大象传媒

One will probably remember the abhorence when Herman Kahn's presented his scenario's in the 60ties. But you might ask yourselves; what did he do else than his predecessor the Italian theorist of Air-power Douhet did in the thirties of the last century. Having about the same reactions in the media in those days as Kahn had in his.
" We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today" , this is what Harold Macmilllan wrote in 1966 (Winds of Change, p.522) .He meant to say : ' One rather does not think about it at all !'
(J.R.Evenhuis, journalist, De Militaire Spectator, Januari 1979)

There is a nice quote about war in the old days by Robert Brasillach. I saw it somewhere on the web. I will go and look for it soon.
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach by Alice Kaplan, published by the University of Chicago Press. 漏2000 by the University of Chicago.
I saw that this book is available now in Europe, I'll on my way to order a copy!
Now work is calling again...

It must have been 1986 when I was in a therapeutical centre somewhere in the north of the Netherlands in the woods near a village called Zuidlaren, not very far away from the city of Groningen and also not very far from the well known Lager of Westerbork from where the Dutch Jewish people had been transported into Poland durung the war. There are a few points of recognision near Westerbork if my memory is still good. In this Dutch province of Drenthe there are what we call 'Hunebedden'in the woods. Prehistorical graves, very large stones that mark the grave.
I'm not sure whether I mentioned this before, but in the nineties I worked mainly as a farm-hand in the organic agriculture. We have two systems in organic agriculture : Ecological system and the bio-dynamic system using the book written by the founder of 'Anthroposophy' early in the 20th century. One day one of the farmers advised me to read this book called 'The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, an Imagination 'written by Jesaiah Ben Aharon.
Last year when I found time to think and read about the Second World War I thought many times if there was probably a path to solve a part of the problem that Jesaiah describes. What I understood, and I do not understand much of what is written in this book because it's about trancendental life, is that the disclosure has been 'cleaved' and that this is not what was meant to be according to the cosmological development that was to be expected.
I'll try to tell you the essential Jesaiah writes about this cleave''. This means that the Christian spiritual development towards 'disclosure' went wrong. The awareness of initiates is cleaved because the awareness has been obtained illegal. The initiates pass the smaller gate-keeper(*) but don't recognise him. Thereupon they meet the greater Gate-keeper (the Christ) himself and for fear they think that he is their most imortant enemy and try to fight him with all their might.
And this will bring him at the edge of total self-destruction.
You need to be a studied Rosicrusian to understand this fully I think.
Other friends in the city of Lelystad, where I was living and working, gave me this book about the American Rosicrusians ; Max Heindel's cosmology. Again a cosmological system of developing mankind, but this time he is making clear that there is a 'Jewish problem'; the Jews regard themselves The Chosen People and do not mingle with the other races.. I don't know what the Rosicrusians think nowadays but it may be important to keep in mind what they thought in the 1920's when we look at WW2.
Moreover it is interesting to hear about the European Rosicrusians in the early 20th century. Karl Heyer is the man who describes European Rosicrucians. Also diffcult to understand and very trancendental ,but I can be short in this : they condemn Mohammed and the Pope. Because they belong to the Greek Roman (4th post-Atlantic) era that finished in the 15th century. Karl Heyer says that arabism is the basic spiritual attitude that leads to mechanic soullessnes, what later happened on a large scale in the history of our world. The metamorphosis of arabism into the modern materialistic (natural) science , that is to say science representing the exact opposite of the Rosecrucian-trend. There is a trend that denies the 'Spirit'(the Romanistic/juridical-trend); but saves (and wants to gain control over)the soul, and there is a trend culminating into Bolsjewism that denies the spirit but also denies the soul.
The Rosicrucians talk about the healing dynamic livelines in the social live not by jurisdiction but by means of the cooperation between heaven&earth.
They call this theology and healing art a Mercurial-characteristic of the Rosicrucian-trend.
Now it is getting interesting , we go back to the 17th century. In this trancendental Mars-sphere (between life and death )there had been a tendency , if I'm well informed Taoistic, that lead to a certain decadency in this Mars-sphere.
Rudolf Steiner said it this way, according to Karl Heyer,the mystery of Golgotha (the sacrifice of Jesus-Christ)on earth is like what happened in the 17th century in the Mars-sphere by the Buddha. This means that there is a reversal of the trancendental Mars-impulse into a healing Mercury-impulse.
This means that this tranposition in the future in social life on earth will develop.
So far so good. This is European Rosicrusian impulse according to Karl Heyer.(1888-1964)

