The most dangerous intellectual error of modern science

 It was particularly Galileo who realised that mathematics provided the most effective terms in which to express physical observations, and it was he who contributed most to the introduction of those terms into science. The book of nature, he wrote, 'is written in the mathematical language'. But there are two things that should be said about this oft-quoted aphorism. The first is that 'nature', or 'the universe', as Galileo conceived it was a much more restricted concept than that which we hold and that with which modern science is concerned. It comprised only what we study in mechanics; all other phenomena — sights, sounds, smells, etc. — belonged in his view not to the external world but to the observing subject, and it was not at all his idea that mathematics played the all-comprehensive role in science that it is nowadays often assumed to do. Secondly, a language is a medium for expressing ideas, and it is just as capable of expressing false ideas as true ones. The fact, therefore, that something can be expressed with rigorous mathematical exactitude tells you nothing at all about its truth, i.e. about its relation to nature, or to what we can experience.

The most dangerous intellectual error of modern science, with which this book is concerned, lies in the fact that this has been overlooked. Mathematics is an immensely more powerful tool than the Aristotelian syllogism, and its use as a language in which to express the facts of experience has been so successful that the idea has crept unperceived into the minds of physicists that whatever it says must be true. This is openly expressed in the statement already quoted, that everything that is not mathematically forbidden is necessarily observable. Accordingly the habit has developed of assuming that a physical theory is necessarily sound if its mathematics is impeccable: the question whether there is anything in nature corresponding to that impeccable mathematics is not regarded as a question; it is taken for granted.

The fact is, however, that mathematical truths are far more general than physical truths: that is to say, the symbols that compose a mathematical expression may, with equal mathematical correctness, correspond both to that which is observable and that which is purely imaginary or even unimaginable. If, therefore, we start with a mathematical expression, and infer that there must be something in nature corresponding to it, we do in principle just what the pre-scientific philosophers did when they assumed that nature must obey their axioms, but its immensely greater power for both good and evil makes the consequences of its misapplication immensely more serious.

There are so many instances, even in the most elementary uses of mathematics, in which its indications are obviously false, that it may seem strange that this fact is almost automatically overlooked in the more advanced uses of the tool. But there is a universal tendency, not only in science but in everyday life as well, to pay exaggerated attention to predictions that are realised and to ignore those that are not. If, on say three occasions in a week, we dream of something unusual which happens later to occur, there is a very strong pre-disposition to believe that the dreams and the occurrences are directly related, notwithstanding the thousands of instances of dreams, apparently of the same general type, that are not realised. In somewhat the same way, although almost all mathematical solutions of a physical problem give both true and false results, we habitually accept the former as valid and pay no attention at all to the latter, when we are working in fields of experience where our existing knowledge is sufficient to enable us to distinguish them at once. Here is an example which I gave in a broadcast talk a short time ago,4 to which I shall revert later:

Suppose we want to find the number of men required for a certain job under certain conditions. Every schoolboy knows such problems, and he knows that he must begin by saying: 'Let x = the number of men required.' But that substitution introduces a whole range of possibilities that the nature of the original problem excludes. The mathematical symbol, x, can be positive, negative, integral, fractional, irrational, imaginary, complex, zero, infinite, and whatever else the fertile brain of the mathematician may devise. The number of men, however, must be simply positive and integral. Consequently, when you say, 'Let x = the number of men required,' you are making a quite invalid substitution, and the result of the calculation, though entirely possible for the symbol, might be quite impossible for the men.

Every elementary algebra book contains such problems that lead to quadratic equations, and these have two solutions, which might be 8 and - 3, say.

We accept 8 as the answer and ignore - 3 because we know from experience that there are no such things as negative men, and the only alternative interpretation — that we could get the work done by subtracting three men from our gang — is obviously absurd. But what right have we to reject - 3? Clearly, none at all if we accept the substitution: 'Let x = the number of men required.' If we have proved that 8 is the answer, then with the same inevitability we have proved that - 3 is the answer; and if we have not proved that - 3 is the answer, then we have not proved that 8 is the answer. The two solutions stand or fall together as soon as we allow mathematical symbols to represent facts of experience. Yet the inexorable fact is that one answer is true and the other false.

Now in this example it is experience alone that distinguishes the true from the false solution. We cannot prove by pure reason that there cannot be creatures who, with regard to the qualities here considered, can be interpreted as negative men; we know from experience alone that they are as unreal as centaurs. If the problem had been one concerning charges of electricity, of which there are two kinds which we call positive and negative, it might have led to the same equation, and then both solutions would in all probability have been true. There is nothing intrinsically impossible in the existence of negative men, any more than in the existence of black swans: experience alone enables us to reject the solution - 3 as false.

But it is possible to obtain perfectly valid mathematical solutions of a problem which we can see without experience to be physically false because the physical interpretation requires what can be seen without experience to be impossible. Here is an example. Suppose we have a cubical vessel whose volume is 8 cubic feet, and we wish to find the length of one of its edges. Now physically what we are asking is the reading of a standard measuring rod when it is placed along the edge. But suppose there is no such rod handy. That does not matter, for we can solve the problem by mathematics. We let x be the required length, and all we have to do is to solve the equation, x3 = 8. But this equation has three solutions, viz. 2, √( - 3) - 1, - √( -3) - 1 — all having the same mathematical validity. But we know that the only one of these solutions that can possibly correspond to the reading of a measuring rod is 2, because of the necessary properties of measuring rods, which we should understand even if we had never made or seen one. We might one day discover negative men, but we cannot conceivably discover a standard measuring rod that can read √(- 3) - 1 because, owing to the accepted standards of measurement, such an object would not be a measuring rod. So we just ignore two of the mathematical solutions, and quite overlook the significance of that fact — namely, that in the language of mathematics we can tell lies as well as truths, and within the scope of mathematics itself there is no possible way of telling one from the other. We can distinguish them only by experience or by reasoning outside the mathematics, applied to the possible relation between the mathematical solution and its supposed physical correlate.

Now it is this latter kind of reasoning that — according to the argument outlined in the Introduction, to which I can get no answer and which seems to me plainly unanswerable — invalidates the special theory of relativity. The problem here is to find the relation between the rates of two exactly similar standard clocks, A and B, of which one is moving uniformly with respect to the other, on the assumption that the motion is indeed truly relative, i.e. that there is no justification for ascribing it to one rather than to the other. Now this is a problem that can be solved mathematically, and we find that there are two solutions, known technically as the 'Galilean transformation' and the 'Lorentz transformation'. According to the first the clocks work at the same rate, and according to the second they work at different rates. The special theory of relativity regards the second as true and the first as false; the usual expression is that 'a moving clock runs slow'. But, as we have said, it is a condition of the problem that either clock can be regarded as the 'moving' one, so this second solution (subject, of course, to the truth of the postulate that the motion is truly relative) requires equally that A works faster than B and that B works faster than A, and just as we know enough about measuring rods to know that they cannot read √(-3) - 1, so we know enough about clocks to know that one cannot work steadily both faster and slower than another. Hence, without in the least rejecting the Lorentz transformation as a mathematical solution of the problem, we can say at once that it is not a possible physical solution. Nevertheless, in modern physics it is universally assumed to be so, on the sole ground of its mathematical validity.

How such an obvious error could have occurred and escaped immediate recognition is explained in Part Two, but it may be said at once that the apparently simplest way of exposing it — by setting two clocks in relative motion and observing their rates — is impracticable because the difference which the theory requires is too small to be detected except at velocities far too high to be yet attainable. Experiments have been made in which elementary electrically charged particles (conceptual bodies, such as electrons, protons, etc.) have been used instead of clocks, and observations of what have been regarded as their 'rates' have been made, and these have shown that such 'rates' differ for particles which, according to electromagnetic theory, have vastly different velocities. These observations have been held to constitute an experimental proof that the Lorentz transformation is a physically valid solution of our problem. But there are two reasons why this argument fails. In the first place, even if it be fully granted, it shows only that one 'clock' works more slowly than the other — which would be quite possible if the motion of each was absolute, as Lorentz showed before Einstein's special relativity theory appeared. If the motion is relative, however, and the Lorentz transformation is a valid solution, then also the second 'clock' must work more slowly than the first — and this, it need hardly be said, has been left unproved. The second reason for the failure of the argument is that the interpretation of the particles as 'clocks' and of the observed phenomena as their 'rates', and the assumption that they move with velocities, ascribed to them (it is, of course, quite impossible to observe them; their existence and properties have all to be inferred on theoretical grounds) depend on the truth of a theory that itself depends on the truth of the Lorentz transformation (this is explained in Part Two), so the argument is circular: the observation proves the physical truth of the Lorentz transformation only if we first accept a theory which itself requires that transformation to be physically true.

