PukeOnABook

Chapter Eighteen. May 23, 1993. This is my last night in Dallas. I've been here two weeks now, and I'd hoped to be heading back to Washington tomorrow, but orders came in this afternoon to go to Denver instead. It looks like I'll be doing approximately the same thing there I've been doing here, which is teaching. I have just finished conducting a crash course in the technology of sabotage for eight selected activists here, and I do mean "crash"; this is the first free hour I've had since I arrived here when I wasn't too tired to think. We've been at it from eight in the morning until eight at night every day, with only a few minutes off for meals. I have taught the people here virtually everything I know. We started by learning how to build improvised detonators, timers, igniters, and other gadgets from scratch. Then we studied the structure, properties, and performance characteristics of currently available military devices which can be adapted for various purposes. All my students can now disassemble and reassemble every type of fuse and delay device we studied, blindfolded. After that we examined a large number of hypothetical targets and worked out detailed plans for attacking them. We considered reservoirs, pipelines, fuel depots, rail lines, air terminals and aircraft, telephone exchanges, oil refineries, power transmission lines, generating stations, highway interchanges, grain elevators, warehouses, and various types of machinery and other manufacturing equipment. Finally, we picked a real target and destroyed it: Dallas's central telephone exchange. That was yesterday. Today we held a post- mortem and criticized the operation in detail. Actually, everything went extraordinarily well; my students all passed their final examination with flying colors. But I did everything possible to guarantee there would be no slipups. We spent three full days preparing specifically for the telephone exchange. First we thoroughly pumped one of our local members who had formerly worked in the building as an operator. She described the layout for us, giving us the approximate location of the rooms on each floor which held the automatic switching equipment. With her help we made a rough map, showing the stairwells, the employees' entrances, the guard room, and other pertinent details. Then we prepared our equipment. I decided we would use surgical precision on this job rather than brute force; besides, we didn't have a sufficiently large quantity of explosives for a brute- force demolition job. What we did have were three 500-foot spools of PETN-filled detonating cord and a little over 20 pounds of dynamite. I broke our eight activists up into four two-man teams. One man in each team carried a sawed-off, autoloading shotgun, and the other carried demolition equipment. Three of the teams were assigned to the three floors of switching equipment, one to a floor. Each of these teams was given one of the spools of detonating cord; a five-gallon can of a homemade, napalm-like mixture of gasoline and liquid soap; and a delayed-action detonator. The fourth team was given a 20-pound satchel charge and a homemade thermite grenade and assigned to the transformer vault in the basement. The dynamite would wreck the transformers, and the thermite would set the transformer oil afire. About ten o'clock last night we were parked in two automobiles on a dark side street two blocks from the telephone exchange. Every few minutes a telephone company service truck went through the intersection directly in front of us. Finally the situation for which we had been waiting occurred: a service truck came to a stop for the red light at the intersection, and there were no other vehicles or pedestrians in sight. We sped out of the side street, blocking the truck fore and aft while two of our men jerked open the truck doors and ordered the driver into the back at gunpoint. Then we drove all three vehicles back onto the side street and transferred everyone and all our gear into the service truck. That only took a few seconds, but we spent another half hour talking to the telephone serviceman we had kidnapped. With a minimum of prodding he answered a number of questions we still had about the location and layout of the switching equipment in the telephone building and about the security staff and procedures. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that there was only one armed guard in the building at night and that he depended upon a direct line to the police substation five blocks away for backup in case of emergency. We relieved the serviceman of his uniform and his magnetically coded company security badge, which was needed to unlock the rear employees' entrance at night. Then we tied him securely with wire, gagged him, and drove the truck back to the rear entrance of the telephone building. I was wearing the uniform. Following the serviceman's instructions, I gained entrance to the building while the others remained hidden in the truck. It was then only a matter of a moment to relieve the surprised guard of his gun and beckon to the others to enter. While our four teams fanned out through the building I found a convenient janitor's closet and used the guard's own master key to lock him in it. From that point the whole operation took less than five minutes. The three teams assigned to the switching equipment worked quickly and efficiently. While the man with the shotgun on each team herded any employees that were encountered into an office and kept an eye on them, the other man went to work on the equipment. The detonating cord was unreeled and laced through two or three long banks of electronic panels on each floor. Then the demolition man took the five-gallon can of napalm and sloshed its contents over large sections of the equipment, both those which had been laced with the detonating cord and those which had not. Finally, a time-delay detonator was taped to one end of the detonating cord. As our men came racing down the stairs to join me on the ground floor, three deafening explosions rocked the windowless building. A moment later our fourth team came running up the stairs from the basement. We wasted no time in piling back into the truck. Just as we drove out of the parking lot, the satchel charge went off in the basement transformer vault with a roar which caused a huge section of the brick facade on one side of the building to split off and topple into the street, exposing the interior, which by now was filled with flames and smoke from the blazing napalm and burning switching gear. The accounts of the operation in this afternoon's local newspaper indicated that the two dozen or so employees who were in the building managed to get out safely-all except the guard I locked in the closet, who died of smoke inhalation. I feel guilty about that, but it couldn't be helped; we were in a hurry. Although our destruction of the equipment in the telephone building was pretty thorough, the telephone company has announced that it expects to have most essential telephone lines back in service within 48 hours and complete restoration of telephone service for the city within two weeks. That announcement did not surprise us. We knew that the telephone company can fly in new equipment and teams of repair specialists to quickly undo the damage we did. Our attack on the telephone exchange would only make real sense as a blow against the System if it had been coordinated with an all-out assault on a number of other fronts. The System has figured that out for itself, of course, and, not having any way of knowing that yesterday's operation was only a training exercise, it is bracing itself for the worst. There are tanks at nearly every downtown intersection, and troops and police have set up so many vehicle checkpoints on all the main roads and freeways that automobile traffic is at a virtual standstill throughout the city. If it weren't for that, I'd be leaving for Denver tonight instead of tomorrow.June 8. Received a note from Katherine today! It came enclosed in a box of equipment I had asked the Organization to have sent to me from the shop back home. I didn't discover the note until I unpacked the box, and so there was no chance to send a reply with the courier who made the delivery. She and the others have all been working 70 to 80 hours a week in the shop, she reports, printing money mostly but also large quantities of propaganda leaflets. She suspects from the urgency with which the leaflets have been requested that a major new campaign is afoot in the Washington area. (She'll find out what's afoot soon enough!) She thinks I am still in Dallas, and she says she is hoping she will be ordered to make another cash delivery to Dallas soon so she can see me. How my heart aches to be with her again, even if only for a few hours! There's not much chance of my getting back to Washington again for at least another three weeks, though. Things have really mushroomed out here in the Rocky Mountain area. The Organization is not particularly strong here, and yet Revolutionary Command has designated 43 high-priority targets in the area- more than half of them military installations- which we must prepare ourselves to hit simultaneously when the order is given, probably early in July. On top of that, there is practically no one out here with any experience in specialized ordnance, and so I am having to train everyone from scratch-26 students altogether. They will have the responsibility for preparing and using all the incendiary and explosive devices required for the assigned targets in the area. Fortunately, we do have several military people here with an excellent grasp of guerrilla tactics, and so I am restricting my training to the technical end only and leaving the tactics to the military people. Despite the narrower scope of my work here, it's still going more slowly than in Dallas, because things are so spread out. It was deemed inadvisable to try to hold classes for 26 people at a time, so I meet with six here in Denver; 11 in Boulder, a college town about 20 miles north of here; and nine in a farmhouse just south of here. I see each group every third day, but I give them plenty of homework to do between meetings. We've initiated virtually no violent actions against the System in the Rocky Mountain area so far, and the general atmosphere here is quite a bit more relaxed than along the East Coast. Something very unpleasant happened last week, though, which serves as a grim reminder that the struggle here will be just as brutal and vicious as anywhere else. One of our members, a construction worker, was caught trying to sneak a few sticks of dynamite off the construction site where he was employed. Apparently he had been smuggling a dozen or so out in his lunch box every day for quite a while. The site guard turned him over to the local sheriff, who immediately searched the man's house and found not only a big cache of dynamite but also several guns - and some Organization literature. The sheriff figured he had stumbled onto something which could really give a boost to his career. If he could crack the Organization in the Rocky Mountain area, the System would be very grateful to him. He would have a good chance of winning a seat in the state legislature, perhaps even becoming lieutenant governor or being appointed to some other high post in the state government. So the sheriff and his deputies began beating our man, trying to make him name other Organization members. They gave him a vicious working over, but he wouldn't talk. Then they brought in the man's wife and began slapping and kicking her around in his presence. The outcome was that our man, in desperation, snatched a revolver from the holster of one of the deputies. He was shot dead by another deputy before he could pull the trigger. The wife was handed over to the FBI and flown back to Washington for interrogation. She should not be able to give them any significant information, but I shudder to think of the ordeal to which she is being submitted. The sheriff's glory was short-lived, however. The evening of the day our member was killed, the sheriff appeared in a televised news interview, boasting of the blow he had struck in the name of law, order, and equality and pompously warning that he would treat with equal ruthlessness any other "racists" who fell into his hands. When he arrived home that night after his TV interview, he found his wife on his living-room floor, with her throat cut. Two days later his patrol car was ambushed. His bullet-riddled body was found in its burned-out wreckage. It is a terrible thing to kill women of our own race, but we are engaged in a war in which all the old rules have been scrapped. We are in a war to the death with the Jew, who now feels himself so close to his final victory that he can safely drop his mask and treat his enemies as the "cattle" his religion tells him they are. Our retribution against the sheriff here should serve as a warning to the Jew's Gentile henchmen, at least, that if they adopt the X Jew's attitude toward our women and children, then they cannot s expect their own families to be safe. (Note to the reader: Several sets of books containing the Jewish religious doctrine, which was called "Judaism," are still extant today. These books, the Talmud and the Torah, do, indeed, refer to non-Jews as, "cattle." Especially horrifying to us is the attitude the Jews had toward non-Jewish women. The word they used to designate a girl of our race was "shiksa," which was derived from the Hebrew word meaning both "abomination" and "non-kosher meat" or "unclean meat.") June 21. I was stopped at a police roadblock driving back from Boulder tonight. No problem getting through it; they just checked my driver's license (i.e., the late and unlamented David S. Bloom's license), asked me where I was going, and took a quick look in the car. But the roadblock had traffic backed up for miles, and other motorists were really fuming. One of them told me this is the first time they've used roadblocks in this area. The roadblock and a couple of hints I've caught on news broadcasts in the last few days lead me to believe that the System knows something big is cooking. I hope they don't tighten up security out here the way they have back on the East Coast, it'll mess up our plans if they do. On the other hand, it'll do these bumpkins around here a lot of good to get a full dose of Big Brother's loving care. Most of them hardly ever see a liberal or a Jew, and they act as if there's not a war going on. They seem to think that they're far enough away from the things that are plaguing other parts of the country that they can keep on with their same old routine. They resent any hint that they may have to halt their pursuit of pleasure and affluence long enough to cut a cancer out of America that will surely destroy us all if it's not eliminated soon. But it's always been that way with Boobus Americanus. I'm quite concerned that I've heard no news of Evanston. I've been expecting the raid there every day since the last week of last month. Has there been more trouble with Harrison? Or has Revolutionary Command decided to postpone the Evanston raid, perhaps until our big offensive next month? There was no indication of such a postponement at my last briefing. More than likely the trouble is Harrison, damn him! When I recalculated the hit probability on the target at the range given me by our Chicago mortar team just before I left Washington for Dallas, I decided we should distribute our radioactive contaminant among five rounds instead of only three. That gives us a probability of nearly 90 per cent that we'll get one or more rounds into the generator building. But Harrison may have balked at having to handle that much ordnance. If that's the case, why hasn't someone told me? I'm also becoming concerned that I've received no orders as to what I'm to do when I finish my work here next week. If I don't get back to Washington then, I'm afraid I may not make it before the big push starts. I want to be back there with Katherine and the others when everything hits the fan next month. And I can't see any reason why I shouldn't, because there will hardly be time to send me anywhere else to set up another training course in special ordnance.

Haynes Owners Manual for the Avro Vulcan Bomber

Sun and Steel YUKIO MISHIMA "Nothing gives the armed forces so much attraction as the fact that even the most trivial duty is ultimately an emanation of something far loftier and more glorious, and is linked, somewhere, with the idea of death. The man of letters, on the other hand, must scratch together his own glory from the rubbish within himself, already overfamiliar in every detail, and refurbish it for the public eye." "Once there were such words, though they are lost to us nowadays. They were not simply beautiful phrases, but a constant summons to superhuman behavior, words that demanded that the individual stake his very life on the attempt to climb to their own lofty heights. Words such as these, in which something first uttered as a conscious resolve gradually comes to demand an inescapable identification, lacked from the outset any bridge that might link them with ordinary, everyday preoccupations." "Before my eyes, there slowly emerged a giant snake coiled about the earth; a snake that by constantly swallowing its own tail vanquished all polarities; the ultimate, huge snake that mocks all opposites. Opposites carried to extremes come to resemble each other; and tilings that are farthest removed from each other, by increasing the distance between them, come closer together. This is the secret that the circle of the snake expounded."

"The Naked Communist" W. Cleon Skousen The Ensign Publishing Company, Salt Lake City, Utah Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-lU64 ELEVENTH EDITION January, 1962 13th Printing, 1972 Designed by Keith Eddington, illustrated by Arnold Friberg “THE CONFLICT BETWEEN COMMUNISM AND FREEDOM IS THE PROBLEM OF OUR TIME. IT OVERSHADOWS ALL OTHER PROBLEMS. THIS CONFLICT MIRRORS OUR AGE, ITS TOILS, ITS TENSIONS, ITS TROUBLES, AND ITS TASKS. ON THE OUTCOME OF THIS CONFLICT DEPENDS THE FUTURE OF ALL MANKIND.” George Meany President, AFL-CIO PREFACE One of the most fantastic phenomena of modern times has been the unbelievable success of the Communist conspiracy to enslave mankind. Part of this has been the result of two species of ignorance — ignorance concerning the constitutional requirements needed to perpetuate freedom, and secondly, ig- norance concerning the history, philosophy and strategy of World Communism. This study is designed to bring the far-flung facts about Communism into a single volume. It contains a distillation of more than one hundred books and treatises — many of them written by Communist authors. It attempts to present the Communist in his true native elements, stripped of propaganda and pretense. Hence, the title, “The Naked Communist.” Students in the western part of the world have a tendency to shy away from the obscure complexity of Communism because they have a feeling they are groping about in a vacuum of un- known quantities. It therefore became the author’s objective many years ago to try and clarify these concepts so that they could be more readily understood and thereby become less frightening. The most terrifying of all human fears is “fear of the unknown” and consequently it seemed highly desirable to disarm the Communist revolutionists of any such supreme advantage by spreading before the student the whole picture of Marxism which is simply “modern materialism in action.” A panoramic study of Communism might easily degener- ate into a long list of dates, names, and platitudes without helping the student to gain a genuine understanding of the his- tory and philosophy of Marxism. Therefore, in this study, an attempt has been made to present Communism as the living, breathing, vibrating force in the earth which it really is. The political development, the philosophy, the economic theory and the big names in World Communism have all been presented in their historical setting. Since an ever increasing number of disillusioned Com- munist officials have fled from behind the Iron Curtain, it has been possible to remove much of the mystery which formerly obscured a correct understanding of the Marxian- disciplined mind. This study therefore presents the Marxian civilization without reference to its propaganda claims but within the realm of reality where, during each passing day, millions of human beings are vicariously learning for the rest of the race the true meaning of life under Communism. To those who have never taken occasion to study the past one hundred years of Marxism, this presentation may at first seem somewhat harsh. But that is because the exposed seams of Communism are inherently harsh. Marx designed it that way. From a comfortable armchair in a cloistered study it is sometimes difficult for a student to catch the spirit and sub- stance of Communism in action. But the Korean veteran, the Iron Curtain refugee, the returning ambassador from Mos- cow — these who have felt the physical and psychological impact of World Communism — may count this study under- drawn and overconservative. The reader should be warned that the complex nature of Communism prevents some of this material from being geared to rapid reading. Sometimes whole volumes have been digested into a few paragraphs. It will be helpful to the reader if sufficient time is taken to explore rather thoroughly the technical or philosophical chapters before proceeding. To help the reader identify the most significant points in the text, a list of preliminary questions is presented at the be- ginning of each chapter. While seeking to be brief, the author hopes he has not been obscure. There are many to whom I am indebted for assistance, suggestions and technical data used in connection with the preparation of this work. Since the writing and much of the research was completed while I was a member of the faculty of Brigham Young University I received much valuable help from the members of the faculty as well as the administrative staff. I am also indebted to several of my former associates in the FBI with whom I studied Communist philosophy, Com- munist subversion and Communist espionage during my six- teen years with that organization. The impressive vignette illustrations heading each chapter throughout this book are the work of the famous American artist, Arnold Friberg. They exemplify his ability to con- dense a complex idea into a simple, forceful, pictorial symbol. His magnificent gallery of Biblical paintings which he did for Cecil B. DeMille's production of “The Ten Commandments” has been widely acclaimed during their worldwide tour of exhibition. I am proud to have the text of these pages en- hanced by the talented hand of such a good friend. Another close associate, Keith Eddington, is responsible for the striking jacket and impressive design of this book. The tedious task of typing the manuscript and reams of research data for the project was capably performed by Velora Gough Stuart and Louise Godfrey. The bulk of the credit for the final completion of the work should go to my wife who efficiently managed the affairs of eight robust offspring while their father completed the re- search and writing for the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to all those who contributed time, skill and encouragement to bring the work to final fruition. W. CLEON SKOUSEN Salt Lake City, Utah, November 1, 1958 Preface to the Eleventh Edition The generous acceptance of this book by the public has been both encouraging and gratifying. In this edition, as in several of the others, I have included some new material in order to keep the study up to date. W. CLEON SKOUSEN Salt Lake City, Utah, January 1, 1962 CONTENTS The Rise of the Marxist Man — I I The Founders of Communism — 7 London, 1853 The Early Life of Karl Marx Marx as a Young Man Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto The Revolution of 1848 The End of the Communist League The Family of Karl Marx The Founding of the First International Marx Writes a Book to Change the World The Closing Years Epilogue II The Appeal of Communism — 31 The Case for Communism The Communist Philosophy of Nature The Origin of Life, Consciousness and Mind A Brief Critique of the Communist Philosophy of Nature The Communist Approach to the Solution of World Problems 43 The Communist Interpretation of History Human Progress Explained in Terms of Class Struggle The Communist Theory Concerning Private Property The Communist Theory of the Origin of the State The Communist Theory of the Origin and Economic Significance of Religion The Communist Theory of the Origin and Economic Significance of Morals The Communist Plan of Action The Dictatorship of the Proletariat The Classless, Stateless Society Under Full Communism IV A Brief Critique of the Communist Approach to World Problems — 61 Communism as a By-Product of the Industrial Revolution The Communist Interpretation of History The Communist Explanation of Society The Origin of the State What Is Religion ? The Communist Theory of Morals The Communist Theory of Class Struggle The Dictatorship of the Proletariat The Stateless, Classless Society Under Full Communism Communism as a Negative Approach to Problem-Solving V The Rise of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia 89 Marxism Comes to Russia The Early Life of Nikolai (V. I.) Lenin Origin of the Bolsheviks Background of Leon Trotsky The Russian Revolution of 1905 Background of Joseph Stalin Stalin Engages in Criminal Activities Stalin as a Union Organizer, Writer and Bolshevik Leader The Role of Russia in World War I VI How Russia Became a Communist World Power — 109 The Russian Revolution of March, 1917 The Destruction of Russia’s Plans for a Democracy Russia Repudiates Communism at the Polls Lenin Takes Russia Out of the War The First Attempt to Communize Russia The End of a Communist Dream The Rise of Stalin to Power The First Five-Year Plan The Communist Crisis of 1932-33 U. S. Recognition of Communist Russia Comes at a Critical Time Joseph Stalin’s Return to Power Stalin Creates a New Class VII Communism in the United States — 131 American Founding Fathers Try Communism Marxism Comes to the United States The First Wave of Communist Violence Strikes the United States William Z. Foster Launches the Communist Labor Union Drive The Growth of U. S. Communism as Seen by Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers Breaks with Communism Elizabeth Bentley Takes Over After Chambers Leaves THE SILVERMASTER CELL THE PERLO CELL VIII Communism and World War II — 155 The Rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany The Communists Claim Credit for Starting World War II Stalin Suffers a Strategic Defeat World War II Moves Closer to the United States The U. S. Policy of Coexistence Goes into Its Third Stage The Story of American Lend-Lease to Russia Russian Attempts to Secure the Secrets of the Atomic Bomb Closing Months of World War II U. S. Policy of Coexistence Enters the Fourth Stage Creation of the United Nations Communist Attitudes at the Close of World War II IX Communist Attacks on the Free World During the Post-War Period — 177 The Decay in U. S. - Soviet Relations at the End of World War II The Free World Loses 100 Million People The Free World Loses China with Her 450 Million People Effect of the Yalta Agreement on Post-War China Chiang Kai-shek Attempts to Create a Democracy in China Disaster Strikes Down an Old U. S. Ally The Wedemeyer Report The State Department White Paper of 1949 An Amazing Development The Communist Attack on South Korea The Korean Armistice The U. S. Summarily Abandons Its Twenty-Year Policy of Appeasement The Role of the FBI in the Battle of the Underground The Crack in the Iron Curtain The Communist Conquest in lndo-China The Task of Isolating a World Aggressor Russia Tests the New U. S. “Get Tough” Policy X Communism Under Khrushchev — 209 Khrushchev as the Dictator of the Ukraine How Khrushchev Seized Power The Hungarian Revolution — 1956 The UN Investigation of the Hungarian Revolution Inside Khrushchev’s Russia The Hazardous Life of a Communist Dictator Khrushchev’s Scheme to Force the U. S. to Invite Him to America Was Khrushchev’s Visit a Mistake? Aftermath of the Khrushchev Visit The U-2 Incident The RB-47 Incident The Space Race The March of Communism in Africa The Tragedy in the Congo XI The Communist Conquest of Cuba — 237 Who Is Fidel Castro? Castro’s Second Attempt at Murder Is Successful Castro as a Soviet Agent in the Bogota Riots Castro Commits His Third Murder The Batista Regime in Cuba The Castro Coup D’Etat The Communist Take-Over XII The Future Task — 253 The Communist Timetable of Conquest Importance of the Psychological War Current Communist Goals What About Disarmament? What About Peaceful Coexistence? What About the United Nations? Is the Communist Movement a Legitimate Political Party? Is the Soviet Empire Vulnerable to Economic Pressure? Could Peaceful Pressures Cause the Communist Empire to Explode Internally? What Can the Ordinary Individual Do? Suggestions for Parents Suggestions for Teachers Suggestions for Students Suggestions for Businessmen Suggestions for Legislators Suggestions for the Press Suggestions for Ministers The West Can Win Historical Photographs FIVE VITAL QUESTIONS 1 Whaf Do the Defenders of Communism Say? — 289 PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE ILLEGAL OPERATIONS REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE WAR AND PEACE THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC INTRIGUE ETHICS AND MORALS THE BIBLE RELIGION INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND CIVIL LIBERTIES EDUCATION LABOR 2 How Does a People Build a Free Nation? — 317 Rise of the Liberals Political Philosophy of American Founding Fathers A Philosophy Becomes a Reality Results of 175 Years of American Liberalism The Pattern for Abundant Living 3 What Is Free Enterprise Capitalism? — 327 The Nature of Man Man’s Mainspring of Action The Law of Variation Under Capitalism Everyone Can Gain The Meaning of a Free Economy 1. FREEDOM TO TRY 3. FREEDOM TO BUY 2. FREEDOM TO SELL 4. FREEDOM TO FAIL How Capitalism Makes Things Plentiful and Cheap The Law of Supply and Demand Sets the Price Failure of an American Experiment with Socialism 4 Did the Early Christians Practice Communism? — 343 5 What Is the Secret Weapon of Communism? — 347 Who Inspired Hitler? What Was the Mission of Karl Marx? Pirates of Science and Religion Men Who Worship Themselves The Fruits of Materialism Communists without Labels First Major Premise of Communism Second Major Premise Third Major Premise Fourth Major Premise Can Communist Beliefs Hurt Us? What Puzzled Gouzenko Most? Treason in High Places The Secret Weapon of Communism Home-Made Materialism Conversation between a Student and a Professor The Bible Provides Its Own Rebuttal Sometimes Students Puzzle Parents What About Atomic-Bomb Security? Would the Ten Commandments Frighten a Communist? Who Has Seen God? How Important Is an Oath? The Fourth Commandment A Vacuum in the Training of Youth Are Elderly People Important? What About Communist Purges? Significance of Marital Integrity The Thief and the Character Assassin The Sanctity of Work The Christian Code A New Dynamic Trend in Education Bibliography — 379 Index — 385 The Rise off the Marxist Man It is a terrible and awesome thing when a man sets out to create all other men in his own image. Such became the goal and all consuming ambition of Karl Marx. Not that he would have made each man equal to himself ; in fact, it was quite the contrary. The image he hoped to construct was a great human colossus with Karl Marx as the brain and builder and all other men serving him as the ears and eyes, feet and hands, mouth and gullet. In other words, Marx surveyed the world and dreamed of the day when the whole body of humanity could be forced into a gigantic social image which conformed com- pletely to Marx’s dream of a perfect society. To achieve his goal, Marx required two things. First, the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies. “Then,” he wrote, “I shall stride through the wreckage a creator!” The second thing he needed was a new kind of human being. He visualized a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters. He wanted a race of men who would no longer depend upon free will, ethics, morals or conscience for guidance. Perhaps, without quite realizing it, Marx was set- The Naked Communist ting out to create a race of human beings conditioned to think like criminals. Producing such a race had been the dream of power- hungry men for more than 4000 years. Nimrod had projected the design, Plato polished it, Saint Simon sublimated it — now Marx materialized it. Today this breed of criminally conditioned man walks the earth in sufficient numbers to conquer countries or continents, to change laws and boundaries, to decree war or peace. He might well be called Homo-Marxian — the Marxist Man. He has made it terribly clear that he intends to become the man of the twentieth century. Homo-Marxian is frightening and puzzling to the rest of humanity because a criminally conditioned mind does not respond the way normal people expect. For example, if a well meaning person invited a profes- sional criminal into his home for dinner the shifty eyed guest would be likely to survey the fine variety of choice foods, the expensive silverware and shiny goblets, and completely miss the warm sincerity and friendship which the host was trying to convey. In fact, the criminal mind would probably con- clude that his host was not only soft hearted but soft headed. Eventually, he would get around to deciding that such a weak man could not possibly deserve so many fine things. Then he would spend the rest of the evening figuring out how he could return in the darkness of the night and relieve his host of all his bounteous treasures. Anyone familiar with the history of Communist leader- ship during the past one hundred years will immediately recognize this same kind of mind at work. The flagrant abuse of U.S. friendship and generosity during World War II is typical. Homo-Marxian puzzles all those who try to work with him because he seems irrational and therefore unpredictable. In reality, however, the Marxist Man has reduced his think- ing to the lowest common denominator of values taken from nature in the raw. He lives exclusively by the jungle law Marxist Man of selfish survival. In terms of these values he is rational almost to the point of mathematical precision. Through calm or crisis his responses are consistently elemental and there- fore highly predictable. Because Homo-Marxian considers himself to be made en- tirely of the dust of the earth, he pretends to no other role. He denies himself the possibility of a soul and repudiates his capacity for immortality. He believes he had no creator and has no purpose or reason for existing except as an incidental accumulation of accidental forces in nature. Being without morals, he approaches all problems in a direct, uncomplicated manner. Self-preservation is given as the sole justification for his own behavior, and “selfish mo- tives or stupidity” are his only explanations for the behavior of others. With Homo-Marxian the signing of fifty-three treaties and subsequent violation of fifty-one of them is not hypocrisy but strategy. The subordination of other men’s minds to the obscuring of truth is not deceit but a necessary governmental tool. Marxist Man has convinced himself that nothing is evil which answers the call of expediency. He has released himself from all the confining restraints of honor and ethics which mankind has previously tried to use as a basis for harmonious human relations. History is demonstrating that because of his mental con- ditioning, Homo-Marxian is probably the most insecure of all men in his feelings. Since he believes himself to be an accidental phenomenon in a purposeless universe, he has an insatiable appetite to bring all things under his total domina- tion. He admits that until this is done he cannot feel secure. Not only must he conquer the human race, but he has assigned himself the task of conquering matter, conquering space, and conquering all the forces of cosmic reality so as to bring order out of natural chaos. He must do this, he says, because man is the only creature in existence which has the accidental but highly fortunate capacity to do intelli- gent, creative thinking. He believes that since Homo-Marxian is the most advanced type of man, he must accept the responsi- bilities of a supreme being. He is perfectly sincere in his The Naked Communist announcement that Homo-Marxian proposes to become the ulti- mate governor and god of the earth and then of the universe. Under the impact of such sweeping theoretical ambitions, many non-Marxists have been caught in the emotional tide of this ideological fantasia and have allowed themselves to be carried along in the current toward the shores of what they hoped would be a promised land of man-made godliness. How- ever, in recent years a growing number of these pilgrims have risked life itself to come back to reality. Each one returns with the same story. Homo-Marxian was found to behave exactly like the graduate creature from the jungle which he believes himself to be. He regards all others with fearful suspicion and responds to each problem as though his very existence were at stake. Although he demands the right to rule humanity, he disdainfully rejects the most basic lessons learned during thousands of years of human experience. Re- turning pilgrims bear one witness : Homo-Marxian has reversed the direction of history. He has turned man against himself. It is in this historical crisis that man finds himself today. Marxist Man could not have come upon the earth at a more illogical time. In an age when technological advances have finally made it feasible to adequately feed, clothe and house the entire human race, Marxist Man stands as a military threat to this peaceful achievement. His sense of insecurity drives him to demand exclusive control of human affairs in a day when nearly all other peoples would like to create a genuine United Nations dedicated to world peace and world-wide pros- perity. Although man can travel faster than sound and po- tentially provide frequent, intimate contacts between all cultures and all peoples, Marxist Man insists on creating iron barriers behind which he can secretly work. Marxist Man makes no secret of his ultimate objectives. He is out to rule the world. Because Homo-Marxian is still an adolescent he knows he cannot devour the whole human race in one greedy gulp. Therefore, he must be satisfied with one chunk at a time. As we shall see later, he has adopted an orderly “time-table of conquest” which he is following Marxist Man with a deadly fixation. According to Communist prophecy, time is running out on the free world. This dilemma leaves the unconquered portion of fright- ened humanity with only three possible courses of future action : 1. They can meekly capitulate. 2. They can try to co-exist. 3. They can set about to pull the blustering bully down. As far as this writer is concerned there is absolutely no question whatever as to the course of action free men must ultimately take. In fact, it is the only choice the law of survival allows. Surely no man who has felt the throbbing pound of freedom in his veins could countenance capitulation as a solution. And no man who knows what lies behind the lethal Communist program of “co-existence” would dare ac- cept that proposal as a long range solution. What then remains? Several years ago while serving with the FBI this writer became aware that the experts on Marxism have known for a long time that there are definite ways to stop Communism cold. Furthermore, if free men move in time, this can be done without a major war! That is why this book was written. It was written under the persuasion that modern men would be foolish indeed if they accepted the phenomenon of Homo- Marxian as a permanent fixture in the earth. There are well established and easily understood histori- cal reasons why every legitimate influence should be brought to bear on the removal of this roadblock from the pathway of normal human advancement. This must be done for the sake of Homo-Marxian as well as for the rest of humanity. He is the victim of a man-made experiment, trapped in his own self-perpetuating cycle of human negation. As long as free men are the prevailing majority in the earth there is a very good chance of breaking this cycle. To do so, however, free men must achieve an intelligent and dynamic solidarity at least as strong as the illusory but firmly fixed purposes of Homo-Marxian. The Naked Communist At the conclusion of this study there are listed a number of policies which, if used in time, could remove the roadblock that Marxist Man has thrown across the pathway of the race. These policies are solutions which automatically spring out of an understanding of the history, philosophy and ultimate objectives of Marxism. They are also the cold hard facts which have grown out of our bitter experiences in attempting to deal with Marxist Man. If enough people will study the problem and move across the world in one vast united front it is entirely possible that the race can celebrate the close of the Twentieth Century with this monumental achievement: Freedom in our time for all men! I The Founders off Communism In this chapter we shall try to become acquainted with two men. The first is Karl Marx, the originator of Communism, and the second is Friedrich Engels, his collaborator. We shall try to present their lives the way the Communists present them — not as the soft, visionary social reformers which so many text books seem anxious to describe, but rather as the two-fisted, power hungry revolutionists which their closest followers found them to be. Although presented in brief summary, this chapter attempts to include sufficient details so that the student of Communism can answer these questions: Why do Marxist writers call their founder a “genius” yet frankly admit he was “a violent, quarrelsome, contentious man, a dictator and a swashbuckler” ? Was Marx well educated? What was his nationality? Where did he do most of his revolutionary writing? author’s note: Because this book was written for high school seniors as well as college students and members of the armed forces, the author has deliberately avoided the use of research references such as ibid.y and op, cit. f lest they prove confusing. The Naked Communist How was it that Marx never acquired a profession, an office, an occupation or a dependable means of livelihood? How did Engels differ from Marx? What were the six principal goals which Marx and Engels set forth in the Communist Manifesto? Why did Marx believe one of his first tasks was to “de- throne God”? Why did he think his book, Capital, would change the world? Why did Marx fail in his two attempts to create organiza- tions for the promotion of world revolution? London, 1853 On a chilly, foggy day in 1853, a British government official stood in the drizzling rain before the doorway of a human hovel in the heart of London’s slums. He knocked and after a short delay was admitted. As the officer entered the room thick clouds of smoke and tobacco fumes billowed about his head causing him to choke and cough while his eyes watered. Through the haze he saw the proprietor of the slum dwelling, a barrel-chested man with disheveled hair and a bushy beard. The man greeted the officer in a strong German accent, offered him a clay pipe and then motioned him toward a broken-backed chair. If the officer had not known better he would never have guessed that the bushy-bearded man who sat before him was a graduate of a university with a Ph.D. degree. Nor that the wife who had just hustled the children into a back room was the daughter of a German aristocrat. Yet such was the case. This was the residence of Dr. and Mrs. Karl Marx. At the moment Karl Marx was a political fugitive — having been driven from Germany, France and Belgium. England had granted him domicile along with other revolutionary leaders from the Continent and for this Marx was grateful. It gave him a lifelong base from which to continue his revolu- tionary work. On this particular day the presence of the officer was no The Founders of Communism cause for alarm. It was the routine check which the British Government made on all political exiles living in England. Nor was the officer hostile. He found the Marxes strange but interesting people who could engage in very lively conversation on world problems while sitting blissfully in a domestic en- vironment of incomprehensible confusion. The officer later included his puzzled observations concerning the Marxes in his official report: “(Marx) lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest, neighborhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. The room looking out on the street is the parlor, and the bed- room is at the back. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, but everything is broken, tattered and torn, with thick dust over everything and the greatest untidiness everywhere. In the middle of the parlor there is a large old-fashioned table covered with oilcloth. On it there are manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, odds and ends and his wife’s sewing- basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives and forks, lamps, an ink-pot, tumblers, some Dutch clay-pipes, tobacco ashes — all in a pile on the same table. . . . But all these things do not in the least embarrass Marx or his wife. You are received in the most friendly way and cordially offered pipes, tobacco and whatever else there may happen to be. Eventually a clever and interesting conversation arises which makes amends for all the domestic deficiencies .” 1 Thus we are introduced to one of the most dramatic per- sonalities to cross the pages of history during the nineteenth century. And one who would have a greater impact dead than alive. Biographers would grapple with the enigma of Marx’s life. At one moment Marx would be called “the greatest genius of this age,” and a moment later even his disciples would feel forced to call him “a violent, quarrelsome, contentious man, a dictator and a swashbuckler, one at feud with all the world and continually alarmed lest he should be unable to assert his superiority .” 2 1 Wilson, Edmund, “to the Finland station,” pp. 217-218. 2 Ruhle, Otto, “KARL MARX,” pp. 209, 308. The Naked Communist Such were the contradictory, surging forces of human dynamics which found expression in the turbulent personality of Karl Marx. The Early Life of Karl Marx Karl Marx first saw the light of day at Treves, Germany, May 5, 1818. He certainly had no need to apologize for his progenitors. For many generations his male ancestors on both sides had been outstanding scholars and distinguished rabbis. However, the father of Karl Marx decided to break the ties of the past both religiously and professionally. He withdrew his family from the local synagogue to join the congregation of a local protestant faith and then reached out after pro- fessional recognition as a practicing attorney. Karl Marx was six years of age when the traditional moorings of the family were thus uprooted, and some biographers of Marx attribute his rejection of religion in later years to the conflicts which this sudden change in his life precipitated. In elementary school young Karl revealed himself to be a quick, bright scholar. He also revealed a quality which would plague him the rest of his life — his inability to keep a friend. Seldom, in all of Marx’s writings, do we find a reference to any happy boyhood associations. Biographers say he was too intense, too anxious to dominate the situation, too concerned about personal success, too belligerent in his self-assertiveness, to keep many friends. However, Karl Marx was not lacking in sentiment and genuine hunger for affection. At 17, when he began his university career, the letters which he wrote to his parents occasionally unveiled deeply sentimental, woman- like feelings. Here is an example : “In the hope that the clouds which hang over our family will gradually disperse ; that I shall be permitted to share your sufferings and mingle my tears with yours, and, perhaps, in direct touch with you, to show the profound affection, the immeasurable love, which I have not always been able to ex- press as I should like ; in the hope that you, too, my fondly and The Founders of Communism eternally loved Father, bearing in mind how much my feelings have been storm-tossed, will forgive me because my heart must often have seemed to you to have gone astray when the travail of my spirit was depriving it of the power of utterance ; in the hope that you will soon be fully restored to health, that I shall be able to clasp you in my arms, and to tell you all that I feel, I remain always your loving son, Karl.” Such expressions must have puzzled the elder Marx. Throughout his career as a father he was never able to counsel or cross this hot-tempered son without precipitating an emo- tional explosion. The letters of Karl Marx make frequent reference to the violent quarrels between himself and his parents; the letters from Karl’s parents complain of his ego- ism, his lack of consideration for the family, his constant demands for money and his discourtesy in failing to answer most of their letters. Marx as a Young Man It was in the fall of 1835 that Marx entered the University of Bonn to study law. This was a hectic year. He scandalized his parents by joining a tavern club, running himself deeply in debt and almost getting himself expelled for “nocturnal drunkenness and riot.” His studies were most unsatisfactory and he threatened to become a professional poet instead of a lawyer. In the summer of 1836 he fought a duel and received a wound over the eye. It was finally decided that it would be better for the University of Bonn if Karl Marx transferred to some other university. The elder Marx heartily agreed. Karl was sent to Berlin. It was at the University of Berlin that the intellectual forces in Karl Marx became sinews and the whole pattern of his life began to take shape. Although he complied with his father’s wishes and studied law, it was a half-hearted cam- ouflage to cover up his avid exploration of philosophy. In the midst of this exploration his father died and Marx im- mediately came out in the open with his announcement that The Naked Communist he would seek an academic career. He wanted to occupy a chair of philosophy at some university. Marx chose for his doctoral dissertation: “The Difference Between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and of Epicurus.” In this study he favored the materialism of Epi- curus because it allowed for an energizing principle in matter. He thought that if matter were auto-dynamic it would do away with the need for a Creator, a designer or a governing force in the universe. The anti-religious senti- ments of Marx found further expression in his thesis when he chose for its motto the cry of Prometheus: “In one word — I hate all the gods !” During this period of intellectual incuba- tion three things dominated the thinking of Karl Marx: his desire to discover a philosophy of nature; his desire to com- pletely repudiate all forms of religion; his desire to win the hand of the daughter of Baron von Westphalen. While Marx was at the University of Berlin he fell in with a left-wing school of Hegelians who were followers of the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Hegel. At the mo- ment their whole energy was consumed by a desire to liqui- date Christianity. David Friedrich Strauss had published his Life of Jesus in 1835 and shocked all Germany with his contention that the Gospels were not true historical documents but were merely myths which he believed evolved from the communal imagination of early Christians. A close associate of Marx, Bruno Bauer, wrote on the same theme in 1840 under the title. Historical Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels. In this book he claimed the Gospels were forgeries. He said Jesus had never existed, that he was a figure of fiction and therefore Christianity was a fraud. At this point Bauer and Marx decided they would boldly publish a Journal of Atheism, but the magazine lacked financial sponsorship and died in gestation. Nevertheless, the anti Christian campaign gained anoth- er eloquent protagonist named Ludwig Feuerbach who came out in 1841 with his Essence of Christianity. He not only ridiculed Christianity but presented the thesis that man is the highest form of intelligence in the entire universe. This The Founders of Communism exotic flash of speculation fascinated Marx. He had written the same idea into his thesis for a doctorate. Marx had bluntly said it is necessary “to recognize as the highest di- vinity, the human self-consciousness itself !” The government’s reaction to this anti-Christian cam- paign took a serious turn, therefore Marx decided it would not be prudent to present his thesis to the University of Berlin where he had been studying. His friend, Bruno Bauer, sug- gested that he go to the University of Jena. Marx followed this suggestion and consequently received his degree of Doc- tor of Philosophy from that institution in April, 1841. Shortly afterwards, however, a leveling blow wiped out his passionate ambition to become a professor of philosophy at some German university. This resulted from the fact that Marx collaborated with Bauer in writing a pamphlet which was vigorously investigated because of its revolutionary flavor. When the Prussian officials identified the authors, Bauer was summarily dismissed from the University of Bonn and Marx was assured that he would never be allowed to teach at any university in Germany. Now the revolutionary spirit flamed high in Marx; somehow he must start a movement to remake the world. However, to succeed in such a task he felt he must have the companionship of Jenny von Westphalen, the attractive and popular daughter of a German aristocrat who lived in Marx’s hometown. For seven years he had corre- sponded with her. One of his letters made it clear that if she married him she would become the wife of a revolutionary. Said he: “Jenny ! If we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt shall I fling my glove in the world's face, then shall I stride through the wreckage a creator !” 3 In June, 1843, the wedding took place. At the time the bridegroom was unemployed and Jenny von Westphalen soon discovered that this was to be a permanent characteristic of their entire married life. Karl Marx never acquired the slightest comprehension of the responsibilties which a hus- 3 Wilson, Edmund, “to the Finland station,” p. 115. The Maked Communist band assumes as the head of a family. Nevertheless, Jenny von Westphalen remained loyal and devoted to Karl Marx under circumstances which would have crushed a woman of weaker mettle. After the marriage they had a five month honeymoon following which they went to Paris, where Marx hoped to collaborate in publishing a revolutionary organ called The Franco-German Year Books. The publication collapsed after its first issue and Marx spent the next fifteen months in the pleasant task of “studying and writing.” This was to be the pattern of his whole life. In later years while his family was starving he could be found at the library devoting himself to the interesting but, for him, completely unremunerative study of higher mathematics. Voltaire re- ferred derisively to the breed of men who cannot run their own families and therefore retreat to their attics so that from there they can run the whole world. Marx seemed to fit this pattern. Although he seemed physically indolent, Marx was actually capable of prodigious quantities of intellectual work if it dealt with a subject which interested him. Otherwise, he would not stir. As a result of these personal characteristics, Marx never did acquire a profession, an office, a regular oc- cupation or a dependable means of livelihood. Concerning this phase of his career a friendly biographer states : “Regular work bored him, conventional occupation put him out of humor. Without a penny in his pocket, and with his shirt pawned, he surveyed the world with a lordly air. . . . Throughout his life he was hard up. He was ridiculously ineffectual in his endeavors to cope with the economic needs of his household and family; and his incapacity in monetary matters involved him in an endless series of struggles and catastrophies. He was always in debt; was incessantly being dunned by creditors. . . . Half his household goods were al- ways at the pawnshop. His budget defied all attempts to set it in order. His bankruptcy was chronic. The thousands upon thousands which Engels handed over to him melted away in his fingers like snow .” 4 4 Ruhle, Otto, “kari, marx,” pp. 383-381,. The Founders of Communism This brings us to the only close friend Karl Marx ever had — Friedrich Engels. Friedrich Engels In many ways Engels was the very opposite of Karl Marx. He was tall, slender, vivacious and good natured. He enjoyed athletics, liked people and was by nature an opti- mist. He was born in Barmen, Germany, November 28, 1820, the son of a textile manufacturer who owned large factories both in Barmen, Germany, and in Manchester, England. From his earliest youth Engels chafed under the iron disci- pline of his father, and he learned to despise the textile fac- tories and all they represented. As he matured it was natural that he should have lined himself up with the “industrial pro- letariat.” For the son of a bourgeois businessman, young Engels had a surprisingly limited education; at least it did not in- clude any extensive university training. But what he lacked in formal training he supplied through hard work and na- tive talent. He spent considerable time in England and learned both English and French with such facility that he succeeded in selling articles to liberal magazines of both languages. Biographers have emphasized that while the hearty and attractive Engels differed in personal traits from the brood- ing, suspicious Marx, nevertheless, the two of them followed an identical course of intellectual development. Engels, like Marx, quarreled bitterly with his father, took to reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus, fell in with the same radical left- wing Hegelians who had attracted Marx, became an agnostic and a cynic, lost confidence in the free-enterprise economy of the Industrial Revolution and decided the only real hope for the world was Communism. Engels had been an admirer of Marx long before he had a chance to meet him. It was in August, 1844, that he traveled to Paris for the specific purpose of visiting Marx. The mag- The Naked Communist netic attraction between the two men was instantaneous. After ten days both men felt it was their destiny to work to- gether. It was during this same ten days that Marx con- verted Engels from a Utopian Communist to an outright revolutionist. He convinced Engels that there was no real hope for humanity in the idealism of Robert Owen or Saint- Simon but that conditions called for a militant revolution to overthrow existing society. Engels agreed and proceeded back to Germany. Six months later Marx was expelled from France, along with other revolutionary spirits, and took up residence in Brussels, Belgium. Here Marx and Engels wrote The Holy Family, a book designed to rally around them those Communists who were willing to completely disavow any connection with the so-called “peaceful reforms” of phil- anthropy, Utopianism or Christian morality. The red flag of revolution was up and Marx and Engels considered them- selves the royal color-guard. The strange relationship which rapidly developed between Marx and Engels can be understood only when it is realized that Engels considered it a privilege to be associated with such a genius as Marx. Among other things, he counted it an honor to be allowed to assume responsibility for Marx’s financial support. Shortly after Marx was expelled from France, Engels sent him all the ready cash in his possession and promised him more : “Please take it as a matter of course that it will be the greatest pleasure in the world to place at your disposal the fee I hope shortly to receive for my English literary venture. I can get along without any money just now, for my governor (father) will have to keep me in funds. We cannot allow the dogs to enjoy having in- volved you in pecuniary embarrassment by their infamous be- havior.” This new partnership between Marx and Engels gave them both the courage to immediately launch an International Communist League based on the need for a violent revolution. They planned to use the workers in Germany and France as the backbone for their new political machine but this proved The Founders off Communism bitterly disappointing. After spending several months among the French workers Engels castigated them because they “prefer the most preposterous day-dreaming, peaceful plans for inaugurating universal happiness.” He told Marx that the tinder for a revolution in France was nonexistent. Having thus failed in their plan to build their own revolu- tionary organization, Marx and Engels decided to take over one that was already in existence. In August, 1847, they suc- ceeded in gaining control of the “Workers’ Educational So- ciety” in Brussels. This immediately gave them prestige among reform organizations in Europe. It also gave them the first opportunity to extend their influence in England. At this point Marx and Engels would have been surprised to know that England rather than the Continent would become the headquarters for their revolutionary work. The Communist Manifesto During November, 1847, word came from London that the “Federation of the Just” (later known as the Com- munist League) wanted Marx and Engels to participate in their second congress as representatives of the Communist organizations in Brussels. Marx and Engels not only at- tended the congress but practically took it over. By staying up most of the night laying their plans and by using shrewd strategy at each of the meetings, they succeeded in getting the congress to adopt all of their basic views. Marx and Engels were then commissioned to write a declaration of principles or a “Manifesto to the World.” They returned to Brussels and immediately set to work with Marx pouring into the text his passionate plea for a revolution. When they were through they had announced to mankind that the new program of Interna- tional Communism stood for: 1. the overthrow of capitalism, 2. the abolition of private property, 3. the elimination of the family as a social unit, 4. the abolition of all classes, 5. the overthrow of all governments, and 6. the establishment of a communist order with communal ownership of property in a The Naked Communist classless, stateless society. To accomplish this, the Communist Manifesto was crystal clear as to the course to be taken : “In short, the Communists everywhere support every rev- olutionary movement against existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” The Revolution of 181*8 The red glare of revolution came much sooner than either Marx or Engels had anticipated. In February, 1848, while the ink on the Communist Manifesto was still drying, the revolutionary spirit of the French proletariat united with the resentment of the bourgeoisie against Louis Philippe and a violent uprising ensued which drove the Emperor from the country. Immediately afterwards a provisional government was set up which included members of the Communist League, who promptly summoned Marx to Paris. Marx was flushed with excitement when he arrived at the French capitol armed with full authority from the Communist League headquarters to set up the international headquarters in Paris and to engineer the revolutions in other countries from there. Marx learned that the intoxicating success of the uprising in France had induced the radical element in the provisional government to send “legions” into surrounding countries. Their purpose was to launch an uprising in each country and build the revolution into one magnificent conflagration. Al- though this was precisely what Marx had been advocating for several years, he suddenly sensed that such a campaign at the present moment might backfire and cause them to lose the support of the masses in those countries where legions were sent. Nevertheless, the plan was adopted and the first legions were marched off to Germany. Marx soon followed and be- gan publishing a revolutionary periodical in his native tongue called the Rheinische Zeitung. The revolutionary leaders soon discovered that Marx was The Founders of Communism a propaganda liability. This became painfully evident when he was sent with other members of the Communist League to organize the workers in the Rhine Valley. Marx, when asked to address the German Democratic Congress, badly bungled this golden opportunity. Carl Schurz says: “I was eager to hear the words of wisdom that would, I supposed, fall from the lips of so celebrated a man. I was greatly disappointed. What Marx said was unquestionably weighty, logical and clear. But never have I seen any one whose manner was more insufferably arrogant. He would not give me a moment’s con- sideration to any opinion that differed from his own. He treated with open contempt everyone who contradicted him. . . . Those whose feelings he had wounded by his offensive manner were inclined to vote in favor of everything which ran counter to his wishes . . . far from winning new adherents, he repelled many who might have been inclined to support him.” 3 From the beginning the revolution in Germany had been anemic and by May 16, 1849, it had reached a state of in- glorious collapse. Marx was given twenty-four hours to quit the country. He stayed just long enough to borrow funds and print the last edition of his paper in red ink and then hastened away to find refuge in France. But France was no refuge. Marx arrived in Paris penni- less and exhausted, only to find that the Communist influence in the new Republic had wilted and died. The National As- sembly was in the hands of a monarchial majority. As soon as possible he fled from France, leaving his family to follow later because he was destitute of funds. He decided to make his permanent exile in London. The End of the Communist League Although Marx had to cram his family into a cheap, one- room apartment in the slums of London, he felt sufficiently i Ruble, Otto, “karl marx,” pp. 157-158. The Naked Communist 20 satisfied with their well-being to immediately concentrate his attention once again on the task of reviving the fires of the revolution. In spite of this spirit of dedication, however, Marx’s effort to lead out did more harm than good. His agitating spirit always seemed to create splinters and quarrels in the ranks of his confederates and before long he had prac- tically cut himself off from his former associates. The Cen- tral Committee was taken out from under his influence and transferred to Cologne. There it remained until 1852 when all Communist leaders in Germany were arrested and sen- tenced to heavy prison terms for revolutionary activity. Marx did everything in his power to save his estranged comrades. He gathered documents, recruited witnesses and proposed various legal arguments which he thought might help, but in spite of all this yeoman service the verdicts of “guilty” pulled out of active revolutionary service every one of the party leaders then on trial. This sounded the death knell for the Communist League. The Family of Karl Marx From this time on the Marx family lived in London in the most extreme poverty. A peculiar combination of emo- tions was expressed by Marx in his correspondence during this period. On the one hand he expressed soulful concern for the welfare of his wife and children. He confessed in a letter to Engels that the “nocturnal tears and lamentations” of his wife were almost beyond endurance. Then, in the same letter he blithely went about explaining how he was spending his whole time studying history, politics, economics and social problems so as to figure out the answers for all the problems of the world. In 1852 his little daughter, Francisca, died. Two years later marked the passing of his young son, Edgar, and two years after that a baby died at birth. A few paragraphs from a letter written by Mrs. Marx indicates the amazing loyalty of this woman who saw her half- The Founders of Communism fed children dying around her while their father spent days and nights in the British Museum library. “Let me describe only one day of this life, as it actually was. . . . Since wet-nurses are exceedingly expensive here, I made up my mind, despite terrible pains in the breasts and the back, to nurse the baby myself. But the poor little angel drank in so much sorrow with the milk that he was continually fretting, in violent pain day and night. Since he has been in the world, he has not slept a single night through, at most two or three hours. Of late, there have been violent spasms, so that the child is continually betwixt life and death. When thus afflicted, he sucked so vigorously that my nipple became sore, and bled ; often the blood streamed into his little mouth. One day I was sitting like this when our landlady suddenly appeared. . . . Since we could not pay this sum (of five pounds) instantly, two brokers came into the house, and took posses- sion of all my belongings — bedding, clothes, everything, even the baby’s cradle and the little girls’ toys, so that the children wept bitterly. They threatened to take everything away in two hours. (Fortunately they did not.) If this had happened I should have had to lie on the floor with my freezing children beside me. . . . “Next day we had to leave. It was cold and rainy. My husband tried to find lodging, but as soon as he said he had four children no one would take us. At length a friend helped us. We paid what was owing, and I quickly sold all my beds and bedding in order to settle accounts with the chemist, the baker, and the milkman. Thus the years passed. Literally hundreds of letters were exchanged between Engels and Marx and nearly all of them refer in one place or another to money. Engels’ letters char- acteristically contain this phrase: “Enclosed is a post office order for five pounds,” while Marx’s epistles are shot through with exasperated passages such as : “My mother has positively assured me that she will protest any bill drawn on her.” “For ten days we have been without a sou in the house.” “ Richie, Otto, “KARL MARX,” pp. 202-204. The Naked Communist “You will agree that I am dipped up to my ears in petty- bourgeois pickle.” At one point in this bitter existence there seemed to be a sudden ray of hope. During a particularly desperate period when Engels could give no relief, Marx made a trip to Hol- land where a prosperous uncle generously handed him one hun- dred and sixty pounds. This was enough to put Marx on his financial feet, pay off his debts and give him a new start. But with money in his pocket, Marx decided to take a tour of Ger- many. He visited his mother in Treves, proceeded to Ber- lin, undertook a number of drinking excursions with his old friends, had himself photographed and generally played the role of a gentleman of leisure. Two months later he returned home. Frau Marx welcomed her tourist husband thinking that now bills could be paid, clothing and furniture could be purchased and better rooms rented. She was horrified to learn that practically nothing remained of the hundred and sixty pounds. The Founding of the First International In 1862 a great international exhibition was held in Lon- don to proudly parade the industrial achievements of nine- teenth century capitalism. The promoters of the exhibition were desirous of creating an atmosphere of international good will and therefore invited all countries to not only submit dis- plays but also to send representatives of their workers to exchange ideas and good will with the workers of other countries who would be in attendance. The British labor leaders, who had been gaining strength since 1860, considered this an excellent time to set up an inter- national workers’ organization. They therefore took every opportunity to make firm friends with labor leaders from Italy, Germany, France, Poland and Holland. In due time they were able to establish a permanent “International” with headquarters in London. One of the leaders of this move- ment was a tailor named Eccarius who had formerly been a The Founders of Communism right hand man to Marx during the days of the Communist League. As soon as the new movement began to catch on, Marx was invited by Eccarius to participate. Immediately Marx began to assert himself — but within bounds. This was the lesson he had partially learned from the failure of the Communist League. The new organization was called the International Workingmen’s Association and is frequently referred to as the First International. As long as Marx restrained himself he was able to exercise consider- able influence among the labor leaders from the various coun- tries. By careful maneuvering behind the scenes he was able to get nearly all of his ideas adopted in preference to weaker, more peaceful programs suggested by “social-minded reform- ers.” But all of this seemed mealy-mouthed and unnatural to Marx. He admitted to Engels he had been forced to make compromises in order to keep peace : “My proposals were all adopted by the sub-committee. Only one thing, I had to pledge myself to insert in the pre- amble to the rules two phrases about ‘duty’ and ‘right’ ; also about truth, morality and justice — but they are all so placed that they cannot do any harm. ... It will be some time before the reawakened movement will permit the old boldness of speech. We must be strong in the substance, but moderate in the form.” 7 In spite of this determination to be “moderate,” how- ever, it was not long before the true feeling of Marx rumbled to the surface. He was concerned about two things: first, the need to create a hard core of disciplined revolutionists who could inflame the workers of the major industries in all coun- tries with a will to act, and secondly, the need to eliminate any who might threaten Marx’s leadership in this new movement. What Marx was contemplating was a party purge. The first to feel the force of the new campaign was the German labor leader, Herr von Schweitzer. All students of Marx and Engels seem to agree that both of them were completely without mercy when it came to dealing with a 7 Ruhle, Otto, “karl marx,” pp. 248-2i9. The Naked Communist comrade who was marked for party liquidation. The broad- side of propaganda which they launched against Schweitzer alleged that he was working for Bismarck, the Iron Man of Germany. Although this was pure fabrication, nothing would have been more devastating to Schweitzer’s reputation. Even today some historians use Marx’s charges as a basis for the claim that Schweitzer was a traitor to the cause of labor. Another party pillar to fall under the purge was Mikhail Bakunin, the first Russian to become interested in revolutionary activities. He escaped from a Russian prison and had taken up residence in Geneva. Bakunin be- came so enthusiastic in advocating Marx’s principles that certain elements of the labor movement began gravitating to- ward his leadership. This was fatal. Marx immediately set out to destroy him. The technique was the same as that used against Schweitzer except that Marx and Engels charged Bakunin with being an agent of the Russian Czar. This had a ruinous effect for awhile. Then they spread a charge which later proved to be completely false — that Bakunin had embez- zled 25,000 francs. Finally, to administer the coup de grace, Marx succeeded in getting the International to oust Bakunin from the Association. By this act Marx secretly felt he had destroyed the last man who might seriously threaten his leadership. What Marx did not know was the fact that in spite of this abuse, Bakunin would remain loyal to Marx’s precepts, even translate Marx’s books into Russian and thereby plant seeds which would ultimately bring the first nation in the modern world under a Communist dictatorship. However, Mark’s anxiety to purge the International of all his personal enemies created such violent suspicion, distrust and party dissension that it brought about the organization’s total destruction. In fact, the end of the First International came close on the heels of Bakunin’s expulsion. The trade unions in England began to abandon the cause of international revolution and the workers’ groups on the Continent began ignoring the mandates of the Association. Finally, on Septem- ber 8, 1873, the last congress of the International Working- men’s Association was held at Geneva and Marx found that The Founders off Communism the thirteen delegates who finally agreed to attend had to be practically “dug up out of the ground.” For all practical intents and purpose, the First International was dead. Marx Writes a Book to Change the World Much of Marx’s motivation in trying to make the Inter- national Workingmen’s Association a great world movement was his desire to put into practice the very theories he was struggling to put down on paper. For several years he had pampered his two pet projects — the International and his “book.” Both projects drained him of his normal physical strength. This permitted an old liver ailment to flare up again and before long he was suffering from a rash of boils which threatened to cover his entire body. Ill health was to plague him the remainder of his days. In a letter to Engels he poured out his complaints against the pain and disappointment he was suffering : “To my extreme disgust, after being unable to sleep all night I discovered two more first-class boils on my chest.” Later he wrote, “I am working now like a drayhorse, seeing that I must make the best use of all the time available for work, and the carbuncles are still there, though they are now giving me only local trouble, and are not interfering with my brain.” After a particularly severe attack he wrote: “This time it was really serious — the family did not know how serious. If it recurs three or four times more, it will be all up with me. I have wasted amazingly, and am still damnably weak, not in the head, but in the trunk and limbs. . . . There is no question of being able to sit up, but, while lying, I have been able, at intervals, to keep digging away at my work.”" The “work” to which Marx refers was the research and preparation of the first volume of Capital. Marx was con- vinced that a revolution would never succeed unless the work- ing masses had a revolutionary philosophy of history, s RuMe, Otto, "KARL MARX,” p. 2112. The Naked Communist 26 economics and social progress. He wrote Capital in order to show why the violent overthrow of the present order was not only justified but inescapable. Elsewhere, we shall examine the theories of Marx, but at this point it is sufficient to point out that Marx looked upon the writing of this book as an unpleasant mission which had to be completed before in- ternational communism could germinate and flourish. During 1865, when Marx was striving to prepare a final copy of his first volume for the printer, he told Engels he wanted to “finish it off quickly, for the thing has become a perfect nightmare to me.” He occasionally enjoyed periods of respite from his illness and finally wrote to Engels: “As regards the damned book, this is how the matter stands. It was finished in the end of December.” Engels assured Marx that the pain and suspense of getting the book completed were as great a trial to him as they were to Marx. He wrote : “The day the manuscript goes to press, I shall get gloriously drunk!” It was not until March, 1867, that all the revisions were finally completed and Marx set out for Germany to have the book published in his native tongue. In a short time it began to be distributed. But when Capital appeared in the book stalls it was far from the literary triumph which Marx and Engels had both expected. Its line of reasoning was entirely too finely drawn for the working masses and far from persuasive among in- tellectual reformers. It remained for the intellectuals of an-

