The Death of a Trinity: Changing the Climate of Fear and Deception, Part 2

“Give me hope, give me hope, give me hope on this lonely ride …‘cause I know one day I will be the one in the sky.” -Sunset Jesus, by Avicii (Tim Bergling)

Egypt annually celebrates its National Day on 23 July to commemorate the day it became a republic in 1952, following a ‘bloodless coup’ which ended the decades-old monarchy, seen by most Egyptians as an extension of British colonialism. The Qattara Depression Project with a goal of constructing a waterway from the Mediterranean Sea to the Qattara Depression, a vast region well below sea level at the edge of the Sahara Desert, was proposed thereafter. The motivating reason was said to be hydroelectric power, though a quick calculation demonstrates that the then-envisioned Aswan Dam would be a much larger source of power located closer to Egypt’s population centers. The project as proposed would have gradually led to salinity levels too high to support sea life in the new body of water. Therefore, unlike the proposal outlined in (Changing the Climate of Fear and Deception (part 1), https://thewayout.substack.com/p/changing-the-climate-of-fear-and ), it would not have directly increased Egypt’s food supply in the long term, though increased cloudiness and rainfall in surrounding regions was considered to be an indirect benefit. The effect of lowering sea level worldwide was not even a consideration. Given these significant limitations, one may wonder whether other factors might have motivated support for the Qattara Depression Project. 

The post World War II era marked a turbulent period for the entire world, but especially for Egypt. One of the young leaders of the bloodless coup which led to the formation of the republic was General Gamal Abdel Nasser, and in 1954, Nasser became the President of Egypt.

Rather than recreate the circumstances surrounding President Nasser’s rise to power, below are a series of images which comprise an article published in the August 1956 issue of Reader’s Digest. The story is titled, “Egypt’s Nasser: Hope or Menace?” and was written by Edwin Muller. Drawing material from a single source is disadvantageous because only one vantage point is portrayed, and in instance it is tailored for an American audience. Nevertheless, the contemporary nature of the article eliminates the filter of time, and it provides a sufficient, if incomplete, background for the remainder of this story. 

I have highlighted two portions of the articles. The first describes the many civil engineering projects which were implemented by Nasser with the goal of improve the lives of ordinary Egyptians through advancements in agriculture and improved access to electricity. The proposed Qattara Depression Project fell within this broad class of public works.

1. “Nasser has begun to make his way out of the land shortage by making new land out of the desert. On the edge of the Nile Delta 7,000 workers are digging new irrigation canals, leveling dunes, spreading fertilizer. The goal is more than a million acres of new land. On other reclamation projects artesian wells are bored in the desert, pumps installed – and the desert is ready to bloom.”

The second describes the sense of empowerment brought about by the influence of colonial reign.

2. “Along with these physical changes has come a noticeable change in morale. Here is how it was described by one of the new peasant landowners. First he folded his arms and bowed low, timid and obsequious: ‘Formerly, I was like this.’ Then he squared his shoulders and looked the visitor straight in the eye: ‘Now I am like this.’

Or, as it was put by a farmer in another village: ‘We were cattle. Now we are men.’

There’s a new attitude toward foreigners- which some foreigners don’t like. It isn’t hostility or insolence. Rather, it’s: ‘Hi, American. Now I’m as good as you are.’ – which is certainly better than the cringing, servile hatred one used to feel in the streets of Cairo.

This new spirit is tied up with the new nationalism that has grown so fast in all the Arab states- and throughout Asia and Africa. Egypt, one of the oldest of civilized countries, is today a brand-new nation, young, callow, with the faults as well as the merits of youth. It thumbs its nose at the elderly powers which once dominated it.”

***

According to sources (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Qattara_Depression is the most readily available and is quoted below) the Qattara Depression Project was proposed as follows:

“In 1957, the American Central Intelligence Agency proposed to President Dwight Eisenhower that peace in the Middle East could be achieved by flooding the Qattara Depression. The resulting lagoon, according to the CIA, would have four benefits:

(1) it is easier to extract oil from offshore platforms than in swamps

(2) the flow will turn the hydroelectric power station

(3) fishing, resorts, pearls

(4) It would get Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser's ‘mind on other matters’ because ‘he need[ed] some way to get off the Soviet hook’”

The source continues:

“In the 1970s and early 1980s, several proposals to flood the area were made by Friedrich Bassler and the Joint Venture Qattara, a group of mainly German companies. They wanted to make use of peaceful nuclear explosions to construct a tunnel, drastically reducing construction costs compared to conventional methods. This project proposed to use 213 Hydrogen bombs, with yields of one to 1.5 megatons, detonated at depths of 100 to 500 metres (330 to 1,640 ft). That fit within the Atoms for Peace program proposed by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. The Egyptian government turned down the idea.”

I suppose we might accept these statements at face value, combine them, and take away the lesson that peace in the Middle East is achievable through the detonation of 213 hydrogen bombs. Let us instead explore the underlying circumstances which surrounded President Nasser, President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Program, and the Soviet Union in the post WWII era.

***

President Eisenhower’s farewell address on 17 January 1961 is well-known and often cited, especially the line in bold [added here, from https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address ].

“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

The statement emphasizes Eisenhower’s focus on military issues while president. This seems natural given his successful role as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Western Europe during World War II.  But the reason also goes much deeper. A remarkable account of the developments of the nuclear enterprise and how it couples with the story of Eisenhower’s presidency is described in “Atoms for Peace and War” by Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl and is available at: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2013/08/f2/HewlettandHollAtomsforPeaceandWarComplete.pdf .  This volume in total comprises over 600 pages, and the next portion of this story will liberally use excerpts from this text.   

In November 1952, just after Eisenhower, a Republican, won election and two months before he would assume office, he was confronted with shocking information, which was at that time was top secret. The first inset image from the book sets the stage:

The world’s first thermonuclear test [referred to as ‘Mike’] demonstrated a bomb equivalent to more “than 10 million tons of TNT, or 500 times the power of the weapon that devastated Hiroshima. It left “an underwater crater of some 1,500-yards in diameter” where once there had been an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Eisenhower’s experience commanding military forces in WWII led to a very measured response to the news of ‘Mike’:

“ ‘Complete destruction,’ he said somewhat enigmatically, ‘was the negation of peace.’ Certainly the United States needed enough force to counteract the Soviet threat, but he neither feared the Russians nor thought this kind of fear should influence American foreign policy.”

One much more subtle point from the introductory paragraphs of the inset suggests that Eisenhower was comfortable having discussions with leaders of industry about the possibility of turning the nuclear ‘sword’ into a ‘plowshare’ by generation of nuclear power for the good of the civilian population. The text refers to a specific conversation which Eisenhower had with the then-president of Monsanto (Charles Thomas) about his company “produc[ing] both electric power for commercial uses and plutonium for weapons.”

Next, consider the extraordinary turn of events which took place in January 1953, still weeks before Eisenhower’s inauguration. For context, the text following inset describes how then Senator Brien McMahon, chair of the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and William L. Borden, executive director of the same committee had initiated a probe in February 1952 into whether Klaus Fuchs, the German-born scientist convicted of Soviet espionage in 1950, had learned enough about the principles of the thermonuclear weapon during his time at Los Alamos to pose a threat to national security. Senator McMahon, a Democrat from Connecticut, had been contemplating a presidential run in 1952.

In March 1952, McMahon “fell ill and spent a week at Bethesda Naval Hospital for a condition which would be diagnosed as lung cancer.” McMahon died at age 48 in July 1952, and his death was front-page news around the country and was commemorated with a stamp. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brien_McMahon and https://www.thehour.com/norwalk/article/Se-Brien-McMahon-honored-at-namesake-high-school-8257551.php ]

Months later, Borden asked fellow Yale Law graduate John T. Walker to compile a chronology of the development of thermonuclear weapons. Walker relied on physicist John A. Wheeler, who had expert knowledge from a project carried out at Princeton University. Wheeler also agreed to comment on the extent to which Fuchs might have learned about thermonuclear weapons. Walker had mailed the evidence and details of Fuchs exposure to the thermonuclear principle, and Wheeler intended to read a final draft of the document. What came next is an intriguing episode described as “The Wheeler Incident”. The extraordinarily sensitive top secret letter was lost during an overnight train ride to Washington DC.

The authors note that “whether by design or circumstance”, a letter written by J. Edgar Hoover, then-director of FBI, did not convey the significance of the loss of the document and delayed reaction to the breach of security.  

Once President Eisenhower learned of the affair, he was “shocked”, “unnerved days later” and “not satisfied” with the explanation. National Security Council members “expressed their opinions that the incident could not be attributed to carelessness but to nothing less than treason and espionage.”

Perhaps of significance, “Vice-President Richard Nixon suggested a complete FBI investigation of every member of the committee [Joint Committee on Atomic Energy] staff, and there was some discussion about whether Hoover and the FBI could take custody of the committee’s classified files.” Does it seem ironic that Vice-President Nixon would trust J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to take custody of the files even though Hoover initially “did not suggest the true significance of the lost document” in a letter sent days after the loss took place?  

The story continues, and there is an interesting coincidence. “When Wheeler had made has ill-fated trip to Washington DC on the night of 6 January [1953] many Rosenberg sympathizers were coming to the nation’s capital to demonstrate at the White House for presidential clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the convicted atomic spies whose execution had been stayed until the President could act. On 11 February, just a week before Eisenhower learned of the loss of the Walker document, the President had denied clemency on the grounds that the Rosenberg’s betrayal of the nation’s atomic secrets to Russia ‘could well result in the deaths of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.’”

The authors ultimately show that the net effect of the loss of the papers was inconsequential to the careers of Walker or Wheeler, who actually lost the papers. By contrast, Borden’s career and influence was effectively destroyed.  “By bringing the incident to the attention of the President and some committee members before Borden reported it, [Gordon] Dean undermined confidence in Borden in places that counted most. In spring 1953 Borden began in earnest to wind up his affairs on the Hill.”

Now, let us broaden the suggestion raised by National Security Council members that “espionage or treason” occurred, whether by a spy on the train stealing the letter or by Wheeler himself if he were bribed or otherwise compromised. Borden’s main ally who favored rapid expansion of thermonuclear weapon development by the US was Senator McMahon. In addition to being the Chair of a powerful Senate Committee, McMahon had aspirations of running for president. Had he won, his track record suggests he would have advocated for a vast expansion of the production of those weapons. He also would have been the Commander-in-Chief of the United States, the one person in the entire world authorized to deploy the most devastating weapon ever known to mankind.

The combination of McMahon’s illness and Borden’s resignation eliminated two of the strongest advocates for an expansion of thermonuclear weapons in the United States. If one accepts the possibility raised by National Security Council members that the Wheeler incident was “treason and espionage,” another question arises: Is it possible that McMahon death, at the very young age of 48, might have been induced by a bad actor, whether by espionage or treason, instead of the natural development of lung cancer? For example, is it fair to ask whether anthrax or a fungal infection might have been used to poison McMahon?

According to an article published in 2021 [  https://www.verywellhealth.com/fungal-infection-in-lungs-or-cancer-5205148 ], “Research has shown that fungal lung infections can be mistaken for lung cancer. Fungal lung infections may appear similar to lung cancer in both the symptoms they cause and how they look on imaging, such as computed tomography or chest X-ray. Among the most common fungal infections that mimic primary lung cancers are aspergillosis, blastomycosis, coccidioidomycosis, cryptococcosis, histoplasmosis, mucormycosis, and paracoccidioidomycosis.”

Given that discerning between a fungal infection and lung cancer remains challenging even with modern diagnostic tools, imagine how difficult it would have been for doctors to distinguish poisoning due to a fungus (or anthrax) in 1952. Moreover, given the intrigue of the times, one must consider the possibility, even if remote, that the doctors making the diagnosis might themselves have been compromised. Consider that a single person- Commander-in-Chief of the United States- would ultimately have control over the use of such a weapon. Many entities, not only the Soviet Union, would wish to influence the identity of that person and the actions that person takes.

***

Historically, a colonial empire with powerful weaponry can inflict its will to extract wealth through slave labor and the natural resources of its colony. The ruling class of the empire typically uses a small portion of its wealth gained through colonization to enhance the lives of its citizens in order to maintain local support for the system. As the “Egypt’s Nasser: Hope or Menace?” article above demonstrates, the rallying cry of ‘freedom’ by the Allied Powers in WWII in the fight against the Axis Powers was incompatible with the colonial system of governance employed, for example, throughout Africa and parts of Asia. India and Pakistan gained independence from British rule in 1948, due largely to the non-violent protests led by Mahatma Gandhi, in which Gandhi effectively exploited the hypocritical stance of the British. The demonstrations Gandhi led posed the question: How can one fervently oppose the authoritarian power of Hitler while espousing authoritarian colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent?

The Suez Canal Crisis illustrates the complexity of the post WWII world. A century prior, the British had used Egyptian labor to construct the Suez Canal through the Egyptian desert in order to connect the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The canal greatly reduced shipping costs for goods from colonized regions, such as India, to be transported to Europe. Thus, controlling access to the canal was especially critical because it could otherwise throttle trade and increase the cost of goods in Britain.  

One succinct version of the Suez Canal Crisis is described by this 27-minute video, [“Suez Crisis (1956)”

] and several excerpts are given below.

At 6:02 (Narrator): “In the 1950’s, America and the West were engaged in a stand-off with the Soviet Union known as the Cold War. A so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ divided Europe, between communist east, and capitalist west. Around the world, each side tried to win friends and limit the other’s influence. Egypt, the largest and most powerful Arab state, would be a valuable prize for either side. But which way would President Nasser turn?

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted to win over Nasser – but couldn’t grant his request for a major arms deal – they’d most likely be used against Israel, which had many supporters in the US. The US and Britain instead offered to fund construction of the Aswan Dam – the centerpiece of Nasser’s plan to modernize the Egyptian economy. Britain also agreed to remove its troops from the Suez Canal Zone by June 1956. But then, border tension between Israel and its neighbors boiled over, as the Israeli army attacked Egyptian-controlled Gaza, killing 38 Egyptian soldiers. The Gaza raid made Nasser determined to rapidly strengthen and modernize Egypt’s army.

Since the US wouldn’t help, Nasser turned to the Soviet bloc, and signed a major deal to purchase modern tanks and aircraft from communist Czechoslovakia…. The US and British offer to fund the Aswan Dam was withdrawn.”  

At 16:00 (Narrator): “Nasser, like all leaders of Arab states, did not view the new Jewish state as legitimate. Now receiving modern weapons from Czechoslovakia, he was seen as a potential threat to Israel’s survival. [The Israeli government was] also determined to end Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran, which prevented Israeli access to the Red Sea, and limited opportunities for trade. France wanted to ally with the Israelis to get rid of Nasser. But British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden was anxious about being seen as the aggressor. So the French came up with an idea… At Sevres, near Paris, representatives of Britain, France, and Israel met in secret to plan a war.

Israel would invade Egypt – allowing Britain and France, posing as peacemakers, to issue an ultimatum they knew only Israel would accept. Then, claiming to be acting to safeguard the canal, they would invade Egypt and overthrow Nasser- though they had no real plan for what to do once he was gone.

It would take years for the full details of this conspiracy to emerge.” 

At 19:30:

“(Narrator): ‘It wasn’t hard to see that the British, French, and Israelis were working together – and at the United Nations, world opinion quickly turned against them. For once, the United States and Soviet Union were united in condemnation. A typically animated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev even threatened to fire rockets at Paris and London. President Eisenhower thought the invasion had no moral or legal justification. And he was furious with his British ally for going behind his back.’

‘The British and French governments delivered a 12-hour ultimatum to Israel and Egypt now followed up by armed attacks against Egypt. The United States was not consulted in any way about any phase of these actions nor were we informed of them in advance. As it is the manifest right of any of these nations to take such decisions and actions, it is likewise our right, if our judgment so dictates, to dissent. We believe these actions to have been taken in error.* For we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes. ’  [*See also https://www.history.com/speeches/eisenhower-on-the-suez-canal-crisis - For some reason, the following phrase, comprising the most succinct and candid portion of Eisenhower’s critique was edited out of the video documentary “…to dissent. We believe these actions to have been taken in error.” ]

(Narrator): ‘Eisenhower wanted attention focused on Hungary, where Soviet troops were, at that moment, brutally crushing a popular uprising. Instead, Britain and France’s reckless intervention was likely to push Arab states closer to the Soviet Union.’ ”

At 22:00 (Narrator): “Britain’s economy had been fragile before the crisis began. Now, market fears caused the British currency to crash, threatening economic disaster. Only a massive loan from the International Monetary Fund could save Britain, but Eisenhower blocked any IMF aid until Britain agreed to a UN-backed cease fire in Egypt. Eden, facing growing opposition abroad and from within his own government, had few options. Just two days after British troops landed in Egypt, they announced a cease-fire. The French, abandoned by their ally, had no choice but to follow suit. Within days, the UN’s first major peacekeeping operation got underway, as Danish UN troops arrived in Egypt to take over from the British and French.” 

This episode illustrates one instance in which Eisenhower determined that the United States, which had not historically participated in colonialism in Africa or Asia, should withhold support for the traditional colonial powers in those regions, Britain and France.

The events also demonstrated that the Soviet Union capitalized on the division through timing its invasion of Hungary with the Suez Canal Crisis. Thousand of Hungarians were killed and nearly a quarter-million people fled the country. Per Wikipedia, “The Soviet troops supported the Communist Matyas Rakosi, a Stalinist who was beholden to the USSR… The Rakosi government politicized the education system [and promoted] the ‘Russiafication’ of Hungary. The study of Russian language and political instruction were mandatory at school. Religious schools were nationalized, and church leaders were replaced with communist officials.”

The Hungarian leader of the rebels against Communism, Imre Nagy, was executed for treason in 1958.

One of the individuals who worked closely with President Eisenhower to coordinate and carry out the negotiations in the Suez Canal Crisis was UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. Five years later, and only a few months after Eisenhower's farewell speech, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash. One media report from 2016 ( https://theconversation.com/speaking-truth-to-power-the-killing-of-dag-hammarskjold-and-the-cover-up-65534 ) describes the incident as follows:

“Fifty-five years ago, shortly after midnight on 18 September 1961, an aircraft crashed on its approach to Ndola airport in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, which is now Zambia. On board were 16 people: the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, the members of his mission, and the Swedish crew. The sole survivor, who spoke of ‘sparks in the sky’ and said the plane ‘blew up’, died six days later. Suspicions were voiced about the crash because of the strange details that quickly emerged. For instance, the British high commissioner, who was at Ndola, showed no concern that Hammarskjöld failed to land and insisted that he must have decided “to go elsewhere”. It took four hours after daybreak to start an official search. This in spite of local residents, policemen and soldiers reporting a great flash in the sky shortly after midnight. There were also witness accounts of a second, smaller plane trailing and then dropping something that ‘looked like fire’ upon the larger one’.

The Prime Minister of the Congo, Cyrille Adoula, who had met with the Secretary-General just hours before the crash, believed he had been murdered. According to the 1961 Montreal Gazette he had commented: ‘How ignoble is this assassination, not the first of its kind perpetrated by the moneyed powers. Mr Hammarskjöld was the victim of certain financial circles for whom a human life is not equal to a gram of copper or uranium.’

 …Hammarskjöld, as second Secretary-General, sought to shape the UN as an organization devoted to peace. He developed the strategy of ‘preventive diplomacy’, which defused the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. His prevailing commitment was to the UN Charter and he refused to act in the interest of any particular state.”

Per

(https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/evidence-may-lead-to-new-probe-in-1961-death-of-un-secretary-general-dag-hammarskj%C3%B6ld-1.3121036  ): "Just two days after the crash, former U.S. President Harry Truman told The New York Times, 'Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, 'When they killed him,' Truman emphasized, without elaborating."

Nine years after the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, on 28 September 1970, Gamar Abdel Nasser died of a heart attack at the age of 52.  According to a report published by the Guardian ( https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/sep/29/egypt-president-nasser-dies-archive-1970 ):

“For Nasser it was a bitter time. Early this year he had taken the risk - against the advice of most other Arab leaders - of accepting the American peace initiative and stating his readiness for a settlement with Israel negotiated through the United Nations. Nasser had worked intensively in the past six days to bring about a ceasefire in Jordan and a reconciliation between the warring factions. Against all expectations, he succeeded on Sunday night in getting Yasser Arafat, commander of the guerrilla forces, to sign an accord with [Jordan’s King] Hussein. It was underwritten by all the other Arab States. Its survival now that Nasser, its architect, is gone, must lie in question.”

One must admit that age 52 is quite young for a heart attack. While one may assume the heart attack was a natural event, it is important to note that, according to media reports, heart attacks can also be brought about by toxins which are very difficult to detect, as described in ( https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun ):

“The roots of the heart attack gun lay in the work of one Mary Embree. Going to work for the CIA as an 18-year old high school graduate, Embree was a secretary in a division tasked with devising hidden microphones and other audio surveillance equipment, before being promoted to the Office of Technical Services. Eventually, she was ordered to find an undetectable poison. Her research led her to conclude that shellfish toxins were the ideal choice.

Unbeknownst to her, Embree had been made a part of Project MKNAOMI, a highly secretive program dedicated to crafting biological weapons for the United States’ Cold War arsenal and successor to the far more infamous Project MKULTRA. But while other MKNAOMI projects were dedicated to poisoning crops and livestock, Embree’s findings were destined to form the basis of the brass ring of black ops: killing a human being — and getting away with it…

The heart attack gun may have seemed like an outlandish idea from a spy novel, but the CIA had reason to believe it would work perfectly. After all, KGB hitman Bohdan Stashynsky had used a similar, cruder weapon with success not once, but twice, in 1957 and again in 1959. Years after leaving the CIA, Embree claimed that the modified pistol, known as a ‘nondiscernible microbionoculator,’ had been tested on animals and prisoners to great effect.

Along with a number of other MKNAOMI creations, the heart attack gun might never have been detected if not for a growing awareness of illegal activities carried out by the United States intelligence community. When a New York Times article revealed a series of reports detailing illegal operations dubbed ‘the family jewels,’ the Senate convened a select committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church to investigate the depth of criminal intelligence actions in 1975.

The Church Committee soon became aware that former President Richard Nixon had shut down MKNAOMI in 1970. They also learned that Dr. Gordon, against the orders of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the elusive head of Project MKULTRA, had secreted 5.9 grams of shellfish toxin — nearly a third of all shellfish toxin ever produced at the time — and vials of toxin derived from cobra venom in a Washington, D.C. laboratory.”

