Astrónomos de Estados Unidos han descubierto el primer planeta fuera del Sistema Solar que cumple con las condiciones de temperatura y gravedad para ser potencialmente habitable.Este exoplaneta, según informaron en una rueda de prensa los responsables del hallazgo, se encuentra en el centro de una "zona habitable", a una distancia de una estrella donde recibe suficiente energía estelar para tener agua líquida en su superficie y, por tanto, sustentar la vida.La habitabilidad de un planeta depende de varias condiciones, pero la existencia de agua líquida y de una atmósfera son dos de los más importantes factores para que exista vida.En este planeta, a 20 años luz de la Tierra y en órbita de la estrella Gliese 581, los científicos han detectado las condiciones "adecuadas" de temperatura para que haya agua, y de gravedad para que exista una atmósfera."El planeta está a la distancia correcta (de la estrella) para que haya agua, ni con mucho calor ni con mucho frío, y con una gravedad similar a la de la Tierra para que haya una atmósfera", explicó en una conferencia uno de los científicos a cargo de la investigación, Steven Vogt.El descubrimiento del planeta está detallado en un estudio que publicará la revista Astrophysical Journal y que está basado en once años de investigación en el observatorio W M. Keck de Hawai, Estados Unidos, financiada por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencia de Estados Unidos y la agencia espacial NASA.
jueves, 30 de septiembre de 2010
Hallan planeta habitable fuera del Sistema Solar
martes, 28 de septiembre de 2010
Y luego se extrañan de lo que esta tratado infamé causó, A casi un siglo Alemania apenas cubrió los gastos impuestos por la guerra... es decir, la primera guerra mundial
Germany Closes Book on World War I With Final Reparations Payment
Germany will make its last reparations payment for World War I on Oct. 3, settling its outstanding debt from the 1919 Versailles Treaty and quietly closing the final chapter of the conflict that shaped the 20th century.
domingo, 26 de septiembre de 2010
Lady Guttenberg vs. Lady Gaga: Why Germany's Conservatives Can't Be Cool - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
Lady Guttenberg vs. Lady Gaga: Why Germany's Conservatives Can't Be Cool - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
¿ Alemania medio reacciona ?
- Recientemente un político/a alemán de quien no puedo recordar su nobre declaró que la guerra no solo la inició Alemania sino qu efue Polonia la que también provocó pues desde tiempo antes que Alemania empezó una acumulación de tropas y reacomodo de las mismas cerca de la frontera con Alemania. Como es natural muchos reaccionaron con estupor antes estas palabras que si se busca y hasta donde sé son un hecho contundente y comprobable, pero bueno, al menos ya alguien se atreve a decirlo fuerte y claro.
- En Der Spiegel apareció un artículo sobre un libre que pone en el banquillo de loa acusados como fantoche, ególatra y falso a aquel que muchos ven casi como héroe (más falso al caso que los de DC Comics o Marvel) me refiero al personaje llamado Simon Wiesenthal supuesto "cazador" (vaya que título) de Nazis. Lo peculiar aquí es qu eaun en una publicación como Der Spiegel den espacio a cuestionar a una figura tan ligada al Holocausto y la venganza posterior a el que montaron judíos y sionistas. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,716216,00.html#ref=nlint
La guerra cibernética una realidad ya entre naciones o grupos de interés a naciones.
http://www.youtube.com/v/S6bG8Db09sY?fs=1&hl=en_US
La infamia fanática apocalíptica ataca de nuevo, reanudan israelíes fanáticos y extremistas construcciones en el West Bank.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68P1ZG20100926
jueves, 23 de septiembre de 2010
Y quien es Leo Suckerman
¿Y quién es Cyro Gómez Leyva y Denisse Maerker, José Cárdenas, etc.
etc. etc. para opinar sobre la inseguridad y sobre lo que se debe
escribir en los medios escritos y electrónicos?
En 2006 estos y miles de comunicadores en todo el país que se hicieron
pen……….penitentes ante el gigantesco fraude electoral y ayudaron a
poner la piedra angular de la corrupción e impunidad que está dando
sus frutos amargos ahora. Estos comunicadores nos vienen a dar recetas
del problemón que ellos ayudaron a gestar. Si hubieran tenido un
poquito de valor civil y de respeto a la democracia y al pueblo de
México habrían informado a la población del golpe de estado electoral
perpetrado por el PAN y el PRI y apoyado también por dos países
extranjeros, España y Estados Unidos.
