed almost entirely to middle class intellectuals whose ranks were composed of many members of esoteric organizations such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. As with the Rosicrucians before them, many Freemasons exhibited genuine revolutionary sentiment, however, many members who came from the aristocracy primarily continued to view peasants as a source of expendable, cheap labor. During the time of the revolution, Edinburgh philosophy professor John Robison attended meetings of the sect only to later report that the true aim of Freemasonry was to subvert revolutionary uprisings in order to establish international hegemony on behalf of the ruling classes. In successive centuries, the elite families tied to Freemasonry would play a crucial role in the expansion of the British Empire, a series of military conquests that left Native populations devastated by mass famine and poverty due to war, slavery and ruthless taxation by the British. In Treason in America, Anton Chaitkin meticulously documents how the British East India company established Masonic lodges in China to enable the unimpeded importation of opium, an act that ended in addiction for tens of millions of Chinese peasants.
The social stratification represented by the degree system of Freemasonry is a logical extension of natural law, the Catholic ideology by which rigidly maintained social hierarchy was deemed a necessary component of any holy society. The Eye of Providence, colloquially known as the all-seeing eye, was first a Catholic symbol intended to symbolize the divine providence of God watching over humanity and superseding in human affairs through ecclesiastical authorities. The earliest depiction of the Eye of Providence in Europe was within the Palatine Chapel, whose construction was begun by Charlemagne in 786. Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor, and his accession inaugurated a return to the divine right of kings in Christian Europe. In the New Testament, the concept of the divine right of kings had been justified by the statement of St. Peter that all Christians should honor the pagan Roman Emperor. Throughout Medieval Europe, the same idea applied to feudal properties, which were believed to be owned by God and managed by Kings, who were in turn answerable only to the authority of Popes. This arrangement of power formed the basis of the figurative pyramid whose base was composed of serfs living in conditions akin to slavery in all of its most essential aspects. Feudal plantation owners were legally allowed to beat, murder and rape their serfs, while the serfs were forbidden from owning or selling property. The etymology of the term “serf” can be traced to the Latin word “servus”, which literally translates to slave.
In 1865 slavery was permanently abolished within the United States by way of the Thirteenth Amendment. Less than a year later, the Holy Office responded via an instruction signed by Pope Pius IX, which states: “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and there can be several just titles of slavery, and these are referred to by approved theologians and commentators of the sacred canons … It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given”. This policy was not officially changed within Canon law until 1918. Medieval texts used the words “peasant”, “serf” and “slave” as synonymous representations of the overwhelming majority of the population who did not own property. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded a census of Britain's million and a half inhabitants, noting that less than three percent were free landholders. The feudal pyramid explicated a regimented division of value whereby corporeal hierarchies of serfs, lords, abbots, knights and bishops were arranged below heavenly hierarchies of saints, angels and, ultimately, God. As a material extension of these values, religious institutions such as abbeys and monasteries maintained a significant portion of European feudal properties while simultaneously amassing vast fortunes as a result.
The social stratification of greater Medieval society was also applied to individual families, which were typically formed according to strict laws and customs as opposed to individual choice. For example, the lord of an estate could prevent serfs from marrying women from another estate, while also exercising the power to choose husbands for their tenants' daughters. Medieval laws also required parental consent for marriage up to the age of 30 for men and the age of 25 for women. The doctrine of mutual consent also allowed for spouses to abandon their families based on “confession” of prior marriage to a different spouse. As merchant classes arose in later centuries, the doctrine of mutual consent ostensibly allowed for freedom of choice in marriage, however, in practice, parents controlled the choices of their children by denying inheritance rights to those who married against their wishes. The free bench was an English manorial custom that defined a widow's inheritance rights as dependent on her chastity, and remarriage, as well as any ostensible evidence of sexual activity, required the widow to forfeit her lands. Similarly, the Legrewite was a fine designed to punish single sexually active women, a fee often compounded by the childwite, yet another fine for the birth of illegitimate children. As stated previously, the doctrine of mutual consent allowed for previously married women to have their children classified as illegitimate regardless of the wife's commitment to her marriage. In France, unmarried pregnant women were systematically interrogated at local government offices.
The “virtue” of blind obedience to religious and political authorities was promoted by the Jesuits, a Catholic fraternity that predated both the Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati. In his Letter on Obedience, Jesuit (Society of Jesus) founder Ignatius of Loyola wrote “And so, I should wish that all of you would train yourselves to recognize Christ our Lord in any Superior whomsoever, and with all devotion, reverence and obey in him His Divine Majesty. And this will appear less strange to you, if you keep in mind that St. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, bids us obey even temporal and pagan Superiors as Christ from Whom all well ordered authority descends: Slaves, obey your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your hearts as you would Christ: not serving to the eye as pleasers of men, but as slaves of Christ.”
Loyola's apparently tolerant attitude toward polytheistic cultures did not, however, prevent the Jesuits from playing a central role in the Goa Inquisition. The office of the Inquisition on the Portugese state of Goa was responsible for sanctioning the death by torture of dozens of Hindus and Muslims for the crime of practicing their native religion. The Goa Inquisition was originally installed after Francis Xavier, a student of Loyola's, one of seven original Jesuits and co-founder of the same group, wrote a letter to King John III of Portugal, requesting Catholic expedition to India as a route to ensuring Christian purity. As Xavier departed to lead the mission, the pope appointed him apostolic nuncio to the East, an ecclesiastical diplomatic title equivalent to that of ambassador. The Inquisition's first act was to establish the death penalty for open practice of the Hindu faith. Hundreds of prison cells were set up to accommodate the accused. Hindu temples were destroyed and ransacked, their contents confiscated by army action. The local Konkani language was suppressed, Hindu holy books were destroyed and Portugese became the compulsory national language.
The Jesuits organized an annual mass baptism on January 25, the Feast of Saint Paul, whereby their African slaves were ordered to grab Hindus and smear their lips with beef, an act that resulted in many Hindus being labeled as untouchable by their own people. In his book, the Goa Inquisition, Indo-Portugese historian T.R. De Souza writes “...the government transferred to the Church and religious orders the properties and other sources of revenue that had belonged to the Hindu temples that had been demolished or to the temple servants who had been converted or banished. Entire villages were taken over at times for being considered rebellious and handed over with all their revenues to the Jesuits.” The Goa Inquisition also exhaustively details the methods of torture through which Catholic missionaries enforced religious conversions, including flogging, dismemberment and amputations carried out so slowly that the victims remained alive throughout the process. The auto-de-fa was the Catholic ritual of public penance whereby condemned heretics and apostates were burned at the stake. According to De Souza, Francis Xavier was present at the first Inquisition, where two of the accused, including a French cleric, were burned alive. For his efforts, Xavier was canonized as a saint by Pope Gregory XV, at the same time as Ignatius Loyola, and proclaimed the “Patron of Catholic Missions” by Pope Pius XI.
Aside from their work in suppressing cultural and religious expression abroad, the Jesuits also endeavored to suppress European institutions that threatened the power of the Catholic church, particularly in the areas of politics and scientific discourse. In 1616 the Inquisition declared the scientific proposition that the Earth rotates around the Sun to be heresy, shortly after the Index of Prohibited Books banned any writings that advanced Copernican heliocentric astronomy. Jesuit astronomers argued that geocentrism, the theory that the earth is the center of the universe around which all heavenly bodies revolve, was in accordance with a literal interpretation of Scripture, particularly Psalms 96:10, Chronicles 16:30, Psalms 93:1, Ecclesiastes 1:5 and Psalms 104:5. The chief theologian of the Inquisition, Robert Bellarmine, was a Jesuit who read the astronomer Galileo Galilei the decree of the Index and ordered him to abandon his research into the Copernican system. When this decree was ignored, Galilei was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life. Galilei's discoveries were so ground-breaking that he has since been dubbed the “father of observational astronomy”.
