Reincarnation

It is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once. 

Voltaire 

Do human beings reincarnate? To think that one's personality could survive biological death (which would imply that the body is not essential to one's full personality) and then subsequently "take up" a new body for some purpose or other seems philosophically fantastic. Nevertheless, in 1982 a Gallup poll found that nearly one in four Americans believed in reincarnation; in 1980 the London Times had reported the results of their own poll in which 29 percent of the British population surveyed expressed a belief in reincarnation. The emerging popularity of the belief, however, is no clear sign that there is any truth to it. Such growing popularity only raises the question of its truth. After all, the National Science Foundation recently conducted a national poll and announced that approximately 30 percent of all the American adults surveyed either did not know or agreed with the statement that the sun goes around the earth.

Even so, serious philosophers no less famous than Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Giordano Bruno, and Cicero have argued for reincarnation on purely philosophical grounds. Of course, most people who believe in reincarnation do so primarily for religious, rather than scientific or philosophical, reasons; and this sort of motivation is apparent as far back as the ancient Pythagoreans, for whom belief in reincarnation (or transmigration of souls) was simply a matter of religious faith.

Quite apart from the religious context, however, belief in reincarnation has not prompted much serious philosophical discussion since Plato. This is not surprising. The most interesting evidence warranting such a discussion did not appear until quite recently. But even so, philosophers have still not yet noticed this evidence. They have been preoccupied with what they consider the more pressing question in the area of inquiry surrounding death, namely, whether we can successfully identify human personality with the corruptible body. There is, of course, no logically necessary connection between the answer to this question and reincarnation. Presumably, even if human personality should turn out to be identified with some nonphysical and naturally incorruptible principle (like a soul), the truth of reincarnation would not follow from that fact alone. One's personality could in some way survive one's biological death and yet not reincarnate. So, even if contemporary philosophers of mind do establish the falsity of mad-dog materialism, the most that would thereby be granted is the possibility of reincarnation as one of the ways in which human personality might survive biological death.

Curiously and interestingly enough, however, the belief in reincarnation offers the best available scientific explanation for certain forms of observable behavior not capable of explanation by appeal to any current scientifically accepted theory of human personality. In the conclusion to this chapter, one of the points that will emerge strongly is that, from a philosophical point of view, the belief in reincarnation is certainly as well established as (if not better than), say, the belief in the past existence of dinosaurs.

Anyway, in this chapter we will assume at the outset something we shall see proven in the conclusion of this book, namely, that belief in personal survival after death is certainly neither logically absurd nor factually impossible. Given this assumption, let us examine the best evidence for reincarnation. For reasons we shall explore later, many philosophers and scientists manage to bypass this evidence while seeking to determine whether human beings are more than just physical bodies.

Stevenson's Argument for Reincarnation, and Some Compelling Cases

The strongest argument for reincarnation has been offered by Ian Stevenson, primarily in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of  Reincarnation.1 Throughout most of this chapter, we shall review that argument, say why it is convincing, and confront various objections to it.Basically, Stevenson's argument is that the belief in personal reincarnation offers the best available explanation for a large body of data that, until recently, has been generally ignored or rejected for various unacceptable reasons. The body of data consists in a number of case studies (described in great detail in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and elsewhere), many of which typically and ideally share at least the following core features:

A. A young person, usually between the ages of three and nine, claims to remember having lived an earlier life as a different person, and provides his (or her) parents with a detailed description of his alleged earlier life—a description including, but not restricted to, where and when he lived, his name, the names and characteristics of his various relatives, highly selective historical events that could be known only by the person he claims to have been in that earlier life, the way he lived, and the specific details of the way in which he died.

B. These memory claims consist of two types: (1) those that admit of simple verification in terms of available information; and (2) those that admit of verification but not in terms of available information. For example, if a young person from Evanston, Illinois, claims to remember having lived an earlier life as one Lazarus Smart, born in approximately 1630 in Boston, Massachusetts, and the son of Mary and Abraham Smart who lived on Boylston Street during the Boat Fire of 1642, then the fact that one Lazarus Smart did exist under this description could be verified easily in terms of available birth records, historical documents, and other information publicly accessible. But if the same person claims to recall having secretly buried a silver spoon with the initials L.S. in the concrete pier under the northwest corner of the Boylston Street Church when it was rebuilt in 1642, then this is the sort of claim that would be verifiable but not in terms of known or existing information.

C. The person claiming to remember having lived a past life, as well as the person's immediate (present) family members, are interviewed (with near-verbatim notes taken and some tape recordings) at great length, and asked to provide information one would expect to emerge if indeed the subject did live that earlier life. Although the majority of the person's memories are involuntary and spontaneous (and hence not often the direct response to questions of the interviewers), the relevant memory claims and information are provided during the interviews.

D. Investigators independently confirm both the spontaneous and the solicited memory claims; and in some cases (those cases in which the person's claims refer to extant past-life family members with whom he was intimate), past-life family members are interviewed and led to confront the subject, who proceeds to remind them of various nonpublic details of the life they spent together.

E. The person claiming to remember having lived a past life also manifests certain skills (such as speaking fluently a foreign language or dialect, or playing an instrument) that the person in the alleged earlier life had, but that the person claiming to have lived the earlier life could not have acquired or learned in this life. For example, if a person claims to remember having lived a life in medieval Sweden, and in a hypnotic trance he begins to speak and describe his earlier life in a difficult but clear dialect of medieval Swedish, then that person (assuming we can document that he has not learned or been exposed to the study of medieval Swedish) manifests a skill not acquired in this life.

F. Deception, or the real possibility of deception, by way of fraud or hoax on the part of the person claiming to have lived a past life cannot be substantiated.

Stevenson's basic argument says that for cases with characteristics A through F the only available explanation that plausibly fits the data is belief in reincarnation. Before discussing all available objections to this argument, however, we need to examine a few particular cases (some of them Stevenson's) that have the characteristics A through F.

Memory Evidence and Acquired Skills 

Certainly some of the most compelling evidence for reincarnation occurs in cases that, as described in Stevenson's ideal-typical characteristics, offer detailed memory claims substantiated by extant past-life family members. The first case we will examine— the Bishen Chand case—involved just such evidence. The second— the Mrs. Smith case—is more problematic in that the past life remembered took place centuries ago. However, historical records (some of them extremely obscure or only recently available) have been used to verify many of the surprising memory claims of the subject.

Both cases exhibit another of Stevenson's ideal-typical characteristics, namely, the manifestation of skills acquired by the pastlife person but not acquired by the present-day subject in this life. As explained later in this chapter as well as in Chapter 3 in our discussion of possession, this characteristic carries a great deal of evidential weight in replying to those sceptics who see these cases as evidence of paranormal knowledge rather than reincarnation.