Estos comunicadores y miles más en todo el territorio nacional no
tienen la menor autoridad moral para hablar sobre lo que se debe o no
se debe de comunicar ya que son cómplices del desastre nacional.
Debería de darles vergüenza y pedir perdón a Mexico por su abyección
informativa durante las elecciones del 2006. ¿Cuánto les pagarían por
hacerse patos? ¿O es que le tienen un pánico terrible al desempleo?
¡Tienen razón!; Hay que ser héroes para oponerse a esta mafia que
saquea al país; los comprendemos; pero mejor sería ahora que se
quedaran calladitos y no aumentar su desprestigio porque que ya no
hay peligro. La línea de la mafia corrupta ahora es atacar al mismo
que protegieron antes.
Este desastre nacional que ayudaron a crear se les va a revertir en
sus hijos y en sus nietos que son los que van a cosechar los frutos
amargos de un país hecho garras. Ni Miami ni Mc Allen ni Houston serán
suficiente para albergar a tanto traidor. Así que sus hijos y nietos
los maldecirán por no haber sabido estar a la altura con un mínimo de
patriotismo, de moral y de ética profesional. ¡Que con su pan se lo
coman! ¡A toda acción hay una reacción! !La acción está dada y la
reacción ya empezó y va a durar!
domingo, 19 de septiembre de 2010
The Guardian: The powerful coalition that wants to engineer the world's climate
The Guardian
The powerful coalition that wants to engineer the world's climate
- Clive Hamilton for OurWorld 2.0, part of the Guardian Environment Network
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 September 2010 16.16 BST
In August 1883 the painter Edvard Munch witnessed an unusual blood-red sunset over Oslo. Shaken up by it, he wrote in his diary that he "felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature". The incident inspired him to create his most famous work,The Scream.
The sunset he saw that evening followed the eruption of Krakatoa off the coast of Java. The explosion, one of the most violent in recorded history, sent a massive plume of ash into the stratosphere, turning sunsets red around the globe. The gases emitted also caused the Earth to cool by more than one degree and disrupted weather patterns for several years.
The cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions has been known for some time. A haze forms from the sulphur dioxide spewed into the upper atmosphere reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth. It's estimated that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 — the largest since Krakatoa — cooled the Earth by around 0.5°C for a year or more.
Now, a powerful coalition of forces is quietly constellating around the idea of transforming the Earth's atmosphere by simulating volcanic eruptions to counter the warming effects of carbon pollution. Engineering the planet's climate system is attracting the attention of scientists, scientific societies, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed — nothing less than taking control of Earth's climate system — the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning.
The Royal Society defines geoengineering as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change" and divides methods into two types: carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and solar radiation management aimed at reducing heat coming in or reflecting more of it out.
Techniques ranging from the intriguing to the wacky have been proposed to remove carbon from the atmosphere, including fertilising the oceans with iron filings to promote the growth of tiny marine plants that absorb carbon dioxide, installing in the ocean a vast number of floating funnels that draw nutrient-rich cold water from the deep to encourage algal blooms that suck carbon dioxide from the air, and construction of thousands of 'sodium trees' that extract carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into sodium bicarbonate.
Some of the ideas put forward to block the Sun's heat would be far-fetched even in a science fiction novel. One is to send billions of reflective discs to a point in space known as L1 and located between the Earth and the Sun. Another is to launch hundreds of special unmanned ships that plough the oceans sending up plumes of water vapour that increase cloud cover. Or dark-coloured forests could be converted into light-coloured grasslands that reflect more sunlight.
Enhanced dimming
But the option that is taken most seriously is altogether grander in conception and scale. The scheme proposes nothing less than the transformation of the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere so that humans can regulate the temperature of the planet as desired. Like volcanic eruptions, it involves injecting sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere to blanket the Earth with tiny particles that reflect solar radiation.
Various schemes have been proposed, with the most promising being adaptation of high-flying aircraft fitted with extra tanks and nozzles to spray the chemicals. A fleet of 747s could do the job. To have the desired effect we would need the equivalent of one Mount Pinatubo eruption every three or four years. The emissions from the eruption in April of Iceland's 'Mount Unpronounceable' were less than a hundredth of those from Pinatubo, so to engineer the climate we'd need the equivalent of one of those every week, every year for decades.