The Society of Jesus was also able to gain political influence by hearing the confessions of kings, princes and other political authorities. According the New Catholic Encyclopedia, “they acted as royal confessors to all French kings for 2 centuries, from Henry III to Louis XV; to all German emperors after the early 17th century; to all Dukes of Bavaria after 1579; to most rulers of Poland and Portugal; to the Spanish kings in the 18th century; to James II of England; and to many ruling or princely families throughout Europe.” Confessions in this context functioned much as the Bacchanalia had in previous centuries: organizations in a position to elicit incriminating secrets were much more likely to gain the advantage of political blackmail. Royal confessors were thus able to promote the interests of the Papacy, such as when LeTellier, Jesuit confessor to King Louis XIV, convinced the monarch to revoke the Edict of Nantes which granted substantial rights to Calvinist Protestants. Because of this history of political maneuvering, the Society was expelled from most states across Europe, as well as a number of European colonies. In Portugal the Jesuit royal confessor Gabriel Malagrida was declared guilty of high treason on account of his role in plotting the attempted assassination of King Jose I. Malagrida was not executed because the Papacy expressed opposition to the execution of a Jesuit by secular authorities. Instead, he was confined to a dungeon beneath the tower of Belem along with other Jesuits, who were also arrested for their role in the plan.
Aside from political intrigue, another charge commonly leveled at the Society was economic exploitation, especially regarding trade revenues derived from colonial mission plantations. As a religious order the Jesuits were technically forbidden from buying and selling for profit, however, as had been the case with the Knights Templar before them, this rule was largely disregarded. Referring to the Society's financial management of mission plantations, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 states “...this was allowed, partly to provide for the current expenses of the mission, partly in order to protect the simple, childlike natives from the common plague of dishonest intermediaries.” In the Americas, Jesuit acquisitions were so extensive that suppression of the order resulted in widespread economic changes. The Society had owned the largest number of black slaves in Chile, so when Jesuits were expelled from the country there was a sharp decrease in the number of imported slaves. After Jesuit vineyards in Peru were auctioned, wine production also declined because the new owners did not have the expertise necessary to manage the fields.
The combined political, economic and academic influence of the Society contributed to numerous anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories alleging the order to be involved in plotting to overthrow nation-states on behalf of the Papacy. Many of these theories were a product of French anti-clericalism and claimed a rivalry between Freemasons and the Society of Jesus. Ironically, historians documenting the origins of speculative Freemasonry have unearthed evidence indicating that Freemasonry is in large part derived from Catholicism, with the Jesuits in particular playing an important role in their expansion throughout France. According to Chevalier Ramsay, a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as a tutor to King James' two sons, Freemasonry was founded in antiquity and renewed at the time of the Crusades. Crusaders utilized a symbolic language derived from the ancient Mystery cults, which was intended to differentiate Crusader from Saracen. The close relationship between these early Masons and the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem eventually resulted in the Blue Degrees which are named St. John's Masonry. Masonic participation in the Crusades may also be the reason why, according to Freemasonic legend, the original Lodge is “symbolically” located in Jerusalem. It may also be worth noting that Ramsay was a Baronet in the Jacobite Peerage (a hereditary honor granted by the deposed Stuart dynasty), so he may have been in a strategic position for absorbing the guarded secrets of high-ranking initiates.
One of the oldest surviving Masonic documents, from December 1658, suggests that the commonly held belief of the ideals of Freemasonry being opposed to royalism may, in truth, be erroneous. The document states, “That as formerly we and predecessors have and had from the temple of temples building on this earth one uniform community and union throughout the whole world from which temple proceeded one in Kilwinning in this our nation of Scotland and from that of Kilwinning many more within this kingdom of which there proceeded the Abbey and Lodge of Scone, built by men of art and architecture where they placed that lodge as the second lodge within this nation, which is now past memory of many generations, and was upheld by the Kings of Scotland...this Lodge is the most famous Lodge (if well ordered) within this kingdom-of which name of Mylne there had continued several generations of Master Masons to his Majesties the Kings of Scotland ." Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts is a book by architectural historian Vaughan Hart which further verifies this assertion, primarily through documenting the Hermetic-Cabalistic themes inherent in the masques of the Stuart court, which were typically planned and conceived by Masons.
Aside from the influence of Catholicism, one of the Enlightenment era philosophies associated with speculative Freemasonry was libertinism, a belief system that came to be defined as a complete absence of religious constraints. The ideology was named after the Roman god Liber, whose festival, the Liberalia, was celebrated by a procession in which a large phallus was paraded through the countryside to bring the promise of fertility to the land. Libertinism, in its most idealistic potential, attempted to expose the moral inadequacies of organized religion while providing a framework for community absent the constraints of social norms. Yet, without being grounded in political self-determination and mutual aid, the far more likely result of it propagation in a highly stratified society would have been abandonment of troublesome or inconvenient family members, since family life was considered a cornerstone of Christian ethics.
Perhaps the most recognized libertine of the era is the Marquis de Sade, an aristocrat, author, politician and alleged Freemason who is famous for inciting the storming of the Bastille, an event that inaugurated the French Revolution. Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille on account of his sexual torture of servants and prostitutes, acts that included rape, poisoning and cutting the women with knives. Although he is classified by many political theorists as a revolutionary, Sade was in fact opposed to the revolutionary goal of releasing feudal servants from debt bondage. During the September Massacres, a mass wave of violence directed against the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy, peasants ransacked the homes of nobility and burned records of feudal dues. De Sade immediately wrote to his deputy, Ripert, to order him to transport his family's estate books to a protected location in order to secure his inheritance. On September 2nd, several hundred priests were murdered by a mob who feared counterrevolutionary activity. Some of those who the rioters chose to execute were children that obviously could not have comprehended anything of the social injustice that motivated revolutionary impulse. De Sade later wrote of the massacres in a letter to his lawyer, saying "All of the refractory priests had their throats cut in the churches where they were being held, among them the archbishop of Arles, the most virtuous and respectable of men...There is nothing equal to the horror of the massacres, but they were just."
Given this predilection for status-seeking and exploitation of the lower classes, it should come as no surprise that De Sade was widely rumored to be a Freemason. Ex-Freemason and occult researcher Bill Schnoebelen contends to having seen internal masonic documents listing the Marquis as one of five founding members of the Illuminati. In one of his two major works, Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, De Sade describes a secret society of libertines whose lodge is founded by members of the Knights Templar. The organization contains members of the royal family who routinely engage in incest and sexual torture of commoners. De Sade claimed that much of the novel was factually accurate and based on real life experience.
Historical precedent for Juliette can be found in the life of Gilles de Rais, a member of the French court and commander in the Royal Army who was convicted of murdering dozens of children as part of of a highly sexualized occult ritual sacrifice. Rais was thought to have murdered up to several hundred missing children and many have speculated that he was part of a larger network of aristocrats that saw the common people as expendable resources for their own sexual appetites. Far from being a collective voice for the downtrodden masses, many prominent Freemasons agitated for the revolutionary uprising of peasants while simultaneously colluding with royalists who would likely have had the working classes exterminated if that course of action became advantageous to their own survival. The overriding imperialistic instinct intrinsic to the elite inner core of Freemasonry is observable in the fact that nearly every family member, military officer and council member in Napoleon's inner circle was an established member of the cult. Napoleon himself was depicted flashing masonic hand signs, even though his name was never listed in official records of the fraternity.
Masonic intrigue was ultimately the common denominator between the bloodshed of the latter stages of the French Revolution and the subsequent consolidation of empire under the direction of Napoleon. This political centralization would eventually lead to the present era of nascent global governance through a direct line of international organizations oriented towards political integration, which many critics of globalist policy would see as an embodiment of the world hegemony that so many detractors of Freemasonry had warned of. As a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna was called to redraw the political boundaries of the continent, which had been called into dispute after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Ostensibly a peaceful balance of European powers, the Congress set a prototype for The League of Nations and, later, The United Nations, globalist organizations that would come to be overwhelmingly staffed by members of occult fraternities, including the Freemasons.