In his book about Raimondo Montecuccoli, 'The military intellectual and the battle'Thomas M. barker writes that three persons are to be mentioned first if one wants to know who's ideas wielded most influence on military questions in Europe.
Machiavelli was the first man , one and a half century later Montecuccoli, the second and the third again one and a half century later : von Clausewitz.
Von Clausewitz ambivalence towards his (Prusian)State
- He changed his Prussian uniform for a Russian after Prussia had been beaten by Napoleon in 1806 and offered his service to the Russian Czar Alexander I when Prussian troops were to assist Napoleon's invasion into Russia.
- He was one of the first who saw the danger of an idealisation of the own European national State and was able to formulate a war-doctrine that free from the values of an era or geographical position, including political and psychological aspects.
Anatol Rappoport (introductial lecture Pelican-edition 'On War'):
The wars waged by the United States in the nineteenth century were punitive or exterminating actions against Indian tribes and easy wars of conquest against Mexico and the moribund Spanish empire. Neighter of the two serious American War experiences before the Second World War (the civil War and the First World War) were percieved by Americans as wars in the Clausewitzian sense to 'promote national interests'. On the contrary, the First World War was seen by most Americans as an ideological war fought for principles, not for power. The entry of the United States into the Second World War appeared to Americans even more devoid of 'Clausewitzian' motives.
Nevertheless Rappoport establishes the 'resurgence of Clausewitzian philosophy in a country that has practically no experience as a participant in what he calls the 'Clausewitzian system'.
He accuses the neo-Clausewitzians and mentions the name of Herman Kahn, that they try to use Clausewitz trying to make fluently the frontier between war and peace in our modern nuclear era.
Although Clausewitz thought about war in the European context to be a natural phenomenon, likely no other military theorist ever has emphasized more the benefit of keeping peace instead of actually waging war.
It's the question of how you interpret his most famous saying 'The war being a phenomenon of politics making use of different means.'
Rappoport says that Kahn c.s. mainly want to quote Clausewitz because they want to make the americans familiar with the thought that war , even in a nuclear era, is in the prolongation of politics.
'The main thrust of their arguments is directed towards restoring the 'legetimacy 'of war. In the United States this implies the demolition of the eschatological idea of 'the war to end war'which dominated American public opinion from 1917 to 1945.'
But Rappoport himself is probably worst in understanding von Clausewitz. He thinks war is an irrational kind of meteorological disaster (like Herg茅's Shooting star)that is to happen upon people like Tolstoi's proclaims in his ' War and Peace'.
Often the problem 'war' or 'open war' is diminished to the dimension of a moral problem .
Solutions are often found within the wishfull ethic perpective. True analysis of the problem does not take place, and seems not to be neccesary because the ethic perspective puts things in line so wonderfully that even the best analysis looks bungling !
('Emigration of a doctrine about war : von Clausewitz and his new adepts, J.R. Evenhuis, Dutch Mil.Spect. 1979)