More cautious scientists recognise that attempting to regulate the Earth's climate by enhancing global dimming is fraught with dangers. Most worryingly, the oceans are absorbing around a third of the extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans, which is raising their acidity, dissolving corals and inhibiting shell-formation by marine organisms. Turning down the dimmer switch may reduce incoming solar radiation but would do nothing to slow ocean acidification. The climate system is hugely complicated and tinkering with it might be akin to introducing cane toads to control sugarcane beetles.
Moral hazards
Although ideas for climate engineering have been around for at least twenty years, until recently public discussion has been discouraged by the scientific community. Environmentalists and governments have been reluctant to talk about it too. The reason is simple: apart from its unknown side-effects, geoengineering would weaken resolve to reduce carbon emissions.
Economically it is an extremely attractive substitute because its cost is estimated to be "trivial" compared to those of cutting carbon pollution. While the international community has found it difficult to agree on strong collective measures to reduce carbon emissions, climate engineering is cheap, immediately effective and, most importantly, available to a single nation.
Among the feasible contenders for unilateral intervention, one expert names China, the USA, the European Union, Russia, India, Japan and Australia. Could they agree? It's like seven people living together in a centrally heated house, each with their own thermostat and each with a different ideal temperature. China will be severely affected by warming, but Russia might prefer the globe to be a couple of degrees warmer.
If there is no international agreement an impatient nation suffering the effects of climate disruption may decide to act alone. It is not out of the question that in three decades the climate of the Earth could be determined by a handful of Communist Party officials in Beijing. Or the government of an Australia crippled by permanent drought, collapsing agriculture and ferocious bushfires could risk the wrath of the world by embarking on a climate control project.
To date, governments have shunned geoengineering for fear of being accused of wanting to avoid their responsibilities with science fiction solutions. The topic is not mentioned in the Stern report and receives only one page in Australia's Garnaut report (see Section 2.4.2). As a sign of its continuing political sensitivity, when in April 2009 it was reported that President Obama's new science adviser John Holdren had said that geoengineering is being vigorously discussed as an emergency option in the White House, he immediately felt the need to issue a "clarification" claiming that he was only expressing his personal views.
Holdren is one of the sharpest minds in the business and would not be entertaining what is now known as 'Plan B'— engineering the planet to head off catastrophic warming — unless he was fairly sure Plan A would fail.
Fiddling with the dimmer switch may prove an almost irresistible political fix for governments. It gets powerful lobbies off their backs, gives the green light to burn more coal, avoids the need to raise petrol taxes, allows unrestrained growth and is no threat to consumer lifestyles.
In short, compared to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, geoengineering gets everyone off the hook. No government is yet willing to lend official support to geoengineering. However, the pressure is building and the day when the government of a major nation like the United States, Russia or China publicly backs Plan B cannot be far off. Then the floodgates will open.
Even now, beneath the radar, Russia has already begun testing. Yuri Izrael, a Russian scientist who is both a global-warming sceptic and a senior adviser to Prime Minister Putin, has tested the effects of aerosol spraying from a helicopter on solar radiation reaching the ground. He now plans a full-scale trial.
Strangelove and son
Two of the earliest and most aggressive advocates of planetary engineering were Edward Teller and Lowell Wood. Teller, who died in 2003, was the co-founder and director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, described by US author Jeff Goodell as having a "near-mythological status as the dark heart of weapons research". Teller is often described as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" and was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound mad scientist prone to Nazi salutes in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film of that name.
Lowell Wood was recruited by Teller to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and became his protégé. For decades Wood was one of the Pentagon's foremost "weaponeers", leading him to be christened "Dr. Evil" by critics. He led the group tasked with developing Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars missile shield that included plans for an array of orbiting X-ray lasers powered by nuclear reactors.
Since 1998 Wood and Teller have been promoting aerosol spraying into the stratosphere as a simple and cheap counter to global warming. Reflecting the dominant opinion of the 1950s, they believe it is humankind's duty to exert supremacy over nature. It is perhaps for this reason that they have long been associated with conservative think tanks that deny the existence of human-induced global warming. Both men have been associated with the Hoover Institution, a centre of climate scepticism partly funded by ExxonMobil, and Wood is listed as an expert with the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank that became one of the main centres of climate denial in the 1990s.