According to Schnoebelen, another of the five founding members of the Illuminati was Francis Dashwood, 15th Baron le Spencer, Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of the British branch of the Hellfire Club. The Hellfire Clubs, formally known as the Orders of St Francis of Wycombe, were a series of exclusive clubs throughout Europe which provided an environment where politicians and other "men of quality" engaged in mock religious rituals allegedly involving prostitutes dressed as nuns. Rumors surrounding the club said its members routinely engaged in black masses, orgies and ritual human sacrifice. One of the buildings in which meetings were held, Medmenham Abbey, had been officially recognized by royal charter before being privately sold several centuries later. Dashwood had Medmenham Abbey redecorated in the style of Gothic revival, with the grounds of the former monastery ornamented with statues of mythological figures, phallic symbols and other relics of pagan cultures.
While the club's members played at blasphemy, they also worked hand-in-hand with Christian policymakers to limit the freedoms of the rest of the population. One member, Robert Vansittart, was a governor of Bengal under the direction of the British East India Company. His older brother Henry, also said to be a member of the club, was director of the company. Governor Vansittart presided over Bengal during the time of the catastrophic Bengal Famine of 1770, for which the British East India Company is generally regarded as having been responsible for. As a result of company policy, Bengal farmers were forced to pay five times the amount of land tax and most of this revenue left the country entirely, placing an undue burden on the local economy. At the same time, the company actively destroyed food crops which were then replaced by opium poppies, further reducing food supplies while funneling profits to foreign markets. Company officials passed laws forbidding the "hoarding" of rice, so when a relatively mild drought occurred in the spring of 1770, farmers were left with no surplus to feed their families. By the year's end, ten million people, or one third of Bengal's population, had died of starvation. Meanwhile, the British East India company had established a monopoly in grain trading, even managing to increase their already substantial profits during the lean years of the drought.
Other influential members of the Hellfire Clubs included Edward Thompson, member of British Parliament, and Philip Wharton, first Duke of Wharton and member of the occult fraternity Order of the Garter. Both would go on to be Grand Masters of Freemasonry, Thompson for the Grand Lodge of York and Wharton for all of England. Thompson, in particular, became a target of Jonathan Swift on account of his introducing a bill in favor of inland taxes that, as had been the story in Bengal, siphoned away the meager resources of the lower classes, a group which collectively produced the foods, clothing and luxury items the aristocracy had come to depend on. Swift's polemic stated unequivocally that every member of Parliament was driven exclusively by greed and loyalty to the Crown, a claim that obviously contradicts the revolutionary Hellfire aesthetic, rendered mere window dressing when compared to the political uprising of the productive classes which was motivated sheerly by economic necessity. Essentially, the clubs functioned as an incentive for politicians and other men of influence to adopt the customs of the dominant world order, fleecing the laboring classes of their resources while looking out for the interests of industry and the old money families that governed its development. The Hellfire Clubs also heralded the next phase in the inception of the modern intelligence agency, whose dominion over world affairs is reinforced through the induction of shame and secrecy in otherwise "respectable" individuals.
During the 19th century, libertine philosophy found expression through the first wave of the free love movement which was originally not oriented towards promiscuity but instead a separation of personal relationships from the domain of state regulation. Proponents of free love, which was closely tied to the first wave of feminism, valued marriage for its role in promoting personal happiness instead of an exclusive purpose in biological reproduction and maintenance of social order. A particular focus of some early libertine feminists was the repeal of divorce laws that prevented women from leaving abusive marriages. Another tenet of the free love movement was opposition to Comstock laws, which sought to restrict discussion of sexuality to doctors and moral reformers. The Comstock laws functioned as a medicalized continuation of Roman Catholic suppression of midwifery and herbal birth control, tools that could have alleviated the unnecessarily high rate of maternal death, a problem that had reached epic proportions by the 19th century. Central demands of the free love movement included choice in marriage and resistance against state censorship, however the ethical aspirations of the masses which composed that movement proved to be more comprehensive than that of its founder, whose public scandals revealed a personality driven by self interest.
The phrase "free love" was coined by John Humphrey Noyes, the son of a Vermont congressman who formed a religious community called Oneida in upstate New York. Oneida was centered around the idea of complex marriage, a form of polygamy where monogamy and emotional attachment to individuals were explicitly forbidden. As it turns out, free love wasn't quite so free at all since Noyes presided over the decision-making process regarding the selection of appropriate sexual partners for each community member. Oneida was heavily invested in the practice of stirpiculture, a form of selective breeding in which only the most virtuous members were allowed to breed, and only after applying for the privilege and being approved by a committee headed by Noyes. This process was intended to achieve moral and spiritual enhancement in successive generations. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the children born on the commune were fathered by Noyes himself. The community was eventually disbanded after Noyes was accused of statutory rape, after which a son of Noyes formed a joint stock company, Oneida ltd., which went on to become the world's largest manufacturer of cutlery. The stirpiculture developed at Oneida is believed to have been the first selective breeding experiment involving human beings, a field of research that would eventually result in forced sterilizations and labor camps for those members of society deemed to be physically or morally unfit.
The commune had originally been named after the Oneida people, who were one of five tribes comprising the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois people, far from having a centrally planned, hierarchical community structure like that created by Noyes, were perhaps one of the only functional examples of a participatory democracy during that time period since every adult member exerted influence over political decisions. Iroquois clan mothers, for example, appointed chiefs who would represent the interests of their clan at the Grand Council, and only women were granted the ability to remove those chiefs from power if the policies they advocated did not fall in line with the wishes of their community. Iroquois society was also matrilineal, meaning that clan lineage was passed down through the mother's family. Like most First Nation peoples, the Iroquois held property collectively and the entire extended family resided within a single dwelling, cultural traits that European settlers saw as indecent violations of Christian propriety.
First and foremost, contemporary historians have explained European conquest of the Americas as being impelled by colonists' desire for land. This aspect of colonization should not be ignored or minimized because forcing First Nation peoples from their ancestral homelands almost totally destroyed their culture, spiritual traditions and ability to survive, since, unlike European society, literally every element of Native American daily life, including religion, was tied directly to the land. President Andrew Jackson, Grand Master of the Freemasons of Tennessee, was responsible for the Indian Removal Act, the federal policy which allowed for the forcible removal of Southeastern tribes to barren lands in Oklahoma, leading to the deaths of many thousands during the Trail of Tears. Holocaust expert David Cesarani has argued that "In terms of the sheer number killed, the Native American genocide exceeds that of the holocaust".
While land-grabbing inarguably played a defining role in colonization, another aspect of European conquest that has been somewhat neglected by modern historians is the way that First Nation peoples' conception of gender norms provided rationale for some of the furthest extremes of cultural imperialism, even going so far as to justify outright eradication of Native culture as a whole, which differed from the patriarchal social order that had characterized Europe for millennia. Christian missionaries were alarmed by Native women's influential role in their communities, an attitude which is not surprising considering that they had been infused with the belief system of Church fathers such as Thomas Aquinas, who wrote "There is another kind of subjection which is called economic or civil, whereby the superior makes use of his subjects for their own benefit and good; and this kind of subjection existed even before sin. For good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates."
In 1887 the General Allotment Act authorized the U.S. government to survey tribal land which was then divided into individual land parcels designated for nuclear families. Also known as the Dawes Act, it was established for the explicit purpose of destroying the political power of tribal kinship networks, which for centuries had been viewed by moral reformers as a threat to Christian virtue and, by extension, Manifest Destiny, the idea that the westward expansion of the United States was an expression of God's will. In many areas, this compulsory assimilation resulted in Native women's status being lowered in their kin networks, since land that had traditionally been held by women was now owned by the male head of the household. Previously, divorce had been an easy procedure in most tribes, but after the Dawes Act took effect women were disinclined to divorce because land titles were preferentially given to men, a change that restricted womens' freedoms considerably.