Final Chapters of Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler

Misner Thorne and Wheeler, "Gravitation", Chapters 36 to 40.

Chapter Seventeen. April 20, 1993. A beautiful day, a day of rest and peace, after a hectic week. Katherine and I drove to the mountains early this morning and spent the day walking in the woods. It was cool and bright and clear. After a picnic lunch we made love in a little meadow under the open sky. We talked of many things, and we were both happy and carefree. The only shadow which fell on our happiness was Katherine's complaint about the number of out-of-town trips the Organization has sent me on recently, even though I have been out of prison for less than a month. I didn't have the courage to tell her that in the future we will have even less time together. I only found that out myself yesterday. When I reported to Major Williams last night after returning from Florida, he told me that I'll be traveling a lot in the next few months. I didn't get all the details from him, but he hinted that the Organization is preparing for an all-out, nationwide offensive this summer, and I am to be a sort of roving military engineer. But today I put that out of my mind and just enjoyed being alive and free and alone with a lovely girl in the midst of Nature's beauty. As we were driving home this evening, we heard the news on the radio which capped a perfect day: the Organization hit the Israeli embassy in Washington this afternoon. No better date in the year could have been chosen for such an actions For months an Israeli murder squad, working out of their embassy, has been picking off our people around the country. Today we settled the score-for the moment. We struck with heavy mortars while the Israelis were throwing a cocktail party for their obedient servants in the U.S. Senate. A number of Israeli officials had flown in for the occasion, and there must have been more than 300 people in the embassy when our 4.2inch mortars began raining TNT and phosphorus onto their heads through the roof. The attack only lasted two or three minutes, according to the news report, but more than 40 projectiles struck the embassy, leaving nothing but a burned-out heap of wreckage-and only a handful of survivors! So, we must have had at least two mortars firing. That confirms what I was told last week about our new weapons acquisitions. One fascinating incident in the news story, which the censors somehow failed to cut before it was broadcast, was the murder of a group of tourists by an embassy guard. During the attack an Israeli came running out of the crumbling building with a submachine gun, his clothing in flames. He spotted a group of a dozen tourists, all women and small children, gawking at the scene of destruction from across the street. Shrieking out his hatred in guttural Hebrew, the Jew opened fire on them, killing nine on the spot and critically wounding three others. Of course, he was not charged by the police. Your day is coming, Jews, your day is coming! I should be getting to bed early tonight in order to be ready for a long day tomorrow, but the excitement of our achievement this afternoon makes it impossible for me to sleep yet. The Organization has demonstrated once again what an incomparable weapon the mortar is for guerrilla warfare. I am much more enthusiastic now about our new plan for Evanston, and I'll be better braced for overcoming any more balkiness on the part of our professor in Florida. Last Saturday, when I was discussing my plan for getting radioactive material into the Evanston plant with Henry and Ed Sanders, they convinced me that a mortar could do the job better, and that we are now well supplied in that department. So I redesigned the delivery package, changing it from a walking cane to a 4.2-inch mortar projectile. We will replace the phosphorus in three WP rounds with our radioactive contaminant. After we have zeroed in the target with conventional rounds, we'll fire our three modified projectiles, which will be adjusted to exactly the same weight, of course. This way of doing it has three advantages over my original plan. First, it is surer; there is much less chance of something going wrong. Second, we will be delivering approximately 10 times as much contaminant, and the bursting charges in the projectiles will disperse it better than anything we could hope for with a loaded walking cane. And third, it need not be a suicide mission. We can keep the "hot" projectiles shielded until the moment they are to be fired, so the mortar crew will not be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. My big worry was whether we would be able to get our projectiles inside the power station, instead of just on the roof The building is so heavily constructed that I doubt that they would penetrate, even with delayed-action fuses. Ed Sanders convinced me, though, that once a 4.2-incher is zeroed in and firmly seated it will deliver rounds with sufficient accuracy and a low enough trajectory so that we will have an excellent hit probability on the side of the generator building facing the shore, which is practically one, huge window, 10 stories high and more than 200 yards wide. Armed with this new plan, I went to talk to Harrison, our Florida chemist. I explained to him that his part of the job is to procure a suitable radioactive material and then, using his special facilities, safely load it into the mortar projectiles I will bring him. Harrison had a fit. He complained that he had only offered to supply the Organization with small quantities of radionuclides and other hard-to-obtain materials. He did not want to become involved in actually handling any ordnance, and he especially objected to the quantity of material required by our plan. Not many people in the country have access to so much radioactive material, and he is afraid it will be traced to him. I tried reasoning with him. I explained that if we try to load the projectiles ourselves, without the shielded handling facilities he has, one or more of our people will surely be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. And I told him that he is free to choose a radionuclide, or a mixture of radionuclides, which will cast the least suspicion on him-so long as it is suitable for our purpose. But he flatly refused. "It's out of the question," he said. "It would jeopardize my entire career." "Dr. Harrison," I replied, "I am afraid you do not understand the situation. We are at war. The future of our race depends upon the outcome of this war. As a member of the Organization you are obliged to put your responsibility to our common effort ahead of all personal considerations. You are subject to the Organization's discipline." Harrison turned white and began stammering, but I continued relentlessly: "If you continue to refuse my request, I am prepared to kill you on the spot." As a matter of fact, I was unarmed, because I had flown down on a commercial airliner, but Harrison didn't know that. He swallowed a couple of times, found his voice, and said he will do what he can. We went over our figures and our requirements again and settled on an approximate timetable. Before I left I assured Harrison that if he feels this operation will place him in too much jeopardy to continue as a "legal" we can bring him underground after it is completed. He is obviously still very nervous and unhappy, but I don't think he will try to betray us. The Organization has established a very high degree of credibility for its threats. Just to be on the safe side, however, we will use another courier when the time comes to drive the modified projectiles down to Florida to be loaded and brought back. No technical knowledge is required for that. I don't like to act like a "tough guy" and threaten people; that is an unnatural role for me. But I have very little sympathy for people like Harrison, and I am sure that if he had not agreed to cooperate, I would have leaped on him and strangled him with my bare hands. I guess there are a lot of other people who think they are playing it smart by looking out for themselves and letting us take all the risks and do all the dirty work. They figure they will reap the benefits with us if we win, and they won't lose anything if we lose. That's the way it has been in most other wars and revolutions, but I don't believe it will work out that way this time. Our attitude is that those whose only concern is to enjoy life in these times of trial for our race do not deserve life. Let them die. In the conduct of this war we certainly will not concern ourselves with looking out for their welfare. More and more it will be a case of either being for us, all the way, or against us. April 25. Off to New York tomorrow for at least a week. Several things cooking up there which require my attention. The business down in Florida should have been taken care of by the time I return, and, if so, it'll be another trip to Chicago for me, this time by car. The Yids are really screaming about the attack on their embassy. They are giving far more emphasis in the news media to this attack than they did to either the attack on the Capitol or the bombing of the FBI building. Each day on TV it gets worse, with more and more of the old "gas chamber" propaganda that has worked so well for them in the past. They are really pulling their hair and rending their garments: "Oy, veh, how we are suffering! How we are persecuted! Why did you let it happen to us? Weren't six million enough?" What an act of outraged innocence! They are so good at it that they almost have me weeping along with them. But, strangely, there has not been another mention of the murder of those nine tourists by the Israeli guard. Ah, well, they were only Gentiles! One unexpected benefit to us from the embassy action has been a major quarrel between the Blacks and their Jewish patrons. Purely by coincidence the attack came three days before the date which had been set for a nationwide "strike for equality"- another of those giant media affairs to be stage-managed by the Human Relations Councils, in which "spontaneous" demonstrations were to be held simultaneously in a number of large cities, with Black and White citizens joining together in a call for the government to break down the last of the barriers between the races and assure the Blacks of "full equality." But then last Thursday, the day after we hit the Israelis, the big boys in the Councils-Jews, of course-called it all off. They decided they can't afford to share the media spotlight with the Blacks until they have finished milking their own "martyrdom" in the embassy raid for all it is worth. A few of the more militant Black leaders, who spent a long time working on the preparations for the equality strike, didn't see it that way. They have long resented the high-handed way in which the Jews manipulate and exploit the entire "equality" movement for their own ends, and this was the last straw for some of them. There were angry accusations and counteraccusations, which culminated Saturday in the Jews' number-one liberal, the nominal "chairman" of the National Association of Human Relations Councils, giving a press interview at which he denounced his Jewish masters. From now on, he said, the Human Relations Councils will not recognize the Jewish claim to minority status. They will be treated just like the White majority and will no longer be exempt from investigation and punishment for "racism." He was out on his ear before he knew what happened, of course, and his place has been taken by a better-housebroken Black, but the fat is already in the fire. On the streets the roving bands of Black "deputies" have gotten the word, and woe betide any member of the self-chosen tribe who falls into their hands. Several have already died while being "questioned," just in the last two days. The "Toms" will eventually get their more militant and ' resentful brethren back into line, but meanwhile Izzy and Sambo are really at one another's throats, tooth and nail, and it is a joy to behold. May 6. It's nice to be home again, even if only for a day. But New York was interesting! I saw more ordnance up there than I ever imagined we'd have at our disposal. One of our specialized units in New York has been acquiring military materiel of all sorts and stockpiling it. The purpose of my visit was to survey the types of military gadgets available which might be useful to me in designing and building special weapons and sabotage devices, so that I can make recommendations for future procurement priorities. I was met at the airport by a girl, who drove me to a wholesale plumbing supply store in an incredibly filthy industrial and warehouse area in Queens, near the East River. Garbage, old newspapers, and empty liquor bottles were strewn all over. We had to navigate around the stripped and rusting hulks of several abandoned autos which nearly blocked the narrow street before the girl finally pulled into a small, muddy parking area behind a tall, chain-link fence. She knocked at a steel door marked "employees only," and we were quickly admitted to a gloomy, dusty storeroom filled with bins of pipe fittings. There she turned me over to a cheerful young man, about 25 years old, dressed in greasy coveralls and carrying a clipboard. He introduced himself only as "Richard" and offered me a cup of coffee from a disreputable-looking electric urn at one end of a long counter near the door. Then we took an old and rickety freight elevator to the second floor of the building. When we stepped out of the elevator, I gasped in surprise. In a huge, low-ceilinged room, more than a hundred feet on a side, there were immense heaps of every sort of military weaponry imaginable: automatic rifles, machine guns, flame throwers, mortars, and literally thousands of cases of ammunition, grenades, explosives, detonators, boosters, and spare parts. I don't know how the floor supported it all. In one corner of the room four men and a woman worked at two long benches under fluorescent lights. One man was grinding the serial numbers off automatic rifles, which he took one at a time from a stack of approximately 50, while the others oiled and reassembled the rifles and then carefully packed them inside a large hot-water heater from which the top had been removed. I saw a dozen large cartons nearby which contained other water heaters. "That's the way we store and ship the weapons," Richard explained. "We remove the serial numbers just to make it harder for the authorities to figure out where we're getting the stuff, in case they ever find any of it. And once the water heaters leave here, there's no way they can be traced back to us. The phony shipping tags we put on the cartons are coded to tell us what the contents are. You'll find that our rather special water heaters have been installed in the headquarters of quite a few of our combat units along the east coast, but we ship them everywhere in the country." Almost in a daze, I wandered among the heaps of weaponry. I stopped beside a ceiling-high stack of large, olive-drab crates. Stenciled on each crate were the words: "Mortar, 4.2 inch, M 30, Complete," and under that, "Gross Wt. 700 lbs." "Where did you get these?" I asked. I remembered all the work we had done a year and a half ago modifying just one mortar of ancient vintage. "Those came in last week from Fort Dix," Richard answered. "The people in one of our units just outside Trenton paid a dumb liberal supply sergeant on the base $10,000 to swipe a truck with those things on it and deliver it to them. Then they brought them up here two at a time in the back of a pickup. "We receive materiel here from more than a dozen bases and arsenals in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Look what we got last month from Picatinny Arsenal," he said, throwing back a tarpaulin covering a nearby stack of cylindrical objects. I leaned over to examine them. They were fiberboard tubes about two feet long and five inches in diameter. Each one contained an M329 high-explosive mortar projectile. There must have been at least 300 of them in that one pile. Richard continued his explanation: "It used to be that most of our new weapons were smuggled off military bases one at a time, by our own people who were stationed there. But lately we've switched to hiring Liberal service personnel to hijack the stuff for us by the truckload. We don't always get exactly what we want that way, but we get a lot more of it. "We've set up a couple of phony fronts posing as Mafia buyers for the illegal weapons-exporting business. Our people on the bases steer the buyers to Blacks in charge of the weapons storage areas. For enough money they'll walk off with the whole base for us. They just have to share some of the money we give them with a few of their 'soul brothers' on guard duty. "There are several advantages for us. First, it's easier for the Blacks to swipe the stuff without getting caught. The political police aren't watching them as closely as they are the White service personnel, and the Blacks already have organized networks on all the bases for siphoning off and selling tires, gasoline, PX supplies, and other things for which there is a civilian demand. And it allows our people in the service to concentrate on their main task, which is recruiting other White servicemen and building our strength inside the military." I spent the rest of the day going through everything in the room and mentally cataloguing it. When I left I took samples of a couple dozen different types of high-explosive fuses, igniters, and other odds and ends I wanted to experiment with. Which meant I had to come back on the train. The situation in the military is double-edged. With more than 40 per cent Blacks in the Army and nearly that many in the other services, morale, discipline, and efficiency are shockingly low. That makes it enormously easier for us to steal weapons and also to recruit, especially among the career personnel, who resent what has been done to their services. But it also poses a fearful danger in the long run, because the day will come when we must make our move inside the military. With so many Blacks under arms, there is bound to be a bloody shambles. While we are cleaning out the Liberals and reorganizing the services, the country will be virtually defenseless. Well, I guess it has been planned that way.

Chapter Sixteen. April 10, 1993. This is the first time in a week I've had some time to myself and have been able to relax. I'm in a Chicago motel with nothing to do until tomorrow morning, when I'll take a tour of the Evanston Power Project. I flew out here Friday afternoon for two things: the Evanston tour and a delivery of hot money to one of our Chicago units. Bill started his press up Monday night, as soon as we had mixed the chemical additives into the ink, and he kept it going almost continuously until the wee hours of Friday morning, with Carol spelling him twice for a few hours of sleep. He didn't shut down until he had used the last of the banknote paper acquired for the purpose. Katherine and I helped by doing the cutting and by handling the paper at both ends of the press. The work nearly killed all of us, but the Organization wanted the money in a hurry. They really have a pile of it now! I had never dreamed of seeing so much money in my life. Bill printed just over ten million dollars in $10 and $20 bills-more than a ton of crisp, new banknotes. And they look good! I compared one of Bill's new tens with a genuine, new one, and I couldn't tell which was which, except by the serial numbers. Bill really did a professional job all around. Every bill even has a different serial number. This project just shows what can be accomplished with careful planning, dedication, and hard work. Of course, Bill had six months to set things up and practice with dry runs, before I was available to help him with the ink additives and the UV unit. He had all the bugs worked out of the process before beginning his three-and-a-half-day run. I brought 50,000 of the new 20's with me and delivered them to my Chicago contact yesterday. His unit has the job of "laundering" the bills, so that an equivalent amount of genuine currency will be available for the Organization's expenses in this area. That's really a much trickier and more time-consuming operation than theprinting. At the same time I left for here, Katherine was boarding a flight for Boston with $800,000 in her luggage. Later this week we will be making deliveries in Dallas and Atlanta. Getting through the airport security checks with all that hot money is a little ticklish, but as long as they don't do anything other than x-ray our luggage we'll be all right. The only things they seem to be looking for now are bombs and firearms. But just wait until they begin picking up our hot bills all over the country! I had a chance to do some thinking on the plane from Washington. From 35,000 feet one gets a different perspective on things. Seeing all those sprawling suburbs and freeways and factories spread out below makes one realize just how big America is and what an awesomely difficult task we have undertaken. Essentially, what we are doing with our program of strategic sabotage is hastening along somewhat the natural decay of America. We are chipping away at the termite-eaten timbers of the economy, so that the whole structure will collapse a few years sooner-and more catastrophically-than without our efforts. It is depressing to realize what a relatively small influence all our sacrifices are having on the course of events. Consider our counterfeiting for example. We will have to print and distribute in a year's time at least a thousand times as much money as Bill printed last week-at least $10 billion a year- before we will make even a barely measurable effect on the national economy. Americans spend three times that much just on cigarettes. Of course, we have two other money presses running on the West Coast, and we'll be setting up others in the near future. And if I can figure a way to take out the Evanston Project, that'll be a capital loss of nearly $10 billion in one stroke-not to mention the economic damage which will result from the loss of electrical power to industrial plants throughout the Great Lakes region. But we are doing something else which is really more important than our campaign against the System. In the long run, it will be infinitely more important. We are forging the nucleus of a new society, a whole new civilization, which will rise from the ashes of the old. And it is because our new civilization will be based on an entirely different world view than the present one that it can only replace the other in a revolutionary manner. There is no way a society based on Aryan values and an Aryan outlook can evolve peacefully from a society which has succumbed to Jewish spiritual corruption. Thus, our present struggle is unavoidable, completely aside from the fact that it was forced on us by the System and was not of our choosing. Looking at the events of the past 31 months from this viewpoint-that is, considering our constructive task of building a new social nucleus rather than our purely destructive war against the System-it appears to me that our initial strategy of hitting System leaders instead of the general economy was not really as bad a way to start as I had thought. It shaped the character of the battle from the beginning as us vs. the System, rather than us vs. the economy. The System responded repressively to protect itself from our attacks, and this caused it to isolate itself to a certain extent from the public. When we weren't doing much but assassinating Congressmen, Federal judges, secret policemen, and media masters, the people themselves did not feel especially threatened, but they resented the inconveniences caused by all the System's new security measures. If we had hit the economy from the beginning, the System could have more easily painted the struggle as one of us vs. the people, and it would have been easier for the media to convince the public of the necessity of collaborating with the System against a common menace-namely us. So our initial error in strategy has providentially made it easier for us to recruit now, when we are deliberately working to make things as uncomfortable for everyone as we can. And it isn't just the Organization which has been doing a lot of recruiting lately. The Order is also growing at a rate unprecedented in the last 48 of its nearly 68 years of existence. I surreptitiously made the Sign when I met our pickup man here yesterday-as I always do when I meet new Organization members now - and I was pleasantly surprised when he responded in kind. He invited me to be a guest at an induction ceremony last night for new probationary members in the Chicago area. I gladly accepted, and I was astounded to count approximately 60 persons at the ceremony, nearly a third of whom were inductees. That's more than three times the total number of members the Order has in the Washington area. I was nearly as moved by the ceremony as I was by my own induction a year and a half ago. April 14. Problems, problems, problems! Nothing has gone right since I got back from Chicago. Bill can't find any more of the paper he used for the last batch of money, and he asked me to help him improvise. We tried tinting some slightly off-color paper of the same basic texture and composition, but the result was unsatisfactory. Bill will keep looking for another supply of the original paper, while I continue trying different tinting processes. Then there was the delegation from the local Human Relations Council which visited the shop yesterday. Four Blacks and a sick, sick, sick White male, all wearing Council armbands, came into the print shop. They wanted to put a big poster in the shop window- the same kind one sees everywhere now, urging citizens to "help fight racism" by reporting suspicious persons to the political police-and leave a container for donations on the counter. Carol was behind the counter at the time, and she told them, in effect, to go to hell. That, of course, wasn't the right thing to do, under the circumstances. They would have reported us to the political police, if I hadn't heard the commotion and intervened. I came up the basement stairs with what I hoped was a convincingly Jewish expression on my face and went into a "So, vot's goink on here,already?" routine. I laid it on thick-not too thick, I hope -so they would get the message: the shop manager here was himself a member of a minority group, a very special minority group, and could hardly be suspected of harboring any hostility for the Human Relations Councils or their commendable efforts. The head lberal began complaining indignantly to me about Carol's rebuff. I cut him off with an impatient wave of my hand and directed a look of mock shock at Carol. "Of course, of course," I said, "leave your collection box here. It's for a good cause. But no vindow poster-not enough room. I vouldn't even let my cousin Abe put vun of his United Jewish Appeal posters there. Come! I show you where." As I officiously led the delegation toward the door, I ordered Carol back to work in my best Simon Legree manner. "Yes, Mr. Bloom," she said meekly. Out on the sidewalk I overcame my revulsion while I chummily put an arm around the shoulders of the Black spokesman and directed his attention to a store directly across the street. "Ve don't have so many customers here," I explained. "But my good friend Solly Feinstein has many people going in and out. And he has a big vindow. He vill be happy for your poster to be there. You can put it right under where it says 'Sol's Pawn Shop,' and everybody vill see it. And be sure to leave him a donation box- two donation boxes; he has a big store." They all seemed pleased by my friendly suggestion and started across the street. But the White, a sorry-looking specimen with pimples and an imitation Afro, hesitated, turned, and said to me: "Maybe we ought to get that girl's name. Some of the things she said to us sounded definitely racist." "Don't vaste your time on her," I responded brusquely, dismissing his suspicion with a wave. "She is just a dumb shiksa, She talks that way to everybody. I get rid of her soon." When I re-entered the shop Bill, who had overheard the episode from the basement stairs, and Carol were convulsed with: laughter. "It's not really that funny," I admonished them with an effort at sternness. "I had to do something right away, and if my pucker and my phony accent hadn't fooled that crew of sub-humans we'd be in real trouble now." Then I lectured Carol: "We can't afford the luxury of telling these creatures what we think of them. We have a job to do first, and then we will settle with that bunch once and for all. So, let's swallow our pride and play along as long as we have to. Those who don't have our responsibilities can get themselves investigated for racism if they want-and more power to them. " But I could not repress a grin when I saw the poster go into place in the pawn shop window across the street, blotting out most of Sol's display of used cameras and binoculars. He must really have had to bite his tongue! And now all the people who see that particular poster will make the correct mental association between the Council's thought-control program and the people behind it. The last thing to go wrong was Katherine coming down with the flu last night. She was scheduled to take a load of money to Dallas this morning, but she was too sick to go, and it looks like she'll be in bed for another two or three days. Which means that I'll be stuck not only with a trip to Atlanta tomorrow, but I'll also have to make the Dallas delivery. That'll be a whole day wasted on planes and at airports, and I need the time badly for getting ready for the Evanston operation. We want to hit the new nuclear power complex at Evanston during the next six weeks, while they're still guiding tourists through it. After the first of June, when it will be closed to the public permanently, knocking it out will become much more difficult. The Evanston Power Project is an enormous thing: four huge nuclear reactors surrounded by the biggest turbines and generators in the world. And the whole thing sits on concrete pilings a mile out in Lake Michigan, which supplies the cooling water for the reactors' heat exchangers. The Project generates 18,000 megawatts of electrical power-almost 20 billion watts! Incredible! The power is fed into the power grid which supplies the entire Great Lakes region. Before the Evanston Project went into operation two months ago, the whole Midwest was suffering from a severe power shortage-much worse than we have here, which is bad enough. In some areas factories were restricted to operating only two days a week, and there were so many unexpected blackouts in addition that the region was on the verge of a real economic crisis. If we can take out the new power plant, things will be even worse than they were before. In order to keep the lights on in Chicago and Milwaukee, the authorities will have to steal power from as far away as Detroit and Minneapolis, where there is none to spare. All of that part of the country will be hit hard. And it took 10 years to design and build the Evanston Project, so they won't be able to remedy the situation very soon. But the government has thought about the consequences of losing the Evanston Project too, and the security there is pretty formidable. One can't get near the place except by boat or airplane. And there are searchlights, patrol boats, and strings of buoys with nets of cable between them all around it, which makes the approach by water almost out of the question. The shore for miles in either direction is fenced off, and there are a number of military radar and anti-aircraft installations behind the fence, making any attempt to crash an airplane loaded with explosives into the plant very unlikely to succeed. It seems to me that about the only way we could mount an attack on the place by conventional means would be to sneak some heavy mortars within range, somewhere near the shore where there is a possibility for concealment. But, to my knowledge, we don't have that kind of weaponry available at the moment. Anyway, the really vital parts of the power station are in such massive buildings that I doubt a mortar attack could inflict more than superficial damage. So, Revolutionary Command asked me to tour the place and come up with some unconventional ideas-which I have done, but there are still several tough problems to be solved. My visit there last Monday gave me a pretty good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the security arrangements. Some of the weaknesses are really quite astounding. Most astounding of all is the government's decision to let tourists into the place, even temporarily. The reason for that decision, I am sure, is the big fuss the anti-nuclear crazies have been making about the plant. The government feels obligated to show the public all the safety features which have been built into it. When I signed up for the tour, I deliberately loaded myself down with all sorts of paraphernalia, just to see what I could get into the plant. I carried an attach_ case, a camera, and an umbrella, and I filled my pockets with coins, keys, and mechanical pencils. On the ferry boat which takes tourists out to the plant there is very little security. They merely made me open my attach_ case for a cursory inspection. But when I got into the guard station at the plant itself, they divested me of my case, camera, and umbrella. Then I had to walk through a metal detector, which picked up all the metal junk in my pockets. I emptied my pockets for the guards, but then they handed the stuff back to me. They didn't look closely at any of it. So, one can at least sneak an incendiary pencil in. What really interested me, though, was that one old gentleman in my group was carrying a cane with a metal head, and the guards let him keep it during the tour. In essence, my idea is this: Since there's no way a single tourist can sneak in enough explosive material to wreck the place-nor any way he can position the small amount he could sneak in so it would be really effective, like punching a hole in one of the reactor pressure vessels, we may as well forget about explosives. Instead, we'll try to contaminate the plant with radioactive material, so that it can't be used. What makes this idea feasible is that we have a source, inside the Organization, for certain radioactive materials. He's a chemistry professor at a university in Florida, and he uses the materials in his research. We can easily pack enough of a really hot and nasty radionuclide-something with a half-life of a year or so-into a cane or a crutch, together with a small explosive charge for dispersing it, to make the entire Evanston Power Project uninhabitable. The plant won't be damaged physically, but they'll have to shut it down. Decontamination will be such an enormous task that the plant may very well stay closed permanently. Unfortunately, this will be a suicide mission. Whoever carries the radioactive material into the plant will already have been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation before he gets to the plant gate with it. There's just no practical way to provide for any shielding. The biggest worry is the radiation detectors which are all over the plant. If one of those gets a whiff of our man before he's ready to do his thing, it could get sticky. I noticed, however, no detectors in the entrance station of the plant, where the guards check the incoming tourists. There are several in the huge turbine-and-generator room, where the tourists are taken, and there is one beside the exit gate used by the tourists- presumably to guard against the unlikely event of a visitor somehow pocketing a piece of nuclear fuel and trying to sneak it out. But it seems not to have occurred to them that someone might try to sneak radioactive material into the plant. I remember pretty well where all the detectors are, and I'll have to consult with our man in Florida on the likelihood of one of them picking up something at a given distance from the material he will supply us. If an alarm goes off after our carrier is in the plant but before he gets to the generator room, he'll just have to make a run for it. But we'll try to design our gadget so as to give him the best possible chance. The whole plan is pretty scary, but it has one big advantage: the psychological impact on the public. People are almost superstitious in their fear of nuclear radiation. The anti-nuclear lobby will have a field day with it. It will catch people's imagination to a far greater extent than any ordinary bombing or mortar attack. It will horrify many people-and it will knock more of them off the fence. I must confess that I'm glad at this point that my probationary period still has 11 months to run and that I won't be asked to volunteer for this particular mission.

Gravitation, Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, Chapters 31 to 35

The Turner Diaries, Chapter 15 ==================== Chapter Fifteen. March 28, 1993. I'm finally back in the swing of things now. Over the weekend Katherine answered many questions for me and gave me the details, especially about local developments, which I failed to get from Henry Friday. While I was locked up the work on our communications equipment had to go on, of course, and now there are two other well-qualified people in the area handling that task. But there's still plenty of technical work left for me. Bill is a fine mechanical craftsman and gunsmith, but he can't handle the ordnance jobs that require chemical or electronic techniques. He gave me a long list of requests for special devices which came into our unit while I was in prison and which he had been obliged to put aside. We went over the list carefully last night and decided which items are most important for the current needs of the Organization. I then made up my own list of supplies and equipment needed to begin work. The top-priority items on Bill's list of requests are radio- controlled detonators and time-delay detonators and igniters. The Organization has been improvising in the latter category-and getting too high a percentage of misfires. We want a time-delay device which is adjustable from a few minutes to a day or more and which is 100 per cent certain. Another category of items requested is disguised bombs and incendiary devices. It is now just about impossible to get into any government or media facility without walking through a metal- detector, and all packages and mail are routinely scanned by x-ray. This will require some cleverness, but I already have a few ideas. And then there is Bill's own project, on which he needs some technical assistance: counterfeiting! The Organization is already successfully printing money on a fairly large scale on the West Coast, Bill said, and they want him to begin doing the same thing here. I understand now why the economic status of the Organization seems to have improved so much in the last year! Actually, since we switched to large-scale actions we've begun tapping some new sources of contributions-mostly fat cats buying "insurance," I suspect-but we are apparently still finding it useful to print some of our own money. Whatever genius is running our West Coast counterfeiting operation made up a very thorough set of instructions, which Bill showed me. The guy must have worked for the Secret Service or the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He really seems to know his business. (Note to the reader: The "Bureau of Engraving and Printing" was the government agency which produced paper money in the United States, and the "Secret Service" was a police agency which combatted counterfeiting, among other things. As we know, counterfeiting was later used by the Organization not only to supply its units with funds but also to disrupt the general economy. In the last days of the Great Revolution, the Organization was dumping such huge quantities of counterfeit money that the government, in desperation, outlawed all paper money, requiring all monetary transactions to take place either in coin or by check. This move played havoc with public morale and was one of the factors leading to the final success of the Revolution.) Bill has already finished setting up nearly everything; he has a really fine shop for precision printing. He just needs help with the fluorescence problem. The instructions tell him what chemical additives to put in his ink, but not where to get them. And he is not sure about how to make and use an ultraviolet inspection unit for checking the finished product. That won't be hard. Our new working and living arrangement is radically different from the one we had before. Instead of sneaking around "underground," we are right out in the open now. There's a neon sign in the window of the printing shop, and it's listed in the Yellow Pages. During the day the shop is "open for business," with Carol behind the counter, but Bill keeps his prices so high that just enough work to maintain appearances comes in. His real work takes place after hours, usually in the basement, where the armory is. The four of us live above the shop, like we did over the old place, but we don't have to keep the windows blacked out. And Bill's pickup truck stays parked right on the street in front. So far as the world is concerned, we are just two young couples in the printing business together. The trick, of course, was in establishing false identities that would stand up to System scrutiny, but the Organization has developed an admirable degree of expertise along that line. We all have Social Security cards, and two of us have driver's licenses. The cards and licenses are genuine (I have heard some unpleasant stories about how the Organization obtained them), so we can open bank accounts, pay taxes, and do other things like anyone else. I just have to remember that my new name is-ugh!- "David J. Bloom." I am really being ribbed about that. Fortunately, the photograph on the driver's license is indistinct enough to pass for me, as long as I keep my hair dyed. The Organization had no choice about establishing new identities for all of us who are underground. A person without a documented identity simply can't function in this society any longer. One can't buy groceries or even ride a bus without showing either a driver's license or one of the new identity cards the government has begun issuing. It's still possible to get by with a fake in most cases, but the computerized system will be completed in another few months, and then fakes will automatically be detected. So the Organization decided to do it right and give us "genuine" credentials, even though that's a slow and difficult job. A few special units handle that task with cold-blooded ruthlessness, but the demand for new credentials still far exceeds the supply. It also appears that the System has become even more ruthless in its campaign against us. A number of our people-perhaps as many as fifty for the whole country-have been murdered by professional killers in the last four months. It's hard to fix the exact total, because some we suspect have been killed have just disappeared, and no body has been found. When our people first began to disappear or to be found floating in the river with their hands tied behind their backs and six or seven bullet holes in their heads, there was a widespread assumption among the Organization rank and file that these killings were internal disciplinary actions by the Organization itself. In fact, there was a period last fall when we were losing more members because of disciplinary executions than anything else. That was a time when morale was very low, and it was necessary to use extreme methods to convince waverers to remain steadfast in their obligations to the Organization. But it was immediately apparent to Revolutionary Command - and it soon became apparent to everyone else-that a new element had entered the picture. From our contacts inside one of the Federal police agencies we learned that our people are being killed by two groups: a special Israeli assassination squad and an assortment of Mafia "hit men" under contract to the government of Israel. Where both these groups are concerned, U.S. police have been given a "hands off" order by the FBI. (Note to the reader: The "Mafia" was a criminal confederation, composed primarily of Italians and Sicilians but usually masterminded by Jews, which flourished in the United States in the eight decades prior to the Great Revolution. There were several half-hearted governmental efforts to stamp out the Mafia during this period, but the unrestricted capitalism then flourishing provided ideal conditions for large-scale, organized crime and its concomitant political corruption. The Mafia remained in existence until virtually all its members-more than 8,000 men-were rounded up and executed in a single, massive operation by the Organization during the mopping- up period which followed the Revolution.)All the victims so far have been among our "legals." Apparently someone in the FBI gives the names of persons suspected of being members of the Organization but not yet under arrest to someone in the Israeli embassy, and they take it from there. We have made some reprisals-in New Orleans, for example. After two of our "legals," one a prominent attorney there, were murdered Mafia-style about six weeks ago, we mined the nightclub which served as the local Mafia hangout. When the bombs went off and the place burst into flames during a birthday celebration for one of their "underbosses," the fleeing patrons were met with merciless hails of machine-gun fire from our people, who were stationed on rooftops across from the only two exits. More than 400 persons lost their lives there that night, including approximately 60 members of the Mafia. But this new threat still remains very much with us, and it has severely damaged the morale of those of our members and partisans who are exposed to it-namely those who, by retaining their status as law-abiding citizens and operating under their own identities, do not enjoy the anonymity of us in the underground. It is clear that we will soon have to move against the source of the threat. April 2. Supply problem solved-at least temporarily. It required another one of those stickup operations which I really detest. I wasn't as nervous this time as when Henry and I pulled our first one-that seems half a lifetime ago-but I still didn't like it. Bill and I broke our list of needed items up into three categories, according to their source. About two-thirds of the chemical items we needed were not readily available on the general-consumer market and would have to come from a chemical supply house. Then, I wanted at least 100 wristwatches for timing devices, and they would cost us too much if we simply purchased them. Finally, there were a number of electronic and electrical components, some items of general hardware, and a few readily available chemicals, all of which could be purchased without difficulty and within the resources of our budget. I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday gathering up the items in the last category. The chemical problem was also solved Wednesday. That had been a worry, because suppliers of laboratory and industrial chemicals are now required to check out all new customers with the political police, just as are suppliers of explosives. I'd just as soon avoid that sort of scrutiny. But I checked with WFC and a found that one of our "legals" in Silver Spring has a small electroplating shop and could order what I need from his regular supplier. I'll pick the stuff up from him Monday. But the watches! I knew exactly what I wanted for our timers, and I wanted enough of the same style so that the timers could be standardized, both for efficiency in building them and precisely known behavior in operation. So Katherine and I robbed a warehouse in northeast D.C. yesterday and got 200 of them. It took two days of telephoning just to find the watches I was looking for. Then they had to be sent down to the Washington warehouse from Philadelphia. I told the man in Washington I was in a big hurry for them and would send someone out right away with a certified check for $12,000 to pick them up. He said they would be waiting for me in the front office. And they were. I wanted Bill to go with me, but he has been tied down with work at the shop all week. And Katherine really wanted to go. The girl has a wild streak in her that someone who doesn't know her well would never suspect. First, one of Katherine's makeup jobs, to protect my "David Bloom" identity and her own. Identity under identity under identity-I've almost forgotten who Earl Turner is or what he actually looks like! Then we had to swipe a vehicle. That only took a few minutes, and we followed the usual procedure: Park the pickup in a big shopping center, walk to the other side of the parking lot, find a car which is unlocked, and get in. I used a small bolt-cutter to cut the armored cable to the ignition switch under the dashboard, and then it was a matter of only a few seconds to find the right wires in the cable and attach clip leads. I had hoped there would be no violence at the warehouse, but my wish was not to be granted. We presented ourselves to the manager and asked for our package. He asked for the certified l check. "I have it," I said, "and I'll give it to you as soon as I check to see that the watches are the ones I ordered." My plan was to take the watches and just walk out the door, leaving the manager yelling for his check. But when the man came back with our package, two husky warehouse workers came with him, and one took up a position between us and the door. They were taking no chances. I opened the package, checked the contents, and drew my pistol. Katherine also drew her gun, and she waved the man near the door away. But then the door would not open when she tried it! She turned her gun on the worker and he quickly explained: "They have to push the buzzer in the office to unlock the door." I whirled back toward the manager and snarled at him, "Get this door open now, or I'll pay you for these watches with hot lead!" But he nimbly ducked out another doorway, from the office into the storage area, and slammed a heavy metal door behind him before I could react. I then ordered the female clerk at the desk to push the buzzer for the door. She, however, continued to sit as rigidly as a statue, her mouth wide open in an expression of horror. Beginning to feel desperate, I decided to shoot the lock off the door. It took four shots to do it, partly because my nervous haste spoiled my aim. We ran to the car, but the warehouse manager was already there. The bastard was letting the air out of our tires! I slammed the barrel of my revolver down on his head and sent him sprawling in the gravel. Fortunately, he had only partially deflated one tire, and the car could still be driven. Katherine and I wasted no more time getting away from there. What a life! It wasn't until this afternoon, when I had finished assembling and testing the first timer, that I was convinced that the fancy watches I wanted were worth the hassle it took to get them. The new timer works perfectly; it makes a positive, low-resistance contact every time, and I am sure it will reduce our percentage of misfires to practically zero. I also got Bill's UV inspection unit working for him, and he will be ready to print his first greenbacks as soon as I pick up his ink additives Monday. His product won't be perfect, but it should be close enough. In particular, it should pass all the standard tests used in banks to spot counterfeit bills. They'll have to take it to a lab to tell it's phony. And I finished designing three different bomb mechanisms that should pass an X-ray examination without arousing suspicion. One of them fits into an umbrella handle-batteries, timer, and all. The main shaft of the umbrella can be filled with thermite if one wants an incendiary device, or the handle can be detached and used as a detonator. Another timer-detonator combination will be built into a pocket transistor radio (that one can also be fired by a tone-coded radio signal), and the third will be an electric wristwatch, with the detonator and booster molded into the wrist band and fired by the watch's built-in battery. In each case, of course, the bulk explosives must be brought into an area separately, but they can be disguised in many different ways-cast like plaster, for example, into the shape of any familiar object, even painted the right color.