*** “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together,” Ask, The Smiths

While Eisenhower’s actions in the Suez Canal Crisis illustrated a case of the US opposing traditional colonial powers, there are numerous other examples of the United States supporting them. For instance, the CIA partnered with Britain to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq to install the Shah in 1953. A document released to the public quite recently – in 2017- gives context. [https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2018-02-12/cia-declassifies-more-zendebad-shah-internal-study-1953-iran-coup (p. 79) and also

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16331-document-3-zendebad-shah ].

Kermit Roosevelt, who happened to be the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, addressed a group which included President Eisenhower and several others. Two individuals present were Allen Dulles, then Director of the CIA and his brother, Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.

According to the declassified report, Roosevelt remarked “that cables sent to Washington were scarce during the key period of 16-19 August 1953 – for a good reason. ‘Gentlemen,’ Roosevelt joked to general applause, ‘I made a point of not letting you know what was happening.’ No one seemed more amused than Allen Dulles.”

The report continued: “Roosevelt had long thought that contradictions in American foreign policy would continue to make covert action necessary. In 1952, he wrote that, at least in the Middle East, as long as American words do not match American deeds ‘… our reliance upon clandestine operations increase.’ Outside the Middle East, he wrote, strategic considerations – chiefly the fear of losing French and British support for NATO- ‘often require or seem to require our pursuit of a foreign policy which alienates large segments of the Islamic-Asian world.’”

The report continues in reference to an admonition by Kermit Roosevelt to restrain covert actions, by stating, “Secretary of State [John Foster] Dulles did not heed Roosevelt’s admonition. The Secretary was already contemplating a similar operation in [Guatemala]. Officials in the CIA’s Directorate of Plans had been working since 1952 on schemes to depose Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Like Mossadeq, Arbenz was willing to turn a blind eye to Communist machinations in his country. Unlike Mossadeq, however, Arbenz appeared to be a Communist sympathizer. Even the most bitter anti-Mossadeq partisans did not claim the Iranian Prime Minister was a Communist or sympathizer.”

The text of Atoms for Peace and War provides some clues about the reasons Eisenhower did not object to CIA intervention in Iran. Compared to eh Suez Canal Crisis, the chain of events leading to the operation occurred much earlier in his presidency, with several preceding his inauguration. Eisenhower certainly would have been influenced by the Wheeler incident at this time. Consider that Soviet Premiere Malenkov announced a successful test of a thermonuclear device on 8 August 1953, which was confirmed by the US four days later on 12 August 1953.

The key period of quiet described by Kermit Roosevelt occurred less than one week later, 16-19 August 1953. It would be logical to conclude that the surprising Soviet hydrogen bomb test led Eisenhower to be more willing to support Britain’s desire to overthrow the Mossadeq government in Iran.

Taken together, there is a remarkable irony surrounding (1) the coupling of the Suez Crisis and invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union and (2) the coupling of the Soviet hydrogen bomb test and the deposition of the Iranian government. In the first instance, Eisenhower was distracted by an invasion involving the British, which enabled the Soviet Union to dictate who controlled the Hungarian government. In the second instance, Eisenhower was motivated to ensure NATO remained in solidarity after the first test of by the Soviet Union of a hydrogen bomb. Therefore, in the second instance, the Soviet distraction enabled Britain to dictate who controlled the Iranian government.

Is it possible that this irony is not a coincidence? In other words, did entities involved with both the British and Soviet Union collaborated in order to achieve the desired outcome? The shorthand use of “Britain” is perhaps misleading; the true beneficiaries of the installation of the Shah were the owners of British Petroleum, who immediately reclaimed control of the oil in Iran and profited massively. Is it possible that the use of “Soviet Union” might be similarly misleading? In other words, is it possible that wealthy and powerful individuals within both Britain and the Soviet Union were able to influence their respective governments to coordinate action?

Let us add that we need not place geographical limitations on those powerful individuals, given that the US-based Dulles brothers also clearly influenced who governed Iran in 1953 – and in Guatemala only months later.  

Traditionally, the term ‘colonialism’ corresponds to one country’s government controlling that of another country or region through force. ‘Neocolonialism’, a term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre was focused on the transgressions of capitalists who work as part of a corporation to profit from slave labor or natural resources of a poor country. Certainly, ‘neocolonialism’ seems an apt description of the events in Iran (and, later, Guatemala), but those who opposed Communist rule in Hungary would gain little comfort in knowing that the Soviets who rolled tanks into Budapest and installed their puppet government did not qualify as neocolonialists. It seems that if the coupling of these two events described above were coordinated, a new description will be required.

***

A passage from the text of Atoms for Peace and War provides a glimpse into how coordination between Britain and the Soviet Union (to return to our shorthand reference by country) might be advantageous. In 1958, two years after the Suez Crisis, the US Congress was debating whether to share restricted data with NATO allies for the purpose of developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes. John Foster Dulles, responded to the Congressional Committee as follows, with context in the inset:

“Dulles frankly asked the Joint Committee why the British should be ‘forced to follow the sterile course of reworking ground already covered by the United States and known to the Soviet Union.’” The argument posed by Dulles in this passage could also be extended to apply to events which occurred earlier in Eisenhower’s presidency regarding nuclear weapons development in this sense: If the Soviet Union were able to demonstrate an advanced weapon, it is reasonable to think that Secretary Dulles might have advocated that the United States share information with Britain.

Let us suppose that the true goal of a wealthy group was to ensure the continuation of the colonial model. If the United States government alone held the most powerful weapon, it would have been in a position to dictate terms, as occurred in the Suez Crisis. Therefore, the US posed a threat not only to the Soviet Union, but also to traditional colonial powers.  It would have been logical for this wealthy and powerful group to exaggerate threat of the Soviet Union to the United States- or even to take steps to ensure that the Soviet threat was real. John Foster Dulles would have been in a position to catalyze such an operation, especially in combination with his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles.

***

History books sometimes characterize Eisenhower as a passive president, but another example challenges that perception. A speech titled “Atoms for Peace” was delivered by President Eisenhower on 8 December 1953 to the United Nations General Assembly and comprised statements of goals of curbing the nuclear arms race and focusing on ways to use nuclear energy for the betterment of societies around the world. The inset describes the overwhelmingly positive reaction of the UN delegates.

Eisenhower’s speech ( https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/eisenhowers-atoms-peace-speech ) also resonated with the people of the United States. Consider this excerpt: “It is with the book of history, and not isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified. My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreements, not wars, among nations. It wants itself to live in freedom and in the confidence that the people of every other nation enjoy equally the right of choosing their way of life. So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, to find a way by which the minds of men, the hopes of men, the souls of men everywhere, can move forward toward peace and happiness and well-being.”

President Eisenhower “was not reticent in claiming the Atoms-for-Peace idea as his own.” Significantly, Eisenhower had kept the speech contents mostly private, keeping members of Congress and the Atomic Energy Commission (apart from Lewis Strauss) unaware of what he would say until he delivered the speech.

His approach to the speech was commensurate with that of a military leader. It was his choice to deliver a speech with very limited input from others. He clearly anticipated that his words would resonate with the people who voted him into office, as in fact they did. In deference to those who voted him into office, it is likely that he felt a duty to express his interpretation of their sentiments within the speech.

While the reaction ‘even by the Soviet delegation’ to the speech was positive on the floor of the UN, it did not lead directly to tangible immediate results. In fact, during the time frame of Eisenhower’s Atoms-for-Peace speech, a crucial set of nuclear weapons tests were being carried out by the United States in the Pacific Ocean. They occurred at a time which the “deadly race (toward nuclear arms) with the Soviet Union was very much in doubt.”

But “Castle changed all that”. These tests demonstrated weapon devices which “were evidence of exceptional scientific ingenuity and imagination.” Furthermore, “It seemed that the American scientists had suddenly found the key to new realms of nuclear weapons. With a few notable exceptions, every new design principle incorporates in the Castle series seemed to work, often beyond the hopes of the most optimistic designers.” One of the terrible and terrifying ramifications of the testing was that nuclear fallout led to severe injuries and deaths of Japanese fisherman aboard their boat named Lucky Dragon.

On 31 March 1954, after Castle had concluded and less than four months after his Atoms-for-Peace speech, President Eisenhower held a press conference in which Strauss replied to a question as follows: “In fact, the hydrogen bomb was so enormous in its destructive power that it defied human description… Strauss said that the bomb could be made big enough to ‘take out any city,’ even New York City. The remark made headlines in the nation’s newspapers.”

The progress by the US in hydrogen bomb development led to an interesting set of circumstances. In a March 1954 a set of speeches by representatives of the Soviet Union, “stressed prohibition on use, not abolition, showing they had no more interest than the United States on totally scrapping such [nuclear] weapons. And for the first time, the Kremlin admitted Russia’s vulnerability in a nuclear war.” It is noteworthy that the Soviets held an advantage in conventional weapons. The Atoms-for-Peace plan was criticized by the Soviets in that it would “only create the illusion of a ‘peaceful atom’ because growing electrical generation using nuclear reactors would actually increase the amount of nuclear material available for weapons.” (p. 221)

Meanwhile, Winston Churchill “was [not only] concerned that a single bomb could destroy London, but he also realized that a hydrogen bomb dropped in the sea to the windward side of Great Britain could poison the entire country with fallout.” (p. 223)

The United States pressed forward with nuclear energy initiatives, as Eisenhower signed the Atomic Energy Act into law on 30 August 1954 and participated in a ceremony initializing new construction for the United States’ first commercial nuclear power reactor on Labor Day 1954. Then on 22 September 1954, the Soviets ended five months of silence by surprisingly proposing to continue negotiations with the US on the Atoms-for-Peace plan. Both the US and the Soviets were concerned about appearance, and both the Atoms-for-Peace initiative and the Soviet expression of willingness to negotiate were viewed, with some justification, as propaganda by the opposite side.  

It was under these circumstances, which developed through winter and spring of 1955 that Eisenhower’s next major initiative was formulated. On 21 July 1955, Eisenhower delivered a proposal called “Open Skies” at the Geneva summit shared some traits of “Atoms-for Peace”. In the Atoms for Peace and War text, the term “Open Skies” first appears in the following paragraph.

A tip for all aspiring “conspiracy theorists” is that if the word “coincidentally” appears only one time in a 600+ page report, and it happens to be in the same sentence with the word “Rockefeller”, you may wish to dig a little bit deeper.

Below are more excerpts from a 1983 Washington Post article by Professor Gregg Herken (  https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1983/01/23/the-poker-of-arms-control/e355c0ae-662a-4f0f-8fdd-c6de6ec85d9d/ ), which give more context to ‘Open Skies’ with bold added here for emphasis.

“Eisenhower thought that the event which followed his presentation of the Open Skies proposal at the Geneva summit on July 21, 1955, had been a suitably dramatic--if foreboding--coup de theatre: ‘Without warning, and simultaneous with my closing words, the loudest clap of thunder I have ever heard roared into the room, and the conference was plunged into Stygian darkness.’ Ike's proposal had been a diplomatic thunderbolt all its own--a plan whereby the United States and the Soviet Union would exchange blueprints of their military establishments and allow reciprocal overflights of their territory in order to reduce the fear of surprise attack and facilitate further steps toward disarmament. Eisenhower had even departed from his prepared text to make the remarkable proposal, adding an assurance that it ‘would be but a beginning.’ The Russians were perhaps understandably relieved when, immediately thereafter, the lights had gone out. W.W. Rostow, one of the originators and promoters of Open Skies, correctly points out in his new book that it was the most important and ambitious arms-control proposal offered by the United States to the Soviets since the ill-starred 1946 Baruch plan for the international control of atomic energy. Like that early and doomed effort to banish the bomb, Open Skies represents another tantalizing might- have-been in the dismal history of strategic weaponry…

The true wild card of the story at Geneva is the dominant temperament of Dwight Eisenhower. While the originators of the Open Skies proposal envision and defend it either as a way to penetrate the Iron Curtain or a weapon to turn back the latest Soviet peace offensive, Eisenhower apparently confounds all his aides and advisers by taking the idea seriously.

The Open Skies proposal grew out of a recommendation from a top-secret government panel convened at Quantico to identify Russian vulnerabilities that might be exploited during the upcoming summit meeting at Geneva. The "Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel," headed by Nelson Rockefeller, quickly perceived that one such vulnerability was the Soviets' mania about preserving a closed society. The success with which the Russians had sequestered their military secrets from Western intelligence was also thought to be the cause of a particular American vulnerability in the Cold War: the uncertainty as to whether the Russians might be planning a surprise atomic attack. The United States had occasionally violated Soviet airspace with deliberate overflights along Russia's borders beginning in the late '40s, but those operations--as recently revealed--had proven both costly and ineffective.

The fact that the ultrasecret U-2 program was then only a year away from its first mission over Russia almost scotched the Open Skies idea at the outset. Critics thus suggested that there seemed no reason to allow the Russians a free ride in an area where the United States would soon have a unilateral advantage; an Air Force representative on the panel, for example, urged ‘that this proposal be examined with particular skepticism by the Department of Defense.’ Rostow's book makes clear that what finally sold the Open Skies idea in the administration was the plain fact that the United States stood to benefit from the offer whether or not the Russians accepted it. If, as most expected, the Soviets turned it down at Geneva they would attract international censure for blocking an apparent effort at easing Cold War tensions; and at the same time provide a domestic rationale for the dramatic increase in defense spending that Rostow and others on the panel thought the times demanded, but Eisenhower had been resisting. In the unlikely event that the Russians acceded to the plan the United States would still gain disproportionately, since American society was already an open book. (In a footnote, Rostow describes the moment during Rockefeller's briefing on the proposal when the light finally dawned for Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as to the real intent of Open Skies: "I see what you fellows are doing--you are trying to open up the Soviet Union.")

Open Skies was still almost shot down by Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who resented the panel's (and Rockefeller's) encroachment upon his foreign policy domain. ‘He's got them down at Quantico, and nobody knows what they're doing,’ Dulles once fumed suspiciously about Rockefeller and his panel of experts. Dulles also worried about what might happen at Geneva to his hard-line policy toward the Soviets. He confided to a friend that Eisenhower ‘is so inclined to be humanly generous, to accept a superficial tactical smile as evidence of inner warmth, that he might in a personal moment with the Russians accept a promise or a proposition at face value and upset the apple cart.’ However, Dulles too was ultimately persuaded to support the plan in the expectation that it would almost certainly be rejected by the Russians.

All but lost sight of in this cynical drama was the prospect that Eisenhower himself might embrace Open Skies as a promising step toward arms control--what would later be termed a ‘confidence-building measure’ --and a way of defusing the dangerous tensions in Soviet-American relations. Yet the president was ‘deadly serious’ about Open Skies, Rostow argues, believing that it might "open a tiny gate in the disarmament fence.’ Dulles even mused that he might have to resign as secretary of state if the Russians accepted Eisenhower's offer; he dreaded, Dulles told his confidant, that he ‘may have to be the Devil at Geneva.’ To Dulles' relief --and that of apparently everyone else in the American delegation, save Eisenhower--the Russians preempted the devil's role at the summit. According to the account in Eisenhower's memoirs, which Rostow cites, Khrushchev dismissed the proposal outright, characterizing it as ‘nothing more than a bald espionage plot against the U.S.S.R.’ Eisenhower was reluctantly forced to conclude that ‘Khrushchev's own purpose was evident--at all costs to keep the U.S.S.R. a closed society.’ Both poignant and revealing of Eisenhower's commitment to Open Skies, however, is Rostow's disclosure that, following the formal adjournment of the summit, the president and his interpreter ‘rushed down the corridors of the Palais des Nations to the Soviet delegation offices for one more try.’ Unfortunately, the Russians had already left.

In retrospect, the fate of the Open Skies proposal seems as sadly prefigured as that of the Baruch plan, which had also contained a mix of noble and cynical motives, and which the Russians had likewise dismissed-- with some cause--as an espionage ploy. There can be little disagreement a generation later, however, with Eisenhower's assessment of the time that the Russians' rejection of Open Skies had been ‘short-sighted.’ We now know that the president was right about Khrushchev's purpose, and that the latter was able to use the secrecy and deception possible in a closed society to foster the myth of Soviet strategic superiority. Unlike Eisenhower, the members of the Quantico panel and their successors proved all too willing to believe the myth of the missile gap when the U-2 program was unable to open up the Soviet Union to the degree expected. It was not until late 1960 that the aptly named Discoverer satellite confirmed the Russians had only a fraction of the intercontinental-range missiles they boasted of, and we credited them with.”

***

The text reveals John Foster Dulles’s clear displeasure with the Open Skies concept. So why might Nelson Rockefeller appear to have “coincidentally” arrived at the same proposal? It seems incongruous since sources, including Politico ( https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/24/john-foster-dulles-dead-at-71-may-24-1959-601028 ) have pointed out that the wife of John Foster Dulles (Janet Pomeroy Avery), was John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s first cousin, and various other sources have noted close ties between the Rockefeller family and the Dulles brothers.

To gain some understanding, consider Nelson Rockefeller’s purported position on atomic power, as described in “Atoms for Peace and War”.

As the text demonstrates, Rockefeller outrageously proposed advancing nuclear power in a fashion which, in actuality, discouraged its implementation. Clearly, declassifying information on nuclear power and providing enriched uranium to over 40 countries in the world in the 1950’s would never have been acceptable to decision-makers in the US government at the time. So why did Nelson Rockefeller make such a suggestion?

New Mexico Democratic Senator Clinton Anderson provided his own opinion after “the unexpected defeat” of an amendment which would have supported the use of nuclear power solely within the United States failed in Congress:

“Senator Anderson had harbored visions of a well-articulated federal program for nuclear power development that the Democratic members of the Joint Committee might propose as a key plank in the party’s platform for the 1956 elections. Now that dream was in shambles. Frustrated by the Administration’s refusal to accept any substantial increase in funding for the development of nuclear power, Anderson became ever more suspicious of Strauss’s motives. He even convinced himself that Strauss was really opposed to nuclear power on any basis because it would threatened the economic interests of the Rockefellers, who he believed had vast holdings in fossil energy resources… [Strauss] considered Senator Anderson’s suspicions of his long associations with the Rockefellers preposterous, but he hoped the incident would serve as evidence of Anderson’s irrational hostility towards him. Anderson was correct, however, in his conclusion that Strauss was determined to keep the development of nuclear power in the private sector as much as possible.” (p. 345)

From this description, one can discern that Anderson considered Nelson Rockefeller to be what today we would call “controlled opposition.” In other words, he sensed that Rockefeller only *appeared* to support nuclear power development while his true motive was to prevent nuclear power development due to his family’s financial stake in oil and gas. By the way, does it appear that the authors of Atoms for Peace and War might be dismissing Senator Anderson as a “conspiracy theorist” for believing that the Rockefeller family “had vast holdings in fossil energy resources”?

Would it be reasonable to hypothesize that Nelson Rockefeller’s actions with respect to the “Open Skies” proposal fell into the same category of “controlled opposition”? The Rockefeller family surely would have been invested in the defense industry, as they were in oil and gas. If, as Professor Herken’s Washington Post article suggests, “Russians had only a fraction of the intercontinental-range missiles they boasted of, and we credited them with,” then US federal defense budget might have likewise decreased, as Eisenhower wished. If one follows the logic path of Senator Anderson, who assessed that Nelson Rockefeller’s apparent support for nuclear energy was insincere, we are left to conclude the same insincerity in Rockefeller’s apparent support for ‘Open Skies.’ In other words, this theory suggests that Nelson Rockefeller served as “controlled opposition” to Secretary John Foster Dulles’s position. Together, the logical conclusion is that Dulles and Rockefeller worked together to influence President Eisenhower’s own path forward. This outcome would be consistent with expectations, given the family ties between the two men. 

Recall that President Eisenhower placed great value upon the opinion of industrial leaders, with one example being his aforementioned interaction with Monsanto’s corporate president. Is it possible that the Nelson Rockefeller’s “coincidental development of ideas closely resembling ‘Open Skies’” was not so coincidental? Perhaps President Eisenhower confided in an industrial leader with ties to Rockefeller. Presumably, if the Rockefeller family wished to disrupt ‘Open Skies’, it would have been a prudent strategic move to lead the ‘Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel’ discussing the details of the proposal.

The apparently coincidental support for Eisenhower’s ‘Open Skies’ may also have bolstered the Rockefeller family’s influence on atomic power initiatives. For example, in the case of nuclear power, Eisenhower announced “progress in negotiating agreements with ten foreign countries” during [an] address on 11 June 1955.” (p. 245)

Could it be that, as suggested by his actions surrounding his Atoms-for-Peace speech, that President Eisenhower was motivated only by his responsibility to act in the best interests of the American people in promoting ‘Open Skies’? Furthermore, in his book Rostow reported that President Eisenhower so believed in the premise of Open Skies that “following the formal adjournment of the [Geneva Summit on 18 July 1955], the president and his interpreter ‘rushed down the corridors of the Palais des Nations to the Soviet delegation offices for one more try.’” At that point, any propaganda-based advantage had already been gained, so Eisenhower’s incentive must have been driven by something different- perhaps a desire for peace.

Regardless, within his administration, President Eisenhower was isolated in supporting for ‘Open Skies’ for its stated goals. And circumstantial evidence suggests that, unbeknownst to Eisenhower, his apparent ally, Nelson Rockefeller, was playing the role of “controlled opposition” to the ‘Open Skies’ initiative.

Over the next several weeks following the 21 July summit few weeks, the Soviet Union moved to improve its negotiating position by raising specific questions about how ‘Open Skies.’

What happened next might be described as a coincidence.

“On September 24, while on vacation, Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack.” (The inset below gives context.)

“Stunned, the National Security Council nevertheless met on October 13… Obviously melancholy, perhaps discouraged, Dulles compared Open Skies with Atoms for Peace. Both ideas had been offered by Eisenhower primarily with the hope of improving the climate of international relations. In neither instance had the President fully appreciated the technical difficulties his proposals raised for inspections and safeguards.”

One report of the heart attack is given by https://www.9news.com/article/life/style/colorado-guide/colorado-history-president-dwight-eisenhowers-1955-heart-attack-in-denver/73-0a70f685-17b9-45f8-a61c-f87c2f875716

“Eisenhower also had a family connection to Colorado. The former first lady, Mamie Doud was raised in Denver. The couple married at the Doud family home in 1916. When President Eisenhower came to Colorado, he enjoyed spending time outdoors, painting and golfing.