Of particular focus for the cultural imperialism of Christian missionaries were two-spirit Native Americans, not only because their gender presentation deviated from Victorian moral standards but because they so often played a central role in polytheistic tribal practices, which were viewed as heathenism by monotheistic European settlers. Amongst the Pueblo tribes, two-spirits frequently led ceremonial dances and acted as intermediaries between the clan and deities representing powers of nature, which were invoked in order to ensure success in hunting, warfare and agriculture. Spanish settlers viewed the animism of ceremonial dances as blasphemous idolatry, using what they interpreted as "sexual perversity" as a justification for massacring entire tribes en masse. Many First Nation peoples of the Plains region practiced solitary vision quests where two-spirits acted as shamanistic guides between normative reality and the spirit world. In addition to their participation in religious ceremonies, two-spirits played an important role in tribal kinship networks through assisting in child care, adopting orphans and caring for widows and the elderly. When U.S. marriage laws were imposed on tribal cultures, same-sex marriages were outlawed, destroying many centuries of Native American cultural heritage while denying legal recognition to the relationships of two-spirits and their spouses.
By the late 1800s the U.S. government had entirely failed to honor its treaty promises to protect Native reservations from encroachment by settlers and gold miners. Without arable land or the large bison herds which had formerly been a staple food for the Plains tribes, the overwhelming majority of First Nation peoples of that region sunk deep into crippling poverty. During the solar eclipse of 1889 a medicine man of the Paiute peoples, Wovoka, experienced a vision in which he saw the Christian messiah, Jesus Christ, resurrected as a Native American. In his vision the civilization built by European descendants was obliterated, and the former lands of First Nation peoples were rejuvenated and rich with game, while the ancestors of tribal communities were brought back to life. Wovoka's vision became the basis of the Ghost Dance religion, an effort to resist the subjugation of Native peoples through cross-cultural cooperation between tribes. U.S. Indian agents were disturbed by the site of Great Basin and Plains tribes performing the Ghost Dance and quickly moved to outlaw the practice, in the process arresting many tribal leaders who refused to obey government orders. The conflict over the right of Native peoples to perform ceremonial dances was what initially triggered the Wounded Knee Massacre, during which hundreds of tribal members, including women and children, were murdered by the U.S. military.
In an effort to dissolve social unrest on reservations, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries Christian missionaries established compulsory, off-reservation boarding schools as a way to extinguish the cultural legacies of tribal nations. In many cases officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly kidnapped children from their homes, at times threatening their families with reduced rations if they refused to comply. Since reservations were located on lands that, due to a lack of arable soil, could not possibly provide economic sustenance, tribal communities were forced to participate in their own culture's annihilation sheerly for survival purposes. The boarding schools placed strict regulations on every aspect of students' lives, forbidding any expression of Native culture, including language, religion and clothing. Students who broke these rules were punished by whipping, starvation and public humiliation. School administrators were especially concerned with assimilating Native children into adopting the gender norms of Victorian morality, including cutting the long hair of boys and forcing women to learn housekeeping skills, while prohibiting their work in the fields even though agriculture had traditionally been women's domain. Conditions in many schools were austere, with Native children undergoing perpetual undernourishment and disease. In Canada the federal government funded the establishment of a parallel residential school system which was run by Christian churches. Due to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and medical care, as well as incredibly high rates of physical and sexual abuse, the death rate in Canadian residential schools was up to 69 percent for First Nation students, a history that has resulted in the quite reasonable allegation that the Canadian federal government, as well as the churches who oversaw the residential school system, are guilty of cultural genocide.
Many Christian theologians have argued that Native peoples benefited from European colonization, especially as regards the status of women in polygynous tribes, since, up until the recent past, most anthropologists assumed these women lived in a condition of unbearable hardship and drudgery compared to male tribal members. To provide a complete picture of colonists' impact on indigenous society, it is necessary to avoid glamorization of Native cultures because, despite the fact that most indigenous tribes placed women in a higher social status than that of European-American women of the Victorian era, there were a minority who practiced dismemberment of adulterous women. The Blackfoot Confederacy, in particular, passed on a tradition of chopping off the noses of adulterous women and little can be gained by minimizing this cultural atrocity. Yet, when the effects of colonization are considered thoroughly, does the historical record confirm that European settlers were truly the defenders of women's empowerment that theologians have penned them to be? First, an analysis of the immediate consequences of colonial marriage laws is required.
In The Importance of Being Monogamous, Sarah Carter outlines the myriad ways in which marriage laws served to lower the status of both Canadian aboriginal and European-American women while justifying the encroachment of settlers onto Native territories. The imposition of bigamy laws meant that deserted wives and husbands were unable to remarry, and those with children were left with little means to care for their family. Catholic women who remarried were met with public humiliation by excommunication while women who "lost their virtue" before marriage were regarded as social outcasts. Since the nuclear family was seen as the cornerstone of social order, the Canadian government unilaterally barred single women who were not widows from owning property, since they were not contributing to society via marital reproductive labor.
The customs of English common law formed the basis of Canadian law codes, and these laws had historically preserved the idea of the "doctrine of marital unity" under which the legal autonomy of wives was subsumed by their husbands who were allowed to "chastise" their wives in so far as that chastisement did not put her life in jeopardy. In practice, divorce was expensive and exceedingly difficult to obtain, so it was ruled out as an option for all but the wealthiest members of society. Divorces were granted solely by Parliament and involved the examination of witnesses as well as public debate, an obviously embarrassing procedure that few women were willing to endure even in the most distressing situations. Furthermore, a husband was legally entitled to divorce if his wife had committed adultery, however wives could not divorce their husbands on this qualification alone, needing evidence of extreme violence or desertion.
No one benefits by minimizing the abuses perpetrated by members of the Blackfoot tribes or other indigenous communities, yet the fact remains that, before colonists arrived, the concept of illegitimacy, including single motherhood, was unknown in Native cultures. Within many aboriginal communities, the terms "mother" and "father" applied to cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings. Complex kinship systems predominated and came with the assumption that the community shared collective responsibility for children. Previously, marriage laws of Plains aboriginals had been flexible on the issue of divorce, but after colonial bigamy laws were enforced, women in abusive relationships had little recourse to leave dangerous situations. Officials from the Department of Indian Affairs were given nearly unlimited amounts of power over aboriginal communities, since they alone were able to authorize the legal validity of a marriage, meaning that DIA agents often arranged marriages, refused to recognize marriages they deemed unacceptable and captured "runaway wives" who were then returned to their former husbands.
When residential schools enforced enrollment of First Nation children, indigenous communities consequently began arranging marriages of very young girls, since marriage exempted their daughters from being subjected to the dangerous, unhealthy conditions of boarding schools. According to Carter, "Aboriginal women were often labeled immoral prostitutes who posed a serious danger to public health. The movement of aboriginal women off their reserves was restricted and monitored through a pass system", a limitation that did not apply to DIA agents who routinely trespassed on Native lands. Moreover, it is surely not a coincidence that, at the time bigamy laws were established, tribal communities were in the majority of Canadian populations and had fomented several armed uprisings which threatened the stability of colonial expansion. In conclusion, while theologians and politicians alike wax philosophical about how two parent families form the basis of moral societies, scant analysis has been focused on the ways that standardization of the nuclear family has destroyed communities while aiding in the suppression of dissident populations.
