🧵THREAD🧵
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 25, 2021
That the Covid pandemic could’ve leaked from a lab in Wuhan went from terrible, racist conspiracy theory to plausible overnight for the mainstream media, without a shred of accountability.
If you don’t believe me, look at these stories side-by-side, then vs. now⤵️
china-embassy | Lately, some people have played the old trick of political hype on the origin tracing of COVID-19 in the world. Smear campaign and blame shifting are making a comeback, and the conspiracy theory of "lab leak" is resurfacing.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and blame game, while ignoring their people's urgent need to fight the pandemic and the international demand for cooperation on this front, which has caused a tragic loss of many lives. The lesson from last year is still fresh in our memory. While the pandemic is still causing great damage in today's world and the international community is expecting greater coordination among countries, some people are turning to their old playbook. We cannot but wonder, have they already put that bitter lesson behind them, so soon? Or do they want to see a replay of tragedies? With such irresponsible behaviors, how can they face up to their own people? How can they face up to the international community? And how can they face up to human conscience?
On the origin tracing of COVID-19, we have been calling for international cooperation on the basis of respecting facts and science, with a view to better coping with unexpected epidemics in the future. To politicize origin tracing, a matter of science, will not only make it hard to find the origin of the virus, but give free rein to the "political virus" and seriously hamper international cooperation on the pandemic. Out of a sense of responsibility towards the health of mankind, we support a comprehensive study of all early cases of COVID-19 found worldwide and a thorough investigation into some secretive bases and biological laboratories all over the world. Such study and investigation shall be full, transparent and evidence-based, and shall get to the bottom to make everything clear.
theanalysis | The Federal Reserve’s job is to make sure that the economy is run for the banking system and for the bond holders, rather than having the banking system and bond markets run for the economy. So we’re living in an upside down economy where everything is being run in order to sustain the bond holders and the banks. And the problem with this is that the mortgage debts, the student loan debts, the personal debts, the car loan debts, they’re growing at an exponentially high rate, while the economy is not growing at a high rate. All of the economy’s growth since 2008 has been only for the top five percent of the population. For 95 percent of the population since 2008, the GDP has actually shrunk. And so you’re having a very sharp polarization right now. So I think if you’re talking about the debt issue, the question is, do you want to sustain this polarization between creditors at the top and the indebted 95 percent or do you want to restore the kind of equality that people think usually is the hallmark of democracy, at least of economic democracy? And the choice by the government is we’re going to sustain the polarization. No matter what, the creditors won’t lose a penny. The debtors will lose.
Paul Jay
OK, so why do you think Biden, and not just Biden, but
that section of finance that they represent, why don’t they want to
forgive student debt?
Michael Hudson
I think partly it’s what you said. It’s the whole
idea that if you admit that you should write down debts when the effect
is to help the economy grow and you write down debts that impair
economic growth, then people would put economic growth over the welfare
of creditors. And that’s revolution. That’s not what our economy is all
about. We put creditors first, not the economy. And the very thought of
putting the welfare of the people first over the creditors in general,
well that’s totalitarianism. That’s a dictatorship. We can’t possibly
have that. So it’s the greed of the creditors and the fact that the
creditors are able to control politics and who gets nominated, et
cetera, enables them to prevent anything that might shock the assumption
that the sanctity of property is really the sanctity of creditors to
evict property owners if they can’t pay. It’s really the sanctity of
debt. And if you talk about the sanctity of debt, it’s the sanctity of
the exponential growth of debt, even when it’s beyond the ability to
pay, even when it pushes the economy into a chronic depression. And in
fact, what we’re suffering now is debt deflation. And the debt deflation
at the bottom, students are experiencing, the unemployed are
experiencing, cities and states are experiencing it. The transportation
systems are running at deficits. All of these deficits are the savings
and the gains and the wealth of the one percent or five percent or
whatever you want to call the banking and creditor class.
Paul Jay
And of course, the irony of banking as a public utility
and the finance sector’s opposition to that is they can’t exist without
government subsidy and bailouts and all the rest. And actually, it kind
of is a public utility, except for the people that owe the banks.