The Bishen Chand Case 

Bishen Chand Kapoor was born in 1921 to the Gulham family living in the city of Bareilly, India. At about one and a half years, Bishen began asking questions about the town of Pilibhit, some 50 miles from Bareilly. Nobody in his family knew anybody in Pilibhit. Bishen Chand asked to be taken there, and it became obvious that he believed he had lived there during an earlier life.2As time passed, Bishen Chand talked incessantly of his earlier life there in Pilibhit. His family grew increasingly distressed with his behavior. By the summer of 1926 (when he was five and a half years old), Bishen Chand claimed to remember his previous life quite clearly. He remembered that his name had been Laxmi Narain, and that he had been the son of a wealthy landowner. Bishen claimed to remember an uncle named Har Narain, who turned out to be Laxmi Narain's father. He also described the house in which he had lived, saying it included a shrine room and separate quarters for women. Frequently, he had enjoyed the singing and dancing of nautch girls, professional dancers who often functioned as prostitutes. He remembered enjoying parties of this sort at the home of a neighbor, Sander Lal, who lived in a "house with a green gate." Indeed, little Bishen Chand one day recommended to his father that he (the father) take on a mistress in addition to his wife.

Because Bishen Chand's family was poor (his father was a government clerk), Bishen Chand's memories of an earlier and wealthier life only made him resentful of his present living conditions with the Gulham family. He sometimes refused to eat the food, claiming that even his servants (in his former life) would not eat such food.

One day Bishen's father mentioned that he was thinking of buying a watch, and little Bishen Chand said, "Pappa, don't buy. When I go to Pilibhit, I shall get you three watches from a Muslim watch dealer whom I established there." He then provided the name of the dealer.

His sister Karnla, three years older than he, caught Bishen drinking brandy one day (which finally explained the dwindling supply of alcohol kept in the house for medicinal purposes only). In his typically superior way, the child told her that he was quite accustomed to drinking brandy. He drank a good deal of alcohol in his earlier life. Later, he claimed to have had a mistress (again showing he knew the difference between a wife and a mistress) in his former life. Her name, he said, was Padma; and although she was a prostitute, he seemed to have considered her his exclusive property, because he proudly claimed to have killed a man he once saw coming from her apartment.

Bishen Chand Kapoor's memory claims came to the attention of one K. K. N. Sahay, an attorney in Bareilly. Sahay went to the Kapoor home and recorded the surprising things the young boy was saying. Thereafter, he arranged to take Bishen Chand, along with his father and older brother, to Pilibhit. Not quite eight years had elapsed since the death of Laxmi Narain, whom this little boy was claiming to have been in his earlier life.

Crowds gathered when they arrived at Pilibhit. Nearly everyone in town had heard of the wealthy family and its profligate member Laxmi Narain who had been involved with the prostitute Padma (who still lived there), and how in a jealous rage Laxmi Narain had shot and killed a rival lover of Padma's. Although Laxmi Narain's family had been influential enough to get the charges dropped, he died a few months afterward of natural causes at the age of 32.

When taken to Laxmi's old government school, Bishen Chand ran to where his classroom had been. Somebody produced an old picture, and Bishen recognized in it some of Laxmi Narain's classmates, one of whom happened to be in the crowd. When the classmate asked about their teacher, Bishen correctly described him as a fat, bearded man.

In the part of town where Laxmi Narain had lived, Bishen Chand recognized the house of Sander Lal, the house that he had previously described (before being brought to Pilibhit) as having a green gate. The lawyer Sahay, when writing the report later for the national newspaper The Leader in August 1926, claimed to have seen the gate himself and verified that its color was green. The boy also pointed to the courtyard where he said the nautch girls used to entertain with singing and dancing. Merchants in the area verified the boy's claims. In the accounts published by The Leader, Sahay wrote that the name of the prostitute with whom the boy associated in his previous life was repeatedly sought by people in the crowd (following the boy). When Bishen Chand mentioned the name "Padma," the people certified that the name was correct.

During that remarkable day, the boy was presented with a set of tabla, a pair of drums. The father said that Bishen had never seen tabla before; but to the surprise of his family and all assembled, Bishen Chand played them skilfully, as had Laxmi Narain much earlier. When the mother of Laxmi Narain met Bishen Chand, a strong attachment was immediately apparent between them. Bishen Chand answered the questions she asked (such as the time in his previous life when he had thrown out her pickles), and he successfully named and described Laxmi Narain's personal servant. He also gave the caste to which the servant belonged. He later claimed that he preferred Laxmi's mother to his own. Laxmi Narain's father was thought to have hidden some treasure before his death, but nobody knew where. When Bishen Chand was asked about the treasure, he led the way to a room of the family's former home. A treasure of gold coins was later found in this room, giving credence to the boy's claim of having lived a former life in the house.Finally, Bishen Chand's older brother testified that Bishen could, when he was a child, read Urdu (written in Arabic script) before he had been taught this language. Bishen Chand's father, in a sworn statement about the case, stated that Bishen had (as a child) used some Urdu words that he could not have learned in the family—words such as masurate and kopal (for "women's quarters" and "lock," respectively), rather than the usual Hindi words zenana and tala. Laxmi Narain was reasonably well educated and quite capable of speaking Urdu.

In examining this case, Ian Stevenson urges that it is especially significant because an early record was kept by a reliable attorney when most of the principals were still alive and capable of verifying Bishen Chand's memory claims.3 Many of the people who knew Laxmi Narain were still alive and well when Bishen Chand Kapoor was making his claims. They verified nearly all the statements Bishen made before he went to Pilibhit. Moreover, according to Stevenson, the possibility of fraud is remote because Bishen Chand's family had little to gain from association with the Laxmi Narain family.4 It was well known that the latter had become destitute after Laxmi Narain had died. As in most cases similar to this, the events could not be explained in terms of anticipated financial gain. (...)

The Shanti Devi Case 

Some researchers believe, for various reasons, that the Shanti Devi case offers the best available evidence for reincarnation. However, owing to the inaccessibility of the original case study, and because of the seriously questionable methods used in gathering and corroborating the alleged facts of the case, I will not include it for critical discussion along with the other cases examined here.22 But because, as noted earlier, it is an interesting case and shows what would be strong evidence, it is certainly worthy of our qualified consideration.

Shanti Devi was born in 1926 in old Delhi. At three, she began to entertain her family with "stories" about a former life in which she had been married to a man named Kedar Nath who lived in nearby Muttra, had two children, and died in childbirth bearing a third child in 1925.

Like Bishen Chand, she also described in detail the home in Muttra where she said she had lived with her husband and children. Shanti said her name in that life was Lugdi. She further described the relatives of her former family and those of her husband, what her former life had been like, and how she had died. Unlike Bishen Chand, however, her alleged reincarnation had occurred so quickly (one year after her death) that there was the possibility of extensive corroboration by extant relatives with fresh memories. When her parents could no longer turn her from these stories, her grand uncle Kishen Chand sent a letter to Muttra to see how much, if any, of the little girl's story might be true. He sent it to an address Shanti gave him. The letter reached a startled widower named Kedar Nath who was still grieving the loss of his wife Lugdi. Lugdi had died in childbirth in 1925. Even as a devout Hindu, he could not accept the fact that Lugdi was reborn, living in Delhi, and in possession of an accurate picture of their life together. Suspecting some sort of fraud, Kedar Nath sent his cousin Mr. Lal (who lived in Delhi) to investigate and interrogate the girl. If she were an imposter, his cousin would know. When Mr. Lal, on the pretext of business, went to Devi's home, Shanti opened the door and, after screaming, threw herself into the arms of the astonished visitor. Her mother rushed to the door. Before the visitor could speak, Shanti (now nine) said, "Mother, this is a cousin of my husband! He lived not far from us in Muttra and then moved to Delhi. I am so happy to see him. He must come in. I want to know about my husband and sons."

