Newsletter No 335

                                                                               ISSN 1440-9828
                                                                    June 2007
                                                                  No 335

Fredrick Töben: Global Warming – and all that

Revisionists are all too familiar with the approach adopted by global warming believers such as George Monbiot. His criticism of the global warming skeptics is instructive, and his article follows below. Just look at his use of the new concept >denial industry< that comes directly from the Holocaust industry’s arsenal and is used by the Holocaust believers in an attempt to discredit anyone who refuses to believe their version of events.

Why is this character assassination, this smearing one’s opponent’s reputation so important? It’s the problem of funding, and of winning and not losing the argument, never mind about factuality, of truth-content. Monbiot gloats when a scientist admits he is wrong. This admission is to be celebrated because this is the essence, the hallmark of science, something that has been lost almost completely because of this battle over funding that then also flows into reputations and social standing. Many scientists adopt an absolutist approach mainly because those who fund their works want to see results.

And then there is also the matter of the law – litigation is one of the American diseases that can be called a growth-industry, and that all too often forces individual scientists to follow where the money is, and the fiddling of results begins. The AIDS saga is a prime example of this. In fact, medicine is a field where scientists are terribly constrained in what they can and can’t do. Dr Geerd Ryke Hamer, the founder of German New Medicine, and his contentious cancer research is a prime example where because of his unorthodox research and results school medicine is under direct attack. If the scientific community adopted his method, then a multi-billion dollar cancer industry would wither away. Revisionists know all about this in their battle against the multi-billion dollar >Holocaust-Shoah< industry.

I always am reminded of my studies when I see scientists admitting they got something wrong because American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, on whose works I wrote my thesis, put it beautifully:

>>Though infallibility in scientific matters seems to me irresistibly comical, I should be in a sad way if I could not retain a high respect for those who lay claim to it, for they comprise the greater part of the people who have any conversation at all. When I say they lay claim to it, I mean they assume the functions of it quite naturally and unconsciously. The full meaning of the adage humanum est errare, they have never waked up to. In those sciences of measurement which are the least subject to error — metrology, geodesy, and metrical astronomy — no man of self–respect ever now states his result, without affixing to it its probable error; and if this practice is not followed in other sciences it is because in those the probable errors are too vast to be estimated.<<

In science there is thus no absolute because we are dealing with the physical world. Islam puts it well: >The world is imperfect, only God is perfect<, i.e. the creations of our mind are absolute, but when we attempt to translate such impulses into physical reality, then we come across imperfections. When, for example, the creation of our mind becomes reality, as did the planning and execution of 9:11, then we see how dissenting voices – those who refuse to swallow the nonsense official conspiracy theory that a group of Arab terrorists did it – need to be legally persecuted/prosecuted in order to hide the truth.

There is also the other problem of the mind looking for a home, especially since Marxism-Feminism has reached its intellectual demise, and its remnants made up of >amoral< atheism fails to satisfy the questing mind’s need to know about things. In Australia, for example, individuals, such as broadcaster Phillip Adams, need to find a new mental home that enables them to see things holistically. Adams’ sometime embrace of Marxism morphed into Holocaust belief, which is also now falling apart, and he has now wholeheartedly embraced >Global Warming< as his new holistic world view – so much for someone who refuses to adopt a sound moral framework that is based on an empirical-biological theory of knowledge. Adams would never ask the question: >>If programs are set up to combat global warming, then can we get a measure through such programs how much global cooling is produced?<<

Remember the attitude adopted by Frenchman, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and how he attempted to deal with Revisionists, such as Robert Faurisson?

>>I have thus imposed on myself the following rule: one can analyze their texts as one might the anatomy of a lie; one can and should analyze their specific place in the configuration of ideologies, raise the question of why and in what manner they surfaced. But one should not enter into debate with the >revisionists<. It is of no concern to me whether the >revisionists< are neo-Nazi or extreme left wing in their politics; whether they are characterized psychologically as perfidious, perverse, paranoid, or quite simply idiotic. I have nothing to reply to them and will not do so. Such is the price to be paid for intellectual coherence.<<

Adopting such a mindset, of course, is fatal for those who are still interested in developing fields of knowledge, of searching for the truth of a matter. The following is the >>closed-mind<< syndrome as illustrated by French academics Pierre Vidal–Naquet, Leon Poliakov, et al, who wrote and published the following in response to Professor Faurisson’s challenge: >>Show me or draw me the Auschwitz homicidal gas chamber!<< the following:

>>…It is not necessary to ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was technically possible since it took place. Such is the point of departure required of any historical enquiry on the subject. This truth obliges us to state quite simply: there is not, there cannot be, any debate on the existence of the gas chambers.<<

And then there is Erica Wagner’s famous interview with Gitta Sereny and published in The Times, 29 August 2001:

Gitta Sereny’s ruthless desire to stick to the facts – that, say, Auschwitz was not a >death camp< – has not always won her friends. She is particularly scathing about the identification of Hitler’s evil with the death of the Jews and only the Jews. She deplored the use of the word >holocaust<, she says.