Michael Hudson
It’s an unregulated public utility, because, again,
as Bill Black has explained, there’s been regulatory capture. The
problem in the United States is the creation of the Federal Reserve by
banks. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to move to make banking a
private enterprise, not a public utility. And very explicitly to shift
the center of money creation and credit and credit rules away from
Washington, towards Wall Street and Philadelphia and Boston, and to
decentralize it, to get the government out of the credit and debt system
and let the creditors run wild over the economy. That was what they
said the result was. They even removed the secretary of the Treasury
from membership on the Federal Reserve Board at that time. This was a
new class war. And it wasn’t the kind of class war that Marx warned
about. It was a class war of finance against the rest of the economy. It
was a resurgence of the rentier economy, except the rentiers in the
20th century and the 21st century are the creditors and the bankers and
the financial institutions, not the landlords.
project-syndicate | Even if everyone agreed that printing another trillion dollars to finance a basic income for the poor would boost neither inflation nor interest rates, the rich and powerful would still oppose it. After all, their most important interest is not to conserve economic potential, but to preserve the power of the few to compel the many.
ATHENS – Back in the 1830s, Thomas Peel decided to migrate from England to Swan River in Western Australia. A man of means, Peel took along, besides his family, “300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children,” as well as “means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000.” But soon after arrival, Peel’s plans were in ruins.
The cause was not disease, disaster, or bad soil. Peel’s labor force abandoned him, got themselves plots of land in the surrounding wilderness, and went into “business” for themselves. Although Peel had brought labor, money, and physical capital with him, the workers’ access to alternatives meant that he could not bring capitalism.
Karl Marx recounted Peel’s story in Capital, Volume I to make the point that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons.” The parable remains useful today in illuminating not only the difference between money and capital, but also why austerity, despite its illogicality, keeps coming back.
For now, austerity is out of fashion. With governments spending like there’s no tomorrow – or, rather, to ensure that there is a tomorrow – fiscal spending cuts to rein in public debt do not rank high among political priorities.
US President Joe Biden’s unexpectedly large – and popular – stimulus and investment program has pushed austerity further down the agenda. But, like mass tourism and large wedding parties, austerity is lingering in the shadows, ready for a comeback, egged on by ubiquitous chatter about impending hyperinflation and crippling bond yields unless governments re-embrace it.
There is
little doubt that austerity is based on faulty thinking, leading to
self-defeating policy. The fallacy lies in the failure to recognize
that, unlike a person, family, or company, government cannot bank on its
income being independent of its spending. If you and I choose to save
money that we could have spent on new shoes, we will keep that money.
But this way of saving is not open to the government. If it cuts
spending during periods of low or falling private spending, then the sum
of private and government spending will decline faster. This sum is
national income. So, for governments pursuing austerity, spending cuts
mean lower national income and fewer taxes. Unlike a household or a
business, if the government cuts its spending during tough times, it is
cutting its revenues, too.
CNN | President Joe Biden's team shut down a closely-held State Department effort launched late in the Trump administration to prove the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab over concerns about the quality of its work, according to three sources familiar with the decision.
mediaite | Russell Brand said Monday that he didn’t appreciate the way media and social-media companies suppressed news about President Joe Biden’s family, including his son, Hunter Biden, and brother, Jim Biden.
The British actor made the comment during an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald on his YouTube channel, but started out with a caveat. “I’m not a pro-Republican person,” Brand said. “I don’t see myself that way. I don’t see myself as conservative, or that I’m in a Trump, or Giuliani, or [the] kind of media establishments that were reporting on these revelations [about Biden’s family]. They are not my cultural, social, or political allies. That’s certainly not how I see myself.
“However, it seems to me — what reason is Hunter Biden sat [sic] on the board of an energy company in … Ukraine?” he added. “What reason is James Biden sat on the board, or receiving payments from an energy company, in China?”
Brand was referring to Hunter Biden’s 2014-19 term on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural-gas company with operations in Ukraine. He and Jim Biden were also involved in a failed venture with CEFC, a Chinese energy company. Twitter and Facebook prevented users from sharing certain stories that touched on the dealings in the month leading up to the 2020 election, while Twitter took the added step of suspending The New York Post’s account on the platform.