During a trip in September 1955, he played a round at Cherry Hills Golf Club. That night, he felt ill. Eisenhower complained of chest pains which he thought was minor indigestion from a hamburger with onions that he ate earlier in the day. But, it was more than that.

Eisenhower’s personal physician and a cardiac specialist were called to evaluate him. An electrocardiogram determined the president had suffered a massive heart attack. He was rushed to the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado…

Eisenhower’s condition was not good, according to historian John Stewart.

‘He was pretty serious,’ said Stewart. ‘He had a dangerous clot near his heart…’ Stewart said it took about six weeks for Eisenhower to recover under medical guidance before he could leave the hospital and return to Washington to run the White House.”

***

In recent times, the official story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has come under considerable scrutiny. Given the circumstances both preceding and following Eisenhower’s heart attack, it would be worthwhile to carefully reconsider its cause.

At the time, President Eisenhower was 64 years old and physically fit, though he did smoke. The link above suggests that President first felt unwell after having lunch. Several media accounts associate his heart attack with playing golf, but he attributed his first symptoms, which mimicked indigestion, to his lunch. 

Eisenhower had demonstrated independence of both thought and action in Atoms for Peace and Open Skies initiatives. In 1954, after the Castle tests, Eisenhower, as commander-in-chief of the United States, would be the person to decide whether to deploy the most advanced weapon the world had ever known. Only one year after his heart attack demonstrated that he was willing to take independent action in the Suez Crisis.

Recall that, in spring 1952, when the US had the most powerful nuclear weapon, presidential aspirant Senator Brien McMahon appeared to have died of lung cancer after a 3-month battle, at only 48 years old. Moreover, the death of Egyptian President Nasser due to an apparent heart attack occurred several years later when he was only age 52.  

What are we to make of these seemingly coincidental natural deaths of powerful and influential individuals during a tumultuous period of time, is it not?

Was President Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955 was caused by a toxin, similar to that described in the Church Committee hearings, as described above? And if his heart attack was induced by a poison, might the perpetrators have been the same group that President Truman suggested had caused the downing of the plane carrying Dag Hammarskjöld and the 15 others?

I confess that I suspect the answer is ‘yes’ to both questions. But even if the reader believes the heart attack truly was a coincidence, consider the following point. This episode reveals a general weak point in the American system of governance. A vice-president is often chosen to aid in the election, which means the choice is often influenced strongly by demographic or geographical factors. Moreover, the vice-presidential candidate is selected as a means to ‘balance’ a ticket. For example, an older political outsider like Eisenhower selected a younger political insider in Nixon.

Would Richard Nixon, vice-president under Eisenhower, have made the same decision during the Suez Crisis? Or would he have supported the actions of Britain, France, and Israel?

The Suez Canal Crisis might have motivated a criminal organization to seek to a replace a president with his (or her) opposite in the vice-president, whether through assassination or impeachment via false charges for presidents who followed Eisenhower. Could it be that the lesson of Eisenhower inspired a well-organized criminal operation to replace a young, independent-minded President from Massachusetts with a veteran party insider from Texas only a few years later? 

***

One reason Khrushchev dismissed Eisenhower’s ‘Open Skies’ plan was because the Soviet scientists and engineers were making great strides in the Sputnik program. In principle, the Soviet Union would not have needed permission if a satellite could fly over the US and take pictures and return them to Earth, so tOpen Skies would have been a moot point under those circumstances.

The remarkable triumph of Sputnik shocked the West, and especially the United States. To place this technological victory into proper context, it is useful to consider the birth of Communism in Russia.

*** “Got war and peace inside my DNA.” -DNA, Kendrick Lamar

The origin of the Soviet Union is often framed as a popular uprising overthrowing an imperial government led by the Russian Tsar. However, several sources clarify that the nascence of the Soviet Union has some hidden roots in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Several excerpts of one (https://themillenniumreport.com/2018/07/the-nyc-and-london-banker-who-financed-the-bolshevik-revolution/ ) are included here:

“The top Communist leaders have never been as hostile to their counterparts in the West, as the rhetoric suggests. They are quite friendly to the world’s leading financiers and have worked closely with them, when it suits their purposes. As we shall see in the following section, the Bolshevik revolution actually was financed by wealthy financiers in London and New York. Lenin and Trotsky were on the closest of terms with these moneyed interests both before and after the Revolution. Those hidden liaisons have continued to this day and occasionally pop to the surface, when we discover a David Rockefeller holding confidential meetings with a Mikhail Gorbachev in the absence of government sponsorship or diplomatic purpose…

In the February 3, 1949 issue of the New York Journal American [American financier Jacob] Schiff’s grandson, John, was quoted by columnist Cholly Knickerbocker as saying that his grandfather had given about $20 million for the triumph of Communism in Russia… 

When Trotsky returned to Petrograd in May of 1917 to organize the Bolshevik phase of the Russian Revolution, he carried $10,000 for travel expenses, a generously ample fund considering the value of the dollar at that time. Trotsky was arrested by Canadian and British naval personnel, when the ship, on which he was traveling, the S.S. Kristianiafjord, put in at Halifax. The money in his possession is now a matter of official record. The source of that money has been the focus of much speculation, but the evidence strongly suggests, that its origin was the German government. It was a sound investment.

Trotsky was not arrested on a whim. He was recognized as a threat to the best interests of England, Canada’s mother country in the British Commonwealth. Russia was an ally of England in the First World War, which then was raging in Europe. Anything, that would weaken Russia – and that certainly included internal revolution – would, in effect, strengthen Germany and weaken England. In New York on the night before his departure Trotsky had given a speech, in which he said: ‘I am going back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government and stop the war with Germany.’ (A full report on this meeting had been submitted to the U.S. Military Intelligence. See Senate Document No. 62, 66th Congress, Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 1919, Vol. II, p. 2680.) Trotsky therefore represented a real threat to England’s war effort. He was arrested as a German agent and taken as a prisoner of war.

With this in mind we can appreciate the great strength of those mysterious forces both in England and the United States that intervened on Trotsky’s behalf. Immediately telegrams began to come into Halifax from such divergent sources, as an obscure attorney in New York City, from the Canadian Deputy Postmaster-General and even from a high-ranking British military officer, all inquiring into Trotsky’s situation and urging his immediate release. The head of the British Secret Service in America at the time was Sir William Wiseman, who, as fate would have it, occupied the apartment directly above the apartment of Edward Mandell House and who had become fast friends with him. House advised Wiseman, that President Wilson wished to have Trotsky released. Wiseman advised his government and the British Admiralty issued orders on April 21st, that Trotsky was to be sent on his way. (‘Why Did We Let Trotsky Go? How Canada Lost an Opportunity to Shorten the War’, MacLeans magazine, Canada, June 1919. Also see Martin, pp. 163-164.) It was a fateful decision that would affect not only the outcome of the war, but the future of the entire world.

It would be a mistake to conclude, that Jacob Schiff and Germany were the only players in this drama. Trotsky could not have gone even as far as Halifax without having been granted an American passport and this was accomplished by the personal intervention of President Wilson. Professor Antony Sutton says:

President Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother, who provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to ‘carry forward’ the revolution… At the same time careful State Department bureaucrats, concerned about such revolutionaries entering Russia, were unilaterally attempting to tighten up passport procedures. (Antony C. Sutton, Ph. D.: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, published by Arlington House in New Rochelle, NY, 1974, p. 25)…

What emerges from this sampling of events is a clear pattern of strong support for Bolshevism coming from the highest financial and political power centers in the United States; from men, who supposedly were ‘capitalists’ and who according to conventional wisdom should have been the mortal enemies of socialism and communism.

Nor was this phenomenon confined to the United States. Trotsky in his book My Life tells of a British financier, who in 1907 gave him a ‘large loan’ to be repaid after the overthrow of the Tsar. Arsene de Goulevitch, who witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand, has identified both the name of the financier and the amount of the loan. ‘In private interviews’, he said, ‘I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord [Alfred] Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.’ Another name specifically mentioned by de Goulevitch was that of Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador to Russia at the time. (See Arsene de Goulevitch: Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, California, no date; rpt. from 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230)…

It is now a matter of record, that [William Boyce] Thompson syndicated the purchase on Wall Street of Russian bonds in the amount of ten million roubles. (Hagedorn, p. 192) In addition, he gave over two million roubles to Aleksandr Kerensky for propaganda purposes inside Russia and with J.P. Morgan gave the rouble equivalent of one million dollars to the Bolsheviks for the spreading of revolutionary propaganda outside of Russia, particularly in Germany and Austria. (Sutton: Revolution, pp. 83, 91.) It was the agitation made possible by this funding, that led to the abortive German Spartacus Revolt of 1918. (See article “W.B. Thompson, Red Cross Donor, Believes Party Misrepresented” in the Washington Post of Feb. 2, 1918) A photograph of the cablegram from Morgan to Thompson advising, that the money had been transferred to the National City Bank branch in Petrograd, is included in this book.”

[An extraordinarily detailed investigation of the events surrounding the Bolshevik rise to power is described by author Richard Poe at:

How the British Invented Communism (And Blamed It on the Jews)

Another interesting side note is that Allen Dulles claimed to have been contacted by Vladimir Lenin on 8 April 1917, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/wwii-spy-allen-dulles

]

***

Turning to a more recent time, excerpts of a 1995 interview of Christopher Story by William H. McIlhany are included below. This interview took place shortly after the publication of Perestroika Deception, written by Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn and edited by Christopher Story:

McIlhany: “…Who is Anatoliy Golitsyn, and what did he reveal when he defected from the Soviet KGB?”

Christopher Story: “Golitsyn is the most important defector ever to reach the West. He fled to Finland in 1961 with his family, and he revealed the existence of a long-range strategy of deception based on Leninist principles. His importance is that all defectors who’ve come since him appear to have been engaged in an attempt to refute what he says. So we look to Golitsyn as the source for proper insights of what the Communists are really up to.”…

McIlhany: “…He provided this whole new understanding of Soviet disinformation…”

Christopher Story: “…What Golitsyn taught and revealed... was that all these Soviet governments are Leninist governments. They are driven by the deception strategy perfected by Lenin which is aimed at, namely, control of the whole world…. After the death of Stalin, the Communists realized the method of control- brutal repression- was an inefficient method of achieving control of a population. And that it was more efficient to seek to achieve control through infiltration and deception and through control of the minds of the target… The deception plan is a means of projecting Communism into the whole of the rest of the world. And they do it through deception…. (16:00): One of the things I have done is to go back to Lenin and try to read and understand what this evil man is saying. He’s actually preaching hatred. He’s preaching how to deceive. And Lenin’s disciples remain in control of the world Communist movement. All they’ve done is to re-label themselves to appear acceptable to the West. There’s a passage in [a work of] Lenin where he says there may come a time in the revolution when the true revolutionaries must put on the appearance and the clothing and the manners and the language of the enemy.” 

The entire text of Perestroika Deception is presently available at: https://archive.org/details/AnatoliyGolitsyn

On page 116, Golitsyn described the Soviet infiltration of churches (as of March 1990) as follows:

“The Vatican ignores the anti-Western design of Soviet strategy. It fails to understand that the greater apparent official tolerance of religion in the Soviet Union is accompanied by a secret drive to increase party and KGB penetration of the Catholic and other churches and to use agents therein for political and strategic purposes inside and outside the Soviet Union. As part of the program to destroy religion from within, the KGB in the late 1950’s started sending dedicated young Communists to ecclesiastical academies and seminaries to train them as future church leaders. These young Communists joined the Church, not at the call of their consciences to serve God, but at the call of the Communist Party in order to serve that party and to implement its general line in the struggle against religion.

In the present phase, secret agents in the Catholic and other churches are being used to implement Communist strategy. When they achieve their Communist world victory, they will use mass withdrawal of their agents to disrupt and destroy the churches. Never in its history since Nero has Christianity faced such a threat of possible destruction. The dictum of the late Pope Pius XII about the incompatibility of Communism and religion is as right as ever. The Vatican should reaffirm this dictum and should use its influence and its ‘divisions’ to defend Western values from the new Communist methods.”

***

In my view, communism equates to nothing more than a deceptively-marketed version of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Forming a communist government to the benefit of the working class would be like balancing a bowling ball on the head of a pin. It might be theoretically possible for the ball to be balanced, but in practice, as soon as even one butterfly flaps its wings from a distance, the faint breeze sends the ball crashing to the ground. Likewise, as soon as one leader in the communist system decides to secure an extra benefit for himself or his family, another perceives a slight and either asks for an even bigger benefit or finds a way to punish the first leader for his transgression. Either way, another individual in the leadership follows suit. Since there is no need to consult a higher power, the cycle builds until only the strongest, most tyrannically-minded individual is left standing and takes charge.

In a Communist state, the people of the working class must either relinquish their traditional religious beliefs, or else face severe punishment. Religion, and specifically Christianity in the Western tradition, has countered the premise that ‘might makes right,’ and eliminating religion is necessary to carry out the philosophy of Nietzsche.

There is strong argument to be made that many of those who instilled Communism throughout the world were fully aware that they were actually forming a government based on the philosophy of Nietzsche, rather than Marx. It is laughable to contrive that, during the Bolshevik Revolution, that industrialists like J.P. Morgan and Armand Hammer would place the working class in control of any government. It is much easier to understand their motive if one considers Nietzsche’s teachings, as described in this lecture by Professor Michael Sugrue [ 

, starting from 14:35 ], bold added for emphasis:

“In abolishing morality and destroying ethics, [Nietzsche] is taking a position very much like that of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s great novel, Crime and Punishment. If any of you know that piece, you’ll know that early in the novel, before Raskolnikov comes back to the Christian fold, he commits a murder because he has the theory of ‘The Exceptional Man’-that the usual norms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which we expect to be universal, are only partially complete. There are certain superior individuals, according to Raskolnikov, for whom the traditions of morality do not apply. That’s the idea of ‘The Exceptional Man.’ 

Well, Nietzsche in fact makes an argument along these lines – that the great world historic individuals, that ‘superior men’ do not have to be bound by the constraints of traditional notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. They are the great Artists. They are the great Creators. They may not be artists in the sense of painters or in the sense of literary men, but they are creative in things like politics or things like science, as well. From this perspective-from the perspective of Nietzsche- all superior men in every discipline that are breaking the bounds of inherited forms, they are what he means by ‘Artist’. The Artist is the creative human being, and the creative human being can create in any domain. It doesn’t have to be sculpture or literature or something like that. What Nietzsche is saying is that that Art and that capacity to create is more important than any moral judgment we might make about an Artist. An Artist may be a wicked man, but if he writes well, then he is a superior individual. It doesn’t make any difference whether he obeys the usual rules that we like to impose upon all people. What makes a man great is his willingness to give up that ‘herd morality’, as Nietzsche calls it. Nietzsche says that all of our moral systems have been made to satisfy ‘lowest common denominator needs’. He looks, for example, at the history of Christianity and says, ‘The reason why Christianity is a religion of slaves is because it serves the interests of slaves. If you were a Roman Master,’ as Nietzsche kind of likes and sympathizes with, ‘then you could do all sorts of cruel and wicked stuff, and because you were superior, you never felt bad about it. You didn’t have this nasty religious guilt. What kind of a superior, heroic man would do that?’

Nietzsche said that all of Western Heroism was poisoned by the advent of Christianity because it made superior people develop what he called a ‘conscience’. And he thought that was a very bad development because it truncated their ability to act. Who knows what great figures would have done if they had not been kept back- held back- by those arbitrary strictures of Christian morality.”

It is easy to see why Nietzsche’s philosophy would appeal to industrialists like JP Morgan and Armand Hammer. They viewed themselves as “Exceptional Men”, and would have embraced a society where the strong could do whatever they want, including the enslavement of the weak. Pause to consider Lenin’s statement that there may come a ‘time in the revolution’ when the true revolutionaries must put on the appearance and the clothing and the manners and the language of the enemy. Little did his audience know – that ‘time’ may have been at the very instant he spoke those words! I posit that the entire idea of implementing Marxism itself was a ruse which obscured Lenin’s true goal, which was to trick the working class into embracing their own slavery and into eliminating religion-especially Russian Orthodox Christianity, in the Bolshevik Revolution- from their culture.  

It seems likely that many other apparent capitalists in the West, like JP Morgan and President Woodrow Wilson, were also in disguise. These apparent ‘Anti-Communists’ instead may have been motivated to install a version of the same philosophy of Nietzsche ushered into Russia by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin around the entire world. If true, we must confront the prospect that the accepted history of the 20^th century was a deception on a scale which is virtually unimaginable.  

*** 

An example which suggests demonstrates the possible influence of Nietzsche on Josef Stalin and which is especially relevant today is that of his enforcement of Lysenkoism. An excerpt of an especially enlightening article on this subject ( https://allthatsinteresting.com/trofim-lysenko ) is given here in full:

“Lysenko starves Ukrainians”

By Morgan Dunn | Edited By John Kuroski Published February 9, 2021, Updated September 5, 2022

“… The Russian Civil War clattered to a close in 1920, leaving millions dead and the countryside of the young Soviet Union stripped bare by marauding armies. Four years later, Vladimir Lenin died, and Joseph Stalin took control as the country’s de facto dictator.

Stalin, however, inherited a desperately hungry and under-developed country. Surveying the war-torn land, Stalin decided that because the preceding centuries hadn’t carried Russian agriculture into the 20th century, it was up to him to drag it there.

One of his most devoted followers was Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, a man who believed Soviet Communism could achieve anything. He grew up in poverty in what is now Ukraine, so he was no stranger to hunger. But as a result of this upbringing, he came to see food, and the lack of it, as enemies to be vanquished.

Dedicating himself to science, Lysenko became an agronomist in 1925 and was soon deployed to a remote research station in Azerbaijan. But despite his degree, Lysenko had garnered some truly bizarre ideas about science.

For starters, he believed that plants and seeds could be trained to follow socialist organizational principles. His theory, which would eventually be dubbed Lysenkoism, stated that crops could be trained to conform and produce vast yields almost from out of thin air. According to what he called “the law of the life of species,” seeds wouldn’t compete with one another, but rather they would cooperate with each other in a near-sentient fashion — like humans.

Applying the Marxist principle of materialism, in which the conditions surrounding an individual dictate its behaviors and responses, Lysenko believed that plants and animals, too, could be reshaped as needed.

In 1927, Lysenko’s theories appeared to be proven when a crop of peas he’d planted in the winter before burst forth into green life. He thought this proved that he had taught the peas to grow even in their off-season simply by exposing them to the cold.

A glowing write-up in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, followed, which lauded his achievement in “turning the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow.”

Lysenkoism Becomes Official Ideology

What Lysenko had “discovered” was actually a well-known process in which the extreme cold induces the seeds to flower. Russian peasants, and indeed farmers from all over the world, had been doing this for centuries, but Lysenko claimed to have reinvented the idea and proudly promoted it as what he called “Jarovization”. He loudly announced his “success” in the media.

But where Lysenko truly doomed Russia was in claiming that the results of his work, a flowering vegetable in winter, would be remembered by the plant and passed onto its offspring. This idea already existed, it was called “soft inheritance,” or Lamarckism for the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who coined it. The theory posited that traits garnered by a plant or animal while alive could be passed on to its offspring.

But by the logic of Lamarckism or Jarovization, a person who broke their leg while alive could pass on the trait of a broken leg to their child. Geneticists, therefore, did not agree with the ideas of Lamarckism or Jarovization.

Even though Lysenko’s scientific credentials and methods were sorely lacking and his theories flawed, he happened to be in the right Russia at the right time. In 1928, Stalin initiated the collectivization of all farms across the Soviet Union, forcing peasants across the country onto cooperatives under state control in what amounted to a hostile takeover of traditional Russian agriculture. The result was catastrophic. Crops were destroyed, viable land was lost, grain was hoarded, and famine engrossed the country.

Stalin was desperate for a miraculous solution, and so when he received word of the audacious young scientist named Trofim Lysenko, he ordered him to spread his ludicrous ideas to the struggling collective farms.

Lysenko promised to transform the whole of Russia into a super-farm that churned out unnaturally durable produce. It was music to Stalin’s ears — but a death knell for millions.

Consolidating the country’s farms was a disaster in itself, but adding Trofim Lysenko’s dangerous brand of pseudoscience to the mix only worsened the crisis. His choice to expose seeds to different temperatures, pack them tightly together in the fields and forbid the use of pesticides and fertilizers resulted in record crop failures.

Especially risky were his treatments like scraping seeds with sandpaper or treating them with acid, which weakened them to blights and fungal infections, making any plants that did sprout insufficient for food and potentially dangerous to eat.

Stalin’s policies resulted in what is now known as the Holodomor, a Ukrainian term which loosely translates to “hunger plague.” As many as seven to 10 million died of starvation while Lysenko oversaw the country’s farms, and nightmarish stories of cannibalism soon spread across the country.

According to William deJong-Lambert, Professor of History at Bronx Community College, by 1932, “famine in the Ukrainian breadbasket was so severe that the sight of victims dropping dead on the street from hunger ceased to provoke notice.”

Many of these victims might have been saved had sound science been at work on the country’s farms. Instead, there was Trofim Lysenko.

That there weren’t more deaths may have more to do with the fact that farm bosses soon quietly ignored his ideas.

Even as his ideas exacerbated one of history’s most devastating famines, Lysenko’s star was rising among Soviet leaders. By 1939, he was so widely supported that after an extended struggle with geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who debunked Lysenko’s work, Lysenko came into control of almost all of the Soviet food research.

Vavilov was subsequently arrested and imprisoned before dying of starvation in 1943. Any further scientist who dared to question Lysenkoism risked being discredited, imprisoned, or even killed.

Official support only spurred Lysenko’s theories or ‘Soviet Darwinism’ to ever more absurd heights.

In 1948, his ideas were made universal law at a party conference in a speech edited by Stalin himself. By then, Lysenko was given to making outstandingly weird assertions like wheat could be induced to produce rye or that inorganic substances could be combined to create life.

Stalin’s death in 1953 destroyed much of Lysenko’s support, as premier Nikolai Khruschev reinstated proven geneticists and began importing sounder scientific ideas from outside of the Soviet Union, where Lysenkoism enjoyed little more than universal ridicule.

However, Trofim Lysenko’s lethal beliefs hadn’t been entirely abandoned. The People’s Republic of China had been established in 1949, and Mao Zedong’s party began systematically copying everything the Soviets did — including their science. As a part of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, an effort to jump-start every sector of China’s economy and industry, the mistakes of collectivization and Lysenkoism were mimicked nearly to the letter.