>>I deplore it because what happened to the Jews was the sort thing that was done – but it has now become the only thing. And that is totally wrong. If one wants to be disgustingly numerical, one would have to say that Hitler killed more Christians than Jews. But we don’t want to be like that. It’s all wrong. But if we concentrate entirely on what happened to the Jews, we cannot see its parallels – and you know many in the Jewish community refuse to see such parallels because they think it diminishes their suffering. But it’s not just terrible to kill Jews – it’s terrible to kill anybody. This whole thing of the murder of the Jews – we must never forget it, it is part of history, children as long as the world lasts must know that this happened – but we badly need to accept it now as part of a terrible history, not the terrible history. I don’t want anyone to think that I diminish it. I don’t diminish it. It was the worst thing. But it was not the only thing.<<

Sticking to the facts is the only way to avoid playing into the hands of people such as David Irving. >>Untruth always matters,<< she writes, >>and not just because it is unnecessary to lie when so much terrible truth is available. Every falsification, every error, every slick rewrite job is an advantage to the neo-Nazis.<<

She is puzzled, too, by what she perceives as a reluctance to confront the truth by those who seem to have the most interest in it:

>>Why on earth have all these people who made Auschwitz into a sacred cow … why didn’t they go and look at Treblinka which was an extermination camp? It was possible. There were survivors alive when all this started. Nobody did. It was an almost pathological concentration on this one place. A terrible place – but it was not an extermination camp.<<

Then she sighs; and suddenly the fierceness leaves her. >>The distinctions are important,<< she says more quietly. >>But – death is death.<<

***

And now, literally, off for a brief look into the climate change debate.

Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline – Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein – took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today’s crank has often proved to be tomorrow’s visionary.

But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have >>any measurable effects<< on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself with Galileo.

The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast in Britain earlier this year and which the ABC plans to screen, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.

The film’s main contention is that the increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. it is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in >>strikingly good agreement<< with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the >>agreement<< was the result of >>incorrect handling of the physical data<<. The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artifact of mistakes.

So Friis_Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming.

But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data that did not inf act measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar5-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

Friis-Christensen’s co-author, Hendrik Svensmark, published a paper last year purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release that went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and present climate events are the result of cosmic rays.

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA has shown on www.real.climate.org

five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. >>We’ve often criticized press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work,<< Schmidt says, >>but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen<< None of this seems to have troubled the program-makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as it it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth’s surface and temperatures in the troposphere – or lower atmosphere. But the program fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proven wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.

Christy himself admitted last year he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper that states the opposite of what he says in the film.

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them shriek >>censorship<<. This is an example of manufactured victimhood. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was >>completely misrepresented<< by the program, and >>totally misled<< by the people who made it.

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the British Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had >>misled<< his interviewees about >>the content and purpose of the programs<<. Their views had been >>distorted through selective editing<<. Channel Four had to apologise.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence that appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct.

You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides.

But for the film’s commissioners, all that counts is the sensation.

***

A response from Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee, Australia - 26 March 2007

Note for Colleagues:

The accompanying paper, Climate Change is Nothing New, is being published in the March 2007 issue of the journal, New Concepts in Global Tectonics – www.ncgt.org

I was invited to prepare the paper by the Editor as a scientific response to the IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policy Makers, issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, February 2007. The paper can also be regarded as a response to the movie by Al Gore, and to the report on carbon trading by the London financier, Sir Nicholas Stern.

The key points of the paper are:-

1. The Earth, the Sun, and indeed the Cosmos, comprise an inter-acting, dynamic, and evolving system. It is all in a state of continuing change. There is no steady state. In contrast, the IPCC assumes that the Earth was in a steady state until 250 years ago, which was upset by Man through increasing use of carbon fuels, and that led to atmospheric changes and consequential global warming.

2. In geological time, the climate of the Earth has been influenced by the immediate environment of the solar system as it travels through our Milky Way Galaxy. There were times when the solar system was enveloped in vast clouds of gas and dust, causing extreme cooling on Earth, and ice ages lasting for millions of years. In recent times the solar system has been travelling through space that is virtually empty, enabling a benign climate in which our civilization has flourished.

