I remember one of my discussions with Brother Michael as if it were only last week. Though it took place in the summer of 1989, a mere 34 years ago! A gifted linguist, he was a private French tutor, Michael taught himself Arabic so he could read the Quran and the works of Muslim mystics. As often happened when we met, our conversation passed seamlessly from the history of Sufism in Australia – Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Australian disciple Baron von Frankenberg and Meher Baba’s 1959 visit – to the spread of New Thought in the country at the start of the last century.
Advertisement in a Melbourne newspaper for Cole’s Book Arcade that highlights “New Thought and Occult Books.” Once the world’s largest bookstore, Cole’s Book Arcade was known as ‘The Poor Man’s University’.
Brother Michael fondly recalled his mother and her parents as dedicated ‘spiritual seekers’, some of his first memories were of being taken to New Thought meetings in 1920s Melbourne. His maternal grandparents were introduced to the ‘Higher Thought’ after attending public lectures by the American ‘Mental Healer’ Dr Frederic Bell, who toured Australia in 1900 before establishing himself in Melbourne for a period around 1906. Dr Bell – billed in the press as the “Prince of Orators, Song Lecturer and Teacher of Practical Occultism and the New Thought” – captivated Australian audiences with his talks on subjects like “Dreams, Visions, Prophecies and Revelations Explained” and “The Prodigal Son from an Occult Perspective.”
New Thought inspired a diverse range of organisations and activities in early 20th century Australia. Michael told how his mother’s family frequented the New Thought Club in Collins Street and avidly read the latest books on ‘practical occultism’ available at the New Thought & Occult Book Store as well as Cole’s Book Arcade, then the world’s largest bookstore. Michael accompanied his mother to Sunday services of the Melbourne New Thought Centre, participating in New Thought-inspired children’s programs. He remembered seeing the influential American New Thought lecturer and writer Dr Julia Seton on her final Australian lecture tour. The founder of the Church and School of the New Civilization in the United States, Dr Seton was a major figure in the development of the New Thought movement from the esoteric and metaphysical point of view.
Spiritual Healers
Victor E. Cromer broadcast on Sydney Radio 2GB in the late 1920s, urging his listeners to “tune-in to the spiritual healing power.” His mass healings at Sydney Town Hall attracted large and enthusiastic crowds along with the attention of the mainstream media who ridiculed them as “nothing more or less than mass hysteria.” Consequently the State Health minister was called on to enact legislation “to deal with” Mr Cromer and “all other unregistered healers.”
Michael’s grey eyes, which matched his well-worn three-piece suit, lit up as he recalled a childhood journey to Sydney in 1928 with his grandfather to meet the ‘seer’ and ‘Mental Healer’ Mr Victor E. Cromer. Originally from South Australia, Cromer founded the Spiritual Healing Institute in Burdekin House, Macquarie Street, then Australia’s most prestigious address. Michael’s grandfather credited Cromer’s ‘distant healing’ with curing him of a chronic health condition.
“Grandfather and Mr Cromer were firm friends, old correspondents. They knew each other from when Mr Cromer lived in Melbourne, both having started out in the workers’ movement. Mr Cromer founded the Worker’s Educational Association of South Australia and went to Germany as the Australian delegate to the Socialist International where he met Lenin, Trotsky, and Ramsay McDonald, the future British PM. With the outbreak of the Great War, disillusioned with politics as the best vehicle for social revolution, he gave himself 100% to the higher cause of spiritual revolution, the healing of mind and body through divine power and Higher Thought.”
Michael said his grandfather also subscribed to the publications of another prominent Sydney spiritual healer, Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson, who lectured weekly at The Truth Centre. A tireless organiser for New Thought, Sister Veni founded several organisations over the years, including ‘The Universal Truth Centre & Metaphysical College’, ‘The Esoteric College’, ‘The Universal Truth Publishing Company’, and ‘The New Thought Book Depot & Library’. The latter was promoted as “the Premier Australasian Centre for the dissemination of Higher Thought, Metaphysical, Occult, Esoteric, Mental Culture, Physical Culture, Health Culture, Dietetic, Humanitarian, and other progressive literature. Our stock of New Thought books is the largest in Australasia.”
In his book A History of the New Thought Movement, Horatio Dresser notes that “the pioneer work of Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson in Australia began in 1903, under the title ‘The Women’s White Cross Moral Reform Crusade’.” Adding that Sister’s first magazine, The Truth Seeker, was established in January 1905.
Australian New Thought pioneer, healer and metaphysical teacher Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson (1867–1943).
“In April 1909, the Church Universal in Perth, Western Australia, was organized. In December 1914, this church was moved to Sydney, and a Truth Centre was established. The first magazine [The Truth Seeker] was united with The Healer and called The Revealer in 1915.”
Michael had no clear memory of seeing Sister Veni but was adamant that his mother and grandfather would have frequented her Truth Centre during visits to Sydney in the twenties.
By the 1930s New Thought peaked in Australia and started to steadily decline. Popular enthusiasm for spiritual healing soon passed over in favour of the modern wonders of medical science. The impact of secularisation brought a loss of belief in Australia’s divinely ordained destiny. A notion widespread in the years immediately after Federation. No longer seen as the land of which Sister Veni once prophesied:
It is the vision of the Future that reveals to the waiting nations that thou, O! Queen of the South! Thou last of the lands to arise from the sea, shall yet be first in splendour, greatest in wisdom and highest in power and glory. Out of thee shall sons and daughters arise that shall be mighty before the Lord of Life; and from them shall come the seed of the new and regenerate humanity.1
Richard, Duc de Palatine
Richard, Duc de Palatine
Exposed from birth to New Thought, spiritual healing, occultism, and a bewildering array of ‘progressive’ and ‘alternative’ beliefs and practices, no surprise then that when in college, Michael attended lectures of the Psychological Society of Victoria, where he met his future ‘Master Teacher’ Ronald Powell (later known as Rev. Richard, Duc de Palatine). While listening to Powell lecture on Atlantis in November 1940, Michael felt himself transported back to the days of the legendary city!2
Ronald Powell, born in North Fitzroy on 4 July 1916, had himself undergone a profound spiritual experience while in the library of the Melbourne Theosophical Society where he was mysteriously drawn by the “Invisible Presence” to study “the extant writings concerning the Gnostics, Essenes and Secret Mysteries.” By 1944, Powell became convinced “that one day he would cause to be formed a Brotherhood which would partially restore the Sacred Lore and encourage people to prepare themselves for the Illumination and Interior Communion with the God within as practised in the Secret Brotherhoods of all the ages.”3
In 1948, the Invisible Presence directed Ronald Powell, whom Michael had come to know quite well in the post-war years, to sail for England to begin his mission. Powell confided to Michael and his Melbourne friends that his work was not in Australia. Settling in London’s Kensington, Ronald Powell, who legally changed his name to Richard, Duc de Palatine, established the Pre-Nicene Gnostic Church and shortly after the Brotherhood & Order of the Pleroma. Following his Master Teacher’s footsteps, Michael left Australia for England in the 1950s, moving on to France to study with the French Gnostic Church. On his return to Australia, Michael took charge of the Australian branch of the Brotherhood & Order of the Pleroma headed by his old teacher Richard, Duc de Palatine in London.
Fast forward to January 1991, the first Gulf War got underway when the US unleashed Operation Desert Storm with unprecedented airstrikes on Iraq. It was clear that the whole story of the war and the events leading to it were not being presented in the dominant mainstream media. A small group met in the library of the Arab Cultural Centre in Brunswick, Melbourne, to discuss the need for a publication to present the other side of the story. A magazine examining the hidden dimensions of world affairs and a forum for alternative views and ideas neglected in the mainstream media. But what should such a publication be called?
Michael came by unexpectedly, carrying with him a book by Nicholas Roerich. When told we were in search of a name for a new magazine, he quickly turned to a passage in the Roerich book which read, “The East has said that when the Banner of Shambhala encircles the world, verily the New Dawn will follow.”
“That’s your name – the New Dawn,” Michael said with assurance. At the very moment he spoke those words we heard Nina Simone singing Feeling Good on the radio playing in the background, with the refrain, “It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. It’s a new life for me. And I’m feeling good.” So New Dawn magazine was born.
Before he passed on in 2003, Michael assured us New Dawn magazine would endure for many years, the rightful heir and “flowering in current times” of work commenced by the spiritual pioneers who went before. He left a bequest to New Dawn which included magazines published by Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson and the writings of Richard, Duc de Palatine, among others.
Is there behind all men that live One all-containing Soul, Where symbols, apt for each one, give A transcript of the Whole?
We are not all the Self we seem; We are twined around with men Who once performed this mortal dream, And dream in us again. – ‘The Silent Land’ by Bernard O’Dowd, Australian socialist & New Thought advocate
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 197.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
Footnotes
1. “Australia! … Land of the Dawning” by Veni Cooper-Mathieson
2. Meeting With A Magus, The Untold Story of Richard, Duc de Palatine & The Brotherhood & Order of the Pleroma, New Dawn Special Issue Vol. 13 No. 2
What happens when the government itself becomes the country’s greatest purveyor of misinformation and disinformation – gaslighters of their entire populations?
And that same government is hell-bent on censoring the truth?
That is exactly what has happened, and is happening, in Australia.
Long known as the most illiberal of all Western democracies – as the greatest surveiller, manipulator and oppressor of its own population of any so-called democracy – Australia stepped straight off the cliff into a totalitarian abyss during the Covid era. And made headlines around the world for all the wrong reasons.