With Shanti's family, Mr. Lal confirmed all the facts she had testified to over the years. As a result of this, they all agreed that Kedar Nath and the favorite son should come to Delhi as guests of the Devis.

When Kedar Nath arrived with the son, Shanti showered them with kisses and pet names. She treated Kedar Nath as a devoted wife would be expected to, serving him biscuits and tea. When Kedar Nath began to weep, Shanti consoled him using endearing little phrases known only to Lugdi and Kedar Nath.

Eventually, the press featured the case, and independent investigators appeared on the scene. The investigators decided to take Shanti to Muttra and have her lead them to the home where she claimed to have lived and died in her earlier life. When the train pulled into Muttra, Shanti cried out in delight and began waving to several people on the platform. She told the investigators with her that they were the mother and brother of her husband. She was right. More importantly, however, she got off the train and began to speak with and question them using not the Hindustani she had been taught in Delhi, but rather the dialect of the Muttra district. Shanti had not been exposed to, nor had she been taught, this dialect. But she would certainly have known the dialect if, like Lugdi, she had been a resident of Muttra.Later Shanti led the investigators to the Nath home and conveyed other information that only Lugdi could have known. For example, Kedar Nath asked her where she had hidden several rings before she died. She said they were in a pot and buried in the ground of the old home where they had lived. The investigators subsequently found the rings where she said they would be.

As the case developed, it was celebrated in the international press and became the subject of extensive speculation on the part of scholars everywhere. At last word, Shanti never returned to live with Kedar Nath, though; and she could very well still be living in Delhi with her Devi family. As far as we can tell, all those who had known Lugdi accepted Shanti fully as Lugdi's reincarnation.

Apart from the fact that cases like this are somewhat rare, the Shanti Devi case (as well as Stevenson's Sharada case, which we shall not discuss here)23 offers an instance of responsive xenoglossy that was not induced under hypnotic regression. In this respect it obviously differs from both the Lydia Johnson qua Jensen case and the DJ. qua Gretchen case. What is important here is that there are cases of spontaneous (or uninduced) responsive xenoglossy in which the subject demonstrates a clear knowledge of historical events that neither the subject nor any interviewer could have had natural knowledge of in this life, because the truth of the claims made could be established only after the subject's testimony. For example, in the Shanti Devi case, Shanti told the investigators something nobody else knew, namely, where Lugdi had hidden several rings before she died. And, if you will remember, we have seen in the Mrs. Smith case an instance of recitative xenoglossy with this same feature: she was right when it came to the question of the color of the Cathar priests' garments—a fact not known for quite some time after her testimony. More on this later. For now, let us look at a particularly rich memory case that does not involve xenoglossy in any straightforward way, but that is persuasive for other reasons. Thereafter we will begin our discussion on the evidential strength of these cases.

Memory Evidence and Recognition: The Swarnlata Case 

In 1951 an Indian man named Sri M. L. Mishra took his threeyear-old daughter Swarnlata and several other people on a 170mile trip south from the city of Panna (in the district of Madhya Pradesh) to the city of Jabalpur, also in the same district.24 On the return journey, as they passed through the city of Katni (57 miles north of Jabalpur), Swarnlata unexpectedly asked the driver to turn down a certain road to "my house." The driver quite understandably ignored her request. Later, when the same group was taking tea at Katni, Swarnlata told them that they would get better tea at "my house" nearby. These statements puzzled her father, Mishra; neither he nor any member of his family had ever lived near Katni. His puzzlement deepened when he learned that Swarnlata was telling other children in the family further details of what she claimed was a previous life in Katni as a member of a family named Pathak. In the next two years Swarnlata frequently performed for her mother (and later in front of others) unusual dances and songs that, as far as her parents knew, there had been no opportunity for her to learn. In 1958, when she was ten, Swarnlata met a woman from the area of Katni whom Swarnlata claimed to have known in her earlier life. It was at this time that Mishra first sought to confirm the numerous statements his daughter made about her "previous life."

In March 1959, H. N. Banerjee began to investigate the case; and in 1961 (after Banerjee's investigation), Ian Stevenson went to Chhatarpur to recheck carefully the work done by Banerjee. From the Mishra home in Chhatarpur, Banerjee had traveled to Katni where he became acquainted with the Pathak family of which Swarnlata claimed to have been a member. He noted, before journeying to Katni, some nine detailed statements Swarnlata had made about the Pathak residence. These statements he confirmed on his arrival. Incidentally, before Banerjee went to Katni, the Mishra family did not know or know of the Pathak family.

Banerjee also found that the statements made by Swarnlata corresponded closely to the life of Biya, a daughter in the Pathak family and deceased wife of a man named Pandey who lived in Maihar. Biya had died in 1939—nine years before the birth of Swarnlata.

In the summer of 1959, members of the Pathak family and of Biya's marital family traveled to Chhatarpur (where the Mishra family lived). Without being introduced to these people, Swarnlata recognized them all, called them by name, and related personal incidents and events in their various lives with Biya—events that, according to these relatives, only Biya could have known. For example, Swarnlata claimed that, as Biya, she had gold fillings in her front teeth. Biya's sister-in-law confirmed as much. The Pathaks eventually accepted Swarnlata as Biya reincarnated, even though they had never previously believed in the possibility of reincarnation.

After these visits, in the same summer, Swarnlata and members of her family went first to Katni and then to Maihar where the deceased Biya had spent much of her married life and where she died. In Maihar, Swarnlata recognized additional people and places and commented on various changes that had occurred since the death of Biya. Her statements were independently verified. Later, Swarnlata continued to visit Biya's brother and children, for whom she showed the warmest affection.

The songs and dances that Swarnlata had performed presented some problem, however. Biya spoke Hindi and did not know how to speak Bengali, whereas the songs Swarnlata had sung (and danced to) were in Bengali. Although the songs were publicly available and had been recorded on phonograph records and played in certain films, she could not have learned these songs from records or films because her parents had neither seen nor heard them and, therefore, Swarnlata—as a typical child under close surveillance of her family—had no occasion to do so. The parents were also certain that Swarnlata had not been in contact with Bengali-speaking persons from whom she might have learned the songs. Swarnlata claimed that she had learned the songs and dances from a previous life. Stevenson notes that this is a case of recitative rather than responsive xenoglossy, because she could not converse in Bengali although she could sing Bengali songs.25

After careful examination, Ian Stevenson concludes that it is very difficult to explain the facts of the case without admitting that Swarnlata had paranormal knowledge. After all, how otherwise could Swarnlata have known the details of the family and of the house? These details (including the fact that Biya had gold fillings in her teeth—a fact that even her brothers had forgotten) were by no means in the public domain. Moreover, how otherwise can we explain her recognition of members of the Pathak and Pandey families? How can her knowledge of the former (as opposed to the present) appearances of places and people be explained? Her witnessed recognitions of people amount to 20 in number. As Stevenson notes, most of the recognitions occurred in such a way that Swarnlata was obliged to give a name or state a relationship between Biya and the person in question. On several occasions, serious attempts were made to mislead her or to deny that she gave the correct answers, but such attempts failed.Could there have been a conspiracy among all the witnesses in the various families (the Mishras, the Pathaks, and the Pandeys)? Might not all of them have conspired to bring off a big hoax? Well, according to Stevenson, a family of prominence such as the Pathaks, with far-reaching business interests, is unlikely to participate in a hoax with so many people involved, any one of which might later defect. If a hoax did occur, it is more likely to have come from the Chhatarpur side. But even here, Sri M. L. Mishra had nothing to gain from such a hoax. He even doubted for a long time the authenticity and truth of his daughter's statements, and he made no move to verify them for six years. Most of the people involved agreed that they had nothing to gain but public ridicule.