An experimental test of this requirement of the special relativity theory is therefore at present impracticable, and the claims often advanced that such a test has been made are spurious. But surely, one does not need an experiment to prove that one clock cannot at the same time work both faster and slower than another. And this brings me to the most serious aspect of this whole matter. How is it possible that such an obvious absurdity should not only have ever been believed but should have been maintained and made the basis of almost the whole of modern physics for more than half a century; and that, even when pointed out, its recognition should have been universally and strenuously resisted, in defiance of all reason and all the traditions and principles of science expressed by Sir Henry Dale in the statement quoted at the beginning of this chapter?

This question has two aspects, an intellectual and a moral one. Both are astonishing, but of their reality and profound importance there can be no question. The former is the less difficult to understand, though it needs a careful survey of the history of the subject to make it credible: this I attempt in Part Two — necessarily less completely than is desirable, but sufficiently, I hope, to show that what appears patently absurd in one context may present quite a different semblance in another, and to explain how the special relativity theory came to be accepted in spite of its contradictions (disguised as 'paradoxes') in the early decades of this century. After all, it was not so very long ago that men of the highest intelligence believed that Moses wrote the account of his own death recorded in the Pentateuch. But the more serious lapse is the moral one, not only because of the intrinsically greater seriousness of a moral as compared with an intellectual fault, but also because the nature of science itself does not ensure its eventual correction as it does when the mistake is intellectual. When Dale wrote of the unflinching fidelity of science to the answers which nature gives to its questions, he took it for granted that those answers would, in the long run, be unmistakable, and the contribution that science had to offer to civilisation lay in the moral sphere, in its acceptance and publication of those answers, at whatever cost to expectancy and without prejudice or preconception of any kind. It is in the failure of present-day science to live up to Dale's ideal in this respect that, notwithstanding the incalculable physical danger involved in the intellectual error, lies the ultimate offence. That is so, not only because fidelity to truth for its own sake is ultimately more compulsory than that for the sake of physical well-being (if that is disputed I shall not argue the question), but also because the loyalty of science to truth has a far wider relevance than that exhibited in the matter of special relativity alone, wide though that is. In an age in which science has begun to play a dominant role, quite beyond the control or even the comprehension of the non-scientific citizen, the whole future of civilisation is dependent on the absolute unqualified fulfilment by scientists of their moral obligations.

Science At the Crossroads

Herbert Dingle

Beverly Eckert - “My Silence Cannot Be Bought"

 Please understand that the perpetrators of this heinous crime, anticipated in advance all of the intense scrutiny of their actions, knowing full-well that not everyone is dumb enough to simply blindly, accept without question their version of events. Indeed, this is where their damage limitation abilities now come to the forefront; they are nothing if not past-masters of the art of deception and disinformation.

The controlled-media generally ignored the 9/11 ‘truth movement,’ until a few months before the 2004 election, when the movement began to gain traction. But now these forces of evil love to focus on that same ‘truth movement,’ just so long as they are able to denounce and ridicule it, in much the same way as with all those that question all their other false-flag atrocities.

By 2009, the ‘9/11 truth movement’ was so inundated with disinformation that it had become almost a laughing stock. Their easily-discredited claims contaminated the greater issue and tarnished dissenters, across the board. The Zionist media, whether corporate or foundation-funded, to further their own agenda, could easily find ‘shills,’ (paid agents of deliberate dis-information) ranting about ‘the Jews” or ‘the Illuminati,’ the ‘lizard people,’ the missiles, holograms, mini-nukes or space-beam weapons vapourising the Twin Towers, in order to discredit the entire truth movement. Many shills and even public personalities, played the roles of professional disinformation artists, hard at work concocting and posting far-fetched garbage online, which gullible others repeated to their own detriment and that of the movement as a whole. It is far from easy to prove that any individual is a paid shill, a disinformation agent or a cyber-agent provocateur, but be assured, they are out there in Internet-land, in huge numbers. I have indeed personally met two of these cynical individuals, on separate occasions and who both openly boasted of the fact.

The author Thomas Pynchon wrote, “ . . . If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” And if they can get you asking stupid questions, then their lapdog media can easily dismiss you as a ‘conspiracy nut.’ But please think for yourself. It is sometimes far from easy to discern or identify what is real information and what is not, but please do your own research to reach the truth, as 9/11 is surrounded by more deception and dis-information than almost any other topic.

The 9/11 truth movement is a prime target for dis-information, infiltration, and other forms of sabotage by forces who do not want the public asking difficult questions about 9/11. Believers of the official story may see the discussion of dis-information as further evidence of paranoia, but objective researchers will recognise the clear evidence of dis-information. Dis-information and counter-intelligence sabotage have long been used by government authorities in subverting progressive groups and causes.

Much dis-information is carefully crafted to appear legitimate and misleading evidence is often delivered alongside accurate information. Dis-information requires an intention to deceive whilst mis-information does not. In the 9/11 truth movement, both are apparent through evidence of materials, researchers, and groups that either consciously or unconsciously promote false or misleading information. Much incorrect information within the 9/11 truth community likely began as dis-information that has often been perpetuated as unintentional mis-information.

The objectives and methods of dis-information are very sophisticated. Here are some of the main strategies . . . 

The Straw Man Argument/Sensationalism. By promoting speculative, sensational, and false evidence, opponents can set-up easily debunk-able or dismiss-able points that can be used to lend credence to their position. The opposition prefers dealing with topics that can be easily countered, or that simply make 9/11 sceptics look like idiots.

Muddying the Waters. Making it harder to discern the real evidence/researchers/websites from the fake ones. This approach both frustrates efforts at understanding the subject and makes the project less focused and more frustrating to be a part of. For example, when a newcomer visits the ‘Scholars for 9/11 Truth’ site, and sees that there are two mutually-exclusive, competing groups (that are each essentially calling the other ‘dis-info,’) then they may become frustrated or dismissive of the entire movement. Even if an individual is interested in researching the facts of 9/11, distinguishing between honest information and dis-information, between trustworthy and suspect sources, becomes another time-consuming occupation, thereby distracting real investigation.

Bad Jacketing / Death by Association / Smear Campaign. By associating the target idea / individual / movement along with another topic that is already discredited (UFOs, anti-Semitism, Nazis, etc.,) the original subject can be smeared and dismissed. These smear campaigns can be extremely effective, as most people are very concerned with the image of a group or subject with which they may become involved. This dynamic may be seen in action in the generalised image of ‘conspiracy theories.’ Many diverse topics, UFOs, 9/11, JFK, Illuminati, Satanism, New World Order, are commonly conflated with each other in people’s minds.

Paranoia / Divide and Conquer. One of the most effective ways to destroy a group is to sow distrust among members by knowingly providing them with false information in order to create suspicion between authentic activists. Seemingly paradoxically, dis-information agents may actually promote discussion of dis-information / infiltration in order to increase paranoia.

Now it is widely acknowledged, that anything photographic can be faked, even YouTube™ amateur videos that either attempt to show us the truth, or to distort it. But it is video evidence that is the most compelling, especially that of dedicated amateurs.

Oddly enough, some of the most legitimate facts and discoveries of 9/11 come from dis-info agents, such as Alex Jones, Webster Tarpley, Dave von Kleist and other prominent names. They take us maybe 80% of the way to the truth, then sharply veer away from it in order to mis-direct.

The real benefit of this whole 9/11 psy-op, dis-info tactic, to those who would deceive us, is that it overloads our senses, plays with our minds, and finally we trust nothing at all that we may read or hear.

As has been demonstrated, the Zionists had total control over the crime scenes, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and even the Shanksville site. They also had control of US telecommunications, the computer spyware of the US military and NORAD defence systems, the CIA, NSA, and the FBI. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff, President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the State Department, the Pentagon, were all in their thrall, too. In addition, this was coupled with total control of the mass-media, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, the internet, including numerous ‘9/11 truth’ sites.

They also had total control of the 9/11 ‘investigations,’ and the 9/11 Commission and its report and total control of the evidence, both in destroying and manufacturing it.

And perhaps even more significantly, the Zionists had total control of 9/11 justice, from releasing the guilty Israeli ‘students,’ to framing innocent Arabs and the handling all litigation and legal procedures associated with 9/11. If Israeli agents were not prime suspects in the ‘false flag’ terror attacks on the World Trade Center, and if a passenger screening company owned by Israeli intelligence agents were not a defendant in the 9/11 litigation, the fact that the crucial 9/11 lawsuits were handled by two Zionist judges from the same synagogue, may be considered as a coincidence. But with so much evidence of Israeli involvement in 9/11 in plain view, the intimate connection with the State of Israel of these judges cannot be discarded as mere coincidence. It should rather be viewed as evidence of the on-going, high-level, and well-planned Zionist cover-up.

The federal judges, Alvin K. Hellerstein and Michael B. Mukasey, were both members of a Zionist congregation, the orthodox Kehilath Jeshrun synagogue of Manhattan, and were active supporters of its yeshiva, the Ramaz School. Hellerstein, who presided over the 9/11 litigation process, also had a connection to the Mossad through his son, Joseph. This is of crucial importance because one of the key defendants in the 9/11 wrongful death, tort litigation process was the Mossad-controlled airport security firm named ICTS which was in turn, the owner of Huntleigh USA, the passenger screening company that checked the passengers boarding the aircraft at the key airports on 9/11.