Chapters 26 to 30 of Gravitation. Chapter 26 Stellar Pulsations Chapter 27 Idealized Cosmologies Chapter 28 Evolution of The Universe to its Present State Chapter 29 Present and Future Evolution of The Universe Chapter 30 Anisotropic and Inhomogeneous Cosmologies

Gravitation, Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, Chapters 21-25 Some of the most difficult chapters, including embedding of four space into three space.

======== Translated from the German. Written to Celebrate 100 years since the battle of Leipzig, and 25 years of the rule of Kaiser William the second, Germany under Kaiser William II was published just months before WW1. It includes chapters on the Army and the Navy. ======== Fourth book. The German Wehrmacht. The Army. From Von Bernhardi, general of the cavalry z. D. Geographical position and economic development of Germany. The fate of Germany is largely determined by its geographic location. In the east the flood of the Slavic peoples surges against its open border. In the north of the Baltic Sea is the Scandinavian peninsula, the North Sea England. The exits to the ocean are ruled by foreign peoples. In the west the enemy France, in the northwest Holland and Belgium border the German Reich; in the south it is separated from the Mediterranean by high mountain ranges and in the south-east it joins Austria-Hungary, which in turn is oppressed by the South Slavic peoples who at the same time live in large numbers within its borders. As long as there has been a real Germany since the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, the German people have continued to fight in various directions in order to defend themselves against enemy attacks and to expand their borders. This is how today's German Empire came into being amidst the blows of the sword and the turmoil of battle, after heavy defeats and brilliant victories; but even today it is influenced by its geographical position. When Kaiser Wilhelm the second ascended the throne, however, Bismarck's statecraft had succeeded in substantially mitigating the dangers it opposed. Germany was united with Austria and Italy by an alliance aimed at joint defense in the event of an enemy attack, and there was an agreement with Russia under which both states assured each other of neutrality if one of them were attacked. At the same time relations with England were friendly. It was thus possible to temporarily isolate France. However, this did not remove the deep national differences between Germans and Slavs. Russia's distrust of German politics had at times assumed dubious forms, and only too soon did the opposition between the two empires find its political expression. In any case, it was clear that Germany's position of power rested primarily on its military strength, which made it valuable to its allies and terrible to its enemies. At the same time, the development of the German people in cultural and economic terms had taken a powerful upswing since the Wars of Unification and justified the proud endeavor not only to maintain the position of power that had been achieved, but also to gain an expanded sphere of influence and, with it, increasing world renown. This striving became a necessity after the foundations of a colonial policy had been laid, and the rapid population growth suggested the desire to gain settlement areas and to further increase exports in order to create employment opportunities for the growing masses; it pointed out to sea and showed the need for strong armaments at sea to protect trade and colonial activity. Army development, the main task of the state. From the beginning of the government of Wilhelm the second, two enormous tasks arose: the expansion of the army to maintain the position within Europe and the construction of a fleet to assert the necessary world power aspirations. Both tasks complemented each other. World politics was inconceivable without strong naval armament; but on the other hand even the strongest navy would have to be unsuccessful if the opponents of Germany succeeded in wrestling it in the country and robbing it of its European position of power. So the most important task of the state was the development of the army, which would ensure the superiority of Germany under all circumstances. At first the emperor found little understanding for these lines of thought among the people. The realization that Germany needed a navy only gradually broke through, and the people's representatives put up stubborn resistance to the expansion of the land army, with complete political ineptitude and mundane mischief. The struggle against the views of the Reichstag marked the gradual development of the army during almost the entire reign of Wilhelm the second. Later, the high demands for sea armament were often disadvantageous to her, and sometimes it seemed as though there was a lack of understanding for the fact that a sufficiently strong land army formed the necessary basis for all political activity, but especially for Germany's overseas policy. Army submission 1890. When Kaiser Wilhelm the second took office, the army numbered 468,409 men, excluding officers, civil servants, doctors and one-year volunteers. It was divided into 15 army corps and 2 Bavarian corps and consisted of 534 infantry battalions, 465 squadrons, 364 batteries, 31 foot artillery, 19 engineers, 5 railway and 18 and a third train battalions. In the spring of 1888, when a war seemed imminent, compulsory service in the Landwehr was extended to the age of 39 and the army was strengthened by around 700,000 men. But these conditions in no way corresponded to the principle of general conscription and justice. Numerous young men fit for duty could not be employed, in the event of war the old men had to be led against the enemy, while many young men had to be trained. The crews drafted as substitute reservists only served ten weeks, so they enjoyed a substantial preferential treatment. These were untenable conditions. An army reinforcement of around 80,000 men was therefore planned, to be brought in during the spring of 1890. Prince Bismarck declared himself ready to represent such a proposal before the Reichstag and to enforce it. Some changes had been made earlier. The sixteenth and seventeenth Corps were formed from excess troops; the field artillery was subordinated to the general commands after the general inspection was abolished; a brigade of two regiments was formed from the 4 railway battalions. The artillery training school was separated into the field and the foot artillery training schools; two cavalry inspections were established. In the meantime, however, a profound contradiction had developed between the Kaiser and the Reich Chancellor, which led to Bismarck's resignation on March 18 and his leaving Berlin immediately afterwards. His successor, General von Caprivi believed that he would not be able to push through the planned military bill with the existing composition of the Reichstag. It was therefore limited to the essentials and reduced to a reinforcement of the army by 18,574 men. According to the law of July 15, the army was to have 468,983 men and 538 battalions of infantry, 465 squadrons, and 434 batteries by the end of the existing septnate (March 31, 1894), 31 foot artillery, 20 engineer, 5 railway and 21 train battalions would exist. This of course did not fulfill the original purpose of the bill, and the political situation soon developed in such a way that further reinforcement of the army seemed absolutely necessary in the interests of national defense. Army submission 1892. Two years of service. The treaty with Russia, which ensured neutrality in the event of an enemy attack against us, had expired in 1890. It was not renewed on the German side. In Russia, with which strong tensions had already arisen, this aroused a deep distrust of German politics and opened the way for a Russian-French alliance. The political rapprochement between the two states took place very soon. In July 1891 a French squadron arrived in Kronstadt and was greeted with lavish celebrations, and in the autumn of 1892 the conclusion of a Russian-French treaty was announced. This gave rise to the possibility of war on two fronts, which made significantly increased armaments an absolute necessity. However, the government did not believe that it would be able to enforce this by maintaining the three-year period of service at the Reichstag; it was therefore decided, under the pressure of circumstances, to transition to two years of service at least for foot troops and field artillery. For this, the strength of the peace presence should be increased by more than 80,000 men, meaning increased to 492,000 common, the artillery increased significantly and some reinforcements were also planned for the cavalry, the engineers and the transport troops. Cadet corps, non-commissioned officers 'and non-commissioned officers' pre-schools should expand. Target practice funds were increased and funds were made available for the training of officers on leave of absence in the field and for foot artillery. However, the bill was rejected by the Reichstag, although the army administration had tried to arrange everything as cheaply as possible. The newly elected then accepted it with a small majority, but not without having made considerable compromises. On August 3, 1893, it became law. The increase of the cavalry had been refused, an engineer battalion was canceled, the number of men was fixed at only 479,229. The posts of officers, medical officers, civil servants and NCOs were to be subject to the determination of the Reich budget. The exercises in the reserve were discontinued in order to prevent the training staff from becoming overburdened. From now on the army was to consist of 538 battalions of infantry and 173 similar half battalions, which were to be supplemented to form whole battalions in the event of war, 465 squadrons, 494 field batteries, 37 foot artillery, 23 engineer, 7 railroad and 21 train battalions. The cavalry and mounted artillery men, who remained with the flag for three years, were only to belong to the Landwehr's first contingent for three years. The law was to be valid until March 31, 1899. This marked the transition from the septnate to the quinquennate. The duration of the determination was made the same as that of the legislative periods of the Reichstag. The new law did not overload the people. In spite of the fact that 97,028 men were transferred to the Landsturm in 1893 and 80,352 to the reserve, there were still 8,350 men, and in 1894 even 14,022 fully capable men remained as surplus. The expenditures for the army and the navy after the implementation of the army bill amounted to 13.8 marks per head of population, compared to 18.8 marks in France. In the following years only minor changes occurred. The foot artillery was divided into two inspections and four brigades in 1895. In the same year the Guard, first and fifteenth Corps rider detachments formed from charges of the cavalry, in 1896 one with the second Bavarian Corps. At the train two stringing departments (heavy horses) were set up for the foot artillery, as two of which had existed on a trial basis since 1891. On April 1, 1897, 86 full battalions were formed from the 173 half battalions, which were generally formed into regiments of 2 battalions and brigades of 2 regiments. These brigades were usually attached to the corps in question as the fifth. On the other hand, this measure, which made training easier, had the disadvantage that the framework available for accommodating the mobilization teams was considerably reduced. In the event of mobilization, this made it necessary to recruit more troops, but it could not be avoided. In 1897 and 1898 the independent rider detachments, now referred to as hunters on horseback, were increased by three and were given the strength of squadrons. In 1897 three new clothing departments were set up. In 1898 the position of General Inspector of the Cavalry was created and the number of inspectors increased to four. At the end of 1898 the army consisted of 624 battalions of infantry, 472 squadrons, 448 mobile and 46 mounted batteries, 37 foot artillery and 23 pioneer, 7 railroad battalions with an operations division, a telegraph test company, 2 airship divisions and 21 train battalions with 7 clothing departments. The airship department in Prussia had become an independent unit in 1895; the other belonged to the Bavarian army. The total strength, excluding 9,000 one-year volunteers, was 23,176 officers, 557,436 men, 98,038 horses and 2,542 artillery pieces. At the same time there were 934,360 reservists, 759,240 for the Landwehr, 759,240 for the first and 751,500 for the second, for a total of 2,495,100 men, who gradually had to reach 3,246,000 as a result of the reinforcement of the army. The further development of the army took place amid continued struggles with the Reichstag, which, guided by party interests and electoral considerations, pettily nagged at the proposals of the government without understanding the major political questions, which for its part believed that it was faced with a negative attitude of the people's representatives in having to be content with temporary and half measures. The great demands that had to be made for the expansion of the fleet naturally had a restrictive influence on the willingness of the Reichstag to approve the expenditures for the army. Army template 1898. As the current quinquennat neared its end, very important permits for the fleet had been made in 1897 and 1898. They seemed necessary as Germany was drawn ever deeper into overseas politics through the lease of Kiautschou and its colonial aspirations. It was also evident that the naval law that was enacted at the time would not end the expansion of the navy. It is true that the government declared in January 1899 that an extension of the enacted naval law was not being considered for the time being: after all, it is reasonable to assume that consideration for the construction of the navy had a major influence on the new demands for the army. The government demanded an increase in army strength by 23,277 men, mainly to increase the budget of the infantry, a strong increase in artillery and some new formations of the other weapons, especially the transport troops. She declared her readiness to keep the two-year period of service, if the training personnel were constantly able to cope with the increased demands and the establishment of large training areas was accelerated, and at the same time called for a change in the organization of the field artillery, which should now be directly subordinate to the divisions in peacetime. Three new army corps were also to be formed; one each in Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria. The Reichstag approved the main points of the bill, but cut 7,000 men of the required strength, approved the required 10 squadrons only in the form of detachments of mounted hunters without regimental association and looked away from an increase in the number of NCOs. It was expected that they could be replaced by teams who would volunteer for a third year and who were to remain in the Landwehr's first contingent for only three years. On March 25, 1899, after fierce parliamentary struggles that almost led to the dissolution of the Reichstag, the submission of these resolutions became law, which was to remain in force for five years until March 31, 1904. After that the army should be strong: 625 battalions, which were increased by only one, 482 squadrons, 574 batteries, 38 foot artillery, 26 pioneer, 11 traffic and 23 train battalions, a total of 495,500 common. The propagation should take place until 1903. The eighteenth Corps was established in Frankfurt, the nineteenth in Leipzig, the third Bavarian in Nuremberg. In spite of this, eight army corps retained fifth brigades, while two divisions had no cavalry. On the other hand, 16 machine gun sections were formed over the next few years to be assigned to the army cavalry. From now on, each division received a brigade of two regiments of field artillery, two divisions had to be content with one regiment for the time being. The heavy artillery of the field army to be formed from the foot artillery battalions consisted of howitzer and mortar batteries, four of them and six of them. The clothing departments were increased to ten; the traffic troops were subject to an inspection. In the railway brigade, which consisted of three regiments and two battalions, the operations department of the military railroad was reinforced. Then three telegraph battalions with clothing detachments were formed, with the loss of the telegraph test company; the military telegraph school was converted into a cavalry telegraph school with a clothing department. Furthermore, in 1901 the airship division was reinforced with a battalion of two companies with a clothing department. The teams required for these new formations were obtained through budget reductions. To speed up the mobilization, 1900 district officers and horse prototype inspectors were employed. According to the permits, the army counted 24,374 officers, 81,954 NCOs, 495,500 common, 105,885 horses and 3,126 guns on March 31, 1904, excluding the medical officers, civil servants and one-year volunteers. The annual contingent of recruits had increased to 243,621 men; Nevertheless, 98,992 men had to be transferred to the Landsturm and 82,786 to the reserve, a large number of which could undoubtedly be described as fit for service. The implementation of general conscription was far from being carried out. On the other hand, a naval bill had been approved in 1900, which provided for a planned expansion of the fleet within 16 years up to the strength of 38 ships of the line and 51 cruisers. This required very substantial expenses, and since the expedition to China, 1900-1901, had also devoured significant sums, the government temporarily waived the introduction of a new military bill and contented itself with the expiry of the law on March 31, 1904 for one year to be extended. Law of April 1905. It was not until the winter of 1904–1905, when the Anglo-French colonial agreement of 1905 also made the political rapprochement between the two states known and the Moroccan dispute with France loomed, that a further small reinforcement of the army for a further five years was required, the two-year service period was permanently fixed for the foot troops, the artillery and the train. According to the new law, by the end of the new quinquennate, the strength of the peace presence was to be gradually increased to 505,839 congregations without annual volunteers, but 12,000 economic craftsmen who had to be replaced by civilian craftsmen should not count towards this. In addition, the reorganization of 8 battalions, 9 cavalry regiments, 2 foot artillery, 3 engineer battalions and 1 telegraph battalion was approved. The existing 17 squadrons of fighters on horseback and 6 companies of foot artillery should be taken into account. The approved battalions were provisionally set up in ones or twos in the years up to 1909, but 48 machine gun companies in the latter year, since after the experience of the Russo-Japanese war it seemed desirable to equip the infantry with this weapon as well. In the cavalry, 5 hunter regiments, 1 (Saxon) Uhlan regiment and 2 Bavarian Chevaulegers regiments were established by 1909; the Bavarian cavalry then numbered 12 regiments, of which 5 were only 4 squadrons strong. For this purpose, one (Saxon) hussar regiment and a sixth hunter regiment were set up in 1910. In the field artillery, observation cars were introduced, which caused an increase in the horse budget. In the foot artillery, the training battalion of the shooting school was assigned to 4 companies. In addition, this weapon was formed in such a way that there were 14 regiments of 2 battalions (8, 9 and 10 companies each) and 4 regiments of 3 battalions and 12 companies each; also 1 training battalion and 1 experimental company. The number of clothing departments was increased to 14. The companies were renamed batteries in 1908. Among the pioneers, the guard battalion received one experimental company in 1905, and from 1907–1909 a pioneer command and one battalion were newly set up in the seventeenth, seventh and eighteenth corps. In 1907, a fourth telegraph battalion with a clothing department was formed for the transport forces. All telegraph battalions received radio operator departments up to that year. In Bavaria the telegraph company was reduced to 1 detachment of 2 companies with a radio operator. 1 inspection of the field telegraph was newly formed, to which 2 inspections by the telegraph troops were subordinate. The transport troops were increased by one test company, which was joined in 1907 as the second company by 1 motor vehicle division. Such was also set up in Bavaria. The third Bavarian Train Battalion received a third company. Army strength and crew 1910. On October 1, 1910, the army counted 633 battalions, 510 squadrons, 574 batteries, 40 foot artillery, 29 pioneer, 12 traffic and 23 training battalions, not counting the teaching and experimental troops, etc. Officials, annual volunteers and craftsmen 25,494 officers, 87,350 NCOs, 505,839 common, 114,162 horses, 3,126 artillery pieces and 384 machine guns. How little the army reinforcement brought about by this law corresponded to the actual number of crews available is shown by the fact that although the recruiting contingent in 1910 without 13,145 one-year volunteers was 252,462, in the same year 144,737 men were considered unfit for the Landsturm and 80,262 as future suitable had to be transferred to the replacement reserve. On the other hand, the training was promoted by the fact that the teams on the leave of absence were increasingly drawn on for service. In Prussia alone the number of people called for exercises grew to 375,659 by 1911. The reservists were mostly used to reinforce the companies and to set up missing third battalions, but special formations were formed from the soldiers who were first called up; and from reserve regiments that met at the military training areas towards the end of the quinquennate. The train represented an obvious weakness of the organization. The formations to be set up in the event of mobilization could only be formed by calling on cavalry reservists and had to have the character of improvisations. The number of these formations was in no relation to the strength of the train battalions and the existing train officers. Each train battalion had to set up: provisions, vehicle fleet and field bakery columns, field hospitals, the trains of the field administration authorities; also 1 appropriately composed reserve battalion, 1 replacement battalion and the extensive stage formations. The train battalions also had to help set up the bridge trains and the trains of the transport troops. Accordingly, they had a huge task to cope with, and it seemed quite questionable whether the peace organization provided for this would be sufficient in an emergency. In spite of this, no improvements were sought in this direction, probably for the sake of savings. Development of the political situation from 1905–1911. In the meantime the political situation had not developed favorably. After England had failed to involve Germany in an anti-Russian policy with regard to Manchuria through the Yangtze Agreement, England approached France and concluded the aforementioned agreement with Morocco by ceding Morocco to that country without affecting its rights and showing consideration for German interests. At the same time it offered France the prospect of its active participation in the event of a war over the Moroccan question. In Germany, people initially felt that France had gained against the country. At the same time in the course of the Japanese war and the revolution that broke out as a result, Russia was deeply shaken but on the other hand the lack of sufficient sea defense was clearly evident in relations with England, it was believed that the development of the navy should be taken into account in the first place. This seemed all the more necessary since the Russo-Japanese war had clearly shown under certain circumstances that cooperation between the army and the navy could gain great importance. The consequence of such considerations was initially the scant military bill of 1905; they then found further expression in the naval laws of 1906 and 1908, which not only brought a further increase in the fleet and the transition to the construction of capital ships, but also the lowering of the age of the liners and thus an acceleration of shipbuilding. The resulting costs were very significant, and it therefore seems understandable that the greatest possible restriction was imposed on army expenditures, all the more since the conclusion of the Algeciras Act and the Franco-German Agreement of 1909 ruled out an immediate danger of war. The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had brought the possibility of Russian military intervention close, also passed without a European shock. Thus, in spite of the grave dangers inherent in the European situation, a new military bill was not tabled until the beginning of 1911, which was kept within the most modest limits due to financial concerns. The Army situation in 1911. According to the law passed on this basis on March 27, 1911, the army was to be reinforced by 9,482 men by March 31, 1916. At this point in time it should consist of 634 battalions, 510 squadrons, 592 batteries, 48 foot artillery, 29 engineer, 17 traffic and 23 train battalions. The number of clothing departments should be increased to 24. In addition, 112 machine gun companies were to be set up among the infantry, taking into account the 48 provisional and 5 machine gun divisions that were available from which companies were to be formed. In the future, each infantry brigade should be assigned 1 machine gun company. In the field of field artillery, 2 regiments and 6 Bavarian batteries were to be rebuilt, taking into account 20 mounted batteries, which had to be converted into mobile ones. A new company was to be formed for each of the 21 train battalions, and the organization of the higher train authorities was also to be reorganized. Major changes were planned for the transport forces. As early as April 1, 1911, the inspection was converted into a general inspection of transport and an inspection of military aviation and motor vehicles was established. On October 1st, radio companies were formed from the radio operators' departments; in the case of the airships, two new battalions of two companies were set up with the dissolution of the experimental company; the motor vehicle department was converted into 1 motor vehicle battalion with 3 companies. The railway troops should in future consist of 1 inspection, 2 brigades, 3 regiments to 2 battalions, 1 new battalion, the Bavarian railway battalion and the operations department of the military railroad consist of 3 companies. However, this organization and the other measures provided for by the law were only partially carried out on October 1st. The following remained to be formed: 1 infantry battalion, 4 machine gun companies from 4 similar departments, 38 mobile batteries using 20 mounted, 7 foot artillery battalions, taking into account 3 already existing provisional battalions that had been set up in the spring of 1911, 10 clothing departments, 1 (Bavarian) Pioneer company, 1 railway battalion, 1 telegraph battalion and 22 trainer companies. That was equivalent to a head count of 460 officers, 1,300 non-commissioned officers and 8,068 men. The strength of the army was therefore without medical and veterinary officers, civil servants, annual volunteers and craftsmen: 25,880 officers, 88,292 non-commissioned officers, 507,253 common men, 118,246 horses, 738 machine guns and 3,072 artillery pieces. The Political crisis of 1911. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1911, a serious political crisis had arisen. Since France disregarded the existing treaties with regard to Morocco, Germany sent a warship to Agadir to safeguard its rights and thereby put the jealousy of England in its place, which was now threatening Germany. The German nation unanimously demanded a powerful rejection of the opposing arrogance; the government, however, did not want to allow war over Morocco and concluded an agreement with France, to which, in return for moderate compensation in the French Congo and a few trade guarantees, it left the Sherif Empire and with it a tremendous increase in power. At least the threatened danger of war had led to the realization that the army reinforcement stipulated by the 1911 law did not correspond to the danger of the situation and that a further increase in the armed forces was necessary. Greater reparteeism also seemed desirable for the fleet. So the demands for the army and the navy entered into competition again and had a paralyzing effect in both directions. The naval bill, however, was essentially an organizational change; but another ship of the line was required and the number of submarines to be built was legally stipulated. A considerable increase in staff was the necessary consequence. Army template 1912. In spite of the fact that the resulting financial claims were relatively modest, and in spite of the war threats from superior enemies that had shaped the summer of 1911, the army administration once again believed that it could be satisfied with relatively low demands, which the Minister of War as the Minister of War was adequately labeled. Initially, two new Prussian army corps were to be established from mostly existing troop units and also newly formed: 17 infantry battalions, 6 squadrons, 41 batteries, 4 engineer, 1 traffic and 2 train battalions. The strength of the peace presence would be increased by about 29,000 men by March 31, 1916 and amount to 544,211 men. The number of machine gun companies was to be doubled so that each infantry regiment could have one. The engineer battalions were to receive floodlights, and the traffic troops were to be expanded by setting up an air force. The posts of staff officers and captains were to be increased with consideration for new mobilization formations and 22 new Landwehr inspections were to be established. In the light of the events of 1911, this bill was essentially approved by the Reichstag and passed into law on June 14, 1912. Only 15 Landwehr inspections were canceled, of which there were now 10, and there was the requested increase in staff officers in the small infantry regiments. Some of these permits were issued on October 1, 1912. The twentieth corps was established in Allenstein, the twenty-first in Saarbrücken. In the infantry, 1 regiment of 3 battalions and 11 third battalions were formed; 2 machine gun departments were converted into companies. 2 Prussian field artillery regiments with 6 batteries each were set up, and 6 Bavarian regiments received one new battery each. The foot artillery formed 5 new regiments using the overflowing battalions and batteries. The training battalion of the foot artillery shooting school was expanded to 1 regiment with 2 battalions; 10 clothing departments were reorganized. The pioneers were increased by 3 new battalions and 15 floodlights, the traffic troops by 1 Prussian telegraph battalion and 1 air force. In Bavaria, the telegraph detachment, as well as the aviation and motor vehicle departments, were expanded to include 1 battalion each and 1 air force was set up. Two new Prussian battalions of three companies were set up on the train, and one company that was still missing in Bavaria. At the beginning of 1913 the army consisted of: 647 infantry battalions and 1 training battalion, 109 machine gun companies, 13 machine gun divisions, 510 squadrons, 616 field batteries, 47 foot artillery battalions with 183 batteries and 22 clothing departments, 32 engineer, 18 traffic and 25 train battalions of 3 companies; 1 Prussian and 1 Bavarian infantry and 1 field artillery and 1 foot artillery shooting school. On the other hand, the authorized troops still had to form: 4 battalions and 109 machine gun companies, 6 squadrons (5 Prussian, 1 Bavarian), 17 batteries, 9 foot artillery battalions, 1 engineer battalion, 1 pioneer command, 6 floodlight trains, 1 railway battalion, 1 motor vehicle company, 21 train companies and 2 train commands. A part of these troops was to be formed in 1913 by increasing the number of floodlights to 11. How little it was possible to achieve the implementation of compulsory service is evident from the fact that in 1905 0.849 percent, in 1910, on the other hand, only 0.838 percent of the rapidly growing population were employed. Even bringing the organization of the army to a certain conclusion had not yet been successful. The army corps should normally consist of 2 divisions of 2 infantry, 1 cavalry and 1 artillery brigade, 1 hunter, 1 engineer and 1 train battalion. However, even after the 1912 law was implemented, 6 army corps retained the 5th Infantry Brigades; the 3rd battalions were missing from 18 regiments; 4 Bavarian cavalry regiments the 5th squadrons. There were also too few cavalry regiments and there were only 18 battalions of hunters. Clothing offices were not set up in several corps. There were also some other gaps to be closed. The train remained inadequately organized, and many engineer battalions lacked floodlights. Even a more or less uniform formation of the foot artillery was not achieved. So if in some respects the army had to be described as unfinished at the time, on the other hand it was at the height of modern requirements in terms of equipment and armament. That is still the case today. Armament. The infantry is armed with a Model 98 rifle, which can be considered a major improvement on the 88 rifle. With a caliber of 7.9 mm and an appropriate pack charge, it carries a pointed S-bullet and reaches an initial speed of 885 meters per second, which was achieved partly by the shape and lightness of the bullet, partly by a relatively strong charge and an improved smokeless powder. No rifle of any other army is superior to this weapon. Cavalry and foot artillery are equipped with a carbine of the same construction and almost the same efficiency; the cavalry is also armed with tubular steel lances; the field artillery received a self-loading pistol with a nine-cartridge magazine in the handle and a range of 1500 meters with a length of only 21.7 cm. The introduced machine gun, based on the Maxim system, is designed as a self-loading machine and allows a rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute. In the area of field artillery, after the introduction of the low-smoke powder in 1889, some improvements were made to the existing material. The double fuze was introduced for shrapnel, and soon afterwards the high-explosive grenade, which, however, did not prove very useful; In 1892 an automatic rope brake and the aiming surface were added, which made shooting from hidden positions easier, and in 1893 a new, more powerful shrapnel. In the meantime the question of the rapid-fire gun had become a burning one; it was primarily a matter of eliminating the return flow. This purpose could either be achieved in that the return of the mount was inhibited by a spur or by a device by means of which the tube could slide back on the lower mount when fired and be automatically brought forward again. The latter system was chosen in France, and the former in Germany. An appropriately designed gun, Model 1896, was introduced. The directional means have also been significantly improved. Soon, however, it was felt compelling to go over to the second system, and at the same time as France had stepped forward, to introduce protective shields for the service teams and to change the gun in 1896 in this sense. The new gun, which met all modern requirements, was introduced by 1907. The rate of fire is 20 rounds per minute. In addition to the field cannon, the army wields the field howitzer, a rapid fire gun of 10.5 cm caliber, which is designed to be effective against field-like coverings and targets behind cover with significant penetrating power and a steep angle of incidence. In addition, however, it provides a useful and, because of the larger caliber, very effective flat track section and is therefore versatile. In 1907 this howitzer was modified for return pipe and provided with protective shields. The "Feldhaubitzgeschoß 05" was also introduced with her, which can be used as shrapnel and grenade due to its peculiar detonator design. Each division is now to receive a howitzer division. A further acceleration of the fire was achieved by the unit cartridge, in which the projectile and cartridge are connected. In 1909, observation cars and telephones were introduced to the artillery. The heavy artillery of the field army had already received some new material in 1899. It was made up of howitzer and mortar battalions, those with 24 guns in 4, these with 8 guns in 2 batteries. As a flat-track gun, it carried a 12 cm cannon. The mortar had a caliber of 21 cm, the howitzer was 15 cm. In 1907 it also received very modern recoil guns, the heavy field howitzer 02 (caliber 14.97 cm) and the 10 cm cannon 04. With the introduction of wheel belts, the bedding was eliminated. The two mentioned guns were also used in the siege artillery, which in 1909 received a 13 cm gun instead of the outdated 15 cm cannon. It also carries 15 cm ring cannons, 21 cm and 28 cm mortars and 5 cm rapid fire cannons. The fortress artillery has a wide variety of material, as all cannons that can still be used are used here, which have been discarded elsewhere, including in the navy. Particularly heavy artillery - cannons and howitzers - are used in the coastal artillery, as these must take up combat with the enemy ironclad, so in some cases they must at least have an armor-piercing effect. Anti-balloon guns have also recently been introduced. In terms of artillery, Germany is probably at the forefront of all major military states. Fortress construction. The tremendous development of the artillery also had a decisive influence on fortress construction. Since the mid-1880s, concrete and steel cladding had to be used to protect against the effects of artillery. The profiles were reduced in order to hide the works from view, artillery and infantry positions were separated and finally the large forts were replaced by connected groups of several smaller works in new installations. Only the armored domes for assault guns and observation posts are now on the parapet, those of the combat guns inside the batteries are under the parapet, with howitzers raised above them. In the case of the large fortresses, the defense is completely placed in the fort belt, so city walls are no longer used. It remains to be seen whether the latter measure will prove successful. Only the future can teach us that. In addition, the most varied of views have been authoritative in recent years. Many fortresses have been closed, numerous new works have been built; Only recently has it been possible to introduce a solid principle into the land and coastal fortifications. Military transportation. The military transport system has experienced a tremendous upswing in recent years. The railway network has been expanded according to strategic considerations, and the latest technological inventions have been made available to the army. The main means of sending messages is the electric telegraph, which recently has no longer been tied to lines, but works wirelessly. Radio operators' departments are attached to the higher authorities and the advanced cavalry; You can also keep in touch with the airships by radio. In addition, the line telegraph remains in use, and telephones are also used in the army. Light signals are used under favorable conditions. Motor vehicles are also of great importance for the army, both for passenger transport and for replenishing the needs of the army. Truck trains were constructed for the latter purpose. For a premium they are maintained by industrial and trading companies in peacetime and are available in war. The bicycle and motorcycle are also used in the intelligence service. Aviation has at last experienced an extraordinary development. Either large dirigible airships or flying machines are used. They are mainly used for exploratory purposes, but can also be used to hurl explosive projectiles. The flying machines are monoplane or biplane; the airships are partly constructed according to the rigid principle of Count Zeppelin, partly as semi-rigid, partly as non-rigid Parsevall airships. Each of these systems has its advantages and disadvantages. Recently, airships like flying machines have been equipped with weapons for defense and attack. This development is still in its infancy, but it can already be overlooked that battles will take place in the air and that aviation will play an important role in the wars of the future. Clothing and equipment. Substantial progress has also been made in the clothing and equipment of the troops. Above all, the introduction of gray field uniforms is important in order to ensure that the troops in combat stand out as little as possible from the terrain. Vehicles and artillery have also been given field-gray paint. The men’s luggage and equipment were relieved. The bare weapons were also changed several times. In addition, all units received bicycles for the reporting service; the Infantry and the pioneers were equipped with kitchen wagons, one of which is to be given to each company. A new army saddle was introduced for the cavalry; Furthermore, each regiment now has two light bridge wagons and a telegraph wagon with them, after the cumbersome folding boat wagons that were initially introduced have been abolished. Smaller uniform changes and the introduction of various badges cannot be touched upon here. The room also did not allow the various budget changes, the increase and distribution of ammunition columns, as well as the organization of the authorities and preparations for mobilization to go into more detail. A few essential points should only be briefly pointed out. The number of army inspections had been increased to 7 and that of engineer inspections to 4. The number of district commands gradually increased to 303. Organization of the authorities. Various changes had also occurred within the organization of the War Ministry. The most important one can be described as the establishment of a Feldzeugmeisterei in 1898, which, in place of the general war department, took over the supervision of the procurement, manufacture and administration of the controversial means as well as of the personnel employed in this process, thereby relieving the ministry significantly; This was left with the provision on the introduction of new weapons. The Feldzeugmeisterei was responsible for the inspection of the technical institutes of the infantry and artillery, the artillery depot inspections with 4 artillery depot directorates, the train depot inspection with initially 4, now 2 train directions and the train depots, and finally the inspectors of the weapons and the artillery material. Similar orders were issued in Bavaria and Saxony. The remont system was regulated and expanded throughout the empire; NCO schools and NCO cadet schools were increased. Finally, of particular importance for the entire training was the procurement of large military training areas, 24 of which are currently available in the German Reich; they also serve as artillery firing ranges. The military justice system was completely redesigned. The medical and veterinary system also experienced various fundamental changes. Space forbids going into all these things in more detail. On the other hand, we must at least briefly mention the development of the General Staff, in which, alongside the War Ministry, the entire life of the Army is concentrated as if in a focal point in which the intellectual forces of the Army are trained for practical military activity. In the last 25 years it has undergone a significant expansion, partly due to the new formations, but partly also due to the great changes and new achievements in the war system that characterize the period mentioned, and due to the sometimes great development of the armies of other states. As early as 1889, three senior quartermasters were appointed instead of the quartermaster general, and in 1894 the head of the regional administration was added as the fourth has been. The number of departments was gradually increased - apart from two war history units - to ten. In addition, there was the trigonometric, topographical and cartographical department, which is subordinate to the head of the land survey. To facilitate the deployment, railway commissioners were created and the lines increased to 26. In 1898 the secondary budget was eliminated, and most of the officers belonging to it were transferred to the main budget in order to be able to cover the additional need for general staff officers in the event of mobilization. Since the senior quartermaster positions were also increased, the existence of the general staff in autumn 1912 was as follows: Under the chief of the general staff of the army with 2 adjutants, 6 senior quartermasters, 39 chiefs and 217 other officers of the general staff, 1 chief and 18 officers were assigned to the general staff, 19 officers in the railway department who are not general staff officers, 124 officers who are part of the general staff and 11 who are commanded to take up the country, 10 inactive officers and 22 line commanders. Some of these and other officers belong to the General Staff. Preparatory training for the General Staff takes place at the War Academy, which has also been expanded, but has increasingly lost its character as a free academy and has become a professional General Staff preparatory school. The Saxon and Bavarian General Staff developed in a similar way to the Prussian. If in the foregoing the external growth and organization of the army were described in broad outline, its mode of struggle and intellectual development must now also be examined in order to obtain a more or less accurate picture of the nature of the army. Fighting style and training. The way of combat has undergone profound changes in all weapons, primarily as a result of modern weapons, which have been expressed in numerous new regulations. With the infantry, one appeared as early as autumn 1888, which took modern conditions into account and was replaced by a new one in 1906 after the Manchurian War, which with numerous changes from 1909 is still in force today. The various successive firing regulations from the years 1889, 1893, 1899 and 1905 also tried to take account of the changed weapon conditions, especially after the introduction of the rifle in 1898 and the S ammunition, and to give combat shooting the necessary attention without questioning the careful training in individual shooting. The essence of modern tactics is to reduce losses in relation to the increased performance of firearms by moving the troops within the fire zone only in lines of fire or in many small marching columns that can easily find cover in the terrain. It is therefore deployed from the marching column at an early stage and developed for combat. But of course there must be uniformity of tactical will are preserved in this resolution. One seeks to achieve this through a strictly implemented discipline of the rifle lines and through the fact that not only the lower ranks but also the teams are trained to act independently in the sense of the combat concept and to understand the combat tasks. Any modern tactic that is to promise success must be an individualistic one. The spiritually superior people will therefore always gain a certain superiority, and education in school thus forms the basis of later military training. We should take this into account to a greater extent than it is today. Our regulations expect victory in attack and defense from fighting superiority by fire. Here it seems to me that there is a certain danger to our provisions, for history teaches that offensive victories have generally been achieved in spite of the defender's superiority by fire. Given the equality of weapons, it is quite natural that the defender lying covered and shooting calmly must achieve better results than the agile uncovered attacker. Attack victories are achieved partly through numerical superiority, partly and primarily through moral preponderance and the determined will to win despite all losses. But if the attacking infantry is asked to fight for superiority by fire, then the energy of the attack can be broken. It is all the more correct that our regulations place the greatest emphasis on the cooperation of the artillery with the infantry. A rich tactical development has also taken place in this weapon. The newly introduced guns, propellants, projectiles and aiming devices repeatedly forced new regulations and firing rules to be issued. Furthermore, efforts were made to simplify the tactical forms as much as possible, to improve the shooting method and to make the composition of the batteries as expedient and combat-oriented as possible. In this regard, the elimination of the second squadron for the batteries and the introduction of light ammunition columns, which were directly attached to the troops, were particularly important. The mounted batteries have also recently been formed into 4 guns. Increasing importance was attached to the exploitation of shrapnel and indirect fire; tactically on the interaction with the infantry. The artillery duel as an end in itself faded more and more into the background; the main task was to fight the enemy infantry, which is intended to facilitate the advance of friendly infantry as far as possible. All corresponding improvements and changes are gradually being reflected in the regulations of 1889, 1892, 1899 and 1907, the latter being improved in 1911 as a result of several new introductions, as well as in various shooting regulations. Such were issued in 1890, 1899 and 1907; the latter was partially reworked in 1911. The foot artillery has undergone a similar tactical development, and in 1908 received regulations that are still valid today. It has become the most essential task for heavy artillery in the army, in conjunction with the field artillery, to fight the enemy artillery down and to prepare for the infantry to break into the enemy positions. The agility that it has gradually acquired enables it to cope with this task. Artillery training has also made considerable progress. The first step towards this was the separation of the shooting school into a field and foot artillery shooting school and its gradual expansion. All young officers and all officers suitable to be battery operators are now being trained here; furthermore, training courses for officers on leave of absence have been set up. The frequent change of firing ranges also promotes training, and finally, since 1895, field artillery exercises have been taking place as an introduction to the maneuvers. The cavalry found it hardest to tear itself away from the old, glorious traditions and adapt to the demands of modern combat. The attack is no longer their main task; the focus today is on operational mobility; in combat, however, fighting on foot is completely on an equal footing with actual equestrian combat. This is due to the development of today's weapons system. It remains to be seen whether the cavalry divisions of 24 squadrons and, within their framework, the brigades provided for the case of war are strong enough. On the other hand, their efficiency is significantly increased by the allocation of engineers, mounted artillery and machine guns, as well as by equipping them with the excellent carbine 1898. For a long time the weapon suffered from the three-hit tactic, the unsuccessful attempt to adapt the misunderstood Frederickian tactics to modern conditions, and tactically moved in a dead formalism. The regulations of 1895 brought various practical simplifications, but no fundamental tactical change. The skirmish on foot was not given enough emphasis either, although a number of shooting regulations raised the shooting range significantly. It was not until 1909 that the meeting tactic for equestrian combat was eliminated, replaced by the use of command units on a wing-by-wing basis, and modern regulations were created, which admittedly still have many weaknesses. The training of the cavalry also suffers from the fact that larger exercises of independent cavalry bodies do not take place annually for the whole cavalry, while in war this activity is almost exclusively required. With the striving spirit that animates the weapon, it tries today to strip off the formalism even further and to let the operative element prevail in the leadership, regardless of tradition and personal inclination. The material and equipment are excellent and the riding training is at a high level. It is successfully cultivated at the military riding institute in Hanover and the riding school in Paderborn. Another riding school is to be established in Soltau in 1913. The new riding instruction from 1912 meets the most extensive requirements. Field Service Regulations. In the case of the other auxiliary weapons, too, a development guided by modern standards has taken place. The rules of engagement have been incorporated into the regulations everywhere; however, the provisions that are necessary for other conduct in the field, for march, rest, outpost, reconnaissance, veiling, conduct in front of and in fortresses and more are compiled in the "Field Service Regulations". The regulations issued in this sense in 1887 had to be repeatedly changed and expanded with the gradual development of the army and the numerous new introductions, especially in the artillery, the transport troops, in the airship sector and in the pioneer service, until the currently valid field service regulations finally appeared in the spring of 1908. By simplifying the rules and eliminating everything that is schematic, this has given the personality more room to maneuver and has made purposeful and simple provisions, especially for outposts, reconnaissance, veiling, marching orders, baggage, ammunition columns and trains. A special section contains the rules for the maneuvers, in which the entire training culminates. They strive for a behavior of all parts that is as warlike as possible and, in addition to brigade, division, corps and imperial maneuvers, provide for special exercises in fortress wars, pioneer and intelligence services, etc. as well as for the cavalry. Above all, they encourage and raise the offensive spirit. Lately the main emphasis has been placed on the exercises of large numbers of troops. Strategic military leadership. If numerous far-reaching changes in the military system have taken place in the field of tactics and equipment, the enormous numerical growth of the armies and the many new aids in warfare must also influence strategic military command. Moltke still reckoned that the army could essentially live on the means of the theater of war and therefore did not shy away from putting several army corps on one road in order to create versatile development possibilities and to be able to use large masses in narrow spaces. When he left office in 1888, Count Waldersee took his place, a brilliant soldier who, fully aware of his own abilities, refused to engage in a scientific systematization of strategy, but molded the judgment of his subordinates by constantly changing tasks and procedures everywhere and sought to emphasize what was expedient, which could be different in every situation. It was not until Count Schlieffen, who replaced him in his high position in 1891, that it was decided to develop a certain strategic system for the modern mass armies; he has the undeniable merit of having clarified this in the most varied of directions. Proceeding from the idea that all troops marching on one road would have to march into battle in one day and be fed daily from the rear, he set up the principle with the great depth of march of modern army corps that one should only have one corps on each marching road. At the same time, however, he was anxious to have the will to destroy the enemy in battle the clearest expression. He found the solution to this problem in enclosing the enemy wings while attacking the front. With the perfection of the weapons he believed that there would be an opportunity to save forces in the front in order to strengthen the decision-seeking wing. In all his theoretical and practical war exercises and also as a critic of historical events, he kept this point of view. This conception has gained a foothold in wide circles of the army. Against this, voices are also asserting themselves which, despite all recognition of the truths that Schlieffen taught, warn against the exclusive application of his principles. They point out that simultaneous attack in the front and flank presupposes superiority and thus the weaker army is deprived of the possibility of attacking. Even the victorious encirclement only guaranteed victory if its success could assert itself along the entire line of battle before a decision was made in the front, which apparently would not always be the case on very long fronts. One must therefore have more arrows in one's quiver than just the idea of embracing. Whether these concerns are given a certain justification or not, it is certain that Count Schlieffen significantly promoted the theory of operations and, in a certain sense, created the basis for the further development of modern strategy. Work in the army. In the army itself, free scientific activity suffers from the increased burden of practical service and from the abundance of technical knowledge required. They paralyze the creative power of one's own thought, as it can only result from a deep general education. In spite of this, the spirit of striving forwards, initiative and offensive thought has remained strong and lively in the army and forms the unshakable basis for great future achievements. Perhaps there has never been more work in the army than in the last 25 years, and there is a blessing power in this work itself. The greatest devotion and sacrifice can, however, in politics as on the battlefield only ever replace real power to a certain extent, and so no one who saw clearly could ignore the knowledge that the political situation and the means of power of our presumed opponents in no way corresponded to the development of the army as it was shaped under the pressure of the Reichstag. Change in public opinion. Meanwhile, there had also been a significant shift in public opinion. The course of the Moroccan dispute and the eventual agreement with France in 1911 had profoundly offended the pride of the German people. It was now recognized that the existing means of power were not sufficient to give the states of the hostile Triple Entente force against German policy. Now it was public opinion that returned to general Called for conscription and sharply criticized the army drafts of 1911 and 1912. In this mood the German people found the Balkan crisis of 1912. The collapse of European Turkey and the enormous growth of the Slavic Balkan states showed that in a European war Austria, allied to us, would never be able to use all its forces against Russia, but troops will always have to be left standing on the Balkan border. As a result, the balance of power between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente was completely shifted to the disadvantage of the former, and under the pressure of these relations the government decided not only to strengthen the army, but also to further expand the fortifications, especially on the eastern border. The Army template of 1913. In the spring of 1913, 100 years after Prussia's glorious uprising against the Napoleonic tyranny and in the 25th year of the government of Kaiser Wilhelm the second, a new military bill was introduced and essentially accepted by the Reichstag, which at least to some extent closed the gaps in the army organization and which should make the nation's human resources more subservient to the development of military strength. The new law stipulates that the permits issued in 1911 and 1912, which were to come into force gradually over a number of years, would be carried out as early as October 1, 1913. In addition, 63,000 more recruits are to be hired each year, mainly to increase the budget for all weapons. There are also to be newly formed: In 18 infantry regiments the missing 3rd battalions, cyclist and machine gun companies in the 18 hunter battalions, 6 cavalry regiments and four squadrons still missing in Bavaria, 3 new regiments of foot artillery and 1 Wuerttemberg battalion, 11 engineer battalions, whereby the separation is made possible in field and fortress pioneers, 13 new transport troop battalions, among which 5 aviation and 2 new airship battalions are to be located, finally for the train 1 battalion and 20 companies. New clothing departments for the heavy batteries of the field army are also to be formed. In order to secure the replacement of non-commissioned officers, the non-commissioned officers are to be placed in a much better position, two new non-commissioned officers 'schools are to be created, and the non-commissioned officers' schools and cadet schools are to be strengthened in Prussia and Saxony. Even in peacetime a large number of officers were made available for the reserve formations. In view of the increased need for officers, the cadet schools are to be enlarged and a new war school is to be built. It is necessary to increase the number of civil servants for general and special administrative purposes, administration of justice and pastoral care. The medical facilities and practice areas are to be expanded. In total the increase amounts to 4,000 officers, 15,000 NCOs, 117,000 common and 27,000 horses, and in the future there should be 669 battalions of infantry, 550 squadrons, 633 batteries, 55 foot artillery, 44 pioneer, 31 traffic troop and 26 train battalions with 661 176 common. All of these measures are to be carried out as early as October 1, 1913; only in the case of special weapons will they have to be spread over a number of years. The procurement of war material is also to be accelerated, and Königsberg and Graudenz are to be converted into large arsenals. Significant funds are being made available for the expansion of the air fleet. The exercises of the leave status are increased. The military law of 1913 provides for a generous reinforcement of the army and tries successfully to make up for the omissions of earlier years. At least the guiding idea of the whole proposal, to expand general conscription according to the status of the population, has not yet been fulfilled, because even now a considerable percentage of those fit for military service are still absent from armed service. Above all, the train, whose importance for modern warfare is still underestimated, is not sufficiently reinforced. The overall organization cannot be described as complete either, as the higher formations for numerous excess troops are missing. It will not be possible to avoid reorganization of these in the future, since an excessively large increase in the peace budget during the two-year service period is a double-edged measure in that it increases the percentage of recruits in the war troops too much. Outlook into the future. Thus the law does not form a conclusion to the development of the army, but it does form a sound basis for the further development of the future and a strong and powerful expression of the state's political will to power. To a great extent, contrary to the previous situation, it increases the tactical strength of the army and will have a beneficial effect on the life of the army in the most varied of areas. It is particularly gratifying that the German people have finally convinced themselves of the need to develop military power and will hopefully be ready in the future to provide the means for further armaments. Then we can hope with confidence that the German army, when called to draw the sword for Germany's political will, will fight worthy of its old glory and fight for the German people's future as a world power and the world's first cultural power. Sea power and the navy. By Vice Admiral a. D. Baron von Maltzahn. Introduction and history. Explanation of terms. If they are protected by a sufficiently strong navy, trade and shipping, which connect a state across the ocean with the purchasing and sales markets of its industry, own colonies, capital invested overseas, profitable activities of nationals living there, not least the political reputation that the state has from energetic representation of these overseas relations, will create a position of maritime power. Thus, in the military-political sense, the navy becomes the carrier and representative of the sea power of a state. Without it, all maritime interests would form an element of weakness. For a continental state like the German Reich, of course, the continental position of power protected by the army was