3. The Sun is the dominating influence on the climate of the Earth. That simple fact is not recognised by IPCC. The Sun is a churning, quivering body of hot plasma, generating intense electromagnetic fields in space that envelop the Earth. The electromagnetic behaviour of the Sun dominates and determines the electromagnetic and geotectonic response of the Earth, and thereby climate.

4. The climate of the earth has always changed. There have been times lasting centuries when the Earth was warmer or colder than now. The period of 500 years from 800 to 1300 AD was warmer. It brought prosperity to Europe. It is known as the Medieval Warm Period. Many great cathedrals were built, the Vikings discovered a verdant land they called Greenland, and there were vineyards in England. After that, for the next 450 years from 1300 to 1750 AD, Europe experienced a progressively colder climate. It is known as the Little Ice Age. It was especially cold for 100 years from 1600 to 1700 AD, when there was famine and starvation in the northern parts of Europe. In London, the River Thames often froze in winter.

5. A key part of the IPCC report is the presentation of evidence of parallel increases in both global temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is claimed by IPCC that the increased carbon dioxide emitted by Man is causing global warming. In my paper it is shown that the cause and effect relation is exactly the opposite; that natural global warming has caused an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, simply because of the reduction in solubility of carbon dioxide in sea water with increasing sea temperatures.

6. It is the vast surface area of the oceans that determines the interchange of gases between the oceans and the atmosphere. The oceans breathe carbon dioxide and methane in and out with the seasons, and the oceans release carbon dioxide and methane with the natural warming caused by the Sun. If in the future there is a significant decrease in the electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, the Earth will cool down, and the levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere will then decline.

7. IPCC refers to a rise in sea levels over the past century as evidence of global warming caused by Man. I show that the rise is due to the great exploitation of non-rechargeable groundwater over the past century which has led to a net addition to the hydrosphere, and thereby, the oceans.

8. Air pollution and global warming are scientifically separate issues. Global warming is natural and global. Atmospheric pollution is man-made and mostly close to the sources of emission. The IPCC have locked themselves into a scientifically untenable position by interweaving air pollution and global warming.

9. The deadly pollution of dust, acid gases, and water vapour entering the atmosphere in many cities of the world should be the focus of action. A large number of cities are most unhealthy places, with a lower expectation of life. The problems are not global but local. The correction of the problems must be industry and city-centred.

10. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it is essential to all life. There is no need for carbon trading or geosequestration. The concept of carbon trading has been advocated by IPCC, and by many governments signing the Kyoto agreement, and is being welcomed by the financial community. But carbon trading has not arisen from the normal operation of the market. It is the result of fears about global warming created by IPCC and others. It thereby presents risks to investors. If it comes to be recognised that global warming has a natural cause, and the fears subside, the value of carbon credits will then drop to zero, and the market in carbon trading will collapse.

The paper and this memorandum are circulated for your information.

Lance Endersbee

endersbee@optusnet.com.au

***

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOTHING NEW

Abstract: Since 1750 the electromagnetic radiation of the Sun has increased significantly, as indicated by the sunspot record. This increased electromagnetic radiation is considered by the author and others to be the real cause of global warming. The examination of the annual temperature records of the northern and southern hemispheres shows a sharp change and major increases since 1978, especially in the northern hemisphere. This is the so-called hockey stick effect, which the author concludes is not due to the influence of Man, and probably due to a change in the geothermal regime of heat flow from the fracture zones in the floor of the northern oceans. There is some confirmation of this in recent sea floor explorations. The role of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane is considered in relation to claims that emissions by Man are causing global warming. It is shown that the increased warming is due to the Sun, and that the consequent warming of the oceans is causing the ex-solution of carbon dioxide and methane from the oceans, simply due to the decreasing solubility of these gases in sea water with increasing ocean temperatures. The extensive exploitation of groundwater around the world over the past century, at rates far in excess of possible recharge, has created a net addition to the hydrosphere commensurate with the apparent rise in sea levels over the past century. There is deadly pollution in the atmosphere over many world cities and industrial regions. These are local and regional matters, and should be corrected at the sources of pollution. Air pollution and global warming are scientifically separate matters.

Keywords: climate, sunspots, carbon dioxide, methane, geothermal, cosmic rays

Let the record show that I’, not in the David Flint camp when it comes to Alan Jones. And that record includes countless columns during the >>cash for comment<< scandals, an open letter to Alan following his London embarrassment – and my book Emperors of the Air, which provided close-up observations of shock-jockery at Sydney radio station 2UE, and in particular of Jones, John Laws and Stan Zemanek. I’ve also praised, both in broadcast and in print, Chris Masters’ masterful Jonestown.