Without the right to freedom of assembly or freedom of speech in its Constitution, and without a Bill of Rights, the despotic conduct of Australian governments has run out of control, accelerated first by the overreach of the terror response post the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, and then by the heavy-handed government response to the Covid panic beginning in early 2020. Aided and abetted by a legacy media taken hostage by its funding sources, principally the government, either through direct grants, tax right-offs, or threats to withdraw advertising if they step out of line.
Not content with having a controlling hand in all the country’s mainstream media and untrammelled by common sense or any inconvenient social conscience, the Australian government is now introducing a new and entirely counterproductive level of censorship unseen at any time in the nation’s history.
On 25 June 2023, on what – appropriately – marked 120 years since George Orwell’s birth, the Australian government released an “Exposure Draft” of its The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023, for public and institutional comment.1
The public had until 6 August 2023, later extended by a fortnight, to make submissions to a government Inquiry on the Bill, which would give the media regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), yet greater powers. Private submissions will not be published.
Once a paper tiger, an obscure bureaucratic backwater, ACMA has grown dramatically in power over recent years and now has the power to control all online public discourse.
ACMA wields power over Australia’s entire communications spectrum, including television, radio, newspapers, digital platforms, and the internet.
The new laws include content aggregation services, connective media services, media sharing services and, somewhat broadly, “a digital service specified by the minister.” Targets include websites that collate information and present it to end users, self-produced information, search engines, instant messaging services, social media platforms and podcasting services.
Many Laws “in this space”
There have been flotillas of government overreach legislation launched on the public since the early days of the millennium; so many laws “in this space,” an expression beloved by bureaucrats, that it is hard to keep track. One piece of Malcolm Turnbull-era legislation the general public has never heard of is the innocuous-sounding Defence Trade Controls Act, a poorly drafted piece of catch-all legislation. Interpreted literally, it could make the use of mobile phones or internet banking illegal, both, obviously, using encryption.2
As usual, the government has only been going through the motions of a public inquiry and has zero interest in what the public thinks. The tight deadlines, the complexity of making a submission – well beyond the average punter – the lack of any genuine public information campaign and town hall meetings are all designed to ensure the voices of ordinary people are eliminated from the process.
The last people this government wants to hear from are its many incensed citizens, offended by the censorship they have repeatedly endured, at the Australian government’s request, on American-owned social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Subjects which the government has seen fit to censor or deplatform or outright ban have included Christian websites, opponents of mass immigration, critics of the current LGBTQIA+ obsessions, and in the past three years, thousands of often factually correct communiques on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, and the views of world medical experts dissenting from the Big Pharma line. Bill Gates, of course, is a protected animal online. Protected with our money. Not for us. And not for the public good. But purely for the benefit of the world’s elites.
All this is being done under the rubric of keeping Australians safe and under the auspices of the Orwellian named “eSafety Commissioner,” a World Economic Forum (WEF) acolyte now acting as the country’s Chief Censor, Julie Inman Grant.
Touted as the world’s first government regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online, there’s a reason why every other country on Earth has avoided going down this path. Censoring your citizens builds enormous stressors in the system, rapidly leading to chaos, state control, and a totalitarian nightmare.
Julie Inman Grant was appointed by the conservatives in 2017 when an already intensely disliked Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull dominated the political stage and took every opportunity possible to get himself on the nightly news.
Turnbull’s Totalitarian State Measures
Before becoming Prime Minister, Turnbull headed the Australian arm of the obscenely wealthy financial group Goldman Sachs, one of whose specialties is the creation of new markets, particularly renewables, an agenda Turnbull pursued with great diligence and which is now being equally diligently pursued by the Labor Party. Always follow the money. In this case the money of Goldman Sachs, which Turnbull re-joined after leaving politics.
As The Australian Financial Review describes the firm: “Its occasionally dodgy reputation among the public is outweighed by the deference it commands in circles of power. The network. The platinum Rolodex. Rich people who help powerful people get rich, and powerful people who make rich people powerful. It all stems from a culture of breathtaking exclusivity.”3
Malcolm Turnbull passed into law some of the most anti-democratic, anti-free speech anti-journalist legislation Australia, indeed the world, had ever seen. Under his watch, journalists became Persons of Interest under the Australian Security and Intelligence (ASIO) Act. He introduced Journalist Information Warrants, meaning the authorities can legally sweep all of a journalist’s communications. Created without any consultation with the industry, the legislation means if perchance a journalist discovers he, she, they, or them, discover they are the subject of such a warrant and publicises the fact, they can be sent to jail.4
As former Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Margaret Stone pointed out publicly, it is possible to be arrested and jailed for five years for breaching orders you did not even know existed in Australia.
It also became legal under Turnbull for the intelligence agencies to detain ten-year-olds and hold them incommunicado for a fortnight, without access to their families or to a lawyer. If a concerned family publicised the fact, they also face jail.5
Equally, under the Stasi chambers of anti-corruption commissions, a journalist can be hauled before a Commission and forced to reveal their sources. If they fail to comply, they can be jailed, and if they so much as tell a family member, a friend, a lawyer, or their own union that they have been thus summoned, they can also be jailed for up to two years.
That’s not democracy. That’s a totalitarian state.
The WEF & Our New eSafety Commissioner
It is no surprise that back in 2017 the fully committed globalist Malcolm Turnbull, with his extreme hostility to the profession of journalism and thereby to free speech, was responsible for the appointment of one Julie Inman Grant, the so-called eSafety Commissioner now more than willing to censor her fellow Australians.
Easy to find online is her 2022 call to recalibrate what we understand to be free speech at the World Economic Forum, an increasingly reviled organisation whose dystopian vision of humanity’s future has provoked widespread criticism. Any notion of a modern democracy being “Of the people for the people by the people” has long been dispensed with under the tutelage of the caricature of an evil despot, WEF head Klaus Schwab.
A contempt for the views and indeed the lives of ordinary people pervades everything the WEF does and is on full display at their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, frequented by some of the wealthiest, and some would argue most ruthless, dishonest, and unpleasant individuals on Earth.
“We are finding ourselves in a place where we have increasing polarisation everywhere,” Ms Grant told a WEF Forum in 2022. “Everything feels binary when it doesn’t need to be. I think we are going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online, from the freedom of speech to the freedom to be free from online violence. Or the right of data protection to the right to child decency.”6
Right, that makes sense.
Ms Grant’s biography reads like a holy writ of horror, a long dance with the world’s worst corporate entities, bookended by the rapid expansion of her powers which have made her the country’s unelected Chief Censor.
Reappointed for a five-year stint just before last year’s election, she has been fervently embraced by the so-called “progressives” of the left, whose desire to censor the views of ordinary Australians is outdoing even their censorious predecessors.
The World Economic Forum records: “Julie has extensive experience in the non-profit and government sectors and spent two decades working in senior public policy and safety roles in the tech industry at Microsoft, Twitter and Adobe. The Commissioner’s career began in Washington DC, working in the US Congress and the nonprofit sector before taking on a role at Microsoft. Julie’s experience at Microsoft spanned 17 years, serving as one of the company’s first and longest-standing government relations professionals, ultimately in the role of Global Director for Safety & Privacy Policy and Outreach. At Twitter, she set up and drove the company’s policy, safety & philanthropy programs across Australia, New Zealand & Southeast Asia.”
Translation: Ms Grant worked closely with Bill Gates, whose devastating role promoting unsafe, ineffective, and highly profitable “vaccines” during the Covid era has left him as a discredited and widely despised figure. She also worked with Twitter during the height of its suppression of freedom of speech at the request of American military and intelligence agencies.
At the height of government-propelled Covid hysteria, the World Economic Forum notes, “Julie oversaw significant increases in the eSafety office’s budget, increased staffing levels and launched the global Safety by Design initiative. As Commissioner, she has led work to stand up novel and world-first regulatory regimes under the new Online Safety Act 2021, with implementation of a sweeping new set of reforms beginning on 23 January 2022.”7
Well, that’s reassuring!!
The WEF also nominated Ms Grant as one of their so-called Agile 50: The World’s 50 Most Influential People Revolutionising Government. It says: “This list seeks to laud those politicians, civil servants and entrepreneurs driving agility in governments all around the world. Julie Inman Grant is Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. In this role, Grant leads the world’s first government agency committed to keeping its citizens safe online.”8
If you’re not reassured by having an unelected person closely associated with Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum acting as the nation’s Chief Censor and dedicated to “transforming government,” you’re not alone. As the saying goes, one of the only good things to come out of the Covid era is that the power structures have now been exposed for all to see.
Dangerous Legislation
The response to the government’s plans to expand the power of the Australian Communications and Media Authority to become our very own Ministry of Truth has been hostile and widespread, provoking an onslaught of criticism, with the bill being repeatedly described as Orwellian and labelled the most dangerous legislation ever introduced into the Australian parliament.
The laws would give the government the power to censor content they decide is “untrue, false or misleading,” declared Sky News host and favoured News Ltd personality Sharri Markson.
“A government entity cannot be allowed to decide what is misinformation,” she said. “They do not have first-hand contact with sources like journalists do. This is extremely dangerous territory.”
Paul Gregoire, winner of a New South Wales Council of Civil Liberties award for excellence in journalism, suggests the laws will be used to silence political dissent.