“We’re talking about sleaze, corruption, financial misdemeanors, and relationships between corporations, big business, and politicians — let’s face it, unless you’re bloody stupid, you know that’s going on all the time,” Brand told Greenwald. “For me, revelations that there are financial connections between energy companies in … Ukraine, energy companies in China, and the Biden family are troubling. That should be public knowledge. And it’s even more troubling that Twitter, and Facebook and the media at large deliberately kept it out of the news because they didn’t want it to influence the election.”
Taking a more philosophical tone — and turning his fire on the Democratic Party — Brand added, “What is democracy then? It suggests to me that democracy is, ‘We want you to vote for this person. We don’t want you to vote for that person.’ As I’ve said, Donald Trump, you know, I don’t think Donald Trump’s the answer, but I’m sad to realize that I can no longer even claim to believe Joe Biden or the Democratic Party might be the answer, because look at how they behave. And look at the relationships between media, social media, and that party. They conspired to keep information away from you because it was not convenient to their agenda.”
Watch above via Russell Brand on YouTube.
thoughtco | By 1945, as the Allies were mopping up the last remnants of the Axis, it was clear that the next great conflict would come between the capitalist USA and the communist USSR. Some people, including Perón and some of his advisors, predicted that World War III would break out as soon as 1948.
In this upcoming "inevitable" conflict, third parties such as Argentina could tip the balance one way or the other. Perón envisioned nothing less than Argentina taking its place as a crucially important diplomatic third party in the war, emerging as a superpower and leader of a new world order. The Nazi war criminals and collaborators may have been butchers, but there is no doubt that they were rabidly anti-communist. Perón thought these men would come in useful in the "upcoming" conflict between the USA and the USSR. As time passed and the Cold War dragged on, these Nazis would eventually be seen as the bloodthirsty dinosaurs they were.
After the war, communist regimes were created in Poland, Yugoslavia, and other parts of Eastern Europe. These new nations requested the extradition of many war criminals in allied prisons. A handful of them, such as the Ustashi General Vladimir Kren, were eventually sent back, tried, and executed. Many more were allowed to go to Argentina instead because the Allies were reluctant to hand them over to their new communist rivals where the outcome of their war trials would inevitably result in their executions.
Medium | Ingrid von Oelhafen (born in 1941) had a tough childhood. Her father Herman von Oelhafen was often away. Her mother Gisela was emotionally distant. Her parents sent Ingrid to the children’s home, where she grew up without true parental love.
When she was eleven years old, she found out that she was a foster child. Her actual name was Erika Matko. Her father Herman and mother Gisela were not her true parents. Her brother Dietmar was not her real brother.
When she was fifteen, she saw a Red Cross poster with her childhood image with the name Erika Matko on the streets of Hamburg. She realized she was not German.
In 1999, Red Cross contacted Ingrid, asking if she wanted to learn about her true origins. She was fifty-eight years old.
Medium | ABBA was one of the most popular music groups in history. You have probably heard at least one of their hits. For example Waterloo, SOS, or Mamma Mia. At the height of their popularity, ABBA earned more money than another Swedish trademark — automobile company Volvo.
Lebensborn means Spring of life in German. However, this word received a much more malevolent meaning in the time of Nazi Germany. The Lebensborn program was a notorious Nazi project, which tried to increase the Aryan population. They used various inhumane methods, including state-sponsored breeding and abducting of children from Nazi-occupied countries such as Poland, Russia, and Yugoslavia.
The ideal Aryan had blue eyes and blonde hair. The Scandinavians perfectly fit into this requirement. The Lebensborn program encouraged German soldiers to have relationships with Danish and Norwegian women. In Norway only, over 12,000 children were born from such relationships.
wikipedia | Lebensborn e.V. (literally: "Fount of Life") was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the goal of raising the birth rate of Aryan children of persons classified as 'racially pure' and 'healthy' based on Nazi racial hygiene and health ideology. Lebensborn provided welfare to its mostly unmarried mothers, encouraged anonymous births by unmarried women at their maternity homes, and mediated adoption of these children by likewise 'racially pure' and 'healthy' parents, particularly SS members and their families. The Cross of Honour of the German Mother was given to the women who bore the most Aryan children. Abortion was legalised (and, more commonly, endorsed) by the Nazis for disabled and non-Germanic children, but strictly punished otherwise.