The French Revolution, next in the line of major historical events impacted by occult fraternities, is marked by the abolishment of feudalism and a transition away from absolutist monarchies towards constitutionalist states and republics, which have since become the dominant forms of government in the modern world. All of these political accomplishments originated in grass roots peasant uprisings that were then later attributed almost entirely to middle class intellectuals whose ranks were composed of many members of esoteric organizations such as the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. As with the Rosicrucians before them, many Freemasons exhibited genuine revolutionary sentiment, however, many members who came from the aristocracy primarily continued to view peasants as a source of expendable, cheap labor. During the time of the revolution, Edinburgh philosophy professor John Robison attended meetings of the sect only to later report that the true aim of Freemasonry was to subvert revolutionary uprisings in order to establish international hegemony on behalf of the ruling classes. In successive centuries, the elite families tied to Freemasonry would play a crucial role in the expansion of the British Empire, a series of military conquests that left Native populations devastated by mass famine and poverty due to war, slavery and ruthless taxation by the British. In Treason in America, Anton Chaitkin meticulously documents how the British East India company established Masonic lodges in China to enable the unimpeded importation of opium, an act that ended in addiction for tens of millions of Chinese peasants.
The social stratification represented by the degree system of Freemasonry is a logical extension of natural law, the Catholic ideology by which rigidly maintained social hierarchy was deemed a necessary component of any holy society. The Eye of Providence, colloquially known as the all-seeing eye, was first a Catholic symbol intended to symbolize the divine providence of God watching over humanity and superseding in human affairs through ecclesiastical authorities. The earliest depiction of the Eye of Providence in Europe was within the Palatine Chapel, whose construction was begun by Charlemagne in 786. Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor, and his accession inaugurated a return to the divine right of kings in Christian Europe. In the New Testament, the concept of the divine right of kings had been justified by the statement of St. Peter that all Christians should honor the pagan Roman Emperor. Throughout Medieval Europe, the same idea applied to feudal properties, which were believed to be owned by God and managed by Kings, who were in turn answerable only to the authority of Popes. This arrangement of power formed the basis of the figurative pyramid whose base was composed of serfs living in conditions akin to slavery in all of its most essential aspects. Feudal plantation owners were legally allowed to beat, murder and rape their serfs, while the serfs were forbidden from owning or selling property. The etymology of the term “serf” can be traced to the Latin word “servus”, which literally translates to slave.
In 1865 slavery was permanently abolished within the United States by way of the Thirteenth Amendment. Less than a year later, the Holy Office responded via an instruction signed by Pope Pius IX, which states: “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and there can be several just titles of slavery, and these are referred to by approved theologians and commentators of the sacred canons … It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given”. This policy was not officially changed within Canon law until 1918. Medieval texts used the words “peasant”, “serf” and “slave” as synonymous representations of the overwhelming majority of the population who did not own property. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded a census of Britain's million and a half inhabitants, noting that less than three percent were free landholders. The feudal pyramid explicated a regimented division of value whereby corporeal hierarchies of serfs, lords, abbots, knights and bishops were arranged below heavenly hierarchies of saints, angels and, ultimately, God. As a material extension of these values, religious institutions such as abbeys and monasteries maintained a significant portion of European feudal properties while simultaneously amassing vast fortunes as a result.
The social stratification of greater Medieval society was also applied to individual families, which were typically formed according to strict laws and customs as opposed to individual choice. For example, the lord of an estate could prevent serfs from marrying women from another estate, while also exercising the power to choose husbands for their tenants' daughters. Medieval laws also required parental consent for marriage up to the age of 30 for men and the age of 25 for women. The doctrine of mutual consent also allowed for spouses to abandon their families based on “confession” of prior marriage to a different spouse. As merchant classes arose in later centuries, the doctrine of mutual consent ostensibly allowed for freedom of choice in marriage, however, in practice, parents controlled the choices of their children by denying inheritance rights to those who married against their wishes. The free bench was an English manorial custom that defined a widow's inheritance rights as dependent on her chastity, and remarriage, as well as any ostensible evidence of sexual activity, required the widow to forfeit her lands. Similarly, the Legrewite was a fine designed to punish single sexually active women, a fee often compounded by the childwite, yet another fine for the birth of illegitimate children. As stated previously, the doctrine of mutual consent allowed for previously married women to have their children classified as illegitimate regardless of the wife's commitment to her marriage. In France, unmarried pregnant women were systematically interrogated at local government offices.
The “virtue” of blind obedience to religious and political authorities was promoted by the Jesuits, a Catholic fraternity that predated both the Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati. In his Letter on Obedience, Jesuit (Society of Jesus) founder Ignatius of Loyola wrote “And so, I should wish that all of you would train yourselves to recognize Christ our Lord in any Superior whomsoever, and with all devotion, reverence and obey in him His Divine Majesty. And this will appear less strange to you, if you keep in mind that St. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, bids us obey even temporal and pagan Superiors as Christ from Whom all well ordered authority descends: Slaves, obey your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your hearts as you would Christ: not serving to the eye as pleasers of men, but as slaves of Christ.”
Loyola's apparently tolerant attitude toward polytheistic cultures did not, however, prevent the Jesuits from playing a central role in the Goa Inquisition. The office of the Inquisition on the Portugese state of Goa was responsible for sanctioning the death by torture of dozens of Hindus and Muslims for the crime of practicing their native religion. The Goa Inquisition was originally installed after Francis Xavier, a student of Loyola's, one of seven original Jesuits and co-founder of the same group, wrote a letter to King John III of Portugal, requesting Catholic expedition to India as a route to ensuring Christian purity. As Xavier departed to lead the mission, the pope appointed him apostolic nuncio to the East, an ecclesiastical diplomatic title equivalent to that of ambassador. The Inquisition's first act was to establish the death penalty for open practice of the Hindu faith. Hundreds of prison cells were set up to accommodate the accused. Hindu temples were destroyed and ransacked, their contents confiscated by army action. The local Konkani language was suppressed, Hindu holy books were destroyed and Portugese became the compulsory national language.
The Jesuits organized an annual mass baptism on January 25, the Feast of Saint Paul, whereby their African slaves were ordered to grab Hindus and smear their lips with beef, an act that resulted in many Hindus being labeled as untouchable by their own people. In his book, the Goa Inquisition, Indo-Portugese historian T.R. De Souza writes “...the government transferred to the Church and religious orders the properties and other sources of revenue that had belonged to the Hindu temples that had been demolished or to the temple servants who had been converted or banished. Entire villages were taken over at times for being considered rebellious and handed over with all their revenues to the Jesuits.” The Goa Inquisition also exhaustively details the methods of torture through which Catholic missionaries enforced religious conversions, including flogging, dismemberment and amputations carried out so slowly that the victims remained alive throughout the process. The auto-de-fa was the Catholic ritual of public penance whereby condemned heretics and apostates were burned at the stake. According to De Souza, Francis Xavier was present at the first Inquisition, where two of the accused, including a French cleric, were burned alive. For his efforts, Xavier was canonized as a saint by Pope Gregory XV, at the same time as Ignatius Loyola, and proclaimed the “Patron of Catholic Missions” by Pope Pius XI.
Aside from their work in suppressing cultural and religious expression abroad, the Jesuits also endeavored to suppress European institutions that threatened the power of the Catholic church, particularly in the areas of politics and scientific discourse. In 1616 the Inquisition declared the scientific proposition that the Earth rotates around the Sun to be heresy, shortly after the Index of Prohibited Books banned any writings that advanced Copernican heliocentric astronomy. Jesuit astronomers argued that geocentrism, the theory that the earth is the center of the universe around which all heavenly bodies revolve, was in accordance with a literal interpretation of Scripture, particularly Psalms 96:10, Chronicles 16:30, Psalms 93:1, Ecclesiastes 1:5 and Psalms 104:5. The chief theologian of the Inquisition, Robert Bellarmine, was a Jesuit who read the astronomer Galileo Galilei the decree of the Index and ordered him to abandon his research into the Copernican system. When this decree was ignored, Galilei was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life. Galilei's discoveries were so ground-breaking that he has since been dubbed the “father of observational astronomy”.