Whilst Michael Chertoff supervised the confiscation and destruction of the critical evidence, government appointed doctors ‘medicated’ the grieving relatives with mood-altering Prozac, and Kenneth Feinberg began his war of attrition on the families of the victims of 9/11.  Eligibility for the Victim Compensation Fund required the victims’ ‘physical harm or death’ as a result of one of the crashes, before compensation would be considered, to one of the relatives of a deceased victim.

But the ‘catch’ was the waiver of a claimant’s right to independently file suit, if he or she applied for fund money. In other words, accepting a fund payment automatically disbarred the relative from pursuing a lawsuit against the airlines or the US government. If victims or survivors decided not to take the money, the new law stated that they could “ . . . bring in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, an exclusive cause of action for damages based upon the substantive law, including choice of law principles, of the State in which the crash occurred unless such law was inconsistent with or pre-empted by Federallaw.”

All those who settled for fund pay-outs, those who took the ‘hush money,’ were thereby kept quiet with gag orders and non-disclosure clauses, and their ideas of the truth about 9/11 would never be revealed in a courtroom. Very clever, indeed. So this federally funded pay-off to the families effectively prevented the possibility for almost all relatives to obtain justice or truth through the legal process, which would no doubt have caused some uncomfortable or unpalatable truths of the events of 9/11, to be revealed.

The Kenneth Feinberg Group, one of his highly profitable enterprises, was listed as one of the top ten supporters of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies for 2004-2005. The Jerusalem Institute is an Israel-based Zionist organisation that supports the building of the illegal separation wall across Palestine, for example. The Feinberg Group also listed as its clients, major insurance and re-insurance companies such as Lloyds of London and these were the companies who stood to lose billions, had 9/11 victims’ lawsuits been forthcoming.

Feinberg was tasked with the prevention of the real facts of 9/11 from being disclosed in a court of law. He was a man whose job was to severely limit any compensation to the victims and victim’s families of this bloody crime spree, a man who was good friends with, and in league with, the mass-murdering masterminds of 9/11.

On 9/11, Barry Jennings reported that he and Michael Hess had been blown back by a big explosion inside WTC-7. He later said in an interview that he had heard explosions in Building 7 before either Tower had collapsed. And he also reported that he was stepping over bodies when he left the building, contradicting the official claim that no-one died in WTC-7. Jennings died mysteriously on 19th August 2008, two days before the release of the NIST Report’s first draft. The cause of death was undisclosed. A private investigator was hired by his family to investigate his strange death, but he quickly returned the money he had been paid, referred the case back to law enforcement and that was that. But why does the death of Barry Jennings continue to be shrouded in mystery and what was it that scared-off a highly-paid private investigator?

As in the case of the JFK assassination, many people knew many secrets, and were unafraid to talk about them, but unfortunately this brought them to the attention of powerful forces, and were thus considered a threat. Human life is indeed cheap, to the banksters. Whether it is one single life, or that of billions of lives, it does not matter in the slightest to them. They are simply sacrificed for the banksters’ evil goals. It is just business, nothing personal.

Beverly Eckert was murdered by Zionist operatives who were threatened by her relentless pursuit for justice regarding the death of her husband, Sean Rooney, whom she had loved dearly. Rooney had died a terrible, heart-rending death as WTC-2 collapsed around him and it was a truly horrendous event. Beverly was actually speaking on the phone with Sean, who was trapped in the building, and while she was speaking to him, saying a tearful goodbye, he died in the collapse.

In her own words, she said . . . “I guess I wish I wasn’t here, because it was such a different life before September 11th. I never envisioned myself speaking to the public having to say anything other than about my own little life. I was just like everyone else, very complacent, very content. World events didn’t seem to affect me, that’s what I believed at the time. All that changed on September 11th, and I guess I just found that I couldn’t just sit back and be a victim. I hate that word. I guess we’re always called victims’ families and things like that. I hate that term, what it conveys is helplessness and no control. I think it’s just been part of my healing process to see if I can make something good happen out of allthis.

BeverlyEckertMy husband Sean worked in the South Tower, his office was on the 98th floor with a couple of hundred other people and he didn’t really have a good understanding of evacuation and escape options and so they went up, only to find that the doors were locked. They had a window of opportunity to escape down Staircase A, there were three staircases in the South Tower. I think they thought that the rooftop was an option, and so they went up and they were trapped because the roof doors were locked. And I heard from him, he called me and was able to get through to me so I was one of the very lucky family members, I was able to say goodbye. I know what happened to him, I know what his last moments were like. He was very brave. He was a hero. So I have a legacy that I have, that I thought just to take his strength and try to do something positive with it. He was a really strong individual his whole life and I’m kind of feeling infused with that now. I’m trying to make a difference. I’m trying to find the truth in all this chaos.”

Beverly had also issued this statement . . . 

“My Silence Cannot BeBought

Beverly Eckert, Friday, 19thDecember 2003

I’ve chosen to go to court rather than accept a payoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. Instead, I want to know what went so wrong with our intelligence and security systems that a band of religious fanatics was able to turn four US passenger jets into an enemy force, attack our cities and kill 3,000 civilians with terrifying ease. I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.

I am suing because unlike other investigative avenues, including congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence.The victims fund was not created in a spirit of compassion. Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgement by Congress that it tampered with our civil justice system in an unprecedented way. Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the September 11 fires still smouldered. And this liability cap protects not just the airlines, but also World Trade Center builders, safety engineers and other defendants.

The caps on liability have consequences for those who want to sue to shed light on the mistakes of 9/11. It means the playing field is tilted steeply in favour of those who need to be held accountable. With the financial consequences other than insurance proceeds removed, there is no incentive for those whose negligence contributed to the death toll to acknowledge their failings or implement reforms. They can afford to deny culpability and play a waitinggame.

By suing, I’ve forfeited the ‘$1.8 million average award’ for a death claim I could have collected under the fund. Nor do I have any illusions about winning money in my suit. What I do know is I owe it to my husband, whose death I believe could have been avoided, to see that all of those responsible are held accountable. If we don’t get answers to what went wrong, there will be a next time. And instead of 3,000 dead, it will be 10,000. What will Congress dothen?”

Eckert was one of the few surviving relatives who refused to accept the ‘hush money’ offered by Kenneth Feinberg and took her own action, ultimately leading to the White House and beyond. She sought only justice for her husband and in so-doing publicly referred to the Zionist-orchestrated Project for the New American Century, as the “most sinister” of all documents she had ever seen. Eckert had gathered evidence that former President Bush knew all about the attacks in advance and had even contributed to the planning of them. Because of her relentless activism she was ‘allowed’ to meet with Barack Obama, informing him that she would not rest until justice was served, and also demanded that George Bush be investigated for conspiracy and complicity in mass-murder.

Less than a week later, Beverly Eckert was dead.

She had met with Obama in 2009 at the White House asking him to open a new 9/11 investigation. Obama shook her hand on TV, then sent her on a ‘complimentary’ flight to Buffalo to celebrate her late husband’s 58th birthday anniversary. The plane crashed just 6 days after the meeting with Obama and Beverly Eckert was silenced forever.

The crash of Continental Express flight 3407 brought tragedy to the friends and family of all 50 victims, but for one family, grief struck for a second time. The plane was flying without cause for concern, but then it suddenly began pitching wildly and crashed. The slick media ‘experts’ claimed it was due to ice, yet the plane had powerful de-icing systems. Suspiciously, there was a strong FBI presence at the crash scene. The FBI only investigates cases where the NTSB has determined that ‘foul play’ is involved. They stated that criminal action was ruled out, yet their presence proved otherwise.

This suggests that they knew there was foul play and that their only purpose at the scene was to enact a cover-up operation. The forensics team was led by the same man who led the forensics recovery efforts for Flight 93 in Shanksville. This man was a FEMA operative who had also worked with the UN on the crash of Egyptian Airlines 990 (another black-op.) Was he considered a ‘safe pair of hands,’ for dealing with these incidents?

Marvin Bush’s house maid, Bertha Champagne, was killed on 29th September 2003 on Marvin’s property.  As with many other bizarre stories relating to the Bush family, Bertha was crushed to death in Marvin’s driveway by her own vehicle which pinned her against the garage.  The investigation concluded that it was an ‘accident.’ What did she know?

There were so many other ‘convenient’ deaths, too. Here is just a sample . . . 

Kenneth Johannemann, an eyewitness to explosions inside WTC, saw “floors just blow up.” He suffered a gunshot wound to the head, ruled as a suicide.

Prasanna Kalahasthi, the wife of a 9/11 ‘Flight 11 passenger.’ Her death was ruled as a ‘suicide by hanging.’

David Graham, a dentist who saw three of the 9/11 hijackers (after the event) with a Pakistani businessman in Shreveport, Louisiana, was murdered by poisoning with anti-freeze.

Paul Smith, a helicopter pilot for WABC7 on 9/11, died in a ‘car accident.’