Initially set up in Germany in 1935, Lebensborn expanded into several occupied European countries with Germanic populations during the Second World War. It included the selection of 'racially worthy' orphans for adoption and care for children born from Aryan women who had been in relationships with SS members. It originally excluded children born from unions between common soldiers and foreign women, because there was no proof of 'racial purity' on both sides. During the war, many children were kidnapped from their parents and judged by Aryan criteria for their suitability to be raised in Lebensborn homes, and fostering by German families.
strategic-culture | The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military intelligence for the objective of population control, Finian Cunningham writes.
There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth. Several viral video clips purporting to show extraordinary flying technology have been “confirmed” by the Pentagon as authentic. The Pentagon move is unprecedented.
The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or by naval surveillance and subsequently “leaked” to the public. The question is: were the “leaks” authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space? The Pentagon doesn’t actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are “authentic”.
A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report from the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month. That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and surveillance systems.
Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they don’t seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on the United States. That’s intergalactic American “exceptionalism” for you!
Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training grounds or high-security areas.
overcomingbias | That is, in response to any question of theory, it seems that they say the only acceptable answer is “I don’t know”. One must not express more refined degrees of belief, neither numerically nor in terms a more refined partition of possibilities. Regarding various possible hypotheses, one must not discuss their prior plausibility, the likelihood which which each one predicts various empirical details, nor the appropriate posterior beliefs that best combine prior plausibility and empirical fit. Just say “I don’t know” and shut up.
(Yes, they allow an exception for expressing confidence that hoaxes, lies, delusions, and honest mistakes don’t work as explanations. And for giving detailed reasons for this confidence. But only those exceptions.)
This anti-theory taboo among the “serious” who study UFOs seems to me quite wide-spread and it has been going for a long time. You can find a vast amount of UFO work on many particular cases, some work on patterns across those cases, and even some work considering concrete physical mechanisms to explain some common patterns. But you will find almost nothing among the “serious” people on less proximate more social explanations. They are okay with saying that UFOs often seem intelligent, aware, and responsive, but not with discussing the goals, agendas, origins, or histories of those intelligences.
Alas, I have seen this before, in other areas of social science. In fields similarly dominated by empiricists who keep throwing more data papers on the pile, but offering few rewards to those who might try to make sense of all that data. Often because they wouldn’t like the best explanations. It seems that UFOs is now such a field.
Apparently reports have been submitted on over 100,000 UFO encounters worldwide in the last 75 years. Of which 5-10%, or 5K-10K, seem quite hard to explain. Yes, the taboo may have discouraged reports on ten times that number, and yes some governments have actively taken or prevented some data. But the rate at which encounters allow concrete physical samples to be collected seems to have gone way down over the decades, and it isn’t obvious to me that we will really learn that much more from sharper and longer pictures, videos, and radar images.
So an anti-theory taboo risks us spending another 75 years in data collection, after which we may still not know that much more than we do now. The point of data is to inform theory, and it still seems to me that we now have plenty enough data, not only to judge if there is something real, but also to do some theorizing. Yes much theorizing so far has been motivated and/or sloppy, but honestly most of that has been done by folks not very experience or skilled at social science theory. Which is why it seems a shame that social theorists Wendt and Duvall explicitly endorse the anti-theory taboo.
Well I plan to continue to ignore both taboos, both the anti-UFO one and the anti-UFO-theory one. And I invite other experienced and knowledgeable social theorists to join me. It may be less fun at times to work on tabooed topics, but when the taboo is unfair you can have much higher of making valuable contributions on them. And the huge potential importance of this topic seems obvious.
Strongest argument against aliens pic.twitter.com/eF2FFZpJQE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2021
richardhanania | Imagine an alien civilization that can make it to this planet from somewhere in the universe beyond what we can observe. Once they get here, they are so advanced that all of our scientific knowledge leaves us dumbfounded about how they can achieve such speed and mobility.
At the same time, these aliens keep getting caught on camera, and sometimes on radar (while humans have already invented aircraft that largely avoids it). But the pictures are never any good! They’re just dots in the distance that seem to move around erratically, and despite all of our improvements in technology and camera resolution, our pictures and videos of them never improve.
I can imagine three possibilities:
1) Aliens visit this planet and want to get caught.