But even if we suppose that there was some attempt at fraud, who would have tutored Swarnlata for success in such recognitions? Who would have taken the time to do it? Sri M. L. Mishra, apart from Swarnlata, was the only other member of the family who received any public attention from Swarnlata's case. And what attention he received, he was not too happy about. Also, how could Sri Mishra have gotten some of the highly personal information possessed by Swarnlata about the private affairs of the Pathaks (e.g., that Biya's husband took her 1,200 rupees)?

Might Swarnlata have been tutored by some stranger who knew Katni and the Pathaks? As Stevenson notes, like all children in India—especially girls—Swarnlata's movements were very carefully controlled by her family. She never saw strangers in the house alone, and she never was out on the street unaccompanied.26 Besides the legal documentation and methods used in Stevenson's examination, what is interesting about this case is that it is one of many similar cases. Can we explain the facts plausibly without appealing to the belief in reincarnation?

Death and personal survival 

Robert F Almeder 

Don Marquis - a few quotes

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves.

The most pleasant and useful persons are those who leave some of the problems of the universe for God to worry about.

The people who have willpower enough to quit their vices don’t seem to have so many vices to quit.

The humorist is a philosopher who breaks the sad news gently because he is so sorry for the world.

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.

The sort of man who brags about his ancestors is never bragged about by his descendants.

Philanthropy is the business of giving it back to the people you took it from.

Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.

Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

When man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him WHOSE.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

The bees got their governmental system settled millions of years ago, but the human race is still groping.

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

If cremation became universal, some of us would lose our one chance of owning real estate.

Live that you wouldn’t be afraid to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.

When you can’t have anything else, you can have virtue.

I drink only to make my friends seem interesting.

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.

He worked like hell in the country so he could live in the city, where he worked like hell so he could live in the country.

Drinking used to be a mighty commonplace matter, but Prohibition has brought a smack of adventure into it that makes it really enjoyable.

On Samuel T. Francis

Early Aryan thought reflects a conviction of the existence of an objective order of things independent of the beliefs or wishes of men, and even of gods. This mental background certainly contributed to later European achievements in science and philosophy. It also bore ethical implications. Recognition of an objective cosmic order “implies that human action has consequences—that you cannot do whatever you please and expect nothing to come of it—and that no matter what you do you will not be able to avoid your Fate.” Yet Aryan myth affirms the value of life and struggle even as it accepts the inevitability of death and other limits upon human ambition.

[Good quote, apart that true ariyan rejects the inevitability of death] 

In 1984 Sam produced his first substantial book, Power and History, a study of the political thought of James Burnham (1905-1987). After some years as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, Burnham broke with Marxism altogether in 1941 with publication of The Managerial Revolution. This book’s thesis was that bourgeois capitalism had been superceded neither by proletarian rule nor by a classless society, but by a new ruling elite centered on those possessing expertise in important technologies and the control of mass organizations: the managers. Whether the resulting regime claimed to be socialist (as in the USSR or National Socialist Germany) or preserved the name and some of the appearances of free enterprise (as in Franklin Roosevelt’s United States) was of comparatively little importance.

Burnham was also a student of the Italian school of elite theory, whose main ideas he summarized in his next book The Machiavellians (1943). In contrast to classical political thought, which emphasizes the threefold typology of monarchal, aristocratic, and democratic rule, elite theorists asserted an iron law of oligarchy: in any political regime, including supposedly absolute monarchies and democracies, a closer look will always reveal a small minority of men who command and a majority who obey. Robert Michels, for example, spent years studying the inner workings of European socialist parties, all of which advocated for the spreading of power to the broad masses. What he found was that all such parties were in fact under the command of a very few men. This was not a matter of hypocrisy, as the parties could not otherwise have operated effectively. Their stated ideals made no difference at all; it is simply in the nature of human organization for power to remain the preserve of a small elite.

Italian elite theory, combined with Burnham’s concept of the managerial class as the elite governing the contemporary world, would become fundamentals of Sam Francis’s own political thinking. The managers and technocrats who rule us today seek above all a passive and compliant subject population unbound by any traditions and at the farthest possible remove from republican self-government. The goal of a realistic right under such circumstances must be the replacement of this deadening and out-of-touch elite with a new one more representative of ordinary Americans from the heartland and their best traditions.

Sam’s book on James Burnham was not widely reviewed. A favorable notice from Joe Sobran in National Review was one honorable exception.

At some not easily specified time in the 1980s and -90s, Sam worked on a book entitled Leviathan and Its Enemies, applying Burnham’s ideas to American twentieth century political history and developing a Burnhamist strategy for Middle American Revolution in far greater detail than Burnham himself ever had. This work was recovered from his computer and published following his death.

(...)

1993 saw the publication of Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, a collection of some of Sam’s best writing from the decade 1981-91. According to Scotchie, it remained Sam’s only book with the University of Missouri Press due to the scandal occasioned among the press’s faculty advisors by his essay on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sam’s insistence on speaking forthrightly on the subject of race and racial differences would now come to play an increasing role in his career. American Renaissance, Jared Taylor’s monthly publication addressing racial issues from a white point of view, began publication in 1990, and by May 1994 Taylor felt confident enough to hold a public conference. Sam Francis was among the invited speakers. Of everything he said, the statement which caused the most widespread outrage was as follows:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

This is hardly a radical thought and should not be controversial. After all, even a dog pound cannot exist apart from the genetic endowments of dogs. But it would be enough to get him fired from the Washington Times when brought to editor Wes Pruden’s attention fifteen months later.

Sam’s termination was a national news story, but he declined requests for interviews, seemingly experiencing the episode as something of a liberation:

My column has actually gained newspapers since my defenestration at the Times. It’s true I lost my job and my Washington outlet, and that’s a blow, but it’s far from death. In the coming years, the Beltway right may be amazed to discover how little it has to do with the direction in which the country is moving, and I plan to be there when it finds out that no one else is paying much attention to its precious “limits” on what you can say and cannot say.

When Sam got wind that certain well-wishers were planning a protest outside the paper’s editorial offices, he put a stop to it. He was as ready to leave the Times as they were to be rid of him. Sylvia Crutchfield, a tireless fundraiser for right-wing causes, quietly made it possible for Sam to remain in the Washington area, even providing him with personal office space at the Henry Lee House in Alexandria, VA. He remained as busy and prolific as ever.