The Society of Jesus was also able to gain political influence by hearing the confessions of kings, princes and other political authorities. According the New Catholic Encyclopedia, “they acted as royal confessors to all French kings for 2 centuries, from Henry III to Louis XV; to all German emperors after the early 17th century; to all Dukes of Bavaria after 1579; to most rulers of Poland and Portugal; to the Spanish kings in the 18th century; to James II of England; and to many ruling or princely families throughout Europe.” Confessions in this context functioned much as the Bacchanalia had in previous centuries: organizations in a position to elicit incriminating secrets were much more likely to gain the advantage of political blackmail. Royal confessors were thus able to promote the interests of the Papacy, such as when LeTellier, Jesuit confessor to King Louis XIV, convinced the monarch to revoke the Edict of Nantes which granted substantial rights to Calvinist Protestants. Because of this history of political maneuvering, the Society was expelled from most states across Europe, as well as a number of European colonies. In Portugal the Jesuit royal confessor Gabriel Malagrida was declared guilty of high treason on account of his role in plotting the attempted assassination of King Jose I. Malagrida was not executed because the Papacy expressed opposition to the execution of a Jesuit by secular authorities. Instead, he was confined to a dungeon beneath the tower of Belem along with other Jesuits, who were also arrested for their role in the plan.
Aside from political intrigue, another charge commonly leveled at the Society was economic exploitation, especially regarding trade revenues derived from colonial mission plantations. As a religious order the Jesuits were technically forbidden from buying and selling for profit, however, as had been the case with the Knights Templar before them, this rule was largely disregarded. Referring to the Society's financial management of mission plantations, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 states “...this was allowed, partly to provide for the current expenses of the mission, partly in order to protect the simple, childlike natives from the common plague of dishonest intermediaries.” In the Americas, Jesuit acquisitions were so extensive that suppression of the order resulted in widespread economic changes. The Society had owned the largest number of black slaves in Chile, so when Jesuits were expelled from the country there was a sharp decrease in the number of imported slaves. After Jesuit vineyards in Peru were auctioned, wine production also declined because the new owners did not have the expertise necessary to manage the fields.
The combined political, economic and academic influence of the Society contributed to numerous anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories alleging the order to be involved in plotting to overthrow nation-states on behalf of the Papacy. Many of these theories were a product of French anti-clericalism and claimed a rivalry between Freemasons and the Society of Jesus. Ironically, historians documenting the origins of speculative Freemasonry have unearthed evidence indicating that Freemasonry is in large part derived from Catholicism, with the Jesuits in particular playing an important role in their expansion throughout France. According to Chevalier Ramsay, a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as a tutor to King James' two sons, Freemasonry was founded in antiquity and renewed at the time of the Crusades. Crusaders utilized a symbolic language derived from the ancient Mystery cults, which was intended to differentiate Crusader from Saracen. The close relationship between these early Masons and the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem eventually resulted in the Blue Degrees which are named St. John's Masonry. Masonic participation in the Crusades may also be the reason why, according to Freemasonic legend, the original Lodge is “symbolically” located in Jerusalem. It may also be worth noting that Ramsay was a Baronet in the Jacobite Peerage (a hereditary honor granted by the deposed Stuart dynasty), so he may have been in a strategic position for absorbing the guarded secrets of high-ranking initiates.
One of the oldest surviving Masonic documents, from December 1658, suggests that the commonly held belief of the ideals of Freemasonry being opposed to royalism may, in truth, be erroneous. The document states, “That as formerly we and predecessors have and had from the temple of temples building on this earth one uniform community and union throughout the whole world from which temple proceeded one in Kilwinning in this our nation of Scotland and from that of Kilwinning many more within this kingdom of which there proceeded the Abbey and Lodge of Scone, built by men of art and architecture where they placed that lodge as the second lodge within this nation, which is now past memory of many generations, and was upheld by the Kings of Scotland...this Lodge is the most famous Lodge (if well ordered) within this kingdom-of which name of Mylne there had continued several generations of Master Masons to his Majesties the Kings of Scotland ." Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts is a book by architectural historian Vaughan Hart which further verifies this assertion, primarily through documenting the Hermetic-Cabalistic themes inherent in the masques of the Stuart court, which were typically planned and conceived by Masons.
Aside from the influence of Catholicism, one of the Enlightenment era philosophies associated with speculative Freemasonry was libertinism, a belief system that came to be defined as a complete absence of religious constraints. The ideology was named after the Roman god Liber, whose festival, the Liberalia, was celebrated by a procession in which a large phallus was paraded through the countryside to bring the promise of fertility to the land. Libertinism, in its most idealistic potential, attempted to expose the moral inadequacies of organized religion while providing a framework for community absent the constraints of social norms. Yet, without being grounded in political self-determination and mutual aid, the far more likely result of it propagation in a highly stratified society would have been abandonment of troublesome or inconvenient family members, since family life was considered a cornerstone of Christian ethics.
Perhaps the most recognized libertine of the era is the Marquis de Sade, an aristocrat, author, politician and alleged Freemason who is famous for inciting the storming of the Bastille, an event that inaugurated the French Revolution. Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille on account of his sexual torture of servants and prostitutes, acts that included rape, poisoning and cutting the women with knives. Although he is classified by many political theorists as a revolutionary, Sade was in fact opposed to the revolutionary goal of releasing feudal servants from debt bondage. During the September Massacres, a mass wave of violence directed against the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy, peasants ransacked the homes of nobility and burned records of feudal dues. De Sade immediately wrote to his deputy, Ripert, to order him to transport his family's estate books to a protected location in order to secure his inheritance. On September 2nd, several hundred priests were murdered by a mob who feared counterrevolutionary activity. Some of those who the rioters chose to execute were children that obviously could not have comprehended anything of the social injustice that motivated revolutionary impulse. De Sade later wrote of the massacres in a letter to his lawyer, saying "All of the refractory priests had their throats cut in the churches where they were being held, among them the archbishop of Arles, the most virtuous and respectable of men...There is nothing equal to the horror of the massacres, but they were just."
Given this predilection for status-seeking and exploitation of the lower classes, it should come as no surprise that De Sade was widely rumored to be a Freemason. Ex-Freemason and occult researcher Bill Schnoebelen contends to having seen internal masonic documents listing the Marquis as one of five founding members of the Illuminati. In one of his two major works, Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, De Sade describes a secret society of libertines whose lodge is founded by members of the Knights Templar. The organization contains members of the royal family who routinely engage in incest and sexual torture of commoners. De Sade claimed that much of the novel was factually accurate and based on real life experience.
Historical precedent for Juliette can be found in the life of Gilles de Rais, a member of the French court and commander in the Royal Army who was convicted of murdering dozens of children as part of of a highly sexualized occult ritual sacrifice. Rais was thought to have murdered up to several hundred missing children and many have speculated that he was part of a larger network of aristocrats that saw the common people as expendable resources for their own sexual appetites. Far from being a collective voice for the downtrodden masses, many prominent Freemasons agitated for the revolutionary uprising of peasants while simultaneously colluding with royalists who would likely have had the working classes exterminated if that course of action became advantageous to their own survival. The overriding imperialistic instinct intrinsic to the elite inner core of Freemasonry is observable in the fact that nearly every family member, military officer and council member in Napoleon's inner circle was an established member of the cult. Napoleon himself was depicted flashing masonic hand signs, even though his name was never listed in official records of the fraternity.