2) Aliens visit this planet and don’t care if they get caught because they’re too advanced and physics-defying to care what we think.
3) Aliens visit this planet and don’t want to get caught.
We can rule out 1, as if they wanted to get caught they’d clearly provide much stronger evidence.
I think we can also rule out 2, because a common theme of these sightings is that when military cameras start to lock in on the aliens, they fly away and disappear. If they didn’t care if we saw them, it’s likely they would leave some more evidence behind, and not freak out when they’re observed.
As for 3, it’s hard to imagine that a species this advanced would be so incompetent. Intergalactic travel seems a lot harder than avoiding radar and US military pilots. Maybe aliens are flying around all the time, it’s just their lowest IQ pilots that keep getting caught. But you’d think a species that advanced would have a more meritocratic selection process for space missions.
jasoncolavito | A complicating factor that Lewis-Williams’s work creates for the UTH is
the fact that shamanic ASC and historical “abduction” experiences, cited
by Vallée and other UTH speculators, do not conform to the full
narrative of the modern UFO phenomenon, as developed after the Betty and
Barney Hill abduction claim (Fuller 1966) and J. Allen Hynek’s (1972)
classification of three types of UFO encounters, culminating with
contact. Prior to this, strange lights in the sky were not generally
found in conjunction with other staples of the narrative, such as
abduction, sexual experimentation, and cattle mutilation, a fact even
the credulous Vallée (2009) himself seemed to concede in cataloguing the
“best” evidence for prehistoric UFOs and finding no unambiguous
evidence for a complete UFO narrative prior to the modern era, only
fragments that paralleled portions of the modern narrative. This might
mean that the trans-dimensional beings first emerged into our dimension
only in 1947, 1961, or some other date, but this would not explain those
partial parallels.
I have previously traced the Hill abduction to alien encounter and
medical experimentation motifs derived from three consecutive episodes
of The Outer Limits (1964) airing over the three weeks
prior to Barney Hill’s first hypnosis session, including the
slanted-eyed aliens and their distinctive clothing, the invasive
probing, the backwoods setting, and even an interracial narrative
paralleling the Hills’ own romance (Colavito 2012).
It is noteworthy that the Hills originally only reported to Project
Bluebook seeing a flying saucer until they were placed in an altered
state of consciousness three years later and began recalling abduction
imagery exactly paralleling Outer Limits episodes
in both plot and aesthetics from the weeks before hypnosis. This origin
point for the classic abduction narrative strongly favors the PCH over
the UTH if this order of events is correct. Given that high profile
abduction cases that followed, including the Travis Walton incident, can
be shown to reproduce ideas and imagery appearing originally with the
Hill case, this again favors PCH over UTH.
Since Mizrach cited Sherlock Holmes about acceptance of the
improbable, it is only fair to mention Occam’s Razor in defense of the
idea that the hypothesis with fewer assumptions is more likely to be
correct; in this case, the proposal of an unseen and unattested
alternative dimension of reality, populated by multiple beings of
near-supernatural intelligence, who are capable of interacting with this
dimension in fixed ways across time and space is vastly more
complicated than the alternatives. The only serious support for this
claim is the contention that the UFO phenomenon encompasses physical
phenomena—such as UFOs that can be tracked on radar—that preclude a
purely mental explanation. Indeed, this is Mizrach’s primary objection
to PCH. This leads to my final question: Is the UFO phenomenon singular?
The modern UFO phenomenon is composed (roughly) of four parts: UFO
sightings, crop circles, cattle mutilation, and alien abduction.
Ufologists disagree on whether crop circles and cattle mutilation should
be considered part of the phenomenon, and alternative explanations
exist even among believers. Cattle mutilation, for example, was
traditionally ascribed down to the twentieth century to the evil power
of the goatsucker (nightjar), a (real) bird whose mythology was
reapplied to the Chupacabra, whose name (literally: goat sucker) belies
its origins (see my chapter on the Chupacabra
in Colavito 2013) and provides an equally incredible explanation for
something science recognizes as natural decay. Similarly, prior to the
modern UFO myth, lights in the sky were treated as a distinct class of
“prodigy” from nocturnal visitation by strange visitors such as incubi
and succubae, whom Vallée and Bullard both see as analogous to UFO
denizens. These visitations, however, were not associated with
spaceships or intense light, just kinky sex. Additionally, the first
reported alien encounters—those from before the Hills like George
Adamski’s—were wildly diverse, including civilized diplomatic meetings
with Nordic-looking aliens from Venus, like those of Golden Age science
fiction, as filtered through Theosophy. It is only after the 1960s that
these threads come together in the modern UFO myth.