The failure of these efforts was predictable, but the scale of the destruction wrought in China surpassed that of even the Holodomor. Between 1959 and 1961, as many as 45 million Chinese people died as a result of starvation, malnutrition, illness, and injury after the country’s farms were wrecked by Lysenko’s crackpot ideas. This period of time would become known as The Great Chinese Famine.”

***

When a ‘mistake’ leads to the deaths of 10 million people and is subsequently repeated to kill 45 million more, we must consider that the so-called ‘mistake’ might have been intentional. The most logical explanation may be that the true support for Lysenko’s pseudoscience derived from a powerful, well-organized and wealthy group which favored depopulation and elimination of demographic groups they viewed as weak or inferior.

I suspect that this group persuaded Stalin and Mao –perhaps in exchange for information on rival governments and their weaponry to slaughter the citizens of the respective countries they governed. It may be that a combination of bribery, flattery, and other motivators might also have been used to persuade the two dictators to accept Lysenko’s methods.

As described in “Changing the Climate of Fear and Deception, (part 1)” Nietzsche’s philosophy has been characterized by many as the underlying philosophy of those who committed the worst atrocities committed by Hitler’s Third Reich, so the characterization of as Nietzsche as the source of the actions of Stalin and Mao hardly comprises a novel concept.

***

The agricultural practices of Lysenko led to food shortages, as peasant farmers in the Ukraine region were certain would happen. Therefore, many of those same farmers took actions of self-preservation by secretly storing grain for their families and communities. This action ran against the Soviet laws requiring collectivism and was severely punished, when discovered by the authorities. Most farming communities are tight-knit, and so the secret storage of food was often difficult for authorities to detect. So the Soviet authorities contrived a propaganda tool, which led to the legend of Pavlik Morozov described here ( www.soniamelnikova.com/id9.html ) with excerpts below:

INFORMER 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov, Independent research by Yuri Druzhnikov

Adapted selection and translation from Russian by Sonia Melnikova

Published by ICARUS, Rosen Publishing, New York, 1993

“When I was eight years old, I sang in a children's choir. The conductor would announce proudly, ‘And now, with lyrics by the famous children's poet Sergei Mikhalkov and music by Hungarian Communist Ferentz Sabo — a song about Pavlik Morozov!’

Ours were not the only voices lifted in honor of the heroic Pavlik Morozov. For half a century, the whole country lauded this brave teenage boy...

What was the deed that made him a hero? In 1932 Pavlik Morozov exposed his father as an ‘enemy of the People.’ He informed the OGPU (as the KGB, or Soviet secret police, was then called) that his father was helping the kulaks, successful peasants who refused to relinquish their land and livestock to the State as was required by the Collectivization Plan, and was therefore branded as an enemy of Socialism. Pavlik's father was arrested, tried, and sent to a concentration camp, never to be seen again. Soon after his father's trial, Pavlik was murdered by ‘enemies of the State.’ After his death, he was hailed as a hero of the people, and every child in the Soviet Union was required to learn his story and be prepared to follow his example…

…Maxim Gorky called Pavlik Morozov ‘a small miracle of our times,’ and Nikita Khrushchev, in his preface to the 1962 edition of the Children's Encyclopedia, called Pavlik Morozov an ‘immortal of this age.’ But the villagers primarily remembered the boy as a hooligan who smoked cigarettes and liked to sing obscene ditties…

…Misguided by their teachers, [Soviet] children, like their model, Morozov, were the victims of a political struggle they were too young to understand.

For more than fifty years, Soviet children were taught to keep a sharp eye out for enemies of the people, even among their neighbors and family members. A young Komsomol leader, A. Ksoarev, wrote in Pravda, ‘We do not share a common morality with the rest of mankind... For us, morality is that which builds Socialism.’

Moved by this kind of ‘morality,’ Stalin and his government easily converted millions of living people into corpses. But in the case Pavlik Morozov, a corpse was converted into a living symbol. Through the power of this legend, Stalin raised an army of Morozov imitators, and the myth became an everyday reality of Soviet life.”

Proclaiming Pavlik Morozov’s betrayal of his family through an “act of heroism” amounted to an attempt at not only physical, but also cultural, genocide. There is no better illustration of Josef Stalin’s tyrannical rule.

It is a stark contrast between the deplorable anti-science advanced via Lysenkoism for agriculture and the extraordinary scientific and engineering accomplishments of the Soviets in space. There was no ‘golden road’ to Sputnik. The unmatched achievements of the Soviet Union in rigorous adherence to the principles of science and engineering in aeronautics only serves to illustrate that Lysenkoism was not merely a mistake. It is illogical for a country to be the best in the world in applying the principles of aeronautics but choose to devalue science, not to mention centuries of experience, for the arbitrary opinion of a charlatan, such as Lysenko. However, it would be logical for a follower of Nietzsche to implement Lysenko’s methods, as most of those who died were the weak- the elderly, the poor, and children.

***

In 1957 Sputnik shocked the population of the West, and particularly the United States, out of the misplaced sense of technological superiority over the Soviet Union. The movie October Sky captured the mood of many people in the US who merely had to look up into the night sky to witness the Soviet success of Sputnik racing form horizon to horizon.

But the success of Sputnik paled in comparison to the accomplishment of the most emphatic statement of Soviet excellence in science and technology which came shortly thereafter.

Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly into space.

Consider the following article about Yuri Gagarin, written from a British viewpoint:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210409-yuri-gagarin-the-spaceman-who-came-in-from-the-cold

“Yuri Gagarin: the spaceman who came in from the cold;

Yuri Gagarin belied the West's austere impression of the Soviet Union – a charming, easygoing Russian with a ready smile. The first man in space became a powerful propaganda tool.”

By Stephen Dowling,12 April 2021

“It was the smile that clinched it.

The first cadre of Soviet space explorers gathered together numbered 20. Among them were Gherman Titov, still the youngest person to fly in space (aged 26), and Alexei Leonov, the first person to venture out of the safety of a capsule to conduct a spacewalk.

But these pioneers still followed in the footsteps of another.

The cosmonaut who would become the first man in orbit needed to be a calm and confident pilot, someone able to function on a mission no person had ever encountered without going to pieces. But there was more to this selection process than pure technical skill.

Yuri Gagarin's smile, it's been said, could melt the stoniest heart, and not even those at the highest echelons of Soviet power were immune. When Sergei Korolev – the USSR's chief rocket designer – first met the cadre of pioneering cosmonauts, he spent most of that first meeting chatting to the charismatic Gagarin. Korolev would later call him his "little eagle".

Gagarin's historic mission in Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 lasted one hour and 48 minutes – far less than the average multiplex movie. The fighter pilot and former foundry worker – his short stature perfect for the cramped interior of the Vostok capsule, it turned out – blasted into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with a delightfully informal quip into his earpiece: "Let's roll!" Less than two hours later, his re-entry capsule landed on the ground near the city of Engels in Western Russia, with Gagarin himself landing by parachute minutes later.

A farmer and her granddaughter, who had seen the round capsule fall heavily to Earth, were greeted by the site of a strange, silver-suited figure. "I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!" Gagarin later wrote in his log book. In a few short weeks, the cosmonaut's face would become one of the most recognisable in the world.

*

Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to conquer space. The politburo had another mission for him – to conquer the world.

The Soviet Union's leadership knew that should the maiden mission be successful, the first human in space would become a face recognised around the world. The first cosmonaut would become a weapon of soft power.

The Soviets kept quiet about Gagarin's mission until he had returned safely to Earth – and then broadcast the news far and wide via the state news agency Tass. The reports sent shockwaves around the world, not least in the US, which had been trying to beat the Russians to the first manned flight. "About 4am, telephones began buzzing up and down the east coast of the United States as reporters demanded responses from NASA officials to the Tass dispatch," NASA wrote in a report on Gagarin’s mission. "John A 'Shorty' Powers half-consciously replied to his first inquisitor, 'We're all asleep down here'." One widely celebrated US newspaper headline later that day reads: "Soviets put man in space: Spokesman says US asleep."

At this stage, Gagarin was just a name, a previously unknown Soviet air force pilot now being trumpeted as the first space explorer. On 14 April, two days after he returns to Earth, the USSR unveils the cosmonaut to the world at a giant gathering in Moscow's Red Square after a 12-mile (10km) parade through the city. Millions of Soviet citizens attend.

"[Soviet leader] Nikita Khrushchev said before: 'It's not going to be stage-managed, this is going to be spontaneous'," says Tom Ellis, a professor of Cold War history at the London School of Economics. "And the gathering is spontaneous, there's this amazing footage of labourers and students all dancing together." It's thought the celebrations to mark Gagarin's return are the biggest since the end of the war in Europe, 16 years before.

Gagarin's charisma and easy smile are quickly evident. There are invitations for the first cosmonaut to visit from across the globe. "There are crowds wherever he goes to meet him, even in the UK, which is very firmly in the US camp," says Ellis. "It's very difficult for us now to understand the interest. People just wanted to get a glimpse of him."

Gagarin's humble roots are a godsend for the Soviet propaganda industry. Born to peasant farmers in a small village near the western Russian city of Smolensk, Gagarin's village was invaded by the Germans when he was only seven years old; his family are evicted from their home and have to spend the next 21 months living in a mud hut. Yuri sabotages German equipment and is lucky to survive the war, though he spends several months in a hospital. He's a gifted student – especially in engineering and maths – but is no bookish wallflower – he's equally good at sports, and works in a foundry while studying. Later, after graduating as a military pilot, he flies MiG fighter jets in the far north of Russia, near the Finnish border. Out of hundreds of applicants, he is one of the first 20 chosen as the USSR’s first batch of cosmonauts.

Gagarin's visit to the UK, three months after his historic flight, is initially a cautious affair. The US-aligned United Kingdom steps carefully around the politics, refusing to make it a state visit, even though Gagarin is accompanied by an official delegation. The UK authorities are perhaps taken aback by the excitement. A foundry workers' union – in honour of Gagarin's former occupation – invite the cosmonaut to Manchester, and Gagarin accepts, extending his stay. "There's quite a famous moment when he's appearing in Manchester, and he stays in an open-top car even though it's raining, because, he says, 'The people have come to see me.'"

Gagarin's world tour comes at a delicate time in East-West relations. It is only a few months before the building of the Berlin Wall. His flight takes place only a few days before the abortive US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; the Cuba Missile Crisis a year later will bring the world closer to a nuclear confrontation than ever before. Amid such tension, Gagarin's visit is a rare moment of celebration, and possibly a way of building detente. "One of the other people who was working with him said, 'That person who asks for an autograph and gets a moment with him, will come back and show all their friends and family, and start reading more about the space programme,'" says Ellis.

"When he came here to England, he was seen as a superhero," says Gurbir Singh, a space journalist who has written a book about Gagarin's visit to the UK. "He had experienced something no one else had experienced. Apart from the speed and altitude records he achieved… he'd also experienced a realm – space, micro-gravity, weightlessness – something no one had ever experienced, and for a few months, no one else would experience."

In 1957, the launch of Sputnik 1 had sent a spasm of panic around Western nations, who saw it as proof of the USSR's ballistic missile arsenal. But Sputnik never survived its historic mission, Gurbir says, burning up in the atmosphere some three months later. "Gagarin was a person, a human being, a very delightful character… he came across as a very warm and engaging individual. And that smile! Everybody I spoke to remembered that."

In the UK, Gagarin's popularity took the establishment by surprise. "He certainly met the prime minister MacMillan and the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and neither of those two things were on the cards at the time he arranged to come. It was very confusing for the British government, to on the one hand recognise the technological achievement. And it was a huge technological achievement – and the bravery of this individual… it was a very high-risk adventure." Gagarin, it emerged later, was lucky to survive the mission – not because of problems in space, but because his re-entry module had failed to disengage properly from the orbital module. The cables failed to cut correctly and the two craft spun violently until the wires gave way. Only after that was Gagarin able to eject from the module and make it safely back down to Earth. "So when he did come over, everybody in the West acknowledged that this was a huge achievement for the Soviet Union."

"It put the senior politicians here in the UK in a very awkward position. One the one hand they did want to acknowledge the huge achievement for the Soviet Union, but on the other hand they didn't want to upset the allies across the Atlantic. At that time the American space programme was struggling to catch up. In the end there was a compromise, the invitation for Gagarin to visit the UK didn't come from the British government, it came from various places – including the mayor of Newcastle." An exhibition promoting the Soviet Union, which started the day before Gagarin arrived, was another convenient peg on which to hang his visit.

Though by this time Gagarin had already visited Prague in then-Czechoslovakia and the Finnish capital Helsinki, Singh says the London visit was the pinnacle because "it was the heart of the capitalist West".

The ever-smiling Gagarin was, Ellis says, "a much more appealing face for communism. Gagarin is a really charismatic figure. He embodies the Soviet Union and the journey it's going through. He's had a childhood interrupted by the war… he's come from a collective farm to the stars in just 27 years. It's kind of what the Soviet Union has done, too." When his parents attend his parade in Red Square, they are told to dress simply – further strengthening the "carpenter to cosmonaut" ideal the Soviet top brass wishes to present.

This glorification of Gagarin's humble roots goes deeper than a simple East-vs-West battle of wills, says Ellis. The early 1960s is a period of enormous global change, with many former colonies finally gaining their independence. Ellis says the exploits of Gagarin – and wider Soviet accomplishments – are a "model of development" for many new nations. "The Soviets are essentially saying to them, 'Look, we've been through the same things that you have, we were technologically backward, and we've managed to forge ahead and get to space in a short amount of time.'" The garrulous, ever-smiling Gagarin was the easygoing public face of something more imposing – a giant technical/industrial base able to design and build a rocket to send a human into space.

Gagarin's tour included a stop off at the United Nations in New York (technically he did not set foot on US soil because he was taken from the airport to the UN by helicopter) but also visited some newly independent nations, like India, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

Unlike most of his contemporary cosmonauts – such as Alexei Leonov, who passed away in 2019 aged 85 – Gagarin is frozen in time. The statues and paintings, like the young cosmonaut himself, never age. After his world tour, Gagarin became deputy director of the new Cosmonaut Training Centre. Sudden fame and the pressure of his diplomatic duties put strain on his marriage; there were rumours of a drink problem and infidelities, including one where Gagarin leapt out of a window after being caught by his wife in bed with another woman.

Gagarin then focused on getting fit enough for a return to space. The first cosmonaut was reserve pilot for the first Soyuz mission in April 1967; this mission ended in tragedy, killing Gagarin's friend Vladimir Komarov. Soviet authorities banned him from space travel, though Gagarin still insisted on logging enough flight hours on jet aircraft to remain a credible instructor. It was on one of these flights, in March 1968, that Gagarin died. In an incident still mired in conspiracy and controversy, Gagarin's MiG-15 trainer crashed in woodland just outside Moscow. He was only 34.

"When he died, it all started to go wrong for the Soviet Union," says Ellis. "Korolev dies. You have the Americans surging ahead with the Saturn 5 rocket [which eventually takes them to the Moon]. They know they're in trouble. "Gagarin's status survives the Soviet space programme being eclipsed by the Americans. "He's enshrined as a hero," says Ellis. "When Neil Armstrong visits the Soviet Union, he is mobbed by crowds who are really pleased to see him. NASA thought that it's maybe because Armstrong looks a little like Gagarin."

Stephen Dowling is BBC Future’s associate editor.

***

Yuri Gagarin played a key role in Soviet outreach to former colonies of England and other western European nations. He met with President Nasser of Egypt, and there is a short video clip of their meeting where his visit packed a stadium.

An interview with Gagarin was broadcast on Egyptian television during his visit in 1962 is available here:

https://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2021/04/when-yuri-gagrin-visited-egypt.html?m=1

The site also several photographs and includes this statement: “It is not a secret that the whole tour was Soviet propaganda on steroids likewise on the American side years later. Yet despite the political use of those space achievements, one can’t do anything except admire those early cosmonauts and astronauts and their courage…”

***

This article describes the world tour for Yuri Gagarin and includes many pictures.

https://www.rbth.com/history/333652-gagarin-after-spaceflight

“April 12, 1961, was a day that changed history. The first human flew into space and returned safely, becoming the number one celebrity in the world. In his homeland, he was greeted like a rock star, and countries all over the world clambered to invite him to visit….

In the spring of 1961, Gagarin embarked on a world tour, visiting more than 30 countries; literally everyone from Cuba to Japan wanted to see him in the flesh. The US was one of the few countries that did not extend an invitation to the cosmonaut. The pilot was no longer his own man, but a media personality; at all times he had to “keep face” and please onlookers with his trademark smile.

Air Force Colonel General Nikolai Kamanin, who accompanied Gagarin on foreign trips, recalled: “Almost all newspapers noted that Gagarin’s trip proved how great a man he is. Every day I talked with this great man in the midst of unprecedented luxury and splendor, and saw that he just wanted to relax, alone, somewhere with a fishing rod on a river outside Moscow...”

***

When India played host to Yuri Gagarin, Dec 10 2016, Ajay Kamalakaran

https://www.rbth.com/blogs/tatar_straits/2016/12/10/when-india-played-host-to-yuri-gagarin_655041

“The first man to travel to space spent eight days in India in 1961. During those exhausting days, Gagarin met Jawaharlal Nehru, addressed a huge gathering in Mumbai’s Shivaji Park and received a raucous welcome from an adulating public across India.

On November 29, 1961, seven and a half months after he made history by becoming the first man to travel to outer space, Yuri Gagarin visited India.  While crowds had already thronged to see the cosmonaut in places such as the UK, Cuba and Brazil, accounts suggest that the largest numbers turned up in Indian cities. This was before the television age, so a lot of people felt it worth their time to try and even get a glimpse of their hero.

“I was 12 years old at that time and I remember not sleeping before the night Gagarin would hold a rally at Shivaji Park,” says Ramesh Borkar, who attended the event. “Gagarin spoke in Russia and there was a simultaneous translation. I wasn’t even this excited when Indian won the (cricket) World Cup in 1983.”

Others at the rally recalled the cosmonaut’s attire and charisma.

“He was wearing his uniform and was handsome, humble and friendly,” Prakash Reddy, who was 10 at that time, told the Hindustan Times. And the atmosphere on the ground was magnetic.”

Reddy, who went to become the secretary of the Communist Party of India in Mumbai, added, “This was a different kind of achievement by a communist state for mankind and the whole world.”

Before coming to Mumbai, the cosmonaut was entertained by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. A British Movietone newsreel showed a smiling Gagarin applauding to the crowd that was waiting at the airport for him. He was presented with bouquets in Russian style and garlanded in Indian style on arrival. Even Soviet schoolchildren were part of the crowd at the airport in Delhi.

The newsreel shows Gagarin’s wife Valentina Goryacheva who accompanied him on the Asian tour that also included  Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Nehru entertained the couple at his Teen Murthi residence, attended a rally and major cultural program and also joined them on an open-air motorcade through Rajpath. Gagarin was shown snake charmers but he apparently did not see any elephants on his trip.

It was the adulation from the Indian public that Gagarin seemed to appreciate the most. “Thousands of people greeted Gagarin warmly,” Nikolai Kamanin, a Russian aviator and war hero who accompanied the cosmonaut on the trip, wrote. “I was reminded of my naïve childhood impression of Christ meeting his people. He needed a miracle with five thousand loaves and fishes, but our Gagarin satisfied the people’s hunger with his appearance alone.”

Kamanin wrote that he had anticipated that Gagarin would become world famous, but added that he could have “never predicted the scale of the clamour.”

During the trip, which was full of official engagements and functions, the cosmonaut also visited Lucknow and Hyderabad. The fact that he’d been on display for months was starting to take a toll on Gagarin after a while. One Russian author claimed that humidity and 40 degree heat exhausted the cosmonaut, but it’s hard to imagine that anyplace in India could have been that hot in the first week of December. There were just too many expectations placed on Gagarin.

After eight days in India, the cosmonaut left for Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was officially called then. “By 9^th December, 1961, Gagarin, Valya (short for Valentina) and the accompanying entourage were in Colombo, Ceylon,” Kamanin wrote in his diary. “Gagarin told me that he was ‘close to wearing out.’ The Soviet ambassador in Colombo insisted on his making as many appearances as possible.”

On a sharply critical note, Kamanin added: “They’re doing their best to squeeze the maximum possible use of Gagarin to make the government look good. They have no interest in how all this affects him.”

[Nikolai Kaminan was a highly respected Soviet aviator awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union” in 1934 for his role in a daring rescue of dozens of men from a ship’s crew which were trapped in ice. He successfully commanded an air brigade fighting the Nazis during WWII, and subsequently headed the Cosmonaut Training Program from 1960-1971.]

***

From these accounts it seemed clear that Pavlik Morozov, an informant presented to the Soviet Union as the ideal - a teenager who betrayed his father to further the glory of the Communist State- would be supplanted by a new Soviet hero: Yuri Gagarin.

Like young Pavlik, Yuri Gagarin came from the peasant class. In his youth, he had demonstrated bravery and fortitude against Nazi invaders, and as a young man became the first man in space.

His appeal recognition of his extraordinary bravery was far-reaching. His appeal was evident in the newly independently countries, such as Egypt and India. Even for Great Britain and the United States, Gagarin drew excitement and recognition. He was charismatic and, by all accounts, charming. Media accounts suggest that this is partly because the people viewed him as so relatable – one of their own, so to speak.  

But Yuri Gagarin also posed a problem to the Communist Party. According to several accounts, Yuri Gagarin was also a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. His faith posed a particular dilemma for Khrushchev who, at the same time as Gagarin's ascent, was closing churches and monasteries at an alarming rate.

The repression of religion in the Soviet Union was on an unimaginable scale, and the Khrushchev era policies were among the most repressive. Per

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/USSR%20anti-religious%20campaign%20(1958-1964)

“The anti-religious campaign of the Khrushchev era began in 1959, coinciding with the Twenty First Party Congress in the same year. It was carried out by mass closures of churches (reducing the number from 22,000 in 1959 to 13,008 in 1960 and to 7,873 by 1965), monasteries, and convents, as well as of the still-existing seminaries (pastoral courses would be banned in general). The campaign also included a restriction of parental rights for teaching religion to their children, a ban on the presence of children at church services (beginning in 1961 with the Baptists and then extended to the Orthodox in 1963), and a ban on administration of the Eucharist to children over the age of four. Khrushchev additionally banned all services held outside of church walls, renewed enforcement of the 1929 legislation banning pilgrimages, and recorded the personal identities of all adults requesting church baptisms, weddings or funerals…

The 1962 14th Komsomol congress called for a more concrete attack on religion and that it was the duty of every Komsomol member to resolutely struggle against religion. This congress also declared that freedom of conscience did not apply to children and that parents should not cripple children spiritually. On a similar note, the top Soviet legal journal declared that parental rights over children was a right given by the society and which could be withdrawn by the state if this right was abused…

Khrushchev also criticized Stalin's attempt to turn the site of the former Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow into a great Soviet monument, which Khrushchev decided instead would be a swimming pool.”