Chapter Fourteen. March 24, 1993. Today I was tried on the charge of Oathbreaking-the most serious offense with which a member of the Order can be charged. It was a harrowing experience, but I knew it was coming, and I am enormously relieved to have it behind me, despite the outcome. All during the months in my prison cell, I agonized over the question: Did I, by failing to kill myself before I was captured, break my Oath to the Order? I must have reviewed in my mind a hundred times the circumstances of my capture and the subsequent events, trying to convince myself that my behavior had been blameless, that I had fallen alive into the hands of my captors through no fault of my own. Today I related the whole sequence of events to a jury of my peers. The summons came this morning, via radio, and I knew immediately what it was for, although I was surprised at the address to which I was ordered to report: one of the newest and largest office buildings in downtown Washington. As an attractive receptionist ushered me into a conference room in a large suite of law offices, my apprehension was mixed with gratitude for the three-day period of recuperation I had been allowed since the breakout. I had just slipped into the robe which I found waiting for me on a coat-rack, when another door opened and eight other robed and hooded figures walked into the room and silently took seats around a large table. The last of the eight had his hood pushed back, and I recognized the familiar features of Major Williams. The proceedings were brisk and bathed in an air of formality. After a little more than an hour of questioning, I was told to wait in a smaller, adjoining room. I waited there for nearly three hours. When the others had finally finished discussing my case and had reached a decision, I was summoned back into the conference room. While I stood at one end of the table, Major Williams, seated at the other end, announced the verdict. His words, to the extent I can remember them, were as follows: "Earl Turner, we have weighed your performance as a member of this Order on two grounds, and we have found you wanting on both. "First, in your conduct immediately prior to the police raid in which you were seized and imprisoned, you gave evidence of a shocking lack of maturity and sound judgment. Your indiscretion in visiting the girl in Georgetown-an act which, although not specifically forbidden, was not within the realm of your assigned duties-led directly to a situation in which you and the members of your unit were placed in extreme jeopardy, and a valuable facility was lost to the Organization. "Because of this failure of judgment on your part, your period as a probationary member of the Order is being extended for six months. Furthermore, your time as a prisoner will not count as a part of your probation. Therefore, you will not be permitted the rite of Union before March of next year, at the earliest. "We find, however, that your conduct prior to the police raid does not constitute a violation of your Oath." I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief upon hearing this last statement. But then Williams continued, with a grimmer note in his voice: "The fact that you were taken alive by the political police and remained alive during nearly a month of interrogation is a far more serious matter. "In swearing your Oath, you consecrated your life to the service of the Order. You undertook to place your duty to the Order ahead of all other things, including the preservation of your life, at all times. You accepted this obligation willingly and with the knowledge that, for the duration of our struggle, it entails a very substantial possibility of your actually having to give up your life in order to avoid breaking your Oath. "And you were specifically warned against falling alive into the hands of the political police and were given the means to avoid this. Yet you did fall into their hands and remained alive. The information they extracted from you seriously hampered the work of the Organization in this area and placed many of your comrades in very grave danger. "We understand, of course, that you did not make a conscious decision to violate your Oath. We have carefully looked into the circumstances of your capture, and we are aware of the interrogation techniques the political police now use against our people. If you were merely a soldier in any other army in the world, you would be held blameless. "But the Order is not like any other army. We have claimed for ourselves the right to decide the fate of all our people and, eventually, to rule the world in accord with our principles. If we are to be worthy of this right, then we must be willing to accept the responsibility which goes with it. "Each day we make decisions and carry out actions which result in the deaths of White persons, many of them innocent of any offense which we consider punishable. We are willing to take the lives of these innocent persons, because a much greater harm will ultimately befall our people if we fail to act now. Our criterion is the ultimate good of our race. We can apply no lesser criterion to ourselves. "Indeed, we must be much sterner with ourselves than with others. We must maintain for ourselves a standard of conduct much higher than we demand of the general public or even of ordinary members of the Organization. In particular, we must never accept the idea, born of the sickness of our era, that a good excuse for nonperformance of a duty is a satisfactory substitute for performance. "For us, there can be no excuses. Either we perform our duty, or we do not. If we do not, we need no excuse; we simply accept the responsibility for failure. And if there is a penalty, we accept that too. The penalty for Oath-breaking is death." The room was perfectly still, but I could hear a buzzing in my ears, and the floor seemed to sway under my feet. I stood in stunned silence until Williams began speaking again, this time in a somewhat softer voice: "The duty of this tribunal is clear, Earl Turner. We must act in your case in such a way that every member of this Order who may, at some time in the future, find himself in circumstances similar to yours during the police raid on your headquarters, will know that death is inevitable if he cannot avoid capture-either an honorable death by his own hand or a less-than-honorable death at the hands of his comrades later. There must be no temptation for him to avoid his duty, in the hope that a 'good excuse' later will preserve his life. "Some of us here today have argued that this consideration- setting a firm example for others - should be the sole determinant of your fate. But others of us have argued that, because you had not yet achieved full membership in this Order at the time in question- because you had not yet participated in the rite of Union- your conduct can be reasonably judged by a different standard than would be applied to someone who had completed his probationary period and achieved Union. "Our decision has not been easy, but now you must hear it and you must abide by it. First, you must satisfactorily complete your extended period of probation. Then, at some time after the end of that period, you will be permitted Union-but only on a conditional basis, something we have never allowed before. The condition will be that you undertake a mission whose successful completion can reasonably be expected to result in your death. "Unfortunately, we are all too often presented with the painful task of assigning such 'suicide missions' to our members, when we can find no other way to achieve a necessary goal. In your case, such a mission will serve two ends. "If you complete it successfully, the act of completion will remove the condition from your Union. Then, even though you die, you will continue to live in us and in our successors for as long as our Order endures, just as with any other member who achieves Union and then loses his life. And if, by some chance, you should survive your mission, you may then take your place in our ranks with no stain on your record. Do you understand everything I have said?" I nodded, and answered: "Yes, I understand, and I accept your judgment without reservation. It is just and proper. I have never expected to survive the struggle in which we are now engaged, and I am grateful that I will be allowed to make a further contribution to it. I am also grateful that the prospect of Union remains before me." March 25. Today Henry came over, and he, Bill, and I had a long talk. Henry is heading for the West Coast tomorrow, and he wanted to help Bill fill me in on the developments of the past year before he leaves. Apparently he will be engaged in training new recruits and handling some of the Organization's other internal functions in the Los Angeles area, where we are especially strong. When he greeted me he showed me the Sign, and I knew that he had also become a member of the Order. In essence, what I learned today is what I had already concluded in my prison cell: the Organization has shifted the main thrust of its attacks from tactical, personal targets to strategic, economic targets. We are no longer trying to destroy the System directly, but are now concentrating on undermining the general public's support for the System. I have felt for a long time that this change is necessary. Apparently two things forced Revolutionary Command to the same conclusion: the fact that we were not recruiting enough new members to make up our losses in the war of attrition against the System, and the fact that neither our blows against the System nor the System's increasingly repressive responses to those blows were having any really decisive effect on the public's attitude toward the System. The first factor was mandatory. We simply could not keep up our level of activity against the System as our casualties steadily mounted, even if we wanted to. Henry estimated that the total number of our front-line combat troops for the whole country- those ready and able to use knife, gun, or bomb against the System-had declined to a low point of about 400 persons last summer. Our front-line troops make up only about a fourth of the Organization's membership, and they have been suffering a greatly disproportionate casualty rate. So, the Organization was forced to de-escalate the level of the war temporarily, while we still preserved a strong enough nucleus for another approach. Our whole strategy against the System was failing. It was failing because the great bulk of White Americans were not responding to the situation in the way we had hoped they would. That is, we had counted on a positive, imitative response to our "propaganda of the deed," but it was not forthcoming. We had hoped that when we set the example of resisting the System's tyranny, others would resist too. We had hoped that by making dramatic strikes against top System personalities and important System facilities, we would inspire Americans everywhere to initiate similar actions of their own. But, for the most part, the bastards just sat on their asses. Sure, a dozen or so synagogues were burned, and there was an overall rise in the level of politically motivated violence, but it was generally misdirected and ineffective. Without organization such activities have little value, unless they are very widespread and can be sustained over a long period. And the System's response to the Organization irritated many people and caused a lot of grumbling, but it didn't even come close to provoking a rebellion. Tyranny, we have discovered, just isn't all that unpopular among the American people. What is really precious to the average American is not his freedom or his honor or the future of his race, but his pay check. He complained when the System began busing his kids to Black schools 20 years ago, but he was allowed to keep his station wagon and his fiberglass speedboat, so he didn't fight. He complained when they took away his guns five years ago, but he still had his color TV and his backyard barbeque, so he didn't fight. And he complains today when the Blacks rape his women at will and the System makes him show an identity pass to buy groceries or pick up his laundry, but he still has a full belly most of the time, so he won't fight. He hasn't an idea in his head that wasn't put there by his TV set. He desperately wants to be "well adjusted" and to do and think and say exactly what he thinks is expected of him. He has become, in short, just what the System has been trying to make of him these past 50 years or so: a mass-man; a member of the great, brainwashed proletariat; a herd animal; a true democrat. That, unfortunately, is our average White American. We can wish that it weren't so, but it is. The plain, horrible truth is that we have been trying to evoke a heroic spirit of idealism which just isn't there any more. It has been washed right out of 99 per cent of our people by the flood of Jewish-materialist propaganda in which they have been submerged practically all their lives. As for the last one per cent, there are various reasons why they aren't doing us much good. Some, of course, are too ornery to work within the confines of the Organization-or any organized group; they can only "do their own thing," as a number, in fact, are. The others may still have different ideas of their own, or they simply may not have been able to make contact with us since we were forced underground. Eventually we could recruit most of these, but we no longer have the time. What the Organization began doing about six months ago is treating Americans realistically, for the first time-namely, like a herd of cattle. Since they are no longer capable of responding to an idealistic appeal, we began appealing to things they can understand: fear and hunger. We will take the food off their tables and empty their refrigerators. We will rob the System of its principal hold over them. And, when they begin getting hungry, we will make them fear us more than they fear the System. We will treat them exactly the way they deserve to be treated. I don't know why we held back from this approach for so long. We have had the example of decades of guerrilla warfare in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to instruct us. In every case the guerrillas won by making the people fear them, not love them. By publicly torturing to death village leaders who opposed them and by carrying out brutal massacres of entire village populations which refused to feed them, they inspired such terror in neighboring villages that everyone was afraid to refuse them what they asked. We Americans observed all this but failed to apply the lesson to ourselves. We regarded-correctly-all those non-Whites as mere herds of animals and were not surprised that they behaved as they did. But we regarded ourselves-incorrectly- as something better. There was a time when we were better-and we are fighting to insure that there will be such a time again-but for now we are merely a herd, being manipulated through our basest instincts by a pack of clever aliens. We have sunk to the point where we no longer hate our oppressors or try to fight them; we merely fear them and attempt to curry favor with them. So be it. We will suffer grievously for having allowed ourselves to fall under the Jewish spell. We stopped wasting our resources in small-scale terror attacks and shifted to large-scale attacks on carefully selected economic targets: power stations, fuel depots, transportation facilities, food sources, key industrial plants. We do not expect to bring down the already creaky American economic structure immediately, but we do expect to cause a number of localized and temporary breakdowns, which will gradually have a cumulative effect on the whole public. Already a sizable portion of the public has been made to realize that it will not be allowed to sit back and watch the war on TV in safety and comfort. In Houston, for example, hundreds of thousands went for nearly two weeks without electricity last September. The food in their refrigerators and freezers quickly spoiled, as did the perishables in their supermarkets. There were two major food riots by hungry Houstonians before the Army was able to set up enough relief stations to handle everyone. In one instance Federal troops shot 26 persons in a mob trying to storm a government food depot, and then the Organization got another riot started with the rumor that the emergency rations the government was handing out were contaminated with botulism. Houston isn't back to normal yet, with most of the city still subject to a staggered six-hour-a-day power blackout. In Wilmington we put half the city on the dole by blowing up two big DuPont plants. And we turned the lights off for half of New England when we knocked out that power-generating station just outside Providence. The electronics manufacturer we hit in Racine wasn't very big, but he was the sole supplier of certain key components for other manufacturers all across the country. By torching his plant, we eventually caused twenty others to shut down. The effects of these actions are not decisive yet, but, if we can keep it up, they will be. The public reaction has already convinced us of that. That reaction can certainly not be considered friendly to us, on the whole. In Houston a mob took two prisoners-suspects arrested for questioning in one of the bombings-away from the police and tore them limb from limb. Fortunately, they were not our people- just two hapless fellows who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the conservatives, of course, have redoubled their squawking and cackling that we're ruining all chances for an improvement in conditions by "provoking" the government with our violence. What the conservatives mean when they talk of an "improvement" is a stabilization of the economy and another round of concessions to the Blacks, so that everyone can return to consuming in multiracial comfort. But we learned long ago not to count our enemies, only our friends. And the number of the latter is growing now. Henry indicated that we have increased nearly 50 per cent in membership since last summer. Apparently our new strategy has knocked a lot of spectators off the fence-some on our side and some on the other. Perceptive people are beginning to realize that they won't be able to sit this war out. We are forcing them into the front lines, where they must choose sides and participate, whether they like it or not.

Germany under Kaiser William the Second was a three volume encyclopedia published in 1914. The first chapter was written by former Chancellor von Bulow, and discusses some of the issues of Germany before the first world war from a German point of view. In the mid-nineties in Rome, where I was ambassador at the time, my English colleague, Sir Clare Ford, said to me with a sigh: “How much more comfortable and convenient it was in politics when England, France and Russia formed the European Areopagus, and at most occasionally Austria needed to be consulted. ”Those good old days are over. More than four decades ago, the High Council of Europe was increased by one voting member who not only has the will to have a say, but also the strength to take part. State rebirth of Germany. A great piece of work was completed in the history of the world with the masterpiece of Prince Bismarck. The persistent heroism of the Prussian army and the unshakable devotion of the Prussian people had supported the purposeful will of the Hohenzollern for centuries under changeful fates, until the Brandenburg March became the Prussian great power. Twice the wreath that had already been won seemed to slip away from the state of Prussia. The devastating defeat of 1806 plunged Prussia from the admired and feared heights of Frederician fame. Those seemed right who had never wanted to see more than an artificial political structure in the proud state of the great king, which stood or fell with the monarch's unique statesmanlike and warlike genius. The uprising after the avalanche of Jena and Tilsit proved to the astonished world what unspoilt and indestructible power lived in this state. Such a willingness to sacrifice and such heroism on the part of an entire people presuppose a deeply rooted national self-confidence. And when the people of Prussia did not rise in a random uprising, like the much-admired Spaniards and the valiant Tyrolean peasants, but naturally submitted to the orders of the king and his advisors man by man, one saw in astonishment how national and state consciousness in Prussia were such that the people had been brought up to be a nation through the hard school of the Frederickian order. The reorganization of state life under the direction of creative men in the period from 1807 to 1813 won the state the conscious love and obedience of its subjects. The liberation struggle from 1813 to 1816 earned Prussia the respect of all and the trust of many non-Prussian Germans. It was a rich legacy that left behind the great times of uplift and liberation. But due to the retroactive effect of a dull and lackluster external policy and an internal management that neither knew how to give at the right moment nor how to refuse, this legacy was largely ruined over the next few decades. Towards the end of the fifties of the 19th century, Prussia lagged behind, as it had emerged from the wars of freedom, in internal attitude and external validity. The national unity movement had probably received its first solid foundation through the Prussian customs policy. But the day of Olomouc destroyed the hope of the German patriots, who expected Prussia to fulfill national wishes. Prussia seemed to be on its world historical mission, to renounce the power-political continuation of the unification value, which it had begun consciously in terms of economic policy. The transition of state life to constitutional channels had freed up new forces for national life. This state would have gained an infinite amount of inner vitality and national impetus if this loyal people had been called to political cooperation at the right time, as Stein and Hardenberg, Blücher and Gneisenau, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Boyen, and Yorck and Bülow-Dennewitz had wished. When the great step was taken thirty-three years too late, the trust between the people and the authorities was already too deeply eroded, the reputation of the government in the course of the revolutionary uprising had been too severely damaged for the modern forms of government to be able to bring immediate blessings. The course of Prussian politics was inhibited internally by a suspicious and doctrinal representation of the people, and externally by the undefeated resistance of the Austrian claims to supremacy. Almost in the twelfth hour Bismarck, appointed by King Wilhelm at the decisive moment, reached into the faltering wheel settings of the Prussian state machinery. The insightful patriots of those years were well aware that a normal historical development had to lead to the state unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, that the foremost aim of Prussian statecraft was to accelerate and complete this development. But all the paths that had been trodden to achieve the goal had proven impassable. The longer, the less seemed to be expected of the initiative of the Prussian government. The well-intentioned but impractical attempts to induce the German people to take control of their own destiny failed because the decisive driving force of the governments in Germany was lacking more than in any other country. In “Wilhelm Meister” the experienced Lothario replies to the melancholy Aurelie, who has a lot to criticize about the Germans, that there is no better nation in the world than the German, as long as it is led properly. The German, whatever tribe he may be, has always been able to achieve the greatest under strong, steady and firm leadership, rarely without such leadership or in opposition to his governments and princes. Bismarck himself told us in his “Thoughts and Memories” that he was in no doubt about this from the start. With brilliant intuition he found the way on which the hopes of the people would have to meet the interests of the German governments. More than any other statesman, he had penetrated the history of the nation whose leadership was in his hands. Behind the external context of the events he sought and found the driving forces of national life. The great time of the liberation and uprising of Prussia, that was born in Waterloo and consecrated by Schleiermacher in the Trinity Church in Berlin, never faded from his memory; at the beginning of his world-historical work it stood in full vividness before his eyes. He felt that in Germany national will and national passion are ignited not in friction between government and people, but in the friction between German pride and a sense of honor and resistance and claims of foreign nations. As long as the question of German unification was only an internal political problem, a problem about which the parties and between the government and the people quarreled, it could not generate a powerful, compelling national movement that would sweep princes and peoples. When Bismarck presented the German question as what it was at its core, as a question of European politics, and when the non-German opponents of German unification soon began to stir, he also gave the princes the opportunity to take the lead in the national movement to deliver. In Frankfurt, in Petersburg, in Paris, Bismarck had seen the powers of Europe in the cards. He had recognized that the unification of Germany could only remain a purely German-national matter as long as it was the pious wish and unfulfillable hope of the Germans and that it had to become an international matter the moment it reached the stage of realization. The struggle with the resistance in Europe was in the way of solving the great task of German politics. In such a struggle, however, the resistance in Germany itself could hardly be resolved. National policy was thus integrated into international policy, and the completion of the German work of unification through incomparable statesmanship and boldness was assigned to the inherited weakest abilities of the Germans, the political ones, and the innate best ones, the warlike ones. It was a fortunate coincidence that Bismarck found a general like Moltke, a military organizer like Roon at his side. At the same time, it was secured by the armed forces that had regained our European position as a great power. They took away the desire of the great powers to wrest from us the place in the European college that we had conquered in three victorious wars. Even if we were reluctant to have this place, it has not been seriously contested since then. With the exception of France, the whole world would have gradually made friends with Germany's position of power if our development had ended with the founding of the empire. State unification did not end our history, but the beginning of a new future. In the forefront of the European powers, the German Reich regained its full share in European life. For a long time, however, the life of old Europe had only been a part of the entire life of the people. Germany as a world power. Politics became more and more world politics. The world political paths were also opened for Germany when it gained a powerful and equal position alongside the old great powers. The only question was whether we should tread the new paths that lay before us, or whether we should shrink from further ventures in fear of the power we had just gained. In Kaiser Wilhelm the second, the nation found a leader who, with a clear vision and a firm will, led the way on the new path. With him we embarked on the global political path. Not as conquistadors, not under adventures and traders. We moved slowly, didn't dictate the pace let go of the impatience of ambition, but of the interests and rights that we had to promote and assert. We did not jump into world politics, we grew into our world political tasks, and we did not exchange the old European politics of Prussia-Germany for the new world politics, but we still rest today as before with the strong roots of our strength in old Europe. “It is the task of our generation to simultaneously maintain our continental position, which is the basis of our world position, and to look after our overseas interests in such a way, to conduct a prudent, sensible, wisely restrictive world policy in such a way that the security of the German people is not endangered and the future of the nation is not impaired.” With these words I tried on November 14, 1906 towards the end of a more detailed presentation of the international situation to formulate the task that Germany has to fulfill now and according to human judgment in the future: world politics as the solid basis of our European great power position. In the beginning voices were heard which criticized the treading of the new world political paths as a stray from the tried and tested paths of Bismarckian continental policy. It was overlooked that Bismarck in particular showed us new ways by leading the old to their goals. His work actually opened the gates of world politics for us. Only after the unification of the state and the political strengthening of Germany was it possible for the German economy to develop into a world economy. Only after the Reich saw its position in Europe secured could it think of standing up for the interests that German enterprise, German industrial diligence and commercial daring had created all over the world. Certainly Bismarck did not foresee the course of this new German development or the tasks of this new era in detail and could not foresee them. In the rich treasure trove of political knowledge that Prince Bismarck left us with, nowhere can we find the generally applicable sentences for our global political tasks, as he coined them for a large number of possibilities in our national life. We look in vain in the resolutions of his practical policy for a justification for the resolutions which our global political tasks demand of us. This new, different time was probably also prepared by Bismarck. We must never forget that without the gigantic achievement of Prince Bismarck, who made up in years with a mighty jolt what had been wasted and neglected in centuries, we would not have been able to experience the new era. But even if every new epoch of historical development is conditioned by the previous one, its driving forces more or less thanks to the past, it can only bring progress if it leaves the old ways and goals behind and moves on to others of its own. If we move away from the European politics of the first chancellor on our new world-political paths, it remains true that the world-political tasks of the 20th century are the proper continuation of the continental-political tasks that he fulfilled. In that speech of November 14, 1906, I pointed out that the succession of Bismarck was not an imitation, but demanded an advanced training. "If the development of things demands it," I said at the time, "that we go beyond Bismarckian goals, we must do it." The development of things, however, has long since driven German politics out of the narrowness of old Europe into the wider world. It was not ambitious unrest that urged us to emulate the great powers who had long been following the paths of world politics. The forces of the nation, rejuvenated by the state rebirth, expanded beyond the boundaries of the old homeland, and politics followed the new national interests and needs. To the extent that our national life has become world life, the politics of the German Reich became world politics. In 1871 the new German Empire gathered forty one million inhabitants within its borders. They found food and work in their homeland, better and more easily than before, under the protection of increased national power, under various conditions of traffic that were facilitated by the founding of the Reich, under the blessings of the new general German legislation. In 1900 the population was over fifty six million; today it has grown to more than sixty five million. This huge mass of people could no longer feed the empire within its borders in the old way. The increase in population posed a huge problem for German economic life and thus also for German politics. It had to be resolved if the surplus of German strength, which the homeland was unable to maintain, did not benefit foreign countries. Around 171,000 Germans emigrated in 1885, 116,339 in 1892, only 22,921 in 1898, and this last low number has remained average since then. In 1885, Germany was therefore able to provide a population twenty million smaller with less favorable living conditions than its sixty six million members at present. In the same period, German foreign trade rose from around six billion marks to over nineteen billion. World trade and people's nutrition are unmistakably connected. Much less, of course, from the imported foods themselves than from the increased employment opportunities which industry connected with world trade is able to provide. The development of industry, first and foremost, has solved the problem posed to national life by the population increase, without prejudice to the disadvantages initially caused by the surprisingly rapid pace of development in older areas of economic life. The enormous increase and enlargement of the industrial establishments, which today employ millions of workers and employees, could only be achieved by the fact that industry seized the world market. If they were still dependent today on the processing of the raw materials that the continent supplies and on the European market for the sale of their products, then there would be no question of the modern giant companies, and there would be millions of Germans who today directly benefit from having an industrial livelihood without wages or bread. According to statistical surveys, raw materials for industrial purposes to the value of 5,393 million marks were imported in 1911 and finished goods to the value of 5,460 million marks were exported. In addition, there is an export of raw materials, especially mining products, to the value of 2,205 million. Nutritional and luxury goods are imported for 3,077 million marks and exported for 1,096 million marks. These dead numbers gain life when it is considered that a great deal of German well-being depends on them, the existence and work of millions of our fellow citizens. World trade mediates these enormous masses of goods. They only go to a small extent on the land and waterways of the mainland, mainly over the sea on the vehicles of German shipowners. Industry, trade and shipping have won the old German economic life the new world economic forms, which have also politically led the empire beyond the goals that Prince Bismarck had set for German statecraft. With its 19 billion foreign trade, Germany is now the second largest trading power in the world, behind Great Britain with 25 billion and ahead of the United States with 15 billion. In 1910, the German ports saw 11,800 own and 11,698 foreign ships arriving, 11,962 own and 11,678 foreign ships leaving. The German shipping companies hire an average of 70 steamers and 40 sailing ships every year. In rapid development, we Germans have won our place in the forefront of the seafaring and maritime trade peoples. Necessity of the navy. The sea has become more important to our national life than ever before in our history, not even in the great times of the German Hansa. It has become a strand of life for us that we must not allow to be cut if we do not want to turn from a blossoming and youthful people into a withering and aging nation. We were exposed to this danger as long as our world trade and our shipping lacked national protection on the sea against the overpowering navies of other powers. The tasks that the armed forces of the German Reich had to carry out had shifted significantly since the continental protection that our army ensured us was no longer sufficient to shield domestic industry from disturbances, interference and attacks from outside. A navy of war had to stand by the side of the army so that we could enjoy our national work and its fruits. When, in the spring of 1864, the English ambassador in Berlin drew the attention of the then Prussian Prime Minister to the excitement that Prussia's action against Denmark had caused in England and dropped the remark that if Prussia did not stop, the English government would take military action against it Mr. von Bismarck-Schönhausen replied: “Yes, what are you actually going to do to us? In the worst case, you can throw a few grenades at Stolpmünde or Pillau, but that's all. ”Bismarck was right about that time. At that time we were as good as invulnerable to the ruling England, because we were not vulnerable at sea. We had neither a large merchant navy, the destruction of which could hurt us, nor an overseas trade worth mentioning, which we feared to have interrupted. Quite different today. We have become vulnerable at sea. We have entrusted Billions in value to the sea and with this value the weal and woe of many millions of our compatriots. If we do not ensure the protection of this precious and indispensable national property in good time, we are in danger of one day having to watch defenselessly as it is taken from us. But then we would not have sunk back economically and politically into the comfortable ex world's first sea and trading power.istence of a purely landlocked state. Rather, we would have been able to neither employ nor feed a considerable part of our millions of people at home. The result would have been an economic crisis, a crisis that could develop into a national catastrophe. Construction of the navy. The construction of a fleet sufficient to protect our overseas interests had become a vital question for the German nation since the end of the 1880s. It is to his great historical merit that Kaiser Wilhelm the second recognized this and applied the full power of the crown and the full strength of his own individuality to the achievement of this goal. This merit is further increased by the fact that the head of the Reich advocated the building of the German navy at the moment when the German people had to decide about their future and when, according to human calculations, the last possibility existed, for Germany to forge the sea armor it needed. The navy was to be built while maintaining our position on the continent, without colliding with England, which we had nothing to oppose at sea, but with full preservation of our national honor and dignity. Parliamentary resistance, which was still considerable at the time, could only be overcome if public opinion exerted sustained pressure on parliament. Public opinion could only be set in motion if the national motive was emphatically emphasized and national consciousness aroused in the face of the uncertain and discouraged mood that prevailed in Germany in the first decade after the resignation of Prince Bismarck. The pressure that had weighed on the German mind since the break between the bearer of the imperial crown and the mighty man who had brought this crown out of the depths of the Kyffhauser could only be overcome if the German people, who were in need of unity at that time and whose hopes and goals were unclear, had a new path set by their emperor and were shown the place in the sun to which they had a right and to which they had to strive. The patriotic sentiment should not, however, overflow and disturb our relations with England in an irreparable way, against which our defensive strength at sea was still quite inadequate for years and before which we were, as in that year, a competent judge in 1897 once put it, at sea like butter in front of the knife. To enable the construction of a sufficient fleet was the next and greatest task of post-Bismarckian German politics, a task which I, too, was primarily faced with when I was on the "Hohenzollern" in Kiel on June 28, 1897 on the same day and in the same place that 12 years later I asked for my release from His Majesty the Emperor. On March 28, 1897, in its third reading, the Reichstag accepted the proposals of the Budget Commission, which made considerable cuts in the government's demands for replacement buildings, reinforcement and new buildings. On November 27th, after the previous State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt, Admiral von Hollmann, had been replaced by a first-rate force, Admiral von Tirpitz, the government published a new naval bill, which included the construction of 7 ships of the line, 2 large and 7 small Kreuzern, and demanded that the time for the completion of the new buildings be set at the end of the accounting year 1904 and that replacement buildings be carried out in good time by limiting the lifespan of the ships and determining the formations to be kept permanently in service. The draft said: “While fully respecting the rights of the Reichstag and without recourse to new sources of taxation, the allied governments are not pursuing an endless naval plan, but rather the sole aim of establishing a patriotic navy of such limited strength and strength within a reasonable period of time To create efficiency that it suffices to effectively represent the maritime interests of the Reich. ”The proposal pushed the naval policy on a completely new track. So far, individual new buildings had been requested and in some cases approved from time to time, but the navy had lacked the solid foundation that the army had in the nominal inventory of its formations. It was only through the determination of the lifespan of the ships on the one hand and the number of serviceable ships on the other hand that the fleet became an integral part of our national armed forces. The building of the German fleet, like other great tasks in our patriotic history before it, had to be carried out with an eye on foreign countries. It was to be foreseen that this momentous increase in our national power would arouse unease and distrust in England. The traditional politics of England. The politics of no state in the world moves as firmly in traditional lines as the English one, and England owes its grandeur not least to this tenacious consistency of its foreign policy, which has been independent in its final goals and basic lines of the change of party rule, not least of all to this tenacious consistency of its foreign policy world political successes. The be-all and end-all of English politics has always been the attainment and maintenance of English naval rule. All other considerations, friendships as well as enmities, have always been purposefully subordinated to this point of view. It would be foolish to want to dismiss English politics with the hounded word of "perfidious Albion". In truth, this alleged perfidy is only a healthy and justified national egoism to which other peoples, as well as other great characteristics of the English people, can take an example. During the second half of the 18th and the first of the 19th century stood England at the side of Prussia, especially in critical times of Prussian history during the Seven Years' War and in the age of Napoleon the First. It was less comfortable sympathy with the bold and laboriously rising blood-related state in the German north that determined the English attitude. For its purposes England stood by the side of the most capable opponent of the strongest European power and left Frederick the Great in a difficult hour, and cold-bloodedly abandoned Prussia at the Congress of Vienna when she saw her aims had been achieved. During the shackling of the French forces in the Seven Years War, England brought her North American possessions to safety. In the great years from 1813 to 1815, the stormy bravery of Prussia finally and finally smashed Napoleonic world domination. When Prussia had to grapple bitterly for every square kilometer of land in Vienna, England had won her world power and, after the defeat of the French enemy, could see it as secure for the foreseeable future. As the enemy of the strongest continental power, we were friends of England; through the events of 1866 and 1870, Prussia-Germany became the strongest power on the European mainland and gradually moved in the English imagination into the place which the France of the Sun King and the two Bonapartes had earlier taken. English policy followed its traditional direction of taking the front against the respective strongest continental power. After the fall of Habsburg Spain, the France of the Bourbons was England's natural opponent, from Marlborough's outstanding participation in the War of the Spanish Succession to the alliance with the victor in the Battle of Rossbach, which was celebrated in London like a triumph of British arms. After decades of jealous distrust of Russia, which had grown stronger under Catherine the second, British policy turned again and with full energy against France when Bonaparte led the armies of the republic to victory over all the states of mainland Europe. In the wrestling match between the First Empire and England, England remained victor, certainly primarily thanks to the unshakable and grandiose steadfastness of its policy, the heroism of its blue jackets at Abukir and Trafalgar and the successes of its iron duke in Spain, but also because of the tenacity of the Russians and Austrians and the impetuosity of our old Blucher and his Prussians. When, after the fall of Napoleon, the military preponderance seemed to pass from western Europe to the east, England turned its political front. England played a prominent part in the unfortunate outcome of the Crimean War for Russia and in the failure of the lofty plans of the proud Emperor Nicholas the first, and Emperor Alexander the second also found English politics not infrequently on his political paths, most noticeably in the Near East, the old hopes of Russian ambition. The English alliance with Japan emerged from considerations similar to the entente cordiale with France, which has a decisive influence on contemporary international politics. The interest that England takes in shaping the balance of power on the European continent is of course not only directed towards the well-being of those powers which feel oppressed or threatened by the superior strength of one. Such philanthropic sympathy seldom exerts a predominant influence on the political resolutions of the government of a large state. The repercussions of the European balance of power on English naval rule are decisive for the direction of British policy. And every shift of power which could not have such an effect in the wake has always been rather indifferent to the English Government. If England traditionally, that is, in keeping with its unchangeable national interests, is unfriendly or at least suspicious of the strongest continental power, the main reason lies in the importance that England attaches to superior continental power for overseas policy. A major European power which has so drastically demonstrated its military strength that it need not be prepared to attack its borders in the normal course of events is in a way gaining the national conditions of existence through which England became the world's preeminent sea and trading power. England, with her strength and her daring, could go out to sea with no worries, because she knew that her home frontiers were protected from enemy attacks by the surrounding sea. If a continental power possesses precisely this protection of the frontiers in its dreaded, victorious and superior army, it gains the freedom to pursue an overseas policy, which England owes to its geographical position. She becomes a competitor in the field in which England claims rule. English politics is based here on the experiences of history, one could almost say on the lawfulness of the development of nations and states. Every people with a healthy instinct and a viable state system has pushed to the seashore when nature has denied it. There has been the most persistent and bitter struggle for stretches of coast and harbor places, from Kerkyra and Potidea, about which the Peloponnesian War was ignited, to Kavalla, about which the Greeks and Bulgarians struggled in our day. Peoples who could not win the sea or were pushed out of it, tacitly dropped out of the great world historical competition. Owning the seashore means nothing more than the possibility of overseas development of strength and, ultimately, the possibility of expanding continental politics into world politics. The peoples of Europe who did not use their coasts and ports in this way could not do so because they needed all their national strength to defend their borders against their adversaries on the mainland. So the far-sighted colonial-political plans of the Great Elector had to be abandoned by his successors. The world's political avenues have always been most freely open to the strongest continental power. But England kept watch on these routes. When Louis the fourteenth suggested a Franco-English alliance with Charles the second, this English king, who was otherwise very friendly to the French, replied that certain obstacles stood in the way of a sincere alliance, and of these the most distinguished was the trouble that France took to become a respectable maritime power. For England, which could only be of importance through her trade and her navy, this was such a reason for suspicion that every step France took in this direction inevitably led to jealousy between the two peoples. After the Treaty of Hubertusburg, the elder Pitt expressed his regret in Parliament that France had been given the opportunity to rebuild her navy. Primarily as an opponent of French overseas policy, England became the enemy of France in the War of the Spanish Succession, which dealt the first sensitive blow to French supremacy in Europe, England with Gibraltar brought the key to the ocean and the core area of Canada, which was hotly contested by France. In the middle of the eighteenth century Lord Chatam said: "The only danger that England has to fear arises on the day when the French see France as a great naval, commercial and colonial power." And before the Crimean War, David Urquhart wrote: “Our island location only allows us to choose between omnipotence and powerlessness. Britannia will be the queen of the sea or be devoured by the sea." English policy has remained true to itself to the present, because England is today, as it was once, the ultimate sea power. The greater diplomatic conflicts have taken the place of the great conflicts of earlier times. The political purpose is unchanged. Germany and England. When Germany, after solving its continental political tasks, after securing its European position of power, showed itself neither willing nor able to forego embarking upon the world-political path, existence had to become uncomfortable for England. The consequences of this change could be lessened in their effects by diplomacy, but they could not be prevented. But if we can understand the traditions of British politics, such an understanding by no means implies that England has reason to expand the German economy into a world economy, German continental policy into world politics and, in particular, the construction of a German navy with the to encounter the same distrust that might have been appropriate in earlier centuries towards other powers. The course of our world politics is fundamentally different in the means and in the ends from the attempts at world conquest by Spain, France and at the time of Holland and Russia in the past. The world politics, against which England opposed so emphatically in the past, was mostly aimed at a more or less violent change in international conditions. We merely take account of our changed national living conditions. The world politics of other countries, often opposed by England, was offensive, ours was defensive. We wanted and had to become so strong at sea that every attack on us was associated with a very considerable risk for every sea power, and we were thus freed from the influence and arbitrariness of other naval powers in the protection of our overseas interests. Our powerful national development, primarily in the economic field, had pushed us across the ocean. For our interests as well as for our dignity and honor, we had to ensure that we gained the same independence for our world politics that we had secured for our European politics. The fulfillment of this national duty might be made more difficult by any British resistance, but no resistance in the world could relieve us of it. With an eye on English politics, our fleet had to be built - and that's how it was built. My efforts in the field of great politics had primarily to be directed towards the fulfillment of this task. Germany had to make itself internationally independent in two respects. We were not allowed to allow the law of our decisions and actions to be dictated by a policy directed fundamentally against England, nor were we allowed to become dependent on England for the sake of English friendship. Both dangers were given and more than once they were approaching precariously. In our development to maritime power, we were unable to achieve the desired goal either as England's satellite or as England's antagonist. The unreserved and secure friendship of England could ultimately only have been bought by sacrificing the very world-political plans for the sake of which we would have sought British friendship. If we had gone this way, we would have made the mistake that the Roman poet meant when he said that one should not propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. As England's enemy, however, we would hardly have had the prospect of getting as far as we did in the end in our development to become a sea and world trading power. Germany and England during the Boer War. During the Boer War, which strained the strength of the British Empire to the utmost and led England to great difficulties, there seemed to be an opportunity to touch the silent adversary of our world politics. As in the rest of Europe, the waves of Boer enthusiasm went up in Germany. If the government undertook to fall into the arms of England, it was certain to be applauded by public opinion. To many, the European constellation seemed favorable to a momentary success against England, and French aid in particular seemed secure. But the European community of interests against England was only apparent, and the value of a possible political success against England in the Boer question would still have been more apparent for us. The attempt to take action under the impression of the pro-bourgeois mood at the time would soon have resulted in disillusionment. In the French nation, the deep-seated national resentment against the German Reich would have quickly and elementarily suppressed the current resentment against England as soon as we had committed ourselves to England and a fundamental change of front in French policy would have been within reach. No matter how annoying the fresh memory of Fashoda might be for French pride, it weighed as light as a feather against the memory of Sedan. The Egyptian Sudan and the White Nile had not pushed the thought of Metz and Strasbourg from the French hearts. The danger was that we would be pushed forward by France against England, while France refused to cooperate in the psychological moment. As in Schiller's beautiful poem “Die Ideale”, the companions would have lost each other on the way. But even if we succeeded in thwarting England's South African policy through European action, nothing would be gained for our closest national interests. Our relations with England would of course have been thoroughly poisoned from that hour and for a long time. The passive resistance of England to the world politics of the new Germany would have turned into a very active opposition. It was precisely in those years that we set about establishing German naval power by building our navy, but England, regardless of a possible failure in the South African war, had the power to nip our development into a naval power in the bud. Our neutral stance during the Boer War arose from weighty national interests of the German Reich. We were not strong enough at sea to forcibly pave the way for us to gain sufficient naval power over and above the interests of England. In the wake of English politics, the British goal of curtailed development of German power at sea was just as difficult to achieve. Press discussions about the possibility of an Anglo-German alliance. The idea was obvious that the English resistance to German world politics and above all, to German naval construction could most easily be overcome by an alliance between Germany and England. The idea of an Anglo-German alliance has in fact been discussed in the press in both countries. Bismarck was already preoccupied with this idea, of course, only to elicit the resigned remark from him: "We would love to love the English, but they don't want to be loved by us." To enter into a contractual relationship with England on the basis of full parity and equal ties, stipulations which England could have cast off in the event of a change of government or the occurrence of other events independent of our will, while we would have remained bound by them, would not have served German interests. Nor could it have been enough for us that only this or that minister seemed inclined to a German-English agreement. In order to make an agreement sustainable, the entire government, and above all the Prime Minister, had to work towards it. Bismarck has pointed out how difficult it is to establish a stable relationship with England because long-term alliances do not correspond to English traditions and the opinions expressed by British politicians, even in leadership positions, or the current moods of the English press, are not worth unchanging promises. France, to which for many reasons British public opinion is more inclined than us, in which England no longer sees a rival and especially no serious competitor at sea and in world trade, England is in a different position than we are. Only with absolutely and permanently binding British obligations would we have an Anglo-German bridge in the face of the jealousy of broad English circles against the economic progress of Germany and, above all, against the growth of the German navy, and be allowed to enter into alliance. We could only bind ourselves to England on the assumption that the bridge that was supposed to lead over the real and supposed contradictions between us and England was actually sustainable. The world situation back then, when the alliance question was ventilated, was in many respects different than it is today. Russia had not yet been weakened by the Japanese war, but was willing to fortify and expand the position it had just gained on the east coast of Asia and especially in the Gulf of Pechili. Relations between England and Russia were tense at the time precisely because of the Asiatic questions pending between the two empires. The danger was that a Germany allied with England would take on the role against Russia, which Japan would later assume alone. Only we should have carried out this role under conditions which cannot be compared with the favorable conditions which Japan found for its clash with Russia. The Japanese war was unpopular in Russia, and Russia had to wage it over immense distances as a colonial war, so to speak. If we allowed ourselves to be pushed against Russia, we would find ourselves in a much more difficult position. Under such circumstances the war against Germany would not have been unpopular in Russia; it would have been waged on the Russian side with the national vigor that is characteristic of the Russian in the defense of his native soil. For France, the case foederis would have existed. France could have waged its war of revenge under not unfavorable conditions. England was then facing the Boer War. Her position would have been eased if her great colonial political enterprise had been supported and accompanied by a European entanglement such as had served England well in the mid-18th and first decade of the 19th century. In a general conflict, we Germans would have had to face a serious land war on two fronts, while England would have had the easier task of further expanding her colonial empire without great difficulty and profiting from the mutual weakening of the mainland powers. At last and not least, during a military engagement on the mainland and for a long time afterwards, we would not have found the strength, means and leisure to promote the development of our war fleet in the way we could. So we had only the option of bypassing English interests, as it were, of avoiding enemy clashes and docile dependency in the same way. England and the German fleet. So we have indeed succeeded in creating that power at sea, unmolested and uninfluenced by England, which gives our economic interests and our world-political will the real basis, and which to attack must appear a serious risk even to the strongest opponent. During the first ten years after the introduction of the naval bill of 1897 and the start of our shipbuilding, an extremely determined British policy would have been able to forcefully prevent the development of Germany into a naval power, to render us harmless before our claws had grown at sea. In England such action against Germany has been repeatedly called for. On February 3, 1905, the Admiralty's civil lord, Mr. Arthur Lee, declared in a public speech that one had to keep one's eyes on the North Sea, gather the British fleet in the North Sea and, in the event of war, “strike the first strike before the other party could find time to read in the newspapers that war has been declared”. The Daily Chronicle underlined this omission with the words: “If the German fleet had been destroyed in October 1904, we in Europe would have had peace for sixty years. For these reasons, we consider the statements made by Mr. Arthur Lee, assuming they were made on behalf of the Cabinet, to be a wise and peaceful declaration of the unchanging purpose of the Lady of the Seas. ”In the fall of 1904 the Army and Navy Gazette had stated how It was unbearable that England should be compelled, simply by the presence of the German fleet, to take precautionary measures which otherwise would not be necessary. “We have,” it said in this article, “at one point or another have had to blow the life out of a fleet that we had reason to believe could be used to harm us. In England, as on the mainland, there is no shortage of people who consider the German navy to be the only real threat to the maintenance of peace in Europe. Be that as it may, we content ourselves with pointing out that the present moment is particularly favorable for our demand that this fleet not be enlarged. "At the same time a respected English review wrote:" When the German fleet is destroyed, the peace of Europe would be secured for two generations; England and France or England and the United States or all three would vouch for the freedom of the seas and prevent the building of new ships which are dangerous weapons in the hands of ambitious powers with growing populations and without colonies. ”Just about this time, in the autumn of 1904 France was preparing to snub us in Morocco. A few months earlier, in June 1904, a French publicist had told me that the construction of our navy was causing great and growing unrest in large English circles. It is not yet clear there how the continuation of our shipbuilding is to be prevented, whether through direct ideas or by favoring the chauvinistic elements in France. Today England allows us to be regarded as a sea power, as the strongest sea power after itself. When, in the winter of 1909, an English speaker in parliament stated the fact that England would not need to arm so feverishly at sea if the arrival of German maritime power had been prevented ten years earlier, he expressed a thought that is understandable and perhaps correct from the standpoint of pure power politics. The opportunity to nip a nascent fleet in the bud, which England repeatedly used in earlier times and against other countries, could not have been employed against Germany, since we did not offer the flank. The peacefulness of German world politics. The fleet that we have created since 1897 and that makes us the second sea power on earth, admittedly at a great distance from England, ensures us the possibility to lend political power to the representation of our German interests in the world. Its primary task is to protect our world trade, the life and honor of our German fellow citizens abroad. German warships have fulfilled this task in the West Indies and East Asia. It is certainly a predominantly defensive role that we assign to our fleet. It goes without saying that this defensive role could expand in serious international conflicts. If the Reich were to be attacked willfully, no matter from which side, the sea as a theater of war will gain a completely different and increased importance than in 1870. That in such a case the navy and the army, true to the Prussian-German tradition, will take on the attack would see the best parade, there is no need to say a word about it. Completely irrelevant, however, is the concern that accompanied the construction of our fleet that Germany would like to awaken the aggressiveness with the strengthening of Germany at sea. Of all the peoples on earth, the German is the one that has been the least likely to attack and conquer. If we disregard the Roman journeys of the German emperors of the Middle Ages, whose driving force was more a great, dreamlike political error than an unbridled lust for conquest and war, then we will look in vain for wars of conquest in our past, similar to those of France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The 18th and 19th centuries, those of Habsburg Spain, Sweden in its heyday, and those of the Russian and English empires in the course of their fundamentally expansive national policy should be set alongside. In centuries we Germans have never striven for anything more than the defense and security of our fatherland. Just as the great king did not lead his undefeated battalions to adventures after the conquest of Silesia and the securing of the independence of the Prussian monarchy, so little did Emperor Wilhelm the first and Bismarck think about doing new things after the unprecedented successes of two great wars. If a people can boast of political self-restraint, it is the German one. We have always limited our own successes and have not waited for a limit to be set by the exhaustion of our national resources. Our development therefore lacks the epochs of blinding sudden ascent and has been more of a slow, undaunted forward work and progress. The restless way of other peoples to draw the incentive for new, greater ventures from the successes achieved, is almost completely lacking in the German. Our political style is not that of the daringly speculating merchant, but rather that of the thoughtful farmer who patiently awaits the harvest after careful sowing. After the Franco-German war, the world was full of fear of Germany's new war-like ventures. No plan of conquest of any kind was foreseen at the time. More than four decades have passed since then. We are richer in people's strength and material goods, our army has become stronger and stronger. The German fleet came into being and developed. The number of major wars fought since 1870 has been greater rather than fewer than earlier in the same period. Germany did not seek participation in any and coolly resisted all attempts to be drawn into warlike entanglements. Without pride or exaggeration it can be said that never in history has an armed force of such superior strength as the German served to the same extent for the maintenance and security of peace. This fact is not explained by our love of peace, which is beyond doubt. The German has always loved peace and yet had to take up swords again and again because he had to defend himself against foreign attacks. In fact, the peace was primarily preserved, not because a German attack on other nations was not carried out, but because other nations feared the German defense against any attack of their own. The strength of our armaments has proven to be a protection of peace that the last turbulent centuries have not known. A world-historical judgment lies in this fact. The addition of the fleet to our armed forces means an increased and strengthened guarantee of peace if German foreign policy is properly managed. Just as the army prevents the willful disruption of Germany's continental political path, so the navy prevents the disruption of our global political development. As long as we did not have the fleet, our vastly growing world economic interests, which are at the same time inalienable national economic interests, were the open target that the German Reich offered its adversaries. When we covered this nakedness and made the attack on the Reich at sea a risk for every enemy, we not only protected our own peace, but also with it the European peace. Our task was to obtain means of protection, not means of attack. After joining the ranks of the naval powers, we calmly continued on the paths we had previously trodden. The new era of boundless German world politics, which was often prophesied abroad, has not materialized. However, we now have the opportunity to defend our interests effectively, to counter attacks and to maintain and expand our position everywhere, especially in Asia Minor and Africa. The network of our international relations had to expand to the extent that we grew into our global political tasks. Far-away overseas empires, which we had little to worry about in the era of pure continental politics, became of greater and greater importance to us. Maintaining good, if possible friendly, relations with them became an important duty of our foreign policy. First and foremost, these were the two new great powers of the West and the East, the United States of North America and Japan. Here as there it was necessary to overcome certain temporary cloudings before the initiation of friendly relations could be thought of. Germany and the United States. During the Spanish-American war, strong sympathies for Spain had emerged in a section of German public opinion, which was not found to be pleasant in North America. Also, the way in which part of the English and American press portrayed incidents that had taken place off Manila between our squadron and the American fleet, clouded German-American relations. This disgruntlement reached its climax in February 1899, so that it seemed advisable to speak out emphatically about the initiation of more favorable relations between the two blood and tribe-related peoples. What I said in this direction in the Reichstag at the time has since proven to be true: “From the standpoint of a sensible policy, there is no reason whatsoever why Germany and America should not have the best relations with one another. I do not see any point where German and American interests met in a hostile manner, and in the future I do not see any point where the lines of their development would have to cross hostile one another. We can put it calmly, in no other country has America found better understanding and fairer recognition than in Germany during the last century.” Kaiser Wilhelm the second brought this understanding and recognition of America more than any other, and the establishment of a good and secure relationship with the United States is primarily due to him. He gradually won over the Americans through a kind treatment that was as consistent as it was understanding. He had good personal relationships with President Roosevelt. The dispatch of Prince Heinrich to America had the full hoped-for success. He made a major contribution to reminding both peoples of how many common interests they have in common and how little real contrasts separate them. It was also a happy thought of our emperor to shape the spiritual connection between the two Germanic peoples even more firmly and intimately through the exchange of well-known university teachers from German and American universities. Nowhere in the world have German intellectual life, German poetry, philosophy, and science found such sincere admiration as in the United States. On the other hand, in no other country have the wonders of American technology been studied so eagerly and so joyfully recognized as in Germany. This intimate exchange of intellectual and scientific achievements gained its external expression through the establishment of the exchange professors. The increasingly intimate relations between peoples and heads of state also fostered our political relations with the United States. Not only did we get on friendly terms with the Americans about Samoa, America also never stood in our way during the critical period which our policy had to go through at the beginning of the new century. There is hardly an empire, apart from Austria, where there are such natural prerequisites for lasting friendly relations with us as North America. About 12 million Germans live in the United States. Since the founding of the “German-American National League” in 1901, the endeavor has been growing in them to maintain and revive the connection with their old German homeland while remaining fully loyal to their new fatherland. As long as politics here and there are led by steady hands, exaggerated expressions of friendship are avoided as well as nervous moods in relation to the occasional friction that can always arise in the economic field, we need for our relations with the United States have nothing to worry about. Respect for one another on the basis and within the limits of self-respect will also be most conducive to friendship between us and the United States. Germany and Japan. Like our relationship with America, our relationship with Japan went through a period of resentment towards the end of the 19th century. Up until the early 1890s, we had served the Japanese as role models and were considered friends. Our military facilities, our warlike past found ardent admirers in the East Asian warrior people, and after the defeat of China the Japanese fancied and proudly called themselves the Prussians of the East. Our relations with Japan took a great shock when, in 1895, together with France and Russia, we forced victorious Japan to cut back its demands on the conquered China. When we fell into the arms of Japan, we lost many of the sympathies that had been accumulated there for decades, without reaping any special thanks from France or Russia. A picture drawn up by the German Kaiser around this time, which was only intended to serve ideal peace efforts, had been eagerly and successfully used by our opponents and competitors to destroy us in Japan. Years of diligence gradually made room for a better mood against Germany in Japan. We have no interest in opposing the excellently capable and brave people. Of course, we are also not there to take the chestnuts out of the fire for the Japanese. It would have been a considerable relief not only for Japan but also for England if we had allowed ourselves to be pushed against Russia for the sake of their East Asian interests. It would have served us badly. As unfortunate as it was the thought of annoying Japan for the beautiful eyes of France and Russia and of alienating us, so little could we be concerned with dividing us with Russia on account of the East Asian interests of other powers. Towards the end of the 1880s, Prince Bismarck once said to me, referring to Russia and Asia: “It is fermenting and rumbling in the Russian barrel very worryingly, that could lead to an explosion one day. It would be best for world peace if the explosion did not take place in Europe, but in Asia. We just have to not stand in front of the bunghole so that the peg doesn't hit us in the stomach. ”If we had allowed ourselves to be pushed forward before the Russo-Japanese war against Russia, we would have come to stand in front of that bunghole during the explosion. Occasionally I have heard Prince Bismarck say: “If Mr. N. suggests something that is useful for him but harmful to you, it is not stupid of N. But it is stupid of you if you accept it. " Continental and world politics. If, after having achieved the great goal of her European policy, Germany can reach into the wider world with her increased and constantly increasing forces, that does not mean that the whole sum of our national force has now become free for Business outside of mainland Europe. The transition to world politics means to us the opening of new political paths, the development of new national tasks, but not abandoning all old paths, not a fundamental change in our tasks. The new world politics is an expansion, not a transfer of our political field of activity. We must never forget that the consolidation of our European superpower position made it possible for us to expand the national economy into a world economy, and continental politics into world politics. German world politics is based on the successes of our European politics. At the moment when the firm foundations of Germany's European position of power begin to shake, the global political structure will no longer be tenable. It is conceivable that a world political failure would leave our position in Europe untouched, but it is unthinkable that a significant loss of power and validity in Europe would not result in a corresponding shaking of our world political position. We can only conduct world politics on the basis of European politics. The preservation of our strong position on the mainland is today, as in the Bismarckian period, the beginning and end of our national policy. Even if we have gone beyond Bismarck in terms of world politics, following our national needs, we will always have to assert the principles of his European politics as the solid ground under our feet. The roots of the new age must rest in the traditions of the old. Here, too, the guarantee for healthy development lies in a reasonable balance between old and new, between preservation and progress. The renunciation of world politics would have been tantamount to a slow and secure withering of our national vital forces. A policy of world political adventure without taking our old European interests into account might initially be attractive and impressive, but would soon lead to a crisis, if not to a catastrophe, in our development. The healthy political successes are not won much differently from the commercial successes: in a quiet journey between the Scylla of fearful caution and the Charybdis of daring speculation. Since the day when I took over the business of the Foreign Office, I have been firmly convinced that there would be no clash between Germany and England, which would be a great misfortune for both countries, for Europe and for humanity. If we one, built ourselves a fleet that would be associated with an excessive risk for any enemy to attack. Two, we did not engage in any aimless and excessive building and arming, no overheating our naval boiler beyond that. Three, did not allow any power to get too close to our respect and dignity, Four, also put nothing between us and England that could not have been made good. That is why I have always repudiated indecent attacks, which offend our national sentiments, from whatever side they might come from, but I have resisted any temptation to interfere in the Boer War, for such an attack would have inflicted a wound on the English self-esteem that would never have closed again. Five if we kept calm nerves and cold blood, and neither snubbed nor ran after England. "The basis of a healthy and sensible world policy is a strong national home policy." I said that in December 1901, when the Member of Parliament Eugen Richter wanted to construct a contradiction between the policy on which the new customs tariff was based, the protection of domestic work, in particular the agricultural, purpose, and the new world politics, which followed the interests of trade. The apparent contrast was actually a compensation, for the German world economy had emerged from a national economic life that had developed to its peak. The connection between politics and economics is more intimate in our modern times than in the past. Modern states react directly with their internal and external policies to the fluctuations and changes in highly developed economic life, and every significant economic interest soon presses for political expression in some way. World trade, with all the vital interests that depend on it, has made our world politics necessary. The domestic economic life demands a corresponding domestic policy. A balance must be sought and found back and forth. Seven years after the tariff negotiations, the then economically controversial balance between German world and home politics came into play on the occasion of the Bosnian crisis in 1908. This event is perhaps better than any academic discussion, the right real relationship between our overseas ones and to clarify our European policy. Until the Bosnian question was raised, German politics was predominantly dominated by considerations for our world politics. Not due to Germany orienting its foreign relations to its overseas interests, but because of England's displeasure with the development of German overseas trade and especially with the strengthening of German sea power which had an impact on the grouping of powers and their position in relation to the German Reich. The public opinion of the otherwise so level-headed and intrepid English people at times abandoned themselves to a completely unfounded, even senseless and therefore almost panic-like fear of a German landing in England. This concern was systematically nourished by no small part of the widely ramified and powerful English press. English encirclement policy. In English politics from the beginning of the new century the influence of King Edward the seventh, a monarch with an unusual knowledge of human nature and an art of treating people, of rich and varied experience, made itself felt. English policy was directed not so much directly against German interests as it tried to gradually checkmate Germany by shifting the European balance of power. Through a series of entents, for the sake of which many not unimportant British interests were sacrificed, it sought to attract the other states of Europe and thus isolate Germany. It was the era of the so-called English encirclement policy. A Mediterranean treaty had been signed with Spain. France naturally came to visit as the adversary of the German Reich, and the Anglo-French treaty over Egypt and Morocco in 1904 pushed the memory of Fashoda completely into the background. In the aftermath of the heavy defeats it had suffered on land and sea in the war with Japan, and severe internal unrest, Russia had decided to come to an agreement with England on spheres of interest in Asia, and thus brought England closer. Italy was wooed with zeal. Similar occa