It is strange that geoengineering is being promoted enthusiastically by a number of right-wing think tanks that are active in climate denialism. The American Enterprise Institute, an influential think tank also part-funded by ExxonMobil that offered US$10,000 to academics for papers debunking the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has launched a high-profile project to promote geoengineering.
Of course, geoengineering protects their supporters and financiers in the fossil industries because it can be a substitute for carbon reductions and justify delay. But a deeper explanation lies in their beliefs about the relationship of humans to the natural world.
Pursuing abatement is an admission that industrial society has harmed nature, while engineering the Earth's climate would be confirmation of our mastery over it — final proof that, whatever minor errors made on the way, human ingenuity and faith in our own abilities will always triumph. Geoengineering promises to turn failure into triumph.
Lowell Wood believes that climate engineering is inevitable; it's a matter of time before the 'political elites' wake up to its cheapness and effectiveness. In a statement that could serve as Earth's epitaph, he declared: "We've engineered every other environment we live in—why not the planet?"
Wood is contemptuous of the ability of world leaders to reduce emissions (which he dubs "the bureaucratic suppression of CO2") and of their ability to reach a consensus on trialling geoengineering. He predicts that necessity will overrun popular resistance to the idea of fiddling with the atmosphere.
Faced with this resistance, Wood speculates about getting private funding from a billionaire for an experiment. "As far as I can determine, there is no law that prohibits doing something like this". Wood is right: there is no law against a private individual attempting to take control of the Earth's climate.
Regulating climate regulation
This goes to the heart of the push to develop the tools for climatic manipulation. The debate over climate engineering is at present confined largely to a tight-knit group of scientists, some of whom want to keep the public in the dark and fend off regulation of their activities. In his book, How To Cool the Planet, Goodell describes a series of three private dinners in early 2009 that brought together the main players. Convened by two of the leading advocates, Ken Caldeira of Stanford University and David Keith of the University of Calgary, they were "a turning point in the evolution of geoengineering as a policy tool".
In March this year a private meeting of leading climate engineers,held in Asilomar, California, aimed to develop guidelines to govern research and testing. The invitees wanted a voluntary code of conduct that would forestall regulation by governments and the international community so that the experts could work unhindered at their task of understanding how to control of the Earth's climate system.
David Keith argues that an international treaty may be unnecessary because the use of solar radiation management could be regulated by unwritten "norms". This is despite his acknowledgement that the threat of unilateral action is very real; any one of a dozen countries could begin it within a few years. Indeed, one wealthy individual could transform the atmosphere and, with enough determination, bring on an ice age.
Perhaps the wealthy individual he has in mind is Bill Gates, who has covertly been funding geoengineering research for three years with advice from Keith and Caldeira. They now oversee Gates' research fund, which has spent some $4.5 million to date, including funding the three private dinners. Keith will not reveal what the money is being spent on, downplaying it as "a little private funding agency". Right—the world's richest man has a little private funding agency devoted to researching ways to manipulate the Earth's climate system. Conspiracy theory anyone?
Gates is also an investor in a firm named Intellectual Ventures that is promoting a scheme called "StratoShield", which would pump sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through a 30-kilometre hose held aloft by V-shaped blimps. Intellectual Ventures is run by Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and includes Lowell Wood among its associates.
Gates is not the only billionaire lone ranger who wants to save the planet. Richard Branson has set up his own "war room" to do battle with global warming. The battalions he wants to mobilise on "the path to victory" are successful entrepreneurs—like himself—and their weapons are "market driven solutions to climate change", including geoengineering.
The Carbon War Room — where inspirational quotes from Branson are mixed in with those of other titans like Churchill, Roosevelt and Einstein — represents the type of rich man's folly common amongst modern entrepreneurs with a Messiah complex.
The War Room site promotes a paper co-authored by Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute and published by the centre run by "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg. It argues that the benefits of geoengineering vastly outweigh the costs and shows how to set an optimal temperature for the Earth for the next two hundred years.