It was common for Khrushchev to mock religious followers. This would have suited the stated goals of Communism, but more importantly, it would have served the purposes of Nietzsche’s philosophy. And Khrushchev famously *used* Gagarin (and other Cosmonauts) to assert that God does not exist.

At the height of the Cold War, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was proclaimed by the Soviet leader to have announced, “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.”

By doing so, Khrushchev drew a parallel: 

Pavlik Morozov was a Soviet Hero because he betrayed his earthly father to the state authorities.

Yuri Gagarin could be a new Soviet hero, but only if he was seen as betraying his *Heavenly Father* to *Khrushchev* and the atheism that is at the heart of Communism and- more essentially- the philosophy of Nietzsche.

There is no doubt that Gagarin proclaimed the virtues of Communism and his native country. As noted above, he had firsthand experience with the atrocities committed by the Nazis, and it makes sense that he would have been proud of his nation’s accomplishments, including its victory in World War II, and its history and cultural roots.

But how many times do you suppose Yuri Gagarin was asked to confirm or clarify Khrushchev's line that he "did not see God" in space? Surely, it happened often. And is there a record of him doing so? Perhaps there are ways to answer such a question in a narrow sense, but surely a broad, all-encompassing response was the one expected by Khrushchev and Soviet authorities.

Khrushchev and those behind the scenes who supported Nietzsche’s worldview surely would have anticipated that Gagarin would provide a full-throated denial of the existence of God and to confirm atheism as his own belief system, describing it as the scientifically-supportable answer. After all, he *symbolized* the victory of Soviet science and engineering over the West.

A lesser man would have compromised and capitulated to Khrushchev expectations, if not demands. The problem for the Soviet state was that Yuri Gagarin was a man of extraordinary courage. 

Yuri Gagarin refused to deny his beliefs and, by doing so, ensured that the people of the Soviet Union would have a true hero, worthy of their admiration- not than another Pavlik Morozov.

If Gagarin's controversial and forbidden faith was well-known among his friends, wouldn't the Soviet authorities also have found out? As Anatoliy Golitsyn points out, the Communist Party had infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church. And if those authorities knew, any Nietzsche followers behind the scenes would surely have been aware. Certainly, Yuri Gagarin posed a serious threat to them.

Infiltration may not have even mattered because by 1964, Gagarin is said to have announced his faith according to the account given here:

https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/on_the_front_lines_of_the_culture_wars/2011/04/yuri-gagarin-first-human-in-space-was-a-devout-christian-says-his-close-friend.html

“Yuri Gagarin, first human in space, was a devout Christian, says his close friend”

The first man in outer space 50 years ago believed fervently in the Almighty — even though the atheistic Soviet government put famous words in his mouth that he had looked around at the cosmos and did not see God.

Mankind’s first space flight lasted 108 minutes on April 12, 1961.

It was the height of the Cold War. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was proclaimed by the Soviet leadership to have announced, “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.”

However, he never uttered those often-quoted words, says a close friend. And it seems that the Soviet Union lied about a number of aspects of the 1961 space flight.

For example, they covered up the fact that he landed more than 200 miles away from where they were expecting him, a new book discloses. The Soviets trumpeted his mission, the first manned flight into space, as a major Cold War propaganda coup, portraying it as a glitch-free triumph of Communist ideology, writes Russian journalist Anton Pervushin in his book, 108 Minutes That Changed the World.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in line with the official atheistic Soviet line, proclaimed that Gagarin had told him the famous line about not seeing God in space. But nobody else ever heard Gagarin say it –and he never repeated it.

In fact he was a baptized member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Due to Soviet repression of Christianity, he kept that to himself.

A new book published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s famous flight reveals that Soviet scientists severely miscalculated where he would land. “For many years Soviet literature claimed that Yuri Gagarin and his Vostok I landing capsule had come down in the area it was supposed to,” writes Pervushin. “They had been expecting Gagarin to land almost 250 miles further to the south. So it turned out that nobody was waiting or looking for Yuri Gagarin. Therefore the first thing he had to do after landing was set off to look for people so he could tell the leadership where he was.”

The Soviets also lied about the manner of his landing, claiming that he had touched down inside the capsule — which landed on dry land, unlike American space capsules, which splashed down in water. In fact, Gagarin bailed out and landed by parachute.

The book reveals a touching letter Gagarin wrote to his family before the mission in which he pondered his own mortality, telling his wife not to “die of grief” if he never returned. “After all life is life and there is no guarantee for anybody that tomorrow a car might not end one’s life.”

Earlier, the Soviets had sent Laika, a dog, but had made no provision for her to return to earth — so she died in orbit.

“Gagarin also became well-known for the phrase he is said to have stated, a phrase that was used extensively by the atheist propaganda of the time,” writes Nafpaktos Hierotheos Vlachos, the head of today’s Russian Orthodox Church. “And I say ‘he is said to have stated.'”

In fact, “Gagarin was a baptized faithful throughout all his life,” says General Valentin Petrov, Professor of the Russian Air Force Academy and a personal friend of the cosmonaut. “He always confessed God whenever he was provoked, no matter where he was.”

In a 2007 article titled “Yuri Gagarin, the Christian,” by Maria Biniari, she wrote on his birthday in 1964, he visited a monastery, the Lavra of Saint Serge, and met with the Prior — the monk in charge.

There, he had a photo taken of himself, which he told the priest “this is for those who don’t believe.” He signed it “with my best wishes, Yuri Gagarin.”

“That famous phrase which has been ascribed to him, well, in actual fact it was Khrushchev who had said it,” says Petrov. “It was heard during a meeting of the Central Committee, whose desire it was to promulgate anti-religious propaganda.

“Khrushchev had mockingly addressed the following words: ‘Why didn’t you step on the brakes in front of God? Here is Gagarin, who flew up to space, and yet, even he didn’t see God anywhere.’

“Immediately after that, those words were placed into another’s mouth, because the people would have believed more in Gagarin’s words than Khrushchev’s,” says Petrov.

In fact, Gagarin should be remembered for completely different words, says his friend:

“I always remember that Yuri Gagarin said: “An astronaut cannot be suspended in space and not have God in his mind and his heart.”

***

A second account of Yuri Gagarin’s visit to the monastery with Col. Petrov is as follows:

https://www.pravmir.com/did-yuri-gagarin-say-he-didnt-see-god-in-space/

Did Yuri Gagarin Say He Didn’t See God in Space?

Colonel Valentin Petrov | 12 April 2013

Today Russia celebrates Cosmonautics Day, which marks the anniversary of the first manned space flight, made on this day in 1961 by Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968). To mark this day, we offer the following excerpts from an interview given by Colonel Valentin Vasilyevich Petrov, lecturer at the Gagarin Air Force Academy, to Interfax-Religion in 2006.

Interviewer: Valentin Vasilyevich, you were close friends with Yuri Gagarin. According to some accounts, the first cosmonaut was a believer, although he did not advertise it. Can one say that the Orthodox faith was another tacit element linking your friendship as young Soviet pilots during those years of state atheism, so difficult for the Church?

Colonel V. Petrov: Yuri Alekseyevich, like all Russians, was baptized; and, as far as I can know, he was a believer. Our joint visit to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in 1964, right on Gagarin’s thirtieth birthday, remains unforgettable to me. He, who was so lively by nature, once asked me directly if I had ever been to the Lavra. Having received an answer in the affirmative, he suggested going again. We set off at once, that evening, disguised in “civilian” clothes. We were perfect fools, of course, because Gagarin couldn’t disguise himself… When we arrived at the Lavra, a crowd of people approached him for autographs. The service hadn’t even ended when everyone, having heard about Gagarin’s arrival, rushed up to him. Such was the people’s love for Yuri, and he couldn’t refuse anyone.

Yuri Alekseyevich was a unique person: he never boasted of his fame. When you turned to him, he’d see and hear no one but you. It’s the same with his children, who weren’t (and aren’t) puffed up by the knowledge that they’re the children of the first cosmonaut.

Then, in the Lavra, the Father Superior saved us – and, of course, Gagarin in the first place. He took us to his cell where, according to Russian custom, he of course poured us drinks. After the third shot he said: “Well, who’d believe me that Gagarin was in my cell?” And Gagarin replied to him jokingly: “Well, who wouldn’t believe it?” He then procured a photograph of himself, signed it “To Father Superior from Gagarin, with best wishes,” and presented it to him. The latter said: “Well, we need to drink to this!” And of course we did!

Then the Father Superior suggested that we visit the TsAK. We replied in astonishment: “What are you talking about, Father, we’ve been to the TsAGI!” We were thinking of our Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute [TsAGI]. It turned out that he was talking about the Ecclesio-Archaeological Cabinet of the Moscow Theological Academy [TsAK]. [1] We went there, of course, and something happened there that completely amazed me. When we reached the model of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Yuri glanced inside, looked at it, and then said to me: “Valentin, look at what beauty they destroyed!” Then he kept looking at it for a very long time…

When we were returning from the Lavra that time, we were so impressed by everything we had seen that we drove as though hypnotized. Yuri said to me unexpectedly: “Valentin, ponder these words: ‘who art in the heavens.’” I looked at him wide-eyed: “Yuri Alekseyevich, do you really know prayers?!” He said: “Do you think you’re the only one who knows them? Well, you know how to keep quiet.” After all, this was 1964, when Khrushchev promised to “show the last priest…”

I got in trouble because of this trip: I was accused of “dragging Gagarin into religion.” But Gagarin saved me. He said: “How can a Captain drag a Colonel into religion?! He didn’t drive me: we went in my car.” As a result, I was reprimanded according to the party line for “leading Yuri Gagarin into Orthodoxy” – and now I take great pride in this.

Shortly after our trip, Yuri Gagarin, while speaking at a plenary session of the Central Committee on the education of youth, openly suggested restoring the Cathedral of Christ the Savior as a monument of military glory and an outstanding product of Orthodoxy. He simultaneously proposed restoring the then-ruined Triumphal Arch of Moscow. Gagarin’s motives were very simple: one can’t increase patriotism if one doesn’t know one’s roots. Inasmuch as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was a monument of military glory, then people who are going to defend their Motherland should know this.

No one in the plenum, of course, expected such words from the first cosmonaut: the reaction was amazing and the applause was thunderous. The presidium, of course, was seriously frightened, but it goes without saying that they couldn’t do anything against Yuri Alekseyevich.

Interviewer: But what about the famous phrase attributed to Gagarin: “I flew into space, but didn’t see God”?

Colonel V. Petrov: It was most certainly not Gagarin who said this, but Khrushchev! This was connected with a plenary session of the Central Committee addressing the question of anti-religious propaganda. Khrushchev then set the task for all Party and Komsomol [Young Communists] organizations to boost such propaganda. He said: “Why are you clinging to God? Here Gagarin flew into space and didn’t see God.” However, some time later these words began to be portrayed in a different light. They were cited in reference not to Khrushchev, but to Gagarin, who was beloved by the people. Such a phrase spoken by him would be of great significance. Khrushchev wasn’t especially trusted, they said, but Gagarin would certainly be. But nothing was ever said by Gagarin about this, nor could he have uttered such things.

***

Yuri Gagain died only 4 years later, in 1968. An account of his death is given by

https://www.rbth.com/history/330160-death-yuri-gagarin :

“The mysterious death of Yuri Gagarin – why did the first man in space die so young?” History

March 27 2019, Oleg Yegorov

“He conquered space but was killed during a routine training flight. However, his passing is shrouded in mystery, raising many questions and fueling several theories.

Yuri Gagarin achieved legendary status when he became the first person to blast into space on April 12, 1961. He left Earth an ordinary pilot and returned an icon – in the Soviet Union he was worshipped like a rockstar. After his glorious journey, the Soviet authorities immediately sent Gagarin “on tour” to 30 or so countries. He even had lunch with the Queen of England, Elisabeth II, and broke protocol by taking a photo with the monarch. The President of Egypt gave Gagarin the golden keys to the gates of Cairo and Alexandria, while in Havana Fidel Castro just hugged the hell out of him.

Little did anyone know that Gagarin, a young, handsome man with an infectious smile and the world at his feet, would be dead in seven years.

Prepared for future flights

After three years of touring the world, Gagarin returned to his job. To improve his flying skills, he enrolled in the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy’s flight training program. He was keen to visit space again.

“We can’t turn Gagarin into a museum exhibition – that would kill him,” wrote his boss and friend Nikolai Kamanin, the head of cosmonaut training in the Soviet space program. Kamanin’s word’s suggest Moscow was intending to send Gagarin on another space mission – but they never got the chance.

Crash

March 27, 1968, was a cloudy day. Gagarin was performing a training flight in a MIG-15UTI fighter jet, alongside his mentor Vladimir Seryogin, an experienced pilot who had been awarded a Hero of the Soviet Union medal during WWII. Colonel Seryogin was checking Gagarin’s flying technique before letting him loose on the new MIG-17 jet.

Gagarin preparing for the flight on a MIG-21.

At 10:19 am Gagarin and Seryogin took off from the Chkalovsky military airbase near Moscow. The plan was to fly for at least half an hour but at 10:32 am Gagarin informed ground control they were returning to base. Shortly after this all communication with the jet was lost.

After the aircraft disappeared from radar, the authorities sent a search party of planes and helicopters. Four hours later the wreckage of the jet was discovered near the city of Kirzhach (Vladimir Region, 133 km east of Moscow). The crash site was a complete mess and the bodies of the two pilots completely obliterated. Formally identifying Gagarin and Seryogin was no easy task.

“It was impossible to imagine Gagarin dead. Gagarin was life himself, the unbound dream of the sky, of flying, of space,” Kamanin said. But the spaceman was gone, and the investigation of his death began.

Official version: Deadly weather balloon

People gathered on the Red Square to mourn Gagarin's death.

It wasn’t until 2011 that the results of the investigation were officially revealed. On the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s space flight the Russian authorities declassified the findings.

“The most likely reason for the catastrophe was a radical maneuver to avoid crashing into a weather balloon. That led the jet into a critical flight regime and further downward spiral,” said Alexander Stepanov, an official from the Presidential Archive.

According to this version, sheer bad luck sparked Gagarin’s demise – a large weather balloon appeared in his flight zone and the pilots, in a desperate bid to avoid it, unintentionally sent the jet into a nosedive they couldn’t correct, largely thanks to the additional weight (the jet was equipped with two additional fuel tanks which made it slower) and thick clouds.

Nevertheless, not everyone is satisfied with the official version and various theories have emerged as a result.

Four Alternative Theories

1) Seryogin suddenly lost conscience

“I believe the version that suggests Seryogin had a heart attack. Perhaps he just fell on one of the control levers, which led to fatal consequences,” said Vitaly Zholobov, a Soviet astronaut.

2) Depressurization killed the pilots

Igor Kuznetsov, a pilot involved in the investigation of Gagarin’s death, believes unexpected cabin depressurization killed the pilots. Some people think that when they were at 4,000 meters they started losing pressure and altitude before passing out and losing control of the jet.

3) The engine broke down

Yet another version suggests that the MIG-15 just span out of control.

Engineer Valentin Kozyrev wrote in his memoirs that one of the investigators told him the jet’s engine broke down causing a nosedive  – the pilots tried to right it but their efforts were in vain.

4) Another jet caused the catastrophe

Alexei Leonov, Gagarin’s fellow astronaut and the first human to do a spacewalk (in 1965), supports this version. In 2013, he said that a careless maneuver of another jet accidentally killed Gagarin and Seryogin. When the other aircraft passed them at supersonic speed it forced their MIG-15 into a nosedive.

Not one of these theories has been proven. What’s clear is that Gagarin and Seryogin died due to tragic circumstances that involved technical difficulties, bad weather, and, possibly, human error.”

***

I would like to propose another theory regarding Yuri Gagarin’s death to this list. But first, more context must be provided.

First consider that his death occurred on 27 March 1968, just two weeks prior to Leonid Brezhnev’s plan to send soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia was initiated. It was carried out several months later in August 1968. One reason for the operation was to ensure that ending the “persecution of Catholic priests and other Christian clergy” would continue unabated by reforms sought by the Czechoslovakian government, as described by  https://www.acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2018/08/21/prague-spring-50-years-later (excerpts below):

“On 21 August 1968, armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia out of fear that the tiny nation might liberate itself from the yoke of Communism. A nascent liberation had begun in the cultural, religious, and social life of the country, if not its economy… By the mid-1960s, the Marxist government had failed to suppress the Church and extinguish the intellectual quest for freedom of expression, a quest that penetrated all walks of society – from pop music to the Scouting movement. A vigorous defense of religious and human rights came from priests, high literary circles, and even supported to a degree by some honest – though naïve – individuals in the ranks of the Communist Party….

To calm the situation, Soviet leaders replaced the secretary of the Communist Party, Antonín Novotný, with the poet/journalist-turned-Communist boss Alexander Dubček. The Soviet-educated Dubček was an honest, good-natured, and naïve believer that mankind is basically benevolent (no observer denies these characteristics). In January 1968, he proposed his own counterpoint to Novotný’s policies, which he called “socialism with a human face.” The very title shocked Communist leaders. Brezhnev is said to have commented off-the-record to Dubček, ‘If your socialism has a human face, what is the face of ours?’…”

Religious liberty begins to dawn

After 1948, the Communist authorities attempted to impose atheism on the society. But the Czech and Slovak people were deeply religious: 76 percent of Czechs and Slovaks were Roman Catholics, and 10-11 percent were Czech Hussites, with other religious groups also represented. Part of the Communist strategy was to paint priests as fascists, to split the Church between the two nations, and contrast a coopted group of “New Catholics” (young priests who publicly advocated socialism) with bishops who were bold guardians of religious liberties and human rights. By the early 1960s, the New Catholics had lost their public appeal. Dubček had no choice but to liberalize the nation’s religious life by ending the persecution of, and tacitly lifting the ban on, Catholic priests and other Christian clergy…”

…Soviet leadership concluded that that “Zionist, revisionist, and counter-revolutionary elements” had undertaken “a major assault on socialism” and began planning to invade Czechoslovakia as early as April 8, 1968. The plan was ready by mid-April….”

***

According to General Petrov, Yuri Gagarin’s support for restoration of Cathedral of Christ the Savior was highly visible, and there surely his private religious beliefs were known to the KGB. His extraordinary combination of charisma and heroism clearly represented a growing threat to the Communist regime. If the Czechoslovakian reforms of spring 1968 had been tolerated, a similar progression toward religious freedom for the Russian Orthodox Church might arise within the borders of the Soviet Union – and Yuri Gagarin would have been a  natural choice for the leader of such a movement.

It would logically follow that Yuri Gagarin’s flight (whether the aircraft and/or co-pilot) was sabotaged by Soviet authorities. In other words, I am suggesting that Yuri Gagarin was likely murdered for his Christian (Russian Orthodox) beliefs.

*** “Satan led Jesus up and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And Satan said to Him, ‘I will give You all this domain and all its glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You worship before me, it shall be Yours.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘It is written: You shall serve the Lord your God and serve Him only.’” (Luke 4: 3-8) ***

Mikhail Gorbachev’s views on religion stood in stark contrast to those of Yuri Gagarin. When Gorbachev died at age 91 in 2022, a report (from

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/252180/Mikhail-gorbachev-s-death-revives-unfounded-rumoors-of-christian-conversion ) reminded readers of Gorbachev’s clarification of persistent rumors about Gorbachev’s faith.

“In March 2008 Gorbachev had to dispel claims he had become a Christian…Gorbachev, the former head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, clearly rejected these reports. ‘Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies — I can’t use any other word — about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie,’ he told the Russian news service Interfax. ‘To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist.’…A spokesman for then-Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II had responded to the reports, saying, ‘He is still on his way to Christianity. If he arrives, we will welcome him.’”

Gorbachev is known for instating some nominal reforms. But, Christopher Story-acting as editor- added this footnote to Anatoliy Golitsyn’s discussion to enlighten readers of Gorbachev’s stance in 1987: “[Statement by Mikhail Gorbachev on 15 December 1987 to a group of Communist Party officials, cadres, and Soviet military personnel in Uzbekistan]: ‘There must be no let up in the war against religion because as long as religion exists, Communism cannot prevail. We must intensify the obliteration of all religions wherever they are being practiced or taught.’ With his wife, Raisa, Gorbachev is a disciple of the late Sardinian Communist Antonio Gramsci – the Marxist proponent of a policy of active social demoralization (attack against morality) and the Marxisation of religion… Thus, religion must be destroyed and the worship of God (above man) should be replaced by the worship of Man- to ‘help Man establish his home on Earth.’”

***

Can you imagine what might have been offered to Yuri Gagarin if he were willing to make the same emphatic repudiation of God in a public address? One might consider the example of Gorbachev, who was of the same generation (3 years older than Gagarin).

Consider excerpts from a 1995 media report on the then-newly-formed Gorbachev Foundation ( https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Gorbachev-Foundatiion-s-S-F-Meeting-3024180.php

“Gorbachev Foundation's S.F. Meeting / Celebrities, scholars to discuss world's future,” By Edward Epstein, Chronicle Staff Writer Sep 25, 1995

A unique amalgam of world leaders, deep thinkers and big- time doers descends on San Francisco this week for five days of brainstorming about nothing less than the future of the Earth and human civilization in the 21st century. Such sweeping issues have become the stock-in-trade of the assembly's moving force, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. His San Francisco-based Gorbachev Foundation USA has organized the "State of the World Forum" as the start of a five-year process of consultation that will meet annually until the year 2000. About 500 people are expected to join Gorbachev at the Fairmont Hotel, […and] about 275 of them will pay $5,000 apiece for the privilege of hobnobbing with an incredible assortment of people. These will include free-market economist Milton Friedman, billionaires David Packard and Ted Turner -- accompanied by his wife, Jane Fonda -- primate researcher Jane Goodall, astronomer Carl Sagan, princes from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, and New Age gurus Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra.