I loathe shock jocks, and I detest the way locals mimic and plagiarise the bigotries and production tricks of Rush Limbaugh – the US source of such Laws phrases as >>femi-nazis<< abd that >>keeping the dream alive<< twaddle. For me, Zemanek represents the nadir of Australian radio – and I’ve been enraged by much of Jones’s output.

While Jones’s punishment last month for naming a juvenile witness in a murder trial may turn down his volume at least a little, I’m relieved the criminal conviction wasn’t a consequence of his more notorious anti-Lebanese commentary. There are those who’d throw the book at Jones over Cronulla. I’m not one of them.

I was deeply troubled by the campaign to >>turbo-charge<< racial vilification laws with criminal sanctions. My opposition to this crusade cost me many friends on the Left – and within ethnic organizations. I found myself being booed at a multicultural conference in Hobart for urging caution on the issue and, even worse, was applauded by racists on their hate pages.

But the points I tried to make remain valid. First, how could I support criminal sanctions in anti-vilification legislation while, as a member of Amnesty international, protesting at foreign governments imprisoning people for simply saying things? Amnesty fights to have non-violent dissidents released from prisons all over the world – yet Australians were trying to jail people not for actions but for words. Appalling, even monstrous words. But only words.

[FT comments: Amnesty International refuses to support imprisoned Revisionists whor effuse to believe in the >Holocaust-Shoah< because such dissident voices are deemed to be >>violent Nazis<<.]

Second, remember Brer Rabbit and the Briar Patch? Many bigots – particularly anti-Semites such as the Adelaide Institute’s Fredrick Töben – would see their day in court as a personal triumph, a chance to spread their toxic sludge from the dock and witness stand throughout mainstream media. An opportunity for martyrdom.

And the shock jocks? Laws, Jones, Howard Sattler and Derryn Hinch seem to thrive on officialcomplaints, defamation actions or sundry legal threats, wearing them as badges of honour, proof of their spurious >>pro-battler<< status. Why give them further opportunity for self-agrandisement?

[FT comments: Poor Phillip. He fails to realize that sometimes there are individuals who are merely concerned individuals who have just had enough of being pushed about within society.]

Third, where is there a scintilla of evidence that bottling up hatred or censoring bigotry does the slightest good? It seems to me then – and now – that the opposite may be true. Attempting to silence racists only intensifies their venom. For example, I’d always opposed the bans on the noxious Holocaust denier David Irving, who used Australia’s refusal to grant him a visa as further evidence of a global Jewish conspiracy – and as advertising for his books, his tapes, his website. Better to have the neo-Nazis and historical revisionists on the public record, so that they can be refuted. Censorship always, always fails.

Case in point. John Howard was notorious for his opposition to Asian migration. As a member of Malcolm Fraser’s cabinet he and he alone opposed admitting Vietnamese refugees whose affiliation to Australia made them especially vulnerable for retribution. So it was hardly a surprise when, in 1988, Howard attacked Asian immigration during a Laws interview. That cost Howard the Liberal leadership.

As PM he got his own back by calling for an end to >>political correctness<< and the bigots emerged from the sewers more rabid than ever. On a large scale, the ethnic and religious tensions bottled up by Tito or Saddam did not dissipate – as >>ethnic cleansing<< in the former Yugoslavia and the civil war in Iraq so bloodily demonstrate.

How to deal with shock jocks? Turn the dial. Complain to their advertisers. Or have the authorities fine the station.

Jones’s case is the more complex because he isn’t invariably a knee-jerk reactionary. Though his >>Jo for Canberra<< crusade was ridiculous, he was resolute in his support for Lindy Chamberlain, and I had some sympathy for his relentless and ultimately successful attack on the ID card. Although wrongheaded with his >>turn the rivers inland<< campaign, Jones got steamed up over our water crisis long before his friend the PM seemed to notice it. And while iffy on climate change, Jones is paradoxically a warrior against the reckless expansion of Australia’s coal mining industry.

It’s easy to support freedom of expression for those who share our views. Tougher to support it for those we don’t like, whether a ratbag mufti, a Holocaust denier or a snarling shock jock. They’re the price we pay for free speech.

*******

Fredrick Töben responds

Adelaide 31 May 2007

Phillip, me old mate! Someone just forwarded me your Weekend Australian Magazine column of May 26-27, 2007. What would you do if you didn’t have me to insult? You’d have to find another enemy image –

Perhaps before you permanently close your eyes you would like to consider what I talk about without blocking your critical faculties with those stupid and rather infantile concepts - >toxic sludge< and >antisemitism<.