The authors worry that ethical objections from environmental advocacy groups may block the deployment of solar radiation management, before noting with relief, "in reality, important economies remain largely beyond the influence of environmental advocacy groups." They expect deployment of solar radiation management will be led by nations with weak environmental lobbies—which of course means dictatorships.
Blue-sky dreaming
More vivid sunsets like the one Edvard Munch saw in 1883 would be one of the consequences of using sulphate aerosols to engineer the climate; but a more disturbing effect of enhanced dimming would be the permanent whitening of day-time skies. A washed-out sky would become the norm.
If the nations of the world resort to climate engineering, and in doing so relieve pressure to cut carbon emissions, then the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would continued to rise and so would the latent warming that would need suppressing. It would then become impossible to call a halt to sulphur injections into the stratosphere, even for a year or two, without an immediate jump in temperature.
It's estimated that, if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop, the back-up of greenhouse gases could see warming rebound at a rate 10-20 times faster than in the recent past, a phenomenon referred to, apparently without irony, as the "termination problem".
Once we start manipulating the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on a program of sulphur injections into the stratosphere. In that case, human beings would never see a blue sky again.
Via -- -->
Miguel Valencia
ECOMUNIDADES
domingo, 12 de septiembre de 2010
¿Para qué banales expediciones al espacio ? Mejor vayamos al espacio del fondo marino
Lo que traen los tsunamis
sábado, 11 de septiembre de 2010
No hay tal cosa de desastres naturales: Investigador mexicano
viernes, 10 de septiembre de 2010
¿El orgullo alemán ha despertado cual Bella Durmiente de los hermanos Grimm?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world/europe/11germany.html
Sumemos lo que sucede con alguien como Erica Steinbach y Thilo Sarrazin y tenemos unos fenómenos muy interesantes a valorar en Alemania. En particular que Erica Steinbach haya dicho que fué Polonia quien empezó a acumular tropas en la frontera con Alemania y no esta última pone el dedo en la llaga y la verdad histórica le asiste, aunque resulte incómoda y eso no disculpe los excesos de la guerra que libró Alemania.
miércoles, 8 de septiembre de 2010
Pequeños sucios secretos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial
Dirty Little Secrets Of WWIIThe Hidden, Awkward Origins Of World War 2By Jason Collett9-6-10http://www.rense.com/general92/dirty.htm
The unexpected views of four key diplomats who were close to events:Just consider the following:
Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Britain during the years immediately preceding WW2 was the father of the famous American Kennedy dynasty. James Forrestal the first US Secretary of Defense (1947-1949) quotes him as saying "Chamberlain (the British Prime Minister) stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war". (The Forrestal Diaries ed. Millis, Cassell 1952 p129).
Count Jerzy Potocki, the Polish Ambassador in Washington, in a report to the Polish Foreign Office in January 1939, is quoted approvingly by the highly respected British military historian Major-General JFC Fuller. Concerning public opinion in America he says "Above all, propaganda here is entirely in Jewish handswhen bearing public ignorance in mind, their propaganda is so effective that people have no real knowledge of the true state of affairs in Europe It is interesting to observe that in this carefully thought-out campaign no reference at all is made to Soviet Russia. If that country is mentioned, it is referred to in a friendly manner and people are given the impression that Soviet Russia is part of the democratic group of countries Jewry was able not only to establish a dangerous centre in the New World for the dissemination of hatred and enmity, but it also succeeded in dividing the world into two warlike campsPresident Roosevelt has been given the power.. to create huge reserves in armaments for a future war which the Jews are deliberately heading for." (Fuller, JFC: The Decisive Battles of the Western World vol 3 pp 372-374.)
Hugh Wilson, the American Ambassador in Berlin until 1938, the year before the war broke out, found anti-Semitism in Germany 'understandable'. This was because before the advent of the Nazis, "the stage, the press, medicine and law [were] crowded with Jewsamong the few with money to splurge, a high proportion [were] Jewsthe leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia, a movement desperately feared in Germany, were Jews. One could feel the spreading resentment and hatred." (Hugh Wilson: Diplomat between the Wars, Longmans 1941, quoted in Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh, Hodder 1976).
Sir Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador in Berlin 'said further that the hostile attitude in Great Britain was the work of Jews and enemies of the Nazis, which was what Hitler thought himself' (Taylor, AJP: The Origins of the Second World War Penguin 1965, 1987 etc p 324).