He writes: “The freedom of expression the internet has brought to the global community has always posed an issue for governments. This is especially so in this country, now that the mainstream media has become so compliant that ministerial press releases often dictate whole stories, as they’re taken as gospel.
“Of course, governments don’t lie, they produce propaganda. Could it simply be that the government of what TheNew York Times described as ‘the world’s most secretive democracy’ is seeking to empower itself?”9
Human rights lawyer Peter Fam described the misinformation bill as “a poorly drafted piece of proposed legislation” that poses a threat to the rights of free expression, self-determination, and freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
“Do we want a government department to have the power to impose civil and criminal penalties on users of the internet if they publish something that the government doesn’t like? That is what the ACMA bill would allow. It proposes an unacceptable and contemptible breach of the right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”10
Rukshan Fernando, one of the most talented journalists and broadcasters to emerge from the Covid era, says: “It has become very apparent that we in Australia are at the forefront of a battle for internet freedom, for freedom of speech, for the freedom of political communication. The right to share ideas that we in a modern society should have. The internet is now the town square. People get together online. The fact that people can do this is a very powerful part of our human nature. There is nothing more that our government would like to do than diminish the ability of people to have this form of communication. Government people will tell you they are doing it to keep you safe. I am telling you, there are many people out there who are looking at this, from all experts to the layman like you and me, and we can see it for what it is. Our government is running rampant.”11
Under the proposals, the Australian Communications and Media Authority could require digital platforms to keep records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and turn them over when requested.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said this would “essentially mean that the regulator is able to look under the hood of what the platforms are doing and what measures they are taking to ensure compliance.”12
The ACMA would also be able to request the industry to develop a “code of practice” covering measures to combat misinformation.
Violating the code could result in penalties up to $2.75 million dollars or two per cent of global turnover – whichever is greater.
And lastly, ACMA would be empowered to create and enforce its own industry standard. Penalties for breaching those standards could see companies paying up to $6.8 million or five per cent of their global turnover.
Frequently incandescent with rage, Paul Collits has come to the fore in recent years as one of Australia’s most perceptive and acerbic political commentators. As he has repeatedly pointed out, during the Covid era Australian governments gaslighted the entire population, lying about everything from the effectiveness of masks, social distancing and lockdowns to the safety of the vaccines administered to millions of the nation’s children.
He writes that the massive fines to be imposed on social media giants if they fail to comply with the Australian government’s agendas and censor or delete their users has reached the point of absurdity.
“Is the eSafety Commissioner – one Julie Inman Grant – coming for me? Or you? Well, she is coming for Elon Musk, threatening Twitter with a $700,000 a day fine unless the company shows that it is countering online ‘hate’.
“Like many, I had never heard of this person or her job until this week. I wish I hadn’t. This is a takeover by the State of our rights to determine what we hear, what we believe, what we say. It has nothing whatsoever to do with alleged hate speech.
“The loudmouthed threats to Twitter by Julie Inman Grant are merely a foretaste of what is to come. Who gets to define what is mis- and disinformation? This is THE question.”13
Covid-19 Censorship
As one of the best of a new breed of journalists actively reshaping Australia’s media landscape, Rebekah Barnett of Dystopian Down Under, observes that all these moves to censor the citizenry are highly ironic after revelations that the federal government censored thousands of online posts during the Covid era, many of which were factually correct.
Barnett reports that a Freedom of Information request by Senator Alex Antic revealed that from the start of the pandemic up to 15 Dec 2022, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) referred 4,213 social media posts that they argued were a breach of big tech platforms’ community guidelines.
“This comes as a surprise, given that the Department’s purview includes border security, counter-terrorism and immigration, but not public health,” notes Barnett. DHA representatives told Senator Antic that under the Scott Morrison Government, the Department was directed to “lean in on Covid dis- and misinformation.”14
Covid was the most politicised disease in Australian history, which meant that the Prime Minister was using both the bureaucracies and social media platforms to further his own political ends. It is clearly scandalous that the Australian government was censoring correct information to further the careers of politicians and the interests of Big Pharma, most notably Moderna and Pfizer.
Censored posts included claims that lockdowns were ineffective, now a widely accepted truism. Ditto mask mandates. Claims that the Covid-19 vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission were removed as “potentially harmful information” yet, as is now also well recognised, were correct.
Barnett writes: “Notably, the government will be exempt from the new Bill. The collusion of government with big tech, industry, academia and think tanks to steer public conversation and suppress inconvenient truths veers sharply from the democratic ideals that our societies were founded on. In a world where the experts were always right, this would only be a violation of our freedom of expression and thought. But as we know from the Covid era, the experts get it wrong, a lot, which makes the Censorship Industrial Complex a violation of truth itself.”15
Broadcaster Chris Kenny wrote in The Australian: “It is extraordinary and alarming to see the factual, arguable and reasonable social media posts the government censored. This was a secret stifling of proper debate and crushing of dissent over crucial government actions. Much of this censorship did not protect the public from misinformation. Rather, it protected the government from dissent and suppressed sensible discussion of the facts.”16
There has been not one word of concern from Australia’s Chief Censor, Ms Julie Inman Grant, over the revelations to parliament that the government was actively censoring correct information on Covid.
In other words, the government is free to lie.
The people are not free to tell the truth.
Why surveillance is such a serious threat
Australians now find themselves under surveillance, and therefore under some sort of state control, both physically and online, in their homes and their cars, on the streets and in the supermarket, and on the social media platforms that the majority of the population rely on for their news.
Despite the uber surveillance of the past few years, to this day people will shrug and say: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, why does it matter if you’re under surveillance?”
It matters because surveillance, in and of itself, alters human behaviour and severely impacts the culture.
Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s leading cyber security experts and author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, told this writer that mass surveillance profoundly affects liberty and justice, fairness and equality, and freedom.
Bruce Schneier
“When we are observed at all times we become conformist, and creativity suffers,” he said. “Fear, discrimination, oppression. Again and again, society forgets that targeting entire groups of people in a vain effort to find the few bad actors is both ineffective and toxic. There’s a reason why surveillance states aren’t the ones that flourish; it’s profoundly inhumane.”17
Books such as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power and Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet clearly demonstrate that for the Australian authorities, technology is the gift that keeps on giving, offering levers of social control they could once only have dreamed of.
A technology that evolved from the electronic footprints recorded by online searches during the earliest days of the internet now means you cannot enter a Woolworths or a Bunnings, you cannot drive down a public street or meet a friend on a street corner, without being under surveillance.
The technology does not merely track your whereabouts and online activity but can determine your mood, IQ, heart rate, and multiple personality traits. It can detect whether or not a woman is pregnant before she herself knows.
In recent years there has been a plethora of advances in biometric tracing and associated technologies, including facial recognition at scale, and rafts of legislation to accompany it.
Where does it all end? With the relaxation of euthanasia laws to include mental health issues, it is no longer science fiction to imagine a state where anyone who disagrees with climate change, mass immigration, gender diversity, or claims that vaccines are safe and effective, can be classified as mentally ill, and thereby a candidate for elimination. A surplus human. Easily dispensed with. And if anyone has the temerity to disagree with the state’s diagnosis and publicises the fact on social media, their voice will be systematically eliminated.
As US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the repeatedly deplatformed author of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, told a US House Committee inquiry recently: “Once you start censoring, you’re on your way to dystopia and totalitarianism.”
With the rapid evolution of brain-reading technology, there will soon be literally no place to hide.
And if you think this is all being done for your benefit, you really do need your head read. You are not in good hands.
John Stapleton is the author of the new book Australia Breaks Apart, which shines a light on one of the darkest episodes in Australian history, the COVID overreach that gripped the nation in madness between 2020 and 2022. Order your copy from online booksellers.
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 200.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. – Albert Einstein
A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm. – Stanislav Grof
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. – Martin Luther King Jr
We are a world at war. This is the first time in history that the war has not been fought on battlefields, or in the air, or on the water, for territories or principalities or rights to land and resources, for conquering other cultures and peoples, but for the mind, the heart, the soul, and the collective consciousness of humanity.
This war is an insidious and invisible all-out assault on individual freedom, thought, choice, and self-expression. What happens to the individual spreads like a pebble in a pond to everyone with whom the individual comes in contact. Humanity’s future is at stake, but no number of guns or tanks or nuclear weapons can win this war.
The outcome of this war will be determined by our ability, alone and together, to open our eyes, awaken to truth, and move from dark to light on a whole different battlefield – human consciousness.
We have been through this before – revolutions of consciousness that catapulted humanity out of quagmire. We have experienced cultural, political, and societal revolutions that propelled history forward. We have fallen prey to totalitarianism, fascism, and communism, but never on the scale we now face. It’s like we are battling a cult of massive proportions, one that may include those we love and care for.
Whether it’s the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, or the government push for digital wallets and enforced medical procedures, it’s all about control and the puppet masters are wealthier, more powerful, and more determined than ever to take control over every aspect of our lives: from what we eat to what we drive to where we live and what we spend our money on.
One thing that eludes their control is consciousness. Consciousness is the great mystery of existence. We know what it means – to be internally and externally aware of one’s existence. But we know little about its source and how it operates with the human brain to manifest perceptions and levels of awareness. Is consciousness outside the brain? Does it reside within the brain? Are our brains acting as transceivers of consciousness, taking in signals and sending them out?