The $1.38 million being forked over by the well-heeled will cover the expenses of a long list of speakers who are flying in from all over the world. In addition, the forum will gross about $270,000 by selling $100 tickets to an internationally televised, Sunday morning roundtable at the Masonic Auditorium, at which Gorbachev will be joined by two of his old friends from his glory days in the Kremlin, former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

With the money rolling in, and with the Fairmont donating many of its services, the foundation expects to break even on the enterprise. Despite the presence of many conservative pillars of the international establishment, the entire enterprise has an insurgent flavor. With the world still trying to find its way in a post-Cold War environment, "Gorbachev believes we are giving birth to a new global civilization," said Jim Garrison, executive director of the Gorbachev Foundation, which occupies waterfront offices in San Francisco's Presidio. Such transitional periods are chaotic and are a time for testing new ideas, he added. Gorbachev thinks the nation-state is eroding; the much-discussed New World Order is inevitable; and environmental, technological and social challenges confront humanity.

"In times of transition, honor the heretic," said Garrison. "Orthodoxy is crumbling."

Leaders of mainline Western religions or philosophies are mostly absent from the speakers' lineup, while unorthodox describes many on the list… A New Age world view is nothing new for Garrison, who has a doctorate in theology from Cambridge University in England…”

***

Mikhail Gorbachev was also the Founder of the Green Cross Foundation, based in Geneva Switzerland.

From

https://www.gcint.org/

The organization states it first tenet of its mission is to “promote legal, ethical and behavioural norms that ensure basic changes in the values, actions and attitudes of government, the private sector and civil society, necessary to develop a sustainable global community.”

Shortly, after his death the group published a letter from its Founding President on its website, which praised the group for establishing its Earth Charter for its “guidelines of governance for all sectors of society, and the school curricula that reached out to millions of children.” The full letter, dated 2019, is inset below.

***

Suppose the Russian people were asked to choose between following the example set by Yuri Gagarin on one hand and Mikhail Gorbachev on the other. Who would they follow?

And if one were to pose the same choice to the people of Ukraine, once represented by both Gorbachev and Gagarin when it was part of the Soviet Union, would the answer be any different?

As for Nikita Khrushchev, given the foregoing discussion, would it come as a surprise that his son became not only an American citizen, but also a professor at an elite Ivy League University? (https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/my-father-nikita )

“My Father, Nikita: A conversation with Sergei Khrushchev” by William van Ornum, November 06, 2013

“An engineer by training, Sergei Khrushchev immigrated with his wife to the United States in 1991, eventually becoming a historian and a professor at Brown University and a U.S. citizen in 1999…

…During [a] visit to the United States [in 1959], many American observers were surprised at Khrushchev’s intense interest in food production methods. On a visit to an Iowa farm, Khrushchev startled the press corps traveling with him by taking an impromptu detour into the fields to examine the corn crop more closely. Poplin summer suits became grass-stained; shined shoes were scuffed. According to his son, this interest was part and parcel of Khrushchev’s larger plans to improve the Soviet agricultural sector, which became one of his proudest accomplishments. In a country that suffered chronic food shortages (particularly after Stalin’s catastrophic agricultural programs of earlier decades), Khrushchev was able to coax real productivity out of the Soviet farming culture…

‘In the 20th century,’ Sergei repeated, ‘Russians never lived better than they lived under Khrushchev: not before him, not in the Soviet time, not in the Imperial time, not in the post-Soviet time.’…

Though both he and his wife were avowed atheists as adults, and Nikita Khrushchev was convinced that religion was vanishing from the world (‘he believed that in his lifetime he would shake hands with the last Orthodox priest’), his son recalls that Khrushchev was the first Soviet politician to attempt to establish relations with the papacy…

In light of these discussions of the papacy and of Khrushchev’s at least literary appreciation for Christianity, I thought of Pope Francis’s recent expression of admiration for the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I asked if Nikita Khrushchev had felt the same. “He read Dostoyevsky.’ Sergei said, ‘but he preferred Tolstoy.’” 

*** “Three. That’s the magic number. Yes, it is. It’s the magic number.” –The Magic Number, De La Soul

***

To place the death of Yuri Gagarin into its proper context and to understand the primary reason I am convinced it was a murder, it is necessary to consider something which at first might seem to be an irrelevant subject: Friedrich Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of Art. (From

  at 39:00)

“What Nietzsche forces us toward is the domain of Art, Religion, and Philosophy because those are the greatest human achievements. But religion is over- we can’t believe in that any more. And the important part of philosophy that was religious– the metaphysics- that’s over as well. So there is a tiny fragment of philosophy left, but it wasn’t what philosophy used to be. And then, what still is puissant and serious and worthwhile? Art.

So Art now emerges as the domain, not of transcendence, but of salvation – secular, this-worldly salvation, and Stephen Dedalus [referring to a James Joyce’s alter ego in his literary works] is going to take this path to salvation. Nietzsche is certainly the greatest and most important of the theological thinkers of the last 100 years. When he abolishes religion and truncates philosophy, Art and thus the Artist achieves consummate importance.”

***

In the United States, it is common to associate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. with that of Robert F. Kennedy. A typical example is given by: https://www.ushistory.org/people/twolions.htm which states, “...Through the events of history, these two men are tied together, including through the commemoration of their assassinations. Their assassinations occurred almost exactly two months apart.”

I would now like to point out what some might call a “coincidence”. Yuri Gagarin’s death occurred on 27 March 1968, only 8 days prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

What if we group the death of Yuri Gagarin in combination with that of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy?

Then we have:

Yuri Gagarin - Russian Orthodox

Martin Luther King, Jr. - Protestant (Black Southern Baptist)

Robert F. Kennedy - Roman Catholic

Consider the emphasis which followers of Nietzsche place emphasis on "Art" and that Christianity is the enemy of the self proclaimed “Anti-Christ,” Nietzsche.

There is strong symbolism in the death of 3 people, and followers of Nietzsche are not confined to think of “Art” in the fashion of Western philosophical tradition. Do you see? To a Nietzsche follower, they form a trinity- analogous to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They were charismatic young idealists, poised to become not only future political leaders within their own nations - but also cultural leaders worldwide.

In addition, each of the three was an extraordinarily devout Christian. Surely, each of the three had flaws as all of us do, but each had a higher calling and held uncompromising moral qualities which severely threatened the Homeric model of governance that was (and remains) the goal of the neo-Colonial Nietzsche followers. Contrast them to the malleable mediocrity of Nixon and Brezhnev.

From a pragmatic standpoint, one can easily see why “they”-to use President Truman’s terminology- would wish to work with the latter two individuals whom they could influence and, perhaps, control. 

But the true importance of the murders is obvious when one accounts for the *symbolism*. A person following the ethics of the Western philosophical tradition would never understand it in this sense, but it would align perfectly for a person who followed the teachings of Nietzsche.

To Nietzsche followers, the collective murders of Yuri Gagarin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy was an Art form, the “secular, this-worldly salvation” of Nietzsche. It was their “artistic expression” of the killing of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and symbolized what they viewed as the Destruction of Christianity.

The preceding section demonstrates the bravery - and the consequences- of Gagarin’s support for the Russian Orthodox Church. Most of the remainder of this article will focus on the bravery of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy – and its consequences.

***

Martin Luther King’s comprehension of the battle between Christianity and communism (a disguised form of Nietzsche’s philosophy) was on display as early as August 1953. He drafted a sermon titled “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity” which aligned very closely with the aforementioned dictum of Pope Pius XII.  Nearly 15 years prior to the events leading to his assassination, Dr. King expressed that “one cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously.” The full text of the sermon, is available at

http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol06Scans/9Aug1953Communism'sChallengetoChristianity.pdf , and it is included here in its entirety (some of Dr. King’s handwritten notes are also included):

“I hope that all of you will listen to me very attentively this afternoon as I humbly attempt to speak to you about one of the most important issues of our day. There are at least two reasons why I as a Christian Minister feel obligated to talk to you about Communism.

The first has to do with the wide spread influence of Communism. It is believed in by more than 200,000,000 people covering one fifth of the earth's surface. Multitudes have embraced it as the most coherent philosophy and the greatest single emotional drive they know.

A second reason why the Christian minister should speak about it is that Communism is the only serious rival to Christianity. Other historic world religions such as Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, may be listed as possible alternatives to Christianity, but for Christianity's greatest rival we must look elsewhere. Certainly no one in touch with the realities of the contemporary situation can deny that in the crisis confronting civilization Christianity's most formidable competitor and only serious rival is communism.

Let us begin by stating that communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible. One cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously. How then is Communism irreconcilable with Christianity?

In the first place it leaves out God and Christ. It is avowedly secularistic and materialistic. It regards religion psychologically as mere wishful thinking, intellectually as the product of fear and ignorance, and historically as serving the ends of exploiters. Because of public opinion authorities have had to modify some of their anti-religious doctrines, but the official policy of the Communist Party is still atheistic.

In the second place the methods of communism are diametrically opposed to Christianity. Since for the Communist there is no Divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles. Force, violence, murder, and lying are all justifiable means to the millennial end. Said Lenin, "we must be ready to employ tricking, deceit, and lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth." That the followers of Lenin have been willing to act upon his instructions is a matter of history.

In the third place, the end of communism is the state. I shall qualify this by saying that the state in Communist theory is a temporary reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges. But it is true that the state is the end while it lasts. Man becomes only a means to that end. And if any man's so called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of press or pulpit expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books and even his friendships are all restricted. Man has to be a servant, dutiful and submissive, of the State, and the state is omnipotent and supreme.

Now there can be no doubt that all of this is the negation not only of the Christian belief in God and the moral order that he has established, but also of the Christian estimate of man. I am cognizant of the fact that the record of the Christian Church has been smeared in the past by infamous persecutions and the irremovable strain of the inquisition, but even so Christianity at its best has never let go the ideal that man is an end because he is a child of God, and that the end of all life is the glory of God. The Christian ethic would affirm that destructive means can never justify constructive ends, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the mean.

So let us not fool ourselves: these two systems of thought are too contradictory to be reconciled. They represent diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world and transforming the world. We must try to understand Communism, but never can we accept it and be true Christians.

Yet we must realize that there is something in Communism which challenges us all. It was the late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple that referred to Communism as a Christian heresy. By this he meant that Communism had laid hold on certain truths which are essential part of the Christian view of things, but that it had bound up with them concepts and practices which no Christian can ever accept or profess. In other words, although Communism can never be accepted by a Christian, it emphasizes many essential truths that must forever challenge us as Christians. Indeed, it may be that Communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert.

It should challenge us first to be more concerned about social justice. However much is wrong with Communism we must admit that it arose as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. The Communist Manifesta which was published in 1847 by Marx and Engels emphasizes throughout how the middle class has exploited the lower class. Communism emphasizes a classless society. Along with this goes a strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of the blood in your veins.

With this passionate concern for social justice Christians are bound to be in accord. Such concern is implicit in the Christian doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. The Christian ought always to begin with a bias in favor of a movement which protests against unfair treatment of the poor, for surely Christianity is itself such a protest. The Communist Manifesta might express a concern for the poor and oppressed, but it expresses no greater concern than the Manifesta of Jesus with this as its opening sentence: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; Ye hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And so a passionate concern for social justice must be a concern of the Christian religion.

We must admit that we as Christians have often lagged behind at this point. Slavery could not have existed in America for more than two hundred and fifty years if the Church had not sanctioned it. Segregation and discrimination could not exist in America today without the sanction of the Church. I am ashamed and appalled at the fact that Eleven O'clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America. How tardy we have been. The Church has too often been an institution serving to crystallize the patterns of the status quo. Who can blame Karl Marx for calling such a religion an opiate? When religion becomes involved in a future good "over yonder" that it forgets the present evils "over here" it is a dry as dust religion and needs to be condemned. We must be concerned about the gulf between [superfluous?] wealth and abject poverty. Marx revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole [basis?]}[remainder missing]

Communism also challenges us to invite all Christian forces for action. Too often have we been preoccupied with debates about orders and sacraments and ritual and denominationalism while civilization is engaged in a race with catastrophe. If we are to win the world to Christ we must rise above our differences realizing that we have unity of purpose and that God is not a denominational God.

Lastly we are challenged to dedicate and devote our lives to the cause of Christ as the Communist do to Communism. We cannot accept their creed, but we must admire their zeal, and their readiness to sacrifice themselves to the very uttermost and even to lay down their lives for a cause that they believe is going to make the world a better place I have seen communist in universities passionately attempting to win their associates to communism. How many Christians students in our universities today have ever attempted to win other students to Christ? How many of you on your jobs have ever attempted to win others to Christ? Would today that the Christians fire were burning with the same intensity in the hearts of Christians as the Communist fire is burning in the hearts of Communists. We must match the evangelistic passion of the Communists. We must unreservedly commit ourselves to the cause of Christ.

It seems that I can hear a voice crying through the vista of time: "ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." I can hear the same voice saying, "go out into the highways and hedges and compel men to come." I can hear the same voice saying, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." Who this afternoon will answer saying: "Here am I, O Lord, and I unreservedly commit myself to thy cause."

Preached Aug. 9, 1953

***

Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals” is credited with the quote, “Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate (people) against evidence of your own guilt.”  This tactic is an extension of the philosophy of Nietzsche as results in an oxymoronic description.

Prof. Michael Sugrue describes Nietzsche’s technique as follows: “Socrates’ characteristic way of communicating to other people is called ‘irony’. Socrates is not remarkable for his literal speech. In fact, he is constantly and opaquely ironic, and many times there are levels to his irony, which is what makes his work inexhaustible, which is why we still read it 25 centuries later. Well, Nietzsche has figured out a similar neat trick, and it is called – not irony- but oxymoron. My argument is that Nietzsche uses oxymoron in the way Socrates that uses irony. For those of you have forgotten what an ‘oxymoron’ is, it is a turn of phrase like ‘cold fire’ or ‘hot ice’. The idea is that we attribute an adjective to a thing that doesn’t have that has the opposite property.” (at 10:15 in )

The “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity” sermon by Dr. King clearly conveys an unequivocal anti-Communist message. Some of the passages suggest that he interpreted Communism as the embodiment of the philosophy of Nietzsche (“[Communism is] the negation not only of the Christian belief in God and the moral order that he has established, but also of the Christian estimate of man.”) masked by the false promise that the state was only a temporary necessity. FBI Director Hoover later engaged in Nietzsche’s favored approach by falsely labeling Dr. King a Communist- effectively generating the oxymoron of an “Anti-Communist Communist”. 

***

Robert F. Kennedy’s life was immeasurably changed by the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy:

https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1726656_1726689_1726242,00.html and

https://time.com/5300908/rfk-life-book/

“John Kennedy’s death haunted Bobby. He couldn’t sleep and walked around in a trance, plagued by guilt. ‘He is worried that he has gotten his brother killed and is really psychologically undone for a long period,’ says [biographer] Evan Thomas. He feared that the targets he pursued—Castro, the Mob, and others—had exacted a dreadful price. ‘I thought they’d get one of us,” Kennedy told Edwin Guthman, who worked for him in the Justice Department. “I thought it would be me.’

With her husband’s death, Jackie Kennedy leaned heavily on her brother-in-law. The two made numerous nighttime visits to John’s grave, and they found themselves discussing religion and God. Looking for guidance to make sense of the incomprehensible, Bobby read Shakespeare and other classics, along with the works of the ancient Greeks that Jackie suggested. “I am going to dwell in the pain, and I am going to understand that something terrible has happened,” his daughter Kathleen recalled him saying.

Ethel remembered it as “six months of just blackness.” But after her husband reemerged, he was a different man. As Village Voice writer Jack Newfield observed, Kennedy had a “private, internal change, from rigidity to existential doubt, from coldness to an intuitive sensitivity for sorrow and pain, from one-dimensional competitiveness to fatalism, from football to poetry, from Irish-Catholic Boston’s political clubhouses to the unknown.”

He also inherited John’s legacy. But, still serving as attorney general, he had to work with Lyndon Johnson. Although Johnson promoted John’s policies, in Bobby’s eyes the man was a usurper. “Johnson was the wrong person to inherit the mantle from Bobby’s perspective,” says [historian] Jeff Shesol.

With John gone, Robert Kennedy lost his zeal for leading the Justice Department, and in the fall of 1964 he sought a Senate seat from New York. He also appeared at the Democratic National Convention to speak before a showing of a film about his brother.

For the gathered delegates, the awkward man at the podium had come to represent what they had lost. Following a 22-minute standing ovation, Bobby told the Democrats that when he thought of his brother he thought of words spoken by Shakespeare’s Juliet: “When he shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

After Bobby finished, he found a spot on a fire escape and wept for 15 minutes.

In his race against the incumbent, Republican senator Kenneth Keating, Bobby was called a carpetbagger from Massachusetts and proved to be a flat public speaker. But none of that seemed to matter. Crowds turned out to see him, driving him to compare himself to the Beatles. He had, though, no illusions about the source of his popularity, telling Edwin Guthman that he knew the crowds were really there because of John. “They’re for him. They’re not for me,” he acknowledged.

Bobby won.

…

Kennedy’s favorite song was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and, like some anointed soldier of the Lord, he flew to South Africa in June 1966. Invited by the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students, he came to deliver the annual Day of Affirmation speech.

The land was under the yoke of apartheid, and Bobby and Ethel toured Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria. He met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the outlawed African National Congress. He walked down streets shaking the hands of black servants, and crowds swarmed to gaze at him. He delivered five speeches, the most famous at the University of Cape Town. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,” he said, “and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Change, Bobby believed, was possible. A fan of the song “The Impossible Dream” from the musical Man of La Mancha, he took to heart the idea of tilting against windmills. He read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and embraced the idea of the dignity of work. In Delano, Calif., he met with Cesar Chavez, who was trying to organize farm workers. In Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood he launched a community development organization. Hungry children especially troubled him. After returning from the Mississippi Delta, he expressed to friend Amanda Burden the feeling that, given what he had seen, all the work he had done in his life amounted to nothing.

Bobby’s pained and looming presence haunted Johnson. The President feared Kennedy. By the mid-1960s the war in Vietnam had started consuming the nation. Kennedy, who during his brother’s administration saw the slow growth of U.S. presence there, had long had concerns about Johnson’s military buildup, which took the nation’s commitment from 23,300 troops in 1964 to 485,000 in 1967.

Bobby felt he had no other choice but to speak out in opposition to President Johnson’s course. He took to the Senate floor and called for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and the start of peace talks with Hanoi. “I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed,” he said, “there is enough to go around for all—including myself.”

Many of his advisers and friends wanted him to do more than just object. They wanted him to seek the presidency.

Ethel even had the children hang a banner reading “Run, Bobby, Run” outside the house. When John won in 1960, he had given Bobby a cigarette case inscribed, “When I’m through, how about you?” But the Senator feared being accused of ambition and envy, and he didn’t want to run until and unless the time was ripe...”

On 16 March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced he was running for president.

https://4president.org/Speeches/rfk1968announcement.htm

Announcement of Candidacy for President, Robert F. Kennedy (Washington, D.C. 16 March 1968)

I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies - policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war.

I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who are now making them. For the reality of recent events in Vietnam has been glossed over with illusions.

The Report of the Riot Commission has been largely ignored.

The crisis in gold, the crisis in our cities, the crisis in our farms and in our ghettos have all been met with too little and too late.

No one knows what I know about the extraordinary demands of the presidency can be certain that any mortal can adequately fill that position.

But my service in the National Security Council during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin crisis of 1961 and 1962, and later the negotiations on Laos and on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty have taught me something about both the uses and limitations of military power, about the opportunities and the dangers which await our nation in many corners of the globe in which I have traveled.

As a member of the cabinet and member of the Senate I have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts; young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they've lacked all hope and they feel they have no future, and proud and able-bodied families to wait out their lives in empty idleness in eastern Kentucky.

I have traveled and I have listened to the young people of our nation and felt their anger about the war that they are sent to fight and about the world they are about to inherit.

In private talks and in public, I have tried in vain to alter our course in Vietnam before it further saps our spirit and our manpower, further raises the risks of wider war, and further destroys the country and the people it was meant to save.

I cannot stand aside from the contest that will decide our nation's future and our children's future.

The remarkable New Hampshire campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy has proven how deep are the present divisions within our party and within our country. Until that was publicly clear, my presence in the race would have been seen as a clash of personalities rather than issues.

But now that the fight is on and over policies which I have long been challenging, I must enter the race. The fight is just beginning and I believe that I can win...

Finally, my decision reflects no personal animosity or disrespect toward President Johnson. He served President Kennedy with the utmost loyalty and was extremely kind to me and members of my family in the difficult months which followed the events of November of 1963. I have often commended his efforts in health, in education, and in many other areas, and I have the deepest sympathy for the burden that he carries today. But the issue is not personal. It is our profound differences over where we are heading and what we want to accomplish. I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election.

At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.

***

Remember: On 27 March 1968, only eleven days after Robert F. Kennedy’s announcement, Yuri Gagarin was killed in a “training accident”.

And one day later, on 28 March 1968, a 17-year-old Memphis resident named Larry Payne was gunned down by Memphis Police officer, Leslie Dean Jones.

The following excerpts are from: https://mlk50.com/2018/03/29/on-losing-larry-payne

“By all accounts, Larry was well-liked at Mitchell Road High School. He was one of nine children born to Lizzie Mae and Mason Payne, who lived separately. Larry split his time between them but lived mostly with his father in the Westwood community. Lizzie Mae lived at Fowler Homes, a public housing complex near Mason Temple…

…It had been 45 days since City of Memphis sanitation workers, all black men, had gone on strike, and tensions were escalating between those who supported the black workers and city officials, led by white segregationist Mayor Henry Loeb. Joan Beifuss, author of At The River I Stand, quotes a “young black militant” saying “God Almighty, man, black people all over the city had nothing going on but the sanitation strike.”

The strike began after the Feb. 1, 1968 deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, crushed inside a faulty garbage truck where they had sought shelter from the rain while working. Sanitation workers stopped showing up for work until demands for better pay, union recognition and humane working conditions were met. Harsh, dead-end negotiations led to marches calling for justice along trash-lined streets…

This strike represented the work left to be done after the mighty fight to end legal segregation had claimed victory with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King continued to press for “a sharing of power where blacks had equality and whites took responsibility for racism,” as historian Michael Honey described in his book Going Down Jericho Road. For weeks, strikers engaged in activities rooted in the diligent nonviolent civil disobedience Martin Luther King touted — attention-getting as a riot but without violence....