Is all of this merely attributable to terrible 'anti-semitism'?
The economic background to the war is necessary for a fuller understanding, before casting judgement on the originators of these viewpoints.
At the end of the First World War, Germany was essentially tricked [see Paul Johnson A History of the Modern World (1983) p24 and H NicholsonPeacemaking 1919 (1933) pp13-16] into paying massive reparations to France and other economic competitors and former belligerent countries in terms of the so-called Treaty of Versailles, thanks to the liberal American President Woodrow Wilson. Germany was declared to be solely responsible for the war, in spite of the fact that 'Germany did not plot a European war, did not want one, and made genuine efforts, though too belated, to avert one.' (Professor Sydney B Fay The Origins of the World War (vol. 2 p 552)).
As a result of these massive enforced financial reparations, by 1923 the situation in Germany became desperate and inflation on an astronomical scale became the only way out for the government. Printing presses were engaged to print money around the clock. In 1921 the exchange rate was 75 marks to the dollar. By 1924 this had become about 5 trillion marks to the dollar. This virtually destroyed the German middle class (Koestler The God that Failed p 28), reducing any bank savings to a virtual zero.
According to Sir Arthur Bryant the British historian (Unfinished Victory (1940 pp. 136-144):
'It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities.. They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation.. But to those who had lost their all this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions. The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions (in spite of constituting) less than one percent of the population.
The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the press all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilized country is formed.. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly.. Every year it became harder and harder for a gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation.. At this time it was not the 'Aryans' who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination that operated without violence. It was exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination.. It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed and lavishly displayed by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes, and the poverty and misery of native Germans, that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have just thrown out of the saddle."
Goodness gracious, Sir Arthur! What made you get out of the wrong side of the bed?
Strangely enough, a book unexpectedly published by Princeton University Press in 1984, Sarah Gordon (Hitler, Germans and the "Jewish Question") essentially confirms what Bryant says. According to her, 'Jews were never a large percentage of the total German population; at no time did they exceed 1% of the population during the years 1871-1933.' But she adds 'Jews were over-represented in business, commerce, and public and private service.. They were especially visible in private banking in Berlin, which in 1923 had 150 private Jewish banks, as opposed to only 11 private non-Jewish banks.. They owned 41% of iron and scrap iron firms and 57% of other metal businesses.. Jews were very active in the stock market, particularly in Berlin, where in 1928 they comprised 80% of the leading members of the stock exchange. By 1933, when the Nazis began eliminating Jews from prominent positions, 85% of the brokers on the Berlin Stock exchange were dismissed because of their "race".. At least a quarter of full professors and instructors (at German universities) had Jewish origins.. In 1905-6 Jewish students comprised 25% of the law and medical students.. In 1931, 50% of the 234 theatre directors in Germany were Jewish, and in Berlin the number was 80%.. In 1929 it was estimated that the per capita income of Jews in Berlin was twice that of other Berlin residents..' etc etc.
Arthur Koestler confirms the Jewish over-involvement in German publishing. 'Ullstein's was a kind of super-trust; the largest organization of its kind in Europe, and probably In the world. They published four daily papers in Berlin alone, among these the venerable Vossische Zeitung, founded in the eighteenth century, and the B.Z. am Mittag, an evening paper.. Apart from these, Ullstein's published more than a dozen weekly and monthly periodicals, ran their own news service, their own travel agency, etc., and were one of the leading book publishers. The firm was owned by the brothers Ullstein - they were five, like the original Rothschild brothers, and like them also, they were Jews.' (The God that Failed (1950) ed. RHS Crossman, p 31).
Edgar Mowrer, Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, wrote an anti-German tract called Germany Puts the Clock Back (published as a Penguin Special and reprinted five times between December 1937 and April 1938). He nevertheless notes 'In the all-important administration of Prussia, any number of strategic positions came into the hands of Hebrews.. A telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial offices could result in the suspension of any periodical or newspaper in the state.. The Jews came in Germany to play in politics and administration that same considerable part that they had previously won by open competition in business, trade, banking, the Press, the arts, the sciences and the intellectual and cultural life of the country. And thereby the impression was strengthened that Germany, a country with a mission of its own, had fallen into the hands of foreigners.'