Do we have an individual consciousness that is part of a larger collective consciousness and how much influence over that collective do our thoughts, actions, and behaviours have? While philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists debate these questions, we all agree that we perceive our world according to our own perspectives and from a greater perspective that is true for us all. We might all look at a horse and react to it differently based on our individual past experiences with horses, but we all agree it’s a horse.
Psychic Epidemics – The Fall Before the Rise
Indeed it is becoming more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. – Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life
Revolutions in higher consciousness are always predicated by periods of darkness and despair. The collective psyche must become so damaged it feels compelled to take action, break out of chains and through boundaries often imposed by external forces, and decide unequivocally to heal from an epidemic that, if not healed from, will destroy the host.
Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet is recognised as the world’s leading expert on the theory of mass formation psychosis as it applied to the COVID-19 pandemic. In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, he deconstructs the societal conditions that allow this collective psychosis to take hold.
During the recent COVID lockdowns, the work of Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet on ‘mass formation’ psychosis took centre stage as a way to explain the global insanity of the last few years. Desmet presented his theories about how free-floating fear and discontent serve to breed the kind of fear-based environment where common sense and cognitive functioning fly right out the window, replaced by a desperate need to find a common enemy upon which people could project that fear.
The article, “Mass Psychosis – How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill,” which appears on the Academy of Ideas website, describes this condition as “an epidemic of madness and it occurs when a large portion of a society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions. Such a phenomenon is not a thing of fiction.”
The article puts forth two historical examples: the American and European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century. “When a mass psychosis occurs, the results are devastating.” Many have seen this unfold in their personal lives and on the global stage, when common sense and logic no longer exist, and you are either in the cult or you are the enemy.
Killing of the Mind
This psychological warfare has what are called psychogenic triggers, the most common being a flood of negative emotions such as fear, anger, or anxiety that “drives an individual into a state of panic.” Sometimes this leads to a psychotic break and a literal “re-ordering of one’s experiential world which blends fact and fiction, delusion and reality, in a way that helps end the feelings of panic,” notes the Academy of Ideas. In other words, those afflicted by this epidemic adapt by becoming delusional, and no amount of fact or logic will wake them from their trance-like condition.
This non-stop attack on the individual psyche also infects society as a whole, and totalitarianism becomes the next easy step for those seeking ultimate power and control. With much of the populace operating in disempowered states of consciousness, controlling and manipulating them is easy.
Arthur Versluis in The New Inquisitions says: “Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralised state power coupled with the obliteration of human rights; in the totalised state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims.”
This objectification leads to menticide, a “killing of the mind,” notes psychoanalyst Joost Meerloo in his book, The Rape of the Mind, an analysis of brainwashing techniques and thought control in totalitarian states.
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systemised anew. It is an organised system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which [a ruling class] can imprint [their] own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those [they] plan to use and destroy,” writes Meerloo.
Meerloo expounds on the presence, at this point in time, of effective means to manipulate society: cell phones, social media, the Internet, propaganda-spreading bots, and censorship algorithms.
The addictive nature of these technologies means that many people voluntarily subject themselves to propaganda with remarkable frequency. Think Stockholm Syndrome and capture-bonding of the masses. Add to this social isolation, as we saw with COVID lockdowns (we now possibly face ‘climate change’ lockdowns & blackouts), and the human being becomes a remote-controlled robot.
Clearing Muddy Waters
The collective consciousness is coloured by the energy we each and all put into the world around us when faced with increasing chaos, disorder, crises, and challenges. The Chinese word for ‘crisis’ comprises two Chinese characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. There’s an opportunity to create a new order in times of chaos. But, of course, the puppet masters want to keep their power in any “new order.”
A Great Awakening and new consciousness revolution is pushing things forward in an accelerated manner. Its ultimate aim is to seek the light, but first, the shadows and darkness propel it from a point of stasis to the light at the end of a tunnel. That tunnel might be a long way off and involve a lot of suffering and pain, but the light is the key attractor point.
Our awareness as individuals in the body of humanity is rapidly changing and – though many members of that body grasp onto the ways of old – enough of us are tipping the scales in the other direction. We seek that light by our very nature because we know it lifts us. But only when we courageously break free of the capture-bonding to embrace our shadow selves can we truly become whole to advance the larger positive agenda of the consciousness revolution.
According to Jungian psychology, the shadow self is an archetype of the darker side of the unconscious mind composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings. When we ignore, deny, or avoid our shadow self, we project it onto others. That projection becomes the reality we exist within, made up of all the personality traits and emotions we find hard to accept because they don’t fit our egoic self-conception. It’s like each of us throwing poison into a pool we will all drink from, then each denying we threw in our share.
When we work with and embrace the shadow we can transform it into something beneficial for wisdom and growth – but only if we are courageous enough to undergo the alchemical process of intense self-examination. In today’s social media world, attention spans have diminished to the point of five-second video clips. Yet the idea of conscious evolution suggests that we all have the ability to become willing participants in the growth and expansion of culture, of society, of life itself.
We must become aware of the patterns of belief and behaviour that shape our internal and external worlds. These keep us from evolving out of our current state, one we might describe as a comfort zone of conscious awareness because we feel safe there, we know its stink and circumstance. We must do a lot of hard excavating work, like excising a cancerous tumour.
Moscow-born musician and writer Tessa Lena writes: “We, modern people, are very much like cells that are born into a body overtaken with metastatic cancer. We only know how to be a part of a sick body and, based on our immediate practical experience, we ascribe our starved state to ‘just how things are.’ But no. This is only how things are for a cell that exists in a body overtaken by metastatic cancer. This is not how things are by default. This is how they are now. And we are in a journey. We are swimming through sewage collectively, and we’ll get to our destination faster if we keep swimming forward…”
When we open our eyes and see the way things really are, including the dirt and muck we are currently swimming in, we can consciously choose to make effective and revolutionary change.
Levels of Consciousness
Dr. David R. Hawkins, author of the seminal Power Vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior, writes of the 17 levels of human consciousness we experience throughout our lives.
From lowest to highest, these levels of consciousness are shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride, courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace, enlightenment. Few ever achieve the top level. We are told that one person operating at the highest level can offset the damage done by millions operating below. But we don’t have to all be Buddhas to change the world to that degree. Small ripples have big results, too.
Sadly, too many people operate in the realms of shame, guilt, and other lower-level vibrations, not realising they affect other people and energy fields around them and thus, the collective.
Those who seek to keep us down in the dirt will never shine any light on this truth. Once we learn and see, we cannot unlearn or unsee. That alone is the biggest threat to totalitarians poised to imprison us in fifteen-minute cities, control our behaviour through trackable digital currencies, or new insidious schemes to depopulate the planet of “useless eaters.”
Lessons from the Quantum Field
Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, stated: “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
The bizarre world of quantum physics indicates that we are part of this intelligent Mind that creates the matrix of matter. An act of observation affects a particle’s trajectory and behaviour.
Quantum entanglement posits that two particles that come in contact with one another will continue to affect each other’s ‘spin’ even across vast distances. Could this be applied to life on a grander, cosmic scale? If we, too, are entangled, then we are all a part of the web of connectivity, and this does not exclude our enemies. Our individual level of consciousness influences everyone around us, as theirs does everyone around them, and so on and so on. Raise enough individuals up the scale to higher consciousness and we offset the damage of many who vibrate lower.
We cannot rely only on the high-vibers to save us. We must find our inner light and let it shine brightly right where we are. Two powerful flashlights can light up a dark room. A million or more can light up the entire world.
Writer, artist, and journalist Martin Geddes writes succinctly of the times at hand and what is required to rise to their challenges in his book, Open Your Mind to Change: A Guidebook to the Great Awakening.
Geddes unravels the forces behind the emergence of the ‘Great Reset’ – a plan offered up by the technocratic elite to maintain power – and the concurrent Great Awakening.
“The unacknowledged reality is that there is a spiritual war raging around us, and it can be seen in classical terms of light versus dark. The good news is that the light is winning, as it always eventually must. For however you describe and define it, the universe fundamentally is interconnected and seeks unity. Evil always collapses under its conceit that it can maintain separateness. It is like a physics of morality: it takes non-linear energy to compartmentalise us and resist the unifying power of love.”
Geddes refers to his own experiences during modern crises such as COVID, the 2020 US election, vaccine mandates, and the Ukraine conflict. A personal revolution of consciousness led him to a more illumined perspective on the ongoing spiritual war, and he is both hopeful and realistic:
“It took us 6,000 years to get into this mess, so fixing it won’t be quick or painless. However, just as there is a negative ‘occult’ power in the world that enslaves us, there are also unseen positive forces for good.”
Perhaps we cannot fight against what we don’t want. The “fighting against” creates resistance to the expansion of consciousness. It is negative energy, tight and constricted. It adds low-level vibratory energies into the collective quantum field, which is then shaped to become external reality.
Now is the time to awaken and choose a higher path that does not involve “warring against” but “welcoming into.”
Imagine duelling lighthouses so engrossed in trying to outshine each other in a “battle of the beams” that they forget to shine their lights outward to the sea and end up causing untold ships to crash against the rocky shores. Both are at fault because their focus was on trying to control the other, to suppress or oppress, rather than to combine energies and save a lot of lost souls.
We should strive to attain a higher state of consciousness, to grow and become and seek and speak truth, and to emit light and counter shadow. We don’t become the darkness we dissipate. Instead, we become the light that – when shined into the darkness – dissipates it.
If enough of us do this, there will be little darkness left to fight and dissipate. The Great Awakening is at hand.