Masonic intrigue was ultimately the common denominator between the bloodshed of the latter stages of the French Revolution and the subsequent consolidation of empire under the direction of Napoleon. This political centralization would eventually lead to the present era of nascent global governance through a direct line of international organizations oriented towards political integration, which many critics of globalist policy would see as an embodiment of the world hegemony that so many detractors of Freemasonry had warned of. As a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna was called to redraw the political boundaries of the continent, which had been called into dispute after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Ostensibly a peaceful balance of European powers, the Congress set a prototype for The League of Nations and, later, The United Nations, globalist organizations that would come to be overwhelmingly staffed by members of occult fraternities, including the Freemasons.
According to Schnoebelen, another of the five founding members of the Illuminati was Francis Dashwood, 15th Baron le Spencer, Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of the British branch of the Hellfire Club. The Hellfire Clubs, formally known as the Orders of St Francis of Wycombe, were a series of exclusive clubs throughout Europe which provided an environment where politicians and other "men of quality" engaged in mock religious rituals allegedly involving prostitutes dressed as nuns. Rumors surrounding the club said its members routinely engaged in black masses, orgies and ritual human sacrifice. One of the buildings in which meetings were held, Medmenham Abbey, had been officially recognized by royal charter before being privately sold several centuries later. Dashwood had Medmenham Abbey redecorated in the style of Gothic revival, with the grounds of the former monastery ornamented with statues of mythological figures, phallic symbols and other relics of pagan cultures.
While the club's members played at blasphemy, they also worked hand-in-hand with Christian policymakers to limit the freedoms of the rest of the population. One member, Robert Vansittart, was a governor of Bengal under the direction of the British East India Company. His older brother Henry, also said to be a member of the club, was director of the company. Governor Vansittart presided over Bengal during the time of the catastrophic Bengal Famine of 1770, for which the British East India Company is generally regarded as having been responsible for. As a result of company policy, Bengal farmers were forced to pay five times the amount of land tax and most of this revenue left the country entirely, placing an undue burden on the local economy. At the same time, the company actively destroyed food crops which were then replaced by opium poppies, further reducing food supplies while funneling profits to foreign markets. Company officials passed laws forbidding the "hoarding" of rice, so when a relatively mild drought occurred in the spring of 1770, farmers were left with no surplus to feed their families. By the year's end, ten million people, or one third of Bengal's population, had died of starvation. Meanwhile, the British East India company had established a monopoly in grain trading, even managing to increase their already substantial profits during the lean years of the drought.
Other influential members of the Hellfire Clubs included Edward Thompson, member of British Parliament, and Philip Wharton, first Duke of Wharton and member of the occult fraternity Order of the Garter. Both would go on to be Grand Masters of Freemasonry, Thompson for the Grand Lodge of York and Wharton for all of England. Thompson, in particular, became a target of Jonathan Swift on account of his introducing a bill in favor of inland taxes that, as had been the story in Bengal, siphoned away the meager resources of the lower classes, a group which collectively produced the foods, clothing and luxury items the aristocracy had come to depend on. Swift's polemic stated unequivocally that every member of Parliament was driven exclusively by greed and loyalty to the Crown, a claim that obviously contradicts the revolutionary Hellfire aesthetic, rendered mere window dressing when compared to the political uprising of the productive classes which was motivated sheerly by economic necessity. Essentially, the clubs functioned as an incentive for politicians and other men of influence to adopt the customs of the dominant world order, fleecing the laboring classes of their resources while looking out for the interests of industry and the old money families that governed its development. The Hellfire Clubs also heralded the next phase in the inception of the modern intelligence agency, whose dominion over world affairs is reinforced through the induction of shame and secrecy in otherwise "respectable" individuals.
During the 19th century, libertine philosophy found expression through the first wave of the free love movement which was originally not oriented towards promiscuity but instead a separation of personal relationships from the domain of state regulation. Proponents of free love, which was closely tied to the first wave of feminism, valued marriage for its role in promoting personal happiness instead of an exclusive purpose in biological reproduction and maintenance of social order. A particular focus of some early libertine feminists was the repeal of divorce laws that prevented women from leaving abusive marriages. Another tenet of the free love movement was opposition to Comstock laws, which sought to restrict discussion of sexuality to doctors and moral reformers. The Comstock laws functioned as a medicalized continuation of Roman Catholic suppression of midwifery and herbal birth control, tools that could have alleviated the unnecessarily high rate of maternal death, a problem that had reached epic proportions by the 19th century. Central demands of the free love movement included choice in marriage and resistance against state censorship, however the ethical aspirations of the masses which composed that movement proved to be more comprehensive than that of its founder, whose public scandals revealed a personality driven by self interest.
The phrase "free love" was coined by John Humphrey Noyes, the son of a Vermont congressman who formed a religious community called Oneida in upstate New York. Oneida was centered around the idea of complex marriage, a form of polygamy where monogamy and emotional attachment to individuals were explicitly forbidden. As it turns out, free love wasn't quite so free at all since Noyes presided over the decision-making process regarding the selection of appropriate sexual partners for each community member. Oneida was heavily invested in the practice of stirpiculture, a form of selective breeding in which only the most virtuous members were allowed to breed, and only after applying for the privilege and being approved by a committee headed by Noyes. This process was intended to achieve moral and spiritual enhancement in successive generations. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of the children born on the commune were fathered by Noyes himself. The community was eventually disbanded after Noyes was accused of statutory rape, after which a son of Noyes formed a joint stock company, Oneida ltd., which went on to become the world's largest manufacturer of cutlery. The stirpiculture developed at Oneida is believed to have been the first selective breeding experiment involving human beings, a field of research that would eventually result in forced sterilizations and labor camps for those members of society deemed to be physically or morally unfit.
The commune had originally been named after the Oneida people, who were one of five tribes comprising the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois people, far from having a centrally planned, hierarchical community structure like that created by Noyes, were perhaps one of the only functional examples of a participatory democracy during that time period since every adult member exerted influence over political decisions. Iroquois clan mothers, for example, appointed chiefs who would represent the interests of their clan at the Grand Council, and only women were granted the ability to remove those chiefs from power if the policies they advocated did not fall in line with the wishes of their community. Iroquois society was also matrilineal, meaning that clan lineage was passed down through the mother's family. Like most First Nation peoples, the Iroquois held property collectively and the entire extended family resided within a single dwelling, cultural traits that European settlers saw as indecent violations of Christian propriety.
First and foremost, contemporary historians have explained European conquest of the Americas as being impelled by colonists' desire for land. This aspect of colonization should not be ignored or minimized because forcing First Nation peoples from their ancestral homelands almost totally destroyed their culture, spiritual traditions and ability to survive, since, unlike European society, literally every element of Native American daily life, including religion, was tied directly to the land. President Andrew Jackson, Grand Master of the Freemasons of Tennessee, was responsible for the Indian Removal Act, the federal policy which allowed for the forcible removal of Southeastern tribes to barren lands in Oklahoma, leading to the deaths of many thousands during the Trail of Tears. Holocaust expert David Cesarani has argued that "In terms of the sheer number killed, the Native American genocide exceeds that of the holocaust".
While land-grabbing inarguably played a defining role in colonization, another aspect of European conquest that has been somewhat neglected by modern historians is the way that First Nation peoples' conception of gender norms provided rationale for some of the furthest extremes of cultural imperialism, even going so far as to justify outright eradication of Native culture as a whole, which differed from the patriarchal social order that had characterized Europe for millennia. Christian missionaries were alarmed by Native women's influential role in their communities, an attitude which is not surprising considering that they had been infused with the belief system of Church fathers such as Thomas Aquinas, who wrote "There is another kind of subjection which is called economic or civil, whereby the superior makes use of his subjects for their own benefit and good; and this kind of subjection existed even before sin. For good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates."