Mowrer says 'No one who lived through the period from 1919 to 1926 is likely to forget the sexual promiscuity that prevailed.. Throughout a town like Berlin, hotels and pensions made vast fortunes by letting rooms by the hour or day to baggageless, unregistered guests. Hundreds of cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like served for purposes of getting acquainted and acquiring the proper mood..' (pp. 153-4). Bryant describes throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants. He adds 'Most of them (the night clubs and vice-resorts) were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews.. among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.' (pp. 144-5).
Douglas Reed, Chief Central European correspondent before WWII for the London Times, was profoundly anti-German and anti-Hitler. But nevertheless he reported: 'I watched the Brown Shirts going from shop to shop with paint pots and daubing on the window panes the word "Jew", in dripping red letters. The Kurfürstendamm was to me a revelation. I knew that Jews were prominent in business life, but I did not know that they almost monopolized important branches of it. Germany had one Jew to one hundred gentiles, said the statistics; but the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, according to the dripping red legends, had about one gentile shop to ninety-nine Jewish ones.' (Reed Insanity Fair (1938) p. 152-3). In Reed's bookDisgrace Abounding of the following year he notes 'In the Berlin (of pre-Hitler years) most of the theatres were Jewish-owned or Jewish-leased, most of the leading film and stage actors were Jews, the plays performed were often by German, Austrian or Hungarian Jews and were staged by Jewish film producers, applauded by Jewish dramatic critics in Jewish newspapers.. The Jews are not cleverer than the Gentiles, if by clever you mean good at their jobs. They ruthlessly exploit the common feeling of Jews, first to get a foothold in a particular trade or calling, then to squeeze the non-Jews out of it.. It is not true that Jews are better journalists than Gentiles. They held all the posts on those Berlin papers because the proprietors and editors were Jewish' (pp238-9).
The Jewish writer Edwin Black notes 'For example, in Berlin alone, about 75% of the attorneys and nearly as many of the doctors were Jewish.' (Black,The Transfer Agreement (1984) p58.
To cap it all, Jews were perceived as dangerous enemies of Germany after Samuel Untermeyer, the leader of the World Jewish Economic Federation, declared war on Germany on August 6 1933. (Edwin Black The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Palestine (1984) pp272-277) According to Black, 'The one man who most embodied the potential death blow to Germany was Samuel Untermeyer.' (p 369). This was the culmination of a worldwide boycott of German goods led by international Jewish organizations. The London Daily Express on March 24, 1933 carried the headline Judea Declares War on Germany. The boycott was particularly motivated by the German imposition of the Nuremberg Laws, which ironically were similar in intent and content to the Jewish cultural exclusivism practiced so visibly in present-day Israel (Hannah ArendtEichmann in Jerusalem p 7).
Hitler saw the tremendous danger posed to Germany by Communism. He appreciated the desperate need to eliminate this threat, a fact that earned him the immense hatred and animosity of the Jewish organisations and the media and politicians of the west which they could influence. After all, according to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant, although Jews formed less than five percent of Russia's population, they formed more than fifty percent of its revolutionaries. According to the Jewish writer Chaim Bermant in his book The Jews (1977, chapter 8):
'It must be added that most of the leading revolutionaries who convulsed Europe in the final decades of the last century and the first decades of this one, stemmed from prosperous Jewish families.. They were perhaps typified by the father of revolution, Karl Marx.. Thus when, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions broke out all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm; Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, and, most improbable of all, Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.
'To many outside observers, the Russian revolution looked like a Jewish conspiracy, especially when it was followed by Jewish-led revolutionary outbreaks in much of central Europe. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party had a preponderance of Jews.. Of the seven members of the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the country, four, Trotsky (Bronstein), Zinoviev (Radomsky), Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Sverdlov, were Jews.' Other authors agree with this:
"There has been a tendency to circumvent or simply ignore the significant role of Jewish intellectuals in the German Communist Party, and thereby seriously neglect one of the genuine and objective reasons for increased anti-Semitism during and after World War 1.. The prominence of Jews in the revolution and early Weimar Republic is indisputable, and this was a very serious contributing cause for increased anti-Semitism in post-war years.. It is clear then that the stereotype of Jews as socialists and communists.. led many Germans to distrust the Jewish minority as a whole and to brand Jews as enemies of the German nation." (Sarah Gordon Hitler, Germans and the 'Jewish Question' Princeton University Press (1984) p 23).