Because we find the various elements of the UFO myth in isolation
throughout history, the logical conclusion is that the four facets of
the myth were originally separate and brought together because of
the UFO myth and the UFO phenomenon is not the cause the four facets.
In this an instructive parallel can be found in the ancient Greek myth
of giants who (a) built the massive Mycenaean ruins, (b) left behind
their gigantic bones, and (c) performed magic from their underground
tombs and rose to communicate with those who sacrificed to them. The
myth emerged from mistakes (about the origin of ruins and about the
giant bones, really those of extinct Pleistocene mammals—see Mayor
[2000]) and religious ideology, but it seemed supported by facts which
were forever after linked to the myth. In the same way, the modern UFO
myth is leading researchers down the path of proposing elaborate
explanations for a phenomenon that cannot yet be proved to require a
singular explanation.
If treating sightings, abductions, mutilations, and crop circles as
distinct events yields productive explanations for each (as skeptics
contend), then the UFO phenomenon as a whole may be considered as a
modern myth and the UTH can be discarded as redundant, though as with
phlogiston and unicorns, it cannot be conclusively proven wrong, only
unnecessary. This then frees the researcher to examine multiple causes
for various phenomena, from ASC for most abduction cases to a wide range
of events that yield lights in the sky. By discarding the strictures of
forcing all of the factors of contemporary UFO mythology to conform to a
single hypothesis, the truth may in fact emerge more fully and
brilliantly than ufologists suspect.
greyfalcon | September 30 marks the birthday of this strange but remarkable woman, who probably did the most to spread the "Hitler escaped in a UFO" legend.
Her name was Maximiani Portas, but she's better known to history by her nom de voyage, the name she traveled under...Savitri Devi.
Maximiani was born in Lyons, France's second largest city, on September 30, 1905. "Her mother, Julia Nash, came from Cornwall, and her father was of mixed Mediterranean heritage, having an Italian mother from London and a Greek father who had acquired French citizenship due to his residence in France."
As a schoolgirl, Maximiani was greatly influenced by the work of the French poet Leconte de Lisle, whose Poemes barbares glorified the gods and religions of antiquity. And when she dicovered Bullfinch's Mythology, the result was the same as with H.P. Lovecraft a decade earlier. She became an ardent believer in the gods of Olympus. But where Lovecraft soon ended his infatuation with Graeco-Roman religion, the topic became a lifelong obsession with Maximiani.
In 1929, now interested in tracing the roots of occult traditions, Maximiani traveled to Jerusalem. She arrived just in time for the riots between the Arabs and the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants. She sided with the Arabs, and the entire episode left her with a lifelong hatred of Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the Talmud. [Some occultists believe that there is a network of ancient tunnels under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, similar to the tunnels in the Andes. These tunnels are alleged to be left over from the lost continent of Atlantis. See the book Timeless Earth by Peter Kolosimo, University Books, 1974]
By 1932, Maximiani's quest had brought her to India. Here she came under the influence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920), also known as Sri Baba Lokmanya, who was widely acclaimed as the 'father of Indian unrest'. Besides his radical political activities, Tilak was an accomplished scholar of ancient Hindu sacred literature. Imprisoned by the British Raj in 1897 for sedition, Tilak had immersed himself in Vedic study and in 1903 published his book about the origins of the "Aryan race," The Arctic Home in the Vedas.
Maximiani wandered through India for three years. Then, in July 1935, she enrolled in Rabindranath Tagore's ashram in Shantiniketan in the Bolpur district. But she left in December after getting into scraps with German Jewish refugees who were also the guests of Tagore.
At the ashram, she "learned Hindi and perfected her command of Bengali. She then taught English and Indian history at Jerandan College, not far from Delhi, and worked in a similar capacity in Mathura, the holy city of Krishna, during 1936. Ever more involved in the life and customs of Hinduism, she adopted a Hindu name--Savitri Devi."