After all, truth is a far more beautiful and life-affirming concept than the ones you use, though I note you did use the other usual ones later on when gloating over and describing David Irving. But please note that Irving still believes in >limited gassings< while I say this matter has not been proven and is, in fact, a lie! Now, send a copy of this letter to any court, better still, take it personally to a police station and start an action against me for having contravened the Federal Court gag order that prohibits me from saying such a thing.

Your triumphalism in your column is so hollow-sounding, almost as if you are still in your midlife crisis, as if you need viagra now. I say this because I sometimes listen to your program and note a lot of slobbering and heavy breathing on your part coming through as you talk with your guests. From memory I do not recall that you are hooked on the spirit bottle as Hitchens now is.

Do you like the formulation that I used for the Teheran Conference in December 2006:

>The Holocaust-Shoah has no reality in space and time, only in memory<.

I have a faint suspicion that you actually know the >gassing story< is a gigantic lie. After all, with your known critical attitude, why do you not ask for physical evidence? Why not ask the simple question of those who assert the gassings were a fact: >Show me or draw me the Auschwitz homicidal gas chamber?<

And then there is the German editor of Der Spiegel, Fritjof Meyer, who in 2003 claimed, like Gitta Sereny, that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp. Did you ever follow that up?

Never mind, Phillip, like you I will defend your right to discredit yourself by abusing those whose beliefs you hate with a vengeance. I am lucky that I cannot hate: I was not raised in the Jewish, Christian or Muslim faith. Also, I never stooped to intellectual hubris and nihilism either, as you do. Do you still claim that you are an atheist and a Judeophile and a believer in the >Holocaust-Shoah<?

A personal note – when you write your columns, do you still lie on your back on the floor and dictate the guff to a machine or to whoever bothers being next to you?

What a pity you still hate Germans. I wonder what human qualities you don’t like about them, and thus have this pathological and feverish need to pull out that >Holocaust-Shoah< lie in order to get your high and deflect whatever you don’t like about Germans.

Finally, I wonder when you’ll realize that the left-right divide is quite limiting because there are those who are at home in both camps. There are larger truths waiting to be discovered when you transcend this divide – and that is exhilarating because it liberates you from your own ignorance AND prejudice. Perhaps your total embrace of >global warming< is the synthesis of your former beliefs, whereby you hope to retain a belief in internationalism. It would still enable you to embrace ideals/principles such as Landrights-apology for Aboriginals, as I do – you know, Blut und Boden, and all that stuff!

Until later

Fredrick Töben toben@adelaideinstitute.org

Since Milan Kundera’s famous but somewhat fanciful essay, L’Europe Kidnappée, the countries on the western margin of the Eastern Bloc – Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – have been credited with belonging to a rather posh cultural area called Central Europe.

This is, surprisingly, a Central Europe without Austria and Germany. Convenient for those who think that – unlike our less distinguished neighbours, Russia and the Balkan States – we have a so-called democratic tradition and a half-western social style.

What is being disregarded in a cavalier fashion is that what all these places have in common is the German presence. Tourists, when they admire Polish or Hungarian Gothic cathedrals, forget that the proud spires were built by and for Germans. These Germans were no colonizers but peaceful settlers invited by our kings as missionaries of Western Christendom, civilization, crafts and agriculture.

The eastern half of Europe from Prague to Dorpat-Tartu and from Danzig-Gdansk to Agram-Zagreb, was full of German cities, the monasteries full of German monks, the markets of German-reaped wheat, the offices of diligent German bureaucrats.

Listen to the names of the great Hungarian architects of the 19^th century: Hild Ybl, Hauszmann, Steindl, Lechner. People in Hungary read the Pester Lloyd, the Neues Pester Journal, the Westungarischer Grenzbote. My granfather’s café in Nagyvard-Oradea subscribed – apart from 46 Hungarian papers, eight of them in German – to the Viennese Neue Freie Presse and to the Prager Tagblatt.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, was printed in Riga, now in Latvia, and he lived, as did Johann Georg Hamann, the >>Magnus of the North<<, in Königsberg – now Kaliningrad, Russia. Arguably the greatest German poet since 1945, Paul Celan, comes from Czernowitz – in Bucovina, which belonged to Austria, to Romania and now to the USSR.