"The second paroxysm of strong anti-Semitism came after the critical role of Jews in International Communism and the Russian Revolution and during the economic crises of the 1920s and 30s Anti-Semitism intensified throughout Europe and North America following the perceived and actual centrality of Jews in the Russian Revolution.. Such feelings were not restricted to Germany, or to vulgar extremists like the Nazis. All over Northern Europe and North America, anti-Semitism became the norm in 'nice society', and 'nice society' included the universities." (Martin Bernal, Black Athenavol. 1 pp. 367, 387).
"The major role Jewish leaders played in the November (Russian) revolution was probably more important than any other factor in confirming (Hitler's) anti-Semitic beliefs." (J&S Pool, Who Financed Hitler, p.164).
Hitler came to power in Germany with two main aims, the rectification of the unjust provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the destruction of the Soviet/ Communist threat to Germany. Strangely enough, contrary to the mythology created by those who had an opposing ethnic agenda, he had no plans or desire for a larger war of conquest. Professor AJP Taylor showed this in his book The Origins of the Second World War, to the disappointment of the professional western political establishment. Taylor says, "The state of German armament in 1939 gives the decisive proof that Hitler was not contemplating general war, and probably not intending war at all" (p.267), and "Even in 1939 the German army was not equipped for a prolonged war; and in 1940 the German land forces were inferior to the French in everything except leadership" (p104-5). What occurred in Europe in 1939-41 was the result of unforeseen weaknesses and a tipping of the balance of power, and Hitler was an opportunist 'who took advantages whenever they offered themselves' (Taylor). Britain and France declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Hitler wanted peace with Britain, as the German generals admitted (Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill 1948, Pan Books 1983) with regard to the so-called Halt Order at Dunkirk, where Hitler had the opportunity to capture the entire British Army, but chose not to. Liddell Hart, one of Britain's most respected military historians, quotes the German General von Blumentritt with regard to this Halt Order:
"He (Hitler) then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but 'where there is planing, there are shavings flying'. He compared the British Empire with the catholic Church saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany's position on the Continent. The return of Germany's colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops if she should be involved in difficulties anywhere.." (p 200).
According to Liddell Hart, "At the time we believed that the repulse of the Luftwaffe in the 'Battle over Britain' had saved her. That is only part of the explanation, the last part of it. The original cause, which goes much deeper, is that Hitler did not want to conquer England. He took little interest in the invasion preparations, and for weeks did nothing tospur them on; then, after a brief impulse to invade, he veered around again and suspended the preparations. He was preparing, instead, to invade Russia" (p140).
David Irving in the foreword to his book The Warpath (1978) refers to "the discovery.. that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire."
This gives a completely different complexion, not only to the war, but to the successful suppression of this information during the war and afterwards. Historians today know only too well where the boundaries lie within which they can paint their pictures of the war and its aftermath, and the consequences of venturing beyond those boundaries, irrespective of the evidence. Unfortunately, only too few of them have been prepared to have the courage to break out of this dreadful straitjacket of official and unofficial censorship.
E-mail comment received:
I worked and studied in Berlin for three years, have an MA in International Relations and a BA in Government with a minor in History. I am embarrassed to say that until I read this article, I had no idea of the scope and cause for the anti-Semitism in Germany before WWII. The Halt Order at Dunkirk was never mentioned in my studies, nor was the ownership of the media, banks and businesses.
Thank you for the excellent article. It certainly gives me a new perspective. I have always questioned the actual numbers of Jewish victims of the concentration camps, as the numbers didn't make sense based upon Germany's population. Perhaps it was fear of failing or being labeled an anti-Semite by my history professors (all but two were Jewish) and classmates that I refrained from demanding an honest discussion during my classes.
I once said that the only reason Israel existed was out of Holocaust guilt, and I was immediately labeled a terrorist sympathizer.
I see what is now happening in Israel and I am aghast. The parallels to WW II are frightening. Even today, one cannot bring up this subject without being labeled a Holocaust denier or white supremacist.
Thanks again for an excellent article. I am forwarding it to several friends.
JBP