Friday, Robert A. Heinlein. ...with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of electronic surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible-keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren’t really records …so it is good to be alert to opportunities to foul up the system. If you can’t evade a tax, pay a little too much to confuse their computers. Transpose digits. And so on... No matter how lavishly over paid, civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid-but all public employees have larceny in their hearts, or they wouldn’t be feeding at the public trough. These two facts are all you need-but be careful! a public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect. there ain’t no such animal as a well-documented conspiracy. Or sometimes too well documented but the documents contradict each other. If a conspiracy happened quite some time ago, a generation or longer, it becomes impossible to establish the truth. You should leave this planet; for you there is nothing here. The Balkanization of North America ended the last chance of reversing the decay of the Renaissance Civilization. It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named …but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” Friday, Robert A. Heinlein. One. As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule, he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door contracted behind him, I killed him. I have never liked riding the Beanstalk. My distaste was full blown even before the disaster to the Quito Skyhook. A cable that goes up into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic. But the only other way to reach Ell-Five takes too long and costs too much; my orders and expense account did not cover it. So, I had been edgy even before I left the shuttle from Ell-Five at Stationary Station to board the Beanstalk capsule …but damn it, being edgy isn’t reason to kill a man. I had intended only to put him out for a few hours. The subconscious has its own logic. I grabbed him before he hit the deck and dragged him quickly toward a rank of bonded bombproof lockers, hurrying to avoid staining the floor shoved his thumb against the latch, pushed him inside as I grabbed his pouch, found his Diners Club card, slid it into the slot, salvaged his IDs and cash, and chucked the pouch in with the cadaver as the armor slid down and clanged home. I turned away. A Public Eye was floating above and beyond me. No reason to jump out of my boots. Nine times out of ten an Eye is cruising at random, unmonitored, and its twelve-hour loop mayor may not he scanned by a human before it is scrubbed. The tenth time- A peace officer maybe monitoring it closely. Or she maybe scratching herself and thinking about what she did last night. So, I ignored it and kept on toward the exit end of the corridor. That pesky Eye should have followed me as I was the only mass in that passageway radiating at thirty-seven degrees. But it tarried, three seconds at least, scanning that locker, before again fastening on me. I was estimating which of three possible courses of action was safest when that maverick piece of my brain took over and my hands executed a fourth: My pocket pen became a laser beam and “killed” that Public Eye-killed it dead as I held the beam at full power until the Eye dropped to the deck, not only blinded but with antigrav shorted out. And its memory scrubbed-I hoped. I used my shadow’s credit card again, working the locker’s latch with my pen to avoid disturbing his thumbprint. It took a heavy shove with my boot to force the Eye into that crowded locker. Then I hurried; it was time to be someone else. Like most ports of entry Beanstalk Kenya has travelers’ amenities on both sides of the barrier. Instead of going through inspection I found the washrooms and paid cash to use a bath-dressing room. Twenty-seven minutes later I not only had had a bath but also had acquired different hair, different clothes, another face-that takes three hours to put on will come off in fifteen minutes of soap and hot water. I was not eager to show my real face, but I had to get rid of the persona I had used on this mission. What part of it had not washed down the drain now went into the shredder: jump suit, boots, pouch, fingerprints, contact lenses, and passport. The passport I now carried used my right name-well, one of my names-a stereographs of my bare face, and had a very sincere Ell-Five transient stamp in it. Before shredding the personal items, I had taken off the corpse, I looked through them-and paused. His credit cards and IDs showed four identities. Where were his other three passports? Probably somewhere on the dead meat in that locker. I had not given it a proper search-no time! -I had simply grabbed what he carried in his pouch. Go back and look? If I kept trotting back and opening a locker full of still-warm corpse, someone was bound to notice. By taking his cards and passport I had hoped to postpone identifying the body and thereby give myself more time to get clear but-wait a moment. Mmm, yes, passport and Diners Club card were both for “Adolf Belsen.” American Express extended credit to “Albert Beaumont” and the Bank of Hong Kong took care of “Arthur Bookman” while MasterCard provided for “Archibald Buchanan.” I “reconstructed” the crime: Beaumont-Bookman-Buchanan had just thumbed the latch of the locker when Belsen sapped him from behind, shoved him into the locker, used his own Diners Club card to lock it and left hastily. Yes, an excellent theory…and now to muddy the water still more. Those IDs and credit cards went back of my own in my wallet; “Belsen’s” passport I concealed about my person. I could not stand a skin search but there are ways to avoid a skin search including (but not limited to) bribery, influence, corruption, misdirection, and razzle-dazzle. As I came out of the washroom, passengers from the next capsule were trickling in and queuing up at Customs, Health, and Immigration; I joined a queue. The CHI officer remarked on how very light my jump bag was and asked about the state of the up-high black market. I gave him my best stupid look, the one on my passport picture. About then he found the correct amount of squeeze tucked into my passport and dropped the matter. I asked him for the best hotel and the best restaurant. He said that he wasn’t supposed to make recommendations but that he thought well of the Nairobi Hilton. As for food, if I could afford it, the Fat Man, across from the Hilton, had the best food in Africa. He hoped that I would enjoy my stay in Kenya. I thanked him. A few minutes later I was down the mountain and, in the city, and regretting it. Kenya Station is over five kilometers high; the air is always thin and cold. Nairobi is higher than Denver, nearly as high as Ciudad de Mexico, but it is only a fraction of the height of Mount Kenya, and it is just a loud shout from the equator. The air felt thick and too warm to breathe; almost at once my clothes were soggy with sweat; I could feel my feet starting to swell- and besides they ached from full gee. I don’t like off Earth assignments but getting back from one is worse. I called on mind-control training to help me not notice my discomfort. Garbage. If my mind-control master had spent less time squatting in lotus and more time in Kenya, his instruction might have been more useful. I forgot it and concentrated on the problem: how to get out of this sauna bath quickly. The lobby of the Hilton was pleasantly cool. Best of all, it held a fully automated travel bureau. I went in, found an empty booth, and sat down in front of the terminal. At once the attendant showed up. “May I help you?” I told her I thought I could manage; the keyboard looked familiar. (It was an ordinary Kensington 400.) She persisted: “I’d be glad to punch it for you. I don’t have anyone waiting.” She looked about sixteen, a sweet face, a pleasant voice, and a manner that convinced me that she really did take pleasure in being helpful. What I wanted least was someone helping me while I did things with credit cards that weren’t mine. So, I slipped her a medium-size tip while telling her that I really did prefer to punch it myself-but I would shout if I got into difficulties. She protested that I did not have to tip her-but she did not insist on giving it back and went away. “Adolf Belsen” took the tube to Cairo, then semi ballistic to Hong Kong, where he had reserved a room at the Peninsula, all courtesy of Diners Club. “Albert Beaumont” was on vacation. He took Safari Jets to Timbuktu, where American Express had placed him for two weeks at the luxury Shangri-La on the shore of the Sahara Sea. The Bank of Hong Kong paid “Arthur Bookman’s” way to Buenos Aires. “Archibald Buchanan” visited his native Edinburgh, travel prepaid by MasterCard. Since he could do it all by tube, with one transfer at Cairo and automated switching at Copenhagen, he should be at his ancestral home in two hours. I then used the travel computer to make a number of inquiries- but no reservations, no purchases, and temporary memory only. Satisfied, I left the booth, asked the dimpled attendant whether or not the subway entrance I saw in the lobby would let me reach the Fat Man restaurant. She told me what turns to make. So, I went down into the subway-and caught the tube for Mombasa, again paying cash. Mombasa is only thirty minutes, 450 kilometers, from Nairobi, but it is at sea level, which makes Nairobi’s climate seem heavenly; I got out as quickly as I could arrange it. So, twenty-seven hours later I was in the Illinois Province of the Chicago Imperium. Along time, you might say, for a great-circle arc of only thirteen thousand kilometers. But I didn’t travel great circle and did not go through a customs barrier or an immigration checkpoint. Nor did I use a credit card, even a borrowed one. And I managed to grab seven hours of sleep in Alaska Free State; I hadn’t had any sound sleep since leaving Ell-Five space city two days earlier. How? Trade secret. I may never need that route again but someone in my line of work will need it. Besides, as my boss says, with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything wherever they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninety-nine other sorts of electronic surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible-keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers. Computers are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren’t really records …so it is good to be alert to opportunities to foul up the system. If you can’t evade a tax, pay a little too much to confuse their computers. Transpose digits. And so on... The key to traveling half around a planet without leaving tracks is: Pay cash. Never credit, never anything that goes into a computer. And a bribe is never a bribe; any such transfer of valuta must save face for the recipient. No matter how lavishly over paid, civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid, but all public employees have larceny in their hearts, or they wouldn’t be feeding at the public trough. These two facts are all you need-but be careful! a public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect. I always pander to this need and the trip had been without incident. I didn’t count the fact that the Nairobi Hilton blew up and burned a few minutes after I took the tube for Mombasa; it would have seemed downright paranoid to think that it had anything to do with me. I did get rid of four credit cards and a passport just after I heard about it, but I had intended to take that precaution anyhow. If the opposition wanted to cancel me-possible but unlikely-it would be swatting a fly with an ax to destroy a multimillion-crown property and kill or injure hundreds or thousands of others just to get me. Un-professional. As maybe. Here I was at last in the Imperium, another mission completed with only minor bobbles. I exited at Lincoln Meadows while musing that I had garnered enough brownie points to wheedle the boss out of a few weeks R&R in New Zealand. My family, a seven S-group, was in Christchurch; I had not seen them in months. High time! But in the meantime, I relished the cool clean air and the rustic beauty of Illinois-it was not South Island, but it was the next best thing. They say these meadows used to be covered with dingy factories-it seems hard to believe. Today the only building in sight from the station was the Avis livery stable across the street. At the hitching rail outside the station were two Avis Retrigs as well as the usual buggies and farm wagons. I was about to pick one of the Avis nags when I recognized a rig just pulling in: a beautiful, matched pair of bays hitched to a Lockheed landau. “Uncle Jim! Over here! It’s me!” The coachman touched his whip to the brim of his top hat, then brought his team to a halt so that the landau was at the steps where I waited. He climbed down and took off his hat. “It’s good to have you home, Miss Friday.” I gave him a quick hug, which he endured patiently. Uncle Jim Prufit harbored strong notions of propriety. They say he was convicted of advocating papism-some said that he was actually caught bare-handed, celebrating mass. Others said nonsense, he was infiltrating for the company and took a fall to protect others. Me, I don’t know that much about politics, but I suppose a priest would have formal manners, whether he was a real one or a member of our trade. I could be wrong; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a priest. As he handed me in, making me feel like a “lady,” I asked, “How did you happen to be here?” “The Master sent me to meet you, miss.” “He did? But I didn’t let him know when I would arrive.” I tried to think who, on my back track, could have been part of Boss’s data net. “Sometimes I think the boss has a crystal ball.” “It do seem like it, don’t it?” Jim clucked to Gog and Magog, and we headed for the farm. I settled back and relaxed, listening to the homey, cheerful clomp clomp! of horses’ hooves on dirt. I woke up as Jim turned into our gate and was wide awake by the time he pulled under the porte-cochere. I jumped down without waiting to be a “lady” and turned to thank Jim. They hit me from both sides. Dear old Uncle Jim did not warn me. He simply watched while they took me. Two. My own stupid fault! I was taught in basic that no place is ever totally safe and that anyplace you habitually return to is your top danger spot, the place most likely for booby-trap, ambush, stakeout. But apparently, I had learned this only as parrot rote; as an old pro I had ignored it. So it bit me. This rule is analogous to the fact that the person most likely to murder you is some member of your own family-and that grim statistic is ignored too; it has to be. Live in fear of your own family? Better to be dead! My worst stupidity was to ignore a loud, clear, specific warning, not just a general principle. How had dear old “Uncle” Jim managed to meet my capsule?-on the right day and almost to the minute. Crystal ball? Boss is smarter than the rest of us but he does not use magic. I may be wrong but, I’m positive. If Boss had supernatural powers, he would not need the rest of us. I had not reported my movements to Boss; I didn’t even tell him when I left Ell-Five. This is doctrine; he does not encourage us to check in every time we move, as he knows that a leak can be fatal. Even I didn’t know that I was going to take that particular capsule until I took it. I had ordered breakfast in Hotel Seward’s coffee shop, stood up without eating it, dropped some money on the counter- three minutes later I was sealed into an express capsule. So how? Obviously chopping off that tail at Kenya Beanstalk Station had not eliminated all tails on me. Either there had been a backup tail on the spot or Mister “Belsen” (“Beaumont,” “Bookman,” “Buchanan”) had been missed at once and replaced quickly. Possibly they had been with me all along or perhaps what had happened to “Belsen” had made them cautious about stepping on my heels. Or last night’s sleep may have given them time to catch me. Which variant was immaterial. Shortly after I climbed into that capsule in Alaska, someone had phoned a message somewhat like this: “Firefly to Dragonfly. Mosquito left here express capsule International Corridor nine minutes ago. Anchorage traffic control shows capsule programmed to sidetrack and open Lincoln Meadows your time eleven-oh-three.” Or some such chatter. Some unfriendly had seen me enter that capsule and had phoned ahead; otherwise, sweet old Jim would not have been able to meet me. Logic. Hindsight is wonderful-it shows you how you busted your skull after you’ve busted it. But I made them pay for their drinks. If I had been smart, I would have surrendered once I saw that I was hopelessly outnumbered. But I’m not smart; I’ve already proved that. Better yet, I would have run like hell when Jim told me the boss had sent him, instead of climbing in and taking a nap, fer Gossake. I recall killing only one of them. Possibly two. But why did they insist on doing it the hard way? They could have waited until I was inside and gassed me, or used a sleepy Dart, or even a sticky rope. They had to take me alive, that was clear. Didn’t they know that a field agent with my training when attacked goes automatically into overdrive? Maybe I’m not the only stupid. But why waste time by raping me? This whole operation had amateurish touches. No professional group uses either beating or rape before interrogation today; there is no profit in it; any professional is trained to cope with either or both. For rape she (or he-I hear it’s worse for males) can either detach the mind and wait for it to be over, or (advanced training) emulate the ancient Chinese adage. Or, in place of method A or B, or combined with B if the agent’s histrionic ability is up to it, the victim can treat rape as an opportunity to gain an edge over her captors. I’m no great shakes as an actress but I try and, while it has never enabled me to turn the tables on unfriendlies, at least once it kept me alive. This time method C did not affect the outcome but did cause a little healthy dissension. Four of them (my estimate from touch and body odors) had me in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It may have been my own room but I could not be certain as I had been unconscious for a while and was now dressed (solely) in adhesive tape over my eyes. They had me on a mattress on the floor, a gang bang with minor sadism…which I ignored, being very busy with method C. In my mind I called them “Straw Boss” (seemed to be in charge), “Rocks” (they called him that-rocks in his head, probably), “Shorty” (take that either way), and “the other one” as he did not have distinctive characteristics. I worked on all of them-method acting, of course-reluctant, have to be forced, then gradually your passion overcomes you; you just can’t help yourself. Any man will believe that routine; they are suckers for it-but I worked especially hard on Straw Boss as I hoped to achieve the status of teacher’s pet or some such. Straw Boss wasn’t so bad; methods Band C combined nicely. But I worked hardest on Rocks because with him it had to be C combined with A; his breath was so foul. He wasn’t too clean in other ways, too; it took great effort to ignore it and make my responses flattering to his macho ego. After he became flaccid, he said, “Mac, we’re wasting our time. This slut enjoys it.” “So, get out of the way and give the kid another chance. He’s ready.” “Not yet. I’m going to slap her around, make her take us seriously.” He let me have a big one, left side of my face. I yelped. “Cut that out!” -Straw Boss’s voice. “Who says so? Mac, you’re getting too big for your britches.” “I say so.” It was a new voice, very loud-amplified-from the sound-system speaker in the ceiling, no doubt. “Rocky, Mac is your squad leader, you know that. Mac, send Rocky to me; I want a word with him.” “Major, I was just trying to help!” “You heard the man, Rocks,” Straw Boss said quietly. “Grab your pants and get moving.” Suddenly the man’s weight was no longer on me and his stinking breath was no longer in my face. Happiness is relative. The voice in the ceiling spoke again: “Mac, is it true that Miss Friday simply enjoys the little ceremony we arranged for her?” “It’s possible, Major,” Straw Boss said slowly. “She does act like it.” “How about it, Friday? Is this the way you get your kicks?” I didn’t answer his question. Instead, I discussed him and his family in detail, with especial attention to his mother and sister. If I had told him the truth-that Straw Boss would be rather pleasant under other circumstances, that Shorty and the other man did not matter one way or the other, but that Rocks was an utter slob whom I would cancel at the first opportunity-it would have blown method C. “The same to you, sweetie,” the voice answered cheerfully. “I hate to disappoint you but I’m a crèche baby. Not even a wife, much less a mother or a sister. Mac, put the cuffs on her and throw a blanket over her. But don’t give her a shot; I’ll be talking to her later.” Amateur. My boss would never have alerted a prisoner to expect interrogation. “Hey, crèche baby!” “Yes, dear?” I accused him of a vice not requiring a mother or a sister but anatomically possible-so I am told-for some males. The voice answered, “Every night, hon. It’s very soothing.” So, mark one up for the Major. I decided that, with training, he could have been a pro. Nevertheless, he was a bloody amateur and I didn’t respect him. He had wasted one, maybe two, of his ables, caused me unnecessarily to suffer bruises, contusions, and multiple personal indignities-even heartbreaking ones had I been an untrained female-and had wasted two hours or more. If my boss had been doing it, the prisoner would have spilled his/her guts at once and spent those two hours spouting her fullest memoirs into a recorder. Straw Boss even took the trouble to police me-led me into the bathroom and waited quietly while I peed, without making a production of it-and that was amateurish, too, as a useful technique, of the cumulative sort, in interrogating an amateur (not a pro) is to force him or her to break toilet training. If she has been protected from the harsher things in life or if he suffers from excessive amour-propre-as most males do-it is at least as effective as pain, and potentiates either with pain or with other humiliations. I don’t think Mac knew this. I figured him for basically a decent soul despite his taste for-no, aside from his taste for a bit of rape-a taste common to most males according to the Kinsey’s. Somebody had put the mattress back on the bed. Mac guided me to it, told me to lie on my back with my arms out. Then he cuffed me to the legs of the bed, using two pairs. They weren’t the peace officer type, but special ones, velvet-lined-the sort of junk used by idiots for SM games. I wondered who the pervert was? The Major? Mac made sure that they were secure but not too tight, then gently spread a blanket over me. I would not have been surprised had he kissed me good night. But he did not. He left quietly. Had he kissed me would method C call for returning it in full? Or turning my face and trying to refuse it? A nice question. Method C is based on I-just-can’t-help-myself and requires precise judgment as to when and how much enthusiasm to show. If the rapist suspects the victim of faking, she has lost the ploy. I had just decided, somewhat regretfully, that this hypothetical kiss should have been refused, when I fell asleep. I was not allowed enough sleep. I was exhausted from all the things that had happened to me and had sunk into deep sleep, soggy with it, when I was roused by a slap. Not Mac. Rocks, of course. Not as hard as he had hit me earlier but totally unnecessary. It seemed to me that he blamed me for whatever disciplining he had received from the Major…and I promised myself that, when time came to cancel him, I would do it slowly. I heard Shorty say, “Mac said not to hit her.” “I didn’t hit her. That was just a love tap to wake her up. Shut up and mind your own business. Stand clear and keep your gun on her. On her, you idiot!-not on me.” They took me down into the basement and into one of our own interrogation chambers. Shorty and Rocks left-I think that Shorty left and I know that Rocks did; his stink went away-and an interrogation team took over. I don’t know who or how many as not one of them ever said a word. The only voice was the one I thought of as “the Major.” It seemed to be coming through a speaker. “Good morning, Miss Friday.” (Morning? It seemed unlikely.) “Howdy, crèche baby!” “I’m glad that you are in fine fettle, dear, as this session is likely to prove long and tiring. Even unpleasant. I want to know all about you, love.” “Fire away. What will you have first?” “Tell me about this trip you just made, every tiny detail. And outline this organization you belong to. I might as well tell you that we already know a great deal about it, so if you lie, I will know it. Not even a little white fib, dear-for I will know it and what happens then I will regret but you will regret it far more.” “Oh, I won’t lie to you. Is a recorder running? This will take a long time.” “A recorder is running.” “Okay.” For three hours I spilled my guts. This was according to doctrine. My boss knows that ninety-nine out of a hundred will crack under sufficient pain, that almost that percentage will crack under long interrogation combined with nothing more than raw fatigue, but only Buddha Himself can resist certain drugs. Since he does not expect miracles and hates to waste agents, standard doctrine is: “If they grab you, sing!” So, he makes sure that a field operative never knows anything critical. A courier never knows what she is carrying. I know nothing about policy. I don’t know my boss’s name. I’m not sure whether we are a government agency or an arm of one of the multinationals. I do know where the farm is but so do many other people…and it is (was) very well defended. Other places I have visited only via closed authorized power vehicles-an APV took me (for example) to a practice area that maybe the far end of the farm. Or not. “Major, how did you crack this place? It was pretty strongly defended.” “I ask the questions, bright eyes. Let’s have that part again about how you were followed out of the Beanstalk capsule.” After a long time of this, when I had told all, I knew and was repeating myself, the Major stopped me. “Dear, you tell a very convincing story, and I don’t believe more than every third word. Let’s start procedure B.” Somebody grabbed my left arm, and a needle went in. Babble juice! I hoped these frimping amateurs weren’t as clumsy with it as they were in some other ways; you can get very dead in a hurry with an overdose. “Major! I had better sit down!” “Put her in a chair.” Somebody did so. For the next thousand years I did my best to tell exactly the same story no matter how bleary I felt. At some point I fell off the chair. They didn’t stick me back onto it but stretched me on the cold concrete instead. I went on babbling. Some silly time later I was given some other shot. It made my teeth ache and my eyeballs felt hot, but it snapped me awake. “Miss Friday!” “Yes, sir?” “Are you awake now?” “I think so.” “My dear, I think you have been most carefully indoctrinated under hypnosis to tell the same story under drugs that you tell so well without drugs. That’s too bad as I must now use another method. Can you stand up?” “I think so. I can try.” “Stand her up. Don’t let her fall.” Someone-some two-did so. I wasn’t steady but they held me. “Start procedure C, item five.” Someone stomped a heavy boot on my bare toes. I screamed. Look, you! If you are ever questioned under pain, do scream. The Iron Man routine just makes them worse and it worse. Take it from one who’s been there. Scream your head off and crack as fast as possible. I am not going to give details of what happened during the following endless time. If you have any imagination, it would nauseate you, and to tell it makes me want to throw up. I did, several times. I passed out, too, but they kept reviving me and the voice kept on asking questions. Apparently, the time came when reviving didn’t work, for the next thing I knew was back in bed-the same bed, I suppose-and again handcuffed to it. I hurt all over. That voice again, right above my head. “Miss Friday.” “What the hell do you want?” “Nothing. If it’s any consolation to you, dear girl, you are the only subject I have ever questioned that I could not get the truth out of, eventually.” “Go soothe yourself!” “Good night, dear.” The bloody amateur! Every word I had said to him was the naked truth. Three. Someone came in and gave me another hypodermic shot. Presently the pain went away, and I slept. I think I slept a long time. I either had confused dreams or half-awake periods or both. Some of it had to be dreams-dogs do talk, many of them, but they don’t lecture on the rights of living artifacts, do they? Sounds of a ruckus and people running up and down may have been real. But it felt like a nightmare because I tried to get out of bed and discovered that I couldn’t lift my head, much less get up and join the fun. There came a time when I decided that I really was awake, because cuffs no longer bothered my wrists and sticky tape was no longer across my eyes. But I didn’t jump up or even open my eyes. I knew that the first few seconds after I opened my eyes might be the best and possibly the only chance I would have to escape. I twitched muscles without moving. Everything seemed to be under control although I was more than a little sore here and there and several other places. Clothes? Forget them-not only did I have no idea where my clothes might be hut also there is no time to stop to dress when you are running for your life. Now to plan- There didn’t seem to be anyone in this room; was anyone on this floor? Hold still and listen, If and when I was fairly sure I was alone on this floor, get noiselessly out of bed and up the stairs like a mouse, on past the third floor into the attic, and hide. Wait for dark. Out an attic gable, down the roof and the back wall and into the woods. If I reached the woods back of the house, they would never catch me …but until I did, I would be an easy target. The chances? One in nine. Perhaps one in seven if I got really cranked up. The weakest spot in a poor plan was the high probability of being spotted before I was clear of the house … because, if I was spotted-no, when I was spotted-I would not only have to kill but I would have to be utterly quiet in doing so-because the alternative was to wait until they terminated me which would be shortly after “the Major” decided that there was no more to be squeezed out of me. Clumsy as these goons were, they were not so stupid-or the Major was not so stupid-as to let a witness who has been tortured and raped stay alive. I stretched years in all directions and listened. “Nothing was stirring, not even a mouse.” No point in waiting; every moment I delayed brought that much closer the time when someone would be stirring. I opened my eyes. “Awake, I see. Good.” “Boss! Where am I?” “What a time-ridden cliché. Friday, you can do better than that. Back up and try again.” I looked around me. A bedroom, possibly a hospital room. No windows. No-glare lighting. A characteristic grave like silence enhanced rather than broken by the softest of ventilation sighing. I looked back at Boss. He was a welcome sight. Same old unstylish eye patch-why wouldn’t he take time to have that eye regenerated? His canes were leaning against a table, in reach. He was wearing his usual sloppy raw-silk suit, a cut that looked like badly tailored pajamas. I was awfully glad to see him. “I still want to know where I am. And how. And why. Somewhere underground, surely-but where?” “Underground, surely, quite a few meters. ‘Where’ you will be told when you need to know, or at least how to get to and from. That was the shortcoming of our farm-a pleasant place but too many people knew its location. ‘Why’ is obvious. ‘How’ can wait. Report.” “Boss, you are the most exasperating man I have ever met.” “Long practice. Report.” “And your father met your mother at a swing ding. And he didn’t take off his hat.” “They met at a Baptist Sunday-school picnic and both of them believed in the Tooth Fairy. Report.” “Dirty ears. Snot. The trip to Ell-Five was without incident. I found Mister Mortenson and delivered to him the contents of my trick bellybutton. Routine was interrupted by a most unusual factor: The space city was experiencing an epidemic of respiratory disorder, etiology unknown, and I contracted it. Mister Mortenson was most kind; he kept me at home and his wives nursed me with great skill and tender loving care. Boss, I want them compensated.” “Noted. Continue.” “I was out of my silly head most of the time. That is why I ran a week behind schedule. But once I felt like traveling, I was able to leave at once as Mister Mortenson told me that I was already carrying the item, he had for you. How, Boss? My navel pouch again?” “Yes and no.” “That’s a hell of an answer!” “Your artificial pochette was used.” “I thought so. Despite the fact that there aren’t supposed to be any nerve endings there, I can feel something-pressure, maybe-when it’s loaded.” I pressed on my belly around my navel and tightened my belly muscles. “Hey, it’s empty! You unloaded it?” “No. Our antagonists did so.” “Then I failed! Oh, God, Boss, this is awful.” “No,” he said gently, “you succeeded. In the face of great danger and monumental obstacles you succeeded perfectly.” “I did?” (Ever had the Victoria Cross pinned on you?) “Boss, cut the double talk and draw me a diagram.” ”I will.” But maybe I had better draw a diagram first. I have a ‘possum pouch, created by plastic surgery, behind my bellybutton. It isn’t large but you can crowd one whale of a lot of microfilm into a space of about one cubic centimeter. You can’t see it because the sphincter valve that serves it holds the navel scar closed. My belly button looks normal. Unbiased judges tell me that I have a pretty belly and a sightly navel …which, in some important ways, is better than having a pretty face, which I don’t have. The sphincter is a synthetic silicone elastomer that holds the navel tight at all times, even if I am unconscious. This is necessary as there are no nerves there to give voluntary control of contraction and relaxation, such as is possible with the anal, vaginal, and-for some people-throat sphincters. To load the pouch use a dab of K-Y jelly or other nonpetroleum lubricant, and push it in by thumb, no sharp corners, please! To unload it I take the fingers of both hands and pull the artificial sphincter open as much as I can, then press hard with my abdominal muscles-and it pops right out. The art of smuggling things in the human body has a long history. The classic ways are in the mouth, in the nasal sinuses, in the stomach, the gut, the rectum, vagina, bladder, eye socket of a missing eye, ear canal, and exotic and not very useful methods using tattoos sometimes covered with hair. Every one of the classic ways is known to every customs officer and every special agent public or private the world round, Luna, space cities, other planets, and anywhere men have reached. So, forget them. The only classic method that can still beat a pro is the Purloined Letter. But the Purloined Letter is high art indeed and, even when used perfectly, it should be planted on an innocent who can’t give it away under drugs. Take a look at the next thousand bellybuttons you encounter socially. Now that my pouch has been compromised, it is possible that one or two will conceal surgically emplaced hideaways like mine. You can expect a spate of them soon, then no more will be emplaced as any novelty in smuggling becomes useless once the word gets around. In the meantime customs officers are going to be poking rude fingers into bellybuttons. I hope a lot of those officers get poked in the eye by angry victims-navels tend to be sensitive and ticklish. “Friday, the weak point of that pochette in you has always been that any skillful interrogation-“ “They were clumsy.” “-or rough interrogation using drugs could force you to mention its existence.” “Must have been after they shot me with babble juice. I don’t recall mentioning it.” “Probably. Or word may have come to them through other channels, as several people know of it-you, me, three nurses, two surgeons, one anesthesiologist, possibly others. Too many. No matter how our antagonists knew, they did remove what you were carrying there. But don’t look glum; what they received was a very long list reduced to microfilm of all the restaurants listed in a 1928 telephone book of the former city of New York. No doubt there is a computer somewhere working on this list right now, attempting to break the code concealed in it … which will take a long time as there is no code concealed in it. A dummy load. Sense-free.” “And for this I have to chase all the way to Ell-Five, eat scummy food, get sick on the Beanstalk, and be buggered about by brutal bastards!” “Sorry about the last, Friday. But do you think I would risk the life of my most skillful agent on a useless mission?” (See why I work for the arrogant bastard? Flattery will get you anywhere.) “Sorry, sir.” “Check your appendectomy scar.” “Huh?” I reached under the sheet and felt it, then flipped the sheet back and looked at it. “What the hell?” “The incision was less than two centimeters and straight through the scar; no muscle tissue was disturbed. The item was withdrawn about twenty-four hours ago by reopening the same incision. With the accelerated repair methods that were used on you I am told that in two more days you will not be able to find the new scar in the old. But I am very glad that the Mortensons took such good care of you as I am sure that the artificial symptoms induced in you to cover what had to be done to you were not pleasant. By the way, there really is a catarrhal-fever epidemic there-fortuitous window dressing.” Boss paused. I stubbornly refused to ask him what I was carrying-he would not have told me anyhow. Shortly he added, “You were telling me about your trip home.” “The trip down was without incident. Boss, the next time you send me into space I want to go first-class, in an anti gravship. Not via that silly Indian rope trick.” - “Engineering analysis shows that a skyhook is safer than any ship. The Quito cable was lost through sabotage, not materiel failure.” “Stingy.” “I don’t intend to bind the mouths of the kine. You may use anti gray from here on if circumstances and timing permit. This time there were reasons to use the Kenya Beanstalk.” “Maybe so, but someone tailed me out of the Beanstalk capsule. As soon as we were alone, I killed him.” I paused. Someday, someday, I am going to cause his face to register surprise. I retackled the subject diagonally: “Boss, I need a refresher course, with some careful reorientation.” “Really? To what end?” “My kill reflex is too fast. I don’t discriminate. That bloke hadn’t done anything to rate killing. Surely, he was tailing me. But I should either have shaken him, there or in Nairobi, or, at most, knocked him cold and placed him on ice while I went elsewhere.” “We’ll discuss your possible need later. Continue.” I told him about the Public Eye and “Belsen’s” quadruple identity and how I had sent them to the four winds, then I outlined my trip home. He checked me. “You did not mention the destruction of that hotel in Nairobi.” “Huh? But, Boss, that had nothing to do with me. I was halfway to Mombasa.” “My dear Friday, you are too modest. A large number of people and a huge amount of money have gone into trying to keep you from completing your mission, including a last-ditch attempt at our former farm. You may assume, as least hypothesis, that the bombing of the Hilton had as its sole purpose killing you.” “Hmm. Boss, apparently you knew that it would be this rough. Couldn’t you have warned me?” “Would you have been more alert, more resolute, had I filled your mind with vague warnings of unknown dangers? Woman, you made no mistakes.” “The hell I didn’t! Uncle Jim met my capsule when he should not have known the time I would arrive; that should have set off every alarm in my head. The instant I laid eyes on him I should have dived back down the hole and taken any capsule anywhere.” “Whereupon it would have become extremely difficult for us to achieve rendezvous, which would have aborted your mission as thoroughly as losing what you carried. My child, if affairs had gone smoothly, Jim would have met you at my behest; you underestimate my intelligence net as well as the effort we put into trying to watch over you. But I did not send Jim to get you because at that moment I was running. Hobbling, to be precise. Hurrying. Trying to escape. I assume that Jim took the ETA message himself-from our man, or that of our antagonists, or possibly from both.” “Boss, if I had known it at the time, I would have fed Jim to his horses. I was fond of him. When the time comes, I want to cancel him myself. He’s mine.” “Friday, in our profession it is undesirable to hold grudges.” “I don’t hold many, but Uncle Jim is special. And there is another case I want to handle myself. But I’ll argue with you later. Say, is it true that Uncle Jim used to be a papist priest?” Boss almost looked surprised. “Where did you hear that nonsense?” “Around and about. Gossip.” ‘Human, All Too Human.’ Gossip is a vice. Let me settle it. Prufit was a con man. I met him in prison, where he did something for me, important enough that I made a place for him in our organization. My mistake. My inexcusable mistake, as a con man never stops being a con man; he can’t. But I suffered from a will to believe, a defect of character that I thought I had rooted out. I was mistaken. Continue, please.” I told Boss how they had grabbed me. “Five of them, I think. Possibly only four.” “Six, I believe. Descriptions.” “None, Boss, I was too busy. Well, one. I had one sharp look at him just as I killed him. About a hundred and seventy-five tall, weight around seventy-five or six. Age near thirty-five. Blondish, smooth-shaven. Slavic. But he was the only one my eye photographed. Because he held still. Involuntarily. As his neck snapped.” “You never do.” “Was the other one you killed blond or brunet?” ‘Belsen’? Brunet.” “No, at the farm. Never mind. You killed two and injured three before they piled enough bodies on you to hold you down by sheer weight. A credit to your instructor, let me add. In escaping, we had not been able to thin them down enough to keep them from taking you…but, in my opinion, you won the battle in which we recaptured you by your having earlier taken out so many of their effectives. Even though you were chained up and unconscious at the time, you won the final fracas. Go on, please.” “That about wraps it up, Boss. A gang rape next, followed by interrogation, direct, then under drugs, then under pain.” “I’m sorry about the rape, Friday. The usual bonuses. You will find them enhanced as I judge the circumstances to have been unusually offensive.” “Oh, not that bad. I’m hardly a twittering virgin. I can recall social occasions that were almost as unpleasant. Except one man. I don’t know his face, but I can identify him. I want him! I want him as badly as I want Uncle Jim. Worse, maybe, as I want to punish him a bit before I let him die.” “I can only repeat what I said earlier. For us, personal grudges are a mistake. They reduce survival probability.” “I’ll risk it for this bucko. Boss, I don’t hold the rape qua rape against him; they were ordered to rape me under the silly theory that it would soften me up for interrogation. But the scum should bathe and he should have his teeth fixed and he should brush them and use a mouthwash. And somebody must tell him that it is not polite to slap a woman with whom he is copulated. I don’t know his face, but I know his voice and his odor and his build and his nickname. Rocks or Rocky.” “Jeremy Rockford.” “Huh? You know him? Where is he?” “I once knew him and I recently had one clear look at him, enough to be sure. Requiescat in pace.” “Really? Oh, hell. I hope he didn’t die quietly.” “He did not die quietly. Friday, I have not told you all that I know-“ “-because I wanted your report first. Their assault on the farm succeeded because Jim Prufit had cut all power just before they hit us. This left us nothing but hand weapons for the few who wear arms at the farm, only bare hands for most of us. I ordered evacuation and most of us escaped through a tunnel prepared and concealed when the house was rebuilt. I am sorry and proud to say that three of our best, the three who were armed when we were hit, elected to play Horatius at the bridge. I know that they died as I kept the tunnel open until I could tell by the sounds that it had been entered by the raiders. Then I blasted it. “It took some hours to round up enough people and to mount our counterattack, especially in arranging for enough authorized power vehicles. While we conceivably could have attacked on foot, we had to have at least one APV as ambulance for you.” “How did you know I was alive?” “The same way I knew that the escape tunnel had been entered and not by our rear guard. Remote pickups. Friday, everything that was done to you and by you, everything you said and was said to you, was monitored and recorded. I was unable to monitor in person-busy preparing the counterattack-but the essential parts were played for me as time permitted. Let me add that I am proud of you. “Be knowing which pickups recorded what, we knew where they were holding you, the fact that you were cuffed, how many were in the house, where they were, when they settled down, and who stayed awake. By relay to the command APVI knew the situation in the house right to the moment of attack. We hit- They hit, I mean-our people hit. I don’t lead attacks hobbling on these two sticks, I wield the baton. Our people hit the house, were inside, the designated four picked you up-one armed only with a bolt cutter- and all were out in three minutes eleven seconds. Then we set fire to it.” “Boss! Your lovely farm house?” “When a ship is sinking, one does not worry about the dining room linens. We can never use the farm again. Burning the house destroyed many awkward records and many secret and quasi-secret items of equipment. But, most compelling, burning the house gave us a quick cleanup of the parties who had compromised its secrets. Our cordon was in place before we used incendiaries, then each one was shot as he attempted to come out. “That was when I saw your acquaintance Jeremy Rockford. He was burned in the leg as he came out the east door. He stumbled back in, changed his mind and tried again to escape, fell and was trapped. From the sounds he made I can assure you that he did not die quietly.” “Ugh. Boss, when I said that I wanted to punish him before I killed him, I didn’t mean anything as horrible as burning him to death.” “Had he not behaved like a horse running back into a burning barn, he would have died as the others did …quickly, from laser beam. Shot on sight, for we took no prisoners.” “Not even for interrogation?” “Not correct doctrine, I so stipulate. But Friday my dear, you are unaware of the emotional atmosphere. All had heard the tapes, at least of the rape and of your third interrogation, the torture. Our lads and lassies would not have taken prisoners even if I had so ordered. But I did not attempt to. I want you to know that you are held in high esteem by your colleagues. Including the many who have never met you and whom you are unlikely ever to meet.” Boss reached for his canes, struggled to his feet. “I’m seven minutes over the time your physician told me I could visit. We’ll talk tomorrow. You are to rest now. A nurse will be in to put you to sleep. Sleep and get well.” I had a few minutes to myself~ I spent them in a warm glow. “High esteem.” When you have never belonged and can never really belong, words like that mean everything. They warmed me so much that I didn’t mind not being human. Four. Someday I’m going to win an argument with Boss. But don’t hold your breath. There were days when I did not lose arguments with him-the days he did not visit me. It started with a difference of opinion over how long I was going to have to remain in therapy. I felt ready to go home or back to duty, either one, after four days. While I didn’t want to get into a dockside fight just yet, I could take light duty-or a trip to New Zealand, my first choice. All my hurts were repairing. They hadn’t been all that much: lots of burns, four broken ribs, simple fractures left tibia and fibula, multiple compound fractures of the bones of my right foot and three toes of my left, a hairline skull fracture without complications, and (messy but least disabling) somebody had sawed off my right nipple. The last item and the burns and the broken toes were all that I recalled; the others must have happened while I was distracted by other matters. Boss said, “Friday, you know that it will take at least six weeks to regenerate that missing nipple.” “But plastic surgery for a simple cosmetic job would heal in a week. Doctor Krasny told me so.” “Young woman, when anyone in this organization is maimed in line of duty, she will be restored as perfectly as therapeutic art can achieve. In addition to that our permanent policy, in your case there is another reason, compelling and sufficient. We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste. You have an unusually comely body, damage to it is deplorable. It must be repaired.” “Cosmetic surgery is all right, I said so. But I don’t expect to have milk in these jugs. And anybody in bed with me won’t care.” “Friday, you may have convinced yourself that you will never have need to lactate. But esthetically a functional breast is very different from a surgery-shaped imitation. That hypothetical bedmate might not know …but you would know, and I would know. No, my dear. You will be restored to your former perfection.” “Hmm! When are you going to get that eye regenerated?” “Don’t be rude, child. In my case, no esthetic issue obtains.” So, I got my tit back as good as ever or maybe better. The next argument was over the retraining I felt I needed to correct hair-trigger kill reflex. When I brought up the matter again, Boss looked as if he had just bitten into something nasty. “Friday, I do not recall that you have ever made a kill that turned out to be a mistake. Have you made any kills of which I am unaware?” “No, no,” I said hastily. “I never killed anybody until I went to work for you, and I haven’t made any that I didn’t report to you.” “In that case all of your killings have been in self-defense.” “All but that ‘Belsen’ character. That wasn’t self-defense; he never laid a finger on me.” “Beaumont. At least that was the name he usually used. Self-defense sometimes must take the form of ‘Do unto others what they would do unto you but do it first.’ De Camp, I believe. Or some other of the twentieth-century school of pessimistic philosophers. I’ll call up Beaumont’s dossier so that you may see for yourself that he belonged on everyone’s better-dead list.” “Don’t bother. Once I looked into his pouch, I knew that he wasn’t following me to kiss me. But that was afterward.” Boss took several seconds to answer, far beyond his wont. “Friday, do you want to change tracks and become a hatchet man?” My chin dropped and my eyes widened. That was all the answer I made. “I didn’t intend to frighten you off the nest,” Boss said dryly. “You will have deduced that this organization includes assassins. I don’t want to lose you as a courier; you are my best. But we always need skilled assassins, as their attrition rate is high. However, there is this major difference between a courier and an assassin: A courier kills only in self-defense and often by reflex…and, I concede, always with some possibility of error …as not all couriers have your supreme talent for instantly integrating all factors and reaching a necessary conclusion.” “Huh!” “You heard me correctly. Friday, one of your weaknesses is that you lack appropriate conceit. An honorable hatchet man does not kill by reflex; he kills by planned intent. If the plan goes so far wrong that he needs to use self-defense, he is almost certain to become a statistic. In his planned killings, he always knows why and agrees with the necessity…or I won’t send him out.” (Planned killing? Murder, by definition. Get up in the morning, eat a hearty breakfast, then keep rendezvous with your victim, cut him down in cold blood? Eat dinner and sleep soundly?) “Boss, I don’t think it is my sort of work.” “I’m not sure that you have the temperament for it. But, for the nonce, keep an open mind. I am not sanguine about the possibility of slowing down your defense reflex. Moreover, I can assure you that, if we attempt to retrain you in the way that you ask, I will not again use you as a courier. No. Risking your life is your business when on your own time. But your missions are always critical; I won’t use a courier whose fine edge has been deliberately blunted.” Boss did not convince me, but he made me unsure of myself. When I told him again that I was not interested in becoming a hatchet man, he did not appear to listen-just said something about getting me something to read. I expected it-whatever-to show up on the room’s terminal. Instead, about twenty minutes after he left me, a youngster-well, younger than I am-showed up with a book, a bound book with paper pages. It had a serial number on it and was stamped “EYES ONLY” and “Need-to-Know Required” and “Top Secret SPECIAL BLUE Clearance.” I looked at it, as anxious to handle it as a snake. “Is this for me? I think there has been a mistake.” “The Old Man does not make mistakes. Just sign the receipt.” I made him wait while I read the fine print. “This bit about ‘never out of my sight.’ I sleep now and then.” “Call Archives, ask for the classified documents clerk-that’s me-and I’ll be here on the bounce. But try not to go to sleep until I get here. Try hard.” “Okay.” I signed the receipt, looked up and found him staring with bright-eyed interest. “What are you staring at?” “Uh- Miss Friday, you’re pretty.” I never know what to say to that sort of thing, since I’m not. I shape up all right, surely-but I was fully clothed. “How did you know my name?” “Why, everybody knows who you are. You know. Two weeks ago. At the farm. You were there.” “Oh. Yes, I was there. But I don’t remember it.” “I sure do!” His eyes were shining. “It’s the only time I’ve had a chance to be part of a combat operation. I’m glad I had a piece of it!” (What do you do?) I took his hand, pulled him closer to me, took his face in both my hands, kissed him carefully, about halfway between warm-sisterly and let’s-do-it! Maybe protocol called for something stronger but he was on duty, and I was still on the disabled list-not fair to make implied promises that can’t be kept, especially to youngsters with stars in their eyes. “Thank you for rescuing me,” I said to him soberly before letting go of his cheeks. The dear thing blushed. But he seemed very pleased. I stayed up so late reading that book that the night nurse scolded me. However, nurses need something to scold about now and then. I’m not going to quote from the incredible document…but listen to these subjects: Title first: The Only Deadly Weapon. Then: Assassination as a Fine Art Assassination as a Political Tool Assassination for Profit Assassins Who Changed History The Society for Creative Euthanasia The Canons of the Professional Assassins Guild Amateur Assassins: Should They Be Exterminated? Honorable Hatchet Men-Some Case Histories “Extreme Prejudice”-“Wet Work”-Are Euphemisms Necessary? Seminar Working Papers: Techniques and Tools Whew! There was no good reason for my reading all of it. But I did. It had an unholy fascination. Dirty. I resolved never to mention the possibility of changing tracks and not to bring up retraining again. Let Boss bring it up himself if he wanted to discuss it. I punched the terminal, got Archives, and stated that I needed the classified documents clerk to accept custody of classified item number such-and-such and please bring my receipt. “Right away, Miss Friday,” a woman answered. Notoriety, I waited with considerable unease for that youngster to show up. I am ashamed to say that this poisonous book had had a most unfortunate effect on me. It was the middle of the night, early morning; the place was dead quiet-and if the dear thing laid a hand on me, I was awfully likely to forget that I was technically an invalid. I needed a chastity girdle with a big padlock. But it was not he; the sweet youngster had gone off duty. The person who showed up with my receipt was the older woman who had answered me on the terminal. I felt both relief and disappointment-and chagrin that I felt disappointed. Does convalescence make everybody irresponsibly horny? Do hospitals have a discipline problem? I have not been ill often enough to know. The night clerk swapped my receipt for the book, then surprised me with: “Don’t I get a kiss, too?” “Oh! Were you there?” “Any warm body, dear; we were awfully short of effectives that night. I’m not the world’s greatest but I had basic training like anyone else. Yes, I was there. Wouldn’t have missed it.” I said, “Thank you for rescuing me,” and kissed her. I tried to make this simply a symbol, but she took charge and controlled what sort of a buss it would be. Rough and rugged, namely. She was telling me clearer than words that anytime I wanted to work the other side of the street, she would be waiting. What do you do? There seem to be human situations for which there are no established protocols. I had just acknowledged that she had risked her life to save mine-precisely that, as that rescue raid was not the piece of cake that Boss’s account made it appear to be. Boss’s habitual understatement is such that he would describe the total destruction of Seattle as “a seismic disturbance.” Having thanked her for my life how could I snub her? I could not. I let my half of the kiss answer her wordless message-with my fingers crossed that I would never have to keep the implied promise. Presently she broke the kiss but remained holding on to me. “Dearie,” she said, “want to know something? Do you remember how you told off that slob they called the Major?” “I remember.” “There is a bootleg piece of tape floating around of that one sequence. What you said to him and how you said it is highly admired by one and all. Especially me.” “That’s interesting. Are you the little gremlin who copied that piece of tape?” “Why, how could you think such a thing?” She grinned. “Do you mind?” I thought it over for all of three milliseconds. “No. If the people who rescued me enjoy hearing what I told that bastard, I don’t mind their listening to it. But I don’t talk that way ordinarily.” “Nobody thinks you do.” She gave me a quick peck. “But you did so when it was needed and you made everywoman in the company proud of you. And our men, too.” She didn’t seem disposed to let go of me, but the night nurse showed up then and told me firmly to go to bed and she was going to give me a sleepy time shot I made only the usual formal protest. The clerk said, “Hi, Goldie. Night. Night, dear.” She left. Goldie (not her name-bottle blonde) said, “Want it in your arm? Or in your leg? Don’t mind Anna; she’s harmless.” “She’s all right.” It occurred to me that Goldie probably could monitor both sight and sound. Probably? Certainly! “Were you there? At the farm? When the house was burned?” “Not while the house was burning. I was in an APV, taking you here as fast as we could float it. You were a sad sight, Miss Friday.” “I’ll bet I was. Thanks. Goldie? Will you kiss me good night?” Her kiss was warm and undemanding. I found out later that she was one of the four who made the run upstairs to grab me back-one man carrying big bolt cutters, two armed and firing…and Goldie carrying unassisted a stretcher basket. But she never mentioned it, then or later. I remember that convalescence as the first time in my life-except for vacations in Christchurch-when I was quietly, warmly happy, every day, every night. Why? Because I belonged! Of course, as anyone could guess from this account, I had passed years earlier. I no longer carried an ID with a big “LA” (or even “AP”) printed across it. I could walk into a washroom and not be told to use the end stall. But a phony ID and a fake family tree do not keep you warm; they just keep you from being hassled and discriminated against. You are still aware that there isn’t any nation anywhere that considers your sort fit for citizenship and there are lots of places that would deport you or even kill you-or sell you-if your cover-up ever slipped. An artificial person misses not having a family tree much more than you might think. Where were you born? Well, I wasn’t born, exactly; I was designed in Tri-University Life Engineering Laboratory, Detroit. Oh, really? My inception was formulated by median Associates, Zurich. Wonderful small talk, that! You’ll never hear it; it does not stand up well against ancestors on the Mayflower or in the Doomsday book. My records (or one set) show that I was “born” in Seattle, a destroyed city being a swell place for missing records. A great place to lose your next of kin, too. Since I was never in Seattle, I have studied very carefully all the records and pictures I could find; an honest-to-goodness native of Seattle can’t trip me. I think. Or not yet. But what they gave me while I was recovering from that silly rape and the not-so-funny interrogation was not phony at all and I did not have to worry about keeping my lies straight. Not just Goldie and Anna and the youngster (Terence) but over two dozen more before Doctor Krasny discharged me. Those were just the ones I came into contact with. There were more on that raid; I don’t know how many. Boss’s standing doctrine kept members of his organization from meeting each other save when their duties necessarily brought them together. Just as he firmly snubbed questions. You cannot let slip secrets you do not know, and you cannot betray a person whose very existence is unknown to you. But Boss did not have rules just for the sake of rules. Once having met a colleague through duty one could continue the contact socially. Boss did not encourage such fraternizing but he was no fool and did not try to forbid it. In consequence Anna often called on me in the late evening just before she went on duty. She never did try to collect her pound of flesh. There wasn’t much opportunity but we could have found one if we had tried. I didn’t try to discourage her-hell, no; if she had ever presented the bill for collection, I would not only have paid ch