In 1887 the General Allotment Act authorized the U.S. government to survey tribal land which was then divided into individual land parcels designated for nuclear families. Also known as the Dawes Act, it was established for the explicit purpose of destroying the political power of tribal kinship networks, which for centuries had been viewed by moral reformers as a threat to Christian virtue and, by extension, Manifest Destiny, the idea that the westward expansion of the United States was an expression of God's will. In many areas, this compulsory assimilation resulted in Native women's status being lowered in their kin networks, since land that had traditionally been held by women was now owned by the male head of the household. Previously, divorce had been an easy procedure in most tribes, but after the Dawes Act took effect women were disinclined to divorce because land titles were preferentially given to men, a change that restricted womens' freedoms considerably.
Of particular focus for the cultural imperialism of Christian missionaries were two-spirit Native Americans, not only because their gender presentation deviated from Victorian moral standards but because they so often played a central role in polytheistic tribal practices, which were viewed as heathenism by monotheistic European settlers. Amongst the Pueblo tribes, two-spirits frequently led ceremonial dances and acted as intermediaries between the clan and deities representing powers of nature, which were invoked in order to ensure success in hunting, warfare and agriculture. Spanish settlers viewed the animism of ceremonial dances as blasphemous idolatry, using what they interpreted as "sexual perversity" as a justification for massacring entire tribes en masse. Many First Nation peoples of the Plains region practiced solitary vision quests where two-spirits acted as shamanistic guides between normative reality and the spirit world. In addition to their participation in religious ceremonies, two-spirits played an important role in tribal kinship networks through assisting in child care, adopting orphans and caring for widows and the elderly. When U.S. marriage laws were imposed on tribal cultures, same-sex marriages were outlawed, destroying many centuries of Native American cultural heritage while denying legal recognition to the relationships of two-spirits and their spouses.
By the late 1800s the U.S. government had entirely failed to honor its treaty promises to protect Native reservations from encroachment by settlers and gold miners. Without arable land or the large bison herds which had formerly been a staple food for the Plains tribes, the overwhelming majority of First Nation peoples of that region sunk deep into crippling poverty. During the solar eclipse of 1889 a medicine man of the Paiute peoples, Wovoka, experienced a vision in which he saw the Christian messiah, Jesus Christ, resurrected as a Native American. In his vision the civilization built by European descendants was obliterated, and the former lands of First Nation peoples were rejuvenated and rich with game, while the ancestors of tribal communities were brought back to life. Wovoka's vision became the basis of the Ghost Dance religion, an effort to resist the subjugation of Native peoples through cross-cultural cooperation between tribes. U.S. Indian agents were disturbed by the site of Great Basin and Plains tribes performing the Ghost Dance and quickly moved to outlaw the practice, in the process arresting many tribal leaders who refused to obey government orders. The conflict over the right of Native peoples to perform ceremonial dances was what initially triggered the Wounded Knee Massacre, during which hundreds of tribal members, including women and children, were murdered by the U.S. military.
In an effort to dissolve social unrest on reservations, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries Christian missionaries established compulsory, off-reservation boarding schools as a way to extinguish the cultural legacies of tribal nations. In many cases officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly kidnapped children from their homes, at times threatening their families with reduced rations if they refused to comply. Since reservations were located on lands that, due to a lack of arable soil, could not possibly provide economic sustenance, tribal communities were forced to participate in their own culture's annihilation sheerly for survival purposes. The boarding schools placed strict regulations on every aspect of students' lives, forbidding any expression of Native culture, including language, religion and clothing. Students who broke these rules were punished by whipping, starvation and public humiliation. School administrators were especially concerned with assimilating Native children into adopting the gender norms of Victorian morality, including cutting the long hair of boys and forcing women to learn housekeeping skills, while prohibiting their work in the fields even though agriculture had traditionally been women's domain. Conditions in many schools were austere, with Native children undergoing perpetual undernourishment and disease. In Canada the federal government funded the establishment of a parallel residential school system which was run by Christian churches. Due to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and medical care, as well as incredibly high rates of physical and sexual abuse, the death rate in Canadian residential schools was up to 69 percent for First Nation students, a history that has resulted in the quite reasonable allegation that the Canadian federal government, as well as the churches who oversaw the residential school system, are guilty of cultural genocide.
Many Christian theologians have argued that Native peoples benefited from European colonization, especially as regards the status of women in polygynous tribes, since, up until the recent past, most anthropologists assumed these women lived in a condition of unbearable hardship and drudgery compared to male tribal members. To provide a complete picture of colonists' impact on indigenous society, it is necessary to avoid glamorization of Native cultures because, despite the fact that most indigenous tribes placed women in a higher social status than that of European-American women of the Victorian era, there were a minority who practiced dismemberment of adulterous women. The Blackfoot Confederacy, in particular, passed on a tradition of chopping off the noses of adulterous women and little can be gained by minimizing this cultural atrocity. Yet, when the effects of colonization are considered thoroughly, does the historical record confirm that European settlers were truly the defenders of women's empowerment that theologians have penned them to be? First, an analysis of the immediate consequences of colonial marriage laws is required.
In The Importance of Being Monogamous, Sarah Carter outlines the myriad ways in which marriage laws served to lower the status of both Canadian aboriginal and European-American women while justifying the encroachment of settlers onto Native territories. The imposition of bigamy laws meant that deserted wives and husbands were unable to remarry, and those with children were left with little means to care for their family. Catholic women who remarried were met with public humiliation by excommunication while women who "lost their virtue" before marriage were regarded as social outcasts. Since the nuclear family was seen as the cornerstone of social order, the Canadian government unilaterally barred single women who were not widows from owning property, since they were not contributing to society via marital reproductive labor.
The customs of English common law formed the basis of Canadian law codes, and these laws had historically preserved the idea of the "doctrine of marital unity" under which the legal autonomy of wives was subsumed by their husbands who were allowed to "chastise" their wives in so far as that chastisement did not put her life in jeopardy. In practice, divorce was expensive and exceedingly difficult to obtain, so it was ruled out as an option for all but the wealthiest members of society. Divorces were granted solely by Parliament and involved the examination of witnesses as well as public debate, an obviously embarrassing procedure that few women were willing to endure even in the most distressing situations. Furthermore, a husband was legally entitled to divorce if his wife had committed adultery, however wives could not divorce their husbands on this qualification alone, needing evidence of extreme violence or desertion.
No one benefits by minimizing the abuses perpetrated by members of the Blackfoot tribes or other indigenous communities, yet the fact remains that, before colonists arrived, the concept of illegitimacy, including single motherhood, was unknown in Native cultures. Within many aboriginal communities, the terms "mother" and "father" applied to cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings. Complex kinship systems predominated and came with the assumption that the community shared collective responsibility for children. Previously, marriage laws of Plains aboriginals had been flexible on the issue of divorce, but after colonial bigamy laws were enforced, women in abusive relationships had little recourse to leave dangerous situations. Officials from the Department of Indian Affairs were given nearly unlimited amounts of power over aboriginal communities, since they alone were able to authorize the legal validity of a marriage, meaning that DIA agents often arranged marriages, refused to recognize marriages they deemed unacceptable and captured "runaway wives" who were then returned to their former husbands.
When residential schools enforced enrollment of First Nation children, indigenous communities consequently began arranging marriages of very young girls, since marriage exempted their daughters from being subjected to the dangerous, unhealthy conditions of boarding schools. According to Carter, "Aboriginal women were often labeled immoral prostitutes who posed a serious danger to public health. The movement of aboriginal women off their reserves was restricted and monitored through a pass system", a limitation that did not apply to DIA agents who routinely trespassed on Native lands. Moreover, it is surely not a coincidence that, at the time bigamy laws were established, tribal communities were in the majority of Canadian populations and had fomented several armed uprisings which threatened the stability of colonial expansion. In conclusion, while theologians and politicians alike wax philosophical about how two parent families form the basis of moral societies, scant analysis has been focused on the ways that standardization of the nuclear family has destroyed communities while aiding in the suppression of dissident populations.
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