Sam’s explicitness on race set him apart from some of his longtime colleagues. Before addressing the American Renaissance conference, Scotchie explains:

Sam showed a draft [of his talk] to Tom Fleming. The latter advised against delivering it. Sam had a key position at the Washington Times. Why risk it? Were the knives already out? […] In a talk with this author, Fleming said Sam was essentially going to give his head on a platter to his legion of enemies.

I read Chronicles from 1997 until after Sam’s death, and I well remember how Sam’s racial views contrasted with those of the other editors and contributors. Sam called for whites to organize on the explicit basis of race and pursue their collective interests without apology. Tom Fleming preferred to accuse anyone who demonstrated knowledge of or interest in race of being a “biological determinist.” This was, of course, a straw man. All informed racialists know that racial differences are statistical in character, not determinative. Moreover, racial identity politics has very little to do with the theoretical question of how much human behavior is explicable by biology. Fleming even took a couple of rhetorical pokes at American Renaissance before Sam asked him to desist. Other Chronicles writers were not above dismissing the importance of “skin color,” an infallible sign of cluelessness in racial matters. Sam’s racialism continued to be tolerated, however, as it almost certainly would not have been from a newer or younger contributor. Moreover, reader surveys revealed that a large percentage of the magazine’s audience subscribed mainly in order to read Sam. They needed him more than he needed them.

(...)

Perhaps Sam’s most important statement on race is the essay “Roots of the White Man,” published in the November and December 1996 issues of American Renaissance. It was written in response to Jared Taylor’s argument that Western culture gives “priorities to considerations of fairness over the exercise of pure power.” Sam did not disagree, but thought Taylor came too close to identifying the white man’s distinctive character with its modern liberal expressions. Looking back farther into history, to the days of the earliest Indo-Europeans or Aryans, he found our ancestors to be marked especially by three traits: belief in a cosmic order, a restless dynamism, and greater individuation that the other races of mankind.

Early Aryan thought reflects a conviction of the existence of an objective order of things independent of the beliefs or wishes of men, and even of gods. This mental background certainly contributed to later European achievements in science and philosophy. It also bore ethical implications. Recognition of an objective cosmic order “implies that human action has consequences—that you cannot do whatever you please and expect nothing to come of it—and that no matter what you do you will not be able to avoid your Fate.” Yet Aryan myth affirms the value of life and struggle even as it accepts the inevitability of death and other limits upon human ambition.

Furthermore, Aryan man is marked by a restless Faustian dynamism “clear enough in their earliest and most obvious habit of invading other people’s territories and conquering them.” Later this expressed itself in a more general love of travel, maritime exploration, colonization and discovery, the drive to uncover the secret workings of nature. Aryan man’s descendants

have cured diseases, shrunk distances, raised cities out of jungles and deserts, constructed technologies that replace and transcend human strength, restored lost languages, recovered forgotten histories, stared into the heart of distant galaxies, and reached into the recesses of the atom. No other people has even dreamed of these achievements.

This dynamism, in Francis’s view, explains the relative resistance of European man to despotism and enslavement. The typical Aryan political form is a broad aristocratic republic of arms-bearing citizens in which everyone is free to state his opinion, and rulers are constrained by the need to maintain the consent of those they rule. Aryan man “resists and rebels against any effort to induce the passivity that allows despotism to flourish.”

Aryan man is also marked by a greater degree of individuation that the other races of mankind. This is true even in their bodily traits, but more importantly in the variety of character reflected in their myths and literature. Such individuation should be distinguished from modern “individualism” which justifies the neglect or even betrayal of the larger social formations of which each individual is a part.

Western man today suffers from the excess or misapplication of his traditional virtues. He has succumbed, e.g., to the belief that his values are universal and that his outlook and achievements can be extended to the entire human race. Hence modern liberal enthusiasm for “exporting democracy” and inviting immigration from the entire world. We should respect the right of non-Aryan people to live according to their own very different traditions, but also insist on their exclusion from our territories.

If America’s political right was not ready for such racial explicitness, there were growing signs in the 1990s of a new willingness at least to reconsider the prudence of allowing mass immigration. In 1992, National Review published Peter Brimelow’s “Rethinking Immigration,” later expanded into the book Alien Nation (1995) and brought out by a mainstream New York publisher. In 1999, Brimelow would establish the website VDare.com, which carried Sam’s columns.

(...)

In 2002, David Frum published “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” an attack on right wing opponents of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sam responded as follows:

The paleos in general are disaffected not from the country itself but from the determination of the US government to wage unnecessary wars that either border on the unjust or go well over the line of injustice, wars that are unprovoked and not clearly in the interests of the nation, and wars that, even if victorious, may lead to so many entanglements, complications, injustices and costs (human, economic, diplomatic, technological) that they are better avoided regardless of their moral character. What most paleos have written about the Iraq war has been along these lines—lines that are perfectly consistent with and indeed reflect a serious patriotism, as opposed to the kind of sophomoric chauvinism that demands blind obedience to whatever wars the government launches.

F. Roger Devlin

https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/a-first-biography-of-sam-francis/

Logic Storms Darwin's Gates

Few evolutionists would agree, but by my reckoning, there are now two strikes on Darwinism. Whoa! Here comes a Nolan Ryan fastball!

The problem of half organs

In a popular evolutionary explanation, here's how reptiles evolved into birds: They wanted to eat flying insects that were out of reach. So the rep­ tiles began leaping, and flapping their arms to get higher. Over millions of years, their limbs transformed into wings by increments.l In another model, the reptiles were tree-dwellers who leaped. Those who glided well survived and eventually developed wings, but those who glided poorly went ker­ plunk and were wiped out. In these scenarios, the reptiles' scales sprouted feathers over time, and finally, they became birds. 

One problem is that, anatomically, reptilian scales and bird feathers are completely dissimilar. Scales are a tough, thin plate. Feathers are soft and delicate; like hair, they arise from small holes in the skin called follicles; they are held together by a network of little hooks invisible to the naked eye-one eagle feather has over 250,000 of them.

In Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, Barbara J. Stahl noted: "It is not difficult to imagine how feathers, once evolved, assumed additional functions, but how they rose initially, presumably from reptilian scales, defies analysis."2

The theory suffers from an illogical premise that pervades Darwinism. According to natural selection, a physical trait is acquired because it enhances survival. Obviously, flight is beneficial, and one can certainly see how flying animals might survive better than those who couldn't, and thus natural selection would preserve them.

The problem is, wings would have no survival value until they reached the point of flight. Birds' wings and feathers are perfectly designed instru­ments. Those with crippled or clipped wings cannot fly, and are bad candi­dates for survival. Likewise, the intermediate creature whose limb was half leg, half wing, would fare poorly-it couldn't fly, nor walk well. Natural selection would eliminate it without a second thought.

The same would hold true for the limbs that Darwinism's fish supposedly developed, or for any body part. Until the organ is operative, it offers no advantage, and natural selection has no reason to favor it. As Stephen Jay Gould asked: "Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?"3 Evolutionists, including Gould, generally try to explain organs' develop­ ment by hypothesizing that, en route to becoming functional, they must have served some other useful purpose, now unknown to us, and thus sur­vived under natural selection. But this is merely a rationalization based on no evidence. 

A classic example of an organ that could not have evolved is the human eye, whose superlative design was not really appreciated until the invention of cameras and other optical instruments dependent on the same principles.