Michael H. Doran, a 9/11 victims lawyer, died in a plane crash.

Christopher Landis, the former Operations Manager for the Safety Service Patrol for the Virginia Department of Transportation, interviewed by makers of the documentary exposé ‘The Pentacon’ and who gave the filmmakers a photographic collection, containing evidence that the Pentagon attacks were not as officially described. Death ruled as a ‘suicide.’

An un-named ticket agent at Boston, Logan airport who allegedly checked-in Atta and Alomari. Death ruled as a ‘suicide.’

Perry Kucinich, the brother of the Congressman who advocated a new 9/11 investigation. Fell down some stairs.

Salvatore Princiotta, the firefighter from Ladder 9. Murdered.

Deborah Palfrey ran a ‘high-class’ prostitution ring in Washington DC, that had several of the 9/11 perpetrators among its clients.

She naively said in an interview with Alex Jones, that . . . “I have information that would be of great interest to the 9/11 Commission. There’s information that I have that would have been very important for the 9/11 Commission to know, having to do with intelligence picked up about 9/11 before it happened.”

Alex Jones: “The fact that you’re so visible, really protects you, going on Larry King and other big shows. Do you want to put it on record that you’re not planning to commit suicide?”

Deborah Palfrey: “No, I’m not planning to commit suicide. I’m planning to go into court on April 17th if indeed we do have the trial, and I plan on defending myself vigorously and I plan on exposing the government in ways that I do not think they want me to expose them on.”

On 15th April 2008, a police spokesman said that when Deborah’s mother, Blanche went outside, she noticed that the bicycle that was normally kept in the shed, had been moved. Then upon entering the shed located on the west side of the residence, Blanche Palfrey discovered her daughter Deborah had apparently hung herself from a metal beam on the ceiling of the shed, using a nylon rope. She then called 911. At approximately 11.01 am, the Fire Rescue department pronounced Deborah Palfrey dead from suicide.

So in conclusion, there is monumental corroborating evidence that Israel played a central role in the 9/11 attacks, aided and abetted by corrupt elements of the Bush administration. This is reinforced by Zionists’ many roles in the cover-up.

Those who are relatively new to the issues of false-flag terrorism, Zionism and the New World Order may be asking themselves if suggestions that ‘Israel did 9/11’ is just another ‘conspiracy theory’ or is ‘anti-Semitic.’ That particular dis-information has been disseminated by the 9/11 perpetrators themselves, who love to exploit it as a means of deflecting attention from themselves, their crimes and deceptions.

We also have Israelis with proven foreknowledge, a highly-placed Zionist with access to the best Flight Termination System for electronically hijacking aircraft via a Command Transmitter System, an Israeli Instant Messaging service through which two hours’ advance knowledge of an attack on the World Trade Center was transmitted, and Zionists who were friends with four Israeli prime ministers and who took control of the WTC lease, and insured the buildings against terror attacks for billions of dollars, six weeks before the buildings were destroyed in terror attacks, not forgetting to insert a clause stating that in the event of a terrorist attack the partners could not only collect the insured value of the property, but would also be released from all of their obligations under the 99-year lease.

I would assert that the original plan was to have both Twin Towers collapse at around 10.00 am, which would allow the perpetrators’ lackeys sufficient time to exit WTC-7, and then have Flight 93 strike WTC-7 at around 10.30 am. This third strike would provide the pretext for the planned WTC-7 collapse, which was necessary in order to eliminate evidence of the remote-control transmitters for controlling Flights 11, 175, and 93, that is, if remote-controlled planes or drones were used, and radio controls for the detonating of charges in each of the Twin Towers. However, Flight 93, scheduled to depart at 8.00 am, was delayed because of congestion and did not depart until 8.42. At 9.36 am, Flight 93 filed a new flight-plan to arrive in Washington at 10.28. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, the US air defences could not be delayed indefinitely, and so United Airlines 93, was shot down near Shanksville at 10.06 am. The Zionist plotters still had to demolish WTC-7, but were now without a convenient ‘suicide-piloted’ passenger plane to hand. Hence, the official story was compelled to ridiculously assert that the collapse of WTC-7 was solely as a result of ‘fires.’

And after the event,  the Zionist ‘mafia’ and the Bush Administration had a false pretext for the attacking and looting of nations that were now deemed ‘fair game’ as states who ‘sponsored terrorism.’ The CIA was anxious to invade Afghanistan in order to get back into the opium trade, which had proven highly lucrative for them until the intervention of the Taliban. The Bushes and their partners-in-crime hoped to profit from Iraq’s oil wealth, from looting its Oil-for-Food fund, and from extensive reconstruction contracts, all of which were conveniently offered to their cronies. Israel wished to see its Arab neighbours neutered, and maybe even turned into its ‘satellite colonies’ as the US, UK and Germany already were. But their immediate interest was Iraq, not Afghanistan. The Bush family had business links with the bin Ladens, and Osama was selected as the arch-villain since his health was rapidly failing and he was not expected to survive long. But it was much easier to link Osama with Afghanistan than Iraq.

And so, the world was redefined after 11th September 2001, just as it had been so many times before, with previous earth shattering and cataclysmic, false flag events. But it was now the new age of the ‘War on Terror,’ however the only terrorism in existence was being instigated by the very same people allegedly fighting against it.

Behind The Curtain

A Chilling Exposé of the Banking Industry

John Hamer

Squirrels – Inhabitants of Mars?

 

Situation: On September 28th back in 2012 NASA released a photo to the public taken by the Curiosity Rover depicting the red tinted barren landscape that we have been condi-tioned to believe is what Mars looks like. The problem is that several intrepid souls over the years have matched up the scenery from Mars photographs as being a dead ringer for the Mojave Desert located in Nevada and California sans a little red tint to the photoshopped outcome. While it could be argued that Mars and the Mojave Desertscapes look re-markably similar, what can’t be refuted easily at all by NASA is why is there a Mojave ground squirrel in their pho-tograph. NASA refuses to address the fact that the squirrel is in their photo maintaining that the climate of Mars is com-pletely inhospitable for animal growth with an atmosphere of 95.32 percent Carbon Dioxide. So NASA where did the squirrel come from? Maybe this is why relatively few photos are ever released to the public of the final frontier.

Guy S. Stanton, III

**

German Hyperinflation 1923

 

The true facts of this financial disaster do not appear in any history textbooks today.  Today’s history uses this inflation to twist the truth into its opposite.  It cites the radical devaluation of the German mark as an example of what goes wrong when governments print their own money, rather than borrow it from private cartels run by the banksters.  In reality the exact opposite is the truth as with so much of our accepted historical wisdom today.

The Weimar financial crisis actually began with the impossible reparations payments imposed at the Treaty of Versailles. Hjalmar Schacht (who was never a Nazi Party member and now it appears clear why that was the case), the Rothschild agent who was currency commissioner for the Republic, opposed letting the German government print its own money…

 “The Treaty of Versailles is a model of ingenious measures for the economic destruction of Germany.  Germany could not find any way of holding its head above the water, other than by the inflationary expedient of printing bank notes.”

Schacht echoes the history books’ deception that Weimar inflation was caused when the German government printed its own money; however, in his 1967 book ‘The Magic of Money’, Schacht revealed that it was the privately owned ‘Reichsbank’, not the German government that was injecting new money into the economy. Thus, it was that this Elite-owned and run private bank caused the Weimar hyperinflation.

Like the US Federal Reserve, the Reichsbank was overseen by appointed government officials, but was operated for private gain.  What drove the wartime inflation into hyperinflation was speculation by foreign investors, who sold the German Mark short, betting on its decreasing value.  In the manipulative device known as the ‘short sell’, speculators borrow something they do not own, sell it, and then ‘cover’ by buying it back at the lower price.

Speculation in the German Mark was made possible because the privately owned Reichsbank (not yet under Nazi control) made massive amounts of currency available for borrowing.  This currency, like all first-world currency today, was created with accounting entries in the bank’s books and then this ‘magic’ money was lent at compound interest.  When the Reichsbank could not keep up with the voracious demand for Marks, other private banks were then allowed to also create Marks out of nothing and to lend them at interest.  The result was runaway debt and inflation.

On the 24th June 1922, right-wing fanatics assassinated Walter Rathenau, the moderate German foreign minister.  Rathenau was a charismatic figure and the idea that a popular, wealthy and glamorous government minister could be shot in a law-abiding society shattered the faith of the German people, who needed to believe that the country was in safe hands after the trauma of the previous decade. The wealthier, by now extremely nervous citizens were already taking their money out of banks and investing it into ‘real goods’ such as diamonds, works of art and safe real-estate, with true intrinsic values, unlike currency which the Elite will manipulate up or downwards to suit their own agendas. Eventually, the ordinary German citizens also began to trade their Marks for real commodities.