If it could be demonstrated that substantially all the sacred traditions of the world – from the myths of the ancient Egyptians to those of the Norse, from the stories of the Olympian gods and goddesses of Greece to the Vedas of ancient India, to the legends of the Maori and of the Inca and the Maya and the shamanic cultures of Asia, and even to the ‘Bible stories’ found in the scriptures which made their way into the canon of the Old and New Testaments and influenced ‘Western civilisation’ for almost two thousand years – share an identical system of celestial allegory, designed to convey a similar esoteric message about the nature of human existence and the nature of the universe we inhabit, that fact would instantly become one of the most important discoveries of our time.
The ramifications of such a discovery would be profound.
First, it would raise the important question of how such an intimate kinship among cultures spanning essentially the entire globe, reaching to the most remote tribes in some of the world’s most isolated jungles, mountains, and steppes, and existing in time across a gulf of centuries (from the earliest ancient Sumerians and Egyptians to cultures which survived into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries with their traditional belief-systems largely intact), ever came to be. Nearly every possible explanation for a common esoteric system across so many cultures would overturn or radically upset the conventional historical paradigm, which is generally staunchly ‘isolationist’ and dead-set against theories positing ancient contact across oceans between cultures, and which denies the possibility of an advanced ancient civilisation or civilisations predating the known civilisations of history.
Second, a discovery showing that the original intention of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and the esoteric technique of celestial allegory they employ, is either very similar or identical to the intention and technique of the Greek, Norse, Maya, Maori and Egyptian myths, would immediately subvert the wall of separation which has been erected between the religions patterned on those Old and New Testament scriptures and the sacred systems of all the world’s ‘pagans’.
We have been led to believe, for at least the past seventeen centuries, that the faiths which sprang from the biblical texts were based upon historical events and historical figures, in contrast to the pagan mythologies peopled by deities and entities which personify forces of nature, and that this difference set the biblical faiths completely apart from the nature-worshipping pagan systems. Even those who deny the supernatural aspects of the biblical stories tend to fall into this trap (including the most up-to-date academics), searching for evidence of a ‘historical Jesus’ and wondering whether he might have had a ‘secret wife’, or asking questions about who Moses really might have been (perhaps Akhenaten?), when they would never dream of trying to discover the ‘historic’ Hercules or Horus or Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, or whether any of them might have had a ‘secret wife’ and descendants who are still alive today.
Third, such a discovery arouses the question of why such an unusual method of transmission and preservation was selected, and what exactly that message might be. And finally (for now at least – there are many other profitable questions which could be raised), there is the important question of how the esoteric understanding of ancient scriptures and myths was so thoroughly lost. This question is especially important when it comes to the interpretation of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, because the literalist interpretation (as opposed to the esoteric interpretation that the texts themselves invite) has played so dominant a role in world history – and continues to do so to this day.
In fact, it can be demonstrated quite convincingly that the myths of the world’s sacred traditions – including those in the biblical scriptures – consist almost entirely of celestial allegory. The system of celestial allegory is complex, and multi-layered, but a strong sense of its basic workings can be obtained through the consideration of the stories related to the zodiac wheel, one of the central aspects of the entire system.
A suspicion that the stories in the Old and New Testament might be celestial in nature can be raised by the simple fact that the tribes of Old Testament Israel, and the disciples called by Jesus in the New Testament gospels, are twelve in number. Indeed, it can be satisfactorily demonstrated that the scriptures of the Old Testament clearly indicate the twelve ‘tribes’ of Israel are intended to describe the twelve constellations (groupings of stars – ‘tribes’ of stars, if you will) of the zodiac, and the same for the twelve disciples of the New Testament.
The Esoteric Meaning of the Story of Samson
The demonstration of the connection (especially to someone sceptical of the theory) requires some extended discussion and diagrams, and it is much easier to examine some other well-known biblical stories, where the connection is immediately obvious and difficult to deny.
One of these is the story of Samson, the famous strong-man of the book of Judges, who is described in chapter fourteen as taking a trip “down” to Timnath to meet a woman “who pleased him well,” encountering a lion on the way down and slaying it with his bare hands. After a time he returned and found that the carcass of the lion was now buzzing with a swarm of bees and honey (presumably the bees built a hive in the carcass of the dead lion).
This event provides the material for a “riddle” which Samson puts to the Philistines, and they are unable to answer it. The fact that it is described as a riddle should cause us to consider it very closely – the text is practically inviting us to ask of the hidden meaning to this puzzle, and one is soon found if we consider the zodiac wheel. In the zodiac wheel (left), the sun’s progress through the year is indicated with the signs shown as they would have been during the ‘Age of Aries’ (for good and cogent reasons which lie outside the scope of this particular article).
Each year, due to the obliquity of the ecliptic (the earth’s tilt upon its axis), the path of the sun during the day traces an arc that is either above or below the line of the celestial equator. The celestial equator is the imaginary great circle which can be said to encircle the inside of the ‘heavenly sphere’ at a distance of ninety arc-degrees down from the north pole, or up from the south pole for observers in the southern hemisphere, although the rest of this discussion will take a northern-hemisphere-centric perspective, since the biblical texts (and the land of Egypt from whence they almost certainly originated) come to us from lands situated in the northern hemisphere. The sun’s ecliptic path crosses above this line at the point of the spring equinox each year (the March equinox for the northern hemisphere), after which days are longer than nights as the sun progresses towards the ‘summit’ of the summer solstice in June, and then the path crosses back down below that line at the point of the fall equinox, and the onset of the part of the year in which nights are longer than days.
In the above diagram, the line of the celestial equator is indicated as a horizontal line, above which are the months with days longer than nights, and below which are the months with nights longer than days. The direction of the sun’s progress throughout the year is indicated by arrows, and the points at which the sun crosses the line are marked each with a large ‘X’ indicating the two equinoxes.
From the point of summer solstice, at the top of the zodiac wheel, if the sun is going down towards the autumn equinox (the way Samson in Judges 14 is initially going down towards Timnath), he will first encounter the zodiac sign of Leo the Lion (just as Samson encountered a young lion on his way). Next, he will encounter the sign of Virgo the Virgin, who obviously corresponds to that beautiful woman of Timnath.
But what about the swarm of bees? As it happens, if Samson continued around the wheel and came back again to the point of Leo the Lion, the sign he would encounter just prior to reaching Leo would be Cancer the Crab (indicated in the somewhat archaic zodiac used above by a design that looks more like the animal we would call a lobster). It is an indisputable fact that the constellation of Cancer contains a shimmering cluster of stars known as the Beehive Cluster (and for this reason, ancient depictions of lions sometimes show them as having a bee coming out of their mouth or having a bee flying just in front of their dignified leonine visage).
Clearly, all of these zodiac correspondences in the event which furnished the material for the ‘riddle of Samson’ are unlikely to be sheer coincidence. It is difficult to argue that the events of the book of Judges involving Samson (and there are many more of them which have similar celestial correspondences) took place in the historical life of a literal human being, and just happened to match up perfectly with the constellations of the zodiac between Cancer and Virgo (with the directions ‘up’ and ‘down’ matching perfectly as well).
While it may be – just barely – possible to argue these events could be the accurate record from the life experiences of a literal, historical human being named Samson, the fact this same pattern of celestial allegory (often involving zodiac signs) is repeated over and over throughout the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (and the myths of the world) effectively puts the ‘coincidence’ argument to rest.
The Story of Abraham & Isaac
To see another example which argues strongly for a celestial and allegorical approach to the events of Old and New Testament scripture, it is first important to understand that the ‘crossing’ points of the equinoxes, where the sun’s daily path crosses the celestial equator (once upward at the spring equinox and once downward at the fall or autumnal equinox) were anciently allegorised as places of sacrifice. In the New Testament stories, of course, these ‘crossings’ would involve an actual sacrifice upon a cross. But in the Old Testament, we see a famous sacrificial scene in the near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham upon Mount Moriah.
The story is found in the book of Genesis, in the 22nd chapter. There, we are told that God directs Abraham to take his beloved and only son Isaac up a mountain in the land of Moriah and offer him up for a burnt offering. Abraham and Isaac dutifully trudge up the mountain, and Isaac makes note of the fire and the wood for the sacrifice, and asks his father, “but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (verse 7).
The famous sacrificial scene involving Abraham and son Isaac, as outlined in the book of Genesis, encodes an esoteric narrative not apparent to the casual reader. Woodcut engraving “The Sacrifice of Isaac” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1860.
Here again we clearly have the elements which point to an esoteric rather than a literal interpretation of the text. The fact that the characters in the story are trudging up the mountain indicates we should suspect the story involves the sun’s path up towards the summer solstice. Since equinoxes are often indicated with a sacrifice, the equinox on the way up towards the summit of the year would be the spring equinox, not the fall equinox.
The mention of ‘fire’ in the text is also indicative of the ancient symbology of the sun’s path or the ecliptic: in ancient Mithraic symbology, for instance, the equinoxes are indicated by two distinctive characters who each carry a torch, with one of them carrying his torch pointing upwards to indicate the spring equinox (sun climbing up towards summer solstice) and one of them carrying it pointing downwards to indicate the autumnal equinox (in which the sun is declining downwards towards winter). The identification of the sun’s ecliptic, and especially the equinox, with the symbol of fire is amply supported by the discussion and evidence presented by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in their magnum opus Hamlet’s Mill (1969).