For sight to occur, light must pass through the pupil, which automatically adjusts, by widening or contracting, to permit a proper amount of light to enter the eye. It then passes through the lens, which focuses the image on the retina, the light-sensitive area in back of the eye. The retina contains more than 120 million photosensitive cells called rods and cones, which translate light into nerve impulses that reach the brain via the optic nerve.

Vision requires that all of these be working. How then did natural selec­tion make them? Did the lens precede the retina? Did the optic nerve come first? By themselves, none of these constitute vision; they possess no inher­ent survival value that would cause natural selection to prefer them. To accept evolution, we must believe that chance mutations simultaneously developed each, until one day, by sheer coincidence, all were complete and harmoniously arranged, and vision occurred. The situation troubled Darwin himself, who noted:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjust­ing the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.4

Most evolutionary texts avoid discussing eye evolution. One that tried­ Gavin de Beer's Atlas of Evolution-followed Darwin's own attempted explanation by showing a sequence of eyes of different organisms, starting with the most primitive. But as one observer pointed out, "This mere listing of eyes from various animals, which he neglects (or is unable) to show to be related can carry no conviction for the case for evolution. It would be equally stupid to place a candle, a torch and a searchlight side by side and proceed to advance to a genealogical relationship."5

What about color vision? Michael Pitman wrote:

It is found in several bony fishes, reptiles, birds, bees and primates. Among mammals only primates see in color. Dogs, cats, horses and bulls do not. Fish supposedly evolved the necessary retinal cones to give them color vision, but then lost them. "Re-evolved" by certain unrelated birds and reptiles, they were lost by mammals, but by luck "re-surfaced" in pri­mates. An odd story indeed.6

Science has proven the eye far more complicated than was known in Darwin's time. Any organ, of course, may be reduced to its molecular struc­ ture. In Darwin 's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe describes vision's microscopic physiology. The following material is full of technical words, but this underscores the complexity:

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called II-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a sin­gle human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin . . . .

GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phos­ phodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to "cut" a molecule called cGMP . . . . When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phos­ phodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane that, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.7

So mutations had to engineer, simultaneously, not only the gross anatom­ical structures of the eye, but its elaborate molecular interactions.

Irreducible complexity

As the complexity of anything increases, the probability of chance creating it decreases. The main point of Behe's book is that biochemistry has proven a number of bodily systems to be irreducibly complex. He says that "design [intelligent creation] is evident when a number of separate, interacting com­ponents are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components."8 Gradual change, as Darwin proposed, cannot pro­duce such systems because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."9

on an enzyme to activate it. So which evolved first-the protein or enzyme? Not the protein; it cannot function without the enzyme to switch it on. But why would the enzyme have come first?-without the protein, it serves no purpose. The system is irreducibly complex.

If a person lacks just one clotting factor, as in hemophilia (a mutational disorder), he risks severe bleeding. Furthermore, after a clot forms, the pro­teins which produced it must be inactivated by other substances-otherwise the rest of the person's blood would start to coagulate. Step-by-step evolu­tion of clotting is inconceivable: in the trial and error stage, organisms would have either bled to death or clotted to death.

Another example Behe gives: the immune system. In infections, it must distinguish the invading bacterial cells from the body's own cells-other­ wise the latter will be attacked (which is the case in "autoimmune" diseases). An antibody identifies the bacterium by attaching to it. In a complex bio­ chemical process, a variety of white blood cells-"killer cells" such as lym­ phocytes and macrophages-are notified of the bacterium's presence. These travel to the site, and, using the identifying antibody, attack the enemy.

Like blood clotting, this system is irreducibly complex. What evolved first? The killer cells? Without the identifying antibody, they wouldn't know where to attack. But why would the identifier develop first, without any­ thing to notify? If the network evolved gradually, disease would kill the individual before it was perfected.

Behe notes the paucity of articles and books on how such biochemical entities evolved. He says that "if you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines-the basis of life-developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it. . . .10 In his research, he found only two very short, highly speculative papers attempting to explain the immune system's evolution on a molecular level." Biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago agrees:

There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fun­damental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful specu­lations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory expla­nation for such a vast subject-evolution-with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity. 12

The human body, as a total system, is also irreducibly complex. It is dif­ficult to change one part without influencing others. Take the liver: it man­ufactures bile; detoxifies poisons and wastes; regulates storage and use of glucose, proteins, fats and vitamins; synthesizes blood clotting and immune system factors; and processes breakdown products of old blood cells. Or take the kidneys: they remove wastes through urine production; regulate the body's water content and electrolytes (sodium, calcium, etc.); and support the adrenal glands, which secrete hormones such as adrenaline.

Evolution says every organ developed through chance mutations. But structures like the liver or kidneys cannot change without drastically affect­ing the rest of the body, with which they maintain a delicate balance. We must assume that by lucky happenstance, each time these organs mutated, other body parts also mutated in harmonious cooperation. The noted writer Arthur Koestler commented:

You cannot have a mutation A occurring alone, preserve it by natural selection, and then wait a few thousand or million years until mutation B joins it, and so on, to C and D. Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all inter­dependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation 13

And what of the human brain? W. H. Yokel wrote in a promotional letter for Scientific American in 1979:

The deep new knowledge about the brain, gathered at an accelerated rate in recent years, shows this organ to be marvelously designed and capacitated beyond the wonders with which it was invested by ignorant imagination.

Microelectronics can pack about a million circuits in a cubic foot, whereas the brain has been estimated to pack a million million circuits per cubic foot. Computer switches interact with not more than two other switches at a time, whereas a brain cell may be wired to 1,000 other cells on both its input and output sides . .. . 14

Yokel called the brain "designed." It has about ten billion neurons (nerve cells) with a thousand trillion connections. 15 Each neuron contains around one trillion atoms. The brain can do the work of hundreds of supercomput­ers. Building a computer requires great intelligence. Who believes even a simple one could arise by chance? Indeed, the brain is more than a com­puter-"It is a video camera and library, a computer and communications center, all in one." 16 Yokel added: 

Perhaps the most elusive questions surround the brain functions that make us human-the capacities of memory and learning. Transcending what might be called the hardware of the brain, there comes a software capacity that eludes hypothesis. The number that expresses this capacity in digital information bits exceeds the largest number to which any physical meaning can be attached. 17

How about our thoughts? Did chance evolve them, too? Darwin critic Phillip Johnson asks: 

Are our thoughts "nothing but" the products of chemical reactions in the brain, and did our thinking abilities originate for no reason other than their utility in allowing our DNA to reproduce itself? Even scientific materialists have a hard time believing that. For one thing, materialism applied to the mind undermines the validity of all reasoning, including one's own. If our theories are the products of chemical reactions, how can we know whether our theories are true? Perhaps [evolutionist] Richard Dawkins believes in Darwinism only because he has a certain chemical in his brain, and his belief could be changed by somehow inserting a differ­ ent chemical.18

The animal kingdom also illustrates features too complex for evolution to explain. Time magazine, in an article critical of creationism, described the remarkable bombardier beetle:

Its defense system is extraordinarily intricate, a cross between tear gas and a tommy gun. When the beetle senses danger, it internally mixes enzymes contained in one body chamber with concentrated solutions of some rather harmless compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydro­ quinones, confined to a second chamber. This generates a noxious spray of caustic benzoquinones, which explode from its body at a boiling 212 F. What is more, the fluid is pumped through twin rear nozzles, which can be  rotated, like a B- l 7's gun turret, to hit a hungry ant or frog with bull's-eye accuracy. 37

Since the chemicals and enzymes are explosive when mixed in a small space, how could chance have evolved this defense system without blowing the beetle to smithereens?