 The British historian Adam Fergusson noted that pianos were being bought, even by non-musical families.  Sellers held back because the Mark was worth less every day and as prices soared, the amounts of currency demanded became greater and greater and the German Central Bank responded to these demands through the printing of more, increasingly worthless paper.  Yet still the ruling authorities did not acknowledge that there was anything amiss.  A leading financial newspaper at the time, reported that the amounts of money in circulation were not excessively high but nevertheless Dr. Rudolf Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank (German equivalent to the Federal Reserve / Bank of England) told an economics professor that he needed a new suit but wasn't going to buy one until prices came down.

 Why did the German government not act sooner to halt the inflation?  The problem was partly that it was a shaky, fragile government, especially after the assassination of Rathenau.  The vengeful French sent their army into the Ruhr to enforce their demands for reparations due under the Versailles Treaty and the Germans were powerless to resist due to the virtual disbandment of their armed forces and they feared unemployment far more than inflation.  In 1919, Communists had attempted a coup and severe unemployment may have given the Communists another opportunity to seize power.  The great German industrial combines Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben and Stinnes welcomed the inflation and survived it well by astute forward planning and possibly foreknowledge of what was to come.  A cheaper Mark, they reasoned, would make German goods cheap and easy to export and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad.  Inflation kept everyone working.

 And so the printing presses continued producing the ever-decreasing in value Mark and once they began to run, they were impossible to stop.  The price increases became unmanageable.  Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough to keep up with the speed of the inflation.  A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a café and the price on the menu was 5,000 Marks per cup.  He had two cups but when the bill arrived, it was for 14,000 Marks.  ‘If you want to save money and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time’, he was told by the proprietor.

Things became so bad that people would not even bother to bend down to pick up a one hundred million Mark note carelessly discarded by a passer-by as by that time it had become worth less than the paper upon which it was printed.  There was a famous case of a man walking along a street on a shopping trip to buy bread, carrying his money in a large wicker basket, such was the quantity and bulk of the notes he needed to carry.  Upon unsuccessfully attempting to enter a particularly busy shop, he reasoned that he could quite safely leave most of his money outside in the basket as no-one would bother to risk stealing such a bulky yet paltry amount of money.  He was absolutely correct.  When he returned, he found his money was all still there but someone had stolen his basket!

 The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up to demand, even though they ran through the night.  Individual cities and states began to issue their own money and Dr. Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank, did not get his new suit.  A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11 am: ‘At 11:00 in the morning a siren sounded, and everyone gathered in the factory forecourt, where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded to overflowing with paper money.  The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top.  They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes.  As soon as you had caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going.’  Teachers, paid at 10 am, brought their money to the playground, where relatives took the bundles and hurried off with them.  Banks closed at 11am as by this time they had invariably run out of cash anyway.

 The flight from currency that had begun with the buying of diamonds, gold, country houses and antiques now extended to minor and almost useless items, bric-a-brac, soap and hairpins to name but a few.  This hitherto law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery, petrol (gasoline) was siphoned from cars and people bought things they didn't need and used them to barter.  A pair of shoes for a shirt or some crockery for coffee.  Berlin had an unreal atmosphere, prostitutes of both sexes roamed the streets and cocaine was the fashionable drug.  When the 1,000-billion Mark note was first issued in 1923, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it.  By November 1923, with one dollar equal to one trillion Marks, the breakdown was complete and the German economy had become one of barter.  The currency had completely lost its meaning.

 Then, a new president took over the Reichsbank, Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, who came by his first two names because of his father's admiration for an editor of the New York Tribune.  The Rentenmark was not Schacht's idea, but he executed it and as the Reichsbank president, he got the credit for it.  For decades afterward he was able to maintain a reputation for financial wizardry and he became the architect of the financial prosperity brought by the Nazi party.

 Obviously, although the currency was worthless, Germany was still a rich country with mines, farms, factories, and natural resources aplenty.  The backing for the Rentenmark was mortgages on the land and bonds on the factories, but that backing was a fiction; the factories and land could not be turned into cash or used abroad.  Nine zeros were struck from the currency, that is, one Rentenmark was equal to one billion old Marks.  The Germans wanted desperately to believe in the Rentenmark, and so they simply did. 

But although the country slowly began to function almost normally again, the savings of the middle-classes were never restored, nor were the values of hard work and decency that had accompanied the savings.   With the currency went many of the lifetime plans of average, ordinary citizens.  It was the custom for the bride to bring some money to a marriage; so many marriages were called off and many widows dependent on insurance found themselves destitute.  People who had worked for a lifetime and built up a sizeable pension fund, found that their pensions would not even buy a cup of coffee.  Such are the ways that the ordinary citizens of the world are cheated out of the money by these vultures. 

“The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people.  They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them.  Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.”  Pearl Buck, American author

Thus, according to Schacht himself, the German government did not cause the Weimar hyperinflation.  On the contrary, the government brought hyperinflation under control.  It placed the Reichsbank under strict government regulation and took prompt corrective measures to eliminate foreign speculation.  One of those measures was to eliminate easy access to loans from private banks and eventually Hitler regained Germany’s financial stability through the issuance of Government Treasury Certificates.

Schacht, the Rothschild agent, disapproved of this government fiat money (obviously) and was consequently dismissed as head of the Reichsbank when he refused to issue it.  Nevertheless, he acknowledged in his later memoirs that allowing the government to issue the money it needed did not produce the price inflation predicted by classical economic theory, which states (for obvious reasons) that currency must be borrowed from private cartels.

What really causes hyperinflation is uncontrolled speculation.  When speculation is coupled with debt (owed to private banking cartels) the result is always disaster.  On the other hand, when a government issues currency in carefully measured ways, it causes supply and demand to increase together, leaving prices unaffected.  Hence there is no inflation, no debt, no unemployment, and no need for income taxes.

Naturally this terrifies the bankers, since it eliminates their powers and it also terrifies the Elite, since their control of banking allows them to buy the media, the government and everything else.  Were the nations of the world to revert to Government-only money issuance, then the world financial crisis would be solved overnight, as would much of the ever-increasing poverty and suffering we are currently witnessing.

Significantly, it was in the midst of this financial carnage that further devastated an already prostrate nation, that an unobtrusive, former army corporal was thrust into the spotlight and promoted as a great ‘leader of men’.  The prevailing conditions of the time providing a perfect stage for anyone with any aspirations of greatness and the ability to ‘mesmerise’ his audiences with nationalist, patriotic rhetoric.  And thus the world was introduced to the soon-to-be world public enemy number one, Adolf Hitler…

The Falsification Of HistoryOur Distorted RealityBy

John Hamer

They try to portray all of life as very simple

 

Darwinists’ deception techniques are generally based on not permitting people to think. One of the most effective ways of doing this, they foolishly imagine, is to completely ignore the extraordinary complexity of life and portray is as really very “simple.”

Darwinists say that, "The cell came into being in muddy water.” They try to deceive people with the idea of the cell “forming in muddy water,” despite being at a complete loss to explain how a single protein might have formed by chance and are still striving to fully unravel the mystery of the cell in the most technically advanced laboratories.

Darwinists also claim that fish emerged onto dry land and gradually turned into amphibians, that reptiles suddenly grew wings and began to fly, that bears turned into whales while romping by the shore – which is Darwin’s own claim, and that chimpanzees (or, since Darwinists regard the words chimpanzee or monkey as slightly disparaging, fictitious “ape-like creatures,” as they themselves put it) turned into scientists, professors, and scholars who examine their own brain cells in laboratories. the glorious complexity in life is a huge dead-end for Darwinists. the only way out for them, is to explain everything in terms of chance; to depict life and the complexity within it as actually very “simple.”

To that end, the idea that Darwinists want to condition people with is essentially this: Muddy water + chance + time = Life! According to Darwinists, when coincidences, to which Darwinists attribute a creative power, combine together they can work miracles (surely Allah is beyond that) and turn life forms into one another, no matter how impossible that may actually be. the Darwinist claim is a ludicrous one that seeks to portray everything as very simple.

This is a cunning act of indoctrination performed on people. This indoctrination has such an effect on some people that they are immediately able to believe in utterly nonsensical concepts. They are able to believe that man is a slightly more developed form of chimpanzee, that fish can emerge onto dry land and turn into terrestrial life forms when they so choose, that a cell can really form in muddy water and that dinosaurs managed to grow wings and turn into birds. That is because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, almost to the level of brainwashing. This constant indoctrination is worked into them by well-known professors, wielding incomprehensibly strange formulae and peculiar scientific terminology on the covers of world famous magazines.

The fact is that there is nothing “simple” about life at all. Everything set out under this indoctrination is a lie. With all of its infrastructure and organization, a single cell is far more complex than a giant metropolis such as New York City. Despite much wide-ranging laboratory research over the last few years, only a very small part of this extraordinary structure has been clarified. but there is no way in which it can be replicated. Not one of the thousands of proteins in the cell can be artificially manufactured. Living things are literally works of art in terms of their complexity, sensitivity, symmetry, order, detail, equipment and systems. for that reason, the simplistic explanations offered by Darwinism’s adherents are simply intended to deceive.