Having identified some clues indicating this story may depict events at an equinox, and specifically at the spring equinox when the sun is “ascending the mount” which culminates at summer solstice, we read on to see if there are any confirming symbols which might correspond to a zodiac sign. Sure enough, as Abraham is in the very act of stretching forth his hand and taking the knife to slay his son, we are told that an angel of the LORD directs Abraham to stay his hand, and as Abraham “lifted up his eyes, and looked,” behold, he saw “a ram caught in a thicket by his horns” (verse 13). This miraculous appearance of a ram caught in a thicket is confirmatory evidence that the story of Abraham and Isaac ascending Mount Moriah is actually an esoteric allegory pointing to the sun’s passage through the spring equinox, which takes place right at the beginning of the sign of Aries, the Ram.
Goddess at the Gates of the Underworld
Such celestial allegories can be found throughout the scriptures of the Old Testament, as well as in the sacred traditions of other cultures the world over. We know that the crucifixion of Christ in the New Testament is also surrounded by equinoctial imagery, but in this case the primary imagery is autumnal. Some evidence includes the presence of Mary (or more than one Mary) at or near the base of the cross during the crucifixion – representative of the zodiac sign of Virgo the Virgin.
The constellation Virgo is associated with a sheaf of wheat and harvest season (marking as she does the autumnal equinox), with the star Spica traditionally associated with wheat. Virgo’s outstretched arm is marked by a star anciently designated Vindemiatrix, which literally means ‘grape-gatherer’, as if she is plucking the fruit of the vine. These two symbols, of grapes and of wheat, are representative of the autumnal activities of the harvest season, and we find them prominently repeated in the Last Supper meal of bread and wine, immediately prior to the crucifixion.
CONSTELLATION VIRGO
The constellation Virgo stands just at the edge of the autumnal equinox, the gateway to the lower half of the year, allegorised in sacred traditions around the globe as ‘the underworld’, or Hades, Sheol, and Hell. Appropriately enough, we see the ancient Apostles’ Creed asserts that immediately after Christ died, he “descended into hell,” although this assertion has confused some literalist Christian theologians who do not realise the scriptures encode the motions of the starry heavens.
In many myths around the world there is the figure of a maiden or a virgin or a goddess who stands at the gates of the underworld. This confirms that the esoteric pattern being described is extremely ancient – probably traceable to an ancient advanced civilisation prior to the dawn of any known historical civilisation – or at least to advanced or ascended sages from that pre-historic time. Often, this maiden or goddess greets the souls of the newly deceased or (in some cases) living heroes who are embarking upon a trip to the underworld, and in many cases she offers them wine or mead. All of this is in keeping with the pattern we are examining, and can be explained by the fact Virgo is located at the very ‘gates of the underworld’, and that she is associated with both grapes and the sheaf of wheat.
This gilt statue of the scorpion-goddess Selket from ancient Egypt was discovered standing guard over the canopic chest in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. This example of Selket (with Scorpion on her head) has Virgo’s outstretched arm.
We see her as Medea directing Odysseus on his quest to the realm of the dead, in the Odyssey of Homer. We see her as the ‘old goddess with the scorpion tail’ who greets the souls of the dead and gives them drink, found in the mythology of the Maya and many other Native American cultures according to de Santillana and von Dechend (Hamlet’s Mill, 243-244). The addition of a scorpion tail, of course, comes from the fact that the constellation Scorpio or Scorpius is found not far from Virgo, just beyond Libra and below the line of the celestial equator on the ‘underworld side’ of the fall equinox.
De Santillana and von Dechend note that this scorpion-goddess at the gateway to the realm of the dead and found in the mythology of the Americas is very reminiscent of the scorpion-goddess Selket from ancient Egypt, a beautiful gilt statue of whom was discovered standing guard over the canopic chest in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Of course, the conventional historians assure us there could have been no contact between the cultures of ancient Egypt and the civilisations of Central or South America, and yet each has a scorpion-goddess associated with the entry of souls into the realm of the dead.
A maiden with mead at the edge of the underworld is also present in Norse mythology, as discovered by Maria Kvilhaug and detailed in her important Masters’ dissertation The Maiden with the Mead (2004). All of these myths, from cultures found around the globe, undoubtedly allegorise the sign of Virgo at the gate of the autumnal equinox and the lower half of the year (the half which was depicted in ancient myth as Hell, Hades, or the underworld). Most of them involve the offering of mead or wine, beverages made from wheat or from grapes, both of which were associated with the constellation Virgo. Some of the goddesses incorporate the sign of Scorpio as well.
An outline of the priestess of Delphi (the Pythia) showing that she is directly related to the constellation Virgo.
We also see a Virgo-like figure in the Pythia of the important ancient Greek oracle at Delphi, who was depicted as being seated on a tripod near a great rift leading to the underworld containing the body of the dragon-serpent Python: the fumes which proceeded from that rift caused the Pythia to go into a trance-state in which she could relay knowledge from the realm of the gods. In the ancient art, this maiden was often depicted as holding a sacred laurel branch and a plate of sacred water from the nearby spring – both characteristics that can be associated with the outline of the constellation Virgo, as is the seated posture of the constellation. The circle of water corresponds to the dim outline of stars that can be seen in the Virgo constellation chart above the outstretched arm of the maiden, which is sometimes depicted in other myths as a tambourine, or other circular instrument.
Why Encrypt Esoteric Teachings?
The foregoing examples should suffice to establish the fact that the ancient mythologies of the world (of which the scriptures of the Old and New Testament were originally part) were intended to be understood allegorically and esoterically, rather than literally. This immediately triggers the question of why? Why would the ancients ascribe such importance to the motions of the heavens and the heavenly bodies, the rising and setting of the sun, moon, planets and stars each day and throughout the year?
The answer to that question is multi-layered, and it is profound. Essentially, the ancient sages wished to convey truths esoterically, truths so deep that they would tend to ‘trip up’ the logical intellect, the aspect of our thinking usually described as ‘left-brained’.
To illustrate the power of esoteric teaching, perhaps the best example is the famous scene from the original Karate Kid movie (1984), in which a frustrated Danny is finally fed up with waxing cars, sanding the floor, painting the fence (up, down), and painting the house (side-side). He confronts his teacher, Mr. Miyagi, and demands to know when he is going to finally be permitted to learn martial arts. The ensuing scene is so powerful that it has become world-famous: Mr. Miyagi demonstrates to Daniel-San that he has already been learning the secret art, in the motions of all his chores. Mr. Miyagi shows Daniel-San the ‘hidden teaching’ inside the motions of waxing the car, or painting the fence, and by unexpectedly launching ferocious attacks on Danny (accompanied by terrifying shouts), makes Daniel-San experience for himself that the martial art will actually work as advertised.
This is the essence of the esoteric: it is not designed to keep knowledge secret, but rather to impart knowledge. If Mr. Miyagi had tried to explain various blocks to Danny, Danny would probably have had all kinds of questions, and doubts, and ‘what if’s’. By first giving Danny the motions in a ‘disguised’ format (and ensuring that Daniel-San internalised those motions), Mr. Miyagi enabled Danny to experience them for himself, achieving what the ancients called gnosis – a type of knowledge that comes not from the intellect or from ‘believing’ but rather from experience.
It is quite possible – in fact it is almost certain – that the esoteric myth-systems of the world were designed to convey gnosis in much the same way. In fact, there is evidence these metaphors were not just a bunch of “stories built to hide the teachings about the motions of the stars,” but that the motions of the stars themselves were also allegories which convey profound teachings about the nature of human existence, and about the nature of the universe. Like the martial art Mr. Miyagi wanted to impart to Daniel-San, these profound teachings are of the sort that the intellectual ‘left-brain’ mind will choke upon.
There is evidence they teach a ‘holographic universe’ and a cosmology anticipating the discoveries of modern quantum physics by many thousands of years. Anyone who has encountered quantum physics knows it is very difficult to accept, and elicits the kind of incredulous questions that Mr. Miyagi would probably have gotten from Daniel-San had he tried to teach karate using ‘left-brain explanations’ instead of his esoteric ‘wax on, wax off’ method.
In brief, they were using the motions of the stars to teach about the existence of a spiritual realm which interpenetrates and coexists with the material realm, and to which one could travel using shamanic techniques in order to effect changes which would impact the material world or to gain knowledge that could otherwise not be accessed using strictly material or even ‘scientific’ methods.
If the ancient sages, or the ancient civilisation or civilisations which preceded the earliest-known civilisations of history such as Sumer and Egypt, possessed such an advanced cosmography, it may go a long way towards explaining their incredible architectural achievements, achievements which conventional historical paradigms are at a loss to explain.
How Did We Lose Access to the Ancient Wisdom?
This possibility brings us to the final question this incredible information raises: what happened to it? How did a large portion of humankind lose access to this ancient wisdom? Much of it seems to have been lost before the dawn of the earliest-known historical civilisations, although it is clear some portion of it survived in the ancient cultures of the world – in large part, perhaps, because of the exquisitely-crafted esoteric myths we have been discussing.
But somewhere along the line, the esoteric understanding of these myths was replaced by a literalist approach, and it appears this process was a deliberate subversion carried out by the originators of literalist Christianity in the case of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. There, the literalists were able to wage a successful campaign to silence, marginalise, or eliminate the gnostic teachers and the texts which taught a gnostic approach (the Nag Hammadi texts, found in the twentieth century buried beneath a cliff along the Nile River in Egypt, testify to this ancient campaign). Then, allied with the power of the Roman Empire, the literalists expanded their campaign against esotericism and the shamanic to other cultures of Europe.