Rosenberg, the chief ideologist of the Nazi Party, was an architecture student in St Petersburg – and allegedly a good friend of Blok and Mayakovsky. Modern Hungarian nationalism was invented in a review called Der Ungar, edited by a Prussian Jew, Karl Beck.

And for us, as well as the millions of Germans living among us, German was identical with culture. We know from EliasCanetti’s splendid autobiography that even a Sephardic family in northern Bulgaria – mother tongue, Ladino Spanish – subjects of the Sultan in Constantinople, thought German was the thing.

The Volksdeutsche, the >>ethnic Germans<< of the East, were by no means a unitary group. The Zipser, the Lutheran Saxons of Upper Hungary - now Slovakia – and the Catholic Swabians of the Banat – now in Romania – were pro-Hungarian, the Saxons of Transylvania – now in Romania – anti-Hungarian, although their bishop, Teutsch, emigrated to Budapest after 1919, not to Vienna or Berlin.

The German aristocracy of the Baltic lands had little in common with the humble Volga German peasants. Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, writers from Prague, were very unlike the Sudeten German politicians, Heinlein – A Nazi- or Jaksch – a pro-Czech Social Democrat - , although all lived in Bohemia.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a largely artificial, dynastic creation. Its unmistakable common culture was a result of the fact that in its >>foreign<< lands there was always an important German-speaking population. When people wonder how the spirit could vanish, they forget that the body – the Germans themselves – has vanished as well.

We also forget that the millions of Jews in the Austria and Russian empire spoke Yiddish, a German dialect, and of course understood and enjoyed literary German. The Jews almost everywhere were, to all intents and purposes, a peculiar German ethnic group.

If you find interesting German books in East European second-hand bookshop, the names inscribed on the flyleaves can be Jewish or Gentile, but the owners were probably displaced or murdered or both. We tend to ignore the fact that the German-speaking population of the East was annihilated in two steps, by Hitler, then by Stalin. The glue that held eastern Central Europe together was fatally diluted by these industrious mass murderers.

The matter is obscured by our failure to recognize that Hitler was not a nationalist. If he had been one, he would have sought alliance with the biggest German-speaking group of the East, the Jews. He was instead a doctrinaire racist, and in 1944 he contemplated a final racial purge even among the Germans, refreshing their stock with Scandinavian blood. The Holocaust was, apart from anything else, a German national suicide.

If you spell the Austrian for >>dear wee town<< as >>Shtetl<<, you will think of pogroms and Hanoverian boots; but it you spell it correctly, Stadtl, you will remember the cavernous cafes with their huge mirrors and marble-topped little tables, the bittersweet jokes, Edwardian plush, old-fashioned bookishness, quotations from Goethe and hand kissing.

The Jews were murdered and mourned. There was some soul searching and self-criticism. But who has mourned the Germans?

Who feels any guilt for the millions expelled from Silesia and Moravia and the Volga region, slaughtered during their long trek, starved, put into camps, raped, frightened, humiliated? Who cares about German and Hungarian peasants sold as slaves to Moravian farmers under that great democrat President Benes?

Who dares to remember that the expulsion of the Germans made the communist parties quite popular in the 1940s? Who is revolted because the few Germans left behind, whose ancestors built our cathedrals, monasteries, universities and railway stations, today cannot have a primary school in their own language?

The world expects Germany and Austria to >>come to terms<< with their past, but no-one will admonish us – Poles, Czechs and Hungarians – do the same, Eastern Europe’s dark secret remains a secret. A universe of culture was destroyed.

The West within East, that intriguing mystery, was simply the civilizing work of our Germans of different denominations. Our supposed >>common<< culture does not make sense without them, and never will.

Prague was the capital of the >>Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation<<, to give it its full official title. We know what it is now. The buildings survive, the meaning cannot be resurrected. Too many genocides, too many stolen calf-bound volumes pf Nestroy and Gotthelf, too many mendacious histories, too many cover-up and half-digested guilt.

Anzac Service in small country communities

Although plagued by all sorts of problems it is gratifying to note that many small towns managed to commemorate this national event with reflective dignity.

All Australians can and perhaps should be able to relate to an event that required its most able to sacrifice themselves for a worthy cause. Also of importance is the fact that the event bridges the generational gap in the age of the individualistic Internet.

Goroke, with barely 300 residents offered an Anzac event at which the very young and the very old were once again together, as a community.

However, national cohesion in the age of multi-national internationalism, becomes a problem when human sacrifice does not translate into community impulses, where the relevance of a potential sacrifice remains obscure – as is the case with our current soldiers doing battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world.