In relating all of this nonsense, Darwinists are of course well aware that there is nothing simple in life. They are of course well aware that not a single cell can spontaneously emerge from muddy water, let alone a complex, multi-cell organism, and that a fish can never emerge onto dry land and start flying. We must not forget that Darwinists relate these accounts for purposes of casting a psychological spell; a kind of hypnosis. Moreover, the Darwinists who so shamelessly do all this are quite unable to account for how even a single protein came into being. This represents a huge and absolute defeat for Darwinists right from the beginning. One must never forget this fact as one listen to Darwinist fairy tales.

Secret backing is provided for the major press so they will support Darwinism.

Darwinists have been making propaganda through the press for 150 years and have used the press for all of their psychological conditioning techniques. If they didn't control such a major force as the press, it would be impossible for the Darwinist dictatorship to have established a false dominion across the world and for the nonsense of evolution to have found its way into institutions of state, schools and universities.

The first decision for Darwinism to be disseminated by the press, to make such a fantastical idea in some way believable, was taken in a senior masonic lodge made up of atheist freemasons in Darwin’s time. Members of the 33rd Degree Mizraim Freemasonry Supreme Council in Paris announced the need for evolution to be supported by depicting it as science, but had no qualms about ridiculing the theory amongst themselves;

It is with this object in view that we are constantly by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories. the intellectuals... will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our agentur specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want. Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism...”2

Thus it was that Darwinism spread to the masses of people in the light of this decision taken at a French lodge made up of atheist freemasons. Ever since then it has always been under the atheist Freemasons’ protection. Atheist freemasons, who have established a global dominion and therefore possess a press army capable of shaping the world as they choose, can thus produce whatever reports they wish, raise whichever subjects they choose, and thus manage people as they desire. This cunning policy of management continues to this day.

Successes in eliminating Darwinism make atheist masons very uneasy. at such times they immediately embark on an intensive policy of conditioning, as already described, through the press. the Darwinist press is immediately unleashed and a false fossil is immediately discovered. a Darwinist scientist is trotted out, and tall tales are written about this fossil. That is how the atheist freemasons’ system works.

It is noteworthy as to why reports about Darwinism are supported by certain sections of the press. the press in question produces their reports solely in line with the instructions they receive from atheist freemasons, and not because of any scientific fats, data or information. This needs to be borne in mind in evaluating the false, global dominion of the Darwinist deception.

Darwinist Propaganda Techniques

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)

Ota Benga

 

In 1904, an American missionary brought Ota Benga, a pygmy from the central Congo, to the United States. He was placed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, where his filed teeth, disproportionate limbs and tricks helped attract 40,000 visitors a day. He was exhibited alongside an orangutan, with whom he performed tricks, in order to emphasize Africans’ similarities with apes. An editorial in the New York Times, rejecting calls for his release, remarked that “pygmies are very low in the human scale.... The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”
Jason Stearns

***
PREFACE

In 1906 a young man from the Congo known as Ota Benga became the subject of headlines around the world when he was exhibited in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo Monkey House. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocked to the zoo to behold the so-called pygmy, who stood four feet eleven inches and weighed a little over one hundred pounds. That this occurred in a preeminent American city in the twentieth century would seem enough to cause astonishment. But there’s far more to the story than meets the eye.

While on the surface this appears to be the saga of one man’s degradation—of a shocking and shameful spectacle—on closer inspection it is also the story of an era, of science, of elite men and institutions, and of racial ideologies that endure today. Benga left no written account of his own, and others have filled the gap with conspiratorial silence, half-truths, and even flagrant deception. As a result, what has been officially recorded and recycled in hundreds of accounts around the globe is a flourishing, ever-expanding fiction. So this book is also a story of secrets, lies, denial, and overdue reclamation.

Through a forensic-type inquiry we can unearth missing chapters from Benga’s extraordinary journey and in the process retrieve portions of our past from the waste bin of history. As we retrace Benga’s footsteps from Central Africa through Europe and America, we find him in the shadow of a lettered elite. In its correspondence, journals, books, photographs, and other historical documents, he clings to the margins, doggedly asserting his humanity; insisting that his story—that our story—be truthfully told. If we lean in we may hear the muffled voice of a man long thought silenced, and see ever more clearly who we were as the century turned in America’s imperial city.
**
Waves of women in long skirts and bonnets and men in suits and derbies streamed along the path from Fordham Road, scaled the graceful winding stairways, and went past the pool of sea lions. They had come from mansions along Fifth and Madison Avenues, and from teeming ghettos on the Lower East Side and in the Tenderloin District. They eagerly flocked to the left side of the court, to the elegant beaux arts pavilion flanked by columns with the words “Primate House” etched into the stone lintel above its ornate archway.7 High above the doorway, carved into the triangular tympanum crowning the building, was an intricately depicted family of orangutans, foreshadowing what lay ahead.

They filed along the narrow, dark corridor, through the stench of humid feces and monkey musk. Undaunted, they marched over a carpet of discarded peanut shells, carefully scanning the monkeys, lemurs, chimpanzees, orangutans, and baboons, until they reached the far end, where they found, displayed in an iron cage, Ota Benga, his slight 103-pound, four-foot eleven-inch chocolate-colored frame sheathed in white trousers and a khaki coat. His small brown feet were bare.

“Ist das ein Mensch?”—Is it a man?—one woman asked in German.
“Something about it I don’t like,” said another.8

Could this caged creature be, many no doubt wondered, the incarnation of one of the characters in best-selling books like Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast, published in 1900, or the “half child, half animal,” described in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, published the previous year, “whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger”?

Could he be the missing link, the species bridging man and ape that preoccupied leading scholars?

Some were probably made uneasy by eyes that radiated understanding. This small being with smooth brown skin and small solemn eyes sat erectly and neither swung from an apparatus nor made seemingly vile gestures. He was composed, if somewhat sad. In fact, except for his child-size stature and teeth meticulously filed to sharp points, he appeared no different from an ordinary “Negro.” But if he was wholly human, would he be in a cage in a fetid monkey house?

As many as five hundred people at a time crowded around to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from the bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the human spectacle.
**
The cage Benga inhabited had been built at the southern end of the Primate House to keep the monkeys warm and make the orangutan easier to observe. Benga’s cage, like those of his housemates, was connected to a room inside the building. And like the orangutan and monkeys, he was at the mercy of the keepers, who decided when he could enter the building and elude the crowds. Until then, he was unavoidably on display and, like his housemates, subjected to the disquieting hysteria and stares of a seemingly endless stream of spectators.

Benga became the object of pointing fingers, audible gasps, and bellowing laughter. Alone and locked in a monkey house cage he could, in the September Indian summer heat, smell the stench of ape feces, urine, and musk laced with the foreign odors of hundreds of spectators packed into the steamy, cramped quarters. He did not initially comprehend their language but could feel both the sting of their scorn and the pang of their pity. In their wide eyes he could see his humanity, like one’s image in a fun house mirror, monstrously distorted. He was cornered, and exposed to cackling hyenas under a glaring spotlight.

We cannot know exactly what Benga felt, but research on the psychological trauma associated with shame suggests that it is not substantially different from the effects of physical torture. Studies also consistently show a strong correlation between event-related shame and post-victimization symptoms including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, withdrawal, and phobias.2 One researcher, J. P. Gump, found that the most profound shame results from the destruction of your subjectivity when “what you need, what you desire, and what you feel are of complete and utter insignificance.”3

That would certainly apply to Benga as he endured the gawking of spectators utterly indifferent to his feelings. They howled. Gasped. Gaped. Pointed. Jeered.

Benga frequently walked to the door with eyes pleading for his keepers to release him from public view.

“Shame is such a searing painful experience that its characteristic defense is turning away from the stimulus situation,” another researcher has said.4 Andrew Morrison observes, “Shame induces a wish to become invisible, unseen, to sink into the ground or to disappear into the thick, soupy fog that we have just imagined.”5

Occasionally Benga was mercifully permitted to roam the forest under the watchful eye of park rangers. However, once discovered, he was hungrily pursued by park-goers, and returned to his cage. He was a sensation.

“Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes” was the headline in Sunday’s New York Times. The five-hundred-word article described Benga’s captivity as a dark comedy, in which the tragic hero was, in the view of the Men of Science, an inferior creature. The article would cast the newspaper as a central character in Benga’s unfolding trauma.