Literalist Christianity later took this campaign across the oceans, to eradicate the ancient wisdom in the cultures of the Americas, and later into Polynesia and even into Asia, including the civilisations of India, China, Tibet, and others.
There is much more to this story, and it is one whose ending has yet to be written. There is no doubt the ancient wisdom entrusted to the human race is esoteric in nature, and attempts to suppress this truth – often through violence, threats, and deliberate falsehood – have caused tragic loss and suffering throughout human history since at least the rise of literalism during the first through fourth centuries CE. Stemming that violence, and healing that damage, will require courage, and it will require wisdom. The first steps, perhaps, include understanding this ancient esoteric system, and the profound wisdom the sages of pre-history intended it to convey to us and to future generations.
Waiting for the Apocalypse, the Prologue to Volume One of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, ends with a quote from (retired) Major General Shlomo Gazit, the best and the brightest of Israel’s Directors of Military Intelligence.
Over coffee one morning in early 1980, I took a deep, Gentile breath and said to him: “Shlomo, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all a myth. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger.” Through a sad smile he replied: “Alan, the trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda.”
In this article for New Dawn I’m going to put some flesh on the bone of that statement to explain in tight and possibly inadequate summary how the Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel became its own worst enemy and a threat not only to the peace of the region and the world, but also to the best interests of Jews everywhere and the moral integrity of Judaism itself.
The key to understanding is knowledge of the difference between Judaism and Zionism.
Judaism is the religion of Jews, not “the” Jews because not all Jews are religious. Like Christianity and Islam, Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. As Nazi holocaust survivor Dr Hajo Meyer states in his 2007 book, An Ethical Tradition Betrayed: The End of Judaism, these values and principles put Jews “at the forefront of humanitarian and socially constructive endeavours” throughout much of history. (A sort of light unto nations, I add, until Zionism came along).
Because of Alan Hart’s special relationships with leaders on both sides of the Middle East conflict, in 1980 he found himself directly involved in the covert diplomacy of conflict resolution. (Top) Meeting Yasser Arafat, (above left) photo card inscribed to Alan from Golda Meir when she was Prime Minister of Israel, (above) photo card to Alan from US President Jimmy Carter (and wife Rosalynn).
Even the shortest definition of Zionism must begin by recognising that there is what might be called spiritual Zionism and political Zionism. In the sense that they look to Jerusalem as their spiritual capital or centre, all Jews who are religious could regard themselves as spiritual Zionists. The Zionism of my book’s title and substance (and this article) is political Zionism, hereafter Zionism.
It is Jewish nationalism in the form of a sectarian, colonial enterprise which, in the process of creating in the Arab heartland a state for some Jews, mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing, made a mockery of, and demonstrated contempt for, Judaism’s moral values and ethical principles.
Judaism insists that the return of Jews to biblical Israel must await the Second Coming of the Messiah. Zionism, when it declared itself to be in existence, in Switzerland in 1897, said, in effect: “We can’t wait for Him. Zionism is the Messiah.” As Israel’s longest-serving Director of Military Intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi, noted in his seminal book Israel’s Fateful Hour (published in English in 1986), the return of Jews to the land of the ancient Hebrews by the efforts of man and thus Zionism was “proscribed” by Judaism. Very few Jews today are aware of this, but it is a fact.
Judaism & Political Zionism are Total Opposites
Supporters of Israel right or wrong conflate Judaism and Zionism because the assertion that they are one and the same enables them to claim that criticism of the Zionist state of Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Often, almost always these days, the accusation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is a form of blackmail intended to silence criticism of, and suppress informed and honest debate about, the Zionist state and its policies. The reality is that Judaism and political Zionism are total opposites, and knowledge of the difference is the key to understanding two things:
1) Why it is perfectly possible, with good reason on the basis of all the facts, to be passionately anti-Zionist – opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise – without being, in any way, shape or form anti-Semitic. (It’s worth noting that the most perceptive and devastating critics of Zionism were and are Jews).
2) Why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardcore Zionist few in Palestine that became little Israel and then Greater Israel.
Most Arabs and other Muslims have always known the difference between Judaism and Zionism. And it can be said without fear of contradiction that throughout much of their history, Arabs and other Muslims were the best protectors of Jews in need of sanctuary. It was Zionism’s colonial enterprise that poisoned the relationship, but not to the point, yet, at which most Arabs and other Muslims blame all Jews for Zionism’s crimes.
Zionism’s Big Lies
Adolf Hitler best defined “The Big Lie.” It was, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “a lie so enormous that people would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Zionism is the master of this art. Its narrative about the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine – the narrative upon which the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed – is one big propaganda lie after another.
Zionism’s first big lie was in its recruiting slogan which described Palestine as “A land without people for a people without land.” In reality, there were hundreds of Arab settlements in Palestine. And Haifa, Gaza, Jaffa, Nablus, Acre, Jericho, Ramle, Hebron and Nazareth were flourishing towns. And Jerusalem was a flourishing city. As many a traveller had noted, the hills of Palestine were painstakingly terraced, and irrigation ditches crisscrossed the most fertile part of the land. The products of the citrus orchards and olive groves were known throughout the world. Cottage industries were much in evidence. It’s true that Palestine was underdeveloped, as was all of the Arab world and much of the whole world; but uninhabited, uncultivated and uncivilised Palestine was not. Except in Zionist mythology.
It also has to be said that most if not all of the Jews who went to Palestine in answer to Zionism’s call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews. The incoming Zionist Jews were mainly foreign nationals of many lands, descended from those who became Jewish by conversion to Judaism centuries after the fall of the ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel and what is called the “dispersal” into “oblivion” of its people. The notion that there were, are, two entire peoples with an equally valid claim to the same land is historical nonsense. The relatively few Jews with a valid claim were the descendants of those who stayed in Palestine through everything. They numbered only a few thousand at the time of Zionism’s birth; they regarded themselves as Palestinians; and they were fiercely opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise – because they rightly feared that it would make them as well as the incoming, alien Zionist Jews enemies of the Arabs among whom they had lived in peace and security.
According to the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This, too, is nonsense.
In the first place, the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine, did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. It was a formula for a massive injustice. Some 56.4 per cent of Palestine was to be given for a Jewish state to a people (many of them recently arrived alien immigrants) who constituted 33 per cent of the population and owned 5.57 per cent of the land.
But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect and would not become policy or confer even spurious legitimacy unless approved by the Security Council.
The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration! Why not? Because the US knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force, and US President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had been driven out by Zionist terrorism and washed its hands of the problem – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the US was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what to do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.
The truth of the time was that the Zionist state had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist unless… Unless it was recognised and legitimised by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law, only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not take from the Palestinians by force.
Foundational Myth “a sheer fabrication”
Zionism’s second big lie was in its explanation of how the Palestinian refugee problem was created. According to it, the 700,000 Arabs who became refugees left their homeland voluntarily, in response to a call from Arab leaders for them to leave a clear field of fire for the incoming Arab armies. The truth about how three-quarters of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine were disposed of their land, their homes and their rights is now fully documented in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Professor Ilan Pappe, one of Israel’s leading “revisionist” (which means honest) historians. He describes Israel’s foundational myth (the Palestinians left voluntarily) as “a sheer fabrication.” And he documents the planning and implementation of Zionism’s ethnic cleansing policy – a systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres.
In 1940, when Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews was turning to extermination, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonisation Department in Palestine, wrote a secret memorandum headed A Solution to the (Jewish) Refugee Problem. In it, he said: “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left!” (In Israeli terminology, then and today, “transfer” is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing).
On 17 November 1948, Aharon Cizling, Israel’s first minister of agriculture said the following at a cabinet meeting: “Now the Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken.” But having spoken those words, he agreed that the Zionist state’s crimes should be covered up.
Zionism’s colonial enterprise would not have attracted enough Jewish financial and political support and would have been doomed to failure but for the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust. Prior to the extermination of six million Jews – a European crime for which the Arabs, effectively, were punished – most Jews of the world were not interested in Zionism’s colonial enterprise, and the most informed and thoughtful of them were strongly opposed to it.They believed it to be morally wrong. They believed it would lead to unending conflict. And they feared that if Zionism was allowed by the major powers to have its way, it would one day provoke anti-Semitism which could threaten the wellbeing and perhaps even the survival of Jews everywhere. In 1986 Harkabi gave this fear a fresh airing when he wrote (my emphasis added):
“Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism. It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.”
The core assertion of Zionism’s version of history – this is the third big lie – is that poor little Israel has lived in danger of annihilation – the “driving into the sea” of its Jews.
Shlomo Gazit
The truth of history, which flows fully documented through my book and is implicitly endorsed in its Prologue by Shlomo Gazit as quoted above, is that Israel’s existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Zionism’s assertion to the contrary was the cover that allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most – in America and Western Europe – with having its aggression perceived as self-defence and presenting itself as the victim when, actually, it was and is the oppressor.
Despite their stupid rhetoric to the contrary which enabled Zionism to sell its lies as truth, Arab leaders did not have either the ability or the intention to destroy the Zionist state at birth. When they ordered elements of their armies into Palestine in response to Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence on 14 May 1948, their only intention was to hold the territory assigned to the Arab state of the vitiated partition plan – to prevent the Zionists from grabbing it, too.