The Anzac spirit also contains a conciliatory element that is justifiably stressed by all politicians: Christian/Jewish Australians and Muslim Turks come together to remember the tragedy that resulted out of the political and military conflicts that made up World War One. So, during the Anzac marches we see Australians, ex-Soviet Union members and a host of others from different armies – mainly from the World War Two Allies – marching together, remembering those that paid the supreme sacrifice.

Unfortunately such reconciliation still does not extend to Germans and Italians and Japanese who now live in Australia but who may not wear their military honours and march with the Anzacs. This is, especially in the German case, because the Second World War is still in progress, though South Australian Premier, Mike Rann, a couple of years ago officially declared hostilities between Germany and South Australia over!

Whether we rationalise away this fact or not this attitude does affect all those Australians of German descent when the annual Anzac Day celebrations are planned in the various towns around Australia. Remember: “Don’t mention the war!’

However, it is not the RSL’s fault that it still embargoes German-Italian-Japanese Anzac participation. The fault lies within the Germans themselves. Most Australians of German descent are still afflicted with a horrendous non-justifiable guilt complex that stems directly from the Second World War – and what has become its defining event: the ‘Holocaust’. A belief in the ‘Holocaust’ is crippling Germans and Australians of German descent to the point where they self-destruct, instead of asserting themselves healthily within Australia, and demanding that they also participate in the national Anzac parades. After all, there is not a single German who did not lose a family member during World War Two.

In Germany itself the mindset is such that any patriotic feelings such as grieving for one’s own World War Two dead, is sneered at, and it is interpreted as a ‘diminishing of Nazi crimes’ perpetrated over 60 years ago. The problem arising out of this is that a country that does not honour its dead is soulless and a living corpse. So, the younger generation of Germans has disconnected from its own history because it refuses to accept the imposed ‘war guilt’ that Germany’s foreign-dominated media incessantly rams down their throats.

You will note that many Germans living in Australia, and those Australians of German descent, do everything possible to bow their head in assumed guilt and shame when it comes to the ‘Holocaust’. Instead of viewing the tragedy as a matter that emerges out of war, in Germany and other European countries, such as Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland, et al, the event has been enshrined in law as ‘absolute evil’ and thus beyond rational debate. In fact, recently two Germans were given prison sentences for daring to question the basic factuality of the ‘Holocaust’. Imagine if Australians who disputed the politics behind the Anzac story were sent to prison! Thought criminals in the making as foreshadowed in George Orwell’s 1984!

In Australia we are lucky that the Anzac story, like the ‘Holocaust’ story is still accessible to rational discourse. This may be because just as the Anzac story occurred overseas, so too the ‘Holocaust’ story occurred overseas. There is benefit flowing from the fact that we are an island continent.

Re: The Inverell Forum 16-19 March 2007

Sir

Permit me briefly to comment on the wonderful and informative long-weekend event during which citizens of your town hosted about 250 people who travelled to Inverell from all over Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

The fact that this forum has been held for almost twenty years speaks for itself, and it clearly indicates that concerned citizens from all Australian states, in particular, do need a forum where vital issues are addressed. There were farmers, bulldozer drivers, teachers, former soldiers, pensioners, academics. In other words there were individuals from all walks of life who attended this forum.

It was refreshing to listen to speakers who expertly addressed, among others, local, national and world politics, contemporary health, education and economic issues, always focusing on what is in Australia’s best interest. That some politicians would find this a challenge to their stayed routine life is obvious. But surely, would it not have been in their own interest to have attended the Forum to see and hear what this significant group of individuals is talking about? Unfortunately, the only politician willing to listen to the people talk was Senator Len Harris.

It was quite informative to hear the American media personality Dave von Kleist talk about the 9:11 tragedy. He suggested we should not accept the official conspiracy theory that is currently part of our mainstream mindset, that a small group of Arab ‘terrorists’ perpetrated the 9:11 attack on the USA. There are just too many physical facts that contradict such an official conspiracy theory.

During the Social Day at the Inverell Race Course discussions continued, among others there was Wendy Scurr who talked about the Port Arthur Massacre. Stuart Beattie had earlier stated that Sims Metal had collected the guns the Victoria Police had obtained through an amnesty call, and some of those guns had been found at Port Arthur! Or, there was the announcement of War Games in Australia at the end of May until the beginning of July 2007 called OPERATION TALISMAN SABER 2007, where the US military will be experimenting with toxic weaponry, etc. I have not read anything about this major event in any newspaper.

Climate change, that latest topic of concern for all Australians, was also addressed, though it was sad to note that Professor R M Carter, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, felt that his presence at the conference would diminish his standing within his own academic environment. [*- see his letter below – the letter was not reproduced by the editor.]