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Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler,Chapters 16 to20. PREFACE. This is a textbook on gravitation physics (Einstein's "general relativity" or "geometrodynamics"). It supplies two tracks through the subject. The first track is focused on the key physical ideas. It assumes, as mathematical prerequisite, only vector analysis and simple partial-differential equations. It is suitable for a one-semester course at the junior or senior level or in graduate school; and it constitutes-in the opinion of the authors-the indispensable core of gravitation theory that every advanced student of physics should learn. The Track One material is contained in those pages of the book that have a One outlined in gray in the upper outside corner, by which the eye of the reader can quickly pick out the Track One sections. In the contents, the same purpose is served by a gray bar beside the section, box, or figure number. The rest of the text builds up Track One into Track Two. Readers and teachers are invited to select, as enrichment material, those portions of Track Two that interest them most. With a few exceptions, any Track Two chapter can be understood by readers who have studied only the earlier Track One material. The exceptions are spelled out explicitly in "dependency statements" located at the beginning of each Track Two chapter, or at each transition within a chapter from Track One to Track Two. The entire book (all of Track One plus all of Track Two) is designed for a rigorous, full-year course at the graduate level, though many teachers of a full-year course may prefer a more leisurely pace that omits some of the Track Two material. The full book is intended to give a competence in gravitation physics comparable to that which the average P h D has in electromagnetism. When the student achieves this competence, he knows the laws of physics in flat spacetime (Chapters one to seven). He can predict orders of magnitude. He can also calculate using the principal tools of modern differential geometry (Chapters eight to fifteen), and he can predict at all relevant levels of precision. He understands Einstein's geometric framework for physics (Chapters sixteen to twenty two). He knows the applications of greatest present-day interest: pulsars and neutron stars (Chapters twenty three to twenty six); cosmology (Chapters twenty seven to thirty); the Schwarzschild geometry and gravitational collapse (Chapters thirty one to thirty four); and gravitational waves (Chapters thirty five to thirty seven). He has probed the experimental tests of Einstein's theory (Chapters thirty eight to forty). He will be able to read the modern mathematical literature on differential geometry, and also the latest papers in the physics and astrophysics journals about geometrodynamics and its applications. If he wishes to go beyond the field equations, the four major applications, and the tests, he will find at the end of the book (Chapters 41-44) a brief survey of several advanced topics in general relativity. Among the topics touched on here, superspace and quantum geometrodynamics receive special attention. These chapters identify some of the outstanding physical issues and lines of investigation being pursued today. Whether the department is physics or astrophysics or mathematics, more students than ever ask for more about general relativity than mere conversation. They want to hear its principal theses clearly stated. They want to know how to "work the handles of its information pump" themselves. More universities than ever respond with a serious course in Einstein's standard 1915 geometrodynamics. What a contrast to Maxwell's standard 1864 electrodynamics! In 1897, when Einstein was a student at Zurich, this subject was not on the instructional calendar of even half the universities of Europe. "We waited in vain for an exposition of Maxwell's theory," says one of Einstein's classmates. "Above all it was Einstein who was disappointed," for he rated electrodynamics as "the most fascinating subject at the time" as many students rate Einstein's theory today! Maxwell's theory recalls Einstein's theory in the time it took to win acceptance. Even as late as 1904 a book could appear by so great an investigator as William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, with the words, "The so-called 'electromagnetic theory of light' has not helped us hitherto ... it seems to me that it is rather a backward step ... the one thing about it that seems intelligible to me, I do not think is admissible ... that there should be an electric displacement perpendicular to the line of propagation." Did the pioneer of the Atlantic cable in the end contribute so richly to Maxwell electrodynamics-from units, and principles of measurement, to the theory of waves guided by wires-because of his own early difficulties with the subject? Then there is hope for many who study Einstein's geometrodynamics today! By the 1920's the weight of developments, from Kelvin's cable to Marconi's wireless, from the atom of Rutherford and Bohr to the new technology of high- frequency circuits, had produced general conviction that Maxwell was right. Doubt dwindled. Confidence led to applications, and applications led to confidence. Many were slow to take up general relativity in the beginning because it seemed to be poor in applications. Einstein's theory attracts the interest of many today because it is rich in applications. No longer is attention confined to three famous but meager tests: the gravitational red shift, the bending of light by the sun, and the precession of the perihelion of Mercury around the sun. The combination of radar ranging and general relativity is, step by step, transforming the solar-system celestial mechanics of an older generation to a new subject, with a new level of precision, new kinds of effects, and a new outlook. Pulsars, discovered in 1968, find no acceptable explanation except as the neutron stars predicted in 1934, objects with a central density so high (around ten to the fourteen grams per cc) that the Einstein predictions of mass differ from the Newtonian predictions by 10 to 100 per cent. About further density increase and a final continued gravitational collapse, Newtonian theory is silent. In contrast, Einstein's standard 1915 geometrodynamics predicted in 1939 the properties of a completely collapsed object, a "frozen star" or "black hole." By 1966 detailed digital calculations were available describing the formation of such an object in the collapse of a star with a white-dwarf core. Today hope to discover the first black hole is not least among the forces propelling more than one research: How does rotation influence the properties of a black hole? What kind of pulse of gravitational radiation comes off when such an object is formed? What spectrum of x-rays emerges when gas from a companion star piles up on its way into a black hole? All such investigations and more base themselves on Schwarzschild's standard 1916 static and spherically symmetric solution of Einstein's field equations, first really understood in the modern sense in 1960, and in 1963 generalized to a black hole endowed with angular momentum. Beyond solar-system tests and applications of relativity, beyond pulsars, neutron stars, and black holes, beyond geometrostatics (compare electrostatics!) and stationary geometries (compare the magnetic field set up by a steady current!) lies geo- metrodynamics in the full sense of the word (compare electrodynamics!). Nowhere does Einstein's great conception stand out more clearly than here, that the geometry of space is a new physical entity, with degrees of freedom and a dynamics of its own. Deformations in the geometry of space, he predicted in 1918, can transport energy from place to place. Today, thanks to the initiative of Joseph Weber, detectors of such gravitational radiation have been constructed and exploited to give upper limits to the flux of energy streaming past the earth at selected frequencies. Never before has one realized from how many kinds of processes significant gravitational radiation can be anticipated. Never before has there been more interest in picking up this new kind of signal and using it to diagnose faraway events. Never before has there been such a drive in more than one laboratory to raise instrumental sensitivity until gravitational radiation becomes a workaday new window on the universe. The expansion of the universe is the greatest of all tests of Einstein's geometro-dynamics, and cosmology the greatest of all applications. Making a prediction too fantastic for its author to credit, the theory forecast the expansion years before it was observed (1929). Violating the short time-scale that Hubble gave for the expansion, and in the face of "theories" ("steady state"; "continuous creation") manufactured to welcome and utilize this short time-scale, standard general relativity resolutely persisted in the prediction of a long time-scale, decades before the astro-physical discovery (1952) that the Hubble scale of distances and times was wrong, and had to be stretched by a factor of more than five. Disagreeing by a factor of the order of thirty with the average density of mass-energy in the universe deduced from astrophysical evidence as recently as 1958, Einstein's theory now as in the past argues for the higher density, proclaims "the mystery of the missing matter," and encourages astrophysics in a continuing search that year by year turns up new indications of matter in the space between the galaxies. General relativity forecast the primordial cosmic fireball radiation, and even an approximate value for its present temperature, seventeen years before the radiation was discovered. This radiation brings information about the universe when it had a thousand times smaller linear dimensions, and a billion times smaller volume, than it does today. Quasi stellar objects, discovered in 1963, supply more detailed information from a more recent era, when the universe had a quarter to half its present linear dimensions. Telling about a stage in the evolution of galaxies and the universe reachable in no other way, these objects are more than beacons to light up the far away and long ago. They put out energy at a rate unparalleled anywhere else in the universe. They eject matter with a surprising directivity. They show a puzzling variation with time, different between the microwave and the visible part of the spectrum. Quasi stellar objects on a great scale, and galactic nuclei nearer at hand on a smaller scale, voice a challenge to general relativity: help clear up these mysteries! If its wealth of applications attracts many young astrophysicists to the study of Einstein's geometrodynamics, the same attraction draws those in the world of physics who are concerned with physical cosmology, experimental general relativity, gravitational radiation, and the properties of objects made out of superdense matter. Of quite another motive for study of the subject, to contemplate Einstein's inspiring vision of geometry as the machinery of physics, we shall say nothing here because it speaks out, we hope, in every chapter of this book. Why a new book? The new applications of general relativity, with their extraordinary physical interest, out date excellent textbooks of an earlier era, among them even that great treatise on the subject written by Wolfgang Pauli at the age of twenty one. In addition, differential geometry has undergone a transformation of outlook that isolates the student who is confined in his training to the traditional tensor calculus of the earlier texts. For him it is difficult or impossible either to read the writings of his up-to-date mathematical colleague or to explain the mathematical content of his physical problem to that friendly source of help. We have not seen any way to meet our responsibilities to our students at our three institutions except by a new exposition, aimed at establishing a solid competence in the subject, con- temporary in its mathematics, oriented to the physical and astrophysical applications of greatest present-day interest, and animated by belief in the beauty and simplicity of nature. Charles W Misner, Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler.

Stan Getz Roost Recordings (1997) Dolby 5.1 3+ hours. Complete Roost Recordings Album 1 On The Alamo (alt tk) On The Alamo Gone With The Wind Yesterdays Sweetie Pie You Go To My Head Hershey Bar Tootsie Roll Strike Up The Band Imagination (alt tk) Imagination For Stompers Only Navy Blue (alt tk of above) Out Of Nowhere 'S Wonderful Penny Split Kick (alt tk) Split Kick It Might As Well Be Spring (alt tk) It Might As Well Be Spring The Best Thing For You Signal (alt tk) Budo (alt tk) Complete Roost Recordings Album 2 Thou Swell The Song Is You Mosquito Knees Pennies From Heaven Move Parker 51 Hershey Bar Rubberneck Signal Everything Happens To Me Jumpin' With Symphony Sid Yesterdays Budo Wildwood Complete Roost Recordings Album 3 Melody Express Yvette Potter's Luck The Song Is You Wildwood Lullaby Of Birdland Autumn Leaves Autumn Leaves (alt tk) Fools Rush In Fools Rush In (alt tk) These Foolish Things Where Or When Tabu Moonlight In Vermont Jaguar Sometimes I'm Happy Stars Fell On Alabama Nice Work If You Can Get It Tenderly Little Pony Easy Living Nails

Chapter Thirteen. March 21, 1993. Today a new beginning. Quite a coincidence that it's the first day of spring. For me it is like a return from the dead- 470 days of living death. To be back with Katherine, back with my other comrades, able to resume the struggle again after so much wasted time-the thought of these things fills me with an indescribable joy. So much has happened since my last entry in this diary (how glad I am that Katherine was able to save it for me!) that it's difficult to decide how to condense it all here. Well, first things first. It was about four o'clock in the morning, pitch dark, a Sunday. We were all sound asleep. The first thing I remember is Katherine shaking me by the shoulder, trying to wake me up. I could hear an insistent buzzing in the background, which, in my sleep-fogged condition, I assumed was our bedroom alarm clock. "Surely, it's not time to get up yet," I mumbled. "It's the warning buzzer downstairs," Katherine whispered urgently. "Somebody's outside the building." That snapped me awake, but before I could even get my feet on the floor, there was a loud crash, as something trailing a stream of sparks came hurtling through the carefully boarded-up bedroom window. Almost immediately the room was filled with a choking cloud of gas, and I was gasping for breath in agony. The next couple of minutes are a little hazy in my memory. Somehow we all got our gas masks on without turning on any lights. Bill and I raced downstairs, leaving Katherine and Carol to man the upstairs windows. Fortunately, no one had yet tried to enter the building, but as Bill and I reached the bottom of the stairs we could hear someone outside with a bullhorn ordering us to come out with our hands up. I took a quick look through our peephole. The darkness outside had been turned bright as day by dozens of searchlights, all trained on our building. The glare kept me from seeing much of anything beyond the lights, but it was instantly clear that there were several hundred troops and policemen, with lots of equipment, out there. It was obviously futile to attempt to shoot our way out, but we laid down a brief barrage anyway-half-a-dozen quick shots each- from the upstairs and downstairs windows, front and back, just to discourage the people outside from attempting to force a quick entry into the building. After that, we all stayed clear of the windows and doors, which were immediately riddled with a withering return fire, and concentrated on getting as much of our essential equipment out through our escape tunnel as we could. The cement-block walls of the garage offered protection from the small-arms fire being sprayed at us from every direction. Bill, Katherine, and Carol relayed our gear down the long, dark tunnel, while I stayed in the shop and gathered together for them the things I thought we should try to save. In a frantic and exhausting three-quarters of an hour, they assembled a small mountain of armaments and communications equipment in the drainage ditch at the far end of the tunnel. Although the three of them did most of the carrying, at least they were not in danger of being shot. I had bullets whistling around my ears the whole while, and I was stung at least a dozen times by splinters of concrete chipped from the walls by ricochets. I still don't understand how I avoided being killed. I even managed to fire a few rounds back through the door at our attackers every five minutes or so, just to keep them under cover. Finally we had gotten out all our small arms and ammunition, about half our bulk explosives and heavier weapons, and all the completed communications units. Bill's tools were saved, because he has the tidy habit of keeping them all together in a tool box, but we abandoned most of my test equipment, because it was scattered all over the shop. We huddled briefly in the grease pit and decided that Bill and the girls would steal a vehicle and load our things into it while I stayed in the shop and prepared a demolition charge that would cover the entrance of our escape tunnel. I would give them 30 minutes, then I would light the fuse and make my own exit. Katherine broke away and ran quickly back upstairs, where she grabbed some of our personal items-including my diary- and then I shooed her back into the tunnel with the others for the last time. The downstairs doors and the boards over the windows were about half shot away by this time, and so much light was coming into the shop from the searchlights that any movement was becoming extremely hazardous. Working with nervous haste, I assembled a 20-pound charge of tritonal in the grease pit, just above the tunnel entrance, and primed it. Then I crawled along the floor, heading for the wall where approximately another 100 pounds of tritonal was stacked in small containers. I intended to run a length of primacord from that batch to the charge in the grease pit, so that the whole shop would go up in one blast, thoroughly covering everything in rubble. It would take the cops a couple of days to sift through the debris and discover that we had escaped. But I never made it to the wall. Somehow-I still don't understand exactly what happened-the charge in the grease pit exploded prematurely. Perhaps a ricocheting bullet hit the primer. Or perhaps sparks from one of the tear gas grenades which were still being lobbed into the place ignited the fuse. In any event, the concussion knocked me cold-and very nearly killed me. I regained consciousness on an operating table in a hospital emergency room. The next few days were extraordinarily painful ones. I wince at the memory. I was taken directly from the emergency room to an interrogation cell in the sub-basement of the FBI building, which was still only partially cleared of the rubble from our bombing seven weeks earlier. Although I was still disoriented and in extreme pain from my wounds, I was handled very roughly. My wrists were tightly handcuffed behind me, and I was kicked and punched whenever I stumbled or failed to respond fast enough to an order. Forced to stand in the center of the cell while half-adozen FBI agents shouted questions at me from all sides, I could hardly do more than mumble incoherently, even if I had wanted to cooperate with them. Even in my agony, however, I felt a surge of elation when I realized from my interrogators' questions that the others must have gotten away safely. Over and over again the men around me screamed out the same questions: "Where are the others? How many were in the building with you? How did they get out?" Apparently, the charge in the grease pit had successfully obliterated the tunnel entrance. The questions were punctuated with repeated slaps and kicks, until I finally sagged to the floor, mercifully unconscious again. When I came to, I was still lying where I had fallen, on the bare, concrete floor. The light was on, no one else was in the room, and I could hear the chattering of pneumatic hammers and other sounds being made by repairmen working in the corridor beyond my cell door. I ached all over, with the handcuffs causing me particular agony, but my head was nearly clear. My first thought was one of regret that I no longer had my poison capsule. The secret police, of course, had taken my little necklace away as soon as they had found my unconscious body in the wreckage of the garage. I cursed myself for having failed to take the precaution of carrying the capsule in my mouth before the explosion. Probably it wouldn't have been found there, and I could have bitten it as soon as I woke up in the hospital. In the days to come, this regret was to recur again and again. My second thought was also one of regret and self-recrimination. I was tormented by a suspicion so strong that it nearly amounted to certainty that my ill-advised visit to Elsa two days earlier was responsible for my predicament. Evidently, someone from Elsa's group had followed me home and then had informed on me. This suspicion was later confirmed indirectly by my captors. I was alone with my aches and somber thoughts for only a few minutes before my second interrogation session began. This time two FBI agents came into my cell, followed by a physician and three other men, two of the last three being large, muscular-looking Negroes. The third man was a stooped, white-haired figure of about 70. A nasty little smile flickered around the corners of his coarse-looking mouth, which occasionally split into a leering grin, revealing the gold caps on his tobacco-stained teeth. After the physician had quickly checked me over, pronounced me reasonably fit, and left, the two FBI agents jerked me to my feet and then took up positions near the door. The session was turned over to the sinister-looking fellow with the gold teeth. Speaking with a thick Hebrew accent and a disarmingly mild, professorial manner, he introduced himself to me as Colonel Saul Rubin, of Israeli Military Intelligence. Before I could even wonder what business a representative of a foreign government had questioning me, Rubin explained: "Since your racist activities are in violation of the International Genocide Convention, Mr. Turner, you will be tried by an international tribunal, with representatives from both your country and mine. But first we need some information from you, so that we can also bring your fellow criminals to justice at the same time. "I understand that you were not very cooperative last night. Let me warn you that it will go very hard for you if you fail to answer my questions. I have had a great deal of experience over the last 45 years in extracting information from people who did not wish to cooperate with me. In the end they all told me everything I wanted to know, both the Arabs and the Germans, but it was a very unpleasant experience for those who were stubborn." Then, after a brief pause: "Ah yes, some of those Germans, back in 194S and 1946-particularly the ones from the SS- were quite stubborn." The apparently satisfying recollection brought another hideous grin to Rubin's face, and I could not suppress a shudder. I remembered the horrible photographs one of our members who was a former Army intelligence officer had shown me years ago of German prisoners who had had their eyes gouged out, their teeth pulled, their fingers cut off, and their testicles smashed by sadistic interrogators, many wearing U.S. Army uniforms, prior to their conviction and execution by military courts as "war criminals. " I wanted nothing so much as to be able to smash the leering Jewish face before me with my fists, but my handcuffs would not permit me that luxury. I settled for spitting into Rubin's face and simultaneously aiming a kick at his crotch. Unfortunately, my stiff, aching muscles ruined my aim, and my kick only caught Rubin's thigh, sending him staggering back a couple of paces. Then the two Negro orderlies seized me. Under Rubin's instructions, they proceeded to give me a vicious, thorough, and scientific beating. When they finished my whole body was a throbbing, searing mass of pain, and I was writhing on the floor, whimpering. The subsequent interrogation sessions were worse-much worse. Because a public "show trial" was planned for me, presumably in the Adolf Eichmann manner, Rubin avoided the eye-gouging and finger-cutting, which would have disfigured me, but the things he did were fully as painful. (Note to the reader: Adolf Eichmann was a middle-level German official during World War II. Fifteen years after the war, in 39 BNE, he was kidnapped in South America by Jews, flown to Israel, and made the central figure in an elaborately staged, two-year propaganda campaign to evoke sympathy from the non-Jewish world for Israel, the only haven for "persecuted" Jews. After fiendish torture, Eichmann was displayed in a soundproof glass cage during a four-month show trial in which he was condemned to death for "crimes against the Jewish people.") For days at a time I was completely out of my mind, and, as Rubin had predicted, I eventually told him everything he wanted to know. No human being could have done otherwise. During the torture sessions the two FBI agents who were always present as spectators sometimes turned a bit pale-and when Rubin had his two Black assistants thrust a long, blunt rod up into my rectum, so that I was screaming and wriggling like a skewered pig, one looked as if he were going to be sick-but they never raised an objection. I guess it was much the same after World War II, when American officers of German descent calmly watched Jewish torturers work over their racial brothers who had been in the German army and likewise saw nothing amiss when Negro G.I.'s raped and brutalized German girls. Is it that they have been so brainwashed by the Jews that they hate their own race, or is it that they are just insensitive bastards who will do whatever they're told as long as they keep drawing their salaries? Despite Rubin's exquisitely painful expertise, I am now thoroughly convinced that the Organization's interrogation techniques are much more effective than the System's. We are scientific, whereas the System is merely brutal. Although Rubin broke my resistance and got answers to his questions, fortunately he failed to ask many of the right questions. When he had finally finished with me, after nearly a month-long nightmare, I had told him the names of most of the members of the Organization that I knew, the locations of their hideouts, and who had been involved in various operations against the System. I had described in detail the preparation for the bombing of the FBI building and my role in the mortar assault on the Capitol. And, of course, I explained exactly how the other members of my unit had escaped capture. All these disclosures certainly caused problems for the Organization. But since they were able to anticipate exactly what the political police would learn from me, they were able to nullify any potential damage. Mainly it meant hastily abandoning several perfectly good hideouts and establishing new ones. But Rubin's interrogation technique elicited only information in the form of answers to direct questions. He asked me nothing about our communications system, and so he found out nothing about it. (As I learned later, our legals inside the FBI kept the Organization informed as to just what information my interrogation was yielding, so we retained confidence in the security of our radio communications.) He also found out nothing about the Order or about our philosophy or long-range goals, which knowledge might have helped the System understand our strategy. As it was, everything Rubin got from me was of a tactical nature only. I believe the reason for this to be the System's arrogant assumption that the task of liquidating the Organization would be a matter of only weeks. We were regarded as a major problem but not as a mortal danger. After my period of interrogation was over, I was kept in the FBI building for another three weeks, apparently in anticipation of having me handy to identify various Organization members who might be arrested on the basis of the information I had furnished. None were arrested during this time, however, and I was eventually transferred to the special prison compound at Fort Belvoir where nearly 200 other Organization members and about the same number of our legals were being held. The government was afraid to put us into ordinary prisons because of the danger that the Organization might free us-and also, I suspect, because they were afraid we might indoctrinate other White prisoners. So all captured Organization members were taken to Fort Belvoir from all over the country and kept in solitary- confinement cells in buildings surrounded by barbed wire, tanks, guard towers with machine guns, and two companies of MP's-all in the center of an Army base. And there I spent the next 14 months. What happened to the plans for my trial I cannot say. Many people consider solitary confinement to be especially harsh treatment, but it was a blessing for me. I was still in such a depressed and abnormal frame of mind-partly the result of Rubin's torture, partly from a sense of guilt at having yielded to that torture, and partly just from being locked up and unable to participate in the struggle-that I needed some time alone to straighten myself out again. And, of course, it was nice not to have to worry about Blacks, which would have been a real curse in any ordinary prison. No one who has not been subjected to the terror and agony to which I was can understand the profound and lasting effect of such an experience. My body has healed completely now, and I have recovered from the peculiar combination of depression and nervous jitters with which my interrogation left me, but I am not the same man I was. I am more impatient now, more serious- minded (even somber, perhaps), more determined than ever to get on with our task. And I have lost all fear of death. I have not become more reckless-less so, if anything-but nothing holds any terror for me now. I can be much harder on myself than before and also harder on others, when necessary. Woe betide any whining conservative, "responsible" or otherwise, who gets in the way of our revolution when I am around! I will listen to no more excuses from these self- serving collaborators but will simply reach for my pistol. All the time I and-the others were at Fort Belvoir we were supposed to be incommunicado and were allowed no reading material, newspapers or otherwise. Nevertheless, we soon learned how to communicate to a limited extent with one another, and we established an oral news pipeline from the outside through our guards, who were not an altogether unsympathetic lot. The news we all wanted to hear, of course, was of the war between the Organization and the System. We were especially cheered up whenever there was news of a successful action against the System-an "atrocity," in the jargon of the news media- and we became depressed if the period between news of major actions stretched to more than a few days. As time passed, news of actions did become considerably less frequent, and the media began predicting with greater and greater confidence the imminent liquidation of the remnants of the Organization and the return of the country to "normalcy. " That worried us, but our worry was tempered by the observation that fewer and fewer new prisoners were joining us at Fort Belvoir. An average of one a day was being brought in when I first went there, but that number had declined to less than one a week by August of last year. Then came the great Houston bombings of September 11 and 12, 1992. In two earthshaking days there were 14 major bombings, which left more than 4,000 persons dead and much of Houston's industrial and shipping facilities smoldering wreckage. The action began when a fully loaded munitions ship, carrying aerial bombs to Israel, detonated in the crowded Houston ship channel in the pre-dawn hours of September 11. That ship took four others to the bottom of the channel with her, thoroughly blocking it, and also set fire to an enormous refinery nearby. Within an hour eight other massive explosions had occurred along the ship channel, putting the nation's second-busiest port out of business for more than four months. Five later explosions closed the Houston airport, destroyed the city's main power-generating station, and collapsed two strategically located overpasses and a bridge, making two of the most heavily traveled freeways in the area impassable. Houston became an instant disaster area, and the Federal government rushed in thousands of troops-as much to keep an angry and panic-stricken public under control as to counter the Organization. The Houston action won us no friends, but neither did it help the government's case. And it thoroughly dispelled the growing notion that our revolution had been stifled. And, after Houston, there was Wilmington, then Providence, then Racine. Actions were fewer than before, but they were much, much bigger. It became apparent to us last fall that the revolution had entered a new and more decisive phase. But more of that later. Last night was the most important action of all for those of us at Fort Belvoir. Just before midnight, as usual, two olive-drab buses pulled up in front of the gate to our prison compound. Ordinarily they bring in about 60 MP's for the midnight guard shift and take away the evening shift. This time it was different. My first inkling that a breakout was in progress came when I was wakened by the sound of a machine gun being fired from one of the guard towers. It was quickly silenced by a direct hit from the 105-mm gun on one of the four tanks in our compound. After that there was intermittent small-arms fire and a lot of shouting and the sound of running feet. Finally, the wooden door of my cell burst inward under the blow of a sledgehammer, and I was free.I was one of the lucky 150 or so who squeezed into the two MP buses and rode out in them. Several dozen others clung to the outside of the four captured tanks, whose inattentive crews had been the first targets of our rescuers. The rest had to go on foot, slogging through a downpour which providentially kept the Army's helicopters grounded. Altogether we lost 18 prisoners and four rescuers killed and 61 prisoners recaptured. But 442 of us-according to the news report on the radio-made it to the waiting trucks outside the base, while the tanks kept our pursuers at bay. That wasn't the end of the excitement, but let it suffice to say that by four o'clock this morning we had successfully dispersed to more than two dozen pre-selected "safe houses" in the Washington area. After a few hours rest, I slipped into a set of civilian work clothes, took the set of false identification cards that had been carefully and masterfully prepared for me, and, carrying a newspaper and a lunch pail, made my way among the morning job- goers to the rendezvous point I was assigned. Within two minutes a pickup truck carrying a man and a woman pulled up to the curb beside me. The door opened and I squeezed in. As Bill drove off into the rush-hour traffic, I held my beloved Katherine in my arms once again.

PREFACE. This is a textbook on gravitation physics (Einstein's "general relativity" or "geometrodynamics"). It supplies two tracks through the subject. The first track is focused on the key physical ideas. It assumes, as mathematical prerequisite, only vector analysis and simple partial-differential equations. It is suitable for a one-semester course at the junior or senior level or in graduate school; and it constitutes-in the opinion of the authors-the indispensable core of gravitation theory that every advanced student of physics should learn. The Track One material is contained in those pages of the book that have a One outlined in gray in the upper outside corner, by which the eye of the reader can quickly pick out the Track One sections. In the contents, the same purpose is served by a gray bar beside the section, box, or figure number. The rest of the text builds up Track One into Track Two. Readers and teachers are invited to select, as enrichment material, those portions of Track Two that interest them most. With a few exceptions, any Track Two chapter can be understood by readers who have studied only the earlier Track One material. The exceptions are spelled out explicitly in "dependency statements" located at the beginning of each Track Two chapter, or at each transition within a chapter from Track One to Track Two. The entire book (all of Track One plus all of Track Two) is designed for a rigorous, full-year course at the graduate level, though many teachers of a full-year course may prefer a more leisurely pace that omits some of the Track Two material. The full book is intended to give a competence in gravitation physics comparable to that which the average P h D has in electromagnetism. When the student achieves this competence, he knows the laws of physics in flat spacetime (Chapters one to seven). He can predict orders of magnitude. He can also calculate using the principal tools of modern differential geometry (Chapters eight to fifteen), and he can predict at all relevant levels of precision. He understands Einstein's geometric framework for physics (Chapters sixteen to twenty two). He knows the applications of greatest present-day interest: pulsars and neutron stars (Chapters twenty three to twenty six); cosmology (Chapters twenty seven to thirty); the Schwarzschild geometry and gravitational collapse (Chapters thirty one to thirty four); and gravitational waves (Chapters thirty five to thirty seven). He has probed the experimental tests of Einstein's theory (Chapters thirty eight to forty). He will be able to read the modern mathematical literature on differential geometry, and also the latest papers in the physics and astrophysics journals about geometrodynamics and its applications. If he wishes to go beyond the field equations, the four major applications, and the tests, he will find at the end of the book (Chapters 41-44) a brief survey of several advanced topics in general relativity. Among the topics touched on here, superspace and quantum geometrodynamics receive special attention. These chapters identify some of the outstanding physical issues and lines of investigation being pursued today. Whether the department is physics or astrophysics or mathematics, more students than ever ask for more about general relativity than mere conversation. They want to hear its principal theses clearly stated. They want to know how to "work the handles of its information pump" themselves. More universities than ever respond with a serious course in Einstein's standard 1915 geometrodynamics. What a contrast to Maxwell's standard 1864 electrodynamics! In 1897, when Einstein was a student at Zurich, this subject was not on the instructional calendar of even half the universities of Europe. "We waited in vain for an exposition of Maxwell's theory," says one of Einstein's classmates. "Above all it was Einstein who was disappointed," for he rated electrodynamics as "the most fascinating subject at the time" as many students rate Einstein's theory today! Maxwell's theory recalls Einstein's theory in the time it took to win acceptance. Even as late as 1904 a book could appear by so great an investigator as William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, with the words, "The so-called 'electromagnetic theory of light' has not helped us hitherto ... it seems to me that it is rather a backward step ... the one thing about it that seems intelligible to me, I do not think is admissible ... that there should be an electric displacement perpendicular to the line of propagation." Did the pioneer of the Atlantic cable in the end contribute so richly to Maxwell electrodynamics-from units, and principles of measurement, to the theory of waves guided by wires-because of his own early difficulties with the subject? Then there is hope for many who study Einstein's geometrodynamics today! By the 1920's the weight of developments, from Kelvin's cable to Marconi's wireless, from the atom of Rutherford and Bohr to the new technology of high- frequency circuits, had produced general conviction that Maxwell was right. Doubt dwindled. Confidence led to applications, and applications led to confidence. Many were slow to take up general relativity in the beginning because it seemed to be poor in applications. Einstein's theory attracts the interest of many today because it is rich in applications. No longer is attention confined to three famous but meager tests: the gravitational red shift, the bending of light by the sun, and the precession of the perihelion of Mercury around the sun. The combination of radar ranging and general relativity is, step by step, transforming the solar-system celestial mechanics of an older generation to a new subject, with a new level of precision, new kinds of effects, and a new outlook. Pulsars, discovered in 1968, find no acceptable explanation except as the neutron stars predicted in 1934, objects with a central density so high (around ten to the fourteen grams per cc) that the Einstein predictions of mass differ from the Newtonian predictions by 10 to 100 per cent. About further density increase and a final continued gravitational collapse, Newtonian theory is silent. In contrast, Einstein's standard 1915 geometrodynamics predicted in 1939 the properties of a completely collapsed object, a "frozen star" or "black hole." By 1966 detailed digital calculations were available describing the formation of such an object in the collapse of a star with a white-dwarf core. Today hope to discover the first black hole is not least among the forces propelling more than one research: How does rotation influence the properties of a black hole? What kind of pulse of gravitational radiation comes off when such an object is formed? What spectrum of x-rays emerges when gas from a companion star piles up on its way into a black hole? All such investigations and more base themselves on Schwarzschild's standard 1916 static and spherically symmetric solution of Einstein's field equations, first really understood in the modern sense in 1960, and in 1963 generalized to a black hole endowed with angular momentum. Beyond solar-system tests and applications of relativity, beyond pulsars, neutron stars, and black holes, beyond geometrostatics (compare electrostatics!) and stationary geometries (compare the magnetic field set up by a steady current!) lies geo- metrodynamics in the full sense of the word (compare electrodynamics!). Nowhere does Einstein's great conception stand out more clearly than here, that the geometry of space is a new physical entity, with degrees of freedom and a dynamics of its own. Deformations in the geometry of space, he predicted in 1918, can transport energy from place to place. Today, thanks to the initiative of Joseph Weber, detectors of such gravitational radiation have been constructed and exploited to give upper limits to the flux of energy streaming past the earth at selected frequencies. Never before has one realized from how many kinds of processes significant gravitational radiation can be anticipated. Never before has there been more interest in picking up this new kind of signal and using it to diagnose faraway events. Never before has there been such a drive in more than one laboratory to raise instrumental sensitivity until gravitational radiation becomes a workaday new window on the universe. The expansion of the universe is the greatest of all tests of Einstein's geometro-dynamics, and cosmology the greatest of all applications. Making a prediction too fantastic for its author to credit, the theory forecast the expansion years before it was observed (1929). Violating the short time-scale that Hubble gave for the expansion, and in the face of "theories" ("steady state"; "continuous creation") manufactured to welcome and utilize this short time-scale, standard general relativity resolutely persisted in the prediction of a long time-scale, decades before the astro-physical discovery (1952) that the Hubble scale of distances and times was wrong, and had to be stretched by a factor of more than five. Disagreeing by a factor of the order of thirty with the average density of mass-energy in the universe deduced from astrophysical evidence as recently as 1958, Einstein's theory now as in the past argues for the higher density, proclaims "the mystery of the missing matter," and encourages astrophysics in a continuing search that year by year turns up new indications of matter in the space between the galaxies. General relativity forecast the primordial cosmic fireball radiation, and even an approximate value for its present temperature, seventeen years before the radiation was discovered. This radiation brings information about the universe when it had a thousand times smaller linear dimensions, and a billion times smaller volume, than it does today. Quasi stellar objects, discovered in 1963, supply more detailed information from a more recent era, when the universe had a quarter to half its present linear dimensions. Telling about a stage in the evolution of galaxies and the universe reachable in no other way, these objects are more than beacons to light up the far away and long ago. They put out energy at a rate unparalleled anywhere else in the universe. They eject matter with a surprising directivity. They show a puzzling variation with time, different between the microwave and the visible part of the spectrum. Quasi stellar objects on a great scale, and galactic nuclei nearer at hand on a smaller scale, voice a challenge to general relativity: help clear up these mysteries! If its wealth of applications attracts many young astrophysicists to the study of Einstein's geometrodynamics, the same attraction draws those in the world of physics who are concerned with physical cosmology, experimental general relativity, gravitational radiation, and the properties of objects made out of superdense matter. Of quite another motive for study of the subject, to contemplate Einstein's inspiring vision of geometry as the machinery of physics, we shall say nothing here because it speaks out, we hope, in every chapter of this book. Why a new book? The new applications of general relativity, with their extraordinary physical interest, out date excellent textbooks of an earlier era, among them even that great treatise on the subject written by Wolfgang Pauli at the age of twenty one. In addition, differential geometry has undergone a transformation of outlook that isolates the student who is confined in his training to the traditional tensor calculus of the earlier texts. For him it is difficult or impossible either to read the writings of his up-to-date mathematical colleague or to explain the mathematical content of his physical problem to that friendly source of help. We have not seen any way to meet our responsibilities to our students at our three institutions except by a new exposition, aimed at establishing a solid competence in the subject, con- temporary in its mathematics, oriented to the physical and astrophysical applications of greatest present-day interest, and animated by belief in the beauty and simplicity of nature. Charles W Misner, Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler.