During a 30-day truce that ended on 9 July, the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) came formally into being with 60,000 men added to its fighting strength. When the first Arab-Israeli war was resumed, it was no contest. Some 90,000 well-armed Israelis were taking on not more than 21,000 Arab soldiers and irregular forces who were without the ammunition and weapons to offer more than token resistance. From that point on it was the Arab (Palestinian) state of the vitiated partition plan that was facing the prospect of annihilation, not the Zionist state. And from that point on Israel was the Goliath. (US President John F. Kennedy tried and failed to prevent it from becoming a nuclear-armed Goliath).
The Six Days War & Israel’s Warhawks
I write and speak as an eyewitness to the Six Days War of June 1967. For ITN, I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis; and because of the quality of my contacts – they included one of the founding fathers of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence – I was privy to some of the plotting behind closed doors on the Israeli side in the countdown to war.
Nearly four decades on, almost all Jews everywhere and most other people still believe that Israel went to war either because the Arabs attacked (that was Israel’s first claim), or because the Arabs were intending to attack (thus requiring Israel to launch a pre-emptive strike). The truth about that war only begins with the statement that the Arabs did not attack and were not intending to attack. The complete truth includes the following facts.
Israel’s prime minister of the time, the much-maligned Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. Nor did his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. They wanted only very limited military action, an operation far, far short of war, to put pressure on the international community to cause Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser to re-open the Straits of Tiran. (Nasser was, in fact, looking forward to that pressure to save face).
Moshe Dayan
Israel went to war because its military and political hawks insisted that the Arabs were about to attack. They, Israel’s hawks, knew that was nonsense – years later some of them admitted that much, but at the time they promoted it to undermine Eshkol by portraying him to the country as weak. The climax to the campaign to rubbish Eshkol was a demand by the hawks that he surrender the defense portfolio and give it to Moshe Dayan, Zionism’s one-eyed warlord and master of deception. Four days after Dayan got the portfolio he wanted, and the hawks had secured the green light from the Johnson administration to smash Egypt’s air and ground forces, Israel went to war.
What actually happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup, executed quietly behind closed doors without a shot being fired. For Israel’s hawks, the war of 1967 was the unfinished business of 1948/49 – to create Greater Israel with all of Jerusalem as its capital. (In reality, Israel’s hawks set a trap for Nasser and, for reasons of face, he was daft enough to walk into it).
The single most catastrophic happening of 1967 was not, however, the war itself and the creation of Greater Israel. At America’s insistence, and with the eventual complicity of the Soviet Union, it (the single most catastrophic happening) was the refusal of the Security Council of the United Nations to condemn Israel as the aggressor. If it had done so, the history of the region and the world might well have taken a very different course. There might well have been a negotiated end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a comprehensive peace within a year or two.
Question: Why, really, was it so important from the Zionist state’s point of view that it not be branded the aggressor when actually it was? The full answer is in my book, the short version of it comes down to this.
Aggressors are not allowed to keep the territory they take in war. They have to withdraw from it unconditionally. This is the requirement of international law and, also, a fundamental principle the UN is committed to upholding. Eisenhower was the first and last American president to uphold it with regard to Israel when he read the riot act after it had colluded with Britain and France in 1956 to invade Egypt. That is on the one hand.
On the other hand is the generally accepted view that when a state is attacked, is the victim of aggression, and then goes to war in genuine self-defence and ends up occupying some (or even all) of the aggressor’s territory, the occupier has the right, in negotiations, to attach conditions to its withdrawal.
In summary, it can be said that although Security Council Resolution 242 of 23 November 1967 did pay lip service to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” it effectively put Zionism in the diplomatic driving seat. By not condemning Israel as the aggressor and thereby giving Israel the scope to attach conditions to its withdrawal, Resolution 242 effectively gave Israel’s leaders and the Zionist lobby in America a veto over any peace process.
In 1956, when he insisted Israel withdraw from the Sinai without conditions, President Eisenhower said that if a nation that attacked and occupied foreign territory was allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal, “this would be tantamount to turning back the clock of international order.” That’s what happened in 1967. President Johnson, preoccupied with and distracted by the war in Vietnam, and mainly on the advice of those in his inner circle who were hardcore Zionists, turned back the clock of the international order. And that effectively created two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one set for all the nations of the world excluding Israel, which were expected to behave in accordance with international law and their obligations of members of the United Nations; and one set for Israel, which was not expected to behave, and would not be required to behave, in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the United Nations. That double-standard is the mother and father of Arab and all other Muslim hurt, humiliation and anger.
And that’s where we still are today, with two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations. But it’s no longer one set of rules for the Zionist state of Israel only. Under President George “Dubya” Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, America and Britain became associate members of Israel’s Club of One and demonstrated complete contempt for international law. They turned back the clock on it.
On 7 October 1973, it was the Arabs – the Egyptians and the Syrians – who initiated the fighting. But their intention was only to liberate (take back) territory Israel occupied in 1967, in Egypt’s case only a small amount of it, to give US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the opportunity to get a peace process going – a peace process in which Israel had no interest prior to that war. Even Kissinger had been troubled by Israel’s intransigence and the threat he believed it posed to America’s and Israel’s own real and best interests in the region. (In Volume Two of my book I tell the story of Kissinger’s collusion with Egypt’s President Anwar El Sadat and how and why the war for peace they both wanted went seriously wrong when Israel’s General Ariel Sharon decided to teach Kissinger as well as Sadat a lesson).
Israel, not the Arabs, Sabotaged Peace Efforts
Zionism’s fourth big lie, repeated ad nauseam over the years, was that Israel had “no partners,” Palestinian or other Arabs, for peace. The most detailed and fully documented demolition of this lie is in The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World by Professor Avi Shlaim, another of Israel’s leading revisionist historians. On the basis of his examination of de-classified Israeli state papers, other documents and conversations with key players, Avi concluded that it was Israel, not the Arabs, which spurned opportunity after opportunity to be serious about making peace.
Take, for example, Egypt’s President Nasser. According to Israel and its most zealous French, British and American supporters, Nasser was the “Hitler on the Nile.” In reality, Nasser was looking and working for an accommodation with Israel from almost the moment he came to power in a bloodless coup in 1951. He authorised a low-level, secret exploratory dialogue with Israel and subsequently had secret exchanges of his own, some in writing, with Israeli Foreign Minister and briefly Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who was probably the only completely rational leader Israel has ever had.
Gamal Abdel Nasser
As I discovered during the research for my book Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? it was Nasser, after the 1967 war, who convinced Yasser Arafat that if the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) wanted to be taken seriously by the major powers of the West and the Kremlin, it had to be “realistic.” What did that mean? Arafat and his leadership colleagues would have to come up with a policy for an accommodation with Israel inside its pre-1967 borders, in accordance with the letter and spirit of Resolution 242.
It took Arafat ten long years to persuade first his Fatah leadership colleagues and then the PNC (Palestine National Council, more or less the Palestinian parliament-in-exile) to back his policy of politics and unthinkable compromise with Israel. The compromise he was requiring his people to make was unthinkable to almost all at the outset because it required the Palestinians not only to legitimise Israel’s existence and make peace with it in return for only 22% of the land they were claiming with right, legal and moral, on their side. It also required them to legitimise Zionism’s theft of the other 78% of their land.
Towards the end of 1979 when the PNC voted on and approved Arafat’s policy of politics and compromise, I had the first of many meetings with him. As he came to the end of the story of his struggle to sell compromise, he extracted a notebook from his hip pocket. “It’s all here,” he said with triumph. “Let me tell you the figures… 296 votes for the mini-state formula, only four against. Imagine that! We have turned our people around. No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. Now we are prepared to live alongside them in a little state of our own. It is a miracle.”
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, US President Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony on 13 September 1993. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a zealous Zionist, which helped kill off the “peace process.”
Arafat himself was the miracle worker. No other Palestinian leader could have done it. With his policy of politics and compromise endorsed by the highest decision-making authority on the Palestinian side, Arafat was then at the height of his powers. He could have delivered the compromise necessary from his side for peace on terms that any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. The problem was that Arafat did not have a partner for peace on the Israeli side. The most successful terrorist leader of modern times, Menachem Begin, was in power in the Zionist state; and he was stuffing the occupied West Bank with settlers to make it impossible for any future Israeli government to withdraw for peace. And that was a manifestation of an underlying truth – Zionism is not interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. (Arafat did eventually have a partner for peace on the Israeli side, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but he was assassinated by a zealous Zionist who knew exactly what he was doing – killing the peace process).
The political reality to be faced can be summarised as follows. The governments of the major powers are never going to use the leverage they have to call and hold Zionism to account for its crimes unless and until they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion – by demonstrations of real democracy in action. The problem throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian or Western world is that citizens, the voters (most of them), are too uninformed to do the pushing because they’ve been conditioned by the corporate-controlled mainstream media to believe a version of history that is simply not true. It follows, or so it seems to me, that if the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped, the name of the game must be empowering the citizens of nations to make democracy work for justice and peace in the Middle East. That’s why I devoted more than five years of my life to researching and writing Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.
The above article originally appeared in New Dawn 113 (Mar-Apr 2009). Alan Hart passed away at the age of 75 in 2018, but you can still obtain his valuable and powerful books, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (Volumes 1, 2 & 3), from claritypress.com/book-author/alan-hart.