On that March morning, ahead of a march where King planned to join striking workers in the streets, according to Honey, C.O.M.E. distributed a flyer across Memphis schools and public housing:

“Be cool, fool, Thursday’s march is King’s thing If your school is tops, pops, prove it. Be in the know, Get on the go, Thursday at 10. See you then. Together we stick, Divided are stuck, Baby…”

At Hamilton High School, kids gathered outside, reportedly hurling rocks and bricks at passing cars, including a garbage truck and its police escort. Police confronted protesters in riot gear, with tear gas and nightsticks. Students were slow to retreat and, in the chaos, rumors of a 14-year-old named Ann Talbert having been killed (she wasn’t) after a hard blow to the head caused a shift in tension that traveled back to Clayborn Temple. There, thousands of residents were getting ready to receive King and start marching. About half were students.

But King was running behind. Road-weary, he had been in Harlem and was traveling to Memphis, exhausted. While folks waited in the pews of Clayborn, rumors began, including the one about the girl named Ann, the presence of Northern black power activist Stokely Carmichael and other militants. The waiting hour filled with tension and unpredictability.

Meanwhile, Larry and his friends stood in a crowd outside Clayborn. In police interviews conducted after his death, his friends described him in good spirits, playing card games with folks as they waited.

Honey described many wildcards present on what is described at a hot spring day. Already, looting at liquor stores took place that morning. When King arrived at 10:56 a.m. in a white Lincoln borrowed from R.S. Lewis Funeral Home, people had already started stripping protest signs of their posts, carrying just the sticks. The crowd, responding to the excitement of King’s arrival began shifting out of the strategic formation organizers had made. Folks in the back worked their way up in front of striking workers. People sang “We Shall Overcome,” while chants of “Down with Loeb” also rang out. Newspapers estimated more than 6,000 people came that day.

The headline above a next-day story written by Kay Pittman Black, of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, screamed: “It began like a carnival and ended like a horror show.”

About 20 minutes into the march with King’s aides holding him up as exhaustion kicked in, violence began. Storefront windows were smashed and with the level of police presence, King feared he was now leading people into a potentially deadly confrontation. His aides and other leaders decided to return to the Rivermont Hotel to regroup. Assistant Police Chief Henry Lux would testify later: “It was obvious that the ministers could not handle it.”

Tear gas was deployed on Main and Beale streets. A reporter for The Commercial Appeal wrote about hearing a deputy sheriff having to be calmed down after shouting “shoot the son of a bitch” in response to a man throwing a bottle. By 11:45 a.m., police asked for permission to lob tear gas at Clayborn Temple, where many women and children had sought sanctuary.

Back on South Main Street, a United Press International photographer Jack Thornell would capture an image of Larry and his friends in the middle of a confrontation with a police officer. In preliminary reports, police said they caught the boys breaking the windows on a tailor shop. Larry, dressed in a light collared shirt and dark pants, is on the right side of the frame, mid-turn. He’s watching the officer, who has Larry’s friend, nicknamed “Spaceman” by the collar, cracking his nightstick across his back. Jerry Lee Sanders, a friend and classmate to the boys, is tumbling on the curb…

Memphis police had spent $150,000 dollars (over $1 million today) on new equipment and overtime since the strike began Feb. 12. Despite the hefty investment, officers were encouraged to bring personal weapons in anticipation of a big event on March 28.

“The Memphis Police Department was ‘policing’ Negroes not rioters,” read an editorial published in the Tri-State Defender, a black newspaper. The piece described groups of black Memphians being the victims of attacks by the police, including one scene at the Big M Lounge, blocks away far from where looting had occurred. People were pepper sprayed without provocation, according to the paper.

At Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s oldest and largest black high school, the same editorial described male faculty members, who had maintained peace all day, sprayed with Mace and tear gassed when police assumed they were looters. About 60 people were arrested that afternoon on charges of looting and rioting.

After the incident on Main Street, Larry and his friends somehow managed to avoid arrest. Larry went to Fowler Homes, where his mother lived. There he regrouped with his pals. Friends interviewed by the police said that is when they decided to go to Sears. It was 12:10 p.m.

In the next morning’s paper, The Commercial Appeal described seeing patrolman Leslie Dean Jones around 12:30 p.m. running down the street, tears streaming down his face, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, yelling: “We’re trying our damndest. Write that down. We’re trying our damndest. The police didn’t start this. Write that down. Treat us fair.”

Officer Jones was one of many who had brought his personal gun to work that day: Savage Model 2208, sawed off, 18-barrel single shot.

Around 12:45 p.m., Jones and his partner got the call about looting at Sears. They followed other officers to Fowler Homes, where it was reported a group of men carrying televisions and record players were. Jones caught up with Larry, seen carrying a television set, and chased him into an open basement door that Larry shut behind him.

Because Fowler Homes had so many units and the day’s chaos had driven a lot of folks home, there were a lot of witnesses. Onlookers described Larry as having a TV when he ran into the basement.

They also saw what happened next.

Jones approached the door with his shotgun drawn. He had a can of Mace on his belt and a holstered revolver. He ordered Larry to open the door and come out, hands up. The door started to open, then shut as Jones got within a few feet. After a few seconds, Larry began to slide out the door, left side first, with his arms up. Because Jones couldn’t see his right arm, he continued to order Larry to come out with his hands raised while approaching him with his shotgun.

According to his preliminary report, as Jones got closer. Larry’s right arm came into view. He claimed Larry had a butcher knife and was starting to aim it at him. It was then Jones pulled the trigger.

By 12:50 p.m., the call came over the police radio: “We shot one.”

With witnesses at nearly every angle, details of the incident were well-reported but confusing. Nearly every one of the neighbors said Larry had his hands over his head in some way, without a knife. They all saw the nurse who lived at Fowler Homes who had come home to check on her children in the chaos of the day and tried to care for him as he lay bleeding on the ground. They all heard Payne’s mother, Lizzie Mae, cry out.

It was a well-reported detail: Lizzie Mae had been watching the soap opera “As The World Turns” when she heard the shot and the news. She ran out to the courtyard where her 17-year-old son lay with a gunshot to his belly. She was in near collapse when she tried to touch him and was stopped by the barrel of an officer’s gun pressed to her own stomach, while calling her a ‘N-----,’ ordering her to stay back…

About a year after Larry’s death, his family filed a civil suit against Officer Jones and the City of Memphis seeking $500,000 in damages, according to transcripts and copious notes taken by archive volunteers. Mason and Lizzie Mae Payne said their son was “wrongfully, torturously and negligently” shoved with the barrel of a gun and shot at point-blank range. He had been accused of a crime without a warrant. Jones claimed self-defense.

Most of the eyewitnesses at Fowler Homes only saw a knife Jones was carrying around after the shooting but couldn’t identify it in photos when presented in evidence. The Press-Scimitar ran a photograph of inspector William P. Huston holding the knife. During proceedings, police produced a forensic photo of it but said they had disposed of the knife, along with other evidence, like the pants Payne wore that day, deemed no longer necessary, by throwing it in the Mississippi River. They had presumed Jones’s innocence.

The trial ultimately focused its arguments not on whether a knife was present, but whether the shooting was justified. Assistant City Attorney John Thomason’s got the City of Memphis off the hook, but city officials encouraged him to stay on as Jones’ attorney.

His notes include interviews with people who had seen Larry that day. Many said they had seen him carrying a $109.98 television set. The television along with another set and some record players were recovered as evidence from the basement. The notes also include a bit about witnesses who had heard Jones’ partner, patrolman Charles F. Williams cry out “you didn’t have to shoot him” to Jones. Williams denied saying so during the trial.

Thomason’s notes also showed where arguments tried to pit Larry and Jones against each other: Larry Payne by the accounts was a young man of good character, a good student, a good worker with high morals. An incident where he and a friend were questioned on an assault against a classmate was brought up. (It was ultimately a nonissue.) Jones, the son of a policeman and former U.S. Marine, had been on the force for six years with a good record and commendations. And he was also alive for questioning.

The case was settled for $40,000, well within the Memphis Police Dept.’s liability coverage. Sears had been able to file an insurance claim for the $5,700 in damage that incurred on March 28. In the archive’s file is a letter written by Mayor Loeb sent to Thomason:

“I spoke to Mr. Jones this morning after the decision, as I did last week and both times he told me of the outstanding job that you and Kim [Kimbrough] Johnson had done. These days we need examples of excellence, and I think your handling of this case was right down that track.”…

Larry’s story has been subjected to the same dehumanizing trope: He was violent, he was a thief, he played hooky. Had he not broken the law, maybe he wouldn’t be dead despite the fact theft and truancy have never been capital crimes in American democracy.

Reports that the FBI would reopen Payne’s case as a civil-rights cold case have not materialized.”

***

According to a Time Magazine article on Andrew Young,  (https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1726656_1726689_1726242,00.html ):

“[Andrew Young] remembers that he and his SCLC colleagues did not want King to travel to Memphis to get involved with the garbage workers' strike that had started in February. They felt he should continue his progress toward Washington to advance the organization's Poor People's Campaign

But when King went to Memphis, his march was disrupted by a youth gang that Young says had claimed they were paid to do so.

"But that violence was what upset Dr. King the most, and it meant that instead of going to Memphis and coming back to Washington, it meant that we had to go down to Memphis," Young recalled.

King wanted to do it right. He wanted to show that demonstrations work best when they are done non-violently. So back to Memphis he and his aides went….

[The article goes on to describe Young joining Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Hotel.]

King came out of his room onto the upper balcony. Young was below in the parking lot.

"And I said 'You know, it's cool, and you've had a cold. You better go back and get your topcoat. And he was saying 'Do I really need a coat?'"

And then the shot rang out.

"I don't even think he heard the shot. I don't think he felt anything," says Young.

Forty years later, Young is still disturbed by one significant detail: bushes in front of the motel, where some believed the shot originated, were gone by the next day. Young says that the brush removal amounted to destruction of a crime scene and he says it is one of the reasons he does not go back to Memphis.”

This raises the question: what entity (or entities) might bankroll the youth which disrupted the peaceful march, as Andrew Young claims occurred?

Consider an interview of filmmaker Sam Pollard conducted on 23 January 2021 by National Public Radio. The audio is available at:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/18/956741992/documentary-exposes-how-the-fbi-tried-to-destroy-mlk-with-wiretaps-blackmail

The interview opens with a clip of Martin Luther King’s speech in Washington DC. It then plays Sam Pollard’s clip in the film:

Pollard: “After Dr. King gave his famous march on Washington speech, Wednesday August 28, 1963, in a memo dated the 30^th of August, no later than that, a second person in the FBI – it may have been Sullivan- sends an urgent memo in which he says, ‘After the march on Washington, it is clear that Martin Luther King, Jr. is the most dangerous Negro in America. And we have to use every resource at our disposal to destroy him.’” 

Interviewer: “…I think one of the main points of the film is that while today Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered a hero, and J. Edgar Hoover is often maligned as this authoritarian leader of the FBI, who was perfectly happy using extralegal means in his investigations. Public opinion of them in the 50’s and 60’s was very different, wasn’t it?

Sam Pollard: “Yeah, it’s amazing when you think back. I forgot that in the mid-60’s when they took a poll, J. Edgar Hoover was more popular than Dr. King. Dr. King wasn’t so popular back then. Some people thought he was destroying the fabric of American democracy. So you know, growing up as a young man, I had watched all these movies about the FBI. I had watched this television series about the FBI. And I thought they were the good guys. And that they were out there to take out the bad guys- be it gangsters or be it Communists. So in retrospect, realizing how popular Hoover was, it is interesting that King is an iconic figure now, but he was not so beloved by many Americans back then.”

Interviewer: “Although I think you loved both the FBI and King at that point, didn’t you?”

Pollard: “Well, I did. I grew up in a household where we had on our walls pictures of Dr. King, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. And then I was watching these TV shows and watching these little movies, and so I didn’t differentiate between King and Hoover back then.

Interviewer: “So what were the fears that Hoover had of MLK at the beginning?”

Pollard: “The first fear that he had was that King was going to align himself with the Communist Party, which as you know J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with destroying because he felt the Communist Party was going to kill democracy. So when they first learned of Dr. King’s relationship with a gentleman named Stanley Levinson, who had been a former Communist, they were pretty sure that he was going to be co-opted by the Communist Party.  And that was when J. Edgar Hoover went to Bobby Kennedy, then the Attorney General, to ask permission to wiretap and bug Dr. King and his associates…”…

(The interview shifts to describe alleged findings that the FBI recorded sexual liaisons of King. Pollard also discusses the Communist Party and its limited appeal to Americans. They go on to discuss the extensive wiretapping of hotel rooms of King and his associates by the FBI, and Hoover’s intention to use the media to expose the indiscretions. They also discuss a variety of subjects pertaining to the history of racism in the United States. Eventually, the interviewer returns to the subject of the FBI and Dr. King.)  

NPR Interviewer: “Perhaps the most troubling part of the FBI’s campaign against King is when the agency creates this compilation of the tapes they have of him. And they send it to him with this letter that the second-in-command Bill Sullivan writes. It’s meant to be this anonymous letter. The author is supposed to be a former supporter of King who is now disillusioned and it has a sentence that reads, ‘You know what you have to do.’ Most people agree that it is suggesting that King should kill himself. And you know I think people have known about that letter for a long time, but it was only recently declassified, wasn’t it?

Sam Pollard: “Yes it was. The thing to remember about that letter too is that they were trying to make it sound like it was not only a former associate, but a Negro who wrote that letter too– that it was somebody from community saying to Dr. King, ‘Maybe you should consider killing yourself.’  So just reading the excerpts from that letter from the Freedom of Information Act, just reading that… it’s pretty disgusting to me to think the lengths the FBI would go to discredit and destroy King’s reputation. And then on top of that letter, to send a tape to his wife, Coretta Scott King, that basically is supposed to be King and another woman involved in some sexual activity. It’s absolutely horrendous to do that. This is supposed to be the nation’s police that is supposed to be doing the right thing. And this is the lengths they will go to destroy a human being.”

[The interview and Pollard then discuss that former FBI director James Comey kept a copy of the letter on his desk to remind recruits of the dark days of the FBI. Pollard then continues…]

Pollard: “…I would bet that there will be some revelation in the next 10 to 15 years that shows there were even darker periods in the history of the FBI. That’s my particular opinion about that.”

Interviewer: “One of the interesting things we learn about the FBI’s operations against King is that the bureau had all these informants around him, including those within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Who were those informants?” 

Pollard: “Well, there was a gentleman who worked in the SCLC office who was an informant for the FBI. The one who was probably the most famous is Ernest Withers the photographer, many of whose pictures of the Civil Rights movement are iconic today – specifically his ‘I am a Man’ picture. And to know that Ernest Withers, who was well respected by members of the SCLC, the fact that he was talking to the FBI sort of saddens me. But you know, it was a payday for him. He wasn’t making a lot of money taking pictures. And so this was to make some extra money from his point of view. And also you should be aware that Andrew Young and Dr. King - they knew Withers was on the payroll of the FBI. Obviously, they didn’t feel it was so dangerous that he was giving them information. But he did it…”

NPR Interviewer: “One of the interesting points that you make in the film about the assassination is that you have the FBI constantly around King. They’re listening to him in most hotels, either next to him or down the hall. And they never warned him of threats to his life or even attempted to protect him from those threats.  At one point, I think you asked with all the surveillance around King, why weren’t they able to prevent this assassination?”

Pollard: “That’s exactly right.

Interviewer: “What is your answer to that?”

Pollard: “That’s exactly right. I mean how is it possible - as [former FBI agent] Chuck Knox was saying in the film, that with any time King and his associates went to a new city, the FBI was manned up to go and to follow him and surveil him- so how is it possible with agents constantly surveilling King in nearby hotel rooms not to be aware of someone like James Earl Ray with a rifle who is going to shoot Dr. King? It just doesn’t make any sense. And Andrew Young’s answer to me was that he doesn’t believe it was James Earl Ray at all. Obviously, somewhere in there, there was some conspiracy, you know, where I personally think the FBI was involved, to take King out. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense. And there’s got to be some place, in some archive, in some file, in some tape, where we will learn the actual truth.”

[Interestingly, toward the end of the interview, Pollard briefly mentions the events of 6 January 2021, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the interview aired less than two weeks later.] For example, Pollard replies to a very leading and pointed question by the interviewer in part as follows:

Pollard: “…Watching that footage, watching these people smashing the windows of the Capitol Building, climb into the Capital Building, walk into the Rotunda with the Confederate Flag, and then go to the Senate floor to try to smash in those doors, and the House of Representatives floor and smashing those windows. And then to see these men sitting in the seats of power there where the President of the Senate sits, to see them in Nancy Pelosi’s office with his legs up on the table, what a desecration of what it means to be an American...”

***

These comments reveal the effectiveness of the images of vandalism (smashed windows) as a persuasion tool. An audience predisposed to be against the cause of the protestors is highly likely to vilify both the protestors and their cause. Furthermore, supporters of the cause of the protests become disillusioned once vandalism is inflicted because it detracts from the message.

It follows that paying a subset of protestors to riot and vandalize the scene of an otherwise peaceful protest is a highly effective tool for countering the cause of the protestors. The effectiveness of this approach can be amplified greatly if a protestor dies. 

Let’s objectively consider the events surrounding Larry Payne in Memphis on 28 March 1968 and those surrounding Ashley Babbitt on 6 January 2021.

1. Elements within the leadership and a large subset of the rank-and-file FBI wished to destroy (to use Sam Pollard’s term) Martin Luther King.

It seems highly likely that FBI leadership and a large subset of the rank-and-file FBI wish to destroy Donald Trump.

2. Pictures and/or video place both Larry Payne and Ashley Babbitt at the scene of vandalism, specifically smashed windows. The FBI is known to have paid photographer Ernest Withers. Did the FBI also pay the photographer who snapped the image of Payne adjacent to the broken glass in 1968?

It is possible that the FBI might have paid alleged protestor/rioter John Earle Sullivan to take pictures of Ashley Babbitt at the scene of her apparent shooting? Or are we to believe that Sullivan was a rabid support of Donald Trump, so much so that he broke into the Capitol Building? Which is more likely?

3. A police officer shot both Payne at close range. Payne was said by witnesses to be unarmed at the time of the shooting.

The video of Ashley Babbitt appears to show her being shot at close range. Apparently, she was also unarmed.

4. The police officer involved in the shooting of Payne was not punished. Local politicians praised his effort in carrying out the law and order.

Likewise, the police officer who allegedly shot Ashley Babbitt was not charged with a crime. He has been widely praised by some in Washington DC as taking a step necessary to preserve law and order. 

5. The shooting of Larry Payne, combined with the vandalism carried out by protestors, demoralized Martin Luther King, Jr. Andrew Young says that this series of events was what led to Dr. King remaining in Memphis where he was assassinated only a week later.

The shooting of Ashley Babbitt, combined with the vandalism and deaths of other protestors during the events of 6 January 2021, demoralized Donald Trump. It led him to ask his supporters to stand down in a televised live speech.    

6. The media depiction of the Sanitation Workers’ Strike was highly unfavorable in Memphis. The local newspapers blamed Martin Luther King for the violence. Excerpts from a story which documents ( https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2018/03/15/memphis-sanitation-strike-met-hostility-misunderstanding-media/919171001/ ) include:

“…As local authors and reporters would later observe, the papers provided little coverage giving readers a humanized look at the workers and explaining why they were striking. ‘There was just no appetite (among editors) for the sorts of stories that should have been done,’ remembers Thomas BeVier, a CA reporter at the time. BeVier, now 81, said reporters at the CA [Commercial Appeal, the dominant morning paper with a circulation of some 270,000] realized that given the views of top management at the paper, writing profiles humanizing the strikers would do nothing to help their careers.… When a Downtown march led by King dissolved into violence, The CA and other outlets were quick to blame him with derogatory cartoons and editorials... ‘Dr. King’s pose as leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered,’ the CA said, while the Press-Scimitar saw the riot as evidence that King’s rhetoric no longer resonated with young black ‘hotheads’ and militants.”

Likewise, both the Washington DC and national media have failed to give readers and viewers a humanized look at those who protested at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Those mainstream media outlets have blamed Donald Trump for inspiring the violence, despite his statements calling for peaceful demonstrations. 

7. At this point, let us consider the possibility that Andrew Young was right – that protestors were paid to vandalize property in the Memphis demonstration. Who might have paid them? Given Sam Pollard’s commentary that criminal elements associated with the FBI paid Ernest Withers, it is reasonable to expect that these criminal elements may also have paid those protestors as well to act out violently. It is conceivable that Larry Jones was paid to participate. Now, consider the possibility that Officer Jones might also have been paid by those same criminal elements to shoot Larry Payne.

If this set of assumptions seems too conspiratorial to believe, consider the effectiveness of the tactic used against Dr. King. Also, take into account the fact that Officer Jones was cleared of any wrongdoing and even thanked by the mayor of the city of Memphis.

Is it conceivable that Ashley Babbitt was paid by elements associated with what Bill Moyers described as ‘The Deep State’ to vandalize the Capitol in the protest on January 6? Unlike Larry Payne, her apparent shooting was captured on video from several different angles. Very quickly after these events, an analysis of videos provided compelling evidence that the shooting was faked (presently available at https://rumble.com/v24cfg0-ashley-babbitt-hoax-by-wooz-news-everything-wrong-with-the-capitol-shooting.html   ). It would be tempting for those Trump supporters who view the 6 January 2021 events as a setup to believe that Ashley Babbitt is still alive, but I suspect the most likely scenario is that she was murdered after she was carried away. 

There are several reasons why this approach would be an effective, at least for followers of Nietzsche who are bound to no moral code of ethics. Following the example of how Larry Payne’s death was used against Martin Luther King, Ashley Babbitt’s violent death could be attributed to Trump, effectively clearing a path for Biden to become President later in the month. The video analysis demonstrating that the shooting was faked led to mainstream media outlets to labeling the Trump supporters as conspiracy theorists. Meanwhile, other Trump supporters would blame the Capitol police office for the shooting an unarmed protestor/rioter. So it yields a natural split in the opposition.

The other individuals who were likely paid by the “Deep State” associated group would have been given a false explanation. They would have thanked the participants and explained that it was appropriate because Trump was a traitor who was a danger to the United States. They would have suggested that Babbitt was paid a very large amount of money and given a new identity. However, Babbitt was a “loose end,” and she could have become a major liability to the Deep State if she had ever stepped forward.  It makes more sense for them to have murdered her after she was carried away on a stretcher. The possibility that she was actually killed by those who paid her would also intimidate others participants, such as John Earle Sullivan, who otherwise might be tempted to come forward and admit they were paid to protest in support of Donald Trump.