Or how could natural selection produce the monarch butterfly, which transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly with two compound eyes, each with 6,000 lenses, and a brain that can decipher 72,000 nerve impulses from the eyes?20 Extinct creatures make the problem even more perplexing. Cambrian rocks, dated at over 500 million years, contain fossils of many of the oldest invertebrates known. Among them: the trilobite. It was an arthropod (the broad category of joint-legged animal that includes lobsters and spiders).

According to evolution, Cambrian rocks should contain only "primitive" organisms. The trilobite was anything but. It had a segmented body, legs, gills, antennae, and a complex nervous system. Moreover, 

Blood clotting swings into action when we get a cut. Its multi-step process utilizes  proteins, many with no other function besides clotting. Each protein depends according to Sci­ence News, trilobites had "the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature."21

Riccardo Levi-Setti of the University of Chicago writes in his book Trilobites:

In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery­ that the refracting interface between the two lens elements in a trilobite's eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century-borders on sheer science fiction . . . . The design of the trilobite's eye lens could well qual­ify for a patent disclosure.22

Like other animals, trilobites lack fossil ancestors showing how they evolved.

TORNADO IN A  JUNKYARD THE RELENTLESS MYTH OF DARWINISM
James Perloff

If–

If you can keep your head when all about you  
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;  
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;  
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,  
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

One of the worst cases of scientific fraud or

The law that wasn't

When I went to school in the sixties, our biology textbooks showed a picture of a human embryo next to various animal embryos. The human looked almost indistinguishable from the animals. We were told this demonstrated the common ancestry we share with them.

It was further stated that embryonic development proved Darwinism, because the embryo went through various stages mimicking its evolutionary history. The fetus began as a single cell-just as life had billions of years ago. It then would undergo a tadpole stage, fish stage, amphibian stage, and so forth, en route to becoming human.

This theory was known as "embryonic recapitulation" as well as "the bio­genetic law." Although the concept preceded Darwin (he discussed it in The Origin of Species), it was popularized by Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, as we have mentioned, published baseless drawings of ape-men and "sponta­ neously generated" bacteria. He also created those famous pictures of iden­tical-looking human and animal embryos. Haeckel explained:

When we see that, at a certain stage, the embryos of man and the ape, the dog and the rabbit, the pig and the sheep, though recognizable as higher vertebrates, cannot be distinguished from each other, the fact can only be elucidated by assuming a common parentage . . . . I have illustrated this significant fact by ajuxtaposition of corresponding stages in the devel­ opment of a number of different vertebrates in my Natural History of Cre­ation and in my Anthropogeny.¹

But shamefully, Haeckel grossly altered the appearance of embryos to make his case. As Francis Hitching explained:

But as a matter of biological fact, the embryos of men, apes, dogs, and rabbits are not at all the same, and can easily be distinguished by any com­petent embryologist. They only looked the same, in Haeckel's books, because he had chopped off bits here and there, and added bits elsewhere, to make them seem identical.

Another example was his illustration of the "worm-like" stage through which all vertebrates were supposed to have passed. He published three identical drawings captioned respectively a dog, a chicken, and a tor­toise. In 1886, a Swiss professor of zoology and comparative anatomy complained that Haeckel had simply used the same woodcut (of a dog embryo) three times.
Over the years various other forgeries were exposed. To illustrate the "embryo of a Gibbon in the fish-stage," Haeckel used the embryo of a dif­ferent kind of monkey altogether, and then sliced off those parts of the anatomy inconvenient to his theory, such as arms, legs, heart, navel and other non-fishy appendages.² 

At Jena, the university where he taught, Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court.³ His deceit was thor­oughly exposed in Haeckel's Frauds and Forgeries ( 1915), a book by J. Assmuth and Ernest J. Hull. They quoted nineteen leading authorities of the day. F. Keibel, professor of anatomy at Freiburg University, said that "it clearly appears that Haeckel has in many cases freely invented embryos, or reproduced the illustrations given by others in a substantially changed form."⁴ L. Riitimeyer, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Basle University, called his distorted drawings "a sin against scientific truth­fulness deeply compromising to the public credit of a scholar."⁵

Julius Weisner, professor of plant physiology at the University of Vienna, called Haeckel "one who in his most recent writings exhibits himself as a fanatical misleader of the people; one who, with delusive assurance, puts forth what have long been recognized as errors and mistakes as if they were verities."⁶ J. Reinke, professor of botany at the University of Kiel, wrote that "wherever biology comes in, Haeckel uncritically jumbles together proved and unproved matter, and thus creates a chaos in the mind of his readers. It is the opinion of not a few that, on account of his lack of critical disposition, Haeckel forfeits all place in the ranks of serious naturalists."⁷

Such exposure did not prevent Haeckel's "biogenetic law" and fraudulent drawings from being spread in biology classrooms throughout the world.

For decades to come, students were taught that the human embryo mani­fested reminders of man's past, such as "gill slits" from the fish stage of evolution. Actually, the "gill slits" evolutionists thought they saw were simply clefts and pouches which, as the embryo grows, develop principally into structures of the ear, jaw and neck.⁸

Many scientists knew Haeckel's theory was completely false. The human fetus is fully human at every stage. Keith Thomson, president of the Acad­emy of Natural Sciences, wrote in American Scientist: "Surely the bio­genetic law is as dead as a doornail. . . . As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties."⁹ Dr. Sabine Schwabenthan wrote:

Fetoscopy makes it possible to observe directly the unborn child through a tiny telescope inserted through the uterine wall. : . . The devel­opment of the child-from the union of the partners' cells to birth-has been studied exhaustively. As a result, long-held beliefs have been put to rest. We now know, for instance, that man, in his prenatal stages, does not go through the complete evolution of life-from a primitive single cell to a fish-like water creature to man. Today it is known that every step in the fetal developmental process is specifically human.¹⁰

Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Medical School, London, found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckel s claims by systematically comparing human and other fetuses dur­ing development. He assembled a scientific team that did just that - pho­tographing the growing embryos of 39 different species. In a 1997 interview in London's The Times, Dr. Richardson stated:

This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It's shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately mislead­ing. It makes me angry . . . . What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don't. . . . These are fakes. In the paper we call them "misleading and inaccurate," but that is just polite scientific language)¹¹

Unfortunately, embryonic recapitulation's disproof is still not popularly known, and Haeckel's drawings continue to hold sway in the public mind.

What Columbia University biologist Walter J. Bock noted in 1969 still seems true today: "[T]he biogenetic law has become so deeply rooted in bio­logical thought that it cannot be weeded out in spite of its having been demonstrated to be wrong by numerous subsequent scholars." ¹² It seems the height of pretense that a theory - a fraudulent one, at that­ was designated a "law," as if it had been established with the certainty of gravity. But this is symptomatic of Darwinism, where speculative opinions routinely masquerade as facts.