“The human being,” the article said, “happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale. But to the average non-scientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was something about the display that was unpleasant.”6

However unsettling, the exhibit on the respectable grounds of a world-class zoological park had been sanctioned by Hornaday, one of the world’s leading zoologists, and by Henry Fairfield Osborn, among his era’s most eminent scientists.
(...)
For Benga, each second may have seemed an eternity, but for Hornaday, the debut was a resounding success. He assured a reporter that the exhibition had been authorized by the Zoological Society. Madison Grant, the society’s secretary, had in fact been intimately involved in the negotiations to secure Benga. As an exhibit, Benga personified the society’s mission, expressed by Osborn on the park’s opening day: the zoological park was meant to educate the masses who could not travel and explore, and to serve as “a delightful pleasure ground.”10

Hornaday also insisted that the exhibit was in keeping with human exhibitions in Europe, breezily suggesting the Continent’s indisputable status as the world’s paragon of culture and civilization.11 Hadn’t Sara Baartman, a southern African woman, been exhibited, barely clad, throughout London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” until her death in 1815? The famous scientist Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and founding father of vertebrate paleontology, believed Baartman’s ample derriere was evidence that her people, the Khoikhoi, were oversexed. After her death he performed an autopsy and concluded that she and the so-called Hottentots were more akin to apes than to humans. He made a cast of Baartman’s body and preserved her brain, genitals, and skeleton, ensuring that even in death, she’d draw a crowd. While Benga was being exhibited in a monkey house cage, Baartman’s remains—her brain, genitals, and skeleton—were still on display in case number 33 at the Paris Musée de l’Homme.12While today most people of all races would find such behavior both racist and morally contemptible, in the era’s elite white circles Cuvier was generally considered an embodiment of scientific truth.
Long after Baartman’s death human zoos celebrating Europeans’ conquest of purportedly primitive people remained popular in Europe; these included zoos in Hamburg, Barcelona, and Milan. Carl Hagenbeck, a seller of wild animals, exhibited Samoan and Sami people to great success in 1874. So popular was his 1876 exhibit of Egyptian Nubians that it toured Berlin, Paris, and London.13 A year later Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimation in Paris, organized exhibits of Nubians and Inuit seen by one million people; and in 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium exhibited several hundred of his newly conquered Congolese people in Brussels to appreciative crowds.14

Hornaday conceded that these had all been human zoos; none of the people had been exhibited in a monkey house cage. But he was an inveterate showman, and he saw the exhibition as in keeping with the mission of the zoological gardens. He hoped that he had not given his colored brethren reason to believe that Benga’s placement in a monkey house suggested any close analogy of the African “savage” with apes.

“Benga,” he wryly assured them, “is in the primate house because that’s the most comfortable place we could find for him.”15
**
Shortly before 2 P.M., Benga appeared in an arena-like cage, equipped with a bow and arrow, a new target made of clay, and a pet parrot. A short time later, he was joined in the cage by Dohong, an orangutan.

Three hundred to five hundred spectators at a time crowded around to gape at the pair. Those who had been present the day before noted that Benga’s feet, which had been bare, were now covered by canvas shoes. The two captives were sometimes locked in each other’s arms; at other times, Dohong was placidly perched on Benga’s slight shoulder, or the two frolicked with Benga flinging Dohong like a ball. The crowds reveled in these antics. For Benga, Dohong provided a needed distraction, and also companionship and affection, all of which he had been denied.

The Times reporter noted the similarities between Benga and Dohong, saying that Benga was not much taller than the orangutan, and their heads were alike. “Both grin in the same way when pleased,” he added, casually suggesting a closer kinship between Benga and the ape than other humans shared.7

A bewildered Benga occasionally sat silently on a stool, staring—at times glaring—through the bars as his tormentors hysterically howled their approval. Benga occasionally mimicked the menacing mob, as he did when a knicker-clad boy goaded him to shoot his bow and arrow, commanding, “Shoot, shoot.”

“Shoot, shoot,” Benga mocked back.8 The crowd roared. In fact, Benga found that, like the monkeys, he was a source of amusement whether he sat motionless, erupted in anger, or sought to allay his anxiety by playing with Dohong or shooting his bow and arrow.

But not everyone was amused by Benga’s misfortune. The Reverend Dr. Robert Stuart MacArthur, the influential pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Church on West Fifty-Seventh Street, stood among the heckling, howling herd that Monday, and he was outraged.

“The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African,” MacArthur said. “Instead of making a beast of this little fellow we should be putting him in school for the development of such powers as God gave him.”9 MacArthur said he would contact the city’s black clergy to organize a protest against the exhibit. “Our Christian missionary societies must take this matter up at once.” In MacArthur, Benga had found a formidable ally.
**
By Sunday, September 16, a week after his debut, Benga was no longer in the cage, but roamed the park under the watchful eye of park rangers. Still he was not free. That day a record forty thousand people visited the zoo, nearly all to see Ota Benga. Wherever Benga went, hordes followed in hot pursuit, “howling, jeering and yelling,” reported the Times.15 The rowdy crowd pursued Benga, and when he was cornered, some people poked him in the ribs or tripped him, while others merely laughed at the sight of a frightened “pygmy.” In self-defense, Benga struck several visitors, and it took three men to get him back to the monkey house.

Hornaday had long shared Osborn’s and Grant’s contempt for the lower-class zoo-goers, whom he privately described as “low-lived beasts who appreciate nothing and love filth and disorder.”16 Now, the unruly mobs overwhelmed the park rangers. Benga had excited their raw emotions and Hornaday had tired of the chaos. He wrote to Verner on Monday, September 17, to report that Benga had again resisted authority.

“I regret to say that Ota Benga has become quite unmanageable,” he wrote.17 “He has been so fully exploited in the newspapers, and so much in the public eye, it is quite inadvisable for us to punish him; for should we do so, we would immediately be accused of cruelty, coercion, etc., etc. I am sure you will appreciate this point.”

Immune from punishment, Hornaday complained, “the boy does quite as he pleases, and it is utterly impossible to control him.”18

Unable to fathom Benga’s resistance to his captivity with monkeys and apes, Hornaday expressed dismay that Benga threatened to bite the keepers whenever they tried to bring him back to the monkey house “and would undoubtedly do so if they should persist.”

Given the insurrection, Hornaday was prepared to relinquish the reins. “I see no way out of the dilemma but for him to be taken away.”19Meanwhile Benga’s daily adventures in the wilds of the New York Zoological Gardens had become a newspaper publisher’s dream. Neither journalists nor the public could get enough of Benga, whose adventures in the picturesque zoological park were a daily source of headlines. “Zoo Has a Pygmy Too Many,” reported Monday’s New York Sun. From the depths of his debasement, Benga was a star.
That day, a keeper managed to catch Benga after he was once again chased through the park by a jeering mob. He reportedly asked how Benga liked America. “Me no like America,” Benga forlornly replied.20
**
Finally on the afternoon of Friday, September 28, Benga, escorted by the long-overdue Verner, bade farewell to the zoo. Benga asked to say good-bye to the attendants, to whom he gave his arrows, reserving the bow for the chief keeper.

Hornaday breathed a sigh of relief as Verner quietly left the park with the person who had first been exhibited in a cage twenty days earlier. The exhibition had contributed to a doubling of park attendance compared with the preceding year. Some 220,800 people had visited the park in September and nearly all, if not all of them, had seen Benga.8

Benga’s departure would be as calm and contained as his debut was frenetic and flamboyant. Hornaday apparently did not wish to invite the fanfare that had accompanied the debut. No reporters were alerted to witness Benga’s farewell.
Benga, wearing the same khaki uniform with gold buttons as the attendants, would be quietly lifted from the bowels of debasement in the Bronx Zoo monkey house to the height of African American achievement in Brooklyn’s Weeksville section. There, he would enter the city’s largest and most affluent African American community, complete with schools, churches, businesses, doctors, lawyers, and teachers steeped in Victorian ideals, to live in a finely appointed orphanage. Gordon was ecstatic.

“He looks like a rather dwarfed colored boy of unusual amiability and curiosity,” Gordon said.9 “Now our plan is this: We are going to treat him as a visitor. We have given him a room to himself, where he can smoke if he chooses.”
Concerns had been raised by relatives about the welfare of the children residing at the orphanage once Benga—who had routinely been described in the press as a savage cannibal—arrived. “Why he’ll eat my Matilda alive,” one anguished mother told Gordon.10

Gordon assured anxious relatives that Benga would not board with the children, and that he would dine with the cooks in the kitchen. Gordon said Benga had already learned a surprising number of English words and would soon be able to express himself.

“This,” he asserted, “will be the beginning of his education.”11

**
From the moment Benga set foot on American soil he had been held up to public ridicule by those determined to prove he belonged to an inferior species. Now, at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn’s Weeksville section, he would be surrounded by elite African Americans determined to show that blacks could be fully integrated into American life as respectable and self-sufficient citizens.
Named for James Weeks, a stevedore from Virginia who in 1838 bought a plot of land in the ninth ward of central Brooklyn, by the 1850s Weeksville had become one of the largest African American communities, a picturesque suburb bounded by present-day Fulton Street and East New York, Troy, and Ralph Avenues. Its population had swelled to nearly seven hundred after the 1863 draft riots made it a refuge for blacks fleeing Lower Manhattan.1

Hundreds sought safety in Weeksville and Flatbush, where, according to an account in the Christian Recorder, “the colored men who had manhood in them armed themselves and threw out their pickets every day and night, determined to die defending their homes.”2
***
At the end of 1909 Gordon wrote to Verner, who by then was working on the Panama Canal, to report that Benga was still working on the farm. “He has a bank account, and is saving his money to go back home or to do whatever is thought for him,” Gordon said.21

Gordon said the educational project had “proved to be a failure,” given Benga’s age. “It was simply impossible to put him in a class to receive instructions, from a literary point. . . . I have done the best I could in trying to develop him, from every standpoint, and I find that the only thing to do is to let him work.”22

Soon afterward, in January 1910, Benga made his second pilgrimage to Lynchburg, Virginia. That spring William Sheppard settled in Staunton, Virginia, seventy-four miles away. Sheppard would never return to Africa—a fate that Benga desperately hoped would not befall him.
**
So Benga, with his halting English and little more than a rudimentary education, found himself in an academically rigorous environment surrounded by black intellectuals who were dedicated to attaining racial equality in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, their students were held to the same high standards as white students at top colleges.
A survey of the required curriculum in 1917 found that it included three years of Latin and Greek and one year of German.13 Such an environment would be daunting, even overwhelming, for many American students. Now a person who had spent most of his life as a hunter was thrust into the vortex of a vigorous debate over the course of education most suitable for Africans and their descendants. While Benga might have found greater satisfaction in the woods or on a farm than he could find learning Latin, such thinking would be deemed heretical among the school’s academic elite.