The Rage and The Pride (La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio) by Oriana Fallaci. You ask me to speak, this time. You ask me to break at least this once the silence I’ve chosen, that I’ve imposed on myself these many years to avoid mingling with chattering insects. And I’m going to. Because I’ve heard that in Italy too there are some who rejoice just as the Palestinians of Gaza did the other night on TV. "Victory! Victory!" Men, women, children. Assuming you can call those who do such a thing man, woman, child. I’ve heard that some of the insects of means, politicians or so-called politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, not to mention others not worthy of the title of citizen, are behaving pretty much the same way. They say: "Good. It serves America right." And I am very very, very angry. Angry with an anger that is cold, lucid, rational. An anger that eliminates every detachment, every indulgence. An anger that compels me to respond and demands above all that I spit on them. I spit on them. Angry as I am, the African-American poet Maya Angelou roared the other day: "Be angry. It’s good to be angry, it’s healthy." And I don’t know whether it’s healthy for me. But I know that it won’t be healthy for them, I mean those who admire Osama Bin Laden, those who express comprehension or sympathy or solidarity for him. Your request has triggered a detonator that’s been waiting too long to explode. You’ll see. You also ask me to tell how I experienced this apocalypse. To give, in other words, my testimony. Very well, I’ll start with that. I was at home, which is in the center of Manhattan. At exactly nine o’clock I had a sensation of danger, of a danger that perhaps would not touch me, but that undoubtedly concerned me. It’s the sensation you feel in war, or rather in combat, when every pore of your skin feels the bullet or the rocket as it approaches, and you perk up your ears and yell at the person next to you: "Down! Get down!" I pushed it away. It’s not like I was in Vietnam. It’s not like I was in one of the many wars, those fucking wars that have tortured my life since World War II. I was in New York for God's sake, on a marvelous September morning in 2001. But the sensation still possessed me, inexplicably. So I did something I never do in the morning and turned on the TV. The audio wasn’t working. The screen was. And on every channel—and here there are almost a hundred— you saw a tower of the World Trade Center burning like a giant match. A short circuit? A small plane gone off course? Or an act of deliberate terrorism? I stayed there almost paralyzed, fixed on that tower, and while I fixed on it, while I asked myself those three questions, another plane appeared on the screen. White, huge. An airliner. It was flying extremely low. Flying low, it turned toward the second tower like a bomber who draws a bead on a target and then hurls himself at it. That’s when I understood. I also understood because in that same moment the audio came back on and transmitted a chorus of primal screams. Repeated and primal. "God! Oh, God! Oh, God, God, God! Gooooooood!" And the plane went into that second tower like a knife going into a stick of butter. By now it was quarter past nine. Don’t ask me what I felt during those fifteen minutes. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I was a piece of ice. Even my brain was ice. I don’t even remember whether certain things I saw were from the first tower or the second. For example, the people the morning and turned on the TV. The audio wasn’t working. The screen was. And on every channel—and here there are almost a hundred— you saw a tower of the World Trade Center burning like a giant match. A short circuit? A small plane gone off course? Or an act of deliberate terrorism? I stayed there almost paralyzed, fixed on that tower, and while I fixed on it, while I asked myself those three questions, another plane appeared on the screen. White, huge. An airliner. It was flying extremely low. Flying low, it turned toward the second tower like a bomber who draws a bead on a target and then hurls himself at it. That’s when I understood. I also understood because in that same moment the audio came back on and transmitted a chorus of primal screams. Repeated and primal. "God! Oh, God! Oh, God, God, God! Gooooooood!" And the plane went into that second tower like a knife going into a stick of butter. By now it was quarter past nine. Don’t ask me what I felt during those fifteen minutes. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I was a piece of ice. Even my brain was ice. I don’t even remember whether certain things I saw were from the first tower or the second. For example, the people who threw themselves from the eightieth or ninetieth floor to avoid being burned alive. They broke the glass of the windows, they climbed up and jumped out like someone who jumps out of an airplane with a parachute on. They came down so slowly, waving their arms and legs, swimming in the air. Yes, they seemed to swim in the air, never arriving. Around the thirtieth floor though, they sped up. They started to gesture desperately, penitently I imagine, almost as though they were shouting for help. And maybe they really were. Finally they fell like rocks and splat. You know, I thought I’d seen everything in war. I’d considered myself vaccinated against war, and in substance I am. Nothing surprises me anymore. Not even when I get angry, not even when I get indignant. But in war I’d always seen people who died by the hand of others. I’d never seen people who die killing themselves, throwing themselves without parachutes from the eightieth or ninetieth or hundredth floor. In war, I’d always seen things that explode. That blow up in all directions. And I’d always heard a huge racket. Those two towers though, didn’t explode. The first imploded, swallowed itself. The second fused and melted. It melted just like a stick of butter placed on the fire. And it all happened, or so it seemed to me, in tomblike silence. Is that possible? Was that silence real, or was it inside me? I also have to say that in war I’d always seen a limited number of deaths. Every battle, two or three hundred dead. Four hundred at most. Like at Dak To in Vietnam. And when the battle was finished, the Americans would gather up and count them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. In the massacre of Mexico City, the one where I caught a fair number of bullets myself, they gathered at least eight hundred dead. And when, thinking me dead, they stuck me in the morgue, the cadavers I soon found around and on myself seemed like a deluge. Well, almost fifty thousand people worked in the two towers. And very few had time to evacuate. The elevators didn’t work anymore, obviously, and to go down on foot from the highest floors would have taken an eternity. Flames permitting. We’ll never know the number of dead. (Forty thousand, fifty thousand?) The Americans will never tell, so as not to underline the intensity of this apocalypse. So as not to give satisfaction to Osama Bin Laden and encourage other apocalypses. And anyway the two abysses that absorbed those tens of thousands of creatures are too deep. At most the workers will unearth pieces of scattered members. A nose here, a finger there. Or else a kind of paste that seems like ground coffee but is actually organic material. The residue of bodies pulverized in a flash. Yesterday the mayor Guiliani sent more than ten thousand body bags. But they went unused. What do I feel for the kamikazes who died with them? No respect. No pity. No, not even pity, I who always wind up giving in to pity. I’ve always disliked kamikazes, that is people who commit suicide in order to kill others. Starting with the Japanese ones from World War II. I never considered them Pietro Miccas who torch the powder and go up with the citadel in order to block the arrival of the enemy troops at Torino. I never considered them soldiers. Even less do I consider them martyrs or heroes, as Mister Arafat, hollering and spitting saliva, described them to me in 1972. (Or when I interviewed him at Amman, where his marshals were also training the Badder-Meinhof terrorists.) I just consider them vain. Vain people who instead of seeking glory in cinema or politics or sports seek it in the death of themselves and others. A death that, in place of an Oscar or a ministerial seat or a medal, will get them (they think) admiration. And, in the case of those who pray to Allah, a place in the paradise that the Koran speaks of: the paradise where heroes get to fuck houris. I’ll bet they’re even physically vain. I have in front of me a photo of the two kamikaze I speak of in my novel Inshallah: the novel that begins with the destruction of the American base (more than four hundred dead) and the French base (more than three hundred fifty dead) at Beirut. They’d had it taken before going to die, this photo, and before going to die they’d gone to the barber. See what lovely haircuts. What pomaded moustaches, what well–groomed little beards, what coquettish sideburns... I can just imagine how Mister Arafat would seethe with rage to hear me. There’s bad blood between us, you know. He never forgave me, either for the scorching differences of opinion we had during that meeting or for the judgments I expressed about him in my book Interview With History. As for me, I never forgave him anything. Including the fact that an Italian journalist who imprudently presented himself as "a friend of mine" found himself with a revolver pointed at his heart. So we don’t see each other any more. It’s too bad. Because if I met him again, or rather if I were to grant him an audience, I’d scream in his face who the martyrs and heroes are. I’d scream: "Illustrious Mister Arafat, the martyrs are the passengers of the four airplanes that were hijacked and transformed into human bombs. Among them is a four year old little girl who disintegrated in the second tower. Illustrious Mister Arafat, the martyrs are the employees who worked in the two towers and at the Pentagon. Illustrious Mister Arafat, the martyrs are the firemen who died trying to save them. And do you know who the heroes are? The passengers of the flight that was supposed to throw itself into the White House but instead crashed into the woods in Pennsylvania because they fought back! There ought to be a paradise for them, illustrious Mister Arafat. The real problem is that you are now a perpetual head of state. You play the monarch. You visit the pope, announce that you disapprove of terrorism, send condolences to Bush." And in his chameleon–like ability to contradict himself, he’d even be capable of telling me I’m right. But let’s change the subject. I’m very sick, as you know, and talking with the likes of Arafat gives me a fever. I prefer to talk about the invulnerability that many, in Europe, attributed to America. Invulnerability? What invulnerability? The more democratic and open a society is, the more it’s exposed to terrorism. The more a country is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings or massacres like the ones that took place for many years in Italy and Germany and other parts of Europe. And that now take place, magnified, in America. It’s no accident that non-democratic countries, countries governed by a police regime, have always hosted and financed and helped terrorists. The Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's satellites and the People’s Republic of China, for example. Ghadaffi's Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Arafat's Lebanon, Egypt itself, that same Saudi Arabia of which Osama Bin Laden is a citizen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, of course, and all the Islamic African regions. In those countries’ airports or airplanes I have always felt safe. Tranquil as a sleeping newborn. The only thing I was afraid of was being arrested because I used to write bad things about the terrorists. In European airports and airplanes, on the other hand, I always felt uneasy. In American airports and airplanes I actually felt nervous. Twice as nervous in New York. (Not in Washington DC, though. The plane at the Pentagon was a complete surprise to me.) In my opinion it was ultimately never an issue of "if": it was always one of "when." Why do you think that on Tuesday morning my subconscious felt that anxiety, that sensation of danger? Why do you think that despite my habits I turned on the TV? Why do you think that one of the three questions I was asking myself while the first tower was burning and the audio wasn’t working was that of a terrorist attack? Why do you think that when the second airplane appeared I immediately understood? Since America is the strongest country in the world, the richest, the most powerful, the most modern, almost everyone fell into that trap. The Americans did themselves, at times. But America’s vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It’s the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail. It comes from America’s multi-ethnic being, its liberality, its respect for its citizens and guests. Example: about 24 million Americans are Muslim-Arabs. And when a Mustafa or a Mohammed comes, say from Afghanistan, to visit his uncle, nobody tells him he can’t attend pilot training school to learn how to fly a 757 jet airplane. Nobody can keep him from enrolling in a University (something I hope will change) to study chemistry and biology: the two sciences necessary to wage bacteriological war. Nobody. Not even if the government fears that this son of Allah might hijack that 757 or that he might toss a vial full of bacteria into the reservoir and unleash a disaster. (I say “if” because this time the government knew absolutely nothing and the disgrace of the CIA and FBI goes beyond all bounds. If I were President of the United States I’d send them all packing for stupidity with wellplaced kicks to the posterior.) Having said that, let’s go back to the original thought. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology. Those impressive skyscrapers, so tall, so beautiful that while you raise your eyes to gaze at them you almost forget the pyramids and the divine buildings of our past. Those gigantic airplanes, oversized, which they now use as they once used sailing ships or trucks because everything here is moved by airplane. Everything. The mail, fresh fish, ourselves. (And don’t forget that they invented the air war. Or at least they’re the ones who developed it to the point of absurdity.) That terrifying Pentagon, that fortress which scares you just looking at it. That all–present, all–powerful science. That chilling technology that in a few short years has completely changed our daily lives, our millennial ways of communicating, eating, living. And where did he strike them, the reverend Osama Bin Laden? In the skyscrapers and in the Pentagon. How? With airplanes, with science and technology. By the way: do you know what gets me the most about this wretched multi– millionaire, this AWOL playboy who instead of courting blonde princesses and running wild in the night clubs (as he used to do in Beirut when he was 20 years old) enjoys himself by killing people in the name of Mohammed and Allah? The fact that his endless wealth comes from the earnings of a corporation specializing in demolition, and that he himself is a demolitions expert. Demolition is an American specialty. When we met I found you almost stupefied by the heroic efficiency and admirable unity with which the Americans have faced this Apocalypse. That’s right. Despite all the shortcomings that always get rubbed in their face—that I myself always rub in their face (though those of Europe, and of Italy in particular, are even more serious)—America is a country with important things to teach us. And speaking of heroic efficiency, let me sing a paean to the Mayor of New York. That Rudolph Giuliani to whom we Italians should kneel in gratitude. Because he has an Italian last name and an Italian origin and he makes us look good before the whole world. Rudolph Giuliani is a great mayor, one of the greatest. And that’s coming from someone who is never happy with anything or anyone, starting with myself. He’s a mayor worthy of another great mayor with an Italian last name, Fiorello la Guardia, and many of our mayors ought to go and study under him. They ought to come to him with bowed heads, or better with ash on their heads, and ask him: "Signor Giuliani, sir, please tell us how it’s done." He doesn’t delegate his duties to others, no. He doesn’t waste his time with bullshit and greed. He doesn’t split himself between the tasks of a mayor and those of a minister or deputy (is anybody listening in the three cities of Stendhal—Naples, Florence and Rome?). He ran over there immediately, and immediately entered the second tower, at the risk of being turned to ashes with all the others. He only made it out by a hair and only by chance. And in the space of four days he put this city back on its feet. A city with nine and a half million inhabitants, mind you, and almost two million in Manhattan alone. How he did it, I don’t know. He’s sick like me, the poor man. The cancer that comes and returns has got him, too. And, like me, he pretends to be healthy: he works anyway. But I work at a desk, for God’s sake, sitting down! He, on the other hand...He looked like a general who joins the battle in person. A soldier who charges with his bayonet: "Come on, people, come on!!! Let’s roll up our sleeves, move!" But he could do it because those people were, are, like him. People without airs and without laziness, my father would have said, and with balls. As for the admirable ability to unite, the almost martial compactness with which the Americans respond to disaster and to the enemy, well: I have to admit that then and there I was astounded as well. I knew, yes, that it had exploded at the time of Pearl Harbor, that is when the people huddled around Roosevelt and Roosevelt entered the war against the Germany of Hitler and the Italy of Mussolini and the Japan of Hirohito. I had caught a whiff of it, yes, after Kennedy’s assassination. But that had been followed by the war in Vietnam, the lacerating rift caused by the war in Vietnam, and in a certain sense it had reminded me of their Civil War of a century and a half ago. So, when I saw whites and blacks crying in each other’s arms—and I mean in each other’s arms—when I saw Democrats and Republicans arm in arm singing "God Bless America", when I saw them drop all their differences, I was flabbergasted. Just as I was when I heard Bill Clinton (someone for whom I've never harbored much tenderness) declare: "We must stand behind Bush. We must have faith in our president." I felt the same when those same words were forcefully repeated by his wife Hillary, now senator for the State of New York. And when they were reiterated by Lieberman, the ex–Democratic candidate for the vice– presidency. (Only the defeated Al Gore remained squalidly silent). I felt the same when Congress voted unanimously to accept war and punish those responsible. Oh, if only Italy would learn this lesson! It’s such a divided country, Italy. So factious, so poisoned by tribal pettiness! They hate each other even within their own parties in Italy. They can’t stick together even when they have the same emblem, or the same banner, for God’s sake! Jealous, bilious, vain, small, they think only of their own personal interests. Of their own careers, their own petty glory, their own small–town popularity. For the sake of their personal interests they spite each other, they betray each other, they accuse each other, they expose each other...I am absolutely convinced that, if Osama Bin Laden were to blow up Giotto’s tower or the Tower of Pisa, the opposition would blame the government. And the government would blame the opposition. The heads of the government and the heads of the opposition would blame their own party people and comrades. And having said this, let me explain where the ability to unite that characterizes the Americans comes from. It comes from their patriotism. I don’t know whether in Italy you saw and understood what happened in New York when Bush went to thank the rescue men (and women) who are digging in the ruins of the two towers trying to save some survivor but only coming up with the occasional nose or finger. In spite of this, they do it without giving up. Without resigning themselves, so that if you ask them how they do it they say: "I can allow myself to be exhausted, but not to be defeated." All of them. The young, the very young, the old, the middle aged. White, black, yellow, brown, purple...You saw them, didn’t you? While Bush was thanking them all they did was wave their little American flags, raise their clenched fists, and roar: "USA! USA!" In a totalitarian country I’d have thought: "Look how nicely organized this was by the Powers That Be!" Not in America. In America you don’t organize these things. You don’t manage them, you don’t command them. Especially in a disenchanted metropolis like New York and with workers like New York workers. New York workers are real pieces of work. Freer than the wind. They don’t even obey their unions. But if you touch their flag, or their Patria...In English the word Patria doesn’t exist. To say Patria you have to put two words together. Father Land. Mother Land. Native Land. Or you can simply say My Country. But they have the noun "patriotism." They have the adjective "patriotic." And apart from France, I can’t imagine a country more patriotic than America. God! I was so moved to see those workers clenching their fists and waving their flags and roaring USA–USA–USA, without anyone ordering them to. And I felt a kind of humiliation. Because I can’t even begin to imagine Italian workers waving the tricolor and roaring Italia–Italia. Oh, I’ve seen them wave plenty of red flags in the marches and rallies. Rivers, lakes, of red flags. But never very many tricolor flags. None at all, actually. Ill–led or tyrannized by an arrogant left devoted to the Soviet Union, they always left the tricolor flags to their adversaries. Not that the adversaries made very good use of them, I’d say. Nor did they waste them either, thank God. And those who go to Mass, ditto. As for that yahoo with the green shirt and tie, he doesn’t even know what colors make up the tricolor. I–am–Lombard, I–am–Lombard. That guy wants to take us back to the wars between Florence and Siena. So the result is that today you see the Italian flag only at the Olympics if you happen to win a medal. Worse: you see it only in the stadiums, when there’s an international soccer match. Which is also, by the way, the only time you’ll ever hear a cry of Italia–Italia. Well let me tell you something. There’s a big difference between a country in which the flag is waved only by hooligans in a stadium and a country where it’s waved by the entire population. Waved, for example, by indomitable workers who dig in the ruins to come up with an ear or nose of the creatures slaughtered by the sons of Allah. Or to gather the ground coffee. The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It’s special also because the idea of liberty wasn’t fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so–called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti–Americans of the good–it–serves–America–right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!) What’s more, it’s a special country, a country to envy, because that idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers. The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality. The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were, the Benjamin Franklins and the Thomas Jefferson’s and the Thomas Paine’s and the John Adamses and the George Washington’s and so on? These weren’t the small–time lawyers ("avvocaticchi" as Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French Revolution! These weren’t the brooding and hysterical executioners of the Terror, the Marats and the Dantons and the Saint Justs and the Robespierres! These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.) Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it "Toscano".) He spoke and read in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought him multiple copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled "Of Crimes and Punishments." As for the self–taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered the electric nature of lightning and invented the lightning rod. Is that enough for you? And it was with these extraordinary leaders, these men of great quality, that the often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers rebelled against England in 1776. They fought the War of Independence, the American Revolution. Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll that is the cost of every war, they didn’t do it with the rivers of blood of the future French Revolution. They didn’t do it with the guillotine and massacres at Vandea. They did it with a piece of paper that, along with the need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, put into effect the sublime idea of liberty—or rather of liberty married to quality. The Declaration of Independence. "We hold these Truths to be self–evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..." And that piece of paper that we’ve all been copying well or badly from the French Revolution on, or from which we’ve drawn our inspiration, is still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them, rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality, to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did, prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary kings. My father used to say, "Communism is a monarchic regime, and it’s an old–school monarchy. Because it cuts off men’s balls. And when you cut off a man’s balls, he’s no longer a man." He also used to say that instead of freeing the plebes, communism turned everyone into plebes. It made everyone starve to death. Well, in my view America frees the plebes. Everyone is a plebe there. White, black, yellow, brown, purple, stupid, intelligent, poor, rich. Actually the rich are the most plebeian of all. Most of the time they’re such boors! Crude, ill– mannered. You can tell immediately that they’ve never read Galateo, that they’ve never had anything to do with refinement and good taste and sophistication. In spite of the money they waste on clothes, for example, they’re so inelegant as to make the Queen of England look chic by comparison. But they are freed, by God. And in this world there is nothing stronger or more powerful than freed plebes. You will always get your skull cracked when you go up against the Freed Plebe. And they all got their skulls cracked by America: English, Germans, Mexicans, Russians, Nazis, Fascists, and Communists. Even the Vietnamese got theirs cracked in the end, when they had to come to terms after their victory so that now when a former president of the United States goes there to visit they're in seventh heaven. "Bienvenu, Monsieur le President, bienvenu!" The problem is that the Vietnamese don’t pray to Allah. It’s going to be much harder to deal with the sons of Allah. Much longer and much harder. Unless the rest of the Western world stops peeing its pants. And starts reasoning a little and gives them a hand. I am not speaking, obviously, to the laughing hyenas who enjoy seeing images of the wreckage and snicker good–it–serves–the– Americans–right. I am speaking to those who, though not stupid or evil, are wallowing in prudence and doubt. And to them I say: "Wake up, people. Wake up!!" Intimidated as you are by your fear of going against the current—that is, appearing racist (a word which is entirely inapt as we are speaking not about a race but about a religion)—you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a reverse–Crusade is in progress. Accustomed as you are to the double– cross, blinded as you are by myopia, you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a war of religion is in progress. Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, but a war of religion nonetheless. A war which they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we’ve managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted—or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, and our pleasures...Christ! Don’t you realize that the Osama Bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short–shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you fuck when you want and where you want and who you want? Don’t you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it. For twenty years I’ve been saying it. For twenty years. With a certain meekness, not with this passion, twenty years ago I wrote an editorial on this subject for the Corriere. It was an article by a person used to being with all races and all creeds, a citizen used to fighting all forms of fascism and intolerance, a lay person without taboos. But it was also an article by a person indignant at those who failed to smell the stench of a coming Holy War and who were letting the sons of Allah get away with a little too much. I made an argument that went more or less like this, twenty years ago: "What sense is there in respecting those who don’t respect us? What sense is there in defending their culture or presumed culture when they scorn ours? I want to defend ours and I am informing you that I prefer Dante to Omar Khayan." The sky came crashing down. They crucified me: "Racist! Racist!" It was these same progressives (who at the time called themselves communists) who crucified me. I got the same treatment when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Do you remember those bearded men with the gowns and the turbans who, before firing their mortars–or rather with each shot—shouted God’s praises? "Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!" I remember them very well. And I used to shiver hearing the word God coupled with the shot of a mortar. I thought I was back in the Middle Ages and I said: "The Soviets are what they are. But we have to admit that by waging that war they are protecting us, too. And I for one thank them." Again the sky came crashing down. "Racist! Racist!" In their blindness they didn’t even want me to speak of the monstrosities that the sons of Allah were committing on their POWs (they would cut off their legs and arms, remember? A little vice in which they’d already indulged in Lebanon with their Christian and Jewish prisoners.) They didn’t want me to say it, no. And just to be progressive they would applaud the Americans who, having lost their marbles in fear of the Soviet Union, were arming the heroic–Afghan–people. They trained those bearded men, and among them the most– bearded–one–of–all, Osama Bin Laden. Away–with–the–Russians–in–Afghanistaaaaan! The–Russians–must–go–from–Afghanistaaaan! Well, the Russians left Afghanistan. Happy? And from Afghanistan the bearded men of the most-bearded Osama Bin Laden arrived in New York with the un-bearded Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Saudis who made up the band of the identified nineteen kamikaze. Happy? Worse: now people here speak of the next attack that will hit us with chemical weapons, or biological, or radioactive, or nuclear. People are saying the next massacre is inevitable because Iraq provides them with materials. People are talking of vaccinations, of gas masks, of plague. People are wondering when it will happen. Happy? Some are neither happy nor unhappy. They couldn’t care less. America's far away anyhow, there’s an ocean between America and Europe...oh, no, my dear friends. There’s a mere thread of water. Because when the destiny of the West, the survival of our civilization is at stake, we are New York. We are America. We Italians, we French, we English, we Germans, we Austrians, we Hungarians, we Slovaks, we Polish, we Scandinavians, we Belgians, we Spaniards, we Greeks, we Portuguese. If America falls, Europe falls. The West falls, we fall. And not just in a financial sense, which seems to be what worries you the most. (Once when I was young and naive, I said to Arthur Miller: "Americans measure everything with money, they only think of money." And Arthur Miller replied: "You don’t?") We fall in every sense, my friend. And we’ll find muezzin instead of church bells, chador instead of miniskirts, camel’s milk instead of the old shot of cognac. Don’t you grasp even this? Do you refuse to understand even this?!? Blair understood it. He came here and brought the solidarity of the English people. Renewed it, rather. Not a solidarity expressed with chattering and whining: a solidarity based on hunting down the terrorists and on military alliance. Chirac, on the other hand, didn’t. As you know, last week he was here for an official visit. A visit scheduled a long time ago, not prompted by events. He saw the wreckage of the two towers; he learned that the death toll is incalculable and unspeakable, but he sure didn’t overextend himself. During the interview with CNN, my friend Cristiana Amanpour asked as many as four times in what way and to what degree he intended to take a stand against this Jihad, and four times Chirac avoided giving an answer. He slipped away like an eel. One wanted to scream at him: "Monsieur le President! Remember the landing at Normandy? Do you know how many Americans croaked at Normandy to kick the Nazis out of France?" Not that I see any Richard Lion hearts among the other Europeans either, apart from Blair. Certainly not in Italy where the government has yet to single out, let alone arrest, a single accomplice or suspected accomplice of Osama Bin Laden. For God’s sake, Mister Knight–of–Labor, for God’s sake!! In spite of their fear of war, every country in Europe has found and arrested some accomplice of Osama Bin Laden. In France, in Germany, in England, in Spain. But in Italy, where the mosques of Milan, Turin and Rome overflow with scoundrels singing hymns to Osama Bin Laden and terrorists waiting to blow up Saint Peter’s cupola, not a one. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Please explain, Sir Knight: are your policemen and carabinieri that inept? Your secret services that idiotic? Your civil servants that stupid? And are the sons of Allah we host all saints, all unaware of what happened and is happening? Or is it that if you make the right inquiries, if you single out and arrest those you haven’t singled out and arrested so far, you’re afraid of being tagged with the old racist–racist label? I, as you can see, am not. Christ! I don’t deny anyone the right to be afraid. Anyone who’s not afraid of war is an idiot. And as I’ve written a thousand times before, anyone who acts as though he’s not afraid of war is both an idiot and a liar. But in Life and in History there are times when one is not permitted to be afraid. Times when being afraid is immoral and uncivilized. And those who evade this tragedy out of weakness or lack of courage or habitual fence–straddling strike me as masochists. Masochists, yes, masochists. Why? Do you want to talk about what you call the Contrast– between–the–Two–Cultures? Well, if you really must know, it bothers me to even talk about two cultures: to put them on the same plane as though they were two parallel realities of equal weight and equal measure. Because behind our civilization we have Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Phydias, for God’s sake. We have ancient Greece with its Parthenon and its discovery of Democracy. We have ancient Rome with its greatness, its laws, and its concept of Law. Its sculptures, its literature, its architecture. Its buildings, its amphitheaters, its aqueducts, its bridges and its roads. We have a revolutionary, that Christ who died on the cross, who taught us (too bad if we didn’t learn it) the concept of love and of justice. Yes, I know, there’s also a Church that gave me the Inquisition. That tortured me and burned me a thousand times at the stake. That oppressed me for centuries, that for centuries forced me to sculpt and paint only Christs and Madonnas, that almost killed Galileo Galilei. Humiliated him, shut him up. But it also made a great contribution to the History of Thought: Yes or no? And then behind our civilization we also have the Renaissance. We have Leonardo da Vinci, we have Michelangelo, we have Raphael, we have the music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven. And on and on through Rossini and Donizetti and Verdi and Company. That music without which we could not live and which is prohibited in their culture or supposed culture. God forbid you should whistle a tune or hum the chorus of Nabucco. And finally we have Science, for God’s sake. A science that has understood a lot of diseases and that cures them. I am still alive, for now, thanks to our science. Not Mohammed’s. A science that has invented marvelous machines. The train, the car, the airplane, the spaceships with which we’ve gone to the Moon and Mars and soon will go who knows where. A science that has changed the face of this planet with electricity, the radio, the telephone, the TV, and by the way: is it true that the gurus of the left don’t want to say what I have just said?!? God, what pricks! They will never change. And now the fatal question: what is behind the other culture? Damned if I know. I search and search and find only Mohammed with his Koran and Averroe with his scholarly merits (The Commentaries on Aristotle, et cetera.) Arafat also finds numbers and math. Again yelling in my face, again covering me with spit, he told me in 1972 that his culture was superior to mine, far superior to mine, because his grandparents had invented numbers and math. But Arafat has a short memory. That’s why he changes his mind and contradicts himself every five minutes. His grandparents did not invent numbers and math. They invented the graphic symbols for numbers that we infidels use as well. Math was conceived almost simultaneously by all ancient civilizations. In Mesopotamia, in Greece, in India, in China, in Egypt, among the Mayans...Your grandparents, my illustrious Mister Arafat, left us nothing but a few beautiful mosques and a book they’ve been breaking my balls with for the past thousand four hundred years like not even the Christians do with their Bible or the Jews with their Torah. And now let’s see just what are the positive features that distinguish this Koran. Positive, really? Ever since the sons of Allah half–destroyed New York, the scholars of Islam have done nothing but sing the praises of Mohammed, explain how the Koran preaches peace, brotherhood and justice. (Even Bush has been chiming in. Poor Bush. It goes without saying that Bush has to keep on good terms with the twenty–four million Muslim–Americans, convince them to squeal what they know about the relatives, friends or acquaintances who might turn out to be devoted to Osama Bin Laden). So what do we do with the whole Eye–for–an–Eye–Tooth–for–a–Tooth business? What do we do with the chador, or better with the veil that covers the faces of Muslim women so that in order to glance at the person next to them the poor wretches have to peer through a close–meshed net at eye–level? What do we do with polygamy and the principle that women count less than camels, that they can’t go to school, they can’t go to the doctor, they can’t have their pictures taken, etc.? What do we do with the veto on alcohol and the death penalty for those who drink it? This is in the Koran, too. And it doesn’t seem all that just, all that brotherly, all that peaceful. So here’s my answer to your question on the Contrast–between–the–Two–Cultures: I say in this world there’s room for everyone. In your own home you can do whatever you want. And if in some countries the women are so stupid as to accept the chador, or rather the veil you peer out of through a close-meshed net at eye level, that’s their problem. If they are such birdbrains as to accept not going to school, not going to the doctor, not having their pictures taken, that’s their problem. If they are such idiots as to marry some asshole who wants four wives, that’s their problem. If their men are so silly as not to drink beer or wine, ditto. Far be it from me to stand in their way. I was raised with the concept of liberty, I was, and my mother used to say: "Variety is what makes the world beautiful." But if they presume to impose the same things on me, in my home...And they do presume it. Osama Bin Laden says that the entire planet Earth must become Muslim, that we must convert to Islam, that he will convert us by fair means or foul, that this is why he massacres us and will continue to do so. And this can’t be pleasing to us. It can’t help but make us itch to turn the tables and kill him. But this thing won’t end, won’t die out with the death of Osama Bin Laden. Because there are tens of thousands of Osama Bin Ladens by now, and they’re not only in Afghanistan or in other Arabic countries. They’re everywhere, and the most hardened ones are right in the Western world. In our cities, in our roads, in our universities, in the ganglions of technology. That technology that any dolt can handle. The Crusade has been in progress for some time. It works like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a malice comparable only to the faith and malice of Torquemada when he led the Inquisition. The fact is that dealing with them is impossible. Reasoning, unthinkable. Treating them with indulgence, tolerance or hope, suicide. Whoever thinks differently is deluded. This is coming from one who has known this type of fanaticism rather well in Iran, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in Libya, in Jordan, in Lebanon, and at home. That is, in Italy. Known it, and had it chillingly confirmed through a number of trivial episodes—or rather, grotesque ones. I’ll never forget what happened to me at the Iranian Embassy in Rome when I asked for a visa to go to Teheran, to interview Khomeini, and I showed up wearing red nail polish. To them, this is a sign of immorality. They treated me like a whore to be burned at the stake. They ordered me to take off that red immediately. And if I hadn’t told them, or rather screamed at them, what I really felt like taking off—or better yet, cutting off of them...Nor can I forget what happened in Qom, Khomeini’s holy city where as a woman I was turned away from all the hotels. To interview Khomeini I had to wear chador, to put on the chador I had to take off my jeans, to take off my jeans I had to find a secluded place. Naturally, I could have performed the operation in the car in which I had arrived from Teheran. But the interpreter wouldn’t let me. You’re–crazy, you’re–crazy, you–get–shot–in–Qom–for– doing–something–like–that. He preferred to bring me to the former Royal Palace where a merciful custodian took us in and let us use the former Throne Room. I actually felt like the Virgin Mary who has to take refuge with Joseph in the barn heated by the donkey and the ox to give birth to Baby Jesus. But the Koran forbids a man and a woman not married to each other to be alone behind a closed door, and alas, all of a sudden the door opened. The mullah in charge of Morality Control barged in screaming shame– shame, sin–sin, and there was only one way not to wind up being shot: get married. Sign the temporary (four months) marriage certificate the mullah was fanning in our faces. The problem was that the interpreter had a Spanish wife, a woman by the name of Consuelo who was not at all disposed to accept polygamy, and I didn’t want to marry anyone. Least of all an Iranian with a Spanish wife not at all disposed to accept polygamy. At the same time I didn’t want to be shot, that is, miss my interview with Khomeini. As I was debating what to do in this dilemma... You’re laughing, I’m sure. These seem like jokes to you. In that case, I won’t tell you the rest of this episode. To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–Akbar, Allah–Akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones. Oh, I could go on ad infinitum. Tell you things never told, things to make your hair stand on end. About that dotard Khomeini, for example, who after our interview held an assembly at Qom to declare that I had accused him of cutting off women’s breasts? He extracted a video from this assembly that was shown for months on Teheran television so that, when I returned to Teheran the next year, I was arrested as soon as I got off the plane. It looked bad for me, you know, very bad. This was the period of the American hostages...I could tell you about Mujib Rahman, who, again at Dacca, had ordered his guerillas to eliminate me as a dangerous European, and lucky for me an English colonel saved me at the risk of his life. Or about that Palestinian named Habash who held me for twenty minutes with a machine gun pointed at my head. God, what people! The only ones I’ve had a civil relationship with remain poor Ali Bhutto, the first prime minister of Pakistan, who was hanged because he was too friendly to the West, and the most excellent king of Jordan: King Hussein. But those two were as Muslim as I am Catholic. Anyway I want to get to the point of my argument. A point that will not please many, given that defending one’s own culture, in Italy, is becoming a mortal sin. And given that, intimidated by the inapt term "racist," everyone shuts up like rabbits. I don’t go pitching tents at Mecca. I don’t go singing Our Fathers and Hail Mary’s in front of Mohammed’s tomb. I don’t go peeing on the marble of their mosques; I don’t go shitting at the feet of their minarets. When I find myself in their countries (something from which I never derive pleasure), I never forget that I am a guest and a foreigner. I am careful not to offend them with clothing or gestures or behavior that are normal for us but impermissible to them. I treat them with dutiful respect, dutiful courtesy, and I excuse myself when through mistake or ignorance I infringe some rule or superstition of theirs. And the images I’ve had before my eyes while writing this scream of pain and indignation haven’t always been those of the apocalyptic scenes I started with. Sometimes I see another image instead, a symbolic (and therefore infuriating) one: the huge tent with which the Somalian Muslims disfigured and befouled and profaned the Piazza del Duomo at Florence for three months last summer. My city. A tent put up in order to beg–condemn–insult the Italian government that hosted them but wouldn’t give them the papers necessary to rove about Europe and wouldn’t let them bring the hordes of their relatives to Italy. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, pregnant sisters–in–law, and if they had their way, their relatives’ relatives as well. A tent situated next to the beautiful palazzo of the Archbishop on whose sidewalk they kept the shoes or sandals that are lined up outside the mosques in their countries. And along with the shoes or sandals, the empty bottles of water they’d used to wash their feet before praying. A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors. A tent, finally, furnished like a sleazy little apartment: seats, tables, chaise–lounges, mattresses for sleeping and for fucking, ovens for cooking food and plaguing the piazza with smoke and stench. And, thanks to the customary irresponsibility of ENEL, which cares about our works of art about as much as it cares about our landscape, furnished with electric light. Thanks to a radio tape player, enriched by the uncouth wailing of a muezzin who punctually exorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells. Add to all this the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the marble of the Baptistry. (My, these sons of Allah sure have a long range! However did they manage to hit the target when they were held back by a protective railing that kept it nearly two whole meters away from their urinary equipment?) And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore al Vescovo: that exquisite Romanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a shithouse. You’re well aware of this. You’re well aware because I’m the one who called you, begged you to talk about it in the Corriere, remember? I also called the mayor, who, I admit, came politely to my house. He listened to me, he agreed with me: "You’re right. You’re quite right." But he didn’t remove the tent. He forgot or he wasn’t able. I also called the Foreign Minister, who was a Florentine, indeed one of those Florentines who speaks with a very Florentine accent, not to mention being involved in the whole affair. And he too, I admit, listened to me. He agreed with me: "Oh, yes. You’re right, yes." But he didn’t lift a finger to remove that tent, and as for the sons of Allah who urinated on the Baptistery and shat all over San Salvatore al Vescovo, he moved quickly to appease them. (I understand that the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins and pregnant sisters-in-law are now where they wanted to be. That is in Florence and in other cities of Europe.) So I changed tactics. I called a nice police officer who directs the security office and said to him: "My dear officer, I am not a politician. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. I also know something about war and have certain skills. If by tomorrow you don’t get that fucking tent out of here, I will burn it. I swear on my honor that I will burn it, that not even a regiment of carabinieri could stop me, and I want to be arrested for it. Taken to jail in handcuffs. That way I’ll get into all the newspapers." Well, being more intelligent than the others, in the space of a few hours he got rid of it. In place of the tent there remained only an immense and disgusting stain of filth. It was a Pyrrhic victory, though. Because it had no effect on the other atrocities that for years have wounded and humiliated what used to be the capital of art and culture and beauty. It did nothing to discourage the other arrogant guests of the city: the Albanians, the Sudanese, the Bengalese, the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Pakistani, the Nigerians who contribute with so much fervor to the drug trade and prostitution which, it appears, are not prohibited by the Koran. Oh yes: they’re all right where they were before my policeman took away the tent. In the courtyard of the Uffizi Galleries, at the foot of Giotto’s tower. In front of the Loggia dell’ Orcagna, around the Loggie del Porcellino. Opposite the National Library, at the entrances to the museums. On Ponte Vecchio where every so often they kill each other with knives or revolvers. Along the banks of the Arno where they asked for and received municipal funding. (That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: municipal funding.) In the churchyard of San Lorenzo where they get drunk on wine and beer and liquor, bunch of hypocrites, and where they utter obscenities at women. (Last summer in that churchyard they even tried it with me, an old lady. Needless to say they lived to regret it. Oooh, did they regret it! One of them’s still there whimpering over his genitals.) In the historic streets where they camp out on the pretext of selling merchandise. By "merchandise" I mean purses and bags illegally copied from patented models, photo murals, pencils, African statuettes that ignorant tourists take for Bernini sculptures, stuff–to–sniff. ("Je connais mes droits, I know my rights" one of them hissed at me on Ponte Vecchio, one who I’d seen selling stuff–to–sniff). And God forbid that a citizen protest, God forbid that someone tell him to take–those–rights–of yours–and–go– exercise–them–at–home. "Racist, racist!" God forbid that a pedestrian brush up against a presumed Bernini sculpture while trying to walk through the merchandise that blocks the way. "Racist, racist!" God forbid that a metro cop should walk up to him and dare to say, "Signor Son of Allah, Your Excellence, would you mind moving over a hairsbreadth to let people get by?” They’d eat him alive. They’d go after him with knives. At the very least, they’d insult his mother and progeny. "Racist, racist!" And people just take it, resigned. They don’t react even if you yell what my old man used to yell during fascism: "Don’t you care at all about dignity? Don’t you have even a little pride, you big sheep?" The same thing happens in other cities, I know. At Turin, for example. That Turin that created Italy and now doesn’t even seem like an Italian city. It seems like Algiers, Dacca, Nairobi, Damascus, Beirut. At Venice. That Venice where the pigeons of Piazza San Marco have been replaced by little rugs with "merchandise" and even Othello would feel ill at ease. At Genoa. That Genoa where the marvelous palazzi that Rubens so admired have been seized by them and are now perishing like beautiful women who have been raped. At Rome. That Rome where the cynicism of a politics of every falsehood and every color courts them in the hope of obtaining their future votes, and where the Pope himself protects them. (Your Holiness, why in the name of the One God don’t you take them into the Vatican? Strictly on condition, of course, that they refrain from shitting on the Sistine Chapel and the paintings of Raphael.) And here’s something I really don’t understand. Instead of sons of Allah, in Italy they call them "foreign laborers." Or else "manual–labor–for–which– there–is–demand." And I don’t doubt that some of them work. The Italians have become such little lords. They vacation in Seychelles, come to New York to buy sheets at Bloomingdale’s. They’re ashamed to be laborers and farmers, and won’t be associated with the proletariat. But those of whom I speak, what kind of laborers are they? What work do they do? In what way do they satisfy the demand for manual labor that the Italian ex–proletariat no longer supplies? Camping out in the city on the pretext of selling merchandise? Loitering and defacing our monuments? Praying five times a day? And then there’s something else I don’t understand. If they’re really so poor, who’s giving them the money for the voyage by ship or rubber dinghy that brings them to Italy? Who gives them the ten million lira a head (at least ten million) necessary to buy the ticket? It’s not by any chance Osama Bin Laden looking to launch a conquest not only of souls, but of real estate? Well, even if he’s not the one giving them money, the situation bothers me. Even if our guests are absolutely innocent, even if there’s no one among them who wants to destroy the Tower of Pisa or the Tower of Giotto, wants to put me in chador, wants to burn me at the stake of a new Inquisition, their presence alarms me. It makes me uncomfortable. And whoever takes this situation lightly or optimistically is wrong. And even more wrong is the person who compares the wave of migration hitting Italy and Europe to that which spilled into America in the second half of the 1800’s or rather at the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of the 1900’s. Now I’ll tell you why. Not long ago I happened to catch a phrase uttered by one of the thousand prime ministers that have honored Italy with their presence over these past few decades. "Well, my uncle was an immigrant too! I can remember him leaving for America with his little cardboard suitcase." Or something along those lines. No, my friend. No. It’s not the same thing at all. And it’s not for two rather simple reasons. The first is that the wave of migration to America that took place in the latter half of the 1800’s was not clandestine and was not carried out by bullying on the part of those who effected it. It was the Americans themselves who wanted it, urged it, and by a specific act of Congress. "Come, come, we need you. If you come, we’ll give you a nice piece of land." The Americans even made a movie about it. That one with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and what struck me about it was the ending. The scene with the poor souls running to plant a little white flag on the piece of land they want to claim as theirs, so that only the youngest and strongest are able to make it. The rest wind up with diddly squat and some of them die in the process. To my knowledge, there was never any act of Parliament in Italy inviting or rather urging our present guests to leave their countries. Come–come–we–really–need–you, if– you come–we’ll–give–you–a–little–farm–in– Chianti. They came to us on their own initiative, with their accursed dinghies and in the teeth of the customs officers who tried to send them back. What occurred was not an immigration, it was more of an invasion conducted under an emblem of secrecy. A secrecy that’s disturbing because it’s not meek and dolorous but arrogant and protected by the cynicism of politicians who close an eye or maybe even both. I’ll never forget the way these stowaways filled the piazzas of Italy with assemblies last year to clamor for visas. Those distorted, savage faces. Those raised fists, threatening. Those baleful voices that took me back to the Teheran of Khomeini. I’ll never forget it because I felt offended by their bullying in my home, and because I felt made fun of by the ministers who told us: "We’d like to deport them but we don’t know where they’re hiding." Bastards! There were thousands of them in those piazzas and they sure as hell weren’t hiding. To deport them all they had to do was put them in line, please– right–this–way–sir, and escort them to a port or airport. The second reason, my dear nephew of the uncle with the little cardboard suitcase, is one even a schoolboy could understand. It requires only two elements to expound. One: America is a continent. And in the latter half of the 1800’s when the American Congress gave the green light to immigration, this continent was practically unpopulated. Most of the population was massed in the eastern states, in other words those on the side of the Atlantic, and there were even fewer people in the Midwest. California was practically empty. Well, Italy isn’t a continent. It’s a very small country, and far from unpopulated. Two: America is a very young country. If you recall that the War of Independence took place at the end of the 1700’s, you can deduce that it’s only two hundred years old and you understand why its cultural identity is not yet well defined. Italy, on the other hand, is a very old country. Its history goes back at least three thousand years. Its cultural identity is thus very precise—and let’s not beat around the bush: that identity has quite a bit to do with a religion called Christian religion and a church called the Catholic Church. People like me have a nice little saying: the–Catholic–church–has–nothing–to–do–with– me. But boy does it have to do with me. Whether I like it or