Settling in Calcutta in 1936, Savitri came under the influence of Srimat Swami Satyananda, who was director of the city's Hindu Mission and active in the nationalist Hindu Mahasabha movement. Tilak had gotten it wrong, Satyananda told Savitri, the Aryans didn't originate in the Arctic--they came from the Antarctic. During previous interglacial periods, Antarctica had enjoyed a temperate climate, and there were still ancient cities buried under the ice and snow. [Curiously, Lovecraft wrote a short novel about this topic in 1932 entitled At the Mountains of Madness, repeatedly referring to a city called "Kadath in the Cold Waste"].
More ominously, Satyananda told Savitri that the presence of the swastika, the traditional Hindu sign of good fortune, in the flag of Nazi Germany showed that this European nation was returning to its Aryan roots. In addition, "he told her that he considered Hitler an incarnation of Vishnu, an expression of the force preserving cosmic order."
Satyananda and his new guest lecturer, Savitri Devi, were very much excited when Hitler dispatched an expedition to Antarctica in 1938 under Captain Alfred Rischer. Here was proof that the Nazis were seeking the ancient Aryan homeland. [In 1916, Charles Fort wrote a book called Y in which he talked about buried cities at the South Pole. He inexplicably destroyed this manuscript in 1917, claiming that "it was not what I wanted." Whatever Antarctic oddities the old boy dug up are delightful to conjecture but are unfortunately lost to history].
Friends in the Mahasabha introduced Savitri to Asit Krishna Mukherji, the editor of The New Mercury, India's one-and-only National Socialist magazine until its suppression by the British authorities in 1937. "Mukherji admired the growing might and influence of the Third Reich. He was deeply impressed by the Aryan ideology of Nazi Germany, with its cult of Nordic racial superiority, anti-Semitism and race laws," which he compared favorably with the Vedic law of varna or caste.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, Savitri and Mukherji became the biggest pro-Axis cheerleaders around. Which immediately got Savitri into trouble with the Raj. For one thing, she was a citizen of France and needed a permit to stay in India. Her pro-Nazi views put her on a list for deportation. And when the Germans overran France in May 1940, she was in imminent danger of arrest as "an enemy alien."
So, on June 9, 1940, at the age of 34, Savitri married Mukherji in Calcutta. It was a traditional Hindu wedding.
While her husband worked for Indian independence under the pro-Axis leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, Savitri "spent the rest of the war in joyful anticipation of an Axis victory. By the end of the war, Savitri Devi had assimilated many notions from Hinduism into a heterodox form of National Socialism that glorified the Aryan race and Adolf Hitler.
Undeterred by the Allied victory in May 1945, Savitri resolved to return to Europe and preach her new Hitlerian faith. What spurred her to action was a curious article that appeared in The Times and Le Monde on July 18, 1945 claiming that Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, had been taken by a U-boat to Argentina.
Convinced that der Führer would soon be making his comeback, "Savitri Devi returned to Europe in October 1945. In London she took casual employment as a wardrobe manager with a traveling Indian dance company."
During her brief showbiz career, Savitri read another article that appeared in the Argentinian newspaper Critica on July 17, 1945 which "stated that the Führer and Eva Braun had landed from the U-530 in Antarctica, noting the possible place of embarkation was Queen Maud Land, the destination of a German Antarctic expedition in 1938-1939."
She also read a book by Ladislao Szabo, a Hungarian living in Buenos Aires, entitled Hitler esta vivo (Hitler is alive) Szabo expanded on the Critica article and discussed the top-secret but abortive Operation High Jump.
But what really kindled Savitri's excitement was the sudden appearance of the "flying saucers" in July 1947. UFOs dominated front pages everywhere.
Ready to undertake her missionary work, Savitri hit upon the idea of distributing pro-Nazi leaflets while passing through Germany by train in June 1948.
Returning through France and entering Germany at Saarholzbach, she spent some three months between 7 September and 6 December 1948 distributing a further six thousand leaflets in the three Western (Allied) occupation zones and the Saarland.