Some where in the stories it might be that I explained that I'm no longer in the air-force. Ihave been there '76-'80. And now I'm back again in my hometown. I had to take care of my parents in 1998/1999, after my mother suffered from a serious stroke and she could no longer make use of her right arm and leg. Nor speak easily. [this is when you suffer from a stroke in the left side of your brain, the doctors told me.]
Mother wanted to stay in her home where she had lived so many years, and been happy with her family and friends, neighbours.
She'd been living there since summer 1959 and the neighbouring lady still lived there too. She had been the first in, in these houses, built in 1935!
There is a little book too about a Jewish family, the Salmangs, they lived in those days at the other side of the canal, there has been a canal between the high and the lower dike of the river Meuse untill 1962 I guess. It's a road nowadays. A few houses in our row more southwards, right opposite the house of the Salmangs there you can see , when you are upstairs in the attic, a hole in the wall that had been cut by the former inhabitans to have a way out for the Salmangs who where into hide in the houses right opposite their own, at the lower dike. A few years ago , many years after they had died, the family, Mr.&Mrs.Couregg-Stahl, were awarded the Yad Vashem for their act of keeping the Salmangs into hide during the days of the 2nd. world-war.
Mia,the lady nextdoor, told me they didn't award me did they not? My Jewish girl wnet of after the war not to see or hear anything of her again afterwards ! Well this is how live goes, is it not?
I'm to become the new verger, the last one Harry, is getting older, he's 68years old, been doing this work for more than 20 years.
But what is the task of the verger in the Roman Catholic Church ? They gave me a book about this. I have to sing in the church-choir (I do), I have to open and close the church and make things in order to have the ceremony of the Holy Mass properly carried out by the priests.(I do too)
I have to read during the mass from the Holy Bible in public.(too)
Now comes the little joke.
Why do I want to be a verger ? Well this is an interesting story that I'm going to explain to you!
Many years ago, I was only 17teen, I wanted to be a pilot like everyone else, except not in my class. I knew that I'd stand a better chance if I could be selected for a soaring-course subsidiated by our government.
It worked ! So in 1974 I went to Terlet, near Apeldoorn to have a primary training as a glider-pilot.
At the end of our course, that summer, I was taken up in the air by a Piper-cup together with my trainer-pilot. It was a bit hazy but , I guess we where at about 1000ft.we heard a deafening roar behind us and suddenly swelling everywhere around us!
I looked down at my 6 o'clock-position(that's behind me, under me) and what did I see? I saw a cross moving fast coming from behind leading me towards my front-view !
Well this experience made me decide; when I don't become a fighter-pilot in the future; I will be a verger in my town !
p.s. These Maltese crosses flying through the air where quite common. They were brushed on the wings of the German Lockheed F-104's or Fiat G-91's that the German Air forces were flying in those days. What we found out later is that there had been four of them in a low-level attack on military Deelen-airfield nearby Terlet gliding area that day 2nd of August'74.

* In the tradition of the Himalayan People's in the Kangchenjunga range they refer to the gate-keeper in their religion to be the 'Migu'.
Loren Coleman's ; ' Tom Slick and the search for the yeti ; Faber and Faber, Boston and London 1989. p.34/35
These legends are found for thousands of miles all over the Himalayan range, from Karakoram to northern Burma, in Tibet,Nepal, Sikkim, Buthan and Assam, and the creatures have many different names in different countries.
Henry Newman, a very reputable columnist in the Calcutta Statesman seems to have been the first to publish the Tibetan name ' metoh kangami' ("abominable or filthy man of the snow"), which he misspelt metoh kangmi, Frank Lane says that the Indian peasants on the high plateaux call the abominable snowman banjhakris (but Mr. M.P. Koirala, Prime Minister of Nepal, has pointed out that the name banjhakris, or "forest wizards", refers to almost unknown forest tribes "credited with great powers of healing"):
the Sherpas call the snowmen yeh-teh (hence yeti) ot mi-teh, words whose very controversial meaning will be discussed later; Ernst Schaefer asserts that the same creatures are called 'migu' around the Green Lake at the foot of the Kangchenjunga range, and Frank Smythe quotes...........

Abominable Snowman
Message 1

Eric Shipton; 'Blank on the map 'p.262
...This latter feeder [glacier] is about three miles long, and its south wall is remarkably high, precipitous, straight ridge carrying the Orge, the peak almost overlooking the col. Some nine miles in length, this ridge terminates where the Snow Lake ends and the main Biafo begins its south-easterly course.
While contouring round the foot of the ridge between these two feeder glaciers, we saw in the snow the tracks of an Abominable Snowman. They were eight inches in diameter, eighteen inches apart, almost circular, without sign of toe or heel. They were three or four days old, so melting must have altered the outline.......The Sherpas judged them to belong to the smaller type of Snowman or Yeti, as they call them, of which there are apparently two varieties: the smaller, whose spoor we were following, which feeds on men, while his larger brother confines himself to a diet of Yaks. My remark that no one had been here for nearly thirty years and that he must be develish hungry did not amuse the Sherpas as much as I expected! The jest was considered ill-timed, as perhaps it was, the three of us standing forlorn and alone in a great expanse of snow, looking at the strange tracks like so many Robinson Crusoes.

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