Benga would, however, find a kindred spirit in one of his instructors. Annie Bethel Spencer was not quite twenty-six when Benga arrived at Virginia Seminary. She had been born on a farm in Henry County, Virginia, to mixed-race parents. Her father, of black, white, and Seminole Indian ancestry, had been born into slavery in 1862, and her mother was the biracial daughter of a wealthy Virginia aristocrat and his enslaved mistress. In America, where “one drop” of African American blood outweighed such nuances of ancestry, Annie Spencer was considered African American, a designation she proudly embraced.
**
Benga took elementary courses alongside children believed to be less than half his age, but outside the classroom he became a trusted teacher and companion to neighborhood boys. For Gregory, Hunter, and Wilelbert Hayes, who were born between 1903 and 1906 and lost their father before his memory could become indelible, Benga became a father figure and hero.

Often barefoot, though wearing western clothes, Benga would lead a band of boys—including the three Hayes boys and Annie Spencer’s son Chauncey—and teach them the secrets of the forest, including how to shave the tips of hickory wood to sharp points to make spears, or how to make bows from vines. With Benga the boys also learned how to gather blackberries and spear fish. The man they called Otto Bingo also taught them how to hunt wild turkeys and squirrels with a bow and arrow and how to trap small animals. They learned to forage for roots to make sassafras tea and marveled at his ability to collect honey from the bees without being stung.

Years later Hunter recalled with amusement how Benga rolled on the ground, overcome with laughter, after Gregory stuck his hand in a hive as he had watched Benga do. Unlike Benga, Gregory was stung, and ran home crying to his mother.

In his scrappy Congo-infused English, Benga regaled the boys with stories of his adventures hunting elephants, pantomiming how he stalked them—“Big, big,” he’d say with outstretched arms—and recounting how he would celebrate a kill with a triumphant hunting song.

In Benga they found an open and patient teacher, a beloved companion, and a remarkably agile athlete who sprinted and leaped over logs like a boy. And with his young companions Benga could uninhibitedly relive memories of a lost and longed-for life and retreat to woods that recalled home.
Benga also delighted in eating, and at the sound of the noon whistle at the cotton mill, he would drop what he was doing to race home and fix his lunch. “Gotta go cooka eat,” he’d say.7

He especially relished Mary’s cooking and she happily indulged him, often specially preparing for him the baked yams that he so enjoyed. He delighted in the hog-killing season, and enthusiastically joined the men in the time-honored communal ritual that took place throughout the South—and nowhere more than Lynchburg—and that had many of the characteristics of his own hunter culture.
The slaughtered hog would be placed in a barrel and then boiled over hot sandstones to soften the bristles. With the hog splayed on a long table, Benga would go to work, vigorously scraping it to remove the hair, which he then used for ticking. With the hog hung by its feet, and cut from bung to throat, he’d clean its insides with a sharpened broomstick.
The hog would then be divided into parts and products: bacon, belly, ham, shoulders, feet, ears, sausage, spareribs, neck bone, tail, brains. The fat would be used for soap and the small intestine for chitterlings. What wasn’t cooked for the day’s feast was salted, dried, and seasoned and days later hung in the smokehouse to be preserved for future meals. The ritual, for the hunter, surely evoked home.
In Lynchburg Benga had found a surrogate home and family and would learn their customs, and the contours and boundaries of their binding blackness. When he crossed into neighboring Cottonwood, a white working-class community, he was heckled and pelted with rocks. “He would come back and ask why they did that,” Chauncey recalled years later. “He didn’t understand.”8

However, long before he arrived in Lynchburg Benga had seen that scowl of scorn; he had seen it on the faces of the chicotte-wielding capitas; in the jeering crowds in St. Louis, and among the spectators outside the cage at the Monkey House.

The experience in Lynchburg probably triggered memories of earlier trauma.

A study on shame and post-victimization released in 2011 found that individuals who, like Benga, had experienced shame-related trauma risked developing severe psychological symptoms, and also that “shame is more likely to be evoked in these individuals, increasing the risk for re-traumatization.” New trauma, the athors of this study said, caused “a significant increase in the frequency of post-traumatic stress reactions to the original trauma.”9
Whether Benga internalized shame or blamed his oppressors, he would know that he was not free. He learned to live within the carefully drawn lines of Lynchburg’s black community and practice customs its people had crafted from memory and centuries-old oppression. In their sermons and spirituals he may have recognized a sorrow as familiar as the forest dew. They were the descendants of a people who knew the despair of displacement and the loss of language and of friendships, family, ritual, sights, scents, and sounds.

These people, cobbled together from a far-off continent and made anew, sang of being “r’buked and scorned,” and yet drew him to their bosom. Some had lost loved ones to slavery; some bore the children of their enslavers. Yet with all of their travails, they had made room for a homeless stranger.
Still, they did not know the piercing rupture; the vacuous eternity of alienation that many of their forebears had known—and that the man they called Bingo now knew. While they were burdened and disdained in America, it was the land they had tilled and spilled blood on, the land where they created life and buried their dead. For all the rejection and hardship, they were home.

Benga had only memories, and no one but he could know what form they took. Was his sleep troubled by nightmares of being stalked by howling mobs, or being caged with apes? Was he haunted by visions of murdered loved ones, or of starving, tortured, chained Congolese? Did he dreamily drift into joyful gatherings of kin and clan, only to awaken alone?
Some nights, beneath a star-speckled sky, the boys would watch Benga build a fire and dance and sing around it. Chauncey, Gregory, Wilelbert, and their friends were enraptured as he circled the flame, hopping and singing as if they weren’t there. They were no older than ten, too young to grasp the poignancy of the ancient ritual, or the urgency of Benga’s refrains.

**
Benga did odd jobs for Anderson and sometimes stayed in her hayloft, where he spent countless hours delighting children with enchanting tales of home, of hunting and singing in a mythical forest teeming with creatures reminiscent of Noah’s Ark. After a few years attending school he had taken a job at a tobacco factory.
But by 1916, something had changed. Benga was no longer the eager friend of the neighborhood children. He had lost interest in their excursions to the surrounding woods to hunt or to fish in nearby streams. Many had noticed his darkening disposition, his all-consuming longing to go home. For hours he would sit alone in silence under a tree. Some of his childhood companions would decades later recall a song he’d sing that he had learned at the Virginia Theological Seminary:
I believe I’ll go home,
Lordy, won’t you help me
It had been ten years since he left the Congo, and his tie to home was fraying. He would know nothing of his village, of the family and friends he left behind. The decade had been marked by his exhibition in a cage and by World War I. During that period the earth seemed to spin off its axis, increasingly consumed by a war that would, over the next four years, claim nine million lives. (...)

The man who had been referred to by so many names—including Mbye Otabenga, Ota Benga, Otto Bingo, Otto Binga, Bengal, Artiba, Autobank, and Ottobang—was in Lynchburg without any known intimate relationships. For all the many kindnesses he had been shown in Lynchburg, he was isolated—an ocean and a river away from the life he knew. In a city of thirty thousand people, he alone sang lustily to the forest and had roamed amid beasts, wild and free.

The music of home was getting fainter; the drumbeats, the rumbling elephants, a distant dream.

In the late afternoon on March 19, 1916, the boys watched as Benga gathered wood to build a fire in the field between Mary’s house and the seminary. As the fire rose to a brilliant flame, Benga danced around it while chanting and moaning. He danced faster and faster, twirling and moaning, as the boys watched in solemn silence. They had seen his ritual before, but this time they detected a profound and boundless sorrow. This time their beloved Benga seemed eerily distant, as vacant and frightening as a ghost.

That night, as they slept, Ota Benga entered the battered gray shed behind Mammy Joe’s store where a chorus of giggles had pierced the air. Sometime before daybreak he recovered a gun he had apparently hidden in the hayloft and fired a bullet through his broken heart.

And in the harrowing stillness, he was free.

SPECTACLE.
Pamela Newkirk