While in Germany, Savitri made contact with former SS men, who told her an amazing story: in 1942, a German engineer named Miethe began work on a "flying disk," also known as the V-7. Encouraged by the progress in the development of this new "vengeance weapon," Hitler placed the project under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Kammler. A limited number of these vehicles were produced at underground factories in the Harz Mountains.
The V-7 was a futuristic aircraft, Savitri was told, 'a fantastic creation nearly 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter, in its center the plexiglass cupola of the control room glistening in the sunlight.'...it had no rotating parts and was driven by twelve adjustable jets, five rearward for forward flight and the other seven for directional steering. With a range of 13,000 miles (20,000 kilometers) the V-7 was able to reach 1,500 to 2,000 miles per hour (2,400 to 3,200 kilometers per hour).
Soon it was all coming together in her mind--Hitler's controversial demise, the Antarctic expedition of 1938, the Miethe V-7 flying disk, the SS rumors of a diehard "Last Battalion" preparing to resume the war. She truly believed that a flying saucer had spirited the Führer out of an embattled Berlin and dropped him off in Cuxhaven. From there, the U-boat convoy ferried him to the Nazi colony of Neuschwabenland in Antarctica.
Thus convinced, Savitri undertook her most dangerous gamble yet. In preparation for her third propaganda sortie to enemy-occupied Germany, she had printed in London a small German-language handbill with a swastika. Here she exhorted the Germans to remain true to their Führer, who was alleged still to be alive, and to rise up against the Allied forces that now were stationed throughout the country.
In part, the handbill read,
"However, 'Slavery is to last but a short time more.'"
"Our Führer is alive."
"And will soon come back, with power unheard of."
"Resist our persecutors."
"Hope and wait."
She began distributing the handbill on the night of 13-14 February 1949 in Cologne and soon found a young ex-SS man to help her.
The Allied occupation officials were at first alarmed by the appearance of these handbills. Was there a clandestine neo-Nazi group out there actually agitating for revolution? But then a German informer told them that a certain Mrs. Mukherji was distributing the subversive leaflets. And on February 22, 1949, Savitri was arrested by the British Army.
She was detained at the British military prison for women at Werl until her formal trial, which was fixed for 5 April 1949.
No doubt about it, Savitri was in a heap of trouble. As part of the postwar "denazification" program, the Allies had proclaimed the Laws of Occupation Status n Germany. Article 7 of Law Number 8 "forbade the promotion of militarist and National Socialist ideas on German territory subject to the Allied Control Commission." The maximum penalty was death.
Instead, the Allied court-martial sentenced Savitri to three years at the prison in Werl. She struck up close friendships with former SS concentration camp guards from Belsen and began writing her book Defiance. Here she enjoyed a high regard among her fellow Nazi and SS prisoners for her high-flown rhetoric, her insistence on the idealistic philosophy of Aryan rebirth, and her pious Nazi spirituality. Her presence proved so disruptive that Savitri was soon placed in solitary.
Just as Savitri was looking at an extended stay at Werl, the husband she had abandoned four years earlier came to her rescue. Asit Krishna Mukherji, now a citizen of newly-independent India, arrived in Germany and lobbied the Allied occupation authorities for his wife's release.
In the end, Mukherji was successful, and Savitri was released from prison in August 1949.
For the rest of her life, Savitri continued her mission as a Nazi evangelist, writing several books and helping to found the World Union of National Socialists. She also insisted that some UFOs were indeed craft from the Nazi sanctuary in Antarctica, a theme that her colleage and disciple Ernst R. Zundel expanded upon in his 1974 book, UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapons?
Savitri Devi died on October 22, 1982.
Although her main contribution to ufology was the promotion of the "saucer Nazis" legend, there is one curious postscript concerning Savitri Devi.
On April 5, 1949, at the same moment Savitri was facing the Allied court-martial in Germany, a spectacular UFO event occurred thousands of miles to the west, over that part of the USA's New England region Loren Coleman calls "the Bridgewater Triangle."
A "very large, luminous, blue-green object" first appeared over Middleboro, Massachusetts, then flew a wobbly corkscrew course westward over Taunton, Rehoboth and Seekonk, Mass. and finally over H.P. Lovecraft's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, where it suddenly and inexplicably vanished. The sighting was reported in Doubt--The Fortean Society Magazine for October 1949.
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