Tornado in a Junkyard by James Perloff

1984 Revisited

 

George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed a totalitarian world of the future. According to former MI6 officer John Coleman, Orwell was attached to MI6 and was simply fictionalizing what he knew was to come.

When the actual year 1984 rolled around, the world didn’t look just the way Orwell’s book envisioned; therefore some criticized the book as a failed prophecy. However, events have increasingly vindicated Orwell and silenced his critics. For those who will complain he missed on the year, we point out that (A) the vigilance of freedom-loving people has forced the Establishment to reset its timetable more than once; and (B) if you read Orwell’s novel carefully, it’s not even certain that the year is 1984 – that was simply what the people were told by the government, which controlled all information.

Let’s explore ways 1984 has been fulfilled:

• In 1984, citizens are under constant electronic surveillance by the Thought Police, not only in the city streets, but through their home televisions, which cannot be turned off. To quote the book:

With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police . . . .252

Today, through computers connected to the Internet, and through cell phone traffic, the government can keep the bulk of the population under surveillance, in the name of “security” under the Patriot Act. This may even be happening through televisions. Years ago, I thought: “Orwell got it wrong. TVs receive, but they don’t transmit!” Certainly the TVs of the 1950s didn’t transmit, but with the enforced upgrading to digital television, it is increasingly apparent that televisions will probably transmit soon, if they are not doing so already. See, for example, “Is Your TV Spying on You?” at http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427405/is-your-tv-spying-on-you/. Orwell was well ahead of the game.

• In 1984, all people of the world fall under three regional governments – Oceania (where the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives), Eurasia and Eastasia. This is reminiscent of the regional approach to world government (European Union, North American Union) now unfolding.

• Just as we have described, power is in a pyramidal structure. At the top of the pyramid is an Antichrist-like figure, Big Brother.

At the apex of the pyramid is Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.253• Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where newspapers, periodicals, books, and other literature forms are continuously changed according to the government’s wishes. For example, if the Times reported Big Brother had made a speech predicting something, which later did not happen, the Times would be subsequently corrected so that it appeared Big Brother had made the correct prediction.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.254While current society has not advanced to this extreme, history has been altered, changing the true nature and records of wars, revolutions, the United Nations, trade treaties, the Federal Reserve, and even the effectiveness of vaccines.

Furthermore, electronic data is increasingly replacing hard copy information. In the Internet age, newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay in print. Newsweek is no longer published in hard copy. If all information eventually becomes electronic, it will be very easy for bureaucrats to change what back copies of newspapers and magazines say – exactly as in Orwell’s novel.

• Although everything in Oceania is in short supply (except that reserved for the elite “Inner Party” members), the government’s economics ministry is termed “The Ministry of Plenty.” This reminds one of the “Security and Prosperity Partnership” borne out of NAFTA, which claims we are enjoying “prosperity” while millions of jobs are slashed and we drown in inflation. In 1984, the Ministry of Plenty spews out falsified statistics:

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture . . . . 255

Even today, the U.S. government fudges statistics to make the realities look brighter. For example, the June 23, 2008 The New American exposed how the government has continuously altered methods of determining the Consumer Price Index, inflation’s main barometer. For example, under Richard Nixon, food and energy costs were simply eliminated from the “core CPI.” Later:

In 1983, the Reagan administration decided that rising real estate costs were causing the CPI to be overstated, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) substituted an “Owner Equivalent” measurement, basing housing costs on what homeowners might get if they were renting their houses. Homes were labeled an investment, and the cost of buying a home (like other investments) was no longer included in the CPI.

The Bush, Sr., Clinton, and Bush, Jr. presidencies each further modified how CPI is determined, each change serving to lower it. The end result of all these tweaks is that the U.S. now reports an annual inflation rate of some two percent, whereas true inflation is closer to ten percent. This enables the government to cheat senior citizens out of their Social Security, making payment increases based on the distorted CPI, rather than the actual rising costs the elderly face.

• In the culture of 1984, the truth is reversed. Two of the government’s main slogans are “WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” Today, many of yesterday’s truisms have also been reversed. For example, homosexuality, once understood as perverted, is now construed as “normal”; abortion, previously a crime, is today a “right”; advocates of traditional family values, once mainstream, are now “extremists.”

• 1984 says:

It was always at night – the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.256

Many film fans are familiar with the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller The Net, about a woman who no longer “exists” after her identity is destroyed by the cyber-manipulations of the movie’s villains. And today, many have been victims of real-world identify theft. Like money and information, the more your identity becomes electronic, the more it becomes erasable. Orwell warns us that someday identity loss may become a function of government.

• We have mentioned that the Establishment has created much of the “popular” music and literature via the Tavistock Institute. In 1984, Winston hears a woman singing a song as she hangs clothes on a line:

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless songs published for the benefit of the proles [the poor] by a sub-section of the Music Department [at the Ministry of Truth].257

• Winston’s secret lover, Julia, also works in the Ministry of Truth, where she had

been picked out to work in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girl’s School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.258• Oceania was continually at war, the wars never being actually won (sound familiar, Americans?). Bombs would sometimes drop on London (where Winston lived), rousing the people to patriotism. But the bombs “were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself.” 259 Shades of 9-11?

• The war ministry (called the Ministry of Peace) was working on means of “producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves.” 260• Oceania had a language called Newspeak. It restricted vocabulary to very few words. Each successive Newspeak dictionary deleted more words. The eventual result was to eliminate ideas unacceptable to the state, since words for those ideas no longer existed. Orwell pointed out that ultimately an older document, such as the American Declaration of Independence, would become unreadable gibberish. Is this unlike today, when “dumbing down” has left American public school students less and less able to read books of the past?

• In the novel, Winston is exposed as a thought criminal and imprisoned by the Ministry of Love (the secret police). In view of the concentration camps FEMA is now reportedly preparing, certain aspects of Winston’s torture are worth mentioning.

The following exchange occurs between Winston and his torturer, O’Brien:

[O’Brien:]“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”

“To make them confess.”

“No, that is not the reason. Try again.”

“To punish them.”

“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, nor to punish you. Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured?”

O’Brien continues:

“You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

After many tortures, Winston still retains a shred of independent thinking. To finish breaking him, the Thought Police bring him to the place every prisoner dreads – Room 101. Room 101 is different for every person. It contains their greatest horror. In Winston’s case, he has a primal fear of rats. His head is placed in a two-compartment cage. The furthest compartment is filled with hungry sewer rats. If the connecting door dropped, the rats would devour Winston’s face. At this point, Winston completely loses it – he is broken.

How did the Thought Police know Winston’s darkest fear was rats? Because they had monitored his conversations. Likewise, the government today could know a person’s greatest fear, by simply monitoring his emails and phone calls. Compiling a profile of nearly every person would be easy.

At the book’s end, the Thought Police have turned Winston free – because he no longer constitutes any threat. He believes every bit of propaganda coming from the telescreen. He gazes at Big Brother’s image. And the book closes with these words: “He loved Big Brother.” If I may freely translate, he worshiped the Antichrist.

James Perloff

Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: ...