The Appointment, by Herta Muller. I've been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp. Lately I'm being summoned more and more often: ten sharp on Tuesday, ten sharp on Saturday, on Wednesday, Monday. As if years were a week, I'm amazed that winter comes so close on the heels of late summer. On my way to the tram stop, I again pass the shrubs with the white berries dangling through the fences. Like buttons made of mother-of-pearl and sewn from underneath, or stitched right down into the earth, or else like bread pellets. They remind me of a flock of little white-tufted birds turning away their beaks, but they're really far too small for birds. It's enough to make you giddy. I'd rather think of snow sprinkled on the grass, but that leaves you feeling lost, and the thought of chalk makes you sleepy. The tram doesn't run on a fixed schedule. It does seem to rustle, at least to my ear, unless those are the stiff leaves of the poplars I'm hearing. Here it is, already pulling up to the stop: today it seems in a hurry to take me away. I've decided to let the old man in the straw hat get on ahead of me. He was already waiting when I arrived-who knows how long he'd been there. You couldn't exactly call him frail, but he's hunchbacked and weary, and as skinny as his own shadow. His backside is so slight it doesn't even fill the seat of his pants, he has no hips, and the only bulges in his trousers are the bags around his knees. But if he's going to go and spit, right now, just as the door is folding open, I'll get on before he does, regardless. The car is practically empty; he gives the vacant seats a quick scan and decides to stand. It's amazing how old people like him don't get tired, that they don't save their standing for places where they can't sit. Now and then you hear old people say: There'll be plenty of time for lying down once I'm in my coffin. But death is the last thing on their minds, and they're quite right. Death never has followed any particular pattern. Young people die too. I always sit if I have a choice. Riding in a seat is like walking while you're sitting down. The old man is looking me over; I can sense it right away inside the empty car. I'm not in the mood to talk, though, or else I'd ask him what he's gaping at. He couldn't care less that his staring annoys me. Meanwhile half the city is going by outside the window, trees alternating with buildings. They say old people like him can sense things better than young people. Old people might even sense that today I'm carrying a small towel, a toothbrush, and some toothpaste in my handbag. And no handkerchief, since I'm determined not to cry. Paul didn't realize how terrified I was that today Albu might take me down to the cell below his office. I didn't bring it up. If that happens, he'll find out soon enough. The tram is moving slowly. The band on the old man's straw hat is stained, probably with sweat, or else the rain. As always, Albu will slobber a kiss on my hand by way of greeting. Major Albu lifts my hand by the fingertips, squeezing my nails so hard I could scream. He presses one wet lip to my fingers, so he can keep the other free to speak. He always kisses my hand the exact same way, but what he says is always different: Well well, your eyes look awfully red today. I think you've got a mustache coming. A little young for that, aren't you. My, but your little hand is cold as ice today-hope there's nothing wrong with your circulation. Uh-oh, your gums are receding. You're beginning to look like your own grandmother. My grandmother didn't live to grow old, I say. She never had time to lose her teeth. Albu knows all about my grandmother's teeth, which is why he's bringing them up. As a woman, I know how I look on any given day. I also know that a kiss on the hand shouldn't hurt, that it shouldn't feel wet, that it should be delivered to the back of the hand. The art of hand kissing is something men know even better than women-and Albu is hardly an exception. His entire head reeks of Avril, a French eau de toilette that my father-in-law, the Perfumed Commissar, used to wear too. Nobody else I know would buy it. A bottle on the black market costs more than a suit in a store. Maybe it's called Septembre, I'm not sure, but there's no mistaking that acrid, smoky smell of burning leaves. Once I'm sitting at the small table, Albu notices me rubbing my fingers on my skirt, not only to get the feeling back into them but also to wipe the saliva off. He fiddles with his signet ring and smirks. Let him: it's easy enough to wipe off somebody's spit; it isn't poisonous, and it dries up all by itself. It's something everybody has. Some people spit on the pavement, then rub it in with their shoe since it's not polite to spit, not even on the pavement. Certainly Albu isn't one to spit on the pavement-not in town, anyway, where no one knows who he is and where he acts the refined gentleman. My nails hurt, but he's never squeezed them so hard my fingers turned blue. Eventually they'll thaw out, the way they do when it's freezing cold and you come into the warm. The worst thing is this feeling that my brain is slipping down into my face. It's humiliating, there's no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it's barefoot. But what if there aren't any words at all, what if even the best word isn't enough. I've been listening to the alarm clock since three in the morning ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp. Whenever Paul is asleep, he kicks his leg from one side of the bed to the other and then recoils so fast he startles himself, although he doesn't wake up. It's become a habit with him. No more sleep for me. I lie there awake, and I know I need to close my eyes if I'm going back to sleep, but I don't close them. I've frequently forgotten how to sleep, and have had to relearn each time. It's either extremely easy or utterly impossible. In the early hours just before dawn, every creature on earth is asleep: even dogs and cats only use half the night for prowling around the dumpsters. If you're sure you can't sleep anyway, it's easier to think of something bright inside the darkness than to simply shut your eyes in vain. Snow, whitewashed tree trunks, white-walled rooms, vast expanses of sand-that's what I've thought of to pass the time, more often than I would have liked, until it grew light. This morning I could have thought about sunflowers, and I did, but they weren't enough to dislodge the summons. And with the alarm clock ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp, my thoughts raced to Major Albu even before they shifted to me and Paul. Today I was already awake when Paul started thrashing in his sleep. By the time the window started turning gray, I had already seen Albu's mouth looming on the ceiling, gigantic, the pink tip of his tongue tucked behind his lower teeth, and I had heard his sneering voice: Don't tell me you're losing your nerve already-we're just warming up. Paul's kicking wakes me only when I haven't been summoned for two or three weeks. Then I feel happy, since it means I've learned how to sleep again. Whenever I've relearned how to sleep, and I ask Paul in the morning what he was dreaming, he can't remember anything. I show him how he tosses about and splays his toes, and then how he jerks his legs back and crooks his toes. Moving a chair from the table to the middle of the kitchen, I sit down, stick my legs in the air, and demonstrate the whole procedure. It makes Paul laugh, and I say: You're laughing at yourself. Who knows, maybe I dreamed I was taking you for a ride on my motorcycle. His thrashing is like a forward charge disrupted by an immediate call to retreat. I presume it comes from drinking. Not that I say this to him. Nor do I explain that it's the night drawing the shakes out of his legs. That's what it must be-the night, seizing him by the knees and tugging at the shakes, pulling them down through his toes into the pitch-black room, and finally tossing them out into the blackness of the street below, in the early hours just before daybreak, when the whole city is slumbering away. Otherwise Paul wouldn't be able to stand up straight when he woke. But if night wrenches the shakes out of every drunk in the city, it must be tanked up to high heaven come morning, given the number of drinkers. Just after four, the trucks begin delivering goods to the row of shops down below. They completely shatter the silence, making a huge racket for the little they deliver: a few crates of bread, milk, and vegetables, and large quantities of plum brandy. Whenever the food runs out, the women and children manage to cope: the lines disperse, and all roads lead home. But when the brandy runs out, the men curse their lot and pull out their knives. The salespeople say things to calm them down, but that only works while the customers are still inside the store. The moment they're out the door they continue prowling the city on their quest. The first fights break out because they can't find any brandy, and later because they're stone drunk. The brandy comes from the hilly region between the Carpathians and the arid plains. The plum trees there are so dense you can barely make out the tiny villages hiding in their branches. Whole forests of plum trees, drenched with blue in late summer, the branches sagging with the weight of the fruit. The brandy is named after the region, but nobody calls it by its proper name. It doesn't really even need a name, since there's only one brand in the whole country. People just call it Two Plums, from the picture on the label. Those two plums leaning cheek to cheek are as familiar to the men as the Madonna and Child are to the women. People say the plums represent the love between bottle and drinker. The way I see it, those cheek to cheek plums look more like a wedding picture than a Madonna and Child. None of the pictures in church shows the Child's head level with his mother's. The Child's forehead is always resting against the Virgin's cheek, with his own cheek at her neck, and his chin on her breast. Moreover, the relationship between drinkers and bottles is more like the one between the couples in wedding pictures: they bring each other to ruin, and still they won't let go. In our wedding picture, I'm not carrying flowers and I'm not wearing a veil. The love in my eyes is gleaming new, but the truth is, it was my second wedding. The picture shows Paul and me standing cheek to cheek like two plums. Ever since he started drinking so much, our wedding picture has proven prophetic. Whenever Paul's out on the town, barhopping late into the night, I'm afraid he'll never come home again, and I stare at our wedding picture until it starts to change shape. When that happens our two faces start to swim, and our cheeks shift around so that a little bit of space opens up between them. Mostly it is Paul's cheek that swims away from mine, as if he were planning to come home late. But he does come home. He always has, even after the accident. Occasionally a shipment of buffalo-grass vodka comes in from Poland-yellowish and bittersweet. That gets sold first. Each bottle contains a long, sodden stem that quivers as you pour the vodka but never buckles or slips out of the bottle. Drinkers say: That stem sticks in its bottle just like your soul sticks in your body, that's how the grass protects your soul. Their belief goes together with the burning taste in your mouth and the roaring drunk inside your head. The drinkers open the bottle, the liquid glugs into their glasses, and the first swallow slides down their throats. The soul begins to feel protected; it quivers but never buckles and never slips out of the body. Paul keeps his soul protected too; there's never a day where he feels like giving up and packing it all in. Maybe things would be fine if it weren't for me, but we like being together. The drink cakes his day, and the night takes his drunkenness. When I worked the early morning shift at the clothing factory, I heard the workers say: With a sewing machine, you oil the cogs, with a human machine, you oil the throat. Back then Paul and I used to cake his motorcycle to work every morning at five on the dot. We'd see the drivers with their delivery trucks parked outside the stores, the porters carrying crates, the vendors, and the moon. Now all I hear is the noise; I don't go to the window, and I don't look at the moon. I remember that it looks like a goose egg, and that it leaves the city on one side of the sky while the sun comes up at the other. Nothing's changed there; that's how it was even before I knew Paul, when I used to walk to the tram stop on foot. On the way I thought: How bizarre that something so beautiful could be up in the sky, with no law down here on earth forbidding people to look at it. Evidently it was permissible to wangle something out of the day before it was ruined in the factory. I would start to freeze, not because I was underdressed, but simply because I couldn't get enough of the moon. At that hour the moon is almost entirely eaten away; it doesn't know where to go after reaching the city. The sky has to loosen its grip on the earth as day begins to break. The streets run steeply up and down, and the streetcars travel back and forth like rooms ablaze with light. I know the trams from the inside too. The people getting on at this early hour wear short sleeves, carry worn leather bags, and have goose pimples on both arms. Each newcomer is measured and judged with a casual glance. This is a strictly working-class affair. Better people take their cars to work. But here, among your own, you make comparisons: that person's better off than me, that one looks worse. No one's ever in the exact same boat as you-that would be impossible. There's not much rime, we're almost at the factories, and now all the people who've been sized up leave the tram, one after the other. Shoes polished or dusty, heels new and straight or worn down to an angle, collars freshly ironed or crumpled, hair parted or not, fingernails, watch-straps, belt buckles: every single detail provokes envy or contempt. Nothing escapes this sleepy scrutiny, even in the pushing crowd. The working class ferrets out the differences: in the cold light of morning there is no equality. The sun is in the streetcar, along for the ride, and outside as well, pulling back the white and red clouds in anticipation of the scorching midday heat. No one is wearing a jacket: the freezing cold in the morning counts as fresh air, because with noon will come the clogging dust and infernal heat. If I haven't been summoned, we can sleep in for several hours. Daytime sleep is not deep black; it's shallow and yellow. Our sleep is restless, the sunlight falls on our pillows. But it does make the day a little shorter. We'll be under observation soon enough; the day's not going to run away. They can always accuse us of something, even if we sleep till nearly noon. As it is, we're always being accused of something we can no longer do anything about. You can sleep all you want, but the day's still out there waiting, and a bed is not another country. They won't let us rest till we're lying next to Lilli. Of course Paul also has to sleep off his drunk. It takes him until about noon to get his head square on his shoulders and relocate his mouth so he can actually speak and not just slur his words in a voice thick with drink. His breath still smells, though, and when he steps into the kitchen I feel as if I were passing the open door of the bar downstairs. Since spring, drinking hours have been regulated, and consumption of liquor is prohibited before eleven. But the bar still opens at six-brandy is served in coffee cups before eleven; after that they bring out the glasses. Paul drinks and is no longer himself, then he sleeps it off and is back to being himself. Around noon it looks as if everything could turn out all right, but once again it turns out ruined. Paul goes on protecting his soul until the buffalo grass is high and dry, while I brood over who he and I really are until I can no longer think straight. At lunchtime we're sitting at the kitchen table, and any mention of his having been drunk yesterday is the wrong thing to say. Even so, I occasionally toss out a word or two: Drink won't change a thing. Why are you making my life so difficult? You could paint this entire kitchen with what you put away yesterday. True, the flat is small, and I don't want to avoid Paul; but when we stay at home, we spend too much of the day sitting in the kitchen. By mid-afternoon he's already drunk, and in the evening it gets worse. I put off talking because it makes him grumpy. I keep waiting through the night, until he's sober again and sitting in the kitchen with eyes like onions. But then whatever I say goes right past him. I'd like for Paul to admit I'm right, just for once. But drinkers never admit anything, not even silently to themselves-and they're not about to let anyone else squeeze it out of them, especially somebody who's waiting to hear the admission. The minute Paul wakes up, his thoughts turn to drinking, though he denies it. That's why there's never any truth. If he's not sitting silently at the table, letting my words go right past him, he says something like this, meant to last the entire day: Don't fret, I'm not drinking out of desperation. I drink because I like it. That may be the case, I say, since you seem to think with your tongue. Paul looks out the kitchen window at the sky, or into his cup. He dabs at the drops of coffee on the table, as if to confirm that they're wet and really will spread if he smears them with a finger. He takes my hand, I look out the kitchen window at the sky, into the cup, I too dab at the odd drop of coffee on the table. The red enamel tin stares at us and I stare back. But Paul does not, because that would mean doing something different today from what he did yesterday. Is he being strong or weak when he remains silent instead of saying for once: I'm not going to drink today. Yesterday Paul again said: Don't you fret, your man drinks because he likes it. His legs carried him down the hall-at once too heavy and too light-as if they contained a mix of sand and air. I placed my hand upon his neck and stroked the stubble I love to touch in the mornings, the whiskers that grow in his sleep. He drew my hand up under his eye, it slid down his cheek to his chin. I didn't take away my fingers, but I did think to myself: I wouldn't count on any of this cheek-to-cheek business after you've seen that picture of the two plums. I like to hear Paul talk that way, so late in the morning, and yet I don't like it either. Whenever I take a step away from him, he nudges his love up to me, so naked, so close that he doesn't need to say anything else. He doesn't have to wait, I'm ready with my approval, not a single reproach on the tip of my tongue. The one in my head quickly fades. It's good I can't see myself, since my face feels stupid and pale. Yesterday morning, Paul's hangover once again yielded up an unexpected pussycat gentleness that came padding on soft paws. Your man-the only people who talk like that have shallow wits and too much pride tucked around the corners of their mouths. Although the noontime tenderness paves the way for the evening's drinking, I depend on it, and I don't like the way I need it. Major Albu says: I can see what you're thinking, there's no point in denying it, we're just wasting time. Actually, it's only my time being wasted; after all, he's doing his job. He rolls up his sleeve and glances at the clock. The time is easy to see, but not what I'm thinking. If Paul can't see what I'm thinking, then certainly this man can't. Paul sleeps next to the wall, while my place is toward the front edge of the bed, since I'm often unable to sleep. Still, whenever he wakes up he says: You were caking up the whole bed and shoved me right up against the wall. To which I reply: No way, I was on this little strip here no wider than a clothesline, you were the one taking up the middle. One of us could sleep in the bed and the other on the sofa. We've tried it. For two nights we took turns. Both nights I did nothing but toss around. My brain was grinding down thought after thought, and toward morning, when I was half asleep, I had a series of bad dreams. Two nights of bad dreams that kept reaching out and clutching at me all day long. The night I was on the sofa, my first husband put the suitcase on the bridge over the river, gripped me by the back of my neck, and roared with laughter. Then he looked at the water and whistled that song about love falling apart and the river water turning black as ink. The water in my dream was not like ink, I could see it, and in the water I saw his face, turned upside down and peering up from the depths, from where the pebbles had seeded. Then a white horse ate apricots in a thicket of trees. With every apricot it raised its head and spat out the stone like a human being. And the night I had the bed to myself, someone grabbed my shoulder from behind and said: Don't turn around, I'm not here. Without moving my head, I just squinted out of the corners of my eyes. Lilli's fingers were gripping me, her voice was that of a man, so it wasn't her. I raised my hand to touch her and the voice said: What you can't see you can't touch. I saw the fingers, they were hers, but someone else was using them. Someone I couldn't see. And in the next dream, my grandfather was pruning back a hydrangea that had been frost-burnt by the snow. He called me over: Come take a look, I've got a lamb here. Snow was falling on his trousers, his shears were clipping off the heads of the frost-browned flowers. I said: That's not a lamb. It's not a person, either, he said. His fingers were numb and he could only open and close the shears slowly, so that I wasn't sure whether it was the shears that were squeaking or his hand. I tossed the shears into the snow. They sank in so that it was impossible to tell where they had fallen. He combed the entire yard looking for them, his nose practically touching the snow. When he reached the garden gate I stepped on his hands so he'd look up and not go wandering off through the gate, searching the whole white street. I said: Stop it, the lamb's frozen and the wool got burnt in the frost. By the garden fence was another hydrangea, one that had been pruned bare. I gestured to it: What's wrong with that one. That one's the worst, he said. Come spring it'll be having little ones. We can't have that. The morning after the second night, Paul said: If we're in each other's way, at least it means we each have someone. The only place you sleep alone is in your coffin, and that'll happen soon enough. We should stay together at night. Who knows the dreams he had and promptly forgot. He was talking about sleeping, however, not dreaming. At half past four in the morning I saw Paul asleep in the gray light, a twisted face above a double chin. And at that early hour, down by the shops, people were cursing out loud and laughing. Lilli said: Curses ward off evil spirits. Idiot, get your foot out of the way. Move, or do you have shit in your shoes. Open those great flapping ears of yours and you'll hear what I'm saying, but watch you don't blow away in this wind. Never mind your hair, we haven't finished unloading. A woman was clucking, short and hoarse like a hen. A van door slammed. Lend a hand, you moron. If you want a rest you should check into a sanatorium. Paul's clothes were strewn on the floor. The new day was already in the wardrobe mirror, the day on which I have been summoned, today. I got up, careful to place my right foot on the floor before my left, as I always do when I've been summoned. I can't say for sure I really believe in it, but how could it hurt. What I'd like to know is whether other people's brains control their good fortune as well as their thoughts. My brain's only good for a little fortune. It's not up to shaping a whole life. At least not mine. I've already come to terms with what fortune I have, even though Paul wouldn't consider it very good at all. Every other day or so I declare: I'm doing just fine. Paul's face is right in front of me, quiet and still, gaping at what I've just said, as if our having each other didn't count. He says: You feel fine because you've forgotten what that means for other people. Others might mean their life as a whole when they say: I'm doing just fine. All I'm talking about is my good fortune. Paul realizes that life is something I haven't come to terms with and I don't simply mean I haven't done so yet, that it's only a matter of time. Just look at us, says Paul, how can you go on about being fortunate. Quick as a handful of flour hitting a windowpane, the bathroom light cast a face into the mirror, a face with froggy creases over its eyes which looked like me. I held my hands in the water, it felt warm; on my face it felt cold. Brushing my teeth, I look up and see toothpaste come frothing out of my eyes-it's not the first time I've had this happen. I feel nauseous, I spit out what's in my mouth and stop. Ever since my first summons, I've begun to distinguish between life and fortune. When I go in for questioning, I have no choice but to leave my good fortune at home. I leave it in Paul's face, around his eyes, his mouth, amid his stubble. If it could be seen, you'd see it on his face like a transparent glaze. Every time I have to go, I want to stay behind in the flat, like the fear I always leave behind and which I can't take away from Paul. Like the fortune I leave at home when I'm away. He doesn't know how much my good fortune has come to rely upon his fear. He couldn't bear to know that. What he does know is obvious to anyone with eyes: that whenever I've been summoned, I put on my green blouse and eat a walnut. The blouse is one I inherited from Lilli but its name comes from me: the blouse that grows. If I were to take my good fortune with me, it would weaken my nerves. Albu says: You don't mean you're losing your nerve already-we're just warming up. I'm not losing my nerve, not at all: in fact, I'm overloaded with nerves. And every one of them is humming like a moving streetcar. They say that walnuts on an empty stomach are good for your nerves and your powers of reason. Any child knows that, but I'd forgotten it. What sparked my memory wasn't the fact that I was being summoned so often-it was sheer chance. One time I had to be at Albu's at ten sharp, like today; by half past seven I was all set to go. Getting there takes an hour and a half at most. I give myself two hours, and if I'm early I walk a while around the neighborhood. I prefer it that way. I've always arrived on time: I can't imagine they'd put up with any lateness. It was because I was all set to go by half past seven that I got to eat the walnut. I'd been ready that early for previous summonses, but on that particular morning the walnut was lying there on the kitchen table. Paul had found it in the elevator the day before. He'd put it in his pocket, since you don't just leave a walnut sitting there. It was the first one of the year, with a little of the moist fuzz left from the green husk. I weighed it in my hand: it seemed a little light for a good fresh nut, as if it might be hollow. I couldn't find a hammer, so I split it open with the stone that used to be in the hall but has since moved to a corner of the kitchen. The brain of the nut was loose inside. It tasted of sour cream. That day my interrogation was shorter than usual, I kept my nerve, and once I was back on the street, I thought to myself: That was thanks to the nut. Ever since then I've believed in nuts, that nuts help. I don't really believe it, but I want to have done whatever I can that might help. That's why I stick to my stone for cracking nuts, and always do it in the morning. Once the nut's been cracked, it loses its power if it lies open overnight. Of course it would be easier on Paul and the neighbors-not to mention myself-if I split them open in the evening, but I can't have people telling me what time to crack nuts. I brought the stone from the Carpathians. My first husband had been on military service since March. Every week he wrote me a whining letter and I responded with a comforting card. Summer came, and I tried to figure out exactly how many letters and cards we would have to exchange before he returned. My father-in-law wanted to take his place and sleep with me, so I soon had enough of his house and garden. I packed my rucksack and early one morning, after he'd gone to work, I stashed it in the bushes near a gap in the fence. A few hours later I strolled out to the road, with nothing in my hands. My mother in law was hanging out the laundry and had no idea what I was up to. Without saying a word, I pushed the rucksack through the gap in the fence and walked to the station. I took a train into the mountains and joined up with some people who'd just graduated from the music academy. Every day we trekked and stumbled from one glacial lake to the next until it grew dark. Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around-portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff our life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds. The music graduates sang as the lake pictured them, upside down, taking their measure as potential corpses. Hiking, resting, or eating, they sang in chorus. It wouldn't have surprised me to hear them harmonize while they slept at night, just as they did at those bleak altitudes where the sky blows into your mouth. I had to stay with the group because death makes no allowance for the wanderer who strays alone. The lakes made our eyes grow bigger by the day; in every face I could see the circles widening, the cheeks losing ground. And every day our legs grew shorter. Nevertheless, on the last day I wanted to take something back home with me, so I picked through the scree until I found a rock that looked like a child's foot. The musicians looked for small flat pebbles they could rub in their hands as worry-stones. Their stones looked like coat buttons, and I had more than enough of those every day in the factory. But those musicians put their faith in worry-stones the way I now put mine in nuts. I can't help it: I've put on the blouse that grows, I bang twice with the stone, rattling all the dishes in the kitchen, and the walnut is cracked. And as I'm eating it, Paul comes in, startled by the banging. He's wearing his pajamas and downs one or two glasses of water, two if he was as blind drunk as he was last night. I don't need to understand each individual word. I know perfectly well what he says while drinking water: You don't really believe that nut helps, do you. Of course I don't really believe it, just as I don't really believe in all the other routines I've developed. Consequently I'm all the more stubborn. Let me believe what I want. Paul lets that one go, since we both know it's not right to quarrel before the interrogation, you need to keep a clear head. Most of the sessions are torturously long despite the nut. But how do I know they wouldn't be worse if I didn't eat the nut? Paul doesn't realize that the more he pooh-poohs all my routines, with that wet mouth of his and the glass he's draining before clearing it off the table, the more I rely on them. People who are summoned develop routines that help them out a little. Whether these routines really work or not is beside the point. It's not people, though, it's me who's developed them; they came sneaking up on me, one by one. Paul says: The things you waste your time on. What he does, instead, is consider what questions they'll ask me when I'm summoned. This is absolutely necessary, he claims, whereas what I do is crazy. He'd be right if the questions he's preparing me for really were the ones I was asked. Up to now they've always been completely different. It's too much to expect my routines to really help me. Actually they don't help me so much as help move life along from one day to the next. There's no point expecting them to fill your head with lucky thoughts. There's a lot to be said for moving life along, but there's essentially nothing to say when it comes to luck, because as soon as you open your mouth you jinx it away. Not even the luck you've missed out on can bear being talked about. The routines I've developed are about moving from one day to the next, and not about luck. I'm sure Paul's right: the walnut and the blouse that grows only add to the fear. And what sense is there in shooting for good fortune when all that does is add to the fear. I am constantly dwelling on this, and as a result I don't expect as much as other people. Nobody covets the fear that others make for themselves. But with luck it's just the opposite, which is why good fortune is never a very good goal. On the green blouse that grows there's a large mother-of pearl button which I picked out from a great many buttons at the factory and took for Lilli. At the interrogation I sit at the small table, twisting the button in my fingers, and answer calmly, even though every one of my nerves is jangling. Albu paces to and fro; having to formulate the right questions wears at his calm, just as having to give the right answers wears at mine. As long as I keep my composure there's the chance he'll get something wrong maybe everything. Back home I change into my gray blouse. This one's called the blouse that waits. It's a gift from Paul. Of course I often have misgivings about these names. But they've never done any harm, not even on days when I haven't been summoned. The blouse that grows helps me, and the blouse that waits may be helping Paul. His fear on my behalf is as high as the ceiling, just as mine is for him when he sits around the flat, waiting and drinking, or when he's barhopping in town. It's easier if you're the one going out, if you're the one taking your fear away and leaving your fortune at home, and if there's someone waiting for you to come back. Sitting at home, waiting, stretches time to the brink and tightens fear to the point of snapping. The powers I've bestowed on my routines verge on the superhuman. Albu yells: You see, everything is connected. And I twist the large button on my blouse and say: In your mind they are, in my mind they aren't. Shortly before he got off, the old man in the straw hat turned his watery eyes away from me. Now there's a father with a child on his lap sitting on the seat facing me, his legs stretched out into the aisle. Watching the city go by outside the window isn't something he can be bothered with. The child sticks a forefinger up his father's nose. Crooking a finger and hunting for snot is something kids learn early. Later they're told not to pick anyone's nose but their own, and then only if no one's watching. This father doesn't think that later has arrived yet; he smiles, perhaps he's enjoying it. The tram halts in the middle of the tracks, between stops, the driver gets out. Who knows how long we'll be stranded. It's early in the morning and already he's sneaking a break when he should be driving his route. Everyone here does what he wants. The driver strolls over to the shops, tucking in his shirt and adjusting his trousers so no one will notice he's abandoned his tram in mid-route. He acts like someone who's so bored that he finally got up off his couch just to poke his nose into the sunshine. If he's planning to buy anything in one of the shops over there, he'll either have to say who he is or else he'll have to wait in line. If all he's after is a cup of coffee, I hope he doesn't sit down to drink it. He doesn't dare touch brandy, even if he does keep his window open. Every one of us sitting on the tram has the right to reek of brandy except for him. But he's behaving as if it were the other way round. My summons puts me in the same position as far as brandy is concerned. I'd rather have his reason for abstaining than my own. Who knows when he'll be back. Ever since I began leaving my good fortune at home, the kiss on my hand doesn't paralyze me as much as it used to. I crook up my finger joints so that my knuckles keep Albu from speaking. Paul and I have rehearsed this kiss. In order to approximate the importance of the signet ring on Albu's middle finger, to see how it affects the finger-squeeze, I made a ring out of a strip of rubber and a coat button. We took turns wearing it, and we laughed so much we completely forgot why we were going through the exercise in the first place. I learned not to crook my hand up all at once but gradually. That way the knuckles can block his gums and keep him from speaking. Sometimes when Albu is kissing my hand, I think of my rehearsal with Paul. Then the pain at my fingernails and the slobber on my hand aren't so humiliating. You learn as you go, but I can't show that I'm learning, and whatever happens I cannot laugh. If you're walking or driving around the leaning tower, where Paul and I live, you can't really keep more than the entranceway and the lower stories under surveillance. From the sixth floor up the flats are too high, so that you'd need sophisticated technology to see anything in detail. What's more, about halfway up the building, the facade angles out toward the front. If you stare up at it long enough you'll feel your eyes rolling back into your forehead. I've tried it often; your neck grows tired. The leaning tower has looked like that for twelve years now, says Paul, from the day it was built. Whenever I want to explain where I live, all I have to do is say: In the leaning tower. Everyone in the city knows where it is. They ask: Aren’t you afraid it might collapse. I'm not afraid, I say, it was built with reinforced concrete. Whenever I refer to the tower, people look down at the floor, as if looking at me might make them dizzy, so I say: Everything else in this city will collapse first. At that they nod, to relax the veins that are twitching in their necks. The fact that our flat is high up is an advantage for us, but it also has the disadvantage that Paul and I can't see exactly what's going on down below. From the seventh floor you can't make out anything smaller than a suitcase, and when do you see anyone carrying a suitcase. Individual items of clothing blur into big splotches of color, and faces turn into little pale patches between the hair and the clothes. You could guess at what the nose, eyes, or teeth inside those patches might look like, but why bother. Old people and children can be recognized by the way they walk. There are dumpsters located on the grass between our building and the shops, with a walkway running alongside them. Two narrow footpaths leave the paved sidewalk and circle around the group of bins, without quite meeting. From up here the bins look like ransacked cupboards with the doors torn off. Once a month someone sets them on fire, the smoke rises and the garbage is consumed. If your windows aren't shut, your eyes start stinging and your throat gets sore. Most things happen outside the entrances to the shops, but unfortunately all we can see are the rear service doors. No matter how often we count them, we can never match up the twenty-seven doors in back with the eight front doors belonging to the grocer, the bread shop, the greengrocer, the pharmacy, the bar, the shoemaker, the hairdresser, and the kindergarten. The whole rear wall is riddled with doors; nevertheless, the delivery trucks stop mostly in the street, out front. The old shoemaker was complaining he had too little room and too many rats. His shop consists of a workbench enclosed in a small space that is partitioned from the rest of the room by a makeshift wall of wooden planks. The man I took over from was the one who fixed the place up, the shoemaker said. Back then the building was new. The space was boarded off then too, but he couldn't think of anything to do with all those planks, or maybe he just didn't want to; anyway, he didn't use them at all. I knocked in a few nails and ever since I've been hanging the shoes up by their laces, thongs, or heels, they don't get gnawed on anymore. I can't have the rats eating everything after all, I have to pay for the damage. Especially in winter, when they're hungrier. Behind those planks there's a great big hall. Once, back in the early days, during a holiday, I came down to the shop, loosened two of the boards behind the bench, and squeezed through with a flashlight. There's nowhere you can put your feet, the whole floor skitters and squeaks, he said, it's full of rats' nests. Rats don't need a door, you know, they just tunnel through the ground. The walls are covered with electrical sockets, and the back wall has four doors leading out to the bins. But you can't budge them so much as an inch to drive the rats out even for a couple hours. The door to my workplace is just a cheap piece of tin-in fact, more than half the doors in back of the shops aren't doors at all, they're just tin plates they built into the wall to save on concrete. The sockets are probably there in case of war. There'll always be war all right, he laughed, but not here. The Russians have got us where they want us with treaties, they won't be showing up here. Whatever they need, they've shipped off to Moscow: they eat our grain and our meat and leave us to go hungry and fight over the shortages. Who'd want to conquer us, all it would do is cost them money. Every country on earth is happy not to have us, even the Russians. The driver returns, eating a crescent roll, in no particular hurry. His shirt has slipped back outside his trousers, as if he'd been driving the whole time. His cheeks are stuffed with food, he runs his hand through his hair, clutching a half-eaten roll and making more of a face than the effort of chewing calls for. Now he tidies up on the step up to the car, although not for us. For us he puts on a grouchy face so no one in the tram will dare utter a word. He climbs in, his other hand holding a second roll, while a third is poking out of his shirt pocket. Slowly the tram starts moving. The father with the boy has taken his legs out of the aisle and stretched them between the seats. His son is licking the pane, but instead of pulling the boy away, the man is holding the little one's neck so his little bright-red tongue can reach the window. The boy turns his head, stares, grabs his father's ear, and babbles. The father doesn't bother to wipe the dribble off the boy's chin. Maybe he's actually listening. But his thoughts are clearly elsewhere as he stares out through the saliva smeared on the windowpane, as if it were perfectly normal for windows to drool. The hair at the back of his head is shorn close, like on a pelt. Running through it is the bald line of a scar. For a whole week, when summer came and people began running around in short sleeves, Paul and I were suspicious of a man who to this day walks over from the shops every morning at ten to eight, empty-handed. Every day he steps off the paved sidewalk and follows the paths around the dumpsters and then steps back on the sidewalk and returns to the shops. At one point Paul couldn't stand it any longer, he stuffed some paper in a plastic bag and set out to follow the man. He didn't come back until lunch, equipped with a long white loaf of the kind you can carry under your arm. With that he headed for the street the next morning at a quarter past seven, and at ten to eight, after the man had completed his circuit of the dumpsters, Paul returned with the same loaf of bread now broken in two. Evidently the man is about forty, wears a cross on a gold chain, has an anchor tattooed on one inner arm and the name Ana on the other. He lives in a bright-green row house on Mulberry Street and every morning, before he makes his circuit of the dumpsters, he drops off a blubbering boy at the kindergarten. There's no reason for him to pass by our tower on his way home from the kindergarten, unless he just wants a change of pace. Though it's hardly a change if you take the same detour every single day. Paul says: The man walks by the trash cans because they're near a bar he just passed that's nagging at him. The brandy-like smell of fermenting garbage somehow eases his guilty conscience, so he does an about-face and orders his first brandy of the day in the bar. The rest of the glasses follow automatically. Around nine o'clock he's joined by another man wearing a short-sleeved brown summer suit, who only drinks two cups of coffee but stays at the man's table until five to twelve, when it's time to pick up the child. The boy is still crying at noon, when he sees the man waiting for him. To my nose the trash cans don't stink of brandy, but drinkers may have a different sense of smell. Still, why does the man insist on craning his neck and looking up while he's making his rounds down there. And who is that person who keeps him company in the bar. I suspect Paul has himself in mind when he says that the man is lifting his head up to heaven as he heads home, in order to stave off the guilt he feels at hitting the booze. And why does the child cry when he sees him, maybe he doesn't belong to the man at all. Paul has no idea but says: Who'd borrow a kid. Obviously Paul never does the shopping, or else he'd know that people really do borrow children to get larger rations of meat, milk, and bread in the shops. Why does Paul say this drinker goes to such and such a place every morning when in fact he only followed the man for one morning and part of an afternoon. It could all be coincidence rather than habit. Albu is trained to notice such things. At varying intervals, and just to confuse me, he asks the same thing at least three times before he's satisfied with the answer. Only then does he say: You see, things are getting connected. Paul says I should follow the alcoholic myself if I'm not satisfied with his report. But I'd rather not. A bag in your hand and a loaf under your arm doesn't make you invisible; it could easily give you away. I no longer stand beside our window at ten to eight, although every morning it occurs to me that the man is walking around down there, craning his neck. Nor do I say anything anymore, because Paul digs in so, insisting he's right, as if he needs this drinker in his life more than he needs me. As if our life would be easier if the man caught between his child and his drink were simply a tormented father. That may all be true, I say, but he still might be doing a little spying on the side. Now the driver has scratched the salt off his second crescent roll. The coarse grains burn your tongue and ruin the enamel on your teeth. And salt makes you thirsty, maybe he doesn't want to be drinking water all the time, because he can't go to the toilet while he's on duty, and because the more you drink the more you sweat. My grandfather told me that in the camp they used salt from evaporated water to clean their teeth. They would take it in their mouth and rub it over their teeth with the tip of their tongue. But that salt was as fine as dust. After the driver finished his first roll he swigged something from a bottle. Water, I hope. A truck full of sheep crosses the intersection. The sheep are crammed in so tight they can't fall over no matter how bumpy the ride. No heads, no bellies, just black and white wool. Only when we take the turn do I notice a dog's head in their midst. And a man in a small green climbing cap, the kind that shepherds wear, sitting in the cab, next to the driver. They're probably moving the flock to a new pasture-you don't need a dog at the slaughterhouse. Some things aren't bad until you start talking about them. I've learned how to hold my tongue before it gets me into trouble, but usually it's already too late, because sooner or later I always want to have my say. Whenever Paul and I don't understand something that troubles other people, we start to quarrel. Things quickly escalate until they get out of hand, and every salvo calls for an even more thunderous one in return. I think we see in that alcoholic man the things that most torment us, and these things are different for each of us, despite our common love. Evidently drinking troubles Paul more than my being summoned. He drinks the most whenever I'm summoned, and on those days especially I have no right to reproach him for his drinking, even though his being drunk troubles me more than.. My first husband also had a tattoo. He returned home from the army with a rose threaded through a heart inked on his chest. My name beneath the stem. But I left him nevertheless. Why in the world have you gone and ruined your skin. The only place that rosy heart might possibly look right is on your gravestone. Because the days were long and I was thinking of you, he explained, and everybody else was getting one. Apart from the chicken-hearts. We had our share of those, just like anywhere else. I didn't leave him for some other man, as he suspected, I just wanted to leave him. He wanted an itemized list of the reasons why. I couldn't spell out a single one. Are you disappointed in me, he asked. Or have I changed. No, we were both exactly the same as when we met. Love can't go on just running in place, but that's what our love had been doing for two and a half years. He looked at me, and when I said nothing, he declared: You're one of those who needs a good beating now and then, only I wasn't up to giving it to you. He meant it, since he knew he could never raise a hand against me. I believed it too. Up to that day on the bridge he wasn't even capable of slamming a door in anger. It was already half past seven in the evening. He asked me to dash out with him to buy a suitcase before the shops closed. He was planning to leave the next day for a two-week trip to the mountains. He expected me to miss him. But two weeks is nothing. Even our two and a half years weren't much. We left the store and walked through the city in silence. He was carrying the new suitcase. The shop had been about to close and the salesgirl hadn't cleaned out the case, it was stuffed full of paper and had a price tag dangling from the handle. The previous day there had been a down pour, the high, silty water was tearing at the willows along the river. Halfway across the bridge he stopped and squeezed my arm. He was kneading my flesh so hard, down to the bone, that I shuddered, and he said: Look at all that water. If I come back from the mountains and find you've left me, I'll jump right in. The suitcase was suspended between us; behind him I could see water, and branches, and muddy scum. I yelled: You can jump right now, with me watching. Then you won't have to bother going to the mountains. I took a deep breath and lowered my head. It wasn't my fault if he thought I wanted a kiss. He parted his lips, but I repeated: Go on and jump. I'll take full responsibility. Then I jerked my arm away so both his hands were free and he could jump. I was numb with the fear that he'd actually do it. Then I walked on, taking short steps, without looking back, so he wouldn't have to feel awkward, and so I'd be far enough away from the body. I'd nearly reached the far side of the bridge when he came panting after me and shoved me up against the railing, crushing my belly. He grabbed me by the back of my neck and forced my head down toward the water as far as his arm would let him. The whole weight of my body was hanging over the railing, my feet were off the ground, he kept his knees clamped tight around my calves. I shut my eyes and waited for a final word before I plummeted. He kept it short and said: All right. Who can say why instead of loosening his knees to let me drop he relaxed his grip on my neck, lowered me to the ground, and took a step away. I opened my eyes and slowly they rolled back down from my forehead and into my face. The sky hung there reddish blue, no longer firmly anchored, and the river was spooling brown eddies of water. I started to run before he registered that I was still alive. I never wanted to stop again. The terror came jolting up into my mouth, giving me the hiccups. A man wheeled his bike past me, ringing the bell, and called out: Hey, sweetie, keep your mouth closed or else your heart'll catch a chill. Reeling, I stopped in my tracks, my legs shaking, my hands heavy. I was burning and freezing and hadn't run far at all, just a short distance, but I felt as though I'd raced halfway around the globe. I could still feel his viselike grip cutting into my neck. The man wheeled his bike into the park, the tires left long ripples snaking through the sand behind him, the tarmac ahead was completely deserted. The park was a sheer wall of blackish green, the sky clutching at the trees. The bridge made me horribly anxious and I couldn't help looking back. And there stood the suitcase, right in the middle of the bridge, exactly where it had been left. And he was standing right on the spot where I had run away from death, his face turned to the water. Between hiccups I could hear him whistling. Very melodically, without missing a beat, a tune he had learned from me. My hiccups vanished, frozen between one wave of terror and the next. I raised a hand to my throat and felt my larynx bobbing. Everything happened in a twinkling, the time it takes for one person to assault another. And there he stood on the bridge, whistling O the tree has its leaves, the tea has its water, money has its paper, and my heart has snow that's fallen astray. Now I think it was a lucky thing that he grabbed me by the neck. That way no one could accuse me of provoking him. But he came very close to committing murder. All because he wasn't up to giving me a good beating, and because he despised himself for that. The father had nodded off and was holding the child so loosely I could see him falling any moment. Then the boy kicked him in the stomach with his shoes. The father gave a start and pulled the boy back onto his lap. The boy's little sandals are dangling like little toys, as if his parents had dressed him that morning in some of his playthings. Their new soles had yet to step on the street. The father has handed the boy a handkerchief to play with. It's knotted, and must have a hard object wrapped into the knot, which the child is now using to hit the windowpane. Coins maybe, keys, nails, or else screws the father doesn't want to lose. The driver hears the banging; he turns around and says: Go on, keep it up, those windows cost money, you know. Don't worry, says the father, we're not going to break it. He taps on the pane and points outside and says to the boy: See that, there's a baby inside there who's even smaller than you. The boy drops the handkerchief and says: Mami. He sees a woman with a stroller. And the father says: Our Mami doesn't wear sunglasses. If she did, she wouldn't be able to see how blue your eyes are. Whenever Paul asks me about my first husband, I say: I've forgotten all that, I don't remember a thing. I think I have more secrets from Paul than he does from me. Lilli once said that secrets don't go away when you tell them, what you can tell are the shells, not the kernel. That may have been true for her, but for me, if I don't keep something concealed, then I've already exposed the kernel. You call it shells, I said, when something goes as far as it did on the bridge. But you tell the story the way it suits you, Lilli said. How is it supposed to suit me, it doesn't suit me at all. Of course it makes you look bad, and him as well, Lilli said, but it suits you because you can talk about it however you like. Not however I like. I tell it the way it was. You just don't believe I'm telling you anything you wouldn't tell me. That's why you're going on about shells. The point is that no matter how often I tell these stories, they stay the same, like the secret about my stepfather. The last thing I need is to drive myself crazy wondering about the alcoholic by the trash cans. And who knows what he's thinking; after all, he's been seeing me next to the window for days on end as well. Finally, since we've never managed to agree about the alcoholic, Paul and I have given up puzzling about the people down below. Whether they move in a square or in circles or straight ahead, it's impossible to know them. Even if you go down to the street and walk right next to them, what can you tell. The fact that their gait looks alien, as if their toes were in back, has nothing to do with their feet, only with me. Of course we're still constantly looking out our window. And even though there's nothing puzzling about a car parked, to no apparent purpose, behind the shops, or else perched halfway on the sidewalk in front of our apartment house, where no normal person is allowed to park-this is more than enough to keep us busy. I prefer looking out the kitchen window. There the swallows fly through a vast stretch of sky in circles of their own invention. This morning they were flying low, and I chewed my walnut and could tell by looking at them that it was a whole new day. Since I've been summoned, it will have to stay a window day, even if I can see half a tree to one side of the Major's table. The tree must have grown the length of an arm since my first interrogation. In winter it's the bare wood that marks the time, in summer it's the foliage. The leaves nod or shake their head, depending on the wind, but I can't rely on that. When the question is short, it means Albu wants the answer right away. Short questions aren't necessarily the easiest. I'll have to think about it. You mean you'll have to think up some lie, he says. Of course you could have one all ready and waiting, but that takes brains. Which you don't have, sad to say. All right, so I'm dumb, but not so dumb as to say something that might hurt me. Nor am I dumb enough to let myself feel pressured when Albu's trying to gauge if I'm lying or telling the truth. Sometimes his eyes are cool, sometimes they burn into me so that… Sometimes Lilli is inside me and gazes too long into Albu's eyes. I shuffle my shoes under the table, then it's not so quiet. O the tree has its leaves, the tea has its water, money has its paper, and my heart has snow that's fallen astray. A winter and summer song, but for outside. In here you can quickly fall into a trap with foliage and snow. I don't know the tree's name, otherwise I'd sing ash, acacia, poplar in my head, and not just tree. I twist at the button on the blouse that grows. I never get as close to the branches as the Major, not from my small table. We both look at the tree at the same time. I would like to ask: What sort of tree is that. It would be a distraction. He wouldn't answer me, that's for sure, just scrape his chair forward and, with his trouser cuffs loose about his ankles, he might fiddle with his signet ring or play with the stub of his pencil and turn the question around: Why do you need to know that. What could I say then. He doesn't know why I always wear the same blouse, just as he always wears his signet ring. He also doesn't know why I twist the large button. And I don't know why he always keeps that chewed pencil stub, no longer than a match, lying on his table. Men wear signet rings, women wear earrings. Wedding rings make you superstitious, you never take them off until you die. If the man dies, the widow takes his ring and wears it next to hers, day and night, on her ring finger. Like all married people, Albu wears his narrow wedding ring at work. But jewelry at a job like that, tormenting people. It's not an ugly ring by any means, and if it weren't his it would be beautiful. The same is true of his eyes, cheeks, earlobes. I'm sure Lilli would gladly have stretched out her hands to stroke him; maybe even have introduced him to me one day as her lover. He's good-looking, I'd have had to say. Lilli's beauty was a given, what your eyes saw wasn't to blame for dazzling them so. Her nose, the curve of her neck, her ear, her knee, in your amazement you wanted to protect them, cover them with your hand, you were afraid for them, and your thoughts turned to death. But it never occurred to me that such skin might someday wrinkle. Between her being young and being dead, it never crossed my mind that Lilli might age. With Albu's skin, age is simply there, as if his flesh had nothing to do with it. His age is a rank to which he has been promoted in recognition of his sterling work. From this point on, nothing more will change, he will maintain his superiority, with nothing else to come but death. I wish it would come soon. Albu's good looks are flawless, tailor-made for interrogations, his personal appearance is never at risk, not even when he’s slobbering on my hand. Perhaps it is his very distinction that forbids him to mention Lilli. The chewed pencil on his table doesn't suit him, or anyone else his age. Surely Albu doesn't need to save on pencils. Perhaps he's proud that his grandson is teething. A photo of his grandson might serve instead of the pencil stub, except that here, as in all offices, it's probably forbidden to put family pictures on display. Perhaps a stub like that works well for his upright script. Or maybe a longer pencil would rub at his signet ring. Or maybe the stub is supposed to let me know exactly how much is being written about people like me. We know everything, Albu says. Maybe so--and here I agree with Lilli-about the shells of the dead. But nothing about their secrets, nothing about the kernels, about Lilli, whom Albu never mentions. Nothing about good fortune or common sense, which together may cause something tomorrow that I cannot foresee today. And nothing about what chance may bring the day after tomorrow; after all, I am alive. There's nothing special about the fact that Albu and I are looking at the tree together. Our eyes fall on other things at the same time as well: my table or his, a section of wall, the door, or the floor. Or he looks at his pencil and I look at my finger. Or he looks at his ring and I look at my large button. Or he looks at my face and I look at the wall. Or I look at his face and he looks at the door. Constantly looking each other in the face is tiring, particularly for me. The only things I trust here are the ones that don't change. But the tree is growing: it gave the blouse its name. I may leave my happiness a

Chapter Twelve. December 4, 1991. I went over to Georgetown today to talk to Elsa, the little redheaded "dropout" I met there a couple of weeks ago. The reason for my visit was to try to make a better evaluation of the potential of some of Elsa's friends for playing a role in our fight against the System. Actually, some of them-or, at least, people in similar circumstances-already are involved in their own war against the System. In the last month there's been a bewildering proliferation of incidents in which the Organization has not been involved. These have included bombings, arson, kidnapping, violent public demonstrations, sabotage, death threats against prominent figures, even two widely publicized assassinations. Credit for the various incidents has been claimed by so many different groups-anarchists, tax rebels, "liberation fronts" of one stripe or another, half-a-dozen far-out religious cults-that no one can keep up with it all. Every nut with an ax to grind seems to have gotten into the act. Most of these people are such careless amateurs that even our racially integrated FBI has been doing a fairly creditable job of rounding them up, but more seem to keep cropping up. The general atmosphere of revolutionary violence and governmental counter- violence that the Organization's activities have brought on is apparently responsible for encouraging most of them. The most interesting aspect of all this is the proof it represents that the System's grip on the minds of the citizenry is less than total. Most Americans, of course, are still marching in mental lockstep with the high priests of the TV religion, but a growing minority have broken step and regard the System as an enemy. Unfortunately, their hostility is usually based on the wrong reasons, and it would be nearly impossible to coordinate their activities. In fact, in the great majority of cases there is no reasoned basis at all for their activity. It is really just a massive venting of frustrations in the form of vandalism rather than political terrorism. They just want to smash something, to inflict some injury on the people they see as responsible for the unlivable world they are forced to live in. Vandalism on the massive scale we are seeing now is something with which the political police simply cannot continue to cope for very long. It is running them ragged. Besides the political vandals and the loonies, two other segments of the population have been playing an important role in recent events: the Black separatists and the organized criminals. Until a few weeks ago everyone assumed that the System had finally bought off the last of the nationalist-minded Blacks back in the '70's. Apparently they've just been lying low and minding their own business, and now they see a chance to get a few licks in. Mostly they seem to have been blowing up the offices of Tom groups and shooting each other, but they organized a pretty good riot in New Orleans last week, in which there was a lot of window- breaking and looting. More power to them! The Mafia, two or three of the big labor unions they own, and a couple of other organized-crime groups have been capitalizing on the disorder and the public apprehension by substantially stepping up their extortion activities. When they tell a businessman or a merchant that they'll bomb his place of business unless he coughs up a "protection" payment, they are more likely to be believed than they were a few months ago. And kidnapping has become a big business. The cops are too busy working on things the System is really worried about (namely, us) to bother the professional thugs, and they are having a field day. Taking a strictly cold-blooded view, we must welcome even this upsurge in crime, since it helps to undermine the confidence of the public in the System. But the day must also come when we will take every one of these elements which the System's "bought" judges have coddled for so long and put them up against the wall without further ado-along with the judges. I knocked at the address Elsa gave me-it is the basement entrance of what was once an elegant townhouse-and when I asked for Elsa I was invited in by an obviously pregnant young woman with a bawling infant in her arms. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw that the whole basement is being used as a communal living area. Blankets and sheets tied to the pipes which run along the low ceiling serve to crudely partition off half-a-dozen corners and niches as semi-private sleeping areas. In addition, there are several mattresses on the floor in the main portion of the basement. Other than a card table next to the laundry sink, where two young women were washing some cooking utensils, there is no furniture, not even a chair. Against one wall there is an ancient, wood-burning stove, which gives off the only heat in the basement. As I learned later, running water is the only public utility which the little commune has at its disposal, and they obtain fuel for their stove by scavenging in the neighborhood or by sending a raiding party upstairs to break up doors, bannisters, window jambs, even floorboards. Another, larger commune occupies the upper portion of the house, beyond the heavily barricaded steel door at the head of the basement stairs, but they often indulge in wild drug parties, after which they are in no condition to repel fuel-raiders from downstairs. The basement dwellers shun hard drugs and regard themselves as quite superior to the upstairs people. They nevertheless prefer the grubby basement for themselves, because it is easier to heat and easier to defend than upstairs, the only windows being a few tiny, dirt-streaked panes near the ceiling, far too small to admit any hostile intruder. In addition, it is cooler in the summer. Seven or eight of them were sprawled on mattresses, watching some inane "game" program on a battery-powered television receiver and smoking marijuana cigarettes, when I entered. The whole place was permeated by the stink of stale beer, unwashed laundry, and marijuana smoke. (They don't regard marijuana as a drug.) Two small boys, about four years old, both stark naked,were rolling on the floor and fighting near the stove. A gray cat, perched comfortably on one of the idle heating pipes near the ceiling, stared down at me curiously. The people on the mattresses, though, after a brief glance, paid no further attention to me. I could see that none of the faces illuminated by the TV screen was Elsa's. When the girl who had admitted me called out her name, however, one of the blanket- partitions in a far corner was suddenly thrust aside, and Elsa's head and bare shoulders became momentarily visible. She squealed with delight when she saw me, ducked back behind her blanket, and emerged a moment later in her "granny" dress. I was vaguely disturbed to catch a glimpse of another form on the mattress in the dim recess as Elsa parted the blanket and came out. A twinge of jealousy? Elsa gave me a quick hug of genuine affection and then offered me a cup of steaming coffee, which she poured from a battered pot on the stove. I gratefully accepted the coffee, for the walk from the bus stop had thoroughly chilled me. We sat on an unoccupied mattress near the stove. The sound from the TV and the noise being made by the crying baby and the two scuffling boys allowed us to talk in relative privacy. We talked of many things, for I didn't want to blurt out immediately the true reason for my visit. I learned a lot about Elsa and the people she is living with. Some of the things I learned saddened me, and some profoundly shocked me. I was saddened by Elsa's story of herself. She is the only child of upper-middle-class parents. Her father is (or was-she hasn't been in touch with her family for more than a year) a speech writer for one of the most powerful Senators in Washington. Her mother is an attorney for a left-wing foundation whose principal activity is buying up houses in White, suburban neighborhoods and moving Black welfare families into them. Until she was 15 Elsa had been very happy. Her family had lived in Connecticut until then, and Elsa had attended an exclusive, private school for girls. (Single-sex schools are illegal now, of course.) She spent the summers with her parents at their vacation home on the beach. Elsa's face glowed as she described the woods and trails around their summer home and the long walks she took by herself. She had her own little sailboat and often sailed to a tiny island offshore for private picnics and long, happy hours of lying in the sun and daydreaming. Then the family moved to Washington, and her mother insisted that they take an apartment in a predominantly Black neighborhood near Capitol Hill, rather than living in a White suburb. Elsa was one of only four White students at the junior high-school to which they sent her. Elsa had developed early. Her natural warmth and open, uninhibited nature combined with her outstanding physical charms to produce a girl who had been extraordinarily attractive sexually even at 15. The result was that the Black males, who also continually badgered the one other White girl at the school, gave Elsa no peace. The Black girls, seeing this, hated Elsa with special passion and tormented her in every way they could. Elsa dared not go into the restroom or even let herself out of the sight of a teacher for a moment while she was at school. She soon found that the teachers offered no real protection, when a Black assistant principal cornered her in his office one day and tried to put his hand inside her dress. Each day Elsa came home from school in tears and begged her parents to send her to another school. Her mother's response was to scream at her, slap her face, and call her a "racist." If the Black boys were bothering her, it was her fault, not theirs. And she should try harder to make friends with the Black girls. Nor did her father offer her any comfort, even when she told him about the incident with the assistant principal. The whole issue embarrassed him, and he didn't want to hear about it. His liberalism was more passive than her mother's, but he was usually intimidated by his thoroughly "liberated" wife into going along on any matters that touched on race. Even when three young, Black thugs accosted him on his very doorstep, took his wallet and wristwatch, and then knocked him down and stomped on his eyeglasses, Elsa's mother wouldn't let him call the police and report the robbery. She regarded the very thought of filing a police complaint against Blacks as somewhat "fascist." Elsa stood it for three months, and then she ran away from home. She was taken in by the little commune she is with now, and, having a basically cheerful disposition, she learned to be tolerably happy in her new situation. Then, about a month ago, the trouble arose which led to my meeting her. A new girl, Mary Jane, had joined their group, and there was friction between Elsa and Mary Jane. The boy Elsa was sharing her mattress with at the time had apparently known Mary Jane earlier, before either had joined the group, and Mary Jane regarded Elsa as a usurper. Elsa in turn resented Mary Jane's none- too-subtle efforts to entice her boyfriend away. The result was a screaming, clawing, hairpulling fight between the two one day which Mary Jane, being the stronger, had won. Elsa had wandered the streets for two days-that's when I met her- and then she had returned to the basement commune. Mary Jane, meanwhile, had gotten on the wrong side of another of the girls in the group, and Elsa pressed this advantage by issuing an ultimatum: either Mary Jane must go or she, Elsa, would leave permanently. Mary Jane had responded by threatening Elsa with a knife. "So, what happened?" I asked. "We sold her," was Elsa's simple reply. "You sold her? What do you mean?" I exclaimed. Elsa explained: "Mary Jane refused to leave after everyone sided with me, so we sold her to Kappy the Kike. He gave us the TV and two hundred dollars for her." "Kappy the Kike," it turned out, is a Jew named Kaplan who makes his living in the White slave trade. He makes regular trips to Washington from New York for the purpose of buying runaway girls. His usual suppliers are the "wolf packs," from one of which I had rescued Elsa. These predatory groups snatch girls off the street, keep them for a week or so, and then, if their disappearance has caused no comment in the newspapers, sell them to Kaplan. What happens to the girls after that no one can say with certainty, but it is thought that most are confined in certain exclusive clubs in New York where the wealthy go to satisfy strange and perverted appetites. Some, it is rumored, are eventually sold to a Satanist club and painfully dismembered in gruesome rituals. Anyway, someone in the commune had heard that Kaplan was in town and "buying," so when Mary Jane wouldn't leave they tied her up, located Kaplan, and made the sale. I had thought I was unshockable, but I was horrified by Elsa's story of Mary Jane's fate. "How," I asked in a tone of outrage, "could you sell a White girl to a Jew?" Elsa was embarrassed by my obvious displeasure. She admitted that it was a terrible thing to have done and that she sometimes feels guilty when she thinks about Mary Jane, but it had seemed like a convenient solution to the commune's problem at the time. She offered the feeble excuse that it happens all the time, that the authorities apparently know all about it and don't interfere, and so it is really more society's fault than anyone's. I shook my head in disgust, but this turn of our conversation gave me a convenient opening to the topic in which I was mainly interested. "A civilization which tolerates the existence of Kaplan and his filthy business should be burned to the ground," I said. "We should make a bonfire of the whole thing and then start over fresh." I had unconsciously raised my voice loud enough for my last comment to be heard by everyone in the basement. A shaggy individual got up from his mattress in front of the TV and sauntered over. "What can anyone do?" he asked, not really expecting an answer. "Kappy the Kike's been arrested at least a dozen times, but the cops always turn him loose. He's got political connections. Some of the big Jews in New York are his customers. And I've heard that two or three Congressmen go up there regularly to visit some of the clubs he supplies." "Then someone should blow up the Congress," I answered. "I guess that's already been tried," he laughed, apparently referring to the Organization's mortar attack. "Well, if I had a bomb now I'd try it myself," I said. "Where can I get some dynamite?" The fellow shrugged his shoulders and wandered back to the TV set. I then tried pumping Elsa for information. Which groups in Georgetown have been doing bombings? How can I get in touch with one of them? Elsa tried to be helpful, but she just didn't know. It was a subject in which she had no particular interest. Finally, she called out to the man who had strolled over earlier: "Harry, aren't the people over on 29th Street, the ones who call themselves 'Fourth World Liberation Front,' into fighting the pigs?" Harry was obviously not pleased by her question. He jumped to his feet, glared fiercely at the two of us, and then stomped out of the basement without answering, slamming the door behind him. One of the women at the laundry sink turned around and reminded Elsa that it was her day to prepare the midday meal and that she hadn't even put the potatoes on the stove to boil yet. I squeezed Elsa's hand, wished her well, and made my exit. I guess I botched things rather badly. It was incredibly naive of me to imagine that I could just walk into the "dropout" community and be politely directed to someone engaged in violent and illegal activity against the System. Obviously every undercover cop in Washington has been trying the same thing. Now the word must certainly be out everywhere that I'm a cop too. That blows any chance I may have had of making contact with anti-System militants in that particular milieu. Of course, we could send someone else over to try to find the "Fourth World Liberation Front," whatever the hell it is. But I wonder now whether there's any point in that. My visit with Elsa has pretty well convinced me that, in the people who share her life- style, there's just not much potential for constructive collaboration with the Organization. They lack self-discipline and any real sense of purpose. They've given up. All they really want to do is lie around all day screwing and smoking pot. I almost believe that if the government would double their welfare allowances, even the bomb throwers would lose their militancy Elsa is basically a good kid, and there must be a number of others whose instincts are mostly all right but who just couldn't cope with this nightmare world and so they dropped out. Although we both reject the world in its present condition and have both dropped out, in a sense, the difference between the people in the Organization and Elsa's friends is that we are capable of coping and they aren't. I cannot imagine myself or Henry or Katherine or anyone else in the Organization just sitting around watching TV and letting the world go by when so much needs to be done. It is a difference of human quality. But there's more than one kind of quality that's important to us. Most Americans are still coping, some barely and some quite successfully. They haven't dropped out, because they lack a certain sensitivity-a sensitivity which I believe we in the Organization share with Elsa and the best of her friends-a sensitivity which allows us to smell the stink of this decaying society and which makes us gag. The copers out there, just like many of the non- copers, either can't smell the stink or it doesn't bother them. The Jews could lead them to any kind of pigsty at all, and as long as there was plenty of swill they would adapt to it. Evolution has made skilled survivors of them, but it has failed them in another respect. How fragile a thing is man's civilization! How superficial it is to his basic nature! And upon how few of the teeming multitudes to whose lives it gives a pattern does it depend for its sustenance! Without the presence of perhaps one or two per cent of the most capable individuals-the most aggressive, intelligent, and hardworking of our fellow citizens-I am convinced that neither this civilization nor any civilization could long sustain itself. It would gradually disintegrate, over centuries, perhaps, and the people would not have the will or the energy or the genius to patch up the cracks. Eventually, all would return to their natural, pre-civilized state-a state not too different from that of Georgetown's dropouts. But even energy and will and genius are not enough, clearly. America still has enough over-achievers to keep the wheels turning. But these over-achievers seem not to have noticed that the machine their exertions keep running long ago ran off the road and is now hurtling headlong into an abyss. They are insensitive to the ugliness and unnaturalness, as well as to the ultimate danger, of the direction they have taken. It is really only a minority of a minority which led our race out of the jungle and along the first few steps toward true civilization. We owe everything to those few of our ancestors who had both the sensitivity to feel what needed doing and the ability to do it. Without the sensitivity no amount of ability can lead to truly great achievement, and without the ability sensitivity leads only to daydreams and frustration. The Organization has selected from the great mass of humanity those of our present generation who posses this rare combination. Now we must do whatever is necessary to prevail.

The Textbook