This kind of prejudice, the fear of addressing a group unjustly regarded as scientifically illiterate indicates that Professor Carter lacks moral and intellectual courage. His failure of nerve is thus evident because anyone who is firm in his knowledge and belief does not fear speaking outside of his known inner circle.

This is what freedom and democracy is all about, and if we in Australia still value such freedoms we should proudly proclaim them.

That is what about 250 individuals did on this weekend in Inverell. Perhaps next year The Inverell Times will consider it a newsworthy event that a thinking group of individuals meets in your lovely city to thrash out problems and make worthy suggestions as to how the Australian political, economic and social fabric can be improved, how the quality of life of ordinary Australians can be enriched and sustained.

***

Dear Robert

I write with regret my offer to speak at your forthcoming Inverell Forum in mind-March.

It was with great dismay that I learned from last Thursday’s Australian that Richard Krege will be addressing the forum on the topic of the Holocaust. On checking your web site to confirm this, I discovered that Dave von Kleist is also a speaker.

You must be aware that these are not persons with whom a professional scientist can associate and retain credibility. Indeed, I am concerned about the damage that has been caused to my reputation already by just the brief reference that has appeared in The Australian.

When you approached me to speak on climate change, I of course understood that I might share the podium with an eclectic group of speakers, but I had also assumed that they would comprise other persons with scientific or professional credibility comparable to my own. That not being the case, I regret that I have no alternative but to decline to participate.

I apologize for withdrawing at this relatively late stage, as I realize that it will require you to schedule your opening evening address.

Finally, I would like to be crystal clear about one thing. Which is that I appreciate your invitation to speak on climate change at Inverell, and would have little hesitation in agreeing to do so on a future occasion, with one proviso. The proviso is that any such event must involve other speakers of high professional credibility, who have assembled to discuss the many scientific facets of the vexed topic of human-caused global warming.

With kind regards.

Bob Carter

Professor R M Carter

Marine Geophysical Laboratory

James Cook University, Townsville, Qld. 4811

Canada - Gay bar suit

The Advertiser, 1 June 2007

A woman who was turned away from a gay bar in Canada has filed a human rights complaint.

Audrey Vachon, 20, said yesterday she was recently refused service at Le Stud in Montreal's gay village after sitting down with her father.

A waiter told her father, Gilles, that the bar did not serve women.

Tree apes >took first steps<

Paris: Tree-dwelling apes may have been the first to begin walking on two legs, claims a new study which questions the current theory that more recent human ancestors were the first bipeds.

The study to be published today in the US journal Science, says apes may have walked on two feet with support from their armsto traverse thin branches to collect food.

>>If we're right, it means you can't rely on bipedalism to tell whether you're looking at a human or other ape ancestor,<< one of the study's authors, Robin Crompton, of the University of Liverpool, said.

***

Polish court drops case against Mein Kampf publisher

EJP, 28/May/2007 www.ejpress.org/article/17104

WARSAW-COLOGNE (EJP)---A regional court in Poland has conditionally dropped a criminal case against a Polish publisher charged with breaking copyright laws for publishing Adolf Hitler’s ’’Mein Kampf’’.

In this book Hitler expressed his hatred of Jews and desire to conquer territory in Eastern Europe.

The Wroclaw court in south western Poland ruled that a publisher, identified only as Marek S., broke copyright law by printing 3,000 copies of the Polish translation of Mein Kampf - My Struggle in 2005, the Polish news agency PAP reported.

The state of Bavaria in Germany, which owns the rights to Mein Kampf brought a case in 2005 against the publishing house in Poland.

Bavarian authorities underlined that they strictly adhere to the copyright laws in order to prevent the spreading of Hitler’s philosophy.

Arguing that the harm caused by the small-scale publishing of the book was minimal - especially since Marek S. agreed in a 2005 civil trial to halt printing and withdraw the work from bookstores at his own cost - the Polish court agreed to drop the case against the publisher for a probationary period of two years.

Mein Kampf is banned from public display or sale in Germany, though it is available for historical research in libraries.

Meanwhile, Schiwago Film, a German film company, will produce Mein Kampf, a fictitious account of Adolf Hitler’s period as a young man in Vienna.

It will be directed by Urs Odermatt. Despite the title, it will not be based on Hitler’s autobiography but on a stage play written by George Tabori, who in the 1950s penned screenplays for Charles Vidor and Alfred Hitchcock.

Schiwago Film recently has gained attention for its social and political satires such as Bye Bye Berlusconi and low-budget surprise hit Muxmauschenstill.