If this scenario seems unlikely, consider this: have any of the protestors in Memphis stepped forward publicly to admit they were paid? Yet, Time Magazine reported that Andrew Young said that protestors were paid. I believe Young is telling the truth and that the protestors were (and still are) too afraid and ashamed to speak publicly. 

I believe it likely that the events of 28 March 1968 were shaped by monetary influence, but let us instead suppose that the violent act of Officer Jones was driven by racism, anger and frustration over the day’s events. Let us furthermore suppose that Larry Payne was not paid to take part in the destruction and petty theft of property but rather acted out of his own self-interest. The lesson would nonetheless have been clear: if a group of protestors vandalize property, and if one protestor were shot and killed by a law officer, the cause of the protestors could be defeated and its leaders demoralized, especially if a compliant media dehumanizes the protestors. Therefore, if the mindset of the general public could be shaped- by a climate of fear and deception- to view events surrounding a protest in such a manner, the officer would not face punishment.

The vandalism by protestors, who were allegedly paid, combined with the killing of a protestor by a police officer effectively destroyed the morale and aspirations of both Martin Luther King and Donald Trump.  A group whose goal was to ensure Donald Trump left office would have learned many lessons in media manipulation from the murder of Larry Payne in Memphis.

Some will be quick to suggest that this section is written to promote Donald Trump’s 2024 bid for the Presidency. That is not the case. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate a logical set of motives and actions which explain the evidence related to Ashley Babbitt’s apparent death on 6 January 2021.

***

Let us return to the question of Josef Stalin’s unyielding support for Trofim Lysenko, despite an outcome which was obviously disastrous for the people of the Soviet Union.

One scenario might be that Josef Stalin was tricked by his advisors into truly believing that Lysenko’s methods were an advanced scientific breakthrough. It may be that, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, that he truly did not believe any of the evidence. Surely, those same advisors would have lied about the effectiveness of Lysenko’s methods and would have suggested that provocateurs were spreading lies to discredit him. Perhaps Stalin chose to imprison, and ultimately starve, Nikolai Vavilov because he believed Vavilov was one such provocateur acting at the behest of Western Europe or the United States. Perhaps Stalin went to his grave believing Lysenko’s methods were sound agricultural practice.  

A second possibility is that Josef Stalin was initially tricked by his advisors into believing in Lysenko’s approach to raising crops but that he eventually discerned that Lysenko was either lying or completely wrong. Consider that if it took years for Stalin to reach this conclusion, then he may have felt compelled to continue the lie in order to preserve his reputation, despite the human cost. After all, imagine what it would have taken for Stalin, a man with megalomania tendencies, to reverse course and perhaps even apologize to the country he governed for choices which led to the deaths of millions of his countrymen. Perhaps Stalin may have simply chosen to ignore the problem. In that case, he would have known that Vavilov was telling the truth but would have wished to silence him, knowing that his imprisonment would also prevent others from speaking out, thereby preserving his reputation as a great leader.

A third possibility is that Josef Stalin was aware from the very beginning that his enforcement of Lysenko’s methods would directly lead to the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. Recalling the stories of Trotsky and Lenin’s support from Western bankers, would it be impossible to imagine that Stalin made a similar deal with Nietzsche followers who were willing to provide Stalin with something for his personal benefit (e.g., a bribe), or perhaps something of value to the Soviet Union (e.g., weapon system information) in exchange for murdering millions of his countrymen? If so, Stalin would have sought to punish with severity the first influential individual- Vavilov-to speak against Lysenko in order to prevent an uprising.

Former President Trump’s continues to praise the Covid mRNA vaccines brought about through his administration’s Operation Warp Speed program, despite their clear failure. Would it be inappropriate to consider that Donald Trump’s predicament resembles that of Josef Stalin, and that the same three possibilities might apply? …Or could there be a fourth?

***

Several media accounts reveal reactions to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/38573/when-robert-f-kennedys-mourners-found-refuge-in-the-rosary

“When presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was shot in a California hotel on June 5, 1968, his supporters prayed.

“ ‘After Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, many supporters got down on their knees and prayed the rosary. A famous picture from the time shows a busboy, Juan Romero, pressing rosary beads into Kennedy's hands in the kitchen of the hotel. Imagine Catholics doing that today,’ Mark Stricherz, political reporter and author of the 2007 book Why the Democrats are Blue, told CNA.

Kennedy's own life had similar devotion. He was born the seventh of nine children to Joseph and Rosemary Kennedy in Brookline, Mass. After serving in the Navy during the Second World War, he married Ethel Skakel, with whom he would have eleven children – the last of whom was yet unborn at the time of his death.

Kennedy was often considered one of the more devout Kennedy brothers, with his house full of devotionals, bibles, and crucifixes, and regular prayer with his wife and children. He served as an altar boy as a young man and even at points during his career of public service, biographer Larry Tye said in his 2017 book Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon…”

https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2018/06/robert-kennedys-catholicism-was-part-of-his-personal-life-and-politics

WASHINGTON , D.C. — Recollections and tributes to Robert F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination have mainly highlighted his charisma and determined advocacy for social and racial justice.

But underlying these tributes to the former attorney general, U.S. senator, Democratic presidential candidate and father of 11, also is an unmistakable connection to his Catholic faith.

Inevitable references to Kennedy’s faith come up when mentioning his Irish Catholic family or his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, but there also are plenty of anecdotes in biographies mentioning that he was an altar server or wore a St. Christopher medal. And then there are his speeches, which often echo Catholic social teaching without coming right out and saying it.

A Newsweek tribute to Kennedy describes one of his speeches as “typically peppered with erudition and an almost ecclesiastic, Catholic compassion.”

That particular speech asked what reason people have for existing “unless we’ve made some other contribution to somebody else to improve their own lives?”

Historians and biographers alike have not shied away from Kennedy’s Catholicism, often saying he was the most Catholic of the Kennedy brothers and that he wasn’t afraid to express his faith.

Larry Tye, author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon in 2016, said Kennedy’s faith helped him as he grieved the 1963 assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, noting that he kept a missal beside him in the car and thumbed through it to prayers he found consoling.

And instead of just attending Sunday Mass, Tye said, Kennedy was “in the pew nearly every day. His faith helped him internalize the assassination in a way that, over time, freed his spirit.”

Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who was a legislative aide to Kennedy from 1964 until his death, can attest to this.

He described Kennedy as “assiduous in his practice of his Catholicism” and said his “values and work were certainly based significantly in his faith.”

When asked to explain this more, he told Catholic News Service that when he and Kennedy were in New York City, Kennedy often stopped for a few minutes to go into a church to pray while Edelman said he stayed outside because he is Jewish.

“Robert was the Kennedy who took his Catholicism most seriously. He attended Mass regularly, and prayed with his family before meals and bed,” said Jerald Podair, a history and American studies professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

In a 2008 interview with the Boston Globe, Kennedy’s daughter Kerry Kennedy, the seventh child, who was 8 when her father died, said faith was central to her upbringing — especially prayers before and after meals, an out loud Bible reading and Sunday Mass.

Kerry Kennedy, who established the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights in New York, said her faith was influenced by both of her parents, noting that her father thought about being a priest and her mother considered being a nun.

In a June 6 tweet the day of a 50th anniversary memorial service for her father at Arlington National Cemetery, Kerry Kennedy said: “I miss my father every day, but I am strengthened to know the causes he believed in are still championed by brave activists today. His legacy and work are timeless.”

That service, which included numerous tributes and people quoting Kennedy’s own words, began fittingly with an opening invocation by a priest echoing the hope Kennedy so often expressed.

“We are gathered here in a spirit not of mourning, but of hope,” said Jesuit Father Matt Malone, editor of America magazine.

He also added: “Bobby Kennedy still lives in millions of hearts that seek a newer world.”

And from https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/50-years-ago-the-assassination-of-rfk-kennedy-politician-catholic:

“…It seems fitting that, in November 1936, a young Bobby was present at a family meeting with a prominent Vatican diplomat named Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli — the future Pope Pius XII — who visited the Kennedy house in Bronxville, New York. He was 10 years old.

When Bobby was away from home studying at St. Paul’s, a private Episcopal school in New Hampshire, he wrote to his mother complaining about the frequent use of the Protestant Bible. She arranged his transfer to Portsmouth Priory, an orthodox Benedictine school.

Biographer Ronald Steel speculates that if RFK had been born into a poor family without a power-hungry patriarch driving the boys into politics, he might have been a priest. Steel observed Bobby’s “fierce brand of Irish Catholicism” and said that he was “at heart, and had always been, a Catholic conservative deeply suspicious of the moral license of the radical left,” particularly its embrace of the drug culture and sexual permissiveness of the ’60s...

Jacqueline Kennedy, who observed Bobby’s piety, once remarked that it seemed unfair that JFK’s faith was an issue in the 1960 campaign, particularly in light of Bobby’s devoutness. “Now if it were Bobby: He never misses Mass and prays all the time,” she said.

Bobby’s faith was called upon most acutely with the assassination of Jack in November 1963. He suffered greatly from the death of his beloved brother. The two were extremely close. No two brothers so dominated the Oval Office. The younger Kennedy questioned God the day his big brother was taken Nov. 22, 1963.

That night, alone in his White House bedroom, a friend could hear Bobby cry out, “Why, God?” He was in visible pain, said one friend, “like a man on the rack.”

Biographer Evan Thomas says that Bobby “cast about” to make sense of the despair. At the suggestion of his brother’s widow, Jackie, he began reading the ancient Greeks, where he discovered fate and hubris…

Robert Francis Kennedy, whose middle name was a tribute to St. Francis, patron saint of the Kennedy family, a saint of peace, died 26 hours later at Good Samaritan Hospital. Among those at his side was Mrs. John F. Kennedy. Bobby was only 42 years old. Had he lived to win the presidency, he would have been 43 at his inauguration, the same age as his late brother at his swearing in. His shooter was 24 years old, the same age of Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter of his late brother. Today, 50 years later, the shooter is still with us. Bobby Kennedy is long gone. Who knows what might have been?”

https://jfk.blogs.archives.gov/2018/06/08/who-advanced-this-the-rfk-funeral-train/

Ted Sorensen recalled: “There was on the train, a reaction to the enormous crowds that lined the tracks outside all the way…very touching and moving portraits of Americans of every age and race and sex and economic and ethnic background who regarded the train as they regarded the Senator…as a special happening in their lives; and who saluted him in death as he passed by, just as so many of them had saluted him in life.”

*** The Cave Analogy and Tilting at Windmills

 In The Republic, Plato’s representation of Socrates famously crafts the “Cave Analogy” to help build the case that Philosopher Kings must be convinced to govern his ideal state.

(Sugrue)

“Socrates has to justify the idea that philosophers ought to be kings. And the hard part is not persuading people to bring the philosopher into the city. But rather, it is persuading the philosopher to take on the job of being the king. Remember, one of the funny ironies of this book [Plato’s ‘Republic’] is that we’ve established justice by making sure that there is one man-one job. Everyone pursues only one course in life – except for the best and most wise person in the city, the Philosopher King because to be a philosopher is not the same thing as being a king. He’s the only person that has two jobs.

So apparently, the most just man in the city, the man with the most wisdom, and the most philosophical insight is also the person who we force due to our own necessity to engage in a kind of injustice- to pursue more than one job (philosopher and king). It is one of the crowning ironies of The Republic.”

In his “Cave Analogy,” Socrates imagines a cave where a group of prisoners, held captive their entire lives, are only allowed to view only shadows cast by a fire behind a group of men putting on something similar to a puppet show. He builds a case that the prisoners believe the shadows are reality because they know nothing else. The shadows tell a story of how fortunate the prisoners are to be protected from the world above.

Socrates then envisions a prisoner who is first released and forced to look into the fire and shown how the illusion has been generated. He then described the released prisoner being dragged up out of the cave to see the glory of the sun (which Socrates uses to symbolize the Form of the Good) and the beauty it illuminates.

Socrates then describes how, when the former prisoner returns to tell the prisoners about the glory of the true world above, the prisoners would not believe his description of the sun or anything else he had seen above the surface. Moreover, the former prisoner’s eyes would not have adjusted to see the shadows which are the basis of their belief system. The prisoners were so conditioned to believe the shadows are real that they would view him as a fool and suggest he is “tilting at windmills” if he tried to release them. In fact, the former prisoner who has gained insight into the world above knows that he would actually be fearlessly “charging at the giants” who hold the prisoners hostage while instilling fear through deception.  

By many indications, Robert F. Kennedy ran for the presidency reluctantly in 1968 with one goal being to guide the American people out of the deceptions of the Vietnam War. Socrates emphasizes that such reluctance is precisely the character trait desired for the person who governs the ideal state.

In Socratic terminology, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and Yuri Gagarin had “seen the sun”. They knew the Form of the Good, and each, in his own distinct way, sought to uplift humanity.

***

Martin Luther King’s inclusion of the story of the Good Samaritan in his 3 April 1968 speech is significant for many reasons. I believe there is a possibility that Yuri Gagarin, who had died only one week earlier, was in his thoughts, consciously or perhaps subconsciously. To justify this assertion, consider the following:

Martin Luther King often drew excerpts of his most famous speeches from earlier sermons. Given that the Good Samaritan is one of the most famous passages of the Gospel, it is unsurprising that Martin Luther King discussed the parable in earlier sermons. One from a published draft of a sermon from 1962 is given below. In both passages, Dr. King emphasizes that fear likely played a part in the Priest and the Levite passing by the beaten man of the same faith along the dangerous road without stopping to help him.

But there are subtle differences in the texts, and notably Martin Luther King references the possibility that the “neighbor” might be neither a Russian nor an American in a published draft of “On Being a Good Neighbor”. (The full text is available at :

http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol06Scans/July1962-March1963DraftofChapterIII,OnBeingaGoodNeighbor.pdf

and an excerpt is given below)

“This morning I would like to talk with you about a good man. He is a man whose exemplary life will always stand as a flashing light to plague the dozing conscience of mankind. His goodness was not found in his passive commitment to a particular creed, but in his active participation in a life-saving deed. His goodness was not found in the fact that his moral pilgrimage had reached its destination, but in the fact that he made the love ethic a reality as he journeyed life’s highway. He was good because he was a good neighbor…

Who is my neighbor? “I do not know his name,” says Jesus. “He is anyone to whom you prove to be neighborly. He is anyone lying in need on life’s roadside. He is neither a Jew nor a Gentile; he is neither a Russian nor an American; he is neither Negro nor white. He is ‘a certain man’—any man lying needy on one of the numerous Jericho roads of life.” So Jesus ends up defining a neighbor not in a theological definition but in a life situation.

We may well ask what constituted the goodness of the good Samaritan. Why will he always stand as an inspiring paragon of neighborly virtue? It seems to me that this man’s goodness can be described in one word—altruism. The good Samaritan was altruism to the core. The dictionary defines altruism as “regard for, and devotion to, the interest of others.” Indeed, the Samaritan was great because he made the first law of his life not self preservation, but other preservation.

Let us notice first that the Samaritan had the capacity for a universal altruism. He had the piercing insight to see beyond the accidents of race, religion and nationality. He saw a fellow human being in need. One of the great tragedies of man’s long trek up the highway of history has been his all-too-prevalent tendency to limit his neighborly concern to the race, the tribe, the class, or the nation.”

***

Could it be that the FBI’s defaming of Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most dangerous Negro in the United States,” served as a distraction? Perhaps the organized crime ring which controlled the actions of some members of the FBI- and many other organizations throughout the world- followed the philosophy of Nietzsche and therefore viewed Dr. King as “the most dangerous Christian in the United States” - the man most likely to prevent the destruction of Western Civilization through the implementation of the philosophy of Nietzsche.

***

On 3 April 1968, only 7 days after the death of Yuri Gagarin, Martin Luther King Jr. preached his final sermon: It can be heard here (

).

In reading and listening to the speech, I have come to the conclusion that Martin Luther King Jr. understood the nature of his true foes extraordinarily well. Perhaps this is to be expected since, by this time, he had been fighting them for nearly two decades. Those who have read other “The Way Out Substack” articles may have noticed that I frequently referenced and quoted Dr. King, especially near the end of the articles because he so beautifully expressed many of own thoughts. At first I believed this was simply because Dr. King is bright and eloquent. Furthermore, he dealt with fundamental issues of Good versus Evil in his struggle for Civil Rights in the United States and throughout the world. But I now have come to believe that the reason why it is so easy to draw from Martin Luther King’s work is that he was fighting the *very same enemy* which employs *the very same tactics* which we are fighting today.  The depth of his understanding of “their” goals is the primary reason his sermons and speeches are so relevant in this precise moment in history.  

In his most important speeches, part of his focus is justly placed on the struggle for civil rights in the United States and freedom in previously-colonized regions of the world as it relates to the specific issues of the time. But a significant portion of his speeches are devoted to the defense of Western philosophic tradition with a broad and timeless theme. 

In Dr. King’s final speech, he also includes the story of The Good Samaritan – but he leaves out the phrase ‘neither a Russian nor an American’. In my opinion, the omitted phrase is conspicuous by its absence. I believe Dr. King contemplated the death of Yuri Gagarin only days earlier when he decided to remove it.  

If I may for just one instant look ahead to a victory over Nietzsche’s philosophy- and I admit it is premature and perhaps even foolish to do so-, I believe we will need to raise the status of Martin Luther King even higher than it is today. No one has provided a more eloquent defense of Christianity since St. Paul. But moreover, there has been no greater fighter for Western philosophic tradition since Socrates himself.

As mentioned in the previous TheWayOut substack article ‘Changing the Climate of Fear and Deception’, Thomas Kuhn contended in his book ‘Structure of Scientific Revolution’ argued that progress in the natural sciences is made through revolutionary thoughts and ideas, such as quantum theory, rather than incremental progress. Perhaps, our understanding of history follows the same pattern.

The full text of “I have been to the Mountaintop” is available at  https://genius.com/Martin-luther-king-jr-ive-been-to-the-mountaintop-annotated . Below are excerpts which are the most relevant to this article with bold font added for even more emphasis where needed.

“Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the Promised Land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis….

Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on…

One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother…

It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us. The pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

***

At the end of Professor’s Michael Sugrue excellent and valuable analysis of Nietzsche, he discusses Nietzsche’s autobiography:

“Nietzsche’s autobiography has to catch your eye. I strongly recommend it to you. The title of it is ‘Ecce Homo’. Now those of you familiar with Latin will know that Ecce Homo means, ‘Behold the Man,’ and that this is the phrase used about Jesus on the cross. So this is no small dose of megalomania here that he should title his autobiography ‘Ecce Homo’. And it doesn’t stop there.

Ecce Homo is made up of four chapters. And these chapters each correspond to a question. And these four questions are the only things that Nietzsche thinks is worth telling you about himself, which again tells you about himself than perhaps he intended to say.

The first question is “Why I am so clever.” 

Question two: ‘Why I am so wise.’

Question three: ‘Why I write such good books.’

And Question four: ‘Why I am a destiny.’

Now this, of course, has gone off the chart with regard to philosophical aspiration and ambition. And in some respects, it is easy to send up Nietzsche’s excessive autobiography because if any intellectual or spiritual ambition is excessive, this is excessive. And to title one’s autobiography, ‘Behold the Man’ and to offer us a choice between himself and Jesus and actually expect us to choose him means that he has really lost touch with the rest of the world. Maybe the syphilis is setting in. But I’d like to turn this in another direction. In my conclusion about Nietzsche, I’d like to try and answer those four questions and explain what I think the right answer is to these is to make sense of Nietzsche for you.

Why I am so clever: I would say the reason he is so clever is that he is because he is the great poet-philosopher of the modern age. He is a combination of poet and philosopher that has not been seen with such intensity since Plato. The reason why he hates Plato and constantly rails against him is the same reason Plato rails against Homer- professional jealousy. He’s too good and has been influential in the wrong way. So that’s why he’s so clever. He’s a great poet-philosopher.

Why I am so wise:  Well, to be honest, I am not- as I was convinced at one time- (convinced) that Nietzsche is so wise. I think perhaps he is seriously mistaken. But I won’t take that up. I would say – to give the Devil his due, if that’s the way we are to understand him- I’d say that he is so wise, if he is wise, because he was the first one to see the implication of God’s death. He was the one that said ‘Yes, our culture has killed God, and we must face up to that.’ It may be the case that insofar that he is a wise man that his wisdom lies there.

The (third) question ‘Why I write such good books’, I think that is relatively accessible. The reason why Nietzsche writes such good books is that he has mastered the art of oxymoron. The Nietzschean oxymoron is the modern analog of Socratic irony. It is the skeleton key to all Nietzsche’s works. And when you go back and look through it, if you constantly look at the paradoxical passages and realize the oxymoron is not the problem. It is the solution. Then you will be able to appreciate Nietzsche in a way that perhaps will not drive you crazy as it did me in an earlier part of my life.

And I’ll close with the final question: Why I am a destiny. I believe that Friedrich Nietzsche was a destiny because he was the first person to be willing to face squarely the implications of the rise of modern natural science. The physical world of space and time is real, like it or not. We must find some way of making our moral intuitions and our religious commitments consistent with the best of our rational activities. Any attempt to abdicate our responsibility to our rational faculties is ultimately doomed to failure.

And because Darwin is real, and because our best understanding of the biological history of the world is through natural selection, we are forced to face the fact that science is here to stay. And the reason why he is a destiny is because he was the first man to squarely state that science and religion have to be melded into something we can all participate in. If we have to sacrifice one or the other, we can do that, but the point is, ‘science represents a challenge to Western religion that cannot be met by any sort of minor repair.’ You are going to have to make a radical either-or sort of choice, and Nietzsche forces us to that. I think that if he had not done that for us, then someone else would have. And for that reason, I feel that Nietzsche is correct that in seeing himself as a destiny because it is the destiny of the West to be forced to confront their rational capacities.”

***

Once it is understood that a large and powerful group following Nietzsche is acting out against the so-called “slave class” of the world who have the “herd morality” which relies upon the concepts of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’, every article in The Way Out substack makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, this means that “they” have plotted and carried out the murder of numerous people, including George Floyd.

To use Socrates’ analogy, we have no choice but to ‘look at the fire’ causing the illusions before we can escape the cave. But we must be brave and recognize and acknowledge our history so that we can strive to “see the Sun” and embrace the Good in the world.     

Perhaps Professor Sugrue is right in his characterization that Nietzsche is a destiny in the narrow sense he describes above. But as long as those who understand the true stakes of the battle in which we are now engaged have the faith and courage to follow the examples of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Yuri Gagarin, the “New World Order” sought by those who follow Nietzsche is far from inevitable.

**End***